The Night Parade (30 page)

In the living room, he slid a Paul Desmond CD into the stereo and turned the volume down low as to not disturb Kathy and Ellie. Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a steaming mug of Sumatran coffee, then pried open the window above the sink so he could smoke a cigarette without having to go outside on the porch. He had hoped the music might fool him into thinking things hadn't changed all that much and that they could still enjoy the simple day-to-day pleasures, but it didn't work. He couldn't trick himself into pretending that everything was normal. The music grated on him and he shut it off.

Someone knocked on the front door.

David chucked the half-smoked cigarette down the garbage disposal, then carried his coffee mug to the door. There were curtains covering the vertical strip of glass beside the door, which he pulled aside. Three figures stood on the porch. A sleek black sedan was parked out in the street by the mailbox. He thought they might be cops or federal agents.

He unlocked the door and opened it. The man in the center, flanked by two men in dark suits, wore a tweed sports coat with suede patches on the elbows and a garish pink bow tie over a blue-and-white checked shirt. He was dark-skinned, slender, nervous-looking. The man's face was narrow and pinched, though somehow not unfriendly.

“Mr. David Arlen?” the man said, extending a laminated badge with his photo on it for David's inspection. He spoke with a heavy Indian accent. “My name is Dr. Sanjay Kapoor. I am the head epidemiologist and director of the recently established Washington branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office of Infectious Diseases.”

“The CDC?”

“You are the husband of Kathleen Arlen, is that correct? She is still located at this residence?”

“I think you'd better tell me what this is—”

“Hon?” Kathy said, coming down the hall in a pink terrycloth bathrobe. “What's going on?”

“Mrs. Arlen?” Dr. Kapoor said, peering past David.

“Yes.” She came up beside David, and he put a hand on her shoulder.

“These guys are with the CDC, hon,” David said.

Dr. Kapoor repeated his introduction again, then said, “I came here to speak candidly with you, Mrs. Arlen.” His dark eyes shifted toward David. “You and your husband, of course.”

“What's wrong?” she said.

“You subjected to a blood test at the Spring Hill Medical Center this past quarter,” Dr. Kapoor said.

“Yes,” she said. “But I was told I was okay. The blood test came back negative.”

“Is she sick?” David said. He pulled Kathy away from the door and took a step in front of her. She hugged his arm.

“No, Mr. Arlen.” Astoundingly, Dr. Kapoor's pinched face broke into a smile. A silver incisor glittered like tinsel. “Quite the opposite, in fact. May we come in?”

H
e came awake as if pulling himself from quicksand. His head hurt and his neck was stiff. He was in a car, but he wasn't driving . . . and this realization set off his internal panic alarm, causing him to bolt upright in his seat.

“Hey,” said the woman behind the wheel. “Take it easy, okay?”

Her name was Ganymede, David recalled. He rubbed his eyes, then wiped the scum from his lips. It was still dark. The glowing green numerals on the dashboard clock read 3:11. Rubbing at a kink in his neck, he turned and saw that Ellie was still asleep, sprawled out across the Caddy's backseat.

“Pleasant dreams?” Gany said. She had her window cracked and was smoking a cigarette.

“Do you think I could get one of those?”

She handed him her lit smoke, then dug a fresh one out of the pack that was wedged in the console between an empty cardboard cup and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. A road map was tucked down into the space between the console and the driver's seat.

He sucked the life out of the cig, relishing it. A sweet mentholated air permeated his lungs. “Ah, Jesus,” he muttered.

“Better than sex, isn't it?” Gany said.

Again, David peered into the backseat to make sure his daughter was sleeping. Then he sighed. “Goddamn, it really is.” It was almost enough to take his mind off the throbbing ache in his left arm. He extended the arm, bent it at the elbow, straightened it again. The bandage-work Heck Ramirez had done was holding up—there was no blood seeping through the gauze—but the pain, he feared, had intensified while he slept. The whole arm felt tender and hot.

“There's some Tylenol in my purse, if you need it. Back there.” Gany nodded toward the backseat.

Her purse was on the floor, a slouching gray satchel that looked like the gutted carcass of an armadillo. He fumbled through it until he located the tiny white bottle of tablets. He shook three into his hand, popped them into his mouth, and dry-swallowed them.

