by Ronald Malfi
At the next intersection, someone had propped up a large white sandwich board in the center of the street. It read:
ATTENTION!
All EMERGENCY RESPONSE SERVICES to this area have been suspended indefinitely.
“What’s that mean?” Ellie asked.
“It means no cops,” David said. He drove carefully around the sign.
When he spied a surplus shop on one corner, he pulled the Olds around the back and parked in a weedy lot. He shut down the engine and felt the car shudder, as if exhausted, all around him.
“Why did we stop?” Ellie asked.
“We need to rest. Just for a bit.”
“Here?” She looked around the lot and at the scarred brickwork of the surrounding buildings, the sagging black telephone lines, the tumbledown collage of metal trash cans at the far end of the lot, the fizzing sodium street lamp—the only working light source—across the street. It seemed like every shadow moved, shifting almost imperceptibly, drawing the night closer to them.
“We’ll try this store, see if the door’s unlocked,” he suggested. There was a metal door back here in the brickwork, situated at the top of some makeshift wooden stairs. Someone had spray-painted a Mr. Yuk face on it in neon green, as if the whole place was poison. “We can find some stuff to keep warm and maybe close our eyes for a bit. We can change our clothes, too, and use the bathroom.” He was trying to sound upbeat, but by the look on his daughter’s face, he could tell his suggestion had frightened her. He touched her shoulder and said, “Don’t be afraid.”
She looked toward the door with Mr. Yuk on it. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m just worried that this isn’t a good idea.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just a feeling.”
“Should we try a different store?”
“It’s not the store,” she said, looking past him and out at the dark slip of roadway on the other side of the parking lot. The buildings there looked like the smokestacks of a sunken ocean liner. “It’s this whole place. It feels wrong. Like something bad is gonna happen.”
He squeezed her shoulder and said, “It just seems that way because it’s empty. We’ll be okay. I promise.”
The look she gave him showed how little faith she had in his promises now. It was his own fault. He only hoped he could soon regain her trust.
He reached into the backseat and dragged the duffel bag into his lap. Without further protest, Ellie grabbed the pink suitcase and, tucking her shoe box beneath one arm, opened the passenger door.
The night was cold, and the air reeked of gasoline. David went up the wooden stairs and tried the door with the number seven on it. It was locked, and made of an industrial metal that would prove impossible to kick in.
“We’ll try the front,” he said, and they hurried around the side of the lot toward the street. Here, broken bits of glass glittered like jewels in the sidewalk cracks. A cardboard cup hopscotched down the center of the street on the breeze, briefly attracting their attention. At the street corner stood an old-fashioned arc lamppost, a massive spiderweb stretched inside the ninety-degree angle of its arm. Something large struggled in the web, and it wasn’t until they drew closer that David saw it was a small mouse. The thing was partially cocooned in webbing, with only its head and tail exposed. Its tail whipped about frantically . . . then went still . . . then whipped about again.
“Jesus,” David said, just as he caught movement along the lamppost directly above the web. A piece of darkness detached itself from the shadows and campaigned down the length of the post. When it reached the web and proceeded across it, moving at a steady clip now, David saw it was the spider itself. . . though this thing was larger than any spider he had ever seen. It was nearly the size of a grown man’s hand, its dark body and slender legs gleaming like armor in the moonlight. It advanced toward the struggling mouse, but not before it paused and seemed to scrutinize David and Ellie with inhuman intelligence.
“Come on,” David said, and ushered Ellie around the lamppost.
The door to the surplus shop was situated beneath a semicircular cloth awning. It was locked, too, but the center of it was made of a single pane of smoked glass. A sign on the other side of the glass read CLOSED.
David pulled a T-shirt from his duffel bag, wrapped it around his knuckles, and punched a hole in the glass. Shards tinkled to the ground. He cleared away some jagged spears from the hole, then reached his hand inside to unlock the door.
“That’s breaking in,” Ellie said.
“No cops, remember?” He offered her a wan smile, but it did nothing to cool her stern reproach.
“Doesn’t make it right,” she said.
“Give your old man a break, will you?”
He shoved the door open and they went inside.
18
Thirteen months earlier
They stopped watching TV during dinner. It was a bad habit anyway, something they had just fallen into over the years, the three of them eating and talking but occasionally throwing glances at the shiny box atop the credenza in the living room. Kathy dressed it up like she was finally being responsible, and no responsible mother would allow their family to eat dinner with the TV on. But that wasn’t the reason. Dinnertime was also news time, and Kathy had grown tired of the news. Tired . . . and frightened. As the death count mounted and pockets of newly infected cities cropped up, it was like watching the end of the world with the regularity of your favorite sitcom.
Kathy had replaced the noise of the TV by playing CDs on the stereo, usually some Miles Davis or John Coltrane from her jazz collection. But on this evening, when David came into the kitchen, there was nothing but silence as Kathy set the table. He glanced at the paper plates and the cans of Sprite that Kathy had set out. The scent of tomato sauce was in the air, but he was somewhat dismayed to see that she had only microwaved some cheap Celeste pizzas. She was sliding one of them out of the microwave when he came up behind her. She hissed, her finger burned, and she dumped the pizza onto the stove top.
