Читать книгу The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal - Чак Хоган, Гильермо дель Торо, Guillermo Toro del - Страница 50

Just a few hours later, inside the basement morgue of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, Dr. Bennett was finishing up after a very long day. He should have been exhausted, but in fact he was exhilarated. Something extraordinary was happening. It was as though the normally reliable rules of death and decomposition were being rewritten, right in this room. This shit went beyond established medicine, beyond human biology itself … perhaps even into the realm of the miraculous.

As planned, he had halted all autopsies for the night. Some work continued on other matters, the medico-legal investigators operating out of the cubicles upstairs, but the morgue was Bennett’s. He had noticed something during the CDC doctors’ visit, something about the blood sample he had drawn, the opalescent fluid he had collected in a specimen jar. He had stored it in the back of one of the specimen coolers, stashing it behind some glassware like the last good dessert inside a community refrigerator.

He unscrewed the cap and looked at it now, seated on a stool at the examination counter near the sink. After a few moments, the surface of the six or so ounces of white blood rippled, and Bennett shivered. He took a deep breath in order to collect himself. He thought about what to do, and then pulled an identical jar down from the shelf above. He filled it with the same amount of water and set the jars down side by side. He needed to make certain that the disturbance was not the result of vibrations from a passing truck or some such.

He watched and waited.

There it was again. The viscous white fluid rippled—he saw it—while the considerably less dense water surface did not undulate at all.

Something was moving inside the blood sample.

Bennett thought for a moment. He poured the water down the sink drain, and then slowly poured the oily blood from one jar into the other. The fluid was syrupy and poured slowly but neatly. He saw nothing pass through the thin stream. The bottom of the first jar remained lightly coated with the white blood, but he saw nothing there.

He set the new jar down, and again he watched and waited.

He did not have to watch very long. The surface undulated and Bennett nearly leaped out of his stool.

He heard a noise behind him then, a scratching or a rustling sound. He turned, made jumpy by his discovery. Overhead lamps shone down on the empty stainless-steel tables behind him, every surface wiped down, the floor drains mopped clean. The Flight 753 victims locked away inside the walk-in cooler across the morgue.

Rats, maybe. There was nothing they could do to keep the vermin out of the building—and they had tried everything. In the walls. Or beneath the floor drains. He listened for a moment longer, then returned to the jar.

He poured the liquid from jar to jar again, this time stopping halfway. The amounts in each jar were roughly even. He set them underneath the overhead lamp and watched the milky surface for a sign of life.

There it was. In the first jar. A plip this time, almost like that of a small fish nibbling at the surface of a cloudy pond.

Bennett watched the other jar until he was satisfied, and then poured its contents down the drain. He then started over, again dividing the contents between the two glass vessels.

A siren in the street outside made him sit up. It passed, and in what should have been the ensuing silence, he heard sounds again. Movement-type sounds, behind him. Again he turned, feeling equal parts paranoid and foolish now. The room was empty, the morgue sterilized and still.

Yet … something was making that noise. He stood from his stool, silently, turning his head this way and that in order to get a fix on its source.

His divining directed his attention to the steel door of the walk-in refrigerator. He took a few steps toward it, all his senses attuned.

A rustling. A stirring. As though from inside. He had spent more than enough time down here not to be spooked by the mere proximity to the dead … but then he remembered the antemortem growth these corpses had exhibited. Clearly, these anxieties had prompted him to revert to the usual human taboos regarding the dead. Everything about his job flew in the face of normal human instinct. Cutting open corpses. Defiling cadavers, peeling faces back from skulls. Excising organs and flaying genitals. He smiled at himself in the empty room. So he was basically normal after all.

His mind playing tricks on him. Probably a glitch in the cooling fans or something. There was a safety switch inside the cooler, a big red button, in the event anyone ever got himself stuck in there accidentally.

He turned back to the jars. Watching them, waiting for more movement. He was wishing he had brought his laptop down in order to record his thoughts and impressions.

Plip.

He had been ready for it this time, his heart leaping but his body staying put. Still in the first jar. He poured out the other one and split the fluid a third time, approximately one ounce in each.

As he did this, he thought he saw something ride the spill from the first jar to the second. Something very thin, no more than an inch and a half in length—if indeed he saw what he thought he saw …

A worm. A fluke. Was this a parasitic disease? There were various examples of parasites reshaping hosts in order to serve their own reproductive aspects. Was this the explanation for the bizarre after-death changes he had seen on the autopsy table?

He held up the jar in question, swishing around the thinning white fluid underneath the lamplight. He eyed the contents carefully, closely … and yes … not once but twice, something slithered inside. Wriggled. Wire thin and as white as its surroundings, moving very fast.

Bennett had to isolate it. Dip it in formalin, and then study it, and identify it. If he had this one, he had dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe … who knows how many, circulating inside the other bodies in the—

A sharp bang from the cooler shocked him, made him jerk up, jostling the jar from his hand. It fell to the counter, but did not shatter—bouncing instead, clattering into the sink, spilling and splattering its contents. Bennett let loose a string of obscenities, searching the stainless-steel basin for the worm. Then he felt warmth on the back of his left hand. Some of the white blood had spattered on him, and was now stinging his flesh. Not burning, but mildly caustic, enough to hurt. He quickly ran cold water over it and wiped it off on his lab coat before it could damage his skin.

He whirled around then, facing the cooler. The bang he had heard was certainly no electrical malfunction, but more like a wheeled stretcher banging into another wheeled stretcher. Impossible … and his ire rose again. His worm had just gone down the drain. He would get another blood sample, and isolate this parasite. This discovery was his.

Still wiping his hand on the flap of his jacket, he went to the door and pulled on the handle, releasing the chamber’s seal. A hiss of stale, refrigerated air breathed over him as the door opened wide.

Joan Luss, after having released herself and the others from the isolation ward, hired a car to take her straight to the weekend home in New Canaan, Connecticut, of one of the founding partners of her law firm. She’d had the driver pull over twice so she could retch out the window. A combination of flu and nerves. But no matter. She was victim class and advocate now. Aggrieved party and crusading counselor. Fighting for restitution for the families of the dead and for the four fortunate survivors. The white-shoe firm of Camins, Peters, and Lilly could be looking at 40 percent of the largest corporate-claim payout ever, bigger than Vioxx, bigger even than WorldCom.

Joan Luss, partner.

You think you’re doing all right in Bronxville until you drive out into New Canaan. Bronxville, Joan’s home, is a leafy village in Westchester County, fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan, twenty-eight minutes by Metro-North train. Roger Luss worked in international finance for Clume and Fairstein, and traveled out of the country most weeks. Joan had traveled quite a bit, but had to pull back after the children were born, because it didn’t look good. But she missed it, and had thoroughly enjoyed her previous week in Berlin, at the Ritz-Carlton on the Potsdamer Platz. She and Roger, having grown so accustomed to hotel living, had emulated that very lifestyle in their home, with heated bathroom floors, a downstairs steam room, twice-weekly fresh flower deliveries, seven-day-a-week landscaping, and of course their housekeeper and laundress. Everything but turn-down service and a sweet on their pillows at night.

Buying into Bronxville several years before, with its lack of new construction and forbiddingly high tax rate, had been a big step up for them. But now, having had a taste of New Canaan—where lead partner Dory Camins lived like a feudal lord on a three-house estate complete with a fishing pond, horse stables, and an equestrian track—Bronxville, on her way back, had struck her as quaint, provincial, even a little … tired.

Now home, she had just awakened after suffering through a tremulous late-afternoon nap. Roger was still in Singapore, and she kept hearing noises in the house, noises that finally scared her awake. Restless anxiety. She attributed it to the meeting, perhaps the biggest meeting of her life.

Joan emerged from her study, holding the wall on her way downstairs, coming into the kitchen as Neeva, the children’s wonderful nanny, was clearing away the dinner mess, running a damp cloth over the table crumbs. “Oh, Neeva, I could have done that,” said Joan, not meaning a word of it, walking right to the tall glass cabinet where she kept their medicine. Neeva was a Haitian grandmother who lived in Yonkers, one town over. She was sixty-something, but looked basically ageless, always wearing a long ankle-length floral dress and comfortable Converse sneakers. Neeva was a much-needed calming influence in the Luss home. They were a busy bunch, what with Roger’s traveling and Joan’s long hours in the city and the children’s school and programs in between, everyone going in sixteen different directions. Neeva was the family rudder, and Joan’s secret weapon in keeping the household running right.

