He takes the first sucking breath he might have taken in a minute. His head buzzes with blood and his hand is over his heart and his foot is jammed against the brake so hard his leg is cramping up.
Before he can decide whether to knock the gearshift into park or reverse, the door swings open. He is staring into the muzzle of a pistol. His eyes have trouble focusing on the woman beyond it, her face as narrow as a blade. “Kill the ignition and get on the ground,” she says.
Earlier that day, he stood in his room, his closet door hanging ajar. In his hand was the T-shirt. The one he was wearing that day on the plane. A continent of blood dried across it. They cut it off him and tossed it in a plastic biohazard bag that he later swiped on impulse and hid away. He doesn’t know why. Maybe the same thing that compels people to keep a lost tooth in an envelope or an appendix in a glass jar. It seemed important. He held the shirt up, stiff and rust colored, like a second skin he had outgrown. It smelled like metal and sharpened his breathing and made him feel stabbed through with shame. He balled it up, bits of blood flaking off it, and shoved it into the back corner of his closet and covered it with a magazine.
Now he has another shirt to add to the collection, its fabric ripped and spotted red along his left shoulder. A smear of dirt runs along the belly from when the woman shoved him and he stumbled and fell and caught himself with an outstretched hand.
“Why did you come back? What are you doing here?” she says and kicks him in the hip. “Speak.”
Pricks of pain bother his shoulder when he pushes himself into a seated position. The woman is standing over him with the pistol an inch from his eye, and then closer still, so that his vision waters and he can smell the gun oil. His voice comes out strangled when he says he wanted to check on her, that’s all, to see if she was all right.
She cocks her head, searching his face. “Bad choice.” She motions with the gun, tells him to get up, walk ahead of her. With the Jeep ticking behind them, they start off in the direction of the cabin. He puts his hands in his pockets and she says, no, keep them out and keep walking. A cold wind blows and a gray dust devil rises from the gravel and twists its way toward him and batters him with its grit.
The cabin, smaller than he remembers it, raised foundation, railed-in porch. The woman tells him to open the door and he does and a slab of light falls across the floor, punched through with his shadow, and then the woman’s, when she comes up behind him and nudges him forward, the pistol biting his spine.
The girl is waiting for him. The girl, no longer transformed. Lights off, curled up on the couch, her posture hunched over, as though she has a hook inside her. She wears a gray hooded sweatshirt and black sweatpants. Her sandy hair is chopped short now, and though he doesn’t like that look on everybody, he likes it on her. Her nose and cheeks are dusted with freckles that get lost in the fresh bruises darkening her face—the effect of transforming. She sucks at her mouth and runs a tongue along her teeth. A dime of blood has dried beneath her lips and she knuckles it away.
“It hurts,” she says to the woman.
“Get used to it.”
The air smells stale. Dust and grease and body odor. The woman snaps on a lamp and splashes the room with light, and it is then that he notices the boarded-up windows, making the small room seem even smaller, a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a bureau, and barely space for their three bodies. The woman closes the door behind them, twists the deadbolt into place. The high ceiling with exposed rafters is the only thing that fights the claustrophobia.
The girl looks at him for the first time since he entered the cabin, her eyes red puddles. “Why did you come back?”
“I wanted to see you.”
A small smile dies as soon as it forms. “You shouldn’t have.”
The woman, still behind him, says, “I told you you were stupid to bring him here.”
“Too late for that.”
He feels the gun at his ear. It seems to give off its own noise, an undersound, like a struck tuning fork. “But not too late to put a bullet in his head.”
Some silent message seems to pass between the girl and the woman. They leave him in the living room—the woman first patting him down, telling him he cannot run fast enough to escape her, so don’t bother—and retreat to the back of the cabin, thunking closed a door behind them.
He can hear their voices snapping back and forth, but not what they say. His initial fear has faded, replaced by a sickening confusion. She is a lycan. She scratched him, but he thinks—he hopes—the disease spreads only through blood, through sex.
She is what his father fights. She is what Max rails against. She is what brought down three planes and their passengers. The face of the plague, the creature made monstrous in so many novels and films and cop dramas and comic books—
But now she’s just a girl with choppy hair, wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, who walks past him, opens the door, and says, “Come on.” When he doesn’t follow, she stops there, hand on the knob, framed in a rectangle of daylight, and looks back at him. “Come on already.”
They walk from the cabin and into the dark breadth of trees. The ground is dusted with snow. She doesn’t look back at him—she just assumes he will follow—and he does. He glances over his shoulder, just before the cabin disappears from sight, and sees the woman standing on the porch, watching them go.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” He isn’t sure whether this is a joke. No one knows he is here and he can’t help but imagine his body buried somewhere deep in the woods, a little rock for a marker.
Chapter 20
THE TALL MAN climbs out of his Lincoln Town Car, his beltline nearly parallel with the roof of the car. He wears a long-sleeve button-down wrinkled from the long drive. His jacket is folded neatly over the passenger seat, and he pulls it out now and meticulously brushes the lint off it before sliding one arm and then the other into its sleeves. His head is hairless, not because he shaves his head clean every morning, but because he has been burned terribly. His skin has the wrinkly gloss of chewed bubblegum. It isn’t clear where his lips begin and end. His dark eyes appear lidless. His nose is small and upturned and from a distance appears like no nose at all, slitted like a skull.
