Maria"s distended belly was huge, now. Joy raced through Pitt as he imagined the baby as it kicked inside of her. I"ll make it up to you, honey, he thought. Thank G.o.d our baby"s still alive.
Pitt finally yanked the needle from his arm. He heard Maria growl at the abrupt end of her feast. Pitt debated returning to the parking garage, but sank to his knees. It"s over, he thought. I"m staying here with my family. Before he could change his mind, Pitt unbolted the door leading into the small concrete cell. He opened the door and collapsed.
Screaming...
A horrible keening sound made Pitt bolt upright; fireworks exploded in front of his eyes and a white-hot knife of pain shot down his spine. He nearly lost consciousness again but fought his way back. After a long moment, he remembered what he had done and adrenaline flooded his veins. He knew he was as good as dead. After a long moment, there came another shriek. Pitt opened his eyes.
The door to Maria"s cell was yawning open. She was no longer inside. A trail of clotted blood led out the door and past where he sat on the floor. With a supreme effort, Pitt managed to get to his feet to see where Maria had gone.
He found her curled in a ball over on the far side of the building. She was slowly rocking back and forth, keeping a watchful eye on her surroundings. It was early morning now, and pale light filtered through the skylights. Pitt could see that Maria was holding something in her arms. Something small, that writhed.
Pitt staggered over. He simply had to see. Maria lurched to her feet and tentatively offered up the child. It was a dirty, blood-smeared, oddly deformed little boy; a darkling who was half-living, half-dead.
Pitt had never seen anything so beautiful.
Maria yanked on his left arm, pointing first to his many scabs and then to the baby"s mouth. She wants me to feed him. And Pitt fully comprehended the darkness at last. He closed his eyes, crossed himself and prayed. When he opened them again, Maria was snarling in hunger.
Zack Pitt looked down at where the needle lay on the filthy, concrete floor. He startled Maria by kicking it away toward the empty cell. He looked deep into her feral eyes, turned his head to the side and offered the baby his throat. The elongated, preternaturally sharp teeth quickly broke the skin...
And their child began to suckle.
Connections.
SIMON McCAFFERY.
Today Andrew tied his sneakers without my help, and I cried. The last time I shed tears in front of my son was nine years ago, on the morning I stood beside Sh.e.l.ly in a baggy blue hospital gown and watched the obstetrician lift him, naked and glistening and beautiful, into the light. Later, when his condition was finally diagnosed, Sh.e.l.ly cried on and off for weeks. Not me. One of the psychiatric counselors had the gall to tell me I had difficulty externalizing my emotions, and it was all I could do not to strangle the son of a b.i.t.c.h right there in his two-hundred-dollar-an-hour office.
There are new things, little things, each day now.
I try to remain objective, to not become too hopeful, to maintain my professional distance. But when I see the floppy loops of the bowknots on Andrew"s scuffed Reeboks I sweep his little body into my arms in a crushing hug. Tears collect in my beard like raindrops. He tries to kiss me through the leather muzzle and I wish for the thousandth time that Sh.e.l.ly was alive to share these moments.
For the rest of the afternoon we concentrate on flash cards and bits of the Wechsler scale for children. Andrew fiddles with the colored blocks and simple wooden puzzles, but I can tell he is growing distracted. It"s been hours since lunch, so I finally put the blocks and cards away for the day. There was a time not long ago when I made it home from my office in time for dinner two, maybe three nights a week. Now, with Sh.e.l.ly gone and the world turned into a grotesque Tales From The Crypt script, it"s up to me to care for our son. To be there for him.
The coffin-like freezer in the bas.e.m.e.nt (supplied with juice from a gasoline-powered generator during the sporadic power "interruptions") is empty. That means a trip into town.
"Okay, little man, Dad"s going out for a bit. Can you hold down the fort for me?"
I give Andrew another hugpositive reinforcement is so crucialand leave his toy-cluttered room, locking the door behind me.
Downstairs, the lawn looks empty through the distorting, fish-eye lens of the garage door"s peephole. I thumb the switch that raises the large two-car bay"s segmented door and it clatters up with a familiar hum. Naturally, nothing lurches into sight, though you can never be too careful. I slip into the Taurus wagon and back it out quickly, hitting the b.u.t.ton on the remote to close the garage door. The days haven"t begun to shorten yet, but every expedition is dangerous and Andrew prefers if I return before sundown. Or am I simply projecting that emotion?
