She didn’t believe that the parasite had been bioengineered by aliens or the US government or al-Qaeda, but she was terrified that it would infect her son. Though she sat him down in the matter-of-fact brightness of the kitchen and asked him if he’d heard about the comatose teens (he’d scanned Kaitlin Moore’s Facebook status), though she explained the presumed causes of T. hermeticus transmission, though she went over the symptoms and warned him about the correlation between excessive screen time and junk-food consumption and full-blown toxoplasmosis, she still felt the relentless throb of fear behind her breastbone every second of every waking hour. And her husband was out in the desert doing God knows what. She envisioned him standing on a pink dune, staring into a hazy void specked with an occasional camel. Did they even have camels in Afghanistan? She couldn’t remember. She would Google it when she settled back into her swivel chair.
“If I understand you,” Adam said, “then the screen time and junk food are not causes of the coma but symptoms of the disease.” Was he looking at her with pity, as though she had lost it?
“I’m not sure.” She forced her mouth into a smile that she hoped radiated adult wisdom. “But I think that’s about right.”
“So it doesn’t really matter what I do.” He grinned and slunk toward the dark den.
That night Jenny woke up sweating, shaking off a nightmare in which her husband had transformed into some kind of desert scorpion cyborg, and her son, after falling into a coma, had pupated into a winged creature that moved so fast she couldn’t catch a glimpse of his face.
Miles Escrow had the eerie feeling that he’d experienced it all before: the whine of the jukebox, water stains on the ceiling, Wanda Bonnet blowing her nose into a sodden tissue after another weeping bout. She was the only mother of a comatose teen who’d shown up at Lizard Man that week. Ten minutes and two shots of vodka later, she was gone, driving through rain back to the hospital. She’d come, he figured, thinking her old haunt might soothe her, but she must’ve felt alienated after all, judging by the startled-doe look on her face.
Those patrons whose kids weren’t infected were probably at home, domestic surveillance in overdrive. DHEC had finally issued a statement verifying the number of diagnosed teens in the state (fifty-two), explaining the life cycle of T. hermeticus, and urging people not to panic as medical authorities were doing all they could to understand the bug, including setting up testing facilities that would soon be available to the general population. Although the sick kids were comatose, their comas were relatively high on the Glasgow scale, and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t snap out of it soon.
Tonight it was just Miles, Stein, Old Man Winger, and Rufus Pope, the bottom-heavy mixologist who lurched like Godzilla behind the bar. But then Carla Marlin showed up with some startling news. When she barged into the bar, eyes on fire, she seemed disappointed that her grand announcement would be received by only four men, one of them (Miles dared to think) a decent catch, albeit securely snatched up in the Tabascored talons of Tina Flame.
Or was he? Miles gave Carla the head-to-toe and found her paling in comparison to his ten-year live-in. A sun worshiper with freckled tawny skin and hair bleached white as polar-bear fur, she failed to tickle his fancy. That didn’t stop him from draping a soothing arm over her shoulders as she drew out her prologue to the big revelation, punching code into her Droid, lighting a Winston, and licking a drop of nectar from her piña colada’s straw before clearing her throat. But when Roddy Causey cruised into the bar, she withheld the goods again, waiting for him to secure a Budweiser lest she waste her breath on three old men and the flunky of Tina Flame.
“What’s up?” said Roddy, joining them.
“My neighbor the phlebotomist just got off his shift. Said all hell had broke loose down at Palmetto Baptist.” Carla Marlin blew six perfect smoke rings.
“Enough with the rising action,” said Stein. “Let’s have our climax now.”
Carla raised her eyebrows at the word climax.
“Well, if you got to know right this second: one of the teenagers is missing. They don’t know if he just jumped out of bed and walked out or if it was a kidnapping kind of thing.”
“Or maybe he got beamed to another dimension,” said Stein.
“Yeah.” Carla rolled her eyes. “There’s always that.”
“They’ll find him,” said Roddy. “Bet he woke up with amnesia and got lost.”
