sounded strident even to herself, but . . . ah, Jesus God, measles? The oldest member of the True Knot dying of a childhood disease even children didn’t catch anymore?
“That baseball-playing kid from Iowa had a few spots on him, but I never thought . . . because yeah, it’s like you say. We don’t catch their diseases.”
“He was years ago!”
“I know. All I can think is that it was in the steam, and it kind of hibernated. There are diseases that do that, you know. Lie passive, sometimes for years, then break out.”
“Maybe with rubes!” She kept coming back to that.
Walnut only shook his head.
“If Gramp’s got it, why don’t we all have it? Because those childhood diseases—chicken pox, measles, mumps—run through rube kids like shit through a goose. It doesn’t make sense.” Then she turned to Crow Daddy and promptly contradicted herself. “What the fuck were you thinking when you let a bunch of them in to stand around and breathe his air?”
Crow just shrugged, his eyes never leaving the shivering old man on the bed. Crow’s narrow, handsome face was pensive.
“Things change,” Nut said. “Just because we had immunity to rube diseases fifty or a hundred years ago doesn’t mean we have it now. For all we know, this could be part of a natural process.”
“Are you telling me there’s anything natural about that?” She pointed to Grampa Flick.
“A single case doesn’t make an epidemic,” Nut said, “and it could be something else. But if this happens again, we’ll have to put whoever it happens to in complete quarantine.”
“Would it help?”
He hesitated a long time. “I don’t know. Maybe we do have it, all of us. Maybe it’s like an alarm clock set to go off or dynamite on a timer. According to the latest scientific thinking, that’s sort of how rubes age. They go along and go along, pretty much the same, and then something turns off in their genes. The wrinkles start showing up and all at once they need canes to walk with.”
Crow had been watching Grampa. “There he goes. Fuck.”
Grampa Flick’s skin was turning milky. Then translucent. As it moved toward complete transparency, Rose could see his liver, the shriveled gray-black bags of his lungs, the pulsing red knot of his heart. She could see his veins and arteries like the highways and turnpikes on her in-dash GPS. She could see the optic nerves that connected his eyes to his brain. They looked like ghostly strings.
Then he came back. His eyes moved, caught Rosie’s, held them. He reached out and took her unhurt hand. Her first impulse was to pull away—if he had what Nut said he had, he was contagious—but what the hell. If Nut was right, they had all been exposed.
“Rose,” he whispered. “Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t.” She sat down beside him on the bed, her fingers entwined in his. “Crow?”
“Yes, Rose.”
“The package you had sent to Sturbridge—they’ll hold it, won’t they?”
“Sure.”
“All right, we’ll see this through. But we can’t afford to wait too long. The little girl is a lot more dangerous than I thought.” She sighed. “Why do problems always come in bunches?”
“Did she do that to your hand, somehow?”
That was a question she didn’t want to answer directly. “I won’t be able to go with you, because she knows me now.” Also, she thought but didn’t say, because if this is what Walnut thinks it is, the rest will need me here to play Mother Courage. “But we have to have her. It’s more important than ever.”
“Because?”
“If she’s had the measles, she’ll have the rube immunity to catching it again. That might make her steam useful in all sorts of ways.”
“The kids get vaccinated against all that crap now,” Crow said.
Rose nodded. “That could work, too.”
Grampa Flick once more began to cycle. It was hard to watch, but Rose made herself to do it. When she could no longer see the old fellow’s organs through his fragile skin, she looked at Crow and held up her bruised and scraped hand.
“Also . . . she needs to be taught a lesson.”
2
When Dan woke up in his turret room on Monday, the schedule had once more been wiped from his blackboard and replaced with a message from Abra. At the top was a smiley-face. All the teeth were showing, which gave it a gleeful look.