She opened her eyes. The lower limit of her vision was obscured by clear plastic: something on her face. The world was turned sideways because her head was lying on a piece of wood.
ch-ch-ch-chuhhh/Shwhuhhhh
Her head was killing her. Everything smelled like lilies. Plastic on her face. She lifted an arm—far too heavy—and swatted at her nose but it didn’t work. She tried touching the thing on her face and found that her fingers didn’t work right. The fingertips felt numb, almost completely without sensation. She couldn’t grab the thing on her face, couldn’t get her fingers around it. Panicking a little she scrabbled at it with both hands until it fell away, hissing like a snake. She put her hands down on the wood of a bar and pushed until she was sitting up. Sitting up on a bar stool.
ch-ch-ch-ch
A mask—a kind of oxygen mask it looked like but it was decorated with a sticker of a day-glo flower. Tubing ran back to a metallic white tank bolted to the surface of the bar. There were other tanks, other masks: chromium red, cobalt blue, toxic green. She looked up, glanced around (killing her head as it whipped back and forth) and nearly fell backwards off her bar stool. Bar stool—bar stool—so she was in a bar. But. Not a regular bar. An oxygen bar, obviously. Why would she…?
ch-ch-ch-ch
She reached down and switched off the oxygen mask. The stench of lilies began to dissipate. It must have been mixed in with the compressed gas.
She put a bare foot down on the floor. And screamed. Or at least tried to. The sound that came out of her throat sounded more like a retch. She tried to lift up her foot to take a closer look at what she had just stepped in but found she couldn’t raise it to her facce. Of course she couldn’t! Normal people couldn’t do that. She was a normal person, she was pretty sure. She looked down. Her foot was covered in brownish-purple blood.
So was the floor of the oxygen bar. Blood everywhere, some of it still liquid and dark red. A slaughterhouse, she thought, you wouldn’t see something like that outside of a slaughterhouse. It had splattered in a broad oval pool centered on her bar stool, maybe ten feet wide, staining the orange shag carpet, matting down the fibers. Oh God.
She wanted to throw up, wanted to throw up everything she’d ever eaten but she couldn’t feel her stomach at all, it was just an icy void below her breasts and, and, she was trying very, very hard not to admit it to herself, but—
That was her blood.
She screamed and this time it worked. Blood covered her, dyeing her white clothes, sticking to her skin. It had poured down from a punctured vein in her shoulder, poured down in great gouts and she had run, she remembered now, she had run into the bar, she had run up to the bar but no one was around, the place was deserted and she was already having trouble breathing, her body unable to oxygenate itself because she’d already lost so much blood, she knew the symptoms, somehow she knew the symptoms of somebody about to pass out from anoxia, and the oxygen mask had been right there and.
And.
The memory ended as abruptly as it had begun. She studied it, tried to find details but details were there none. Just that she had been bleeding and she had run here and had trouble breathing so she had self-administered nearly pure oxygen. She tried to step down gingerly from the stool, knowing she was going to have to walk through the blood, trying not to scream again. Her throat was so dry it hurt.
Her leg slid out from beneath her, unable to accept her commands, and she clattered down to the floor, her bones bouncing off the bar, the stools, the carpet and she screamed again even though it didn’t really hurt, not that much, but she screamed because it seemed like if you were ever going to have a chance to scream that was it, when you were lying collapsed in a pool of your own blood and your hair had fallen down over your eyes. She screamed until there was no more air in her lungs.
The door of the bar swung open and she stopped screaming. She turned wild eyes to the light off the street and saw two kids there, black kids in basketball jerseys. One was taller than the other, maybe older. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t call out for help. The older kid disappeared but the younger one just stood there, staring at her, his facial features lost in silhouette.
Help me, she thought, please, help me, but he just stood there and stared.
