by Joe Hill
Below it she had taped a reflective silver square, something she had clipped out of a magazine ad. Beneath it she wrote: Do we look alike? She had a lot of ideas about what belonged in the book. Recipes. Instructions. At least one game. The lyrics of her favorite songs, which she would’ve sung to the baby if she’d had a chance: “Love Me Do,” “My Favorite Things,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
There would be no girly-girly tragic stuff if she could help it. As a school nurse, she had always modeled herself on Mary Poppins, aiming for an air of good-tempered calm, self-assurance, a tolerance for play, but an expectation that the medicine would go down along with the spoonful of sugar. If the kids thought it was possible she might break into song and shoot fireworks from the tip of her umbrella, that was all right with her.
Such was the tone she was trying to nail in the baby book. The question was what a child wanted from his mother; her answer was Band-Aids for scrapes, a song at bedtime, kindness, something sweet to eat after school, someone to help with homework, someone to cuddle with. She hadn’t figured out how to make the book cuddly yet, but she had stapled a dozen Band-Aids into the inside cover, along with four prepackaged alcohol swabs. She felt the book—The Portable Mother—was off to a roaring good start.
When the phone rang, she was in front of the TV. The TV was always on. It had not been off in six months, except in the occasional spells when there was no power. She had electric at the moment and was parked in front of the screen, although she was working on the book, not really paying attention.
There was nothing to watch anyway. FOX was still broadcasting, but from Boston, not New York. NBC was on the air, but from Orlando. CNN was on the air, too, in Atlanta, but the evening news anchor was a man named Jim Joe Carter, a Baptist preacher, and his reports were always about people who had been saved from the spore by Jesus. All the rest of the channels were HSB, the Homeland Security Broadcast, or local news programs, or static. The HSB was broadcast from Quantico, Virginia. Washington, D.C., was still burning. So was Manhattan. She had the TV tuned to FOX. The phone rang and she picked it up. She knew it was Jakob even before he spoke. His breath was strange and a little choked and he didn’t say anything, not at first.
“Jakob,” she said. “Jakob, talk to me. Say something.”
“Do you have the TV on?”
She put down her pen. “What’s wrong?”
Harper had not known how she would be with him, the next time they spoke. She worried she would not be able to keep the resentment out of her voice. If Jakob thought she sounded hostile, he would want to know why, and she would have to tell him. She could never keep anything from him. And Harper didn’t want to talk about his book. She didn’t even want to think about it. She was pregnant and crawling with a flammable fungus and she had recently learned Venice was burning, so now she was never going to get to see it by gondola. With all that going on, it was a bit much to expect her to provide a literary critique of his shitty novel.
But he laughed—roughly and unhappily—and the sound of it rattled her and caused her to forget her resentment, at least for the moment. A part of her thought, calmly, clinically: hysteria. God knew she had seen enough of it in the last half a year.
“That’s the funniest thing anyone has said since I have no idea,” he said. “What’s wrong? You mean besides the world catching fire? Besides fifty million human beings turning into balls of flame? Are you watching FOX?”
“I’m watching. What’s wrong, Jakob? You’re crying. Has something happened?” It was no wonder he held her in contempt. In ten seconds he had her worrying about him again, when five minutes ago she would’ve been glad not to hear from him for a month. It embarrassed her, that she couldn’t hang on to her rage.
“You seeing this?”
She stared at the TV, jittery footage of a meadow somewhere. A few men in yellow rain slickers and elbow-high rubber gloves and gas masks, carrying Bushmaster assault rifles, were on the far side of the field. The tall yellow grass undulated in a soft rain. Beyond the men in the rain slickers was a line of trees. Off to the left was a highway. A car shushed over a rise and swept past, headlights glowing in the half dusk.
“—cell phone camera,” said the newscaster. “We caution you, this footage is graphic.” That was hardly worth mentioning. It was all graphic these days.
They were bringing people out of the woods. Kids, mostly, although there were some women with them. Some of the kids were naked. One of the women was naked, too, but clutching a dress to the front of her body.
“They’ve been showing this one all night,” Jakob said. “The news loves this. Look. Look at the cars.”
The field was in full view of the highway. Another car came over the rise, and then a pickup. Both vehicles slowed as they passed the field, then sped up again.
The women and children who had been marched out of the trees were bunched together into a tight group. The children were crying. From the distance, their voices, all together, sounded like the first keening wind of fall. One of the women took a small boy in her arms, lifted him up, and squeezed him to her. Watching it go down, Harper was struck with a brief but intense wave of déjà vu, the improbable certainty that she was watching herself, at some future point. She was seeing how she herself would die.
The woman who had been stripped, and who was clutching her dress, lunged toward one of the rain-slicker men. At a distance, her bare back looked as if it had been slashed, then stitched up with brilliant gold thread: the Dragonscale. She let go of her dress and careened, naked, toward an assault rifle.
“You can’t,” she howled. “Let us go! This is Ameri—”
The first gun might’ve gone off by accident. Harper wasn’t sure. But then, they had brought them to the field to shoot them, so maybe it was wrong to think anyone was shot there by accident. Prematurely was, perhaps, the more accurate word for it. The muzzle of a gun flashed. The naked woman kept coming, one step, two, then tilted forward into the grass and disappeared.
