Infected

The little boy walked out, holding a cap gun in each hand. The smell of gas billowed out of the kitchen.

He still wore the cowboy hat, but not the mask. He only had one eye. The other socket held a misshapen blue lump, under the skin, that had pushed out his eyelids and eyebrow to obscene proportions. The lump stretched the eyelid out and open, showing a blackish, gnarled textured skin underneath. Whatever it was, it had grown between the boy’s eye and his eyelids — his eye was back there somewhere, behind that... thing.

"You’ve been bad," the little boy said. "I’m going to have to gun... you... down."

He raised the cap guns.

Amos raced past Margaret, heading for the door. She turned and ran with him, still carrying the girl. Heavy footsteps told her that Agent Otto was right behind her.

Margaret ran out the door as she heard the caps firing, the boy pulling the trigger over and over again. She made it out the front porch and was down the steps when the gas finally ignited.

It wasn’t a big explosion, so much as a really large whuff. It didn’t even blow out the windows like on TV, just gave them a good rattle. She kept running and felt the heat on her back — just because it didn’t explode didn’t mean it wasn’t hot, didn’t mean the house wasn’t burning, and didn’t mean the little boy wasn’t already engulfed in flames.

40.

DINNER IS SERVED

Perry loaded up his plate and managed to hop to the couch without spilling any of the rice-Ragu concoction. He slumped into the waiting cus.h.i.+ons, winced at the waves of pain that shot through his leg, then gripped his fork and dug into the meal, not knowing if it would be his last.

The Ragu wasn’t thick enough to make the rice clump, so it was more like a heavy soup than Spanish rice. But it was still tasty, and it quelled his stomach’s grumbling. He shoveled it in as if he’d never seen food before in his life. Man, wouldn’t a Quarter Pounder and some supersize fries..h.i.t the spot right now? Or Hostess cupcakes.

Summer. Now that would have been a nice season to die. His timing, as usual, was terrible. He could have contracted this "illness" in the spring, or in the summer, or at least in the fall. All three seasons were unbelievably beautiful in Michigan. Trees everywhere either bursting with new-growth greenery or exploding in the spectacular, jewel-reflection colors that heralded the coming winter. Dying in summer would have been good — Michigan is just so green once you get outside the cities and towns, out onto the innumerable country roads. The highways to northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula are a black slash of pavement cutting through an endless sea of forest and farmland that sprawls out on either side.

Farmland, forest, swamps, water... the three-hour drive from Mount Pleasant to Cheboygan was interrupted by little more than roadkill and highway-stop towns like g.a.y.l.o.r.d that presented a splotch of buildings and cars before they were gone, fading away in the rearview mirror like the vestiges of a tasteless dream that dissipates into the b.u.t.tery solution of delicious sleep.

Summer was warm, at least early summer. Later on in the season, the true nature of Michigan’s swamps revealed themselves in sweltering humidity, clammy sweat, swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies. But even that posed little problem, as you were never more than five or ten minutes’ drive from a lake. Back home, swimming in Mullet Lake, cool water leaching away the oppressive heat. Sun blasting down, turning white bodies red and leaving streamers in the eye from where it bounced off the surface like a million infinitely bright, tiny supernovas.

As perfect as summer could be, winter was equally oppressive. Sure, it was beautiful in its own right, with snow-covered trees, sprawling fields converted to expanses of white nothingness bordered by woods and dotted with farmhouses snugly nestled into the landscape. But beauty didn’t hold much over substance when that substance was freeze-your-b.a.l.l.s-off cold. Up north the winters were spectacular. Down in the southern part of the state, where population expansion never ceased, the forests and fields were only something he glimpsed on the way to work. Here, winter made life miserable. Cold. Freezing. Wet. Icy. And even the snow looked dirty, pushed to the side of the road in mangy, gravel-embedded slush piles. Sometimes the trees were bedecked with an inch of snow on every last branch and twig, but most of the time they were barren, brown dead and lifeless. That’s why he’d always wanted to make sure he was cremated when he died — he couldn’t imagine spending eternity in the frozen soil of a Michigan winter.

And yet his last days played out in that same Michigan winter. Even if the Soldiers could find him, what could they do for him? How far gone was this monotone cancer that shouted in his head like Sam Kinison on a bad acid trip?

He sc.r.a.ped the last grains of rice into his mouth.

"Pretty tasty, eh?" He tossed the plate carelessly onto the coffee table. Hey, he was dying, no point in cleaning up the mess, now was there? High-pitched fuzzy noise babbled in his head.

w e don ’ t taste just absorb

Don’t. A contraction. How about that? The Starting Five’s vocab was improving.

He leaned back into the couch’s familiar cus.h.i.+ons. His stomach