"How long? I'm really hungry. And thirsty."
"A little over three days. They said you'd come out of it, but I . . . I wasn't sure. Oh, Woody . . ." She cried and he held her until she straightened up again. "What happened? What were you doing? Were you . . . on something?"
"What, you mean drugs?"
"They found a needle mark on your arm."
He looked up at the ceiling, understanding. "That's how then, how he did it."
"Woody?"
He looked at her and his face trembled from the fear of what had visited him and the relief that he had not heeded it. "It was Keith. He was in the house. He must have drugged me or something. He wanted me to . . . to kill you." He didn't tell her about killing the children. He couldn't bear to say the words, and didn't want to terrify her further.
"I was standing over you, and I had to bring the knife down, I just had to. But I couldn't hurt you. He couldn't make me do that. So I stabbed myself instead. And the pain drove him away, drove the need out of my head." He held out his arms and she embraced him. "I never would have hurt you, Tracy. Never. No matter what. He couldn't make me do it."
A nurse came into the room then. Her surprised smile made her seem more attractive than she really was. "All right, Mrs. Robinson," she said with a laugh, "don't bruise the groceries. Glad to have you back with us, Mr. Robinson. Now you can sign my cassette."
It was another fifteen minutes before a doctor came in to examine Woody. He told him that the wound was healing nicely, but that they wanted him in the hospital for two more days. After that, he could go home, but would have to stay off his feet for another week.
"I'd be interested," said the doctor, "in knowing just exactly how you did it." He looked at Tracy. "Your wife tells me it was a bat."
Woody looked at Tracy. There hadn't been time for her to give him her story, so, as ever, he improvised. "That's right. One got in the house. I was trying to slap it down with a towel, but it always got right back up again. So I ran down to the kitchen and got a knife. Damn thing sat right on the edge of the bed. When I swung at it, it took off at my face, scared the hell out of me, and before I knew what happened, I had a knife in my leg. Pretty stupid."
The doctor nodded. "Do you ever indulge in recreational drugs, Mr. Robinson?"
"No," Woody answered with a firm shake of his head that made his neck ache. "I did the usual stuff years ago—grass, hash—but not for a long, long time. That's not part of my life."
The doctor nodded again. Woody thought he'd look perfect on the back ledge of somebody's car. "I had to ask. There were no drugs found in your blood or urine samples. But there was a needle mark. Left a pretty nasty bruise on your arm." He pointed to Woody's left arm, and Woody pushed up the short sleeve of the hospital gown to reveal a dark blue, mottled spot.
"I don't know how that happened," he said with a flatness intended to assure the doctor that further questioning would be futile. "I have no idea at all."
Chapter 35
Rose Parmalee had begun to feel sick.
It wasn't just the dopiness, the sense of lassitude that had bound her ever since she had been placed in the glass cage, ever since the men had caught her, stripped her, raped her over and over again. It wasn't due to that humiliation, or the assurance that she would never leave this place, whatever this place was, alive. It was even worse than that.
She had felt listless, her muscles refusing to obey her. Her appetite for the barely edible food they gave her diminished until she ate nothing at all, yet bloody diarrhea dripped from her, her sphincter muscles too weak to contain it. Lesions had broken out over her flesh, red blotches that opened if she so much as touched them, oozing a thin, pale yellow pus followed by blood. She knew she was dying, and it seemed so unfair.
When the men came in, wrapped in their suits of what looked like thick plastic, their heads encased in flat-topped hoods, she asked them why they were doing this to her, what was happening, how much longer it would go on. But their eyes, barely visible through the darkly transparent panels of glass that covered them, gave no answer, and their voices never spoke. If they did, the words never escaped the confines of their shroud-like garments.
They touched her with heavy gloves, lifted her arms to take her blood, wiped her filthy buttocks, held plastic mouthpieces over her mouth and nose to steal her breath, forced open her mouth and pressed swabs against her cheeks and tongue. Nothing was her own. Everything her body produced was theirs, and they took it as though it was their right. Everything but her tears, for she had no strength and no heart left to shed them.