There followed an instant—just enough time to draw a single breath—of surprised, baffled silence. Another car came over the rise and began to slow.
The other guns went off, all together, firecrackers on a July night. Muzzles flashed, like paparazzi snapping shots of George Clooney as he climbed out of his limousine. Although George Clooney was dead, had burned to death while on a humanitarian aid mission to New York City.
The car passing by on the highway slowed to a crawl, so the driver could watch. The women and their children fell while the guns stuttered in the September rain. The car accelerated away.
The rain-slicker men had missed one person, a little girl, slipping, spritelike, across the field toward the hidden observer with the cell phone. She rushed across the meadow as fast as the shadow of a cloud. Harper watched, gripping her baby book in both hands, holding her breath, sending out a silent wish: Let her go. Let her get away. But then the girl folded in on herself and tumbled forward and collapsed and Harper realized it had never been a person at all. The thing racing across the field had been the dress that the naked woman had been holding. The wind had made it dance for a moment, that was all. Now the dance was over.
The program cut back to the studio. The newsman stood in front of a wide-screen TV, replaying the footage. He kept his back to it and spoke in a smooth, calm voice. Harper couldn’t hear what he was saying. Jakob was talking, too, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying, either.
She spoke over both of them. “Did you think she looked like me?”
Jakob said, “What are you talking about?”
“The woman who was hugging the little boy. I thought she looked like me.”
The newscaster was saying, “—illustrates the dangers of people who have been infected and who don’t seek—”
“I didn’t notice,” Jakob said. His voice was strangled with emotion.
“Jakob. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m sick.”
She felt as
if she had stood up too quickly, although she hadn’t moved. She perched on the edge of the couch, light-headed and a little faint.
“You’ve got a stripe?”
“I’ve got a fever.”
“Okay. But do you have marks on you?”
“It’s on my foot. I thought it was a bruise. I dropped a sandbag on my foot yesterday and I thought it was just a bruise.” For a moment he sounded close to crying.
“Oh, Jakob. Send me a picture. I want to look at it.”
“I don’t need you to look at it.”
“Please. For me.”
“I know what it is.”
“Please, Jake.”
“I know what it is and I have a fever. I’m so fucking hot. I’m a hundred and one. I’m so hot and I can’t sleep. I keep dreaming the blankets are on fire and I jump out of the bed. Are you having those dreams?”
No. Her dreams were much worse than that. They were so bad she had recently decided to quit sleeping. It was safer staying awake.
“What were you doing with a sandbag?” she asked, not because she cared, but because it might calm him to talk about something besides infection.
“I had to go back to work. I had to risk it. Risk contaminating other people. That’s the position you’ve put me in.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“If I just disappeared, people would wonder where I was. They might come by the house and find you. The price of your life is other lives. You’ve made a potential murderer out of me.”
“No. Jakob, we’ve covered this. Until the ’scale is visible on your body you aren’t infectious. Almost everyone agrees on that. And even then, you can only pass it through skin-on-skin contact. I don’t think you’re a mass murderer just yet. So what about the sandbag?”
“They had everyone in Public Works up on the Piscataqua Bridge the other day, taking orders from the National Guard. Building a gun emplacement to shoot any diseased motherfuckers who might try and drive through the new checkpoint. Why are we talking about the fucking bridge?”
“I need you to send me a picture of the mark on your foot,” she said, and her tone was firmer now, her nurse voice.
“I think it’s in my head, too. Sometimes it’s like there are pins pricking in my brain. Like there are a hundred little needles in there.”
That stopped her. It was the first thing he said that sounded not just hysterical but crazy.
When she went on, her voice was calm and certain: “No. Jakob, no. It does eventually coat the myelin in the brain and nerves, but it wouldn’t happen until well after you had Dragonscale all over your body.”
“I fucking know. I fucking know what you did to me. You killed the both of us, and our baby, too, to satisfy your ego.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You knew it was dangerous to work in that hospital, but you wanted to feel important. You have this thing in you, Harper. You have this need to be hugged. You seek out chances to be with people who are hurting, so you can stick a Band-Aid on them and get some cheap, easy affection. That’s why you became a school nurse. It’s easy to squeeze a kiss out of a kid with a scraped knee. Kids will love anyone who gives them a penny lollipop and a Band-Aid for their boo-boo.”
It left her breathless, the spoiled rage she heard in his voice. She had never heard him that way before.
“They were desperate,” Harper said. “They needed every nurse they could get. The hospital was calling in retired nurses who were eighty-five years old. I couldn’t just sit at home and watch people die on TV and not do anything.”
“We have to decide,” he said. Almost sobbed. “I do not want to fucking burn to death. Or be hunted down and butchered in a field, begging for my life.”
“If you aren’t sleeping, that could explain a high temperature. We don’t know you’re sick. Sometimes fever indicates onset of infection, but not always. Not even mostly. I didn’t get a fever. Now I want you to send me a photo of your foot.”
