by Mara, Wil
He smiled and said quietly, “Who was it?”
“That no-good bastard Bob Easton,” she replied, “that’s who.”
* * *
The mere fact that they were all singing struck Dennis as so bizarre that it defied description. The four of them, making their way along the trail as they crooned a casual rendition of “The Muffin Man,” was so peculiar under the circumstances that he wanted to laugh out loud. Oh, do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man?… No one had suggested it; it just sort of happened. Chelsea started; Andi joined her. Billy tried to keep up, having heard it a thousand times back home. Then Dennis chimed in from the back of the line. He felt like an idiot—but loved it at the same time.
In spite of Andi’s determination to import as much as their routine from home as possible, they were forging what she was now calling “a new kind of normal.” Patterns were beginning to emerge from the chaos as each person found his or her niche. Chores were assigned, TV channels committed to memory, new meals prepared based on whatever was available to them. It was funny, he thought, how easily the fundamentals could be replaced. For example, instead of the local ShopRite, they now had Hall’s General Store. They made the two-mile trip last Tuesday when, running low on the basics, they had to take a chance. Hall’s was still a good five miles from Route 88; Dennis and Andi thought of 88 as the transitional point between their safe, isolated universe and the “real world.” So if Hall’s was closed …
Dennis pumped his fist when they pulled up and saw the black and orange OPEN sign in the window. Andi whispered “Thank God.” As it turned out, they were even luckier than they thought—Old Man Hall said business had slowed so much, he was keeping the place open only five hours a day. Dennis found it amazing more people hadn’t escaped to their vacation cabins.
He and Andi loaded up three carriages, everything from bread, milk, and toilet paper to eight DVDs, a dozen coloring books, and a Nerf basketball set. Hall hesitated when Dennis presented his Visa card. The crusty old bastard said he’d actually prefer cash, then pointed out the ATM machine wasn’t working because he wouldn’t permit anyone from the bank to come out and refill it. An argument was about to ensue, when Hall’s wife appeared from the back and scolded her husband. She also gave free lollipops to Chelsea and Billy as they were leaving, to the old man’s dismay.
Once they’d had enough of “The Muffin Man,” Andi led them into “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Billy, exhilarated by the fact that he knew all the words at the ripe old age of five, marched along enthusiastically, like a soldier in a parade. Dennis couldn’t help but marvel at the three of them, especially Andi. He knew her stress level was still high and would remain there until they left this place. But she never let it show when they were around. Their emotional tone would be decided by hers, so she put on a brave face.
They reached the peak of a pebbly, wooded rise, the same point where Scooter had pulled at the leash the week before. He’d been running all over the place today, sniffing and exploring and doing his own thing. Dennis decided ultimately to set him free from now on, his rationale being driven in part by the purchase of a flea-and-tick medication he’d found on the shelf at Hall’s. Scooter was now the happiest dog in the world, free to roam about at will.
When “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” was finished, Chelsea said, “Daddy, can I call Noelle when we get back?”
Both he and Andi had the same thought. Damn … They knew the question was coming sooner or later. Noelle Taylor was one of Chelsea’s best friends. Last week, after enduring relentless wheedling, they decided to let her talk to one of her schoolmates. The challenge was figuring out which one. This led to a strange form of Russian roulette in which they took turns calling the parents to see who was … available. No one answered the first three numbers; the line had been disconnected on the fourth. Then Andi discovered the cell number of Noelle’s mom, scribbled on the back of a business card she kept in her wallet. As it turned out, the Taylors had done something similar to the Jensens—they packed their minivan and hightailed it to a quiet area of West Virginia where some relative had a summer home overlooking a small pond. Dennis and Andi were pleased the Taylors had escaped unharmed; they always liked them.
The parents had talked first, of course, trading survival tips and obituary bulletins. Then came the inevitable back-home stories, dark and horrifying—the Sunoco station exploded … the strip mall burned to the ground … the elementary school’s head janitor hanged himself from the flagpole out front.… No word on whether anyone had found ol’ Jack McLaughlin on the Jensens’ front lawn, though.
