“I don’t hate you,” Violet said. “I love you, but I can’t live with you. I’m sorry.”
June, confused, had said, “Honey, you don’t live with me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Violet hunched down to June’s level. She touched June’s knee, then drew her hand quickly away. “I have something to tell you. It’s the reason I’m leaving. But it’s also good news. Good news for you to take back to the village.”
June waited.
“I’m pregnant. Doc Owle can tell you more. He can explain the details. But it’s possible if you go off the Salt. That’s what I want you to know.”
Randall, seated with his back to June, laughed uproariously. “You’re—oh, Jesus. Oh, that’s definitely not what I expected to hear today.”
Violet’s face twisted.
“What?” June asked. It was as if Violet had told her she’d sprouted wings or traveled through time. It made no more sense than that. “What—but how, Violet?”
She shook her head in a disgusted way. “How do you think?”
Randall said, “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Oh, Violet,” said June. This was—but how could she ever explain this so that anyone, even Roz, would understand?—even worse than she had imagined. Violet was her daughter. Hers. She hadn’t given birth to her, but fate had put Violet in June’s path, and June had chosen her, had taken on the privilege and curse of loving her, and that was more profound than any biological bond. More profound than whatever Violet felt (or thought she felt) for this baby, this product of her victimization, and if this could happen to her in Ruby City, what did that mean about Ruby City? “Violet, who did this to you?”
“No one did this to me,” Violet said. “Why do you assume it was done to me?”
“That’s generally how it works,” Randall said.
“I just mean—” June began, her head filling up with unsayable things. I just mean that someone used you. And that matters, even if you didn’t know that’s what was happening. And I was supposed to protect you, but somehow I failed you. So this is the price I have to pay, and that’s OK. But what price are you going to pay? “I just mean it’s so sudden. You never even told me you were—with somebody. You never told me this is something you want.”
“I’m thirty-seven. Why would you assume it’s not something I want?”
June had only shaken her head.
“This is the way it has to be,” Violet said. “I’m sorry about that. I’m grateful to you. I hope you’ll tell Roz that I’m grateful to her. But I’m doing what I have to do to give my baby a chance.”
“Your baby would have a chance in Ruby City,” June said. “Just like every other baby there has had a chance. Better than a chance. We have a good thing.”
“Ruby City is a pipe dream,” Violet said.
“So are the zones. For people like us.”
“People like you,” Violet said. “You don’t know what’s possible for a person like me.” She stood again. “OK. I’m going.”
And in a few seconds, that’s what she had done.
—
At almost midnight, June estimated, she took the exit off I-40 onto the old Highway 74. It was dangerous being out like this—dangerous for June, whose headlights made her a target, and dangerous for Ruby City, because she could lead a stealthy pursuer right to the village if she wasn’t careful. She slowed to a crawl on a straight stretch and tried turning off her headlights. At first she could see nothing. Then, as her eyes adjusted, she was able to easily find the moon—a full moon, bright overhead—and she could differentiate enough between road and shoulder to keep the car going, so long as a deer didn’t cross her path. She went a few kilometers like this. Then she slowed more, rolled down her window, and listened hard, but it was impossible to tell if anything was happening beyond the radius of her own running engine, so she came to a full stop and stilled the motor.
The night was cool enough for the air to fog when she exhaled. June had left her jacket in the Lenoir house. On the back of a kitchen chair, she recalled. She hadn’t had time, when she left, to think ahead—or she hadn’t bothered to take the time. Her only thought had been getting out of the house and on the road. She would not spend the night in that house. Not with Joe’s and Randall’s cooling bodies. Not for anything. And so she’d fled without her jacket, without food (her stomach had started growling loudly after an hour on the road; lunch seemed a lifetime ago) or Salt tea, without much concern for what would happen the next time she needed to use this house. She’d left behind a mess, and the TI Dimension-Tech was blown, but there was still some valuable equipment that they couldn’t afford to chalk up as a loss, not to mention the house itself. She should have at least dragged the bodies down to the tree line. No use bellyaching over it now, though.
