“Symptoms of what?”
“You heard what people were saying. Rabies. West Nile virus. Lyme disease. Or none of the above.”
I remember that picture in the paper of Ray running away from the hospital in his pajamas, into the night.
“You know, before he freaked out and they stuck him in the hospital?” Howie says. “When I ran into him in the washroom, Ray was delirious. He kept saying how he thought he’d got away, but it was only letting him think that. He said it was coming back for him.”
“It? What the hell is that thing?”
No answer from Howie.
I’ve got a million questions.
Like, where was Ray running to? Was he trying to escape? To hide? To die?
And if the thing that attacked him was the same beast that got me and Howie, then how long before we go running into the night?
SEVENTEEN
I ditch school and head for Howie’s. He’s still recovering, hiding away in his room.
It’s been a couple days since our shared nightmare. Whenever I start doubting it really happened, there’s Howie on the phone wanting to talk about it. This morning he called before breakfast and said he wanted to show me some stuff. He wouldn’t tell me what, said I had to come over and see. So I called Ash for a ride, and she’s ditching with me.
These back roads are a mess. Every rut and pothole her motorbike hits sets off a minor explosion inside my skull. The headache I’ve had since my fall in the ditch is flaring into a migraine. The million-watt glare of the sun reflecting off the snow needles the backs of my eyes.
At the Slater house, Howie’s mom answers the door.
“The boys are upstairs,” she says. “Don’t wear Howie out. He needs his rest. He was up most of the night.”
Me and Ash go up and find Howie in front of the computer. Pike’s sitting on the bed. At the sound of the door opening, Howie swings around, jumpy as always.
“Hey, Howie. Feeling any better?” I ask.
“My head’s pounding. I ache all over. I’m going on next to no sleep. And, oh yeah, I just got a nasty paper cut.”
“I guess that’s a no,” I say.
I find an extra chair and collapse on it. The place feels like a greenhouse. He must have the heat cranked up. I take off my jacket and drape it over the back of the chair. I’m aching from my skull to my toenails, a dull throbbing that feels kind of like the flu.
Me and Howie agreed to keep our nightmare between us. It’s just too weird. And that’s saying something, on top of everything that’s happened.
“Howie, you want another Tylenol?” Pike asks. He’s been staying off school to bodyguard him.
“I’m already overdosing on that stuff. It’s not making a dent.”
“You should eat something,” Pike tries.
Howie grunts a no. As he slouches in his seat, you can see the bones of his shoulders through his T-shirt. It looks like he forgot to take the hanger out when he put it on.
“So, what are you working on?” I nod toward the computer and the books and printouts strewn around it.
“Tell you in a sec. But first, I need you to do something for me.”
“Like what?”
He picks a glass up off the filing cabinet beside his desk. Inside, there’s a thermometer.
“Stick this in your mouth. Don’t ask me why, just go ahead.”
I take the glass, looking dubiously inside.
“It’s clean. I rinsed it off. Come on, stick it in. And I’ll show you some stuff I dug up. It’ll blow your mind.”
I give in and stick it under my tongue.
“You sure that’s the oral thermometer?” Pike asks, grinning.
“Don’t listen to him,” Howie says, pulling together pages of printouts. “I got this stuff off the Barrie Examiner Web site. Their back issues go back more than seventy years to when the newspaper started up. I dug around to see if there were any other reports of animal attacks around Harvest Cove—bear, cougar, wolf or whatever.”
I’d say our attacker falls into the “whatever” category.
“Then I noticed something in the write-up on Ray Dyson’s disappearance. They said that rabies had been ruled out, and that there hadn’t been a human case of rabies in Harvest Cove in fifteen years. I went into the Examiner archives to check that old case out and found this.”
He hands a page to me. Ash reads over my shoulder. It’s dated January 12, fifteen years ago. There’s a story on the aftermath of a nasty blizzard. Downed power lines, blocked roads. A photo shows a guy skiing down the middle of some street in Barrie.
