Greg Bear - Blood Music

Very well, he thought, lying back on the cot. I deserve it. I deserve whatever happens now. Mea culpa .

Bernard fell back on the cot and closed his eyes.

His pulse sang in his ears.

Mother? Howard?” Suzy McKenzie wrapped herself in the sky-blue flannel robe her boyfriend had given her the month before in celebration of her eighteenth birthday, and padded barefoot down the hall. Her eyes were bleary with sleep. “Ken?” She was usually the last to wake up. “Slow Suzy” she often called herself with a secret, knowing smile.

She didn’t keep clocks in her room but the sun outside the window was high enough for it to be past ten o’clock. The bedroom doors were closed. “Mother?” She knocked on the door of her mother’s room. No answer.

Surely one of her brothers would be up. “Kenneth? Howard?” She turned around in the middle of the hall, making the wood floor creak. Then she twisted the knob on her mother’s door and pushed it open. “Mother?” The bed had not been made; the covers slumped around the bottom. Everybody must be downstairs. She washed her face in the bathroom, inspected the akin of her cheeks for more blemishes, was relieved to find none, and walked down the stairs into the foyer. She couldn’t hear a sound.

“Hey,” she called out from the living room, confused and unhappy. “Nobody woke me up. I’ll be late for work.” She was in her third week of waitressing at a neighborhood deli. She enjoyed the work it was much more interesting and real than working at the Salvation Army thrift store—and it helped her mother financially. Her mother had lost her job three months before and lived on the irregular checks from Suzy’s father, plus their rapidly diminishing savings. She looked at the Benrus ship’s dock on the table and shook her head. Ten thirty; she was really late. But that didn’t worry her as much as where everybody had gone. They fought a lot, sure, but they were a close family except for her father, whom she hardly missed any more, not much anyway—and everybody wouldn’t just go away and not tell her, not even wake her up.

She pushed the swinging door to the kitchen and stepped halfway through. What she saw didn’t register at first: three shapes out of place, three bodies, one in a dress on the floor, slumped up against the sink, one in jeans with no shut in a chair at the kitchen table, the third half-in, half-out of the pantry. No muss, no fuss, just three bodies she couldn’t immediately recognize.

She was quite calm at first She wished she hadn’t opened the door just then; perhaps if she had opened it a few moments earlier, or later, everything would have been normal. Somehow it would have been a different door-the door to her world—and life would have gone on with just the minor lapse of no one awakening her. Instead, she hadn’t been warned, and that wasn’t fair, really. She had opened the door at just the wrong rime, and it was too late to close it.

The body against the sink wore her mother’s dress. The face, arms, legs, and hands were covered with raised white stripes. Suzy entered the kitchen two small steps, her breath coming short and uneven. The door slipped out of her fingers and swung shut. She took a step back, then one sideways, a small dance of terror and indecision. She would have to call the police, of course. Maybe an ambulance. But first she would have to find out what happened and all her instincts told her just to get out of the kitchen, out of the house.

Howard, twenty, regularly wore jeans without a shirt around the house. He liked to go bare-chested to show off his well-muscled, if not brawny frame. Now his chest was a reddish brown color, like an Indian’s, and ridged like a potato chip or an old-fashioned washboard. His face was calm, eyes closed, mouth shut He was still breathing.

Kenneth—it had to be Kenneth—looked more like a pile of dough in clothes than her eldest brother.

Whatever had happened was completely incomprehensible. She wondered if it was something everybody else knew about but had forgotten to tell her.

No, that didn’t make sense. People were seldom cruel to her, and her mother and brothers were never cruel. The best thing to do was back out the door and call the police, or somebody; somebody who would know what to do.

She looked at the list of numbers pinned above the old black phone in the foyer, then tried to dial the emergency number. She kept fumbling, her finger jerking from the holes in the dial. Tears were in her eyes when she finally managed to complete the three digits.

The phone rang for several minutes without answer. Finally a recording came on: “All our lines are busy. Please do not hang up or you will lose your priority.” Then more ringing. After another five minutes, she hung up, sobbing, and dialed for the operator. No answer there, either. Then she thought of the conversation they had had the night before, about some sort of bug in California. It had been on the radio. Everybody getting sick and troops being called in. Only then, remembering this, did Suzy McKenzie go out the front door and stand on the steps, screaming for help.

The street was deserted. Parked cars lined both sides—inexplicably—for parking was forbidden between eight in the morning and six at night every day but Thursday and Friday, and this was Tuesday, and the enforcement was strict. Nobody was driving. She couldn’t see anybody in a car or walking or sitting in a window. She ran up one side of the street, weeping and shouting first in supplication, then in anger, then terror, then again begging for help.

She stopped screaming when she saw a postman lying on the front walk of a brownstone between two parallel wrought-iron fences. He lay on his back, eyes shut, and he looked just like Mother and Howard. To Suzy, postmen were sacred beings, always reliable. She used her fingers to push the terror out of her face and scrunched her eyes shut in concentration. “That bug’s gotten everywhere,” she told herself. “Somebody has to know what to do.”

She returned to her house and picked up the phone again. She began dialing all the numbers she knew. Some went through; others created only silence or strange computer noises. None of the phones that rang were answered. She redialed the number of her boyfriend, Cary Smyslov, and listened to it ring eight, nine, ten times before hanging up. She paused, considered for a moment, and dialed the number of her aunt in Vermont.

The phone was answered on the third ring. “Hello?” The voice was weak and tremulous, but it was definitely her aunt

“Aunt Dawn, this is Suzy in Brooklyn. I’m in big trouble here—”

“Suzy.” It seemed to take time for the name to sink in.

“Yes, you know, Suzy. Suzy McKenzie.”

“Honey, I’m not hearing too well now.” Aunt Dawn was thirty-one years old, no decrepit old woman, but she didn’t sound at all well.

“Mom’s sick, maybe she’s dead, I don’t know, and Kenneth and Howard, and nobody’s around, or everybody’s sick, I don’t know—”

“I’m kind of under the weather, myself,” Aunt Dawn said. “Got these bumps. Your uncle’s gone, or maybe he’s out in the garage. Anyway he hasn’t been in here for…” She paused. “Since last night. He went out talking to himself. Not back yet. Honey—”

“What is going on?” Suzy asked, her voice cracking.

“Honey, I don’t know, but I can’t talk anymore, I think I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Suzy.” And then, incredibly, she hung up. Suzy tried ringing again, but there was no answer and finally, on the third attempt, not even a ringing sound.