The Missing (28 page)

Danny’s stomach churned. This was bad. But what could he do? People liked him for his dad’s money. He could drive without a license and drink beer in the woods. He never ran from the cops, because he’d never get arrested so long as his dad covered the bill. With the money Miller made, his mom would never be his bur- den, and neither would James.

Yeah, that kiddie porn shit made all the sense in the world. Lou deserved it, for accusing James of some- thing so bizarre. Seriously, James was psycho, but could any kid really eat a half-dozen grown rabbits? Maybe Lou McGuffin really
was
into toddlers. If he told the cops, his dad would fuck him. He’d never see it coming. Smiling, his dad would say:
Proud of you son, you told the truth just like your mom and I taught you
, and the next thing he knew he and Lou would have adjoining cells. Best to do nothing. Best to chase some tail and play a little more golf this fall, so long as he didn’t get the virus and lived to see next week. Better yet, he should have a beer. Or ten.

So Danny went to the kitchen, and pulled out a Ship- yard, and was feeling just fine until he opened it, and smelled what he thought was a future full of beer and bullshit. He dry-heaved in the kitchen sink.

And now it was after midnight, and his room smelled like a stink bomb. Downstairs, he could smell cigarette smoke. After five years’ cold turkey, his mom was back in Marlboro country. His dad was shouting on the phone, because a lot of people were dead, and the pub- lic health commission wanted the bodies burned, but the lawyers wanted them stored in freezers, so instead nobody was doing anything. Eight different people had

left messages on Danny’s cell phone over the last two days. His girlfriend Janice. His friends on the lacrosse team. They were talking about leaving town, and the people who’d gotten sick. They were talking about the stuff they’d seen during the night, and the rumors about half-eaten animals, like James wasn’t the only kid in town with a thing for vivisection.

And now maybe his brother was dead, and Lou Mc- Guffin was in the slammer, and he was jerking off while four whores talked about whether they’d have sex with a guy on the first date (apparently, if he buys you dinner, the answer is a resounding yes), and he started crying, because even though he’d showered, the dirt from the hole he’d dug was still crammed in his fingernails, and potato chip salt was burning his blisters. He was crying because his room was dark, and his mom’s Marlboros were wafting under his door, and instead of feeling sad, he felt mean. He wanted to punch a wall. He wanted to find his mom, and start yelling about how none of this would have happened if she wasn’t popping pills all the time. He wanted to hurt somebody weaker than him, just like good old dad.

So he wiped his tears and decided. He wasn’t going to be like his dad. He’d go to the police station. He’d tell them about the rabbits. Maybe Miller would kick the shit out of him, or ship him to military school like he was always threatening. Either way, he’d finally be out of this house.

He put on his coat and shoes and grabbed his mom’s keys. Tiptoed down the stairs. They wouldn’t notice he was leaving until they heard the car. By then he’d be gone. In the kitchen the radio was playing classical crap on low volume—Wagner. It smelled down here, almost as bad as the stink bomb in his room. He could hear the echo of his footsteps, which seemed wrong. Miller

wasn’t yelling into the phone anymore. His mom wasn’t flipping through
Being Your Own Best Friend
.

He knew he should go, but the silence was unnerv- ing. He pressed open the door to the master dining room and peeked inside. A cigarette’s plume curled from an ashtray. He opened wider. An arm in a blue sweater dangled from a chair. It moved in slow circles.
Mama
, he thought, even though he hadn’t called her that since before the loony bin.

He opened the door all the way. She was leaning back in the Louis XIV chair with her neck exposed, while on the wood floor below, blood pooled. As each drop fell, it splashed.

His heart migrated from his chest and lodged in his esophagus. It kept beating, even though it was in the wrong place. Everything in his body was in the wrong place. His mom’s throat was missing, and as he watched, her head lolled. He remembered feeding Wonder bread to the ducks with her, and the way she used to cut his apples width-wise, so he could see their stars.

Then the worst thing happened. Worse than he could ever have imagined. Her neck was mostly chewed up, and her head was tilted back. It began to loll. Only a lit- tle bit of bone was still holding it in place. The rest was gristle. The bone broke. It sounded like a knuckle crack- ing. Her head made a wet sound as it squashed against the carpet. Then it rolled in his direction. He thought maybe it was alive. It was trying to tell him something. It stopped only a few inches from his feet. Its mouth was open, and for a moment he thought it might speak.

