There was a clumsy knocking sound, muffled bumps, then a click, the sound of the camera app taking a still. Fifteen seconds passed with no other noise than his labored, miserable breathing.
A photo came through of his dark bare foot, stretched out on some industrial-looking carpet. The top of the foot was a single bloody abrasion.
“Jake,” she said. “What is that?”
“I tried to scrape it off,” he said. His voice was almost sullen. “I had a bad moment. I sandpapered it.”
“Do you have any other stripes on you?”
“I know what it looked like before I went crazy,” he said.
“You don’t scrape at this stuff, Jake. That’s like scraping a match on a matchbook. Leave it alone.” She lowered her phone and looked at the photo again. “I want to see more stripes before you make up your mind you’ve got Dragonscale. In the early going, it can be difficult to tell the difference between a bruise and a stripe, but if you just leave it alone—”
“We have to decide,” he said again.
“Decide what?”
“How we’re going to die. How we’re going to do it.”
On the TV, they were showing a segment about the Dalmatians, crews of women and teenagers who made lunches and cupcakes for the volunteer fire crews.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” Harper said. “I told you that already. I’ve got this baby in me. I mean to see it born. I can deliver by C-section next March.”
“March? It’s September. You’ll be cinders by March. Or target practice for a cremation squad. You want to die like those people in the field?”
“No,” Harper said quietly.
“I know what you did to me,” he said. He drew a shuddering, effortful breath. “I know. I keep getting hot patches on my arms and legs. I loved that you made your work so socially conscious, that you were so connected to community, even if it was, always, just this thing you did to satisfy your own narcissism. You needed to surround yourself with crying kids, because of the good feeling it gives you about yourself when you wipe away their tears. There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it’s always for their own personal psychological reasons. But I’m still a little sick to see how fixated you are on your own needs. You don’t even care how many people you spread it to. As long as nothing uproots you from your delusion of saving one more child.”
He was trying to get a fight out of her, wanted to push her into saying things she didn’t want to say. She tacked in another direction. “These hot patches. I haven’t heard of that. That’s not a symptom of—”
“That’s not your symptom. It’s mine. Don’t pretend you’re a fucking doctor. A fucking master’s in nursing and three years of working at an elementary school doesn’t make you Dr. motherfucking House. You wipe a real doctor’s sweat off his upper lip when he’s performing surgery and shake his prick when he’s done taking a leak.”
“Maybe you should come home. I can examine you without touching you. Maybe I can reassure you.”
“I am going to wait,” he said. “Until I am sure. And then I am coming home. And you need to be there. Because you promised.”
“Jakob,” she said again, but he was gone.
OCTOBER
11
The power went out again one hot, smoky morning, a few days after her last call from Jakob, and this time it didn’t come back.
By then, Harper was down to the last cans from the back of the cupboard, the ones with dust on them that she couldn’t remember buying. She hadn’t been out of the house since the day before she found the first stripe on her leg. She didn’t dare. Maybe she could cover up—she didn’t have the ’scale on her face or hands—but her heart quailed at the thought of bumping into someone in the corner store and accidentally sentencing them to death.
One part of her wondered if she could eat Crisco. Another part of her knew she could and soon would. She had saved a little cocoa powder, hoping she could make it taste like chocolate pudding.
There was no single moment when she thought: I am going. There was no hour of steely-eyed decision, when she realized soon she would be out of food and have to start taking chances.
One day, though, she unstrung clothes from the line across the back deck and began to make a pile on the bed, next to The Portable Mother. At first it was just a collection of things she meant to put away: some T-shirts, a pair of jeans, her sweats. But it also looked like a stack of things she might take with her if she were packing the car to go elsewhere. When she opened the dresser, she found herself picking things out instead of putting them away.
There was no destination, no plan, almost no thought at all. She operated on no more than the half-formed notion that it might be smart to have some things in her old carpetbag, in case she had to leave the house in a hurry. Mostly she was zoned out, gliding along with no more intention or purpose than a leaf blown about by a restless fall breeze. She had the radio on, a violently pink Hello Kitty boom box that ran on D-cells, and she folded clothes to the classic-rock radio station, Tom Petty and Bob Seger supplying the sonic equivalent of wallpaper.
At some point, though, her consciousness settled back into the moment, and she realized the music had stopped. The DJ was belting out a monologue and had been at it for a while. She recognized his voice, a hoarsened, raspy bass that belonged to a former morning-show joker. Or had he been a right-wing radio host? She couldn’t recall and she couldn’t quite remember his real name, either. When he referred to himself—which he did frequently—it was as the Marlboro Man, on account of all the burners he had smoked. That was what he called people sick with Dragonscale: burners.
He boomed, with a certain crass authority, that the former president was blacker than he used to be, since he had cooked to death from Dragonscale. He said when he went off the air he would be out with a Cremation Crew, chasing burners out of their hidey-holes and lighting them up. Harper sat on the bed and listened with a repulsed fascination while he told a story about forcing three girls to take their shirts off, to prove they didn’t have Dragonscale on their boobies.
“Healthy American boobies, that’s what we’re fighting for,” he said. “That needs to be in the Constitution. Every man has a right to life, liberty, and germ-free titties. Learn the drill, girls. If we show up at your front door, be ready to do your patriotic duty and show us your freedom-loving, virus-free knockers.”
The knocker crashed at the front door, and Harper jumped as if a Cremation Crew were kicking it in. The sound was, in a way, more startling than someone screaming in the street, or a fire siren. She heard people screaming every day and sirens every hour. She could not remember the last time someone had knocked on the door.
She padded down the hall and looked through the peephole. Tony the Tiger and Captain America stood together on the front step, holding wrinkled plastic bags. Beyond them, down at the end of the drive, a man sat with his back to the house, smoking a cigarette, a tendril of smoke rising from his head.
“Trick and treat,” came a muffled voice. A girl’s voice.
“Trick or . . .” Harper started, then stopped. “It’s not Halloween.”
“We’re getting an early start!”
It offended her, some idiot sending his kids house to house in the middle of a plague. She had stern ideas about parenting, and such behavior fell well short of her standards. It riled up her inner English nanny and made her want to stab the offending grown-up in the eye with an umbrella.
Harper picked her Windbreaker off the hook and slipped it on to cover the pretty scrollwork of Dragonscale scrawled on her arms. She opened the door, but left it on the chain, and peered out through the six-inch gap.
The girl might’ve been as old as eighteen or as young as thirteen. With her face hidden behind her Captain America mask, it was impossible to tell. Her head was shaved and if Harper hadn’t heard her voice, she would’ve taken her for a boy.