Only Margaret didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The threads were now circling and knitting around her head, too.
Blanche’s eyes, seeming to move around of their own accord, found the window, and the fire in the west. It was bigger now, not a match but a flaming bird’s head. There were still men to fight the fire, but maybe they were too busy taking care of their women to bother. What was the name of that bird, the one that changed into fire, reborn, magic bird, scary, terrible? She didn’t know. All she could remember was an old Japanese monster movie called Rodan. She had watched it as a child, and the giant bird in it had frightened her badly. She wasn’t frightened now, just . . . interested.
“We have lost my sister,” Gail announced. She had sunk to the carpet and was leaning against Dorothy’s legs.
“She’s just asleep,” Blanche said. “You didn’t lose her, honey.”
Gail nodded so emphatically that her hair fell into her eyes. “Yes, yes. You’re right, Blanche. We’ll just have to find each other. Just look for each other in heaven. Or . . . you know . . . a reasonable facsimile.” That made her laugh.
8
Blanche was the last. She crawled over to be near Gail, asleep beneath a layer of webbing.
“I had a love,” Blanche told her. “Bet you didn’t know that. We kept it . . . as the girls at the prison like to say . . . on the down-low. Had to.”
The filaments that lay over her friend’s mouth stirred as Gail exhaled. One fine thread extended itself flirtatiously in Blanche’s direction.
“I think he loved me, too, but . . .” It was hard to explain. She was young. When you were young, your brain wasn’t fully developed. You didn’t know about men. It was sad. He had been married. She had waited. They had aged. Blanche had given up the sweetest part of her soul for a man. He had made beautiful promises and kept none of them. What a waste.
“This might be the best thing that ever happened.” If Gail had been awake, these words of Blanche’s might have been too low and garbled for her to understand. Feeling had left Blanche’s tongue. “Because at least we’re all together, now, at the end.”
And if there was something else, somewhere else . . .
Before Blanche McIntyre could finish the thought, she drifted away.
9
Garth Flickinger wasn’t surprised to see Frank.
After having watched NewsAmerica for the last twelve hours or so, and smoking everything in the house except for his pet iguana (Gillies), probably nothing would have surprised him. Should Sir Harold Gillies himself, that long-dead pioneer of plastic surgery, have come wandering downstairs to the kitchen to toast a cinnamon Pop-Tart, it would have barely pushed the envelope on the phenomena that Garth had witnessed on television that day.
The shock of the violence that had broken out in Truman Mayweather’s trailer while Garth was in the john was but a prologue to what he had absorbed in the hours since, just sitting on the couch. Rioting outside the White House, a woman gnawing off the nose of a religious cultist, a huge 767 lost at sea, bloodied nursing home orderlies, elderly women swathed in webs and handcuffed to their gurneys, fires in Melbourne, fires in Manila, and fires in Honolulu. Something very fucking bad had occurred in the desert outside Reno where there was evidently some kind of secret government nuclear facility; scientists were reporting on Geiger counters spinning and seismographs jerking up and down, detecting continuing detonations. Everywhere women were falling asleep and growing cocoons and everywhere dumbfucks were waking them up. The wonderful NewsAmerica reporter, Michaela with the first-rate nose job, had vanished in the mid-afternoon and they’d promoted a stuttering intern with a lip ring to take her place. It reminded Garth of a piece of graffiti he’d seen on some men’s room wall: THERE IS NO GRAVITY, THE EARTH JUST SUCKS.
This sucked: in and out, back and forth, all the way around. Not even the meth helped. Well, it helped a little, but not as much as it should have. By the time the doorbell began ringing—cling-clong, cling-clong, went the chimes—Garth was feeling glaringly sober. He felt no particular urge to answer, not tonight. Nor did he feel compelled to rise when his visitor gave up on the bell and began knocking. Then hammering. Very energetic!
The hammering ceased. Garth had time to think his unwelcome visitor had given up before the chopping began. Chopping and splintering. The door shuddered inward, broken free of its lock, and the man who had been here earlier strode in, an ax in one hand. Garth supposed the guy was here to kill him—and he didn’t feel too sad about that. It would hurt, but hopefully not for too long.
Plastic surgery was a joke to many people. Not to Garth. What was funny about wanting to like your face, your body, your only skin? Unless you were cruel or stupid, there was nothing funny about it. Only now, it seemed, the joke was on him. What kind of life would it be with only half the species? A cruel and stupid life. Garth could see that right away. Beautiful women often arrived at his office with photographs of other beautiful women, and they asked, “Can you make me look like her?” And behind many beautiful women who wanted to tinker with their perfect faces were mean fuckers who were never satisfied. Garth didn’t want to be left alone in a world of mean fuckers, because there were so many of them.
“Don’t stand on ceremony, come on in. I’ve just been catching up on the news. You didn’t happen to see the part where the woman bit the man’s nose off his face, did you?”
“I did,” said Frank.
“I’m great with noses, and I enjoy a challenge, but if there’s nothing to work with, there’s not much you can do.”
Frank stood at the corner of the couch, a few feet from Garth. The ax was a small one, but still an ax.
“Do you plan to kill me?”
“What? No. I came—”
They were both distracted by the flatscreen, where a news camera showed a view of a burning Apple Store. On the sidewalk in front of the store, a man with a fire-blackened face moved around in a dazed little circle, a smoldering fuchsia handbag looped over his shoulder. The Apple symbol above the entrance of the store suddenly came loose of its moorings and crashed to the ground.
A quick cut brought the viewing audience back to George Alderson. George’s color was a wind-stripped gray, and his voice was gravelly. He’d been on all day. “I just received a call from my—ah, son. He went to my house to check on my wife. Sharon and I have been married for—” The anchor dropped his head and traced the knot of his pink tie. There was a coffee stain on the tie. Garth thought this the most disturbing signal yet of the unprecedented nature of the situation. “—for forty-two years now. Timothy, my son, he . . . he says . . .” George Alderson began to sob. Frank picked up the controller from the side table and turned him off.
“Is your mind clear enough to understand what’s going on, Dr. Flickinger?” Frank indicated the pipe on the side table.