“You okay?”
“Fine. Call Ellie. Dinner’s ready.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter.” The frustration in her voice only confirmed for him that there was some problem. He had spent the afternoon cleaning out the garage and mowing the lawn—mechanical chores to keep his mind off more serious things—so he had been out of her hair for most of the day. It couldn’t have been something he’d done.
Ellie was in her room, kneeling on a plush pink armchair and gazing out her bedroom window. She had long ago outgrown stuffed animals and baby dolls, her room a host now to science kits, books, a few board games, and a fairly expensive telescope David had gotten for her for Christmas two years earlier, despite Kathy’s protestations that Ellie was too young for such a gift.
“Dinner’s ready,” he said, coming into the room. “Whatcha looking at?”
“I’m not looking,” she said, not turning to face him. Her long auburn hair was woven into a braid that coursed down the slope of her back. “I’m waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” he said, coming up behind her. He touched the back of her head and peered out the window with her. Instantly, David’s eyes were drawn to Deke Carmody’s house—or, more appropriately, what remained of the house farther up the block. It had been approximately eight months since the fire and Deke’s death, yet that smoldering black framework served as a constant and horrible reminder. On occasion, David still suffered nightmares about Deke, where he followed Deke through a house that was on fire all around them, choking on thick, black columns of smoke while pillars of white flame boiled out of the walls. In the nightmare, Deke was always a few steps ahead of him, his broad back covered in huge, weeping blisters, while the elastic band of his underwear burned. Whenever Deke would turn to look at David, which was blessedly infrequent in these dreams, the man’s flesh had melted from his skull. Deke’s eye sockets smoked. When Deke tried to speak, his larynx dropped fr
om his throat and swung back and forth like a pendulum on fire.
“I’m waiting for the bird to come back,” Ellie said, pulling him back into the present.
“What bird?”
“There,” she said, pressing a finger to the windowpane.
It took David a moment to see what she was pointing at, but when he saw it, he smiled to himself. There was a wide hedgerow directly beneath Ellie’s bedroom window. Tucked between some boughs was a bird’s nest. Inside the nest were three pale eggs streaked with dark spots.
“Wow,” he said. “Look at that.”
“The mother hasn’t come back,” Ellie said. Her tone was grave, which always made her sound older than her years. “I’m worried she’s abandoned them.”
“She’s probably out foraging for food,” he said. “I bet she’ll be back tonight.”
“She didn’t come back last night,” said Ellie. “Or the night before that.”
“Maybe she came when you were asleep.”
She turned, studied his face. A vertical line formed between her eyebrows. “I wasn’t,” she said, quite matter-of-factly. “I was awake.”
“Well, come on,” he said. “Dinnertime.” He paused in the doorway, then turned back. “Did you do something to upset your mother today?”
Ellie climbed down off the chair. “Nope,” she said.
“You’re sure? Mom seems angry.”
“She’s been like that since she came home from work yesterday.”
Had she? David hadn’t noticed.
In the living room, David switched on the stereo and inserted a Dave Brubeck album into the disc player. Once the music started, he adjusted the volume, then joined Ellie and Kathy in the kitchen.
“I’m feeling some wine,” he said, going to the breakfront. He selected a bottle of cheap merlot. “You want some?”
“Sure,” said Ellie.
“Ha,” David said, retrieving two wineglasses from the shelf.
“No, thanks,” Kathy said.
“Have some anyway,” David said.
Kathy hardly spoke a word throughout dinner. David was thankful that Ellie was there to keep the conversation going. David did his best to keep things lively and ask questions of Ellie about summer vacation and her friends, but he kept glancing at Kathy across from him at the table. There were dark grooves beneath Kathy’s eyes. Her mouth looked tight and drawn. Once, when she caught him staring at her, she didn’t smile or even acknowledge him; she merely kept staring at him until it was he who looked away, an inexplicable feeling of shame causing his face to grow hot, as if he’d been caught spying on her doing something in private.
After dinner, Ellie went out back to play in the yard before it was fully dark. She said she wanted to look for more birds, in the event that those three abandoned eggs might need a surrogate.
“Where does she come up with this stuff?” he said, dumping the dirty paper plates into the trash. Kathy remained at the table. When he looked over his shoulder at her, he saw that she was refilling her wineglass.
He came up behind her, rubbed her back. “Tell me,” he said. “What’d I do? If I’m going to sleep in the doghouse tonight, I’d at least like to know what I did that put me there.”
She slid a hand up her shoulder and rested it atop one of his. “It isn’t you,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“Then tell me,” he said. He pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. “What’s wrong?”
“Three of the women in my office have gotten sick,” Kathy said. She held the wineglass up in front of her face and stared at the bloodred wine as if she could discern some prophetic insight from it. “Two are already dead.”
“Oh God . . .”
“And eleven patients.”
“Jesus. Dead? Eleven? Was it—”
“Yes.” She practically spat the word at him, exasperated. “What else would it be? Of course it’s . . .” She didn’t need to say it. Instead, she fluttered a hand at him.
“Are you worried you might be sick, too?”
She said nothing.
