The Missing (42 page)
Authors: Sarah Langan
“He’ll be back for me, Mom. They’ll all be back. And then we’ll leave here. They’re taking me with them. Can’t you feel them?”
Meg touched Maddie’s foot, ten little toes all per- fectly formed, and Maddie grinned.
“Where is he?” Meg asked. She was crying, and Maddie seemed to be enjoying that.
“Everywhere. We live everywhere. I’m so hungry, Mom. You wouldn’t believe how hungry.”
“Do they live in the woods, mostly?” she asked. She and Fenstad would go into the woods before it got dark. They’d set the whole place on fire. They’d find every one of the infected, and cut them to pieces to keep Maddie safe.
“Some,” Maddie said. “But they also sleep where they lived. They like their old beds.” Then she cocked her head. A flicker of comprehension passed over her brow. Underneath it all, Maddie was a practical girl. “Dad!” she screamed. “
Daddy she’s loose!
”
“He’s not here,” Meg said.
Maddie grinned, but the grin was frightened and Meg
understood that she’d hit a nerve. They were still vulner- able. If she got to Enrique, or even Lois, before dark, it might change the course of the infection.
“I know what you did in room 69, you whore,” Mad- die whispered.
Meg tried to get up, but her ankle hurt bad, and she didn’t want Maddie to see her crawling on her hands and knees. “Stop it,” she said.
“You went wrong the day you were born!” Maddie shouted. Meg tried to hobble off the bed. She fell with a thump, and began to crawl, while behind her, Maddie hissed, “You married a psycho, and you pretended not to notice because you like your pretty house.”
Meg kept crawling. She was crying now. “Shh, shh,” she said as she moved, one knee after the next, and she wasn’t sure whether she was speaking to her child or her own frayed nerves. “Hush,” she said. “Please. Oh, please hush.”
Down the stairs, the front door slammed shut. Fens- tad was home. She tried to crawl faster, but she didn’t make it in time. Fenstad was standing in Maddie’s doorway.
Meg looked at his snarling face, and gave up. She was done. Her leg hurt too much. She was all alone. If only David was here to help her. She kept crying.
Fenstad bent down, and Meg didn’t bother, this time, to fight. He lifted her into his arms. His face was still as wax. She was bawling. She didn’t try to explain:
You tied us up, and I was just trying to get away. You see now how I needed to do that, don’t you?
He carried her to their bedroom. She was inconsol- able. When he lay her down, her ankle twisted. She yelped in pain, and then continued crying. “Please,” she said. “Oh, please. Just stop.”
He left the room, and she kept bawling. She could hardly catch her breath. When he returned he was carry- ing the Ginsu knife she’d ordered by phone as a practi- cal joke.
You can cut cans with it!
“Don’t!” she cried as he brought it down against her skin and began to cut. The cast came apart. Her leg was swollen and red. She couldn’t see her ankle. Only puffy, purple skin. His hand was on her shoulder, and she cried a little less. Then he pulled hard on her leg. One swift motion. It cracked. She saw stars swimming across the room. Then she fainted.
When she woke up, her leg was in a splint made from furniture legs, he’d somehow found the plaster to set a new cast, and he was now dabbing her face with cold water. She started crying again. The feeling of loss pre- ceded recollection. Then she remembered. “Maddie’s sick,” she said.
He didn’t answer. He bent down on the nightstand, and snorted white power. “OxyContin, crushed. Takes the edge off,” he said. “Maddie says I’m not her father. She told me Graham Nero.”
Meg swallowed. “Fenstad. It’s not possible.”
He nodded, but she could tell he wasn’t convinced.
At this point she wasn’t sure she cared.
“They’re in the woods, I think. Enrique and all the others. That’s what Maddie says. We could start a fire. Start with the woods then go from house to house and burn them.”
He shook his head. “We need to wait this out. We’ll keep her tied to the bed until there’s a cure. You, too.”
“I’m not infected.”
He shrugged. There was white shit all over his nose. In less than a week he’d gone from perfect husband with a cold streak to wife-beating-drug-addicted lunatic. Ei- ther way, her stomach rumbled, and could no longer be
ignored. “Could you take me downstairs? I haven’t eaten in more than a day.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “I think you’ve got the ad- vantage, here, Fen.” He picked her up and walked her through the hall. His movements were stiff, and with- out emotion, but she thought she might still be able to get through to him. He’d fixed her ankle, after all.