The knot of armed men at the tall iron subdivision gates parts to let me through. I recognize two of tonight"s sentries: Allan Sprouse, formerly one of the city"s most successful dermatologists, and Richard McCaslin, the balding lawyer who lives behind us in an imitation Colonial with jutting redwood Jacuzzi deck. Both men are dressed for the muggy August air in jogging shorts and bright Nike tee-shirts. Both heft pump shotguns as casually as they once held golf clubs. Sawed-off barrels, like Citizen Patrol Squads, are now perfectly legal. "Just Do It" is now a gruesomely apt slogan to have emblazoned on your chest.
They wave, I wave and the iron gates rattle shut behind the station wagon with a clang that makes you think of war films. The men turn back to their discussion.
The Oakbriar subdivisionrefuge for affluent doctors, lawyers, certified public accountants, and yes, private-practice psychologistshas faired better than most surrounding enclaves of Kansas City suburbia. Over the past six months we have quickly evolved into a tiny feudal state, a fortress of upper-cla.s.s sanity in this new Dark Age. The high stone walls and ebony faux-iron metal gates erected for a sense of exclusivity now serve a more practical purpose.
As always, the sight of my neighbors carrying those ugly truncated weapons with such cool indifference persists in my mind"s eye. How would good old Al and Richie react to Andrew if they showed up for a friendly Friday night poker game? I have to suppress the rage and horror that squeezes my heart.
But Andrew is safe inside his room, with its boarded-up windows and disabled light switch to prevent anyone from seeing his tiny face peering out.
I take the expressway that cuts across Overland Park. Nine miles away the neighborhoods begin to deteriorate significantly.
Giggles automatically start to build in my throat and I nearly drift into a stalled dump truck. Deteriorate significantly. Oh man, we shrinks.e.xalted plumbers of the psycheare chock full of smooth, politically correct euphemisms.
In the reddening light the endless rows of abandoned or razed tract homes resemble a huge, h.e.l.lish graveyard. Every boarded-up house is a testament to the horrifying siege that still isn"t over. Out near the airport, a roiling column of tarblack smoke rises from the pyres that burn day and night as the remnants of the Kansas City National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers dispose of citizens who have succ.u.mbed to post-viability outplacement. The legion of suicides and twice-dead plague victims.
I exit on Riverside Avenue, skirting the warning signs and makeshift barricades, and begin cruising the desolate side streets. Unlike most expeditions, it doesn"t take long to find what I"m looking for.
A figure shambles almost directly into the path of the Taurus. A woman, young and alone. I hit the brakes, swing open the driver"s door and scan all directions quickly. First, to make sure she"s alone; some of them hunt in instinctive packs, using decoys. And if a band of undead doesn"t creep up on you, a pa.s.sing caravan of trigger-happy Guardsmen can always punch your ticket for free.
The street is empty. I step out, leaving the Taurus" engine running.
The woman immediately turns clumsily in my direction, as if directed by a crude organic radar or tropism. Her skin is pale but uncorrupted and her gait is not the stiff, robot-jerk that comes with time and decay. She has only recently started her night-walk. She will do.
I step toward her, trying to look in all directions at once. But the dead woman and I are alone.
I scan her body for the killing wound with a clinician"s eye. The only visible injury is a discolored, shallow crater of flesh missing on her left arm below the elbowprobably a bite-mark. That"s really all it takes; once the plague virus enters the bloodstream it goes to work fast. There"s no such thing as a non-lethal wound or antidote. She was probably fighting off one or more of them and got careless, or just unlucky. She escaped, only to succ.u.mb to the virus six to twelve hours later. Of course death wouldn"t stop her from infecting others. Laughably christened PAP by the Centers For Disease Control, Postmortem Ambulant Plague makes HIV look like the snifffles. The word zombie is taboo, mucho politically incorrect, mentioned only in the sleaziest of checkout counter tabloids.
They are slow and without intellect, driven by a single prime instinct: to feed. I walk right up to her, drawing the nine-millimeter handgun from inside my jacket. Her green eyes are fixed and dilated. Flat, like a doll"s. The rose-colored sunset behind us ignites her disheveled blonde hair like copper.
I place the muzzle of the gun against her forehead just as her outstretched arms close around me in an eager Venus-flytrap embrace. I try not to think of Sh.e.l.ly as I squeeze the trigger.
What I dothe horrors I conceal from my neighborsI do for the love of my son.
We suspected something was seriously wrong with Andrew before he celebrated his first birthday. By the age of two the diagnosis of his condition had been changed from "developmentally disabled" to Early Infantile Autism. Not long after he began displaying traces of Savant Syndrome, which I now know is commonly linked to EIA.
Physically, Andrew is perfectly formed, with the delicate facial features of Sh.e.l.ly and my dark eyes and hair. Autism doesn"t make itself known with the recognizable deformities of Down"s syndrome and other genetic errors.
