The Toyota started just fine; she sagged in the driver’s seat with a sigh of relief. Her radio was on, giving out a tinkling set of notes from the classical station in Lewiston. She snapped it off, and started rustling in her black purse. “So…what do I owe you, Mr Lee?”
“Not a damn thing.” He winced inwardly. “Sorry. I mean, nothin’ at all.” Maybe she didn’t know how damn insulting that was. At least he was talking without stuttering. Small mercies. “Listen, we’ll folla you home. Make sure that spare holds up.”
“Um.” She bit her lower lip, darted a glance at the truck, and he could have kicked himself sideways. Now she probably thought he was a creeper, and God knew he wouldn’t mind finding out where she hung her hat. “I…I mean, that’s not necessary. It’s just a couple miles.”
Of course, she’d said Sixteenth, and he could just look for her car. Which certainly made him feel like a creeper, because he could easily talk himself into it. You got into the habit of figuring out things like that, and it didn’t go away. “Horace’ll give me hell, pardon my language, if we don’t make sure you get home all right, ma’am.”
The small smile had changed, turned into an uncomfortable, placatory expression. “I could call when I—”
“I don’t have no cell.” Short, clipped little words.
“Wow.” Her eyebrows went up. “Really? That’s…wow.”
Yeah, I’m just a backwoods idiot. “But I’ll give you my number, and if you want, you can leave a message on my machine.” He tried not to think about turning around and driving back to the Crossing if the spare went out on her.
“You have an answering machine? That’s amazing.” She pulled her legs in, settling herself on the seat, and he tried not to look at her knees. Her skirt had ridden up, and it was distracting. “Like, with a tape and everything?”
“Ayup.” Still works, no reason to get rid of it. His hands throbbed, from the cold and the effort.
Amazingly, she tilted her head back and regarded him. He was trying not to loom over her slightness, and his scraped hand throbbed in time to his heartbeat. “You can follow me home,” she said, softly. “I’m just not used to, you know, strangers being helpful.”
“They don’t do that in the big city?”
“Not in New York, no.” She sobered instantly, her expression slamming shut just like a door.
“That where you’re from?”
“Um-hmm.” A quick nod. “I have…my family’s back there. Anyway, yes, thank you. Maybe I can get you and Mr Horace some coffee or something?”
He sensed it was merely a polite offer, and shook his head. “No ma’am. Giving him coffee after 8pm means he’ll be up all night, and guess who he’ll blame for that.” He reached for the brim of his hat, realized he wasn’t wearing one. Maybe that was why it was so damn cold, even though the inside of his chest had turned to hot milk. “Let’s get you home.”
Do Any Good
Dr Harry Vardalam, recently divorced and nursing an ulcer his now-ex wife had of course suspected before he did, hunched over the printouts, rubbing at his burning eyes and pushing his steel-rimmed glasses up. His graying mane—thank God he wasn’t losing his hair—was wildly mussed. Sometimes he thought it made him look a little dashing, like Feynman. The tensor lamp over the table focused a raw white circle of brilliance, but the rest of the lab was dark. The centrifuges and other machinery were motionless. There was no point in sequencing or investigating further, you couldn’t stuff the monster back in the coffin.
Pandora wasn’t applicable, Harry thought sourly, because that bitch was innocent.
Oh, there was plausible deniability—taking the step to experiment on the general population had been greenlit at the highest possible levels, and it was a millions-to-one chance that anything could have gone wrong, so on, so forth. But when the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing, when everyone was firewalled from everyone else, things slipped through between those smooth, curving walls. It didn’t matter, at this point, whether someone had been asleep at the switch and let a live batch through, or if there had been a jiggle in combining it with the dead flu. Viruses were good at surviving, good at changing shape, and good at spreading themselves. Little packets delivered straight into cells, hijacking the body’s processes to expand. This particular strain had been chosen for its recuperative powers. Controlled, it could grant better functioning, higher sensory acuity, higher oxygen uptake, all things that would help build a better soldier.
That was probably the first mistake. Mutation was a fact of life, testing with the dead strain only a stepping-stone. Watch out for that first step, they used to say in the cartoons. It’s a lulu.
