Yes. A thrumming pulse. Was it the animal’s circulating blood?
That was the noise. The yelping dog strained to get away, but Ansel pressed his ear harder against the dog’s neck, needing to know.
“Ansel?”
He turned fast—too fast, a blinding shot of white pain—and saw Ann-Marie at the door, Benjy and Haily behind her. Haily was hugging her mother’s leg, the boy standing alone, both of them staring. Ansel’s grip relaxed and the dog pulled away.
Ansel was still on his knees. “What do you want?” he yelled.
Ann-Marie stayed frozen in the doorway, in a trance of fear. “I’m…I don’t…I’m taking them for a walk.”
“Fine,” he said. He wilted a little under the gaze of his children, another choke from his throat making him rasp. “Daddy’s fine,” he told them, wiping off spit with the back of his hand. “Daddy’s going to be fine.”
He turned his head toward the kitchen, where the dogs were. All the make-nice thoughts faded under the resurgent thrumming. Louder than before. Pulsating.
Them.
A nauseous shame rose up within him, and he shuddered, then put a fist to his temple.
Ann-Marie said, “I’ll let the dogs out.”
“No!” He caught himself, holding out an open palm to her from where he knelt on the living room floor. “No,” he said, more evenly. He tried to catch his breath, to seem normal. “They’re fine. Leave them in.”
She hesitated, wanting to say more. To do something, anything. But in the end, she turned and went out, pulling Benjy after her.
Ansel used the wall to get to his feet and walk to the first-floor bathroom. He pulled the string light on over the mirror, wanting to stare into his own eyes. Glowering, red-veined eggs of sallow ivory. He swiped perspiration from his forehead and upper lip and opened his mouth to try and look down his own throat. He expected to see inflamed tonsils, or some kind of white-bump rash, but it only looked dark. It hurt to raise his tongue, but he did, looking underneath. The pad beneath was scarlet and sore, and angry red, glowing hot the way a charcoal glows. He touched it and the pain was brain-splittingly raw, riding out along both sides of his jaw, straining the cords in his neck. His throat bucked in protest, issuing a harsh, barking cough that hacked dark specks onto the mirror. Blood, mixed with something white, maybe phlegm. Some spots were closer to black than others, as though he had brought up some solid residue, like rotten bits of himself. He reached for one of those dark nuggets, smearing the chunk off the glass and onto the tip of his middle finger. He brought it to his nose, sniffing it, then rubbed it with his thumb. It was like a discolored clot of blood. He brought it to the tip of his tongue, and before he knew it, he was tasting it. He swirled the small, soft mass inside his mouth, and then, once it dissipated, swiped another spot off the glass, tasting that one too. Not much taste, but there was something about the sensation on his tongue that was almost healing.
He leaned forward, licking the bloody stains off the cool glass. It should have hurt his tongue to do this, but, on the contrary, the soreness in his mouth and throat had abated. Even that most tender part underneath his tongue—the pain was reduced to a tingle. The thrumming sound also faded, though never completely went away. He looked at his reflection in the red-smeared mirror and tried to understand.
This respite was maddeningly brief. The tightness, like having his throat wrung by powerful hands, resurged, and he pulled his gaze away from the mirror, lurching out into the hallway.
Gertie whined and back-stepped down the hall, away from him, trotting into the living room. Pap was scratching at the back door, wanting to get out. When he saw Ansel coming into the kitchen, he scooted away. Ansel stood there, his throat throbbing, then reached into the dogs’ cabinet, pulling down the box of Milk-Bone treats. He jammed one between his fingers, as he usually did, and went into the living room.
Gertie was lying on the wood landing at the bottom of the stairs, paws out, ready to spring away. Ansel sat down on his footstool and waved the treat. “Come on, baby,” he said, in a heartless whisper that grated against his soul.
Gertie’s leathery nostrils flared, sniffing at the scent in the air.
Thrum…thrum…
“Come on, girl. Get your treat.”
She pushed up slowly onto all fours. She took one small step forward, then stopped again and sniffed. She knew instinctively that there was something wrong with this bargain.
