by Keith Soares
I had a lot of time on my hands. Eventually, after three or four episodes with the cotton swab, two men rolled Todd out, and I stayed by myself. I started to feel sick, but in a more normal sense — sore throat, fever, aches and pains. It felt… old-fashioned. They’d obviously given me the flu by introducing Todd’s germs into my system. Marian kept me hydrated and regularly checked my vitals, marking them down on my chart.
I learned that it all started as an accident. Before there was The Oasis, when the first dozen or so people came to Hickory Knob State Park Lodge, looking for refuge, two of them were in the very beginning stages of the flu. The two men had been chicken farmers, and the common theory later on was that they’d contracted a strain of avian flu. As the others began to notice their symptoms, the group fractured. The majority wanted to send the two men away, fearing they were becoming zombies and would infect everyone. One person objected: Harvey. He was just one of the group then, not a leader, but he was just as forceful, just as brash, and wouldn’t let them condemn the others to die. He volunteered to take the sick men to a small building and take care of them. And that’s how he became the first processing nurse of the community that grew into The Oasis. Under Harvey’s care, the men got better in a few days. Then Harvey himself became ill, and the people who had railed against his plan said it was fate, that even if he had been able somehow to save the two men, now he himself would become a zombie. But he didn’t. Harvey’s wife, Anne, was one of the original members of the group and couldn’t just let him die, and so she entered the building and served as his nurse, caring for him until he got better. In a just over a week, when they felt certain it was over, Harvey opened the doors of the small building where he’d first taken the two chicken farmers and walked out, with the two men behind him. All three were well. The rest of the group was forced to readmit them, but remained wary. Anne contracted the flu and remained in quarantine, with Harvey nursing her to return the favor.
A few days later, there was trouble. Back then, The Oasis didn’t have any fortifications, just the lodge itself. And given its size, they hadn’t been able to check out the entire complex. With the flu outbreak seeming to have passed, they finally went through every room, closet, office, basement, and workroom in the lodge and the surrounding buildings. After going through most of the spaces with no problem, they became a little careless. They stumbled onto a group of zombies locked into a lodge room, and were overrun. Hearing the melee, Harvey ran to help and was bitten. Three others also became infected by bites and cuts — including one of the men Harvey had nursed through the flu — before the zombies were dispatched. In time, the group watched as all four began to show signs of the disease, and began making plans to execute them. And that’s when they saw that Harvey and the other man who’d just had the flu actually got better. As the two others continued to turn, Harvey got an idea.
He rushed the infected men to the small building and into the room with Anne. Others shouted that he was crazy, that he would kill his own wife. But he wiped mucus from Anne onto the two men, took them into another room, strapped them down, and waited.
They lived.
* * *
I asked Marian about Rosa all the time, and Marian told me she was having a rough time. The disease was already working its way through her by the time we got to The Oasis, and the processing was adding even more stress to her body. But Marian thought she would make it. During the time Rosa and I were being processed, during the deepest part of our illnesses, other new people were brought in and strapped to gurneys next to us, and they began their own processing, kicking and screaming. It was a cycle that couldn’t be broken, strung out in a chain all the way back to those first two men and their avian flu.
In a week, I was released. Rosa came out four days after that. And she was fine, with no signs of the disease. Somehow the flu had saved her.
So that was why The Oasis seemed so filthy. They didn’t care anymore about keeping every spot clean, of scouring every nook and corner. They just lived. A little dirt was okay when you knew you weren’t risking zombie infection.
Rosa became obsessed. She’d spent years trying to find any clue that might help eradicate the disease to no avail, and now here was clear evidence of a cure, right in front of her. She asked for as many details as she could from The Oasis’ processing team. Marian told her that they had to keep a live culture of the flu at all times or it wouldn’t work. They tried preserving it but didn’t really have any idea how to do that, which meant a constant cycle of people had to come into The Oasis and be processed. If there was any lull and no living person carried the flu to the next person, the chain would be broken and the cure would vanish forever. Rosa dove right into the middle of it, setting up a makeshift lab.
