Thrall

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Jesse held his arms out for balance, inching toward Tom. “Talk about turning the Thrall Police Department on its ear. Shit like this’ll set the donuts rolling.” He snickered again as his feet pulled him toward the front desk, a Formica partition against the back wall that had caved in halfway down its length. He landed with a huff against it, his backpack sliding off his shoulder and thumping against the top surface. He slid down toward the middle, and peered over. The smile faded from his face.

  A slumped husk of a corpse sat propped against the wall. A policeman’s hat covered the shriveled face, but the spray of dark brown and gray that fanned out behind the head gave Jesse the impression that a better part of the head was probably gone. One desiccated hand still clutched a black handgun. In the corpse’s lap was a Thrall PD police badge.

  “Shit,” Jesse said. He felt the others behind him—almost felt their humor grow cold in their mouths and faces. He figured they were thinking the same thing that he was. Cops had firepower. They had training. They had, ostensibly, the means to serve and protect. And it looked like they had given up, too. Given in to the crazy-sickness.

  He listened to the others’ quiet breathing for a moment before saying, “This probably isn’t a good sign.”

  “Let’s go, Jesse.” Nadia touched his shoulder. “Let’s find those records.”

  “Could be bullets in that gun,” Tom said in a distant tone.

  “Leave them.” Nadia sounded disgusted by the idea of taking them. “If the officer has bullets in that gun, let him have them. Just let him keep them.” She tugged Jesse’s arm gently. “Come on, okay? Stop gawking at the guy.”

  Finally, Jesse turned away. His thoughts returned to Mia and Caitlyn, and the dull gnawing of guilt in his gut.

  Murdock’s gaze was focused intently on him. “You know, in spite of what I said back there, about it being useless to tell anyone what we found—the hardest thing for me about waking up every morning in this place is knowing I was, in a way, responsible for everyone, and knowing that I didn’t save anyone. Do you understand?”

  Jesse nodded. “I think I know that feeling.”

  “For what it’s worth, you did save one,” Murdock answered softly, gesturing at his own gun at his side. “And there’s nothing to say you won’t save more.”

  “Thanks, Murdock.” Jesse clapped him on the shoulder. Then he let Nadia propel him toward the door to the left of the desk. Reaching for the knob, he let out a long breath, considered saying something to try to recapture that laughter, and decided against it. It had felt good to laugh, as good as a much-needed drink of water on a hot day, or an orgasm on a cold night. But the moment was gone, and even if he tried, it would be a mummer-shade of laughter now, a forced and ugly thing. A lot of his life had been like that—brief glimpses of happiness whose windows of opportunity came and went before he could fully realize them. Chances he was offered and regretted never taking. People and love and laughter that he had and lost and might never have again. Things he couldn’t ever reproduce with the same genuineness and clarity as they originally possessed.

  He opened the door, and the others followed him silently inside.

  ***

  As Carpenter walked, Jesse’s car keys jingled in his hand. The staccato of his quick steps against the pavement was louder, though, like the town had quieted to listen just for that, to keep tabs on his movements. Carpenter tossed the keys up and caught them, silencing the jingle. His eyes scanned the sky above his head. Dusk was coming on fast—too fast for the time of day. That was how it went in Thrall—the nights were way too long and the days way too short. What was it now, three o’clock? Four? How long had they been tucked away inside the museum? Still, the time didn’t matter too much. The Raw could roll in like a tarp over their heads and for all intents and purposes, it would be night.

  Night like endless space, a little slice of home for the beast.

  Although the sky hadn’t quite reached the same dimness yet, Carpenter knew it would be a dusk from the past. It would be dark blue tinged with orange and pink that somehow define the depth and breadth of the sky and the strange unknown beyond in a way that sunny midday couldn’t. When Annie had died, it had been that kind of claustrophobic blue, thick and crackling with the static of oncoming night. That had been a summer dusk, though, when Annie died. The crickets had chirped a concert that had reminded him of those weeklong trips in August to Seaside when Ryan had been a boy. He remembered wishing that night that he’d just taken them all and moved down to the beach somewhere, anywhere, far beyond the poisonous reach of Thrall.