Crossing her arms tightly across her chest, she exited the car. The box cutter, wiped carefully of Randall’s blood, was stowed in her pocket.
Silence. Oh, there was the wind rustling a nearby copse of pine trees, a distant hooting owl. The chirp of some insect, though June had thought it too late in the season for crickets.
She looked up the road. Then down. Nothing.
She walked to the copse of trees, chose a spot between trunks, and unbuttoned her pants. She never did this—still—without thinking about the ticks, only to marvel again at the fact that she no longer had to think about the ticks if she really didn’t wish to. Crouching, she looked southeast, in the direction of home. Maybe another hour until she reached the old barn where they stored their vehicles. Then, a thirty-minute walk to her front doorstep. Roz would be startled, perhaps frightened. The group wasn’t due back before tomorrow.
Wait. What was that light?
It was very faint, just visible above the tree line. She had missed it at first because the clear sky was starlit, but there it was: a glow. Like the lights of one of the old cities. Once, when she was a little girl, June’s father and mother had led her up to the top of a hill to watch the sunset; then, when all of the light had gone out of the sky, they’d crossed to the other side of the hill, and her father had pointed to a yellow haze, and he’d said, “That’s Charlotte. That’s where I lived when I was your age.”
“I want to go there,” June had said.
“We can never go back there,” her father told her.
She knew. Immediately, she knew.
Oh, she tried to talk herself out of it. As she raced back to the car, as she started the engine and turned on the headlights. She tried to talk herself out of it even as she laid down on the gas pedal, the car bounding with a trembling groan over every pothole, shocks wheezing, and any moment now she could blow a tire, delay her return by hours, but this sane talk had no effect. She tried to talk herself out of it even when she started to smell smoke. She tried to talk herself out of it even as the faint glow became brighter, and brighter, and she could distinguish peaks and valleys, mountains of hot light, and the air around the car warmed noticeably, and she started to cough so badly that she had to slow, pull over, and vomit into the grass.
She stopped trying to talk herself out of it when she saw the dogs. The princes. They burst from the forest at a gallop, hides smoking, Tauntaun a few paces ahead of Wampa, and they passed within meters of June without stopping, fleeing up the road she had just traveled down, disappearing.
Twenty-One
Berto turned the car into a driveway so ravaged by weeds that they strummed the car’s undercarriage, making a sad sort of tuneless music.
“Drive around to the back of the house,” Violet told him. “Where we can’t be seen from the road.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the car out again.”
“We’ll worry about that when we’ve got to.”
So Berto did as she instructed, bringing the car to a stop under the yellowing strands of a weeping willow. Wes, c
ramped between Edie and Marta, took a panicked breath and pressed against Edie’s shoulder, unable to restrain himself. “I need—I’m sorry—”
She threw the door open and scrambled out, and Wes nearly tumbled to the ground after her. He jumped to his feet—the last thing he needed was another bite—and backed away from the car. He yanked his sleeve up. In the moments since he’d last looked, a new red bump had appeared, this one above the bend of his elbow. Jesus. Jesus Christ.
“What do we do?” Edie said. The others had gotten out of the car now, too, and they exchanged—it seemed to Wes—almost angry looks. And could he blame them? We were this close, those looks said. We should have known we couldn’t be so lucky, those looks said.
And Berto—was he imagining this? Berto’s look seemed to say: Let’s leave him and go.
“Ken?” Edie said. “Is there something you could—I mean, could you, I don’t know, cut into it or something?”
Wes, trying to decide if Edie’s suggestion was cause for panic or hope, wasn’t left in suspense very long. Ken shook his head. “I could take his whole arm off”—Wes flinched—“and it probably wouldn’t make a difference. Not for Shreve’s. It hits the bloodstream too quickly. And as bad as a hatching might be, it’s not going to be any worse than some backwoods amputation with a dirty knife.”
