CHAPTER 5
1
Unit 12 of A Wing was bare except for the single bunk, the steel toilet, and the camera bulbs in the corners of the ceiling. No painted square on the wall for posting pictures, no desk. Coates had dragged in a plastic chair to sit on while Clint examined Kitty McDavid, who lay on the bunk.
“So?” asked Coates.
“She’s alive. Her vitals are strong.” Clint stood from his crouch. He unsnapped his surgical gloves and carefully placed them in a plastic bag. From his jacket pocket he took out a small pad and a pen and began to jot notes.
“I don’t know what that stuff is. It’s tacky, like sap, and it’s also tough, and yet it’s evidently permeable because she’s breathing through it. It smells—earthy, I guess. And a little waxy. If you pressed me, I’d say it was some kind of a fungus, but it’s not behaving like any fungus I’ve ever seen or heard of.” To even attempt to discuss the situation made Clint feel as if he were climbing up a hill made of pennies. “A biologist could take a sample and put it under a microscope—”
“I’ve been told that it’s a bad idea to remove the stuff.”
Clint clicked his pen, stuck it and the pad back in his coat. “Well, I’m not a biologist, anyway. And since she seems comfortable . . .”
The growth on Kitty’s face was white and gauzy, tight to her skin. It made Clint think of a winding sheet. He could tell that her eyes were shut and he could tell that they were moving in REM. The idea that she was dreaming under the stuff troubled him, although he wasn’t sure why.
Little wisps of the gauzy material unspooled from her limp hands and wrists, wafting out as if breeze-blown, catching onto the waist area of McDavid’s uniform, forming connections. Based on the way the stuff was spreading, Clint extrapolated that it would eventually create a full body covering.
“It looks like a fairy handkerchief.” The warden had her arms crossed. She didn’t appear upset, just thoughtful.
“Fairy handkerchief?”
“Grass spiders make them. You see them in the morning, while it’s still dewy.”
“Oh. Right. I see them in the backyard sometimes.”
They were quiet for a moment, watching the little tendrils of gauzy material. Beneath the coating, Kitty’s eyelids fluttered and shifted. What kind of trip was she on in there? Was she dreaming of scoring? Kitty told him once that she liked the prospect even better than the high—the sweet anticipation. Was she dreaming of cutting herself? Was she dreaming of Lowell Griner, the drug dealer who promised to kill her if she ever talked about his operation? Or was her brain gone, blacked out by the virus (if it was a virus) of which the webbing was the foremost manifestation? Her rolling eyes the neural equivalent of a torn power line shooting off sparks?
“This is fucking scary,” Janice said. “And that’s not a phrase I use lightly.”
Clint was glad Lila was coming. Whatever was going on between them, he wanted to see her face. “I ought to call my son,” Clint said, mostly to himself.
Rand Quigley, the officer on the floor, poked his head in. He darted a quick, uneasy glance at the incapacitated woman with the shrouded face before shifting toward the warden and clearing his throat. “The sheriff’s ETA is twenty or thirty minutes with her prisoner.” He hung there a moment. “Got the word about the double shifts from Blanche, Warden. I’m here as long as you need me.”
“Good man,” she said.
On the walk over Clint had briefly filled Coates in about the woman from the murder scene, and that Lila was bringing her in. The warden, far more concerned about what Michaela had told her, had been uncharacteristically nonchalant about such a breach of protocol. Clint had been relieved by that, but only for a few seconds, because then she’d hit him with everything she knew about Aurora.
Before Clint could ask if she was joking, she’d shown him her iPhone, which was set to the front page of the New York Times: EPIDEMIC howled the twenty-point headline. The corresponding article said that women were forming coatings in their sleep, that they weren’t waking up, that there were mass riots in the western time zones, and fires in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nothing about bad shit happening if the gauze was removed, Clint noticed. Possibly because that was just a rumor. Possibly because it was true, and the press was trying not to ignite full-scale panic. At this point, who could tell?
“You can call your son in a few minutes, but Clint, this is a big goddam deal. We’ve got six officers on the shift, plus you, me, Blanche in the office, and Dunphy from maintenance. And there are one hundred and fourteen female inmates with one more on the way. Most of the officers, they’re like Quigley, they recognize they’ve got a duty, and I expect they’ll hold tight for a bit. For which I thank God, because I don’t know when we can expect reinforcements, or what they’ll amount to. You see?”
Clint saw.
“All right. To start with, Doc, what do we do about Kitty?”
“We contact the CDC, ask them to send some boys in hazmat suits to come in and take her out, get her examined, but . . .” Clint opened his hands in expression of how pointless that would be. “If this is as widespread as you’ve told me, and the news certainly seems to agree that it is, we’re not going to get any help until there’s help to get, right?”
Coates still had her arms crossed. Clint wondered if she was holding herself to keep from showing the shakes. The idea made him feel simultaneously better and worse.
“And I suppose we can’t expect St. Theresa’s or anyone else to take her off our hands right now, either? They probably have their hands full, too.”