Had it resurrected? Mixed with live flu somehow, even though it wasn’t supposed to? Had someone decided it could go in any vaccine, not just the dead one?
“What can you tell me?” Hank Johnston said, from the other side of the table. He was a bland man with a bland, shadowed face, and at first Harry thought he was chewing tobacco until the other man pulled a container of wintergreen Tums out of his open briefcase.
Harry pulled a rolling chair up. He kept stumbling over the question, trying to fit the pattern together inside his aching head. “New York, San Diego, Chicago.” Two of the three biggest cities in the US, and you could make a case that anything that went into San Diego would spread down into Tijuana and up to LA in short order. From there, well.
“And Houston,” Johnston added.
A short, burping laugh escaped the foul taste in Harry’s mouth. “Houston? What the fuck?”
“Don’t ask.” Another man might have said it offhand, but Johnston didn’t have an offhand. Not during this visit.
Tissue samples from some of the first casualties were intriguing, until Harry stepped back and considered the effects on the whole organism. That was the trouble with defense work. The larger lines got hazy, your focus got laser-intense, and before you knew it, you had people coughing up a live strain subtly different than the safe one, the one that behaved. “Okay. With the metrics you’ve given me, we’re looking at…well, you want the bad news first, or the bad news?”
Johnston’s shadowed expression didn’t change. Or at least, what Harry could see of it didn’t. “Don’t fuck around, Vardalam. You’re not my only stop tonight.”
“All right, all right. Look, with what you’ve given me, all I can say it, you’d better hope it burns itself out. Or that there’s a cure being mass-produced in some DOD basement.”
“What about overseas?”
“If sixty percent of them managed to reach the target populations listed, it’s worldwide.” And then, if America had the cure, the military-industrial complex would have its biggest payoff yet. If, that was, anyone was around to actually pay them once this finished. “You boys sure know how to spread the pain.”
“Wasn’t my decision.” Did Johnston sound irritated?
He damn well should, Harry thought. The flu. The goddamn flu vaccine. “I can’t tell if—”
He was interrupted by Johnston’s coughing. One, two, three deep-chested, dry sounds.
Harry leapt back, the chair falling over and barking his calf a good one. “Jesus Christ!”
“It’s bronchitis,” Johnston said, dryly. “Had it for months. Not running a fever.” His hands were busy inside the briefcase, stowing the Tums.
The tensor lamp wiggled, a wobbling searchlight. Harry rubbed at his forehead, sheepishly. “Yeah. Okay. Not that it’d do any good, with the way this thing spreads.” His gaze strayed back to the printouts. “It’s fascinating.”
“Yeah.” Johnston closed the briefcase, but didn’t lock it. There was something in his hands, a dull metal gleam. “I’m sorry about this, Doctor.”
Harry Vardalem’s heart lodged in his throat. “What are you—”
“Housecleaning.” Hank Johnston squeezed the trigger. A dark hole appeared in the center of the virologist’s forehead, and he staggered back, clattering over his discarded chair and falling
gracelessly. The body was a sack of potatoes, and the sudden brassy stink of death rustled through the lab. “Not that it’ll do any good.”
Johnston coughed again, this time rackingly. The tensor lamp’s glow didn’t show the great clear beads of sweat on his forehead. The loose ends he could reach were tidied away. If there was a cure, it was outside his bailiwick. The Umbrella, even in what could be termed its death throes, was thorough, and its apostles concerned only with their duties.
Moments later, the lab, like the entire building, was empty.
Ring Again
Ice came in that night, the sky turned to beaten iron. Winter arrived all at once, and whatever weeds had luxuriated in Indian summer curling up and yellowing under the assault. Martin’s Motors had a cloudy front window and a Hawaiian calendar behind the front register, posters about worker safety and taking care of your car from the seventies plastered over every inch of space, a wheezing coffeemaker giving out a tang of burned Folger’s, and a bell on the old, piss-yellow counter.
