Suckers (26 page)

Oh my God
, she mouthed, and Dan laughed as he headed out the door.

Out in the sunshine, he hooked an arm around Ray’s neck, walking side by side with him toward Buddy’s beat-up F-350.

Ray said, “What was that about?”

Smiling, Dan said, “Just returning a favor.”

They had a twenty-minute drive out to his mom’s. She was at work, so they skipped stopping by the house and backed straight up to the barn, Ray letting the tailgate down as Dan popped the padlock on the doors. As he swung them wide, sunlight fell in, making dust dance in its light. He always liked the look of their equipment sitting there in the shadows, stacked up in cases. Waiting for them to come and pull it back out.

They stripped out of their jackets and got to work, hauling speakers and amp heads and Jamie’s drum kit onto the bed. A cigarette jutted from Ray’s pursed lips. Sunshine warmed the browns in his hair as he hoisted himself into the bed to haul stuff toward the front and make room for more in the back.

“I could get used to this.” Dan put a crate of cables on the truck.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Ray looked up at the blue sky. “You know what else is nice?” He put a hand on the side of the truck and jumped down.

“What?”

“Not looking at the fucking internet twenty-three hours a day. I haven’t opened my computer since we got back.”

“So you don’t know if there’s any news?”

“Nope. And I don’t want to. It can fucking wait.” He clapped Dan on the shoulder on the way back into the barn. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but right now, I don’t want to know shit. Is that everything?”

“Everything that’s going, I think.”

They drove their gear back to town and hauled it into their new practice space at Sound Block. The funky smell of the carpet remnants tacked to three of the walls was almost good to come back to. The room they’d got thrown in this time even came with a swaybacked couch shoved up a cinderblock wall. They’d hang moving blankets over the bricks before they got down to serious work.

Instead of working, they fooled around, loosening up, enjoying the sound of their amps, the noise they could make, even with it bouncing off the far wall.

Eventually the door opened and Jamie sauntered in, a take-out cup in hand. “Like what you did with the place.”

“Hey,” Ray said.

“How’s it going?” Dan asked.

“Crazy.” He examined his drum kit before wheeling his stool over.

“How so?” Ray asked.

“Did you hear the shit that’s going on down south?”

Dan, staring at his tuning pedal while he tweaked one of the pegs on his bass, felt a silent yell rising.
Don’t go there. Do not tell us about it
. Ray hadn’t been the only one avoiding the news, and he wanted to hang on to his ignorance just a little longer.

But Ray said, “Unh-uh.”

“Man, it’s fucked up. There was this mob. They beat the shit out of someone. Like, beat him to fucking
death
.”

Stop now. Stop now. Stop now.

“What was that about?” Ray said.

“They thought the guy was one of the suckers.”

“The what?”

“The people who attack people for their blood.”

Dan walked toward the back wall, his fingers pushed into his hair, the bass bumping his hip.

“Was he?” Ray asked.

“Dunno. It just happened.”

Shit.
They needed to write another letter. Send it to the news outlets. He and Ray had been avoiding posting online, even anonymously—just in case. But maybe that’s what they had to do if these people weren’t listening. Hit up Reddit. “I am a reformed sucker. Ask me anything.”

“They had an attack in Pennsylvania too,” Jamie said. “It’s fucking moving north. I mean, the National Guard is out and all, but what are they supposed to do?”

Dan unslung the bass. He wanted to throw it. Because Pennsylvania was
his
. That was
his
fault.

Ray had his phone out, scrolling. Checking the news.

Dan dropped on the couch, all the energy he’d had playing gone. Fucking vanished. “I should have killed them before they got out the window.”

“Like you were in any condition,” Ray said without looking up.

“What happened?” Jamie looked from one to the other.

“
I
should have killed them,” Ray said.

“So you could have gotten bitten yourself, and we could have kept going on blood drives?” Dan asked.

“I should have killed them as you puked them up.”

“What the fuck?” Jamie’s head whipped back and forth.

“
It didn’t fucking die
,” Dan said. “It got up off the fucking floor and flew out the fucking window.”

Jamie’s jaw dropped halfway to his snare.

Finally, Ray said, “Fuck shit we can’t do anything about. Let’s get this song figured out.” He turned up his amp.

Jamie showed up for most of the first week, sometimes late, sometimes taking off after only an hour. Then he didn’t show up at all. Ray checked on him, making sure he hadn’t been bitten. The things had made it to New York, but so far no reports of attacks in New England.

Doctors had discovered parasites in people’s spines. Surgery was their first step, but it turned out opening up a patient’s neck caused the parasites to burrow deeper. The patients they tried it on were dead within hours. At least they were able to collect the parasites, keeping them alive in blood baths so they could study them. Dan had hope for that. They’d figure it out.

Meanwhile, for the infected, they were moving on to radiation, chemo drugs. Anyone who was attacked—by anything, even if they woke up with a spider bite—was told to report to their nearest hospital, where they were then being transferred to Virginia, to the same hospital that had received the six-year-old girls, one infected, the other just brutally attacked.

The infected one was dead now. That news crawled over Dan’s skin. That could have been
him
. He could have gone to the hospital and died.

The regular patients had been transferred out, the place designated infection central. Armed guards patrolled the building, the parking lot.

In the quiet rehearsal room, Ray lit a cigarette, pushed back his hair, and clicked another YouTube video on his phone.

Reports of parasite sightings, the black creatures swooping through the night sky, increased daily, some from as far as Korea. How much of it was real and how much of it panic, there was no way of telling.

