She stared at the TV, jittery footage of a meadow somewhere. A few men in yellow rain slickers and elbow-high rubber gloves and gas masks, carrying Bushmaster assault rifles, were on the far side of the field. The tall yellow grass undulated in a soft rain. Beyond the men in the rain slickers was a line of trees. Off to the left was a highway. A car shushed over a rise and swept past, headlights glowing in the half dusk.
“—cell phone camera,” said the newscaster. “We caution you, this footage is graphic.” That was hardly worth mentioning. It was all graphic these days.
They were bringing people out of the woods. Kids, mostly, although there were some women with them. Some of the kids were naked. One of the women was naked, too, but clutching a dress to the front of her body.
“They’ve been showing this one all night,” Jakob said. “The news loves this. Look. Look at the cars.”
The field was in full view of the highway. Another car came over the rise, and then a pickup. Both vehicles slowed as they passed the field, then sped up again.
The women and children who had been marched out of the trees were bunched together into a tight group. The children were crying. From the distance, their voices, all together, sounded like the first keening wind of fall. One of the women took a small boy in her arms, lifted him up, and squeezed him to her. Watching it go down, Harper was struck with a brief but intense wave of déjà vu, the improbable certainty that she was watching herself, at some future point. She was seeing how she herself would die.
The woman who had been stripped, and who was clutching her dress, lunged toward one of the rain-slicker men. At a distance, her bare back looked as if it had been slashed, then stitched up with brilliant gold thread: the Dragonscale. She let go of her dress and careened, naked, toward an assault rifle.
“You can’t,” she howled. “Let us go! This is Ameri—”
The first gun might’ve gone off by accident. Harper wasn’t sure. But then, they had brought them to the field to shoot them, so maybe it was wrong to think anyone was shot there by accident. Prematurely was, perhaps, the more accurate word for it. The muzzle of a gun flashed. The naked woman kept coming, one step, two, then tilted forward into the grass and disappeared.
There followed an instant—just enough time to draw a single breath—of surprised, baffled silence. Another car came over the rise and began to slow.
The other guns went off, all together, firecrackers on a July night. Muzzles flashed, like paparazzi snapping shots of George Clooney as he climbed out of his limousine. Although George Clooney was dead, had burned to death while on a humanitarian aid mission to New York City.
The car passing by on the highway slowed to a crawl, so the driver could watch. The women and their children fell while the guns stuttered in the September rain. The car accelerated away.
The rain-slicker men had missed one person, a little girl, slipping, spritelike, across the field toward the hidden observer with the cell phone. She rushed across the meadow as fast as the shadow of a cloud. Harper watched, gripping her baby book in both hands, holding her breath, sending out a silent wish: Let her go. Let her get away. But then the girl folded in on herself and tumbled forward and collapsed and Harper realized it had never been a person at all. The thing racing across the field had been the dress that the naked woman had been holding. The wind had made it dance for a moment, that was all. Now the dance was over.
The program cut back to the studio. The newsman stood in front of a wide-screen TV, replaying the footage. He kept his back to it and spoke in a smooth, calm voice. Harper couldn’t hear what he was saying. Jakob was talking, too, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying, either.
She spoke over both of them. “Did you think she looked like me?”
Jakob said, “What are you talking about?”
“The woman who was hugging the little boy. I thought she looked like me.”
The newscaster was saying, “—illustrates the dangers of people who have been infected and who don’t seek—”
“I didn’t notice,” Jakob said. His voice was strangled with emotion.
“Jakob. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m sick.”
She felt as if she had stood up too quickly, although she hadn’t moved. She perched on the edge of the couch, light-headed and a little faint.
“You’ve got a stripe?”
“I’ve got a fever.”
“Okay. But do you have marks on you?”
“It’s on my foot. I thought it was a bruise. I dropped a sandbag on my foot yesterday and I thought it was just a bruise.” For a moment he sounded close to crying.
“Oh, Jakob. Send me a picture. I want to look at it.”
“I don’t need you to look at it.”
“Please. For me.”
“I know what it is.”
“Please, Jake.”
“I know what it is and I have a fever. I’m so fucking hot. I’m a hundred and one. I’m so hot and I can’t sleep. I keep dreaming the blankets are on fire and I jump out of the bed. Are you having those dreams?”
No. Her dreams were much worse than that. They were so bad she had recently decided to quit sleeping. It was safer staying awake.
“What were you doing with a sandbag?” she asked, not because she cared, but because it might calm him to talk about something besides infection.
“I had to go back to work. I had to risk it. Risk contaminating other people. That’s the position you’ve put me in.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“If I just disappeared, people would wonder where I was. They might come by the house and find you. The price of your life is other lives. You’ve made a potential murderer out of me.”
“No. Jakob, we’ve covered this. Until the ’scale is visible on your body you aren’t infectious. Almost everyone agrees on that. And even then, you can only pass it through skin-on-skin contact. I don’t think you’re a mass murderer just yet. So what about the sandbag?”
“They had everyone in Public Works up on the Piscataqua Bridge the other day, taking orders from the National Guard. Building a gun emplacement to shoot any diseased motherfuckers who might try and drive through the new checkpoint. Why are we talking about the fucking bridge?”
“I need you to send me a picture of the mark on your foot,” she said, and her tone was firmer now, her nurse voice.
“I think it’s in my head, too. Sometimes it’s like there are pins pricking in my brain. Like there are a hundred little needles in there.”
That stopped her. It was the first thing he said that sounded not just hysterical but crazy.
When she went on, her voice was calm and certain: “No. Jakob, no. It does eventually coat the myelin in the brain and nerves, but it wouldn’t happen until well after you had Dragonscale all over your body.”
“I fucking know. I fucking know what you did to me. You killed the both of us, and our baby, too, to satisfy your ego.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You knew it was dangerous to work in that hospital, but you wanted to feel important. You have this thing in you, Harper. You have this need to be hugged. You seek out chances to be with people who are hurting, so you can stick a Band-Aid on them and get some cheap, easy affection. That’s why you became a school nurse. It’s easy to squeeze a kiss out of a kid with a scraped knee. Kids will love anyone who gives them a penny lollipop and a Band-Aid for their boo-boo.”
It left her breathless, the spoiled rage she heard in his voice. She had never heard him that way before.
“They were desperate,” Harper said. “They needed every nurse they could get. The hospital was calling in retired nurses who were eighty-five years old. I couldn’t just sit at home and watch people die on TV and not do anything.”
“We have to decide,” he said. Almost sobbed. “I do not want to fucking burn to death. Or be hunted down and butchered in a field, begging for my life.”
“If you aren’t sleeping, that could explain a high temperature. We don’t know you’re sick. Sometimes fever indicates onset of infection, but not always. Not even mostly. I didn’t get a fever. Now I want you to send me a photo of your foot.”