by Ronald Malfi
(calm perfect calm you can even sleep now if you want it’s so calm it’s so perfect it’s living up here in the cool grass)
—now.
“I just wish I could have been there to do that for Mom,” Ellie said.
David hugged her.
“Whatever it is inside me,” Ellie said, “it’s getting stronger.”
“Are you scared?”
“No,” she said, “but you are.”
He offered her a sad smile. There was no use arguing the point. “I’m just worried about you,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” she said. “I think it’s supposed to be this way.”
53
Three weeks earlier
He first noticed the van approximately two weeks prior to Kathy’s death. At the time, he didn’t think much of it. It was parked right there across the street from their house, a white-paneled van with no windows and PVC pipes tied to the roof rack. There were no logos on the side, and it had nondescript Maryland plates. Someone had placed a sunshade on the dash, so it was impossible to see through the windows into the cab.
David had just picked up Ellie from Mrs. Blanche’s house, having spent the afternoon at the Greenbelt facility with Kathy. He turned onto Columbus Court, the daylight already draining from the sky. The trees beyond the houses had started to shed their leaves. As he always did, he glanced at the remains of Deke Carmody’s house. When he looked up, he found that the otherwise inconspicuous white van was crowding the left-hand side of the street. David steered around the van, not thinking much of it . . . yet it was his first conscious sighting of it, and it would come to nestle itself into the recesses of his brain in the days to come, as things with Kathy took a quick turn for the worse.
That evening, before tucking Ellie into bed, they called Kathy on her cell phone. She answered, and despite sounding cheery for Ellie’s sake, David knew she was wiped. Kathy gave the obligatory responses to all of Ellie’s questions. Yes, she was fine. Yes, she would be home with them soon. Yes, this was something very special that she was doing. Yes, of course she missed her very much, but she had been too tired lately for visitors.
After they hung up, David ushered Ellie into bed. He turned off her light and kissed her good night. In the half light, he watched her roll onto her side and hug her pillow.
Before he got up from her bed, she reached out and laced her hand inside one of his. He smiled at her . . . then closed his eyes. It felt good to hold her, to touch her, just as it had when she was an infant and he’d walk the floorboards with her all night while she gazed up at him with those wide, impossible eyes. He felt calm, serene. Strangely at peace.
Once she had fallen asleep, he kissed the side of her face and got up off the bed. He closed her bedroom door, then wandered aimlessly about the house—a house that now seemed impossibly large and mazelike, a turreted castle with countless dark corners and unending corridors. He could feel his anxiety creeping slowly back into him. Since Kathy’s stay at the Greenbelt facility had become permanent, David had stopped sleeping in their bedroom, opting instead for the living room couch. In fact, he found himself limiting his time spent in the master bedroom altogether, as the scent of Kathy’s perfume lingered in the pillowcases, the sheets, the curtains over the windows, the clothes in their shared closet. The hairbrush she’d left on the bathroom sink made him melancholy. The unfinished Wally Lamb novel on the nightstand, propped open with its spine in the air as if it were doing push-ups, made him restless and caused his mind to wander in the direction of dark things.
Despite his nightly reassurances to his daughter, he had a bad feeling about the direction of things. He had mentioned to Kathy a few times lately that he wanted her to come home with him. But she said she was okay, that she could stick it out. She’d insisted.
Earlier that day, he’d commented to Dr. Kapoor about the pallor of Kathy’s skin. She’d become jaundiced, with bruise-colored hollows under each eye. She had lost so much weight in such a brief amount of time—there was no question about that—and the result was eerie, causing the flesh of her face to stretch taut around her skull, which gave her cheekbones an unnatural emphasis. Her fingers had slimmed, and as David sat beside her bed that afternoon eating lunch, they’d both heard the clinking of her wedding band as it fell from her finger and tink-tink-tinked across the floor. He’d picked it up and tried to slide it back on her finger, but she pulled her hand away, almost embarrassed, and shook her head. No. No. For a moment, there was a strange telescopic look in her eyes, much like the lens of a camera as it adjusts to focus on something at some great distance.