“Joan, you don’t look so good.”

“Joan” and “don’t” came out sounding like “Jon” and “don” in Neeva’s island lilt.

“Oh, I’m just a little run-down.” She popped some Motrin and two Flexerils and sat down at the kitchen island, opening House Beautiful.

“You should eat,” said Neeva.

“Hurts to swallow,” said Joan.

“Soup, then,” decreed Neeva, and set about getting it for her.

Neeva was a mother figure for all of them, not just the children. And why shouldn’t Joan have some mothering too? God knows, her real mother—twice divorced, living in an apartment in Hialeah, Florida—wasn’t up to the task. And the best part? When Neeva’s doting ways became too annoying, Joan could simply send her away on an errand with the kiddies. Best. Arrangement. Ever.

“I hear about that air-o-plane.” Neeva looked back at Joan from the can opener. “No good. An evil thing.”

Joan smiled at Neeva and her adorable little tropical superstitions—the smile cut abruptly short by a sharp pain in her jaw.

While the soup bowl rotated in the whirring microwave, Neeva came back to look at Joan, laying her roughened brown hand against Joan’s forehead, exploring the glandular region of Joan’s neck with gray-nailed fingers. Joan pulled back in pain.

“Swollen bad,” Neeva said.

Joan closed the magazine. “Maybe I should go back to bed.”

Neeva stood back, looking at her strangely. “You should go back to hospital.”

Joan would have laughed if she knew it wouldn’t hurt. Back to Queens? “Trust me, Neeva. I am much better off here in your hands. Besides—take it from one who knows. That whole hospital thing was an insurance ploy on the airline’s behalf. All for their benefit—not mine.”

As she rubbed her sore, swollen neck, Joan envisioned the impending lawsuit, and once again her spirits soared. She glanced around the kitchen. Funny how a house she had spent so much time and money redecorating and re-renovating could appear so suddenly … shabby.

Camins, Peters, Lilly … and Luss.

The children entered the kitchen then, Keene and Audrey, whining about some toy-related incident. Their voices worked their way inside Joan’s head such that she was seized by a commanding urge to backhand them each hard enough to send them flying halfway across the kitchen. But she managed to do what she always did, channeling her aggression toward her children into false enthusiasm, thrown up like a wall around her angry self. She closed the magazine and raised her voice in order to silence theirs.

“How would you each like a pony, and your very own pond?”

She believed it was her generous bribe that had silenced the children, but it was in fact her smile, gargoylelike and glaring, baring an expression of utter hatred, that frightened them into stillness.

For Joan, the momentary silence was bliss.

The 911 call came in for a naked man at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel exits. The dispatch went out as a 10–50, a low-priority disorderly person call. A unit from the 1–7 arrived within eight minutes, and found a bad jam-up, worse than usual for a Sunday night. A few drivers honked and pointed them uptown. The suspect, they yelled, a fat guy wearing nothing but a red tag on his toe, had already moved on.

“I got kids here!” howled one guy in a dinged-up Dodge Caravan.

Officer Karn, the driver, said to his partner, Officer Lupo, “I’m gonna say Park Avenue type. Sex club regular. Took too much X before his weekend kink session.”

Officer Lupo unbuckled and opened his door. “I’m on traffic duty. Loverboy’s all yours.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Officer Karn to the slamming of the door. He lit up his rack and waited patiently—he wasn’t paid extra to rush—for the traffic snarl to part for him.

He cruised up past Thirty-eighth, eyeballing cross streets. A fat naked guy on the loose shouldn’t be too hard to find. People on the sidewalks seemed okay, not freaked. One helpful citizen smoking outside a bar saw the slow-rolling cruiser and stepped forward, pointing him up the street.

A second and third call came in, both for a naked man marauding outside the United Nations headquarters. Officer Karn hit the gas, looking to end this. He cruised past the lit-up flags of all the member nations flying out front, to the visitors’ entrance at the north end. Blue NYPD sawhorses everywhere, as well as car-bomb deterring cement planters.

Karn rolled up on a detail of bored cops near the sawhorses. “I’m looking for a fat naked man.”

One cop shrugged. “I could give you a few phone numbers.”

Gabriel Bolivar returned by limousine to his new home in Manhattan, two town houses undergoing extensive renovations on Vestry Street, in Tribeca. When finished, the home would encompass thirty-one rooms and fourteen thousand total square feet, including a mosaic-lined swimming pool, servants’ quarters for a staff of sixteen, a basement recording studio, and a twenty-six-seat movie theater.

Only the penthouse was finished and furnished, rushed into completion while Bolivar was away on his European tour. The rest of the rooms in the lower floors were roughed out, some of them plastered, others still dressed in plastic wrap and insulation. Sawdust had worked its way onto every surface and into every crevice. Bolivar’s business manager had briefed him on the developments, but Bolivar wasn’t much interested in the journey, only the destination of his soon-to-be lavish and decadent palace.

The “Jesus Wept” tour had ended on a down note. The promoters had had to work hard to fill the arenas so that Bolivar could truthfully claim to have played to sold-out audiences everywhere—but he had. Then the tour charter crapped out in Germany, and rather than wait behind with the others, Bolivar had consented to hop a commercial flight home. He was still feeling the aftereffects of that big mistake. In fact, it was getting worse.

He moved inside the front entrance with his security detail and three young ladies from the club. A few of his larger treasures had been moved in, including twin black marble panthers poised on either side of the twenty-foot-high foyer. Two blue industrial-waste drums said to have belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer and several rows of framed paintings: Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Chet Zar—big, expensive stuff. The loose light switch on the wall activated a string of construction lights winding up the marble staircase, beyond a great, winged, weeping angel of uncertain provenance, having been “rescued” from a Romanian church during the Ceauşescu regime.

“He’s beautiful,” said one of the girls, looking up into the angel’s shadowed, time-worn features.

Bolivar stumbled near the great angel, seized by a pain in his gut that was more than a cramp, that was like a punch from an adjoining organ. He gripped the angel’s wing to steady himself, and the girls converged on him.

“Baby,” they cooed, helping him to stand, and he tried to shake off the pain. Had someone slipped him something at the club? It had happened before. Christ, girls had drugged him before, so desperate were they to have their way with Gabriel Bolivar—to get the legend underneath the makeup. He pushed the three of them away, waving off his bodyguards as well, standing erect despite the ache. His detail remained below while he used his silver-encrusted walking stick to shoo the girls up the curling flights of blue-veined white marble to the penthouse.

He left the girls to mix themselves more drinks and fix themselves up in the other bathroom. Bolivar locked himself inside the master bath and dug out his Vicodin stash and self-medicated with two pretty white pills chased with a gulp of scotch. He rubbed his neck, massaging the rawness of his throat, worried about his voice. He wanted to run water through the raven’s-head faucet and splash some on his face to cool down, but he still had his makeup on. Nobody would know him in the clubs without it. He stared at the sickly pallor it gave him, the gaunt shadowing of his cheeks, the dead black pupils of his contact lenses. He was in fact a beautiful man, and no amount of makeup could hide it, and this, he knew, was part of the secret of his success. His entire career consisted of taking beauty and corrupting it. Seducing the ear with moments of transcendent music only to subvert it with gothic screams and industrial distortion. That was what the young responded to. Defacing beauty. Subverting good.

Beautiful Corruption. Possible title for his next CD.

The Lurid Urge had moved 600,000 copies in the first week of its U.S. release. Huge for the post-mp3 era, but still down almost a full half million units from Lavish Atrocities. People were becoming inured to his antics, both onstage and off. He was no longer the anti—everything Wal-Mart had loved to ban and religious America—including his own father—had sworn to oppose. Funny how his father was in agreement with Wal-Mart, proving his thesis about how dull everything was. Nonetheless, with the exception of the religious right, it was getting difficult to shock people anymore. His career was hitting a wall and he knew it. Bolivar was not exactly considering a switch to coffeehouse folk—though that would indeed shock the world—but the theatrical autopsies and onstage biting and cutting were no longer fresh. They were anticipated, like encores. He was playing to his audience instead of playing against them. He had to run ahead of them, because if they ever caught up, he’d be trampled.

But hadn’t he taken his act as far as he could? Where could it possibly go from here?

He heard the voices again. Like an unrehearsed chorus, voices in pain, pain that echoed his own. He spun around in the bathroom to make certain he was alone. He shook his head hard. The sound was like that when you put seashells to your ears, only, instead of hearing an echo of the ocean, he heard the moaning of souls in limbo.