“Then make a doctor’s appointment, Kath. Go see Bahethi. You can do it first thing on Monday.”
“There’s no need,” Kathy said.
“Why?” He didn’t like the defeat in her voice.
“The hospital has mandated that all remaining employees get blood tests to see who else might be infected.”
He had heard about this on the news, but he wasn’t sure how foolproof the blood tests were. It seemed the CDC didn’t even know what they were dealing with yet, so how reliable could a blood test be?
“Okay,” he said, digesting all of this. “Okay. Then get your blood test and you’ll see. You’ll see that everything’s okay.”
“I’m scared.” She turned to him, her face pale, her eyes searching his.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. He brought her close to him, hugged her.
She pushed him away and straightened up. “Have you seen the news? Have you read a newspaper? Jesus, David, they’ve started printing maps with all the cities where . . . where . . .” She shook her head, her thoughts too weighty for them to be spoken. “I don’t know,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, he thought. “I just don’t know.”
“There haven’t been that many cases here,” he said. “Not in Maryland. Not in this area.”
She made a noise that sounded like part-laugh, part-cough. “Are you serious? Deke Carmody just down the street—”
“There was no proof he was sick.”
“Of course he was! You said yourself you saw all that blood in his bathroom. The way he was acting, was talking . . . Don’t you remember how worried you were about him when you came home that night? And then he sets fire to his own house . . .”
“That doesn’t mean he had the disease,” David said. Yet he knew right then and there that he was fighting a losing battle, and not just with Kathy, but with himself, too. Of course Deke had been sick. And not just Deke: All too clearly he was thinking of the ice cream man again, so long ago now, and so early in the game that none of them even knew about the illness that everyone was now calling Wanderer’s Folly—a silly, almost innocuous name, which somehow also made it all the more terrifying.
“All right,” Kathy said, calming down. She kissed his knuckles, then got up from the table with her wineglass. He listened to her footfalls move down the hallway. A moment later, he heard the tub’s faucet clunk on.
Wanderer’s Folly, he thought now, and it was suddenly impossible not to see what remained of Deke’s house through the bay windows.
There was no certainty as to its origin, though many doctors, philosophers, and government officials reserved their own opinions. It was given a scientific name, some cryptic-sounding rubric cobbled from language in medical textbooks that proved a real tongue twister for newscasters, but it soon became known among the general public as Wanderer’s Folly. Little was known about the illness, including its origin or exactly how it was contracted, except that it was a virus that apparently poisoned, attacked, and ultimately killed the brain. Early symptoms appeared harmless enough: a bit of brain fog, excessive daydreaming. More progressed symptoms were supposed to include mild hallucinatory stimulation—such as feeling cold when it was hot, or smelling things that were not there to be smelled—which only escalated as the virus grew stronger. In the middle stages, the infected supposedly found themselves more apt to act out their daydreams or even respond to the hallucinations as if they were real. Someone could spend hours wandering around a city park before realizing their lunch break was over and they were due back at work; someone might drive fifty or even a hundred miles off course of their destination before clearing their mind and wondering what had overtaken them; someone might believe they were standing in the middle of a beautiful orchard, a shiny bronze apple in each hand, when in reality they had wandered into their neighbor’s garage.
Many of these symptoms were easy to overlook, even by someone who found t
hemselves suffering from them. After all, how often did David zone out while grading papers? Wasn’t it true that he could practically drive to the college on autopilot after all these years, paying no attention to road signs and exits?
It wasn’t until the final stage that the disease made itself truly known. Instead of daydreaming through fields of sunflowers or apple orchards, several people took to meandering, terrified and confused, down an interstate and into oncoming traffic. Others walked off rooftops. Others—like Deke Carmody, David couldn’t help but acknowledge—were found stumbling around outside in the middle of the night, often naked. Early in the game, a young mother in Nebraska set herself and her infant son on fire; witnesses observed her walking serenely from her house cradling the baby to her chest while both were engulfed in flames. A young man in Ohio became paranoid that there were tiny bugs under his flesh; he proceeded to shear the skin off his face with a steak knife while his wife stared at him in horror. It was reported that dozens and dozens of people would wake up one morning, get dressed, and drive to a job they hadn’t held in years. In many ways the early stages of Wanderer’s Folly mirrored Alzheimer’s. Yet doctors were at a loss as to how to treat it. It was believed to be airborne, given how widespread it was, though epidemiologists were split on whether you had to breathe the disease into your body or if it simply gained access to the body through osmosis. Others went as far as suggesting that the virus itself wasn’t alien to the human body, but was actually created within it, and functioned as some sort of built-in self-destruct button that, for reasons unknown, had suddenly been activated. But in truth, no one really knew anything for sure. For now, it was incurable. Incubation time varied. Once symptoms were exhibited, the person could last for hours or weeks, depending on what they might do to themselves during one of their hallucinatory spells. And in the end, the results were invariably the same as the brain ceased working altogether—death.
David rubbed absently at his chin, feeling the roughness of his two days’ growth against his fingertips. Ellie always squealed when he kissed her while sporting beard stubble, and he would laugh and continue to rub his face against hers while she giggled and pretended to fight him off.
