CHAPTER 7
1
While Ree Dempster was chewing her thumbnail bloody, deciding whether or not to drop a dime on Officer Don Peters, a Heathrow to JFK flight, a 767 three hours southwest of London at cruising speed over the Atlantic, radioed to air traffic control to report an outbreak of some sort and consult on the proper course of action.
“We’ve got three passengers, one’s a young girl, and they seem to have developed a—we’re not sure. Doctor onboard is saying that it’s possibly a fungus or a growth. They’re asleep, or at least, they seem to be asleep, and the doctor is telling us their vitals are normal, but there’s concern about their airways being—ah, blocked, so I guess he’s going to—”
The exact nature of the interruption that occurred next was unclear. There was a commotion, metallic clattering and screeching, shouts—“They can’t be in here! Get them out of here!”—and the roar of what sounded like an animal. The cacophony continued for almost four minutes, until the 767’s radar trail broke off, presumably at the moment it made impact with the water.
2
Dr. Clinton Norcross strode down Broadway toward his interview with Evie Black, notepad in his left hand and clicking his pen in his right. His body was in Dooling Correctional, but his mind was wandering around in the dark on Mountain Rest Road and worrying over what it was Lila was lying about. And—maybe—who she was lying about.
A few yards away, upstairs in a B Wing cell, Nell Seeger—Dooling Correctional inmate #4609198-1, five-to-ten (Class B possession with intent to distribute)—sat up in her top bunk to thumb off the television.
The small TV, a flatscreen about as thick as a closed laptop, rested on the ridge at the foot of the bunk. It had been showing the news. Nell’s cellie and off-again on-again lover, Celia Frode, not quite halfway through her one-to-two years (Class D possession, second offense), had been watching from her place at their unit’s single steel desk. She said, “Thank goodness. I can’t take any more of this madness. Now what are you going to do?”
Nell lay back down and rolled over on her side, facing the painted square on the wall where the school pictures of her three kids were pasted in a row. “Nothing personal, darling, but I’m going to take a rest. I’m awful beat.”
“Oh.” Celia understood right away. “Well. All right. Sweet dreams, Nell.”
“I hope so,” said Nell. “Love you. You can have any of my stuff that you want.”
“Love you, too, Nell.” Celia put her hand on Nell’s shoulder. Nell patted it once and then curled up. Celia sat down at their cell’s small desk to wait.
When Nell was snoring softly, Celia stood up and peeked at her. Strands were curling around her cellie’s face, fluttering and falling and splitting into more strands, waving like seaweed in a gentle tide. Nell’s eyes were rolling under her eyelids. Was she dreaming about them, together, on the outside, sitting on a picnic blanket somewhere, maybe the beach? No, probably not. Probably Nell was dreaming about her kids. She wasn’t the most demonstrative partner that Celia had ever taken up with, sure wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but Nell had a good heart, and she loved her kids, was always writing to them.
It would be awfully lonely without her.
What the hell, thought Celia, and decided to take a liedown herself.
3
Thirty miles east of Dooling Correctional, and at about the same time Nell was drifting off, two brothers sat handcuffed to a bench in the Coughlin County Courthouse. Lowell Griner was thinking about his father and about suicide, which might be preferable to thirty years in State. Maynard Griner was dreaming about a slab of barbecued ribs that he’d eaten a few weeks earlier, right before the bust. Neither man had any idea what was going on in the wider world.
The bailiff on guard duty was sick of waiting around. “What the fuck. I’m going to see if Judge Wainer plans to pee or get off the pot. I don’t get paid enough to babysit you murdering little peckerwoods all day.”
4
As Celia decided to join Nell in sleep; as the bailiff entered a conference room to consult with Judge Wainer; as Frank Geary sprinted across the lawn of the house he had once lived in, his only child in his arms and his estranged wife steps behind him; while these things were happening, thirty or so civilians attempted an impromptu assault on the White House.
