The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  A severed arm.

  There was a severed arm between her legs. It occurred to her that it was the Pulverizer, what with the disembodied physical comedy of that device, which slithered and slipped around so much that it had fallen well off to her side, like some birth defect, a primordial additional leg or something, but it wasn’t the Pulverizer. It didn’t look, you know, brand-new or silicone or anything. It was a severed arm with all kinds of sand and dust and bits of paper and trash and stuff stuck onto the bloody end of it where the rest of its body should have been. There were pieces of sinew or ligament or tendon or whatever sticking out of the bottom end, the stump end, shreds of muscular tissue, crystallized blood. And then the other really foul part of the severed arm, you know, if she were trying to describe the arm for a police artist or something, was that it was missing a finger, a middle finger. So it was a four-fingered hand.

  At first, with the ripples of orgasmic energy flowing out of her into the bounty of creation, she froze. She just couldn’t take it seriously. The arm. But that paralysis, that erotic catalepsy, only lasted a second, and then she found herself in a kind of hysterical fixation, just like the one that had overtaken Jean-Paul, who was standing at the end of the blanket holding a sneaker, wearing nothing but his satin jockstrap, getting ready to bat the hand, if the hand tried to come near him. Because, yes, the really uncanny part of it was that the hand was kind of moving.

  “Is that moving?”

  “Sure as fucking hell is,” Jean-Paul said. “And I’m pretty sure it, you know, it jerked me off.”

  “It’s a cut-off arm; it can’t move.”

  “But just look at it. It’s trembling right now and moving its fingers! Look at it right now!”

  She looked at it. She did. The fingers seemed to be writhing around as if with some reflexive, postmortem trembling, some last bit of life energy.

  “Jean-Paul,” she said, and here she snatched up a couple of her shredded teenage garments, layers that did little but suggest the necessity of their removal, and she started trying to yank them on without ever losing sight of the heinous extremity. “That’s some kind of, you know, nerve thing, like when you cut the head off of a chicken, right? It can’t possibly have done what you just said.”

  “Did you jerk me off? Did you have your hand around my—”

  “That doesn’t… Maybe it was just attached to some guy, and the guy jerked you off, and then he got hit by a car or something, and that’s what’s left.”

  “Is that a better answer? That some guy jerked me off while you were sitting there with your blindfold on? There was no guy. And the arm didn’t fly here!”

  As if to prove the validity of Jean-Paul’s hypothesis, the arm, which really had been mostly dormant, appeared to suddenly take note of the Pulverizer, or at least the butt plug on the end of the pile of space junk that had once been the Pulverizer, which had been cast off long ago in the drama of erotic love, and grabbing the butt plug, it thoroughly and painstakingly ripped the butt plug from the Pulverizer and went about attempting to crush it in its fist.

  “Oh, fuck,” Jean-Paul said. “That arm is so alive.”

  He had climbed back into his shorts. He was dressing as quickly as he could, which meant awkwardly. There was a fair amount of hopping. But that was the least of it, as Vienna also awakened to the significance of the arm. It wasn’t just that it was alive. It wasn’t just that it violated all the rules, rules of medicine and biochemistry and physics, and every other kind of rule.

  “I think I had sex with that arm too.”

  “It’s so disgusting,” Jean-Paul said. “I don’t even know who that belongs to.”

  “Do you think that’s consensual? You know? Can it possibly be a consenting thing? Having sex with an arm? I mean, what should we do with it? Should we take it to the police to see if we can charge it with something?”

  “Someone’s got to be fucking missing that arm. I mean, you’d think that he’d be wanting his arm back, wherever he is.”

  The arm, having finished, to its satisfaction, the job of squeezing the life out of a marital aid, managed with some difficulty to flip itself over onto its back, or what might be supposed to be its back, so that the palm faced the sky. Vienna was surprised to realize how many things a hand could say just by its posture or orientation in the physical world. An arm with palm facing down, using its fingers as some kind of crawling device, dragging itself along, bent on meddling in the affairs of others. But the arm on its back, with its wrist upward and fingers spread wide, seemed nearly playful, or at the very least submissive, and this was maybe what led Jean-Paul to his next decision. Jean-Paul lunged at the arm. He did so with a swiftness that overpowered the arm, which had no eyes and didn’t know what was to befall it. Jean-Paul lay hold of it by its long, useless base. The fingers, realizing that they were had, began writhing and attempting to grab at him, and Jean-Paul realized, then, the way Vienna understood it, that this would once have been a formidable arm wrestler.

  “You’ve got to help me with this.”

  “Jean-Paul,” Vienna said, “you have to be kidding. You’re not going to bring that thing back with us. Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “The guy who’s missing it might want it to be reattached.”

