The Night Parade (17 page)

Turk went to the end of the hall. He dug around in his pocket as they came to the last door, and ultimately produced a ring of keys. David noted that there was a dead bolt attached to the door frame, right above the knob.

“What's in there?”

“He won't hurt you. Just don't say nothing or move around a whole lot. Too much stimuli seems to set him off.”

Turk unlocked the dead bolt, opened the door, and flipped on the light switch.

David recognized it as a child's room only because there was a child sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. It was a boy, perhaps Sam's age, though it was difficult to tell because the kid had his back to them. The walls were covered in quilts, the mismatched patterns nearly seizure-inducing, and there were smeary brownish-black handprints stamped on some of them. A mattress sat on the floor, soggy and yellowed with stains. Several white balls were scattered about the floor and atop the mattress; it took David a second or two to realize these were tufts of stuffing that had been torn out of stuffed animals, whose gutted carcasses lay strewn about the room. Lastly, he spotted what looked like some dog toys near the head of the bed—a short length of rope; a stuffed animal whose classification in the animal kingdom was no longer evident due to its missing limbs and mangled, threadbare face; a plastic Frisbee stamped with teeth marks; a few rubber balls.

There was also the distinct odor of shit in the air.

“Jimmy,” Turk said.

The boy turned his head the way a ventriloquist's dummy might. He had a face similar to Sam's, though less meaty, and there was dried blood crusted around each of his nostrils. His eyes looked like twin mirrors facing each other, with no comprehension behind them whatsoever. Just idiocy.

“He's sick,” David said.

“Yeah,” Turk said. “He's got the Folly, all right. Had it for nearly two months now.”

“Two
months
?” It must have been a record.

“Far as we can tell, anyway,” Turk said.

“There's butterflies in your hair, Sam,” Jimmy said to Turk. The boy's voice was raspy, ruinous. Probably from screaming himself hoarse. Some of the infected screamed until their throats ruptured. Yet there was an eerie singsong quality to this boy's voice, and somehow that was worse.

“All right,” Turk said.

Jimmy turned those dead eyes on David. “Your hair, too, Sam.”

Turk put a hand on David's shoulder and said, “He knows, sport. You hungry?”

“No, Sam.” An almost musical cadence.

“Okay. Good boy. Check on you later.”

“Good boy, Sam,” Jimmy intoned. A fresh trickle of blood began to seep from his left nostril.

“Jesus,” David said once Turk had shut and locked the door.

“He's Sammy's twin. Been callin' everyone Sam for the past two weeks or so. Lord knows what delusion he's riding now. It's better than before. Used to be he'd scream himself raw, day and night, until his goddamn throat bled.”

“He hasn't been to a doctor?”

“For what? So they can let him die in some hospital room? No, thank you. Besides, we've been taking care of him. His family. Ain't no one could do it better for him. You think he would have lasted this long in some hospital?”

“Trust me, I'm no fan of doctors,” David said.

“Never have been, m'self,” said Turk.

“And he's been like that for two months?”

“Give or take. Maybe been sick with it even longer than that, though with kids, it's harder to tell. They're always half-stuck in some dream world as it is, am I right?”

Not Ellie,
David thought.
Never Ellie. She has always been a practical child, a girl not prone to fancies or silliness. A pragmatic soul. Like her mother.

“We feed him, clean him, take care of him best we can,” Turk said. “We try to keep the end from coming.” Turk shrugged. They could have been talking about baseball scores for all his casualness. “It's all we can do.”

“And no one else who's been in contact with him has gotten sick?”

“No. Anyway, no one's sure how people even catch the damn thing to begin with. Some think it's airborne, others say it's in the water. Even the government's come out and said it might just be hanging in the air and absorbed through the skin. Heck, who's to say it ain't genetics? Who's to say some of us ain't just born with it and now it's coming active inside our brains?”