“We should call around, but that’s my expectation,” Clint said. “So let’s lock her up tight, keep her quarantined. We don’t want anyone else getting close to her or touching her even with gloves on. Van can monitor her from the Booth. If anything changes, if she appears distressed, if she wakes up, we’ll come running.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She brushed at the air where a moth was flitting around. “Stupid bug. How do these things get in here? Goddammit. Next item: What about the rest of the population? How do we treat them?”
“What do you mean?” Clint flapped a hand at the moth, but missed. It circled up to the fluorescent bank in the ceiling.
“If they fall asleep . . .” The warden gestured at McDavid.
Clint touched his forehead, half-expecting to find it burning with fever. A demented multiple-choice question came to him.
How do you keep the inmates of a prison awake? Select from the following:
A) Play Metallica over the prison’s public address system on an infinite loop.
B) Give every prisoner a knife and tell them to cut themselves when they start to feel sleepy.
C) Give every prisoner a sack of Dexedrine.
D) All of the above.
E) You don’t.
“There’s medication that can keep people awake, but Janice, I’d say a near majority of the women here are drug addicts. The idea of pumping them all up with what’s basically speed doesn’t strike me as safe or healthy. Anyhow, something like, say, Provigil, it’s not like I could write a prescription for a hundred tablets. I think the pharmacist at Rite Aid would look askance, you know? Bottom line, I don’t see any way to help them. All we can do is keep things as normal as possible and try to tamp down any panic, hope for some kind of explanation or breakthrough in the meantime, and—”
Clint hesitated for a moment before dispensing the euphemism that seemed like the only way to put it and yet totally wrong. “And let nature take her course.” Although this was no form of nature he was familiar with.
She sighed.
They went out into the hall and the warden told Quigley to pass the word: no one was to touch the growth on McDavid.
2
The woodshop inmates ate in the carpentry shed instead of the mess hall, and on nice days they were allowed to have lunch outside in the shade of the building. This one was nice, a thing for which Jeanette Sorley was grateful. She had begun sprouting a headache in the garden while Dr. Norcross was on the phone, and now it was boring deeper, like a steel rod working its way inward from her left temple. The stink of the varnish wasn’t helping. Some fresh outside air might blow the pain away.
At ten minutes of twelve, two Red Tops—trustees—rolled in a table with sandwiches, lemonade, and chocolate pudding cups. At twelve, the buzzer went. Jeanette gave a final twist to the chair leg she was finishing and then flicked off her lathe. Half a dozen inmates did the same. The decibel level dropped. Now the only sound in the room—hot in here already and not even June—was the steady high-pitched whine of the Power Vac, which Ree Dempster was using to clean up the sawdust between the last row of machines and the wall.
“Turn that off, inmate!” Tig Murphy bellowed. He was a newer hire. Like most new hires, he bellowed a lot because he was still unsure of himself. “It’s lunch! Did you not hear the buzzer?”
Ree started, “Officer, I just got this one more little—”
“Off, I said, off!”
“Yes, Officer.”
Ree turned off the Power Vac, and the silence gave Jeanette a shiver of relief. Her hands ached inside her work gloves, her head ached from the stink of the varnish. All she wanted was to go back to good old B-7, where she had aspirin (an approved Green Med, but only a dozen allowed per month). Then maybe she could sleep until B Wing chow at six.
“Line up, hands up,” Officer Murphy chanted. “Line up, hands up, let me see those tools, ladies.”
They lined up. Ree was in front of Jeanette and whispered, “Officer Murphy is kind of fat, isn’t he?”
“Probably been eating cake with Michelle Obama,” Jeanette whispered back, and Ree giggled.
They held up their tools: hand-sanders, screwdrivers, drills, chisels. Jeanette wondered if male inmates would have been allowed access to such potentially dangerous weapons. Especially the screwdrivers. You could kill with a screwdriver, as she well knew. And that’s what the pain in her head felt like: a screwdriver. Pushing in. Finding the soft meat and disarranging it.
“Shall we eat al fresco today, ladies?” Someone had mentioned that Officer Murphy had been a high school teacher until he lost his job when the faculty was downsized. “That means—”
“Outside,” Jeanette mumbled. “That means eating outside.”
Murphy pointed at her. “We have a Rhodes Scholar among us.” But he was smiling a little, so it didn’t sound mean.
The tools were checked off and collected and put into a steel floor chest that was then locked. The furniture crew shuffled to the table, grabbed sandwiches and Dixie cups of drink, and waited for Murphy to do the count. “Ladies, the great outdoors awaits you. Someone grab me a ham and cheese.”
“You got it, cutie,” Angel Fitzroy murmured under her breath. Murphy gave her a sharp glance, which Angel returned with an innocent gaze. Jeanette felt a little sorry for him. But sorry don’t buy no groceries, as her mother used to say. She gave Murphy three months. At most.
The women filed out of the shed, sat down on the grass, and leaned against the wall of the building.
“What’d you get?” Ree asked.
Jeanette peered into the depths of her sandwich. “Chicken.”
“I got tuna. Want to trade?”
