She was leaving anyway.
Whether she wanted to or not
. She opened the door and led him into the kitchen.
Most of the dishes were packed and the sink was empty. She wiped the countertop to distract herself from familiar urges.
His natural scent mixed with her favorite cologne had always enticed her
. “Do you want something, a glass of water? I think I have a can or two of soda.”
Scott looked around at the boxes. “So, you’re really leaving?”
“I have to,” she said. “It’s too hard for me to stay.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” He smoothed his hand across his forehead. “You just need time. We both need time to deal with losing her. We used to say we could get through anything.”
She nodded. “I remember, but then
anything
happened and we found out we were wrong.”
“Please, Miranda, don’t take that job. Michael should have never put you up for it in the first place. It’s too dangerous.”
Michael Waters, Miranda’s OB/GYN and a friend of theirs since Basic Training, referred her to the Nixon Center where he once worked.
“He didn’t do anything I didn’t ask him to.” The confession swelled inside of her. “There’s something that I never told you, Scott.” The choked-up feeling returned and she took a deep breath to fight it. “The last appointment, one of the tests confirmed that my body turned against the baby.” The guilt crushed her. “It’s a genetic defect, some variant something or other or some carrier thing.” She hadn’t fully understood the science. “There’s nothing the doctors can do about it. There’s no fix. No hope. Michael says
it
will happen again if I get pregnant.” She avoided the term stillbirth. “That it will happen every time. That’s why I have to get away. Michael just helped me find a way to do it.”
“So you filed for divorce?” He wiped his running nose on the back of his hand.
“You deserve the family that you want, Scott. Your
own
children.”
“I would have considered adoption. It just wasn’t my first choice.”
“You’d never love an adopted child like our own. There’s nothing wrong with that, but adoption is my
only
choice. It’s better that I leave now and that you find a way to get past all of this on your own. You’ll find someone else.”
“I don’t
want
someone else.”
She didn’t either, but tell yourself a lie enough and you start to believe it. “You will. Give it time.” She opened the apartment door for him to leave, retreating from his outstretched hand and refusing to cry. Inside, she was falling apart. “It’s better this way.” She couldn’t look him in the eye when she said it.
“Please, Miranda.” He stopped in the doorway and tenderly lifted her chin. The platinum band on his ring finger was hard against her skin. “Please don’t leave. I’m begging you. Please come
home
.”
She stepped back from him and wiped the tears from her cheek on her sleeve. “It’s not my home anymore.”
3
.
Nixon’s office was a secluded, richly decorated suite on the fifth floor of the hospital, which was otherwise under construction. His grand, mahogany furniture glistened in the sunlight. The room smelled of lemon-scented furniture oil and the fresh cut lilies in a crystal vase on his credenza.
Zach stood in wait as Nixon washed up from the delivery and changed into clean clothes. He emerged from the adjoining bathroom, fresh and emotionally unscathed from the grim birth.
“Have a seat, Zach.” Nixon motioned at the plush chair opposite his desk.
Zach sank into the soft leather and crossed his arms over his nauseous stomach, a show of weakness he never intended.
It’s too late to back out, now.
He knew Nixon would never let him quit after what he had seen.
Nixon interlaced his fingers and leaned onto the desk with his elbows. “I’d like to take this opportunity to first remind you of our employment arrangement, of the confidentiality paperwork that you signed and the nature of the work you signed on for. Once you get your legs under you, I’ll take you on the full tour and answer any questions you have after that.”
Full tour.
Zach was afraid of what more he could have to see. Blood rushed in his ears and muffled Nixon’s voice.
“Zach, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” He lied. “I’m just, caught off-guard.” He wanted to say that he hadn’t signed up for unlawful imprisonment, that his “arrangement” as Nixon called it wasn’t supposed to make him a criminal, but there was Allison to consider.
An elderly maintenance man wearing gray-green coveralls knocked on Nixon’s office door. “Excuse me, Dr. Nixon, but I have that elevator key you requested.”
“Ah, thank you. That’s for my new recruit. Jim Lockard meet Zach Keller. Zach, meet Jim.”
Jim’s hand was hard and cracked from a lifetime of manual labor. “Nice to meet you. Don’t let the old age fool you,” he said with a wink. “If something goes down, I’ll be ready.”
