The Missing Read online

  Lois looked up at the cracked ceiling, and tried with her mind to make it come crashing down.

  Feed me, Lois, it demanded. This time, it didn’t croon.

  She covered her ears with her hands. Water leaked through her eyes. She didn’t know why. Was this crying? Did humans cry? Did that mean, by deduction, that she was still human? She felt a flutter in her chest beneath the itch, and named it hope.

  You win, my Lois. You figured it out. You have to eat, or I die inside you. Feed me now.

  “Daddy?” she whispered, even though she knew it wasn’t her daddy; it was the buried thing. It was reading her mind, and telling her what she wanted to hear.

  She squeezed the paper and wished she was dreaming all this. Wished she was back in the woods, only this time, she had run. This time, she’d made a better choice. But she had made so many bad decisions that they had gathered into the fossils of her history, and trapped her in this child’s bed—flesh within bone.

  “Daddy, please tell me what to do,” she whispered, only her voice was flat and unrecognizable, even to herself.

  Lollipop, stop fighting, a voice answered. It sounded so much like her dad that she smiled. His words stumbled over themselves like nervous dominoes, just like they used to. You know what to do, her daddy whispered, It’s the only way. But this couldn’t be her father. Her father would never suggest something so…hideous.

  In the next room, Lois could feel the vibrations of Jodi’s breath as she mouthed guesses to the Wheel of Fortune puzzle: Sus…soup…Susquehannah Hat Company! The itch was bad now. She scratched her stomach and her last fingernail snapped off. Her fingers didn’t look like fingers anymore.

  For the first few nights after eating the dirt in the woods, she’d eaten everything in sight. Food in her belly had slaked her itch, like cold water on a burn. The steaks in her mother’s freezer had been the first to go. Then worse. Then the animals. She could still remember the shiny eyes of a garbage-fatted raccoon and its wild scream as she’d broken its neck with her teeth. She’d told herself in the morning that the memory was a fever dream, but even then she’d known the truth.

  She could guess something about this thing that occupied her body. Like the bright, sweet flowers that attract bees, when it was nearby, it spread its sulfuric scent through the air and infected people’s minds. It had tricked her into eating it, and giving it a home. Right now it was taking over her body, cell by cell. It was speeding up her metabolism, and making her hungry. It was making her in its image. Making her not Lois.

  But why mourn? She hated Lois, didn’t she?

  If she listened now, she could hear the infected roaming the streets. They liked the night, because the sun hurt their black eyes. Last night they’d banged on the windows, and her mother had screamed. They would come back again tonight. There was something about her that they liked.

  Most of the infected changed in seconds. A few lasted long enough to cough their way to the hospital. A lot of them died, or else the virus damaged their brains, and they became simpletons, so that the virus became simple, too. It was only as smart as its host. Because of that the infected had made stupid mistakes. They’d eaten all the animals, and now had no choice but to move on to humans.

  Lois wasn’t like the others. Her mind was still sharp, if changed. Simple body chemistry. One in a million can carry typhoid. That was why it wanted her. To survive, a virus seeks its most perfect host. She’d been trying to starve it out of her, but the hour was growing late, and her hair was falling out in clumps.

  Stop fighting, Lois, the voice said. This time it sounded like Dr. Wintrob. You know the truth; before this, you were nobody. Not even Ronnie Koehler could love you.

  Her cheeks were cool in the places that her tears fell. She squeezed the pink stationery and muttered: This is how you murder me, even though she didn’t know what that meant. Its words were comforting. They were human, unlike the thing that lived inside her. Unlike not Lois.

  What was she becoming, anyway?

  Feed me.

  Her stomach growled. She’d said three rosaries to her father today, hoping that his ghost would send her a sign, but she had no fingernails with which to scratch her itch.

  Feed me, Lois.

  She licked her lips. Even the baby inside her kicked. Whose baby was it, anyway? Ronnie! You used to love him. Remember? a voice pleaded. No, to be honest, she didn’t remember. She’d never loved him. She’d never loved anyone, had she?

  In the other room, her mother chuckled. Vanna White was riding a unicycle.