When he came out of the bathroom, Mindy and Sherry were kissing, and Cleo lay on the big bed with a drink in hand, smiling at the ceiling. All of them started when he appeared, and turned in anticipation of his advance. He crawled up onto the bed, his gut doing kayak rolls, thinking that this was just what he needed. A vigorous pipe cleaning to clear the system. Blonde Mindy came at him first, running her fingers through his silky black hair, but Bolivar chose Cleo, something about her, running his pale hand over the brown flesh of her neck. She removed her top for easier access and slipped her own hands down over the fine leather sheathing his hips.

She said, “I’ve been a fan of yours ever since—”

“Shhhh,” he told her, hoping to cut through the usual acolyte’s back-and-forth. The Vikes must have acted on the voices in his head, because they had dulled to a thrumming noise, almost like an electrical current, but with some throbbing mixed in.

The other two crawled up around him now, their hands like crabs, touching him, exploring him. Starting to peel off his clothes to reveal the man beneath. Mindy again ran her fingers through his hair, and he pulled away, as if there was something clumsy in her touch. Sherry squealed playfully, undoing the buttons of his fly. He knew the whispers that went around about him, from conquest to conquest, about his prodigious size and skill. She slid her hand across his leather pants and over his crotch, and while there was no groan of disappointment, there was no gasp of astonishment either. Nothing doing down there yet. Which was baffling, even given his illness. He had proven himself in much more adverse conditions, over and over and over again.

He returned his focus to the girl Cleo’s shoulders, her neck, her throat. Lovely—but it was more than that. He felt a bucking sensation in his mouth. Not a sensation of nausea, but perhaps its opposite: a need somewhere on the continuum between the longing for sex and the necessity of nourishment. But—bigger. A compulsion. A craving. An urge to violate, to ravish, to consume.

Mindy nibbled on his neck, and Bolivar turned on her finally, pushing her back down against the sheets—first in a fury, but then with a forced tenderness. He eased back her jaw, extending her neck, running his warm fingers over her fine, firm throat. He felt the strength of her young muscles inside—and he wanted them. More than he wanted her breasts, her ass, her loins. The thrumming that obsessed him was coming from her.

He brought his mouth to her throat. He tried with his lips, kissing, but that didn’t quite do it. He tried nibbling on her, and the instinct seemed correct but the method … something about it was all wrong.

He wanted—somehow—more.

The thrumming vibrated throughout his own body now, his skin like that of a drum being pounded in an ancient ceremony. The bed was twirling a bit and his neck and thorax were bucking with need and repulsion. He went away for a little while, mentally. Like the amnesia of great sex, only, when he came back, it was to a woman’s squealing. He had the girl’s neck in his hands and was sucking on it with an intensity that went beyond the realm of the teenage hickey. He was drawing her blood to the surface of her skin, and she was screaming and the other two half-naked girls were trying to pull her away from him.

Bolivar straightened, first chastened by the sight of the florid bruising along her throat—then, remembering his stature as the maypole of this foursome, he asserted his authority.

“Get out!” he railed, and they did, clothes clutched to their bodies, the blonde Mindy whimpering and sniffling all the way down the stairs.

Bolivar staggered off the bed and back into his bathroom and his makeup case. He sat down on the leather stool and went through his nightly ministrations. The makeup came off—he knew this because he saw it on the tissues—and yet his flesh looked much the same in the mirror. He rubbed harder, scraping at his cheeks with his fingernail, but nothing more came off. Had the makeup adhered to his skin? Or was he this sick, this gaunt?

He ripped off his shirt and examined himself: white as marble and crisscrossed with greenish veins and purplish blotches of settled blood.

He went to his contact lenses, carefully pinching out the cosmetic gels and depositing them in the fluid baths of their holding cases. He blinked a few times in relief, swiping at his eyes with his fingers, then feeling something weird. He leaned closer to the glass, blinking, examining his own eyes.

The pupils were dead black. Almost as though he still had the lenses in, only more textured now—more real. And—when he blinked, he noticed further activity within the eye. He got right up against the mirror, eyes wide now, almost afraid to close them.

A nictitating membrane had formed underneath his eyelid, a translucent second eyelid closing beneath the outer eyelid, gliding horizontally across the eyeball. Like a filmy cataract eclipsing his black pupil, closing upon his wild and horrified stare.

Augustin “Gus” Elizalde sat slumped in the back of the dining area with his pinch-front hat on the seat next to him. It was a narrow storefront eatery, one block east of Times Square. Neon burgers shining in the window, and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths on the tables. Budget eating in Manhattan. You walk in and order at the counter up front—sandwiches, pizza, something on the grill—pay for it, and take it in back, to a windowless room of tables jammed in tight. Wall murals of Venice and gondolas surrounded them. Felix scarfed down a plate of goopy macaroni and cheese. It was all he ate, mac and cheese, the more disgustingly orange the better. Gus looked down at his half-eaten greaseburger, suddenly more interested in his Coke, in the caffeine and sugar, getting some jolt back into him.

He still didn’t feel right about that van. Gus turned over his hat underneath the table and checked the inside band again. The original five $10 bills he had gotten from that dude, plus the $500 he had earned for driving the van into the city, were still tucked in there. Tempting him. He and Felix could have a hell of a lot of fun on half that amount. Take home half for his madre, money she needed, money she could use.

Problem was, Gus knew himself. Problem was stopping at half. Problem was walking around with unspent money on his person.

He should get Felix to run him home right now. Unburden himself of half this haul. Slip it to his madre without his dirtbag brother Crispin knowing. Crackhead could sniff out dollars like a fiend.

Then again, this was dirty money. He had done something wrong to get it—clearly, though he didn’t know what he’d done—and handing the money over to his madre was like passing on a curse. Best thing to do with dirty money is spend it quick, get rid of it—easy come, easy go.

Gus was torn. He knew that, once he started drinking, he lost all impulse control. And Felix was the gasoline to his flame. The two of them would burn through $550 before sunup, and then, instead of bringing something beautiful home to his madre, instead of bringing home something good, he would come in dragging his own hungover ass, hat all dented to hell, empty pockets turned inside out.

“Penny for your thoughts, Gusto,” said Felix.

Gus shook his head. “I’m my own worst enemy, ’mano. I’m like a fucking mutt sniffing in the street who don’t know what tomorrow means. I got a dark side, amigo, and sometimes it takes me over.”

Felix sipped his giant-ass Coke. “So what are we doing in this greasy spoon? Let’s get out and meet some young ladies tonight.”

Gus ran his thumb along the leather rim inside his hat, over the folded cash Felix knew nothing about—so far. Maybe just a hundred. Two hundred, half for each. Pull out exactly that much, that was his limit, no more. “Gotta pay to play, right, ’mano?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Gus looked away and saw a family next to him, dressed for the theater, rising and leaving with their desserts unfinished. Because of Felix’s language, Gus guessed. By the looks of these Midwestern kids, they had never heard hard talk. Well, fuck them. You come into this town, you keep your kids out past nine o’clock, you risk them seeing the full show.

Felix finally finished his slop and Gus eased his cash-filled hat onto his head and they sauntered out into the night. They were walking on Forty-fourth Street, Felix sucking on a cigarette, when they heard screams. It didn’t quicken their pace any, hearing screams in Midtown Manhattan. Not until they saw the fat, naked guy shuffling across the street at Seventh and Broadway.

Felix nearly spit out his cigarette laughing. “Gusto, you see that shit?” He started to jog ahead, like a bystander called by a barker to a show.

Gus wasn’t into it. He followed slowly after him.

People in Times Square were making way for this guy and his pasty, floppy ass. Women screamed at the sight, half laughing, covering their eyes or their mouths or both. A young bachelorette party group snapped photos with their phones. Every time the guy turned, a new group got a look at his shriveled, flesh-buried junk, and howled.

Gus wondered where the cops were. This was America for you: a brown brother couldn’t even duck into a doorway for a discreet piss without getting hassled, yet a white guy can parade naked through the crossroads of the world and get a free pass.

“Wasted off his ass,” hooted Felix, following the fool, along with a loose bunch of others, many drunk themselves, savoring the street theater. The lights of the brightest intersection in the world—Times Square is a slashing X of avenues, walled with eye-popping advertisements and word crawls, a pinball game run through with never-ending traffic—dazzled the fat man, set him spinning. He lunged about, lurching like a circus bear on the loose.

