“You’re a slow learner, aren’t you?” said Cheryl. She sounded pleased, like the prospect of Nadine’s stupidity was a little personal gift for her. “Shovel’s by the door. Wheelbarrow’s in the empty stall. Compost is around the back at the edge of the garden. Muck the rest of these stalls out. And watch out for Doris; she bites.”
“Which one’s Doris?” Nadine coughed, but Cheryl was already gone. A brown cow stuck her head over her stall door and snorted in the silence, flicking her ears to dislodge flies. Nadine stayed kneeling for a while, indulging in sullen fantasies of sinking her teeth into Cheryl’s face. Truthfully, though, mucking stalls sounded better than washing dishes. She’d done it a few summers at Gorse Brook Farm, where she’d taken riding lessons. She liked the stink of it, the burn in her arms after hours of shoveling shit. It made her think of her father coming home from rec league basketball, or a job site on a hot day, his T-shirt dark under the arms and around the neck.
The shoveling was hard with her bruised ribs and aching arms, but it felt good to be alone for once. The cows were mostly content to chew their cud as she worked, heaping the dented and rusty wheelbarrow with manure and pushing it around behind the barn to where flowers, weeds, and what she thought might be bamboo grew from a huge hill of refuse. Broken eggshells, apple cores, corn cobs, and other detritus lay heaped among piles of cow shit, some of them already growing grass. By the time she’d finished half the barn’s twenty stalls she’d built up a pleasant sweat. She liked to build up a sweat. It made her feel the same way she did when Tess called her Nate in bed. Once she thought she heard something moving in the hayloft, but when she made her way up the groaning ladder there was nothing to see but a couple of rats skittering among the moldy bales.
It took her the better part of the afternoon to notice the smell. She caught her first whiff of it as she was cleaning out Doris’s stall, eighth on the left—she’d identified the cow when Doris tried to take a bite out of her ear. It cut through the sweet, grassy stench of the manure and the warm musk of the cows themselves, a note a little like the stuffy, slightly tallowy perfume her great aunt Christine always wore. They put little bits of shit and weasel oil and rotting things in perfume, she remembered. To make it smell like sex, and like death. There was a sweetness to it, though, a sticky, syrupy scent. She leaned the shovel against a post and followed the stink toward the rear of the barn. As she did, the buzzing of flies emerged from the stamping and chewing of the cows.
The smell was coming from the last stall on the right. Flies swarmed over the half gate and the cracked and weathered lintel. The drone of their wings filled the air. It set Nadine’s teeth on edge. Her skin crawled as she lifted the heavy wooden latch and the insects, taking flight, bumped against her and crawled over her arm and the sleeve of her flannel. She hauled the gate open, its rusted hinges creaking. The smell intensified. She raised her arm to cover her mouth and nostrils, her eyes watering at the putrid stench.
Inside the stall, beneath a living carpet of flies, a dead cow lay on its side, tongue protruding from its mouth, one empty eye socket staring at her in mute judgment. Maggots writhed in that dark pit. Beetles burrowed through the matted, shit-caked hide, which had begun to slough from the bones and rotten meat beneath.
The seething whine of the flies became a roar, a staticky sound like a TV blasting on a dead channel. The glistening black carpet of their bodies undulated over the carcass, circling the yellowed pillars of its ribs, the fat ropes of its guts, which had spilled from its burst belly. Nadine took a step back without meaning to, her hand flying to her forehead as a headache burned itself in through her temple, a white-hot needle from her eye to the nape of her neck. The world swam before her, shadows stretching and melting in the corners of the barn’s dark alcoves. She swayed, grasping for something to hold on to, and as her hand found the splintered wood of what felt like an antique plow, a voice spoke from the stall.
Nadine.
Her childhood dentist, Dr. Campbell, who had died in a car accident when she was eleven, was crouched beside the carcass, flies crawling through the pitiful landscape of his graying combover and on the lenses of his thick Coke-bottle glasses. Open wide, Nadine, he said, but his voice wasn’t his, it was the dead static howl of the swarm. He smiled hugely, flashing crowded rows of rotten teeth, and crept toward her on all fours. His nails were mottled blue and green, as though his hand had been slammed in a car door. He reached for her and she saw that there was shit trapped under them, a toxic brown crust of sludge. She felt something in her belly stretching, a feeling somewhere between gagging and the hot, convulsive pressure of a hand inside her.
It’s only going to hurt for a second.
