“Jakob,” she said. “Jakob, talk to me. Say something.”
“Do you have the TV on?”
She put down her pen. “What’s wrong?”
Harper had not known how she would be with him, the next time they spoke. She worried she would not be able to keep the resentment out of her voice. If Jakob thought she sounded hostile, he would want to know why, and she would have to tell him. She could never keep anything from him. And Harper didn’t want to talk about his book. She didn’t even want to think about it. She was pregnant and crawling with a flammable fungus and she had recently learned Venice was burning, so now she was never going to get to see it by gondola. With all that going on, it was a bit much to expect her to provide a literary critique of his shitty novel.
But he laughed—roughly and unhappily—and the sound of it rattled her and caused her to forget her resentment, at least for the moment. A part of her thought, calmly, clinically: hysteria. God knew she had seen enough of it in the last half a year.
“That’s the funniest thing anyone has said since I have no idea,” he said. “What’s wrong? You mean besides the world catching fire? Besides fifty million human beings turning into balls of flame? Are you watching FOX?”
“I’m watching. What’s wrong, Jakob? You’re crying. Has something happened?” It was no wonder he held her in contempt. In ten seconds he had her worrying about him again, when five minutes ago she would’ve been glad not to hear from him for a month. It embarrassed her, that she couldn’t hang on to her rage.
“You seeing this?”
She stared at the TV, jittery footage of a meadow somewhere. A few men in yellow rain slickers and elbow-high rubber gloves and gas masks, carrying Bushmaster assault rifles, were on the far side of the field. The tall yellow grass undulated in a soft rain. Beyond the men in the rain slickers was a line of trees. Off to the left was a highway. A car shushed over a rise and swept past, headlights glowing in the half dusk.
“—cell phone camera,” said the newscaster. “We caution you, this footage is graphic.” That was hardly worth mentioning. It was all graphic these days.
They were bringing people out of the woods. Kids, mostly, although there were some women with them. Some of the kids were naked. One of the women was naked, too, but clutching a dress to the front of her body.
“They’ve been showing this one all night,” Jakob said. “The news loves this. Look. Look at the cars.”
The field was in full view of the highway. Another car came over the rise, and then a pickup. Both vehicles slowed as they passed the field, then sped up again.
The women and children who had been marched out of the trees were bunched together into a tight group. The children were crying. From the distance, their voices, all together, sounded like the first keening wind of fall. One of the women took a small boy in her arms, lifted him up, and squeezed him to her. Watching it go down, Harper was struck with a brief but intense wave of déjà vu, the improbable certainty that she was watching herself, at some future point. She was seeing how she herself would die.
The woman who had been stripped, and who was clutching her dress, lunged toward one of the rain-slicker men. At a distance, her bare back looked as if it had been slashed, then stitched up with brilliant gold thread: the Dragonscale. She let go of her dress and careened, naked, toward an assault rifle.
“You can’t,” she howled. “Let us go! This is Ameri—”
The first gun might’ve gone off by accident. Harper wasn’t sure. But then, they had brought them to the field to shoot them, so maybe it was wrong to think anyone was shot there by accident. Prematurely was, perhaps, the more accurate word for it. The muzzle of a gun flashed. The naked woman kept coming, one step, two, then tilted forward into the grass and disappeared.
There followed an instant—just enough time to draw a single breath—of surprised, baffled silence. Another car came over the rise and began to slow.
The other guns went off, all together, firecrackers on a July night. Muzzles flashed, like paparazzi snapping shots of George Clooney as he climbed out of his limousine. Although George Clooney was dead, had burned to death while on a humanitarian aid mission to New York City.
The car passing by on the highway slowed to a crawl, so the driver could watch. The women and their children fell while the guns stuttered in the September rain. The car accelerated away.
The rain-slicker men had missed one person, a little girl, slipping, spritelike, across the field toward the hidden observer with the cell phone. She rushed across the meadow as fast as the shadow of a cloud. Harper watched, gripping her baby book in both hands, holding her breath, sending out a silent wish: Let her go. Let her get away. But then the girl folded in on herself and tumbled forward and collapsed and Harper realized it had never been a person at all. The thing racing across the field had been the dress that the naked woman had been holding. The wind had made it dance for a moment, that was all. Now the dance was over.
The program cut back to the studio. The newsman stood in front of a wide-screen TV, replaying the footage. He kept his back to it and spoke in a smooth, calm voice. Harper couldn’t hear what he was saying. Jakob was talking, too, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying, either.
She spoke over both of them. “Did you think she looked like me?”
Jakob said, “What are you talking about?”
“The woman who was hugging the little boy. I thought she looked like me.”
The newscaster was saying, “—illustrates the dangers of people who have been infected and who don’t seek—”
“I didn’t notice,” Jakob said. His voice was strangled with emotion.
“Jakob. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m sick.”
She felt as if she had stood up too quickly, although she hadn’t moved. She perched on the edge of the couch, light-headed and a little faint.
“You’ve got a stripe?”
“I’ve got a fever.”
“Okay. But do you have marks on you?”
“It’s on my foot. I thought it was a bruise. I dropped a sandbag on my foot yesterday and I thought it was just a bruise.” For a moment he sounded close to crying.
“Oh, Jakob. Send me a picture. I want to look at it.”
“I don’t need you to look at it.”
“Please. For me.”
“I know what it is.”
“Please, Jake.”
“I know what it is and I have a fever. I’m so fucking hot. I’m a hundred and one. I’m so hot and I can’t sleep. I keep dreaming the blankets are on fire and I jump out of the bed. Are you having those dreams?”
No. Her dreams were much worse than that. They were so bad she had recently decided to quit sleeping. It was safer staying awake.
“What were you doing with a sandbag?” she asked, not because she cared, but because it might calm him to talk about something besides infection.
“I had to go back to work. I had to risk it. Risk contaminating other people. That’s the position you’ve put me in.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”