Julia Elliott - The Wilds

“What’s up?” said Roddy, joining them.

“My neighbor the phlebotomist just got off his shift. Said all hell had broke loose down at Palmetto Baptist.” Carla Marlin blew six perfect smoke rings.

“Enough with the rising action,” said Stein. “Let’s have our climax now.”

Carla raised her eyebrows at the word climax .

“Well, if you got to know right this second: one of the teenagers is missing. They don’t know if he just jumped out of bed and walked out or if it was a kidnapping kind of thing.”

“Or maybe he got beamed to another dimension,” said Stein.

“Yeah.” Carla rolled her eyes. “There’s always that.”

“They’ll find him,” said Roddy. “Bet he woke up with amnesia and got lost.”

“A common soap-opera trope,” said Stein. “The whole waking-up-from-a-coma-with-amnesia shtick.”

“Like Anastasia in Purple Passions ,” said Carla.

“It’s actually called a ‘convenient coma,’” said Stein.

Carla Marlin mustered her coldest drop-dead stare.

“There’s nothing convenient about it,” she said.

Beth Irving held a plastic vial of cat piss and repressed another gag. She’d been drinking ginger tea, popping B6, and pressing the acupuncture points reputed to diminish nausea. A rank yellow fume emanated from the vial like the cartoon hieroglyphics that flowed from the tail of Pepé Le Pew, but she held her breath and finished her experiment. She would prevail because she had to, because other specialists in other states were testing their own comatose teens and compiling data, because one of her test subjects had mysteriously disappeared like a patient in a slasher film, and a certain famous neurologist was flying in from Germany. This time, she promised herself with a dark chuckle, she would refrain from sleeping with him. The fact that he was portly and bald (she’d checked out his Web profile) would help.

Though she knew she was pregnant, she didn’t have time to deal with it — emotionally or physically. The nausea, however, made it difficult to ignore the fact that a new life was incubating inside her. Every time a green wave of sickness rocked through her, she couldn’t help but envision the eight-cell zygote glistening in the void of her uterus. The small cluster of dividing cells was already sending chemical messages into her blood and her nervous system, directing her eating habits to suit its needs, tyrannizing her bladder, and producing “emotions” advantageous to its own survival. Her rationality had been hijacked weeks ago, when Dr. Bloom breezed into town at the height of her ovulatory cycle, her exquisitely receptive system going into overdrive upon detecting the neurovirologist’s sweet pheromones.

Had she pounced on him like a starved jaguar in the fake-cherry-scented darkness of her hotel room? Had she still had enough emotional detachment to quip about their feral passion as Dr. Bloom struggled drunkenly with her belt buckle? Yes, and, thank goodness, yes. But she’d also been prompted by a deep urge to sabotage her current relationship.

Now she was exhausted. As she went about her work, renegade factions of her brain goaded her to slink into an unoccupied room and take a nap or flee the bombardment of horrific hospital odors, rush through the automatic doors of entrance C, and take deep breaths in the oasis of landscaping where a variety of flowers bloomed. But she had finally gotten three clearances for MRIs from desperate parents. And just yesterday, one of the patients had possibly come out of his coma, though now the staff at this backwoods facility couldn’t seem to find him. She had to work quickly in case the others woke up. She wanted to test olfactory responses to cat urine and the effects of antipsychotics on dopamine levels.

Struggling to keep her mind focused on her research tasks, she kept getting swept away by surges of nausea and stray images of Dr. Bloom. She saw him gnawing meat from a goat bone. Saw him hovering over her, his hazel eyes aglow. Saw him scurry into the bathroom, where he displayed his scrawny buttocks with mock coyness before gruffly closing the door. He’d flown to Nashville to look into a recent case there, had asked her, with a wistful smile, if she might join him later to diversify her research. They could visit all the infection sites, he romantically suggested.

But the T. hermeticus epidemic was most pronounced in this particular town, and Beth was trying to figure out how the hurricane weather and blighted economic conditions factored into the phenomenon. Remembering her own coming-of-age in South Georgia, she thought that clinical depression might play a role. And she needed to find teens testing positive who had not reached the comatose state, which wasn’t necessarily the upshot of infection. Just as most T. gondii —positive people failed to show marked personality changes, and so-called schizophrenics probably had a predisposition that heightened the parasite’s effects, some T. hermeticus hosts might not be susceptible to full-blown toxoplasmosis. Beth hypothesized that perhaps the hospitalized teens were susceptible due to depression or malnutrition or other immune-weakening factors. But she couldn’t test this without getting her hands on some nonpathological positives, which required slogging through labyrinthine DHEC paperwork, which required mental acuity and a nausea-free system, all of which were eluding her now, especially after she poured cat urine into the TDR diffuser and could not escape its musky insinuations no matter how many times she changed her latex gloves.

According to Adam’s Facebook stream, Todd Spencer, the comatose teen who had mysteriously disappeared from the hospital, had made several shadowy appearances around town, materializing at the margins of various events before vanishing again. Heather Remington had spotted him lurking under the bleachers at a softball game. Josh Williams thought he might’ve seen him skulking down a hallway of First Baptist’s new recreation facility. And several kids swore they’d seen him emerge from the woods and stand at the moonlit edge of Bob Baggott’s pond, where an illicit teen party was in full riot.

Following DHEC’s recommendations, Jenny had confiscated Adam’s iPhone, equipping him with an old-fashioned flip phone until the crisis passed. She knew she was violating his privacy by perusing his Facebook account. She felt that desperate times called for desperate measures, however, even though her son had not tested positive for T. gondii or T. hermeticus antigens. Two days before, she’d driven him to a Walmart where free testing facilities had been set up. At least two dozen teens had waited on the scorched blacktop with their parents, the smell of sunscreen floating in the muggy air. Hurricane Anastasia had dissipated, and now a heat wave settled in, with temperatures capping at 110. People were living like moles, hurrying from one air-conditioned bunker to another, compulsively checking their media gadgets for the latest on T. hermeticus .

The bug was mostly affecting the Southern states, possibly because their weather conditions encouraged the species to thrive. Jenny was very busy with sibyl. com, but she pulled herself away from her screen every half hour to check on Adam, making sure he hadn’t found the power cord to their media screen (which she’d stuffed into a corner of the china cabinet). She did what she could to protect him. She stocked up on healthy snacks. She ordered educational board games for them to play together. She tracked her packages on UPS.com, hoping that when they arrived, a golden age of mother-son bonding would flourish.