THE NEXT MAD COW? Massive Outbreak of Scrapie in the American West Inflames the Fearful, the Fretful, and the Beef Industry Flacks. [“Gourmet” magazine, February 05]
“It’s going to be fine. Shh,” the policeman said, squatting next to her. A wood baton, a pair of handcuffs and a gun that looked like a toy dangled from his belt. He reached into a pouch at his back and took out a pair of disposable latex gloves. “Everything’s going to be alright. I just want to help you, okay?”
She nodded eagerly. Her eyes went wide when he touched her shoulder, probing painfully in the wound there. She could see herself in his mirrored sunglasses and she understood some of his reticence. Her tan was gone—just gone, her skin turned the color and consistency of old, mildew-damaged paper. Fine traceries of broken capillaries showed in her eyes and the skin around their sockets, a raccoon mask of dead blood. A prominent artery running from her jaw to beneath her left ear looked as if it had been painted on with eyeliner.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he told her. His name was EMERSON, according to the nameplate on his uniform, right above his badge, a bas relief of a pair of pistols crossed over a stylized Spanish mission. “Normally I’d call for an ambulance but I think we’d better just take you in the squad car. Can you walk?”
She didn’t know. Not in the same way she didn’t know who she was or what city she was in. Those were abstracts, easily defined and pigeonholed in the category of things she definitively did not know. Whether she could stand up was an open question, which was kind of a relief. Something she could find out.
Her body shuddered as she tried to put some weight on her feet, hauling herself upright by holding onto the bar stool. “Easy now. You’re probably feeling a little weak. Maybe a little light-headed too. That’s pretty common with this kind of injury.” Okay, enough, officer, she thought, but she kept her mouth closed. She needed it to grimace as she shifted her weight entirely onto her legs. Somehow she managed to stumble toward the door, supported on his arm, even though her knees kept locking up. Her muscles felt stiff in a way she knew they’d never felt before. Not so much a memory as an instinct, that, but it was something, and she was glad for it.
Outside another policeman was directing traffic away from the intersection. She glanced over and saw a pile of something on the street—old clothes, maybe fallen palm fronds or the tread off of a blown car tire or—oh. No. It was a body, a human body with a blue jacket draped over its face and chest. “Heh,” she gagged. “He’s the—”
“Shush now, little girl,” the cop said, trying to turn her away from the scene. There was more to it: chalk circles on the ground around pieces of brass. Spent shell casings. More police everywhere she looked—a severe-looking woman filling out a form on a clipboard. Others, mostly men, looking under cars and benches and potted palms, their hands gloved, tiny plastic bags in their hands. Gathering evidence. One cop sat on the hood of his car, his face in his hands while another rubbed slow circles on his back. “You only did your duty,” he said, and the one on the car hood took his hands away from his face, showing a look of absolute bleak horror.
Emerson pushed her into the back of a patrol car, pushing down on her head until her neck started to spasm but then she was in. He and another policeman—PANKIEWICZ—got into the front of the car.
Pankiewicz looked at her through the grille between the front and back of the car. She could barely see his face through the mesh. “How are you doing, Miss? You need any water or anything before we get going?”
She shook her head. “Hungry,” she croaked out. That was about what she could manage vocally. The word was disconnected from what was happening in her head but strangely not from her body. Her nausea had passed and her stomach growled audibl
y.
Pankiewicz grunted and turned this way and that as if looking for food. He opened the patrol car’s glove box and took something out. He had to get out of the car and come around to the back to give it to her—a snack-sized box of cookies. She took it gratefully. Once he was back inside Emerson got the car going and they headed out onto a highway, the flashers on but not the siren.
She shoved a cookie into her mouth with numbed fingers and crunched down on it. She couldn’t really taste it but a feeling of warmth and health swept through her with each swallow. So good. She thrust her hand into the box to get another, ripping the cardboard.
“Do you have insurance, Miss?” Pankiewicz asked her, picking up a radio handset. “We need to know which hospital to take you to.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she mumbled, the words distorted by the three cookies she’d stacked up between her teeth.
“I’m afraid that until we get a democrat in the White House, it does,” Emerson said, darkly.