His index finger touched her lip. Behind him, the dead cow’s foreleg twitched. Something squirmed within the gawping, vacant mouth. Nadine screamed as her headache burned brighter. She squeezed her eyes shut and in a flash of acrid purple and white light she saw a foot-long clot of matted hair and crushed slivers of bone lying half buried in the loose, crumbling desert earth. There was something inside it. A wet thing, rubbery and slick. A mouth full of baby teeth. A finger where its tongue should be.
Nadine vomited. Her knees gave out, and she fell hard on her rear, legs splayed to either side of the puddle of her own puke, around which flies already gathered. Dr. Campbell was gone, and with him the sickly, feverish sensation of being stretched, replaced by a sense of griminess, as though her skin had been sprayed with rotten honey.
Sitting in the hay, the hot pain of the headache ebbing now, Nadine could make out ragged bite marks in the cow’s flank and belly. They were too big to have been made by rats or weasels, the wrong shape for a coyote or a dog.
Oh, God, she realized with mounting horror, bile welling up again at the back of her throat. They’re human.
Shelby looked up from her hole just in time to see Gabe puke. He stretched back like a bow, staring into the sky at an angle, and then bent double and vomited all over his own shoes. John hurried toward Gabe. He caught the smaller boy as Gabe’s legs buckled, and for a moment Shelby thought he’d fainted.
“Get it out of me!” Gabe screamed, jerking upright. He kicked and struggled in John’s arms. His eyes rolled back into his head until only the whites showed. Shelby’s mouth felt dry. She was nauseous and couldn’t seem to find her breath. Her shovel fell to the dirt with a clank. The others were running toward Gabe and John. “Get it out! Get it out!” Gabe vomited again. This time there was blood in it. He began to thrash, the sinews in his throat standing out like cables.
“Help me!” shouted John. His mouth was bleeding where Gabe’s skull had split his lip. He dragged the spasming boy toward the shade of a nearby boulder. “He’s gonna hurt himself.”
Shelby scrambled out of her half-dug hole. It took her, Ben, and Stuart together to hold Gabe down once John had wrestled him to the ground. Brady stripped off his shirt and folded it to stuff under Gabe’s head, then stood by with a fearful look. Slowly, Gabe’s convulsions slackened, becoming tics, and then faded to nothing. He blinked. He had such pretty eyes, deep and gray with long, thick lashes. Shelby let go of his ankles as the others stepped back.
Brady knelt and held a water bottle for him. Gabe took slow sips, then turned his head and spat into the dirt. “What happened?” He croaked. “My head hurts.”
“I don’t know,” said John. The fat boy’s face was the color of milk. Stuart was crying while Ben held him, looking helpless and lost. “You were begging us to get something out of you.”
Shelby’s headache pulsed at her temples. She saw the point of white fire again, the mote of light dancing on the boulder’s side just above Gabe’s head. On her right, Stuart squeezed his eyes shut and put the heel of his hand to his forehead, as though he had an ice cream headache. Gooseflesh crawled up Shelby’s arms, heat or no heat. “I want to go home,” she whispered to nobody, though what she really wanted was to have a home she could go back to.
“It’s getting closer,” Gabe murmured, his eyelids fluttering. “It’s kissing Nadine now.”
“Keep him in the shade,” Shelby forced herself to say, stepping back from Gabe and the others. Her heart was pounding. She wanted to bolt, to run back to camp and make someone bring her to Nadine, get a knife and threaten to kill herself unless they let Nadine go. She sounded like a stranger to herself as she kept talking in that calm, measured tone. “Give him water. A little bit at a time. I’ll finish digging his hole.”
“Closer,” whispered Gabe. “Getting closer.”
At lunch the mess was dotted here and there with empty seats. Jo thought of Smith’s bare mattress as she worked her way mechanically through her beans and meat loaf. Wonder Bread and margarine on the side; a white-person-food triple threat. Her friend Sammy’s mother cooked the same way. Skinless chicken breasts, unseasoned. Undercooked boiled potatoes cut into glistening chunks. Plain broccoli steamed until it was barely solid anymore. It made her want to cry, all the bad food she’d eaten. She pushed her meat loaf around its lonely partition of her scratched and heat-warped plastic tray. Her mother had never really cooked. Her grandparents had done most of that, and then Oji by himself after Oba-chan died of cancer. In the last few years, since her father’s promotion to junior partner at his firm, they had mostly stopped having dinner together at all. The thought of eating bowls of charcoal-cooked chicken and sticky rice in the kitchen with Oji after finishing her homework, of his lumpy homemade mochi and the smell of spicy stock simmering on the stove, brought tears to her eyes. She wiped them on her sleeve as Felix joined her. Nadine hadn’t come back with them. Cheryl had dragged her away during the drama over the phone.
