by Anne Stone
Leaving the pool behind, Dany makes her way up the embankment and crosses the railway tracks. Before her, the busy artery, and beyond it, the old racetrack – home to a hospice and prison. Home to her aunt. Beyond the prison, barely visible in the smouldering dark, she can make out the dilapidated remains of a roller coaster, a bestial skeleton rising into the sky.
As Dany’s eyes adjust to the darkness, she places prison landmarks.
She can easily make out the gates. They’ve mounted a couple of powerful floodlights on a pickup truck – to light up the eighteen-wheeler, spilling out its human cargo. And there, around the truck, she glimpses the telltale orange of prison suits, in among the yellow plague jackets.
The rest of the camp is dark, but for a few low and flickering lights. It’s late. By now, most of the prisoners will be locked up for the night. Somewhere, at the back of the prison, they’ll be interred in a row of tin boxes.
Just past the track, she sees the squat building that once upon a time housed horses. Though, no, it hasn’t always been horses kept in there. Dany knows the history of the place, too. Knows what use it was put to during the war.
On this night, because of the power outage, the ones confined in the stalls will be without heat or light. She pictures them standing, shivering together, seeking out what small measure of warmth their bodies can share. She pictures stick-thin legs and waxen faces. Faces that echo earlier selves. People, she hears Jasper say. But it’s drowned out by Lizzie’s voice, muttering, I’m on fire.
She turns away from the past, forcing herself to take in the hospice before her. First, she finds the dark outline of a hill, the one she and her sister picnicked at. Though she can’t make out details, not from here, just outside the fence she’ll find the old maple tree, the one whose branches overarch the razor wire fence. And a few feet below those branches, on the other side of the fence, there is a chicken coop, with its stunned and ragged birds.
Looking to the hill, she sees them. Lazy, rising into the sky, a pair of smoke trails.
Somewhere, inside the dark compound of the prison-hospice, orange suits heft corpses onto a crematorium’s charger. And her aunt? She could be anywhere. Locked in one of those tin cans, unloading the truck, loading the charger. Here and there, on the prison grounds, her eyes pick out more orange suits, glimpsed as they pass by a low and flickering light.
It is only now that the utter scale of the prison hits Dany.
Her aunt could be anywhere. Anywhere.
What’s worse, already, she can hear them.
Even over the rush of traffic, she can hear them. Over the groans of trucks, under the rush of engines, the sound seeps up through all of the little gaps. It’s like the buzzing of an enormous beehive, the sound carried on the crystalline night air. Dany stands in darkness. There are the stars above her and everywhere, all around her, is the muttering of hundreds, maybe thousands of Lizzie Greenes.
And all of them whispering, I’m on fire.
| Chapter 0 = X + 22
Dany slips into a tunnel that leads under the highway.
The dank hollow smells of piss and tainted meat. So it’s not unoccupied, though she sees no sign of whoever lives in here. Still, in this tunnel, she can make the first part of her journey on foot, unseen.
On the other side, she makes her way to the hill where, only two days before, she and her sister picnicked. Finally, she stands at the base of the maple tree, the one whose branches crest over the razor wire.
Slowly, gripping the rough trunk, she climbs up. The scars on her arms, still sore from earlier this day, scream with pain as she grips the trunk. The bark is as rough as sandpaper, but she monkeys her way up, making her way out onto the overhanging branch. The maple has leaves as big as dishcloths. Dozens break off under her hands, fluttering to the ground below.
She is dangling over the prison fence when the branch she clings to dips, swings low – threatening to dump her onto the razor wire below.
Dany freezes. Becomes as still as stone. Doesn’t even dare to breath.
When the branch stills, she creeps forward again. One more inch. But the branch sways, amplifying her tiny movements to a degree that, she sees only now, is too great. The branch is too thin, too slight to bear her small frame.
Clinging to the see-saw branch, clasping that rough limb, all Dany knows is that Aunt Norah is her people, one of the only ones in her life who’s actually stuck around. After the fire, Norah was all that stood between her and a return to the horrors of the past.