Three police cruisers, a Forest Service Bronco, and a forensics van are parked nearby, in a parking lot corralled by a split-rail fence. A sign hangs from a post—a varnished block of wood with the letters carved out of it—Blood Bath Hot Springs. A rime of snow coats the letters.
The half-mile trail takes him no time to walk, his long legs scissoring quickly, his black wing tips dusted red when the pines open up into a rocky clearing busy with police. Tendrils of steam come off the springs as if something beneath their surface is alive and breathing. The smell of sulfur, like eggs on their way to going bad, is such that more than a few men have their shirts tented over their noses.
They don’t have enough tape to cordon off the crime scene. So there is a strip of black and yellow hanging across the trailhead. Most would duck under it, but the Tall Man steps over. A goateed man in a black North Face fleece approaches him with a question on his face he doesn’t have to ask. The Tall Man already has his identification out, and the goateed man nods at it and says, “Never seen you before.”
“You wouldn’t have.” His voice is baritone, every word he speaks cleanly enunciated.
The policeman is studying the Tall Man, arrested by the sight of him. He eventually says his name is Don and identifies himself as a sheriff’s deputy. He pulls out a pack of Juicy Fruit and pops a piece in his mouth and jaws at it. “You come from the office in Portland or Salem?”
“Neither.”
The deputy chews the gum another moment. “All right. Be a mysterious asshole. Let me know what you need to know.”
The bodies are several days’ dead. They would have been perfectly preserved except for the heat of the springs. As is, their skin is blackened and occasionally split red from swelling, like a hot dog left too long on the
grill. The severed head of an old man, his mouth gaping open, peers at the Tall Man from the top of a spiked boulder. Here is a body of a woman splayed like an X, her belly hollowed out, a brown-and-yellow tangle of intestines piled nearby.
Policemen in blue Windbreakers snap photos. The flashes explode. The ground is uneven with red blistery rocks that their boots thud against often and that send them stumbling forward. Except for the Tall Man, who walks slowly and cleanly around the springs, stepping over bodies, balancing on the rocks, sometimes turning in a circle to look thoughtfully off into the woods.
He spots something in the red puddle of spring water. A naked body, boiled and egg white, floating belly-up. Don stands nearby, talking into a handheld, and when he ends the conversation, he looks at the Tall Man looking at the body. “Lycans.”
“I am aware.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking about how, when I was in college, I thought I was going to be a volcanologist. Isn’t that a funny thing to want to be? There is something about them, volcanoes, that has always appealed to me. I have stood at the smoking rim of Saint Helens and flown a helicopter over Kilauea and stared down into its terrible orange eye. In the end, I didn’t have the head for chemistry and physics, but I took enough classes and read enough books to know that eruption is about force and time.” He visors his eyes with his hand and looks at the cloud-shrouded mountains above them. “Did you know that the Three Sisters, even though they are quiescent, have magmatic activity beneath them? Did you know that their elevation changes, sometimes by several inches, every year? They will erupt again, and this very place we are presently standing in will be a bright-red sea. It is only a matter of time.”
The head of the body is sunken, barely visible in the red murkiness, but when the Tall Man dips his foot into the spring, as if testing the water, to toe the body, it bobs upward and the face gapes back at him, looking like a pencil drawing smeared over by wet fingers.
“Force and time.”
Chapter 21
NEAL DESAI’S DAUGHTER is having one of her dark days. That’s what his wife tells him over the phone, asking him to come home early if he can. His daughter needs him. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.” But then his lab work distracts him and the next time he glances at the clock it is seven thirty. There are no windows here. Hours often pass without him lifting his head from a microscope or computer. Another missed meal. Another night coming home to an upset wife, her face hidden behind a novel or focused on the TV turned up too loud.
He works in the Pacific Northwest Regional Biocontainment Laboratory in the Infectious Disease Research Center. They are part of the University of Oregon, but located outside Eugene, a collection of mostly windowless concrete buildings surrounded by electrified barbed wire and patrolled by armed security guards. From a distance his workplace could easily be mistaken for a prison.
His title is professor, but aside from a few lectures a year, he does not teach, his primary duty research. The center houses five barns and ten acres of pasture, and today he is supervising his graduate students and postdocs as they inoculate calves. They are sedated with xylazine, a midline incision is made in the skull and a hole drilled through the calvarium, and then the inoculum is injected into the midbrain via a disposable needle. The incision is closed with a single suture, and the surgical instruments, including the drill bits, are disposed of in a hazmat bag. You can’t be too careful when you’re deliberately infecting an animal with prions.
This is his specialty, prions, and as interested as he is in mad cow and chronic wasting disease, most of his research over the past ten years has concerned lobos.
