He waited for a sound, any sound, but there was nothing. He knocked again.
Piranha sighed, impatient. “It’s open. Why are you knocking?”
“It’s the middle of the night. We can’t just barge in. What if she’s not dressed?”
“Screw that. What if she’s not breathing?” Darius muttered.
When Terry pushed the door open, the house exhaled a hot breath of stale air. The living room smelled like cedar, old furniture, and doggy musk. So much for cookies. Terry’s eye caught on the antique gold-framed wedding photo, Molly skinnier than she’d been in decades, Vern brilliant in his navy whites. Time had swollen them both, but the young man and woman in the photo still lived in their faces.
Terry took two careful steps inside, as if the floor were a thin sheet of glass. The living room was crowded with plush guest chairs, doilies, and shadows. “Mrs. Stoffer?” he called toward the darkened home. “It’s Terry. We’re checking on you!”
Utter silence, except for an antique clock ticking somewhere.
“Yeah,” Darius whispered. “And we wanted to tell you we just beat hell out of your husband and stuck him in the freezer. Okay, ’bye.”
“Stop being an ass,” Sonia said. “If that’s your ‘thing’ under pressure, don’t.”
“Free country… Mom.” Darius shrugged.
“Shut. The hell. Up.” Piranha’s growl ended the bickering.
The small square kitchen, open at two ends, stood between the living room and the bedrooms, so Terry checked the kitchen first as the others trailed him, instinctively sticking close. Terry flipped on the light, reassured by the spotless counters and sink. A plate covered in foil sat on the stove—maybe cookies after all—but nobody touched it.
Terry’s heart shook his knees.
“Molly?” Sonia called toward the foyer. “Are you okay?”
The hall bathroom beyond the kitchen looked fine too. With each light that went on in the house, the more plausible it seemed that Molly was just a deep sleeper, and the blood on Vern’s face had come from somewhere else.
Did they know it was blood for sure?
But the farthermost room, the bedroom, told the true story.
The bedroom was painted red. And the paint was still wet.
Terry had never seen a dead body before, not even at a funeral, never mind a body as ill treated as Molly Stoffer’s. The hallway light was enough to see too much, and they backed out of the bedroom much faster than they had entered.
Sonia clung to the kitchen sink to puke while Terry picked up the kitchen phone and dialed 911, his hand shaking. His efforts were rewarded by a grating busy signal. He was about to dial again when he got a sharp tug from Piranha, and he realized the others were already halfway out the front door.
“Our cabin!” Darius said.
The phone in the counselors’ quarters didn’t bring much better luck. This time Terry got a recorded message, a woman’s voice that said, “No one is available to take your call, but please leave a message.” At 911? Worse, the phone cut him off before he could finish describing where they were or what had happened. Hipshot still cowered in the corner, as if he knew better than any of them the trouble they were in. Doggy instinct.
Sonia pulled a tattered phone book from beneath the counter, and they finally found the number for the sheriff’s department. Busy again. Dean drifted in from Vern duty, his bat over his shoulder, gape-jawed while Darius whispered in his ear.
“This is bull… This can’t be happening,” someone was saying over and over in a quivering voice, annoying the hell out of Terry—until he realized it was him.
Darius gestured from the doorway. “Guys? You need to see this,” he said.
Darius had turned the TV back on—the same TV Terry now wished they had kept on and stayed planted in front of like a campfire all night instead of going to bed.
The channel, thankfully, looked much clearer now. So did the overall situation.
