Book of the Dead (18 page)

Some of the other nurses were now going into the building. Elaine thought they purposely avoided looking at the head-shaking boy in the window. “I’ll make it up to you,” Mark whispered. “I swear. Not much longer.” But Elaine didn’t answer; she just stared at the boy in the window.

There was now a steady stream of people walking up the steps, entering the hospital, very few permitting themselves to look at the boy.
Tom
, she thought.
His name is Tom
. She watched their quiet faces, wondering what they were thinking, if they were having stray thoughts about Tom but immediately suppressing them, or if they were having no thoughts about the boy at all. If bothered her not knowing. People led secret lives, secret even from those closest to them. It bothered her not knowing if they bore her ill will, or good will, or if for them she didn’t exist at all. Her mother had always told her she cared far too much about what other people thought.

“I gather all the Fed doctors left yesterday afternoon,” Mark said behind her.

“What? I thought they closed all the airports.”

“They did. I heard this morning the governor even ordered gun emplacements on all the runways. Guess they left the city in a bus or something.”

Elaine tried to rub the chill off her arms with shaking hands. The very idea of leaving the city in something other than an armored tank terrified her. It had been only a few months since the last flights. Then that plane had come in from Florida: all those dead people with suntans strolling off the plane as if they were on vacation. A short time later two small towns on Colorado’s eastern plains—Kit Carson and Cheyenne Wells—were wiped out, or apparently wiped out, because only a few bodies were ever found. Then there was another plane, this one from Texas. Then another, from New York City. “It’s hard to believe they could land a plane,” had been Mark’s comment at the time. But there were still more planes; the dead had an impeccable safety record.

“I’m just as glad to see them go,” Mark said now. “Poking over that spastic kid like he was a two-headed calf. And still no signs of their mysterious ‘zombie virus.’ “

“No one knows how it starts,” she said. “It could start anywhere. It could have dozens of different forms. Any vague gesture could be the first symptom.”

“They haven’t proven to me that it
is
a virus. No one really knows.”

But Denver’s quarantine seemed to be working. No one got in or out. All the roads closed, miles of perimeter patrolled. And no zombie sightings at all after those first few at the airport.

The boy’s head drifted left and right as if in slow motion, as if weightless. “I missed the news this morning,” she said.

“You looked so beat, I thought it best you sleep.”

“I
need
to watch the news, Mark.” Anger had such a grip on her jaw that she could hardly move it.

“You and most everybody else in Denver.” She looked at him but said nothing. “Okay, I watched it for you. Just more of the same. A few distant shots of zombies in other states, looking like no more than derelicts prowling the cities, and the countryside, for food. Nothing much to tell you what they’d really be like. God knows what the world outside this city is really like anymore. I lost part of it—the reception just gets worse and worse.”

Elaine knew that everything he was saying was true. But she kept watching the screens just the same, the faces seeming to get a little fuzzier every day as reception got worse, the distant cable stations disappearing one by one until soon only local programming was available, and then even the quality of that diminishing as equipment began to deteriorate and ghosts and static proliferated. But still she kept watching. Everybody she knew kept watching, desperate for any news outside of Denver.

And propped up in the window like a crazed TV announcer, young Tom’s head moved no no no. At any moment she expected him to scream his denial: “No!” But no words ever passed the blurring lips. Just like all the other cases. No no no. Quiet heads that would suddenly explode into rhythmic, exaggerated denial. Their bodies fought it, held on to whatever was available so that muscles weren’t twisted or bones torqued out of their sockets.

His head moved side to side: no no no. His long blond hair whipped and flew. His dark pebble eyes were lost in a nimbus of hair, now blond, now seeming to whiten more and more the faster his head flew. His expressionless face went steadily out of focus, and after a moment she realized she couldn’t remember what he looked like, even though she had seen him several times a day every day since he had been admitted into the hospital.

What is he holding on to?
she wondered, the boy’s head now a cloud of mad insects, the movement having gone on impossibly long. His body vibrated within the broad window frame. At any moment she expected the rhythmic head to levitate him, out the window and over the empty, early-morning street. His features blurred in and out: he had four eyes, he had six. Three mouths that gasped for air attempting to scream. He had become a vision. He had become an angel.

