"I'm not a deer," Stella said.
"Yeah," he said, still gripping the gun, breathing hard. Cranked up on meth. LESTER, said his nametag. "Ought not sneak up on a man like that."
"I'm looking for Seth Napier? He lives on an old logging road near here, by the railroad tracks?"
Lester appeared to think about it a bit, or maybe he was just thinking about the gun some more. Finally, he came back and smiled much too much. "Yeah, hobo kind of guy, always buys Red Man by the box, last friday of every month." He stood and came around the counter. "He's in trouble, right?"
Stella stood her ground, dropping her arm and twirling her purse behind her back. It was only a simple, teardrop-shaped canvas sack with her pocketbook and pager, and a few bottles of prescription medications and ibuprofen, but she'd thrown in her .22 revolver and two speed-loaders for heft. "Is his house back there? Behind your station, in the woods?"
"Yeah," Lester said, looking at the gun as if he could hear it speaking. "In the woods. 'Bout a half-mile. Bunch of other cabins and trailers and shit back there, but he's the only one left."
Stella backing towards the door now. "Thanks a lot, Lester. Thanks a whole bunch, okay?" Turning away from his too-wide smile only when she got outside, running back to her car, getting in, loading the gun.
The road was dirt, of course, and hadn't been graded in decades. Knurled pine roots fanned out across the road like ribs, rocking the car on its rusty toy suspension, Nature's own speed bumps. Should she be watching out for booby traps? Beyond the range of her headlights pine trees loomed to either side of the road, pine trees and velvet blackness. Clearly, it'd been a long time since this road had been used for logging, if ever. She came to a fork after three tenths of a mile, and went right. The road immediately began to veer left, presumably arcing around to rejoin the driveway as the left fork. The pine trees parted and she saw two trailers, a silver Airstream and a fiberglass Chinook. Both had been crushed by a fallen tree. Some of the tree's limbs had been sawn off for firewood, and the trailers had both been ransacked, but she saw no sign of life. This could've happened years ago.
Cruising on, she saw a clapboard cabin with no ceiling, the front door standing open and a pea green Datsun pickup truck up on blocks in the living room. Beyond that, another motor home, in relatively good shape, the windows boarded up the door studded with four deadbolts—on the outside. As her car drew near, the trailer started rocking back and forth, roaring and snarling, rabid and starving. The trailer was an alarm, stuffed to bursting with dogs in a feeding frenzy. Stella noticed a chain running from the bottom of the kennel, trailing off into the woods. Nestled in the darkness into which it disappeared, she saw the pale will-o-wisp glow of a Bug Zapper lamp. She pulled her car as close as she could to the cabin, which stood off thirty feet from the clearing behind a screen of pine and willow trees, an old blue Chevy pickup out front. Watching the throbbing motorkennel, she slowly climbed out of the car, leaving the door hanging wide open, and began to walk towards the sunken porch of Seth Napier's cabin with one hand in her purse.
As horrible as the dogs' racket had been before, it was magnified now the car engine was off and her back was turned to it. It prickled her skin. It was hot. She had to tell herself it wasn't dog breath.
Halfway to the porch, the chain jerked taut.
She saw now that it ran up to a boarded window beside the front door. She saw a sliver of yellow light through the crack, saw a shadow pass across the light as the chain snapped again. Behind her, she heard the click of a lock, and the dogs were suddenly much, much louder.
She sprinted across the yard, gaining the porch in a few seconds. "Mr. Napier?" She screamed, trying to catch her breath as cramps knived her fluttering lungs. "It's me! Nurse Orozco, from the hospital! You called me! I'm outside! Please let me in! Call off your dogs!"
Her gun caught on something in her purse and wouldn't come free. She spun on her heel and saw the first dog, a misshapen gutter-mutt of pit bull-rottweilerish extraction, only twenty feet away and closing fast, with three more a few paces behind it. The dog's eyes were cloudy, rolled back in its knobby, hairless head, its muzzle bedizened with bloody foam.