“Wes passes on the backwoods amputation with a dirty knife,” Wes said dully. He felt exhausted, as if he’d just run sprints.
Marta touched his sweaty forehead. “How quickly will we know if he’s in the clear? What’s it Andy said? A couple of days?”
“That’s the wisdom on it, but I’m not an expert on Shreve’s.” Ken, who was leaning against the back of the car, slapped the trunk. “This one probably knows more than I do.”
A thump sounded from within the trunk. “What’s going on out there?” emanated softly from it.
“OK,” Violet said. “Let him out, Berto.”
Berto began, “Do we really—”
“Let him out!” Marta said.
Berto, jaw clenched, leaned through the driver’s-side window and popped the trunk. Andy, blinking, sprang up to sitting.
“That was quick,” he said.
“Make me glad I took you along,” Violet said. She pointed at Wes. “Show him.”
Wes bared his arm.
Andy sucked air through his teeth. “Oh, man. Sorry about that, dude.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Edie asked. Wes registered, through the intensity of itching, a surprised pleasure at how concerned about him she seemed.
“Do?” Andy shook his head. “No. Not really. Just wait and see.”
“Wait for how long?” Wes demanded. The itching had become accompanied by a sensation that was, if this was possible, even worse—a kind of slow crawling, all over, even in his head. Was it in his head? That is, not the tick eggs, on a sprint from his arm to his brain by way of a vein, but something he was imagining? This wasn’t as reassuring a thought as it ought to have been. Because it seemed to him that even this imagining must be a product of the infestation, that something malevolent had invaded him, a dark, accursed thing, and for the first time in years the name of that old demon from The Shaman and the Salt Line, the picture book he’d so feared as a child, popped into his mind: Vimelea. He who consumes is consumed. Was that how the line had gone?
“The ticks hatch in twelve, maybe fourteen hours. That’s reliable. Signs of Shreve’s are more varied. It can happen fast. Or it can take a while. We always say within forty-eight hours, but I’ve heard of it taking longer, over fifty. But I think it’s usually faster than that. The vomiting, at least. Like, eight or ten hours? Thereabouts.”
“Thereabouts,” Marta echoed.
“Look, I wish I had better news. But do you really think we’d live in the world we do if there were easy answers to this thing?”
There was a rusted-over metal chair on the house’s rotten back patio, and Wes fell into it. Eight hours? At the soonest? He was—well, he had been kind of a hypochondriac in his regular life, though he kept it in check with medications. It got worse in times of stress. When he was going through that nonsense over his honors thesis, those bullshit plagiarism accusations, he spent a few months convinced he had leukemia. Then, when Pocketz launched, Parkinson’s disease. When Virtuz got shit-canned? Stomach cancer. His shrink, who Wes was convinced was good for little more than prescription-writing, told him that the only cure for hypochondria was getting an actual disease. Hell of a cure, he had said.
Hell of a cure, he thought now.
“Chances are in your favor, Feingold,” Andy said. “You’ve got to keep that in mind.”
Silence fell. The air had chilled considerably since morning, and everyone but Wes stood with crossed arms, shifting from one foot to another.
“I have a suggestion,” Andy said. “I mean, I think it’s the only good option, actually.”
“Let’s hear it,” Violet said.
“The OLE chalet,” Andy said. “I can lead you to it. I have all the passcodes. There’s showers, food, real beds. First-aid supplies. Power.”
“I’d completely forgotten about the chalet,” Edie said, her face softening with hope.
“I say we go hunker down there and make a plan,” Andy said. “I have some ideas for getting back over the Salt Line.”
“What kind of ideas?” Berto asked.
“I’ll tell you all about them when I’m safe in the chalet,” Andy said.
Violet went to the trunk, sliced through Andy’s tie with her pocketknife, and offered him a hand getting out. “How long will it take us to drive to it?”