“You could be right. It's almost like—”

Something slammed against the other side of the door, causing them both to jump. The door bucked in its frame, and the crucifix fell from its nail and thudded to the carpet. David took a step back, but Turk remained planted to the spot, a look of consternation on his hardened, sun-reddened face. A muffled moan reverberated against the door, and then it bucked a second time against the frame. It was Jimmy, throwing himself against the door.

“Let's head on back downstairs,” Turk suggested, his voice lowered now. “He don't like us standing out here jawin' about him, is all.”

P
auline invited them to stay for dinner, and David accepted. He was aware that Turk had stashed the Glock somewhere and he didn't want to leave without it, so he thought it best to respond in a positive light to their hospitality. Hopefully he could earn Turk's trust and he'd give him back the gun. Despite the discomfort of knowing they kept their terminally ill son locked in a bedroom upstairs, handprints stamped in shit on the walls, there was still a level of trust and even comfort David felt around this family. He wondered if it was because his own family, over just the course of a handful of days, had essentially disintegrated.

Ellie had brightened a bit toward Sam, too, and after David came down from using their shower (dressed now in one of Turk's clean T-shirts, this one a Motörhead concert tee about two sizes too big), he found them both in the living room watching a DVD of Disney's
Beauty and the Beast.
David paused in the doorway and watched his daughter for several seconds. She had never been the type of girl to dress up like a princess or sing along with a movie's soundtrack, and even now she sat watching the movie cross-legged on the carpet, the look on her face one of studious incredulity at the sight of an animated anthropomorphic teapot lecturing like a British schoolmarm. Yet some fashion of levity had come into her countenance, some brand of innocence and awe that seemed more befitting of an eight-year-old girl than the dark suspicion that also hung just behind her eyes. David had always thought she was too smart for her own good, and too practical to maintain many friendships with girls who just wanted to play dress-up and house, so it did him some good to see a softness in her profile now. Beside her, Sam narrated the events of the film a few seconds ahead of the action, something that the old Ellie would have found annoying. But now she was actually
smiling
at the boy.

In the kitchen, Pauline was preparing a strange assortment of food on a single plate—chocolate chip cookies, a single slice of white bread slathered in peanut butter, apple slices, and a powdered doughnut.

“Healthy food for a healthy body,” he joked.

Pauline smiled at him, but there was no humor in it. David couldn't help quell the feeling that whenever Pauline looked at him, it was with an odd mixture of appreciation and pity. She turned away from the plate and retrieved a plastic cup with Transformers on it from the cupboard. From the fridge, she pulled a jug of chocolate milk. She filled the cup with it.

“Turk says you met Jimmy.”

“Yes. I'm sorry.”

Pauline set the plate of food and the cup of chocolate milk on a tin tray with the NASCAR logo on it. “It happened after the evacuation, you know.” She didn't look at him as she spoke. “Turk says there's no way to be completely sure, seein' how there could be an incubation period and all, but, well . . . a mother knows.”

“So he was healthy after the evacuation? And he hadn't been around anyone else who was sick?”

“No one else,” she said.

He heard Turk speaking in his head, the same words he'd said upstairs, on the other side of his son's locked door:
Some think it's airborne, others say it's in the water. Even the government's come out and said it might just be hanging in the air and absorbed through the skin. Heck, who's to say it ain't genetics?

“Maybe the rest of us ain't gotten sick because we don't got the gene in us,” Pauline said, eerily echoing her husband's sentiment. “Or maybe it's for other reasons.” For the first time, she looked up at David and held him in the gaze of her dark, hypnotic, almost childlike eyes. “Turk thinks there could be other reasons. Like, maybe this ain't something science can explain. Turk's found religion.” She fingered a tiny silver cross on a chain around her neck. “We all have.”

“It's good to have faith,” David said. “I wish I had something I could believe in.”

“You can.” She smiled at him, a gentle easing of her features that never quite reached her eyes. “Maybe you already have. It's been working for us.”

“You mean with Jimmy,” he said.