Stella fired over their heads, and her purse exploded. The lead dog reared back as if to close with her on its hind legs, then recoiled, yipping in shocked pain as pills, spare change and fragments of Stella's beeper and a tumbling .22 slug rained down on it. The others crashed into it and tore at its flanks before it could hit the ground.
Stella turned and lunged for the door, noticing as she did the three Kwikset locks bored into the heavy pinewood door. Oh shit, she thought, oh Jesus, I want to die of cancer…
Die running, she thought, and seized the knob.
The doorknob turned in her hand and she fell through the doorway, into the light. She collapsed on a rug so filthy that plumes of dust shot up around her. Her first breath was mostly dog hair, and she gagged as her throat slammed shut. She kicked out at the door and heard it slam behind her, careening dog bodies pounding into it from outside.
When she caught her breath, she checked her gun and followed the chain across the living room, through a kitchenette, down a short hall, and into the back bedroom. There was no light here, and the light switch did nothing when she flicked at it. Still, she knew he was here. Breathing, regular, deeper than Carlsbad Caverns, smelling wet and meaty and—like death and new life.
"Mr. Napier?" Stella whispered, pointing the gun at the breathing, reaching around for the door behind her that opened on the closet, reaching into it, fumbling around, she found a string, and pulled it.
And the light came on.
Seth Napier lay sprawled across a bed, naked, half-covered by a woolen Army surplus blanket. His exposed flesh glistened, gelatinous, translucent, rumpled and bulging like an oversized wetsuit the color and texture of clotted rubber cement, or smegma. Napier's skin and probably most of the subcutaneous tissue beneath seemed to have spontaneously necrotized. The chain was wrapped several times around one wrist, cutting deep into it, and still twitched spasmodically on the floor.
Even as she watched, his face became almost unrecognizable. As his mouth worked, his features seemed to sag, sliding around on his head as if trying to rearrange themselves, or escape. Stella gasped and backed away, and Napier, his filmy eyes bulging out of tunnels of slime, reared up on the bed. The blanket fell away, and she saw it.
Embedded in the center of Napier's chest was a human hand, black and engorged with nearly luminous black-red blood. Like a piece of fruit suspended in Jell-O, it had almost sunken completely into Napier, and tendrils of violet radiated out from it like the first shoots of a virulent weed. The hand pulsated like a second heart, sending tremors shivering through Napier's dissolving body. He regarded Stella impassively for a moment, trembling, and started to climb off the bed.
Stella drew the gun and pointed it at him, the shredded remains of her purse still clinging to the barrel. "Stay back, Mr. Napier. I'm going to call for an ambulance." Don't breathe, she told herself. Whatever it is, it's highly infectious. Whatever it is…
Napier's eyes regarded her as if he were sinking into himself, succumbing to an inexorable pull that was dragging him so deep into his body he'd never see out of his own eyes again.
His sad, sick old eyes studied her, as if to engulf her image and take her with him wherever he was going. And then Seth Napier's eyes seemed to fill with smoke. And when they cleared, they were not brown anymore, but green.
And Seth Napier's face slid off.
Tearing like the skin of a rotting fruit bursting with the gases of its own corruption, the gray jelly split open along the lines of Napier's jaw, splattering on the dirty tile floor in sizzling chunks. Cloudy pus spewed out of the opening, perversely reminding Stella of a pregnant mother's water breaking at the beginning of labor. Underneath, clean white flesh peered out, shiny and elastic like the new skin beneath a scab. Napier's hands came up and tugged at the clinging shreds and ripped them awa
y. Stella backed against the far wall, still holding her breath, the gun shaking as she made out the new face beneath the one Napier tore off.
It was Stephen.
His benevolent, blissful grin took her in, approved. He settled back onto the bed and folded his arms across his chest, as if he'd arrived from a very long journey and wanted to rest a spell. The outer shell of rotting flesh slid away even faster, melting, pooling in the folds of the sheets. Stella could not scream, could not run, because the only conclusion that made sense froze her to the spot.
Stephen's cancer infected Seth Napier. Remade him…into another Stephen. Perhaps it had already infected her.
