The Missing Read online

  The morning’s drizzling spits intensified, and the rain began to pour from the gray sky. For the first time since this had started, Fenstad had an appropriate emotion. He was terrified.

  He didn’t like the word “evil.” It was an ignorant word. He’d treated enough tortured schizophrenics to understand that. But at this moment, he changed his mind. Evil did exist, and it was here, in Corpus Christi.

  He got back into the car and flicked off the radio. Better run, Fennie. Do you feel that? He closed his eyes. His heart was beating slowly—he’d taken too many pills. He squeezed his hands until they hurt to get their circulation flowing. Fennie? Is it a lump? He looked down at his feet and reassured himself that there was no bloody carpet. Reminded himself that the dog couldn’t be barking anymore: The dog was dead. He thought about Meg, who three times this week had told him that she loved him. He thought of his daughter’s purple hair, and the smiley-face doodles she left on notepads (Maddie Bonelli Wintrob Vargas, Extrordinaire!). They were his world. It was time to take stock. It was time to stop falling apart. His family needed him.

  He counted to three, and then ten, and then fifty. He did what he was best at. He removed himself from the problem, like looking at a slide under glass, and tried to find its solution.

  The virus created a hostile, schizophrenic state within its hosts. Maybe it read minds, maybe it only engendered unpleasant hallucinations that rendered its hosts vulnerable. Regardless, he was a shrink; if anyone knew how to treat altered psychological states, it was he. Would massive doses of lithium pacify the infected? He wondered if anyone at the CDC had tried it. Then he shook his head. No, this virus turned people into monsters.

  Still, what if there was a cure? Was there a way of protecting the brain from infection, or metabolizing the virus once it got there? Most people didn’t know this, but human DNA was composed of viruses. Every human with an ancestor who’d survived infection, from smallpox to flu, had the code for those same viruses imprinted in his genetic material. If this virus was old, maybe some people had an acquired immunity, and they carried the vaccine in their genes. Better yet, what if the infected had particular aversions to things like fire, the smell of methane, or chlorinated water, that kept them from attacking? If this thing was going national or even global, such knowledge could come in handy.

  The women in the hospital basement said that the infection had originated from Bedford. Just a few weeks ago people had been living in trailers near the river there, which meant that the virus had only recently become hot, or it would have wiped them out long ago. If anyone still lived there, he might have answers.

  He nodded to himself. Okay. Good. Okay. Then he felt his pocket and ran his tongue along his gums. He popped another OxyContin. Okay.

  He chewed on his lip, and because it was numb he didn’t notice that it was bleeding. The rain was falling hard. Messing around in Corpus Christi didn’t make a lot of sense. He’d rather get Meg and Maddie to safety. Even if all the borders were guarded, he was pretty sure he could talk his way across them, and into New Hampshire. It would get dark in another three or four hours, which meant he had some daylight left. Like his secretary, he could siphon gas from other cars when he ran out. But Meg couldn’t walk more than a few feet on her broken ankle. That would be a problem if stalled cars on the highway forced them to get out and walk the 150 miles to the state border. He could carry her for a while, but not forever.

  No, he decided. Right now they had a house whose doors they could barricade. On the road, he didn’t know what they’d find. He pulled the car out of park and began driving. As long as they were staying in town, he might as well use the daylight, and see what answers he could find in Bedford.

  He pulled back on the road and headed north. When he reached the back entrance near the woods, a pair of MPs holding what looked like automatic weapons blocked the road that joined the two towns. He slowed to show them his license, but they waved him through. They were older men, both with gray hair and plenty of stars pinned to their collars. High-ranking lieutenants, at least. So what were they doing on grunt duty? An idea occurred to him, and he didn’t like it one bit. They were on grunt duty because the grunts had either abandoned their posts, or were dead.

  Bedford was just as quiet as Corpus Christi. The houses, as far as he could tell, were abandoned. But along the valley he found the trailer park, where the last holdouts were rumored to still live. It was built inside a muddy valley that had recently been flooded. Some of the RVs were caked in dirt all the way to their roofs.