She had wanted to kill herself, but she had not had the strength to smash her head against the glass walls, and they kept her nails cut too short for her to try and rip open her own throat, or claw at the veins in her wrists. When the sores began, she rubbed at them in the hopes that she would bleed to death, but when they saw what she was doing, they strapped her down. They would not even let her die.
"What did you do?" she asked them every time they came in. "Why did you do it?"
Goncourt. Goncourt was the name that she remembered with her mind that was gradually fragmenting, splitting apart under the torture, the disease, whatever they had done.
She remembered caring, centuries ago, about something other than death. The earth, and making it pure again. A silly and stupid dream, it seemed now. Nothing was clean, nothing was pure. The earth was a glass lined cage, and inside it everything was sickness and filth, and only death could end that. Only death could stop the pestilence. In her shattered, decaying mind, the cage was the earth, and the earth was a cage, and the only freedom was in death.
And when she had decided that, she tried to embrace the men who came into her cage, tried to lift her arms and tug off their hoods and take their flesh in her corrupted hands, breathe her fatal breath into their lungs, kiss and slay her slayers. But her hands, bound, would not rise. She had such a sacred gift to grant, but she could not, and the frustration chipped away even more of her sanity.
Until one day, when she heard a voice other than her own asking for answers, for reasons, for death. It sounded muffled, as if from far away, and her short-term memory bore the sensation of intrusions, her mouth and vagina and buttocks and flesh recalled recent violations of smooth metal and glass that felt as rough to her tattered skin as sisal.
And suddenly the voice became a sound she had not heard for so long that at first she thought she was dead and dreaming. It was a voice other than her own, and she was hearing it clearly, without the filter of heavy plastic, the muffling of ghostly hoods.
And the voice said her name, said Rose, and she worked and worked until she was able to open her eyes, the dry inner surfaces of her lids scraping the eyeball so that she would have screamed if she had the breath. Then she saw, through a red haze, his face.
She knew it, though the name that went with that face no longer lived in her rotting brain. She equated warmth and love and tenderness with the face, and thought that now, at last, this was death, and in another moment she knew it as his beautiful face became larger, swam into her sight like a bright planet, like the earth gleaming blue now, no longer red, and the sweet coolness of its seas touched her face, and its soft winds blew into her mouth and blew back out again, taking her breath, her life, her very soul, so that as she died she knew that she had saved it after all, that by taking her life, the sweet earth would live.
~*~
Keith knew he should put his headgear on quickly in case Billy Magruder re-entered, but he could not. He stood over her, entranced, breathing in the vile odor of her body, her last breath from riddled lungs, and found in it such ineffable sweetness that tears came to his eyes.
She knew. Somehow she knew why he was there, what he had come to do. He still tasted the bitter dryness of her lips on his own, and thought he could feel the virus dance joyously as it swirled into his lungs, swam into his veins, burrowed in his cells, claiming him. And its joy became his own as well, and he knew that what h
e had done was right. It meant his death, and the deaths of billions, but life for something far greater.
Keith pulled on the hood, turned it so that he could see through the transparent plastic plate, and connected the seals. He had purposely left the blood collection tube in the supply room, and when he and Magruder discovered it was missing, he had gestured to Magruder that he should exit the cell, remove his suit in the airlock, get the tube, and place it in the airlock for Keith. Magruder had shrugged in agreement, far from anxious to go through the complicated airlock procedure twice, especially since the end of their three-day shift was only an hour away. Strict procedures went by the board when it was time to punch out, and Keith knew that Magruder was one of the least punctilious of Goncourt's staff.
So he had been left alone for priceless and fatal minutes with Rose Parmalee, just long enough to take her blood and her kiss out into the world that was waiting for its deadly salvation.