  They held you down. They kept you meek. They never knew what you could be. The voice sounded like her father, and Dr. Wintrob, and her first boyfriend, and most of all, it sounded like the cold, flat thing that was uncurling like a worm inside her mind. She listened to it, and tried to steel herself against it, and then stopped trying. If it weren’t for her mother and Ronnie, she’d be a professor at UVM by now. She’d be married with three kids and a dog. They’d stolen her life from her. How fitting that this inhuman creature was the only thing that understood that.

  She deserved to be free from this cage she was trapped inside. This bed, this house, this town, this Lois Larkin. She was hungry, but the steak was gone. So were the animals. She heard her mother mumble, “Buy the vowel you moron.”

  …She was hungry for something human.

  The infected crowded against her window. The virus blinked inside her, and she could feel its desperation. Without her, it was only instinct and hunger. Without her, it would eat until nothing was left, and then would die.

  She got out of bed and walked over the traps she’d set for herself; the jangling bells that would alert her mother she was ambulatory, the missing floorboard through which the old Lois had hoped the new one would fall. They smiled when they saw she was on her way, and the buried thing inside her giggled. Or maybe it wasn’t the buried thing; maybe it was she, giggling.

  She thought about Russell Larkin, who she knew would be disappointed in her. But she was disappointed in him, too. Back on that snowy road, he should have called for help. He should have written her a note. He should have crawled out of that car on his hands and knees, if only to tell her good-bye. She took the pink paper on which a poem was written, pressed it inside her mouth, and began to chew. She devoured the old Lois Larkin, and it tasted like nothing.

  She pulled the nails from where she’d hammered them. Her fingers bled, but quickly healed. She opened the window. They reached their pale arms through the aperture and climbed inside. She stood waiting in her white nightgown—(This is how you murder me) like a bride.

  Up front stood every single child from her fourth-grade class. George Sanford’s lips were red, but not, this time, from Crayola. Caroline Fischer. Alex and Michael Fullbright. Donna Dubois. They were lost now that they walked during the night. Sick from the change, they didn’t know how to take care of themselves. Their instincts were all wrong. They need their mother, Lois, the buried thing whispered, and it was true. Her babies needed her. Poor Caroline was bleeding. She’d gotten so hungry that she’d gnawed the skin from her own thumb.

  Lois’s eyes watered. Her babies. Yes, she still loved after all. She loved her children.

  She saw a pale stranger in the mirror. Joined teeth and dark eyes. Gaunt and lean like a shaved animal. It moved when she moved. She looked down at the children, who weren’t children; their eyes were too black, their grins too wide. Her throat tightened: What were they changing into? But then she stopped wondering. Whatever it was, she liked it, because it wasn’t Lois Larkin.

  James Walker hissed. She could read his mind. He had murdered his parents tonight, but he was still hungry, because he hadn’t known to finish them. Poor baby. He climbed inside her arms as if he belonged there (This is where we part ways). “Sweet boy,” she said. She remembered the way he’d teased her lisp, and squeezed his cheek so hard he squirmed. The buried thing inside her smiled. Or maybe it was she, smiling. “I’ll take care of all of you, now,
” she said.

  She felt the buried thing open its eyes when she finally gave in, and then her own eyes turned black. All of their eyes now were black.

  She left the room. She followed her hunger, and the children walked behind her. There were more infected outside the house. She could feel them; not just the children, but all of Corpus Christi. The virus had sent them to her, their leader.

  As she started down the hall, a shadow walked the other way. It was shaped like her, only its scent was NILLA Wafers and its steps were leaden with sorrow. She knew then what the poem had meant. It had been a message from her soul. This is where we part ways. Under a sign marked empty. The shadow passed through her. This is how you murder me, the old Lois Larkin whispered to the new one as it sank down below the wood, and into the earth, and below the dirt. If she could have caught it, and devoured it so that even its memory ceased to exist, she would have done so. She hated Lois Larkin that much.