Felix’s crowd of carousers laughed and reared back when the man turned and staggered toward them. He was getting bolder now, or a little panicked, like a frightened animal, and more confused and seemingly—sometimes he pressed a hand to his throat, as though choking—more pained. Everything was really lively until the pale, fat man lashed out at a laughing woman, grabbing her by the back of her head. The woman screamed and twisted and a part of her head came off in his hand—for a moment it looked as though he had ripped open her skull—but it was just her frizzy black extensions.

The attack crossed the line from fun into fright. The fat man stumbled out into traffic with the fistful of fake hair still in his hand, and the crowd followed, pursuing him now, growing angry, yelling. Felix took the lead, crossing to the traffic island after this guy. Gus went along, but away from the crowd, threading through the honking cars. He was calling to Felix to come away, to be done with this. This was not going to end well.

The fat man was advancing toward a family gathered in the island to take in Times Square at night. He had them backed up against the traffic shooting past, and when the father tried to intervene he got knocked back hard. Gus recognized them as the theatergoing family from the restaurant. The mother seemed more concerned about shielding her kids’ eyes from the sight of the naked man than protecting herself. She got grabbed by the back of the neck, pulled close up against his sagging belly and pendulous man breasts. The crazy man’s mouth opened as though he wanted a kiss. But then it kept opening, like a snake’s mouth—clearly dislocating the jaw with a soft pop.

Gus had no love for tourists, but he didn’t even think before coming up behind the guy and hook-arming him in a headlock. He choked back on him strong, the guy’s neck surprisingly muscular beneath the loose folds of flesh. Gus had the advantage, though, and the guy released the mother, falling against her husband in front of her screaming kids.

Now Gus was stuck. He had the naked man locked up, the big bear’s arms pinwheeling. Felix came up in front to help … but then stopped. He was staring at the naked guy’s face as if there was something really wrong there. A few people behind him reacted the same, others turned away in horror, but Gus couldn’t see why. He did feel the guy’s neck undulate under his forearm, very unnaturally—almost as though he were swallowing sideways. Felix’s look of disgust made him think the fat guy was maybe suffocating under his choke hold, so Gus relaxed his grip a bit—

—just enough for the guy, with the animal strength of the insane, to hurl Gus off with a hairy elbow.

Gus fell to the sidewalk hard and his hat popped off. He turned in time to see it roll off the curb and into traffic. Gus jumped up and started after his hat and his money—but Felix’s yell spun him back. The guy had Felix wrapped up in some kind of maniacal embrace, the big man’s mouth going at Felix’s neck. Gus saw Felix’s hand pull something from his back pocket, flicking it open with a wrist flip.

Gus ran toward Felix before Felix could use the knife, dropping a shoulder into the fat man’s side, feeling ribs crack, sending the tub of flesh sprawling. Felix fell too, Gus seeing blood spilling down the front of Felix’s neck, and—more shockingly—a look of outright terror on his compadre’s face. Felix sat up, dropping the knife in order to grip his neck, and Gus had never seen Felix look that way. Gus knew then that something bizarre had happened—was happening—he just didn’t know what. All he knew was that he had to act in order to make his friend right again.

Gus reached for the knife, taking its burled black grip in his hand as the naked man got to his feet. The guy stood with his hand covering his mouth, almost as though trying to contain something in there. Something squirming. Blood rimmed his fat cheeks and stained his chin—Felix’s blood—as he started toward Gus with his free hand outstretched.

He came fast—faster than a man of his size should have—shoving Gus down backward, before he could react. Gus’s bare head smacked against the sidewalk—and for a moment everything was silent. He saw the Times Square billboards flashing above him in a kind of liquid slow motion … a young model staring down at him, wearing only a bra and panties … then the big man. Looming over him. Something undulating inside his mouth as he stared at Gus with empty, dark eyes …

The man dropped to one knee, choking out this thing in his throat. Pinkish and hungry, it shot out at Gus with the greedy speed of a frog’s darting tongue. Gus slashed at the thing with his knife, cutting and stabbing like a dreamer fighting some creature in a nightmare. He didn’t know what it was—only that he wanted it away from him, wanted to kill it. The fat man reeled back, making a noise like squealing. Gus kept up his slashing, cutting the man’s neck, slicing his throat to ribbons.

Gus kicked away and the guy got to his feet, hands over his mouth and throat. He was bleeding white—not red—a creamy substance thicker and brighter than milk. He stumbled backward off the curb and fell into the moving traffic.

The truck tried to stop in time. That was the worst of it. After rolling over his face with the front tires, the rear set stopped right on the fat man’s crushed skull.

Gus staggered to his feet. Still dizzy from his fall, he looked down at the blade of Felix’s knife in his hand. It was stained white.

He was hit from behind then, his arms wrapped up, his shoulder driven into the pavement. He reacted as though it were the fat man still attacking him, writhing and kicking.

“Drop the knife! Drop it!”

He got his head around and saw three red-faced cops on him, two more behind him aiming guns.

Gus released the knife. He allowed his arms to be wrenched behind him, where they were cuffed. His adrenaline exploded. He said, “Fucking now you’re here?”

“Stop resisting!” said the cop, cracking Gus’s face into the pavement.

“He was attacking this family here—ask them!”

Gus turned.

The tourists were gone.

Most of the crowd was gone. Only Felix remained, seated on the edge of the island in a daze, gripping his throat—as a blue-gloved cop shoved him down, dropping a knee into his side.

Beyond Felix, Gus saw a small black thing rolling farther out into traffic. His hat, with all his dirty money still inside the brim—a slow-rolling taxi crushing it flat, Gus thinking, This was America for you.

Gary Gilbarton poured himself a whisky. The family—the extended family, both sides—and friends were all gone finally, leaving behind stacks of take-out food cartons in the refrigerator and wastebaskets full of tissues. Tomorrow they’d be back to their lives, and with a story to tell.

My twelve-year-old niece was on that plane …

My twelve-year-old cousin was on that plane …

My neighbor’s twelve-year-old daughter was on that plane …

Gary felt like a ghost walking through his nine-room home in the leafy suburb of Freeburg. He touched things—a chair, a wall—and felt nothing. Nothing mattered anymore. Memories could console him, but were more likely to drive him mad.

He had disconnected all the telephones after reporters started calling, wanting to know about the youngest casualty on board. To humanize the story. Who was she? they asked him. It would take Gary the rest of his life to work on a paragraph about his daughter, Emma. It would be the longest paragraph in history.

He was more focused on Emma than he was Berwyn, his wife, because children are our second selves. He loved Berwyn, and she was gone. But his mind kept circling around his lost little girl like water circling an ever-emptying drain.

That afternoon, a lawyer friend—a guy Gary hadn’t had over to the house in maybe a year—pulled him aside in the study. He sat Gary down and told him that he was going to be a very rich man. A young victim like Em, with a much longer timeline of life lost, guaranteed a huge settlement payout.

Gary did not respond. He did not see dollar signs. He did not throw the guy out. He truly did not care. He felt nothing.

He had spurned all the offers from family and friends to spend the night so that he would not be alone. Gary had convinced one and all that he was fine, though thoughts of suicide had already occurred to him. Not just thoughts: a silent determination; a certainty. But later. Not now. Its inevitability was like a balm. The only sort of “settlement” that would mean anything to him. The only way he was getting through all this now was knowing that there would be an end. After all the formalities. After the memorial playground was erected in Emma’s honor. After the scholarship was funded. But before he sold this now-haunted house.

He was standing in the middle of the living room when the doorbell rang. It was well after midnight. If it was a reporter, Gary would attack and kill him. It was as simple as that. To violate this time and place? He would tear the interloper apart.

He whipped open the door … and then all at once the pent-up mania went out of him.

A girl stood barefoot on the welcome mat. His Emma.

Gary Gilbarton’s face crumpled in disbelief, and he slipped to his knees in front of her. Her face showed no reaction, no emotion. Gary reached out to his daughter—then hesitated. Would she pop like a soap bubble and disappear again forever?

He touched her arm, gripping her thin biceps. The fabric of her dress. She was real. She was there. He grasped her and pulled her to him, hugging her, wrapping her up in his arms.

He pulled back and looked at her again, pushing the stringy hair off her freckled face. How could this be? He looked around outside, scanning his misty front yard to see who had brought her.

No car in the driveway, no sound of an automobile engine pulling away.

Was she alone? Where was her mother?

“Emma,” he said.

