The Missing Read online

  Fenstad met Meg at reception. Her hair was straight again, and she’d replaced the button missing from her blouse with a safety pin. Together they left the hospital. He walked slowly while she labored across the blacktop. “I’ll bring the car around,” he said, but she nodded her head at the crutches.

  “I should learn how to use these. I’ll be living with them for the next six months.”

  Night had descended, and the parking lot was dark. Meg grunted with each step, but he knew better than to offer to carry her. When they got to the Cadillac Escalade, she climbed the two steps, grimacing through the pain, and he realized that the bursitis in her hips had to be excruciating. Vanity, he thought, thy name is Meg Wintrob.

  As they drove down the lit-up stores along River Street, he asked, “You take any codeine?”

  She looked straight ahead. “I had to. It really hurt.”

  “Well, yes. I should think from the way you’re sweating that it still hurts.”

  She didn’t answer, and he didn’t say anything more. When they got to the house, she didn’t make a move to get out of the car. Maddie’s bike was not in the garage, which meant that she was visiting with her boyfriend at the Puffin Stop, which in theory she was supposed to ask permission for. “I know what you’re thinking,” Meg said.

  “You do?” Could she guess what he’d imagined about Graham Nero?

  Her tone was matter-of-fact, and a little bit angry. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let Albert come around. I hate to imagine what those parents must think of me.”

  He sighed. “A madman threw you against a wall. Nobody blames you for that.”

  “But you knew it would happen. You warned me.”

  “I’m just glad it wasn’t you on that IV drip.”

  She wiped her eyes, and at first he thought they itched, but then he realized she was crying. This he knew how to respond to with some competence. He slid across the leather seat and held her. At first she stiffened, but then she let go. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Here,” he said. Trying to be chivalrous, he offered her his shirt sleeve. They smiled at each other, and then she burst into another round of tears.

  “I was scared.” She spoke with her face pressed against his chest. It was easier for her to confess this, he surmised, when she didn’t have to look at him.

  He nodded: I was scared, too, he thought, even though he didn’t say so. I still am.

  “I wanted to call you. I wanted to see you. That’s all I wanted when it happened. Isn’t that silly?”

  He felt the tension in him leave. For the first time in a long while, he felt…okay. “No,” he said, “It’s not silly.”

  “I wanted to tell you I love you,” she said, and he squeezed her tighter.

  As she cried, he surveyed their Victorian Tudor that he’d loved from the first day they’d moved into it fifteen years ago, and the garden that had only recently lost its bloom, and the beautiful woman in his arms. He wondered if, despite everything that had happened between them, things would work out after all. Maybe, he thought. Just maybe.

  EIGHT

  The Hunger

  Danny Walker was watching his favorite show, Elimidate. If you wanted to gawk at a train wreck, forget Jerry Springer; this was where it was at. On tonight’s half hour, four skanks were taking turns French kissing a skinny hayseed from Duluth. The hayseed was supposed to bounce the worst kisser from the show. Then he and his remaining slut pack would frolic in a hot tub. With luck, in a bid for the hottest chick with the lowest self-esteem, they’d all take off their tops. Right now they were sloppy drunk, which he guessed explained why they didn’t care that they were acting like degenerates on national television. Or maybe in the land of white trash, this was what passed for famous.

  To keep things interesting, Danny started imagining the kinds of things he’d do to the girls, if he was the hayseed. Three of them were blond with inhumanly massive knockers, which he guessed were implants. He knew silicone was supposed to gross him out, but those six perky tits were pretty hot.

  The cordless phone was in his lap, and any minute his parents might call with news about James, which was why he’d jerked off only once tonight. Also, he’d never have guessed it, but he was worried about the crazy fuck.

  On TV, the really hot girl with long red hair had a pot belly, so after the French kiss round robin, the blondes called her a heifer. In reply, she stuck out her tongue, lifted her tube top, and flicked the diamond in her belly ring, which she seemed to think was a flaming comeback. Then the other girls tried to slap her gut flab, and all of them came close to throwing hands. Then the hayseed announced, “Ladies, don’t fight! There’s more than enough of me to go around,” which convinced Danny that the hayseed was high, because when in his sorry life would four girls fight over him again? Catfights were Danny’s favorite part of Elimidate. Girls ripped one another to shreds over losers they wouldn’t ordinarily let buy them dinner.

