Cotton Crossing

  Oh, hell no.

  He was halfway down the stairs and moving fast before he realized it wasn’t an argument.

  Ginny sat on the couch, her knees pulled up and her hair curling wildly in every direction. She stared at her coffee table, where a sleek silver laptop stood open, its screen full of looping, whirling colors. She clutched a big, wide red mug of something that looked hot, steam lifting from it, and tilted her head, listening to what sounded like a radio broadcast. No sweatshirt. Instead she was in a thin blue cotton tank top, her shoulders bare and pale.

  Oh, man. The cloth clung to her, and Lee just about lost whatever sense he’d woken up with. His mouth, full of sleep, went dry, and if all of him wasn’t standing to attention some parts certainly were.

  “And it just kept coming, man,” someone was saying. A young male voice with a California accent, pitched high with excitement or frustration.

  “The CDC mentioned the foaming at the mouth,” the announcer broke in, a rich fruity tone used to being listened to, enunciating the end of every word clear as day. “Have you seen anything like that?”

  “Oh yeah.” The kid on the line swallowed audibly. “Don’t let them bite you, man. The fast ones, they’re pretty nasty. You gotta hit ’em in the head to keep ’em down.” A thin thread of static ran through the words.

  “That’s what we’ve heard.” The announcer’s tenor held a slight edge of hoarseness. Sounded like he’d been talking a while. “Thanks, Brian. Stay alive out there.” A short pause. “For those of you just joining us, this is Keith Stapleton on livecast, taking calls from everyone who can get through. We have a full-scale national emergency here, folks. We have multiple reports of people going crazy, maybe from some sort of sickness, maybe from a bioweapon. It’s spreading like wildfire. The President addressed the nation this morning at eight AM Eastern time, and the CDC has given out a list of do’s and don’ts. Do stay calm, stay in your homes if you can, and watch for sudden high fevers over 103. Do not go out seeking contact with the infected—don’t try taking selfies with them, okay? If you’re bitten by an infected, disinfect the wound as thoroughly as you can and seek medical attention.” A long, tense pause. “I’m gonna go ahead and say this now, folks: be careful out there. Lots of you are talking about seeing the military doing some really scary stuff. Now, the President says our brave soldiers are putting themselves at risk in a national emergency, but we’ve heard a lot—and I do mean a lot—of really messed-up stuff in the last few hours that tells me maybe, just maybe, they’re shooting first and looking for bites or foamy mouths later.”

  Shooting first and looking for bites later. Yeah, that sounds familiar. Lee’s stomach had dropped and was now tying itself in knots. This was bad.

  Another thread of buzzing static. The announcer coughed and took a drink of something. You could hear him swallow. “All right, let’s hear from another caller! Hello, you’re on Stapleton’s Nexus!”

  “Keith! Long time listener, first time caller—”

  Lee took another step into the living room, and the motion caught Ginny’s attention. She started, violently, and the liquid in her big mug sloshed. She winced as whatever it was splashed her hand, hurried to set it down on the coffee table and push the laptop closed. “Ouch. Hi.” Bounced to her feet—in more ways than one, he had to force himself to watch her face instead, pale and set with a tremulous, hopeful smile. “Did you sleep all right? I’ll make breakfast. I’ve just been listening. This guy, he livecasts all the time, he’s in Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh.” Lee nodded. He needed coffee to jump-start his brain into making some kind of sense of all this. He also needed to get plannin’. “Is that good?”

  “He says there are people going north. That means if I get there, I can probably get up to my parents.”

  Oh, Lord. Yes, he definitely needed coffee before he could handle this. “I ain’t sure that’s a good idea,” he began, carefully.

  Her chin lifted, her mouth setting itself stubbornly, just the way it had yesterday. Good Lord, even in the morning she was pretty as springtime. “I don’t care if it’s a good idea or not. I have to get there. I have to.”

  “Well, all right then.” He was pretty much doomed as soon as he said it, and knew as much. “We’ll take the truck. Long as we stop at my place on the way out.”