Ginny waited for a few minutes at the counter. The place smelled like dry snot and engine grease as well as cooked instant coffee, but this was where Mr Quartine had told her to bring the car. Don’t go to Shellack’s, he’ll gouge you. Go to Tip & Thurgood’s—it says Martin’s on the window—and tell Billy Tipton there Lee Quartine sent you.
She probably should have taken the car to Les Schwab in Lewiston, but that would mean freeway driving, and Lee—she couldn’t call him Military Felon now, it would be uncharitable—was right, the spare wasn’t rated for anything over a crawl.
The door to the garage itself was open, and an unholy racket poured into this shed passing for an office. A radio was blaring some country song about a goodbye town, and she wrinkled her nose a little. Why did all the goddamn recording artists affect a drawl when they were from Schenectady?
Finally, she tapped the bell, and the tiny ding made no impression on the general hubbub. But about half the hubbub stopped on a dime, and a squat fireplug of a man in blue overalls with TIPTON stitched on his breast pocket appeared in the door, working at his grimy hands with a red lint-free shop rag. He had muttonchops and stiff, bristly black hair, and only needed a cigar chomped in his teeth and an Italian accent to be from Brooklyn.
“Y’hallo,” he half-yelled, the word turning to taffy in his mouth. “What can we do you for?”
“Hi.” She tried a smile. At least she’d passed out as soon as her head hit the pillow last night, waking up with her uncharged phone clutched in a sweating fist and the wind keening at the edges of the duplex. “I, uh, have some tire trouble. Lee Quartine said to—”
“Little Lee? Hang on.” He yelled back over his shoulder. “LEE YOU SUMBITCH, GET OVER HERE.”
Ginny winced. The racket diminished by a third, and the man turned back.
“Sorry about that. Gotta yell, or they don’t hear you.” He grinned, showing very white teeth. “You from out of town?”
Well, she’d heard that in a million different ways, in every business in this shitty little burg. “I work at the library.”
His muttonchops were truly extraordinary. “The what now?”
You’ve probably never been inside one. “The library.”
“Oh, yeah. I read off’n my Kindle nowadays.” He nodded sagely, and a familiar face appeared over his blue-clad shoulder. “Lee, you know this gal?”
Lee Quartine ducked his head a bit, reaching as if to touch a hatbrim when his gaze met hers. “She got a tire needs fixin, Tip. Still in your trunk, Miss Virginia?”
Huh? It took her a second to figure out what he was saying through the music, and she finally nodded. “It is. Right where you left it.”
That made the short squat guy’s eyebrows climb up the top of his forehead, two hairy beetles arching surprised backs. Lee just nodded. “Keys?”
She still had them in her hand, and before she thought about it, she looped them at him, a nice accurate throw. His hand shot over the short man’s shoulder, and he caught them, including her Hello Kitty keychain. Kitty was in a red devil costume, her tiny un-hands holding a small plastic pitchfork that had broken off during its stay in her various bags.
“Holy sh—” The short guy ducked too late. “Goldurnit, warn a man!”
The corners of Lee’s hazel-ish eyes crinkled, and he outright grinned at her. It made him look a lot younger, and she couldn’t help smiling back. He wasn’t nearly as old as she thought. “Keep on your toes, Tip.” Lee clapped Tipton’s meaty shoulder, and vanished with her car keys.
That made the short man examine Ginny from head to her toes, and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, wishing she hadn’t worn heels. But she had to head off to work if she got out of here in anything resembling time. Bobbi Evrard had told her to take the day off to get her car fixed, but if she went home after this she would just prowl her house, calling everyone she could think of in New York and getting no answer but unable to help herself from dialing again, again, and again.
The thought made the bottom drop out of her stomach.
“Sorry,” she offered, awkwardly. “I’m a little…it’s been a rough week.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.” He shook his head. “Everyone’s jumpy round here, thinking one of those towel-heads gonna shoot ‘em at any minute. Buncha fools, you ask me.” He waved the rag at her, apparently forgetting she was an out-of-towner, or maybe just assuming she shared his racist little thoughts on the matter. Although she could at least agree heartily that this part of the US was full of fools. “Have some coffee while you wait, ma’am. We’ll get you right fixed up, shouldn’t take long.”
