by Nate Kenyon
I nodded, as if I understood where all this was going, while in my head I was wondering whether we would have to restrain him or something, and what we could possibly do if he didn’t snap out of this obvious psychosis.
“My parents were going to find a Lab breeder but my sister, she insisted on the pound. ‘There are so many dogs looking for a home,’ she said, ‘if they don’t get adopted they’re put to sleep, killed, because nobody loves them.’ So we went and they didn’t have any Labs and we walked all over that place and looked at all the dogs and there were a couple of mutt puppies that had just come in that were pretty cute. But she didn’t want anything to do with them, she just looked around for the ugliest, meanest dog in the place, ‘I want that one,’ and there was T-Bone, huddled in the back of his cage, growling, his fur all matted and that one torn ear and his fur stained around his eyes with the gunk he was always producing. My parents tried to convince her to take another one instead, but she insisted, and when they let T-Bone out of his cage, he wouldn’t come anywhere near us, he snapped at us and growled, but she didn’t give up, and when I started complaining she took me aside. ‘If we don’t save him, nobody else will,’ she said, ‘he’ll die here, all alone. He’s been mistreated all his life, but it’s not his fault. Don’t you want to help him, Jay?’ There were tears in her eyes. That was my sister, always doing the right thing, the smartest, strongest and best person I knew. I could never measure up to that. And you know what? Taking that little dog home was one of the best things we ever did.”
The whole story came out in a single rush. None of us said anything. Jay was crying without making a sound, his shoulders shaking in silence, his face screwed up tight. “I miss that dog,” he said. Then he turned and swept his arm violently across the counter, knocking the dish drainer onto the floor. The three plastic plates stacked in it bounced and clattered across the tile.
He turned back to us, his chest heaving, hair damp with sweat, nose running with snot. “Tell them, Sue,” he said. “They deserve to know the truth.”
She glanced at us, then back at Jay. “Calm down, please,” she said.
“No. Do the right thing.” He clutched his hands to his head. “It’s hidden around here somewhere, the truth. Ah, God! My head, it’s on fire, I can’t stop it, these voices.” He grunted, a brief, strange, fierce bark of sound that echoed through the shelter and died away.
“Jay, listen to me,” I said. I put my hands out as if that would calm him, then drew them back, thinking better of it. “I hear them too.”
That stopped him. He cocked his head at me, not unlike the way a small dog would. I knew just enough about delusional thinking to be dangerous. I remembered a few of the techniques that worked with my father, but they didn’t always work, and you were never sure when the attempt would backfire.
I looked around the room, everywhere but right at him, avoiding eye contact. I wanted him to identify with me, not feel threatened by me. “Sometimes they soothe me. Sometimes they try to give me advice. And sometimes they don’t make any sense at all.” I glanced briefly at Tessa, and she gave me a nod and a brief smile as if to say good job, keep going. The problem was, I had no idea what to say next. There was a voice in my head, sure, but was that really any different than anyone else? I figured everyone had such a voice. It was called a conscience. I was pretty sure the situation with Jay right now was different.
“I learned a way to tune them out,” I continued, fishing for the right words. “But it’s hard. You focus on someone else’s voice, you put on mental blinders and you find something simple that needs to be done. One thing at a time. That can help. If you ignore them, eventually they start fading away.”
“Are you cut?” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“They get into the blood,” he said, staring off into space. I didn’t know if he was talking to me. “They get inside and they start chewing, and they don’t stop until they’re in control.”
I remembered something Jimmie had said: I could feel them inside me, chewing. I didn’t like the sound of this at all. “You mean the voices in your head?”
He squeezed his eyes shut hard, once, twice. “These voices aren’t imaginary, these are real. I can’t understand what they’re saying, it’s just white noise. But they’re getting louder.”
“What’s going on?” It was Dan, emerging from the other room, wide-awake and ready for action, God bless him. “I heard shouting.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re just venting, that’s all. Where’s Jimmie?”