  He hadn’t meant to say it so baldly, or maybe he had. In any case, it brought Ginny up short. She looked down at the red cup-bowl she’d been drinking from, settled in a ring of moisture on her coffee table. The quick motion—a retreat, gathering herself—actually pinched him high up under his left ribs.

  “Ah.” All the uncertainty in the world, packed into one polite, drawn out little syllable.

  Well, no wonder. He was just a backwoods dumbass. Just fine for changing her tire, but not a guest or anything. Not what Nonna Q would have called “a prospect”, of minerals or of…anything else.

  “It’s nice of you,” Ginny continued diplomatically. “But don’t you have people here you want to, you know, check on?” She picked up the cup, carefully. A woman used to deflecting, gently and with a smile, like all pretty ones learned to do.

  “Tipton and Juju.” Lee made the words nice and even. “Prolly old man Slipot too. But all my kin are dead, Miz Mills.” The last to go had been Lee Senior, dead of a stroke over in Colville Correctional while Lee himself was in Syria.

  Lee barely remembered reading the official letter, folding it up and putting it in his breast pocket. Out in the field, you functioned better if you knew you were already a corpse too, and the dead were numb.

  “Why would you want to go with me? Or were you just being polite? I mean, I think we’ve moved past polite.” Her eyes were wide and worried, but at least she was looking at him now. Perplexed, all her weight on one leg and her hip stuck out a little, cupping that big mug in her soft, finely made hands, the darkgreeny-black nail polish chipped a little. Only enough to underscore how pretty even her fingertips were.

  Yeah, I beat in a man’s head yesterday, polite’s gone with the wind, like Nonna used to say.

  Oh, hell. His mouth opened, and as usual, he knew he was going to say the wrong thing. “Not polite.” It had been so much simpler when he just didn’t talk, even if he kicked himself up one side and down the other each time he kept his mouth shut. “I ain’t gonna have anything happen to you.”

  Her quiet matched the silence of the snow outside. She regarded him, several expressions he couldn’t decipher moving across her face, and months of holdin his peace bubbled inside him.

  “I just ain’t gonna have anything happen to you,” he repeated, finally. “And you know why, you’re a smart girl.”

  There. It was out in the open. It was a goddamn relief.

  Lady to the End

  Trying to sleep hadn’t worked. Tossing and turning in her bed, hearing over and over the thumping, meaty sounds of skulls shattering and that horrible, groaning growl, seeing Lee Quartine’s face terribly blank and set. Or seeing, vivid in the darkness, the stumps of Amy McCoy’s legs working against bloody carpet. She musta barricaded herself in there with the kids, Lee had said. And he came right on through. They tried to protect their mama.

  God.

  Yeah, sleeping wasn’t an option. So she’d gotten up and began calling again. Her parents’ number didn’t even ring. Flo’s cell didn’t, either, just clicked into dead air before the call cut off with a trio of beeps. She’d tried all her coworkers, too, getting voicemails for the ones in Lewiston or Hatchie Ground, trying to decide whether or not to leave a message.

  Hi, it’s Ginny, it’s the middle of the night, and I was wondering if any of you had to kill your neighbors?

  She’d thought about going out to knock on doors, but her bravery didn’t extend that far, especially at midnight. So she’d started digging on the internet, a bunch of sites down and others taking forever to load. Around 5am a little notification that the Nexus was on popped up. She’d clicked on it, and the familiar liveca
st she’d listened to since moving from New York made a burst of relief spread in her chest, so hot and aching she thought for a moment she was having a heart attack. She’d burst into tears, and had longing thoughts of kissing the laptop screen.

  And now this. For a moment she couldn’t quite figure it out, but then the way he was looking at her—half stubborn, a quarter flat-out afraid, and a quarter soft and intent—made a weird sort of sense. Ginny had seen that look on men before, but never so…openly. And never directed at her. Even Alec hadn’t looked at her that way, and he’d been long-term.