The phone. Jo kept turning it over and over in her mind. If they could just figure out where they were, what state, the name of a town, they could call someone. It was just conceivable they might even be able to get out of this place before whatever insane shit was in the air finally chose its moment. It would be soon. She could feel it coming.
“Nadine here yet?” she asked Felix. He shook his head and started wolfing down his meat loaf the way he always did, like it was an enemy fortification he had to demolish.
Jo spotted her a moment later coming from the serving counter. Nadine limped toward them through the milling campers. She looked terrible and smelled worse. Her hair was lank and damp with sweat. There were fresh bruises layered over her fading ones, and blood on her flannel work shirt. Her boots and the cuffs of her jeans were crusted with nameless muck. Slowly, as though it hurt her to do it, she lowered herself onto the bench across the table and leaned forward, resting her head in her hands. Kids at neighboring tables stared at her.
“Are you okay?” Jo asked.
Nadine only shook her head. For a while the three of them ate in silence as more counselors led their groups in. Jo sank down a little in her seat as Names-and-Dates arrived with Betty and her little minions in tow. The big redheaded girl was laughing shrilly about something while Celine and Dana tittered. Athena, trailing a little behind the others, scanned the mess with her cold, dark stare. Jo didn’t like the way Athena looked at people. It was the way you were supposed to look at the things you found when you flipped over a rock: interested, but a little repulsed, too.
“Was it Betty?” Felix asked. “Did she fuck with you again?”
“No,” said Nadine. Her voice sounded raw and strained. She looked up from her plate. “We have to get out of here,” she said. Her knuckles were white on her spoon. “There’s something bad happening. Something wrong.” She took a deep breath, like she was about to climb that last rung and step up onto the high dive. “I think they’re going to kill us.
“We have to get out.”
IX GRADUATION
The boys’ cabin was dark except for the moonlight spilling through the windows when Felix led the girls in through the trapdoor. The boys were awake in their beds. Felix felt a twinge of jealousy when he noticed the sparse stubble on Gabe’s cheek. He had the same little mustache his mother had painstakingly plucked from her own upper lip for as long as he could remember, but it was soft and feathery. He wanted Leo’s, thick and bristly, or his tío Lalo’s, covering his mouth like the sweep of a push broom. He sat down on the edge of John’s bed, hands folded between his knees. If anyone but Nadine had told him the story of the dead cow and the thing in the barn, he’d have looked around to see what kind of glue they’d been sniffing, but there was a seriousness to the tall, rangy girl. He trusted her, an uncomfortable feeling.
Shelby and Nadine were kissing and whispering with each other to everyone else’s intense boredom and embarrassment by the time Malcolm popped his head up through the trapdoor, cobwebs stuck to his glasses and a scowl on his face. “Can’t believe you bonded without me.” He climbed up into the closet and brushed dust and dirt from his clothes. “You know how boring my cabin is? The liveliest it gets is when Vick farts in his sleep.”
“Sounds riveting,” said John.
Malcolm chucked him lightly under the chin. “He’s not bad once he gets warmed up,” he said, grinning, and dropped onto the bed beside John, who had turned beet red. For a while they settled into the easy back-and-forth that Malcolm always seemed to bring out in them, even though small talk usually made Felix feel like his head was being slowly crushed in a drill press. It was nice to forget for a minute that they’d all been sent here by their own parents, that they couldn’t call home and say they were in trouble because none of them had ever really had one.
“There’s a phone in the farmhouse,” said Nadine once everyone was settled. She sat on the floor, holding hands with Shelby, shadows darkening the bruises on her face and arms. “If we’re going, we’ll need to hike out there and use it. We’ll need food. Jackets. Water. I was in Scouts for like eight years; if we can get a map and compass, I can take us through the desert.”
“Who are we gonna call?” asked John. Felix thought it was a mark of how afraid they were that no one ventured even a feeble “Ghost-busters.” The thing in the barn. Cheryl crawling in the garden. Malcolm’s story about something scratching at his cabin’s door. Those weird, huge owl pellets, the ones Gabe had fallen on their first day building fences. And now they’d lost Smith. It made him feel cold and angry that he’d needed someone else to connect the dots for him, to show him that he couldn’t just keep his head down and do his time.
