by Ronald Malfi
Ellie came out of the bathroom and joined David at the table. She wasted no time popping the milk shake straw back into her mouth.
“That your boy?” the man said. David watched as the stranger shoveled another spoonful of frozen yogurt into his mouth.
David nodded, hoping the man would take the hint that he was not interested in conversation.
“Well, then. You folks have a good one.” The man raised a hand and ambled off, apparently taking the hint. A minute or two later, the man pulled out onto the roadway behind the wheel of a silver Honda. He tapped the horn twice, waved at David, then motored on down the highway.
“Who was that?” Ellie asked.
“Don’t know. Just a guy.” But he hadn’t liked his questions, hadn’t liked the way he’d been looking at the car. Scrutinizing the car.
Midway through his milk shake—mint chocolate chip, his favorite ever since he was a kid—his cell phone trilled. He saw the blocked caller ID and worried that Tim’s plans had changed.
“Yeah, hello,” he said, answering the call.
“Is this David Arlen?” A man’s voice, frank and clipped. He didn’t wait for a confirmation. “My name’s Craddock. I’ve taken over the CDC’s northeast operations formerly overseen by Dr. Kapoor.”
“You guys are relentless. You tell Kapoor he can go jump off a goddamn bridge.”
“Kapoor’s dead,” said Craddock. “Most of his staff are, too. I’ve been flown in from Atlanta to pick up where he left off. You and your daughter, Mr. Arlen, are our number-one priority at the moment.”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m hanging up.”
“Don’t be so reactionary. You and I need to talk. ASAP. Wherever you are, I’ll go there and meet you, face-to-face. We don’t need to involve your daughter at this point. I understand your reservations. I just want to talk with you and explain things.”
David barked a laugh into the phone. “Meet me? Are you serious? You’ll never find me.”
“We will,” Craddock said. There was not a waver in his voice. “It may take some time, but we’ll find you eventually. I just hope it isn’t too late by then.”
“You can keep your threats.”
“You keep answering your phone,” Craddock said. “There must be some part of you that questions what you’re doing. What happened to your wife will not happen to Eleanor.”
“Empty promises,” David said.
“And then there is you, Mr. Arlen. Your condition. How long do you think you can keep this up?”
David stepped away from the table, out of Ellie’s earshot. She watched him go.
“Have the hallucinations started?” Craddock said. “The nosebleeds?”
“Lies,” David growled into the phone. “I’m not an idiot.”
“We can’t help you, Mr. Arlen,” Craddock said, his voice as smooth as silk sheets, “but we can help your daughter. And your daughter can help the world.”
“You’re just trying to trick me.”
“For what purpose? Do you think my goal here is to torment you and torture your little girl? No, Mr. Arlen. My goal is to save people. I can understand why you’re not convinced of that at the moment, so that is why I’m asking you to sit down and talk with me. Let’s reach an agreement. An understanding. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Go to hell,” David said.
“You can’t run forever,” Craddock said. “Based on the results of your last blood test, I can’t image you have much time left at all.”
“We’re gone,” David said into the phone. “Do you hear me? We’re gone. And if you keep this up—if the cops or the CDC or the fucking FBI or whoever else continues to look for us—I will personally hunt you down and kill you. Do you hear me?”
“David—”
“Go fuck yourself.” David hung up. His whole body vibrated. The milk shake in his stomach felt as if it had started to curdle.
He stood there for a moment, not trusting himself to maintain his composure if he returned to Ellie too soon. He watched the dust swirl in off the roadway. He listened to a pair of young boys playing behind the burger joint, probably the children of the proprietor. He looked in their direction and saw two dark-skinned, slender boys chasing butterflies through a field. So many butterflies. Whole regiments of them.
Beyond the boys, deeper in the field, stood a figure. It was a man, though his face was obscured by a plain white mask with two eyeholes cut into it. It looked eerily like the paper plate mask Sandy Udell had been wearing the day he threw himself from the classroom window.
Despite the distance between them, the figure appeared to be staring directly at him.
Then a sound registered in his ears. Upon hearing it, he realized he had been hearing it for several seconds now, but was only now realizing it. The goddamn whirring blades of a helicopter.
No sooner did he realize this than he looked up and saw the bright silvery frame of a chopper cruise out from behind the roof of the burger joint. It was much too low to the ground to be a casual flyby, and it sent dust and debris twirling like dervishes across the parking lot. The striped umbrellas above the picnic tables rattled and flapped in their frames. Ellie looked up as the helicopter rushed by overhead, its shadow momentarily darkening her as it whipped along the earth. She covered her eyes with one hand as grit whipped across the ground.
David watched it head in the direction of the setting sun. The land was flat, and he was able to watch it for a good long time before it shrank first into a pinpoint, then vanished into nothingness altogether.
“Who were they?” Ellie asked, staring out at the horizon. “Cops?”
He hadn’t made out any insignia on the helicopter. “Not sure. Military, I think.”
“Should we get back in the car?”
“Yes.”
Before leaving, he looked back toward the field. The two boys were still frolicking in the tall grass, but the man in the mask was gone.
