The Night Parade (35 page)

 

T
hey kept her in a white room with a single window that looked out on a gray parking lot. She was in bed with a starched white sheet draped over her thin frame. The air was rank with medicinal smells and industrial cleaners. It made David's eyes burn each time he walked into the room.

“How's Ellie?” Kathy's voice was a sandpapery rasp. The whites of her eyes had turned a chalky gray.

“She misses you.”

Kathy glanced down at the stuffed elephant propped next to her in bed.

“I'm getting you out of here,” he said. “We're not doing this anymore. I've already spoken to Kapoor. You can leave with me tonight.”

“I'm not sure that's a good idea, David,” she said.

He brushed a strand of hair out of her face. Her hair was dry and brittle, and he imagined that if he'd wanted, he could snap that strand right in half like uncooked spaghetti.

“Tell me why,” he said. “You gave it your best shot, but now we've got to get on with our own lives. You've got a little girl at home who misses you very much.”

Something akin to a smile came over her face, stretching out her thin lips and protruding cheekbones. “I'm so scared for her. I'm scared that I've got something and I might be bringing it back home to her.”

“You're not sick, Kath. You don't have the Folly. And Ellie's immune, anyway.” He'd told her this a few days ago, when Dr. Kapoor had notified him regarding the results of their blood tests. Kathy had been elated, had broken out into tears . . . but now there was a different emotion in her eyes. Something darker.

“When I got here, I was immune, too,” Kathy said. “But maybe all that has changed. My body isn't the same since I've gotten here. I feel
off,
David. What if something in this place has changed me? What if I bring that same thing home to Ellie? What if I'm carrying the thing that will hurt her?”

“I think you're overthinking this.”

“No one knows anything about this disease, David. Don't tell me I'm overthinking things. She's my daughter.”

“Yes,” he said. “And she wants her mother back. I want you back, too, Kath.”

Her hands smoothed out the bedsheet, her knuckles sharp and craggy, her fingers too damn thin.

“I had a dream last night where I came home with you, David, and Ellie was so happy that she hugged me and kissed me and wouldn't leave me be. And she crawled into bed with us and the three of us slept together like we did when she was a baby.”

He smiled at the thought.

Then Kathy's face grew grim.

“And when I woke up,” she said, “you were dead. And Ellie was dead. And you were both . . . stiff and gray and dead . . . because I brought something out of this place and carried it home to you. Poisoned you both. Killed you both.”

He reached out and took one of her hands. Squeezed it gently. He felt the bones roll beneath the skin.

“Come home with me,” he said. “Let's be a family again.”

It seemed like she looked at him, smiling in an emaciated way that made the corners of her mouth protrude, for an unmeasurable amount of time.

“Please, baby,” he said.

Kathy's face softened. “Yes,” she said finally. Tears stood out in her eyes. “All right. Let's go home together.”

He closed his eyes and rested his head in her lap. Her thin fingers grazed the nape of his neck.

When he stood up, he was crying a little, but smiling at his wife. She had Ellie's stuffed elephant beside her in bed, which she picked up and looked at now.

“You know,” she said, “it's funny, but when Ellie first gave me this thing, I imagined I was getting strength from it. Every time I hugged it, it was like I was hugging our daughter. It even smelled like her, for a while at least, and it was a beautiful thing.”

“That's nice,” David said.

“But then, after a while, it faded away,” Kathy said, her smile retreating from her face. “And I wasn't strong anymore.” She held the stuffed elephant out to him. “Might as well bring my things down to the car, if I'm leaving with you, Mr. Arlen.”

“I'll go right now,” he said.

“Just do me one favor?” she asked.

“Name it.”

“Give me a kiss before you go.”

Smiling, he leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips felt like burlap.

“Love you,” he said.

“Love you, too,” she said, and touched the side of his face.

He carried the elephant to the door, but just before he could exit out into the hallway, she called out to him.

“What is it?” he said.

“Bring the heater closer, would you, honey? It's so cold in here.”

There was a portable space heater in one corner of the room, attached to an extension cord that was plugged into the wall. David rolled the unit over to her bedside and adjusted the temperature. Kathy had settled back into her pillow, her eyes closed. Tears stood out in the corners of her eyes. He decided not to say anything, and slipped out into the hallway as quiet as a ghost.

He went down the hall and the stairwell, then out into the parking lot. It had grown cold. Darkness crept up over the horizon, and the trees that fringed the parking lot trembled in the wind. What clouds he could see moving across the face of the moon looked malicious and virulent, like a poison descending from the sky.

He went to the Bronco, popped open the door, and tucked Ellie's stuffed elephant into the duffel bag he'd brought with him. Sometimes he'd stay so long he'd need a change of clothes. A pack of cigarettes were inside the bag, only two smokes left. He lit one and sucked hard. The cold made it difficult to keep his eyes from watering. But he was standing out there alone, and so there was no need to fight them off: He wept freely if silently.

He smoked the second cigarette immediately after the first, wiping his bleary eyes with one hand now. He didn't want to go back to Kathy's room looking like he'd been out here bawling. He looked out across the parking lot, watching the sunset just beyond the facility. Most of the vehicles in this lot were black, nondescript, with tinted windows and government plates. There was also a cadre of white vans parked at the far end of the lot along a chain-link fence that appeared to shudder in the strong wind. Something about those vans bothered him.

After he'd sucked the life from the second cigarette, he tossed it to the ground, then began the campaign back across the lot toward the building. The first-floor lobby was empty. He skipped the elevator and took the stairs to the second floor, where the CDC had set up shop. When he came out of the stairwell, he was aware of a commotion at the far end of the hall. A few voices were raised, and a woman in hospital scrubs rushed down the hall into an adjoining room. A persistent mechanical beeping could be heard somewhere close by.

