Standing at the edge of the parking lot beneath a flickering arc-sodium lamp, Rose held her arm up in front of her face and looked at the underside of her forearm. The veins were a little too prominent, a little too dark. In twelve hours, a day at the outside, they would be nearly black. Then her vision would start to grow hazy, as if cataracts had suddenly spread over both of her corneas. Her strength would wane, and then the bleeding would begin, from the mouth, nose, ears, other places. These were symptoms not unlike those a severely hypertrophic person might experience—she’d researched the symptoms on the internet and had even tried taking blood pressure medications, but they only helped for an hour or two—but even that stage would only last a few hours. Soon after, she would be too weak to do more than pull herself along on her belly like a broke-back snake. She’d been that bad only once, but once had been enough. Tonight, she would get what she needed. One way or another.
As she was approaching the front entrance, the doors suddenly banged open and two enormous bouncers in black muscle shirts carried a flailing man out of the club and dropped him on the concrete.
One of the bouncers—the guy looked like a refugee from some late ’80s Schwarzenegger flick—glared down at the leather-clad man, who was covering his head as if he was afraid of being hit or kicked. Which seemed a reasonable fear, considering.
“You even try to come back in here, you’ll spend the next week picking your teeth out of the toilet.” The bouncer didn’t wait for a reply, just trailed his partner back inside. Techno music blared out of the club when the door opened, then died down to bass-heavy thumps as the door swung shut.
Rose stepped back as the man, who was dressed in black leather pants and a black silk shirt and black motorcycle boots, climbed to his feet. He tottered as he stood, and Rose knew he had been drinking heavily.
He wasn’t terrible looking, like an aging Jim Morrison with shorter hair. Jim Morrison meets Wall Street. Brown hair and eyes, a couple days’ worth of stubble on his face, which was smoothly skinned if too tan. He was the kind of guy who liked to cultivate tough when he went out, but who rubbed Neutrogena moisturizer on his face before bed each night, and maybe a dab of Pond’s under-eye lotion to get rid of all that pesky pouching.
Maybe, Rose thought.
The man turned and saw Rose staring.
She watched as something stupid, maybe what the fuck are you looking at, or why don’t you take a picture or something equally brilliant came to his mouth, and then she watched him take her in and wonder, wait a minute, do I have a chance here? Finally, he said, “Funny, huh?”
Rose put on her most sympathetic face, pooching her lower lip. “Are you okay? That looked like it hurt.”
The man mumbled something she couldn’t really hear over the heavy bass from inside, though she made out the words “faggots” and “pussies.”
She nodded and tried to look interested, which must have worked because the guy smiled and stepped closer.
“Hey, you know what?” Rose said and put her hand on his arm. “I’m not really in the mood for this place. Do you want to go for a ride or something?”
He was drunk and stupid but not brain dead. His eyes narrowed suspiciously and he said, “I’m not in the market, baby.” He started to push past her, but Rose kept her hand on his arm.
“I’m just looking for a good time,” she said, looking him directly in the eye, “and I’m not going to find anything better in there.” She nodded toward the club. “I’m going home with someone, one way or the other. It can be you if you want, but it’s your call.”
She watched him fight and lose a two-second battle with himself. “Let’s go,” he said.
Rose smiled. “Good.”
They walked to his car, a black Infinity, and got in. Ten minutes later, maybe five miles from the club, the guy pulled the car onto the side of the road and turned to Rose. His face was flushed and fatter than she’d originally thought. The flesh of his cheeks and neck quivered as he spoke.
“Look,” he said, obviously flustered, “I gotta tell you something. We can’t go to my place. My wife and kids—”
Rose slipped a hand around the back of his head and ran her fingers through his hair. He was sweaty and oily, and Rose felt her stomach turn over with revulsion. Touching this creep was like fondling an undercooked slice of bacon.
“Oh, Christ,” he said, and whatever small fragment of nobility had been trying to assert itself inside his head was bumped aside by lust. “Can we just—you know, here, in the car? I have rubbers.” He looked to Rose like a little boy who had just asked mommy for a popsicle.
“Sure,” she said. “Come here.” She licked her bottom lip.
He leaned in to kiss her, but when he was close enough, Rose dropped her mouth to his neck and, with one snakelike motion, tore it open.
The man screamed and flailed out at Rose, but she was stronger and faster and with one hand slammed his head into the driver’s side window. The glass cracked in a web-like pattern and bulged out slightly but held. The same couldn’t be said for the flabby man, who slumped unconscious in his seat, bleeding from his neck and, now, from his head as well.
Rose spat out the hunk of skin and flesh from her mouth. His skin was greasy and salty and Rose thought the idiot probably hadn’t showered for two days. Another trait he shared with Jim Morrison. But she dipped her head back into the hollow of his neck and drank, at first tasting only the sweat and ordure from the man’s neck. But then, as always, the blood pumping into her mouth began to do its work, and Rose felt the warming, euphoric heat emanating from her stomach, spreading to her limbs, to her brain, to her groin, bringing her a sense of unspeakable relief. She pulled away from the man and wiped her mouth and waited for the world to come back into focus.
