by Ronald Malfi
I don’t like this.
The radio disc jockey had been saying something about an explosion, a possible terrorist attack. David had missed most of it, but seeing those roving white vehicles with the bulletproof hides caused a finger of panic to rise up in him.
More people got out of their cars and began milling about the road. Many looked stricken. David peered to his right and saw a blond woman behind the wheel of a maroon Subaru, her knuckles white as her hands clenched the steering wheel. A small child was in a car seat in the back. David caught the woman’s eye and she quickly looked away, as if he was some swarthy figure eyeing her up on the subway. She said something, presumably to the child in the back, whom she kept glancing at in her rearview mirror.
When he heard the whirring blades of a helicopter, he got out of the Bronco and stared up at the sky. A chopper soared by, so low to the ground that David felt the wind from its rotors. It was a black, sleek affair with no insignia on it, as far as David could tell.
David squeezed between the Bronco and the Subaru and continued down the narrow slip between the parked cars. Horns blared and people shouted from every direction. Someone’s dog was barking and someone else’s baby was screaming.
“What happened?” David said, coming upon a man and a woman standing beside the open door of an F-150. The man was as thick as a construction barrel, with springy silver chest hair spooling out over the neck of his Harley-Davidson tank top, but when he turned to look at David, his was the haunted face of an asylum inmate.
“I don’t know, brother,” the man said.
“I heard something about an explosion just before my radio went dead,” David said.
“I don’t know, brother,” the man repeated, his voice cracking. “My radio’s out, too. Cops are probably using the channels.”
“They can do that?” David said.
“They’re the cops, man. They do what they want.”
The woman at his side—a meaty biker gal in her midfifties with fatty forearms reddened from the sun—pressed a set of acrylic fingernails into the cleft at her chin. Her eyes cut toward David, and he could see gobs of mascara snared in her lashes. She looked like someone who’d just been told they had twenty-four hours left to live.
“Those ain’t the cops,” she said. “They’re federal. Top-secret NSA shit.”
“No Such Agency,” said the man.
They heard sirens but couldn’t tell where they were coming from or where they were headed. People began climbing onto the roofs of their cars for a better vantage. A second helicopter cut through the sky, this one with a TV station logo on its side.
“They’re so low,” said the biker gal. “Whatever happened must be close.”
A third news chopper chased after the others. This one flew low enough to throw grit into David’s eyes. The biker gal coughed and hocked phlegm onto the blacktop.
At that instant, something exploded on the far side of the beltway. The sound was like a crack of thunder, only David could feel it like an earthquake in the ground, radiating up his legs. A moment later, a black column of smoke rose up on the horizon. People started pointing and shouting.
“Jesus,” David muttered.
“Jesus is right,” said the biker.
A helicopter appeared in the vicinity of the smoke. Someone asked where it was coming from and someone else said it was too far away to tell.
“It was a bomb,” said the biker. “Done my time with the marines. I know what a fucking bomb sounds like.”
David could only shake his head and watch as the column of black smoke was slowly blown westward on the breeze.
Once the large white vehicles had exited the beltway, and as the sirens began to fade, traffic started to limp along again. David nodded at the guy and his biker gal and the guy patted him on the shoulder—they had shared some brief and confusing camaraderie, it seemed—and then he hustled back to the Bronco. More horns blared. Where did all these assholes expect people to go?
Back behind the Bronco’s steering wheel, he geared it out of Park and eased forward no more than a couple of inches. The car in front of his—a sea-foam green Prius with a University of Maryland sticker on the rear windshield—seemed hesitant to make a move.
David peered out the side window again. The woman in the Subaru was frantically checking her mirrors. Clutching the steering wheel, her knuckles were white as bone. David glanced in the backseat and was startled to find the kid in the car seat looking back at him through the rear window. The kid was maybe four or five, too damn big to still be facing backward in a car seat, and he had a fresh summer crew cut. A black slick of blood trickled down from the kid’s left nostril, coursed over his lips, and had been smeared in a bright crimson streak along his chin. The kid’s eyes were strangely unfocused, the pupils too big, the whites a canvas of broken blood vessels. The irises themselves seemed to dance as if floating on the surface of rippling water. Yet David knew the boy was staring right at him.
Jesus, he thought, looking back at the frantic mother. Her panic seemed to be a result of the commotion on the road and the black smoke that still clung to the horizon, not because of the child in her backseat. He wondered if she even knew the kid was sick. Had the kid been facing forward instead of backward, she might have caught the poor kid’s reflection in the rearview mirror, but as it was—
The car behind him blasted its horn and someone shouted at him to step on the fucking gas. At the same moment, the Subaru bucked forward then sped off to join the rest of the traffic. David watched it go, noting the vanity plates— BUSYMOM—and the stick-figure family decals on the rear window, which showed she had a husband, two other kids, and a cat at home. The husband stick figure swung a golf club while the mom wielded a tennis racket.
Jesus, he thought again, his heart racing. It seemed the only thing he was capable of thinking at the moment. Jesus Christ Almighty.
The asshole behind him laid on his horn again. David rolled down his window, flipped the guy the bird, then shoved his foot down on the accelerator.
