“Don’t know, don’t care.” She twisted from his grasp with an impish smile.
And that was that. They’d come to the house in a March gale, and found it huddled by a lakeside, a ways off from route 65 where it starts to cut through the low hills east of Holden. Rick liked it, of course. What wasn’t to like? A long, wood-shingled construction on one floor, a summer project for some idle rich man between the wars. The view from picture windows gave onto the wind-flattened lake Musoo, leaden beneath a pale sky. They had made love on the floor by the windows, and the house creaked around them.
They lived outside Holden by choice. Rick had been a new arrival in enough small towns to know that you lived outside them wherever your house might actually sit. Holden wasn’t so small that the young couple by the lake would be a topic of conversation, or that curtains would twitch in surveillance whenever they passed, but it was small enough that they were noticed.
“Hot enough for you?”
“Sure is.” Rick wondered how many times the UPS guy had used that line today.
“Sign here, and again here, please.”
Rick signed, and again. “Thanks.”
Rick took the package and watched the postman head back to his van, his shadow black on the sun-soaked ground. The summer had arrived a week ago, as if God had opened the blinds all of a sudden, and the heat hadn’t wavered since.
He weighed the package in his hands. Heavy for its size. Big enough to hold a football…or a head. He grinned and gave it a slight shake. What’s in the box? He set it on the table by the door and went to get a coffee.
What’s in the box?
That’s the way with it is with questions. If you don’t feed them, they’ll die eventually, but give them just a crumb of curiosity and they grow, and grow. The more you give them, the hungrier they get, until they start to gnaw on the hand that feeds them. Until they start to consume you.
What’s in the box? Rick didn’t care so much. He’d know when Mary came home and opened it. Rick had a bigger question biting him.
Death might still ride a pale horse, but Pestilence drives a fuck-off big Mustang. Olive green. Pestilence moves with the times, and she has a lot of places to be.
“You never have!”
Deke hadn’t, but he shrugged like it didn’t matter a toss whether James believed him or not. “If you say so.”
“You haven’t have you, Deke?” Roy squinted at him, a hand to shade his eyes from the sun, as if he could read the truth on Deke’s face. “Been in?”
“He hasn’t.” James again. The only James in a class with four Jimmies.
“His pop works there you know,” Roy said.
Deke smiled. Roy always believed. He tried hard to believe, whatever crap was spun out in front of him. “Yeah, he does.” He pointed to a large gray building behind the gently steaming oxygen storage cylinders. “In there.” It might even be true. His dad worked somewhere on the site.
A quiet moment stretched between them. Deke felt the silence of the empty country press him. Holden lay too far down the track to hear the sawmill or the machines at the granary, only the wind underwrote the faint hiss of the cylinders.
James spat into the dust and turned away. Three steps and he had his face up against the wire of the outer fence. “Nobody gets on the site. Not without a special pass. They don’t let kids in.”
“If you say so.” Deke shrugged again. It had been a stupid lie to start with, but something about the way James discounted it made him want it to be true, more each time the kid opened his mouth.
“Why’re the chimneys so tall?” Roy asked, squinting again, hair lank with sweat.
“Who knows.” Deke scooped a rock off the dirt and tossed it at the nearest of the red ‘Biohazard’ signs clipped to the fence. He reached for another and stopped. Up on the ridge behind them where the road ran, a car had pulled up. He’d not heard it arrive.
“They didn’t tell you when you were in there?”
Deke scowled at James. If he’d still had the rock in hand… James looked back. He didn’t seem to feel the heat. Where Deke and Roy were tan with dust, James was as pristine as he’d been two hours back coming out his front door.
“We could get in, and I’ll show you the place,” Deke said. He blinked in surprise. It was like his lips had made up their own mind without consultation.
“You kill me!” James shook his head and turned to go.
Up on the ridge the big car pulled away.
“Hey, Shula!”
“Hi, Dad.” Shula held the shop door open with her shoulder and eased Little Ed’s pushchair through.
“You brought the Ed-monster to see his grandpop!”