The airborne virus had been introduced into her cell two weeks before, and the onset of illness, much to Freeman and Horst's dismay, had been immediate, her decline rapid. The selected gene had either failed to act as an antibody, or the virus had once again refused to obey the genetic commands imprinted upon it.
Whatever the reason, the search for the unique gene would have to be continued. This attempt had been a total failure, leaving the germs free to tear through her body like fire through dry grass. Never had a subject sickened so quickly. They took tests and samples every six hours, in order to trace the path of the illness, find the weakest breaches in the defense.
But now, thought Keith as he followed the painstaking procedures in the airlock, it didn't matter any longer. All the tests, all the cloning, all the experiments, none of it meant a thing.
He smiled as the tainted air was drawn from the chamber, and the bath of water washed his garb until nothing clung to the smooth plastic. Then the lock filled with filtered air, and the light went on, signaling that it was safe to remove the suit, which would be sterilized. He took it off and put it into the container, left the lock, dressed in his clothes, and carried the blood sample into the lab.
Magruder came up to him and said softly, "Dumbass. Freeman woulda checked on us while you were in there alone, we'd be dead."
We'd be dead.
Keith laughed gently, so much aware of the air leaving his lungs that he could almost see it as a pale cloud drifting toward Magruder's frowning face, surrounding the man's mouth and eyes, vanishing as Magruder breathed in Keith's breath, and the deadly things that flew on it.
I just killed you, he thought.
"What the fuck are you grinning at?"
Keith shook his head. "Nothin', Billy. Ain't nothin' funny 'bout a dead redneck."
"You know, Pete, you are fuckin' weird sometimes."
Don't crow, Keith thought. Not yet. You're not out of here yet."Well, you know," he said, "I just lost somebody close to me."
Magruder's face was softened by pity. "Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, man, I forgot. Sally was a helluva nice lady."
"She was indeed. Sometimes I guess I ain't myself."
"That Hastings was a real prick," Magruder said, as though that observation was the epitome of sympathy and empathy.
"He was that," Keith agreed, and patted Magruder's shoulder. "Gotta find Al. You have a good few days off now." Infect your family. Infect your friends.
Die in pain.
Burn in hell.
He found Freeman at his desk, going over the results of Rose Parmalee's tissue and blood samples. "Pete," he said. "So how'd the days go? Get through them all right?"
Keith nodded. "Work's good for you. Makes you forget things." He walked over to Freeman's desk, sat across from him, sighed a sigh of death at the man sitting less than three feet away, saw in his mind the virus enter the air and spread like blood in water. "The woman's damn near dead. Might be by now. Better have the next shift check on her soon's they come in."
Freeman stuck out a lower lip. Keith imagined the virus germs landing on it, some pressing into his mouth, others drifting up his nostrils, into his lungs, still others settling on his eyeballs, riding the mucous membrane like tiny boatmen into his system. "I thought we might have hit on it this time. Shame. Dr. Goncourt will be sorry to hear it."
"When'll you tell him?" Today. Please, today.
"Today. Right after your shift leaves."
"When you do . . ."
"Yes?"
"Well, just give him my best. If he remembers me."
"He'll remember you. You impressed him very much . . . the day you joined us."
"It's everything to me, Al. I can't tell you enough what being here means to me. I feel as though . . . it's changed my life."
There must have been something in Keith's smile that made Freeman self-conscious, for he glanced away and cleared his throat, and as he did, Keith imagined a cloud of death floating out onto the air from the man's mouth. "Well, that's . . . I'm glad to hear it. You're a good worker. You'll, uh, be at the funeral tomorrow? Most of the men are coming. And their families."
"That's good. It's good for a community to share . . . their grief. But I don't know. I don't think I'll be there."
"Why not?"
"Well, you may not think it to look at me, but that little gal's death hit me hard. Frankly, Al, I don't know if I could stand up to bein' there."
"I think I see," Freeman said. "And I don't think there's anybody who wouldn't understand, Pete."