Jeanette didn’t care what she had, she wasn’t a bit hungry, so she swapped. She made herself eat, hoping it might make her head feel a little better. She drank the lemonade, which tasted bitter, but when Ree brought her a pudding cup, Jeanette shook her head. Chocolate was a migraine trigger, and if her current headache turned into one of those, she would have to go to the infirmary for a Zomig, which she would only get if Dr. N. was still here. Word had gone around that the regular PAs hadn’t come in.
A cement path ran toward the main prison building, and someone had decorated it with a fading hopscotch grid. A few women got up, found stones, and started to play, chanting rhymes they must have learned as kids. Jeanette thought it was funny, what stuck in a person’s head.
She pounded down the last bite of sandwich with the last swallow of bitter lemonade, leaned back and closed her eyes. Was her head getting a little better? Maybe. In any case, they had another fifteen minutes, at least. She could nap a little . . .
That was when Officer Peters popped out of the carpentry shed like a bouncy little Jack-in-the-box. Or a troll who had been hiding under a rock. He looked at the women playing hopscotch, then at the women sitting against the side of the building. His eyes settled on Jeanette. “Sorley. Get in here. I got a job for you.”
Fucking Peters. He was a tit-squeezer and an ass-patter, always managing to do it in one of the multiple blind spots the cameras couldn’t quite reach. He knew them all. And if you said anything, you were apt to get your tit wrung instead of just squeezed.
“I’m on my lunch break, Officer,” she said, as pleasantly as she could.
“Looks like you’re finished to me. Now get off your duff and come along.”
Murphy looked uncertain, but one rule about working in a women’s prison had been drummed into his head: male officers were not allowed to be one-on-one with any inmate. “Buddy system, Don.”
Color suffused Peters’s cheeks. He was in no mood for ticky-tack from Teach, not after the one-two combination of Coates’s harassment, and the call he’d just received from Blanche McIntyre that he “had” to pull a double because of “the national situation.” Don had checked his phone: “the national situation” was that a bunch of old ladies in a nursing home had a fungus. Coates was out of her mind.
“I don’t want any of her buddies,” Don said. “I just want her.”
He’s going to let it go, Jeanette thought. In this place he’s just a baby. But Murphy surprised her:
“Buddy system,” he repeated. Perhaps Officer Murphy would be able to hack it after all.
Peters considered. The women sitting against the shed were looking at him, and the hopscotch game had stopped. They were inmates, but they were also witnesses.
“Yoo-hoo.” Angel gave a queenly wave. “Oh, yoo-hoo. You know me, Officer Peters, I’m always happy to help.”
It occurred to Don, alarmingly—absurdly—that Fitzroy somehow knew what he had in mind. Of course, she didn’t, she was just trying to be irritating, like every other minute of the day. While he would have liked five minutes alone with that lunatic sometime, he did not care at all for the idea of having his back turned to her for so much as one second.
No, not Fitzroy, not for this.
He pointed at Ree. “You. Dumpster.” Some of the women giggled.
“Dempster,” Ree said, and with actual dignity.
“Dempster, Dumpster, Dimplebutt, I don’t give a fuck. Both of you, come on. Don’t make me ask again, not with the day I’m having.” He glanced at Murphy, the smartass. “See you later, Teacher-gator.”
This provoked more giggles, these of the ass-licking variety. Murphy was new and out of his depth and none of them wanted to be on Officer Peters’s shit list. They weren’t totally stupid, Don thought, the women in this place.
3
Officer Peters marched Jeanette and Ree a quarter of the way down Broadway and halted them outside the common room/visitors’ room, which was deserted with everyone at lunch. Jeanette was starting to get a very bad feeling about this. When Peters opened the door, she didn’t move.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Are you blind, inmate?”
No, she wasn’t blind. She saw the mop bucket with the mop leaning against it, and, on one of the tables, another plastic bucket. This one was full of rags and cleaning products instead of pudding cups.
“This is supposed to be our lunchtime.” Ree was trying for indignant, but the tremor in her voice spoiled it. “Besides, we’ve already got work.”
Peters bent toward her, lips pulled back to show the pegs of his teeth, and Ree shrank back against Jeanette. “You can put it on your TS list and give it to the chaplain later, okay? Right now just get in there, and if you don’t want to go on Bad Report, don’t argue the point. I’m having a shitty day, I’m in an extremely shitty mood, and unless you want me to share the wealth, you better step to it.”
Then, moving to his right to block the sightline of the nearest camera, he grabbed Ree by the back of her smock, hooking his fingers into the elastic strap of her sports bra. He shoved her into the common room. Ree stumbled and grabbed the side of the snack machine to keep from falling.
“Okay, okay!”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, Officer Peters.”
“You shouldn’t push us,” Jeanette said. “That’s not right.”
Don Peters rolled his eyes. “Save your lip for someone who cares. Visitation Day tomorrow, and this place looks like a pigsty.”
Not to Jeanette, it didn’t. To her it looked fine. Not that it mattered. If the man in the uniform said it looked like a pigsty, it looked like a pigsty. That was the nature of corrections as it existed in little Dooling County, and probably all over the world.
