corrosive. It’d rot your stove to crud inside twelve months. But it’s great for industrial use. What they did was bore down into the orimulsion pocket, then simply build the power plant over the top of it. That gas is good for twenty years yet.” The bug buzzed back and his damn fluttery fingers jerked up. He was steering with one hand now, and boy, those shakes. The car started flipping side-to-side on the street. A couple of kids on bicycles were pedaling the other way. “The Caucus… that’s the committee that governs Sullivan… they ruled that in order to eke out the orimulsion stock we shouldn’t squander electricity, so…” He tried flicking the insect from his face, only those trembling fingers were going all over the place. He even knocked the rearview mirror. And, Christ, those kids. They were going to be road meat in ten seconds flat. I flicked the bug against the windshield, where I crushed it under my knuckle.
“Good shot,” he said, then carried on, happily talking about what a brilliant job his hometown was making of what must have been the biggest disaster this side of Noah’s flood. “So they decided to ration electricity to six hours a day, running from six in the evening until midnight. You see, dark evenings are bad for morale, so if we keep the power going for lighting and home entertainment people can watch movies on tape and disk and so on.”
At last his trembling finger hit the play button. At that moment electric guitar sounds soared from the speakers. A driving bass pumped loud enough to shake the car.
“Hendrix!” He nodded to the rhythm as he drove. “This is gold.. . pure gold.”
We drove out of town and past fields where cows chewed their cud. He waved to a woman walking her dog. A rat-sized thing on the end of a leash that wore a tartan coat.
“That’s Miss Bertholly. She’s a big cheese on the Caucus.” He looked at me. “She’s a real iceberg in pants; don’t let her order you ’round.”
Then he flashed me a wide friendly grin. Something gave way inside me. I don’t know what. Because for the last few days I’d been wearing a face engraved out of granite, or as good as. I’d not cracked a single smile since I’d buried my sister and mom out on the bluff. Suddenly I felt this big object moving through me and didn’t know what the hell it was. Then it came out, and I was making this weird braying sound.
Jesus. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror that Ben’s jerky hand had knocked to face me. There I was with my black hair sticking up in wild spikes, my dark eyes glistening, and I realized I was laughing. It wasn’t as if Ben had said the wittiest line in the world. But it uncorked a hell of a lot of emotion pent up inside me. Now I was laughing so hard I thought my guts would rip out through my skin.
Ben looked at me with a grin. Before you knew it, he was laughing, too.
So roaring like a pair of madmen we cruised around the island that wasn’t really an island, while all the time Hendrix’s guitar blazed from the speakers like the cosmos itself had found its own voice and begun to sing.
After that I’d go out for a beer or two with Ben, or we’d hang out with a few like-minded souls.
Ben had one of these brains that people describe as lively and inquiring. He’d been hot as biology student. For months he speculated about the real cause of the “disease” that infected the bread bandits.
Often he’d air his ideas as I made my daily round, using a hook on the end of a twenty-foot pole to haul driftwood from the lake. I’d leave it there on the shore in piles, then either me or old Mr. Locksley would roll up in the truck and haul it back to my cabin, where I’d cut it up for firewood.
“Greg,” Ben once said to me, “you know that scientists never did find bacteria or a virus that could be attributed to the disease?”
“What?” I said, half listening as I hauled branches out of the water. “You mean old Jumpy?”
“Jumpy.” He grinned. “That’s it, give a terrible disease a comical name and it doesn’t seem half so bad, does it?”
“Well, Jumpy seemed to sum it up well enough. Once those bread bandits had a full-blown case they nearly jumped out of their skin. They got so they were terrified of their own shadows.”
“Sure, the disease was named. Officially it was Gantose Syndrome, then it became corrupted to Jumpy. But they don’t know what caused it, or what it actually is, never mind the question of how it could be cured.”
“Does it matter now? No… it’s OK, Ben. I’ll pull it out of the water.” Good-natured Ben would sometimes try and help, but his hands would shake so much he’d shake the wet wood and spray water into our faces. He was good company, though, when I was out fishing for wood, so I always encouraged him to walk with me ’round the shoreline.
And so he’d tell me his latest theory. “If you ask me, Greg, even if Jumpy is a disease it’s not caused by bacteria or a virus.”
“It has to be one or the other, Ben. Even I know that you don’t get sick without some kind of infection.”
“That’s not true. Your body can be invaded by something called a prion.”
“A prion. What the hell’s that when it’s at home?”
“A prion can’t even be described as being alive as such. Usually it’s referred to as an agent, but it seems to be capable of reproduction. What’s more, it’s far smaller than a virus. Even worse, it’s virtually indestructible and can’t be destroyed by heat. Prions have been transmitted using scalpels that have been sterilized.”
“Then why haven’t these prions killed everyone off in the past?”
“Because the diseases they cause are rare. And prions tend not to be harmful as a rule. We’ve all got them swimming about inside us, but as I said, they’re rarely dangerous. They just lie dormant all our lives.”
“What’s the problem then? Don’t we all have benign bugs inside us?”
“That’s true. Normally prions don’t bother us. But if they do turn nasty…”
“I could see that big BUT coming.”
“But if they do turn nasty,” he said, getting enthusiastic again, “they produce a substance called amyloid, which always forms in brain tissue, not in any other part of the body.”
“Ah.” I saw where he was going with this. “If it attacks the brain, then it’s going to affect behavior.”
“Bull’s eye. And prions are transmissible.”
“You mean that these prions may be responsible for Jumpy?”
“I do. And that it caused millions of people in South America to act in such a bizarre and unusual way.”
“But simultaneously?”
“Some diseases spread fast. You’ve ridden a bus in winter when half the passengers are sneezing and coughing.”
“Have prion diseases spread as fast as this before?”
“Not to anyone’s knowledge.” He gave a grim smile. “A tad worrying, isn’t it?”
We talked on the beach as I collected wood that lake currents delivered to us with all the regularity of the old-time mailman. That had been my job of work for the last few months. For that I lived rent-free and took a weekly wage. Dollar bills in the outside world might only be good for starting campfires, but here in Sullivan they were still legal tender.
Never going out farther than their statutory two hundred yards were half a dozen rowboats, each with two or maybe three guys fishing. They’d never go beyond the orange buoys that marked the two-hundred-yard boundary offshore. If you ask me, they’d die of a heart attack if you even suggested they fire up the outboard motors and ride the four miles or so across the lake to Lewis, which now sat there like a crusty black scab. Those old guys’d tell you they didn’t believe in ghosts. But get this: They were still scared of them.
Fish jumped from the shallows. Birds sang in the woods. The sun climbed toward midday. The temperature soared with it, too.
“It’s getting too hot to do this much longer,” I told Ben.
He smiled. “Well, I know a place where we can find some cold beers.”
“Show me that place, Ben.” I grinned. “It sounds like a good place to be.”
Ben reached down into the water’s edge to grab a hefty branch that divided itself off into a mass of twigs.
“Leave it,” I told him. “We’ve got enough for today.”
“Kindling,” he panted as he hauled it in. It must have been heavier than it looked. “It’ll make good kindling.”
I laid the hooked pole down onto the beach, ready to give him a hand, when he let out this cry of shock.
“What’s wrong?” I saw that he was staring into the mass of twigs. His eyes had turned big and round in his face. His body had fixed into the same position, as if he couldn’t bring himself to move.
“Oh, my God…” he gasped, then lost his balance to fall back onto his butt on the shingle.
“Ben?” I bent down to look into the tangle of sticks that still dripped water. “What’s the matter, it’s only a