Terry barely remembered 9/11, except for a stomach-twisting feeling that the roof had fallen in on his world. He had never seen so many adults crying before. The news left no room for denial. There was so much footage from so many regions of the country—labeled Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, D.C.—that street mayhem played continuously in a video box in a corner of the screen while the president of the United States spoke to an unseen audience. The chief executive leaned against his podium, as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“All of us are waking to a nation that is very different from the one we knew when we went to sleep last night,” the president said, his red eyes holding the camera, barely blinking. “Nationwide, U.S. citizens are being attacked, and sometimes killed, by friends, family members, and strangers exhibiting symptoms very similar to animal rabies. But make no mistake: this is not an outbreak of rabies. This may be the most severe health crisis our nation has faced, and beyond any doubt the most sudden and confusing in nature. Law enforcement and health officials are so flooded with reports that they are unable to provide figures on the number of infected or the number of dead…”
“Oh, God,” Sonia whispered. She sat on the floor in a heap, as if her legs had folded beneath her. “Holy…”
The muscles at the corners of the president’s jaw bulged, as if he was cracking walnuts with his teeth. Terry imagined FDR might have looked that way on D-day. “If you are in a secure place… stay there. If you have loved ones who have been bitten… keep them awake as long as you can, but isolate yourself from them. Do not attempt to transport or otherwise assist anyone exhibiting symptoms of this infection.”
“So what the hell are we supposed to do with Vern?” Dean asked the TV screen.
Someone off-camera handed the president a sheet of paper, which he read silently before raising his eyes again, a pall of fear hollowing his cheeks. His face reminded Terry of President George W’s deer-in-the-headlights panic in a documentary he’d seen once, when W was reading to schoolchildren and looked as if he’d dropped a load in his shorts.
“I’m gonna try the sheriff again,” Terry said. His mouth was so dry that it hurt to move his tongue.
As Terry turned, the president went on as if to answer him directly: “Law enforcement cannot keep pace with the emergency calls nationwide, especially in densely populated areas. Please use restraint if you must take measures to protect yourself… but some of you will be forced to take such measures, often against people you know. Wear thick clothing. Avoid exposing your skin. More drastic measures may be required. If you do not protect yourself from bites at all costs, the infection will continue to spread at this harrowing pace…”
Terry stopped short, suddenly realizing how Sonia’s legs might have felt before she flopped to the floor. His body felt liquefied.
What was the point of picking up a phone? The president of the United States had just told him he would be wasting his time. Their Vern terror, which had seemed so deep and personal, had been reduced to a statistical blip. No one gave a damn about Vern Stoffer, his very dead wife, or a handful of juvie offenders.
Terry shuffled back to the huddle at the TV.
“Sheriff’s busy tonight, huh?” Piranha said.
They watched TV until they could no longer ignore the muffled, frantic pounding from the freezer.
EIGHT
By sunrise, they had a plan. They would wait until Vern exhausted himself banging against the icehouse door. Then, once he was unconscious, they would open the freezer, mob Vern up with blankets, and hog-tie him. Once he was tied, they could feed him, give him water, and keep him alive until they heard instructions on a treatment or cure for Vern’s bad case of what Darius called “Cujo.”
By noon, they all realized the major flaw in their plan: Vern never stopped banging, except for a minute at a time, maybe two. Just when they started lining up with the blankets, whispering last-second instructions before their ambush, the ramming sound started again, as if Vern was running into the door headfirst.
By four, it dawn
ed on Terry, probably all of them, that they couldn’t save Vern. Even if he’d finally knocked himself out like they’d hoped, there wasn’t a whisper of good news on the TV or radio. Far from it. Piranha speculated that scientists had to be gathered somewhere working overtime on a cure the way the eggheads came up with the A-bomb to drop on Japan, but the white-smock types Terry saw on TV looked like they needed a doctor themselves. Or a shrink.
Nobody was talking about fixing anybody—only surviving. The president never said it himself, but the message was obvious from spray-painted signs on people’s houses and survivalist types relishing all those years of jerking off to the Second Amendment: The infected will be shot.
“Dude, I just shot my mom!” one wild-eyed man from Denver said to a news camera, waving his .45 in the air. His face streamed tears. “DO YOU GET IT NOW? I shot my mom!”
They searched the camp for weapons. For the first time, they were glad that Vern was an NRA member, with two hunting rifles and a shotgun for home defense. They found two hundred rounds for the rifles and thirty shotgun shells. Plenty of edged implements: saws, axes, knives, and a half-dozen machetes for clearing brush. Archery bows hung in rows on the wall, but the arrows were just for kids to shoot haystacks, nothing they could use. Still, they kept it all nearby, just in case.
