by Glenn Cooper
“I mean how’d you get to be king rat? How’d you recruit your little sicko army? And what are you doing in this house? It isn’t even yours.”
“The hell it isn’t,” Edison said, tossing his napkin onto the table.
“Then how come all the photos in the living room are of other people?”
Edison got up, then reversed course, sitting down again. His face reversed course too, from anger to amusement. “You are a detective, aren’t you? Now listen to me and listen good. As I see it, the world’s gotten a lot simpler since this virus. You got your weak and you got your strong. Guess who come out on top? What are you? You weak or you strong?”
“You have no fucking idea how strong I am.”
Kyra giggled and said, “No fucking idea.”
Joe got the giggles too and said, “I like that girl.”
Linda shot back, “She and her mother do not like you.”
Edison ignored his son and asked Jamie, “You vouch for that, Doc? She strong?”
Jamie had very little interest in the conversation. “She’s a force of nature. I think I’ll go up and check on Brittany.”
“You do that. We’ve got a couple of spare bedrooms upstairs for you two and your girls. Doc, Gretchen will wake me to get you if Brittany’s situation changes. For your safety, I’m gonna lock you in for the night.”
Linda snorted, “More for your safety.”
“We’d like to get back on the road in the morning,” Jamie said.
“Well let’s just wait and see about that.”
When they were alone, Joe said to his father, “I want them, Pa. One at a time or even better, both at the same time. They make the other girls look like dog meat.”
“You leave off them for a while. We need to keep the doc happy till he fixes your sister up. And listen, I want you up at the big house tonight. Lady detective’s probably too drunk to do any damage, but we’ve got to watch out for her, even with her locked up. She’s quite a gal.”
“You like her, don’t you?”
“Put it this way, I look at her and it’s kind of like looking in the mirror.”
38
In the morning, Shaun found another bicycle from a neighbor’s garage and the four of them cycled toward her lab. The confluence of bright sunshine and blazing foliage made BoShaun’s eastside neighborhood seem almost cheerful, but Mandy soon noticed the apocalyptic blemishes. This house had burned down and smoke was still rising from blackened debris. Those dogs were feasting on something that might have been clothed. That window had a gaunt face staring out. Those cries in the distance sounded human. That stretch of sidewalk had a long streak, as if a bleeding body had been dragged along.
BoShaun insisted on wearing their gas masks and Mandy didn’t try to talk them out of it. It was entirely possible that their fastidiousness had spared them from contracting the virus, although it was equally possible they were simply immune. She suspected the masks had a deeper meaning. They were talismans, turning the young men into something akin to the superheroes they idolized, and there was a power in that, and power in the machetes strapped on their backs. She and Keisha rode bare-faced, enjoying the wind against their skin.
In the daylight, the horror of the skirmish in the laboratory parking lot was on full display. A severed arm seemed to be floating in a soup of coagulated blood. The Escalade was splattered. The Range Rover wasn’t there, something BoShaun brooded over when they saw it gone from a distance.
“I still don’t want you to look, short stuff,” Shaun told Keisha.
They climbed through the smashed door. Mandy led the way up the stairs to her lab. It was too much to ask for Jamie to be waiting for her outside her door. Still, she was upset that he wasn’t. She scoured the hall for any signs that he might have been there.
She couldn’t go inside her office. She couldn’t look at Rosenberg. She wanted to honor him with a burial and a few words, but the effort of carrying him down four flights of stairs and finding a shovel and a plot of ground were going to be too much. She asked BoShaun if they could go in and grab some clothes and stuff them into a trash bag. While they were inside the office, she checked her freezer, which was humming away nicely.
“What is this place?” Keisha asked.
“It’s where I do—did my research.”
“What’s that?”
“Research is science. Figuring out how things work, finding cures for diseases.”
“To make people better?”
“Hopefully.”
“Can you make my mama better?”
“I’m going to try.”
She penned a note to Jamie and pinned it to the cork board opposite her lab door. Then she locked the door to protect the precious freezer from foragers. What she did next did not come easily. She had been thinking about it for the last couple of days. She had no way of knowing how much life was left in the generator. A few years back, someone on the maintenance staff had told her how long power could be maintained on the freezer/refrigeration circuit, but now, trying to remember the conversation, it was hazy. She had told Jamie it was two weeks, but was that really what she had heard? Could it have been about two weeks? Or two weeks, plus-or-minus? Or one to two weeks? The only way she could think of to stretch the fuel in the tank was to go lab to lab and manually switch off all the freezers and refrigerators on the circuit. She personally knew most of the researchers in the building. The specimens they kept under refrigeration represented years, and in some cases, decades of work that once thawed, would be lost forever. Every time she hit a switch, it would be like putting a dagger through a colleague’s past life. She used her pass key to open the lab immediately down the hall from her own. As BoShaun kept watch in the hall, she took Keisha inside to kill the first appliance. An hour later, her freezer was the only one running in the building.
*
After a fitful sleep K announced that he was going out.
“Where you going?” his sister asked.
“I got some business.”
He looked in on his mother and grandmother. They were sleeping.
“We still need no-spoil milk.”
“Girl, I got more on my mind than your milk.”
