Plague

couldn’t find any.”
    “Are you retarded? There’s a quarantine on. No one is supposed to be outside.”
    He had hoped for a little smile. He detected no smile. Instead he smelled alcohol on her breath. Although she didn’t seem drunk, her words weren’t slurred, and her eyes focused the full intensity of her incredulity quite effectively.
    “May I come in?” Sanjit asked.
    “In?” Lana echoed. “Here?”
    “Yes. May I come in?”
    Lana blinked.
    “Okay,” she said, and her eyebrows shot up like she was amazed the word had come out of her mouth. She stepped back and Sanjit stepped through.
    The room had once been a sterile, anonymous hotel room.
    It still was. Lana had hung no pictures, collected no precious possessions. No stuffed animals lay on the bed. The room was filthy, of course, but so was just about every room in Perdido Beach.
    It smelled of cigarette butts, whiskey, and dog. A huge shotgun leaned against one wall. Patrick seemed almost as agitated as his owner. Neither Lana nor Patrick was used to receiving guests.
    There was a small Sammy sun in the closet so that when the closet door was left open there would be light, and when closed less light.
    Sanjit crossed to the glass door. “Great view.”
    “What do you want?”
    “I want to get to know you,” Sanjit said.
    “Why?”
    “You’re interesting.”
    “Yeah,” Lana said. “But not in any way you’re going to like.”
    Sanjit sat down on the desk chair. He laid the flowers on the hutch next to the TV set. He noticed a scratch from a thorn. It was bleeding a little, no big deal.
    “No,” Lana said, “I’m not going to heal your scratch.”
    “Good,” Sanjit said.
    “Good? Why good?”
    “Because when you hold my hand, I don’t want it to be work for you.”
    “Hand holding?” Lana barked out a laugh. “That’s what you want? Hand holding?”
    “Well, we would work up to that. If we like each other.”
    “We don’t.”
    Sanjit smiled. “You seem awfully sure of that.”
    “I know me, and I’ve met you,” Lana said. She sighed. “Okay, look, I get it. You’re one of those people who thinks they have to help screwed-up people. Or maybe you’re attracted to dangerous, unbalanced people. But listen up: I’m not Edward and you’re not Bella.”
    “I don’t understand what that means,” Sanjit said.
    “You’re not going to get some kind of contact cool off me, okay? You’re a normal kid, I’m a crazy freak, it’s not really the basis for true love.”
    “Oh. You think I’m normal.”
    “Your mom and dad are movie stars.”
    “My mom was a teenage prostitute who died of pneumonia after a bout of hepatitis. My father was any one of maybe a thousand guys. If you know what I’m saying.” Sanjit made a fake perky smile. “Up until I was adopted half of everything I ever ate was stolen, and the other half came from some charity.” He let this sink in for a moment. “Oh, and see this?” He opened his mouth and pointed to a gap where two molars should have been. “Got beaten up really bad by a pimp who wanted to sell me to some old dude from Germany.”
    Lana glared at him. Sanjit met her gaze and refused to look away.
    Finally, she said, “Okay. You want to talk, okay. I’ll talk, then you get it through your head and you leave.” Lana lit a new cigarette, puffed it, and looked at him through the smoke. “I went up there to kill it. The gaiaphage. I drove a tank of propane up there, let it flow into the mine shaft, and all I had to do was light a match. The coyotes came after me. I shot them. I still could have set off the explosion, but I didn’t. Is that the story you want?”
    “Is that the story you want to tell?”
    “It was inside my head. I couldn’t kill it. Instead it made me crawl to it. Hands and knees. Like a worm. I gave myself to it. I became part of it.”
    Sanjit nodded because he felt like he should.
    “It made me shoot Edilio. Bang.” She pantomimed it.
    “He survived.”
    “Sam and Caine knocked the gaiaphage pretty hard. I was freed.”
    “And you saved Edilio. But you don’t want to talk about that, right?”
    “You know, it’s not a big wonderful thing when you save someone you just shot.”
    “You didn’t shoot him, this monster did. You cured him. That was you.”
    Lana’s eyes were so penetrating he almost couldn’t meet her gaze. But he held steady. She was looking for weakness in him. Or maybe she expected disgust.
    “You went up there on your own to