The Night Parade

  “She’s beautiful, David.”

  “She looks like her mother,” David said.

  “Come inside with me.” Tim slung an arm around David’s shoulder—it was like hefting a log onto his back—and led him up the porch and into the house.

  David was surprised to find the interior of the farmhouse clean, organized, meticulous. The absence of personal flourishes—there were no pictures on the walls, no bric-a-brac on shelves, no homey touches—made the place seem more like a facility than a home. As Tim talked about how he’d purchased the property for a song, David followed him through a series of rooms that all seemed to serve their own very specific purpose—a room filled with computer equipment and two laptop monitors with activated screen savers; another room serving as a library, where hardbound books climbed the walls; a room overflowing with various ferns bursting from hanging pots lit by a regiment of solar lamps while misters breathed vapor into the air. Music issued from hidden speakers and followed them from room to room, some instrumental jazz heavy on the electric bass. The tour ended in a screened-in porch that overlooked a field of brown grass bisected by a narrow wooden structure that looked like a series of miniature boxcars shackled together. Beyond the field, a curtain of fir trees wreathed the base of a mountain range. There was snow on the peaks.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” said David.

  “Sit, sit,” Tim said, waving his hands around at a group of wicker chairs. “What happened to your nose?”

  “Got in a tussle with some hillbilly zealot in Kentucky.”

  “Broken?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How about your arm?”

  “I cut it on some glass.” David sat, the Glock jabbing him painfully in the small of his back. He withdrew it and held it out toward Tim. “Think you could stow this away somewhere?”

  “Christ, man. And they say some people never change.” Tim grinned, plucking the Glock from David’s hand and shoving it down in the rear waistband of his own pants.

  David sighed. Above his head, more potted ferns gently swayed in the breeze that came through the screens. There were birdhouses hanging from the porch on the other side of the screens, but these looked about as vacant as the houses with the X’s on the doors back in Goodwin.

  “Let’s have a look,” Tim said. He knelt beside David and proceeded to unwrap the bandaging.

  “What were those aerials on the roof for?” David asked.

  “I rigged them up myself. I’ve got a ham radio and some closed-circuit monitors in the basement. The place is outfitted with security cameras. Some other junk, too.” Tim removed the bandage from the wound, then made a disapproving face. David glanced down and saw that the wound was still bleeding. He felt woozy just looking at it.

  “I thought you were off the grid.”

  “Most grids,” said Tim. “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Yesterday morning, I think. I’ve lost track of the days.”

  “It’s reopened. It needs stitches.”

  “I can’t go to a doctor.”

  “You won’t have to. I can do it here.”

  “Jesus,” David said, looking away.

  Tim squeezed the back of David’s neck. “It’ll be fine. Ain’t my first rodeo.”

  Tim got up and sauntered into the next room. David heard him rummaging through drawers. Glass bottles clinked together.

  Out in the field, Gany and Ellie trudged through the tall brown grass on their way to the wooden structure that resembled a series of boxcars. David guessed they were the old chicken coops that had been modified into rabbit hutches.

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing out here,” David said.

  “I’m living,” Tim said from the next room.

  “What happened to Kansas City?”

  “I felt stifled there. It was always just a layover for me, anyhow.”

  “Every place is just a layover for you.”

  Tim laughed in the other room. When he returned, he had a black leather satchel under one arm and a lowball glass half-filled with amber liquid. “I was never one for the rat race. You know that. When they started marching the National Guard through downtown, I knew it was time to pop smoke. Hold still.”

  “Wha—”

  Tim splashed the contents of the lowball glass onto David’s wound. It was like being branded with an iron, and David half-expected the open gash to smoke and sizzle. Instead, he shouted and bolted right out of the chair.

  Tim chuckled. “Relax. Sit back down.”

  “Son of a bitch,” David gasped, though he lowered himself back into the chair.

  Tim slipped back out into the adjoining room and returned with a refill. He handed the glass to David. “You can drink this one.”