When they got down the stairs, she saw what he’d done to the house. It was torn to bits. The furniture was in splinters. The legs were ripped from all the tables and chairs. He’d hammered boards against all the first- floor windows, so that it was dark even on this fine, sunny day.
“You had a real party,” she said.
He didn’t say anything, but since there were no chairs on which to sit, he placed her on the kitchen counter. “If you heat up the stuffed peppers in the Tupperware we can eat,” she said. He thought about it for a second or two, and then dutifully stuck the leftovers in the mi- crowave.
“So what do you think? That I’m trying to kill you? Is that it? That my secret lover is that asshole Graham Nero?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m not trying to kill you. For starters, you’re our only way out of here. Also, before you broke my ankle, I was pretty sure I loved you.”
“Somebody broke in while I was gone. Was it Nero?”
The microwave beeped. His eyes were glazed, and he looked at it for a while like he’d forgotten what he was doing. “Get two forks. We’ll share.” He got the forks, and carried the peppers to the counter.
They both began eating, ravenously. There were four peppers, and neither stopped until the first two were
gone. The food felt good in her stomach. It threaded through her blood like a drug. Everything was easier now. Everything was slightly more possible.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded. “Needed something. Salt.”
She looked at him for a few seconds. Then she started laughing. She wasn’t sure where it came from, and it certainly wasn’t happy laughing. “You’re kidding me,” she said.
He smiled. Then he held her hips. A tear ran down his cheek. She rubbed it away, still laughing, and then he chuckled, too. “It did need salt,” he said. That made her laugh harder. He lifted her hands to kiss them, and saw that her fingers were still engorged to twice their size from where he’d bound her. He turned them in his hands and sighed. She wasn’t laughing anymore.
“I’m not well,” he said. She nodded. “Yeah.”
His voice was sandy. “I love you so much, Meg.” He hadn’t told her this for more than ten years, so she was surprised that it came now.
“Well. If you don’t hit me, I love you, too.”
“I can’t go into the woods. I can’t kill another one. Maybe you’re right, and it’ll help Maddie, but I can’t do it. The things I saw in the hospital . . . a man shouldn’t have to see that.”
She nodded, and decided not to tell him about Al- bert. He couldn’t handle it. “But they’re coming for us. What should we do?”
He shook his head. “Meg, I can’t.”
“We’ll sleep on it. We’ll eat something. If we get through the night, we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
His eyes were watery. “I’m afraid for you. You should go. I’ll stay with Maddie. You’ll get help for us when you can.”
She sighed. “You’re forgetting something. If we have to walk I’ll need you. Besides, I’ll never leave either of you. You know that.”
He looked down at his feet. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll stay together.” He held her hands in the empty, broken room. It was mid-afternoon. They had the luck of light for a few more hours, but with the boards over the win- dows they couldn’t see the sun. “They’ll come soon,” he said.
“We’ll be ready,” she answered, while up the stairs Maddie began to laugh.
B
y the time the sun had fallen below the horizon, they’d doubled in number, and her emissaries were
on their way to taking over both coasts. Lois Larkin stood. They surrounded her. They were one now. A single mind. They’d grown stronger inside her, and now she knew everything. She looked for the one who’d betrayed them. In their mind’s eye they saw him cowering in his apartment, drinking fermented yeast.
They raced there on four legs so fast that the wind slashed her skin like a whip. She burst through his door. “Please,” he begged. It was a word she’d heard a million times in a thousand languages before.
He thought they would kill him, but the thing for- merly known as Lois Larkin had a better idea. It would pain him more, though he didn’t know it. There is no punishment greater than being separated from the one you love. She released him.
The virus inside him withered. It emptied out from his eyes like tears. Ended the battle inside him. In- stantly his teeth fell out one by one. The scar along his stomach opened and began to bleed. He wept, and
then cowered, too weak to speak. They left him there, to slurp his bread pudding, and die a slow death all alone.
Then they went in search of the last survivors of Cor- pus Christi’s plague.