“Hhhh,” he wheezed, again and again: “Hhhh . . . Hhhh . . . Hhhh.” He covered his mouth with his hand, and hoped his dad wouldn’t hear. His dad had done this. His dad was a monster. And then he remembered his brother. James had done this . . . Or was it his dad?

He started for the back door. Careful, so careful, not to trip on the thing on the floor. His heart was in his throat, beating fast.

“Brother,” a voice said. The sound was cold, and wet, and wrong.

Danny looked, and there was James, blocking the door. The kid’s eyes were completely black. His toes, impossibly, looked like they’d grown back since the other night. The new ones were pale and perfect. Not even crooked, like they used to be. The hair on his scalp, lashes, and eyebrows was gone. His pale skin was sagging, so he looked like James, only aged one hun- dred years.

Danny hauled ass. He kicked the thing on the ground by accident, and it squashed as it rolled. Her eyes didn’t blink from one revolution to the next, and he wondered if it hurt her. His heart was in his mouth now. He was biting it as he ran.

James lunged and grabbed his legs. He clung tight until they both fell. Danny turned onto his side, and suddenly James was on top of him. His skin smelled rotten, like it was falling off his bones, and Danny gagged.

Overhead, he could see his mother’s headless body, arms still swinging, baaaack and foooorth, so slowly. “Dad!” Danny tried to shout, only it came out a whisper. “Dad!” James mimicked. “Daddy! Daddy!” he shouted.

When no one answered, Danny understood that their father was dead. Absurdly he thought:
The king is dead. Long live the king
.

James’s face contorted into something ugly and full of hate. A crippling, useless, idiot hate that burns so hot it devours itself before its flames can lick the object of its loathing. The kind of hate that spurs a kid to kill his

own pet. James bared his teeth, and went for Danny’s throat.

Danny kicked up his legs as hard as he could. James went flying. He crashed into the body in the chair. They toppled. Danny winced at the sight of Felice’s blue wool socks. There was a hole in one of them, and her big toe peeked through.

He opened the breakfront, and grabbed a steak knife. He didn’t want to, but he pointed it at his kid brother. James got out from under Felice’s body. They squared off. James smacked his red lips. Danny tried not to make the connection, but his mind moved faster than he wanted. Blood. His little brother was wearing his parents’ blood.

He did the worst thing he could imagine (
I’m so sorry Mom and Dad and God and James
). He drove the knife down in a low arc. It connected with James’s chest. He tried to pull it back out and stab again, but lost heart, and left it there. James staggered back, but he didn’t fall. With a howl, he pulled the knife from his ribcage. It clanged against the floor.

James bared his teeth, but Danny could see now that he was frightened. He hadn’t expected this. “I’ll show you!” he said, and his voice wasn’t flat anymore. It was full of worry. “I’ll see you in the woods, Danny. I’ll see you there!” He was crying like they were kids again, and Danny had been teasing him too hard.

Weakened, he dropped to his knees and crawled out the back door. His blood trailed him like a shadow on the ground. Danny followed, and watched as James tore at the grass for purchase. He lumbered across the lawn.

Danny leaned in the doorway. He wanted to scratch his nose, but his hands were bloody. He wanted to be

inside, but his house was bloody. He watched his brother disappear into the dark, and he wanted to res- cue him, to save this last member of his family, but he understood that for this disease, there was only one cure.

T W E N T Y - T H R E E
‌

Wheel of Fortune

This is where I live. Under a sign marked empty.

This is where we part ways. When everything runs out.

That feeling in your stomach. You do not imagine it.

That feeling in your stomach is how you murder me.

T

he thing formerly known as Lois Larkin clutched a piece of pink stationery. Scrawled across its thick grain was a poem she’d written. It was a poignant thing, and she knew it by heart. Had repeated the lines over and over, though she couldn’t remember what it meant.

All she knew was that she was hungry.