"Thanks." Keith looked at the clock on the wall, and stood up. "Almost time to get checked through. You remember now, please give my best to Dr. Goncourt."
Say my name. Let it come into his face on the breath of my name.
"I'll do that, don't you worry."
"No worries. None at all."
Billy Magruder was first in line to be checked out. The two security men went over him carefully, patting him down everywhere a vial or a pack of tablets might be concealed. They were efficient and thorough, and Keith counted twenty slow breaths before they were finished with Magruder, passed him through, and turned to the next man in line.
Take your time, check their chests, their necks, come close to them, breathe slow and strong.
The air was shared, passed from one set of lungs to the next, drawn in, breathed out, passed along, and he wondered how long it would take them before the symptoms started to show, before they began to bleed and hurt. By that time he would be far away, beginning to bleed and hurt himself. But the sight of blood had never bothered him, pain had always been his lover, and his inevitable death, he knew, had only been postponed many times.
He talked to them as they finally patted him down, the last man in line, and they shared jokes and laughter and death in air.
Keith waited until midnight, then packed the few things he needed, left the rest, got in his car and drove away from Bone, Texas forever. He drove southeast again, to Houston. He drove and dreamed and wrote.
~*~
September 23, 1993:
It's free, and so am I. Death's messenger now, spreading the gospel of plague to all the nations.
It was much easier than I thought it would be. Maybe I wouldn't have had to do what I did to my old friends. Still, they posed a menace that I could not allow to exist. I think, however, that I was already tempered to the necessary hardness. Still, in the long run, no harm was done. Death will take us all now.
But if I had not done what I did to them, might I have lost heart at the end? Maybe I wouldn't have unsealed my hood, kissed her, drawn in the fragrance of Rose. Or maybe I would have after all.
My words and thoughts are disjointed—back and forth, first thinking one thing, then another. I wonder if it's the virus, already scurrying into my brain cells.
No. Probably not. It's more logical to assume that it's the effect of the terrible choice I've made, the great responsibility I've assumed in condemning most of my species to death. Better this way, though, quickly, in weeks and months, no longer. Since it exist
s for four hours outside a host, and with wind speeds of 50 mph, it's safe to assume that people living more than 200 miles away from cities and towns will survive, and will eventually find towns of the dead in which even the virus is dead, with nothing left to feed on.
Or perhaps it will live in the rotting tissues, waiting for more people to come. I don't know. There's so much about it I don't know. But I do know that it kills.
Even if I changed my mind now, went back, confessed everything, it would be too late. The men have gone home, kissed their wives, hugged their children, who have gone to other towns. No. Far too late. So I'll spread it quickly and without mercy, the Gaetan Dugas of the apocalypse.
~*~
Keith Aarons left his car in the Houston Intercontinental Airport parking lot, locking the keys inside it. Then he went to the international terminal and walked around for an hour, asking the waiting passengers questions about flights in different languages, trying to make them understand by coming closer and speaking directly into their faces, breathing the gift of death on wings to England, France, Japan, Germany, India.
Then he took his two pieces of baggage, and bought a ticket to Los Angeles International Airport. He planned to sleep on the plane so that he would be rested when he landed in L.A.
Part IV
Chapter 36
The next day, while Keith Aarons spoke to hundreds of international travelers at one of the world's busiest airports, Woody Robinson left the hospital. He balanced on one crutch to keep pressure off his healing right leg as he got into the car, and talked to his children all the way home.
Peter told him about the soccer games he had missed while he was in the hospital (Peter's team had won one, lost the other), and Louisa begged to be allowed to stay over at her friend Megan's the next weekend. He agreed gladly, happy to have some way to make up to them the nightmare that had occurred a few days before.
'They're resilient," Tracy told him later, as they sat on the deck overlooking the ocean. "They were so good the night it happened, did exactly what I told them. Didn't doubt it was an accident for a minute." She kept looking at the ocean, and felt for his hand. "I'm glad you're home. I've been scared."
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