“You keep it for me,” she’d said.
He had it in his pocket now. He dug it out and pushed it onto his pinkie. It fit.
“Something’s wrong with her,” David had expressed to Dr. Kapoor before leaving the facility that evening. They stood talking in the hallway outside Dr. Kapoor’s office, their voices low although there was no one around to eavesdrop. “She doesn’t look well.”
“We’ve been taking a lot of blood,” Dr. Kapoor said. “As long as we keep her on the IV, though, everything will be fine. The weight loss comes from her lack of appetite. She gives us trouble about eating.”
“You’ve taken her off her psych meds, the antidepressants. She’s distraught.”
“It’s necessary for the blood work, the cultures. I assure you, Mr. Arlen, that she is getting all the proper nutrients through the IV.”
He took Dr. Kapoor at his word, though he didn’t feel good about doing it.
That night, he drank a whole six-pack of Flying Dog while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on AMC. By the time Richard Dreyfuss found himself surrounded by those bug-eyed, long-limbed extraterrestrials, David was half in the bag. He rarely got drunk and never when he was home alone with Ellie, but he cut himself some slack tonight.
When the movie was over, he shut the TV off but remained on the couch, staring off into the darkness while the wall clock in the kitchen kept a metronomic beat. There was a drip in the kitchen sink, too, a steady and repetitive plink! every few seconds, and he focused on that for a while in his drunkenness. But then some nonspecific disquiet roused him just as he was about to slip into unconsciousness, and he got up, wended down the hall in the dark, and checked on Ellie. She was still sound asleep in bed. On the nightstand beside her was the shoe box containing the bird eggs. Ellie was not the source of his disquiet, he realized: It was something else. Without disturbing her, he kissed the warm and dewy side of her head, then retreated back out into the living room.
Before going to sleep, he peered out the front windows. It was as if something was beckoning to him. Across the street, the houses were dark, silent.
The white van was still parked along the curb.
And he realized it was the van that troubled him, although he had no idea why.
How do I know that van? Where have I seen it before?
In the dark, he collected the six empty beer bottles from the coffee table and carried them into the foyer. There, he set them up in a line on the floor in front of the door—an adult version of Ellie’s Night Parade. When he finished, he checked the dead bolt to make sure he’d locked it before returning to the warm indentation on the couch.
54
He stood barefoot on a gravelly patch of earth, watching as a parade of impossible animals campaigned along the desolate countryside in a single-file line that stretched all the way to the horizon. They were prehistoric in their hugeness, yet there was nothing mammalian about them. Instead, they appeared insectoid, multi-legged and wielding great segmented antennae, with shimmering, chitinous carapaces and eyes like swirling, gaseous planets. Their massive, spine-laden feet punched craters in the earth, and their sheer size blocked out the sun. Massive machinelike limbs muscled over trees and brushed against the sides of shallow mountain ranges. When these monstrous creatures reached civilization, David saw that all the buildings were decimated and abandoned, like those of ancient
Greece or the bombed-out cities of some Middle Eastern country, and there were no signs of human life anywhere. Or at least it appeared so, until a figure materialized from within the shadows of a crumbling brick alleyway. A ghost-shape. The figure was slight, sinewy, feminine, with long hair hanging over her face. She looked like a teenager, perhaps even older, her clothes filthy and nothing more than rags, her arms piebald with bruises and abrasions. Her bare feet left bloody footprints on the dusty pavement. As David watched, the woman’s hair swung away from her face and, despite her years—despite the feral, detached look in her eyes and the broken shards of teeth that gnashed and chattered endlessly, madly—David recognized his daughter.