“Jesus, would you stop it?” Pankiewicz said. “Now’s not the time.” He turned to glance at her again, appraising her. Looking for something. “Am I right, Miss? Not when things are still so fucked up in Iraq. You don’t switch horses in mid-war. We need a strong leader more than ever.”
“I agree,” Emerson snickered. “Too bad we don’t have one right now. So, Miss. What’s your name, anyway?”
Her hands went automatically to a purse or a wallet but there was nothing in her pockets, nothing that could help her answer that question. Something told her to lie. Not a voice in her head so much as a rising tide of panic that came out of nowhere. Unfortunately she had no idea what to say.
While they had been bantering she had devoured the entire box of cookies. She looked down at the empty package which she had reduced to bits of shredded cardboard and wax paper. She’d even sucked out all the crumbs.
“Nilla,” she said. Nil. Nothing. She had nothing of herself left, after all. She would have to create something new and the box of cookies, the first purely good thing she’d found, made the perfect inspiration.
She wished she had some more. Not cookies necessarily. More food, real food.
Five minutes later they reached the hospital only to find the emergency room entrance blocked by two ambulances that had collided with each other. Nilla could see into one of them through its open rear doors. Nobody was inside but the interior lights were on. Blood dripped from the rear bumper.
“There must be something bad going down. This place looks swamped,” Pankiewicz said. He popped open his door before the patrol car had even come to a stop. He opened her door and helped her out. She leaned on him as they made their way around the ambulances and into the emergency room.
“LARGEST EVER” MANHUNT IN NEVADA DESERT TURNS UP GRUESOME RESULT: Partial Body Found, Feared to be Shawna, Awaits Identification [CNN.com breaking story alert, 3/17/05]
One look at the blood on Nilla’s shirt and they put her in an examination room right away—really just a cubicle, hemmed in by mobile partitions, barely big enough for her narrow bed. Outside the moans of the injured and the sick never stopped. Shadows crossed the fabric of the partition, the acoustic ceiling tiles above her head. A nurse in a jacket decorated with panda bears came in and attached a plastic clip to her finger but didn’t have time to turn on the attached machine before she was called away. When she turned to go the back of her jacket showed a bloody hand print.
Nilla heard screaming a minute later and what had to be a gunshot. After a long, long time of holding her breath and waiting to hear what came next an orderly in a white uniform opened her partition and stormed inside. “I’m really sorry about this, Ma’am,” he said. He spoke with a West Indian accent, syncopated and musical. He had a shaved head and he looked exhausted. Draped across his arm were countless thick loops of thick yellow nylon. He tore one open by its Velcro closure and started feeding it through the tubular frame of her bed.
“That’s not necessary,” she insisted as he fastened the loop around her left wrist. A rivulet of icy cold ran down her back and her body twitched. Her head was pounding.
He just shook his head. “Lots of people get them, Ma’am, I’m just doing my job.” He bit his lip before securing her right wrist, perhaps wondering if she was going to fight him. The thought hadn’t crossed Nilla’s mind until then. “It’s rabies, we think.”
“Rabies? You think it’s rabies?” she repeated, her voice shrill. “What the hell is going on? I haven’t even seen a doctor yet!” Fear rattled inside of her emptiness, desperation at being imprisoned in a ward full of slavering lunatics. This was a hospital, goddamnit! They were supposed to help her. “Get away from me!”
“Ma’am, you’ve got a textbook pattern of bite marks on your shoulder,” he said quietly, with infinite delicacy. “Ma’am, I have a gag here, too. That you don’t have to get, if you cooperate.”
It was a second gunshot, though, that convinced her. Together they looked up—and then their eyes met and she knew he was deadly serious. Something was happening outside, something very bad, and the orderly didn’t know any more than she did but he intended to complete his task one way or another. He tied down her ankles and then turned to go. “Thank you, Ma’am,” he whispered, as if he didn’t know what else to say.
