The Missing (36 page)
Authors: Sarah Langan
“It said I would be your king, and you would be the
fool. It would make you a half-wit, like I used to be,” James whispered, and Danny shook his head. As Miller’s son, shouldn’t he have guessed that such a promise was a lie?
Then James closed his eyes. Danny felt his wrist. His pulse slowed, and then stopped. They didn’t open again. Danny lifted him up and carried him away from the rest of the bodies. The wet ground was just soft enough. With his hands he dug a shallow grave. He buried his brother inside it.
By the time he was done, the sun was low, and he knew he’d have to go back to Corpus Christi tonight. He’d find shelter, and leave tomorrow with a full day of sunlight behind him. He looked once more at Lois Lar- kin. His gun had two bullets left. He could tell the army people what he’d found, but he didn’t think they’d listen. He was alone out here.
He pointed the gun and aimed it at her head. He shot once. Missed. Again. Missed. Again, only this time, the chamber was empty. In his mind, Lois Larkin let out a deafening scream, just as the sun fell down below the horizon, and the bodies began to shiver.
He ran. Like a track star, feet pumping high as his ass, he raced to his car. If he survived the night, he would leave Corpus Christi. There was nothing left for him here. There never had been.
T
he last rays of the sun crawled across the horizon. They were yellow, then red, then brown, then gone. Lois didn’t see colors anymore. Only shadows and shapes. The world was shades of gray. Her thoughts weren’t the same, either. She wanted only to survive, to feed, to find a dark place in which to sleep. It was an easier life, and she didn’t regret it, or miss what she’d once been. Didn’t regret her mother, whose heart, sur-
prisingly, had not been bitter.
On Sunday night, she woke in a clearing. The sun didn’t hurt her kind, but it put them to rest like dolls laid flat, their eyelids closed. The others did not dream, or remember the day. Their sleep was deep, and during it their bodies changed. But she was different. She could feel the things around her even when the sun was bright.
There had been a moment there when she’d been frightened. Danny Walker had cracked her bones. But he was gone now, and so was his threat. From now on she would sleep in a covered place.
Her body had changed. She was longer in the torso, and her knees and elbows had thickened. It hurt her to stand; she preferred to crawl. She was becoming the
same as the virus that lived inside her. Already her hair and eyelashes had fallen out: a hundred wishes on her finger, but she wanted just one thing—Ronnie and Nor- een’s blood.
Around her were bodies. One thousand, two thou- sand. Five thousand. More than she could count. When she woke Sunday night, her bones were whole again. All cuts and wounds healed in this place. All things were eternally temporary.
In her dreams her soul lived underground. She’d been separated from it. Instead of feeding on her body, the worms ate her soul. In her dreams it wasn’t the virus that gave her hunger; it was her body, longing for its mate. It was the ashes in her mouth from this deal she had made with a lover not even human.
But those were dreams, of course. She had no regrets, of course.
She stood, and around her the children knelt. The virus was instinct, and she was direction. Together they were better than their parts. She had a plan. They were feeding too fast, and unwisely. They were making too many of their own kind. They would be more selective in spreading the virus, and they would harvest what they ate. In her way, she would be a scientist, after all.
She touched her belly. In this she was not gentle, ei- ther. The thing in her stomach had not adjusted to the change, and while she slept, it had died. There was no pain. There were no cramps. Its corpse remained fixed inside her, a fossil of skin.
The old Lois Larkin screamed at her from under the ground, and she was glad she’d buried it there. She hated that woman almost as much as she hated herself. As Danny Walker fled the Bedford woods, she and the children woke, and then slithered through the rainy
night.
S
unday night, Graham Nero sat up with a start. He felt better than he’d felt in years. Strong, vital, a fucking he-man. The room was dark, but he could still see the floral bedspread and yellow wallpaper. Could see the fibers and specks of dust that hovered in a thin layer over the thick blue carpet. Could hear the weak
mewing of his brood.
A lump lay in the bed next to him. She’d always been a lump. Useless dead weight. Got knocked up a week after their wedding. Told him the pill wasn’t fail-safe, but he was no fool. He called the pharmacy. She hadn’t refilled her prescription in months!
