That got Terry moving. He moved next to the cruiser as the two EMTs eased Tiffany gently to the ground. Terry grabbed her hanging hair—why, he wasn’t sure—but let go in a hurry when something greasy squelched between his fingers. He wiped his hand on his shirt. Her hair was shot through with white, membranous stuff. Her face was also covered, her features now just dimly visible, as if seen through the kind of veil some older ladies still wore on their hats when they went to church out here in thank-you-Jesus country.
“What is that stuff?” Terry was still rubbing his hand. The stuff felt nasty, slippery, a little tingly. “Spiderwebs?”
Roger was looking over his shoulder, eyes wide with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. “It’s coming out of her nose, Ter! And her eyes! What the fuck?”
EMT Bartlett pulled a swatch of the goo away from Tiffany’s jawline and wiped it on his own shirt, but before he did, Terry saw that it appeared to be melting as soon as it was off her face. He looked at his own hand. The skin was dry and clear. Nothing on his shirt, either, although there had been a moment ago.
Emerson had his fingers on the side of Tiffany’s throat. “I have a pulse. Nice and steady. And she’s breathing fine. I can see that crap billowing out and then sucking in. Let’s get the MABIS.”
Bartlett hauled the orange MABIS all-in-one kit out of the First In Bag, hesitated, then went back into the bag for disposable glove packs. He gave one set to Emerson and took another for himself. Terry watched, wishing mightily he hadn’t touched the webby stuff on Tiffany’s skin. What if it was poisonous?
They got a blood pressure that Emerson said was normal. The EMTs went back and forth about whether or not to clear her eyes and check her pupils and, although they didn’t know it then, made the best decision of their lives when they decided not to.
While they talked, Terry saw something he didn’t like: Tiffany’s web-encrusted mouth slowly opening and closing, as if she were chewing on air. Her tongue had gone white. Filaments rose from it, wavering like plankton.
Bartlett rose. “We should get her to St. Theresa’s, stat, unless you have a problem with that. Say so if you do, because she seems stable…” He looked at Emerson, who nodded.
“Look at her eyes,” Roger said. “All white. Gag me with a spoon.”
“Go on, take her,” Terry said. “It’s not like we can question her.”
“The two decedents,” Bartlett said. “Is this stuff growing on them?”
“No,” Terry said, and pointed to the protruding head. “On that one you can see for yourselves. Not Truman, the guy inside, either.”
“Any in the sink?” Bartlett asked. “The toilet? The shower? I’m talking about wet places.”
“The TV is in the shower stall,” Terry said, which wasn’t an answer, was in fact a total non sequitur, but all he could think of to say at first. Another non sequitur: Was the Squeak open yet? It was early, but you were allowed a beer or two on mornings like this; there was a special dispensation for gruesome corpses and creepy shit on people’s faces. He kept looking at Tiffany Jones, who was slowly but steadily being buried alive under a diaphanous white fog of… something. He forced himself to speak to the question. “Just on her.”
Roger Elway now said what they were all thinking. “Fellas, what if it’s contagious?”
No one replied.
Terry caught movement in the corner of his eye and swung back to look at the trailer. At first he thought the flock lifting off from its roof was butterflies, but butterflies were colorful, and these were plain brown and gray. Not butterflies but moths. Hundreds of them.
A dozen years before, on a muggy day in later summer, a call came in to animal control about a raccoon under the floor of the converted barn that the local Episcopalian church used as a “pastoral center.” The concern was possible rabies. Frank had driven right over. He put on his facemask and elbow-length gloves, crawled under the barn, shone a flashlight on the animal, and it had darted, just the way a healthy raccoon should. That would have been that—rabid raccoons were serious, trespassing raccoons not so much—except that the pretty twenty-something woman who had shown him the hole under the barn had offered him a glass of blue Kool-Aid from the bake sale going on in the parking lot. It had been pretty nasty—watered down, not enough sugar—but Frank drank three dollars’ worth in order to stay there in the yellowing churchyard grass talking to the woman, who had a wonderful big laugh and a way of standing with her hands on her hips that made him feel tingly.
“Well, are you going to do your duty, Mr. Geary?” Elaine finally asked in her patented way, abruptly chopping the head off the small talk, and getting to the point. “I’d be happy to let you take me out if you put a lid on that critter that keeps killing things under the church floor. That’s my offer. Your lips have turned blue.”
He had come back after work and nailed a piece of scrap over the hole under the barn—sorry, raccoon, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do—and then he had taken his future wife to the movies.
Twelve years ago.
So what had happened? Was it him, or did marriage simply have a shelf-life?
For a long time, Frank had thought they were doing all right. They had the kid, the house, their health. Not everything was hunky-dunky, of course. Money was touch-and-go. Nana wasn’t the most engaged student. Sometimes Frank got… well… things wore him down, and when he was worn down, a certain edge emerged. But everyone had failings, and over the course of twelve years, you were bound to spring an occasional leak. Only his wife didn’t see it that way. Eight months ago she’d told him exactly how she saw it.
She had shared her insight after the famous kitchen wall punch. Shortly before the famous kitchen wall punch, she told him she’d given eight hundred dollars to her church, part of a fund drive to feed starving kids in some abysmally fucked-up part of Africa. Frank wasn’t heartless; he grasped the suffering. But you didn’t give away money you couldn’t afford to give away. You didn’t risk your own child’s situation to help someone else’s kids. Crazy as that had been—an entire mortgage payment zooming its way across the ocean—it hadn’t prompted the famous wall punch. That was prompted by what she had said next, and the look on Elaine’s face when she’d said it, simultaneously insolent and closed off: It was my decision because it was my money. As if her marriage vows meant nothing to her eleven years on, as if she could do anything she wanted without putting him in the loop. So he had punched the wall (not her, the wall), and Nana had run upstairs, wailing, and Elaine had made her declaration:
“You’re going to snap on us, baby. One of these days it won’t be the wall.”
Nothing Frank said or did could change her mind. It was either a trial separation or divorce, and Frank chose the former. And her prediction had been wrong. He hadn’t snapped. Never would. He was strong. He was a protector.
Which left a fairly important question: What was she trying to prove? What benefit was she getting by putting him through this? Was it some unresolved childhood issue? Was it plain old sadism?
Whatever it was, it was fucking unreal. And fucking senseless. You did not, as an African-American man in the Tri-Counties (or any county in the United States), arrive at the age of thirty-eight without encountering far more than your fair share of senselessness—racism was the epitome of senselessness, after all. He recalled a miner’s kid back in first or second grade, her front teeth fanned out like a poker hand, her hair in pigtails so short they looked like finger stubs. She had pressed a finger against his wrist and observed, “You are the color of rottened, Frank. Like under my poppa’s nails has.”