As far as I know, she only took one break that whole time, other than eating, going to the bathroom, and sleeping. She came and saw me. She looked nervous, which was uncharacteristic. “Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, trying to get her to look into my eyes.
She wouldn’t make eye contact, and for a time I thought she might turn and hurry back the lab. Then she put her hand in her pocket. “I just...” she stammered.
“What?” I said, as compassionately as I could. “Look, we’ve been through just about everything together. Whatever you have to say, just say it.” Finally she looked at me. When her hand came out of her pocket, it was holding something tightly.
“I just wanted to say thank you. And... I made you this.” She opened her hand. Inside, there was a thin, multi-colored twist of strings. She reached out, lifted my hand, and began to tie them like a band about my wrist. I looked down at her hands as she did it, and saw she still wore her colorful bracelet from her days in D.C. Where hers was made of bright synthetic fabric, mine used organic strings, cottons of various colors. I could only guess she collected them from around The Oasis. When she was finished, she pulled back a few inches to look. And we stood there, each with a colorful thin bracelet, different but still matching.
“I don’t know what to say... I —” She interrupted me by quickly leaning in and placing a short, delicate kiss on my lips. I felt nothing but an electric sensation of surprise. Just as quickly, she turned and rushed out, back to her lab.
* * *
Harvey was thrilled to have a true medical researcher in the group, and so he fully supported Rosa’s work. She was given access to anything and anyone she wanted. She took samples from everyone being processed. Eventually, she needed more equipment. Marian thought Augusta would be the answer — there were several hospital labs back there. The Oasis had scouting groups that routinely went out for supplies, so Harvey had Rosa make a list. She did, and even drew pictures of certain items. The scouts — a wiry young brunette with a long, braided ponytail named Janine, and a tall, muscled Korean kid named Hank — pored over her requests. Their reply: “No.”
“What do you mean, no?” Rosa asked.
“No offense, but, these drawings... they’re terrible.” Hank pointed down at Rosa’s sketches. “I wouldn’t trust us to get the right thing.”
Janine held out one of the pictures. “This round thing. Is this a plate? Or a ball?”
“It’s a Petri dish!” Rosa shouted, throwing up her hands. “I wrote Petri right next to it! As many as you can get.”
“Can’t read your writing,” Janine said with a grimace. “Sorry.”
Hank was holding one of the other sketches. “What is agar? And would any kind of microscope work?”
“It’s a solution for growing cultures... and.... Look. Never mind. I’ll go.” We all turned to Rosa, wide-eyed.
Harvey objected. “Now look, I know you’ve been out there, but you haven’t been a scout and you haven’t been to Augusta. Besides...” He stared at her with a serious look tinged with what seemed like... fear. “You’re our only hope to truly fix this. I can’t risk sending you.”
She thought about that. “No. You can’t risk not sending me. These two,” gesturing at Hank and Janine, “
will try their best, but they might fail. They’ll probably fail. Then what? I make some more sketches and send them again? That’s time wasted that we don’t have. If we miss this window, if the virus dies out now, we may never — the world may never — have this chance ever again.” She let the idea hang in the air like the fetid smell of a rotting corpse.
“Fine.” Harvey was a practical man, after all.
“Me, too,” I added.
Now it was time for the scouts to object. “What? Come on, but aren’t you a little...”
“Old? Yeah. But I go with Rosa.”
“He does,” she added.
In the end, they couldn’t object and still get what we all needed. So Rosa and I joined Janine and Hank on a mission to Augusta.
* * *
The next morning, we set out. Hank and Janine had a jeep fully outfitted for their scouting runs, but we had to take out some items to make room for us in the back seats. As we drove off, I looked at the boxes piled on the ground, and hoped we weren’t going to need anything we left behind.