“A common soap-opera trope,” said Stein. “The whole waking-up-from-a-coma-with-amnesia shtick.”
“Like Anastasia in Purple Passions,” said Carla.
“It’s actually called a ‘convenient coma,’” said Stein.
Carla Marlin mustered her coldest drop-dead stare.
“There’s nothing convenient about it,” she said.
Beth Irving held a plastic vial of cat piss and repressed another gag. She’d been drinking ginger tea, popping B6, and pressing the acupuncture points reputed to diminish nausea. A rank yellow fume emanated from the vial like the cartoon hieroglyphics that flowed from the tail of Pepé Le Pew, but she held her breath and finished her experiment. She would prevail because she had to, because other specialists in other states were testing their own comatose teens and compiling data, because one of her test subjects had mysteriously disappeared like a patient in a slasher film, and a certain famous neurologist was flying in from Germany. This time, she promised herself with a dark chuckle, she would refrain from sleeping with him. The fact that he was portly and bald (she’d checked out his Web profile) would help.
Though she knew she was pregnant, she didn’t have time to deal with it—emotionally or physically. The nausea, however, made it difficult to ignore the fact that a new life was incubating inside her. Every time a green wave of sickness rocked through her, she couldn’t help but envision the eight-cell zygote glistening in the void of her uterus. The small cluster of dividing cells was already sending chemical messages into her blood and her nervous system, directing her eating habits to suit its needs, tyrannizing her bladder, and producing “emotions” advantageous to its own survival. Her rationality had been hijacked weeks ago, when Dr. Bloom breezed into town at the height of her ovulatory cycle, her exquisitely receptive system going into overdrive upon detecting the neurovirologist’s sweet pheromones.
Had she pounced on him like a starved jaguar in the fake-cherry-scented darkness of her hotel room? Had she still had enough emotional detachment to quip about their feral passion as Dr. Bloom struggled drunkenly with her belt buckle? Yes, and, thank goodness, yes. But she’d also been prompted by a deep urge to sabotage her current relationship.
Now she was exhausted. As she went about her work, renegade factions of her brain goaded her to slink into an unoccupied room and take a nap or flee the bombardment of horrific hospital odors, rush through the automatic doors of entrance C, and take deep breaths in the oasis of landscaping where a variety of flowers bloomed. But she had finally gotten three clearances for MRIs from desperate parents. And just yesterday, one of the patients had possibly come out of his coma, though now the staff at this backwoods facility couldn’t seem to find him. She had to work quickly in case the others woke up. She wanted to test olfactory responses to cat urine and the effects of antipsychotics on dopamine levels.
Struggling to keep her mind focused on her research tasks, she kept getting swept away by surges of nausea and stray images of Dr. Bloom. She saw him gnawing meat from a goat bone. Saw him hovering over her, his hazel eyes aglow. Saw him scurry into the bathroom, where he displayed his scrawny buttocks with mock coyness before gruffly closing the door. He’d flown to Nashville to look into a recent case there, had asked her, with a wistful smile, if she might join him later to diversify her research. They could visit all the infection sites, he romantically suggested.
But the T. hermeticus epidemic was most pronounced in this particular town, and Beth was trying to figure out how the hurricane weather and blighted economic conditions factored into
the phenomenon. Remembering her own coming-of-age in South Georgia, she thought that clinical depression might play a role. And she needed to find teens testing positive who had not reached the comatose state, which wasn’t necessarily the upshot of infection. Just as most T. gondii–positive people failed to show marked personality changes, and so-called schizophrenics probably had a predisposition that heightened the parasite’s effects, some T. hermeticus hosts might not be susceptible to full-blown toxoplasmosis. Beth hypothesized that perhaps the hospitalized teens were susceptible due to depression or malnutrition or other immune-weakening factors. But she couldn’t test this without getting her hands on some nonpathological positives, which required slogging through labyrinthine DHEC paperwork, which required mental acuity and a nausea-free system, all of which were eluding her now, especially after she poured cat urine into the TDR diffuser and could not escape its musky insinuations no matter how many times she changed her latex gloves.