“You two are going to clean it from top to bottom and stem to stern, and I’m going to make sure you do the job right.”
He pointed to the bucket of cleaning supplies.
“That’s yours, Dumpster. Miss That’s Not Right gets to mop, and I want that floor so clean I could eat my dinner off it.”
I’d like to feed you your dinner off it, Jeanette thought, but she went to the rolling mop bucket. She did not want to go on Bad Report. If that happened, she would very likely not be in this room when her sister arrived with her son to visit her this coming weekend. That was a long bus ride, and how she loved Bobby for never complaining about making it. But her headache was getting worse and all she wanted in this world was her aspirin and a nap.
Ree inspected the cleaning supplies and selected a spray can and a rag.
“You want to sniff that Pledge, Dumpster? Shoot some up your snoot and get high?”
“No,” Ree said.
“You’d like to get high, wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, Officer Peters.”
Ree began to polish a table. Jeanette filled the mop bucket from the sink in the corner, wet the mop, squeegeed it, and began to do the floor. Through the chainlink fence in front of the prison, she could see West Lavin, where cars filled with free people traveled back and forth, to work, to home, to lunch at Denny’s, to someplace.
“Get over here, Sorley,” Peters said. He was standing between the snack machine and the soda machine, a camera blind spot where inmates sometimes exchanged pills and cigarettes and kisses.
She shook her head and kept mopping. Long wet streaks on the linoleum that dried quickly.
“Get over here if you want to see your boy next time he’s here.”
I ought to say no, she thought. I ought to say you leave me alone or I’ll report you. Only he’s been getting away with it a long time, hasn’t he? Everyone knew about Peters. Coates had to know, too, but in spite of all her big talk about having zero tolerance for sexual harassment, it kept going on.
Jeanette trudged to the little alcove between the machines and stood before him, head down, mop in one hand.
“In there. Back against the wall. Never mind the mop, you can leave that.”
“I don’t want to, Officer.” Her headache was really bad now, throbbing and throbbing. B-7 was just down the corridor, with her aspirin on her little shelf.
“You get in here or you go on Bad Report and lose your visitation. Then I’ll make sure you get another Bad Report, and poof, there goes your Good Time.”
And my chance of parole next year, Jeanette thought. No Good Time, no parole, back to square one, case closed.
She squeezed past Peters and he rocked his hips into her so she could feel his boner. She stood against the wall. Peters moved in. She could smell his sweat and aftershave and hair tonic. She was taller than he was and over his shoulder she could see her cellie. Ree had stopped polishing. Her eyes were filled with fear, dismay, and what might have been anger. She was gripping the can of Pledge and slowly raising it. Jeanette gave her head a minute shake. Peters didn’t see; he was busy unzipping his fly.
Ree lowered the can and resumed polishing the table that needed no more polishing, hadn’t needed any in the first place.
“Now cop my joint,” Peters said. “I need some relief. You know what I wish? I wish you was Coatsie. I wish I had her old flat ass backed up against this wall. If it was her, it wouldn’t be just a pull-off, either.”
He gasped as she grasped him. It was sort of ridiculous, really. He had no more than three inches, nothing he’d want other men to see unless it was absolutely unavoidable, but it was hard enough. And she knew what to do. Most women did. Guys had a gun; you unloaded it; they went about their business.
“Easy, Jesus!” he hissed. His breath was rotten with some spicy meat, maybe a Slim Jim or a pepperoni stick. “Wait, give me your hand.” She gave it to him and he spat in her palm. “Now do it. And tickle my balls a little.”
She did as she was told, and while she did it, she kept her eyes on the window beyond his shoulder. This was a technique she had begun learning at eleven, when her stepfather touched her, and had perfected with her late husband. If you found something to lock onto, a point of focus, you could almost leave your body behind, and pretend it was doing its own thing while you were visiting whatever it was you suddenly found so fascinating.
A county sheriff’s car stopped outside, and Jeanette watched it first wait in the dead space and then roll into the yard once the inner gate rumbled open. Warden Coates, Dr. Norcross, and Officer Lampley walked out to meet it. Officer Peters’s breath panting in her ear was far away. Two cops got out of the car, a woman from behind the wheel and a man from the passenger side. They both drew their sidearms, which suggested that their prisoner was a bad sugarpop, probably bound for C Wing. The woman officer opened the back door, and another woman got out. She didn’t look dangerous to Jeanette. She looked beautiful in spite of the bruises on her face. Her hair was a dark flood down her back, and she had enough curves to even make the baggy County Browns she was wearing look cool. Something was fluttering around her head. A big mosquito? A moth? Jeanette tried to see, but she couldn’t be sure. Peters’s gasps had taken on a squeaky edge.
The male officer took the dark-haired woman by the shoulder and got her walking toward intake, where Norcross and Coates met her. Once inside, the process would begin. The woman brushed at the flyer circling her hair and as she did so, her wide mouth opened and she tilted her head to the sky, and Jeanette saw her laugh, saw her bright, straight teeth.
Peters began to buck against her, and his ejaculate pumped into her hand.