“What’s in there?” I asked, gesturing back at the discarded boxes.
“Mostly grenades,” Janine shouted back as the car accelerated and wind whipped around us, muffling every other sound. Hank nodded to the two young men holding open the gate as we drove through, then raced along the twisty wooded roads, headed first east, then south, taking us through the coniferous woodlands down to US 378. From studying maps before we set out, we knew that our options here were to turn left toward McCormick or right to cross the bridge into Georgia. Hank turned left without a pause.
“After the outbreak, the bridges were pretty much the first thing the military took out, especially around the walled cities,” Janine said, pointing at the map. “The bridge here over the lake is still intact, but farther south we’d have to cross the reservoir on 47, and that bridge is long gone.”
We rolled into McCormick not long after that. Rosa and I were shocked by what we saw.
“Did a tornado go through here or something?” Rosa asked. “Why is this town... flat?”
As Hank steered into town, he pointed to an abandoned bulldozer. “Harvey’s orders. See that bulldozer? We used that and a couple other ones to tear everything down. McCormick isn’t much, but it’s the closest town to camp and we saw zombies in the area. Harvey thought it would be safest to just run the place into the ground, so there was nowhere for them to hide.” Hank turned right onto Mine Street, aiming south again. A few blocks along, I looked across a wide parking lot off to the left. It looked like it used to hold something big, like a supermarket or one of those big-box stores. The building was flat, like everything else. I turned back toward the road... and stopped, whipping my head back to the left.
“Something moved,” I said.
Hank continued driving. “What? A deer? Got a lot of those out —”
“It’s a person,” I said. I could see a man standing just off the parking lot in the scrub brush. He wasn’t moving, but something about him was off. “Looks infected.”
“No way,” Hank said, slowing the jeep and following my gaze. “We cleared this place out.”
“Couldn’t one of them just walk in from somewhere else?” Rosa asked.
Janine turned to look as well. “It’s possible, but we come through here a lot. We took everything the least bit valuable out of that supermarket before we knocked it down.” Hank turned the jeep back toward the parking lot. I had my eyes trained on the spot where I’d seen the zombie. Another one appeared. A woman, from what I could tell.
“There’re two now.”
“Shit.” Hank pulled into the lot, jumped out of the idling jeep. He grabbed a metal baseball bat jammed into a tube on the jeep that was probably originally meant for a fishing rod. “Where?” I pointed. Hank looked, saw the two zombies, began walking toward them. “Wait here,” he said without turning back to us.
We watched Hank approach them. As the zombies noticed him, first the man, then the woman, they became enraged. They rushed at him side by side. His first swing probably destroyed the left patella and lower femur of the woman, young and pale, with a rat’s nest of black hair. She gave an inhuman shriek and fell. Hank looked to finish her, but the other zombie — an older, pudgy bald man with dark skin that might have once been brown but was now a sort of gray — was already upon him. With an upward swing, Hank shattered the zombie’s jaw into his skull, killing him instantly. He fell in a lump. Beside Hank, the female zombie gnashed and flailed, reaching for him, pushing toward him with her good leg. Hank took a second to plan his attack. Deliberately, he swung hard into the left side of her head, and we heard a combination crack and pop. Her dead body dropped beside the other zombie.
As we continued to stare, Hank inspected the scene, then turned to walk back to the jeep. He made it three steps. “Behind you!” he yelled, pointing.
Rosa and I turned and ducked in a fear-induced reaction, looking toward the cemetery on the other side of the road. Janine was better trained. As she pivoted in the direction that Hank was pointing, she pulled out her handgun, saw a tall, skinny infected man rushing at us from between the grave markers, and fired. The first shot grazed his shoulder, and he kept at us like nothing happened. Janine fired again, hitting him in the throat, and he fell in a gurgling rage of blood, flipping his body left and right on the ground next to a pockmarked gravestone. Hank climbed into the jeep, got it moving. When we looked back, we saw another zombie shambling in our direction.