More obscure speaking.
Zach managed an awkward smile and left it at that. “Good to know.”
“Jim’s been with me over twenty years,” Nixon said. “He has a very special job here. He eats, sleeps, and breathes the Center. Don’t you, Jim?”
There was an undertone of secrecy between them.
Jim smirked. “I have my own bed and everything. Anything else, Doc?”
Nixon shook his head. “No, I think we’re all set. We’re about to head back downstairs.”
“You sure you want to do that? This one looks like he’s seen a ghost already.” Jim scrunched up his aged face and the wrinkles folded into one another.
Zach straightened up in the chair and lifted his chest, embarrassed by the fact that even an elderly man found him lacking. “I’ll be fine.”
“Bad call on my part.” Jim clapped his rough hand on Zach’s shoulder. “Watch yourself down there, you hear?”
* * * * *
Miranda rolled down the windows of her black Ford Explorer and breathed in the crisp, spring air. It smelled of melted snow and mud and she loved the way it felt whipping through her ponytail.
The gas light came on, the warning chime drawing her attention to the trip meter rolling 200 miles and the Strandville town line up ahead. Despite the town’s ominous name, it was every bit as peaceful as she imagined. Hers had been the only car for miles and she enjoyed a leisurely, sightseeing drive of modest houses and bustling farms—indicative of a simpler lifestyle than the city could have ever offered her. This was her do-over, her chance at anonymity.
Her escape from the piteous stares and apologies.
She adjusted the rearview mirror but there was, literally, no looking back. Boxes of things she didn’t entrust to the movers--things that belonged to the baby--blocked her view.
“Hang in there.”
She patted the dashboard and her stomach growled as she pulled into the parking lot of Porter’s, a mom-and-pop convenience store, to gas up. She stepped out on the crumbling pavement and gravel, opened the truck’s fuel door, and eyed the confederate flag-bearing truck that pulled up to the other side of the pump. Leonard Skynard blasted loudly through his open driver’s side window and she rolled her eyes at the stereotype.
The driver was a filthy man with an unkempt, reddish beard and cut off jeans that exposed a particularly nasty skin problem. Non-healing ulcers covered his thick calves and oozed a yellow, syrupy fluid into his leg hair. His round, cirrhotic gut bulging out from under his too-small t-shirt gave him up as a likely alcoholic. Miranda took the kind of mental inventory needed to identify a suspect to the police.
It was a new town and one could never be too careful
.
The redneck dry-humped her with his eyes and she bristled, returning a confident stare to let him know that he didn’t intimidate her. She was quite capable of handling him if she had to. Men in the city would have backed down, but not this guy. He spit out a gob of chewing tobacco-laced spit and wagged his eyebrows at her.
“Sweet thang.” His dialect was something out of Deliverance.
“I don’t think so.”
Dirty old pervert.
Miranda locked the truck and went inside to pay.
The rickety front door creaked and a rusty old cowbell announced her entrance to the wood paneled, anything-you-could-want shop. This store had a butcher’s counter, a wall of coolers, windshield wipers, and Band-aids. A deli, a bakery, and an unsettling hardware selection of shovels, rope, and duct tape. Miranda tried to convince herself she’d adjust to the culture, that she’d gone hundreds of miles and not to some third world country, but when a heavy-set woman and her husband came in screaming behind her, she wondered.
“I need to see Jack!” The woman shouted at the clerk--a pimple-faced boy whose eyes were barely visible through the curtain of greasy bangs--and then burst into tears.
Miranda grabbed a bag of chips from the shelf and an iced tea from the cooler, checked the expiration date on both, and watched the escalating drama with curious interest.
A short, heavy-set man wearing a blood-stained butcher’s jacket came from a back room.
“How could you do this to us, Jack? How could you take it down?” The irate woman shook a missing person’s poster at him.
The woman had lost her daughter.
Miranda felt suddenly sick. She tapped her fingers nervously against the butcher-block counter while the clerk cashed her out and wished she could do something to help.
No greater loss than that of a child.
The clerk flattened the crumpled wad of cash she had handed him without taking his eyes off the hysterical woman.
“I just…I don’t know where it went...” Jack pointed his thick finger at a corkboard on the wall behind him brimming with askew posters of dozens of missing women. “There are too many to keep track.”
