by Nancy Kress
“He is not…I have not seen him for fifteen years, the year after Salah finished his studies at the Sorbonne. Richard had rooms near Salah’s and knew Salah and his friend Ruzbihan, Ruzbihan al-Ashan, he was—”
“I’ve spoken to Ruzbihan. Ebenfield emailed him last year asking for Salah’s email address, and Salah said to give it to him. But Ebenfield didn’t contact Salah until December.”
Aisha sighed, a soft sibilant sound continents away. “Richard was…le dommage…a nuisance. He followed around Salah and Ruzbihan, but especially Salah. He was so jealous of Salah! Salah was everything Richard was not. Handsome, intelligent, successful. And rich, of course. Richard would dress like Salah, try to act like him…. It was pathetic. But Richard could have nothing to do with your plague. He did not finish his studies, he did not attend his lectures, he was… thin. Papery. No—the word—light of weight. Not a person of substance. If you think he could, perhaps, genetically engineer a microorganism to infect these dogs’ brains, you are wrong. He could not.”
It was the same thing Ruzbihan had said about Ebenfield.
Tessa listened very carefully, balancing Aisha’s words against her vicious tone. Aisha, who was usually as easy-going as her brother, as generous of spirit. “What did Ebenfield do to you, Aisha?”
Silence.
“Please.”
“He tried to rape me.”
Tessa gaped. She knew what rape meant for an Arab woman, even a modern Arab woman like Aisha: ostracism, blame, shame that could be erased by nothing short of murder.
“When he could not become Salah, he came for me. I was at the Sorbonne then, and Salah had finished his studies. I would not go out with Richard, would not dance with him, would do nothing with him. He caught me one night outside my dormitory and—he could not do even that successfully, Tessa. He failed at the act of rape as he failed, always, at everything. Richard is weak, Tessa, but the weak can nonetheless be dangerous. A contemptible man. Just be careful.”
“Did you report the attempted rape?” Tessa said, and immediately regretted the question. Of course she had not. “Aisha, I am so sorry—”
“This was fifteen years ago, and he did not succeed. I am all right. Richard fled immediately, to Africa, I believe. He joined the Catholics, les Frères de l’Espoir céleste, and none of us heard from him again.”
The Catholics. 2 Kings 8:13. “Okay, Aisha, thank you. I’m sorry to have frightened you about Fatima.”
“Are you in some trouble, Tessa? You said you live in the middle of the dog plague?”
“I’m fine, Aisha. They’re getting it under control, and my dog Minette is not infected.” Tessa suddenly saw Minette, a loving bundle of silvery fur. No one would ever know how much Minette had kept Tessa sane in the first terrible days after Salah’s death. It was only with Minette that Tessa had been able to cry, able to let out the terrible storm of tears and rage. The things we owe to dogs.
“That is good. Good-bye, Tessa. Allah be with you.”
“And you.”
She hung up, hitched her purse onto the shoulder of Jess’s coat, and walked toward the counter for British Air. Maddox would have a trace soon on her credit card, and by that time she had to be out of BWI. She had to be on her way, to the one person who might be able to tell her what he certainly would never tell anyone else.
“None of us heard from him again,” Aisha had said. But that was not strictly true. Ruzbihan’s email to Tessa said he had not seen Richard Ebenfield “since many, many years.” But on the phone, in the stress of a midnight call that he wanted kept secret, Ruzbihan had mentioned seeing Ebenfield in Mogumbutuno “a few years ago.” Mogumbutuno was the capital of a West African country remarkable even on that beleaguered continent for the number of its revolutions. Mogumbutuno, Tessa happened to know, had been open to the West only briefly, between civil conflicts, two years ago. Before that, the country had been closed for two decades. So two years ago was the only time Richard Ebenfield and Ruzbihan al-Ashan could have been there at the same time—which was not “since many, many years.”
She went to study the DEPARTURES board for the next flight to London.
» 34
Allen's foot wouldn't stop hurting. Every time he moved it under the covers, he almost screamed out loud. But he couldn’t do that because then his mother would…do what? Take him to the doctor? Nobody in Tyler was supposed to leave their houses. But if she knew about his foot…
Gross, greenish-yellow stuff was oozing out of the foot. And under the covers, it smelled really bad.
