Pandemic Page 7

She shook her head. “Honey, you don’t—”

“Stop,” he said sharply, the word a slap that landed in her soul instead of on her face. Then, softer: “You know me. You know I wouldn’t start this unless it was already finished. I love you. I always will. You didn’t kill millions, you saved billions. I tried to help you realize that. But you know what? It’s just not something you want to hear.”

Margaret spent much of her time hating him, wanting him to go, but now that he’d brought the idea out of the shadows and into a squirming reality, she suddenly, desperately wanted him to stay. She couldn’t have let this slip away.

“I won’t give you babies, so you’re leaving me,” she said. “That’s all I am to you? Just a breeding factory?”

She’d used that argument before, and it had always worked. This time, however, his eyes hardened.

“You’re not a breeding factory,” he said. “You’re not a wife, either. We don’t even make love.”

This was about his G.o.dd.a.m.n d.i.c.k? Her hands clenched into fists. “We just had s.e.x a couple of days ago.”

“Two weeks ago,” he said. “Only the second time in the last four months.”

It seemed like more, but she knew better than to argue with him. He probably kept a calendar somewhere, tracked the actual days. That was often the difference between the two of them: Margaret reacted, Clarence planned.

He weakly waved a hand at the laptop. “You don’t want me because that is your lover. You want the hurt and the misery. You want to read the awful things people say about you.”

She felt a stinging in the back of her eyes, and a hard piece of iron in her chest where it met her neck. “They despise me,” she said. “I deserve it.”

The sadness faded from his eyes, replaced by conviction. That look stabbed deeper than his angry stare ever could — it was done.

“You don’t deserve to be hated,” he said. “But I’m done being your punching bag. If you can’t love yourself, I won’t spend any more time trying to convince you why you should. You’ve given up on life. I haven’t. I need someone who’ll fight by my side, not roll over and wait for death. I need a soldier. That’s what you were, once … but not anymore.”

She felt her hands gripping her shoulders, felt her body start to shake. Her rage had vanished. The puppeteer that made her say horrible things had fled the field of battle.

“But Clarence … I love you.”

He shook his head.

Margaret wanted to go to him, hold him, have him hold her, but a barrier had sprung up between them, a distance that might as well have been miles.

His cell phone buzzed. He pulled it out in an automatic motion, so fluid and fast it was more muscle memory than conscious thought.

“Don’t answer that,” she said. “Please … not now.”

He looked at the screen, then at her. “It’s Longworth.”

“I don’t care if it’s Jesus. Not now, Clarence, please.”

He stared at her for another moment. The phone buzzed again. He answered.

“Yes sir?”

Clarence listened. His eyes widened. “Yes sir. Now is fine.”

He put the phone away.

She felt numb. Not cold, not hot, not even angry or sad — just numb. “You just told me you’re abandoning me, and now you’re going to go to work?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Murray will be here in fifteen minutes.”

The director of the Department of Special Threats was coming to their house. At three-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. It was important, but she didn’t care.

“You know I don’t want anyone here,” she said. “Why didn’t he have you drive in?”

Clarence took a step closer. “Because he’s coming to see you.”

She felt a cold pinch of fear. There could be only one reason Murray wanted to see her:

It was starting again.

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

Such a tough choice: sit in the sun and watch girls in bikinis, or spend the afternoon rolling up forks and knives in napkins? Steve Stanton had opted for the former.

He’d slipped away from the restaurant earlier that morning while his mother, father, uncle and cousins were prepping the day’s vegetables, pot stickers and egg rolls. Steve held advanced degrees in robotics, artificial intelligence and computational science, yet his family wanted him to snap the stems off green beans and prepare a hundred sets of flatware for the customers who couldn’t figure out how to use chopsticks? He wasn’t doing it, especially on a day like today.

Instead, Steve had brought a lawn chair out to the narrow, run-down park that ran along the St. Joseph’s River. He’d also brought his laptop. That, connected through his cell, gave him the Internet. His father didn’t know cell phones could do that: if the man came looking for Steve, he’d start in the coffee shops that offered free Wi-Fi.

Steve gazed up at blue skies, soaking up delicious warmth. For once, the November clouds had failed to appear. Gulls called constantly, both close and distant. He looked at the boats either heading out onto the endless horizon of Lake Michigan, or returning to port. A century-old, black-iron bridge hovered over the river, ready to turn ninety degrees and connect the railroad tracks on either side should a train come along.

His father would never look for him here, not in the park while an unseasonal sun blazed down. Steve normally avoided the sun. He’d inherited his mother’s light complexion. As she had done back in China, she made a point of staying as pale as possible; dark skin was for laborers, for fieldworkers. Steve didn’t care about his color. He stayed covered up because he had no intention of dying from skin cancer. Shorts and a T-shirt might have been more comfortable than his sweatshirt and jeans, but the long sleeves and hood blocked the sun’s rays.