  “Look at that thing. Half of that tissue is all, like, gangrenous and rotting away. It can’t be reattached. Whoever it was attached to is dead. I promise you.”

  “You don’t know anything about this fucking stuff. You’re a retail employee—in the service economy. I know about this stuff, all right?”

  And so, in a postcoital huff, Jean-Paul Koo took the writhing arm into the back of the van, and he found a roll of duct tape, which he had known would be there. (What van was without its roll of duct tape?) While Jean-Paul held the arm down with his knee (it made a horrible scratching noise with its bloody nails in the bed of the van), he freed up a suitable length of tape. And then, as Vienna watched, he wrapped the tape around the fingers of the hand. They struggled mightily to free themselves. But, as everyone knows, duct tape is hard enough with two hands.

  And then Jean-Paul said, “We’re taking this to my dad.”

  Rob Antoine was on the NASA jet, the one reserved for high-level agency business. You’d have thought that NASA would have a first-class piece of aeronautical design, since it was meant to be the premier space agency on the planet, the premier agency in all of the universe (until proven otherwise). On the contrary, the NASA jet was from a decommissioned-aircraft graveyard near Houston. The jet had been worked over, retrofitted, by the engineers from JPL, in their spare time, just to keep these engineers engaged through a period of budget cuts. This was a private jet unworthy of the agency emblazoned on its fuselage. The few intact seats were noteworthy for torn upholstery and tawdry stains, and there were outcroppings of hardened chewing gum under the armrests. The windows were foggy from moisture that had worked through the rubber seals over the years. Few of the overhead luggage bins latched. And the odd purse or backpack tumbled out in midflight. And the jet rattled and groaned in ways that did not inspire confidence. With every up- and downdraft, the cabin trembled as if about to plummet to earth.

  The good news? There was no problem making the occasional satellite phone call. You wouldn’t have a seat on the NASA jet if you didn’t have the appropriate security clearance for outgoing satellite calls. The pilots of the NASA jet, many of them astronauts who hadn’t yet made the jump into orbit, didn’t fret about the security issues that had dogged civil aviation in the period of the Middle Eastern and Central Asian conflicts.

  Which is how Rob Antoine found himself talking to the director of the Centers for Disease Control during flight. While Debra Levin slept across the aisle, a small rivulet of drool tracking down her attractive if forbidding jawline, he found himself in the middle of an unpleasant interagency conversation. What Rob was doing was trying to explain a certain exotic extraterrestrial infection, though in doing so what he really was doing was trying t
o explain what he in turn had been told by the Department of Defense an hour earlier. He had little confidence in that account. He was giving away half a story, the half he was authorized to possess, to another government agency, without understanding the story entirely and without feeling competent about any of the technical or scientific issues, and all this while he was flying directly into the epicenter of what could become a ghastly epidemic. The director of the CDC, whose name Rob had already forgotten out of anxiety, Anderson or Henderson, was just as rattled as Rob was himself, and Anderson (Henderson) made it more apparent by reaching new heights of condescension when he didn’t feel that he was getting the facts he needed.

  “Can you walk me through this one more time?”

  Below, the glorious mountains had risen up from the plains in the middle of the nation, as if to impale inbound air traffic. Even the fuzzy windows couldn’t stop the mountains. The mountains were an overpowering presence, and no matter how many times Rob flew in this direction he never failed to be impressed. Especially while being dressed down by a medical expert.

  Rob said, “Again, I’m not on the medical staff. But here’s what we think we know. What we think we know is that the astronauts on the Mars mission somehow contracted a bug while on the surface of the planet. Despite the fact that the planet was considered sterile, or all but sterile, our people contracted a bug. The best information we have at this time suggests that the bug is a mutation of something being worked on here on Earth, something that was believed to have military applications, which was then in turn transported to Mars during unmanned missions, perhaps by design, where it picked up some nasty tendencies, such as a high tolerance for gamma rays on the one hand, and for oxygen-deprived environments. Because of some unfortunate personnel problems we had going on during the mission itself—”

  “I’ve heard,” said Henderson or Anderson.

  “Because of personnel problems, we essentially transmitted the bacterium from person to person up there, giving it a new chance to reacclimate to human tissue, and in the process killing the majority of our astronauts. When we thought we were in the clear with the one astronaut who was coming home, we found that unfortunately he was ill as well. At this point the mission was terminated, while that astronaut, Colonel Richards, was still inbound.”

  “Well, one question I have to ask,” Henderson or Anderson said, “is why you didn’t use the antisatellite system to take down the craft when it was farther out. Isn’t that the reason for the shield system? To prevent just this sort of thing?”

