Flashback to how Sadie experienced the outbreak of wildfire.
WARNINGS: violence, angst, gore, no Carl in this chapter
25.06.2010, Atlanta, Georgia
Sadie looked at her plate in disgust. Fish, mashed potatoes and broccoli, it really couldn't get any worse. "When are you driving me to the riding stables?
“When you've finished eating,” her mother replied distractedly. She was engrossed in a fashion magazine.
Sadie rebelliously slammed the cutlery on the table. “But I don't like it!” she moaned.
“Will you be quiet,” Debra Baron chided her younger daughter. “Laurie's asleep. She still has a fever.”
As if Laurie, in her room at the other end of the huge ranch-style house, would notice what was going on in the kitchen. Sadie wrinkled her nose. In any case, for the past few days everything had revolved around Laurie, who had been attacked last weekend in a dark alley not far from the club where she had been partying. She had arrived home around two o'clock in the morning, crying and holding her bleeding shoulder. “But what happened?” Debra Baron had asked in dismay, imagining the worst possible scenarios. Sadie had woken up from the noise and crept to the stairs to listen.
“I was waiting for my cab outside Gironimo's,” Laurie sniffed in shock. “And suddenly this... this guy came staggering out of an alley, and he grabbed me, and he just bit me,” she wailed hysterically. “Just like that! I... I think he was sick,” she continued. “He looked like that. And he stank terribly, like rotten meat.” Her mother had pushed aside the thin, black blouse fabric, and Sadie - peering through the banister - could see a nasty bite mark.
“We should go to the hospital,” muttered her father, who probably didn't know what to make of it. “It needs to be disinfected and treated, and you should get a tetanus shot too.”
Following this event, however, Laurie's condition steadily deteriorated, the margins of the wound became inflamed and a fever set in. The family's GP prescribed an antibiotic, but saw no need for further action. This morning, the area around the wound had turned gray-green, it had looked disgusting, like decay, and Laurie's fever continued. Debra thought about calling the doctor again. “Sadie, please eat up,” she ordered sharply. “I didn't do this for nothing...” A barbaric scream shattered the silence of the house, and they both flinched. Laurie. “You stay here,” Debra ordered, rising to check on Laurie; she didn't notice Sadie sneaking up behind her. She opened the door to Laurie's room and registered the foul odor; the hairs on the back of her neck stood up, an atavistic instinct telling her to immediately lock that door from the outside and flee, but Debra was a privileged twenty-first century housewife whose attention bounced back and forth between preparing healthy meals, her appearance, the pony club, the next tennis match with her friends, hatha yoga and family life; she had completely forgotten how to listen to primal instincts and gut feelings. So she entered the room and approached the bed, leaving Sadie standing on the threshold. “Honey, Laurie, what is it?” she asked softly, flipping back the covers. “Jesus, you're burning up like a chimney, I have to...” She shrieked shrilly as Laurie's teeth dug into her left hand without warning.
Sadie in the hallway also screamed in horror and watched as her mother struggled to free herself from her sister's grasp and rushed towards the door; Laurie staggered after her, her face contorted into a grimace, and somehow it wasn't really Laurie anymore, but somehow it still was. Debra wrenched the key from the lock, slammed the door shut and locked it. Laurie threw herself against the thin white wood from the inside, raging and making inhuman noises. Debra and Sadie looked at each other in fear, Debra's hand was bleeding and the blood stained the carpet in a crazy pattern. “Can she come out, Mum?” Sadie asked in a thin, frightened voice.
“No,” Debra replied, hoping she was right, the wood bulging slightly outwards under Laurie's fury. She was at a loss and couldn't make sense of the situation, perhaps Laurie was suffering from some kind of psychosis. “I'll call your father.”
The look on her mother's face during the following phone call scared the hell out of Sadie, Debra's eyes widened fearfully and she stammered more than she spoke. “A plague? What kind of plague, Tom?” Realizing that Sadie was watching her intently, she tried to put on a good face. “Pack. I... I understand,” she then said tonelessly, her mouth set in stone. “Come on, let's get our suitcases,” she then announced with feigned cheerfulness, clapping her hands so that a few drops of blood were splattered. “We're going on a trip!”
“But what about Laurie? And the school? And the pony club?” grumbled Sadie, who was completely confused. “And my birthday party is on Saturday!” She stomped her foot indignantly.
Debra ignored the protest. “Now be a good girl and get things together for two weeks,” she babbled frantically and went up to the attic to get the suitcases. “We'll celebrate your birthday when we get back,” she promised. ”The party's just on hold, okay?”
It wasn't okay. Nothing was okay, as the terrible noises coming from Laurie's room made clear. Sadie preferred to comply and mechanically began to take underwear, socks, shirts and pants out of the cupboards and pile them up. It wasn't long before her father came home and she heard her parents discussing quietly in the hallway. Her mother cried and then her father disappeared into the master bedroom. When he came out again, Sadie was standing in front of him. “What do you want with that?” she asked accusingly, pointing at the gun in Tom Baron's hand. The gun looked strangely out of place there; Tom Baron was a stockbroker, not a contract killer, and he only had the Glock to defend himself and his family against burglars in an emergency. You never knew when the state-of-the-art alarm system might fail.