  David sniffed it. “Moonshine?”

  “Go on,” Tim said, kneeling beside David’s chair. He unzipped the satchel as David upended the glass, knocking the liquor to the back of his throat. It seemed to fall straight down into his stomach, unimpeded, where it detonated like an explosion.

  David made a hissing sound. “Tastes like lighter fluid.”

  “Shit’s just as flammable, too. My own personal concoction. Distilled dandelions and pinesap. I’ll join you for the second round.” Tim was threading a hooked needle.

  Again, David averted his eyes. “What’s with all the potted plants?”

  “I’ve become something of a horticulturist. Some of the best people I know are plants.”

  “So you’re a horticulturist and a part-time surgeon. A regular Renaissance man.”

  Tim grinned. “Don’t look.”

  David turned away. He winced as Tim sank the hooked needle into his flesh. “Christ, are you kidding me? Goddamn it!”

  “Hold still, you big sissy,” Tim said. He was still grinning. “Remember that time we were roughhousing in the living room and I body-slammed you and broke your collarbone?”

  “It still aches.”

  “I bribed you to keep your mouth shut, gave you my new baseball glove and everything.”

  “I never squealed,” David reminded him.

  “That’s right. But you could only mope around the house so long with one shoulder slumped before someone started to notice. And boy, did my old man let me have it after that.” Tim chuckled, and the sound of it briefly transported David back to a simpler time—a time of his youth, of family, of living in the rambling old house in the woods of rural Pennsylvania with his mother, Tim, and Tim’s father. Ancient memories, buried and forgotten beneath mounds of brain dust.

  Once Tim had finished stitching and bandaging his arm, he returned to the adjoining room, only to reappear with an unlabeled jug of liquor and a second lowball glass. Out in the field, Ellie was holding a large gray rabbit against her chest, the rabbit’s hind legs cycling wildly in the air. David heard Ellie squeal with delight.

  “I guess I should tell you what happened,” David said after some silence.

  “It’s up to you,” Tim said. “If you want to do it now, let’s do it now. If you want to wait, maybe get some rest and put some food in your belly first, then it can wait.”

  “I want to wait, but I also want to get it out while Ellie’s not sitting next to me. You know what I mean?”

  Tim nodded. “Then let’s do it.”

  David cleared his throat and said, “Kathy was working as a psychologist at a state hospital. When things got serious—when some patients and a few doctors got sick—they mandated that all staff get tested. I actually thought it would be a good thing. She had become so depressed, so unlike herself. . . and so convinced that she was sick . . . that I thought this would help alleviate her concerns. Sometime after that, we got a visit from the CDC, some doctor named Sanjay Kapoor, head of their Infectious Diseases office in D.C.”

  He was reliving it now—the conversation with Dr. Kapoor in their living room, a mixture of emotions coursing through him. He had held Kathy’s hand in his as they sat together on the couch, listening to Dr.
Kapoor explain the situation. Had they been pardoned or cursed? It was easy to answer that now, in hindsight, but he had been lost and confused at the time. And maybe—stupidly—a little bit hopeful.

  “There was an abnormality with Kathy’s blood work, something Kapoor and the CDC were very interested in. They were interested in the presence of what they called IgG antibodies in her blood. In other words, she had been exposed to Wanderer’s Folly but had somehow developed antibodies to fight off the virus. Kapoor said that viruses generally rely on receptors that exist on cells within the body. Kathy had what Kapoor called a genetic mutation for that receptor, which prevented the virus from attaching to and infecting the individual cells. It was a hiccup in her DNA.”

  “She was immune, in other words,” Tim said.

  “Exactly. She’d been exposed but that genetic mutation was creating antibodies that fought off the Folly. And they were thrilled at the prospect. They wanted her to volunteer and submit herself to a battery of tests. Blood cultures, exposure to the virus, that sort of thing. There’s a lot of . . . of medical jargon I can’t really . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Tim said.

