The Wilds (32 page)

According to Adam’s Facebook stream, Todd Spencer, the comatose teen who had mysteriously disappeared from the hospital, had made several shadowy appearances around town, materializing at the margins of various events before vanishing again. Heather Remington had spotted him lurking under the bleachers at a softball game. Josh Williams thought he might’ve seen him skulking down a hallway of First Baptist’s new
recreation facility. And several kids swore they’d seen him emerge from the woods and stand at the moonlit edge of Bob Baggott’s pond, where an illicit teen party was in full riot.

Following
DHEC
’s recommendations, Jenny had confiscated Adam’s iPhone, equipping him with an old-fashioned flip phone until the crisis passed. She knew she was violating his privacy by perusing his Facebook account. She felt that desperate times called for desperate measures, however, even though her son had not tested positive for
T. gondii
or
T. hermeticus
antigens. Two days before, she’d driven him to a Walmart where free testing facilities had been set up. At least two dozen teens had waited on the scorched blacktop with their parents, the smell of sunscreen floating in the muggy air. Hurricane Anastasia had dissipated, and now a heat wave settled in, with temperatures capping at 110. People were living like moles, hurrying from one air-conditioned bunker to another, compulsively checking their media gadgets for the latest on
T. hermeticus
.

The bug was mostly affecting the Southern states, possibly because their weather conditions encouraged the species to thrive. Jenny was very busy with sibyl. com, but she pulled herself away from her screen every half hour to check on Adam, making sure he hadn’t found the power cord to their media screen (which
she’d stuffed into a corner of the china cabinet). She did what she could to protect him. She stocked up on healthy snacks. She ordered educational board games for them to play together. She tracked her packages on
UPS
.com
, hoping that when they arrived, a golden age of mother-son bonding would flourish.

So far he’d spent that morning sprawled on his bed, perusing old comics. He’d actually called her in to check out an issue from the bygone era of 2009. If the weather had permitted it, she would’ve suggested some whimsical outing—a picnic, a sporting event.

Around eleven she started thinking about lunch, deciding to drop by Adam’s room to ask what kind of wholesome entrée he fancied. But he wasn’t in his room. She felt the familiar throbbing of her heart as she moved toward the bathroom, calling his name with ostentatious nonchalance. He was not in the bathroom. He was not in the den. He was not hiding out in the master bedroom, which, up until last winter, she’d shared with her husband. When she opened the door to the laundry room, she saw him hunched before their fat old Magnavox, plying the vintage joystick of her husband’s childhood Atari. Her husband, desperate for quality time with their son after returning from a deployment a year ago, had attempted to interest Adam in this outfit.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Adam released a long, slow breath and fixed her with a defiant grin.

“Stone-cold busted.” He tossed the joystick onto the floor, where it bounced unexpectedly. “I’m going out of my mind with boredom, and I can’t even text on that archaic piece of shit you gave me.”

“Watch the language.”

As he stared at the primitive graphics of Asteroids, light from the screen reflected in his irises, which gave him the dead, mechanical gaze of a shark.

Miles Escrow could not remember days this hot. As he listened to Stein go on about how the dinosaurs died out, he wondered if humans were reaching the limits of their current evolutionary stage. Regarding Titus Redmond, a vinyl-siding-installation specialist with a swollen gut, Miles thought,
Here we have the height of evolution, Homo sapiens
, which, as Stein had informed him on numerous occasions, meant “wise man.” If there were such a thing as the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, Miles theorized, maybe he’d survive the sweltering climate that was becoming the norm around there, making it well-nigh impossible to enjoy the great
outdoors, with its super-mosquitoes and poisonous UV rays. In the meantime, he would spend his Saturday afternoon hunkered in the smoked chill of Lizard Man, wondering if he’d ever shake free of Tina Flame.

Though he suspected they’d bicker their way into a double-plot grave at Sunset Memory Gardens, he liked to fool himself with little escapades at Lizard Man—dalliances with single mothers and women estranged from their no-count men. On this summer afternoon with a heat index of 120, he’d zeroed in on Brandy Wellington, who was in better spirits of late, as her comatose cousin up at Palmetto Baptist had shown signs of consciousness.

“He looked right into his mama’s eyes,” said Brandy. “Asked her for a Coke and then zoned out again.”

“He can use the imperative voice logically,” said Stein. “A good sign.”

Brandy rolled her eyes and smirked at Miles.

“And that boy who’s gone missing,” she said. “Todd Spencer. I heard his mama found evidence that he’d been in his bedroom—a few drawers left open; some of his stuff missing.”

“What makes her so sure it was him?” said Stein.

“She said a mother could just tell.” Brandy Wellington blew an irate huff of smoke and examined her ebony fingernails, nails that matched her Elvira hair and black-widow ankle tattoo.

“No empirical evidence there,” said Stein, whereupon Miles and Brandy enjoyed a sweet, conspiratorial eye roll together, solving Miles’s dilemma over whether or not he ought to indulge in adult beverage number four.