“So it snowed,” I mumble around the thermometer.
“Under that,” he says.
Beneath the blizzard story is a small picture of a teenage girl. “Have You Seen Brianna?” the headline asks.
The article talks about Brianna Watts, of Harvest Cove. After contracting a suspected case of rabies from an animal bite, she’d undergone a series of injections to cure her. But now she’d gone missing. Last seen on the night of January 9. Her younger sister said they were watching TV when Brianna just got up and walked out of the house into the blizzard, in her pajamas, without a word. Brianna’s mother said: “She didn’t take her coat, her keys, her bag, anything. I can’t think what’s happened. She’s been sick this past week, recovering from her infection. She’s had the chills real bad, and just hasn’t been in her right head.”
I glance up at Howie. “Did they find her?”
“Not a trace. She just vanished. No sign of foul play, so it was treated as a missing-persons case. A possible runaway. But there’s more.”
He hands me some pages.
The next one goes back twenty-one years. February 1. “Local Boys Report Bear Attack,” the headline says. Two brothers, thirteen and fourteen, claim they were attacked walking home after a hockey game the previous night. They describe a large white bear that chased them down. The brothers say they managed to scare it off somehow, suffering only scratches and bruises. Provincial police are skeptical, noting that only black bears are native to Simcoe county, and the bear population should be inactive in the middle of its hibernation cycle. Also, the boys’ stories and descriptions of the animal are inconsistent. Police have issued a “Bearwatch” alert for Harvest Cove and neighboring counties.
Turning the page, I find another article about those same brothers. February 12. “Brothers Go Missing,” it reads. Possible runaways. There was a history of domestic abuse between the parents. But the mother said that had nothing to do with her sons going missing. “My boys wouldn’t leave me,” she told the paper. “Every family’s got its problems, but there’s no way they’d just up and leave. Doesn’t make any sense.” The article mentions the brothers had both been home sick from school that week.
There’s a follow-up story with photos of the brothers, giving their heights and weights, and a number to call.
“How about these guys?” Ash asks. “They ever show up?”
He shakes his head. “A few years later, they did some age-enhanced shots of them, how they’d look now. Still, nothing.”
I do a quick flip through the dozen or so pages in my hand.
“How ma—” I pull the thermometer out. “How many of these are there?”
“Too many,” Howie says. Then he nods toward the thermometer. “What’s it say?”
“It says … Hold on. That’s way too low. This thing must be broken.”
Ash grabs it from me to take a look.
“Wow,” she says, seeing the reading. “It’s definitely busted.”
Howie shakes his head. “We’ve got another one in the downstairs bathroom. It’ll say the same.”
“True,” Pike puts in.
Ash frowns at the thermometer, then at Howie. “You’d have to be a corpse to have this temperature.”
“Touch him,” Howie tells her.
“Huh?”
“Just touch Danny’s hand.”
“Okay,” Ash says, like this is so
me kind of trick.
I hold my hand out as if we’re going to shake. She reaches to take it, a puzzled smile on her face.
She grabs it and then gasps, pulling away.
“What?” I say. “What’s wrong?”
I glance at my hand. It looks normal. I rub my palms together, feeling nothing strange.
“You’re freezing,” Ash tells me.
“Huh? I don’t feel cold. But you feel like you’re running a fever or something.”
With all the commotion the last few days, me and her haven’t had any time to get up close and personal.
“It’s not her,” Howie says. “It’s you. And me. Don’t you feel … different? You know, since you got bit?”
“Different? Like how?”
“Like, I don’t know … changed?”
Howie’s a major hypochondriac. He’s got a medical guide to symptoms and diseases that he uses like a bible. He diagnoses himself with something new every week.
“Changed into what?” I ask.
“I think it’s like what happened to Ray.”
“Ray had rabies, or Lyme disease. And he went nuts, or whatever.”