  “We were hoping to salvage our guy. That’s all. We believed his condition was safe, and he worked hard, he did the work we asked him to do, and we’d lost a lot of good people. We weren’t ready to give up on him yet.”

  “So you blew pieces of him all over the Southwest, jeopardizing millions of civilians.”

  “Colonel Richards made that decision himself. And I can understand how you might be a little concerned about this, and we are too. But there’s no reason yet to assume that the situation is beyond control. For one thing, we are in an area of very low population density. And furthermore, we aren’t really sure if any of Colonel Richards survived the blast. The redundant systems we had in place to abort should have been effective enough to prevent that. Still, I am calling because we do have one report that is not as reassuring as we’d like. This is in the extreme Southwest, Rio Blanco area, and I’m flying there now, as is the director of the agency.”

  Debra Levin shifted positions in her medicated sleep. The drool detached and beaded on the lapel of her stylish suit jacket. Antoine watched, while listening to the CDC’s protests.

  Rob blundered into a silence, without much heart for it. “The exact facts of the bioweapon, if that’s what it is, I am unable to get out of the Department of Defense. The exact genetic information on the bug. Maybe you have a contact there. Although I should stress that there’s a public-relations issue here, and we would prefer not to alarm the residents of the area just yet. Until we know exactly what we are dealing with.”

  “That’s your problem,” said Anderson, or was it—“Our job is to prevent and contain infectious outbreaks, and we are not concerned with how it looks for the other agencies, and we’re willing to take this up the chain of command.”

  Rob let the shrill stuff that followed from Henderson or Anderson drift by. Some of this was all about the specifics of viral contagions versus bacterial contagions, which apparently Rob had been confusing on and off throughout the discussion. The CDC guy went on and on about Ebola and Marburg and the fact that viruses were simply not as effective as bacterial infections, when weaponized, but the hemorrhagic feature was much more common in these viral infections than in their bacterial cousins, as the viruses would infect the blood and skin cells, and thus the multiplying of tiny cuts in the Ebola outbreaks, like the one in Denmark in 2012 and the one in the Czech Republic two years later. And what about H1N1? And what about hantavirus? If Anderson or Henderson remembered correctly, and he could have the facts in the next few minutes, hantavirus was quite common in the homeless population of Rio Blanco and surrounding towns, and wasn’t the homeless population there restive and militant? These were the kinds of cofactors they’d be dealing with—there could even be a viral infection piggybacking on the bacterial pathogen.

  Almost impossible to take all this in. So quickly had it come to this. So quickly had the story gone sour, with the potential for worse up ahead, in the Southwest, a part of the country that was noteworthy for bad economic news, for the inability of state and local governments to deliver basic services. Still, from the air, it was so beautiful. The absence of government and industry in the better part of the Southwest, and the acute drought, had made it possible for a lot of plant and animal species to rebound. After environmental devastation, some of the animals always rebounded—when there were no people around. You always saw this sort of thing on nature programming.

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying?” Henderson asked.

  “You’re going in and out. Must be a satellite problem.”

  “I’m saying that I don’t have any idea what this ‘disassembling’ nonsense means, but it is very possible that even a corpse, if infected with a bacterium that has mutated to this degree, is liable to be contagious. Based on what I’m hearing. You want to try to isolate and quarantine anyone exposed, and that includes the bodies. I’ll get you more backup on this from our end, but that’s likely what we’re talking about.”

  “The military is isolating the crash site. They’ve already done so, to the tune of several miles. There is a body there, already, and that body belongs to someone not on our payroll. That body is civilian. That means it’s possible, from what I understand, that the bacteria has spread from the site.”

  “You have people on the ground?”

  “We are contacting local doctors and hospitals, and the military has people there—they have a base in the area, and I’m trusting we can all coordinate on this, and that we can play a leadership role in the coordination, since it’s NASA’s mess.”

  Henderson grunted and then said something about CDC being primarily an information and education agency. But they too had research affiliates among medical people in participating regions.

  “Then the last question is,” Anderson or Henderson said, “do you have any reason to believe that you have contained the astronaut’s remains?”

  “We have done statistical modeling,” Rob Antoine said. “There are small pieces of the craft in a debris stream, starting south of the border and moving northwest, through the empty part of the state of New Mexico, across the southern part of the Sonoran Desert. We have helicopters working to isolate every piece of the capsule in this debris stream.We believe we may be able to find every piece of significance. Wherever there is aeronautical or biological debris, we will be working on it. And I’ll have more for you later when I hear from our people. I imagine if somebody finds… a piece of the body, of Colonel Richards, who
was, I should say, a personal friend of mine, we will probably hear about it as soon as it happens.”