The very thought of rats organizing themselves in this scheming fashion nauseated her. She poked the garden pots in the corner with the tip of the shovel. Shazia was flipping through the stack of paper bags they’d been using as kindling.
“See anything?” Ann gingerly lifted aside garden gloves, a trowel, and a bag of topsoil.
“Not yet.”
The door opened. Kate stood there, Owl tucked into her crooked arm. “Mom? Dad wants to know if he can have some envelopes.”
“Close the door.” Ann poked the shovel blade into a dark corner. “Get out of here.”
“I’ll tell him you said ‘Go ahead.’” The door shut.
There were so many hiding spaces. Storage shelves lined one wall. There was Peter’s workbench and tool chest. The bin of sports equipment. “Find anything?”
“No. Perhaps they’ve made their nest elsewhere. I think the freezer out here is okay.”
“You think?”
“They can’t get through metal. But if we remove their food source, they’ll just search out another.” Shazia rubbed a forefinger along the crack where the door met the step. “They don’t need much space. Maybe only half an inch.”
So not even the food in the kitchen was safe from the filthy little beasts. Disease carriers. They’d have to block the door somehow, but how certain could they be that they’d keep them out entirely? She narrowed her eyes. “How do we kill them?”
“We could try some sort of poison.”
“Like what?”
“I really don’t know. Arsenic, I suppose.”
“We don’t have anything like that.”
“I don’t know how successful we’d be anyway. Rats are wary. They’ll take a small taste of something new and wait to see if it makes them sick.” Shazia straightened. “It’d be good to have a cat.”
“Maddie’s allergic.”
“I see.”
Shazia turned and left. Was she actually looking for poison? Was that the sort of thing she’d have brought with her? Ann quickly followed. The girls sat at the kitchen table, pushing folded sheets of paper into envelopes and licking the flaps.
“Don’t go into the garage,” Ann told them. She heard the sharpness in her voice.
So did Kate. She raised her head, staring at Ann, her brows drawn together.
“Want to see what we did?” Maddie said.
“In a minute.”
Instead of heading for the stairs, Shazia veered into the dining room. “Peter?”
Of course, Ann thought.
He looked up from the notebook opened before him. “What’s the matter?”
“We’ve got rats,” Shazia said.
Ann said, “They’ve gotten into the food.”
He set down his pen and pushed back his chair. “I was afraid of this.”
They followed him through the house. “Did you see any droppings?” he said. “No,” Shazia answered. They crowded around the food bin.
Peter ran fingertips across the concrete and rubbed them together. “Any sign of nesting?”
“No,” Shazia said. “We could sprinkle baby powder around the bin and watch for tracks.”
Ann shook her head. “We can’t leave the food out here for them to get into again.”
“It’s no good now anyway,” Shazia said.
The pickles, olives, the salad dressing, the last slices of bread …
“None of it?”
“No tail whips or paw prints, no grease marks.” Peter frowned. “I don’t think rats got into this stuff.”
Thank God.
“You think it was another sort of animal?”
He nodded. “Still, it’s just a matter of time before rats follow.”
“There haven’t been any documented cases of rats spreading H5 to humans,” Shazia said.
“But we know rats can be infected with it,” Peter said. “And we’ve been out of touch for weeks now.”
Ann stared at him. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me these rats could be carrying the flu?”
“I don’t think we have rats.”
“But if we did?” she said impatiently. “Could we be exposed?”
Peter turned his gaze to her. “Yes.”
TWENTY-THREE
PETER LIFTED THE KEYS FROM THE HOOK AND CALLED into the kitchen, “Girls, are you done with those?”
“Almost.”
“Bring them out, will you?” It must have been Finn’s dog, Barney, who’d gotten into their food supply. The animal must have been after more than just shelter the night before. The poor creature was probably starving. In a way, Barney had done them a favor, reminding them of the risks they took leaving their food out like this. A dog today, rats tomorrow.