“Still in bed,” Dan said, staring at Jay with obvious mistrust. “He’s pretty exhausted. I told him to stay there, I’d check it out.”
“I just want to get out of here,” Jay said, his entire body trembling. He wiped the snot from his nose, his chest hitching. “I feel like someone’s tearing my head apart. I can’t think! I can’t think!” He turned to Sue. “Tell them, or I swear to God I will.”
“Baby—”
“No?” Jay turned to the rest of us. “Fine, I’ll do it, then.”
“Please—”
“It’s no coincidence we’re down in this godforsaken hole,” Jay said. “Sue’s grandfather knew it was going to happen. He was a part of the whole thing.”
“Stop it!” Sue screamed. “Just stop it, stop it, stop it—”
Two things happened in quick succession: the first was that Jay stepped forward and slapped Sue’s face. The sound was like a stick snapping in the woods, and it left a bright red, blooming print across her cheek. Her mouth snapped shut, and she raised her fingers to the mark, as if exploring its heat.
The second was a direct result of the first: I leaped forward between them, intent on stopping whatever Jay might do next. As I did, I grabbed for his arms, but caught the sleeve of his sweatshirt instead, and as he yanked and twisted himself away from me, his arm slid out of the sleeve I was holding and the sweatshirt rode up over his head, exposing his belly.
I let go of the sleeve as if I’d been scalded, and Jay pulled the sweatshirt back over his head to cover himself, breathing hard. He clutched his arms to his chest as if to hide it. But the glimpse I’d gotten of his stomach had been burned into my brain forever.
“What was that?” I said.
“Nothing!”
Sue’s sobs grew louder.
Twin swollen lines like scratches down his skin…
“Let us see,” I said. “He’s hiding something. Dan, he’s burning up. Tell him to take that sweatshirt off.”
“No,” Sue said. “Leave him alone!”
“Pete, let him be,” Tessa said. “He’s scared.”
“So am I.”
Dan looked at me strangely. But he gestured at Jay. “Let’s see your stomach, then,” he said. “Come on.”
I didn’t think he’d do it, and I imagined the very unpleasant possibility of wrestling him to the ground. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to, either, if I’d seen what I thought I’d seen…But slowly, Jay let his arms drop. His entire body was shaking so hard and fast I thought he might actually start chattering like a jackhammer across the tile.
“I’m sorry, Sue,” he said. “I love you.” He raised the shirt.
Two deep, bright red furrows ran across his chest to his stomach. But that wasn’t what made my blood run cold.
Hives had bloomed across his skin like a constellation of blood and pus, spreading outward from the twin wounds. Some were little bigger than dimes, while others were almost as large as Jimmie’s had been.
We all stood there staring at him, the silence broken only by Sue’s quiet sobs. I felt pinpricks of fear cross my scalp and the nape of my neck, and the idea that we were alone on this planet, perhaps this universe, utterly alone, filled my mind until I felt impossibly small, that grain of sand on an endless beach, the speck of dust in a hurricane.
“He scratched me, when we were fighting over you in the tunnel, and I was trying to let you back through the door,” Jay said. “They look for brea
ks in the skin, for blood, that’s how they get in. They smell it. My scrape’s not as bad or as deep as his bite, so maybe it took them longer to find me, I don’t know. But they did. I’m infected.”
The fight about the tunnel had happened over two weeks ago. Any wounds he’d received should have pretty much healed up by now. Unless something was keeping them from healing.
Sue’s sobs grew louder. Her cheek, where he’d hit her, was a mass of red, and I could see the swelling growing worse.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Tessa said.
“You should have said something,” I said. “We could help you. Jimmie’s better now, maybe there’s a way to recover from whatever this is—”
“No.” Jay shook his head. “Jimmie’s not better.” He chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound at all. “You just got rid of one version of these things, but the really dangerous ones—they’re microscopic, they get in your blood and move to your brain—those are still there. You’ll see, soon enough.”