  That Murdock fellow could say Thrall was alive, and Carpenter wouldn’t argue it. But he suspected—and he got the impression Jesse thought so, too—that Thrall was more than just a living entity, trying to make its own way. It was a plague carrier. It spread its own kind of sickness, a tumorous insanity thriving on sadness and hatred. It made the people of Thrall weak. In a sense, it was just like the cancer that killed his Annie. And it intended to reproduce and keep on spreading that sickness until its parasites saw to it that no one was left.

  Then what? Would Thrall—and God forbid, other towns like it—launch back into space? Would they drift for years, searching for other planets bearing a new supply of life to waste?

  The concept of Thrall’s sickness brought back thoughts of Annie. He’d watched over her those last few hours of her life, feeling dirty. Death was such an intimate thing, and there he was, spying on her while her invisible companion of so many long months thrust into her, hurting her. He supposed cancer was like that in the end, thrusting death into a body over and over until the body was spent. After she’d passed, he sat a long time on the back porch, watching that blue in the sky grow deeper and the crickets chirp louder and the humid scent of August grow heavy beneath the brightening moon. He’d realized that very night, before the blood on Main Street or any of the rest of it, that Annie and Ryan never had a chance. Those trips to Seaside had been flukes. Sheer luck and timing, was all. Annie, Ryan and his wife, Melody—they were Thrall-born and bred. They would never really be allowed to leave. He’d known that even then. Thrall, the faceless actor. Thrall, the stage. Thrall, the playwright of the greatest tragedy he’d ever seen. Thrall had murdered his family.

  It had started with the two tons of Chevy steel that had mowed Ryan down like a blade of grass. Carpenter almost understood why the driver had kicked back a good half-dozen whiskey sours and some beers; he’d been with Annie long enough to be able to imagine how painful a divorce must be. The driver was in the midst of a rough one, a real biter, as his own dad used to call them. But the reason the soon-to-be-single man gave at the trial for swerving off the road had been unforgivably absurd, drunk or not.

  Dolls, he’d said, and Carpenter had wanted to ring his neck. Dolls, for Christ Almighty’s sake. The man swore up and down that he’d seen broken dolls running across the street. He thought at first they might be children. To avoid them, he’d cut the wheel and lost control right around where Ryan was finishing out his evening jog. He ended up pinning Ryan to a tree instead of one of those imaginary dolls.

  Melody never recovered. Even the sight of her beautiful baby girl couldn’t pull her out of her depression. Carpenter had grown to love the young woman like a daughter. She was pretty and soft, frail really, with overlarge eyes and an easy smile. Such a tiny thing, shuddering in the wake of her memories of youth. Her strengths had been primarily focused on Ryan; she was his support, his unwavering encouragement, his source of unbroken love and affection. Without him, those strengths were sapped away.

  Melody had followed Ryan shortly after the trial with a one-way ticket on the overdose express.

  When Annie died three years later, Carpenter felt all their deaths at once. All the tears half-shed, all the questions to an indifferent God half-uttered—everything came flooding back. He cried, long and hard, cursing between sobs at the town that had taken everything from him.

  Then he’d felt a little arm aro
und his shoulders, and a little hand administering comforting pats on his back.

  “Don’t cry, Grandpa. Gramma’s boo-boos’re gone an’ she got Mommy an’ Daddy to take care of now. An’ you have me.”

  The earnestness in that little voice had squeezed hard at his lungs and heart. He wrapped his arms around his granddaughter and held her tightly.

  Not everything is gone, a voice inside said. Not everything.

  “You’re right, baby. You’re right. I’ve got you now. Grandpa’s got you.”

  Carpenter turned onto North Main and headed south in the direction of Wainright. It was still a ways to go before he reached that car. He could feel stiffness in his knees and across the small of his back. He’d done a lot of walking since Thrall turned sour on him, so it wasn’t the physical exertion, nor was it, amazingly enough, arthritis that he felt. No, this was the blessedly rare ache that meant something was going to happen. It foretold bad news and bad storms and the approach of the Raw.

