I looked around. We were missing a few key players. I knew Sanjay was probably sound asleep, but where was Bullseye?
“Aren’t we down a twelve-year-old?”
Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on with him. I mean, I could probably guess, but I tried to talk to him earlier and he wouldn’t spill.”
“I’m tired, man,” I said. “I’m all about being immature for a night and letting him stew.” No one said anything, so I penciled the subject of Bullseye on my list of things to worry about, but definitely underneath my mother and the rest of the people who were sick.
The door opened and my father came out holding a scented jar candle. The smell of baked apples filled the air. He didn’t smile or clap his hand on my back. Instead he looked like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. “Let me see what you brought,” he said like he had already decided that he wasn’t going to be able to save any of them. His forehead was permanently furrowed and his mouth was drawn into a frown.
I kissed the top of Prianka’s head and softly pushed away from her. Then I brought my dad down to the ambulance to check out what we were able to find. Together, we climbed into the back and I held a flashlight for him as he rummaged through the different bottles and boxes of things. At one point, he opened the sliding cabinets that hung above where the gurney used to be, and pulled their contents out on the floor.
“What’s happening?” I asked. I was afraid what the answer might be, but it was better than silence.
“I don’t know,” he said. “They aren’t dead, that’s for sure.”
“Okay, I pretty much think that’s med school 101.”
“Not into the wise-cracking just now, Tripp,” he snapped. My dad wasn’t really much of a snapper, so I guess he was really on edge.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I held the flashlight over him as he waded through the medical supplies. “What about their eyes?” I asked. “Everyone said that their eyes started to change.”
“They have,” he mumbled as he kept rummaging through the contents of the ambulance. “I just wish I had an ophthalmoscope.”
“A who?”
“An ophthalmoscope,” he said. “It’s a lighted tool that allows you to get a close up look of the eye to inspect arteries and veins. If I had one I could see if any parts of their eyes are diseased or damaged.”
“Would that make a difference?” I asked. I think it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He crouched on the ground, his head held down, and although he was quiet about it, I think he actually started to cry.
Seeing him that way changed everything. It wasn’t about the poxers anymore. It was about my family and my mom and dad. Diana and her people hurt us all and now she made my father cry.
Who in the hell did she think she was? If I ever saw her again, I’d knock her in the head with a brick, and maybe bust the old bag’s kneecaps.
Who in the hell do you think you are, lady? Just who in the hell do you think you are?
29
TECHNICALLY, ONCE the clock dipped past midnight, it was one week ago today that Necropoxy hit. One week—it sounded like nothing, but it wasn’t. One week was seven days, or one hundred and sixty-eight hours, or ten thousand and eighty minutes, or six hundred and four thousand, eight hundred seconds.
In the space of only one of those seconds, someone could die. It only took one wrong move or one little slip for a poxer to sink its teeth into you and turn you into a monster. Except for me and Trina, that is. Except for us.
For some bizarre reason, I was really, really mad that I never got a chance to see the series finale of my favorite TV show. They were going to reveal everything about its incredibly bizarre plot that made no sense unless time travel or alternate dimensions were thrown into the mix. The thing is, the producers promised they weren’t going to use either of those.
I’ll never know for sure, but I’m positive they lied—just like grown-ups lie about the existence of monsters, or Santa Clause, or the Easter Bunny. I’m sorry, but if a six-foot-tall, pink bunny rabbit came hopping toward me carrying a basket filled with eggs, I think I would seriously flip. That goes for leprechauns, flying reindeer, and talking snowmen, too. Creepy, creepy—that’s all I’ve got to say. Creepy, creepy.
The inside of Swifty’s was lit by candlelight and oil lamps. They burned in the gloomy candy area where all the sick people were laid out on quilts. Someone, probably Prianka, had the bright idea to cover all the windows with quilts, too, so from the outside we looked like a dark building. Still, a thin trail of smoke drifted into the sky from the wood-burning fireplace. I wondered if it could be seen at night—then I totally freaked myself out when I realized that night vision goggles were something you could get at any sporting-goods store these days. What if the helicopter people had a pair of those? What if they were watching us right now?
We couldn’t stay here past morning—I knew that for sure—but how could we possibly leave with the adults like this?
When I walked in, Aunt Ella was dabbing Freaky Big Bird’s face with a damp paper towel and sucking on an oversized lollypop—you know, the rainbow colored ones that are the size of a plate? The whole image was just a little twisted, so I decided to blot it out of my head. Someday, if I ever live that long, I’m sure I’ll have a weird dream about my aunt chowing down on a giant lollypop. Weird images like that always come back to haunt you.
Aunt Ella smiled when she saw me and gave me a hug. It felt sort of stiff because she was never the touchy-feely type, but I found myself hugging her back. It felt good to be home, even if home was a cheap tourist trap in the middle of nowhere.
“What’s with the candy?” I asked her.
“Sugar,” she said. “I need the rush.”