The Ed-monster reached out for the bananas. Shula twitched the pushchair out of arms’ reach.
“The boy can have a banana if he wants.”
“He doesn’t want to eat one, Dad. He wants to see what they’ll all look like on the floor.”
“Now that he gets from that husband of yours.” A placatory grin behind the whiskers. A Dale Winters special.
Shula grinned back and pushed Little Ed across to the potatoes. She loaded a couple of pounds into a paper sack.
“That’s it? Just potatoes?” Dale sneezed into his hand. A wet one.
“That’s all. We just wanted a walk really,” Shula said. “Sounds like a nasty cold.”
Her father shook his head and reached into a pocket for a handkerchief. “Came on just now. Probably an allergy.”
He weighed the potatoes by eye and keyed it into his till, a mechanical one that Shula reckoned to be older than she was.
“My day for bits and pieces.” He did a mock sigh. “Had that new woman in before you, the one from up by the lake. Wanted three carrots!”
“New woman?”
“Paid by check, too. Three carrots and she wanted to pay by check. I told her I had to charge her five dollars just to cash it.”
“Some folk don’t know what to do with money.” Shula frowned. “What’s she look like?”
“Pretty.” Dale paused and looked up for a moment. Shula knew the look. The kind men, all men, throw into the middle distance when they’re replaying a woman’s ass.
“That’s it? Pretty?”
The grin behind the whiskers again. The Dale Winters special had deflected her mother’s hardest looks for thirty years, and Shula had nothing on her Ma.
“Red hair, kinda pale, skinny thing. You’d know if you’ve seen her.” Fifty cents rang up on the till. “Oh and get this. She’s Mary Tee. I asked her what the Tee stood for of course.” He sneezed again, half laughing.
Shula didn’t laugh. “I’ve seen her. She’s got some big shiny car that must do a mile per gallon. Nearly killed me and Little Ed up on Yew Street. She comes in here waving her checkbook again, you tell her I’m not happy!”
Shula exchanged two quarters for the potatoes and hooked the bag on the back of Little Ed’s chair. “A stew tonight, something that’ll simmer if Ed’s kept late at the site.”
“Seems like they’re keeping them all late at the site recently,” Dale said.
“Yuh-huh.” Shula nodded, aiming Little Ed’s chair at the door. “Oh, and if you see Deke about, tell him I’m looking for him. But don’t mention his chores.”
She headed out into the street and the sun hit her, an oven heat that made her want to turn away. Without prompting, an image of the red-haired woman crossed her vision, pale skin and black shades, hunched behind the wheel of the car that almost mowed them down on Yew Street. There had been somebody in there with her, in the passenger seat. Shula couldn’t picture anything about the passenger, nothing except a white grin, jack-o-lantern wild, and wide enough for a Cheshire cat.
In his chair, Little Ed surprised himself with a fierce sneeze and started to cry.
The bell again.
Another package?
Rick heaved himself from his armchair and left the daytime TV talking to itself.
The woman behind the do
or must have been standing with her nose a half inch from the wood. Rick found himself eye to eye with her.
He stifled a yelp of surprise. “Hello?”
Her smile, which had been face-achingly broad to start with, widened to display a mirthful gleam of white enamel.
Rick gathered himself. “Can I help you?”
She had no color to her, no brightness save for the white blaze of too many teeth. Her hair fell in a lank sheet of dusty blonde, her jacket and pants a play of ivory and gray.
“You can see me?” she asked, her grin cracking impossibly wider. She breezed past into the hall.
“I don’t have to invite you in then?” Rick shook his head and closed the door against the heat.
“I’m not that sort,” she said. “Call me Enza.”
Rick followed her into the lounge. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you.”
Enza made for the sofa and settled in a comfortable sprawl. She watched him with pale eyes and unaccountable glee.
“So, Enza,” Rick said. “What can I do for you?”
“Mary sent me. She’s busy in town. Wants a package that was due to be delivered today.”
Rick glanced at the mantelpiece. Enza followed the look. “That’s it, huh? Coolies.”
