She moved as quickly as she could. First the restraints. Andy had tied off rope to the bedframe on three ends, and Marta looped each of Wes’s feet, executing the tight figure-eight knot Andy had shown her, then his left arm. “I’m sorry I have to do this,” she kept murmuring. She shook two more tranquilizers from the bottle. “Open,” she said to Wes, wondering if she’d have to sink her fingers into his jaws the way you did a dog’s, but he accepted the pills, and the straw, and his throat worked, and he coughed.
The water bath was a large plastic storage container filled to the brim and sudsy with dish soap. Positioned beside Wes’s bed, it reached just high enough for him to dangle his arm over the side and fully submerge the tick hatching site. “But he’s going to be bucking and shucking, and so you’ll have to keep a close eye on it. Hold it underwater if you have to. They can’t swim. The babies’ll attach and feed, so there’s some risk if they carry Shreve’s, but they can’t burrow. But I don’t think they could attach to you through the water, anyway.”
This didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Still, it was a risk Marta would take over the option of watching hundreds of tiny miner ticks scatter into her locked, vac-sealed room.
“OK, I changed my mind,” Wes gasped.
“About what?”
“About this all being worth it. It’s not.”
Marta laughed through her tears and gripped his hand. “OK, fair enough. But I think it’s going to be over soon. One way or another.”
“Thank you,” Wes said.
“You’re welcome,” Marta told him. She looked at his arm—at the biggest pustules around where the burrowing had occurred. There was movement under the blistered surface of the skin. First she thought this was a trick of the eyes—the lighting, her exhaustion, the intensity of her concentration. Then it happened again. And again. Now there were lots of little movements, and the blisters rippled as if they were boiling, and finally the center pustule oozed open, secreting a yellowish-red fluid, and a small, black, many-legged thing scrambled out.
Marta plunged Wes’s arm into the water.
He screamed, and the water bloomed crimson, and a strange smell filled the room: blood and metal but something else, almost sweet, like raisins, but on the edge of rancid. Wes convulsed in her grip, straining against his restraints, but she managed to keep his arm underwater, bearing down hard with both hands, her face only centimeters from its churning red surface. She had no idea how long this went on. Only a few minutes probably, though it seemed endless. Her arms ached, and her back and thighs ached with the strain of keeping her balanced (so easily she could fall into the water headfirst, and she kept bracing herself for that eventuality).
At last Wes collapsed, and his arm went limp. She pulled it from the water and winced at the raw, ravaged flesh, which made a band around the meat of his forearm and stretched in a wet red mouth from the forearm’s middle to mere centimeters from his armpit. She turned the arm, searching it frantically, and saw a furious black scurrying thing scrambling over the crooks and crags of the wet flesh. With a little wail of disgust she brushed it off into the water, and then she wrapped Wes’s arm in the clean white towel she’d kept nearby for this purpose, and then she looked her own arms over, feeling ticklish feet where her eyes told her nothing moved. The tub of water was pink with a yellowish scrim on the surface in which floated little black specks, too many to count. Marta scanned the floor, Wes’s bedsheets. She saw nothing. In the time it took to do these things, the towel around Wes’s arm soaked red.
“Wes. Wes, are you all right? Can you hear me?”
He nodded wearily.
“I need to clean and dress your arm. I think it’s all right to give you another pill. And I have some ibuprofen. OK?”
“OK,” he whispered.
She slipped the pills between his lips, fed him some water. Then she gingerly peeled the wet towel back. His poor arm—it looked as if he’d held it in a tank filled with piranhas. She shook the canister of antiseptic spray and depressed the nozzle, coating the wounds. He bore this all with a grimace. Then she opened a package of antibiotic gauze and unwrapped it around the arm, overlapping the edges. She finished with dry gauze and a sling Andy had makeshifted from a spare sheet. Wes’s face was ashy, his lips the same color as his skin, his under-eyes bluish-green. She helped him up and led him to one of the other beds, nestling him between clean sheets.
“It’s over,” she said, patting his knee through the sheet. “Lie back. Try to rest.”
“It’s not over,” Wes said. “I’m not in the clear for Shreve’s. Not for days, yet.”
He rolled onto his left side, ruined arm nestled against his chest, and went to sleep.
—
She waited until the rise and fall of his chest was deep and even, then drank a bottle of water, finished her energy bar, and rose wearily to give the room a final once-over. The room was—by strategy, she supposed—all white: white tile flooring, white-painted walls, white linens. She put the lid on the storage container of soapy water and ran microseal tape around the edges: once, twice, three times. Andy had told her that miner ticks can live underwater for days, and their safest bet would be to wait a week before trying to dispose of the dirty water. Then she went to the bed where Wes had lain during his hatching, pulled the covers smooth, turned them back, peeled off the fitted sheet. Nothing. But she threw all of the linens into one of the thick plastic garbage bags Andy had given her and pulled the chemical seal. She did this with the linens on the other two beds, too, just to be safe. She turned the mattresses off the frames, pulled them to the side of the room away from the door, and stacked them. Then she walked the floor in concentric circles. She saw a dark speck that turned out to be an oat flake from her energy bar. Another that was a piece of leaf off one of their shoes. Nothing else. Satisfied, she went to the monitor. “We’re good in here,” she said. Then, just in case, she made the OK sign with her hand.
Now was the moment of truth. Would they come?
So quickly she didn’t have time to waver with doubt, the vac seal ran and the door slid open. Edie stood there, smiling.
“Get some rest,” she said. “I’m on duty.”
Twenty-Four