He stepped back. His cheeks were flushed. There was a smile on his fat little face as he zipped up his fly. “Wipe that on the back of the Coke machine, Sorley, and then finish mopping the fucking floor.”
Jeanette wiped his semen away, then pushed the mop bucket back down to the sink so she could rinse off her hand. When she came back, Peters was sitting at one of the tables and drinking a Coke.
“You okay?” Ree whispered.
“Yes,” Jeanette whispered back. And she would be, as soon as she got some aspirin for her head. The last four minutes hadn’t even happened. She had been watching the woman get out of the police cruiser, that was all. She didn’t need to think about the last four minutes ever again. She just needed to see Bobby on his next visit.
Hsst-hsst, went the shooter of the polish can.
Three or four seconds of blessed silence elapsed before Ree checked in again. “Did you see the new one?”
“Yes.”
“Was she beautiful, or was that just me?”
“She was beautiful.”
“Those County Mounties drew their guns, you see that?”
“Yes.” Jeanette glanced at Peters, who had clicked on the television and was now staring at some news report. The picture showed someone slumped behind the wheel of a car. It was hard to tell if it was a man or woman, because he or she seemed to be wrapped in gauze. On the bottom of the screen, BREAKING NEWS was flashing on and off in red, but that meant nothing; they called it breaking news if Kim Kardashian farted. Jeanette blinked back the water that had suddenly welled up in her eyes.
“What do you think she did?”
She cleared her throat, sucking back the tears. “No idea.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
Before Jeanette could reply, Peters spoke without turning his head. “You two ladies stop gossiping or you’re both going on Bad Report.”
And because Ree couldn’t stop talking—it just wasn’t in her—Jeanette mopped her way down to the far end of the room.
On TV, Michaela Morgan said, “The president so far has declined to declare a state of emergency, but informed sources close to the crisis say that . . .”
Jeanette tuned her out. The new fish had raised her cuffed hands to the circling moths, and laughed when they alit.
You’ll lose that laugh in here, sister, Jeanette thought.
We all do.
4
Anton Dubcek returned home for lunch. This was customary, and though it was only twelve thirty, it was actually a late lunch by Anton’s standards—he had been hard at work since six that morning. What people didn’t understand about pool maintenance was that it was not a business for softies. You had to be driven. If you wanted to succeed in pools, you couldn’t sleep in, dreaming about blintzes and blowjobs. To stay ahead of the competition you had to stay ahead of the sun. At this point in his day, he had swept and adjusted the levels and cleaned out the filters of seven different pools, and replaced the gaskets on two pumps. He could save the remaining four appointments on his schedule for late afternoon and early evening.
In between: lunch, a short nap, a short workout, and perhaps a brief visit to Jessica Elway, the bored married chick he was currently boning. That her husband was a local Deputy Dog made it all the sweeter. Cops sat in their cars all day and snarfed donuts and got their jollies harassing black guys. Anton controlled the motherfucking waters and made money.
Anton dropped his keys in the bowl by the door and proceeded straight to the fridge to get his shake. He shifted around the soy milk, the bag of kale, the container of berries—no shake.
“Mom! Mom!” he cried out. “Where’s my shake?”
There was no answer, but he heard the television going in the living room. Anton poked his head through the open doorway. The evidence on display—television playing, empty rocks glass—suggested that Magda had retired for a snooze of her own. As much as he loved his mother, Anton knew she drank too much. It made her sloppy, and that pissed him off. Since his dad died it was Anton who paid the mortgage. Upkeep and sustenance was her end of the bargain. If he didn’t have his shakes, Anton couldn’t dominate pools the way he needed to, or excel to the maximum in his workouts, or slam a juicy ass as forcefully as the ladies wanted him to slam it.
“Mom! This is bullshit! You gotta do your part!” His voice echoed through the house.
From the cabinet under the silverware drawer he yanked out his blender, creating as much of a racket as possible as he thumped it down on the counter and pieced together jar, blade, and base. Anton dropped in a good bunch of greens, some berries, a handful of nuts, a spoonful of organic peanut butter, and a cup of Mister Ripper Protein Powder™. While he performed this assembly he found himself pondering Sheriff Lila Norcross. She was attractive for an older chick, extremely fit—a true Yummy Mummy, no donuts for her—and he liked the way she rallied when he gave her a line. Did she want him? Or did she want to commit acts of police brutality against him? Or—and this was the truly intriguing possibility—did she both want him and want to commit acts of police brutality against him? The situation bore monitoring. Anton set the blender to the highest speed and watched the mix blur. Once it was a smooth pea color, he flicked off the power, removed the jar, and headed into the living room.
And on the screen, what did you know: his old playmate Mickey Coates!
He liked Mickey, although the sight of her induced uncharacteristically melancholy feelings in the president, CEO, CFO, and sole employee of Anton the Pool Guy, LLC. Would she even remember him? His mother used to babysit her, so in their early years they had been thrust together quite a lot. Anton remembered Mickey exploring his bedroom, looking through his drawers, flipping through the comics, tossing out one inquiry after another: Who gave you this? Why is this G.I. Joe your favorite? Why don’t you have a calendar? Your dad’s an electrician, right? Do you think he’ll teach you how to do wires and stuff? Do you want him to? They must have been about eight and it was like she was planning to write his biography. That was okay, though. Good, in fact. Her interest had made Anton feel special; before that, before her, he had never even wanted someone else’s interest, had been happy just being a kid. Of course, Mickey’d gone off to private school early on, and from junior high onward they’d hardly spoken.