David awoke in a bedroom with blank alabaster walls and a single window at his back. He was sprawled out on a bed, his hair still damp from the shower he’d taken, and he was dressed in the clean clothes Tim had given him, though he could not remember getting dressed. As consciousness fell fully upon him, he was aware of a small headache jackhammering at his right temple. He realized he had come in here to lie down for a few minutes after showering and getting dressed, but the time—and his own consciousness, apparently—had been siphoned from him. Judging by the murky seawater quality of the daylight coming through the partially shuttered bedroom window, David guessed he’d been asleep for a few hours.
The image of those insectile dinosaurs was still fresh in his mind. He could still taste the powdery air of that evacuated city at the back of his throat, could still feel the impossible vibrations of those hideous, segmented, Lovecraftian bug-legs driving themselves into the earth. He knew it was only a dream . . . yet what troubled him was the idea that it might have been a portent of things to come, too: a glimpse into a not-too-distant future when the next breed of creature ruled the earth, much as people had replaced dinosaurs. And in that future, the only living human being was his daughter.
The thought caused him to shudder.
Downstairs, he found the three of them seated around a kitchen table, a plate of overdone flank steaks on the counter. He’d caught them in the middle of their meal, Ellie’s plate piled high with scalloped potatoes, green beans, applesauce, and a blackened, rigid cut of meat. He got the sense that he also had caught them in the middle of some private conversation, for they all ceased talking and stared at him as he approached. Ellie looked startled by his presence.
“Well,” Tim proclaimed. “There he is.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, sugar.” He sat down, rotating his left shoulder to work the stiffness out of his injured arm. “What’re you guys gabbing about?”
“We’re trying to figure out what to do for this little lady’s birthday,” Tim said.
“We’ve got some cake mix in the cupboard,” Gany suggested. “It’s pretty old, so I can’t attest for the quality. Can’t mix it with eggs, either, but it should do in a pinch.”
“Gonna be nine years old,” Tim said, marveling at Ellie while rubbing the back of her head with one of his big hands. Ellie’s gaze still clung to David, and he was certain in that moment that they hadn’t been discussing Ellie’s upcoming birthday when he’d come into the kitchen. It had been something else. “I remember when you were born, squirt.” Tim turned to David. “Those stitches holding up, partner?”
“Feels like it. How long was I out?”
“Four hours or so,” Tim said.
Gany pushed her chair back and stood up. “Hungry?”
He was ravenous. He couldn’t remember the last meal he’d eaten. He found that he couldn’t recall how many days he and Ellie had been on the run, either; time was beginning to come apart at the seams, unraveling like an old afghan. Each day bled into the next.
“You bet,” he said. He stood to help her, but she told him to sit back down and not to be silly. She loaded a steak onto a clean plate, then piled some potatoes and green beans around it for good measure.
While they ate, Tim brought David up to speed with what he’d been doing over the past several years since they’d last seen each other and had a proper conversation. Back in Kansas City, he had started an IT consulting firm, which had become moderately successful. His clients were mostly private industry, and his advertisement was limited to word-of-mouth recommendations. At the height of the company, he’d had three employees working under him, which afforded him the opportunity to do a bit of traveling. Tim Brody had never been one to settle down in one place for very long, and even with the success of the company, he felt constricted by the responsibilities. So after about two and a half years, he sold the company and made himself a “tidy little profit,” which David suspected was a very modest statement. This was around the time the first cases of Wanderer’s Folly broke out. Birds had seemingly vanished overnight, and those held in captivity in zoos, in labs, and on farms, all succumbed to the illness in a matter of weeks. Given the sudden gaping hole in the agricultural ecosystem, the price of beef, pork, and fish skyrocketed. Ever the entrepreneur, Tim decided it was time to invest in a food source that had mostly been overlooked till then, as a way to compete—and undercut—current market prices.
“Rabbits,” he said, grinning.
“Oh no,” David said, pausing with his fork halfway to his mouth. He glanced down at the charred bit of meat at the end of the tines, abruptly recalling the rabbit hutches out back.