It was a short distance to BoShaun’s house. When he followed them home last night it clicked. He remembered the weird little dudes. Every time he and his boys had spotted them from inside their tricked-out SUVs, they’d have a good laugh, roll down a window to call them fags, maybe squeeze their bikes toward the curb and watch them take a spill. He was having trouble processing how these pathetic losers had become machete-wielding fiends who got the drop on him and his boys.
He approached the house from the back, vaulting the fence. At the rear door he pulled his gun and peeked inside. There was no one in the kitchen. He bent down and went from window to window. The place looked empty.
He knocked out a pane in the rear door and went inside, then checked room by room to be sure he was on his own. He marveled at the kitchen, bursting at the seams with food and drink, and started opening the cupboards. He’d have to come back later and loot the place. On one shelf a carton caught his eye. He pulled it out and smiled.
UHT milk.
He stuffed it inside the pocket of his hoodie and said out loud, “I’m gonna be a fucking hero.”
*
“Who’s hungry?” Boris said, flinging his mask on the sofa.
Keisha was next in. “I am!”
Shaun chimed in too and Mandy, keen to pull her own weight, announced she’d make lunch.
There was a moment of confusion as Mandy slowly emerged from the kitchen, unblinking and stiff.
Shaun started to say something then clammed up when he saw K behind her, a gun pointed at her back. Keisha started to cry and Boris just said, “Shit.”
“Yeah, shit. That’s about right,” K said. His voice crescendoed. “So, what you think? You think you can fuck up my boys with your machetes and that’ll be the end of it? Did y’all lose your minds? Thing
s have changed, I’ll give you that. But there’s still the laws of nature. There’s still gravity and shit. There’s still K9 to reckon with!”
Mandy took Keisha’s hand. “Can she go into the bedroom, please?”
“Hell no. Everyone stays where I can see you and throw those fucking machetes down behind the couch. Go on.” K wagged his pistol at Mandy and said, “You ran out on me last night, didn’t you? You were supposed to give your medicine to my mama. You were gonna cure her, remember? So, where’s my cure?”
Mandy pulled Keisha behind her and looked down the barrel of the gun. “There isn’t any. Yet. I’m working on it.”
“So, there it is,” K said with a whisper that was more chilling than his shouting. “Just another lying bitch. Well, it’s payback time. There’s no escaping payback time.”
“No wait!” Mandy said, raising a hand. “A friend of mine, another scientist, is coming from Boston. He’s got half the cure. I’ve got half. Your mother can get the first dose. I promise.”
K tensed his finger around the trigger and said, “You’re a lyin’—”
Boris had been trading sidelong glances with Shaun. The two of them had spent so much time together, they didn’t need words.
Boris made an exaggerated arm motion, as if drawing a gun from his pocket and stepped forward with a throaty yell.
K adjusted his aim and squeezed the trigger, but then he seemed confused that a deafening boom came from elsewhere, from Rosenberg’s antique gun that Shaun had stashed under a sofa pillow before they went out.
As he fell backwards, K sprayed the room with bullets. When he was on the floor, half-propped against Boris’s favorite chair, he looked at the blood soaking the middle of his gray hoodie and at the old pistol in Shaun’s shaking hand. “Fucking bazooka,” he said.
Keisha ran from the room, shrieking.
Mandy was absently staring at the blood welling up from her own left hand.
Shaun dropped Rosenberg’s gun, cradled Boris’s bleeding head on his lap, and felt him take a shuddering last breath.
And as K lay dying a few feet away, pink rivulets of blood and long-life milk flowed from his body onto the floor.
39
Edison was up early to look in on Brittany. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or unconscious. When he couldn’t rouse her, he prodded Gretchen who was curled under a blanket on the floor mattress.
“She’s not waking up,” he said.
The woman rolled over to look at him. “There hasn’t been any change.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up to get the doc?”
“Because there’s been no change?”
“I am so tired of your fucking attitude, all right? I’m gonna get him now. And clean her bed. I think she peed it.”
Jamie examined the girl, inspected the drainage bag, and gave Edison his opinion.
“There are some positive signs,” he said, “I’m cautiously encouraged.”
“What signs? She’s still out cold.”
“Yesterday her left pupil was about six millimeters and poorly reactive to light compared to three millimeters on the right. Now they’re both about the same diameter. Yesterday, her deep tendon reflexes on the right were exaggerated from the left-sided brain trauma. Today they’re almost normal. And overnight, there’s been some more fluid collection in the bag which means the drainage system is patent.”
“Plain English, for Christ’s sake.”
“It means that the procedure worked last night. She’s improving.”
“When’s she gonna wake up?”
“I can’t say. The sooner it happens, the better. It could be today, it could be tomorrow or later, but I’ve got to continue to caution you, she might have sustained permanent damage. It’s too soon to tell.”
“Then it’s not too soon to tell you this—you’re not leaving today, okay? My girl is still unconscious. When she wakes up and does her little ballerina twirl for me, then you can go your way. And here’s another incentive for you to get her healed up. I’m taking your Emma and her friend. They’re gonna stay with all the other sick girls we got down in another house on the compound. And you and Gretchen are gonna switch rooms. I want you here with Brittany 24/7.”