  In the end, the hayseed gave the hot girl the boot because he said she had too much junk in her trunk. “Shithead,” Danny called, and threw a ruffled Lay’s potato chip at the screen. As he let it fly, he accidentally leaned against the talk button on the cordless, so the dial tone resounded, which for a nanosecond he mistook for ringing. He had a moment of real hope that his dad might be on the line with news about James. But nope. Danny pressed off and sank down in the couch. The kid had to be lost, right? James was too fruity to abduct. Christ’s sake, he’d killed a rabbit once, even though nobody wanted to admit it. The kid was a total psycho.

  But then again, James was small, and he didn’t have much common sense. Last month he’d put orange juice in his cereal because they were out of milk. He’d been shocked when he’d swallowed a spoonful and realized it tasted like piss. And he would know…

  On Elimidate, four fake boobs rose above the water line in the hot tub like the soldiers in Apocalypse Now.

  He should have been nicer to James. Miller and Felice thought he was a psycho, so the kid was starting with two strikes against him. He shouldn’t have picked on him so badly when they’d shared a bus stop. He should have given him some advice once in a while, like letting him know that Mr. Crozzier, the teacher who left him back, had a thing for extra credit. If you wanted your report card filled with “outstandings!” all you had to do was write a two-paragraph report on the history of the Iroquois Indians, or Balto the Wonder Dog. But Danny never gave that advice, and now James was a two-time left-back.

  Danny shoved a greasy chip in his mouth. What if James had been hurt, or even killed? It was possible. He didn’t like to think it, but the kid had been missing now for nine hours. If the worst happened, Miller would handle it okay. He’d drink an extra quart of scotch at the club for a while and get a few people over at the school fired, but he’d handle it. Felice, on the other hand, would have another breakdown. Her first one came right after James was born. She got taken away in a padded wagon and everything, which maybe explained why no one had been all that keen on James’s entrance into the world. His colicky crying had been the final straw to drive Felice Walker from permanently nervous to stark-raving-bananas. The day the orderlies had taken her away, she hadn’t recognized her three-month-old baby, or Miller, or even Danny. Danny never forgot how bad it had hurt when he’d waved good-bye, and she hadn’t waved back. A part of him still hated her for it.

  When people wanted to piss Danny off at school, all they had to do was say, “Your mom’s a psycho,” and he went ape-shit. But most knew better than to mess with him. Last time it happened two years ago, he broke Pete O’Donnell’s nose. Felice was still on a bunch of drugs, and at dinner or while watching late-night reruns she usually spaced out even though she wasn’t drunk.

  James wasn’t much help around the house, so everything pretty much fell on Danny’s shoulders. He had to be his dad’s friend, even though Miller was a jackass. At the country club, Miller liked to collect the Irish waitresses’ phone numbers and then wink at Danny, like scr
ewing around was a cute little joke he was playing on Mom. It was Danny who cleaned the dishes and asked Felice about her day because nobody else ever bothered.

  Danny groaned. James. Where was he? He’d never been nice to the kid, so it was unnerving how much he wanted him to be okay. But then again, James was his brother, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t alike, or that the kid was slow. Danny still loved him.

  Just then Danny heard a rap on the door. James? No, he wouldn’t knock. The cops? Maybe they’d found James’s body near the river, or in some gay guy’s torture chamber basement. Or maybe the little shit was eating stale donuts at the Puffin Stop with the druggies and the spic housecleaners waiting for the late bus out of Corpus Christi. God, he hoped it was the donuts. He really did.

  Danny opened the door, but no one was there. He walked out into the dark night. Street lamps shone their yellow sickness in every direction. A few cars drove down the road. It was brisk tonight, and Danny wasn’t wearing a sweater. He started to shiver, and thought about going back inside, but James might be out here. Maybe he was afraid to come home because in those woods today, he’d done something worse than kill a rabbit. And then what would they do? Get a lawyer? Pay off a judge so that James would grow up thinking he could get away with murder? For the first time in a while, he wondered if they were lucky or cursed by Miller’s money.