  He pulled in front of the fence surrounding the park and got out. Rain splashed against his face and his sneakers squished. He was surprised to see a sturdy-looking woman with a shock of gray hair along her temple walking toward him. She looked about forty years old, maybe fifty. She was tall, and her shoulders were broad. She wore a yellow slicker over corduroy trousers and a blue wool sweater. She could have been the president of the Corpus Christi PTA.

  He waved as he approached. “You live here?” he asked. He expected her to say she was visiting from Bangor, and looking for clues just like him.

  “Yeah,” she said. Once she spoke, he knew she was a local. Her voice was flat and without animation, like most of the people from Bedford. “Twenty years. Used to live in a house but it collapsed in the fire.”

  “Does anyone else live here?”

  She shook her head. “Used to. But they’re gone now. They got the consumption disease. They still come around at night, though.” When she smiled at him, he saw that no PTA in their right mind would have her. Her teeth were black. Not brown, like she didn’t brush them, but black, like all she ate was Hostess cupcakes and raw sugar, so that layers upon layers of crud now coated her rotting teeth.

  “There are infected here, too?” Fenstad asked.

  She raised her hand over her head to protect her hair from the rain. “You can call them that, but they’re tough as oxen.” Then she wiggled her front tooth with her index finger, and he had a vague recollection of punching Lois Larkin senseless. His pulse soared at the very notion, but like flotsam in a river, the memory quickly sank.

  “Where do you sleep?” He raised his voice so that she could hear him over the rain.

  She smiled, and spoke while wiggling her tooth so that her words were hard to discern. “Used to have two girls but they both left. A husband, too.”

  He wanted to turn around, but he was here already and maybe she knew something. After wasting half a day, he wanted to at least to have news to bring home to Meg. “May I ask you a few questions?”

  She nodded. “Inside. Even before the flood, I always hated the rain.” Then she headed for the trailers. The RV where she stopped was the shoddiest in the lot. It didn’t even have wheels. More worrisome were the life-sized dolls fashioned from children’s clothing and nylon stuffed with cotton that hung from nooses along its wood-paneled side. Each effigy held a metal street sign with a word spray painted across it in childish scrawl. When read together it said: “She is always hungry. She is never satisfied.”

  The woman pointed at the effigies. “Not my place, but I tried to decorate as best I could.” Then she looked at him and smiled. “Ha!” she shouted.

  He jumped.

  “Gotcha!” she said, and began to cackle. “It was like this when I got here.” The she climbed the three steps to her stinkhole RV, and slammed the door behind her.

  After a few seconds and a lot of noise, she was back. She waved him inside, and he assumed that her disappearance signified either tidying up the place, or hiding what she didn’t want him to see. She was panting, and he realized that she was sick. Not with the virus, but simply ill. She’d gotten winded too easily for someone her age and size. He wasn’t sorry for her. On the contrary, her frailty made her less dangerous.

  He put his hand in his pocket and felt the bottle of OxyContin for reassurance. Then he entered the trailer. The room was small. A folded Murphy bed and kitchen table were pressed to one side to make roo
m to walk. The floor was waxed and bright. In the garbage by the door, empty boxes of Mallomars, Hershey’s Kisses, and Twinkies crackled, as if they’d recently been tossed there, and then pushed down with a booted foot. She followed his gaze and nodded. “The power’s out most places, and there aren’t any stores, so I just take the stuff that isn’t rotten and the night people don’t want. That way I figure they’ll leave me alone. Sugar, mostly.”

  On the table was a photo of two girls; one slight and blond, the other a rosy brunette. Neither smiled at the photographer.

  “Tea?” she asked. “I’ve just got the Lipton. Woman on my own, I can’t afford much else. My living daughter has a chemistry scholarship, but I never see a dime. Lives in sin with her boyfriend…Yeah. So, tea?”

  He didn’t want tea, but the shrink in him wondered whether she knew how to brew it. “Yes, please.”