According to Adam’s Facebook stream, Todd Spencer, the comatose teen who had mysteriously disappeared from the hospital, had made several shadowy appearances around town, materializing at the margins of various events before vanishing again. Heather Remington had spotted him lurking under the bleachers at a softball game. Josh Williams thought he might’ve seen him skulking down a hallway of First Baptist’s new recreation facility. And several kids swore they’d seen him emerge from the woods and stand at the moonlit edge of Bob Baggott’s pond, where an illicit teen party was in full riot.
Following DHEC’s recommendations, Jenny had confiscated Adam’s iPhone, equipping him with an old-fashioned flip phone until the crisis passed. She knew she was violating his privacy by perusing his Facebook account. She felt that desperate times called for desperate measures, however, even though her son had not tested positive for T. gondii or T. hermeticus antigens. Two days before, she’d driven him to a Walmart where free testing facilities had been set up. At least two dozen teens had waited on the scorched blacktop with their parents, the smell of sunscreen floating in the muggy air. Hurricane Anastasia had dissipated, and now a heat wave settled in, with temperatures capping at 110. People were living like moles, hurrying from one air-conditioned bunker to another, compulsively checking their media gadgets for the latest on T. hermeticus.
The bug was mostly affecting the Southern states, possibly because their weather conditions encouraged the species to thrive. Jenny was very busy with sibyl. com, but she pulled herself away from her screen every half hour to check on Adam, making sure he hadn’t found the power cord to their media screen (which she’d stuffed into a corner of the china cabinet). She did what she could to protect him. She stocked up on healthy snacks. She ordered educational board games for them to play together. She tracked her packages on UPS.com, hoping that when they arrived, a golden age of mother-son bonding would flourish.
So far he’d spent that morning sprawled on his bed, perusing old comics. He’d actually called her in to check out an issue from the bygone era of 2009. If the weather had permitted it, she would’ve suggested some whimsical outing—a picnic, a sporting event.
Around eleven she started thinking about lunch, deciding to drop by Adam’s room to ask what kind of wholesome entrée he fancied. But he wasn’t in his room. She felt the familiar throbbing of her heart as she moved toward the bathroom, calling his name with ostentatious nonchalance. He was not in the bathroom. He was not in the den. He was not hiding out in the master bedroom, which, up until last winter, she’d shared with her husband. When she opened the door to the laundry room, she saw him hunched before their fat old Magnavox, plying the vintage joystick of her husband’s childhood Atari. Her husband, desperate for quality time with their son after returning from a deployment a year ago, had attempted to interest Adam in this outfit.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Adam released a long, slow breath and fixed her with a defiant grin.
“Stone-cold busted.” He tossed the joystick onto the floor, where it bounced unexpectedly. “I’m going out of my mind with boredom, and I can’t even text on that archaic piece of shit you gave me.”
“Watch the language.”
As he stared at the primitive graphics of Asteroids, light from the screen reflected in his irises, which gave him the dead, mechanical gaze of a shark.
Miles Escrow could not remember days this hot. As he listened to Stein go on about how the dinosaurs died out, he wondered if humans were reaching the limits of their current evolutionary stage. Regarding Titus Redmond, a vinyl-siding-installation specialist with a swollen gut, Miles thought, Here we have the height of evolution, Homo sapiens, which, as Stein had informed him on numerous occasions, meant “wise man.” If there were such a thing as the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, Miles theorized, maybe he’d survive the sweltering climate that was becoming the norm around there, making it well-nigh impossible to enjoy the great outdoors, with its super-mosquitoes and poisonous UV rays. In the meantime, he would spend his Saturday afternoon hunkered in the smoked chill of Lizard Man, wondering if he’d ever shake free of Tina Flame.