There was a clumsy knocking sound, muffled bumps, then a click, the sound of the camera app taking a still. Fifteen seconds passed with no other noise than his labored, miserable breathing.
A photo came through of his dark bare foot, stretched out on some industrial-looking carpet. The top of the foot was a single bloody abrasion.
“Jake,” she said. “What is that?”
“I tried to scrape it off,” he said. His voice was almost sullen. “I had a bad moment. I sandpapered it.”
“Do you have any other stripes on you?”
“I know what it looked like before I went crazy,” he said.
“You don’t scrape at this stuff, Jake. That’s like scraping a match on a matchbook. Leave it alone.” She lowered her phone and looked at the photo again. “I want to see more stripes before you make up your mind you’ve got Dragonscale. In the early going, it can be difficult to tell the difference between a bruise and a stripe, but if you just leave it alone—”
“We have to decide,” he said again.
“Decide what?”
“How we’re going to die. How we’re going to do it.”
On the TV, they were showing a segment about the Dalmatians, crews of women and teenagers who made lunches and cupcakes for the volunteer fire crews.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” Harper said. “I told you that already. I’ve got this baby in me. I mean to see it born. I can deliver by C-section next March.”
“March? It’s September. You’ll be cinders by March. Or target practice for a cremation squad. You want to die like those people in the field?”
“No,” Harper said quietly.
“I know what you did to me,” he said. He drew a shuddering, effortful breath. “I know. I keep getting hot patches on my arms and legs. I loved that you made your work so socially conscious, that you were so connected to community, even if it was, always, just this thing you did to satisfy your own narcissism. You needed to surround yourself with crying kids, because of the good feeling it gives you about yourself when you wipe away their tears. There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it’s always for their own personal psychological reasons. But I’m still a little sick to see how fixated you are on your own needs. You don’t even care how many people you spread it to. As long as nothing uproots you from your delusion of saving one more child.”
He was trying to get a fight out of her, wanted to push her into saying things she didn’t want to say. She tacked in another direction. “These hot patches. I haven’t heard of that. That’s not a symptom of—”
“That’s not your symptom. It’s mine. Don’t pretend you’re a fucking doctor. A fucking master’s in nursing and three years of working at an elementary school doesn’t make you Dr. motherfucking House. You wipe a real doctor’s sweat off his upper lip when he’s performing surgery and shake his prick when he’s done taking a leak.”
“Maybe you should come home. I can examine you without touching you. Maybe I can reassure you.”
“I am going to wait,” he said. “Until I am sure. And then I am coming home. And you need to be there. Because you promised.”
“Jakob,” she said again, but he was gone.
OCTOBER
11
The power went out again one hot, smoky morning, a few days after her last call from Jakob, and this time it didn’t come back.
By then, Harper was down to the last cans from the back of the cupboard, the ones with dust on them that she couldn’t remember buying. She hadn’t been out of the house since the day before she found the first stripe on her leg. She didn’t dare. Maybe she could cover up—she didn’t have the ’scale on her face or hands—but her heart quailed at the thought of bumping into someone in the corner store and accidentally sentencing them to death.
One part of her wondered if she could eat Crisco. Another part of her knew she could and soon would. She had saved a little cocoa powder, hoping she could make it taste like chocolat
e pudding.
There was no single moment when she thought: I am going. There was no hour of steely-eyed decision, when she realized soon she would be out of food and have to start taking chances.
One day, though, she unstrung clothes from the line across the back deck and began to make a pile on the bed, next to The Portable Mother. At first it was just a collection of things she meant to put away: some T-shirts, a pair of jeans, her sweats. But it also looked like a stack of things she might take with her if she were packing the car to go elsewhere. When she opened the dresser, she found herself picking things out instead of putting them away.
There was no destination, no plan, almost no thought at all. She operated on no more than the half-formed notion that it might be smart to have some things in her old carpetbag, in case she had to leave the house in a hurry. Mostly she was zoned out, gliding along with no more intention or purpose than a leaf blown about by a restless fall breeze. She had the radio on, a violently pink Hello Kitty boom box that ran on D-cells, and she folded clothes to the classic-rock radio station, Tom Petty and Bob Seger supplying the sonic equivalent of wallpaper.
At some point, though, her consciousness settled back into the moment, and she realized the music had stopped. The DJ was belting out a monologue and had been at it for a while. She recognized his voice, a hoarsened, raspy bass that belonged to a former morning-show joker. Or had he been a right-wing radio host? She couldn’t recall and she couldn’t quite remember his real name, either. When he referred to himself—which he did frequently—it was as the Marlboro Man, on account of all the burners he had smoked. That was what he called people sick with Dragonscale: burners.
He boomed, with a certain crass authority, that the former president was blacker than he used to be, since he had cooked to death from Dragonscale. He said when he went off the air he would be out with a Cremation Crew, chasing burners out of their hidey-holes and lighting them up. Harper sat on the bed and listened with a repulsed fascination while he told a story about forcing three girls to take their shirts off, to prove they didn’t have Dragonscale on their boobies.