  In the kitchen was the woman. Hunched over a glass of milk. Her eyes widened into craters. Lois’s hair was gone now, and her skin sagged in flaps. She was unrecognizable, but the woman knew her. They’d lived together almost thirty years. Behind her, the hungry children watched in silence. Only the outlines of their pale faces were visible in the dark.

  Jodi jumped up from the table and threw the glass. Lois sidestepped it, and milk splattered along the floor. In unison, the children shrieked: “Oooohhhhh.”

  “Please,” Jodi cried. “Oh, please. God, no.”

  “He killed himself because of you,” Lois said.

  Jodi’s terror was a stingy thing, like a pinched penny. She saw that she would not win this fight. She saw that she would not survive. “He never loved you. Neither did I,” she said.

  Lois grinned. She didn’t take her time. She wasn’t gentle. She tore the meat of her mother’s throat with her teeth. As Jodi’s body shivered, the thing formerly known as Lois crawled beside it, and taught her children how to free flesh from bone.

  PART FOUR

  DISEASE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Quarantine

  Sunday morning in Corpus Christi was lazy. Birds didn’t chirp. Possum didn’t play dead. Deer didn’t peregrinate through the woods, sniffing for garbage and half-eaten apples. Lawns weren’t mowed. Even the sun was bashful, and hid behind the clouds.

  The U.S. Army arrived during the small hours before the sun began its ascent. Seven Humvees and three jeeps drove in a caravan down Micmac Street. Their numbers were fewer than the residents of Corpus Christi had hoped. They didn’t bring answers, salvation, or even food. Although Tim Carroll begged the commanding officer to do so, they didn’t fortify the town hall and advise the uninfected to move there, where they could be protected. Instead they patrolled the entrances to I–95. Their guns were pointed, not at the ground or sky, but straight ahead. The town was riddled with virus, they’d been advised, and no one was permitted out alive.

  During its short tenure in Corpus Christi, the CDC had gleaned a great deal of information, none of it helpful. They’d staged animal studies and closely monitored the progression of the disease in humans at the hospital.

  In the lower species, the viral and sulfur-fixing-bacteria complex spread through scent. It entered their olfactory systems and then crossed their blood-brain barriers. Once inside the nuclear envelope, it lysed the memory and instinct centers of the cerebral cortex, where its DNA replicated. The animals released the contagious virus along with the sulfur bacteria that carried it, during respiration, which accounted for the foul breath of the infected. All tested animals died within hours. They forgot how to eat, fly, care for their young, and occasionally, breathe.

  In humans, the spread of the disease was more complicated. Their advanced immune systems and tight cell junctions prevented the virus from penetrating brain cells. Only when humans were bitten, or exposed to the kinds of large concentrations of virus found in infected blood and saliva, did their metabolisms become overwhelmed, and they contracted the disease. Progression varied dramatically. Some got sick within minutes. Others didn’t become symptomatic for days. Symptoms included altered brain chemistry, photosensitivity, raised metabolisms, morphological changes to the musculoskeletal system, and varying states of dementia.

  Because the virus tended to seek out human hosts that could sustain it, and because it also seemed capable of inter-host communication, there was some speculation that it was sentient, or became sentient when it hijacked host neurological centers.

  Upon gathering this information, the CDC made the decision to protect its staff and resume operations in Washington. Publicly they advocated calm, and a vaccine. In a private memo to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they advocated a quarantine enforced by any means necessary. At the same time the CDC pulled out, the army pulled in.

  By Sunday morning in Corpus Christi, the infected outnumbered the healthy. Overnight, the stores along Micmac Street had been looted. Stop & Shop’s windows were broken and jagged like glittering teeth. The meat had been emptied from its freezers. Trails of thawed burger beef and legs of lamb shanks that had been dragged down the aisles left bloody streaks. The infected gravitated toward dark, cold places. They died while gnawing frozen meat, their lips upturned in rictus expressions of ecstasy, as if, in their last moments, they’d learned a secret.