Probably as an adult, she was into briefcase-and-cufflink types who read the Wall Street Journal, who understood whatever the hell the appeal of opera was, who watched shows on PBS, that sort of guy. Anton shook his head. Her loss, he assured himself.
“I want to warn you that the footage you’re about to see is disturbing, and we haven’t confirmed its authenticity.”
Mickey was reporting from a seat in the rear of a news van with the door open. Beside her was a man in a headset working on a laptop. Mickey’s blue eye shadow was visibly damp. It must have been hot in the van. Her face looked different somehow. Anton took a large foamy gulp of his shake and studied her.
“However,” she continued, “in light of everything surrounding Aurora, and the rumors of adverse reactions by sleepers who have been aroused, we’ve decided to run it because it would seem to confirm that those reports are accurate. Here’s the section of footage recorded from the streaming site maintained by the self-proclaimed Bright Ones from their compound outside of Hatch, New Mexico. As you know, this militia group has been at odds with federal authorities over water rights . . .”
Good to see Mickey, but the news bored Anton. He picked up the controller and clicked over to the Cartoon Network, where an animated horse and rider were galloping through dark woods, chased by shadows. When he set the controller back on the side table he noticed the empty bottle of gin on the floor.
“Goddammit, Mom.” Anton took another gulp of shake and crossed the living room. He needed to make sure she was sleeping on her side in case of a sudden ejection; she was not going to die like a rock star on his watch.
On the kitchen counter, his cell phone chirruped. It was a text message from Jessica Elway. Now that she finally had the baby down for a nap, she planned to smoke a jay and take off her clothes and avoid the TV and the Internet, both of which were utterly freaky-bizarro today. Was Anton interested in joining her? Her poor husband was stuck at a crime scene.
5
Frank Geary thought the guy currently starring in the New Mexico footage looked like an elderly refugee from Woodstock Nation, someone who should be leading the Fish Cheer instead of a freaky-deaky cult.
Kinsman Brightleaf was what he called himself—how about that for a mouthful? He had a wild spread of curly gray hair, a curly gray beard, and wore a serape patterned in orange triangles that fell to his knees. Frank had followed the story of the Bright Ones as it developed over the spring, and come to the conclusion that beneath the pseudo-religious, quasi-political trappings, they were just another bunch of trumped-up tax dodgers, emphasis on the Trump.
Bright Ones, they called themselves, and oh, the fucking irony of that. There were about thirty of them, men and women and a few kids, who had declared themselves an independent nation. Besides refusing to pay taxes or send their kids to school or give up their automatic weapons (which they apparently needed to protect their ranch from the tumbleweeds), they had illegally diverted the only stream in the area onto the scrubland they owned. The FBI and the ATF had been parked outside their fences for months, attempting to negotiate a surrender, but nothing much had changed.
The Bright Ones’ ideology disgusted Frank. It was selfishness costumed in spirituality. You could draw a straight line from the Bright Ones to the endless budget cutting that threatened to turn Frank’s own job into part-time employment or outright volunteer work. Civilization required a contribution—or a sacrifice, if that’s what you wanted to call it. Otherwise, you ended up with wild dogs roaming the streets and occupying the seats of power in DC. He wished (without, admittedly, a great deal of conviction) there were no kids in that compound so that the government could just roll on them and clean them out like the scum they were.
Frank was at his desk in his small office. Crowded in on all sides by animal cages of various sizes and shelves of equipment, it wasn’t much of a space, but he didn’t mind. It was okay.
He sipped a bottle of mango juice and watched the TV as he held an ice pack against the side of the hand that he’d used to pound on Garth Flickinger’s door. The light on his cell phone was blinking: Elaine. He wasn’t sure how he wanted to play that, so he let her go to voicemail. He’d pushed too hard with Nana, he saw that now. Potentially, there could be blowback.
A wrecked green Mercedes now sat in the driveway of a rich doctor. Frank’s fingerprints were all over the painted paving stone he’d used to break the Merc’s windows and beat on the Merc’s body, as well as on the planter of the lilac tree that, at the height of his rage, he’d stuffed into the careless motherfucker’s backseat. It was exactly the sort of incontrovertible evidence—felony vandalism—that a family court judge (all of whom favored the mother, anyway) would need to fix it so he could only see his daughter for a supervised hour every other full moon. A felony vandalism rap would also take care of his job. What was obvious in retrospect was that Bad Frank had stepped in. Bad Frank had, in fact, had a party.
But Bad Frank wasn’t entirely bad, or entirely wrong, because, check it: for the time being his daughter could safely draw in the driveway again. Maybe Good Frank could have handled it better. But maybe not. Good Frank was a bit of a weakling.