She quit her job as an executive assistant at his office to raise the kid, so suddenly he’d been stuck making pay- ments on the house that they’d bought at the height of the market all by his lonesome. Eight hundred thousand dol- lars is a lot of steak dinners, especially when your part- ner in crime can’t gather enough scratch to cover the country club fee. When he met her, she’d seemed like somebody who could take care of herself. Efficient on the phone, typed forty words per minute, dressed in discount suits that weren’t all that stylish, but had fit her curves just right. He’d never guessed what lurked underneath.
Now she worked part-time in circulation at the
Cor- pus Christi Sentinel
. Every couple of months they threw her a bone and let her write a bleeding heart human interest piece about halfway houses or crystal meth– addicted kids. She’d wanted to be a writer her whole life. At least once a week she thanked him for support- ing her in doing it, as if he’d had a choice. After she got knocked up, the bank told her that unless she came back full-time, to clean out her desk.
That’s what he liked about Meg Wintrob. She worked for a living. She didn’t sulk to get her way; she yelled. He wished she’d come with him to room 69 the other day. Instead he’d had to settle for an underage girl from the bar. She’d tasted young, and now his favorite hotel room was a mess.
Graham could smell his own breath, and it wasn’t good. He pulled a tin of Altoids from his suit pocket (he’d stolen a whole carton of them from Puffin Stop), and crunched on about twenty at once. Smarted, but he kept chewing. Then he wondered:
Why did I wear my suit to bed?
Down the hall his brood wailed. Maybe she was hun- gry. Or scared, or stupid. Isabelle reminded him of Caitlin. The women in his life were the rocks tied to his ankles in a ten-foot pond.
He looked at the bed. The brood didn’t stop crying, and predictably, his lump didn’t get up. He put his feet on the cold floor. He was late for work, wasn’t he? The bitch had forgotten to wake him and make his cof- fee . . . But wait, it was night, and Sunday, at that. Did he usually sleep during the day?
In the mirror he didn’t see his face. Only a silhouette. The rashes on his neck and chest were gone. His cough was gone, too. How had he gotten the virus? Oh, right, the high school girl he’d met at the bar a few nights ago
had leaned in to kiss him, and instead she’d bitten him! He couldn’t remember, now, what had happened next. Only that he’d been hungry.
None of that mattered, though. All that mattered was his clean-shaven face and the dimple in his chin that the ladies liked to trace with their slender fingers. Even the girl from room 69. What was her name?
Sheila, Laura, Dora, Flora?
He couldn’t remember. She’d been his first fatty.
He swished a mouthful of Listerine and spit. Smelled his breath, rancid, and cracked open another tin of Al- toids.
Out the window, the streets were empty. Not even street lamps were lit, which was nice, because he hated the light. The radio played softly, Stravinsky. His wife’s music. He changed the station. The news was a special bulletin. Keep your doors and windows locked. Do not go out at night, the announcer exclaimed.
Graham smiled at the mirror. The toupee was on the sink, and he decided to leave it there. He liked his new look. Sleek. He used to spend hours in the bathroom. Even when Caitlin knocked because she had to pee, he’d never opened the door until he was ready. Once he’d caught the ninny squatting into a jar in the kitchen be- cause the downstairs toilet was broken and she couldn’t hold it in. He smiled at the memory. Then he opened the door. He was hungry.
The lump under the covers reminded him of Meg Win- trob. That she’d turned him down was a splinter in his foot. Insignificant until you notice it, and then relentless. If she had come with him, he wouldn’t have suffered through the nervous giggles of the virgin. If she’d come with him, maybe they could have fed together.
She’d called him about six months ago and told him it was over. Like he hadn’t already moved on to the
stripper at Lucifer’s Delight Men’s Club. Meg had a good body and he liked her, but she was long in the tooth. In a year or two, her eggs would be old, and her crotch would stink. He’d seen it before in the women who waited to marry at his office. They became moody vice-presidents who went on Internet dates, and by the time they were forty-five they smelled.