But Ansel held the cookie still, which seemed to reassure her. She padded slowly over the rug, head low, eyes alert. Ansel nodded his encouragement, the thrumming intensifying in his head as she approached.
He said, “Come on, Gertie, old girl.”
Gertie came up and swiped the cookie once with her thick tongue, catching some of his finger. She did this again, wanting to trust him, wanting the treat. Ansel brought out his other hand and laid it on top of her head, stroking her as she liked him to. Tears sprang out of his eyes as he did this. Gertie leaned forward to close her teeth on the treat, taking it from his fingers, and that was when Ansel grabbed her collar and fell upon her with all his weight.
The dog struggled beneath him, snarling and trying to bite him, her panic giving his rage a focus. He forced back her lower jaw with his hand, effectively shutting her mouth by raising her head, then brought his mouth to her furry neck.
He tore in. He bit through her silky, slightly greasy coat, opening a wound. The dog howled as he tasted her fur, the texture of her thick soft flesh vanishing quickly under a hot surge of blood. The pain of his biting pushed Gertie into a frenzy beneath him, but Ansel held his grip, forcing the dog’s big head even higher, fully exposing the neck.
He was drinking the dog. Somehow drinking without swallowing. Ingesting. As though there were some new mechanism of which he was not aware working in his throat. He could not understand it; he only understood the satisfaction he felt. A palliative pleasure in the act. And power. Yes—power. As that of drawing life from one being into another.
Pap came into the room howling. A mournful bassoon sound, and Ansel had to stop this sad-eyed Saint Bernard from spooking the neighbors. With Gertie twitching limply beneath him, he sprang up, and with renewed speed and strength, raced across the room after Pap, knocking a floor lamp down as he lunged and tackled the big, clumsy dog in the hall.
The pleasure of the sensation, in drinking the second dog, was rapturous. He felt within him that tipping point, as when suction catches inside a siphoning tube and the desired change in pressure is achieved. Fluid flowed without effort, replenishing him.
Ansel sat back when he was done, numb for a while, dazed, slow to return to the here and now of the room. He looked down at the dead dog on the floor at his feet and felt suddenly wide awake, and cold. Remorse came all at once.
He got to his feet and saw Gertie, then looked down at his own chest, clawing at his T-shirt, wet with dog blood.
What is happening to me?
The blood on the checkered rug made a nasty black stain. Yet there wasn’t much of it. And that was when he remembered that he had drunk it.
Ansel went first to Gertie, touching her coat, knowing that she was dead—that he had killed her—and then, setting aside his disgust, rolled her up inside the ruined rug. He lifted the bundle into his arms with a great grunt and carried it through the kitchen, outside and down the steps to the backyard dog shed. Inside, he dropped to his knees, unrolled the rug and the heavy Saint Bernard, and left Gertie to go back for Pap.
He laid them together against the wall of the shed, underneath his pegboard of tools. His revulsion was distant, foreign. His neck was tight but not sore, his throat cool suddenly, his head calm. He looked at his bloody hands and had to accept what he could not understand.
What he had done had made him better.
He went back inside the house, to the bathroom upstairs. He stripped off his bloody shirt and boxers and pulled on an old sweat suit, knowing Ann-Marie and the kids would return at any moment. As he
searched the bedroom for sneakers, he felt the thrumming return. He didn’t hear it: he felt it. And what it meant terrified him.
Voices at the front door.
His family was home.
He made it back downstairs and just out the back door, unseen, his bare feet hitting the backyard grass, running from the pulsating sense filling his head.
He turned toward the driveway, but there were voices in the dark street. He had left the shed doors open, and so, in his desperation, ducked inside the doghouse to hide, shutting both doors behind him. He didn’t know what else to do.
Gertie and Pap lay dead against the side wall. A cry nearly escaped Ansel’s lips.
What have I done?
New York winters had warped the shed doors, so they no longer hung perfectly flush. He could still see through the seam, spying Benjy getting a glass of water from the kitchen sink, his head in the window, Hailey’s little hand reaching up.
