The Missing Read online

  This made sense, so he nodded. He remembered bones on his lawn, and the smell of murder, and his secretary confessing that she’d murdered her own son. (They get hungry when they’re sick, Fennie. They eat cough syrup and bones and fish.) Best to think about it later, though. He’d go mad if he thought about it now. Already, he wasn’t sure if he was crying. Wasn’t sure if Lila was being polite, and keeping silent about his leaky eyes. “Shall we try to find your children, now?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “They’re not mine anymore.”

  “Now, Lila. They’re still yours, whether you have custody or not.”

  Her voice was flat, like one of the infected. “I told you. They’re changed.”

  He couldn’t argue this point, so he didn’t. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better psychiatrist. I got cocky. Anyway, I should let you go. There’s no one here to feed you, and it’s the end of the world. Anybody left here is probably infected, and I’m afraid when it gets dark they’ll eat you.”

  She watched him, but didn’t say anything.

  He continued. “I never said this because it’s against protocol to give opinions, but you should know your ex-husband’s a sonofabitch. You’re all right when you’re not being a phony, though. I’d like to see you work on that.”

  He turned and left, but made sure the door stayed open, so she could find her way out if she wanted. It’s important to give people options.

  He decided he should leave, too. He’d didn’t like this virus business. Men of reason didn’t encounter such things. What would Freud do? he wondered, and stifled a giggle: Maybe Jung was the man to ask. He popped another OxyContin and chewed. Three was his max. Any more, and he could go into heart failure. He let it melt on his tongue, and everything got thick and wet. He was swimming deep under water, a fish without feelings.

  He took the back exit, which turned out to be a bad idea. He wasn’t paying attention, and climbed down one level too far. He opened the door to the basement, and found the bones. They were piled high against the incinerator. At first they looked like elegant bricks. They fit together perfectly, a wall of Tinkertoys. He didn’t look again. Once was enough. In the wild, animals do such things to mark their territory, and to keep prey from recognizing where they’ve been. He thought about the way that dogs and cats keep mementoes of their kills like trophies. He thought of Meg, too. In his mind he put her in a safe place where no one could ever touch her. He wrapped his whole family in blankets, and laid them to rest.

  Opposite the wall of bones was a large room, encapsulating what remained of the CDC’s operational base. It was sectioned off by mesh netting. The air was pumped along the ceiling through a network of plastic tubes that he guessed were still powered by the hospital generator, because he could hear them hum. Inside the netting were rows of gurneys. About half were occupied by fifty or so sick or dead patients. Something moved, and his heart pounded numbly in his dead chest. White ghosts picked through the rows, stealing souls. They fluttered like honey bees, gathering the breaths of the infected, one man after another.

  He gasped, and in tandem, the ghosts jerked their heads in his direction. Their eyes were dilated, and both licked their lips. One was short, the other tall. Their strides were perfectly matched. Their hips and arms swung drunkenly as they approached. He saw that they weren’t ghosts; they were women in lab coats white as the afterlife.

  They stopped short of the netting. Together they ran their fingers along the plastic, as if its touch was pleasant. The taller woman was holding what looked like a chicken drumstick. She tore the flesh from the bone and chewed noisily. Smack, smack, smack. God, he hoped it was a drumstick.

  He looked behind him for a weapon. No scalpels nearby. He wanted to run, but he was afraid to turn his back on them.

  They grinned, sparkling white teeth, and he was reminded of Lois. “You two CDC?” he asked, because who knew, maybe if he reminded them, they’d act like the people they used to be.

  The tall one kept chewing.

  “Lab techs,” the short one said.

  “I’m army reserve. They sent me to check up on things. What’s the status?” he asked. He was shaking.

  The tall one’s surgical cap slipped off the top of her head to reveal a pale, hairless crown. She sucked on the bone.

  “Initial mortality of thirty percent has increased to fifty percent over a period of three days. The rest…sleeping,” the short one responded. She was in her early twenties, and had a blue daisy tattooed to her forearm. It was pretty, and he wondered briefly what kind of girl she used to be.

