Edie waited to see if she’d say more.
“You saw my husband. The kind of person he is.”
Edie shrugged a little, nodded.
“I called Berto and Ken monsters. I’ve been lying here thinking of how unfair that was. I’ve been married for over twenty-five years to a monster. A real monster. But he’s good to our sons, and he gives them a good life. I’ve never been willing to think past that. I’ve never had the courage to.”
“I think you have courage,” Edie said. “I think you’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met.”
Marta reached across the little space of floor between their beds, and Edie met her halfway. Their fingers linked.
“Well, I don’t know about all that. But I’ve already broken one promise to Wes. I told him I’d do whatever I had to do to get back in-zone. Locking myself in a room with a young man having a hatching probably isn’t the best way to go about it.”
“We could switch places.”
“No. This is how it’s supposed to be,” Marta said hoarsely, voice thick with emotion. Edie wondered if she was thinking about that thing her husband said just before Violet shot Joe. About her sons.
There was a buzz at the door. Edie rose from the bed to open the vac seal.
Andy. “I checked on Wes. If you still want to go in with him, I think now’s the time.”
Marta and Edie exchanged looks.
“Yes, I still want to go in,” Marta said. “Show me what to do.”
—
A couple of hours later, Edie sat in the downstairs living area with Violet, Andy, Berto, and Ken. They had been drawn in unspoken consensus not to the couches by the fireplace or the formal dining table but to the bar stools around the kitchen island. Andy made a pot of coffee. They rummaged in the pantry and freezer and pulled out a random assortment of snacks: butter cookies, pretzels, some kind of weird unrefrigerated cheese product that didn’t smear on crackers so much as collapse onto them, dates, mini-quiches that heated up quickly in the convection oven. They ate in silence at first, ravenous; it was at least 9:00, and they’d had nothing since those sandwiches back at the house in Lenoir. Andy had set up a camera in Wes’s room—it worked on an old-fashioned wireless system—and they watched the stream of video on a tablet, muting the audio when Wes started groaning with pain. It was strange to surveil him and Marta like this. Shameful, even. And yet it was the only way to know how and if the situation had progressed, and Edie wanted to be able to spring to action if Marta needed her. To outrace the others to the door if she had to.
“This is going to sound weird, but you know what this reminds me of?” Andy asked, finally breaking the silence.
“What?” said Berto.
“Waiting for my boys to be born.” He unwrapped another foil wedge of cheese and bisected it with a cracker. He took a big bite, a shadow passing over his face. Served him right, Edie thought. He probably didn’t deserve to get to come back to his family, to reenter their lives as if he’d never planned to leave them forever. Would someone sitting here rat him out? Edie didn’t plan to—she wasn’t interested in meting out justice—but she couldn’t imagine Berto staying silent, especially after Andy insisted on bringing Wes into the chalet.
“Yes,” Ken said. “It does.”
“You have kids?” Edie asked, shocked. He’d never once mentioned them.
He nodded. “Four.” He didn’t elaborate.
Violet set down her coffee mug with a sigh, stood.
“You OK?” Edie asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just going to stretch my legs.”
When she’d wandered off toward the fireplace, Berto leaned in and lowered his voice. “So getting back over the Wall,” he said. “What’s the plan?”
“Well,” said Andy, “I’m of two minds about that. So I’ll tell you my ideas, and you all tell me what you think.”
“Spit it out,” Berto said.
Andy frowned, made a show of refilling his coffee, doctoring it again with sugar and powdered creamer. “The first option is to use the satellite phone in this house.”
For a pregnant few seconds, no one knew what to say. Then, Berto exploded: “A phone? In this goddamn house?” Edie thought he was going to fly over the island and start pummeling Andy, but he seemed to remember at the last moment that Andy held all of the passcodes to the storage closets and safes. Trying for calm—though his face was blotchy-red with anger, or maybe excitement—he said, slowly, “Is there a reason we’re not placing the fucking phone call—I don’t know—four hours ago?”