I smiled weakly. “Where’s my mom?” Aunt Ella motioned with her head for me to follow. We went past the register to where my mother, Nedra Stein, Freaky Big Bird, Trudy Aiken, Randy Stephens, and Eddie with the fake hair were laid out on the floor underneath the penny candy. They looked awful. Their skin was mottled and gray and their faces were splattered with the remains of dry blood frantically wiped away with paper towels.
Each of them was tied down with a mixture of t-shirts knotted together, cheap leather belts with dorky Massachusetts belt buckles on them, and plain old rope.
My mother was awake. Her hands were curled into claws as she strained against the makeshift bonds. Dark saliva spilled from her mouth, and she was growling like small dogs do when you try and make friends with them.
Her eyes were the worst. They had gone a dull gray, like she was really old and blind. It hurt me to look at her like that.
“Is she a poxer?” I asked Aunt Ella.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “None of them are. Your dad says they still have pulses.”
Pulses were cool, but I was hoping that they still had brains.
My father came in through the front door carrying a boxful of things from the ambulance. He had a stethoscope around his neck and a blood pressure cuff in his fingers. I only knew what that was because he had one at home, because, well, hello, he’s a doctor.
Anyway, he set the box down on the counter and began pulling stuff out. I should have asked if I could help, but what I really wanted, more than anything, was to not see my mother like that, or the rest of them. I wanted to go hide someplace in a corner and think about happy things for just one minute.
“I’m going to . . . I’m just going to go over near the fire,” I said.
My aunt nodded and let me go. As I pulled away, her fingers brushed against Uncle Don’s watch for a moment and a sort of sadness crept across her face. Thankfully, she didn’t wait for me to say anything. Instead, she turned to help my dad.
Jimmy, Trina, and Prianka had come inside. They were spreading out the remaining quilts on the floor n
ext to a fort of sweaters draped over a bench where Sanjay quietly slumbered underneath. Krystal, with two fingers stuck in her mouth, was wrapped in a quilt. She was sound asleep next to Newfie. He got up when he saw me, lumbered over, and licked my hand. Andrew perched on top of the pile of sweaters with his head tucked under his wing.
Prianka sat down, so I plopped myself next to her and leaned back on my elbows. No one said anything for a while. We just watched as the shadows from the fire danced demons on the walls. Finally, the quiet started to get to me. It was getting uncomfortably close to what it probably sounded like in a morgue.
“So . . .” I finally said in a low voice. “What do we do?”
Trina, her arms wrapped around her knees, leaned back into Jimmy. I could see she was chewing on her lip, which meant she was exerting some kind of mental effort.
“I don’t want to say it,” she said.
I got a little angry. “Good, then don’t.”
“Did I miss something?” asked Jimmy. Yeah, he did. She didn’t want to say that we should burn them and move on. I already did that once with Uncle Don. It was horrible. I wasn’t about to torch our mom. No way. Suddenly, I felt just a teensy bit like Roger Ludlow refusing to believe that his Millie was dead, and I found myself glancing around the store to see if there was a rack of beef jerky.
Prianka’s warm hand curled into mine and she slightly squeezed. I think she was trying to make me feel better but all I felt was electricity.
Damn hormones.
“This isn’t Nexcropxy,” Prianka whispered. “It looks like Necropoxy but it’s not. This is something else.”
“Which could end up turning them into zombies,” I grumbled.
“Or not,” she said again, reassuringly. “You said that Diana’s people had been experimenting on them. Maybe she was trying to make them immune.”
“So?”
“Well maybe they’re not catching Necropoxy—maybe they’re fighting it.”
Maybe they were. Who knows? I let out a deep sigh and put my head down in Prianka’s lap. I didn’t realize it, but it had been a long, long day. As soon as I rested my head down, my eyes closed and strange images flitted around behind them.
I saw Diana, and Dr. Marks, and needles, and monitors. The other doctors were there, too—the weird perfect men and the pretty women with their hair tied back into ponytails that were so tight it looked like their eyes were permanently fixed open.
They were talking and pointing at the monitors, and one of them was saying something about the infection rate and how it was getting longer and longer to take hold.
Then I heard helicopters in my head and Roger Ludlow screaming bloody murder for me in the darkness. Finally, my mom’s poodle, Sprinkles, appeared like a random image caused by too many tacos at dinner. Chuck Peterson, Trina’s ex, bit her face off a week ago. Sprinkles was talking to me out of the place that should have been where her face was, but instead was just a red, gaping wound.
In Chuck Peterson’s voice she said, “Bow, wow, wow, wow, wow.” Then she repeated it again, but this time more slowly. Over and over again she barked at me in Chuck’s voice, but each time it was longer and longer between barks, until finally she just stopped and sat down on her haunches.
There was something else. When I looked at her—when I really looked at her, the gaping wound where her face had been had healed and she looked like new. She even looked better than new, like she had gone to the groomer and had the fanciest sort of poodle cut there was.
In the blackness of my dreams, I fell deeper and deeper into nothingness, until it enveloped me.
For the rest of the night, I truly slept the soundless sleep of the dead.