Gary got to his feet and led her inside, closing the front door, switching on the light. Em looked dazed. She wore the dress her mother had bought her for the trip, that made her look so grown up as she twirled around when she’d first tried it on for him. There was dirt on one sleeve—and perhaps blood. Gary spun her around, looking her over and finding more blood on her bare feet—no shoes?—and dirt all over, and scrapes on her palms and bruises on her neck.

“What happened, Em?” he asked her, holding her face in his palms. “How did you …?”

The wave of relief struck him again, nearly knocking him over, and he grasped her tight. He picked her up and carried her over to the sofa, sitting her there. She was traumatized, and oddly passive. So unlike his smiling, headstrong Emma.

He felt her face, the way her mother always did when Emma acted strangely, and it was hot. So hot that her skin felt sticky, and she was terribly pale, nearly translucent. He saw veins beneath the surface, prominent red veins he had never seen before.

The blue in her eyes seemed to have faded. A head wound, probably. She was in shock.

Thoughts of hospitals ran through his head, but he wasn’t letting her out of this house now, never again.

“You’re home now, Em,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”

He took her hand and tugged on it to get her to stand, leading her into the kitchen. Food. He installed her in her chair at the table, watching her from the counter as he toasted two chocolate chip waffles, her favorite. She sat there with her hands at her sides, watching him, not staring exactly, but not alive to the room either. No silly stories, no school-day chatter.

The toaster jumped and he slathered the waffles with butter and syrup and set the plate down in front of her. He sat in his seat to watch. The third chair, Mommy’s place, was still empty. Maybe the doorbell would ring again …

“Eat,” he told her. She hadn’t picked up her fork yet. He cut off a corner of the stack and held it before her mouth. She did not open it.

“No?” he said. He showed her himself, putting the waffles in his mouth, chewing. He tried her again, but her response was the same. A tear slipped from Gary’s eye and rolled down his cheek. He knew by now that something was terribly wrong with his daughter. But he shoved all that aside.

She was here now, she was back.

“Come.”

He walked her upstairs to her bedroom. Gary entered first, Emma stopping inside the doorway. Her eyes looked on the room with something akin to recognition, but more like distant memory. Like the eyes of an old woman returned miraculously to the bedroom of her youth.

“You need sleep,” he said, rummaging through her chest of drawers for pajamas.

She remained by the door, her hands at her sides.

Gary turned with the pajamas in his hand. “Do you want me to change you?”

He got down on his knees and lifted off her dress, and his very modest preteen daughter offered no protest. Gary found more scratches, and a big bruise on her chest. Her feet were filthy, the crevices of her toes crusted with blood. Her flesh hot to the touch.

No hospital. He was never letting her out of his sight again.

He ran a cool bath and sat her in it. He knelt by the edge and gently worked a soapy facecloth over her abrasions, and she did not even squirm. He shampooed and conditioned her dirty, flat hair.

She looked at him with her dark eyes but there was no rapport. She was in some sort of trance. Shock. Trauma.

He could make her better.

He dressed her in her pajamas, taking the big comb from the straw basket in the corner and combing her blond hair down straight. The comb snagged in her hair and she did not flinch or utter a complaint.

I am hallucinating her, Gary thought. I have lost my bearings on reality.

And then, still combing her hair: I don’t goddamn care.

He flipped back her sheets and quilted comforter and laid his daughter down in her bed, just as he used to when she was still a toddler. He pulled the covers up around her neck, tucking her in, Emma lying still and sleeplike but with her black eyes wide open.

Gary hesitated before leaning over to kiss her still-hot forehead. She was little more than a ghost of his daughter. A ghost whose presence he welcomed. A ghost he could love.

He wet her brow with his grateful tears. “Good night,” he said, to no response. Emma lay still in the pinkish spray of her night-light, staring at the ceiling now. Not acknowledging him. Not closing her eyes. Not waiting for sleep. Waiting … for something else.

Gary walked down the hallway to his bedroom. He changed and climbed into bed alone. He did not sleep either. He was waiting also, though he didn’t know what for.

Not until he heard it.

A soft creak on the threshold of his bedroom. He rolled his head and saw Emma’s silhouette. His daughter standing there. She came to him, out of the shadows, a small figure in the night-darkened room. She paused near his bed, opening her mouth wide, as though for a gusty yawn.

His Emma had returned to him. That was all that mattered.

Zack had trouble sleeping. It was true what everyone said: he was very much like his father. Obviously too young to have an ulcer, but already with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was an intense boy, an earnest boy, and he suffered for it.

He had always been that way, Eph had told him. He would stare back from the crib with a little grimace of worry, his intense dark eyes always making contact. And his little worried expression made Eph laugh—for he reminded him of himself so much—the worried baby in the crib.

For the last few years, Zack had felt the burden of the separation, divorce, and custody battle. It took some time to convince himself that all that was happening was not his fault. Still, his heart knew better: knew that somehow, if he dug deep enough, all the anger would connect with him. Years of angry whispers behind his back … the echoes of arguments late at night … being awakened by the muffled pounding on walls … It had all taken its toll. And Zack was now, at the ripe old age of eleven, an insomniac.

Some nights he would quiet the house noises with his iPod and stare out his bedroom window. Other nights he would crack open his window and listen to every little noise the night had to offer, listening so hard his ears buzzed as the blood rushed in.

He enacted that age-old hope of many a boy, that his street, at night, when it believed itself unwatched, would yield its mysteries. Ghosts, murder, lust. But all he ever saw, until the sun rose again on the horizon, was the hypnotic blue flicker of the distant TV in the house across the street.

The world was devoid of heroes or monsters, though in his imagination Zack sought both. A lack of sleep took its toll on the boy, and he kept dozing off during the daytime. He zoned out at school, and the other kids, never kind enough to let a difference go unnoticed, immediately found nicknames for him. They ranged from the common “Dickwad” to the more inscrutable “Necro-boy,” every social clique choosing its favorite.

And Zack faded through the days of humiliation until the time came for his dad to visit him again.

With Eph he felt comfortable. Even in silence—especially in silence. His mom was too perfect, too observant, too kind—her silent standards, all for his “own good,” were impossible to meet, and he knew, in a strange way, that from the moment he was born, he had disappointed her. By being a boy—by being too much like his dad.

With Eph he felt alive. He would tell his dad the things Mom always wanted to know about: out-of-boundaries things that she was eager to learn. Nothing critical—just private. Important enough not to reveal. Important enough to save for his father, and that was what Zack did.

Now, lying awake on the top of his bedcovers, Zack thought of the future. He was certain now that they would never again be together as a family. No chance. But he wondered how much worse it would get. That was Zack in a nutshell. Always wondering: how much worse can it get?

Much worse was always the answer.

At least, he hoped, now the army of concerned adults would finally screw out of his life. Therapists, judges, social workers, his mother’s boyfriend. All of them keeping him hostage to their own needs and stupid goals. All of them “caring” for him, for his well-being, and none of them really giving a shit.

My Bloody Valentine grew quiet in the iPod and Zack popped the earphones out. The sky was still not yet brightening outside, but he finally felt tired. He loved feeling tired now. He loved not thinking.

So he readied himself for sleep. But as soon as he got settled, he heard the footsteps.

Flap-flap-flap. Like bare feet out on the asphalt. Zack looked out his window and saw a guy. A naked guy.

Walking down the street, skin pale as moonlight, shining stretch marks glowing in the night, crisscrossing the deflated belly. Obvious that the man had been fat once—but had since lost so much weight that now his skin folded in all different ways and different directions, so much so that it was almost impossible to figure out his exact silhouette.

It was old but appeared ageless. The balding head with badly tinted hair and varicose veins on the legs pinned him at around seventy, but there was a vigor to his step and a tone to his walk that made you think of a young man. Zack thought all these things, noticed all these things, because he was so much like Eph. His mother would have told him to move away from the window and called 911, while Eph would have pointed out all the details that formed the picture of that strange man.

The pale creature circled the house across the street. Zack heard a soft moan, and then the rattle of a backyard fence. The man came back and moved toward the neighbor’s front door. Zack thought of calling the police, but that would raise all sorts of questions for him with Mom: he’d had to hide his insomnia from her, or else suffer days and weeks of doctor’s appointments and tests, never mind her worrying.

The man walked out into the middle of the street and then stopped. Flabby arms hanging at his side, his chest deflated—was he even breathing?—hair ruffling in the soft night wind. Exposing the roots to a bad “Just for Men” reddish brown.