“Yes,” Andy said, “there’s a reason. For one, our pal Wes is still doing his thing upstairs.”
Berto shook his head in disgust. “I wish I knew why you have such a hard-on for that guy.”
“I wish I knew why you don’t have more of a hard-on for him. I mean, if we place that call, who do you think is likeliest to get the good guys here to help us on the double? You?” He pointed to Violet and whispered: “The scarecrow over there?”
“Ken’s a big shot in his own right,” Edie said.
“That’s true,” Andy said. “And yeah, if Wes dies, it’s a good thing we got Ken. But better for us if they’re both alive.”
“Why?” Berto asked.
“Because the rest of us aren’t worth the fuel it’d take to get us.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Berto said sorely, but he turned his attention to folding a foil wrapper. A little bird formed in his big hands. “I have the money to cover that. OLE was going to airlift us out in case of emergency, anyway.”
“That’s the claim, but I don’t know if it’s true. It’s never once happened. Which leads me to the other option. And I guess all of this depends on how cynical you are. Or paranoid. Me, I’m a lot of both.”
“Let’s hear it,” Edie said.
“If you’re inclined to doubt how much our government’s willing to risk for us, after everything we’ve seen—even for Ken here, and Feingold—then you might think it’s less of a risk to sneak in on our own. I know some guys who worked for my old boss. They got me out here the first time. They’d smuggle us in for the right price.”
“How much?” Berto asked.
“You were just saying you could afford an evac.”
“I know what I’m getting with a government-sanctioned evacuation.”
“OK, ballpark? A hundred thousand a head.”
Edie laughed. It was all so predictable. “Well, that’s it for me. And Violet. Andy, I guess I know how much you’re charging for your contact.”
“Maybe you don’t,” Andy said. “Maybe I’m charging three hundred thousand.”
“How do we even get the credits to them?” Ken asked.
“They have the tech out here for a transfer.”
“I think the way forward’s pretty obvious,” Ken said. “We use the satellite phone. And if they don’t come to get us after a few days, we use your contact, Andy.”
Andy smirked. “It don’t work like that, bub.”
“Why not?”
Violet spoke up from across the room. “Andy. Can you turn the lights off for a moment?”
“Lights? Why?”
“There’s something outside I’m trying to get a better look at.”
Andy went to the wall plate and tapped the screen. The lights lowered, leaving only a dim band around the room’s baseboards, reminding Edie of the aisle in a movie theater.
Violet was standing in front of the western bank of windows, and now that the lights were out, the object of her gaze was clear: a bright blaze of orange light. How far away it was Edie couldn’t guess. It might have been a very big light very far away, or it might have been a smaller light quite close. She joined Violet at the windows and peered out, trying to fix on the source. She felt the others gathering close, doing the same.
&
nbsp; “What is that?” Berto asked.
Violet’s voice was dull. “Home,” she said.
“Ruby City?” Andy said. “Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”
“How do you know for sure?” Ken said.
“It’s the right direction,” said Andy. “We’re about an hour northeast of it here. Jesus, it looks like a bomb went off.”
Ken again: “What does this mean?”
“It means I vote for getting smuggled in,” Violet said. Her eye was very bright in the low light—damp with tears that she roughly wiped away. “If someone’s willing to pay my tab.”
Twenty-Three
Perhaps an hour passed before Marta regretted turning down Edie’s offer of assistance. When one of the frenzies, as Andy had called them, set in, caring for Wes became a job for two—or a job for one person with more strength and wherewithal than Marta possessed. He paced, ground his teeth; tears leaked out from the corners of his pinched eyes. He hadn’t made a violent move toward Marta (yet), but he was keen to hurt himself, at one point throwing his infested arm against the wall over and over, so that Marta finally broke down and gave Wes the first two tranquilizers of the stash of ten Andy had given her. Were there more pills? He’d been cagey. “Ten should be enough. Give him more than that in a twenty-four-hour period and you might do him more harm than good.” But how long would this go on? A day? Three? If she ran out, would someone come and bring more? Would they do it if Wes were trying to gnaw his own arm off through the biceps?