30
I WOKE UP BECAUSE Andrew stuck his beak in my ear, which, in retrospect, made me wonder if I had bugs or something. After all, my last good bath was when we had all taken a dunk in the pond at Aunt Ella’s house. That was like a few days ago. Anything could have crawled in any part of me and laid eggs that hatched.
There was sunlight streaming through the windows. Prianka was up and taking the quilts down to let the morning in. I watched her as she quietly went from window to window, gently peeling tape and taking out thumb tacks.
Trina and Jimmy were still asleep—his arms around her as if my dad and mom weren’t right on the other side of the store.
There were no signs of movement from underneath Sanjay’s sweater fort, which meant he was probably busy calculating out pi to the millionth digit while he slept. Krystal was curled into a ball with her fingers in her mouth and Newfie softly snored beside her.
Still, we were down one key player and it bugged me.
I brushed Andrew away with a flip of my hand. “Beat it, you flying rat.”
“Rat,” he cackled as he flapped back over to the mound of sweaters and began preening his feathers. Prianka looked over and smiled at me but kept on working. I knew she was as dirty as me, but for some reason I didn’t care. She looked amazing.
I glanced down at my wrist. Uncle Don’s watch said it was just before seven in the morning. I stood up, stretched, and walked quietly over to her.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Where’s Bullseye?”
She took a deep breath and shook her head.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know where he is. Last night, after you and Dorcas left, he wouldn’t come in from out back.”
I kissed her on the forehead, mumbled something about morning breath, then wandered over to the other side of Swifty’s to see what was going on with everybody else.
What I found was a sick ward.
My dad had somehow managed to hang bags of fluid off the candy hopper handles—Lemon Heads for Eddie and Nerds for Freaky Big Bird. He hooked up everyone with tubing he found inside the ambulance, and now a steady drip was sliding down the plastic and into their arms.
I didn’t know what kind of concoction he was pumping into them, and I couldn’t tell if it was working or not. My mom and the other people on the floor looked horrible. You could see the cold, clammy sweat beading up on their foreheads, and their lips were blue. Thankfully, their eyes were closed. I didn’t want to see dead eyes right now. I wasn’t ready for that yet.
The oil lamps and the candles were still alive with fire. Dad, however, was out like a light. He sat on a chair with his chin dipped to his chest. I didn’t want to disturb him. Aunt Ella and Dorcas were both asleep, too. They were up against the back wall, right underneath the candy cigarettes. Fitting for Dorcas.
I tiptoed around everybody until I came to the bin filled with spearmint leaves—those gummy, sugar-coated green things. They weren’t a substitute for brushing my teeth. I just needed something to take away the taste in my mouth because it was truly nasty.
Then I took a deep breath and went out the backdoor to find Bullseye.
I didn’t have to go far.
He was on the deck where we all had dinner before the turkeys and the Asian Tour of the Damned crashed our party. Last night, everything was covered with poxer goo. The big, homemade grill was kicked over and burning briquettes were everywhere.
Now, it looked like nothing ever happened. Bullseye had a mop and a bucket and was just finishing cleaning up the last bits of exploded tourist.
“Hey, man,” I said as I rubbed the back of my neck. “You clean all this?”
Bullseye didn’t say anything. He just kept working at a black streak, putting his full weight into pushing the mop back and forth over the sticky stuff. His shirt was really dirty and he looked exhausted. It occurred to me that he’d probably been at it all night long. I noticed that there were oil lamps still burning on the picnic tables. He had been at it all night long.
“Bullseye—what are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you even sleep?”
He just kept pushing the mop, harder and harder. Any second I expected the handle to break. “Someone had to keep watch,” he grumbled.
“Keep watch?” I said. “It doesn’t look like you were keeping watch. It looks like you have OCD and everything has to be exactly right.”
“Yeah—so?”
“So, what’s up with you?”
“Nothing,” he bristled. Bullseye leaned against the mop handle, trying desperately to get the black up.
I walked over to him and reached out to put my hand on his shoulder. He pulled away from me. “Go away,” he snapped.
“What do you mean, ‘go away’? Really, dude, what is going on with you?” What I really wanted to say was that I didn’t get girls and I didn’t get kids. I’d been working real hard on the girl thing this past week, but the kid thing was new territory.
“I said GO AWAY,” he snapped. “You don’t seem to have a problem with that.”
Whoa! Blindsided! “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bullseye wouldn’t look at me. He kept working at the poxer stain, his knuckles turning red and white.
“You leave, Tripp,” he said with venom in his voice. “That’s what you do. You leave. You left me back in Deerfield, then you left me at your aunt’s house, then you left last night. You leave,” he hissed again. “That’s what you do.”
Well, technically he was right. I did leave him back in Deerfield—where we first met him—mostly because he tried to hold us up with a bow and arrow, pissed his pants, and ran off into the woods. As far as my aunt’s house, Jimmy and I left everyone when we went to save my parents. We were trying to protect them, not put them in danger.
Last night? Last night was different. Everyone was sick. We had to leave.
“I didn’t leave you last night, Bullseye. Dorcas and I had to go to a pharmacy. We came back.”
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead Page 13