We jumped up from the log we sat on and Josh froze, his mouth moving, but no words coming out.
Mike walked toward him. “What is it? Where’s Amanda?”
“Sh-sh-she was trying to help—”
“Where’s Amanda?”
Josh turned and ran back the way he came, and we ran after him. I stumbled, tripped, ran into trees, trying to keep up—what had happened to Nick?
Mike trotted easily at Josh’s side, his head up, eyes scanning the woods. As soon as he saw Nick’s bright blue coat against the mottled brown of bark and leaves, he bolted for him.
“Where’s Amanda?” he said.
I ran past Josh, who stood rooted well away from his brother, and reached Nick’s side at the same moment that Mike jumped back.
There was a dog, dead at Nick’s knees, a once beautiful golden retriever with a dirty white-and-green collar.
Its coat had gone gray, and it appeared to be molting right before our very eyes.
I jumped back ten feet, just as Mike had.
The dog was covered with hundreds of maggoty worms, silver-gray and slick, sprouting fluff-clouds of micro-wire-thin cilia at one end. The cilia moved, like the tentacles of tiny squids, tugging the creatures across the ground. The cilia sparked, seemingly at random, little blue explosions like static electricity.
“Nick?” I said, circling around to see his face.
His open mouth was full of the worms. Tiny tufts hung from his nose. One worm banged at the corner of his eye, pushing at his tear duct—while we watched, it shoved its way in, wiggling until it disappeared.
“Shit!”
“Dad, I’m so sorry, Dad!” Josh was crying, scared. “We were playing hide and seek—he—”
“It’s okay, son,” Mike said. My tongue was pinned to my throat and I couldn’t speak. “Amanda ran to hide when she saw them, right?”
“She—” Josh sobbed, unable to speak.
“It’s okay,” Mike said, taking a step back, abrupt and unexpected, like a missed heartbeat. “Which direction did she go?”
“They got in her face!” he screamed. “Before we could stop them.”
Mike walked away without a word. I stood there—staring at Josh, staring at Nick, watching the worms crawl off the dog toward my kneeling son. I was sick. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know who to ask. Josh took another step away, rubbed the corners of his eyes. “It’s not my fault!” he said.
I wanted to scream at him, to say, hell, yes it was his fault, it was all his fault. But I knew the words were really directed at myself.
“It’s not your fault,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure who I was talking to.
Mike returned in moments, wearing a gas mask like some kind of steel and plastic bug. He emptied a can of gasoline all over the corpse of the dog. The smell made me think of gas stations, of normal days. I ran up and grabbed Nick by the collar, dragging his limp body back as Mike tossed a match and the dog went up in flames.
“Look,” I said, pointing at Nick. “Look, he’s okay! They’re all off him!”
“They’re not off him,” Mike said as the flames danced in the reflections of his goggles. “They’re in him.”
“What?”
“He’s too young. He’ll sit catatonic like that until he dies—unless you feed him. Then he’ll sit that way until he hits puberty and the rapeworm kicks in.”
“What?”
“Amanda can’t have gone far, not yet. We’re going to catch her before she joins the bang at Athens.”
Athens was the home of Ohio University, nested in the wooded hills of southern Ohio. Mike was convinced that’s where the rapeworm colony had collected.
“Because it’s the biggest city around?” I asked.
“No,” he said, as he thumped a box of clinking wine bottles into the bed of his 4x4. “Because the dog was wearing an O.U. collar—green and white, go Bobcats.”
“Ah.”
We left Nick with Josh in one of Mike’s deer blinds across the road. Bitter smoke filled the sky where the fire was smoldering out amid the snow-wet trees and the wet leaf cover.
“Dad, don’t leave me here,” he said.
“You have to be brave,” I said. “We’re going to go rescue Amanda, but I promise we’ll come back.”
After Mike and I climbed into his truck and pulled out of the woods onto the main road, he said, “Don’t kid yourself—we’re not going to rescue Amanda.”
He had to choke out the words.
To calm himself down, he started to explain that in Georgia, they’d seen the victims of the worms follow the paths of least resistance, moving along roads to the places where they gathered, what the soldiers had called bangs.
“Why bangs?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was stupid.
“Huh?”
Mike shook his head. Then he lifted his fist in the air and made a whistling sound like a bomb falling as he lowered it toward the dash. When it touched down, he popped it open and said, “Bang.”