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“That is just . . . horseshit!”
He flinched, and why not? She 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?”