Now he was resting on one of the beds. Marta dipped a washcloth into the large basin of water Andy had filled for her and blotted Wes’s sweaty brow with it. He let out a shuddering, slow breath. His eyes were still closed. Now that she’d showered, Marta was uncomfortably aware of Wes’s stench—the smell made worse by the wild tang of his sick-sweat. She rolled her chair back, putting some distance between them, and tore the wrapper end off an energy bar with her teeth, bolting down a few fast bites and finishing with a slug of bottled water. Just enough to quiet her stomach’s rumble.
“Would you like some water?” she asked Wes.
His mouth twitched. “Maybe,” he said finally. “Hold on.” A few minutes later, he sat up and propped his pillows up behind his back. “OK, I’ll have some now.”
She handed him a cup with a straw in it, aiming the end of the straw at his mouth. He took it from her irritably. “I’ve got it,” he said. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He moved to set the glass down on his bedside table, and his hand shook so badly that the rest of the water went all over him. “Fuck it all,” he muttered. It was the first time she had heard him curse.
“If there’s anything I can do,” Marta said, “please tell me.”
“I don’t know why you’re even in here,” Wes said.
“Because you shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
He shrugged. “I’m doing it alone either way. Now I’ve got to worry about hurting you.”
“You’re not going to hurt me,” Marta said firmly, though she wasn’t convinced this was true. “I’m here to help contain things when you—you know. So if it helps you feel better, think of it as protecting the others.”
His eyes fluttered shut again, and he winced. “I feel them. Like this army on a march inside me. And I hear their voices. Yeah, I know. Ticks don’t have voices. I don’t suppose they have thoughts, either. But I hear them. In my head.”
“I’m sorry,” Marta said. “That sounds awful.”
“If I get through this, I’m going to stop talking and let you complain to me. For as long as you want. I guess I owe you a few weeks’ worth at this point. Don’t I?”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Marta said. “You’re my friend, Wes.”
“Friend,” he mused. “I’ve never really had one, Marta. Not really. I’m glad you’re my friend. It was worth all of this, maybe. To make a friend.”
“For me, too,” she said. She took his hand and squeezed it. He returned the squeeze . . . and then he bore down. She felt the bones in her hands moving, popping, and she yanked free of him with a little yelp of pain and confusion. His face was bleached of color. The tendons in his neck surged outward as he threw his head back against the pillow, grinding his sweaty crown against the Egyptian cotton pillowcase, and silent tears rolled down into the cups of his ears. Under the thin sheet covering him, his entire body stiffened so hard that Wes emanated a vibration.
“Do you think it’s happening?” Marta asked. She was terrified.
He nodded—one quick dip of the chin.
She moved as quickly as she could. First the restraints. Andy had tied off rope to the bedframe on three ends, and Marta looped each of Wes’s feet, executing the tight figure-eight knot Andy had shown her, then his left arm. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” she kept murmuring. She shook two more tranquilizers from the bottle. “Open,” she said to Wes, wondering if she’d have to sink her fingers into his jaws the way you did a dog’s, but he accepted the pills, and the straw, and his throat worked, and he coughed.
The water bath was a large plastic storage container filled to the brim and sudsy with dish soap. Positioned beside Wes’s bed, it reached just high enough for him to dangle his arm over the side and fully submerge the tick hatching site. “But he’s going to be bucking and shucking, and so you’ll have to keep a close eye on it. Hold it underwater if you have to. They can’t swim. The babies’ll attach and feed, so there’s some risk if they carry Shreve’s, but they can’t burrow. But I don’t think they could attach to you through the water, anyway.”
This didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Still, it was a risk Marta would take over the option of watching hundreds of tiny miner ticks scatter into her locked, vac-sealed room.
“OK, I changed my mind,” Wes gasped.
“About what?”
“About this all being worth it. It’s not.”
Marta laughed through her tears and gripped his hand. “OK, fair enough. But I think it’s going to be over soon. One way or another.”
“Thank you,” Wes said.