Though he suspected they’d bicker their way into a double-plot grave at Sunset Memory Gardens, he liked to fool himself with little escapades at Lizard Man—dalliances with single mothers and women estranged from their no-count men. On this summer afternoon with a heat index of 120, he’d zeroed in on Brandy Wellington, who was in better spirits of late, as her comatose cousin up at Palmetto Baptist had shown signs of consciousness.
“He looked right into his mama’s eyes,” said Brandy. “Asked her for a Coke and then zoned out again.”
“He can use the imperative voice logically,” said Stein. “A good sign.”
Brandy rolled her eyes and smirked at Miles.
“And that boy who’s gone missing,” she said. “Todd Spencer. I heard his mama found evidence that he’d been in his bedroom—a few drawers left open; some of his stuff missing.”
“What makes her so sure it was him?” said Stein.
“She said a mother could just tell.” Brandy Wellington blew an irate huff of smoke and examined her ebony fingernails, nails that matched her Elvira hair and black-widow ankle tattoo.
“No empirical evidence there,” said Stein, whereupon Miles and Brandy enjoyed a sweet, conspiratorial eye roll together, solving Miles’s dilemma over whether or not he ought to indulge in adult beverage number four.
Beth couldn’t help but feel a little spooked in the makeshift teen coma ward, for which a whole section of hospital had been corralled off to accommodate the rising number of cases. She’d been cleared for antipsychotic drug testing on five of the patients, and she was making her midnight rounds, checking their encephalographic data for signs of neurological change. Pausing to drink in the Pre-Raphaelite loveliness of a red-haired boy she called Sleeping Beauty, Beth waited for him to open his eyes, as he sometimes did in the wee hours. The sudden jolt of blue always startled her. He would stare at her for a few seconds before his flushed, pink eyelids slid back over the most spectacular set of ocular organs she’d ever seen.
He was an ethereal one, destined to bolt this shit town if he ever roused from his strange sleep, as had happened a total of three times nationally (including the case of Todd Spencer). Even spookier, all three teens had vanished before resurfacing elusively at various events, sending their respective towns into a delirium of tabloid speculation.
As Beth gazed down at Sleeping Beauty, she wondered if it was true that hormonal changes made pregnant women attracted to different kinds of men: unthreatening males with brotherly pheromones and kindred genetic codes. Beth Irving had no brothers, no sisters, only two stern religious parents who had prompted a predictable rebellion that had been nipped in the bud by an abortion and a full scholarship to Duke.
Though the organism that now brewed within her had recently advanced from zygotic to embryonic status, she had not allowed herself to make any decisions about its destiny, vowing to finish her research first. O
nce home amid the placid decor of her town house, its birch cabinets packed with stress-reducing organic teas, she’d make the hard decisions. Still, she couldn’t ignore the creature inside her, which imbued every cell in her body with nausea and made smells almost psychedelic. The aroma that rose from Sleeping Beauty, for instance, was an odd blend of hospital-grade disinfectant and some sweet, woodsy odor. All the comatose teens had weird breath—a pond funk with some obscure chemical component redolent of car exhaust. But the B6 pills were making the situation bearable.
She stood beside Sleeping Beauty for another minute and then moved on to the next room, which housed two girls, one of whom had been approved for antipsychotics. While adjusting Belinda Hammond’s EEG electrodes, she caught a glimmer of movement out in the corridor. Upon rushing into the hall, she saw a tall, slender figure in a pale hospital gown hovering a few inches above the polished vinyl floor. Rubbing her eyes and looking again, she saw nothing. Even though she had been sleeping poorly and had suffered several incidents of blotchy vision, even though she knew that security was on red alert due to the disappearance of Todd Spencer, she followed the figment into the snack room, where she detected a presence. There was only one other door leading out of the snack room, back behind the nurses’ station (which appeared to have been abandoned), and into corridor B.
Although this corridor required the swipe of a security card, the doors were propped open, an industrial cleaning cart parked nearby. In a corner, behind several wheeled shelves piled with broken computer equipment, a hospital janitor crouched. The janitor stood up and clutched at her neckline.
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