the seam, spying Benjy getting a glass of water from the kitchen sink, his head in the window, Hailey’s little hand reaching up.
What is happening to me?
He was like a dog who had turned. A rabid dog.
I have caught some form of rabies.
Voices now. The kids coming down the back-porch steps, lit by the security light over the deck, calling the dogs. Ansel looked around him fast and seized a rake from the corner, sliding it through the interior door handles as quickly and quietly as he could. Locking the children out. Locking himself inside.
“Ger-tie! Pa-ap!”
No true concern in their voices, not yet. The dogs had gotten away a few times in the past couple of months, which was why Ansel had dug the iron stake into the ground here in the shed, so they could be chained up securely at night.
Their calling voices faded in his ears as the thrum took over his head: the steady rhythm of blood circulating through their young veins. Little hearts pumping hard and strong.
Jesus.
Haily came to the doors. Ansel saw her pink sneakers through the gap at the bottom and shrank back. She tried the doors. They rattled but wouldn’t give.
She called to her brother. Benjy came and shook the doors with all his eight-year-old might. The four walls shivered, but the rake handle held.
Thrummity … thrummity … thrum …
Their blood. Calling to him. Ansel shuddered and let his focus fall on the dog’s stake in front of him. Buried six feet deep, set in a solid block of concrete. Strong enough to keep two Saint Bernards leashed during a summer thunderstorm. Ansel looked to the wall shelves and saw an extra chain collar, price tag still attached. He felt certain he had an old shackle lock in here somewhere.
He waited until they were a safe distance away before he reached up and pulled down the steel collar.
Captain Redfern was laid out in his johnny on the stretcher bed inside the clear plastic curtains, his lips open in a near-grimace, his breathing deep and labored. Having grown increasingly uncomfortable as night approached, Redfern had been administered enough sedatives to put him out for hours. They needed him still for imaging. Eph dimmed the light inside the bay and switched on his Luma light, again aiming the indigo glow at Redfern’s neck, wanting another look at the scar. But now, with the other lights dimmed, he saw something else as well. A strange rippling effect along Redfern’s skin—or, rather, beneath his skin. Like a mottling, or a subcutaneous psoriasis, blotching that appeared just below the surface of the flesh in shades of black and gray.
When he brought the Luma light closer for further examination, the shading beneath the skin reacted. It swirled and squirmed, as though trying to get away from the light.
Eph backed off, pulled the wand away. With the black light removed from Redfern’s skin, the sleeping man appeared normal.
Eph returned, this time running the violet lamplight over Redfern’s face. The image revealed beneath it, the mottled sub-flesh, formed a kind of mask. Like a second self lurking behind the airline pilot’s face, aged and malformed. A grim visage, an evil awake within him while the sick man slept. Eph brought the lamp even closer … and again the interior shadow rippled, almost forming a grimace, trying to shy away.
Redfern’s eyes opened. As though awakened by the light. Eph jerked back, shocked by the sight. The pilot had enough secobarbital in him for two men. He was too heavily sedated to reach consciousness.
Redfern’s staring eyes were wide in their sockets. He stared straight at the ceiling, looking scared. Eph held the lamp away and moved into his line of sight.
“Captain Redfern?”
The pilot’s lips were moving. Eph leaned closer, wanting to hear what Redfern was trying to say.
The man’s lips moved dryly, saying, “He is here.”
“Who is here, Captain Redfern?”
Redfern’s eyes stared, as though witnessing a terrible scene being played out before him.
He said, “Mr. Leech.”
Much later, Nora returned, finding Eph down the hallway from radiology. They spoke standing before a wall covered with crayon artwork from thankful young patients. He told her about what he had seen under Redfern’s flesh.
Nora said, “The black light of our Luma lamps—isn’t that low-spectrum ultraviolet light?”
Eph nodded. He too had been thinking about the old man outside the morgue.
“I want to see it,” said Nora.
“Redfern’s in radiology now,” Eph told her. “We had to further sedate him for MRI imaging.”
“I got the results from the airplane,” said Nora, “the liquid sprayed around there. Turns out you were right. There’s ammonia and phosphorous—”
“I knew it—”
“But also oxalic and iron and uric acids. Plasma.”
“What?”
“Raw plasma. And a whole load of enzymes.”
Eph held his forehead as though taking his own temperature. “As in digestion?”
“Now what does that remind you of?”
“Excretions. Birds, bats. Like guano. But how …”
Nora shook her head, feeling in equal parts both excited and bewildered. “Whoever, whatever was on that airplane … took a giant shit in the cabin.”
While Eph was trying to wrap his mind around that one, a man in hospital scrubs came hustling down the hallway, calling his name. Eph recognized him as the technician from the MRI room.
“Dr. Goodweather—I don’t know what happened. I just stepped out to get some coffee. I wasn’t gone five minutes.”
“What do you mean? What is it?”
“Your patient. He’s gone from the scanner.”
Jim Kent was downstairs near the closed gift shop, away from the others, talking on his mobile phone. “They are imaging him now,” he told the person on the other end. “He seems to be going downhill pretty fast, sir. Yes, they should have the scans in just a few hours. No—no word on the other survivors. I thought you’d want to know. Yes, sir, I am alone—”
He became distracted by the sight of a tall, ginger-haired man wearing a hospital johnny, walking unsteadily down the hallway, trailing along the floor IV tubes from his arm. Unless Jim was mistaken, it was Captain Redfern.
“Sir, I … something’s happening … let me call you back.”
He hung up and plucked the wire from his ear, stuffing it into his jacket pocket and following the man a few dozen yards away. The patient slowed for just a moment, turning his head as though aware of his pursuer.
“Captain Redfern?” said Jim.
The patient continued around a corner and Jim followed, only to find, when he turned the same corner, the hallway empty.
Jim checked door signs. He tried the one marked STAIRS and looked down the narrow well between half flights. He caught sight of an IV tube trailing down the steps.
“Captain Redfern?” said Jim, his voice echoing in the stairwell. He fumbled out his phone as he descended, wanting to call Eph. The display said NO SERVICE because he was underground now. He pushed through the door into the basement hallway and, distracted by his phone, never saw Redfern running at him from the side.
When Nora, searching the hospital, went through the door from the stairwell into the basement hallway, she found Jim sitting against the wall with his legs splayed. He had a sleepy expression on his face.
Captain Redfern was standing barefoot over him,