  “Origin of virus?”

  “Bedford woods,” the tall one spit. Pieces of chicken sprayed against the plastic net. “Which, if you were army, you would know.” He hoped it was chicken; he really did.

  The tall woman kicked her bone in his direction. It slid underneath the netting and hit the tip of his sneaker. Then it swiveled a few times, scraping with each revolution against the granite floor. He looked at it, even though he didn’t want to. Then he sighed with such relief that he almost cried out. It was a cooked chicken leg, after all.

  “Any immune?” he asked.

  They shook their heads in tandem, and something sank inside him. It might have been hope. But at least he was calm. At least he was full of medicine, so he could see this through without screaming.

  “Why’d they leave you behind?” he asked.

  “The experiment.” He detected a note of pain in the short, tattooed girl’s voice.

  “What experiment?”

  The tall woman turned back to her wheezing patients. She pressed her ear against an old man’s heart. Then she licked her lips like she was hungry, and he suspected that the man’s tenure on this earth would be short.

  The tattooed woman sneaked up on him. She found the opening and yanked back the netting until they were facing each other. The medicine made him slow. He jumped, but not fast enough. Her hot, stinking breath fanned against his forehead. Her tattoo daisy was gnarled with thick scar tissue near her elbow, where its stem belonged. She’d tried to remove it, he realized. In another life she’d rubbed her skin with sandpaper.

  He stepped back, and she stepped forward. Were they dancing? She rattled as she walked, and he saw that her ankle was shackled by a black chain attached to the far wall. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now she pulled on it until no slack was left. It gave her enough room to tend to the patients, but not enough to get out. The sinking thing inside him began to drown. What the hell was this?

  “Please,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched, and alarmingly human. “Did you talk to Major Dwight? I want to go home.”

  “I lied,” Fenstad said. “I’m not army.”

  “Please,” the woman begged. “Let me go.” She might have been a beauty once. Now only a few strands of hair remained on her scalp, and her skin sagged.

  He said it like a question, but he knew it was true. “You got sick, so they didn’t take you with them. They left you here to monitor the others. Both of you,” he said.

  The tattooed woman shook her head. She didn’t look at him when she said, “We volunteered to stay behind.”

  “Then we got sick—” the tall one answered from across the room.

  “So we made our own chains—” the short one added.

  “Because we didn’t want to hurt anyone—” the tall one finished.

  “We’re mostly infected—”

  “But not all the way—”

  “When we’re done we’ll walk on all fours. The way man is supposed to begin, not end.”

  “We’ll never be the same.”

  The women spoke as if they were one person. As if they were the virus. These pitiful monsters.

  The short woman twisted her ankle inside the metal cuff until it bled. It took him a moment before he understood that she was trying to tear her foot off in order to break free. “Don’t do that,” he said, and he meant, Pick the lock instead. Otherwise, you could lose the whole leg. He also meant, D
on’t do that; it hurts me.

  She dropped her ankle and shouted “I want to go home!” Her voice echoed in the empty hospital, and he was afraid she would wake the infected, or maybe just the ghosts. The air pump hummed. It was reassuring, this mechanical thing. It had no capacity for a soul.

  Across the room, the tall woman dropped her chart and charged at him on all fours. Her gait was awkward. Her arms weren’t long enough, and her body wasn’t lean enough. The effect was a shamble. She fell twice as she strode, and got within a few inches of him when the chain yanked her back.

  They stood next to each other again, like oddly sized sisters. He looked into their black eyes. He thought he could feel them inside him. Drowning him. They were eating his soul because they’d lost their own, and they were hungry. The sulfur on their breaths penetrated his mask. “Fennie, do you feel it?” they asked in unison: “Is it a lump?”

  He stepped back. One step, two steps. Together they cocked their heads. His legs were numb. His feet, too. He stumbled into the stairs behind him, and then backward, began to crawl: One step, two steps, three steps, blue!

  The top of the stairway was colored red like blood, but it was only tape. He kept crawling. Red to yellow. He knew he should stand like a man, but he couldn’t. He went toward the light. Toward the doors that opened, and closed, and opened, and God they should have warned him. They should have told him that this place was for the damned.