It looked up toward Zack’s window, and for one weird moment they locked eyes. Zack’s heart raced. This was the first time he saw the guy frontally. During the whole time, he had been able to see only a flank or the man’s skin-draped back, but now he saw his full thorax—and the pale Y-shaped scar that crossed it whole.

And his eyes—they were dead tissue, glazed over, opaque even in the gentle moonlight. But worst of all, they had a frenzied energy, darting back and forth and then fixing on him—looking up at him with a feeling that was hard to pinpoint.

Zack shrank back, peeling away from the window, scared to death by the scar and those vacant eyes that had looked back at him. What was that expression …?

He knew that scar, knew what it meant. An autopsy scar. But how could that be?

He risked another peek over the window’s edge, so carefully, but the street was empty now. He sat up to see better, and the man was gone.

Had he ever even been there? Maybe the lack of sleep was really getting to him now. Seeing naked male corpses walking in the street: not something a child of divorce wants to share with a therapist.

And then it came to him: hunger. That was it. The dead eyes looked at him with intense hunger …

Zack dove into his sheets and buried his face in his pillow. The man’s absence did not ease his mind, but instead did the contrary. The man was gone, but he was everywhere now. He could be downstairs, breaking in through the kitchen window. Soon it would be on the steps, climbing ever so slowly—could he hear his footsteps already?—and then in the corridor outside his door. Softly rattling his lock—the busted lock that would not catch. And soon it would reach Zack’s bed and then—what? He feared the man’s voice and its dead stare. Because he had the horrible certainty that, even though it moved, the man was no longer alive.

Zombies …

Zack hid under his pillow, mind and heart racing, full of fear and praying for dawn to come and save him. Much as he dreaded school, he begged the morning to come.

Across the street, in the neighboring house, window glass was broken and the TV light snapped off.

Ansel Barbour whispered to himself as he wandered about the second floor of his house. He wore the same T-shirt and boxer shorts he had tried to sleep in, and his hair darted up at odd angles from continuous squeezing and pulling. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Ann-Marie suspected a fever, but when she came to him with the thermometer, he could not bear to think of that steel-tipped probe being stuck in under his inflamed tongue. They had an ear thermometer, for the kids, but he couldn’t even sit still long enough to get an accurate reading. Ann-Marie’s practiced palm against his forehead detected heat—lots of heat—but then, he could have told her that.

She was petrified, he could tell. She made no effort to hide it. To her, any illness whatsoever was an assault on the sanctity of their family unit. The kids’ throw-up bugs were met with the same dark-eyed fear another might reserve for, say, a bad blood test or the appearance of an unexplained lump. This is it. The beginning of the terrible tragedy she was certain would one day befall her.

His tolerance for Ann-Marie’s eccentricities was at low ebb. He was dealing with something serious here, and he needed her help, not her added stress. Now he couldn’t be the strong one. He needed her to take charge.

Even the kids were staying away from him, startled by the not-there look in their father’s eyes, or perhaps—he was vaguely aware of this—the odor of his sickness, which to his nose resembled the smell of congealed cooking grease stored too long in a tin can rusting beneath the sink. He saw them from time to time hiding behind the balusters at the bottom of the staircase, watching him cross the second-floor landing. He wanted to allay their fears, but worried he might lose his temper trying to explain this to them, and in doing so make things worse. The surest way to set their minds at ease was to get better. To outlast this surge of disorientation and pain.

He stopped inside his daughter’s bedroom, found the purple walls too purple, then doubled back into the hallway. He stood very still on the landing—as still as he could—until he could hear it again. That thumping. A beating—quiet and close. Wholly separate from the headache pounding in his skull. Almost … like in small-town movie theaters, where you can hear, during quiet moments in movies, the clicking of the film running through the projector in the back. Which distracts you, and keeps pulling you back to the reality that this is not real, as though you and you alone realize this truth.

He shook his head hard, grimacing from the pain that went with it … trying to use that pain like bleach, to clean his thoughts … but the thumping. The throbbing. It was everywhere, all around him.

The dogs too. Acting strange around him. Pap and Gertie, the big, bumbling Saint Bernards. Growling as they would when some strange animal came into the yard.

Ann-Marie came up later, alone, finding him sitting at the foot of their bed, his head in his hands like a fragile egg. “You should sleep,” she said.

He gripped his hair like the reins of a mad horse and fought down the urge to berate her. Something was wrong in his throat, and whenever he lay down for any length of time, his epiglottis seized up, cutting off his airway, suffocating him until he choked himself back to breathing. He was terrified now of dying in his sleep.

“What do I do?” she asked, remaining in the doorway, her palm and fingers pressing against her own forehead.

“Get me some water,” he said. His voice hissed through his raw throat, burning like steam. “Lukewarm. Dissolve some Advil in it, ibuprofen—anything.”

She didn’t move. She stood there staring, worrying. “Aren’t you even a little better …?”

Her timidity, which normally aroused strong protective instincts in him, now moved him only to rage. “Ann-Marie, get me some goddamn water, and then take the kids outside or something but keep them the hell away from me!”

She scurried away in tears.

When Ansel heard them go outside into the darkened backyard, he ventured downstairs, walking with one hand clamped on the handrail. She had left the glass on the counter next to the sink, set on a folded napkin, dissolved pills clouding the water. He brought the glass to his lips two-handedly and forced himself to drink. He poured the water into his mouth, giving his throat no choice but to swallow. He got some of it down before gagging on the rest of the contents, coughing onto the sink window overlooking the backyard. He gasped as he watched the splatter drip down the glass pane, distorting his view of Ann-Marie standing behind the kids on the swings, staring off into the darkened sky, breaking her crossed arms only occasionally to push low-swinging Haily.

The glass slipped from his hand, spilling into the sink. He left the kitchen for the living room, dropping onto the sofa there in a kind of a stupor. His throat was engorged and he felt sicker than ever.

He had to return to the hospital. Ann-Marie would just have to make it on her own for a little while. She could do it if she had no choice. Maybe it would even end up being good for her …

He tried to focus, to determine what needed to be done before he left. Gertie came into the doorway, panting softly. Pap entered behind her, stopping near the fireplace, settling down into a crouch. Pap started a low, even growl, and the thumping noise surged in Ansel’s ears. And Ansel realized: the noise was coming from them.

Or was it? He got down off the sofa, moving over toward Pap on his hands and knees, getting closer to hear. Gertie whimpered and retreated to the wall, but Pap held his unrelaxed crouch. The growl intensified in the dog’s throat, Ansel grasping his collar just as the dog tried to back up onto its feet and get away.

Thrum … Thrum … Thrum …

It was in them. Somehow. Somewhere. Something.

Pap was pulling and whimpering, but Ansel, a big man who rarely had to use his strength, curled his free arm around the Saint Bernard’s neck, holding him in a canine headlock. He pressed his ear to the dog’s neck, the hair of its fur tickling the inside of his auditory canal.

Yes. A thrumming pulse. Was it the animal’s circulating blood?

That was the noise. The yelping dog strained to get away, but Ansel pressed his ear harder against the dog’s neck, needing to know.

“Ansel?”

He turned fast—too fast, a blinding shot of white pain—and saw Ann-Marie at the door, Benjy and Haily behind her. Haily was hugging her mother’s leg, the boy standing alone, both of them staring. Ansel’s grip relaxed and the dog pulled away.

Ansel was still on his knees. “What do you want?” he yelled.

Ann-Marie stayed frozen in the doorway, in a trance of fear. “I’m … I don’t … I’m taking them for a walk.”

“Fine,” he said. He wilted a little under the gaze of his children, another choke from his throat making him rasp. “Daddy’s fine,” he told them, wiping off spit with the back of his hand. “Daddy’s going to be fine.”

He turned his head toward the kitchen, where the dogs were. All the make-nice thoughts faded under the resurgent thrumming. Louder than before. Pulsating.

Them.

A nauseous shame rose up within him, and he shuddered, then put a fist to his temple.

Ann-Marie said, “I’ll let the dogs out.”

“No!” He caught himself, holding out an open palm to her from where he knelt on the living room floor. “No,” he said, more evenly. He tried to catch his breath, to seem normal. “They’re fine. Leave them in.”

She hesitated, wanting to say more. To do something, anything. But in the end, she turned and went out, pulling Benjy after her.

