by Greg Egan
Reza’s uncle was on the other side of the country, and Beth had been divorced for years. But some of their friends would surely be able to spot the changes, backing up Kate’s assessment and ensuring the three victims got the treatment they needed.
Her phone rang. She stared at it for a while, then answered warily, “Chris? How are you?”
“I’m fine, Kate. But I’ve heard that people are worried about you.”
Fuck. Of all the colleagues she might have trusted to help her, Chris Santos had been top of the list, but he’d only had to speak two sentences to make it plain that he was infected too. And he was going to parrot Reza’s line that she was the problem? Kate resisted the urge to tell him she was having flashbacks to the time a gaggle of dimwitted scammers had called her one by one to say, “This is technical department of Windows operating system; we have detected a dangerous virus on your computer.” However many of them she told, in no uncertain terms, that they weren’t fooling her, there was always another one the next day trotting out exactly the same line.
“I had a fight with Reza,” she said. “Not even a fight, more a misunderstanding. It’s all good now.”
There was an awkward pause. “It’s just, your sister had to take the baby. No one wants to talk about child neglect charges, and I don’t think it has to go that far. But you need to come in and be interviewed, just to reassure everyone. I think your husband’s still freaked out.”
Kate struggled to frame her reply, wondering what the point was in humoring him at all – but it was possible that the call was being shared with people who weren’t just going through the motions, and actually believed she’d been at fault.
“I understand,” she said. “I’ll be in around nine o’clock.”
“Can I ask where you are now?”
“I’m not at home,” she admitted. “I knew Beth was looking after Michael, and I didn’t want to be there when Reza came home. It was just … a bit tense between us. I thought this would give us a chance to cool off.”
“Okay. But you’ll be at Roma Street by nine?”
“Absolutely.”
Kate stepped out of the car, stacked her phone on top of Reza’s behind the rear wheel, then ran over them repeatedly. How had Chris’s wife not noticed what had happened to him? But Kate hadn’t really socialized with the two of them for years; maybe they were estranged, and she just hadn’t heard it through the grapevine.
She got out of the car again and inspected the shattered electronics. She was having second thoughts about walking away; maybe it would be simpler to go undercover and play happy families with Reza, pretending that nothing was wrong while she investigated the outbreak.
But even if she could be that good an actor, Reza might infect her, dragging her down into the same emptiness. She had to believe that he and Michael and Beth still survived somehow, however deeply they’d been buried – but when she pictured the grotesque effigies they’d become, all she felt was revulsion.
The sky was light now, and she could hear traffic sounds rising up amid the birdsong. She hated the thought of abandoning the car, but eventually people would be looking for it, and she had no idea how far the disease had spread through the police force.
As she headed down the street, Kate thought of Natalie Grimes, waking in shock to find herself beside the thing that had once been her husband. Walking from room to room, discovering that even her beautiful daughters were gone. Convinced that her family had been erased, their minds irretrievably destroyed, and that the only loving thing to do had been to put the twitching puppets out of their misery.
Kate could understand the power of the woman’s grief. But she was not going to give up hope, herself, until she had proof beyond doubt that there was no cure, and that everyone she cared about really was gone forever.
6
Kate found a small motel where the clerk was happy to take cash upfront, and for a modest surcharge allowed her to check in without showing ID. In her room, she sat on the bed staring down at the torn carpet, trying to decide who she could trust to be her allies, now that Chris had been ruled out. She drew up a list of twelve names, but when she thought about each one seriously, her confidence began to wane. It was not that any of them had failed to be loyal and supportive in the past, but when she pictured the actual conversation she would need to have with them to enlist their help, the idea that they would back her seemed preposterous. Each time she played out the scenario in her head, every trace of the old friendships she was relying on simply faded away, and the encounter ended with a cold stare.
More than friends, she needed evidence. And since no epidemiologist was going to drop everything and come to her aid, she needed to start with testimony, from as many people as possible, showing that the symptoms she’d observed in her own family had been seen elsewhere.
Without knowing the mode of transmission it was hard to say how the disease might have spread, but the neighborhood around Natalie’s house was the obvious place to begin. Kate left the motel and set off on foot, taking care to avoid intersections where she knew there would be cameras.
When she arrived, the house itself was still cordoned off. She started with the neighbors on the right, but no one was home; it was only four doors down that she finally got an answer. Her knocking summoned an elderly man who was clearly not pleased to have been woken from sleep – but then, chastened by the gravity of the subject, he invited her in.
“I know you’ve spoken to my colleagues already,” Kate explained apologetically, “but if there’s anything else you remember from that time, it could be important.”
“Like what?” the man asked. “I never heard Natalie and Rob fighting. The kids could be noisy; you know how girls that age screech sometimes? But that was just playful. It never sounded like someone was hurting them.”
Kate said, “Apart from the family, has there been anything unusual you’ve noticed going on in the area?”
He pondered the question, but shook his head.
“Anyone acting out of the ordinary? Maybe a stranger, maybe not. Maybe even someone you thought you knew well.”