Leaning back in her seat, head tilted to the side, she watched as blood seeped from the man’s ruined neck. At first it came in sluggish gluts, but after a few seconds those died down into dribbles. Soon the flow ceased altogether and Rose knew he was dead.
She got out of the car and walked around to his side, opened the door, and dragged the corpse out onto the side of the road. In his wallet, she found a hundred dollars in twenties. Not bad. She shucked the platinum-plated Rolex from his wrist and plucked a diamond-studded wedding band from his pocket. He wore a gold chain around his neck, and Rose took that, too, dropping all of the valuables into her shoulder bag. In a week or a month, whenever she was far away from here and out of the range of the local authorities, she’d pawn the jewelry. She kicked the man’s body down the embankment into a soggy drainage ditch, then turned toward the car.
The driver’s side seat was a mess. Smeared blood glistened on the black leather, and Rose saw that small ponds had formed in the seams, an especially deep pool in the spot where the man’s significant weight had pressed the leather down into a reservoir. There was no way she’d be able to clean it up. Not quickly, anyway.
“Shit,” Rose said. She’d hoped to get some mileage out of the car, but looking like this…if she got pulled over, she’d have to kill the cop. Even if she managed to get most of the blood off the seat, she wouldn’t get it all, and if there was one thing she’d learned about blood over the years, the stuff smelled. Not much at first—just a little tang of fresh copper in the air—but within a couple of hours, when the blood started to turn…it would be like riding in the back of a garbage truck.
Beneath the driver’s side seat, a pistol. Rose was no pro with firearms, but she’d seen enough to recognize this one: a Smith and Wesson .32.
“Look at this,” she said. “Naughty, naughty.” She flipped open the cylinder and saw that the pistol was loaded. After checking to make sure that the safety was engaged, she tucked the gun away in the bag, too, secreting it away underneath everything else.
She used a rag from the trunk of the car to wipe the remaining blood from her mouth and chin.
Five minutes later she was a quarter-mile away, whistling to herself as she walked along the shoul
der of the highway in the direction of the beach house.
Chapter 4
Suzie Clusky gave John a ride home from the hospital ten days after he’d been admitted. In actuality, he had been cleared to leave the hospital before that, but what should have been a happy moment turned into a nightmare.
John had said goodbye to his parents before they left for the airport. His mother cried as she kissed him on both cheeks, and his father had done everything but pinch himself to stop his own tears from coming. It was one of the small points of light in the ordeal since Kyra’s accident, that he had been able to spend an extended period of time with his parents; stuck in the room as he was, they’d had little to do but talk, and John felt closer to them than he had in years. He’d as much as decided that he would take the rest of the year off from work and head back up to Pennsylvania, maybe work on the farm for a few months, get his feet back under him.
Several times during their stay, his parents had tried to get him out of bed, out of the room, but from the television coverage, John knew the scene outside the door was the last thing in the world he needed to see.
This was another reason the rolling country of West Chester County drew at John so powerfully; the idea of the news media invading quaint Kennett Square was ludicrous, impossible to imagine. Now, it looked like John might be forced to go to just those lengths to avoid the tabloids and television reporters.
Two days after she had been run down in the street, Kyra Metheny had gone on a daytime talk show. John was still unconscious at this point, so he’d been unreachable for comment, but that was okay; the host had brought not only Kyra but also several members of her physics class, the kids who had seen the accident and the aftermath, onto the stage, and over tears and Kyra’s repeated avowals that she had been saved by an angel, John’s legend was immediately cemented.
Flipping through the channels of the TV in his room, John had seen clips of the interview replayed on several recap shows. He had stopped and watched each time, not because he wanted to hear one more word about what had happened that day, but because of what he saw before him: Kyra Metheny, alive and talking. He searched her head, her posture, for any sign of the grievous injuries she had sustained in the accident, but there was nothing. She was the same girl, the same Kyra he’d taught each day in ninth grade, the same Kyra he’d watched with half-attention as she flipped and tumbled during halftimes at Denton basketball games.
It made no sense. As many ways as he tried to explain it to himself, he couldn’t get his mind around what had happened. He replayed what he could remember. Clarence Drake bursting into the lounge, covered in blood; rushing out to the street; the electricity in the air; and then Kyra’s shattered body, half in and half out of the street, her only remaining eye rolling up to look at him… These things, he knew, were real. He knew that because someone—he had no idea who, but if he ever found out, he would be hard pressed to hold his temper in check—had clicked several photos of Kyra’s prone form with a high-grade camera phone. The pictures weren’t professional quality, by any means, but John could make out the details just fine.
So what had happened? It was the question that plagued John, and the one he did everything he could do to avoid answering. So far, he had turned down interviews with reporters from the Charlotte Observer, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His mother also told him there had been phone calls from several talk shows and from Good Morning America. It was surreal. Surreal and stupid and something he wouldn’t be able to sidestep for much longer.