Ann and Shazia backed up to let him go to his truck. Peter reached into the toolbox in his truck bed and pulled out a pair of latex gloves.
“We’ll have to do the whole neighborhood, won’t we?” Ann looked grim. “If rats get into one house, they’ll make it to ours, too.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Shazia said.
He pulled the tarp from the shelf and shook it across the bed of his truck. Ann and Shazia helped him tuck down the corners. Maddie came running. “Here, Daddy.”
“Good job, honey.” He took the envelopes. “What are those?” Ann said.
“The girls and I wrote a letter to the neighbors.” He tucked the envelopes into his coat pocket.
Ann had been walking around to the passenger side, and now she stopped and looked at him.
“Listen,” he said, wanting to forestall any more arguments. “We can do this without coming into contact with anyone. We’ll work up some sort of system where we leave things on each other’s front porch.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You have a far greater trust in our neighbors than I do.”
In some ways, that had always been the problem. It was one of the reasons they’d left North Carolina. “I’d better get going,” he said. “There’s no need for you to come along. I can manage this.” He got into the truck and slammed the door.
Ann stood back, looking uncertain. Shazia stood beside her. The engine rumbled to life, a welcome, clearing sound. He backed the truck out of the garage.
Averting his eyes from the black thing that had been the Guarnieris’ home, he started at the house on the opposite corner. Small grocery sacks littered the ground around the driveway like huge misshapen snowballs. He grasped a handle and lifted. It resisted. The plastic had melded to the icy slick of the pavement. He tugged harder and the bag ripped, dribbling sodden tissues and fireplace ash. He’d have to scrape it up by hand. Before he drove on, he opened the mailbox, fitted in one of the envelopes, and pulled up the red metal flag. Sooner or later Stan Fox would notice and come investigate.
Metal cans lined the pavement outside the Nguyens’ house. Peter had to work to loosen the lids hammered on too tightly. The cans were too unwieldy to lift over the side of the truck, so Peter pulled out the bags they contained and rolled them onto the tarp. Mrs. Nguyen came out onto the porch and watched. Peter pointed to the mailbox, and she nodded.
A can lay half-buried in the slush in the next driveway. Large bags listed at the one beyond. He let his focus grow distant. He didn’t need to know the Mitchells drank tea and ate pudding from cups, bought this brand of detergent. He wouldn’t match the apple cores to the Hutchesons or the coffee grounds to Singh.
The street curved, and Peter pulled up in front of the yellow ranch at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. He hadn’t been down here in a while. He recalled seeing two small children riding their tricycles in the driveway. Didn’t they have a cat, too? Yes, an obese, yellow creature that had streaked out in front of his truck one spring morning when he’d been on his way to work, the woman of the house running after. “Sorry!” she’d called as Peter screeched to a stop. She’d scooped the cat into her arms and stood back, waving.
Now Peter looked down at the front yard. Soda cans and crushed juice boxes, Styrofoam trays, flattened waxy
boxes, and cans with their lids at sharp angles. Empty wine bottles and baby-food jars. Everything had just been tossed onto the snow and left there to be blown away. He looked at the house. The curtains were still, no smoke from the chimney. He turned off the engine and climbed out of the cab, reaching for his gloves. This would take a while.
Finally, the truck bed was too full to accept another bag. He reached in and tamped things down with the flat of a shovel to keep stuff from flying out the minute he picked up any sort of speed. He peeled off his gloves and squirted hand sanitizer onto his palms. Rubbing them together, he swiped his temples with a forearm.
As he drew past the house, he spotted Ann standing on the front porch, watching. He slowed and rolled down his window. “I won’t be long,” he called to her. He wondered if she’d reply, was relieved when she called back.
“Be careful.”
“I will.” He pulled away from the curb, eagerly accelerated through the stop sign at the bottom of the street. It had been weeks since he’d ventured beyond their neighborhood. Had anything changed during his absence?