He pinched his arm hard to keep himself from crying. Sometimes that was the only thing that helped. He had to stay home and get down to the basement and give Susie food and water and a sleeping pill. He had to.
“Allen? Are you awake, sweetie?” She stood in the doorway in her robe, her hair all mussed up, her eyes red and swollen. So she’d been fighting on the phone with his dad. Probably Allen’s father hadn’t come home again last night because of the quarantine.
“I’m awake.”
“What shall we do today? Would you like to help me make chocolate chip cookies? Yum!”
“Maybe later. I don’t feel so good.”
Instantly she was by his bed, putting a hand on his forehead. “Why, you have a fever! Does your stomach hurt?”
“No,” Allen lied, and promptly threw up.
His mother made little mother-noises and wiped his mouth with a corner of the blanket, which was pretty gross except he saw he’d already gotten puke on the blanket. Now his head started to hurt really bad. At first Allen didn’t realize that she was pulling the blanket and sheet off his bed, and when he did, he tried to grab them and pull them back. “No! No!”
“Sweetie, it’s okay, I’ll just wash the…Allen!”
Now the green, awful-smelling stuff coming out of his foot had blood in it. The smell made him want to throw up again. His mother, her eyes big and scared, touched the foot and Allen screamed and started to cry.
In the hospital he slept, maybe a long time, and when he woke up, he didn’t hurt so much anymore. He lay on a skinny white bed with his mother sitting beside him. He couldn’t ever get away from her, it seemed, and then felt bad because it wasn’t a nice thought. His mother had carried him out to the car even though sick dogs could have attacked them. They had not, in fact, even seen any dogs, sick or well, but it could have happened. Then his mother yelled at nurses and doctors until they paid enough attention to Allen, and then after that he didn’t remember anymore.
His foot, wrapped in so many bandages it looked like a big pillow, was propped up on some rolled blankets. A bag on a big pole hung over his bed and a little hose ran from the bag into his arm. Beside the bed, Allen’s mother snored in a chair. There were three other beds in the room, two with kids in them. One was a little girl holding some sort of babyish stuffed animal. The other was a boy about his age with his arm all bandaged up.
The boy said, “Go away. This is our room now.”
“Is not,” Allen said automatically.
“Is too. The other kids’ mom took them away so it’s ours.”
“Is not.”
“Is too. Is that your mother?”
Allen looked at his mom, asleep hunched over in the chair, as if he’d never seen her before. “Yeah.”
“Our mom’s dead. Our dog ate her.”
Allen said, “Liar.”
“No, he really did,” the boy said, so seriously that Allen felt sick. Maybe it was true. A dog could eat a mother. There was something wrong with the boy’s brown eyes. They were too shiny or something. “He bit her on the neck and bit her on the head and bit her on the shoulder and bit—”
Allen said, to stop him, “My dog would never hurt anybody. She’s a good dog.”
“Snowy was a good dog!”
“Oh, right—a good dog who kills people!”
The other boy jumped out of bed, ran over to Allen’s bed, and socked him on the arm. Allen swung back, missing wildly. They spat at each
other, globs of white hock that landed on the bed. Amazingly, Allen’s mother slept on. The other boy tried to hit Allen in the face, but smacked his arm against the metal bed railing, and cried out.
“Jason! You stop that!”
A woman in a wheelchair pushed past the little girl’s bed over to Allen’s. He expected her to look mad but instead she smiled at Jason and put out one arm to touch him lightly on the hip. He scowled, and looked away, then moved defiantly behind the wheelchair. “Where do you need to go, Cami? I’ll take you!”
Cami’s eyes moved over Allen to his mother. All at once Allen felt a need to defend his mother, sleeping there sagged over like some skinny broken doll. “She’s real tired,” he said angrily. “She was up all night!” Which might even have been true, he realized. Crying or fighting on the phone or walking up and down the way she did.
“And you’re nice to worry about her,” Cami said, smiling at him.