“Ain't no one else but God could keep Jimmy with us for this long,” Pauline said. “That's my belief, anyway.”

He returned her smile, but something about the falseness of it on his face made him feel cold.

“Turk's on the porch drinking a beer,” she said, picking the tray up off the counter. “Help yourself to one. They're in the fridge.”

When she left, he got a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator and joined Turk on the back porch.

“Hear that?” Turk said, not bothering to look at him.

David listened. He could hear nothing. After a time, he said, “What?”

“Bugs,” said Turk. “Crickets. Cicadas. What-have-you. Millions of bugs out there. You know why?”

“Yes,” David said. “I do.”

Turk craned his head around to face him. His eyebrows arched.

“No birds,” David said.

“It's the rapture,” Turk said. “Signs of the plague. Birds die, bugs propagate, start growing, multiplying. Hell, they already had us outnumbered on the planet about a million to one. And that was
before
the Folly.”

David thought about the monstrous spider that had crawled down the lamppost in town, the spider that was preparing to feast on a mouse. He could imagine the chain reaction such events would have—birds die, bugs propagate, just as Turk said. Bugs grow, eat larger prey. Mammals vanish. Larger bugs are eaten by fish—by serpents—and those terrible things grow in size, too. Meanwhile, people vanish from the planet, giving way to a whole new caste of creature that then inherits the earth.

“Where you think them birds went, anyway?” Turk said.

“I don't know.” David sat in the empty chair beside Turk. “People have been asking that for some time now.” He thought of the geese dropping like anchors out of the sky, pulverizing automobile windshields and leaving cracks on the asphalt.

“If they were dead—if they all got sick and died—their little bodies would be all over the place. But nope. Not a single bird. Not even a dead one. Not anymore, anyway.” Turk swigged some beer. “For a while, U.S. Fish and Wildlife were tracking 'em, and you could pull up info on the Internet from the Department of the Interior. But then they stopped tracking.”

“There were early reports of birds migrating out over the oceans,” David said. “Some were being tracked. But then the tracker signals went dead. Scientists on TV and in the newspapers said they probably died during the migration and fell into the oceans.”

“Could be,” said Turk. “But you don't much hear about it anymore. Pauline says maybe they're focused on more important things, given all that's going on now, but I think maybe we don't got the people to do all these things anymore. Let me ask you—when was the last time you saw the president on TV? Or heard a live briefing on the radio?”

“It's been a long time.”

“Sure, the White House releases statements to the media, and every once in a while there's some pencil-neck in a bow tie standing behind that podium with the seal on it to give us a rundown on the situation, make us feel like they're wrangling things under control, although even then they've got no real news for us. But nope, you don't see the president. Or even the vice president. Nobody of any importance, I mean. They said they're holed up in some undisclosed location somewhere, healthy as thoroughbreds, but I ain't so sure about that. They'll play some old recordings of him to make us think that he's still there toiling away behind the scenes, but for my money, I think something bad has happened. Real bad.”

“You think the president's dead.”

“I do. Much of his cabinet, too. And Congress. Not that they've ever been too lively, you ask me. But everyone's been real quiet the past few months.”

“Then who's running the country?”

“That,” said Turk, holding up one finger, “is a very good question, Dave. A very good question, indeed.”

“What about the statements that have been coming from the CDC?”

“I suppose there's always someone around to give a statement.”

David thought of the roadblock near that elementary school, the soldiers in the biohazard suits with the assault rifles. Someone was certainly giving them orders.

Not to mention the people out there looking for Ellie and me,
David thought.
They've got their orders, too.

Once again, Turk craned his head around and looked at David. There was a smoothness to his face now, an expression akin to empathy. “Whatever you and that girl are running from, friend, you're most likely safe as milk. Ain't no one got the time or even the wherewithal to hunt down a father and his kid at the moment.” Turk shrugged as he added, “Unless, of course, that ain't really your kid. But we already covered that, now, didn't we?”