A thin man in baggy overalls set his hand on the woman’s trembling shoulder. “Beth, we have to go.”
Miranda welled up with tears.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’ll put it here, right here, front and center.” He ripped off two lengths of butcher’s tape and fastened the new poster to the meat counter’s glass, calming the woman just enough for her to notice Miranda.
“Have you seen my daughter?” she asked. The smell of whiskey seeped from the woman’s pores.
Miranda looked at the poster of 18-year-old Penny Hammond.
Her chubby, pleasant face resembled her mother’s and she had a heartbreakingly radiant smile. “No, ma’am,” she said after a contemplative pause. “I’m sorry, I haven’t. I’m new here.” She knew the woman’s pain.
“Beth, come on. Stop bothering the customers.” The thin man all but dragged her out the front door.
The storeowner sighed with relief and nudged the clerk aside. “It’s not supposed to take this long to count out a customer’s change, Billy.” He finished Miranda’s order, but she was shaken and could tell he saw it. “I’m sorry about that. New in town, did you say?” He held out his bulky hand, attempting to soothe her with small talk. “Name’s Jack, Jack Porter.”
“Miranda. Miranda Penton.”
“Welcome to Strandville.”
Billy moved on to mopping the aisle behind her. “You’re making a mistake coming here,” he grumbled.
Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry about him. We don’t get too many people moving in, is all. I think what he
meant
to say is what brings you here?”
“A job,” she said, preoccupied by the wallpapering of missing posters. All of the victims were young women, last seen within the year. Penny was one of the more recent, having only been missing for three months.
Jack tried to distract her. “Must be one hell of a job to bring you all the way out here from the city.” His smile had sadness behind it.
“How did you know I came in from the city?”
“I know all the locals and we can spot city a mile away.” He handed her the change. “Take care of yourself, Miranda. Things in Strandville ain’t what they used to be.”
4
.
Metal cages lined the perimeter of the lab. Stacked largest to smallest, they piled from the floor to about a foot from the ceiling. The stench of animal urine and feces made it hard for Zach to breathe.
Nixon grinned. “This is what you came here for.”
Zach scrunched up his face, confused.
Not exactly.
A man wearing a blue lab coat pulled on a pair of chainmail gloves and reached into a rattling cage. Whatever was inside growled, hissed, and went still when the intern sedated it.
“Ben, come meet our newest member of Security.” Nixon looked down the barrel of one of three high-end microscopes and nodded, appearing pleased. “This is Zach Keller.” He introduced them without looking at either of them.
Ben appeared to be in his thirties, even with the horseshoe-shaped bald spot on his head. “I’d shake,” he said, “but I don’t dare take my hand off this guy.” He held up a dusky, charcoal grey rat with milky white eyes and a long, hairless tail that draped over the back of his gloved hand. A large tumor-like growth protruded from behind its translucent ear and extended down his back like furry cauliflower.
“What’s wrong with it?” Zach asked.
Nixon leered. “We gave it cancer.”
For all the people ever diagnosed with the disease, the word, in Zach’s mind, belonged only to Allison.
Ben tilted his head inquisitively. “Does he know?”
Nixon took the rat from Ben and measured its tumor with a flexible measuring tape. “He was in the last delivery.”
Zach couldn’t imagine the correlation.
“It’s a lot to process.” Ben aspirated a half a cc of blood-tinged fluid from the tumor and the rat’s back legs twitched. “Think he’s about to wake up already. The sedative doesn’t last nearly as long as it used to.”
Nixon shrugged. “Mark that down as side-effect one million and one.”
Ben put the rat back in the cage and Zach raised his eyebrows, waiting for an explanation.
Nixon shifted his weight and leaned on the metal lab table bolted to the floor. “About a year ago, six patients with unexplainable illness were air lifted here from a remote area of Haiti. Three of them were family--a father, mother, and their son. Two were male researchers sent to investigate the young boy that died and spontaneously resurrected in front of half of his village. It was as if he were a zombie, though I hate that term. Sounds more like a monster movie than an illness. We studied the biologicals, the disease’s process, and its effects. These people are cannibalistic walking dead. At least, they appear to be. I call them ‘infected’ because they are, in fact, infected by a ravenous, all-consuming virus. One that might save Allison’s life.”