Ansel used the wall to get to his feet and walk to the first-floor bathroom. He pulled the string light on over the mirror, wanting to stare into his own eyes. Glowering, red-veined eggs of sallow ivory. He swiped perspiration from his forehead and upper lip and opened his mouth to try and look down his own throat. He expected to see inflamed tonsils, or some kind of white-bump rash, but it only looked dark. It hurt to raise his tongue, but he did, looking underneath. The pad beneath was scarlet and sore, and angry red, glowing hot the way a charcoal glows. He touched it and the pain was brain-splittingly raw, riding out along both sides of his jaw, straining the cords in his neck. His throat bucked in protest, issuing a harsh, barking cough that hacked dark specks onto the mirror. Blood, mixed with something white, maybe phlegm. Some spots were closer to black than others, as though he had brought up some solid residue, like rotten bits of himself. He reached for one of those dark nuggets, smearing the chunk off the glass and onto the tip of his middle finger. He brought it to his nose, sniffing it, then rubbed it with his thumb. It was like a discolored clot of blood. He brought it to the tip of his tongue, and before he knew it, he was tasting it. He swirled the small, soft mass inside his mouth, and then, once it dissipated, swiped another spot off the glass, tasting that one too. Not much taste, but there was something about the sensation on his tongue that was almost healing.

He leaned forward, licking the bloody stains off the cool glass. It should have hurt his tongue to do this, but, on the contrary, the soreness in his mouth and throat had abated. Even that most tender part underneath his tongue—the pain was reduced to a tingle. The thrumming sound also faded, though never completely went away. He looked at his reflection in the red-smeared mirror and tried to understand.

This respite was maddeningly brief. The tightness, like having his throat wrung by powerful hands, resurged, and he pulled his gaze away from the mirror, lurching out into the hallway.

Gertie whined and back-stepped down the hall, away from him, trotting into the living room. Pap was scratching at the back door, wanting to get out. When he saw Ansel coming into the kitchen, he scooted away. Ansel stood there, his throat throbbing, then reached into the dogs’ cabinet, pulling down the box of Milk-Bone treats. He jammed one between his fingers, as he usually did, and went into the living room.

Gertie was lying on the wood landing at the bottom of the stairs, paws out, ready to spring away. Ansel sat down on his footstool and waved the treat. “Come on, baby,” he said, in a heartless whisper that grated against his soul.

Gertie’s leathery nostrils flared, sniffing at the scent in the air.

Thrum … thrum…

“Come on, girl. Get your treat.”

She pushed up slowly onto all fours. She took one small step forward, then stopped again and sniffed. She knew instinctively that there was something wrong with this bargain.

But Ansel held the cookie still, which seemed to reassure her. She padded slowly over the rug, head low, eyes alert. Ansel nodded his encouragement, the thrumming intensifying in his head as she approached.

He said, “Come on, Gertie, old girl.”

Gertie came up and swiped the cookie once with her thick tongue, catching some of his finger. She did this again, wanting to trust him, wanting the treat. Ansel brought out his other hand and laid it on top of her head, stroking her as she liked him to. Tears sprang out of his eyes as he did this. Gertie leaned forward to close her teeth on the treat, taking it from his fingers, and that was when Ansel grabbed her collar and fell upon her with all his weight.

The dog struggled beneath him, snarling and trying to bite him, her panic giving his rage a focus. He forced back her lower jaw with his hand, effectively shutting her mouth by raising her head, then brought his mouth to her furry neck.

He tore in. He bit through her silky, slightly greasy coat, opening a wound. The dog howled as he tasted her fur, the texture of her thick soft flesh vanishing quickly under a hot surge of blood. The pain of his biting pushed Gertie into a frenzy beneath him, but Ansel held his grip, forcing the dog’s big head even higher, fully exposing the neck.

He was drinking the dog. Somehow drinking without swallowing. Ingesting. As though there were some new mechanism of which he was not aware working in his throat. He could not understand it; he only understood the satisfaction he felt. A palliative pleasure in the act. And power. Yes—power. As that of drawing life from one being into another.

Pap came into the room howling. A mournful bassoon sound, and Ansel had to stop this sad-eyed Saint Bernard from spooking the neighbors. With Gertie twitching limply beneath him, he sprang up, and with renewed speed and strength, raced across the room after Pap, knocking a floor lamp down as he lunged and tackled the big, clumsy dog in the hall.

The pleasure of the sensation, in drinking the second dog, was rapturous. He felt within him that tipping point, as when suction catches inside a siphoning tube and the desired change in pressure is achieved. Fluid flowed without effort, replenishing him.

Ansel sat back when he was done, numb for a while, dazed, slow to return to the here and now of the room. He looked down at the dead dog on the floor at his feet and felt suddenly wide awake, and cold. Remorse came all at once.

He got to his feet and saw Gertie, then looked down at his own chest, clawing at his T-shirt, wet with dog blood.

What is happening to me?

The blood on the checkered rug made a nasty black stain. Yet there wasn’t much of it. And that was when he remembered that he had drunk it.

Ansel went first to Gertie, touching her coat, knowing that she was dead—that he had killed her—and then, setting aside his disgust, rolled her up inside the ruined rug. He lifted the bundle into his arms with a great grunt and carried it through the kitchen, outside and down the steps to the backyard dog shed. Inside, he dropped to his knees, unrolled the rug and the heavy Saint Bernard, and left Gertie to go back for Pap.

He laid them together against the wall of the shed, underneath his pegboard of tools. His revulsion was distant, foreign. His neck was tight but not sore, his throat cool suddenly, his head calm. He looked at his bloody hands and had to accept what he could not understand.

What he had done had made him better.

He went back inside the house, to the bathroom upstairs. He stripped off his bloody shirt and boxers and pulled on an old sweat suit, knowing Ann-Marie and the kids would return at any moment. As he searched the bedroom for sneakers, he felt the thrumming return. He didn’t hear it: he felt it. And what it meant terrified him.

Voices at the front door.

His family was home.

He made it back downstairs and just out the back door, unseen, his bare feet hitting the backyard grass, running from the pulsating sense filling his head.

He turned toward the driveway, but there were voices in the dark street. He had left the shed doors open, and so, in his desperation, ducked inside the doghouse to hide, shutting both doors behind him. He didn’t know what else to do.

Gertie and Pap lay dead against the side wall. A cry nearly escaped Ansel’s lips.

What have I done?

New York winters had warped the shed doors, so they no longer hung perfectly flush. He could still see through the seam, spying Benjy getting a glass of water from the kitchen sink, his head in the window, Hailey’s little hand reaching up.

What is happening to me?

He was like a dog who had turned. A rabid dog.

I have caught some form of rabies.

Voices now. The kids coming down the back-porch steps, lit by the security light over the deck, calling the dogs. Ansel looked around him fast and seized a rake from the corner, sliding it through the interior door handles as quickly and quietly as he could. Locking the children out. Locking himself inside.

“Ger-tie! Pa-ap!”

No true concern in their voices, not yet. The dogs had gotten away a few times in the past couple of months, which was why Ansel had dug the iron stake into the ground here in the shed, so they could be chained up securely at night.

Their calling voices faded in his ears as the thrum took over his head: the steady rhythm of blood circulating through their young veins. Little hearts pumping hard and strong.

Jesus.

Haily came to the doors. Ansel saw her pink sneakers through the gap at the bottom and shrank back. She tried the doors. They rattled but wouldn’t give.

She called to her brother. Benjy came and shook the doors with all his eight-year-old might. The four walls shivered, but the rake handle held.

Thrummity … thrummity … thrum …

Their blood. Calling to him. Ansel shuddered and let his focus fall on the dog’s stake in front of him. Buried six feet deep, set in a solid block of concrete. Strong enough to keep two Saint Bernards leashed during a summer thunderstorm. Ansel looked to the wall shelves and saw an extra chain collar, price tag still attached. He felt certain he had an old shackle lock in here somewhere.

He waited until they were a safe distance away before he reached up and pulled down the steel collar.

Captain Redfern was laid out in his johnny on the stretcher bed inside the clear plastic curtains, his lips open in a near-grimace, his breathing deep and labored. Having grown increasingly uncomfortable as night approached, Redfern had been administered enough sedatives to put him out for hours. They needed him still for imaging. Eph dimmed the light inside the bay and switched on his Luma light, again aiming the indigo glow at Redfern’s neck, wanting another look at the scar. But now, with the other lights dimmed, he saw something else as well. A strange rippling effect along Redfern’s skin—or, rather, beneath his skin. Like a mottling, or a subcutaneous psoriasis, blotching that appeared just below the surface of the flesh in shades of black and gray.

