The Wilds (31 page)

Please pray for Sheila Freeman’s son who is in a coma and the other five teens who struggle in darkness with him. In Jesus name
.

Although the poster did not mention
T. hermeticus
or even verify the hospital, Jenny felt sure that the prayer giver was referring to the new freak parasite. The local
infection had also made an appearance on her son’s Facebook stream. That morning, he’d left his iPhone on the kitchen table, and though she felt guilty typing in his silly password and examining his page, she rationalized that her snooping was for his own good. A girl named Kaitlin Moore had posted the following status update two days ago at 1:36
AM
:

Please send good vibes to my cousin Ashley who is in a coma at the hospital her mom found her passed out in front of the TV. So weird
.

In the ninety-two comments that followed, condolences and positive energy flows abounded, but halfway through, rumors and speculation took over. Jenny learned of three similar cases (friends of friends of posters), in which the hapless hosts had fallen into unconsciousness after especially intense gaming bouts, Twitter marathons, or Internet-porn odysseys. When a boy named Brandon Booth opined that the sufferers were victims of a virus originating from alien life-forms, several teens pounced on him, telling him to “get a grasp, dork” because this was “not a sci-fi flick but the real fucking world.”

Brandon was not the only one who suspected alien shenanigans. Out in cyber la-la land, wild theories flourished. People with usernames like Phoenix66, upon hearing about the parasite, conjectured that the original space colonists had returned to Earth to help humans
evolve to the next level. Later that day, Jenny stumbled upon an antigovernment site attesting that
T. hermeticus
had been designed by the US military in conjunction with Middle Eastern elites to terrorize the US population into docile sheep. Though she chuckled to herself at these paranoid assertions, she often emerged from her Web-surfing stupor with a sense of wonder.
What if?
she’d think as she enjoyed a cigarette, staring out at the riotous jungle that was overtaking their backyard. But the mystique would fade in the fluorescent light of the kitchen as she opened a can of tuna.

She didn’t believe that the parasite had been bioengineered by aliens or the US government or al-Qaeda, but she was terrified that it would infect her son. Though she sat him down in the matter-of-fact brightness of the kitchen and asked him if he’d heard about the comatose teens (he’d scanned Kaitlin Moore’s Facebook status), though she explained the presumed causes of
T. hermeticus
transmission, though she went over the symptoms and warned him about the correlation between excessive screen time and junk-food consumption and full-blown toxoplasmosis, she still felt the relentless throb of fear behind her breastbone every second of every waking hour. And her husband was out in the desert doing God knows what. She envisioned him standing on a pink dune, staring into a hazy void specked with
an occasional camel. Did they even have camels in Afghanistan? She couldn’t remember. She would Google it when she settled back into her swivel chair.

“If I understand you,” Adam said, “then the screen time and junk food are not
causes
of the coma but
symptoms
of the disease.” Was he looking at her with pity, as though she had lost it?

“I’m not sure.” She forced her mouth into a smile that she hoped radiated adult wisdom. “But I think that’s about right.”

“So it doesn’t really matter what I do.” He grinned and slunk toward the dark den.

That night Jenny woke up sweating, shaking off a nightmare in which her husband had transformed into some kind of desert scorpion cyborg, and her son, after falling into a coma, had pupated into a winged creature that moved so fast she couldn’t catch a glimpse of his face.

Miles Escrow had the eerie feeling that he’d experienced it all before: the whine of the jukebox, water stains on the ceiling, Wanda Bonnet blowing her nose into a sodden tissue after another weeping bout. She was the only mother of a comatose teen who’d shown up at Lizard Man that week. Ten minutes and two shots of vodka
later, she was gone, driving through rain back to the hospital. She’d come, he figured, thinking her old haunt might soothe her, but she must’ve felt alienated after all, judging by the startled-doe look on her face.

Those patrons whose kids weren’t infected were probably at home, domestic surveillance in overdrive.
DHEC
had finally issued a statement verifying the number of diagnosed teens in the state (fifty-two), explaining the life cycle of
T. hermeticus
, and urging people not to panic as medical authorities were doing all they could to understand the bug, including setting up testing facilities that would soon be available to the general population. Although the sick kids were comatose, their comas were relatively high on the Glasgow scale, and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t snap out of it soon.

Tonight it was just Miles, Stein, Old Man Winger, and Rufus Pope, the bottom-heavy mixologist who lurched like Godzilla behind the bar. But then Carla Marlin showed up with some startling news. When she barged into the bar, eyes on fire, she seemed disappointed that her grand announcement would be received by only four men, one of them (Miles dared to think) a decent catch, albeit securely snatched up in the Tabascored talons of Tina Flame.

Or was he? Miles gave Carla the head-to-toe and found her paling in comparison to his ten-year live-in. A
sun worshiper with freckled tawny skin and hair bleached white as polar-bear fur, she failed to tickle his fancy. That didn’t stop him from draping a soothing arm over her shoulders as she drew out her prologue to the big revelation, punching code into her Droid, lighting a Winston, and licking a drop of nectar from her piña colada’s straw before clearing her throat. But when Roddy Causey cruised into the bar, she withheld the goods again, waiting for him to secure a Budweiser lest she waste her breath on three old men and the flunky of Tina Flame.