Hank turned to Janine. “Radio it in. I don’t know what the hell’s going on around here, but we need to re-sweep McCormick.” Janine picked up the CB.
After hearing what happened, Harvey made his decision. “You all keep going,” he said, his voice as sure as ever, even through the crackle of the radio. “We need that equipment. I’ll get some others out to McCormick to clean it up. Good luck.”
* * *
We took 221 south along the eastern side of the lake until finally, at the southern tip, we turned right and crossed over the dam. It was still in one piece, although from the dead quiet I’d say its hydroelectric generators must have ground to a halt years ago. We continued south and west through the woods until finally we connected with Interstate 20. That took us almost due east, into the western fringes of Augusta. Marian had told us to look around the hospital there, because there were several labs in the area. We found the first of them behind the hospital, off Wheeler Road, in a collection of small, evenly separated brick buildings with neat, long parking lots — the standard configuration for medical buildings before the outbreak.
“Which one?” Hank asked Rosa.
“How the hell should I know?” She shrugged. “Let’s try this one.” She pointed to a small, ornate, tan building with a sign out front that identified it as a medical lab.
Hank pulled up in front, turning the jeep back toward the road for the fastest getaway in case it was needed and we got out. The plan was for Janine to stick with the jeep. We each had a walkie-talkie that had been charged at The Oasis. They only had six total, so the four they handed out for this mission was a testament to the importance of what we were doing. We checked all four of them to be sure they were in working order. I grabbed a tire iron from the jeep, and Hank got his bat. At his side, he also had a pistol. Rosa refused to carry any sort of weapon, saying she wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. Then the three of us headed toward the door. The day was bright, and we could see into the building through a panorama of large broken windows. While the place was a complete mess, it seemed to be empty. I thought it must have been ransacked dozens of times, especially in the first year or two of the outbreak, and began to wonder how many labs we’d have to hit to get the supplies we needed. Hank peered in the open windows, then went to the front door. He tried the handle, and the door swung open easily. He looked back at us, maybe trying to reassure us, maybe gauging our mettle. Probably both. He must have been satisfied with what he saw; he went inside, and we followed, Rosa
in the middle and me bringing up the rear.
We passed through the destroyed atrium of the front lobby. A large corporate logo was half on the wall, half strewn across the floor in pieces. A desk of some dark wood sat topped with marble where a receptionist would have sat. Wires remained, but the computer that must have been on the desk was long gone. For a moment, although the space was larger and much more corporate, it reminded me of the waiting room at the office of my practice, and another lifetime of memories sprang up. Giving an amoxicillin prescription to a worried mother whose son was wheezing with a sinus infection, setting a broken tibia for a man who fell from the loading dock at his job, recommending an oncologist for an old woman who came to see me thinking she’d eaten something rotten. I realized I’d paused in the lobby as the others moved ahead, so I shook the cobwebs out of my head and continued after them.
Hank led the way through a door and down a hallway, but without the swagger he’d shown earlier. I could tell this wasn’t his bread and butter. He was unsure of himself, looking for things he didn’t really understand in a place he’d never seen before. As he moved away from the lobby, the light grew dim, so he turned on his flashlight. We each had one, plus a backpack to carry things out. Hank looked back at us. “In here?” he said, gesturing to a doorway.
“Try it,” Rosa said, nodding. Hank prepared himself, pushed open the door, holding his pistol forward and swinging his light through the space in an arc. The room was narrow, with counters on each side and rows of shelves above them. A small sink beset with some sort of mold was embedded into the countertop on one side. The room had been gone over, who knows how many times. There were supplies strewn everywhere, hanging from shelves, on the floor, many torn open. After a quick check, Hank let Rosa enter the small room. She looked around quickly with her own small flashlight, grabbing a few items, mostly for sanitation, and stuffed them into her backpack. In a couple of minutes, she turned back to us. “That’s all in here.”