He ran his fingertips across his forehead, disconcerted by the apparent suggestion that some neighbor he’d joked with over the fence might have stabbed this family to death.
“Anyone acting out of character?” Kate pressed him.
“No,” he said firmly. But with the stakes seemingly so high, perhaps he felt compelled to err on the side of caution. Using the murders as a pretext for her questions was going to make it harder to get an honest response.
She worked her way down the street then back, sketching a map of the area as she broadened her search. Having missed her appointment at Roma Street and trashed her phone, she suspected that her badge number would have been revoked by now, so whenever people answered the door with their phone in their hand, she made an excuse and withdrew lest they TrueCop-ped her and made things awkward.
By early evening, she’d conducted thirty-seven interviews. She was thinking of taking a break and grabbing some food, when a door opened and before she’d even raised her badge, the middle-aged woman standing in front of her asked anxiously, “Have you found him?”
“I’m afraid not,” Kate extemporised. Whoever the woman was talking about, that was almost certainly true. “But I’d like to ask you for a few more details, if I could.”
“Of course.”
Kate identified herself and followed the woman into the house. In the living room, there were family photos: mother, father and teenage son.
“Is anyone else at home right now?” Kate asked.
“No, my husband’s in the city. He’s still looking for Rowan. Game arcades, McDonald’s … he’s got no money, but we don’t know where else he’d go to pass the time.”
Kate glanced again at a photo of the boy. The face looked familiar; he was one of the missing persons whose cases she’d been reviewing when the Grimes murders took over.
“Before Rowan went missing,”
she asked, “did you notice any change in his behavior?”
The woman frowned. “Yes! I made a point of that to the other officer!”
Kate nodded apologetically. “I know it’s frustrating to have to repeat yourself, but part of the process is for me to try to come at this with fresh eyes, and make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
“All right.” The woman shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Kate wished she could remember her name, but there’d been more than thirty files.
“So can you tell me, in as much detail as possible: in what way did your son seem different?”
“He was so cold to us,” the woman replied. “He might have had his moods before – he might have been embarrassed or irritated when I said something that a thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t want to hear from his mother – but the day before he left, it was like he had no heart at all.”
“You mean he was deliberately cruel?” Kate asked.
“No. It wasn’t that I’d annoyed him and he was trying to be hurtful; it was as if I just didn’t matter to him, one way or the other.”
If Rowan had caught the disease that had afflicted Natalie’s family, what was the route of transmission? Kate confirmed with the boy’s mother that he’d attended the high school where Natalie and her husband had taught, though he hadn’t been in either of their classes, and it was hard to see how an airborne virus could have affected him while sparing most of the other students.
“Have you spoken to the families of Rowan’s friends?” Kate asked.
“Of course.”
“And have any of their children undergone personality shifts?”
“Not that anyone admitted.” The woman hesitated. “I don’t believe that Rowan was taking drugs, but I’m past the point where I’m certain of anything. So if you think that’s a possibility, and it could have something to do with the reason he’s missing, I don’t want you ruling it out just because my own instincts say otherwise.”
“All right.” Kate didn’t like misleading her, but her own hypothesis was hardly more reassuring.
On her way back to the motel, she bought a small notepad with WiFi only, then she used the motel’s internet connection to download a gallery of missing persons whose names and photos had been made public. Rowan da Silva was there, and most of the other people Kate recalled from her review. At least she hadn’t been listed herself, yet.
In the next three days, as she spiraled out from the epicenter, she encountered twelve families with sons or daughters, husbands or wives who’d gone missing. In four cases, the person had fled without anyone noticing warning signs, but in the others, the distressed loved ones claimed that the event had been preceded by a change in behavior or demeanor that made them feel as if their relationship had disintegrated, for no discernible reason. “That morning, I swear he looked at me as if he was a trapped animal and I was a zoo-keeper,” one woman told Kate. “Maybe he woke up and decided that our whole marriage had been a mistake, and it took him another two days to find the courage to walk out. But two days before, he’d either been as happy as I’d ever seen him, or he was the best actor in the world.”
On the afternoon of the fourth day, Kate knocked on a door and found herself talking to a woman who spoke with a forced cheeriness and couldn’t quite look her in the eye. She had no missing family members, or any information to offer about suspicious activities in the neighborhood; she just seemed discomfited by Kate’s presence. Either she had a drug lab and a fresh corpse in her living room, or Kate’s time was up.
She found a café with WiFi and did a quick search. Authorities had expressed concern about a missing police officer, Detective-Sergeant Katherine Shahripour (pictured). It wasn’t exactly the kind of news that would muscle its way into everyone’s feeds; she suspected that maybe one in fifty people in the city would see it. But the woman she’d spooked would have reported the encounter. It would no longer be safe to keep door-knocking the area.