“I will not—we will not—stand idly by while the so-called United States government perpetrates this hoax.”
On the television screen, Kinsman Brightleaf made his address from behind a long, rectangular table. On the table lay a woman in a pale blue nightgown. Her face was shrouded in white stuff that looked like the fake webby crap they sold at the drugstore around Halloween. Her chest rose and fell.
“What is that shit?” Frank asked the mongrel stray currently visiting with him. The mongrel looked up, then went back to sleep. It was a cliché, but for all-weather company, you couldn’t do better than a dog. Couldn’t do better than a dog, period. Dogs didn’t know any better; they just made the best of it. They made the best of you. Frank had always had one growing up. Elaine was allergic to them—she claimed. Another thing he’d given up for her, far bigger than she could ever understand.
Frank gave the mongrel a rub between the ears.
“We have observed their agents tampering with our water supply. We know that they have used their chemicals to act on the most vulnerable and treasured part of our Family, the females of the Bright, in order to sow chaos and fear and doubt. They poisoned our sisters in the night. That includes my wife, my loving Susannah. The poison worked on her and our other beautiful women while they slept.” Kinsman Brightleaf’s voice bottomed out in a tobacco-scarred rattle that was oddly homey. It made you think of old men gathered around a diner table for breakfast, good-humored in their retirement.
In attendance to the high priest of tax-evasion were two younger men, also bearded, though less impressively, and also draped in serapes. All wore gunbelts, making them look like extras in an old Sergio Leone spaghetti western. On the wall behind them was a Christ on the cross. The video from the compound was clear, marred only by the occasional line scrolling across the image.
“While they slept!”
“Do you see the cowardice of the current King of Lies? See him in the White House? See his many fellow liars on the useless green paper they want us to believe is worth something? Oh, my neighbors. Neighbors, neighbors. So wily and so cruel and so many faces.”
All his teeth abruptly appeared, flashing from amid the wild crop of his beard. “But we will not succumb to the devil!”
Hey now, thought Frank. Elaine thinks she has a problem with me, she should get a load of Jerry Garcia here. This guy’s nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake.
“The parlor tricks of Pilate’s descendants are no match for the Lord we serve!”
“Praise God,” murmured one of the militiamen.
“That’s right! Praise Him. Yessir.” Mr. Brightleaf clapped his hands. “So let’s get this stuff off my missus.”
One of his men passed him a set of poultry shears. Kinsman bent and began to carefully snip at the webbing that coated his wife’s face. Frank leaned forward in his chair.
He felt an uh-oh coming.
6
When he entered the bedroom and saw Magda lying under the covers, masked in what looked sort of like Marshmallow Fluff, Anton dropped to his knees beside her, banged the jar with his shake down on the nightstand and, spying the trimmers—probably she had been clipping her eyebrows using her iPhone camera again—went right to work cutting it off.
Had someone done this to her? Had she done it to herself? Was it some kind of bizarre accident? An allergic reaction? Some crazy beauty treatment gone wrong? It was confounding, it was scary, and Anton didn’t want to lose his mother.
Once the webbing was sliced open, he cast the bathroom trimmers aside, and dug his fingers into the opening in the material. It was sticky, but the stuff peeled, stretching and separating from Magda’s cheeks in gummy white whorls. Her worn face with its choppy wrinkles around the eyes, her dear face that Anton had momentarily been certain would be melted beneath the weird white coating (it was kind of like the fairy handkerchiefs he saw glistening in the grass in the dawn yards of the first couple of pools each day), emerged unharmed. The skin was a bit flushed and warm to the touch, but otherwise she appeared no different than before.
A low grumble began to come from inside her throat, almost a snore. Her eyelids were working, trembling from the movement of her eyes beneath the skin. Her lips opened and shut. A little spittle dripped from the corner of her mouth.
“Mama? Mama? Can you wake up for me?”
It seemed she could, because her eyes opened. Blood clouded the pupils, wafting across the sclera. She blinked several times. Her gaze shifted around the room.
Anton slipped an arm under his mother’s shoulders and raised her to a sitting position in the bed. The noise from her throat grew louder; not a snore now but more like a growl.
“Mama? Should I call an ambulance? You want an ambulance? You want me to get a glass of water for you?” The questions came out in a rush. Anton was relieved, though. She continued to look around the bedroom, seeming to regain her bearings.
Her gaze stopped on the nightstand: faux Tiffany lamp, half-drunk jar of power shake, Bible, iPhone. The growling noise was louder. It was like she was building up to a yell or maybe a scream. Was it possible she didn’t recognize him?
“That’s my drink, Mama,” Anton said, as she reached out and grabbed hold of the jar with the shake. “No thanks to you, ha-ha. You forget to make it, you goose.”
She swung it, belting him across the side of his head, the connection a dull bonk of plastic finding bone. Anton tumbled backward, feeling pain and wet and bafflement. He landed on his knees. His sight focused on a green splatter on the beige carpet beneath him. Red dripped into the green. What a mess, he thought, just as his mother hit him with the jar again, this time flush against the back of his skull. There was a sharper crack upon impact—the thick plastic of the blender jar splitting. Anton’s face slammed forward into the shake splatter on the bristly mat of the beige carpet. He inhaled blood and shake and carpet fiber, and threw out a hand to pull himself away, but every part of him, every wonderful muscle, had gone heavy and limp. A lion was roaring behind him and if he was going to help his mother get away from it, he needed to get up and find the back of his head.