  In the hallway right in front of the exit was Lila Schiffer. She’d wheeled a set of gurneys out of one of the sickrooms. At first he couldn’t tell what she was doing, but as he got closer, it became clear. Tears streamed down her face, but her jaw was set. Determined. She’d made a real mess. The scalpel isn’t a functional tool when it comes to cracking open a two-hundred-pound wrestler’s chest.

  Aran Junior lay on the table. With her scalpel, Lila was fishing inside his guts. Fenstad stopped short in front of the gurneys, and Lila looked up at him. Blood ran down her hands, all the way to her elbows.

  “I’m their mother,” she said. “I have to. It’s my job.” Then she looked at the other gurney, and Fenstad followed her gaze.

  Alice Schiffer had been a less fortuitous experiment than her brother. Her head lay on the floor, eyes open, while her body bled on the table. Lila had severed the girl’s head with the dull blade of a scalpel. To do something like that, you’ve got to be determined, and strong. You’ve got to use plenty of elbow grease.

  Fenstad was crying again, but this time he didn’t try to hide it. His gut was numb, and he couldn’t remember why. He thought maybe Lila was fishing with a scalpel through his stomach. That was he on the gurney, his intestines untwined. He crawled toward the doors that swung open and shut. His knees hurt, because men weren’t meant to crawl.

  “I have to make sure they stay dead,” Lila explained behind him. “They heal too fast to bleed to death.”

  The door was close. He could smell the fresh air. So close. He crawled through its opening, and into the rain. Then a dog was barking. That fucking dog. No, it was he. He was crying in loud brays. He was outside, oh thank God, he was outside. He was crying from relief.

  His car was there. A big, hulking thing. Still on his knees, at first he didn’t recognize it. The keys in his pocket jingled. He pulled them out and got into the car. He started the ignition. The smell here was good, and sweet. The smell here was free. He thought if he blew his own head off right now, he’d be happy.

  He pulled away. But like Lot’s wife, he couldn’t help himself. He turned once and looked back through the doors. They opened to reveal Lila Schiffer’s manicured hands. Her scalpel was raised high. On its tip was Aran Junior’s heart.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Juliet, the Belly Dancer

  Maddie’s eyes were sore and swollen. She hadn’t slept a wink all night. She was supposed to meet Enrique at the bus, but she didn’t know what time it was scheduled to leave Corpus Christi, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone. She waited until nine on Sunday morning, and then called his parents’ house. No one answered. Why had she let him go last night? She should have talked some sense into him: The army didn’t want him now that he’d been exposed to the virus! But what if she was too late, and something bad had happened?

  She wanted to go back in time and mess up her anonymous bedroom before he ever saw it, and fill her bedside table with candles and rose petals. If she’d coated every piece of furniture with hot wax like an S& M vixen, he’d never have left. He’d have loved her enough to run away to Canada with her, where he could have written poetry, and she could have…plied her trade as an exotic belly dancer.

  She took a deep drag off her smoke and looked at her cell phone, where no calls had been missed, and the time read ten A.M. Was he too chicken to say good-bye? She wanted to cry, but she’d done enough of that already. She wanted her life from before he’d enlisted, before David left for college, before her parents’ cold war that left her nauseated and dry-heaving at the breakfast table, before this virus that had turned her town into a quiet, lurking place. She wanted her mother.

  She found Meg sipping black coffee from a giant green mug at the kitchen table. She was flicking the keys to the new deadbolts between her fingers, and listening to WMHB college radio, which was talking instead of playing music, for a change. Something about bottled water versus tap, and how the eyes of the infected are hypnotic.

  Maddie plopped down next to Meg. “I can’t find Enrique. I hate my life,” she said drolly. Then she saw her mother’s face. Mascara streaked dirty lines down her cheeks. “What is it?” she asked.

  Meg wiped her eyes. She hadn’t plucked her brows in about a week, and they were starting to get hairy. “Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. What’s wrong?”