Endless EEGs and other scans found no physical abnormalities in his brain. He wasn"t r.e.t.a.r.ded or a deaf-mute. He didn"t display the rocking, swaying and head-banging of the schizophrenic. He didn"t curl up in the corner in a fetal ball or bray "Five minutes to Wapner!" every afternoon like a fractured chronometer. The damage was deep inside his brain, where billions of neurons make uncountable synaptic connections.
"For all practical purposes, Andrew exists inside his own personal universe," explained a bland young specialist named, of all things, Graves. "He doesn"t perceivedoesn"t processreality the same way we do."
It was like being dropped into a Richard Matheson Twilight Zone script. You can hold your son, sing him a lullaby, whisper your love in his tiny pink ear, but he is trapped in the Andrew Dimension.
The neural pathways inside our son"s brain had been crossed or scrambled in some unfathomable way, and all the things we a.s.sumed we"d experience with himsummer Little League games, teaching him to ride a bicycle, sending him off to a good private grammar school in antic.i.p.ation of an ivy-league educationwere over. That"s what Sh.e.l.ly kept muttering on the sh.e.l.l-shocked drive home, endlessly. It"s over for him. No more Kodak moments for the Strickland family.
I made up my mind on that terrible ride home that nothing was over. Wasn"t it within my power to rescue our son? To break through the barriers and make a connection?
Loading the woman in the back of the Taurus takes longer than I"d like.
My hands are sweat-slick and her body won"t cooperate. The fresher ones are like huge, floppy rag dolls. I"m certain that at any second an olive-drab patrol truck will rumble around the corner, aiming high-powered searchlights like probing fingers. Night rules these streets after sundown; no sodium-arc lights flicker to life on this dead grid of the city. And they shoot on sight after curfew; aim for the head and ask questions later.
Finally, I shove the woman"s feet underneath the humped bedspread and slam down the hatchback. It doesn"t click shut. I reinsert the key and free the swatch of trapped cloth from the lock, then shut it firmly.
I turn to get in the car and there"s one standing right behind me.
There"s no time to wonder where it came from or how it approached so silently. Blackened, fetid claws reach for my jacket and face. Unlike the body stuffed under the bedspread, this advanced plague victim looks like an exhumed mummy and smells like it died the same year as Elvis. No hair, eyes or nose, but plenty of yellow, leaning teeth. It must have evaded hundreds of cleanup patrols.
I grasp its cool leathery neck with my right hand and grope for the handgun with my left. We do a clumsy half-waltz turn and slam into the side of the car. Despite the gallon of adrenaline singing in my blood I"m pinned against the flank of the Taurus, fumbling for the d.a.m.n gun. The reanimated corpse snags a handful of my hair and pulls me closer to that lipless, picket-fence grin. The smell of carrion envelopes me in a sickening cloud.
I free the gun from the folds of my jacket with a terror-driven burst of strength and wedge it underneath the creature"s snapping jaw. The slug rockets up into the cranial cavity and the creepshow thing"s skull explodes like a cherry bomb inside a rotted pumpkin.
The power is still on when I return, shaken but reasonably cleaned up, and that makes preparing dinner for Andrew in the bas.e.m.e.nt a lot easier.
In the cold light of six overhead fluorescent bars, I change into some old clothes and tie on a butcher"s ap.r.o.n. A pair of electrician"s thick rubber gloves protect my hands. My nostrils are held shut with one of those little clamps swimmers use. I pick up the Black & Decker jigsaw and depress the red plastic trigger; the compact saw whines and its single metal tooth blurs.
Before I make the first incision, my mind has already slipped into a familiar numbness. It"s amazing what you can condition yourself to do if you have no other choice. In high school biology I had to have a cla.s.smateWanda Petersenp.r.i.c.k my finger to take a blood sample. Even then, watching bright blood well up on my fingertip, I had to sit down and bend forward to stop the grayness creeping into my vision and the roaring in my ears.
I fill an aluminum pan with enough meat for Andrew"s supper. The rest is quickly wrapped in white butcher"s paper and deposited in the freezer. The bony, inedible parts are sc.r.a.ped in a couple of Glad Heavy Duty trash bags with the drawstring top. Hefty, hefty, hefty! These will be dumped into one of the city-sponsored pyres with the rest of the garbage.
The remaining ritual is a hundred times worse.
I set the pan of flesh in front of Andrew, who is seated against the far wall in his harness. He struggles to grasp the pan, which is just beyond his reach.
"What do we say, Andrew?"
Andrew"s dry little mouth moves. His body wriggles against the nylon harness straps.
"One word, Andrew. You can do it. Say "Daddy.""
Andrew begins to make a low mewling noise.
"One word, son. One word, little guy."
Andrew"s eyes never leave the pan. His mouth snaps open and shut like a suffocating fish.