Jason was scowling again. “Come on, Cami! Where you want to go?”
The little girl spoke for the first time. “You said you’d read me a story!”
“I will, Lisa, I promise. But first I need to go to…to the gift shop and you know I can’t go if Jason doesn’t help me. He’s my main man, aren’t you, Jason?”
Jason had been mouthing bit her on the neck and bit her on the head and bit her on—but now he stopped. His good hand gripped the wheelchair hard and he yanked it backward toward the door. Cami said to the little girl, “I’ll bring you something from the gift shop, Lisa.”
Then they were gone. Allen settled back into his bed. He wanted Cami to bring him something from the gift shop. He wanted to be her main man. Which was stupid because she was a grown-up, too, but not a grown-up like his mother. Nothing like his mother.
Who had brought him to the hospital. If his mother hadn’t of done that, maybe the doctors would have had to cut off his foot or something. That happened in a movie he saw once. His mother had probably saved his life, and he wished she wasn’t here, and Cami was just this dopey adult (only she didn’t look that old) in a wheelchair, and here Allen wanted to push her down to the gift shop….
It was too hard to think about. He gave it up and started to plot how to get Susie her food and water and pills, in the bottom drawer of his father’s filing cabinet in the basement.
» 35
Jess drove his car, with Billy beside him, to the makeshift critical-incident headquarters. He hadn’t wanted Billy to come along, but Billy had been insistent. “I gotta see about one little thing, and then I’ll just sit in the car and wait for you, okay?"
“It turned a lot colder overnight. How long do you think you can sit in a freezing car?”
“How long are you gonna be?” Billy said blandly. “Come on, Jess, you know I’ll go nuts if I just sit at home all day. And I told you, I gotta check on something.”
“Oh, all right,” Jess said, because he’d humored Billy their whole lives.
“Do you remember,” Billy said as Jess drove, “that year in high school when you were a senior and I was a sophomore and we were running around with crazy Desmond and his crowd?”
Of course Jess remembered. That was the year he’d met Elizabeth, Desmond’s sister. He said nothing.
“We had some great times, didn’t we, Jess, huh?”
Jess recognized this opening. “What do you want, Billy?”
“I want you to help me,” Billy said, which was so unprecedented that Jess blinked and glanced over. Billy gazed at him seriously, parka open over his sling, shirt misbuttoned.
“Help you with what?”
“Help me court a girl. No, don’t laugh, Jess, I mean it—not like I usually do, you know, lick ’em and stick ’em, but a real courtship. I was thinking you and some woman could, like, ask us to dinner. A dinner party. You know how to cook. I could bring a bottle of wine or something.”
Now Jess stared so hard at Billy that he nearly ran the car off the road. Billy began to really get into his fantasy. “Maybe you could ask that FBI girl. She’s pretty. Yeah, ‘Jess and Tess’—it’s made for you!”
“It’s ‘Tessa,’ she’s married, and you’re a lunatic, Billy. A raving lunatic.”
Billy said quietly, “You been alone too long, Jess. Elizabeth left a long time ago.”
“We’re here.” Jess stopped the car in front of a uniformed Guardsman. Immediately the car was surrounded by reporters.
“Mr. Langstrom, are dogs hunting in packs?”
“Is it true that yesterday you fatally shot a citizen who wouldn’t surrender his dogs?”
“Mr. Langstrom! Mr. Langstrom!”
“Jesus Christ,” Billy said. From the expression on the Guardsman’s face, Jess could tell that he’d heard the story—or some version of the story—about Victor Balonov. But the soldier waved him through when Jess said, “I have to talk to Dr. Latkin. In an official capacity.” For half a second he considered Tessa’s formula—By order of the president of the United States—but thought better of this.
Jess parked beside the Cedar Springs Motel lot. In the fields around it had sprung up, overnight, an entire city of large Army-issue tents. Billy ambled off toward the dog shelter and Jess knocked on the CDC mobile van. A girl in a white lab coat went to fetch Joe Latkin. When the scientist appeared, Jess said without preamble, “I saw something. I think it was a dog with symptoms of infection but no aggression.”