  “They made it sound so harmless at first. Kapoor said it was no different from donating blood to the Red Cross—those were his actual words, Tim—and that there was no way she could deny their request because she would be in no danger. Like I said, Kathy had been losing it for a time. This whole epidemic terrified her. She’d become severely depressed. She’d started seeing a shrink and was on meds for depression and anxiety. She still looked the same, but I swear to God, Tim, when she walked around the house, it was like someone else was controlling her. When she looked at me, someone else stared out from her eyes. I know how that sounds, but I swear it, Tim. I swear it.”

  “I understand,” Tim said. “So what happened?”

  “We took twenty-four hours to talk it over and make a decision. We couldn’t see the risk. It sounded so simple, and it was like she’d be . . . well, she’d be helping to save the world. My God, it sounds so fucking stupid now, but it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal for her to agree to it.” He laughed now, a humorless bark. “We might have thought about it more clearly if it hadn’t been for some nutcases blowing up a day-care center and a hospital and killing a bunch of kids up in our area. It was all over the news. She was already anticipating the end of the world, and these lunatics with two carloads of manure just so happened to solidify all her fears. She asked me what the point of living was if it was in a world as mad as this one had become. We had a daughter; we needed to make sure she grew up happy and healthy. So, yeah, in the end, it seemed like a no-brainer.”

  A peal of laughter drifted across the field, followed by Ellie crying out, “Oh no!” The rabbit had kicked its way loose and Ellie had dropped it to the ground; she scurried after it now, darting about in the long grass, while Gany laughed and tried to help her catch it. “Oh no! Oh, you rabbit!”

  “She felt like she was doing some good,” David went on. “She felt like she was helping to find a cure. We both did. But she was giving too much of herself, and she was growing weaker and weaker. Because of all the tests, she had to stop taking her meds. Depression medication, stuff prescribed by her shrink. I can’t remember now. Goddamn it. It made her anxious, paranoid. After some time, she fell back into some deep depression, too.

  “A few days a week they would keep her overnight, just to keep an eye on her vitals. I’d stopped going to work—my students had all pretty much dropped out, and the college was pretty much a ghost town by this point—so I spent my days with Kathy at the facility. It wasn’t even a hospital, but some retrofitted office building in Greenbelt.”

  “Where was Eleanor during all this?”

  “In the beginning I would bring her with me. Things were okay back then, and I didn’t see the harm in it. It was good for her and Kathy to be together. But as things . . . worsened. . . as Kathy’s temperament continued to sour . . . I guess I thought it best that she didn’t come. There’s this older woman a few blocks up from our house, used to teach Ellie piano when she was younger. Mrs. Blanche. She agreed to keep Ellie during the day. They got on fine, so I was very thankful. Particularly toward the . . . well, toward the end of things.”

  Tim nodded.

  “They asked Ellie and me to give blood samples, too. They tested our blood the same way they’d tested Kathy’s. Mine was just normal.” He grimaced tiredly at Tim.

  “But Ellie,” Tim interjected.

  “Yes,” David said. “Ellie has the same genetic mutation as her mother. She’s immune.”

  “And so they wanted to study Ellie, too?”

  “Dr. Kapoor suggested it. I told him I’d give it some thought. But by that time, things with Kathy had started to look grim.” He lowered his head. “She was staying at the hospital around the clock by then. I decided to take her home and stop the testing—it was wasting her away, Tim—but Kathy refused. Something . . . something inside her had changed. They said they never actually injected her with the virus, but I don’t believe that. I saw her, Tim. I saw what they did to her.

  “I told her about Ellie’s immunity. She cried, she was so happy. But then that didn’t last long. She began to wonder what it would be like once everyone on the whole goddamn planet died except our daughter.”

  “I guess that didn’t help her state of mind any,” Tim said.