Howie shakes his head. “I think he got bit, just like we did. Like they all did.” He nods toward the printouts I’m holding. “And it did something to him. Infected him, or poisoned him. Something. Can’t you feel it?”
I don’t feel anything, I want to yell at him. I’m not different. I’m the same old idiot I was a week ago. I want it to be true. But.
“You should go to the hospital,” Ash says. “Both of you. Get checked out. Get them to run some tests.”
“Lot of good that did Ray,” Howie mutters.
I shuffle through the pages, shaking my head. “I don’t know, man. This sounds like one of your weird conspiracy theories.”
“Hey, you saw that thing too,” Howie says. “And those pages you’re holding—that’s a lot of missing kids for one small town.”
I catch the date on one of the printouts. “Nineteen forty-eight?”
I scan the write-up on some fourteen-year-old who ran away in the middle of a cold snap.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Who knows?” Howie shrugs. “At least as far back as I could find in the Examiner archives.”
“How come I’ve never heard about any of this?” Ash shuffles through the articles.
“Most of the cases were written off as runaways,” Howie tells her. “There were never any signs of foul play. And no bodies ever showed up. Just poof, and they were gone.”
We’re all quiet for a while. Ash keeps going through the printouts while I’m trying hard to poke some holes in Howie’s crazy idea.
“So, what, all these missing kids got bitten by that thing?” Ash asks.
Howie nods. “Bit. Infected. Changed.”
“But me and you,” I say. “We’re still here. We got away from it.”
“It let us get away.”
“I still say you guys should go to the hospital,” Ash tells us. “Whatever’s wrong, maybe they can help.”
“Right.” Howie shakes his head. “Like they cured Ray Dyson? They’d just stick us in quarantine. If they had anything, or knew anything, they would have used it on Ray. They gave him rabies shots because they thought it was a dog that got him, and he showed some of the right symptoms for it. But then they said the blood work came back negative.”
“What kind of symptoms?” I ask Howie.
“He had headaches, an abnormally low temperature. Hallucinations. What else? Insomnia, photophobia—”
“Photo-what?” I break in.
“Extreme sensitivity to light.”
This sounds way too familiar.
“So,” Howie says. “How you been feeling?”
Like crap, but I don’t want to admit it.
“You’re freezing, right? But you don’t feel the chills?” he asks. “How about the headaches? Insomnia? Photo—”
“Okay already. Yeah, I’m feeling bad. Could just be the flu.”
I start pacing. There’s a maze of stuff on the floor—boxes of junk, a telescope, mountains of books, old jam jars full of dried insects. Hard to breathe with all the dust and heat. “Man, it’s like a sauna in here.”
“Are you joking?” Ash says. “It’s more like a meat locker.”
I notice she still has her jacket zipped up.
“Sorry,” Howie says, “I had to kill the heat and crack the window open. I was going to pass out.”
I go stand by the window, soaking up the arctic breeze blowing in. “I don’t get it. That thing had us both, could’ve just taken us right there—me in the ditch, you on the lake. Instead, it only bites us, or stings us, and lets us go? What’s that about?”
“Maybe it likes to play with its food,” Pike says.
“Funny.” Only I’m not laughing.
“No, really,” Pike goes on. “See Agent Orange there?” He points to the stuffed cat on the top shelf across the room. “She was a great mouser back at Gagetown. Caught six in one day. She was a killing machine. But if you watched her hunting, it was total torture. I mean, she’d catch the mouse, lick it a few times, then let it go. And when it tried to make a run for it, Agent Orange would leap on it again. Catch and release. Till the mouse gave up and just lay there, waiting for her to snap its neck.”
Playing? That’s one game I’d rather skip.
“So, what do we do?” Ash asks Howie.
He always has the answers, but now all we get is a heavy, helpless sigh.
In the silence, my mind goes round and round, chasing its tail. Its little mouse tail.
“How long was it?” I say, finally. “Between when Ray said he got bit, till he went missing in action?”