The roads were unexpectedly clear, the snow gone from the pavement but still standing on the grassy medians and hills. At an intersection, the stoplights dangled overhead, useless. Cars waited to take their turns. Peter drew alongside a minivan the same make and color as Ann’s. He glanced over to see the passenger, a young woman with a hand to her face. She refused to look over at him.
Static hissed from his usual radio stations. Two days before, they’d all sparked out like old Christmas lights. It had been an unwelcome surprise. The AM stations were dead, even the ones the government used to disseminate public information. He’d thought they were foolproof. It must have been some glitch that brought them down, maybe a sequence of glitches. He flicked off the radio and settled back into his seat.
There was the library, the gas station, and the Chinese restaurant, all dark and silent. Normal for Christmas Day, but now they had a more abandoned look, with their long, blank windows completely unadorned by any attempt at holiday festiveness. A fire engine sat skewed in the empty parking lot. No one was around it. There were no lights flashing. Had they run out of gas in the middle of a run?
The dump wasn’t far, five miles perhaps. The map showed it standing off a long curving county road Peter had never been down before. He looked to his gas gauge. The arrow pointed to the halfway mark, more than enough to make it to the dump and back. There was enough to tack on a quick trip to the university. Depending on how long this job took, he might head down there afterward. The power had to be on by now. He wondered about Lewis. Had he been able to tend to his lab animals?
He drove under the freeway and past a sprawling housing development. Everything looked closed and quiet. He slowed as he reached the turnoff and took the left. The road surface changed from asphalt to gravel. Trees crowded in on both sides, and the snow grew thick in the shadows. He bumped over the ruts. A signpost pointed right. The road flattened and he broke through the tree line. Two metal posts stood on opposite sides of the road with a heavy chain lying on the snow between them. The guard box sat empty.
Someone had been through here recently, though. Tire tracks cut through the slush. He could see where they turned around on the berm ahead. He angled into the clearing and rocked to a stop. A mountain of trash rose before him, vast and multicolored, sprawling across the flat Ohio terrain.
White slabs of Styrofoam. Black tires, bundled red and blue rags, steel pipes, yellow plastic buckets. Thousands of twisted bags, their contents undecipherable. The snow had settled, filling in the gaps and softening the edges.
Something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
He edged his truck right up to the very perimeter. The air was still and frosty. The stink seeped in through his closed windows. His eyes watered, and he tried to breathe through his mouth. He sat there and looked at the heap that filled his windshield.
It wasn’t the presence of something that bothered him, he realized, but the absence. Where were the cawing gulls circling above?
Climbing out of the truck, he slammed the door shut.
He tugged on a fresh set of gloves, unfastened the back gate, and reached in for the first bag. The ride had jostled things around, and the first bag he picked up split open. He did what he could to scoop up the mess before heaving it onto the slope of refuse. Things broke apart and rolled toward him. He stepped back out of their reach and began tossing bag after bag, building up a kind of rhythm. Reach, flex, heave.
When most of the truck bed had been emptied, he retrieved the broom he’d brought along for this purpose and climbed up to sweep out the bed. The tarp that he’d spread to protect the truck bed lay wrinkled and slick. He removed his gloves and left them and the broom in the bed, lifted up the back gate, and latched it into place.
He climbed into the cab and turned on the engine. His entire truck would need to be hosed out and disinfected. The sweat he’d built up earlier made him clammy, and he blasted the heat into the cab. The clock on the dashboard read just after three. He put his truck into gear and backed out through the gate. Time for round two.
He took a different route home, slowing as he approached the grocery store. Someone was there, walking toward the lone car parked in the lot. Peter swung the wheel hastily and bumped into the shopping center. He rolled down the window. “Hey.”
The man turned and looked over. Middle-aged, bulky in a quilted navy coat, he wore a red apron tied around his neck and waist. He had his hand on his car door handle, and he looked impatient. “Yeah?”