“Tonight the Sixteenth Street pedestrian mall is closed to foot traffic. Police cars blockaded the popular shopping destination after reports of dangerous animals on the loose. Our action reporting team is on the way to downtown right now, and we’ll have film as it becomes available. Meanwhile, here’s Chip with local pro team action. Chip?” [9News (Denver) Evening Broadcast, 3/17/05]
Long thin stratus clouds turned the air the color of burnished metal. As he rose toward the tree-line the oxygen grew so thin Dick was panting as he crested the slope. Up top no trees grew at all, just scattered patches of lichen like greenish doilies glued to the rock. Thankfully the track went over the ridge just ahead and started downhill again, heading for a narrow valley below so thickly packed with pine trees that when the wind stirred them the valley looked like a bowl filled with shimmering green water. There were buildings tucked away amongst the trees, modest clapboard structures of a kind that had been built in the mountains for over a century. He could mostly see the roofs, warped ranks of split-wood shingles weathered by the sun until they were colorless, veined with silver and dry as picked bones.
Dick paused at the ridge line to drink some water from his day pack and phone in to his field office. He reached a teenage intern who swore he was writing down Dick’s GPS coordinates but who was probably just doodling on NIH stationery. Dick didn’t suppose it mattered too much. It was standard practice to report one’s position on a regular basis—the best way to die up in the mountains was to have nobody know where you were—but he was no more than a quarter mile from the road and even if a snowstorm came through in the next few hours he was certain he could make it back alright. He’d lived through some bad scrapes in the Rockies and always he’d come through alright. “Do we have a phone number for my next interview?” he asked, pretty sure the answer would be no: there were no phone lines or satellite dishes attached to the buildings down in the valley, his next destination.
“Uh, uh, no,” the intern replied after paging inexpertly through Dick’s own calendar. “Mrs. Skye, right? Yeah, uh, she said she, uh, I can’t really read your hand-writing but it looks like she walked into town to use a payphone.”
Dick nodded and hung up. He remembered now—he’d received the message himself from the field office’s voice mail system. This was a scrapie call. Scrapie was becoming the lion’s share of Dick’s business. Scrapie: a fatal and nasty disease of sheep and sometimes goats. Named for its victims’ habit of scraping their skin off against trees and rocks. Most ranchers never bothered to report it when they saw it—the disease wasn’t traditionally infectious, spreading over a span of generations instead of months. By the time a shepherd finally panicked and called for help the il
lness had usually compromised an entire flock.
Those calls were coming more and more frequently, which was truly scary to someone like Dick who knew the numbers. Nearly ten per cent of Colorado’s sheep were potentially infected, and that was just the known cases. Mad Cow disease, a related illness, had decimated the livestock population in England a few years back and he fully expected a similar disaster in American sheep within the decade.
Dick knew enough to assume the worst and he expected to find that Mrs. Skye’s sheep would have to be destroyed and the carcasses incinerated. He didn’t exactly skip down the path into the sheltered valley. It was tough to be grim on that track, though, with the sunlight streaming down through the branches in long dusty shafts, with the musty smell of pine needles baking in the warmth of spring mingling with the fresh winter smell of powdery snow. He had a smile on his face when he approached the main house. “Hello!” he called while he was still a hundred yards away. “Hello there!” In this part of the West, in such a secluded spot, you made a point of announcing your presence well before you arrived. You had to assume that everyone you visited was heavily armed and unfond of intruders. “Hello! Mrs. Skye?”
The house had seen better days. Its clapboard walls looked sturdy enough but its windows had been broken in several places and replaced with butcher paper and duct tape. Pine needles littered the covered porch where a cord of fire wood had collapsed and spilled out into the yard. Broken and rusted farm implements hung from the porch rafters—sickles and mallets and hoes as well as some nasty bits of iron specific to sheep herders, like a mulesing saw and a tooth grinder. The tools looked hand-made. “Hello!” Dick shouted, as loud as he could.
A woman holding a hatchet came around the side of the house and squinted at him. She wore a tie-dyed quilted jacket and her long white hair played around her shoulders in thin strands. Her face looked like a contour map of the mountains around her, filled with lines and blotchy shading. “You,” she called out to him. “You from the Health department?”
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