They went into the house and bolted all the doors and latched all the windows. Without discussing it, they pulled all the window curtains tight, then turned off all the lights so no one could peer in at them.
They huddled together under her blankets, shivering, gripped with their individual fears. Shapeless monsters seemed to threaten them from the dark all night.
Jenny didn’t want to admit it, but she was even feeling a little scared of Seth, too.
Just before sunrise, Tommy rode out of Ashleigh’s driveway. He was covered in mud. He’d left the clay-smeared shovel on the floor of the workshop, which was built onto the garage, and closed the door. Maybe nobody would notice it for a while.
Tommy had found Ashleigh’s remains, wrapped in a Sunday dress, just as Darcy had told him. Along with the skull and broken bones, Darcy had thrown in a gold cross necklace and some kind of silver ring.
Tommy then stuffed Ashleigh’s remains into a backpack he found in Ashleigh’s house—Ashleigh’s, he assumed, from the colorful, girly patches added to it, lots of flowers and animals and hearts.
He’d crammed the backpack into one of the motorcycle’s saddlebags. And now he was leaving town.
He passed a convoy of vehicles going the other way, towards Ashleigh’s neighborhood. There were a couple of the Homeland Security cars, a yellow Caterpillar excavating machine, and some kind of truck full of pipes and hoses.
Tommy kept his head low as he drove past them.
He didn’t fully understand what had happened the night before. He’d put the scare in both those kids, for sure, but they’d given him a little parting gift, hadn’t they? The infection was all over his arms, his torso, his neck and face.
You don’t want to touch me, she’d said. The same thing Tommy had said himself, countless times. It was sometimes a threat, sometimes a warning. Sometimes just a matter-of-fact observation.
And she’d been right. She had a thing inside her as bad as Tommy’s. Worse, even. Tommy didn’t know if he would heal—his sores had run bloody all night as he worked the shovel. But he was pretty sure that if he’d held on to that Jenny girl for another minute, he would have died.
Chapter Thirteen
The day was uncomfortably warm for a biohazard suit. Heather was sweating as she watched men in similar suits handle the pumping of the pond.
They’d dropped a pair of long, fat hoses into the duck pond. Pump machinery on their truck slurped up the black water. The water shot out of another hose, turning the far end of the Goodlings’ back yard into a swamp.
Nobody had answered the door when they arrived that morning. Attempts at interviewing neighbors hadn’t gotten far, but nobody had seen the Goodlings in days. Heather felt like there was something the town just didn’t want to tell outsiders like her.
Draining the pond was a sluggish process, so Heather went in to explore the house. They had broken in the back door to confirm nobody was there before they brought the pumping equipment into the yard.
The house was airy and bright, with huge picture windows and open modernist-style staircases. Everything was cheerful. Every room, she noticed, included a shrine to Ashleigh—her ribbons and awards and trophies and pictures. It was clear Ashleigh’s parents adored her, maybe even to an unhealthy extent. Like they all but worshiped their only child.
She identified Ashleigh’s room, a frilly princess-style theme with a canopy bed, and lots of pictures of Ashleigh and her friends on the wall. Prominently featured were two girls, one a freckled girl with red hair, one a pretty black girl. Heather recognized her. Neesha Bailey, the sole African-American caught in the outbreak. Another piece of the puzzle.
In some of the picture frames, half the picture had been cut out, leaving Ashleigh posing by herself.
In an end table drawer, Heather found the missing halves of those pictures. They each featured a handsome boy with blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. The pictures seemed to be taken over a period of years. They’d been together a long time, for a couple of teenagers.
Heather wasn’t sure how any of this could be relevant to the investigation. But data was thin. No hint of a pathogen had been identified, despite the laboratory trucks running night and day inside the old warehouse that Homeland Security had assigned for the testing of the bodies. The two refrigerated trucks were parked in there, too, and the whole interior of the warehouse sealed with white plastic sheeting. Nothing was to be moved out of the town yet, per Homeland Security.
The broad public screening hadn’t yielded much, either, as far as anyone could tell. Nobody had any unusual illnesses, or any symptoms similar to those of the confirmed cases. It was as if the disease had snuck into town one night, killed two hundred people, and then vanished without a trace.