The Night Parade (23 page)

T
urned out the motel room back in Virginia that first night had been a fluke. David tried two motels in the vicinity of Harmony, but neither would let him pay cash without also showing his driver's license. He might have risked it had he been in a less populated part of the country, but things in Harmony, Missouri, seemed pretty much on the ball, what with all the F
OLLY FREE, COME AND SEE
! signs in the shop windows. Nowadays, good, healthy places were also xenophobic places, suspicious of strangers snaking into their midst and spreading their poison. He didn't want to risk someone recognizing his name or the picture on his driver's license and putting two and two together. Instead, he drove out of the city, thinking he'd find better luck along the highway. But every place he passed was a Marriott, a Motel 6, a Residence Inn, or some similar chain where he knew he'd run into the same problem. Probably, those places wouldn't even take cash. In the end, he settled on a seedy one-story cinder-block establishment that looked like it catered to prostitutes and had probably seen its fair share of homicides within its walls. The haggard female desk jockey did not disappoint, and brandished him with a metal key dangling from a plastic fob without so much as a glance in his direction.

While Ellie slept in the small bed beside him, her shoe box of oriole eggs on the fiberboard nightstand, David sat propped up on a stack of pillows flipping through muted TV channels. His heart hadn't regained its normal rhythm since their escape from the theater.

After a time, he set the remote down on the nightstand and went into the bathroom. His hands were shaking, and his entire body ached. He still looked like death in the mirror, but he was thankful that his nose hadn't gushed any more blood since the theater restroom. Leaning close to the mirror, he examined his pupils. His eyes looked okay.

A thought occurred to him then—one worse than him dropping dead while on the road and leaving Ellie to fend for herself. He thought of Sandy Udell, the kid who had jumped out of the window of his classroom while shrieking about monsters, and of Deke Carmody's madness, which had resulted in the man setting his whole house on fire while he was inside. He thought, too, of the countless horror stories he had heard on the news and read in newspapers since the beginning of the outbreak. All those terrible things people did to themselves. . . and to others.

What if it wasn't a ruse, and that he really
was
sick?

What if he hurt his daughter?

Terror flooded through him at the notion of it. What if he awoke with his hands wrapped around his daughter's throat? What if he . . . Jesus Christ, what if he did something to her with the fucking handgun?

Which was probably what everyone in the world thought . . . until it happened to them and proved them wrong.

As if summoned by his prayer, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He dug it out and saw the blocked caller ID.

“Thank God,” David breathed shakily into the phone.

“You guys okay?” Tim said. “You hanging in there?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, good. Listen, here's the deal. Remember the road trip from hell? The one we all took when we were kids?”

“You mean the cross-country trip in that camper?” David said. Tim's father had rented a camper and the four of them had piled inside and toured the country for five weeks. They'd visited national parks, campgrounds, various cities, and other banal landmarks of interest only to David's stepfather.

“Best left forgotten, I know,” said Tim, “but do you remember the Great Vomit Fest and Mystery Fire? The one at the campsite?”

“Jesus Christ. Of course I do.” To his own amazement, he felt a smile break out across his face.

“Perfect. Meet me there tomorrow night around nine. You should have plenty of time to get there if you leave early enough in the morning.”

“Tim, it's not necessary for you to drive all that—”

“Quiet. Don't talk about it. You just get your butt out there.”

“I will. Christ, Tim, thank you. You have no idea.”

“Not a problem. You sure you don't need money?”

“I'm good.”

“And how are you feeling? You holding up? Are you able to drive?”

“Yes.”

“And Ellie?”

“She's amazingly okay. She's tough.”

“Okay, okay. Look, we'll take care of it. In the meantime, stay off the cell phone. Those things are like hauling around a tracking device. Don't use a GPS, either. Stick to old-fashioned road maps. And try to get some sleep.”

“I will. I can't thank you enough.”

“Don't thank me yet, bubba,” Tim said.

“Good night,” David said into the phone before realizing that his stepbrother had already hung up.