Latkin stared at him. Finally he said, “There’s coffee in the mess tent. This way.”
After Jess told Latkin about the shit-brown terrier mix with milky eyes but no aggression, Latkin made five cell-phone calls. Jess said as mildly as possible, “I want to be part of this search, Joe,” and Latkin nodded absently. Jess took that as authorization and went to search for Don DiBella. Scott Lurie, the FEMA incident chief, would be officially in charge of the search for the terrier, but he knew neither the landscape nor the men who did. Sheriff DiBella would make any decisions that counted.
DiBella was already busy summoning people. Evidently he had not heard about Tessa’s flight, although he had heard about the rest of it. “Hey, Jess, we need you to organize a search for some dog that Dr. Latkin has identified. He says it could be important. Are you still working with that FBI agent who shot Balonov?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, let me describe this dog to you and tell you what we’re looking for and why. Then we’ll meet at the north checkpoint in an hour and form teams. You better get breakfast first, if you haven’t already—going to be a long day. Mess tent is over there.”
“Okay,” Jess said. That was the third person today to tell him things he already knew, if you counted Billy.
Billy, of course, was not waiting in the car as he’d promised. Jess found him in the dog tent, which was significantly colder than yesterday. Rows and rows of dog crates, ranging from the size of a laundry basket to that of a small bathroom, sat on the grass. Dogs snarled or barked or slept or whimpered. The noise was terrifying, as was the smell. Volunteers hosed down cages with warm water without removing the dangerous dogs. More volunteers poured in kibble through chutes that kept them a foot away from the bars. It was a canine version of hell.
But a much smaller hell than it should have been. There were still a lot of loose dogs out there.
Billy was pushing bits of a cookie through the cage bars of a feebly snapping, ancient-looking, clearly arthritic collie. Jess said sharply, “Don’t do that, Billy.”
“Don’t do no harm.” He crooned at the dog, “She’s a good ol’ girl, aren’t you, pretty Belle?”
“I have to take you home, then come back here for duty. We need to find that terrier mix.”
“Just give me another minute with Belle. I gotta report on her to Cami.”
Jess walked the rows of cages. He found Minette in a far section against the tent wall, with a wide swath of withered grass between these cages and the rest. He said to a man inspecting the dogs, “Why are these dogs separate?”
�
�Who are you?” the man said, voice raised to be heard over all the dogs. The shouting made the question sound belligerent.
“Tyler Township Senior Animal Control Officer.”
“Oh. Well, these animals aren’t infected yet. We need to see if the virus is airborne, and if so, what the range is.” He moved on.
So Minette was a guinea pig. The toy poodle wagged her tail at him, pushing against the bars of her cage. Her eyes were clear. On the label giving Minette’s particulars, Jess noticed a red stick-on dot with the number “2.” Other cages in this section bore yellow or blue dots. He found the inspector again.
“What does the system of dots mean?”
The man didn’t look up as he shouted his answer. “Red has had the shortest airborne exposure in the tent here, blue next, yellow longest. Numbers mean order of sacrifice for dissection, if we need to do that.”
“Thanks.”
Jess went back to Minette. He wished he’d brought a cookie, like Billy had. Minette barked hopefully, tail going like a pendulum on speed. Jess inspected all the other red-dotted cages. Then he carefully peeled off Minette’s red dot with the number “2” and exchanged it for another dot on another cage with the number “8,” the highest he could find.
She was still wagging her tail when he left.
» 36
Tessa waited until an hour before British Air flight 0043 was due to take off for London. That was as long as she dared delay. Earlier she’d phoned the ticket counter from a pay phone and discovered that seats were available, but she would need time to make it over to International Departures. It was going to be close.
In the meantime, she took Salah’s laptop into a pay-to-use data booth and accessed her email account on the Web. Her throat spasmed. Two new emails: Ebenfield and Maddox.
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: You
Tessa—Where are you now? Where are any of us in this rotten world? Thousand-year Reichs fall, civilizations crumble, everyone dies. In the end, it all means nothing, and yet still we strive to right the balance. Email me back, Tessa.