It was late Saturday night. She lay in a bed of her own filth and stink. The itch had returned. It crawled between the folds of her wrinkled skin, under her sag- ging breasts, and on the inside, too. Her organs, her dying muscles, her thickening bones; they felt like scabs that would never heal. She was changing. Her black hair was falling out in clumps. It wasn’t just daylight that made her squint; it was the bulb in the hall whose

halo shone under her door, and the headlights of cars that passed on the street. She was becoming
not Lois
. So she squeezed the paper tight, and recited the poem like an incantation, trying to revive the woman she used to be.

But she hated that milksop, didn’t she?

The thing that lived inside her blinked. She felt it slither behind her eyes. Its wetness satisfied the itch.
Sweet Lois,
it crooned.
Your father’s here with us. He says you can give up now. You tried your best. He’s so proud of you
.

Lois looked up at the cracked ceiling, and tried with her mind to make it come crashing down.

Feed me, Lois,
it demanded. This time, it didn’t croon. She covered her ears with her hands. Water leaked through her eyes. She didn’t know why. Was this cry- ing? Did humans cry? Did that mean, by deduction, that she was still human? She felt a flutter in her chest

beneath the itch, and named it hope.

You win, my Lois. You figured it out. You have to eat, or I die inside you. Feed me now.

“Daddy?” she whispered, even though she knew it wasn’t her daddy; it was the buried thing. It was read- ing her mind, and telling her what she wanted to hear.

She squeezed the paper and wished she was dreaming all this. Wished she was back in the woods, only this time, she had run. This time, she’d made a better choice. But she had made so many bad decisions that they had gathered into the fossils of her history, and trapped her in this child’s bed—flesh within bone.

“Daddy, please tell me what to do,” she whispered, only her voice was flat and unrecognizable, even to her- self.

Lollipop, stop fighting,
a voice answered. It sounded

so much like her dad that she smiled. His words stumbled over themselves like nervous dominoes, just like they used to.
You know what to do
, her daddy whispered,
It’s the only way
. But this couldn’t be her father. Her father would never suggest something so . . . hideous.

In the next room, Lois could feel the vibrations of Jodi’s breath as she mouthed guesses to the
Wheel of Fortune
puzzle:
Sus . . . soup . . . Susquehannah Hat Company!
The itch was bad now. She scratched her stomach and her last fingernail snapped off. Her fingers didn’t look like fingers anymore.

For the first few nights after eating the dirt in the woods, she’d eaten everything in sight. Food in her belly had slaked her itch, like cold water on a burn. The steaks in her mother’s freezer had been the first to go. Then worse. Then the animals. She could still re- member the shiny eyes of a garbage-fatted raccoon and its wild scream as she’d broken its neck with her teeth. She’d told herself in the morning that the mem- ory was a fever dream, but even then she’d known the truth.

She could guess something about this thing that oc- cupied her body. Like the bright, sweet flowers that attract bees, when it was nearby, it spread its sulfuric scent through the air and infected people’s minds. It had tricked her into eating it, and giving it a home. Right now it was taking over her body, cell by cell. It was speeding up her metabolism, and making her hungry. It was making her in its image. Making her
not Lois
.

But why mourn? She hated Lois, didn’t she?

If she listened now, she could hear the infected roam- ing the streets. They liked the night, because the sun hurt their black eyes. Last night they’d banged on the windows, and her mother had screamed. They would

come back again tonight. There was something about her that they liked.

Most of the infected changed in seconds. A few lasted long enough to cough their way to the hospital. A lot of them died, or else the virus damaged their brains, and they became simpletons, so that the virus became sim- ple, too. It was only as smart as its host. Because of that the infected had made stupid mistakes. They’d eaten all the animals, and now had no choice but to move on to humans.

Lois wasn’t like the others. Her mind was still sharp, if
changed
. Simple body chemistry. One in a million can carry typhoid. That was why it wanted her. To sur- vive, a virus seeks its most perfect host. She’d been try- ing to starve it out of her, but the hour was growing late, and her hair was falling out in clumps.

Stop fighting, Lois
, the voice said. This time it sounded like Dr. Wintrob.
You know the truth; before this, you were nobody. Not even Ronnie Koehler could love you.