“I’ve been told that it’s a bad idea to remove the stuff.”
Clint clicked his pen, stuck it and the pad back in his coat. “Well, I’m not a biologist, anyway. And since she seems comfortable…”
The growth on Kitty’s face was white and gauzy, tight to her skin. It made Clint think of a winding sheet. He could tell that her eyes were shut and he could tell that they were moving in REM. The idea that she was dreaming under the stuff troubled him, although he wasn’t sure why.
Little wisps of the gauzy material unspooled from her limp hands and wrists, wafting out as if breeze-blown, catching onto the waist area of McDavid’s uniform, forming connections. Based on the way the stuff was spreading, Clint extrapolated that it would eventually create a full body covering.
“It looks like a fairy handkerchief.” The warden had her arms crossed. She didn’t appear upset, just thoughtful.
“Fairy handkerchief?”
“Grass spiders make them. You see them in the morning, while it’s still dewy.”
“Oh. Right. I see them in the backyard sometimes.”
They were quiet for a moment, watching the little tendrils of gauzy material. Beneath the coating, Kitty’s eyelids fluttered and shifted. What kind of trip was she on in there? Was she dreaming of scoring? Kitty told him once that she liked the prospect even better than the high—the sweet anticipation. Was she dreaming of cutting herself? Was she dreaming of Lowell Griner, the drug dealer who promised to kill her if she ever talked about his operation? Or was her brain gone, blacked out by the virus (if it was a virus) of which the webbing was the foremost manifestation? Her rolling eyes the neural equivalent of a torn power line shooting off sparks?
“This is fucking scary,” Janice said. “And that’s not a phrase I use lightly.”
Clint was glad Lila was coming. Whatever was going on between them, he wanted to see her face. “I ought to call my son,” Clint said, mostly to himself.
Rand Quigley, the officer on the floor, poked his head in. He darted a quick, uneasy glance at the incapacitated woman with the shrouded face before shifting toward the warden and clearing his throat. “The sheriff’s ETA is twenty or thirty minutes with her prisoner.” He hung there a moment. “Got the word about the double shifts from Blanche, Warden. I’m here as long as you need me.”
“Good man,” she said.
On the walk over Clint had briefly filled Coates in about the woman from the murder scene, and that Lila was bringing her in. The warden, far more concerned about what Michaela had told her, had been uncharacteristically nonchalant about such a breach of protocol. Clint had been relieved by that, but only for a few seconds, because then she’d hit him with everything she knew about Aurora.
Before Clint could ask if she was joking, she’d shown him her iPhone, which was set to the front page of the New York Times: EPIDEMIC howled the twenty-point headline. The corresponding article said that women were forming coatings in their sleep, that they weren’t waking up, that there were mass riots in the western time zones, and fires in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nothing about bad shit happening if the gauze was removed, Clint noticed. Possibly because that was just a rumor. Possibly because it was true, and the press was trying not to ignite full-scale panic. At this point, who could tell?
“You can call your son in a few minutes, but Clint, this is a big goddam deal. We’ve got six officers on the shift, plus you, me, Blanche in the office, and Dunphy from maintenance. And there are one hundred and fourteen female inmates with one more on the way. Most of the officers, they’re like Quigley, they recognize they’ve got a duty, and I expect they’ll hold tight for a bit. For which I thank God, because I don’t know when we can expect reinforcements, or what they’ll amount to. You see?”
Clint saw.
“All right. To start with, Doc, what do we do about Kitty?”
“We contact the CDC, ask them to send some boys in hazmat suits to come in and take her out, get her examined, but…” Clint opened his hands in expression of how pointless that would be. “If this is as widespread as you’ve told me, and the news certainly seems to agree that it is, we’re not going to get any help until there’s help to get, right?”
Coates still had her arms crossed. Clint wondered if she was holding herself to keep from showing the shakes. The idea made him feel simultaneously better and worse.
“And I suppose we can’t expect St. Theresa’s or anyone else to take her off our hands right now, either? They probably have their hands full, too.”
“We should call around, but that’s my expectation,” Clint said. “So let’s lock her up tight, keep her quarantined. We don’t want anyone else getting close to her or touching her even with gloves on. Van can monitor her from the Booth. If anything changes, if she appears distressed, if she wakes up, we’ll come running.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She brushed at the air where a moth was flitting around. “Stupid bug. How do these things get in here? Goddammit. Next item: What about the rest of the population? How do we treat them?”
“What do you mean?” Clint flapped a hand at the moth, but missed. It circled up to the fluorescent bank in the ceiling.
“If they fall asleep…” The warden gestured at McDavid.
Clint touched his forehead, half-expecting to find it burning with fever. A demented multiple-choice question came to him.
How do you keep the inmates of a prison awake? Select from the following:
A) Play Metallica over the prison’s public address system on an infinite loop.
B) Give every prisoner a knife and tell them to cut themselves when they start to feel sleepy.
C) Give every prisoner a sack of Dexedrine.
D) All of the above.
E) You don’t.
“There’s medication that can keep people awake, but Janice, I’d say a near majority of the women here are drug addicts. The idea of pumping them all up with what’s basically speed doesn’t strike me as safe or healthy. Anyhow, something like, say, Provigil, it’s not like I could write a prescription for a hundred tablets. I think the pharmacist at Rite Aid would look askance, you know? Bottom line, I don’t see any way to help them. All we can do is keep things as normal as possible and try to tamp down any panic, hope for some kind of explanation or breakthrough in the meantime, and—”
Clint hesitated for a moment before dispensing the euphemism that seemed like the only way to put it and yet totally wrong. “And let nature take her course.” Although this was no form of nature he was familiar with.
She sighed.
They went out into the hall and the warden told Quigley to pass the word: no one was to touch the growth on McDavid.
The woodshop inmates ate in the carpentry shed instead of the mess hall, and on nice days they were allowed to have lunch outside in the shade of the building. This one was nice, a thing for which Jeanette Sorley was grateful. She had begun sprouting a headache in the garden while Dr. Norcross was on the phone, and now it was boring deeper, like a steel rod working its way inward from her left temple. The stink of the varnish wasn’t helping. Some fresh outside air might blow the pain away.
At ten minutes of twelve, two Red Tops—trustees—rolled in a table with sandwiches, lemonade, and chocolate pudding cups. At twelve, the buzzer went. Jeanette gave a final twist to the chair leg she was finishing and then flicked off her lathe. Half a dozen inmates did the same. The decibel level dropped. Now the only sound in the room—hot in here already and not even June—was the steady high-pitched whine of the Power Vac, which Ree Dempster was using to clean up the sawdust between the last row of machines and the wall.