Fatigue crashed down on him. Suddenly, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He crawled back onto the bed and switched off the lamp. He thought he could sleep for a thousand years, and imagined he was already dead. His eyelids stuttered closed. He yawned. Somewhere in the street, a car alarm blared then went silent, as though garroted. He wondered if it was real or if he was just imagining things.

After a time, he got up and gathered the Glock up from beneath the bed, where he'd wrapped it in his T-shirt. He released the magazine and racked the slide so the chambered round popped out. He stuck the gun back under the bed but hid the magazine on the shelf in the closet. In the event something terrible took hold of him in the night—in the event that Dr. Kapoor hadn't been lying to him after all—he might not retain the memory of where he'd hidden the mag, the gun, or both. He hoped so, anyway.

That night, his sleep was restless and plagued by demons.

 

T
he day after Sandy Udell launched himself from a second-story window of the humanities building, both David and Burt Langstrom were interviewed by a police detective named Watermere. They were interviewed separately, taking turns occupying the cramped, book-laden office adjacent to the teachers' lounge, where the cloying, antiseptic smell of Watermere's aftershave was more intimidating than the police detective himself. Watermere's questions were benign and shallow little probes, and he appeared fatigued and overwhelmed by the details of it all. David described what had happened, up until the paramedics arrived on the scene.

Watermere was quick to flip his notebook closed. The whole thing seemed to David like a formality.

“He was sick,” David said. It wasn't a question. And judging by the impassive look on Watermere's stony face, he did not think he was passing along any new and vital information to the police detective.

“The Folly, sure,” Watermere said. His voice was rough and deeply resonant, as if he gargled with gravel instead of mouthwash in the mornings. “It's every third call I get.”

“Are you—you're
serious?
Every third call you
get
?”

“It's bad and getting worse.” Watermere seemed under no compunction to withhold any information. “Two days ago, fella over in Glen Burnie, black fella, went for a stroll along the Cromwell Station light-rail tracks. Witnesses said he was raving, having a conversation—heck, an argument—with himself. Nose was bleeding, eyes looking all goofy in his head. When the train appeared, a few folks tried to get him off the track. He refused to go. Then he turns to the train and just, well . . . kinda opens his arms as if to embrace it.”

David said, “Jesus.”

“Was a mess, that one,” Watermere said with a grunt. There was a spot of mustard on his loosened necktie. “They get trapped in these hallucinations, you know? I mean, you hear about it on the news, sure, but you really don't get what it's like till you see it. Or see the aftermath of it.”

“Aren't you afraid you might be exposing yourself to it, dealing with all these sick people?”

“Way I hear it, we're all fucked. If it's in the air, it's in the air. I suppose there's a chance it's by touch, by . . . what's it . . . proximity? I mean, anything's possible. But I don't think that's the case, tell you the truth.”

“No?”

Watermere leaned over the table, closing the distance between them. The pungent aroma of his aftershave caused David's eyes to water. “You wanna hear something
really
fucked up?” said Watermere. “Something that tells me humanity is doomed?”

“Okay.”

“I got a brother-in-law works as a prison guard at the correctional facility over in Cumberland,” Watermere said. “That's the federal joint. They got a wing of inmates there done some heinous things, Mr. Arlen, and these guys, they don't get visitors, or letters, or the occasional romp in the fuck-shed, if you catch my meaning. Other than the prison guards and the other fellas who share that wing, they get exactly zero contact with the outside world. Total isolation. Yet I heard from my brother-in-law that about three or four months ago, these guys start exhibiting symptoms of Wanderer's Folly. At first, the guards didn't know what to make of it. Most of these guys are nut-balls to begin with, so how can you tell when they're hallucinating, right?” Here, Watermere tapped his temple, as if to illustrate where all the crazy was housed. “But then things got worse. One fella, he chewed right through one of his wrists until he fully amputated his hand. Another guy actually pushed his skull through the bars of his cell. Killed himself, in other words. A bunch of the others just curl up in a corner of their cell, whimper like kids who've been spanked for spilling a glass of milk.”

“They're all sick,” David said.