“You’re crazy,” Dan said. “What did you mean, Sue’s grandfather knew? He was a part of what, exactly?”
He took a step backward, as if it might be catching. If Dan wasn’t on board to handle this, I didn’t know what we’d do.
Jay’s face scrunched up again as he fought more tears. He looked at Sue. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t mean to hit you. But they should know everything. It might help.” His voice broke, and he whined in the back of his throat. “Ah, God. This is hard. It hu—huurts. Something…” Then he opened his mouth, wide, wider, and the muscles in his neck stood out, veins jumping in his temples. His head came forward and he stood there, as if trying to force something out of his throat, his eyes leaking tears. I thought he might be choking, and he made a small sound like a cough before his eyes went completely dead. It was the strangest, most unsettling thing, almost as if the Jay we knew was a machine, and someone had just flipped the off switch.
Then, without warning, he screamed again, but this was not a human sound at all. It reminded me of the sound an old dial-up modem made when trying to connect over a phone line. The high-pitched, earsplitting, crackling screech went on until I thought my ears might burst.
Finally he stopped.
In the ensuing silence, as we stood in mute shock, an answering sound came from another part of the shelter.
It didn’t sound human.
“Holy fuck,” Dan said. He did not look at me, kept his eyes on Jay, who stood absolutely still in the center of the kitchen, his eyes still dead and dull, as if whatever essence, whatever life had been in him, was gone. “Pete, go. Now.”
My heart was pounding and I had a sickly sour trembling in my stomach. I turned and raced through the dining room to the bedroom doorway.
Jimmie was sitting straight up in bed. He held the same strange pose as Jay had in the kitchen: tendons standing out in his neck, dead eyes looking at nothing, mouth open and head thrust forward. A line of spittle spun out from one corner of his mouth and dripped onto the mattress.
“Jimmie?” I said. “You okay?” I stepped forward and snapped my fingers in front of his face. No response. I reached down and pinched the flesh of his arm. Nothing. I might as well have been dealing with a wooden sculpture, except for the heat of his skin, his chest rising and falling, air passing through his mouth and nose.
I could see the slight pulse of an artery in his neck. But he did not move one muscle, not even a twitch in his eye or cheek, and when I tried to turn his face to look at me I could not budge it.
Again, the strange idea of a sculpture struck me, a hollow machine like the Trojan horse, something that looked like Jimmie and felt like Jimmie, but wasn’t Jimmie at all. A shell that hid something far worse.
My entire body was tingling, the hairs rising up across my arms and legs as I took a step away from him, everything in my soul telling me to leave this place, take everyone and do it now. But where would we go? There was no escape from what was essentially our tomb. I felt like tearing open that hatch and running until I couldn’t run anymore, until my lungs screamed and gave out, and I collapsed in a heap of debris and under the metal gray clouds of the apocalypse, my tears turned to blood and my skin blistering and turning black.
My breathing grew shallow and quick, my heart rate leaping ever faster as stars swirled in my vision, and I realized that I was having a panic attack. I could not risk passing out now, but already I was feeling light-headed. I stumbled, the room spinning around me.
Almost as if I willed it to happen, I turned and Tessa was there, my Tessa, looking for all the world like my guardian angel, and perhaps she was; I fell toward her and she held out her arms to catch me as lightly as a parent would catch a child, but even as I fell I realized that she wasn’t there at all and had not caught me, it had all been in my mind, and I hit the floor hard.
The fierce bark of pain brought me sharply back into focus, and I sat up rubbing my head. A sudden commotion came from the kitchen, things crashing to the floor and more shouting, and then Jay scrambled through the dining room and around the table right in front of me, slipping and crashing into the wall and then up again from all fours as objects tumbled off the shelves. His glasses were gone and his skin was shiny with sweat, and he moved with a strange, disjointed gait as if there were something wrong with his legs.