“It’s going to take more than a few skin grafts to fix that one,” Betty said, nervously rubbing the back of her neck. “My God, doesn’t he ever stop?” They were at the windows above surgery. He’d been holding on to a hot radiator; it had required three aides to pull him off. Even anesthetized, the boy’s head shook so vigorously the surgeons had had to strap his neck into something like a large dog collar. The surgeries would be exploratory, mostly, until they found something specific. It bothered Elaine. Tom was a human being. He had secrets. “Look at his eyes,” Elaine said. His eyes stared at her. As his face blurred in side-to-side movement, his eyes remained fixed on her. But that couldn’t be.

“I can’t see his eyes,” Betty said with sudden vehemence. “Jeezus, will you look at him? They oughta do something with his brain while they’re at it. They oughta go in there and snip out whatever’s causin’ it.”

Elaine stared at the woman.
Snip it out. Where?
At one time they had been friends, or almost friends. Betty had wanted it, but Elaine just hadn’t been able to respond. It had always been a long time between friends for her. The edge of anger in Betty’s voice made her anxious. “They don’t know what’s causing it,” Elaine said softly.

“My mama don’t believe in ’em.” Betty turned and looked at Elaine with heavily-shadowed eyes, anemic-looking skin. “Zombies. Mama thinks the zombies are something the networks came up with. She says real people would never do disgustin’ things like they’re sayin’ the zombies do.” Elaine found herself mesmerized by the lines in Betty’s face. She tried to follow each one, where they became deeper, trapping dried rivers of hastily applied makeup, where pads and applicators had bruised, then covered up the skin. Betty’s eyes blinked several times quickly in succession, the pupils bright and fixed like a doll’s. “But then she always said we never landed on the moon, neither. Said they filmed all that out at Universal Studios.” Milky spittle had adhered to the inside corners of Betty’s mouth, which seemed unusually heavy with lipstick today. “Guess she could be right. Never read about zombies in the Bible, and you would think they’d be there if there was such a thing.” Betty rubbed her arm across her forehead. “Goodness, my skin’s so
dry
! I swear I’m flakin’ down to the
nub
!” A slight ripple of body odor moved across Elaine’s face. She could smell Betty’s deodorant, and under that, something slightly sour and slightly sweet at the same time.

That’s the way people’s secrets smell
, Elaine thought, and again wondered at herself for thinking such things.
People have more secrets than you could possibly imagine
. She wondered what secret things Betty was capable of, what Betty might do to a zombie if she had the opportunity, what Betty might do to Tom. “Tom’s not a zombie,” she said slowly, wanting to plant the idea firmly in Betty’s head. “There’s been no proof of a connection. No proof that he has a form of the virus, if there is a virus. No proof that he has a virus at all.”

“My mama never believed much in
coincidences
,” Betty said.

Elaine spent most of the night up in the ward with Tom and the other cases that had appeared: an elderly woman, a thirty-year-old retarded man, twin girls of thirteen who at times shook their heads in unison, a twenty-four-year-old hospital maintenance worker whose symptoms had started only a couple of days ago. As in every other place she’d worked, a TV set mounted high overhead murmured all evening. She couldn’t get the vertical to hold. The announcer’s head rolled rapidly by, disappearing at the top of the screen and reappearing at the bottom. But as she watched she began thinking it was different heads, the announcer switching them at the rate of perhaps one per second. She wondered how he’d managed the trick. Then she wondered if all newscasters did that, switching through a multitude of heads so quickly it couldn’t be detected by the average viewer. She wanted to turn off the TV, but the doctors said it was best to leave it on for stimulation, even though their charges appeared completely unaware of it. Dozens of heads shaking no no no. Heads in the windows. Heads exploding with denial. Heads like bombs.

Two more nurses had quit that day. At least they had called; some had just stopped showing up. All the nurses were on double shifts now, with patient loads impossible to handle. Betty came in at six to help Elaine with feeding some of the head shakers.

“Now buckle the strap,” Elaine said. She had the “horse collar,” a padded brace, around the old woman’s neck, her arms around the woman’s head to hold it still. Betty fiddled with the straps.

