With the machete raised in her right hand, she pulled on the end of a strip, drawing it away from the mound in a long trail that revealed...
...nothing.
She dragged away a second strip then-stopping when it revealed a man's hairy arm.
Glory knew that arm. She also knew the hand it was connected to. Knew them both intimately.
She could not believe what she was seeing.
With the machete raised in front of her, she pulled away another length of insulation.
His shirt. One of the short-sleeved button-ups he favored, even in winter. Hermann was a vain man, proud of his hairy arms. His wristwatch and wedding ring were gone.
Glory stood riveted by the sight, melting with dread. Still, she had to see. She reached for another strip which, when drawn away, made most of the rest of the insulation slide off to the floor.
Her dead husband, Hermann, lay asleep in her attic. On a bed of shredded pink fiberglass, fully dressed except for his feet, which were filthy, as though from walking.
She could not process this shock. She could not deal with it. The husband she had thought she was rid of. The tyrant. The batterer. The ra**st.
She stood over his sleeping body, the machete a sword of Damocles, ready to fall if he offered the slightest move.
Then, by degrees, she lowered her arm, the machete blade coming to rest at her side. He was a ghost now, she realized. A man returned from the dead, a presence, meaning to haunt her forever. She would never be free of him.
As she was thinking this, Hermann opened his eyes.
The lids rose on his eyeballs, staring straight up.
Glory froze. She wanted to run and she wanted to scream and she could do neither.
Hermann's head rotated until his staring eyes fixed on her. That same taunting look, as always. That sneer. The look that always preceded the bad things.
And then something clicked inside her head.
A t that same moment, four houses down the street, three-year-old Lucy Needham stood in her driveway feeding a doll named Baby Dear from a snack-size bag of Cheez-Its. Lucy stopped munching the loud crackers, and instead listened to the muffled screams and hard, chopping thwacks coming from...somewhere nearby. She looked up at her own house, then north, her nose scrunched up toward her eyes in innocent confusion. She stood very still, an orange tongue of half-chewed, cheese-baked crackers sticking out of her open mouth, listening to some of the strangest noises she had ever heard. She was going to tell Daddy when he came back outside with the telephone, but by then her bag of Cheez-Its had spilled and she was squatting and eating them off the driveway, and after getting yelled at she forgot the whole thing.
Glory stood there gasping in her attic, retching, the machete gripped in both hands. Hermann lay in pieces among the sticky pink insulation, the attic wall splattered in dripping white.
White?
Glory trembled, soul sick. She surveyed the damage she had done. Twice, the blade had become lodged in the wood joist, and in her mind it was Hermann trying to wrench the machete away from her, and she'd had to rock it back and forth violently to get it free again and keep swinging at his flesh.
She backed away one step. She was experiencing an out-of-body sensation. It was shocking what she had done.
Hermann's sneering head had rolled off between two joists, facedown now, a fluffy pinch of pink fiberglass stuck to his cheek like cotton candy. His torso was gouged and gored, his thighs sliced to the femur, his groin bubbling up white.
White?
She felt something poking her slipper, tap-tap-tap. She saw blood there-red blood-and realized she had nicked herself somehow, her left arm, though she felt no pain. She raised it for inspection, dripping fat, red plops onto the plywood.
White?
She saw something dark and small, slithering. She was bleary-eyed and blinking, still in the grip of a homicidal rage. She couldn't trust her sight.
She felt an itch on her ankle, underneath her bloody slipper. The itch crawled up her leg and she swatted at her thigh with the flat side of the sticky white blade.
Then-another tickle on the front of her other leg. And-separately-her waist. She realized she was having some sort of hysterical reaction, as if bugs were attacking her. She stumbled back another step, and almost tumbled off the plywood walkway.
There was then a most unnerving wriggling sensation around her crotch-and then a sudden, twisting discomfort in her rectum. An intrusive slithering that made her jump and clench her bu**ocks, as though she were about to soil herself. Her sphincter dilated and she stood that way for a long moment, paralyzed, until the feeling started to fade. She allowed herself to unclench, to relax. She needed to get to a bathroom. Another wriggle distracted her, inside her blouse sleeve now. And she felt a burning itch over the cut in her arm.
Then a wrenching pain, from deep within her bowels, doubled her over fast. The machete fell to the plywood and a scream that was a shriek of anguish and violation came out of Glory's mouth. She felt something rippling up her arm-beneath her flesh now, her skin crawling-and while her mouth was open and still screaming, another thin capillary worm slithered from behind her neck and across her jaw to her lip, darting inside the wall of her cheek, wriggling down the back of her throat.
Freeburg, New York
NIGHT WAS FAST approaching as Eph drove east, over the Cross Island Parkway, into Nassau County.
Eph said, "So you're telling me that the passengers from the city morgues, the ones the entire city is looking for-they all just went home?"
The old professor sat in the backseat with his hat on his lap. "Blood wants blood," he said. "Once turned, the revenants first seek out family and friends still uninfected. They return, by night, to those with whom they share an emotional attachment. Their 'Dear Ones.' Like a homing instinct, I suppose. The same animal impulse that guides lost dogs hundreds of miles back to their owners. As their higher brain function falls away, their animal nature takes over. These are creatures driven by urges. To feed. To hide. To nest."
"Returning to the people who are mourning them," said Nora, sitting next to Eph in the front passenger seat. "To attack and infect?"
"To feed. It is the nature of the undead to torment the living."
Eph exited the highway in silence. This vampire business was the mental equivalent of eating bad food: his mind refused to digest it. He chewed and chewed but could not get it down.
When Setrakian had asked him to pick a passenger from the list of Flight 753 victims, the first one who came to mind was the young girl Emma Gilbarton. The one he had found still holding hands with her mother in the airplane. It seemed a good test for Setrakian's hypothesis. How could an eleven-year-old dead girl journey at night from a Queens morgue all the way out to her family home in Freeburg?