Oh, she tried to talk herself out of it. As she raced back to the car, as she started the engine and turned on the headlights. She tried to talk herself out of it even as she laid down on the gas pedal, the car bounding with a trembling groan over every pothole, shocks wheezing, and any moment now she could blow a tire, delay her return by hours, but this sane talk had no effect. She tried to talk herself out of it even when she started to smell smoke. She tried to talk herself out of it even as the faint glow became brighter, and brighter, and she could distinguish peaks and valleys, mountains of hot light, and the air around the car warmed noticeably, and she started to cough so badly that she had to slow, pull over, and vomit into the grass.
She stopped trying to talk herself out of it when she saw the dogs. The princes. They burst from the forest at a gallop, hides smoking, Tauntaun a few paces ahead of Wampa, and they passed within meters of June without stopping, fleeing up the road she had just traveled down, disappearing.
Twenty-One
Berto turned the car into a driveway so ravaged by weeds that they strummed the car’s undercarriage, making a sad sort of tuneless music.
“Drive around to the back of the house,” Violet told him. “Where we can’t be seen from the road.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to get the car out again.”
“We’ll worry about that when we’ve got to.”
So Berto did as she instructed, bringing the car to a stop under the yellowing strands of a weeping willow. Wes, cramped between Edie and Marta, took a panicked breath and pressed against Edie’s shoulder, unable to restrain himself. “I need—I’m sorry—”
She threw the door open and scrambled out, and Wes nearly tumbled to the ground after her. He jumped to his feet—the last thing he needed was another bite—and backed away from the car. He yanked his sleeve up. In the moments since he’d last looked, a new red bump had appeared, this one above the bend of his elbow. Jesus. Jesus Christ.
“What do we do?” Edie said. The others had gotten out of the car now, too, and they exchanged—it seemed to Wes—almost angry looks. And could he blame them? We were this close, those looks said. We should have known we couldn’t be so lucky, those looks said.
And Berto—was he imagining this? Berto’s look seemed to say: Let’s leave him and go.
“Ken?” Edie said. “Is there something you could—I mean, could you, I don’t know, cut into it or something?”
Wes, trying to decide if Edie’s suggestion was cause for panic or hope, wasn’t left in suspense very long. Ken shook his head. “I could take his whole arm off”—Wes flinched—“and it probably wouldn’t make a difference. Not for Shreve’s. It hits the bloodstream too quickly. And as bad as a hatching might be, it’s not going to be any worse than some backwoods amputation with a dirty knife.”
“Wes passes on the backwoods amputation with a dirty knife,” Wes said dully. He felt exhausted, as if he’d just run sprints.
Marta touched his sweaty forehead. “How quickly will we know if he’s in the clear? What’s it Andy said? A couple of days?”
“That’s the wisdom on it, but I’m not an expert on Shreve’s.” Ken, who was leaning against the back of the car, slapped the trunk. “This one probably knows more than I do.”
A thump sounded from within the trunk. “What’s going on out there?” emanated softly from it.
“OK,” Violet said. “Let him out, Berto.”
Berto began, “Do we really—”
“Let him out!” Marta said.
Berto, jaw clenched, leaned through the driver’s-side window and popped the trunk. Andy, blinking, sprang up to sitting.
“That was quick,” he said.
“Make me glad I took you along,” Violet said. She pointed at Wes. “Show him.”
Wes bared his arm.
Andy sucked air through his teeth. “Oh, man. Sorry about that, dude.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Edie asked. Wes registered, through the intensity of itching, a surprised pleasure at how concerned about him she seemed.
“Do?” Andy shook his head. “No. Not really. Just wait and see.”
“Wait for how long?” Wes demanded. The itching had become accompanied by a sensation that was, if this was possible, even worse—a kind of slow crawling, all over, even in his head. Was it in his head? That is, not the tick eggs, on a sprint from his arm to his brain by way of a vein, but something he was imagining? This wasn’t as reassuring a thought as it ought to have been. Because it seemed to him that even this imagining must be a product of the infestation, that something malevolent had invaded him, a dark, accursed thing, and for the first time in years the name of that old demon from The Shaman and the Salt Line, the picture book he’d so feared as a child, popped into his mind: Vimelea. He who consumes is consumed. Was that how the line had gone?
“The ticks hatch in twelve, maybe fourteen hours. That’s reliable. Signs of Shreve’s are more varied. It can happen fast. Or it can take a while. We always say within forty-eight hours, but I’ve heard of it taking longer, over fifty. But I think it’s usually faster than that. The vomiting, at least. Like, eight or ten hours? Thereabouts.”
“Thereabouts,” Marta echoed.
“Look, I wish I had better news. But do you really think we’d live in the world we do if there were easy answers to this thing?”
There was a rusted-over metal chair on the house’s rotten back patio, and Wes fell into it. Eight hours? At the soonest? He was—well, he had been kind of a hypochondriac in his regular life, though he kept it in check with medications. It got worse in times of stress. When he was going through that nonsense over his honors thesis, those bullshit plagiarism accusations, he spent a few months convinced he had leukemia. Then, when Pocketz launched, Parkinson’s disease. When Virtuz got shit-canned? Stomach cancer. His shrink, who Wes was convinced was good for little more than prescription-writing, told him that the only cure for hypochondria was getting an actual disease. Hell of a cure, he had said.
Hell of a cure, he thought now.
“Chances are in your favor, Feingold,” Andy said. “You’ve got to keep that in mind.”
Silence fell. The air had chilled considerably since morning, and everyone but Wes stood with crossed arms, shifting from one foot to another.
“I have a suggestion,” Andy said. “I mean, I think it’s the only good option, actually.”
“Let’s hear it,” Violet said.
“The OLE chalet,” Andy said. “I can lead you to it. I have all the passcodes. There’s showers, food, real beds. First-aid supplies. Power.”
“I’d completely forgotten about the chalet,” Edie said, her face softening with hope.
“I say we go hunker down there and make a plan,” Andy said. “I have some ideas for getting back over the Salt Line.”
“What kind of ideas?” Berto asked.
“I’ll tell you all about them when I’m safe in the chalet,” Andy said.
Violet went to the trunk, sliced through Andy’s tie with her pocketknife, and offered him a hand getting out. “How long will it take us to drive to it?”
“Three or four hours,” Andy said.
“Where’s he going to go?” Ken asked, indicating Andy. “We’re already on top of each other in the backseat.”
“And no offense, but I don’t want to be trapped in a tight space with Wes when those things come out of him,” Berto said.
“What exactly are you proposing?” Marta snapped.