  Or so she’d thought. Until that party. Between the Jagerbombs and the chanting of frat boys, she’d found out just exactly what he thought of her, and the only good part of that memory was how she’d been sober enough to push away grasping hands and leave.

  “Oh.” She tried not to sound anything other than baffled, and ended up breathless. The intensity of his gaze, especially with his eyes lightening into hazel, was disturbing. Well, a whole lot about this was disturbing. “I, uh. Wow.”

  “You don’t have to do nothin’ bout it.” Lee’s dark hair, its chestnut highlights mussed into softness, fell over his forehead, and he glared from under it, as if daring her to argue. “I’m just tellin’ you, I ain’t having you hurt. You wanna go, we’ll go.”

  What if I’d prefer to solo this road trip? But that wasn’t a good idea, was it?

  Not if there were people wandering around foaming at the mouth and biting. Not if there were a bunch of guys shooting anything that moved. Not if there were roadblocks and probably looters and all sorts of chaos.

  So she examined him, blinking her grainy eyes and feeling the effects of the four cups of English Breakfast she’d already taken down in her slightly trembling fingers. She thought he’d just warmed up to her in front of the liquor at Landy’s, but maybe not. How far she could trust him? A Nice Guy often thought you owed him something, and if he was one of those, she was better off getting rid of him politely but thoroughly now, before anything else happened.

  Really, though, if he’d wanted to…you know, do anything to her, he’d had chances. Like last night.

  He knew how to change a tire, too. Then there was the fact of him beating Harry McCoy’s head in with a hammer. What kind of person could do something like that?

  Not me. Not ever. She wasn’t sure if she should think that or not. People were capable of…well, all sorts of things.

  And he was so calm afterward, not even pale. Just…set, as if he was doing a slightly disagreeable but necessary chore. Cleaning the gutters. Taking out the trash. Plus, you’d have to be blind to miss the gun on his belt. Rifles and pistols were as common as candy, trampolines, or flatscreen televisions out here. She knew that…but still.

  Okay, one thing at a time. Her quiet, beautiful living room was no longer soothing. “You mean you were coming into the library for half a year and never spoke to me because you…” Her word-finder was having some serious trouble. What the hell was coming next, for Chrissake?

  “Couldn’t get up the nerve.” He shrugged, an easy movement. He was built deceptively lean, you could miss the wiry, rangy strength in his hands or the breadth of his shoulders. It took a lot of force to break a skull. Not to mention grab an adult female and pull her through a diner door.

  “Okay.” She lifted her tea, decided it was still too hot to drink. Lowered it. “So…look. About yesterday.” Those sounds kept coming back, haunting her. Meaty, bone-splintering thudding, the crackles of spongy bone shattering.

  He didn’t look away. His boots were on, and tied neatly. Had he slept in them? “I was in the Army, Miss Virginia.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would explain it.” The world kept slipping away from underneath her, coming back with an internal jolt. Sooner or later she wouldn’t be able to catch up when it moved, and what would happen then? This was just so…bizarre. “And you saved my life.” Twice, even. “I mean, again.”

  Why did he nod, looking almost pained? Without a hat and his leather vest, he was entirely different. There was no library counter between them, nothing but empty air. It was stupid to worry about what he’d do if he had her alone in a car in the middle of nowhere. They were effectively stranded right now. Not only that, but everyone inside the diner had obeyed him implicitly. He was respected, in his own quiet way, and maybe that meant he wasn’t half bad?

  Maybe. It wasn’t a lot to hang your estimation of someone on, and people had facades. Ginny had her own, and she was beginning to think it might crack under the pressure.

  “Yes ma’am.” Looking not at her but through her. A thousand-yard stare she’d only seen in magazines, or history books. Weary soldiers, staring into a camera’s eyes.

  It was that look, more than anything else, that convinced her. She waited, but he said nothing else. Okay. Right. Fine. Good. All right. What the hell do I do now? “Breakfast,” she said, finally, with more certainty than she actually felt. “Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat.” He just kept looking at her that way. “Better do it soon, though. No telling when the power’ll go out.”