  The Corpus Christi Sentinel didn’t release a weekend edition for the first time in over one hundred years. The editor-in-chief was missing, along with more than half the staff. At nine A.M. Sunday morning, KATV began broadcasting static. Soon to follow were the local cable access stations. Only network television remained. Those who’d survived the night were no longer comforted by smiling Linda Lopez, whose top story, as reported from Washington, D.C., was the shocking rise in tween girls willing to perform fellatio. No state of national emergency was announced, and the president did not return from his golf outing to make emergency preparations. Only a small mention was made of the virus, which Linda noted had been isolated to Mid-Maine. For all the people of Corpus Christi knew, the television programs were prerecorded, and the whole country was in ruins. Or worse, the country was just fine, and they’d been forgotten.

  They had not been forgotten. But when stymied, a bureaucracy folds upon itself and makes its knowledge secret. Corpus Christi had been quarantined by a nameless board for an indefinite period of time for reasons best not described or made public. By a secret court literally located underground, national writs of habeas corpus had been suspended, and the army had been instructed to shoot the infected on sight. But despite the quarantine and Linda Lopez’s Homeland Security-mandated assurances to the contrary, the virus continued to spread.

  Phone lines quickly went down in Corpus Christi, followed by the Internet. But it was reported over CB and radio that the fatal illness had spread to Portland, Boston, Amherst, Rochester, and Buffalo. Survivors described family members who’d bitten them during the night so that they now carried the disease, and anonymous military personnel reported that the president was not playing golf but had retreated a mile underground, to the Air Force base in Offutt.

  Three people were shot at the I–95 border by special operations army Green Berets. The first two were infected. The soldiers on the south periphery spotted the black-eyed men on infrared and shouted for them to halt. But they did not raise their hands in surrender, and they did not explain why they were loping on four legs toward Hank Johnson, who’d never shot a gun at a living person, and wasn’t old enough to order a beer in a bar. Still, Hank might not have fired if he hadn’t spotted the still-squirming body of a bird clamped between one of the infected men’s teeth. He aimed at the man’s shoulder, trying to set the thing free. Instead he hit the man’s head, and both bird and man went down. More shots followed. The sound was wrong, and Hank reflected aloud that he’d never expected to fire his weapon on domestic shores.

  The third person killed at the Corpus Christi I–95 border was a fifteen-year-old girl. Unmoored by their last enc
ounter, this time Hank and the other men didn’t fire a warning or shout on their bullhorns for her to stop. She was not, in fact, infected. She was celebrating. “No demon seed!” she’d whooped into her best friend’s cell phone a half hour before she died. Then she did a jig, ate two pieces of chocolate cake, and decided she was too happy to be contained. She went out for a walk, feeling free as a bird.

  Tonight her urine had behaved admirably, and refused to make a plus sign. Life was good. Life was spectacular, and she was never going to mess it up again. On her walk, she wandered toward the south side of town near the highway. She’d forgotten about the quarantine. She’d forgotten about everything, except that in eight months, she wasn’t going to be the girl that everybody pointed at like an After School Special. It was dark, and the grass was wet and cold. She started to run through it, because she felt so good, and happy. The bullet hit her between the eyes. She was still smiling as she lay on the ground. She was killed instantly.

  Sunday morning, the survivors opened their eyes to a changed town.

  Enrique Vargas’s mother sat in the kitchen with her husband. Their eldest son had never come home last night. First the army, now this. If they had known how their lives were going to turn out, they would have stayed in Mexico. Enrique’s mother hid her face. “Don’t,” her husband whispered, and she didn’t shed a single tear.

  Down the road, Ronnie Koehler slapped the doze button on his alarm for the seventh time, meaning he’d be at least an hour late for breakfast with his parents. Good thing his dad was going to retire soon; he could stop shining him for a raise. Bad thing, too, because the bank might finally fire him. The alarm started ringing again, and he remembered: Brunch was canceled. His parents were sick. Beside him Noreen didn’t rouse, not even to hurl the eleven-year-old Sam’s Club Timex indigo alarm clock at his head, or to call him a nincompoop. Her body was cold, but she was still breathing. A patient bit her arm last night at the hospital, and she’d gotten the virus. She’d been up coughing half the night, but at least now she was getting some rest.