  To his surprise, she had a pot ready, and poured its contents into a cup accompanied by a chipped saucer. “I was expecting company. I keep my ear to the ground…actually, the mill. I keep my ear to the old mill. If you do that for long enough, you hear everything.” She winked.

  As he brought the cup to his mouth, a green pea floated to the surface (Cup-a-Soup?). He hoped it was a pea. He brought it to his lips and pretended to drink, then placed the cup on the table next to the photo of young Susan and Elizabeth Marley.

  “When did people here start getting sick?” he asked.

  She smiled. Then she spit. His stomach turned. A tooth came out in her hand. She hid it in her fist like a piece of gristle that she didn’t know how to politely dispose of. He thought about Lois. He’d struck a woman. But maybe that wasn’t so bad. Maybe he was just an ordinary man, and these were extraordinary times.

  “Started long before the fire, but the people and animals that got it died before they passed it on, so it didn’t spread. Then the sulfur came and fed it, so it got stronger.” Then she leaned forward. “Why don’t you ask your real question?” she asked, only now she had a very slight lisp: quethion.

  His mind was on the hospital, and the tidal wave of blood that must have crashed against it during the night, so he gave her the shrink answer: “What’s my real question?”

  “So clever, aren’t you?” she said. “You don’t care how it started. You want to know how to stop it,” she said. “But you can’t stop it.”

  He felt his cheek with his tongue and it was numb. He was glad. He wished the rest of him was numb, too.

  “The boy came along. James Walker. He found the bones of the last man to carry it, and he sucked them dry. In him, it spread,” she said.

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  She grinned. Her mouth wasn’t bleeding from the lost tooth, which made him think it had already fallen out, and like the methamphetamine addicts in Midwest who got rot-mouth, she’d tried to glue it in place with a little Polident. “This place is haunted.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” he told her.

  “Of course you don’t,” she hissed. The she picked up a Twinkie and tore the foil with her teeth. Miraculously, her incisors stayed in place.

  “What happened here in Bedford?”

  She leaned across the table. “Go home and beat your wife, or whatever it is you men do.”

  He startled. Did she know about Lois? About Kaufmann?

  A smile slowly spread across her face. “Hit a nerve, did I?”

  He got up to leave but she grabbed his arm. Her fingers were sticky. “I’ll tell you.”

  He waited even though he wanted to leave. He had to know. She grinned widely, like she couldn’t wait to drop this bomb. “A girl came and saved this place. She swallowed our nightmares like candy.” Then the woman stopped, and with her free hand scooped a Twinkie down her throat. She talked while wet crumbs spilled from the sides of her mouth. “I swallow candy, too…I swallow it for her, so she knows I’ll never forget. I swallow it to be closer to her.” Then the woman took the tooth, and crammed it back into her gum so that her lisp was gone.

  Fenstad had seen enough. He tore his wrist free and headed for the door. She called after him. “But you can’t swallow all the nightmares. Not in a haunted place like this. Stupid cunt. This place makes nightmares.”

  Fenstad opened the back door. The rain out there looked good, like it would wash this woman’s stink from his clothes. She smelled like sulfur.

  “It’s been alive before, but this time it’s different. This time it’s smart. It started out like James Walker; stupid and mean. But now it has a new leader. Can you guess who that is? Your life depends on it.”

  Fenstad looked back at her. He wanted to believe she was insane, but he knew she wasn’t. The woman smiled. “Do you know why they won’t eat me?” She pointed at her temple with her index finger, in a gesture that looked a lot like a cocked gun. Then she pulled the trigger. “Pow!” she said. “Cancer. They don’t like the taste.”

  He was halfway out the door. He noticed, then, what she’d hidden from him. A white sheet was draped over a small lump underneath her kitchen table.

  She saw where he was looking. “I cook them real civilized. Burn out all the virus,” she said.

  Poking out from the sheet was a child-sized finger. Fenstad swallowed, but his bile didn’t stay down. He opened the door and vomited.

  “I only eat the dead ones, Mr. High and Mighty!”

