“Just hold tight. I’ll be right back.”
The irony, she would think later—and this was perhaps something to be grateful for—was that she was feeling good in this moment, almost as good as she’d felt a few hours ago, when she and Wes first boarded the bus. The nausea was gone. The air was fresh on her face. Her lower back and hips, which had been getting a little tight during the long drive, were warming up. She thought she might even have an appetite, finally.
And then she felt it. The sensation. Unmistakable, as promised.
It began with a pulse of heat, down on the back of her leg, the fleshy part of her calf. Then, the itch: an itch that sank in roots, unfurled tendrils, a growing thing that was in motion, as if blown by a breeze, or underwater, and something in the itch reached well beyond her leg and into the core of her, so that she felt it in her chest, her belly button, her sex, and her first clear and furious desire was to take the back of her leg and rake it across the rough pavement until it bled. Her breath hitched, then caught. She looked up. Wes was coming toward her with a bottled water. All she could do, it seemed, was widen her eyes at him, and she had time to think, I’m going to just stand here and let this happen, but then Wes seemed to understand, to inexplicably know, and he dropped the water and ran toward her, fumbling with his holster-pocket.
“Where?” he shouted.
Tears had started streaming down her face, but still, she couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. She managed with a hand to motion, and Wes said, “Leg?” and she rasped, “Yes,” and then her weight somehow was on her left knee and her palms, her right leg stretched out behind her as if she were at her Pilates class, doing lunges, and someone was holding her shoulders, rubbing the back of her neck. She felt her trouser leg being tugged up, a sudden slap of cold air on her exposed skin.
“Do you want me to—” A male voice.
“No,” Wes said. “I’ve got it.”
Then the pain. At first it was satisfying in a strange, vaguely shameful way: incinerating the itch, severing the tendrils that had reached into those other parts of her body, isolating the agony to this one point of flesh. But then it was as if her heart pumped a surge of blood across her body, a wave that passed hot salt through the burn, and then the agony was more intense, immeasurably worse than the initiation Stamp had been. Her entire leg throbbed hotly, the pain unlocking her voice, and she wailed, couldn’t stop herself, then screamed, the scream breaking up after a long couple of moments into croupy sobs. She collapsed onto her side and pulled her injured leg toward her chest, rocking a little. Someone, a woman, was still patting her head, making a shushing sound. Tia, she thought it was.
“Oh, Marta,” Wes was saying. “Marta, I’m so sorry.”
She blindly put out a hand toward his voice, and when it grasped hers, squeezed it hard. “No,” she said. “You did well. Thank you.”
She could sense that a crowd had gathered around them. She understood why—if another had been the first, she would undoubtedly have been standing and staring stupidly, just like the others—but that did not make it less invasive and mortifying. “Please make them go away,” she whispered to Wes, and he said, “Back off! Give her a minute!”
“Where the fuck did it get on her?” a man yelled. He sounded panicked.
“Where do you think?” said Andy.
“But you said this place is monitored for ticks,” the pop singer said. Marta wasn’t yet looking up, but she knew his voice—the entitled bravado and its underlying warble of fear.
“I also said to be on guard and be near your buddy,” Andy said. “Wes, that was some fast and decisive action. Good job.”
Wes bobbed his head in acknowledgment, face pink. Marta managed to smile at him.
Andy squatted down beside her, forearms resting on his knees. “Marta. How’re we doing?”
“Better,” she said.
“Tia will get some ointment and a bandage on it, and we can give you ibuprofen for the pain. So tell me, where did this happen?” An odd look flickered across his face. “This really shouldn’t have happened,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
Marta pointed. “I went in the grass over there to throw up. I sat down for a minute.”
Tia began dabbing the Stamp site with an alcohol-soaked swab, and Marta winced. “How about your suit?” Andy said. “This is an unusual first contact point. Did you have your pant leg tucked in? Socks and boots, the way we discussed?”
“I thought I did,” Marta said. “But it could have pulled loose. It must have. I just don’t know.”
Andy patted her knee. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. This was probably just bad luck, but if a burrowing can be avoided, we want to avoid it. So remember, tuck in. Check and double-check. You’ve gotten a hard first lesson.”
Tia finished applying the bandage and tugged Marta’s trouser leg down. “Like this,” she said, pulling the microsock up over the leg opening, then re-lacing the boot so tightly that Marta felt like she was going to lose circulation to her foot. She grunted thanks.
Wes helped her up, and she brushed grit off her bottom self-consciously. The wound, bearing now the pressure of her standing weight, throbbed, but she tried to draw back her shoulders, reclaim a posture of dignity. If she still had hair, she would be brushing it carefully into place now.
If only David could see her, could know what his selfishness had already begun to cost her. David will always take care of you, he’d said. What a joke.
Wes’s face was drawn with concern. “Do you want to go inside and sit? Go to the bathroom?” He had picked the bottle of water back up, and he handed it to her. “You should at least drink this.”
“All right,” Marta said. She uncapped the bottle with a trembling hand and took a long sip, then held it against her forehead. “My God, Wes. That was worse than I expected. That was much worse than the initiation Stamp.”
“It was?”
She nodded. Felt her face crumple. “Oh, goodness. I thought I could do this. I don’t know if I can do this again. I thought it would be better when I got through it the once, but it isn’t. It’s so much worse.”
Wes didn’t offer her a platitude in response.