Sonia tried the phone for hours, until she finally got through to her grandmother’s house east of Centralia, where she’d figured her mother would take her sister. Sonia let out such a shriek when she finally got through that Terry woke from his nap on the sofa, convinced Vern must have clawed his way free.
Sonia was wet-eyed during the whole call. Under ordinary circumstances this might have seemed strange, because like most of them, Sonia couldn’t stand her family. Her mother begged her to stay where she was. “There’s nowhere safer than that camp for you,” her mother said, her voice so crisp on the line that they could all hear her. “The roads are a war zone. Let it blow over! We’ll be fine. Suzy wants to talk to you—”
Then the line went dead, and Sonia cried some more when she couldn’t call back.
While Sonia wailed, Piranha called Terry aside. They walked on the path in the peaceful woods under a waning sun that, although it was only four o’clock, already seemed too close to the horizon. The evergreens above them were unchanged, a souvenir of yesterday.
“The Twins are thinking about hitting the road,” Piranha told him quietly, checking to make sure Darius and Dean couldn’t hear. The Twins were on Vern duty, and in an hour it would be Terry’s turn. “I heard them talking. They might want to take off right after freezer patrol. They figger they’ll be okay on their bikes. Dean wants to check on his mom and sisters. And let’s be real: none of us wants to be here at night waiting around for whatever, you know?”
Terry didn’t recognize what he felt at first, except that it was a blade in his gut. Not fear, which he was used to, or even anger… something else. Grief?
Vern’s van was parked where they had left it last night. Molly’s old Rabbit was parked in the driveway, but the battery had been dead since one of the brats had climbed in and left the lights on. The only other vehicle they had was Blue Beauty, the rickety navy blue school bus Vern had bought secondhand and painted with the eagle-and-rabbit Camp Round Meadows logo. Terry could drive it decently, and Piranha could grind the gears into submission, but none of the others could handle its nearly worn-out manual transmission.
“Where’s the keys?” Piranha said.
“What?”
“You were the last one driving the van,” Piranha said. “I don’t remember you giving the keys back to anybody, so where are they?”
Suddenly, Terry noticed how much taller and broader Piranha was, with a wrestler’s build. Remembered Piranha’s stories about kids he’d whaled on after school when they didn’t know when to back off. And there was something about a “look” that Piranha had when he wanted someone to keep his mouth zipped. Although he was larger than Terry, Piranha had never tried to push him around. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that Terry was in for assault, while Piranha was up for a long list of nonviolent mischief.
Hipshot trotted beside Piranha and sat. “Where are the keys?” the big guy asked again.
Terry patted his jeans. He was wearing his faded blues, not the black jeans he’d worn when they’d driven to Seattle. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe still in my pocket.”
“Let’s go look,” Piranha said.
Finding the van’s keys was a good idea. Terry suddenly burned with curiosity himself, and a spark of panic. He’d been assuming all day that they had decided to stay at the camp, but it was different if the keys were lost. Who knew where old Vern might have tucked that treasure? As they walked toward the counselors’ quarters, Terry tried to ignore the increasingly sour taste in the back of his mouth.
“And when we find the keys?” Terry said. “Then what?”
He almost said if instead of when. He hoped he hadn’t handed the keys to Molly after all, that they wouldn’t need to search Vern’s house or Molly’s clothes. They’d already been back to his bedroom once in search of a gun, and Terry never wanted to see that room, or the inside of the Palace, ever again.
“Then we have options,” Piranha said, and left it at that.
Terry closed his eyes in a silent prayer as he reached under his bed for the plastic Hefty bag where he stashed his dirty clothes. His throat nearly squeezed shut when his jeans didn’t jingle and his two front pockets were empty… but he felt a lump in the back pocket.