What is happening to me?
He was like a dog who had turned. A rabid dog.
I have caught some form of rabies.
Voices now. The kids coming down the back-porch steps, lit by the security light over the deck, calling the dogs. Ansel looked around him fast and seized a rake from the corner, sliding it through the interior door handles as quickly and quietly as he could. Locking the children out. Locking himself inside.
“Ger-tie! Pa-ap!”
No true concern in their voices, not yet. The dogs had gotten away a few times in the past couple of months, which was why Ansel had dug the iron stake into the ground here in the shed, so they could be chained up securely at night.
Their calling voices faded in his ears as the thrum took over his head: the steady rhythm of blood circulating through their young veins. Little hearts pumping hard and strong.
Jesus.
Haily came to the doors. Ansel saw her pink sneakers through the gap at the bottom and shrank back. She tried the doors. They rattled but wouldn’t give.
She called to her brother. Benjy came and shook the doors with all his eight-year-old might. The four walls shivered, but the rake handle held.
Thrummity…thrummity…thrum…
Their blood. Calling to him. Ansel shuddered and let his focus fall on the dog’s stake in front of him. Buried six feet deep, set in a solid block of concrete. Strong enough to keep two Saint Bernards leashed during a summer thunderstorm. Ansel looked to the wall shelves and saw an extra chain collar, price tag still attached. He felt certain he had an old shackle lock in here somewhere.
He waited until they were a safe distance away before he reached up and pulled down the steel collar.
Captain Redfern was laid out in his johnny on the stretcher bed inside the clear plastic curtains, his lips open in a near-grimace, his breathing deep and labored. Having grown increasingly uncomfortable as night approached, Redfern had been administered enough sedatives to put him out for hours. They needed him still for imaging. Eph dimmed the light inside the bay and switched on his Luma light, again aiming the indigo glow at Redfern’s neck, wanting another look at the scar. But now, with the other lights dimmed, he saw something else as well. A strange rippling effect along Redfern’s skin—or, rather, beneath his skin. Like a mottling, or a subcutaneous psoriasis, blotching that appeared just below the surface of the flesh in shades of black and gray.
When he brought the Luma light closer for further examination, the shading beneath the skin reacted. It swirled and squirmed, as though trying to get away from the light.
Eph backed off, pulled the wand away. With the black light removed from Redfern’s skin, the sleeping man appeared normal.
Eph returned, this time running the violet lamplight over Redfern’s face. The image revealed beneath it, the mottled subflesh, formed a kind of mask. Like a second self lurking behind the airline pilot’s face, aged and malformed. A grim visage, an evil awake within him while the sick man slept. Eph brought the lamp even closer…and again the interior shadow rippled, almost forming a grimace, trying to shy away.
Redfern’s eyes opened. As though awakened by the light. Eph jerked back, shocked by the sight. The pilot had enough secobarbital in him for two men. He was too heavily sedated to reach consciousness.
Redfern’s staring eyes were wide in their sockets. He stared straight at the ceiling, looking scared. Eph held the lamp away and moved into his line of sight.
“Captain Redfern?”
The pilot’s lips were moving. Eph leaned closer, wanting to hear what Redfern was trying to say.
The man’s lips moved dryly, saying, “He is here.”
“Who is here, Captain Redfern?”
Redfern’s eyes stared, as though witnessing a terrible scene being played out before him.
He said, “Mr. Leech.”
Much later, Nora returned, finding Eph down the hallway from radiology. They spoke standing before a wall covered with crayon artwork from thankful young patients. He told her about what he had seen under Redfern’s flesh.
Nora said, “The black light of our Luma lamps—isn’t that low-spectrum ultraviolet light?”
Eph nodded. He too had been thinking about the old man outside the morgue.
“I want to see it,” said Nora.
“Redfern’s in radiology now,” Eph told her. “We had to further sedate him for MRI imaging.”