Beth couldn’t help but feel a little spooked in the makeshift teen coma ward, for which a whole section of hospital had been corralled off to accommodate the rising number of cases. She’d been cleared for antipsychotic drug testing on five of the patients, and she was making her midnight rounds, checking their encephalographic data for signs of neurological change. Pausing to drink in the Pre-Raphaelite loveliness of a red-haired boy she called Sleeping Beauty, Beth waited for him to open his eyes, as he sometimes did in the wee hours. The sudden jolt of blue always startled her. He would stare at her for a few seconds before his flushed, pink eyelids slid back over the most spectacular set of ocular organs she’d ever seen.

He was an ethereal one, destined to bolt this shit town if he ever roused from his strange sleep, as had happened a total of three times nationally (including the case of Todd Spencer). Even spookier, all three teens had vanished before resurfacing elusively at various events, sending their respective towns into a delirium of tabloid speculation.

As Beth gazed down at Sleeping Beauty, she wondered if it was true that hormonal changes made pregnant women attracted to different kinds of men: unthreatening males with brotherly pheromones and kindred genetic codes. Beth Irving had no brothers, no sisters, only two stern religious parents who had prompted a predictable rebellion that had been nipped in the bud by an abortion and a full scholarship to Duke.

Though the organism that now brewed within her had recently advanced from zygotic to embryonic status, she had not allowed herself to make any decisions about its destiny, vowing to finish her research first. Once home amid the placid decor of her town house, its birch cabinets packed with stress-reducing organic teas, she’d make the hard decisions. Still, she couldn’t ignore the creature inside her, which imbued every cell in her body with nausea and made smells almost psychedelic. The aroma that rose from Sleeping Beauty, for instance, was an odd blend of hospital-grade disinfectant and some sweet, woodsy odor. All the comatose teens had weird breath—a pond funk with some obscure chemical component redolent of car exhaust. But the B6 pills were making the situation bearable.

She stood beside Sleeping Beauty for another minute and then moved on to the next room, which housed two girls, one of whom had been approved for antipsychotics.
While adjusting Belinda Hammond’s
EEG
electrodes, she caught a glimmer of movement out in the corridor. Upon rushing into the hall, she saw a tall, slender figure in a pale hospital gown hovering a few inches above the polished vinyl floor. Rubbing her eyes and looking again, she saw nothing. Even though she had been sleeping poorly and had suffered several incidents of blotchy vision, even though she knew that security was on red alert due to the disappearance of Todd Spencer, she followed the figment into the snack room, where she detected a
presence
. There was only one other door leading out of the snack room, back behind the nurses’ station (which appeared to have been abandoned), and into corridor B.

Although this corridor required the swipe of a security card, the doors were propped open, an industrial cleaning cart parked nearby. In a corner, behind several wheeled shelves piled with broken computer equipment, a hospital janitor crouched. The janitor stood up and clutched at her neckline.

“
Mierda
,” she said. “You scared me.”

“What are you doing back there?” Beth asked.

“Rat,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

“They must take the elevator from the east wing cafeteria,” Beth joked. “Did you see anybody walk through here?”

The janitor shook her head.

Beth moved out into the lobby, where elevators led down to the main wing, which featured the hospital’s gift and coffee shops. Now she understood how Todd Spencer had made his escape, assuming that he’d not spontaneously combusted. And then she saw the figure again—tall, elegant, his shaggy red hair longer than it had looked when he was lying in repose like a creature trapped in a fairy-tale curse. Sleeping Beauty paused before strolling through the automatic doors. The security guard was not at his desk, and Beth had no time to look for him. She jogged toward the door and ran out into the humming summer night.

In her favorite patch of landscaping, where gardenias unleashed their wistful perfume and floodlights cast the Eli Lilly Memorial Bench in a spectral glow, the boy stood barefoot in his pagan gown. He stared up at the sky, as though searching for the moon. And then, after glancing back at Beth and treating her to a smile that did strange things to her blood chemistry, he ran over a green hillock and down toward the flowing highway.

The Love Machine

B
eatrice was my first “love.” The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy. Obscure microprocessors whirred within me. Interface adaptors fluttered. Various regulators jumped out of sequence as I reveled in the perfection of her organs—especially the beautiful efficiency of her heart, which throbbed at the core of her, even when she was at rest.

Dr. Dingo had coded basic information about Beatrice into my Simulated Limbic System. The old pervert had saturated my Artificial Endocrine Processor with the neurochemicals of infatuation. Suddenly, I was gaga over this female specimen of the human race. I could think of nothing but her. I was driven by the desire to have her
safely within the range of my Sensory EgoSphere until the end of “time,” or at least until her skeleton disintegrated into particles. And even then: I would’ve rolled in her dust like a dog.

I am, of course, sexless. There was no biological justification for my desire. There was nothing that I could have
done
to her once I had her in my arms (yes, I have arms). Unlike the male humans around me, I am not tormented by soft seed-sacs dangling between my legs (yes, I have legs, but my “crotch” is an androgynous plate of molded titanium). I have no endlessly replicating gametes to spurt into anyone, nor do I have germ cells stashed within the moist, arcane darkness of ovaries. Nevertheless, I wanted to fuse with her in some meaningful way.