“It made perfect sense. It’s a very lean meat and, to speak frankly, will give you a terrible case of the runs if you eat too much of it,” Tim said, “but it was basically an untapped resource. I was sitting on a cache of dough after the sale of the company and this idea just jumped into my head. When I realized I could buy an old chicken farm for pennies on the dollar—because no one’s raising chickens anymore—I started looking around and doing some research. When I found this place, I saw that it fit my needs perfectly.” He spread his arms wide. “I’m miles from nowhere in every direction. I’m basically running my own sovereign nation out here.”
“Are you saying you eat those rabbits out back?” Ellie said.
“Mostly, I sell them,” Tim said. “In cattle country, I’m the guy undercutting the cattle ranchers by selling rabbit meat. Not to mention the furs, which I also sell on eBay.”
Ellie set her fork down in her dish.
“Honey, this is beef,” Gany reassured her.
“Oh.” Yet Ellie did not look convinced.
“I’ve spent the better part of the year working on these ferns, too,” Tim went on, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward the room with all the hanging plants and UV lamps. “I’ve unlocked something in the ferns that’s helped pump up the body mass of the rabbits.”
“Steroids for Bugs Bunny,” David said.
“In a way,” said Tim, “though they’re totally harmless. No chemicals, no injections. It’s just been a process of trial-and-error, cross-pollenating various seeds and allowing them to germinate under different environmental conditions. It’s all natural.”
“You’re really doing all this stuff?” David said. “I’m impressed.”
“Oh, that’s just two-thirds of my operation.” Tim raised his glass, which contained a cocktail of fruit juice and his pungent liquor. “That moonshine you had earlier?”
“Dandelions and pinesap,” David recalled.
“I’ve got quite the distillery set up.”
“So you’re bootlegging, too?”
“This isn’t Prohibition, man.”
“Not that he has a license,” Gany added. She winked at Tim.
“What are you, the whiskey police?” Tim said. “Anyway, I’m not quite ready to roll the stuff out to consumers, not just yet. It’s still a bit overpowering.”
“We use it to light the bonfire in the yard,” Gany commented. “Not joking.”
“Yeah, it’s basically pure ethanol with natural ingredients added during the distillation process,” Tim said. “The first few batches were just awful.”
“As opposed to that firewater you gave me earlier,” David said.
Tim shrugged. “Hey,” he said. “It did the trick, didn’t it?”
“You make it right here in the house?”
“No. I’ve got a cabin a few miles farther up the mountain. It’s pretty remote.”
“In the event you’re raided by the ATF, I suppose,” David said.
Tim winked at him.
“What’s the ATF?” asked Ellie.
* * *
Once their plates were cleaned, Tim and Ellie cleared the table and washed the dishes by hand in the sink. Gany remained at the table with David, speaking in broad strokes about her own life just to make conversation. When she mentioned a boyfriend in South Dakota, David said, “Oh, I just assumed you and my brother . . .”
At the sink, Tim guffawed. Gany shot him a sly glance, then reclined in her chair. She was sipping a dark red wine, having declined a glass of Tim’s home brew earlier.
“Do you remember that guy Applewhite?” Gany said. “The Heaven’s Gate nut who initiated that mass suicide in the nineties?”
“I remember seeing it on the news,” David said.
“That’s your brother.”
David laughed. “A cult leader, huh?”
“Oh, he hasn’t horse-whispered people into cutting their balls off and taking cyanide pills,” Gany said, “but he’s equally as charismatic.”
“So, where’s the rest of his sordid cabal?”
“Oh, they’re around,” Gany said. “It’s not like we all live in some big commune, you know. I’ve got an apartment back in Colorado.”
“Oh. I just assumed you both lived here.”
“Your brother would lose his mind if he had to share this wonderful estate with anyone but his shadow,” Gany said, shooting Tim a sidelong glance. “We’ve all just united in common beliefs, common thoughts. You don’t need to live under the same roof to share the same ideals.”