As Rachel and I continue to argue (while doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, brushing our teeth), I try not to let on how much her accusation has shaken me. But I can’t stop thinking about what she’s said. I know that it’s preposterous, of course: I know — even if Rachel doesn’t — that I’m not some overzealous Jekyll, ready to inject myself with a sample. Yet it’s still disturbing that that is how she sees me. When I review the few risks I’ve been exposing myself to lately (for instance, hiking into an overgrown field), I can hardly imagine the mountains she must be making of them: treating each as an attempt at self-destruction, away of flirting with infection. As if, in her eyes, I’m just as bad as Matt. As if there is some subconscious part of me — a hidden undeath drive — that desires being bitten. Is that why she thinks I’m accompanying him tomorrow?
In the end, I promise her I will find some way of ‘stopping’ him. This is as we’re lying in bed, that I promise her this. She has her back to mine, in the addorsed posture of domestic discord, and I think I can feel her nod in the dark. We pass the rest of the night in silence. For my part, I have not been able to fall asleep. I doubt that Rachel has either. As I’ve been lying here, my back to hers, I dread the things she must be thinking. How I’ve betrayed her. How she doesn’t know me. ‘Who is this person?’ she must be asking herself. ‘This stranger? What is he doing in my bed?’
SATURDAY
ON THE DRIVE INTO DENHAM THIS MORNING, NOT long after we cross the bridge, Matt and I hit a roadblock. Fifty yards from Mr. Mazoch’s, there is a checkpoint barring the way: sputtering flares, orange barricades, riot guards. ‘What’s this?’ Matt asks, slowing to a stop. He starts to cut the wheel left, and I assume that he’s about to turn around. Take us home. Instead, he drives us down a side street, circumventing the barriers, and after a series of back alleys and shortcuts that I do not recognize, we emerge on the other side of the roadblock, pulling into Mr. Mazoch’s driveway.
From here, it’s immediately clear what the commotion is. At the Freedom Fuel down the street, there are four police cruisers in the parking lot, corralling a crowd of what looks like fifteen infected silhouettes. These can’t be strays — there must have been a ‘spill’ at one of the nearby quarantines. Matt and I turn to watch the scene through the back window: the cruisers are parked hood to hood in a quadrilateral formation, penning in the silhouettes, which shuffle back and forth restlessly. Until an LCDC van can arrive, they are evidently going to have to be wrangled this way. Indeed, even as I am thinking this, I hear a siren somewhere behind us, a single far-off whoop-whoop. I glance back to the windshield, expecting to see the LCDC van coasting up the road, but what I see is another orange barricade, which has since been dragged into the street we used to get here. Trapping us in. I laugh to myself. Of course we’re trapped here. Of course this is happening. The one day that we overstep the deadline — on our first supernumerary day — Mazoch drives us into a maelstrom of moaning corpses. At least I’m here with him, I console myself. I was right to come, just as I told Rachel. Because if Matt were alone right now, he would surely be sprinting into that parking lot, trying to wrestle his way past the riot guards.
As if reading my thoughts, Matt begins to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘Hey?’ I ask. ‘What’s up?’ Without answering he pushes the car door open and climbs out, and before I have a chance to stop him he is hurrying across the yard. But he does not sprint toward the Freedom Fuel, as I had expected. He goes jogging up the driveway and disappears into the house. It does not take me long to realize what he himself must have realized: that if Mr. Mazoch is one of those infected, then there may be signs of struggle in the living room. That is what he has raced inside to find. Shattered chairs, boot scuffs on the linoleum, claw marks in the walls. Any proof that his father has been dragged out bodily, kicking and moaning, by the riot guards now holding him at the gas station. I wait for what feels like much more than a minute — five, ten — before I finally stop counting. Probably he has taken up his post by one of the windows, peering through the binoculars at the parking lot. Scanning the crowd for his father’s face.