That morning, John was propped up in his bed reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a novel he’d loved since he was a kid, when the door opened to admit a fifty-ish woman dressed in blue surgical scrubs that didn’t even come close to fitting her nearly skeletal frame. Her hair was tied back into a gray-streaked ponytail, and her face was heavily lined with wrinkles. John had become familiar with most of the staff in this part of the hospital and didn’t recognize her.
Dr. Barnes had told him that security had been beefed up after the news stories had run last week, and that it would be all but impossible for anyone to sneak into the hospital, but the imbalance in her deeply recessed eyes spoke for itself.
He dropped the book and patted his hand along the bed until he found his panic-button and clicked it, then looked back up just in time to see the woman lock the door behind her and lean back against it, her arms braced against the wood as if waiting for someone to slam into it from behind. John hadn’t seen it at first, but there was a smear of blood on the back of her right hand, and another on the bottom hem of her scrub top. It looked fresh.
She’s a patient here, he realized. Not from the outside at all. She’d seen his picture on the TV the same as everyone else, heard the reporters when they named the hospital.
“What do you want?” John said, trying to keep his voice confident and assertive. It was a ridiculous question, but he had to say something. He kept his eyes on the woman but tried to recall what was on his bedside tray. Books, a pen, a glass of orange juice. Nothing that could help him here.
The woman stepped into the room, toward the bed, eyes locked on John. “I need your help,” she said. “Help me.”
“I can’t do anything for you,” he said.
A nurse’s face appeared in the small window on John’s door. Over the woman’s shoulder he saw the nurse, a pretty girl named Becky, try to push the door open then realize it was locked. She found John’s eyes with her own and held up a finger. One second. Then she was gone and John was alone again.
The woman was closer now, halfway across the room, holding out her hand. “I saw your picture on TV. They said that if you touch someone, they won’t be sick anymore. Touch me,” she said. “Touch me and make me better. I don’t want to die.”
John pushed himself as far away from the woman as he could. The railing on the bed was up, but he reached down and lowered it. “I can’t help you,” John said. “None of what you’ve heard is true. It was all made up.” He was shaking, and when he lowered one leg and then the other down to the cold tiled floor, his muscles trembled from fear and lack of use.
“That’s not true!” the woman screamed. She had reached the bed and now it was all that stood between her and John. She put her hands down and left a bloody smear on the white sheet.
John backed into the wall. “Please,” he said. “Just go away. I can’t do anything for you.”
There was a rattling from the door and John saw a uniformed cop through the window. They have a key, he thought. They have to have a key. Just buy another couple of seconds.
“The police are outside,” John said. “Stop this. You’re only getting yourself in trouble.”
The woman had come all the way around the bed and stood mere feet away from him now, close enough for John to see her bloodshot eyes. There was a stench radiating off of her, something like rancid body odor crossed with ozone. This is the way crazy smells, John thought.
His right hand, which had been flat against the wall, encountered something metal, and it took a minute for him to realize what it was. His walker. The first couple of days he’d been up and around, they’d wanted him to use it, just to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. He grabbed it now in both hands and held the aluminum contraption up in front of him, pointing the rubber-capped feet at the woman.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” John said. “Stay back.”
Just as he finished speaking, the door opened and the woman turned to look as the cop entered the room, followed closely by Becky and two other nurses. The cop stepped forward and the nurses clustered behind him in the doorway.
“Ma’am, don’t move,” the cop said. He was a young kid, no older than twenty-five, but big through the shoulders. Slowly, he drew his gun, but held it pointed at the ground. John silently counted his blessings that the young cop seemed completely uninterested in using his gun in the line of duty. Through the cop’s eyes, John saw what the young man was seeing: a s
ick woman not in control of herself—not someone to be feared, only to be pitied. He was thinking, this could be my mother. John could almost hear those words running through the young cop’s mind. “Stay still.”
There was a brief moment where John thought it might end there, with no real incident to speak of. The woman looked from the cop back to John, and he could see the tears in her eyes, and the fear, the primal and mind-dissolving fear. “I’ll be dead in a month,” she whispered, then lunged toward John. He held the walker out to ward her off and felt a jolt as one of the feet connected with bone, a rib or her clavicle. She grabbed the bars of the walker and tried to jerk it out of John’s hands; her strength was shocking. He stumbled as his feet got tangled, then went to the ground with a grunt, elbows and knees banging hard on the floor, the bars of the walker slipping from his hands.
For one vivid second, John saw her loom over him, arms stretched out, fingers reaching, but then the cop engulfed her in a bear-hug from behind and lifted her emaciated frame off the ground and carried her from the room. John could hear her screaming incoherently as the cop hauled her down the corridor.
John climbed to his feet, his knees scraped and burning from the fall, and Becky stepped forward to help him back to bed. “In a second,” he said, holding up his hand. “I don’t think I’m ready to lie back down right now. What the hell was that all about?”
Becky bent to pick up the walker and said, “She hit a nurse over the head with a cane in the oncology unit and took her scrubs.”
“Is the nurse—”
Waving a hand, Becky said, “She’ll be fine. Scalp laceration and a mild concussion, nothing that won’t fix itself in a week.”
That explained the blood. “What’s wrong with her?”