“You’re welcome,” Marta told him. She looked at his arm—at the biggest pustules around where the burrowing had occurred. There was movement under the blistered surface of the skin. First she thought this was a trick of the eyes—the lighting, her exhaustion, the intensity of her concentration. Then it happened again. And again. Now there were lots of little movements, and the blisters rippled as if they were boiling, and finally the center pustule oozed open, secreting a yellowish-red fluid, and a small, black, many-legged thing scrambled out.
Marta plunged Wes’s arm into the water.
He screamed, and the water bloomed crimson, and a strange smell filled the room: blood and metal but something else, almost sweet, like raisins, but on the edge of rancid. Wes convulsed in her grip, straining against his restraints, but she managed to keep his arm underwater, bearing down hard with both hands, her face only centimeters from its churning red surface. She had no idea how long this went on. Only a few minutes probably, though it seemed endless. Her arms ached, and her back and thighs ached with the strain of keeping her balanced (so easily she could fall into the water headfirst, and she kept bracing herself for that eventuality).
At last Wes collapsed, and his arm went limp. She pulled it from the water and winced at the raw, ravaged flesh, which made a band around the meat of his forearm and stretched in a wet red mouth from the forearm’s middle to mere centimeters from his armpit. She turned the arm, searching it frantically, and saw a furious black scurrying thing scrambling over the crooks and crags of the wet flesh. With a little wail of disgust she brushed it off into the water, and then she wrapped Wes’s arm in the clean white towel she’d kept nearby for this purpose, and then she looked her own arms over, feeling ticklish feet where her eyes told her nothing moved. The tub of water was pink with a yellowish scrim on the
surface in which floated little black specks, too many to count. Marta scanned the floor, Wes’s bedsheets. She saw nothing. In the time it took to do these things, the towel around Wes’s arm soaked red.
“Wes. Wes, are you all right? Can you hear me?”
He nodded wearily.
“I need to clean and dress your arm. I think it’s all right to give you another pill. And I have some ibuprofen. OK?”
“OK,” he whispered.
She slipped the pills between his lips, fed him some water. Then she gingerly peeled the wet towel back. His poor arm—it looked as if he’d held it in a tank filled with piranhas. She shook the canister of antiseptic spray and depressed the nozzle, coating the wounds. He bore this all with a grimace. Then she opened a package of antibiotic gauze and unwrapped it around the arm, overlapping the edges. She finished with dry gauze and a sling Andy had makeshifted from a spare sheet. Wes’s face was ashy, his lips the same color as his skin, his under-eyes bluish-green. She helped him up and led him to one of the other beds, nestling him between clean sheets.
“It’s over,” she said, patting his knee through the sheet. “Lie back. Try to rest.”
“It’s not over,” Wes said. “I’m not in the clear for Shreve’s. Not for days, yet.”
He rolled onto his left side, ruined arm nestled against his chest, and went to sleep.
—
She waited until the rise and fall of his chest was deep and even, then drank a bottle of water, finished her energy bar, and rose wearily to give the room a final once-over. The room was—by strategy, she supposed—all white: white tile flooring, white-painted walls, white linens. She put the lid on the storage container of soapy water and ran microseal tape around the edges: once, twice, three times. Andy had told her that miner ticks can live underwater for days, and their safest bet would be to wait a week before trying to dispose of the dirty water. Then she went to the bed where Wes had lain during his hatching, pulled the covers smooth, turned them back, peeled off the fitted sheet. Nothing. But she threw all of the linens into one of the thick plastic garbage bags Andy had given her and pulled the chemical seal. She did this with the linens on the other two beds, too, just to be safe. She turned the mattresses off the frames, pulled them to the side of the room away from the door, and stacked them. Then she walked the floor in concentric circles. She saw a dark speck that turned out to be an oat flake from her energy bar. Another that was a piece of leaf off one of their shoes. Nothing else. Satisfied, she went to the monitor. “We’re good in here,” she said. Then, just in case, she made the OK sign with her hand.
The Salt Line Page 36