“Three or four hours,” Andy said.
“Where’s he going to go?” Ken asked, indicating Andy. “We’re already on top of each other in the backseat.”
“And no offense, but I don’t want to be trapped in a tight space with Wes when those things come out of him,” Berto said.
“What exactly are you proposing?” Marta snapped.
“Stop. Stop,” Wes said, holding up a weak hand. “I get it. I’ll go in the trunk.”
“No, you’ll do no such thing,” Marta said. She looked at Violet, as if Violet were their leader now and hers the final word on the matter. Wes wasn’t so confident this was the case. “We can’t put him back there. We won’t know how he is, we won’t be able to hear him if we need to stop. Let me sit in the front seat with you. We’re both small.”
“I’m not OK with that,” Ken said. He looked at Wes apologetically. “I just can’t risk it. I hope you understand.”
“It’s fine, Marta,” Wes said. “The trunk’s fine. I can lie down. I’ll be more comfortable if I’m not worried about hurting someone.”
“Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully.
“Positive,” he said. Though that trunk ranked just above the Ruby City storage shed in places Wes wanted to be right now.
“I guess we’re decided, then,” Violet said. “Let’s get on the road. Maybe we can reach it by nightfall.”
—
It took almost five hours, and Wes spent them with his arms and legs braced against the confines of the trunk so he wouldn’t go slamming into one end or the other each time the wheels jostled over another divot in the road. He didn’t throw up, but he felt for most of the ride like he was just about to. And if he did, would it be carsickness or the earliest signs of Shreve’s? How would he be able to tell the difference?
The itching in his arm, the crawling in his head—they continued, worsened. He supposed, lying in the dark, that there was a sort of gift in not being able to see the state of his arm, though he found himself compulsively rubbing the fingers on his left hand over the rough terrain, counting the little raised places. Eight. Eleven. Nineteen. And then, after a while, there were so many that he couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began, and so instead
he measured the distance from the edge to his wrist and the other edge to his shoulder, and by the time the car finally and mercifully stopped, the raised places formed an interrupted band all the way around his arm.
The trunk lid popped open, and a rush of cool air swept in, hitting his sweaty skin and setting Wes to shivering.
“I tried to get them to stop,” Marta was saying, her hands on his hands, tugging him. Blood rushed to his head, and he swooned, gripping the car’s side for balance. “I told them you’d need a break. I’m sorry.”
Wes came to a shaky stand. “It’s OK. It was probably better to just get it over with. I don’t know if I’d have gone back in if you let me out.”
“Was it that bad?”
“It was rough,” he admitted.
Edie joined them. “How’s the arm?”
“I don’t know.” He rolled the sleeve of his microsuit gingerly over his forearm. There was a lot of swelling, and the skin now seemed tight and full of heat, so this wasn’t as easy to do as it had been five hours ago. They all pulled back from the sight of it, grimacing. If Wes could have detached his arm and thrown it over the edge of a ravine, he’d have done so with barely a pang of regret. “So much for SecondSkins,” he murmured.
“That looks . . . bad.” Edie winced.
“But no other symptoms?” Marta asked hopefully.
The others gathered around them. Berto, Wes noticed, kept some extra distance between himself and Wes.
“Nothing so far. I didn’t throw up.” He wiggled his fingers, wiggled his toes in his boots. “Everything’s still working.”
Andy came over for a closer look. “Yeah, that’s on schedule. It’s been, what? Six and half hours?”
Wes nodded.
“At least it’s your arm. It could be worse.”
“It could be better.”
Andy turned around and pulled up his shirt to expose the flesh on his lower right back. Here, instead of the uniform Stamp scars, was a hand-sized scar with irregular edges and texture, striations that reminded Wes of tree bark. “Listen, when I say I know how you feel—I know how you feel. It’s shitty. It’s about to get shittier.”
The Salt Line Page 34