Yeah, so she dumped him, and he’d smiled and said,
Sure, babe
, even though he’d wanted to cut her into lit- tle pieces. Didn’t the skinny bitch know he’d been doing her a favor? He’d pretended she was sexy, even though he had a wife at home with a double-D cup size and a dimpled smile.
He’d been thinking about her for a long time now. After he got the infection, he’d thought about her even more. It was like a switch had been turned inside him, and he couldn’t let her go. When he closed his eyes she was waiting with folded arms, like nothing he could buy for her, no tricks with his tongue, would ever be good enough.
A few days ago, holding Isabelle with one hand and eating an apple in the other, Caitlin offered him a back rub, and he’d snapped. He’d been sick then, but not completely infected. It had only been a cough, a rash, a few clumps of hair here and there. His hand had been in the air, and then against her skin. Again and again. Until he was tired. Until his hands and teeth ached. Then he’d washed his hands and mouth with scented soap until the water stopped running pink. His next stop was the library. He’d pulled back every stop on the Graham Nero charm-o-meter. It hit irresistible. Meg Wintrob had still said no.
Graham started down the hall. The lump under the sheets had begun to smell, so he left it there. It was red and still a little wet. Lazy bitch hadn’t even cleaned it.
He passed Isabelle’s room. She sat in her crib, her lips blue, her face white as snow, her eyes black. She was hungry, but she didn’t know how to feed. The kid was useless, just like her mother.
He went down the stairs and opened the front door. Looked out into the night. In the darkness, there were others. Their bodies long and lean; graceful. They shone in the moonlight. They sniffed from house to house, looking for the scraps that remained. Meg Wintrob on his mind, Graham stepped out into the night on two legs, and then ran on four.
R
onnie woke up from his nap. It was Sunday night, and he and Noreen were sitting on the couch. His cough was gone, and so was Noreen’s. He felt good, sort of. He felt the strongest he’d been since high school, when he was Corpus Christi High’s longest-armed short- stop. But he felt mean, too. Something inside him was tearing things up. He blamed Noreen. She’d done this to him, the bitch. He wanted to rip out her throat, just a
little bit.
It was business as usual at the Ronnie and Noreen chateau of domestic bliss. He was watching
Gilmore Girls
in rerun because Noreen had the remote. There wasn’t any food in the fridge. Nothing worth eating, at least. All the meat was gone, so right now he and Nor- een were passing a rat between them. It was bleeding all over his chin.
It made him sick, the sight of that rat. He hated it, and still he kept eating.
He was hungry all the time now. Didn’t matter how often he ate. He was tired when the daylight came, too, His pot stash was gone, which was the only thing he’d valued in his shitty life. Worse, his dealers were dead, which meant he wasn’t getting more.
The change happened this morning. His eyes turned black. He remembered gasping, and praying for some- thing, but he couldn’t remember what. Something to do with peace. He’d been asking for peace. And then he didn’t remember anything at all, except for waking up tonight in front of the television with Noreen, watching the
Gilmore Girls
.
Noreen was laughing. The older Gilmore girl was saying something smart and witty. “You’re a couple of dogfaces,” Ronnie said to the television screen, which wasn’t like him. Before he got sick he never would have said something mean like that.
Noreen turned and spit in his face. It landed on his lip and rolled slowly down. He didn’t think about it; he just acted. He throttled her. She fought at first. Thrashed against the Jennifer Convertible stain-resistant plaid couch, but then her face turned from white to blue. Her whole body jerked, like she was dying, and he knew he hated her. Hated himself. Hated what they’d become. But he was so goddamn hungry.
He let go. As soon as she caught her breath she tried to strike him. Plump baby hand all curled into a fist. He grabbed her arm and squeezed until it broke. But that was fine. She healed fast. He couldn’t hurt Noreen un- less he killed her, no matter how hard he tried.
“I’m hungry. I don’t want rat,” he said.
She nodded. “We’ll go to the Dew Drop Inn.”
They left the apartment. He headed for the car, but she didn’t. “We don’t need that,” she said, and it was true. He was walking on four legs. His body was low to the ground, which was nice. Made it easier to catch the things that crawled. Spiders, mostly. He preferred in- sects over the things for which Noreen had an appetite. He followed her pale body down the street, fast as a