Then Stephen's face contorted and his back arched like a galvanic current was going through him. His eyes, when they opened again, were the same color they'd turned in the hospital, steely gray.
"The Moon-Ladder," Stephen murmured.
Outside, the sounds of the dogs barking gave way to a thunderous chorus of gunfire. Automatic weapons bratted, turning the barks to agonized whines and howls.
Stella dropped to the ground and belly-crawled towards the front window, peered out through the hairline crack out into the yard. There were at least a dozen men in the yard, standing up from the beds of two monster pickup trucks, spraying the attack dogs with assault rifles. In moments, every one lay dead, most cut in half.
Then they climbed down. Several of them shouldered ungainly metal tanks in shoulder-harnesses, ignited cobalt flames off the metal hoses that came off the bottoms of them. Then they turned and fanned out to surround the cabin.
Stella lay down against the baseboards and reloaded her gun. What are you doing? You're going to die here unless you surrender. These people want Napier, not you. Give yourself up.
And die like a dog. No way.
Stella looked around, studying the warped hardwood floor for signs of a trapdoor leading to a crawlspace. She yanked on a filthy throw rug in the middle of the room. One leg of a recliner held it tacked down. She leaned back and put her whole weight into pulling it free. The recliner tipped over backwards with a resounding crash, knocking over a TV tray littered with empty whiskey bottles.
Under the throwrug, she made out a rectangle of raised boards.
In the bedroom, she heard rustling, followed by the whining creak of old nails pried free from boards. Flashlight beams stabbed through the cracks of a rear window. Two boards were ripped away, and her face was washed in blinding white light. Frantically, she scrambled over to the trapdoor and clawed at it. There was no visible handle, she couldn't make out a recess or a handhold or anything to lift it up. Another board was ripped away from the window, and she saw a black-gloved hand reach in and grab at the next one, working it free.
Stella brought the gun up. "Stop where you are, I have a gun—" she said, unconvinced herself by her quavering tone, "—I'll shoot." Will you?
A rifle barrel peeked in through the crack and sprayed the room. The sound was deafening. Stella leapt sideways, taking shelter behind the overturned recliner. She raised the gun over the chair and fired twice in the general direction of the window.
"Ow! Goddamit!" Someone shouted. "Gas!"
From behind her, a whoomp and a crash, and something burst through the front window-boards and clattered to the floor beside her.
Stella held her breath, pinching her nose shut and lying low. Clouds enveloped her, folding over her and taking her away from the awful place in which she'd just been getting used to the idea that she was going to die. It wasn't just tear gas either, oh no, Stella knew the distinctive flavor of teargas from the baddest of the bad old days down on the farm. Sure her eyes streamed like they were melting, and her stomach wrung itself out on the spot, hot salmon vomit splattering her knees and her trail boots, but she was also fading away and the sensation of her body was fast becoming a vicious rumor she'd rather not have heard about, and she was falling fast into sleep, or into death, and didn't care which.
Don't let this happen.
Like it matters, whether it happens now or in six months. Least this'll be quick. But still she held her breath, still she told herself, I'm supposed to die of cancer—
Her head was too heavy to keep off the floor, so she just let it go, followed it down. Down to the floor and she dropped like dead weight, and a floorboard cracked beneath her, it was rotted and her hand went right through the crack and waved in empty space. The crawlspace under the cabin.
Stella watched her body drag itself over the hole and press her face against it. The dank, moldy air of the crawlspace woke her up instantly. Furiously, she pistoned her fists against the surrounding boards. She couldn't see, but she felt the pulpy chips against her arms and shoulders as she broke through both boards. She lunged into the gap, and with barely enough time to throw out an arm, she hit the dirt beneath the cabin so hard it knocked the wind back out of her. But she was out. Her arm was numb from the elbow down and she tasted blood from something she'd bitten through in her mouth, but she was out. Thank you, God, I'm going to die of cancer after all, she thought and tried to laugh.
After she gave up on that, she let sounds come in, and blinked the tears from her eyes. The first thing she noticed was the sound of a waterfall, it was roaring all around the cabin.
