door, holding onto things to keep her balance. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard before she went out. Ten to two. Everything had happened in just twenty minutes. Incredible.
How much did she find out before I got free of her? How much does she know?
No way of telling for sure, but even a little could be dangerous. The brat had to be taken care of, and soon.
Rose stepped out into the pale early moonlight and took half a dozen long, steadying breaths of fresh air. She began to feel a little better, a little more herself, but she couldn’t let go of that fluttering sensation. The feeling of having someone else inside her—a rube, no less—looking at her private things. The pain had been bad, and the surprise of being trapped that way was worse, but the worst thing of all was the humiliation and sense of violation. She had been stolen from.
You are going to pay for that, princess. You just messed in with the wrong bitch.
A shape was moving toward her. Rose had settled on the top step of her RV, but now she stood up, tense, ready for anything. Then the shape got closer and she saw it was Crow. He was dressed in pajama bottoms and slippers.
“Rose, I think you better—” He stopped. “What the hell happened to your hand?”
“Never mind my fucking hand,” she snapped. “What are you doing here at two in the morning? Especially when you knew I was apt to be busy?”
Instead of pine-scented air freshener and Alcazar cigars, Grampa Flick’s Fleetwood this morning smelled of shit, disease, and death. It was also crowded. There were at least a dozen members of the True Knot present, some gathered around the old man’s bed, many more sitting or standing in the living room, drinking coffee. The rest were outside. Everyone looked stunned and uneasy. The True wasn’t used to death among their own.
“Clear out,” Rose said. “Crow and Nut—you stay.”
“Look at him,” Petty the Chink said in a trembling voice. “Them spots! And ’e’s cycling like crazy, Rose! Oh, this is ’orrible!”
“Go on,” Rose said. She spoke gently and gave Petty a comforting squeeze on the shoulder when what she felt like doing was kicking her fat Cockney ass right out the door. She was a lazy gossip, good for nothing but warming Barry’s bed, and probably not very good at that. Rose guessed that nagging was more Petty’s specialty. When she wasn’t scared out of her mind, that is.
“Come on, folks,” Crow said. “If he is going to die, he doesn’t need to do it with an audience.”
“He’ll pull through,” Harpman Sam said. “Tougher’n a boiled owl, that’s Grampa Flick.” But he put his arm around Baba the Russian, who looked devastated, and hugged her tight against him for a moment.
They got moving, some taking a last look back over their shoulders before going down the steps to join the others. When it was just the three of them, Rose approached the bed.
Grampa Flick stared up at her without seeing her. His lips had pulled back from his gums. Great patches of his fine white hair had fallen out on the pillowcase, giving him the look of a distempered dog. His eyes were huge and wet and filled with pain. He was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, and his scrawny body was stippled with red marks that looked like pimples or insect bites.
She turned to Walnut and said, “What in hell are those?”
“Koplik’s spots,” he said. “That’s what they look like to me, anyway. Although Koplik’s are usually just inside the mouth.”
“Talk English.”
Nut ran his hands through his thinning hair. “I think he’s got the measles.”
Rose gaped in shock, then barked laughter. She didn’t want to stand here listening to this shit; she wanted some aspirin for her hand, which sent out a pain-pulse with every beat of her heart. She kept thinking about how the hands of cartoon characters looked when they got whopped with a mallet. “We don’t catch rube diseases!”
“Well . . . we never used to.”
She stared at him furiously. She wanted her hat, she felt naked without it, but it was back in the EarthCruiser.
Nut said, “I can only tell you what I see, which is red measles, also known as rubeola.”
A rube disease called rubeola. How too fucking perfect.