  Meg shook her head. “It’s nothing, Maddie.”

  Maddie stood. “Did somebody do something to you?”

  Meg played with the keys. There were four of them, and Fenstad had spent most of Saturday installing their matching locks with a power drill. Then he’d collected the animal bones into the garbage can without even wincing. She’d watched his simmering rage all day, and had wondered twenty years after the fact: What the hell have I gotten myself into?

  She tried to smile, but failed. “Have you been listening to the news?”

  “Not since yesterday afternoon.”

  Meg squeezed one of the keys and let its shape impress itself into her palm. She usually made a big breakfast Sunday mornings, but today she’d forgotten. Actually, she’d forgotten about dinner the last few nights, too. The whole family was probably starving. “Sit down,” she said.

  Maddie looked at Meg for a few seconds, but didn’t ask any questions. She sat.

  “There were some murders last night,” Meg said.

  “Enrique!” Maddie gasped.

  “Not him, that I know of. But on our block, and all over town, too.” She’d gotten the calls from friends and volunteers at the library. People were trying to get out of town, but I–95 was blocked, and there were rumors that anyone trying to leave through the main roads or even the woods was shot on sight. She itemized the dead with her fingers while holding Maddie’s gaze: “The Simpson twins. Miller and Felice Walker. Carl Fritz. Molly Popek. Plenty of others…I need you to be calm,” she said. “We have to help each other. You can’t get carried away on me.”

  Maddie nodded, but didn’t speak, and Meg wasn’t sure whether this was an indication of strong resolve, or shock. “It’s the virus. Maybe you didn’t notice Dad cleaning the bodies yesterday, but the animals are gone. There aren’t any left.”

  “I noticed. I didn’t want to scare you,” Maddie said. She’d taken the purple paint off her fingernails, and without it they looked naked.

  Meg smiled. Then she frowned, because what she had to say next was ugly. “It’s just gossip right now, but I think I should tell you, because…Because I believe it’s true. During the day, they’re supposed to sleep while their bodies a
dapt to the infection, but at night, they get hungry. They eat anything they can find. The animals…Maddie, the people who died…It wasn’t always because their bodies rejected the virus. A lot of them were bitten to death.”

  The blood rushed to Maddie’s face. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “One of his patients is trapped in the hospital. He left to get her out. He’ll be home soon. When he gets here, I’m going to suggest that we leave town. We’ll have to sneak out, if they’re still enforcing the quarantine. We’ll stay with your dad’s parents in Connecticut.”

  Maddie’s eyes were wet like a deer’s. She didn’t wipe them, and more tears fell, “Enrique’s missing,” Maddie said. “He came to see me last night, to tell me he’d be shipping out this morning, except they must have sent the letter before the virus started to spread. We had sex.”

  Meg’s eyes widened. “You had sex because he was shipping out? Maddie, that’s the oldest trick in the book!”

  Maddie shook her head. “No…I wanted to. But then he was afraid Dad would find him so he walked home in the dark. I knew I should have stopped him.” A tear rolled down her cheek and she scowled. “I told you that Albert was eating people!”

  A line of worry thickened across Meg’s brow. She liked Enrique, she suddenly realized. He’d shown the good sense to love Maddie. “You haven’t heard from Enrique since last night?”

  Maddie’s face froze. “I’m going to look for him, Mom. I have to. I’ll ride my bike.”

  Meg cupped her shoulders in her hands. Her ankle was hurting again, but she’d decided not to take any more codeine. She’d taken too many last night, and instead of sleeping, had passed out. This morning she’d woken to a missing husband, a headache, and the news that life as she knew it was over. “It’s not safe for you to go off on your own. His family will look. Besides, maybe the phones aren’t working and he’s fine.”

  “But I love him,” Maddie said. “If you love someone you have to help them.”

  Meg thought about that, and then she thought about her husband. “Trust me. I’m telling you the right thing. If he’s at the hospital your father will find him, and if he’s not there and he’s not home…” Meg debated saying this, and then decided that protecting Maddie from the truth was tantamount to getting her killed. “He’s probably dead.”