  David shook his head. “And all along, they kept promising nothing would happen to her.” His voice cracked, and he felt his throat tighten. In his mind, he heard Kathy’s last words to him, echoing like the report of a pistol in the center of his brain: Bring the heater closer, would you, honey? It’s so cold in here. “But it was all too much for her in the end. Her body just gave out. Those doctors had used her up, weakened her body and her mind, and she just . . . she just died, Tim.”

  “Were you there when it happened?”

  “I had stepped out to have a cigarette and put some stuff in the car. She was dead when I went back up to the room.”

  “Okay. Okay. How much of this does Eleanor know?”

  At the mention of her name, David looked back out through the screen at the sloping brown field and rabbit hutches. Gany and Ellie were gone. Trees sighed in the breeze.

  “She knows everything,” he said. “I tried lying to her at first, but Ellie, she’s too goddamn perceptive for that. I mean, I didn’t go into the details of Kathy’s death, but she knows.”

  “She’s a smart kid,” Tim said. “She sees through the bullshit.”

  “There’s something else, too,” David said, “and I’ll be damned if I know how to even begin to explain it to you.”

  Just then, Ellie appeared in the doorway. She had her shoe box under one arm and a smile on her face. “Did you see me with the rabbits, Dad?”

  He returned her smile with one of his own. It felt like it might crack his skull. “I sure did,” he said, pawing at his eyes.

  “One got loose, Uncle Tim.”

  Tim waved a big hand in front of his face. “They come back, you know. They’ve got a whole network of tunnels beneath that coop.”

  Gany came up behind Ellie. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I’m thinking about some food, fellas.”

  Tim stood up. “That’s a great idea.” He turned to David. “In the meantime, why don’t you and El get washed up? I’ve got some clothes for you both to wear. Have a proper shower.”

  David struggled out of the chair, careful not to put pressure on his freshly stitched arm. “Sounds like heaven.”

  Tim knocked back the last of his moonshine, then smiled at them. “So then let’s hop to it,” he said. Then he winked at David and said, “We’ll finish our chat after we chow down.”

  “Works for me,” David said, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. He followed Tim back inside the house.

  52

  Tim had given them two bedrooms at one end of the farmhouse, across the hall from each other. The doo
r to Ellie’s room was cracked open, and David poked his head in while on his way to his own room. Ellie stood before an open window, absently flicking large beetles off the screen.

  “Hey, you,” he said, coming in.

  “Hi.” She didn’t turn away from her bug-flicking exercise.

  Folded at the foot of the bed were some clean clothes, as well as the Nike shoe box containing the bird eggs. David moved them aside and sat down. Bedsprings squeaked.

  “We didn’t get much of a chance to talk about what happened today,” he began.

  “Isn’t much to talk about,” she said. The screen vibrated as she flicked a beetle the size of a quarter off it.

  “How did you know you could . . . ease that girl’s suffering?” He didn’t know how else to phrase it.

  “Just something I felt.”

  “Can you look at me, please?”

  She turned around and he saw that the reason she hadn’t wanted to face him was because she had been crying.

  “Hey.” He got up and went to her. Put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”

  “I wanted to save her. I thought maybe I could.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  She looked down at her feet. “I don’t know.”

  “You brought her peace,” he said. “In the end.”

  Ellie looked up at him. “When I touched her, I saw what was in her head. I saw her hallucination.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was terrible. It scared me. She wasn’t just seeing things, Dad. She was hearing them, feeling them. Like her mind was someplace else and only her body had been left behind. And for a second, I was there, too, seeing and hearing and feeling all those things.” She looked down at her hands, so small and pale, the fingers pink and thin. “I took all that bad stuff out of her and let the good stuff in. I tried to make her sleep.”

  David remembered. When he’d grabbed Ellie around the waist and tried to pull her free from the girl, he had been greeted with a shock from just touching Ellie’s flesh. He recalled something about sleeping and birds flying—it had been more of an emotion than an actual image, an emotion that somehow translated into thoughts, into ideas—but he found he couldn’t remember the details of it—