“Two weeks.” Howie’s already way ahead of me.
I do the math—from the night I got bit till now.
Seven days left.
EIGHTEEN
Small towns have strange acoustics. Whispers at one end of town are heard sharp and clear at the other end. If somebody gets caught screwing around on their husband or wife, gets pulled over for drunk driving, gets caught shoplifting at the Red and White, gets fired, gets pregnant, gets head lice—then you can be sure the news will whip through Harvest Cove like a tornado on steroids.
But that’s for the small stuff. The everyday embarrassments and misdemeanors.
For the big stuff, it’s like the whole place has gone deaf. The way Fat Bill could prey on young guys for years undetected. The way nobody knew Jan Sorenson, the old man who’s been running the Harvest Cove gas station forever, had also been beating his seventy-year-old wife for forever. Not till after she died from internal bleeding, and the cops pulled her records at the Royal Victoria Hospital. They showed she’d been treated for breaking just about every bone you can break, going back nearly forty years.
Everybody hears whispered gossip and rumors clear across town. But nobody hears the scream next door.
“Man, this town is a hole,” I say, looking at the pages and pages of research Howie printed off for me, like it’s a school assignment.
“A black hole,” Ash agrees.
I’m in her room, with my “homework” spread out on the floor. She’s sitting beside me on her workout bench, going over the evidence.
Ash’s room is so Ash. With free weights scattered on the floor waiting to stub your toes, dirty laundry covering every surface, and posters from slasher movies and punk bands as wallpaper. A bulletin board on the back of her door shows her workout stats, body weight and mileage. Hanging off a nail in the wall is an army helmet.
I point it out. “One of your dad’s?”
“Yeah.” She takes it down and shows it to me. CPT ANIMKEE is markered on the canvas sweatband inside the rim. “See that?” She pokes her finger at the coating of dust on the metal. “That’s real authentic Afghanistan desert dust.”
Ash, with a small smile, rubs the gray chalk between her fingers. Proud of her dad.
My headache has died down to a dull throb. The heat’s still bothering me, but I don’t mind so much now that I’m alone with Ash.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Yeah?” Ash calls.
Her mother pokes her head in. “Dinner’s ready. Are you staying to eat, Danny?”
“If that’s okay,” I say.
“Of course. Come while it’s hot.”
Dinner turns out to be meat loaf and mashed potatoes. The loaf is huge and there’s a mountain of taters, enough for a whole platoon. But when Ash and her dad start chowing down, it goes fast. They eat like somebody’s got a stopwatch on them. No talking. No coming up for air.
Ash’s mom, Laura, has strawberry blond hair, bright hazel eyes and a spatter of freckles across her nose and cheeks. I don’t see any of her in Ash. Those Indian genes were way too strong for the pale, freckled Whitey genes.
“I picked up a bunch of those pocket warmers,” Laura says to Ash’s dad.
“Don’t need them,” Nick says.
“I’m not going to have you losing a finger to frostbite. I’m very fond of those hands.”
“Mom,” Ash says. “Trying to eat here.”
“Nick’s going on patrol,” Laura tells me. “Up in northern Ontario, with the Second Rangers. What are you guarding us against up there, anyway?” she asks her husband.
“Hell if I know. Terrorist polar bears?” He forks a baseball-sized scoop of potatoes into his mouth.
“The Second Rangers is made up of Cree and Ojibwa,” Ash says. “They work better with the locals up north. You know, show them some friendly faces.”
“Red faces,” Nick adds.
“Yeah,” Ash says. “And, they know the land.”
“That’s not my land,” Nick puts in. “I’m no Inuit. I was born and raised on the Grassy Narrows reservation, west of here. And I got the hell out of there fast as I could. That’s why I joined the army—my ticket off the rez.”
The loaf is quickly reduced to its dry end-bits, and the mountain of taters to a speed bump on the way to dessert.
“I was telling Danny before about your Windigo ghost stories,” Ash says.