  Danny circled the house. It was the biggest in town, but there wasn’t much land surrounding it. In the mornings he could hear the Wintrobs next door arguing with Maddie. He didn’t usually use the word “freak,” but man, when you looked it up in the dictionary, you saw purple-haired Maddie Wintrob’s picture.

  Danny cupped his hands about his mouth. “James!” he hollered, but nobody answered. Then he smiled, because one of the hemlocks in front of the house was shaking, like someone was hiding inside it. “James. It’s okay,” he called as he headed for the bush. “I’m not mad. I promise. Everybody’s too worried to be mad.”

  He talked at a lower and lower volume as he approached, so that he could sneak up on the kid. It reminded him of the way he used to pretend he was Michael Myers from Halloween back when they were little. He’d walked slowly through the house, not speaking, while James ran. Inevitably James lost his cool and trapped himself in a corner. There Danny would stroll, calm as the bogeyman, to give him a pounding.

  “Mom and Dad are really worried,” Danny said. “Mom’ll probably buy you a rabbit, she’ll be so happy you’re back.”

  The bush that had been shaking went still. Danny was close enough. He pushed the branches aside with one quick stroke and—yes!—there was James, hunched down. Fuck, yeah, he’d found him! He’d throttle the mutant for scaring him this bad.

  James knelt on all fours in the dirt. He raised his eyes. They weren’t the right color, though. Instead of blue, they were big and black. Danny stepped back. His stomach got queasy. James was holding something between his teeth.

  Despite the darkness, Danny could see the blood that ran in a line down James’s chin and against the front of his torn Iron Man sweatshirt. His jaw was clamped tight around a lump of fur with paws.

  Danny tried to say something—to make a joke, even, like: Hey, fuckface, need a napkin? but instead he only gurgled. His throat was full of bubbles. There was acid there, too, and it rose until it burned his tongue.

  James dropped the lump of fur and leaped out from the bushes. An instinct told him to get ready for a fight, but he forced his fists to unclench. This was his brother?

  “James, you okay?” he asked.

  James bared his teeth. He leaped in Danny’s direction, just as a car pulled into the driveway. Its headlights shone blindingly into James’s black eyes. He fell. They were close enough now that Danny could see the bib of blood on his shirt, and his bare, gored feet.

  He looked at Danny, but on his face there was no sign of recognition. Light poured over the lawn, and he started to run. Still on all fours, he charged across the yard, and through the Wintrobs’ morning glories. Like an animal, his hind legs pushed him in the air, and his arms caught him when he came down. The bottoms of his feet and the toes he still had were black.

  Danny took a few breaths, in and out. Fast. From what felt like a thousand miles away, he could hear his dad slam the Mercedes’s heavy door. On the ground was the husk of a rabbit. All that was left was its skin, a few slivers of meat along its spine, and the imprint of James’s small teeth.

  PART THREE

  INFECTION

  NINE

  The Human Trick

  The search for James Walker continued long after the sun had set on Tuesday evening. Cops and volunteers combed the Bedford woods. At a clearing two miles in, Tim Carroll stumbled. He shone his flashlight along the edges of the glade, and saw that it was scattered with animal carcasses. He’d caught his foot on an antelope’s horns, and he focused his light on its unblinking eyes. It clutched a mouthful of a possum’s snout between its teeth. The ground was inky with their blood. He whistled out his breath. Then he shone his light along the circle, and saw that all the animals’ teeth were bared. He took a step back, and he knew that James Walker hadn’t been abducted by a pedophile. The boy had found this terrible place, where the animals had learned a human trick. They’d learned murder.

  That’s when he heard the scream. It sounded like another animal, but by his flashlight, he found Lois Larkin kneeling over a hole in the center of the clearing. Her mouth was ringed with dirt. Like the antelope, her eyes were black. “Lois!” he shouted. She didn’t stop screaming until he took off his standard-issue wool peacoat and draped it over her shoulders.