38
Fifteen minutes later, as they continued heading east along I-70, a police car appeared in the rearview mirror. It seemed the past couple days could be summed up by a procession of police cars in rearview mirrors. They’d passed a few on this lonely stretch of highway, either parked on the shoulder against endless fields of corn or seated behind a billboard, their windshields golden with pollen, but this was the first one on the road. David kept his eyes on it for a while, and at one point he thought that the cruiser was keeping a deliberate distance between them. When David slowed, it appeared that the police car slowed, too. For a moment, he considered pulling onto the shoulder of the road to see if the cop would pass him, but he decided that was a stupid idea. What if the cop stopped to see if he needed some assistance? He’d be inviting disaster.
After a time, his mind returned to the man back at the burger and ice cream shop, the guy who’d been appraising the Oldsmobile while spooning frozen yogurt into his gullet. Ninety-nine Cutlass, am I right? It wasn’t a goddamn Lamborghini; why had that guy been so interested in the car?
But it wasn’t really the car, was it? he thought now. He hadn’t been looking at the car; he’d been checking out the license plate.
“Goddamn,” David muttered, glancing up at the rearview again at the police car. It maintained its distance.
A Maryland license plate in Kansas was certainly unusual but not something overtly suspicious, was it? The guy had definitely been looking at the license plate . . . yet despite his friendly banter, he never once commented on the fact that David and Ellie were roughly twelve hundred miles from home. He’d commented on Ellie, though. That your boy?
“Back at the milk shake place, when you went to the bathroom, which restroom did you use?”
“What?”
“Which restroom, El? Do you remember? Men’s or women’s?”
“Oh, uh . . .” She just stared at him.
Back at the roadside joint, she’d had the baseball hat on, a boy’s shirt. She had been playing her role. The stranger had rec
ognized her as a boy, and had said as much to David—That your boy? Yet he realized that Ellie had come out of the goddamn women’s restroom, and the stranger had seen it.
“I can’t . . . I think . . .” Her voice trembled.
“Never mind.” His eyes flitted back toward the cop car in the rearview. Suddenly his bladder felt heavy. His heart felt like a piston jackhammering against the wall of his rib cage.
Cooper’s gun was under his seat.
As they approached an exit, David decided to take it. He turned onto the ramp, silently praying that the police car would not follow them, would not follow them, would not follow them.
David Arlen held his breath.
39
Ten weeks earlier
Toward the end of June, Burt Langstrom stopped showing up at the college. At first, David thought nothing of it—it was summer, after all—but then he was notified by Miriam Yoleck, the head of the English department, that Burt had turned in his resignation a week earlier and that all his summer classes (which were to be taught online) had been canceled. When David pressed Miriam for additional information, she said she knew very little except that Burt had cited “personal reasons” for his departure. And while Miriam did a good job looking disappointed at this news, David couldn’t help but see through her act; if Burt Langstrom’s “personal reasons” were that he had gotten sick, Miriam was more than happy—relieved, even—not to have him around.
That evening, David detoured from his usual route home, heading instead to the breezy bayside neighborhood where the Langstroms lived. As he drove down Burt’s street, he began to wonder if Burt would even answer the door.
As he rolled up in front of the Langstroms’ split-level house, he was distraught to find that the shades in all the windows had been pulled and that there was an overall vacant look to the house that troubled him on some gut level. Had it not been for Burt’s champagne-colored Oldsmobile in the driveway, David would have suspected the family had picked up and left. For several minutes, David sat in the Bronco, listening to the radio—a classic rock station whose music was interrupted by occasional news and traffic reports. Then he got out.
He was halfway up the Langstroms’ driveway when Burt came around the side of the house. David’s presence must have startled the man; Burt paused in midstride, a slack expression on his face. He wore a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt from last year’s faculty bowling tournament. His bald head was shiny with sweat.
David smiled and raised a hand as he approached. At the back of his head, he was recalling what Miriam Yoleck had said about Burt resigning for personal reasons, and wondered now if Burt had, in fact, contracted the illness. Yet as David drew closer, Burt broke out into a wide grin. David couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Burt Langstrom smile.
“David. What are you doing here?”
“Hi, Burt. I heard from Miriam that you pulled the plug. Thought I’d check in with you, see if everything was okay.”
Burt shook his hand—the palm was clammy and hot—then pulled David closer for a one-armed hug. “Good to see you,” Burt said into his ear, then he pulled away. Rivulets of sweat trailed down the sides of Burt’s face. He smelled of perspiration. “But you didn’t need to come here.”
“I was worried about you. I never expected you to quit. You had summer classes.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Burt peered over at the front of the house, and David had the peculiar feeling that he was checking to made sure the shades were still drawn and that no one was looking out. “I’m done with that job.”
“What will you do for money?”
“I won’t need money. I’m putting the plan into action, David.”
“Renting the RV?”
“We’re heading off to the woods. I stopped by this morning and forked over the first payment. I’ll be picking the old girl up tomorrow morning. Then we take to the hills.”
“And Laura’s okay with it now?”