“I'm going to need you to take over for a while,” Gany said. “I'm running on fumes here. You okay with that?”

“Yeah. I gotta take a leak, though.”

She pointed to the empty cardboard cup in the cup holder.

“You serious?” he said.

Gany laughed. “No. I'm messing with you.”

She pulled over on some bleak and hopeless stretch of highway so they could switch seats. The air smelled of tree sap, and David could hear running water—a waterfall?—somewhere off in the distance. They hadn't passed another vehicle since he'd woken up. While he urinated in the bushes, he took his time to breathe in the air and observe the untouched, expansive surroundings.
Being out here, you could almost trick yourself into believing that the world is fine and everything is okay.

Back on the road, David behind the wheel, he said, “How much farther do we have to go?”

“We should get there around eight in the morning or so.” Gany snapped her seat belt into place, then curled onto her side so that she faced the passenger window.

“How do I know where to go?”

“There's a map stuck down by your seat.” She yawned.

He tweezed the map out with a thumb and forefinger then spread it across the steering wheel. It wasn't even a MapQuest printout, but an actual
road map,
with their route highlighted in bright yellow marker. There were handwritten notes in spidery print near their destination, telling him what back roads to take once they got off the main highway.

“Tim did all this?” he asked.

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“I get the sense that this is his usual MO, and not just because of . . . well, my situation.”

“He's a cautious fella,” Gany said. “Now, will you keep quiet so I can catch some z's?”

“Sorry.”

“There's CDs in the glove compartment. Classic rock. And I don't mean the
new
classic rock, I mean the legit shit. Have at 'em. Just keep the volume down.”

“I think the silence will be just fine.”

Gany didn't respond. Judging by the deepening of her respiration, David guessed she had already fallen asleep.

A
ccording to the map, they were only about an hour from their destination—Tim's so-called Fortress of Solitude—when the early morning sunlight glinted off a collection of chrome bumpers farther up the road. David slowed down. Gany leaned forward in the passenger seat and said, “What is this, now?”

“Daddy?” Ellie said, sitting upright in the backseat.

“It's okay, hon. Looks like a fender bender, that's all.”

“I don't see any fender bender,” Gany said. She rolled down her window and stuck her head out. The morning air swooped into the car. It was downright
cold.

Five or six cars stood in a queue behind a single vehicle that was parked slantways across both lanes of the road. The car—a pine-green Corolla with rusted quarter panels—did not appear disabled. Whatever had occurred, it must have just happened, because there were no police on the scene yet, and as David pulled up to the rear of the line, a few people got out of their cars and began to wander over to the Corolla.

“Should we see if they need help?” Ellie said. She was peering between the front seats now, gazing at the wreckage ahead of them.

“No,” Gany said. “Tim said no stopping. We don't stop.”

David looked at her. She was right; he knew that she was.

“All right,” he said. He spun the steering wheel and rolled the Cadillac up onto the shoulder. There were grooves in the pavement, which caused the car to vibrate.

“But someone might be hurt, Dad.”

“There's enough people around to help out,” he said. His hands were tight on the wheel, the vibrations traveling up his arms. Trees encroached upon the shoulder and he brought the car nearly to a stop in order to navigate around them.

“Hey, asshole!” someone shouted at them.

“Roll your window up,” David instructed.

Gany started to roll her window up . . . then paused. David eased down on the brake and followed her gaze. They were directly across from the Corolla now, and David saw that the driver's door stood open and that a slim brunette had staggered several feet from the vehicle, dragging the rigid body of a child toward the center of the road. The woman held the child under the armpits, and at first David thought the kid was unconscious or possibly even dead until he saw the face.

The child was a girl, maybe a bit older than Ellie, mousy brown hair like her mother's streaking across her pallid, sweaty face. She wore jean shorts, the hems of which were nothing but stringy white tassels. Her legs were smooth and white, the knees pink. A torrent of blood gushed from both nostrils, soaking her powder-blue shirt with a rhinestone unicorn on it. When her head lolled in David's direction, he saw that she was perfectly conscious. The girl exposed all her bloodstained teeth in a hideous grin. When her hair fell away, David saw that her eyes were blind with madness and swelling from their sockets. As if to give David a show, the girl began chattering her blood-flecked teeth, that rictus grin fixed firmly on her face.