“Thank you.” She was already digging for her phone. Surprisingly, this place had free wifi, and at least it was warm though the door to the garage was wide open. She settled in the single anemic orange plastic chair, foregoing the offer of boiled coffee, and dialed her parents again, plugging her other ear to shut out the noise.
She listened to it ring, again.
And again.
Price Tag Hidden
“She ain’t from around here.” Billy Tipton was interested as all get out, as Lee found the culprit wedged in the tire. It wasn’t glass, it was a damn bolt, probably dropped off someone’s truck and driven over, neat as you please. It was an easy patch, though. “What you doin’ at the library, Little Lee?”
“Community meetin’. Old man Slipot needed a driver.” He tried to make sure his face was shut tight, again. At least he was dirty, it wouldn’t show if he blushed.
Or so he hoped.
“Mighty kind of you.” Tip had a busted fuel pump to deal with, and Lolly Harlowe’s Cadillac was having unspecified trouble again. Lady Lolly wouldn’t drive anything else, since it had belonged to that Confederate sumbitch she’d married way back at the turn of last century or before. Between Lee and Tip, they’d kept the old thing running well past its Biblically-appointed threescore and ten, so to speak. “She’s pretty. For a Yankee.”
“Hadn’t noticed,” Lee lied. “Hey, Juju!”
Jujube Thurgood swore violently, metal clattered, and he glared at Lee from under a station wagon hauled in that morning. “What you want?”
“Throw me a tire plug, willya?”
“Get it your own damnself.” But Juju stamped for a pile of parts, his close-cropped, wooly head bobbing. He’d gotten that limp in Iraq, and when Tipton came back and took over his daddy’s business, Jujube came with him. Tip called him “my brother” and fixed anyone who said—or even implied—shit about it with a steely glare that shut them up right quick. You didn’t want to test a Tipton’s temper, and Billy was a Major on his mother’s side, too.
The people who didn’t like being glared at went to Shellack’s, though they knew Harvey Shellack Jr was a cheat. Lee figured that was one way to suss out who was worth a damn and who wasn’t in the Crossing.
“So, you been goin around fixin Yankee girls’ tires, there, Lee?” Tipton had the bit in his strong, even teeth, and w
as fixing to run with it.
Lee contented himself with a grunt, checking the reamer and giving the edges of the hole a grinding. Not too wide, or the plug wouldn’t fit. He’d been expecting the top of a beer bottle or something like that, tearing and gouging. He was also surprised she’d listened to him about coming here.
“Me, I don’t fancy me no curly-haired city girls.” Tipton propped a hip against the Camaro stupid Billy Nodlesse had bought. The thing leaked oil like a sieve, but he kept pouring his paychecks from stocking at Landy’s into it.
“We all know who you fancy,” Jujube weighed in, stamping up with a plug and a frozen-shut jar of cement for it. “She brought her Nova in here just last week, and you gave her a discount.”
Discount was more like “free.” Lee almost winced. He wouldn’t want to be the one yanking Tip’s tail about that. Juju was probably the only one who could get away with it.
Still, he couldn’t help himself. “You know she’s still married, right?” And Andy Bowe has a shotgun he ain’t afraid to use. Tip had been sweet on Lila Bowe since high school, when she’d been Lila Anderson on the cheerleading squad. Andy married her quick, before anyone knew how true the Bowe mean streak ran.
“Everyone knows.” Tip’s broad face reddened, and he kneed the Camaro’s side, viciously. “Everyone knows what he does to her, too.” This was old news, but at least it got them off the subject of curly-haired Yankee girls. It would take a goddamn miracle for Lila to leave Andy. Especially with the kids.
You couldn’t run with rugrats clutching at your legs. Nonna Q said once that some women got to be like dogs if you beat ‘em enough, too—got to thinking they couldn’t even crawl away, and just hunkered down waiting for the hurricane to pass. Poppa Q had remarked that a woman who let a man beat her was a fool, and Nonna had refused to cook for him for a whole week. It only took two cans of cold beans he had to shovel himself for him to say he was sorry, but she didn’t forgive him five days after that.