Outside Atlanta, a man shot his family and himself, leaving a note that said they were all infected, though the autopsy didn’t find any sign of it.

Homeless were beaten and killed, everyone assuming any unwashed person shuffling toward them must be a sucker. A terrifying video from a nightclub in Moscow, where three suckers had lost their shit all at once, had brought some of YouTube’s servers down under the traffic. If the video wasn’t a hoax, two uninfected were killed and eighteen were injured in the melee. One frame zoomed in on a sucker feasting on a young woman’s neck, her eyes open, her empty gaze looking beyond the camera.

Most of the commenters seemed to think getting bitten by a sucker made you a sucker, but Ray, sitting on the edge of the couch as the video played out on his phone, was proof that didn’t happen. When the video ended, he clenched the phone in his hand and reached for another cigarette.

Half the news reports were about the importance of staying calm, of leaving any area where you suspected someone might be infected. Call the authorities to handle it, they urged.

And stay in at night.

Dan rubbed his face, his elbows digging into his knees.

Jamie was using again, but they’d known that even before he stopped showing up. The fidgeting, the eye-contact avoidance, the inability to answer any question without fading into a mumble.

They kept going to their windowless room at Sound Block, where musicians milled in the halls, talking about the attacks. The two of them shut themselves in their carpet-walled room and wrote like their lives depended on it.

Three weeks in, they actually had an album’s worth of songs, between what they’d written on the road and what they’d added at Sound Block.
Bad Blood
, Ray said they should call it. Dan, seated behind Jamie’s drum kit, clutching Jamie’s sticks, nodded.

Ray unslung his guitar. “I think this deserves a drink.” They had about a gigabyte worth of rough sounds and a pile of scrawled notes to sort through. The tracks needed titles—most were still named after the moods they were in when they got started, like “Fuck That Guy at Quiznos.” Some of the lyrics needed work, and they needed to get Jamie in, bring him up to speed so he could lay down the drum tracks once they got studio time organized. But, yeah, where they were at now—that deserved a fucking drink.

“What time is it?” Dan dropped the sticks in a bucket.

“Ten.”

“Night or morning?”

“We ain’t been here
that
long,” Ray said.

They’d arrived around one in the afternoon, after having been there till seven in the morning. It kind of blurred together. Dan stretched, his back popping. “Check the news.” Because he wasn’t going out there at night if those fuckers had made it near New Hampshire.

“South Carolina’s fucking nuts.” Ray, scrolling through his phone, whistled. “Guy in Tennessee shot his wife after she got bit by a dog.”

“Shot her?”

“He says these things are either’s Satan’s work or God’s punishment. I think he’s leaning toward ‘God’s punishment’ because he hinted she’s been sleeping around on him.”

“Some people will look for any excuse.” There’d been a lot of the God’s punishment talk: God’s punishment for letting gay people marry, for electing the antichrist to the White House, for our slothfulness, soullessness, and loose morals.

“The only shit going on our way is people overreacting,” Ray said. “So. Drink? ’Cause I could really use it now.”

Dan slipped into his jacket and put the collar up. “Drink.”

They went outside with their shoulders hunched, the late-November wind whistling down their collars. Dan glanced toward the sky. Lights blinked across it, a flight circling the airport. He was glad they didn’t have to fly right now. The security checks after 9/11 were nothing compared to passenger fear of being stuck in a can with someone who might attack at any moment.

“‘Out the Other Side,’” Ray said as he shoved his key in the Fury’s ignition. “What do you think? For the ‘eight-days-straight-of-rain’ song.”

“Sounds more hopeful than ‘Fuck This Fucking Shit We’re All Gonna Die.’”

“That one had a ring to it, though,” Ray said with a smile.

There was less traffic than usual—Elm Street was dead—but when they walked into McGarvey’s, the narrow bar was packed like a Japanese subway car. They eased through the throng, Ray pushing in toward the bar to order a couple beers. The televisions on the wall were tuned to news instead of ESPN. The one at the end had its volume up, but the voices around Dan overpowered it. From the visuals, it looked like the National Guard in the streets of Atlanta. He recognized the Olympic torch near the Varsity.

A woman bumped into him, apologizing before squeezing past. A guy easing his jacket back as he put his hand on his hip revealed the butt of a pistol. Ray held two beers above his shoulders as he made his way over. He lowered one to Dan, saying, “Jesus, don’t they know they’re all going to have to go out in the dark when they leave here?” He tried to make enough room for his elbow so he could take a drink.

“I guess they’re as dumb as us.” There were a lot of scarves and turtlenecks in the crowd, not just because winter was on its way. Dan wondered if they’d do any good. He figured he was kidding himself if he thought turning up his jacket collar was going to do much. But no confirmed sightings in New Hampshire, just panicked reports that turned out to be bats, stray cats, and, in one case, a homeless man rummaging through a trashcan.

The crowd shoved them together.

“It’s like being at a show.” Ray had to raise his voice to be heard. Someone else’s show, Dan took him to mean, since there was plenty of room up on stage at their own. Jesus, when was the last time they’d been to someone else’s show? If they got out of this, if things went back to normal, he’d make it a point to get to more shows.

The heat and tension made the beer taste extra good. He downed it in long swallows. Someone with a bellowing voice talked about holing up in a cabin up in Colebrook, bring his shotguns, his rifle, put up plenty of food. Sit this thing out. “Alaska,” someone else said, and the bellower’s response was, “No, you need to get closer to the equator. More sunlight. Fewer dark hours.” As if Colebrook was all that much closer to the equator.

He thought of Moss’s exit strategy and wondered how he, Deb, and the baby were doing.