Страница 75 из 102
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Maybe you should go home now. Be with your families.” There wasn’t much else left for them to do. For any of us to do.
• • • •
Rachel was in a private room, with a plastic airlock between her and the outside world. “The CDC is on their way,” said Dr. Oshiro, watching me and Nikki. Anything to avoid looking at Rachel. “They should be here within the day.”
“Good,” I said. It wasn’t going to help. Not unless they were ready to burn this city to the ground. But it would make the doctors feel like they were doing something, and it was best to die feeling like you might still have a chance.
The bed in Rachel’s room was occupied, but where my wife should have been there was a softly mounded gray
thing
, devoid of hard lines or distinguishing features. Worst of all, it moved from time to time, shifting just enough that a lock of glossy black hair or a single large brown eye—the right eye, all she had left—would come into view, rising out of the gray like a rumor of the promised land. Nikki’s hand tightened on mine every time that happened, small whimpers that belonged to a much younger child escaping her throat. I couldn’t offer her any real comfort, but I could at least not pull away. It was the only thing I had to give her. I could at least not pull away.
The doctors moved around the thing that had been Rachel, taking samples, checking displays. They were all wearing protective gear—gloves, booties, breathing masks—but it wasn’t going to be enough. This stuff was manmade and meant to survive under any conditions imaginable. They were dancing in the fire, and they were going to get burnt.
All the steps I’d taken to keep my family safe. All the food I’d thrown away, the laundry I’d done twice, the midnight trips to the doctor and the visits from the exterminator and the vaccinations and the pleas…it had all been for nothing. The agent of our destruction had grown in the lab where I worked, the lab I’d chosen because it let me cha
Dr. Oshiro was saying something. I wasn’t listening anymore. One of the nurses in Rachel’s room had just turned around, revealing the small patch of gray fuzz growing on the back of his knee. The others would spot it soon. That didn’t matter. The edges told me that it had grown outward, eating through his scrubs, rather than inward, seeking flesh. The flesh was already infected. The burning had begun.
“Mom?” Nikki pulled against my hand, and I realized I was walking away, pulling her with me, away from this house of horrors, toward the outside world, where maybe—if we were quick, if we were careful—we still stood a chance of getting out alive. Nikki was all I had left to worry about.
Rachel, I’m sorry
, I thought, and broke into a run.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the di
Jonathan Maberry — SHE’S GOT A TICKET TO RIDE
-1-
Kids, you know?
Tough to raise a kid in almost any household.
Tough to raise a kid with all the shit going on in the world.
You can’t lie to them and say it’s all going to be okay, because pretty much it’s not all going to be okay. There’s stuff that’s never going to be okay. Neither well-intentioned rationalization, protective lies, or outright bullshit is going to make it all right.
Bad stuff happens to good people.
That’s one of those immutable laws, like saying “everybody dies.” They do. Some things are going to happen no matter how much we don’t want them to. Even despite a lot of serious effort to prevent them from happening.
Rape happens.
Murder happens.
Abuse happens.
Go bigger: Wars happen. Poverty happens. Famine happens.
Take it from an arbitrary perspective: Tsunamis happen. Earthquakes and tornados happen.
Shit happens.
And it happens, a lot of the damn time, to good people. To the i
Try to tell a kid otherwise and they know you’re lying.
Lie too much about it and they stop believing anything you tell them.
They stop believing you.
They stop believing
in
you, which is worse.
They stop believing in themselves, which is worst of all.
I see what happens when parents cross that line.
When they call me in, the kid has crossed some lines of his own. We’re not talking about “acting out.” It’s not selling dope to earn fun money or selling yourself as the fun guy. It’s not fucking everyone who comes within grabbing distance as a way of making a statement. It’s not getting a tattoo or fifteen piercings or going Goth.
We’re talking a different set of lines.
When they call me in, the kids have crossed a line that maybe they can’t cross the other way. Either they’re so lost they can’t find it, or they’re so lost they don’t think there ever
was
a line. All they can see is the narrow piece of ground on which they’re standing in that moment. Everything else is chaos. They don’t want to move because who would step off of solid ground into chaos? So they stay there.
That’s when they call me in.
Sometimes that narrow strip of ground is called a “crack house,” and they’re giving five dollar blow jobs so they can buy some rock.
Sometimes it’s some little group of nutbags who want to build bombs and blow shit up.
And sometimes it’s a cult.
A lot of what I do is with kids in cults.
They go in.
I go in and get them out.
When I can.
If
I can.
Sometimes I bring back something that spits poison and is going to need to be in a safe place with meds and nurses and lots of close observation. Sometimes I bring back someone who will always be on some version of suicide watch. Sometimes I bring back a kid who is never—
ever
—going to be “right” again, because they were never right to begin with. Or kids who have traveled so far into alien territory that they don’t even know what language you’re speaking.
They spook the shit out of me, the kids who are so lost they’re empty. Like their bodies are vacant houses haunted by shadows of who they used to be, who people
thought
they were.
That’s sad.
That’s why a lot of guys who do what I do drink like motherfuckers.
A
lot
of us.
Sometimes you get lucky and you find a kid who’s maybe thinking that they crossed the wrong line. A kid who wants to be found, who wants to be rescued. A kid who is maybe drifting on a time of expectations because they hope, way down deep, that mommy or daddy gives enough of a genuine shit to come looking. Or at least to