He kept petting her hair.
The cold lump in her chest wouldn’t go away.
“If only… I could have… gotten his helmet off sooner,” she said quietly, her sobs breaking up her sentence.
“You know that’s not true,” Clarence whispered. “She cut his artery. There was nothing you could have done.”
“But I… was in charge. It’s… it’s my fault.”
She felt Clarence shaking his head, his chin rubbing softly against her hair.
“You’re smarter than that, Margo. I know you’re going to try and blame yourself, because that’s the kind of person you are. You want to take everything on your shoulders. But blaming yourself for his death is stupid, and you know it. That girl had enough drugs in her to knock out an elephant. She had shown no signs of violent behavior. Hell, her hands were strapped down. No one could have seen it coming. In fact, if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine, because I’m responsible for protecting you both. I wasn’t even in the room.”
“But we told you to stay out of our way,” Margaret said. “Too cramped in there with an extra body. If… if you hadn’t been in the computer room, watching it on the monitor…”
“I can override any order you give me if I think your safety is at risk. I could have stayed in the autopsy room. If I had, Amos would still be alive.”
Margaret sat up and looked at him. “Don’t do that, Clarence. It’s not your fault!”
“I know. And it’s not yours, either.”
Another sob grabbed her body, grabbed it and shook it. Amos was dead. Who was going to look after his daughters? Had the FBI agents delivered the news yet? Would his family ever know the truth, or was Murray already dealing another cover story? Amos Braun deserved a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom—his family would get a lie about a lab accident and an insurance payout.
“We can look for blame all day,” Clarence said. “That’s not going to bring him back. All it’s going to do is take our focus away from the job at hand. More people are going to die, Margo, you can bet on that. More good people like my boy Amos. It sucks to say, but we can grieve him all we want once we beat this fucking thing. You want to place blame? Place it where it belongs. Place it on this infection. That’s what killed Amos, not me, and not you.”
Another set of sobs hit, but this time she finally forced them into submission. Clarence was right. This disease had taken Amos, taken all the others. If she could stop it, if she could kill it, that was the greatest tribute she could pay to her friend.
“You know what’s funny?” Clarence said.
“What?”
“I finished up twenty bucks ahead. He’d be so pissed if he knew I won.”
Margaret couldn’t believe Clarence could joke at a time like this. Then she thought of Amos’s face when he took the twenty from Otto, or the scowl when he had to hand it over. For some reason she pictured him looking down on both of them, pointing and laughing.
And despite the pain, she laughed a little herself.
MR. BURKLE THE POSTMAN
John Burkle was a bit behind. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor the gloom of night, but notice how no one ever listed nor horribly rotted blackened corpses as one of the things that could keep you from your appointed rounds.
John had called 9-1-1, then waited for the ambulance and cops to arrive. He couldn’t say for sure if it had been Cheffie in that house. Cheffie was the only one who lived there, but that black… thing …could have been anyone. The paramedics had even given John some test for flesh-eating bacteria, which—thank God—turned out to be negative. He’d gone home after that, a bit shaken up by the whole ordeal, which meant that today he had a double load of mail to deliver.
He stuffed shopper coupons and magazines into the mailbox, shut it, drove back onto the road and checked his next batch.
The Jewells.
It was insane to think that flesh-eating bacteria had hit Gaylord of all places. Nothing happened in Gaylord, which was exactly why John Burkle loved it so much.
He pulled up to the Jewells’ mailbox and put in two days’ worth of mail. He started to drive away, then stopped when he saw Bobby Jewell walking down his long, tree-lined driveway. Bobby was carrying his little daughter, Chelsea, who was waving a letter. What a doll that one was. All those blond curls. If she turned out to be half the looker her mother was, the girl was going to break some hearts when she got into high school.
“Hey there, Chelsea,” John called. “Got some mail for me?”
“Yes sir, Mister Postman!”
About ten feet from the truck, Bobby set Chelsea down. She ran forward, holding the letter up as if it were an object of great importance. Little kids were such a hoot—something as mundane as mailing a letter could carry newness and excitement.
“Here you go, Mister Postman!”
John took the letter with affected importance. “Well, thank you very much, young lady.”
Chelsea actually curtsied. John just wanted to eat her up.
“You’re welcome, Mister Postman. My daddy wants to show you something.”
“Oh?” John looked up. Bobby had closed the distance and just stood there. John knew Bobby from summer softball league, but damn, the guy didn’t look good at all. Sunken eyes, pale skin. Looked like he’d lost at least fifteen pounds.
“Hi, John,” Bobby said. “I got to show you the damnedest thing.”
“What’s that?”
Bobby unzipped his coat, reached in and pulled out a rusty red monkey wrench. “This thing is stuck like you wouldn’t believe.”
John looked at the wrench, then looked at Bobby. Why the hell would Bobby show him a stuck monkey wrench? John’s internal alarm went off—what if Bobby looked like crap because he had that flesh-eating shit?
“Uh… Bobby, I don’t have time right now.”
“Why’s that, Mister Postman?” Chelsea said.
John automatically looked down at the girl. Even as he did, he knew that it was a mistake. By the time he looked up, the monkey wrench was a rusty red blur. He flinched just before the wrench smashed him on the left side of his jaw. He slid to the right, falling off his seat and into the van. He tried to get to his feet, but they were tangled in the gas and break pedals. Time became a dreamy, slow-moving sludge. He knew that the wrench was coming again, the moment before that metallic hit dragged on forever.
His Taser.
His hands searched for his bag, for the weapon that could save him, but it was too late.
The slow-motion sensation evaporated when he felt a blast on his left ear. His head exploded with concussive pain. The van seemed to spin around him. He tried to get up again, but his arms and legs felt so weak. Then he felt weight bearing down on him; he felt strong, callused hands on forehead and jaw, forcing his mouth open.
He felt a small, hot, wet tongue slide into his mouth.
And then he felt the burning…
APPLEBEE’S
Perry Dawsey had never thought normality could seem so surreal.
Or so goddamn uncomfortable.
He sat in an Applebee’s in Gaylord, Michigan, waiting for his burger to arrive. Kitsch lined the walls. Some Top 40 shit played on the sound system. There were tables filled with fat men, fat women and fat kids. Dew sat to Perry’s left. Perry sat across from Claude Baumgartner. Baum had lost the metal brace, but his nose was still a mess. Jens Milner, whose eye remained quite black, sat on Perry’s right, across from Dew.
Add in Perry’s nasty facial cuts and they looked like a foursome back from a fight club—a fight club that Dew had clearly won, since all he had was a little Band-Aid on his head.