Jamie went on high boil; he felt like he was on fire. He had never known this kind of rage and how it could turn a man into a Roman candle. Edison was at least fifteen years his senior, thick around the middle but tough as tree bark. Could he take him in a fair fight? It was one of those hypotheticals that probably wasn’t going to happen, because Edison’s hand was already squeezing the pistol-grip on his hip.
Jamie said, “Don’t you dare touch my daughter. I swear I will kill you if you do.”
Edison pulled his weapon and showed some crooked teeth.
“It’s a real bad idea threatening me in my own house. But here’s the deal, Doc. I’m not gonna hurt you ’cause I need you for my daughter. I’m not gonna hurt your Emma because you’ll take it out on my Brittany. But I damn well will hurt that girl, Kyra—I will hurt her so bad—if you ever threaten me and mine again. Do you understand me? Well do you?”
*
Emma was taken away without Jamie having a chance to talk to her. Taking Kyra was trickier because Linda was in the same room as her. Jamie could hear Linda screaming bloody murder while Joe and Mickey dragged the girl away at gunpoint.
Gretchen was collecting her things to move out of Brittany’s room when she seemed to take pity on Jamie. He was sitting on the edge of the girl’s bed, pushing on his temples.
“I’m sorry you wandered into this mess,” she said.
“Me too. How about you? What’s your relationship with the Edisons?”
“Relationship? There’s no relationship. My husband was mayor of this town. We didn’t socialize with them. And your friend, the police lady, was right. This isn’t his place. It belongs to Ed Villa, who was an elder in Blair’s church. Edison attacked Ed and his family, killed them all, I think, and just took the place. It’s a damned sight nicer than Blair’s farm.”
“Then how did you get involved?”
Her long sigh was one of the most sorrowful sounds he’d ever heard. “When all this started, Blair and Joe Edison came to our house and gunned my husband down. They killed my oldest son, Craig. They took the rest of us hostage. I’ve only seen my twins, Alyssa and Ryan, once and I haven’t seen Craig’s wife, Trish, at all since the day we were taken.”
“Were they sick?”
“Not my husband or Craig. It’s like they wanted to get rid of the healthy men who’d be in a position to defy them. The rest of my family, well, all of them came down with the virus. I don’t know if that’s better or worse for them. I mean the poor things must be so confused as to what’s happening to them. But then again, they don’t really know what it means to lose your freedom.”
“He kept you alive to take care of his family?”
“It sounds like slavery and it is. It’s modern slavery. He threatened me the way he threatened you. I’m doing what he wants on account of my children.”
“This is a nightmare.”
She stuffed her nightdress into a small bag she found in one of Villa’s closets and zippered it. “I say that to myself every single day. I don’t know if you fully understand it, Dr. Abbott, but if that girl dies, Edison will only see you as a threat, just like he saw my husband and my son.”
“And if she recovers? Do you think he’ll let us go?”
She stood with the bag in her hand. “What do you think?”
She went to the door and tried it. It was locked. She yelled for Blair to open it up.
He had a lot more questions, but this was the one he wanted to squeeze in before she left. “What’s he doing with the sick girls?”
“I don’t know that. I am tormented with worry.”
They heard Edison’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
“We’ve got to help each other, Gretchen,” Jamie said.
She looked at him
with an enigmatic sadness before the door opened and she was gone.
*
Jamie spent all day and all of the night locked up with Brittany. The only thing he had to do was check on her and brood, and he did a lot of both. He convinced himself that maybe her coma was lightening a little, but it was like watching water boil. He and Linda reacted to their daughters being taken away differently. He suffered and raged in silence. Linda was more vocal—much more. Throughout the day and well into the night, he heard her shouting and cursing from inside her locked room. Once, Jamie shouted back at her to pipe down, that there was no point in yelling, but she only turned her fire on him and cursed him for being too passive.
When he wasn’t consumed by thoughts of Emma, he was worrying about Mandy. It was two days since they’d left Boston and his inability to contact her was maddening. With Derek gone, Mandy was alone. He wanted to protect her, but he had no idea how long Edison would hold them. He felt for the tubes of freeze-dried CREB peptides that had never left his pocket and then he added the state of Mandy’s freezer to the list of things to fret about.
Edison looked in every few hours and voiced his anger and disappointment at Brittany’s failure to wake up. The subtleties of her improvement fell on deaf ears. Gretchen came in with one of his meals and said she didn’t know anything about Emma and Kyra’s whereabouts or condition. The other meals were brought up by Mary Lou, the silent weeper. Jamie tried to engage her in conversation, but it didn’t come easily.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she finally said after he pressed her.
“Tell me about your situation,” Jamie said. “Maybe I can help.”
“No one can help. We’re all doomed.”
At mid-morning Jamie had a look out the screwed-shut bedroom windows at the sound of a car door slamming. It was Joe Edison coming to the main house from somewhere. He was whistling and smiling and that sent Jamie into a tailspin that lasted for the rest of the day.
*
Edison finally broke down and unlocked Linda’s door after supper.
“What’s it gonna take for you to shut up?” he asked.