“She’s come around. Staying cooped up in the house hasn’t been healthy for her. She’s been so stressed.”
David recalled the way she had sounded that afternoon on the phone, when he’d called her to talk about her husband. She had sounded more than just stressed, David thought; she had spoken like someone under the influence of a hypnotist.
“Well,” David said, “I’m sorry to see you go, but who knows? Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s for the best.”
“Of course,” Burt said. “Of course it is. You should think about it yourself.”
“Maybe I will. Is Laura home now?”
“Of course.”
“Can I see her?”
A deep vertical crease formed between Burt’s eyebrows. “Huh?” he grunted.
“Can I talk to her for a second?”
“She won’t see you,” Burt said. “She won’t see anyone.”
“What about the girls? Are they here?”
Burt planted two meaty hands on his hips. “What’s this about?” he asked.
“I guess I just want to say good-bye before you all take off for the woods,” David said. He offered Burt a sheepish smile and hoped he appeared genuine. The truth was, he was suddenly terrified of what might have become of Burt Langstrom’s family. Something was wrong here. Something was off.
One of Burt’s eyebrows arched. “Is that right?”
“Just to say good-bye.”
“She won’t open the door. Not even for you, David. It’s nothing personal, of course. It’s just . . . the way things are now.”
“Then I’ll wave to her from the window,” David said, already moving past Burt and up the walk toward the front door. He knocked then turned that sheepish, bullshit smile back on.
“She won’t answer it,” Burt called, and followed him up the walk. David stepped aside and Burt opened the door and leaned his head in. He called Laura’s name while keeping a tight grip on the doorknob.
That’s so I don’t shove him aside and run into the house, David had time to think.
David heard movement from inside—a laborious, shuffling sound. When Laura appeared, she was mostly hidden in the gloom of the darkened foyer. All the blinds had been drawn over the windows. David caught a whiff of the air inside, and it smelled stagnant, like unused basements. Yet despite the gloom, David could still make her out . . . and he was instantly taken aback at how much weight she’d lost. Her face looked sallow, her cheeks sunken, her hair an unkempt mop piled atop her head. She was practically swimming in her clothes, which now looked several sizes too large for her. Without stepping any further, she said, “Burt? Who’s there with you?”
“David Arlen,” Burt said.
Laura made no comment; she only shuffled her weight from one foot to the other.
David peered over Burt’s shoulder and raised a hand toward her. “Hello, Laura. How’ve you been?”
Laura just hugged herself with frail arms.
“Wanted to wish you and the girls luck,” he added.
“It’s not safe to keep the door open so long,” she said to her husband. Then she turned around and zombie-walked back down the hallway until the deeper shadows swallowed her up.
Jesus, David thought. She might not have the Folly, but some other stressor had broken Laura Langstrom down until she was nothing more than the walking goddamn dead.
“And the girls?” David said.
Burt grimaced at him and pulled the front door closed. The door knocker thumped. “Look,” Burt said. “I appreciate your concern. I really do, David. But I think it’s time you go now.”
“All right.” David held out a hand for Burt to shake.
Burt glanced at David’s hand, nodded once, but didn’t take it. “So long, David,” he said and turned down the walkway. David watched him as he ambled around the side of the house and vanished.
David looked back up at the house. In one of the second-story windows, the two Langstrom girls were watching him from a part in the curtains. As he looked, the curtains whipped back into
place, as if the children were fearful of being seen by him. Just catching a glimpse of them eased his mind considerably.
David turned and headed back down the driveway. He dragged an index finger through the layer of pollen that covered the Oldsmobile as he went.
40
The police car did not follow them; instead, it continued straight on I-70 as David negotiated the Olds off the exit ramp and onto a narrow band of blacktop.
He looked at Ellie in the passenger seat. “Are you okay?”
She nodded.
“Scared?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Now?”
“I gotta pee too bad to be scared right now,” she said.
He smiled then laughed. She smiled, too. It did his heart some good. “Yeah,” he said. “I gotta pee, too. We’ll stop somewhere.”
But there was no place to stop for several miles. They drove, flanked on one side by acres of cornfields while tracts of dusty flat land greeted them on the other side. For a time, the only sign of civilization were the telephone poles every quarter mile.
“Scarecrow,” Ellie said, pointing out the window. “See it?”
“Look at that.”
The thing was close to the shoulder of the road and looming several feet above the tall green stalks of corn. It was nothing more than a sackcloth head tied to a cross from which a pair of weather-faded overalls hung like the sail of a tiny ship.
“It’s silly now,” Ellie said. “There aren’t any birds for him to scare away.”
“So much for job security,” David said.
Yet as they drew closer, David realized there was something too . . . authentic . . . about the slouching human form strung up to the post in that field—the weighty slump of the head, the articulated fingers protruding from the sleeves, the bulk and musculature of the thighs in its sun-faded overalls. Beyond the scarecrow, David glimpsed several more out in the field. These others had the same distressing qualities as the first, and there were the coppery stains of blood on the clothes of a few of them. He wondered if he was seeing things accurately.