  “I saw James,” Danny Walker told his parents late Tuesday night. “He killed another rabbit.”

  Miller Walker stabbed his index finger into the middle of Danny’s chest hard enough to leave a bruise. “Shut up about that fucking rabbit,” he said.

  Wednesday morning, the search expanded, and state troopers from Augusta, along with volunteers, called James’s name. The search area widened through the town of Bedford to the edges of Corpus Christi. Still, he was not found.

  Lois Larkin woke Wednesday morning with a chest cold and a wide-open window, even though, the night before, she’d left it closed. The morning light hurt her eyes, so she rolled over and hid her face under the sheets. Depression, she guessed. Her life had gone south fast. It wasn’t until late afternoon that she noticed the pile of feathers on her windowsill. She kept a feeder for hummingbirds out there. Had a dog gotten to one of them, and left the feathers for her as a gift? She ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, and between her teeth. She pulled a string of feathery gristle from the gap. Before she realized what she was doing, she sucked out the last of its blood.

  Meg Wintrob didn’t go to work Wednesday morning. Fenstad told her to stay home, and that was all the permission to bum around that she needed. She read the Boston Globe in front of Days of Our Lives, Oprah, and Dr. Phil. By three o’clock she was so bored that she’d finished the crossword puzzle and was scrawling items like “Clean the grout under the refrigerator” on her things-to-do list. It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to relax.

  Fenstad went to work as usual on Wednesday. His first order of business was to call Lila Schiffer. He’d wanted to keep her in the hospital yesterday, but when he’d learned about Meg’s attack, he’d forgotten. Lila was passive-aggressive, and it wasn’t beneath her to slit her other wrist just to spite him for his negligence. Turned out, he needn’t have worried. Wednesday morning Lila answered the phone unharmed and nearly chipper. Her kids were both sick with chest colds, and she was tending to them. They’d been so grateful for her cinnamon toast and back rubs that they’d called her “Mom” for the first time in months. She told him, “Maybe it’s the Stelazine, Dr. Wintrob. But suddenly I’m in a super-good mood. See you next week!”

  As the sun set Wednesday night, Lois Larkin lay in bed with the taste of salty gristle on her tongue. Her stomach growled, and a hazy memory
returned to her, of opening the window the night before, and reaching into the bird feeder. She admitted to herself the thing she’d been trying to deny: Something lived inside her now, and in the darkness, it began to speak.

  It was hard for James to understand words now, and he didn’t recognize faces. He didn’t remember about the hollow trees anymore, or the Incredible Hulk. He’d lost something, parts of him. What was the word? Hands? No, not hands. Something else. Shoes. He’d lost pieces of the things that went inside shoes.

  Last night he’d visited half the houses of the children in his fourth-grade class. He’d wanted to show them what he’d become. That he was special. Sometimes he bit them. Other times he just spit. Now he climbed terraces and backyard porches, and returned for the rest of them. As Wednesday rolled into Thursday, the virus continued to spread.

  TEN

  Babes in the Woods

  Thursday afternoon, Madeline Wintrob pedaled her twelve-speed Trek down Silver Street. She didn’t drive like the other seniors at Corpus Christi High School. Her brother, David, got the junker Volvo station wagon when he left for college in California, and since nobody thought she was responsible enough to drive, she hadn’t bothered suffering through six Saturday morning sessions of driver’s education.

  She didn’t want a car anyway. Because of cars the polar ice caps would dissolve in one hundred years, and winter would be a memory. Currency wouldn’t be dollars anymore; it would be grain and livestock. Relentless tropical storms would make the East Coast uninhabitable, and Canada would close its borders so there’d be no place to flee but Mexico—and who wanted to go there? Her ruling class pigs-for-parents were worried about the thread counts of their Egyptian sheets and the fuel efficiency of their SUV death machines, meanwhile the end of the world was on it way. So fine, her whole family thought she was nuts. They were wrong. She wasn’t nuts; it was the rest of this world that was off its rocker.