  Well, isn’t that a great thought. He was right, though.

  She had the depressing idea that maybe he had a habit of being that way.

  * * *

  The roads, unplowed, were carpets of soft white. The truck handled them all right, chains on the tires biting and Ginny flinching at every slight bump, sure they were going to careen into a ditch. The bigger roads had markers at regular intervals, but he kept away from those streets, looping a wandering course working north through the fringes of town and eventually running parallel to the highway on a collection of patchwork country lanes. The houses drew back from the road, their silhouettes changing, and the the ditches got deeper. It should have been a beautiful drive, but the overall effect was…creepifying.

  For one thing, almost none of the houses had lights on. Sure, it was afternoon, but still. Not a porch light, not a single golden window. No tire tracks, except for a looping, crazy set of them on Peacock Road that went straight off the pavement and over a sharp drop. Lee glanced at them and shook his head; the question of stopping to look for survivors died on her lips.

  There was only one FM station coming in clearly, the smaller Christian rock one in Lewiston. In between solemn hymns, the disc jockey—his voice scraping, painfully hoarse—was reading from the book of Revelations, and it only took two sessions of that before Lee switched it to AM and began hunting.

  …recorded message from the National Weather Service. A hazardous conditions warning is now in effect for the following counties…

  That was all. Over and over.

  “What did that fella on your computer say?” Lee finally asked, working the truck gingerly through a left-hand turn onto Marbury Road. He hadn’t driven them into a ditch yet, but she couldn’t relax.

  Ginny, staring out the window, shook her head, slowly. At least her hair was braided and securely wrapped. “Just what I told you.” A monotone. “That it’s spreading. People get a fever, they don’t know how. Once the fever gets over a hundred and three, they start foaming at the mouth and getting…violent. Then there’s…everyone who called in, the ones that had seen it, said crazy things about dead people. The same thing—foaming and attacking, but after they’re dead. Some of them said it started in major cities. Nobody knows what…” Her throat was dry. It was too bright, even though the cloud cover was thick and gray, promising more snow. “None of it makes sense, from an epidemiological—”

  “The what now?” He didn’t sound disdainful, only curious.

  “The study of epidemics. That’s what this is. But it’s so fast. It doesn’t present like anything else.”

  “Pre-zent?”

  “You don’t normally get that kind of response with a fever.” Her hands held each other, tighter and tighter, her fingers all but creaking. “It uses up the body’s reserves too fast. 103’s just on the edge of cooking the brain. More chance of febrile seizure,
but that’s rare in adults.”

  “Huh.” He considered the white wasteland outside the windshield. “How you know all this?”

  “Med school.” She could, she supposed, just say she looked it up on the internet. It would have been easier, but like all good ideas, it arrived a few seconds too late.

  “You a doctor?”

  “No, I’m a librarian.” I washed out. It hurt, but only for a moment, a swift glancing pain she was used to by now. It was better to gloss over those wasted years. She was a spinster according to her mother’s stuck-in-the-fifties life calendar, working low on the totem pole in the back end of nowhere. A flat-out failure, even though she’d gotten her master’s in library science in record time. Flo had done better, according to her parents. And MBA and marrying a rich man plus giving them a grandchild was acceptable in ways Ginny would never be.

  “Well.” He considered this, feathering the accelerator. “Smart enough to be one.”

  “I just don’t apply myself.” The words tasted bitter. She forced her hands to unclench. “I’m lazy, you know.”

  “Don’t look like it from here.”

  “Yeah, well.” Her fingers tapped at her right knee, her most comfortable jeans with the small hole there, just right for tracing when she wanted to think. Now she studied his profile, deciding that if they ended up in a ditch there was nothing she could do about it. There was a certain de-stressing that followed that particular realization. “It could be that people go so deeply comatose others think they’re dead. Except one or two of the people calling in were medical professionals, they seemed pretty sure. And febrile seizures just aren’t common in adults, and there’s no list of symptoms other than the fever. And irritability.”