When he brought the Luma light closer for further examination, the shading beneath the skin reacted. It swirled and squirmed, as though trying to get away from the light.

Eph backed off, pulled the wand away. With the black light removed from Redfern’s skin, the sleeping man appeared normal.

Eph returned, this time running the violet lamplight over Redfern’s face. The image revealed beneath it, the mottled sub-flesh, formed a kind of mask. Like a second self lurking behind the airline pilot’s face, aged and malformed. A grim visage, an evil awake within him while the sick man slept. Eph brought the lamp even closer … and again the interior shadow rippled, almost forming a grimace, trying to shy away.

Redfern’s eyes opened. As though awakened by the light. Eph jerked back, shocked by the sight. The pilot had enough secobarbital in him for two men. He was too heavily sedated to reach consciousness.

Redfern’s staring eyes were wide in their sockets. He stared straight at the ceiling, looking scared. Eph held the lamp away and moved into his line of sight.

“Captain Redfern?”

The pilot’s lips were moving. Eph leaned closer, wanting to hear what Redfern was trying to say.

The man’s lips moved dryly, saying, “He is here.”

“Who is here, Captain Redfern?”

Redfern’s eyes stared, as though witnessing a terrible scene being played out before him.

He said, “Mr. Leech.”

Much later, Nora returned, finding Eph down the hallway from radiology. They spoke standing before a wall covered with crayon artwork from thankful young patients. He told her about what he had seen under Redfern’s flesh.

Nora said, “The black light of our Luma lamps—isn’t that low-spectrum ultraviolet light?”

Eph nodded. He too had been thinking about the old man outside the morgue.

“I want to see it,” said Nora.

“Redfern’s in radiology now,” Eph told her. “We had to further sedate him for MRI imaging.”

“I got the results from the airplane,” said Nora, “the liquid sprayed around there. Turns out you were right. There’s ammonia and phosphorous—”

“I knew it—”

“But also oxalic and iron and uric acids. Plasma.”

“What?”

“Raw plasma. And a whole load of enzymes.”

Eph held his forehead as though taking his own temperature. “As in digestion?”

“Now what does that remind you of?”

“Excretions. Birds, bats. Like guano. But how …”

Nora shook her head, feeling in equal parts both excited and bewildered. “Whoever, whatever was on that airplane … took a giant shit in the cabin.”

While Eph was trying to wrap his mind around that one, a man in hospital scrubs came hustling down the hallway, calling his name. Eph recognized him as the technician from the MRI room.

“Dr. Goodweather—I don’t know what happened. I just stepped out to get some coffee. I wasn’t gone five minutes.”

“What do you mean? What is it?”

“Your patient. He’s gone from the scanner.”

Jim Kent was downstairs near the closed gift shop, away from the others, talking on his mobile phone. “They are imaging him now,” he told the person on the other end. “He seems to be going downhill pretty fast, sir. Yes, they should have the scans in just a few hours. No—no word on the other survivors. I thought you’d want to know. Yes, sir, I am alone—”

He became distracted by the sight of a tall, ginger-haired man wearing a hospital johnny, walking unsteadily down the hallway, trailing along the floor IV tubes from his arm. Unless Jim was mistaken, it was Captain Redfern.

“Sir, I … something’s happening … let me call you back.”

He hung up and plucked the wire from his ear, stuffing it into his jacket pocket and following the man a few dozen yards away. The patient slowed for just a moment, turning his head as though aware of his pursuer.

“Captain Redfern?” said Jim.

The patient continued around a corner and Jim followed, only to find, when he turned the same corner, the hallway empty.

Jim checked door signs. He tried the one marked STAIRS and looked down the narrow well between half flights. He caught sight of an IV tube trailing down the steps.

“Captain Redfern?” said Jim, his voice echoing in the stairwell. He fumbled out his phone as he descended, wanting to call Eph. The display said NO SERVICE because he was underground now. He pushed through the door into the basement hallway and, distracted by his phone, never saw Redfern running at him from the side.

When Nora, searching the hospital, went through the door from the stairwell into the basement hallway, she found Jim sitting against the wall with his legs splayed. He had a sleepy expression on his face.

Captain Redfern was standing barefoot over him, his johnny-bare back to her. Something hanging from his mouth spilled driblets of blood to the floor.

“Jim!” she yelled, though Jim did not react in any way to her voice. Captain Redfern stiffened, however. When he turned to her, Nora saw nothing in his mouth. She was shocked by his color, formerly quite pale, now florid and flushed. The front of his johnny was indeed bloodstained, and blood also rimmed his lips. Her first thought was that he was in the grip of some sort of seizure. She feared he had bitten off a chunk of his tongue and was swallowing blood.

Closer, her diagnosis became less certain. Redfern’s pupils were dead black, the sclera red where it should have been white. His mouth hung open strangely, disjointedly, as though his jaw had been reset on a lower hinge. And there was a heat coming off him that was extreme, beyond the warmth of any normal, natural fever.

“Captain Redfern,” she said, calling him over and over, trying to snap him out of it. He advanced on her with a look of vulturelike hunger in his filmy eyes. Jim remained slumped on the floor, not moving. Redfern was obviously violent, and Nora wished she had a weapon. She looked around, seeing only a hospital phone, 555 the alert code.

She grabbed the receiver off the wall, barely getting it into her hand before Redfern attacked, throwing her to the floor. Nora kept hold of the receiver, its cord pulling right out of the wall. Redfern had maniacal strength, descending on her and pinning her arms hard to the polished floor. His face strained and his throat bucked. She thought he was about to vomit on her.

Nora was screaming when Eph came flying from the stairwell door, throwing his weight into Redfern’s torso, sending him sprawling, off her. Eph righted himself and held out a cautionary hand toward his patient, dragging himself up from the floor now. “Hold on—”

Redfern emitted a hissing sound. Not snakelike, but throaty. His black eyes were flat and vacant as he started to smile. Or seemed to smile, using those same facial muscles—only, when his mouth opened, it kept on opening.

His lower jaw descended and out wriggled something pink and fleshy that was not his tongue. It was longer, more muscular and complex … and squirming. As though he had swallowed a live squid, and one of its tentacles was still thrashing about desperately inside his mouth.

Eph jumped back. He grabbed the IV tree to keep from falling, and then upended it, using it like a prod to keep Redfern and that thing in his mouth at bay. Redfern grabbed the steel stand and then the thing in his mouth lashed out. It extended the six-foot distance of the IV tree, Eph spinning out of the way just in time. He heard the flap of the end of the appendage—narrowed, like a fleshy stinger—strike the wall. Redfern flung the stand to the side, cracking it in half, Eph tumbling with it backward into a room.

Redfern entered after him, still with that hungry look in his black-and-red eyes. Eph searched around wildly for anything that would help him keep this guy away from him, finding only a trephine in a charger on a shelf. A trephine is a surgical instrument with a spinning cylindrical blade generally used for cutting open the human skull during autopsy. The helicopter-type blade whirred to life, and Redfern advanced, his stinger mostly retracted yet still lolling, with flanking sacs of flesh pulsing at its sides. Before Redfern could attack again, Eph tried to cut it.

He missed, slicing a chunk out of the pilot’s neck. White blood kicked out, just as he had seen in the morgue, not spraying out arterially but spilling down his front. Eph dropped the trephine before its whirring blades could spit the substance at him. Redfern grabbed at his neck, and Eph picked up the nearest heavy object he could find, a fire extinguisher. He used the butt end of it to batter Redfern in the face—his hideous stinger Eph’s prime target. Eph smashed him twice more, Redfern’s head snapping back with the last blow, his spine emitting an audible crack.

Redfern collapsed, his body giving out. Eph dropped the tank and stumbled back, looking in horror at what he had done.

Nora came rushing in wielding a broken piece of the IV tree, then saw Redfern lying in a heap. She dropped the shaft and rushed to Eph, who caught her in his arms.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She nodded, her hand over her mouth. She pointed at Redfern and Eph looked down and saw the worms wriggling out of his neck. Reddish worms, as though blood filled, spilling out of Redfern’s neck like cockroaches fleeing a room when a light is turned on. Eph and Nora backed up to the open doorway.

“What the hell just happened?” said Eph.

Nora’s hand came away from her mouth. “Mr. Leech,” she said.

They heard a groan from the hallway—Jim—and rushed out to tend to him.