“Drive, David. Go.”

For a split second, his foot forgot which pedal was the accelerator and which was the brake.

“Daddy,” Ellie said again, her voice a rising whine. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt.

The woman in the street shrieked, “My baby! My baby!”

The would-be Samaritans froze in their haste to assist the woman, quickly turning into a gaggle of gape-mouthed onlookers too terrified to get any closer.

That bloodied rictus grin persisted. David thought he could even hear the clatter of her teeth—
clack-clack-clack-clack!
The light behind those hideous mad eyes was nearly luminous. She flailed in her mother's arms, and a too-white sneaker came off one slender foot and lay by itself now in the sun.

“Drive the
car,
man,” Gany said. She whipped her head around to glare at him.

Yet before he could snap out of it and plant the accelerator on the floor, he heard the Caddy's back door pop open. A second later, he saw Ellie running across the highway toward the woman and the sick girl.

“Holy shit,” Gany said.

David hopped out of the car and chased after his daughter. In the road, the mother struggled with the girl, shrieking and calling for help. The girl twisted loose and staggered like a zombie a step or two in no particular direction, her one bare foot slapping on the blacktop. Her jaw chattered like some electric machine.

“Ellie!” David cried after her.

Ellie did not stop running, did not turn to look at him. She approached the girl, who cocked her head at a terrible angle, and only then did Ellie slow down to a deliberate walk. Blood sluiced from the girl's nose. Her eyes blazed like twin moons.

“Ellie!”

Ellie reached out and grabbed one of the girl's wrists.

A second after that, David reached her. He wrapped an arm around her waist and, with his other hand, tried to break Ellie's hold on the girl's wrist. Yet, at that same moment, he was overcome by such a powerful jolt that his vision briefly flickered to darkness. A moment later, he felt all his terror drain from him, leaving behind a vast, windy cavern of peacefulness, and he felt—

Ellie shoved him away. He staggered backward, the panic and fear flooding back into his body like boiling water, causing sweat to burst from his pores and his heart to hammer. So overwhelmed by the abrupt shift in emotion, he found he could do nothing but stand there, helpless, terrified.

He realized at one point that Ellie and the girl were no longer standing, but that the girl was laid out supine on the blacktop with her head in Ellie's lap. Ellie had a hand on either side of the girl's head, and she was leaning forward so far that their foreheads nearly touched.

The girl had stopped chattering her teeth. Those eyes—those horrible, impossible eyes—had closed. Now her face was nothing but a smooth canvas of peace, as if she had fallen—

—asleep.

“What is she doing?” It was Gany, speaking in a low voice very close to him, although it took him several seconds to realize this. Not that he could answer her—he no longer possessed the strength to speak.

The only other noise was the sound of the girl's mother sobbing as she stood a few paces behind Ellie, her hands over her mouth. When her daughter's body appeared to go slack, the woman issued a high-pitched whine and sank to her knees.

Gently, Ellie rested the girl's head on the pavement. She stood, and there was blood smeared on her shirt and along one pale white arm. She turned and, without hesitation, approached the mother who remained kneeling in the middle of the street. Ellie's shadow fell over the woman's face. She reached out and touched a hand to the left side of the woman's face, as if to caress her. And indeed, the action looked very much like a caress—an act of comfort, of kindness.

The woman ceased crying. Her chest hitching, her breath coming in rapid gasps, she looked up at Ellie. David watched as the woman's eyes softened, as her respiration slowed . . . as a semblance of . . . peace . . . settled over her face.

But not just her face.

Her entire body.

When Ellie was finished, she rejoined David and Gany at the side of the road. She took both their hands and led them back to the car.

“What did you do?” Gany asked her. “What the hell just happened?” She glanced over her shoulder at the girl, who remained prostrate in the middle of the street. The girl's mother had crawled over to her and was cradling her now, weeping against her lifeless body. The crowd of onlookers stared.