His daughter, Sridavi, is a lost girl. That’s how he thinks of her—though really she is not so much a girl anymore at twenty-two. Her eyes swim with drugs. Her skin always has a sheen of sweat to it. Her bones press against her skin so harshly he fears they might cut through. The black smears beneath her eyes darken her otherwise yellowish complexion. Looking at her makes him feel scraped out by something sharp, a wound that no suture can help heal.
Ten years ago, he heard a crash in her room followed by a banshee scream. Her door was locked and she did not respond when he knocked or called her name, so he splintered the hinges with his weight. He has always been a big man, though not as big then as he is now, drinking gallons of sugary coffee, regularly peeling open candy bars for the rush that keeps him going all these long hours.
He barged into his daughter’s room and found the bookcase overturned and a pair of pants poking beneath it so that at first he thought her crushed. A growl rose from the corner. He spotted her then, at the head of her bed, curled up in a ball nearly curtained by her long black hair. His relief was short-lived. When he called out her name again, her hair parted and a demon’s face emerged from it, the eyes and mouth pocketed with blood.
He knew immediately what had befallen her even though he did not want to believe it. He should have retreated from the room, drawn closed the broken door, but he ran to her instead, stumbling over the mess of books, saying, no, no, no, as if to chase the demon out of her.
She sprang off her bed and he held out his arms to greet her. The impact knocked them both to the floor, where she clawed at him, parting the buttons of his shirt, flaying the skin from his chest, as if to tear the heart from him.
Though Neal outweighed his daughter by more than a hundred pounds, he could barely hold her down, her body rigid and humming with power, as if he were wrestling a sprung diving board. His wife stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth, and he told her to hurry, damn it, call 911.
And while he waited for the sirens to wail, for the police to tromp down the hallway with a tranquilizer syringe, while his daughter bucked against him and he strangled away her snapping jaw, his chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the shredded skin and blood pouring from it.
He strips off his booties and hazmat suit and tosses them in a bagged bin. He punches his personal code into the keypad and the light flashes green and the door unlocks with the shunk of the automatic deadbolt and he enters a white-tiled room and strips off his shoes and socks and underwear and undershirt and tosses them in another bin before standing under a blistering shower and scrubbing off and toweling dry and then heading into the locker room, where he spins his combo and yanks the lock and pulls out his gym bag and dresses in jeans and a long-sleeve collared Izod, a birthday present from his wife, not that he has any time or desire to golf anymore. His jacket he drapes over his arm.
He signs out with the night secretary, a woman named Beatrice, whose pink scalp glows through her thinning red hair. She buzzes him out of the lab and into a short gray hallway, undecorated except for a plastic ficus tree, its leaves leavened with dust. At the end of the hallway, a metal detector and X-ray machine. He says hello to the security guard, one of several posted at every building, then empties his pockets and tosses his bag on the conveyer and picks it up on the other side and says so long. He gets buzzed through another door and heads not into a reception area—they rarely see visitors here—but directly into the chill of the night.
He knows the Willamette Valley is temperate compared to the other side of the state, where he hears a snowstorm is dropping several inches tonight, but even after thirty years of living here, he can’t get used to the temperature dropping below fifty. The air is misting, a hesitant rain. He zips his jacket so quickly that the metal bites his neck, what his wife teasingly calls his second chin. He checks his fingers for blood when he walks a winding concrete path that takes him to the gate.
He can hear the electricity humming in the fence when he approaches. The guard here sits behind a sliding Plexiglas window that he opens to hand Neal a clipboard and pen. He smacks Nicorette and makes small talk about the Trail Blazers sucking it up again as Neal signs out. On his desk, a mess of log sheets and several television screens that offer fish-eye views of the center. The gate buzzes open and the two men wish each other good night.
The space behind his eyes throbs with the exhaustion of the day and the anticipation of what awaits him at home, his daughter likely glassy-eyed and catatonic and soiling herself from some combination of snorting too much Volpexx and smoking too much of the medical marijuana she’s prescribed. The last thing he wants to do is talk to someone—the gauntlet of security was bad enough—so he loudly sighs when he hears his name, “Dr. Desai?”
He turns and sees that the voice comes from the SUV next to his, a silver Chevy Equinox, its window down and dome light on, the soft yellow glow illuminating a round face that appears almost childish except for the wrinkles framing his mouth and the gray hairs collaring an otherwise bald head. “I’m sorry to bother you at this late hour.” He holds out a hand that is small and damp when Neal hesitantly shakes it. “But I have a business proposition for you.”
At the McMenamins brewpub, along the Willamette River, they sit by the rain-dotted window. A bridge reaches over the water and the lights staggered across it diamond the ripples beneath. Neal turns down the craft beer on special tonight, a nut brown, and orders tea instead.
The man—Augustus—folds his hands on the table, one on top of the other, as if they were napkins. “Are you Muslim?”
He is not. He is nothing. “I am exhausted.”
The waiter brings an ale for Augustus and a tray for Neal on which rests a small ceramic pot and an assortment of tea bags arranged like a fan. The waiter has a forked goatee and wears a hemp bracelet. He pulls a pen and pad from his apron and says, “And will we be ordering anything to eat this evening?”
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