The vanguard, three men and one woman, all young, all to the naked eye unarmed, began to climb the White House fence. “Give us the antidote!” bellowed one of the men as he dropped to the ground inside the fence. He was scrawny, ponytailed, and wore a Cubs cap.
A dozen Secret Service agents, pistols at the ready, quickly surrounded the trespassers, but at that point a second, much larger surge of people from the crowd that had massed on Pennsylvania Avenue pushed over the barricades and charged the fence. Police officers in riot gear swept in from behind, hauling them down from the fence. Two shots came in quick succession, and one of the cops stumbled and fell loose-bodied to the ground. After that the gunfire turned into a wall of sound. A teargas canister burst somewhere close by and a pall of ashy smoke began to unravel across the pavement, erasing most of the people running past.
Michaela Morgan, nee Coates, viewed the scene on a monitor in the back of the NewsAmerica van parked across the street from the CDC, and rubbed her hands together. They had acquired a noticeable shake. Her eyes were itchy and watery from the three bumps she’d just snorted off the control deck with a ten-dollar bill.
A woman in a dark blue dress appeared in the foreground of the White House shot. She was around Michaela’s mother’s age, her black shoulder-length hair fissured with streaks of gray, a string of pearls bouncing at her neck. Straight out in front of her, like a hot platter, she held a baby, its lolling head swaddled in white. The woman strode smoothly by, never turning her profile, and vanished beyond the edge of the shot.
“I think I could use a little more. You mind?” Michaela asked her tech guy. He told her to knock herself out (perhaps a poor choice of words under the circumstances), and handed her the Baggie.
5
While the furious, terrified crowd was attacking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Lila Norcross was driving toward Dooling. Her mind was on Jared, on her son, and on the girl, on Sheila, her son’s half-sister, her husband’s daughter, what an interesting new family tree they had! Wasn’t there something similar around their mouths, Sheila’s and Clint’s, that crafty little upturn at the corners? Was she a liar, too, like her father? Could be. And was the girl tired like Lila was tired, still feeling the effects of all that running and jumping she’d done the previous night? If she was, well then, that was something else they had in common, something besides just Clint and Jared.
Lila wondered if she should just go to sleep, abdicate from the whole mess. It would certainly be easier. She wouldn’t have thought that a few days ago; a few days ago she would have seen herself as strong and decisive and in control. When had she ever challenged Clint? Not once, it seemed to her in the light of her new understanding. Not even when she’d found out about Sheila Norcross, the girl who bore his last name, and her last name, too.
Pondering these things, Lila turned onto Main Street. She hardly registered the tan compact that swung left past her, and went blasting up the hill in the direction from which she’d just come.
The compact’s driver, a middle-aged woman, was taking her mother to the hospital in Maylock. In the backseat of the automobile, the middle-aged woman’s elderly father—never the most cautious of men, a tosser of young children into swimming pools, a bettor of trifectas, a cavalier gobbler of pickled sausages in foggy jars on the counters of roadside general stores—was using the edge of an ice scraper to separate the webbing covering his wife’s face. “She’ll suffocate!” he yelled.
“The radio said not to!” the middle-aged woman yelled back, but her father was his own man, right to the end, and continued to carve apart the growth on his wife’s face.
6
And Evie was almost everywhere. She was a fly in the 767, crawling down to the bottom of a highball glass and dabbing her legs in the residue of a whiskey and Coke moments before the plane’s nose connected with the ocean’s surface. The moth that fluttered around the fluorescent bar in the ceiling of Nell Seeger and Celia Frode’s prison cell was also Evie. She was visiting the Coughlin Courthouse, behind the grid of the air duct in the corner of the conference room, where she peered through the shiny black eyes of a mouse. On the White House lawn, as an ant, she moved through the still-warm blood of a dead teenage girl. In the woods where Jared ran from his pursuers, she was a worm beneath his shoes, nosing in the soil, blind and many-segmented.
Evie got around.