“Are you open?”
“We were. You just missed it.” The man swung himself into the driver’s seat. “We’ll open again the next time we get a delivery.”
“Any idea when that’ll be?”
“All I can tell you is keep checking back. Like I do.” He slammed the door and started the engine.
Peter looked to the store. Plywood had been nailed over the picture glass. Shards of glass twinkled on the pavement. The sound of the car engine faded into the distance. Peter slowly pulled forward, loathe to leave.
The little potted fir trees, the empty concrete benches arranged in the little courtyard at the end of the parking lot. There was the mailbox on the corner and a squat metal box beside it.
Braking to a stop, he turned off the engine and patted his pockets. They were empty, of course. Would he have to break the glass? No, wait. The ashtray. He usually kept spare change in there. He fingered out some coins and stepped out of the truck.
The newspaper was thin, the size of the free community papers that used to appear in their driveway every week. He climbed back into the truck and checked the date. Six days old. Still, Ann would be pleased. She’d been hungering for news. They all had.
The front page was completely devoted to H5N1. The vaccine Liederman had been working on had failed and was being pulled. Patients had died. Terrible news. Peter guessed Liederman’s group had been working too fast. The reporter was writing fast, too. He hadn’t even mentioned any other ongoing vaccine programs.
The CDC estimated thirty million Americans were going to die. Ten percent of the U.S. population. A staggering number, but one that came in far below what Peter would have guessed. H5N1 had a fatality rate closer to fifty percent. That translated to one hundred and fifty million American deaths. Either CDC was buffering the numbers or the virus had mutated to a milder form. Peter hoped for the latter, suspected the former.
On the next page was a photograph of a tall building, one side sheared completely off. Steel beams bristled like chopped arteries. He read the caption. Japan had had an earthquake. Thousands of people had died because international relief couldn’t be mustered. All those desperate people waiting for help that never arrived. He read the story below. Militant Pakistanis had marched on Islamabad and overthrown the government. These were headlines that would have carried the front page but which were now relegated to the inside section.
 
; Here was a black-bordered list of things they were supposed to have at home. Below it was an article on caring for the sick. He paused at the next headline. Mass Fatalities Overwhelm System. Morgues and undertakers all across the country had resorted to hiring freelancers to collect the dead. Health departments were lagging in issuing death certificates. Thousands of deaths might end up going unreported. The President’s national database was struggling, and gaps were appearing in the more rural areas. At the bottom of one page was a photograph of a familiar curved structure, the ice hockey rink where the girls had learned to skate. Columbus was storing its overflow of dead bodies there.
He glanced around the empty parking lot. His was the only car there.
Maybe it wasn’t that people were staying home. Maybe they were all dead.
He climbed out of the truck and crammed the newspaper past the metal lid of the nearest trash bin.
TWENTY-FOUR
THEY’D GONE THROUGH so MUCH FOOD.
Ann counted the cans and boxes once again, as if by doing so she could magically multiply their number. Of course she’d thought she’d be feeding three, not five. “Tell us another story, Shazia.”
“Like what?”
“Tell us about your family.”
All the food she’d tossed out over the years without the least bit of remorse. The leftovers too scant for a meal. The lengths of spaghetti used to carry flame from birthday candle to birthday candle. Altogether, a dinner’s worth. The lettuce gone limp in the bottom of the refrigerator drawer. Maybe she could set everything on a table on her front lawn and barter with her neighbors. One jar of pine nuts for one jar of grape jelly or, hell, an apple. She craved the sensation of biting into sweet crispness, the flood of juice filling her mouth. A glass of cold milk. Broccoli. Green, the color of life.
“Well, let’s see. My father’s a pediatrician, and my mother’s a beautician.”
“What’s that?”
“A beautician? She does people’s hair and makeup. Mostly women. Egyptian men don’t tend to wear much makeup.”