David picked up his pace. A few more people crisscrossed the hall in front of him, their white lab coats flapping, and a man's voice shouted something unintelligible but unmistakably urgent. The room they were all going into was Kathy's.

He broke into a sprint and closed the distance to Kathy's room in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Nurses crowded the doorway, but he shoved them aside and entered the room.

His first thought was that she had fallen out of bed, coming to rest half propped up against the steel legs of the bed itself, her legs folded Indian-style on the floor. But, no—her legs weren't
on
the floor, and she wasn't propped up but
held upright,
and unnaturally so, with some strange orange band around her neck—

The horror of it struck him all at once, a tidal wave of electric madness that siphoned the color from the world and caused his body to go numb.

Two large men were attempting to remove the extension cord from around her neck, while a third was hastily trying to untie it from the hook on the wall above the bed. She had tied the heater's extension cord to the hook, noosed it around her neck . . . and had simply rolled off the side of the bed, hanging herself.

Someone was shouting his name over and over again in his ear, but the voice could have traveled the distance of some long, corrugated tunnel for all David could tell. He leapt forward, shoving aside the men attempting to get the cord away from Kathy's neck, and Jesus fucking Christ, her
face—

—gray, dead, vacuous eyes that stared through him, impossible, all of it, this wasn't real, wasn't happening, wasn't—

Someone gripped him in a bear hug and hoisted him up off the floor. David screamed and kicked his legs. The man squeezed the air from his lungs and dragged him out the door and into the hallway. A second man—this guy in a security uniform—reached down and groped for David's ankles to stop his legs from pinwheeling.

At some point, Dr. Kapoor appeared. His brown face looked like that of a puppet carved from expensive, delicate wood. He spoke to David, but David did not register a single word he said. In the end, Dr. Kapoor withdrew a hypodermic needle from the pocket of his lab coat. Expressionlessly, he stabbed David in the forearm with it.

David continued to fight against the arms that constricted around him, and even managed to administer a swift kick to the head of the security guard who knelt on the floor groping for his feet, before whatever was in that hypodermic caused him to feel light-headed and noncombative. After a time, the man's arms loosened, and David felt his body slump to the floor. He sobbed as the two men grabbed him under the armpits and hoisted him to his feet. But his body wouldn't cooperate. They dragged him down the hall and took him into a small room where a ratty sofa stood against one wall. The men let him free-fall onto the sofa, and somewhere in the descent, David blacked out.

* * *

Whatever sedative Kapoor had pumped into his bloodstream wasn't merciful enough to grant him a few hazy moments upon waking when he held no memory of what Kathy had done to herself. Instead, the moment he regained consciousness, he did so with the face of his wife burning in his brain, the unnatural position of her as she hung there over the side of the bed, the extension cord looped around her throat.

David screamed.

His first instinct was to bolt from the room, locate Dr. Kapoor, and throttled the son of a bitch. But when he tried to stand, his legs threatened to surrender beneath him and send him toppling to the floor. He remained seated on the sofa, where he buried his head in his hands and cried.

He lost all concept of time, and didn't realize that it was fully dark until he dried his eyes and looked up at the black rectangle of a window at the opposite end of the room. Careful not to overexert himself, he rose and, somewhat unsteadily, stood up off the sofa. With one hand against the wall for support, he was able to make it around to the far side of the room, the feeling slowly creeping back into his legs. When he reached the window, he looked down at the darkened parking lot, with its matrix of bright sodium lampposts. For a long time, his gaze lingered on the collection of white vans at the far end of the lot. White vans no different from the one that had been parked on Columbus Court for the past two weeks. Right outside their house.

He made it to the door with little difficulty, the control over his muscles returning to him now. He expected the door to be locked, but it wasn't. He opened it and leaned out into the hallway. The place was as silent and void of life as a mausoleum. He hurried down the hall, found the stairwell, and made his way down to the first-floor lobby.

It was as if God had felt pity for him and granted him one final wish, because as he crossed the lobby he nearly walked right into Sanjay Kapoor as the doctor turned a blind corner. Both men froze, momentarily stunned by the presence of the other.

“David.” Kapoor's voice cracked. The small man shuffled back a step or two. “I'm so sorry. Let's sit down and talk. We can—”

David struck the man in the stomach. Kapoor buckled at the waist and, emitting the faintest of grunts, crumpled to the floor.

“I should fucking kill you right here,” David said, standing above him.

Curled in a fetal position, Dr. Kapoor put his head back and gasped for air. His silver incisor gleamed.

David turned and rushed out into the parking lot. His heart slammed in his chest as he hurried to the Bronco. It took several attempts to fit the key into the door, but he finally got it. He climbed behind the Bronco's steering wheel, shoved the key into the ignition, cranked it. The Bronco roared to life.

Kathy's face still hung before his eyes; he couldn't blink it away. He sped through the opening in the facility's front gate and drove in a blind stupor, part of him in shock, part of him still back in that makeshift hospital room with Kathy, another part of him hovering somewhere in the stratosphere, an angel or a ghost looking down upon his mortal form.
Help me.

He was pushing eighty miles an hour down the highway when he reached the exit for his part of town. For several seconds, he couldn't remember where Mrs. Blanche's house was. He'd been picking Ellie up there for the past two weeks or so, but right now, for the life of him, he couldn't remember how to get there. He drove in confused patterns up and down the neighborhood streets, waiting for his brain to engage. When he saw the wedge of beech trees on the corner and the mailbox shaped like a lighthouse, he breathed with a sigh of relief and pulled into the driveway.