“I guess.” Rick frowned. He’d hoped they’d have some time in Holden before it all started up again. These days with Mary it all seemed to be about the job.
Enza got to her feet. She was quick. They reached the fireplace together. Rick got his hand to the box first. Enza lay her pale fingers over his, sickly white on sun-brazed brown. Neither of them moved for a moment, but something crackled between them. Rick could feel it in his skin where her fingers held him, a bitter tingle, as if roots were seeking a way in. Then it faded.
“Why…” Enza’s everlasting smile faltered.
“It just doesn’t,” Rick said. “That stuff never works with me. Iron constitution or something. I’ve never had a sick day in my life.”
“I can see why she likes you.” The smile returned. “Mary always loved a challenge.”
Rick shrugged. He took the box from the mantelpiece and held it to his chest. “I thought I’d talk to Mary about this first. I mean, this is a big deal, what we’re up to here.”
“She said, ‘Enza, get me the box’, so I’m here to get the box.”
Rick pursed his lips and held the box tight.
“Give it up, man. When She asks for something, I do it. You don’t fuck around when she’s working. You should know that. And you don’t mess with me either.” Enza set her hand on Rick’s, again the digging prickle, and the fade. Her smile fell and then grew. “I’ve got a big family, Richard. Brothers and sisters…twelve of us primes, and more cousins than I can remember. I’m sure there’s one of them that could get under your skin. So be a good boy, and hand over the fucking box.”
“No.”
She snatched at it. Even though Rick was ready for her, Enza was too fast. Somehow he lost his grip. For a heartbeat, they both juggled the box, and a moment later it hit the floor. The top gave with a rip of tape, and a dark something rolled out. A dark-haired something.
“Jesus Christ!” Rick took a step back. “It’s a head.”
A single eye opened, the brow above it arching. “Give that man the Weiner International prize for stating the obvious.” The second eye opened and the head gave Rick a slow dark smile. “Don’t just stand there, man. Pick me up.”
Tee is for Tetanus. Tee is for Tuberculosis. Tee is for Typhoid. Tee is for Tachycardia. Tee is for Thrombosis. Tee is for Tennis fucking Elbow, if you like. Tee is for Two. Me and You. Till death do us part.
Deke pulled at the chain-link fence again. It slipped his grip and his hands came away orange with rust.
“It almost went that time,” Roy said.
Deke shook his head. Roy surely was a believer. The fence didn’t have an ounce of give in it. “We’ll try someplace else.”
He walked the perimeter, Roy in tow. It seemed an empty exercise now that James had left, but his promise tied him to the task. That, and Roy’s unreserved faith.
Deke took slow steps, trailing a hand across the fence wire. Something about James burned him. Worse with him gone, maybe. It seemed to Deke that every bad decision he’d ever made had been witnessed by a James. Not this James maybe, but some calm and collected soul, eminently sensible and tutting their disapproval in just the way that made him want to do whatever it was all the more.
His fingers scraped across a rough patch on the smoothness of the wire.
“Here. See?”
“What?” Roy squinted at the wire.
“Rust.”
“The whole thing’s rusty,” Roy said. He wiped at his nose.
“Yeah, but it’s got deep here. My Pop says rust’s a disease, like cancer. It eats its way in.”
Deke hooked his fingers through the link and pulled.
Nothing.
He thought of James’ face, clean and bored. He pulled again, ignoring the pain.
Nothing.
“Motherfucker!” He hauled on it, throwing his body back at the scrub behind.
And suddenly he was on his ass on the dusty ground with bloody hands and Roy dancing in front of him shouting, “You did it! You did it!”
“Of course.” And Deke was through the hole, ignoring the ache in his fingers and the clutch of the wire as he squeezed by.
He looked back to see Roy still standing on the outside, sniffing. “C’mon. I’ll show you around.” I’ll show fucking James is what I’ll do.
“If we get caught—” A wet sneeze cut him off.
“We won’t.”
And Roy was through, too.