“Yep,” said Watermere. “Prison doctor confirmed it with blood tests. And they all died a couple of weeks later. Hemorrhages, embolisms, aneurysms—whatever it is. But what I'm saying is, they'd been
isolated
. And none of the prison guards had any symptoms or ever got sick. No one was carrying the sickness to 'em, in other words. Yet here they are, these jailbird monsters, getting sick and droppin' dead jus' like the rest of us.”

At that moment, Watermere was overcome by a coughing jag so profound it sounded painful. Still sputtering, he produced a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his sports coat and covered his mouth with it. When he finished, his eyes red and leaky, a timorous smile curling up the corners of his otherwise humorless mouth, the detective said, “Coughin' ain't a symptom of the Folly. That's the emphysema.” Then he laughed, an aggravated explosion that started in his belly and volcanoed out through his gaping, spit-flecked lips. Then the laugh transitioned into another coughing fit that, once more, caused David to imagine a bottle of Listerine in Detective Watermere's bathroom filled with granulated bits of gravel.

After the interview with Watermere, David met Burt Langstrom for lunch at the campus cafeteria. David relayed to Burt what the detective had told him about the prison, and Burt just nodded and looked mostly down at his food.

“What's wrong?” David said.

Burt looked up. The smile that appeared on his face wasn't just false: It was terrifying. “Nothing, David,” he said.

“Hey, man, it's cool if you're shaken up. I'm shaken up, too. Every time I close my eyes I can see that poor kid . . .”

“I don't like this,” Burt said.

“What's that?”

“Any of this.” He sat back in his chair and glanced around the cafeteria. It was mostly empty, which was rare for this time of day. The only noise came from the TVs bracketed to the walls and the clanging of pots and pans from the kitchen. “I'm uncomfortable here. Anyway, I heard it's only a matter of time before they shut things down completely.”

“You mean here at the college? That's just a rumor.”

“Is it?” Burt's eyebrows arched. All color had drained from his face. “Is that what you think? Students are dropping classes left and right. They're leaving and going back home to be with their families. They're scared, David.” He lowered his voice. “I'm scared, too.”

At the far end of the cafeteria, one of the lunch ladies dropped a tray of dishes; the sound of them shattering on the tiled floor was like an A-bomb barreling through the silence. Both David and Burt jerked their heads in the direction of the commotion in time to see the lunch lady, a portly woman in what resembled a starched white nurse's uniform, frowning apologetically at them. A second woman joined her, and together they began cleaning up the mess. They both looked terrified, as if the accident might get them fired. Since the Folly, every accident was suspicious, every trip of the tongue or lapse in memory a cause for concern.

“I keep watching my kids,” Burt said. “I'm looking for signs of . . . I don't even know. Disassociation? Daydreaming? Some say bloody noses or burst blood vessels in the eyes or eyelids. How can you tell if a young girl's daydreams are killing her?” He laughed a little bit here, but there were tears forming in the corners of his eyes. David considered that maybe telling him about Watermere's prison story had been a bad idea. “Just look at that,” Burt continued, pointing over David's shoulder to one of the wall-mounted TVs.

David turned around and saw a news report about the outbreak in China. There were people crying in front of the camera, which then cut to what appeared to be men in hazmat suits rolling body bags into a mass grave.

“It's no better anywhere else, including here in the States,” Burt said. “The Black Death wiped out an estimated two hundred million people. That was a third of the world's population back then. At this rate, we'll reach those numbers by the end of the year, or maybe early into next, if we're lucky.”

“They may find a cure before that,” David offered.

“Or they may not,” Burt said. “Doctors don't know shit. It's fucking biblical, David. A plague manifests among the populace with no rhyme or reason, shot like a bolt of lightning straight from the finger of God.”

“You don't really believe that, do you?”

“Been hearing about these people, call themselves Worlders.”

“They're a cult,” David said.

“They might be a cult, or they might be the only sane people left on the planet. While the world is trying to fight this thing, to understand it, to . . . to somehow annihilate it even though no one knows what the hell it even is . . . these Worlders, they're
embracing
it, David. They're saying, ‘Okay, yeah, bring it on. People have been shitty to each other for so long that maybe this is the planet's way of ridding itself of us.' It's like we're fucking head lice or something.”