I still have not tried talking to Matt this morning. We left my apartment in silence, with some vestigial tenseness from last night. My plan was to deliver my speech when we got here, but I was too infuriated. Now I’m stuck waiting in the car, killing time until he returns. It will have to be when he gets back. The moment he sits down in the driver’s seat, I will have to talk to him. And so that is what I have been preparing to do while he’s been inside: rehearsing what I will say to him. Drafting an apostrophic monologue in my mind. Telling him things in my head and telling myself that I’ll tell them to him when he returns. What I’ve been telling him is this:
‘No, listen. You’re never going to find your father. Isn’t it time you gave up this particular ghost? To have checked the number of sites that we have, the number of times that we have, for as long a time as we have, would have been enough to satisfy any reasonable person. Your father’s obviously been hit by a car or shot dead, or else he’s fallen off the map altogether. Wandered into a swamp and sunk. But you’re not a reasonable person. You want to check each site more, even to check more sites. You ask me, “What if he isn’t in Baton Rouge?” What if? You’ll drive to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, is what if. And why? Because he’s “a walking corpse!”, “a rotting corpse!”, “straight out of Revelations!” Because he has to be “burned or buried!” forthwith! Until you went off like a Neo-Nazi about the need to extinguish the infected, I thought that you might still want to protect the man. If your goal was to commit him to a quarantine before he got himself killed, if our search was conceived as a rescue mission, then indeed your indefatigability would be noble. But it’s obvious that your only aim is patricide: not to avenge your father’s murder, but to re-murder your murdered father. And so your indefatigability is insane. Three weeks ago, when there was a chance he could be found, even this — a mercy killing — might have seemed reasonable to me. But now? The odds are so high that he’s already dead, yet still you need to find him. You’re combing rubble, ground zero, for the man you want to kill. We’re well beyond the dedication of a son who can’t stand the thought of his undead father. This is the dedication of a warlord, a warlord ordering his enemy’s head! And you’ll go further even than that. You won’t stop until you sever his head yourself! With your own hands! It’s not enough for you to just assume that he’s roadkill, you have to see him dead — best if beaten to death by you of course — and you’ll search full-time to do it. Where is all this energy and anger coming from? What has been sustaining you every day for the past month? Whom or what would you even be avenging by killing your father? Certainly not your father. Are you mad at him for letting himself get bitten? Did those unboarded windows, that unlocked door, seem as careless to you, as selfish, as the cigarettes and fast food that he gave himself a heart attack with? Do you think that he has neglected his obligations to you as a father, that he should have fought harder for your sake to survive? That, if he really loved you, he would have come to Citiplace? What shit! You don’t need me to tell you what shit that is, Matt. Because blaming a man for dying is what’s selfish. And clocking eight-hour days to hunt the object of your mourning, so that you can vent your rage on it with a baseball bat. For that matter, enlisting your friend to accompany you on this manhunt, endangering that friend by driving him through infected neighborhoods, without being forthright with him about your motives; but enlisting him anyway because his presence “helps you not to think”—i.e., helps you not to get locked into the obsessive and embittered track of indictments against your father, memories of your father, thoughts of your father that would eat you alive as surely as your father would if only you were left alone with them — is what’s selfish. To say nothing of shattering windows like some madman, so as to fabricate evidence, and feeding me a line about how we’ve been “closing in”… all so that you could spring this extra week on me at the last minute. And what happens then? Am I supposed to ride sidecar like this for another month? A year? How long do you need to keep looking, before you finally accept that there’s nothing to find? No. I can’t let you keep on like this. Not for another week. Not for another day. Whatever it is that I’m complicit in by accompanying you in this, it isn’t healthy for you or right. Call this the intervention of a concerned friend, consider this my official unsolicited advice to you: quit when I do. Forget the search. Try volunteering or something else instead. Defer to the hurricane and count your dad among the victims. But don’t spend another week gnawing at this wound. Because I won’t be gnawing at it with you.’