  He hadn’t paid all that much attention to the aches when they had preceded word of family deaths or the post-office lay-offs or the house fires that ravaged that whole area around Endicott. He took little notice, if any, even when those pains struck before newsworthy events, like the time that the Hardley boy had gone missing. As if cosmic forces needed to beat him over the head with the idea, he’d gotten the aches the day of the disappearances at the Grocer-Rite!, and still hadn’t thought much about it. He and Annie had been there in the food store, and the pain in his knees had gotten so bad that he thought he would never make it back to the car. But he’d gotten them out of there. Annie had huddled close to him, sick even then with the early black tendrils of her cancer spidering through her, and they’d watched through the windshield of his Buick Skylark as the black hole that opened up in the middle of the air splintered the roof and shattered the glass of the frozen food cases and sucked up five people from the dairy aisle. But he’d dismissed the pains themselves as the creaks and groans of his aging body settling on its foundation.

  He’d gotten that same kind of ache the night Ryan was killed. He tried to chalk it up to arthritis—God, how he’d wanted it just to be arthritis, just once, and damn it all that it never was—but Annie trusted those aches far more than he had. She knew something had happened to Ryan before the police had even called the house. Just like she knew the results of her tests, even before she left for the appointment with the doctor. She knew by watching him, though he tried not to show how much pain his knees and back were giving him because he knew she was watching him. She’d left for the appointment with a small smile on her face but there were tears in her eyes. She already knew the diagnosis.

  Carpenter sighed. If he’d learned anything—besides, of course, not to trust anyone that ate raw hamburger—it was that sometimes the body knows best. Trust the instincts. Prepare for the biters.

  He passed the silent homes and small businesses to either side of Main, their old bones creaking together in the cool wind. There wasn’t much left to them, just sagging remnants of the time when they served a purpose. They still held their fronts up to the world (made at least the pretense of weathering the biters), but without that purpose, they were empty leftovers locked to a place that had sucked the meaning from their paint-chipped, vinyl-cracked shells.

  He thought of Celeste. Beautiful, bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked Celeste, who looked so much like Ryan, who in turn, looked so much like Annie. The ache had warned him about her, too.

  A year or so after Annie’s death, the pain in his back had woken him up one evening from a dead sleep. Since he was up, he’d gone into Celeste’s room to check on her. A gnawing throb settled into his back when he found she wasn’t there. He moved down the hall in the dark to check the bathroom. Since she’d graduated from training pull-ups to big girl underwear, she took great pride in using the toilet. But the panic flared when he saw the bathroom door open and the light off.

  Then he heard the shuffling sounds from the floor below. He gave a hundred faces to the noise as he raced down the stairs, his back screaming.

  He found her in the kitchen. Her blond curls and the soft, tiny slopes of her shoulders caught the moonlight. He was struck by how small and delicate she looked (like a ceramic doll, in fact, he thought now, although he pushed the thought away). She wore the nightgown with the lace straps—her favorite, because it reminded her, she said once, of a “Mommy kinda nightkown, with vi-lets on it an’ butterflights.” She crouched on the floor, eagerly scooping into her mouth something out of a foam package that looked, in the dim light, like Play-Doh.

  It didn’t smell like Play-Doh, though. It had a sour, metallic tinge to it.

  The girl cracked the foam and tossed plastic wrap aside. Something watery dribbled over the side of the package and pattered to the floor between her knees.

  “Celeste?” He’d been more than a little scared. Raising a little girl alone at his age was terrifying in and of itself. But something about this seemed above and beyond normal child-rearing surprises. “Celeste, baby, what are you doing?”

  “I’m hungry, Grandpa.” Her voice sounded too low, and thick with phlegm. “Hungry.”

  “Well, get off the floor, sweetie, and sit at the table there. If you’re that hungry, I’ll make you a sandwich, maybe, and some warm milk.” His knees cracked as he moved toward her, and pain shot up his legs. The scent hit him again, a feral smell, a blood smell, like oh my God, like raw meat she’s eating raw meat....

  His back constricted in painful throbs, threatening to collapse him. The simple thought that his granddaughter was gobbling raw meat like a wild animal repulsed him. But the look in those big blue eyes scared the hell out of him. She regarded him with a distinct lack of recognition and—he couldn’t fathom this but yeah, there it was: skittishness. Her chin dripped with the blood, watered down by melted ice, and chunks of raw chopped meat stuck to the smooth baby-skin of her cheeks. Grabbing a napkin out of the nearby napkin basket Annie’d picked up one summer in Seaside, he wiped her mouth. The look in her eyes morphed into something that was not quite hate, but animal wariness, to be sure. She didn’t trust him.