He saw me sitting there, and as we made eye contact I caught a glimpse of the sheer panic and desperation that had hold of him.
“F-f-find it,” he said. It took obvious effort for him to speak, the words forced out of him in a stuttering, stop-and-start staccato. “If she won’t tell. If she won’t. It’s in here, s-s-somewhere, the answers to everything. You take care of her, you p-p-promise me. I…can’t hold them off anymore…hurts…so bad.”
He looked at me again, pleading, then clutched his head as he had in the kitchen and shrieked at the ceiling, the sound of pure agony, not the strange inhuman sound from before, but a person in terrible pain. It looked like he was fighting with himself. As strange as it sounds, it looked like a battle for control. I wanted to believe he was finally buckling under the pressure, the pressure he’d felt his entire life from his family, of not being good enough or smart enough as the rest of them; the pressure of being trapped down here under the dirt and rocks in an eight-hundred-square-foot coffin; the pressure of staying strong for a girlfriend who needed more than any of the rest of us seemed to understand.
But at that moment, watching him clutching at his own head and screaming, remembering the hives on his chest, Jimmie’s strange behavior and what we had cut out of his leg, I believed it was something far worse.
They get into the blood…they get inside and they start chewing, and they don’t stop until they’re in control.
I stood on wobbly legs as Sue came out of the kitchen after him, screaming for him to stop. She grabbed for him but he shook her off and went for the steps.
I realized too late what he meant to do.
Dan came through from the kitchen just as I went for the stairs too, and we ran headlong into each other, tangling up our legs and slowing both of us down long enough for Jay to get to the ladder. Sue scrambled up the steps after him as we came around the table toward her, and I could see her reach for him but he kicked at her and she fell back, tumbling down to land at our feet.
Jay started to turn the hatch wheel.
A screeching alarm sounded through the shelter and a flashing red light went off on the wall near the shelves. Above the sound of the alarm I thought I could hear a vast, angry humming sound from beyond the hatch, which frightened me more than anything else. I didn’t know what it could be, but I knew it wasn’t good.
Jay’s feet disappeared as he climbed the ladder up and out and was gone.
I heard Sue screaming again and Dan grabbed her around the waist as she tried to go after Jay. She elbowed him in the face and almost wriggled free, and I jumped on top of them both, but still she fought hard, heaving and twisting against u
s and nearly getting away even then, calling for him to come back, pleading with him to return to her.
I’m not sure why we chose to restrain her, rather than try to get to Jay. I guess we both realized there was no stopping him now, and losing Sue in the process was only going to make things worse. Still, my heart ached for her and as I felt her body wracked with sobs, a terrible hopelessness filled my core until I was weeping too, weeping for the loss of Jay and also for the loss of something important within myself, a part of what made me human.
We held her down as she kicked and clawed and swore at us like some kind of raving lunatic, until we heard the hatch close and that brain-numbing screech of the alarm finally stop.
We were distracted, but that’s no excuse. We should have been more careful.
In the middle of all this, none of us realized what had gotten into the shelter while Jay had the hatch open.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When she heard the alarm stop, Sue went limp beneath us, her body shaking, probably in shock. Tessa came out from the kitchen and helped get her into a chair, talking in a soft, soothing voice. Sue didn’t seem to hear her, just curled up into a ball on the chair. I got her a damp towel to soothe her red cheek, which had swollen pretty badly now, but she just threw it against the wall. Finally I left Tessa to try to talk to her, and sat down on the bottom step, my legs weak from adrenaline as the rush of fear began to fade away.
While we were busy with Sue, Dan had jumped to his feet and disappeared into the other room, and he came out a minute later with one of the hazmat suits, walking fast, already starting to shrug himself into it.
I grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?” I asked.
He spun to glare at me, breathing hard. “Going after him.”
“That’s a bad idea.”
“It might not be too late,” he said. “If I can just get to him quickly, bring him back—”
I glanced at Sue. “Not here,” I said.