"Say "Daddy." I know you can do it."
Andrew thrashes harder against his harness and one of the straps presses into his throat. His head jerks up for a moment and he utters a sound like Aaad.
"That"s my boy! That"s wonderful, Andrew!" I slide the pan toward him.
While he eats I remove the stained ap.r.o.n and strip off the gore-streaked gloves, tossing them into the bone-bag. Holding a can of Glade air freshener, I fan the air until the room reeks of lemons. I step toward the stairs, more than ready for a scalding hot shower, when the doorbell chimes.
I freeze at the bottom of the steps, listening.
The bell rings again.
"You stay right here," I needlessly tell Andrew. I hurry up the steps, wondering who the h.e.l.l it could be. It"s not my evening to stand sentry at the subdivision gates The bell rings again as I hurry through the kitchen and across the carpeted expanse of the living room to the foyer. I flick on the porch light and peer out through the peephole.
Allan Sprouse and Richie McCaslin"s distorted faces stare back. For a moment, a freezing terror envelopes me. Somebody"s finally seen Andrew while I was away, my mind yammers, and they"ve come to take him.
But instead of returning to the kitchen for the gun, I open the door.
We stare at each other for a second that seems to stretch out, and Al and Richie glance at each other.
"Hey, Frank, you mind if we come in?" Richie says.
"If you"re busy we can come back later," Al adds.
They"re both staring at me. For a crazy moment I"m sure I"ll look down and see the dripping butcher"s ap.r.o.n still tied around my waist.
"No, no. Come on in, guys. You both just come off shift?"
"Yeah," Richie says, "Bert and Hal drew the graveyard this week."
"They"ll probably blow each other"s heads off," adds Al cheerfully. "Those two couldn"t find their a.s.ses in the dark with both hands."
"So what"s up?" I ask.
Al and Richie glance at each other again.
"We just stopped by to b.u.m a couple of beers," Al says with a grin. "Maybe catch a game on TV."
We all laugh dutifully at this joke.
I fetch three bottles of beerchilled, no lessand we sit on the teal sectional couch that Sh.e.l.ly d.a.m.n near crucified herself picking out. n.o.body turns on the thirty-five-inch Sony to watch the Emergency Broadcast messages and laughable Center For Disease Control warnings that play endlessly on two of the three networks. Good old TBS, however, is still serving up Eastwood westerns, Cary Grant thrillers and Shirley Temple.
"You know, buddy, you should move in with Claire and the kids," Al ventures softly. "It"s not good, you knocking around by yourself in this big house."
"That"s kind of you to offer," I smile, "but I"m okay. Really." I can imagine watching Andrew playing with Brad and Al Jr., can imagine Al striding toward them across the gra.s.s, shouting and waving them away, leveling the sawed-off shot-gun "Really."
They finally leave an hour later; the most unbearable, nerve-shattering hour of my life. Sitting on my dead wife"s sofa, making macho small talk and waiting to hear Andrew start moaning or banging his pan against the concrete bas.e.m.e.nt floor If good old Al and Richie had stayed ten minutes longer I think I would have walked calmly into the kitchen, removed the gun from the counter drawer and shot them both.
I lean against the door for several moments, counting backward from one hundred, until my stomach settles. Then I hurry to the bas.e.m.e.nt.
Later I sit in Andrew"s room, a Scotch in hand, watching him draw pictures. Besides the other obvious differences, the plague has apparently accomplished what a platoon of high-paid specialists could not; the Savant Syndrome no longer guides his chunky little hands.
A fraction of all autistic children exhibit an island of stunning, inexplicable talent. Andrew isn"twasn"ta lightning calculator or calendar savant. He couldn"t play an opera score after hearing it once. He didn"t build painstaking scale-models of nineteenth-century sailing ships like James Henry Pullen, the celebrated idiot-genius of Earlswood Asylum.
Instead, he would sit hunched over a child"s drawing table for hours, sketching impossibly detailed, dynamic pictures. Trees, horses, a Greyhound bus. Some fantastic imaging system inside his mind required only the briefest glimpse of an object to imprint it forever in his memory. The horse gallops from view, the smoke-farting city bus grinds away into traffic, but not to Andrew. These images persisted in a three-dimensional freeze-frame of time, to be accessed in full clarity a day, a month, a year later.
Then the plague virus escaped from some lab, or hitched a ride on a shuttle flight, or simply mutated on its own. Sh.e.l.ly never made it home from Andrew"s routine doctor"s appointment, probably sacrificed herself to save him. She had driven him because, as always, I had a full roster of patients to see and couldn"t escape from the office. And somehow he found his way home with nothing worse that the tip of one finger missing.