He arrived home two hours later than he should have, sweaty and unnerved. He realized he was speeding through his neighborhood at twice the speed limit when he reached the turn onto Columbus and he nearly lifted two tires off the ground. He slowed to a cool gallop until the Bronco jerked to a stop in the driveway.
“Kath,” he said, coming into the house. His voice cracked.
Ellie appeared at the far end of the hallway. Her expression was one of confusion and fear, a mixture of emotions David so rarely saw on his daughter’s face.
“What happened?” he said.
“The news,” Ellie said. She pointed toward the living room. “Mom’s watching it now on TV.”
In the living room, Kathy was parked on the edge of the sofa staring at the television. The volume was turned way up, and the image on the screen showed a stricken male reporter standing in front of a crisscross of yellow police tape. David could tell Kathy had been crying.
“What happened?” David said.
“Explosions,” Kathy said. “Bombs.”
“Where?”
“One in Towson. One in downtown Baltimore.”
“I heard one. I was stuck in traffic, saw trucks on the beltway. There was an explosion and there was smoke in the distance.”
“It’s bad,” Kathy said. Her lower lip trembled. “The one in Towson was a day-care center or something.”
David shook his head in disbelief. Ellie appeared at his side.
“The other was a hospital. Hopkins.”
“Who did it?”
“They’re not sure yet,” Kathy said, “but it looks like a pair of lunatics with homemade bombs drove their cars into the buildings.”
“My God.”
Ellie’s hand crept into one of his. Just the feel of her helped him relax. It was like a drug. He squeezed her hand gently.
“They think it was related to the virus,” Kathy said.
“The bombers were sick?”
“They don’t know that for sure,” she said, “but that’s not what they’re saying. Apparently the day-care center is in an area that has the highest percentage of infected kids in the state, and it had recently been quarantined by the CDC with the kids and teachers inside. And then there’s Hopkins, where they’ve been taking people who get sick in the city. Some reporter said the CDC has been working there, too.” She looked at him, her eyes muddy and foreign. “David, there were kids inside. Little kids.”
The TV cut from the reporter to one of the scenes of the crime. At first, David couldn’t tell what he was looking at. But then the camera pulled back, and David could make out the rear end of a large automobile—or what was left of it—wedged within the crumbling maw of jagged brickwork and smoldering debris. There was black smoke everywhere. A second angle showed a portion of the building blown out, debris littering the parking lot. Medics were loading small shapes buried beneath white sheets into the backs of ambulances. Men and women screamed from the street.
“. . . found here at the recently quarantined Towson Day School, where the death tally has now risen to eighteen students and three instructors,” the reporter said. “Eyewitnesses said there had only been one occupant in the vehicle that—”
“Go play in your room, sweetheart.” He rubbed the back of Ellie’s head.
“I want to see it.”
“No. Do as I say.”
She exhaled audibly, then turned and sulked down the hallway toward her bedroom.
“This is so messed up, David,” Kathy said. She was gnawing on her thumbnail. “The whole world is falling apart.”
“We’re still here,” he assured her.
She looked at him. There was something beyond fear in her eyes: There was a hopelessness so deep it looked bottomless. “For how long?” she said. “For how long, David?”
He couldn’t answer her. In his mind’s eye, he was back on the beltway, staring out the Bronco’s window at the little boy with blood spilling from his nose while black smoke fell like a shroud over the horizon. A boy with eyes like the gray backing of a mirror.
By the close of the day, there was a total of five children and four teachers dead at the day-care center. Eleven people died at the hospital, with many more treated for injuries. The suspects, both retired toll collectors named Hamish Kasdan and William Maize, were also killed in the blasts. They’d outfitted the trunks of their cars with a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, similar to the cocktail Timothy McVeigh had used in the Oklahoma City bombing. A search of Kasdan and Maize’s Baltimore City apartment revealed suicide notes detailing their roles as “renegade saviors for the earth,” here to help usher in the last days of mankind. They said they were part of the Worlders’ movement, a group of radicals who praised Wanderer’s Folly for bringing an end to mankind’s parasitic reign over the planet. They hadn’t been targeting the sick, but the doctors and nurses who were attempting to help them.
Kathy wept in her sleep that night.
David hardly slept at all.
* * *
When dawn finally cast its lurid hues through their bedroom window, David got up, went to the bathroom, then crept into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. There was a newspaper on the kitchen counter, the front page comprised of a map of the United States with various “hot spots” where the infection was the greatest. Other cities had been completely evacuated. The report said these evacuees had been transported to one of the CDC’s quarantine stations, with D.C., Philadelphia, and Newark being the closest to David’s area. The report also listed the most recent estimated death toll, both domestic and global—numbers that increased daily and required decimal points. He balled up the paper and shoved in down into the kitchen trash.
In the living room, he slid a Paul Desmond CD into the stereo and turned the volume down low as to not disturb Kathy and Ellie. Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a steaming mug of Sumatran coffee, then pried open the window above the sink so he could smoke a cigarette without having to go outside on the porch. He had hoped the music might fool him into thinking things hadn’t changed all that much and that they could still enjoy the simple day-to-day pleasures, but it didn’t work. He couldn’t trick himself into pretending that everything was normal. The music grated on him and he shut it off.