He tried to call for Magda to run but what came out was a gurgle and his mouth was full of carpet.
A weight fell on his spine and as this new pain added itself to the old pain, Anton hoped that his mother had heard him, that she might yet escape.
7
A homeless dog started barking in one of the holding cages, and two others joined in. The nameless mongrel at his feet—so like the one Fritz Meshaum had smashed up—whined. It was now sitting up. Frank absently ran a hand along its spine, calming it. His eyes stayed locked on the screen. One of the young men attending Kinsman Brightleaf—not the one who’d handed him the poultry shears, the other one—grabbed his shoulder. “Dad? Maybe you shouldn’t do it.”
Brightleaf shrugged the hand away. “God says come into the light! Susannah—Kinswoman Brightleaf—God says come into the light! Come into the light!”
“Come into the light!” echoed the man who’d passed the shears, and Brightleaf’s son reluctantly joined in. “Come into the light! Kinswoman Brightleaf, come into the light!”
Kinsman Brightleaf slid his hands into the cut cocoon covering his wife’s face and thundered, “God says come into the light!”
He pulled. There was a ripping sound that reminded Frank of a Velcro strip letting go. The face of Mrs. Susannah Kinsman Brightleaf appeared. Her eyes were closed but her cheeks were flushed, and the threads at the edges of the cut fluttered with her breath. Mr. Brightleaf leaned close, as if to kiss her.
“Don’t do that,” Frank said, and although the TV sound wasn’t high and he had spoken barely above a whisper, all the caged dogs—half a dozen of them this afternoon—were now barking. The mongrel made a low, worried sound. “Buddy, don’t do that.”
“Kinswoman Brightleaf, awake!”
She awoke, all right. And how. Her eyes flew open. She lunged upward and battened on her husband’s nose. Kinsman Brightleaf screamed something that was bleeped out, but Frank thought it might have been motherfucker. Blood sprayed. Kinswoman Brightleaf fell back onto the table with a sizable chunk of her husband’s beak caught in her teeth. Blood dotted the bodice of her nightie.
Frank recoiled. The back of his head struck the file cabinet crammed in behind his desk. One thought—irrelevant but very clear—filled his mind: the news network had bleeped out motherfucker but had permitted America to see a woman tear off a goodly portion of her husband’s nose. Something in those priorities was badly screwed up.
Cacophony in the room where the nose-amputation had occurred. Shouts off-camera, and then the camera tipped over, showing nothing but a wooden floor upon which a spatter of blood droplets was accumulating. Then it was back to Michaela Morgan, who looked grave.
“Again, we apologize for the disturbing nature of this footage, and I want to repeat that we have not absolutely confirmed its authenticity, but we have late word that the Bright Ones have opened their gates, and the siege is over. This would seem to confirm that what you just saw really happened.” She shook her head, as if to clear it, listened to something coming from the little plastic button in her ear, then said, “We are going to repeat this footage again on top of every hour, not out of sensationalism—”
Yeah, right, Frank thought. As if.
“—but as a public service. If this is happening, people need to know one thing: if you have a loved one or a friend in one of these cocoons, do not attempt to remove it. Now back to George Alderson in the studio. I’ve been told he has a very special guest who may be able to shed a bit more light on this terrible—”
Frank used the remote to kill the TV. What now? What the fuck now?
In Frank’s little holding compound, dogs that had yet to be shipped to the Harvest Hills Animal Shelter continued to bark madly at the moth that fluttered and danced in the narrow corridor between their cages.
Frank stroked the mongrel by his feet. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s all right.” The dog stilled. Not knowing any better, it believed him.
8
Magda Dubcek sat astride her son’s corpse. She had finished him off by sliding a green-streaked shard of the blender jar into the side of his neck, and made sure of it by driving another shard into the opening of his ear and all the way down his auditory canal until it buried itself in his brain. Blood continued to spurt from the wound in his neck, soaking the beige carpet in a larger and larger pool.
Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Magda, at some strange distance, was dimly aware of them. Why is that woman crying? she asked herself, not certain who it was that was crying, or where. Come to think of it, where was Magda herself? Hadn’t she been watching television and decided to have a rest?
She wasn’t in her bedroom now. “Hello?” she asked the darkness that surrounded her. There were others in that darkness, many others, she thought she sensed them, but she couldn’t see them—maybe over here? Over there? Somewhere. Magda probed outward.
She needed to find them. She couldn’t be alone in here. If there were others, maybe they could help her get back home, to her son, to Anton.
Her body rose from the corpse, elderly knees cracking. She stumbled to the bed and flopped down on it. Her eyes closed. New white filaments began to unfurl from her cheeks, wavering, then falling gently down to the skin.
She slept.
She searched for the others, in that other place.