Kate wasn’t ready to come in from the cold. Eight families with stories of sudden alienation wouldn’t cut it; after all, the original investigators had written that off as being down to the usual causes: teenage angst, midlife crises, drug problems, infidelity. At the very least, she needed to bring in some of the afflicted in person, fleshing out her collection of hearsay with actual subjects. Reza might have talked his way out of the emergency department, but if she could drag half a dozen of these fractured families, re-united, into the spotlight, that might be the start of a proper investigation, and the first step on the road to a cure.
As she left the café, she tried to picture a future where everything was normal again. But all she could think of was Reza’s bizarre charade, and the husk of her son lying in his cot like a cheap plastic doll. She lowered her sights, and made do instead with memories. The days before, when they had still been themselves, remained as vivid to her as ever. She would hold her feelings for them in that vault, and keep working to find a way to revive them.
7
Kate cut her hair and dyed it black, then bought some cheap earrings, a battered phone with no SIM card, and an assortment of clothes from a charity shop. It took a while for her to find the right look, but at the end of the day she emerged from her room, satisfied that at least she wouldn’t be taken for a cop or a social worker.
She walked into the city, and made her way to one of the homeless shelters. As Leila, the volunteer, showed her the ropes, Kate took out her phone and brought up a picture of Suzanne Reyes, a missing woman a few years younger than Kate. “You haven’t seen my sister, have you? When she’s off her meds, I don’t know what she’ll do.”
Leila regarded her warily. “Sorry, no.”
In the dining room, Kate showed the photo around, but all she got was a few grunts of sympathy. She wished there were some way to seek all eight of her targets at once to better the odds, but it would be stretching credulity to claim a connection with even two of them, and Rowan’s parents had already done the rounds of the shelters. In the dormitory, she lay awake half the night, listening to the other women coughing.
She spent the next day on the streets, finding the places where the homeless congregated and asking again after Suzanne. It was close to nightfall when a thin, twitchy woman with a crumpled face squinted at the picture and announced, “Yeah, love, I’ve seen her. Just a few days ago.”
Kate closed her eyes for a moment, genuinely overcome with relief. “Thank God. Do you know where she is now?”
“She talked a lot of nonsense,” the woman complained. “I’m not surprised what you said about her medication.”
“Yeah, that’s Suzanne. Do you know where she went?”
“She tried to recruit me,” the woman recalled irritably. “Like a missionary. Like a fucking Mormon Scientologist.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wanted me to join her fight against the devil.”
Kate shook her head forlornly. “My sister said that? She thinks she’s fighting the devil?”
The woman thought it over dutifully. “Not the devil, exactly. She said she’s fighting the hollow men, the ones who’ve lost their souls. Raising an army of the … I don’t fucking know.”
“Do you know where I can find her?”
“Not really. I told her to piss off and stop bothering me.”
It was growing dark. Kate crossed town and tried a different shelter. “She might not look the same now,” she warned her fellow diners as she helped ladle out the night’s stew. “But maybe you remember her talking about the hollow men?”
No one could help her, but the next morning, as the shelter was closing, a young woman with long, plaited hair approached Kate. “I don’t think I’ve seen your sister,” she said. “But there was a man I met, talking like you said she talked.”
“In what way?” Kate asked.
“He was warning me about the hollow people. He wanted me to join the fight.”
“Where was this?”
“You know that spot in South
Bank where all the buskers play?”
Kate nodded, but this wasn’t much help; she could probably stand there for a month without the same man reappearing, let alone approaching her.
“I told him I was busy with other things,” the woman continued, “but he said that if I ever wised up and changed my mind, there was a place where I could find him.”
Kate hardly dared breathe, but when the woman said no more she had to ask. “Asgard? Middle Earth? Hogwarts?”
“An old warehouse that’s used as a squat.” She gestured at Kate’s phone. “If that thing’s got a map, I can show you.”
8
The abandoned warehouse stood at the edge of a sprawling industrial park that still had a few tenants, but the place itself looked as if it had been derelict for years. The wire mesh fence around it had been bent almost horizontal in places, and the sign warning of security patrols, cameras and dogs was brown with corrosion.
Kate clambered over the lowest part of the fence and approached the building, carrying a blanket she’d bought for five dollars from a man camped in a city alleyway. Weeds taller than she was sprouted from cracks in the concrete forecourt. When she tried the office door it was securely locked, even though most of the paint had flaked off, but the roll-up door to the loading bay had been breached, torn away from its tracks on one side. The aperture was a tight squeeze; Kate pushed her blanket through, then followed head-first. After the sunlit concrete, she couldn’t see a thing inside, but she ended up doing a hand-stand onto her blanket before her feet fell to the floor.
She waited for her eyes to adapt. The place still stank of some kind of oil or solvent, though there was human waste not too far away. Gradually, she made out the silhouettes of a stack of crates and pallets ahead of her, and some large metal drums of chemicals. She walked past them warily, squinting in the gloom at the hazard warnings, hoping that nothing volatile and carcinogenic had spilled out onto the floor.
Away from the loading bay, in the warehouse proper, a little sunlight made its way through grimy windows set high in the walls. But a dozen or so fluorescent panels hung by cables from the ceiling; no one had ever aspired to make this place function with natural light.