When Chelsea and Noelle finally got the chance to speak, their parents hovered by the phones to monitor the conversation. They rambled on about the usual stuff of interest to a pair of sevensomethings—television, music, video games, and so on. Andi’s resolve weakened as she caught a powerfully nostalgic glimpse of normalcy—or, more to the point, a normalcy she was likely never to experience again. Two weeks ago, they would’ve had the same conversation and she’d pay it no mind. Now she was grateful for every word. It was a bright little piece of a life that seemed so distant now.
“We’ll see, sweetheart,” Andi said, stepping over a rotting cedar tree that had fallen across the trail. Chelsea knew this was the standard answer parents gave when they just didn’t feel like dealing with the inevitable resistance that followed the word no. She groaned out loud.
“Mommy didn’t say you couldn’t,” Dennis told her. “Just not right now. But we will, I promise.”
“Sure,” she said with tenuous conviction.
Dennis’s cell phone rang at that moment, as if on cue.
“Is it Noelle?” Chelsea asked brightly.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Dennis said as he took it from the case clipped on his belt. He checked the caller ID before unfolding it. “Nope, sorry, kiddo. It’s your aunt Elaine.”
Chelsea made a face and turned back to her mother, who put an arm around her shoulders. Billy trotted up and tried to get Andi to do the same from the other side.
The three of them kept walking until Andi realized Dennis wasn’t following. She stopped, turned back, saw him standing there, and knew right away something was wrong. His mouth hung open just slightly, his eyes a little wider than usual. He was also visibly pale, almost sick-looking.
“Honey, what is it?”
He said okay into the phone twice, then shut it with a snap. “We have to go back to the cabin. Something’s happening.”
Andi started in that direction. “What?”
“Elaine said the president is going to talk to the nation at eleven o’clock. It’s supposed to be important.”
Andi checked her watch. “That’s twenty minutes from now. We’d better hurry.”
“Quite.” He scooped up Billy and began jogging. “Where’s Scooter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Scooter! Come on, boy! Come on, Scoot!” Andi called for him, too.
He was about a hundred yards away, due east. He had located the source of the interesting odor from days ago—a large carcass lying on its side. It was only partially decayed, squirming with maggots and hazy with flies. The tongue hung out like a worm on a hook, blood dried around the mouth and between the teeth. Scooter sniffed it all over, pawed at the entrails that had been exposed by a hungry coyote the night before. Then he began licking whatever seemed appetizing. It wasn’t overly flavorful, and when he heard the voices calling for him, he willingly abandoned the corpse and bounded off.
TEN
DAY 13
Sheila Abbott appeared on Meet the Press, at the request of President Obama, to update the public. The president chose her over Secretary Sibelius so Americans would know they were getting the information directly from the CDC rather than feel it might be somehow filtered or otherwise interpreted through the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama also wanted to make sure the public focused on the medical points of the crisis rather than any potential geopolitical aspec
ts. Neither he nor the State Department were anywhere near ready to address the country on that front.
Host David Gregory was thoroughly professional in manner, but his line of inquiry was brutally direct. Abbott, looking haggard even in a new Donna Karan, coughed out the most up-to-date statistics she had at her disposal—4,211 deaths, and more than 7,800 further cases of exposure and infection. She admitted that neither the CDC nor the WHO was any closer to combating the virus than it had been at the beginning. It was now in seventeen states, and she fully expected it to reach more. When Gregory asked if the government suspected a terrorist connection, particularly in light of the capture of Abdulaziz Masood, Abbott said she was not aware of any such discussions. When Gregory asked if she was lying, the skin under her pearls quickly reddened. No, she said firmly, she was not.