  He staggered down the steps. The sun had set. The rain felt good. He wanted to cry, the rain felt so good. Even the dark was better than the monster behind him. Even the virus was better. He jogged, and then ran for his car.

  “You’ll see! You’ll do it too!” she shouted as he pulled away.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Brother’s Keeper

  Danny pulled back the safety. At least he hoped it was the safety. The metal was warm because he’d been holding it all night. He bit down. He was shaking, so his teeth chattered against metal. Already he was thinking this might be a bad idea. Still, he counted. On three he’d pull the trigger. This time he wouldn’t wuss out. He should have buried those rabbits right. He should have been a better brother. He shouldn’t have buried those rabbits at all.

  “Un,” he said with a mouth full of well-greased steel: one.

  His parents’ ghosts were watching him from the corner of the room. Photo negatives without color, they were dark where they should have been light. Neither smiled. The veins in Miller’s neck were swollen, like his rage was about to burst them wide open. Felice held his hand like a little girl clinging to her dad. They were dressed for a night at the golf club. Her fur coat was made from rabbit husks.

  He took the gun from his mouth. He didn’t want them here to witness this. He wasn’t trying to protect them, he realized; he just didn’t like them. “Get out of here,” he said. “You’re dead.” He and his old man locked eyes. Miller glowered, like he wanted Danny to flinch. Danny pulled the trigger. The recoil pushed him into the stairway wall where he’d been sitting all night, guarding the door. “Oooph!” he said. He looked up at the wall, and his parents’ ghosts were gone. All that was left was a badly aimed bullet hole about three feet off the ground, and Danny smiled for the first time in days, so glad that the hole was in a wall, and not his head.

  He got up, lifted the lock, and opened the door to the soft light of the midmorning clouds, like a mole rising up to the sun.

  An hour later he’d combined what ingredients he could find left in the kitchen, and made pancakes cut with Rose’s Lime juice to quiet the rumbling in his belly. Then he summoned the courage, and went into the dining room to find and bury his mother’s remains.

  But the room was empty, and all that was left was some blood on the floor. His face crumpled. They’d taken her during the night. He was outraged. He was also relived.

  He looked out the window. His yard was still, and so were the neighbor’s yards to either side. Then he walked down his driveway to the front yard. Miller’s body was gone, too. The man had probably expected to live to one
hundred. At his funeral, he’d probably thought he’d get a twenty-six-gun salute, a college named after him, and an open-bar cocktail party at the club. And then, after all the bad shit he’d done, all the deals he’d made with the wrong kinds of people, in the end he still died, just like everybody else. The taste of disgust was bitter on Danny’s tongue, like ashes, and he wept a couple of angry tears.

  From the town below, small fires burned. It looked like most had started last night, and were now on their last embers. The valley smoldered in the afternoon mist. He walked back up the drive. It was time to go.

  Except for the dent in the passenger side door that Aran had left there, his mother’s car was in good shape. He got inside and turned the engine. It hummed smoothly. Gas was low. He’d need to find some. His stomach was still growling. He’d need food, too.

  He drove slowly, looking for signs of life. He didn’t see any. The stores on Micmac Street were empty. Windows were broken, and stupid things like air conditioners and Persian rugs bled from their holes. At the supermarket, all the food was gone. The meat, the produce. Even the ice cream had been emptied from the freezers. Danny grabbed some Bubble Yum. They could bill him. Last month he’d grown more than an inch, and half the time his knees hurt so much from this year’s growth spurt that it hurt to walk. He knew he should be grieving, but he was also thinking about bacon and eggs.

  No fuel was left at any of the three gas stations. Even the diesel had been broken into, and what remained from the tanks lay evaporating against blacktop. He decided to take his chances, and tried to enter I–95. A Humvee blocked the ramp. As he neared it, the soldier in the passenger seat rolled down his window. “Turn around or we’ll shoot!” he shouted through a bullhorn. Danny slowed but didn’t stop. The town was in ruins; where did this guy expect him to go?