“No, I’ll get it,” she said, patting his thigh and getting up from the sofa. She disappeared into the kitchen and answered the phone with an exhausted, “Hello?”
David turned his attention to the TV. It was an episode of The Big Bang Theory, one he and Kathy had seen half a dozen times. The show’s canned laughter irritated him, so he found the remote wedged between two sofa cushions and muted the volume. A scroll at the bottom of the screen read, Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are still puzzled over bird deaths and disappearances following unusual migratory patterns.
He thought now of the students from the college, two of whom had exhibited symptoms similar to the girl in Ellie’s class. He hadn’t witnessed either episode, but had learned about them both from Burt Langstrom later in the English department’s office. Burt hadn’t witnessed the incidents either, but he had always been a veritable font of subversive knowledge on campus, and David had no reason to doubt the stories’ authenticity.
Some girl, a freshman, had doubled over in the quad between the humanities building and the cafeteria and had begun convulsing on the ground. When blood started gushing from her mouth, witnesses assumed that she had bitten her tongue while having a seizure. But then the blood had spilled out of her nose, and people started to shout for campus security.
A similar incident had occurred to a frat boy as he sat in class—he simply stiffened and tipped over, crashing to the floor. His legs began to jerk spasmodically, and when he coughed, blood sprayed along the linoleum floor tiles. Both students died at the hospital within days of their collapse. As far as David was aware, no cause of death had ever been stated.
“It’s an illness,” Burt Langstrom had suggested over lunch. Just talking about it had stemmed David’s appetite, but Burt tore into his roast beef sandwich as if they’d been talking about nothing more gruesome than the upcoming Orioles game. “Probably some strain of meningitis or something like that.”
“You’d think they’d notify the school if it was meningitis,” David had said. “Besides, what about the Sandoval kid? That certainly wasn’t meningitis.”
Patrick Sandoval had been the third student to fall ill. He had been a junior, a basketball player, a good-looking kid who’d been in David’s literary criticism class the year before. As far as David was aware, and unlike what had happened with the two previous students, there hadn’t been any clear signs of a physical illness with Sandoval. There was no blood, no convulsing—only that he was spotted by a number of students wandering around campus in the middle of the night completely naked, and with a broad, sleepy smile stretched across his face. Someone even spotted Sandoval holding a conversation with thin air. Campus security showed up, approached him, and assumed he was intoxicated. They took him to the security office, where an officer administered a breathalyzer test. Yet despite his slurred speech and increasingly perplexing statements to the officers, Patrick Sandoval was stone-sober. Assuming he was under the influence of narcotics, he was taken to Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. Whether or not a toxicology test was done at the hospital, David didn’t know, but the boy had returned to school the next day, apparently fine. Two days later, he found his way to the roof of his dormitory—a twenty-story tower at the east end of campus that everyone called the Fortress—where he walked right over the ledge to his death on the pavement below.
Meningitis, David knew, most likely wouldn’t cause someone to do something like that. In fact, it was even possible that the thing with Sandoval was unrelated to what had happened to the two other students. Yet David couldn’t forget the bewildered look in Deke’s eyes that night, and how the poor guy must have, for some reason that would never be explained, set fire to his own house, where he had died in the inferno. How Sandoval had been wandering around campus naked, while Deke had been doing the same in his underwear outside in the street. Moreover, and even more disturbing to David, Patrick Sandoval had dropped right out of the sky like those geese that had rained down on the parking lot at the college the very night Deke died.
This realization was chilling.
David set his wineglass on the coffee table. His hands were trembling.
“Jesus Christ,” he heard Kathy utter from the kitchen. “No. Oh no, Carly!”
Carly Monroe’s daughter, Phoebe, went to Arnold Elementary with Ellie. The girls had been friends since preschool. David leaned forward on the couch, feeling sweat prickle the small hairs on the nape of his neck.
“Okay, okay,” Kathy was saying in the kitchen.