“What’s up?” said Roddy, joining them.

“My neighbor the phlebotomist just got off his shift. Said all hell had broke loose down at Palmetto Baptist.” Carla Marlin blew six perfect smoke rings.

“Enough with the rising action,” said Stein. “Let’s have our climax now.”

Carla raised her eyebrows at the word
climax
.

“Well, if you got to know right this second: one of the teenagers is missing. They don’t know if he just jumped out of bed and walked out or if it was a kidnapping kind of thing.”

“Or maybe he got beamed to another dimension,” said Stein.

“Yeah.” Carla rolled her eyes. “There’s always that.”

“They’ll find him,” said Roddy. “Bet he woke up with amnesia and got lost.”

“A common soap-opera trope,” said Stein. “The whole waking-up-from-a-coma-with-amnesia shtick.”

“Like Anastasia in
Purple Passions
,” said Carla.

“It’s actually called a ‘convenient coma,’” said Stein.

Carla Marlin mustered her coldest drop-dead stare.

“There’s nothing convenient about it,” she said.

Beth Irving held a plastic vial of cat piss and repressed another gag. She’d been drinking ginger tea, popping B6, and pressing the acupuncture points reputed to diminish nausea. A rank yellow fume emanated from the vial like the cartoon hieroglyphics that flowed from the tail of Pepé Le Pew, but she held her breath and finished her experiment. She would prevail because she had to, because other specialists in other states were testing their own comatose teens and compiling data, because one of her test subjects had mysteriously disappeared like a patient in a slasher film, and a certain famous neurologist was flying in from Germany. This time, she promised herself with a dark chuckle, she would refrain from sleeping with him. The fact that he was portly and bald (she’d checked out his Web profile) would help.

Though she knew she was pregnant, she didn’t have time to deal with it—emotionally or physically. The
nausea, however, made it difficult to ignore the fact that a new life was incubating inside her. Every time a green wave of sickness rocked through her, she couldn’t help but envision the eight-cell zygote glistening in the void of her uterus. The small cluster of dividing cells was already sending chemical messages into her blood and her nervous system, directing her eating habits to suit its needs, tyrannizing her bladder, and producing “emotions” advantageous to its own survival. Her rationality had been hijacked weeks ago, when Dr. Bloom breezed into town at the height of her ovulatory cycle, her exquisitely receptive system going into overdrive upon detecting the neurovirologist’s sweet pheromones.

Had she pounced on him like a starved jaguar in the fake-cherry-scented darkness of her hotel room? Had she still had enough emotional detachment to quip about their feral passion as Dr. Bloom struggled drunkenly with her belt buckle? Yes, and, thank goodness, yes. But she’d also been prompted by a deep urge to sabotage her current relationship.

Now she was exhausted. As she went about her work, renegade factions of her brain goaded her to slink into an unoccupied room and take a nap or flee the bombardment of horrific hospital odors, rush through the automatic doors of entrance C, and take deep breaths in the oasis of landscaping where a variety of flowers bloomed.
But she had finally gotten three clearances for
MRI
s from desperate parents. And just yesterday, one of the patients had possibly come out of his coma, though now the staff at this backwoods facility couldn’t seem to find him. She had to work quickly in case the others woke up. She wanted to test olfactory responses to cat urine and the effects of antipsychotics on dopamine levels.

Struggling to keep her mind focused on her research tasks, she kept getting swept away by surges of nausea and stray images of Dr. Bloom. She saw him gnawing meat from a goat bone. Saw him hovering over her, his hazel eyes aglow. Saw him scurry into the bathroom, where he displayed his scrawny buttocks with mock coyness before gruffly closing the door. He’d flown to Nashville to look into a recent case there, had asked her, with a wistful smile, if she might join him later to diversify her research. They could visit all the infection sites, he romantically suggested.

But the
T. hermeticus
epidemic was most pronounced in this particular town, and Beth was trying to figure out how the hurricane weather and blighted economic conditions factored into the phenomenon. Remembering her own coming-of-age in South Georgia, she thought that clinical depression might play a role. And she needed to find teens testing positive who had
not
reached the comatose state, which wasn’t necessarily the upshot of
infection. Just as most
T. gondii
–positive people failed to show marked personality changes, and so-called schizophrenics probably had a predisposition that heightened the parasite’s effects, some
T. hermeticus
hosts might not be susceptible to full-blown toxoplasmosis. Beth hypothesized that perhaps the hospitalized teens were susceptible due to depression or malnutrition or other immune-weakening factors. But she couldn’t test this without getting her hands on some nonpathological positives, which required slogging through labyrinthine
DHEC
paperwork, which required mental acuity and a nausea-free system, all of which were eluding her now, especially after she poured cat urine into the
TDR
diffuser and could not escape its musky insinuations no matter how many times she changed her latex gloves.