In spite of her indignation, the American public was not ready to accept the notion that there was no element of foreign subterfuge involved. Word leaked out about Masood’s possible ties to the Iranian government, and protesters held demonstrations around the country insisting that Obama launch a retaliatory attack. The president’s most fervent and steadfast opponents had a field day reminding people that he had touted the election of Iranian reformist president Maziar Baraheri as a “turning point in the history of Iran, and thus a turning point in the history of Iranian–American relations.” Obama’s misplaced faith in Baraheri, they cawed, had now paid out its first ugly dividend. It should be a lesson to all those who, in the future, might entertain the foolish delusion of trying to make friends with leaders in the Middle East.
The Dow shed more than 15 percent of its total volume as business slowed in every sector. Restaurants, bars, malls, hotels, and supermarkets were empty or altogether shuttered in some areas. Phone and email usage skyrocketed as most people remained indoors, and Internet usage reached historic highs so the public could stay informed. The CDC posted a central page that quickly caused their server to crash due to unexpected volume. Domestic suppliers of surgical masks and rubber gloves were so overwhelmed by the sudden demand that they had to begin importing from overseas manufacturers. There were three separate arrests of relatively low-ranked hospital employees stealing boxes of one or the other and selling them on eBay. In a medical supply store, two young mothers got into a fistfight over the last carton of cotton masks and ended up going to the hospital anyway—one with a broken nose, the other with a deep bite in her left arm.
The virus reached Michigan through two Pennsylvania teenagers who were at a cheerleading meet and shared a joint with one of the hosting school’s baseball players. They had already made his acquaintance online via Facebook. After the meet, he invited them back to his parents’ house—a three-story Tudor in the better section of town—knowing his family wouldn’t return until the following morning. They passed the J among themselves in the backyard, which was fully enclosed by a shadowy gathering of ancient cedars. Then they went inside and starting working through a bottle of vodka the boy had squirreled away for just such an occasion. He couldn’t decide which of the two future debutantes he wanted more—the blonde with the skinny waist or the slightly heavier brunette with the jiggling rack. He settled on the blonde simply because she was more receptive to him. The fact that she seemed to have brought a cold with her was only of mild concern at first, and less so as the vodka diminished. They did it on the couch in the downstairs family room; then he sent both girls packing. He woke up just before noon the next day to the sound of the maid service’s vacuum cleaners. His sinuses were stuffed to the rafters, and he felt sick to his stomach. Cursing the blonde, he took two Advil and returned to bed. When his mother roused him for dinner some hours later, a localized rash had joined the ensemble of symptoms. The next morning he was awoken by his own hand, which was scratching madly at his legs. An odor more foul than anything he had ever encountered in the boys’ locker room seized his attention, pulling him sharply into the moment. He lifted the sheets to find a calico mess of blood and golden pus-oil. His eyes widened into large marbles as he inspected the gooey buildup under his fingernails. Then he heard a scream down the hall—it was his mother, as clear as a bell even from behind the heavy mahogany of her bedroom door. In that moment, all the pieces to the puzzle came together, and he began crying.
