“Honey, I don’t know, but I can’t talk anymore, I think I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Suzy.” And then, incredibly, she hung up. Suzy tried ringing again, but there was no answer and finally, on the third attempt, not even a ringing sound.
She was about to open the phone book and begin dialing at random, but she thought better of it and returned to the kitchen. She might be able to do something-keep them cool, or warm, or bring whatever medicine was in the house.
Her mother looked thinner. The ridges seemed to have collapsed on her face and arms. Suzy reached out to touch her mother’s face, hesitated, then forced herself. The skin was warm and dry, not feverish, normal enough except for its appearance. Her mother’s eyes opened.
“Oh, Mother,” Suzy sobbed. “What’s happening?”
“Well,” her mother said, tongue licking at her lips, “it’s quite beautiful, actually. You’re all right, aren’t you? Oh, Suzy.” And then she shut her eyes and said no more. Suzy turned to Howard sitting in the chair. She touched him on the arm and jumped back as the skin seemed to deflate. Only then did she notice the network of root-like tubes extending from the cuffs of his jeans, vanishing into the crevice between the floor and the wall.
More roots stretched from Kenneth’s paste-colored arms into the pantry. And behind her mother, reaching over her skirt and into the cabinet beneath the sink, was a single thick pipe of pale flesh. Suzy thought wildly for a moment of horror movies and makeup and maybe they were shooting a movie and hadn’t told her. She bent closer to peer behind her mother. She was no expert, but the pipe of flesh wasn’t makeup. She could see blood pulsing in it.
Suzy climbed slowly back up the stairs to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, braiding and unbraiding her long blond hair with her fingers, then lay back and stared at the very old silvery linoleum on the ceiling. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now,” she said. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now.”
And so on, into the afternoon, when thirst drove her to the bathroom for a drink. Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her. She stood by the banister, still in her sky-blue robe, and began to make plans. She wasn’t sick—not yet—and she certainly wasn’t dead.
So there had to be something to do, someplace to go.
And still, in the back of her mind, she hoped that perhaps in the way she opened a door, or on some path she might follow through the streets, she could find her way back to the old world. She didn’t think it was likely, but anything was worth the chance.
There were some tough decisions to be made. What good was all her education and special training if she couldn’t think for herself and make tough decisions? She did not want to go into the kitchen any more than she had to, but food was in the kitchen. She could try entering other houses, or even the grocery store at the end of the block, but she suspected there would be other bodies there.
At least these bodies—alive or dead—were her relatives.
She entered the kitchen with her head held high. Gradually, as she went from cabinet to cabinet and then to the refrigerator, her eyes lowered. The bodies had collapsed even further; Kenneth seemed little more than a filament-covered white patch in wrinkled clothes. The fleshy roots into the pantry had gone straight for the plumbing, climbing up into the small sink and into the water tap, as well as down the drain. At any minute she expected something to reach out and grab her—or for Howard or her mother to turn into lurching zombies—and she gritted her teeth until her jaws ached, but none of them moved. They no longer looked like they could move.
She emerged with a box full of all the canned goods she thought she would need for the next few days—and the can opener, which she had almost forgotten.
It was dusk by the time she thought to turn on the radio. They hadn’t had a television since the last set broke beyond repair its hulk sat in the foyer under the stairs, gathering dust behind boxes of old magazines. She pulled out the multiband portable her mother kept for emergencies and methodically searched the dials. She had once play-acted at being a ham radio operator, but of course the portable couldn’t send anything.
Not a single station played on AM or FM. She picked up signals on the short wave bands—some very dear— but none in English.
The room was rapidly darkening now. She agonized before trying to switch on the lights. If everybody was sick, would there still
When the shadows had filled the living room and there was no avoiding the dilemma—either sit in the dark, or find out whether she would
The light came on, strong and steady.
This broke a very weak dam in her, and she began to mourn. She rocked back and forth on her curled-up legs on the couch and keened like someone demented, her face wet, hands braiding and unbralding her hair and using it to dry her face until it hung in damp strips down to her collarbone. With the single light casting a golden crescent over her face, she wept until her throat ached and she could barely keep her eyes open.
Without eating, she went upstairs, switching on all the lights—each steady glow a miracle—and crawled into her bed, where she could not sleep, imagining she heard someone coming up the stairs, or walking down the hall toward her door.
The night lasted an eternity, and in that time Suzy became a little more mature, or a little crazier, she couldn’t decide which. Some things no longer mattered much. She was quite willing, for example, to forego her past life and find a new way to live. She made this concession in the hopes that whatever was in charge would simply allow the lights to keep burning.
By dawn she was a physical wreck-exhausted, hungry but unwilling to eat, her whole body tense and wrung out from terror and watchfulness. She drank from the bathroom tap again…and suddenly thought of the roots leading into the plumbing. Retching, Suzy sat down on the toilet and watched the water pour clean and clear from the tap. Thirst finally compelled her to take the chance and drink more, but she vowed to lay in a supply of bottled water.
She prepared a cold meal of green beans and corned beef hash in the living room, and was hungry enough to throw in a can of plums in heavy syrup for good measure. The cans stood in a row on the battered coffee table. She sipped the last of the plum syrup; nothing had ever tasted so good.
She returned to her bedroom and lay down, and this time slept for five hours, until awakened by a noise. Something heavy had fallen within the house. Cautiously, she descended the stairs and looked around the foyer and living room.
“Not the kitchen,” she said, and knew immediately that was where the sound had come from. She opened the swinging door slowly. Her mother’s clothes—but not her mother—lay in a pile before the sink. Suzy entered and looked at where Kenneth had been in the pantry. Clothes, but nothing else. She turned.
Howard’s jeans hung from the seat of the stool, which had toppled to one side. A glistening pale brown sheet hung down along the whole wall, neatly edged into the cornices, protruding slightly where it covered a framed print.
She took the mop from the opposite corner, behind the refrigerator, and stepped forward with the handle pointing at the sheet. I’m being incredibly brave, she thought. She poked the sheet gently at first they drove the broom clear through it into the lath and plaster beyond. The sheet quivered but did not otherwise react. “You!” she screamed. She swung the handle back and forth over the sheet, shredding it from corner to corner. “You!”
When most of the shreds had fallen to the floor and the wall was covered with holes, she dropped the broom and fled the kitchen.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon, the ship’s clock said. She regained her breath and then went around the house, turning off the lights. The miraculous energy might last longer if she didn’t use it up immediately.
Suzy then took an address book from beneath the phone in the foyer and made a list of her supplies, and what she would need. There was at least five more hours of daylight, or light enough to see by. She put on her coat and left the snow porch door open behind her.
Down the street, lined with the same parked cars, to the corner, to the grocery, without purse or money, wearing her coat over her pajamas and sky-blue robe; out into the upside-down outside world to see what there was to see. She even felt vaguely cheerful. The wind was blowing fall-cool and a few leaves rattled along the pavement from the trees spaced every few houses. Vines crawled along the wrought-iron fencing between the steps, and flowerpots sat on ledges before the first floor windows.
