The bag was blue plastic so the rocks appeared blue until you removed them. This was probably Tru Mayweather’s half-assed tribute to Breaking Bad. There would be no more tributes from Truman Mayweather, half-assed or otherwise, not after this morning. Garth picked a rock, dropped it in the cup of his pipe. Whatever Señor Dogcatcher was doing to the Mercedes now caused the car alarm to go off: beep, beep, beep.
The television showed footage of a bright hospital room. Two female shapes lay under hospital sheets. Wispy cocoons covered the women’s heads. It looked like they wore beehives that started at their chins. Garth fired up, sucked down a lungful, held it.
Beep, beep, beep.
Garth had a daughter, Cathy. She was eight, hydrocephalic, lived in a facility, a very nice one, near the coast of North Carolina, close enough to catch salt on the breeze. He paid for it all, which he could do. It was better for the girl if her mother looked after the details. Poor Cathy. What had he told himself about the junkie girl? Oh, right: better not to fixate on what couldn’t be changed. Easier said than done. Poor Garth. Poor old ladies with their heads stuck in beehives. Poor cat.
The beautiful reporter was standing on a sidewalk in front of a gathering crowd. Honestly, she was fine with the A-cup. The B was just a thought. Had she had a nose job? Wow, if she had—and Garth wasn’t quite certain, he’d need to see up close—it was a superb one, really natural with a pretty little button tip.
“The CDC has put out a bulletin,” she announced. “ ‘Do not under any circumstances attempt to remove the growth.’ ”
“Call me crazy,” Garth said, “but that just makes me want to.”
Tired of the news, tired of the animal control guy, tired of the car alarm (although he supposed he would shut it off once the animal control guy decided to take his bad temper somewhere else), tired of fixating on what couldn’t be changed, Garth channel surfed until he found an infomercial about building yourself an abdominal six-pack in just six days. He attempted to take down the 800 number, but the only pen he could find didn’t work on the skin of his palm.
CHAPTER 4
The total population of McDowell, Bridger, and Dooling counties amounted to roughly seventy-two thousand souls, fifty-five percent male, forty-five percent female. This was down five thousand from the last full US census, officially making the Tri-Counties an “out-migration area.” There were two hospitals, one in McDowell County (“Great gift shop!” read the only post in the comment section of the McDowell Hospital’s website) and a much bigger one in Dooling County, where the largest population—thirty-two thousand—resided. There were a total of ten walk-in clinics in the three counties, plus two dozen so-called “pain clinics” out in the piney woods, where various opioid drugs could be obtained with prescriptions written on the spot. Once, before most of the mines had played out, the Tri-Counties had been known as the Republic of Fingerless Men. These days it had become the Republic of Unemployed Men, but there was a bright side: most of those under fifty had all their fingers, and it had been ten years since anyone had died in a mine cave-in.
On the morning Evie Doe (so recorded by Lila Norcross because her prisoner would give no last name) visited Truman Mayweather’s trailer, most of the fourteen thousand or so females in Dooling County awoke as usual and started their day. Many of them saw the television reports about the spreading contagion that was first called Australian Sleeping Sickness, then the Female Sleeping Flu, and then the Aurora Flu, named for the princess in the Walt Disney retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. Few of the Tri-County women who saw the reports were frightened by them; Australia, Hawaii, and Los Angeles were faraway places, after all, and although Michaela Morgan’s report from that old folks’ home in Georgetown was mildly alarming, and Washington, DC, was geographically close—not even a day’s drive—DC was still a city, and for most people in the Tri-Counties, that put it in an entirely different category. Besides, not many people in the area watched NewsAmerica, preferring Good Day Wheeling or Ellen DeGeneres.
The first sign that something might be wrong even out here in God’s country came shortly after eight o’clock AM. It arrived at the doors of St. Theresa’s in the person of Yvette Quinn, who parked her elderly Jeep Cherokee askew at the curb and came charging into the ER with her infant twin girls crooked in her arms. A tiny, cocoon-swaddled face rested against each of her breasts. She was screaming like a fire siren, bringing doctors and nurses running.
“Someone help my babies! They won’t wake up! They won’t wake up for anything!”
Tiffany Jones, much older but similarly swaddled, arrived soon thereafter, and by three o’clock that afternoon, the ER was full. And still they came: fathers and mothers carrying daughters, girls carrying little sisters, uncles carrying nieces, husbands carrying wives. There was no Judge Judy, no Dr. Phil, and no game shows on the waiting room TV that afternoon. Only news, and all of it was about the mysterious sleeping sickness, the one that affected only those with the XX chromosome.
The exact minute, half-minute, or second, when sleeping female Homo sapiens stopped waking up and began to form their coverings was never conclusively determined. Based on the cumulative data, however, scientists were eventually able to narrow the window to a point between 7:37 AM EST and 7:57 AM EST.
“We can only wait for them to wake up,” said George Alderson on NewsAmerica. “And so far, at least, none of them have. Here’s Michaela Morgan with more.”
By the time Lila Norcross arrived at the square brick building that housed the Dooling County sheriff’s station on one side and Municipal Affairs on the other, it was all hands on deck. Deputy Reed Barrows was waiting at the curb, ready to babysit Lila’s current prisoner.
“Be good, Evie,” she said, opening the door. “I’ll be right back.”
“Be good, Lila,” Evie said. “I’ll be right here.” She laughed. Blood from her nose was drying to a crack-glaze on her cheeks; more blood, from the gash on her forehead, had stiffened her hair in front, forming a small peacock fan.
As Lila exited the car, making way for Reed to slide in, Evie added, “Triple-double,” and laughed some more.
“Forensics is on the way to that trailer,” Reed said. “Also the ADA and Unit Six.”
“Good,” Lila said, and trotted toward the door of the station.
Triple-double, she thought. Ah, there it was: at least ten points, ten assists, and ten rebounds. And that was what the girl had done last night at the basketball game, the one Lila had come to see.
The girl, she thought of her. Her name was Sheila. It wasn’t the girl’s fault. Sheila’s fault. Her name was the first step toward… What? She didn’t know. She just didn’t know.
And Clint. What did Clint want? She knew she shouldn’t care, given the circumstances, but she did. He was a true mystery to her. A familiar image came: her husband, sitting at the kitchen counter, staring out at the elms in the backyard, running his thumb over his knuckles, vaguely grimacing. Long ago she’d stopped asking him if he was all right. Just thinking, he always said, just thinking. But about what? And about whom? These were obvious questions, weren’t they?
Lila couldn’t believe how tired she felt, how weak, as if she had dribbled out of her uniform and all over her shoes in the twenty or so paces between the cruiser and the steps. It suddenly seemed as though everything was open to question, and if Clint wasn’t Clint, then who was she? Who was anybody?