It got into Kansas from a hitchhiker who had also dropped it off in Kentucky and Missouri. The hitchhiker’s name was Doug: Douglas Fairbanks Miller. His mother had insisted on the “Fairbanks” because she considered the former movie star from Hollywood’s Golden Age the greatest male specimen ever to have graced this Earth. She left Doug’s father after a tequila-fueled, harsher-than-usual beating, then died a few years later in a motorcycle accident while riding with the last in a string of moron boyfriends. Since sperm-donor dad was nowhere to be found, sixteen-year-old Doug was left with the choice of either becoming a ward of the state or escaping. He choose the latter, and drifting became his profession. He picked up cash in odd jobs here and there, and when honest work was scarce, he wasn’t above the petty-crime-and-pawnshops matrix. At the time he caught the virus, he was twenty-six and had been to every state on the continent. He had even spent a little time in that Mexican political curio known as Baja California—and returning there was, in fact, the reason he was working his way through the Midwest. He had liked Baja very much; Mexican laws weren’t quite so voluminous or hard-assed as they were in America. Steady work could be found if you kept to yourself and were willing to show some productivity from time to time. The weather was beautiful and the women were easy. He entertained thoughts of even owning a home of some kind, maybe a little shack right along the Pacific shore. Something like that. He’d never been one for making plans, but then he’d never been in love before, either. And the first step, of course, was getting there. In spite of his bushy beard and hard-rock hairstyle, he’d never had trouble getting a lift. There was always someone, usually a trucker or some idiot college kid looking to piss off his parents or impress his friends. He had begun feeling ill after a six-hour stint in a FedEx rig that had carried him across the Missouri–Kansas border. Working his way along Route I-135, he felt the dizziness strike and decided to lie down for a while. There was a grove of cottonwood trees about a hundred yards from the shoulder, and he found a quiet spot to lie down. He woke several hours later to the distant roar of speeding vehicles and the more intimate calls of crickets, cicadas, and other benign critters of the night. When he tried to stand, the world spun around him and he went back down. Swaying gently on all fours with his unwashed hair hanging on either side of his face, he knew something was seriously wrong. Through his confused and diluted mind he managed to piece together a rudimentary plan—get a ride, then get to a hospital. He’d know where a hospital was when he saw the square blue sign with the white capital H in the middle. They’d have to treat him even though he didn’t have any money. That was the law, he thought. They’d take care of him, and someone else would pay for it. Good ol’ America. He struggled to his feet again, steadied himself against the tree that he’d slept under, and staggered like a newborn foal back to the road. As the hours passed and the infection flooded into his brain tissue, thoughts became more difficult to hold together. The only one that recurred with any cohesion was that his skin seemed to be on fire and itched like a bastard. Just as dawn was creeping into the eastern sky, Douglas Fairbanks Miller stumbled unknowingly in front of an eighteen-wheeler that was carrying a packed load of appliances to a cluster of Best Buys in Wichita. The driver would later tell his wife through a purge of tears that, “the guy just … exploded.”
It was imported into Wyoming via several large containers of coleslaw that had been infected in Nebraska before being shipped across state lines, where it was enthusiastically consumed during a community picnic. All sixty pounds were procured by a local wheeler-dealer named Chester D. “Chet” Maxwell. Quick with a laugh and a firm handshake, he was tall and handsome with the hairstyle all parents wished for their sons. He was an insurance sal
esman by trade, but his great love was his hometown, and the conduit through which he exercised that love was any organization associated with it—the Elks, the VFW, the church. In high school, he couldn’t go a week without being mentioned or photographed in the local paper for one astonishing sports achievement or another. But he didn’t have what it took to be a pro, and he knew it. Being involved in community affairs had been his way of staying in the spotlight. He was particularly proud of the coleslaw deal, from a vendor in Casper that no one had ever heard of. All the food at the picnic, in fact, was got at phenomenal prices, keeping him within a budget that was already microscopic and, as a result, once again anointing him the hero. Sitting in the first-floor office of his comfortable home three days later, however, he found himself faced with the very real possibility of becoming the focus of the local media’s wrath rather than its love. With a tenuous and sweaty grip on the phone, he listened with diminishing strength as the details of the outbreak’s investigation were relayed. Six people were already dead, twenty-two others infected, and at least forty to fifty more—estimated conservatively—would follow in short order. One of the dead was a little boy whose parents had bought a fire-insurance policy from Chet some years back. Another was one of his former teachers. And it had come from the cut-rate coleslaw, the caller said; of that there was no remaining doubt. After Chet returned the phone gently to its cradle, he sat in stunned silence for a while. The phone rang again, but he didn’t answer it that time. He hadn’t eaten any of the slaw himself; he didn’t like the stuff. But he had still been there that day, shaking hands and taking kisses on the cheek like the equally cut-rate politician he was. So he would have the infection soon, too—of that there was also no doubt. He rose from the chair in a daze, went upstairs into his bedroom, and got the revolver that he’d inherited from his father out of its locked box at the back of the closet. Then he nestled the barrel snugly beneath his chin and squeezed the trigger.