The crawlspace was open and empty, as far as she could tell. A few lines of lesser blackness from missing siding boards crisscrossed the dirt, but the light from the side directly before her was almost hurtful. It came from the truck parked out front. She peered out through a crack in the porch just beside the stairs, and saw she was only half-right.
The roaring was not water or wind, but fire. A man with a flamethrower stood in the front yard, hosing down the front of the house with flaming gasoline. The man wore a gasmask and dark brown combat fatigues, but Stella couldn't make out anything like a badge or other insignia of authority. They knew somehow about Stephen and Seth Napier, or why else just burn the house down, without even searching it? She wasn't part of this, she hadn't touched anything, but she was there, and they hadn't seemed too interested in checking for innocent bystanders. They were treating this like an epidemic, and if it was, then she knew, as any nurse would, that she'd probably been infected. Then I'll turn myself in at the fucking hospital, she thought.
Stella got up on all fours and crabwalked backwards towards the rear of the house. Even as she backed away, the porch collapsed with a cheery puff of flame. The fire spread through the rotten, termite-riddled wood in seconds, and the crawlspace began to fill with smoke. Her right hand stomped in something that was once a cat or an opossum and skidded through it so she lay down in it. She rolled over and retched bile and dog hair. Through her tears, she saw too-bright firelight through the slats on both faces of the house, and spreading. They were circling around it.
She scrambled the rest of the way across the crawlspace in three bounds and seized two slats, yanked as hard as she could and they came loose with a whining protest of rusty nails. She threw herself into the crack, her head sticking out into the clear, clean night, the darkness and safety of the woods just beyond her arm's reach. She wrenched her body sideways, the jagged corners of the neighboring slats tearing at her back and breasts. She dug her feet into the moldy dirt and kicked and the slats snapped and she spilled out onto a carpet of pine needles and fresh forest air that was only beginning to reek of burning. She staggered to her feet and took a step towards the forest, one step, and she was pinned to the spot by cold white flashlight beams and the roiling orange glow of idling flamethrowers. There were four men, two on each flank, and the flashlights were taped to the barrels of stubby submachine guns.
Stella threw herself down on her knees and laced her hands over her head. "I surrender, goddamit I didn't touch a fucking thing in there don't you dare fucking burn me you Nazi puto motherfuckers I'm not dying like this—"
The soldiers closed in on her with their weapons leveled. "Bravo Charlie, Bravo one-three," one of them said in flat headset monotone, "have possible second su
bject, please advise." No one spoke for a moment, then the same man said, "roger that," and he shouldered his own rifle, painted a laser dot on her forehead.
Stella threw her arms wide to show them she was unarmed, but that only seemed to make them more nervous. One of the flamethrowers splashed hot death across the forest floor just inches short of her, and she leapt back. Her face seared and eyebrows turned to ash. Incredibly, no one else fired just then. They seemed to be trying to do it, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to shoot, like they were waiting for her to give them a reason. Like they were maybe a little bit afraid of her.
She was about to cry now, and that made her angry, and wasn't that stupid? After all this, getting mad because she was going to cry in front of all these macho asshole soldiers who were about to cremate her?
"Lock me up," she growled, "Quarantine me for a year if you want to, but don't shoot me. I'm not infected. Is this an airborne virus?"
The soldier with the headset exchanged looks with the others, shrugged and asked "How long were you inside?"
"A few minutes. I saw—" you didn't see a goddamned thing! "—a man on the bed inside, and I—and then you showed up."
They didn't seem any less likely to kill her, but they were at least listening to her. She tried to keep talking, tried not to scream. "I am asking you. Not to kill me. I'm a trauma nurse. I work in the ER up in Bishop. I know about infectious disease. We took in a man two summers back who came down with bubonic plague from a squirrel bite up at Twin Lakes. He recovered in three days on antibiotics. If I'm sick, I want to be quarantined, but I don't want to die out here in the woods because of something I don't even fucking understand! Will somebody please fucking talk to me?!"
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