Two keys on Vern’s VFW key ring. The van had less than half a tank of gas left, if he remembered right, but it was better than nothing.
Piranha held out his hand for the keys, but Terry hesitated.
“The van belongs to everybody,” Terry said.
“Damn right,” Piranha said. “And everybody includes me.”
“Why do you want the keys?” Terry tried to keep anger or challenge out of his voice, because things were working fine while he and Piranha were buddies, but nothing would work if they weren’t.
“I’ll drive down to the road, go down a couple miles, check things out. See if I can catch a cell signal.” He lowered his eyes. “Call my stepdad.”
“If the landlines aren’t working, what makes you think your cell will? I bet all the towers are jammed.”
“Gotta try,” Piranha said. “Maybe I can get my e-mail, send a note, update my Facebook status. Right?” Piranha’s palm lay outstretched. He seemed to be waiting patiently, but Terry saw his fingers tremble. If Piranha had to ask for the keys again, he wouldn’t ask nicely. He might not ask at all.
“Then what?” Terry said.
Piranha licked his lips. His dark eyes fixed on Terry’s, a clear signal that he was tolerating his last question. He spoke slowly. “Then I come back here, tell you guys what I saw, what my stepdad said, and we all decide what to do. Maybe before the Twins go. Give them something to think about. While we’re still all together.”
Terry considered Piranha’s plan, but only for a second or two. He dropped the keys in Piranha’s palm, and Piranha closed his fingers around them like a gold nugget.
They both breathed out slowly, glad they still trusted each other. Hoping trust would last.
“If I’m not back in two hours,” Piranha said, “you know shit’s gone south.”
Terry nodded soberly. In two hours, the late summer sun would just be starting to dim, readying for a new night. A problem for Piranha was a problem for all of them.
“Get gas if you can,” Terry said.
They’d been crouching by the bunk, but they both straightened and stood upright. Terry’s father had once told him he would know the day he became a man in his bones, and it had nothing to do with turning eighteen. Terry suddenly missed his dad fiercely.
“Anybody you want me to call for you?” Piranha said.
Terry’s mother had moved to Tucson to live with the meth cooker she’d met in rehab, but Terry had dr
opped his cell phone in the pool a week ago, so he didn’t have her number. Terry would have gnawed off his left arm to call Lisa in L.A., but Aunt Jessie had unlisted her number, dammit. Thinking about Lisa and the footage he’d seen from Southern California made Terry’s stomach turn, so he forced himself not to worry. Lisa was fine. End of story. Like Piranha had said, L.A. was a big place. In L.A., people locked their doors.
“Nah,” Terry said. “I’m good.”
“If Vern gets quiet, cross your t’s before you go in,” Piranha said. “And don’t let Sonia do anything stupid.”
“I’ll watch out for Sonia,” Terry promised. “You’ve got two hours, man.”
They bumped fists to seal the contract. Terry thought, and not for the first time, how much better life would have been if he’d had a brother.
Well, hell. Looked like he had one now.
During the longest two hours of Terry’s life, Vern never got quiet. The constant pounding on the freezer door gave him such a headache that he screamed “Shut the hell up!” and thumped the door with his bat. The impact hurt his elbows, and barely made a dent. Inside, Vern emitted an outraged cry and only pounded harder.
“Not very smart,” Sonia said from the doorway, her arms folded. She drifted in and out of the icehouse, keeping Terry company while she cooked what she could from the pantry and fridge for dinner. Anything in the freezer would have to wait. “That door’s our friend. Save the psycho for a rainy day.”
A rainy day. One of Jolly Molly’s favorite lines. In the Northwest, it seemed most days were rainy days.
Terry didn’t have to ask Sonia if Piranha was back. He wasn’t; Terry could tell by the way she was gnawing her lip, playing with the unlit clove cigarette in her fingers. She’d made Terry promise not to let her smoke another cigarette until dark, since she was afraid she would run out. She had only a pack left besides the half-pack of Djarums in her pocket.
Devil’s Wake Page 4