  “Celeste, why in God’s name are you eating that? You can’t eat raw meat! All kinds of germs live in meat that isn’t cooked, baby, and they can give you an awful, awful tummy-ache. Then we’d have to bring you to the hospital. You wouldn’t want that, right?” He reached for the chopped meat package, intent on taking it away from her.

  She scuttled back, pressing the package to her nightgown. “I’m hungry,” she said again, and this time, he was sure it wasn’t her voice. Couldn’t be. “Hungry.”

  “Celeste, you can’t—” He stopped. Her attention was focused behind him now. He followed her gaze over the sink to the kitchen window. The Raw rolled out over the glass like a spread of fiberglass insulation. It was his first good, hard look at the Raw, and it made him feel queasy in his stomach. Chunky shapes he couldn’t quite see pressed a sickly pinkness onto the panes and then swirled away.

  But something else bothered him about the Raw. It took a minute to click, but then he’d understood. The window pane had been hiked up an inch or two, and some of that pinkness had seeped in. It clung like pink fuzz to the faucet, the drainage rack, the counter space. It even misted the toaster and the coffee maker. As he watched, more of the Raw oozed in through the window. That was back before anyone was sure of anything about the Raw, but instinct had taken over. He leapt on the glass and slammed it down. It took a good portion of his strength; the window stuck something awful. So how had it been raised in the first place?

  “They’re hungry, too.” Her voice sounded small behind him, far away, almost, like she was speaking from the end of a long tunnel.

  He turned slowly back to her. “Give me the hamburger, Celeste.”

  “You told me I should aw’ways share.”

  “That’s right, honey. Share with me. Give Grandpa the package.”

  “Not you, Grandpa. I can’t sha
re with you. I have to share with them.” Her eyes fixed on the window again.

  “There’s no one out there, sweetie. No one goes out into the Raw.” Carpenter wasn’t sure he’d believed, even then, that the Raw was empty.

  She stood up slowly, shaking. As the moon hit her, he saw how pale she really was, and how sunken those chubby cherub cheeks had gotten. And the glassy look in her eyes gave him the insane idea that those blue irises weren’t hers, that some intangible part of her had been hollowed out. What had seeped in to replace it was nothing like his granddaughter.

  Carpenter shook the past out of his head and blinked its remnants from his eyes. He’d managed, on autopilot, to find Wainwright Terrace.

  Taking a deep breath, he walked a little faster, as if he could leave the unpleasant memories on the corner of Wainwright and Main.

  ***

  The room beyond the waiting area of the police station was carved by gray walls into low-rise cubicles. Each had a desk, a computer, a telephone, a chair, and a small lamp. They were arranged in clusters so that each shared a printer. A partition obscured most of the two doors on the left wall, but upon moving further into the room, they could see an observation window between the doors. The rooms behind the glass, each accessible from one of the doors, were separated by a gray brick wall. A small sign above the glass read “Interrogation rooms 3/4.” A third door against the back wall read WILLIAM STRABNER, CAPTAIN in gold and black stenciling on the frosted pane of glass. On the right wall stood another two doors. A long metal filing cabinet about chest height stood between them. A bulletin board hung above it, wallpapered in photocopied HAVE YOU SEEN ME? and MISSING fliers.

  A kind of dark purple ooze was splattered across everything. It looked to Jesse like someone had put a paint can in a Gravitron and let it fly around the station. The first layer had dried to a dark orchid, but there was a fresher, purpler layer on top. The stink of it still clung faintly to the air, reminiscent of rotting fruit. The heaviness of it curled the edges of official looking memos and ate through files, paperwork, and the random desk calendar of muscle cars or bikini babes that he could see on the various desks. The room kept with the mad tilt of the building, but each piece of furniture somehow remained in place. Nothing had slid to the wall, nor had the contents of any of the desks slid off, either. It was as if the furniture had been bolted to the floor, and each item carefully glued in place on top.