“I'm not so sure that's the right way to look at things, either,” David said.

“Listen,” Burt said, lowering his voice. “I've been considering getting out of here. There's a used car lot I pass every night on my way home. They've got really low rates on RVs right now. Rentals, you know? I guess they're big in the summer, but now, they're just sitting there collecting dust.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I'm thinking about renting one. Packing up my family and getting the hell out of here.”

“And go where?”

“Someplace where we can all be alone. Someplace where there aren't any other people around. It might be safer that way.”

“Didn't you hear the story I just told you? What that detective said about those inmates?”

Burt was shaking his head. “He's not a doctor. What does he know?”

“I just don't want to see you make some knee-jerk reaction because of what happened to Udell or because of shit you hear on the news or read on the Internet,” David said. “I'm as shaken up as you are, but we've got to keep our wits about us. And in this day and age, where in the world would you even go where you and your family could be completely alone?”

“A campground,” Burt said without missing a beat. David could tell the man had been giving this plan more than just a passing consideration. “Maybe a national park somewhere out west where there's less people. Or the mountains. We could live in the RV and tuck ourselves up into the woods. It's not as impossible as it sounds. I used to go camping with my dad and brothers all the time when we were kids.”

“But that's just camping. My family rented an RV and did it one summer when I was a kid, too. But that was only for a few weeks. I mean, how long are you talking here, Burt?”

“Permanently,” Burt said. “Or at least until things get back to normal.”

David wondered if things would ever get back to normal. He asked Burt what he would do for money in the meantime.

“Wouldn't need any,” Burt said. “We'd live off the land. You're not hearing me, David.”

“I hear you just fine. I just think you should take some more time and think this through. Have you discussed this with Laura?”

Burt dismissed his question with a flap of his hand. “Laura's in denial. She's petrified. Did I tell you she quit her job? She's home with the girls now. Some days she doesn't leave the bedroom.”

“And you think you're just going to convince her to hop in an RV with you and the girls and drive up to some mountain somewhere?”

“I can.” The words issued out of Burt's mouth in a breathy whisper. David could tell he had already convinced himself of this point, too. “I can do it. And you should talk to your wife, too, David. You need a plan. You can't just sit here and hope that some miracle will happen and things will get better.”

David turned again and glanced at the nearest TV screen. A mother with blood on her face was clutching a small child to her breast. The child's arms and legs flailed, its eyes bugging out like the eyes of a lizard. There was the absence of thought behind those eyes, replaced by nothing but hallucinatory insanity. Just when the image had grown too intense to keep watching, the TV cut to some amateur footage of people jumping off the roofs of buildings. David had to look away.

Later, David cancelled his afternoon classes and went home early. When he drove past the charred skeleton of Deke Carmody's house, he was surprised to find that the memory of that horrible night at Deke's house now seemed no more important than all the other terrible snapshots that scrolled on a nonstop loop through his head: Sandy Udell, the screaming mothers, suicidal people plummeting from rooftops to their deaths, the frequent absences of his students as well as the other deaths on campus, the ice cream man who lost his mind right there in the cul-de-sac that December night that now seemed a million years ago. There was also Kathy's increasing depression, something she freely acknowledged and accepted with inevitable finality. She had become withdrawn, and even her interactions with Ellie appeared rote and unemotional. Her blood test had come back negative for the virus, as had the tests both David and Ellie had most recently taken—the government had mandated quarterly blood tests for all citizens by this point, done alphabetically and by county—yet Kathy shambled through her days and evenings like someone sentenced to death.

When he pulled the car into the driveway, he saw Ellie on the front lawn beside the hedgerow that ran the length of the house. At the sound of his approach, she turned and watched him shut down the car. She waved and he waved back as he got out.

“Hi, Little Spoon,” he said, walking across the lawn toward her. Brown crickets springboarded into the air and rebounded off his shins while gnats clotted around his face. He swatted the gnats away. “Whatcha doing?”