Someone knocked on the front door.
David chucked the half-smoked cigarette down the garbage disposal, then carried his coffee mug to the door. There were curtains covering the vertical strip of glass beside the door, which he pulled aside. Three figures stood on the porch. A sleek black sedan was parked out in the street by the mailbox. He thought they might be cops or federal agents.
He unlocked the door and opened it. The man in the center, flanked by two men in dark suits, wore a tweed sports coat with suede patches on the elbows and a garish pink bow tie over a blue-and-white checked shirt. He was dark-skinned, slender, nervous-looking. The man’s face was narrow and pinched, though somehow not unfriendly.
“Mr. David Arlen?” the man said, extending a laminated badge with his photo on it for David’s inspection. He spoke with a heavy Indian accent. “My name is Dr. Sanjay Kapoor. I am the head epidemiologist and director of the recently established Washington branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Infectious Diseases.”
“The CDC?”
“You are the husband of Kathleen Arlen, is that correct? She is still located at this residence?”
“I think you’d better tell me what this is—”
“Hon?” Kathy said, coming down the hall in a pink terrycloth bathrobe. “What’s going on?”
“Mrs. Arlen?” Dr. Kapoor said, peering past David.
“Yes.” She came up beside David, and he put a hand on her shoulder.
“These guys are with the CDC, hon,” David said.
Dr. Kapoor repeated his introduction again, then said, “I came here to speak candidly with you, Mrs. Arlen.” His dark eyes shifted toward David. “You and your husband, of course.”
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“You subjected to a blood test at the Spring Hill Medical Center this past quarter,” Dr. Kapoor said.
“Yes,” she said. “But I was told I was okay. The blood test came back negative.”
“Is she sick?” David said. He pulled Kathy away from the door and took a step in front of her. She hugged his arm.
“No, Mr. Arlen.” Astoundingly, Dr. Kapoor’s pinched face broke into a smile. A silver incisor glittered like tinsel. “Quite the opposite, in fact. May we come in?”
49
He came awake as if pulling himself from quicksand. His head hurt and his neck was stiff. He was in a car, but he wasn’t driving . . . and this realization set off his internal panic alarm, causing him to bolt upright in his seat.
“Hey,” said the woman behind the wheel. “Take it easy, okay?”
Her name was Ganymede, David recalled. He rubbed his eyes, then wiped the scum from his lips. It was still dark. The glowing green numerals on the dashboard clock read 3:11. Rubbing at a kink in his neck, he turned and saw that Ellie was still asleep, sprawled out across the Caddy’s backseat.
“Pleasant dreams?” Gany said. She had her window cracked and was smoking a cigarette.
“Do you think I could get one of those?”
She handed him her lit smoke, then dug a fresh one out of the pack that was wedged in the console between an empty cardboard cup and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. A road map was tucked down into the space between the console and the driver’s seat.
He sucked the life out of the cig, relishing it. A sweet mentholated air permeated his lungs. “Ah, Jesus,” he muttered.
“Better than sex, isn’t it?” Gany said.
Again, David peered into the backseat to make sure his daughter was sleeping. Then he sighed. “Goddamn, it really is.” It was almost enough to take his mind off the throbbing ache in his left arm. He extended the arm, bent it at the elbow, straig
htened it again. The bandage-work Heck Ramirez had done was holding up—there was no blood seeping through the gauze—but the pain, he feared, had intensified while he slept. The whole arm felt tender and hot.
“There’s some Tylenol in my purse, if you need it. Back there.” Gany nodded toward the backseat.
Her purse was on the floor, a slouching gray satchel that looked like the gutted carcass of an armadillo. He fumbled through it until he located the tiny white bottle of tablets. He shook three into his hand, popped them into his mouth, and dry-swallowed them.
“I’m going to need you to take over for a while,” Gany said. “I’m running on fumes here. You okay with that?”
“Yeah. I gotta take a leak, though.”
She pointed to the empty cardboard cup in the cup holder.
“You serious?” he said.
Gany laughed. “No. I’m messing with you.”
She pulled over on some bleak and hopeless stretch of highway so they could switch seats. The air smelled of tree sap, and David could hear running water—a waterfall?—somewhere off in the distance. They hadn’t passed another vehicle since he’d woken up. While he urinated in the bushes, he took his time to breathe in the air and observe the untouched, expansive surroundings. Being out here, you could almost trick yourself into believing that the world is fine and everything is okay.
Back on the road, David behind the wheel, he said, “How much farther do we have to go?”
“We should get there around eight in the morning or so.” Gany snapped her seat belt into place, then curled onto her side so that she faced the passenger window.
“How do I know where to go?”
“There’s a map stuck down by your seat.” She yawned.
He tweezed the map out with a thumb and forefinger then spread it across the steering wheel. It wasn’t even a MapQuest printout, but an actual road map, with their route highlighted in bright yellow marker. There were handwritten notes in spidery print near their destination, telling him what back roads to take once they got off the main highway.