“Yes,” David said. “We did.”

“Then you're just a daddy-o chillin' on the patio.” Turk raised his can of Bud in a lazy salute before emptying its contents into his mouth.

You're wrong, my friend. What if my daughter is so goddamn important they can't
not
look for her?
And thinking this made him think of the other thing, of Ellie's newfound ability, and what that might mean. It seemed impossible to believe someone could be exclusively blessed with both immunity to Wanderer's Folly and also possess the ability to do what she could do—to regulate her father's mood, was the clearest way he could define it for himself. It went beyond coincidence, which meant there was a connection there. She was immune because of her ability . . . or she had the ability because she was immune ...

Turk snapped his fingers. “You zoning out on me, bud? I boring you?”

“Sorry, no. Was just thinking. You mentioned the Internet earlier. Are you still connected?”

“Yeah. There's a desktop off the living room. Long as we keep paying the bills, they keep the service active.”

“How long will you be able to keep that up?” He knew this was treading close to their previous conversation about packing up and getting out of town, but Turk had mentioned over dinner that he had lost his job with the county's sanitation department, so David wondered how much extra money they actually had squirreled away.

“Long as I can,” Turk said. “Got a generator out in the toolshed. I figure once the power goes out—whether they cut the service or everyone working at the plant keels over dead, whichever happens first—I'll hook that up. After that . . . well . . . I guess God will have to provide. You need to get online?”

“Is that okay?”

“Fine by me. Ask Pauline to boot it up for you. I'm not much of a PC jockey myself. And don't go lookin' at no dirty pictures.” Turk winked at him. He pronounced it
pitchers.

David entered the kitchen just as Pauline returned from upstairs with the food tray. She wore a haggard expression, and there was a thread of bright red blood high up on her cheekbone where she had apparently been scratched by something. It wasn't until that moment that the true horror of the situation dawned upon David—the daily maintenance of that brain-sick child up there, his mind mostly gone to rubble, his brain slowly rupturing, poisoned by madness—and he felt a sudden bolt of sadness for this tired-looking woman.

“Turk said I could use your computer?”

She set the tray on the counter. “Sure thing. Follow me.”

It was an ancient PC filmed in dust, resting on a clapboard desktop in a tiny corner room. There was a single window that looked out on the neighbor's house and a bookshelf overrun by model cars. What dominated the room, however, was a three-foot crucifix hanging on the wall, the face of the miniature Jesus contorted in agony, His eyes rolled partway back to portray what looked to David like insanity. David had never been a religious person, but since Wanderer's Folly, it seemed many folks—including Turk and his brood—had found religion. Many zealots even believed they were in the throes of the Second Coming. Ordinarily such talk would have reduced David to grins and snide comments, but he found that the eyes of that plaster Jesus, which seemed to follow him around the room, gave him a chill.
Judging by the look on His face, forgiveness is probably the furthest thing from His mind,
David thought.
Those are the eyes of a lunatic driven crazy by torture, a man reduced to a feral monster by a whole different kind of madness.

“Neat cars,” he said, opting to address the models on the shelf instead of the crucifix.

“The boys did those.” Pauline sat at the desk and turned on the computer.

“That's impressive.”

“Bronwyn helped. My sister. She's got an eye for projects.”

“Oh.” There was nothing else he could say, assuming the worst had befallen Bronwyn.

“Oh, she ain't dead,” Pauline said, apparently able to read his thoughts. “She's out with the others.”

“What others, exactly?”

“Cooper and Tre. Local boys. They stayed behind. Like us.”

“And Solomon,” he added.

“Yes,” she said, a noticeable change coming over her face at the mention of the name. She grew darker, somehow. “That's right. And Solomon. They should be back by supper. You'll get to meet the whole crew.”

The PC chimed as icons populated the screen. Pauline clicked on Firefox and the screen opened up.

“She's all yours,” she said, getting up.

“Thank you.”

“Do you want another beer?”