“Damn!” Betty said. “I can’t get it to buckle!”

“Hurry! I can’t hold her head still much longer.” Holding the head still put undue pressure on other parts of the system. Elaine could hear the woman’s protesting stomach, and then both bladder and bowel were emptied.

“There!” Elaine let go and the old woman’s head shook in her collar. Betty tried to spoon the food in. The woman’s body spasmed like a lizard nailed to a board. Sometimes they broke their own bones that way. Elaine held her breath. Even strapped down, the old woman’s face moved to an amazing degree. Like a latex mask attached loosely to the skull, her face slipped left and right, led by an agonized mouth apparently desperate to avoid the spoon. Elaine thought it disgusting, but it was better than any other method they’d tried. The head shakers choked on feeding tubes, pulled out IVs, and getting a spoon into those rapidly moving mouths had been almost impossible.

“I know it’s your turn, but I’ll go feed Tom,” Elaine said.

Betty glanced up from the vibrating head, a dribble of soft brown food high on her right cheek. “Thanks, Elaine. I owe you.” She turned back, aiming the spoon of dripping food at the twisting head. “I don’t know. If I had to be like them… I don’t know. I think I’d rather be dead.”

Tom had always been the worst to feed. Elaine fixed a large plastic bib around his neck, then put one around her neck as well. He stared at her. Even as the spasms pulled his eyes rapidly past, she could see a little-boy softness in those adolescent eyes, an almost pleading vulnerability so at odds with the violent contortions his body made.

She moved the spoon in from the side, just out of his peripheral vision. But every time the metal touched the soft, pink flesh of the lips, the head jerked violently away. Again and again. And when some food finally did slip into the mouth cavity, he choked, his eyes became enormous, the whites swelling in panic, and his mouth showered it back at her. It was as if his mouth despised the food, reviled the food, and could not stand to be anywhere near it. As if she were asking him to eat his own feces.

She looked down at the bowl of mushy food. Tom reached his hand in, clutched a wet mess of it, then tried to stuff it into his own mouth. The mouth twisted away. His hand did this again and again, and still his mouth rejected it. Eventually his hands, denied the use of the mouth, began smearing the food on his face, his neck, his chest, his legs, all over his body, pushing it into the skin and eventually into every orifice available to receive it. He looked as if he had been swimming in garbage.

Tom’s face, Tom’s eyes, pleaded with her as his hands shoved great wet cakes of brown, green, and yellow food up under his blue hospital pajama top and down inside his underwear. Finally, as if in exasperation, Tom’s body voided itself, drenching itself and Elaine in vomit, urine, and feces.

Elaine backed away, ripping off her plastic gloves and bib. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she screamed, as Tom’s head moved no no no, and his body continued to pat itself, fondle itself, probe itself lovingly with food-smeared fingers. Elaine’s vision blurred as she choked back the tears. Tom’s body suddenly looked like some great bag of loose flesh, poked with wet, running holes, some ugly organic machine, inefficient in input and output. She continued to stare at it as it fed and drained, probed and made noises, all independent of the head and its steady no no no beat.

She ran into Betty out in the corridor. “I have to leave
now
,” she said. “Betty, I’m
sorry
!”

Betty looked past her into the room where Tom was still playing with his food. “It’s all right, kid. You just go get some sleep. I’ll put old Master Tom to bed.”

Elaine stared at her, sudden alarms of distrust going off in her head. “You’ll be okay with him? I mean—he didn’t
mean
it, Betty.”

Betty looked offended. “Hey! Just what kind of nurse do you think I am? I’m going to hose him off and tuck him in, that’s all. Unless you’re insisting I read him a bedtime story, too? Maybe give him a kiss on the cheek? If I could
hit
his cheek, that is.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“I know what you meant. Get some rest, Elaine. You’re beat.”

But Elaine couldn’t bear to attempt the drive home, searching the dark corners at every intersection, waiting for the shambling strangers who lived in the streets to come close enough that she could get a good look at their faces. So that she could see if their faces were torn, their eyes distant. Or if their heads were beginning to shake.