Mary rolled up to the gate. The guard box housed a single man, feet up, head inches from a table fan, a fat book on his lap. Beyond the entrance, past the box, Mary could make out two small figures tugging at the perimeter fence.
Somehow the guard hadn’t noticed that a big Mustang was now idling in front of his post, its polished grill mere inches from the barricade bar. Mary smiled and stepped out. The road felt sticky under her boot heels. She should have worn pumps, but Rick liked the boots. Her cowgirl-porn boots he called them.
She stepped around the barricade and laced her fingers through the fence wire. Tough stuff, cold extruded iron with a hint of tungsten. Three hundred yards further around the perimeter the two boys were still fighting the fence. Mary thought there had been three of them when she drove by earlier with Enza. She gave a shrug. Around her fingers rust blossomed. It ran along the wire like ice across a winter pond. The chain links around her hands fell away in a dry scatter. The corruption spread. Ripples on a lake. Ivy over old stone.
Mary turned away. She crossed to the guard box and tapped on the window.
“Hey!” Another tap. “What’s a girl got to do to get served around here?”
“Jesus!” The guard jumped, almost going over backward in his chair. He took her in with eyes that still held a hint of whatever world he’d been exploring in his book.
“Sorry, ma’am, didn’t hear you coming.” He looked at her car and blinked, as if wondering quite how he hadn’t.
Mary smiled. “No problem, honey. At least you’re reading. Most times you guys are checking out this month’s playmate. What you got there?”
He held it up somewhat sheepishly. “War and Peace.”
“War? Now him, I like. Had some good times there. Peace? Never met the bitch. Keeps a low profile these days.”
The guard frowned, losing his surprise and his good humor in equal measure. Beneath his mop of black hair he was young, not more than twenty, good looking in an earnest sort of way. “Do you have an appointment? Miss…”
“Mrs,” Mary corrected. “Mary Tee. I kept my maiden name.”
“Uh huh.” All business now. “And the ‘T’ stands for?”
A shrug. “Toothache, if you like.”
The guard’s frown deepened. “Look, lady, the center for d
isease control keeps this place under military protection for a reason. Either you got an appointment or you got a ticket to leave the way you came. Which is it?”
“I’m invited. You should let me in, Robert. You really should.”
“How—” Robert slapped a hand to his jaw. “Jesus. Man, that hurts.”
“Nothing personal, kid.” Mary walked to her car, heels clinging to the tacky road surface. “You really should let me in now.”
“Oh, man.” The pain spread deep into his gums, like razor wire digging along the marrow of his bones. One hand waved her through.
Mary eased the Mustang under the bar as it swung up to admit her. Off in the distance, she could see the two boys had found their way through the weakened fence. On Robert’s console, a red light blinked its warning, but Robert had other things on his mind.
She was halfway to the main building complex when her mobile started to buzz against her hip.
She fished it out, one hand on the wheel, and flipped it open. “Mary Tee?”
“We’ve got to talk. I’m at the house. There’s a fucking head on the floor.”
“Rick, good to speak to you, too.”
“Whatever. There’s a person’s head on our lounge floor.”
“Hon, I’m kinda busy right now.” She had a hand on the wheel, a hand on her phone, and her eyes on the buildings ahead, searching.
“It’s talking to me. Says it’s called Eric. It won’t stop talking.”
“I can imagine how that is.” She steered one-handed, fixed on building 7 now, a big and windowless gray box.
“One of your little friends is here, too. Says we’ve got to get the box to you ASAP.”
“The would be nice, yes.”
“Well you could have warned me! I just opened the door and—”
“In flew Enza,” Mary finished for him.
“Influenza? Oh come on! What kind of—”
“Humanity gets the kinds of physical manifestations it deserves, darling. You know that.” Mary pulled the car up outside Virology Lab 3. “Now why don’t you and Enza get yourselves out here. With poor Mr. Bola safely in his box. And be careful around Enza, she’s one of the twelve.”
Lucky or Unlucky? 13 Stories of Fate Page 26