“Go back to your room, Princess,” Tom's voice sounded foreign and pressed. “And close the door.” Sadie did as she was told at first, but stubborn as she was, she immediately opened the door a crack again so as not to miss anything. She saw her father enter Laurie's room, then two shots rang out in quick succession and Tom Baron came out again, pale as death. Sadie couldn't speak, she was so confused. Debra was crouched next to the bathroom, crying and holding her injured hand. “We have to clean the wound,” Tom said grimly. “We won't be able to get away tonight, the highway is closed, everyone's just leaving town... But first thing in the morning. We can already load the car.”
Sadie wasn't stupid, she was more than aware that something was wrong, completely wrong, her parents were restlessly rushing through the house, gathering stuff that ended up in suitcases and bags in disarray. The fluorescent lights in the garage flickered, her father loaded heaps of tins of canned food into the trunk of the Lexus, despite her mother's strict condemnation of any kind of convenience food. “Dad, what about Daisy and Tornado?” Sadie thought anxiously about her two ponies. “What about Squibbles?” Squibbles was her cat.
Tom Baron gave his daughter a harried look. His tailored shirt had sweat stains under the armpits. “Where's Squibbles?”
“I don't know. Outside? I'll go and find him,” Sadie offered uncertainly, but her father grabbed her arm unusually firmly. “Ouch!”
“You're not going outside,” Tom ordered her. “If the cat's outside, there's nothing we can do for him. Otherwise, put him in the carrier.” Sadie searched the whole house for Squibbles, but she couldn't find the cat anywhere, and her tears began to flow. Her father just seemed to want to leave him behind. And he hadn't said a word about the ponies. She sobbed and found herself in her parents' bathroom, rummaging around in the medicine cabinet, taking a Valium from the tube labeled with her mother's name and swallowing it with tap water. Following an impulse, she put the tube in her trouser pocket.
The pills were Sadie's top secret, not even Victoria, her best friend, knew about them. They often helped her to block out her parents' evening bickering and she liked the soft absorbent cotton cloud on which the Valium transported her. Even now, the medication was doing its job and Sadie lay dozing on her bed, headphones in her ear. At some point, however, despite the Valium fog, she was suddenly overcome by a queasy feeling and switched off the music. Absolute silence. It was strange, given the hustle and bustle her parents had been in just a few hours ago, and she straightened up and slipped into her sneakers. They were probably busy in the garage with the car. Her father had been looking for road maps earlier.
Well, Sadie would go out and look for Squibbles now, whether she was allowed to or not, and she would find him. She wouldn't let him be left behind. She could leave the house through the back door in the kitchen; her parents wouldn't even notice. Quietly, she stalked down the stairs after putting on a hoodie. She tiptoed along the downstairs hallway, turned the corner to the kitchen - and froze. Her brain couldn't grasp what her eyes were seeing, it was too gruesome, so it only fed in fragmented images, like a shaky slideshow.
The kitchen cupboards, the fridge, the floor, Squibbles' feeding place, everything was smeared with a red substance. Blood, Sadie realized. The sight of the kibbles soaked in blood and swollen with it would be etched in her memory forever.
Her father was lying on his back on the floor, his eyes staring up at the ceiling, lifeless and broken. His stomach was torn open. Next to the corpse, her mother crawled around like a nightmare, her face completely covered in blood, and she dug around in her husband's intestines, greedily stuffing them into her mouth. Sadie stood staring dumbly, frozen in place, her infantile psyche on the verge of fainting to protect her from the unspeakable things happening in front of her.
Then Debra Baron emitted an animalistic snarl and lunged towards her daughter like a predator, grabbing at Sadie with fingers clutching scraps of fabric.
The stupor broke just in time, Sadie screamed piercingly, and then she turned and ran for her life. At first she wanted to run up the stairs, but at the last moment she changed her mind - she would be trapped upstairs. Instead, she made her way to the garage, down the back hallway, past the utility room, her mother hot on her heels. Or rather, the thing that had once been her mother.
She tried to close the middle door, severing one of Debra's fingers in the process, but Debra was too strong, she banged into the door, Sadie got a shove and fell, bruising her left elbow on the car. She screamed in pain as her arm went numb for a moment, but she rolled over and got back to her feet immediately. Her mother's teeth snapped into the air above her, and she crawled under the Lexus, sobbing. It smelled of oil and gasoline, and still the fluorescent lights flickered unimpressed, as if Sadie's life hadn't suddenly turned to sheer horror.
Debra stumbled around, growling, obviously not quite understanding where Sadie had gone. She waited until she saw her mother's feet staggering around the workbench, then scrambled out the other side - where the opening mechanism for the garage door was. Sadie frantically hammered on the switch, but once again the electronics didn't work; there was a crank, but she couldn't reach it, it was too small. Her mother attacked her mercilessly, teeth bared, chin bloodied, eyes white, and at the very last moment Sadie's eyes fell on Squibbles' cat flap set into the bottom right corner of the garage door. She dropped to her hands and knees, pushed the plexiglass away and crawled through the small opening, painfully scraping both of her hips. Sadie was lucky that she was small and slender for her age, much more petite than her classmates.
The asphalt of the driveway was sun-warmed under her hands, and she almost made it when her mother's hand closed around her left ankle. Sadie could already feel Debra's breath on her skin, and something inside her knew that if she was bitten, she was just as doomed. With all her strength, she kicked out backwards, right into her mother's face, felt her grip loosen, and finally managed to free her leg.
She was quick-witted enough to push a bucket of flowers in front of the cat flap so that the cat wouldn't return to this home, which was no longer a home and would never be one again.