E
nrique Vargas shoved his hands through the open- ing in Madeline Wintrob’s window and broke off
the nightstand holding it shut. He stepped inside. His
boots were muddy from the woods, and his long hair was beginning to fall out. He stalked from the window to the bed, where Maddie had been bound and gagged. A red bandana stretched across her face like a smile. He touched her neck with his fingers, in a gesture that to Meg seemed almost delicate. Maddie was kicking and jerking, which he probably mistook for fear. It was a warning. Fenstad came out from behind him and stabbed the boy in the back with the Ginsu knife.
The sound was wet. Meg flinched. She wasn’t strong enough to use a knife, so he’d given her a hammer that still had the remnants of someone else’s gore. Her chair was set up behind the bed because she could not stand. She was a liability here, more likely to hurt than help, but Fenstad needed her. Without her, he’d lose his di- rection.
Enrique didn’t fall. The knife was a few inches off the mark, and hadn’t gotten his heart. He bent down and tore the sheets that bound Maddie’s arms.
Meg got up. She didn’t move fast. She limped. Maddie’s
bandana came loose. She sat up and took Enrique’s hand. They didn’t leave. They remained in the room, and they looked hungry. That’s when Meg knew for sure that her daughter was gone. She tried to scream, but nothing came out. The children approached.
They went after Fenstad first, and Meg could do noth- ing to stop them. Enrique wrestled Fenstad to the floor. Fenstad stabbed him again in the chest. The boy was still for a moment. He looked like a boy again. Meg didn’t like to see that. She didn’t like to see his pretty brown eyes. Weren’t they all just lovely, the way their skin shone like the moon? She was going a little mad, too.
Then Fenstad went after Maddie. Held her down while she snapped her teeth at his fingers. “Stop. Let her go!” Meg said, but he didn’t.
She limped closer. “
Stop!
” she called again, while at the window, even more of them began to climb up the trellis. Fenstad’s face was as still as wax. He was gone again, and there wasn’t time to get him back. If this thing had happened slowly, if they’d had a month, or even a week to digest the end of the world, she knew he would have returned to her, stronger than ever. He was a better man than even he realized, and she loved him more than she’d ever guessed.
But there was no time.
Meg limped closer, hammer in hand. Fenstad’s knife inched closer to Maddie’s neck. Meg bent down be- tween them and looked from one love to the next. She did her duty, even though she didn’t want to. She swung the hammer into his head. He reeled, and spasmed. The blood didn’t flow at first. He smiled drunkenly at her, like he’d forgotten everything that had happened, and they were back at that bar on Boylston Street, where he was about to confess that he’d always been a sucker for brunettes. But then his foot gave, and he spun in a half
circle. She saw the blood gushing down his back, and knew that the blow she’d dealt him was fatal.
He was still smiling when he fell, and even before he hit the ground, she knew she’d made a mistake.
She inched back, and Maddie got up from the floor. The bodies of the men lay on the ground. More pale hands reached through the window. The infected, look- ing for a meal. She dropped the hammer. She didn’t want it anymore. Didn’t care anymore. Maddie flew at her. She closed her eyes.
Okay
, she thought.
Get it over with
. And then,
At least I’ll always be a part of her this way.
Maddie ran her hand down the length of Meg’s arm, and then her injured leg. Her green eyes had turned black. Then she leaned in close, and licked Meg’s cheek.
“This one is mine,” Maddie called out.
The thing formerly known as Lois Larkin watched from the Victorian’s broken window. She didn’t an- swer; her mouth was no longer shaped so that it could make words. Something transpired between then. Meg could feel it in the air, like static during an electrical storm. “This one is mine,” Maddie repeated.
Lois climbed down the trellis. The rest, including Maddie, followed. They raced through the street, and the town, and across Maine, and New England, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and beyond. They went howl- ing into the night.
And there Meg Wintrob stood, the last living woman in Corpus Christi.
O
n his way to Bedford, Danny saw a woman walk- ing slowly, with her shoulders slumped. If he wasn’t
so lonely, he probably would have been more cautious.
Instead he stopped and rolled down his window. The woman looked at him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t smile. He could tell she wasn’t sick.