Tess Gerritsen - Bloodstream

The townspeople were all afraid.

Were he licensed to drive, he often thought, he would not be so unsympathetic to an old man. But Warren could not drive. He had a perfectly fine old Ford gathering dust in the barn-his father’s car, a 1945, scarcely driven-yet Warren could not use it. A danger to himself and to others. That’s what the doctors had said about his driving.

So the Ford stayed in the barn, over fifty years now, and it was as shiny as the day his father had parked it there. Time was kinder to chrome than it was to a man’s face. To a man’s heart. Jam a danger to myself and to others.

His hands at last were starting to feel warm.

He pulled them from his pockets and swung his arms as he walked, heart pumping faster, sweat gathering under his cap. Even on the most frigid of days, if he walked fast enough, far enough, the cold would cease to matter.

By the time he reached town, he’d unbuttoned his coat and removed the cap. When he walked into Cobb and Morong’s General Store, he found it almost unbearably hot inside.

As soon as the door swung shut behind him, the store seemed to fall silent. The clerk looked up, then looked away. Two women standing by the vegetable bin ceased their chatter. Though no one was staring, he could feel their attention focused on him as he picked up a shopping basket and walked up the aisle, toward the canned goods. He filled his basket with the same items he bought every week.

Cat food.

Chili with beef. Tina. Corn. He went down the next row for the dried beans and oatmeal, then to the vegetable bin for a sack of onions.

He carried the basket, now heavy; to the checkout counter.

The cashier avoided looking at him as she tallied up the items. He stood before the register, his blaze orange vest screaming out to the world, Look at me, look at me. Yet no one did. No one met his gaze.

In silence he paid the cashier, picked up the plastic grocery sacks, and turned to leave, steeling himself for the long walk home. At the door, he stopped.

On the newsstand was this week’s issue of the Tranquility Gazette. There was one copy left. He stared at the headline and suddenly the grocery sacks slipped out of his grasp and thudded to the floor. With shaking hands he reached for the newspaper.

HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING LEAVES TEACHER DEAD, TWO STUDENTS WOUNDED:

14-YEAR-OLD BOY ARRESTED.

“Hey! You gonna pay for that paper?” the clerk called out.

Warren didn’t answer. He just stood by the door, his eyes fixed in horror on a second headline, almost lost in the bottom right corner:

YOUTH BEATS PUPPY TO DEATH: CITED FOR CRUELTY.

And he thought: It’s happening again.

Damaris Horne was stuck in purgatory, and all she could think about was how to get back to Boston. So this is how my editor punishes me, she thought. We get into a tiff, and he assigns me to the story no one else wants. Welcome to Hicksville-by-the-Lake, otherwise known as Tranquility; Maine. Good name. The place was so tranquil, they should issue it a death certificate. She drove up Main Street, thinking that this was the perfect model for how a town would look after a neutron bomb hit it: no people, no signs of life, just standing buildings and deserted sidewalks. Nine hundred ten residents supposedly lived in this town, so where were they all? In the woods, gnawing lichen off the trees?

She drove past Monaghan’s Diner, and through the front window she caught a glimpse of a plaid shirt. Yes! A sighting of the local natives in their ceremonial dress. (What was the mystical significance of plaid, anyway?) Further up the street, she had another sighting: a shabbily dressed old geezer came out of Cobb and Morong’s, clutching his grocery sacks. She stopped to let him cross the street, and he shuffled past, head bent in a look of permanent weariness. She watched him walk along the lakeshore, a slow-moving silhouette laboring across a bleak backdrop of bare trees and gray water.

She drove on, to the Lakeside Bed and Breakfast, her home for the indefinite future. It was the only local inn still open this late in the year, and although she sneeringly referred to it as the Bates Motel, she knew she was lucky to have found any room at all, what with the other regional reporters arriving in town.

She walked into the dining room and saw that most of her competition were still stuffing themselves at the breakfast buffet. Damaris always skipped breakfast, which put her ahead of the game this morning. It was eight A.M., and she’d already been up for two and a half hours. At six, she’d been at the hospital to observe the boy being transferred out to his new home, the Maine Youth Center.

At seven-fifteen, she’d driven over to the high school. There she’d sat in her parked car and watched the kids in their baggy clothes gather in front of the building, waiting for first bell, looking like teenagers everywhere.

Damaris crossed to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. Sipping it black, she glanced around the room at the other reporters until her gaze settled on the freelancer, Mitchell Groome. Though he couldn’t be much older than forty-five, Groome’s face was all sad droops, like a hound in mourning. Still, he seemed fit enough-perhaps even athletic. Best of all, he had noticed her gaze, and was looking back at her, albeit with puzzlement.

She set down her empty cup and strolled out of the dining room, knowing, without even a backward glance, that Groome was watching her.

Hicksville had just gotten a little more interesting.

Up in her room, she took a few minutes to review her notes from the interviews she’d conducted over the last few days. Now came the hard part-putting it all together in an article that would make her editor happy and catch the eyes of bored New England housewives cruising past the tabloid stands.

She sat at her desk and stared out the window, wondering how to turn this tragic but nonetheless commonplace tale into something a little more titillating. What made this case special? What new angle would entice a reader to reach for a copy of the Weekly Informer?

She suddenly realized she was staring straight at it.

Across the street was a rundown old building, the windows boarded up. The faded sign said Kimball’s Furniture.

The address was 666.

The sign of the Beast.

As her laptop computer powered up, she quickly shuffled through her notes, searching for the quote she remembered from yesterday. Something a woman had said in the local grocery store.

She found it. “I know the explanation for what happened at the school,” the woman had said. “Everyone knows it, but no one wants to admit it. They don’t want to sound superstitious or uneducated But I’ll tell you what it is: it’s this new Godlessness. People have pushed the Lord out of their lives. They’ve replaced Him with something else. Something no one dares speak of.”

Yes! thought Damaris, and she was grinning as she began to type.

“Last week, Satan arrived in the bucolic town of Tranquility; Maine…

Sitting in her wheelchair before the living room window, Faye Braxton watched her thirteen-year-old son step off the school bus and begin to hike up the long dirt driveway to the house. It was a daily event she usually looked forward to, seeing Scotty’s slight figure at last emerge through the bus doors, his shoulders weighed down by the heavy backpack, his head craned forward with the effort to lug his burden of books up the weedy and sloping front yard.

He was still so small. It pained her to see how little he had grown in the last year. While many of his classmates had shot past him in both height and bulk, there was her Scotty, left behind in pale adolescence, and so anxious to grow up he had nicked his chin last week while trying to shave his nonexistent beard. He was her firstborn, her best friend. She wouldn’t have minded at all if time suddenly stood still, and she could keep him as he’d always been, a sweet and loving child. But she knew the child would soon be gone.