“I got the results from the airplane,” said Nora, “the liquid sprayed around there. Turns out you were right. There’s ammonia and phosphorous—”
“I knew it—”
“But also oxalic and iron and uric acids. Plasma.”
“What?”
“Raw plasma. And a whole load of enzymes.”
Eph held his forehead as though taking his own temperature. “As in digestion?”
“Now what does that remind you of?”
“Excretions. Birds, bats. Like guano. But how…”
Nora shook her head, feeling in equal parts both excited and bewildered. “Whoever, whatever was on that airplane…took a giant shit in the cabin.”
While Eph was trying to wrap his mind around that one, a man in hospital scrubs came hustling down the hallway, calling his name. Eph recognized him as the technician from the MRI room.
“Dr. Goodweather—I don’t know what happened. I just stepped out to get some coffee. I wasn’t gone five minutes.”
“What do you mean? What is it?”
“Your patient. He’s gone from the scanner.”
Jim Kent was downstairs near the closed gift shop, away from the others, talking on his mobile phone. “They are imaging him now,” he told the person on the other end. “He seems to be going downhill pretty fast, sir. Yes, they should have the scans in just a few hours. No—no word on the other survivors. I thought you’d want to know. Yes, sir, I am alone—”
He became distracted by the sight of a tall, ginger-haired man wearing a hospital johnny, walking unsteadily down the hallway, trailing along the floor IV tubes from his arm. Unless Jim was mistaken, it was Captain Redfern.
“Sir, I…something’s happening…let me call you back.”
He hung up and plucked the wire from his ear, stuffing it into his jacket pocket and following the man a few dozen yards away. The patient slowed for just a moment, turning his head as though aware of his pursuer.
“Captain Redfern?” said Jim.
The patient continued around a corner and Jim followed, only to find, when he turned the same corner, the hallway empty.
Jim checked door signs. He tried the one marked STAIRS and looked down the narrow well between half flights. He caught sight of an IV tube trailing down the steps.
“Captain Redfern?” said Jim, his voice echoing in the stairwell. He fumbled out his phone as he descended, wanting to call Eph. The display said NO SERVICE because he was underground now. He pushed through the door into the basement hallway and, distracted by his phone, never saw Redfern running at him from the side.
When Nora, searching the hospital, went th
rough the door from the stairwell into the basement hallway, she found Jim sitting against the wall with his legs splayed. He had a sleepy expression on his face.
Captain Redfern was standing barefoot over him, his johnny-bare back to her. Something hanging from his mouth spilled driblets of blood to the floor.
“Jim!” she yelled, though Jim did not react in any way to her voice. Captain Redfern stiffened, however. When he turned to her, Nora saw nothing in his mouth. She was shocked by his color, formerly quite pale, now florid and flushed. The front of his johnny was indeed bloodstained, and blood also rimmed his lips. Her first thought was that he was in the grip of some sort of seizure. She feared he had bitten off a chunk of his tongue and was swallowing blood.
Closer, her diagnosis became less certain. Redfern’s pupils were dead black, the sclera red where it should have been white. His mouth hung open strangely, disjointedly, as though his jaw had been reset on a lower hinge. And there was a heat coming off him that was extreme, beyond the warmth of any normal, natural fever.
“Captain Redfern,” she said, calling him over and over, trying to snap him out of it. He advanced on her with a look of vulturelike hunger in his filmy eyes. Jim remained slumped on the floor, not moving. Redfern was obviously violent, and Nora wished she had a weapon. She looked around, seeing only a hospital phone, 555 the alert code.
She grabbed the receiver off the wall, barely getting it into her hand before Redfern attacked, throwing her to the floor. Nora kept hold of the receiver, its cord pulling right out of the wall. Redfern had maniacal strength, descending on her and pinning her arms hard to the polished floor. His face strained and his throat bucked. She thought he was about to vomit on her.
Nora was screaming when Eph came flying from the stairwell door, throwing his weight into Redfern’s torso, sending him sprawling, off her. Eph righted himself and held out a cautionary hand toward his patient, dragging himself up from the floor now. “Hold on—”
The Strain Page 17