Dany doesn’t know if it is love that has pushed her out onto this slim branch, the one that is swaying dangerously over the razor wire. In this moment, she finds it hard to read the dark swill of emotion within. But she knows this much. She owes her aunt. She owes her.
Dany slows her breathing.
Each breath, each tiny movement of her body, is exaggerated by the branch. If she can make it another few inches, just three or four, the fall to the roof of the chicken coop, at least, will be clean … In the distance, a new sound is added to the muttering of the infected on the track. A low rumbling hum, the sound of something electrical … There is a flicker of lights and the noise evaporates once more in a whining crunk.
Dany inches out a little further, the branch once more dipping down towards the razor wire. This time, the branch swings low, and one of the barbs catches her jeans, snags, pulls and torques the branch like an archer’s bow. The fabric tears slowly, and instead of shooting up, the branch eases off, quibbling its way up and down.
Dany tells herself that the razor wire isn’t that sharp.
Not razor sharp, anyway.
The fence is psychological, she tells herself. Meant to slow you down. To scare you. A wire like this is hard to cross without tools. Of course, tools will get you killed. Razor wire, she knows, has a stainless steel core that is under constant tension. Cut it and the wire recoils in a vicious strike, slashing you, buggering you up in the loosened coils. No, this is the only way to go, slowly. Inch by inch. Over it. Just a little further and she’ll have cleared her legs, too, and then she can let herself down onto the chicken coop’s roof.
Another inch, and Dany knows she can make it.
But the branch begins to dip – this time, in response to no motion of her own.
The branch fails under her, cracking and bending. Dany thinks of everyone in her life, her sister, her aunt, Eva, her mom. She clutches at the branch, her hands slipping, her fingers desperately clawing, but it’s too late.
| Chapter 0 = X + 23
For a moment, Dany hangs there, half-suspended. There is the sound of her pants tearing, as one leg snarls in the coil of wire. Then, hands grappling with the branch, she pushes off, and she is free.
The sound of her impact, when her body lands on the aluminum roof, is as loud as a gunshot. Dany lays utterly still, stunned. Her entire right side is a throb of pain and her lungs feel like they’ve collapsed. Pulling down her mask, she gulps at the stinking night air. But for long panicked seconds, she can’t draw a breath.
Finally, finally, she takes in her first breath of night air.
Dany curls up and breathes. Tentatively, she slides a hand over her throbbing side, but the roof is a tin drum and it creaks and groans with each movement. Below her, stirring to life, she hears the chickens. Long low calls, deep in each throat.
Dany looks over her long-sleeve shirt. There are new spots of blood on her arm. Then her hand gently explores her torso, and with each tiny movement, the roof groans under her. She fingers her ribs. They are bruised, that’s all. Not too bad.
Dany listens for some sign that she’s been heard, that even now there are guards padding towards her. But she hears nothing out of the ordinary. Just the low calls of terrified birds. That distant, omnipresent mutter of the dying. Traffic on the highway. Slowly, on hands and knees,
Dany inches towards the edge of the roof. The chicken coop is roofed with old and rusty corrugated sheets, and they grate and groan under her. Beneath her, the chickens are alive with terror. Most of the birds release a low-pitched distress call, but one, at least, has begun sounding off like a goddamned air raid siren.
Finally, Dany reaches the edge.
There, below her, she sees some kind of a small hill or bump. A cesspit. A filthy pile of straw and shit. At the top of the mound, she sees the corpses of a couple chickens. The ones she saw days before, probably, dead in their cages. But it is the softest landing place she can see.
Dany rolls off the roof and lands in the mess. The pile is swampy and warm, and smells of death and shit. Inside the coop, the chickens are quieting. She hears the last few distress calls, from deep in the throat. Dany carefully stands. One side of her body is throbbing, and her right arm is on fire. Her body and boots are covered in chicken shit and straw, but she’s okay. She’s good.
Ahead of her, in the dim light of the night sky, Dany can see dark figures milling about. Her nose catches the viral smell of piss and shit and tainted meat. They’re close. So, yeah, Dany smells the viral coming before she sees him.
The viral in his yellow plague jacket. She touches the key that hangs from the cord on her neck and knows exactly what she has to do.
Talking in low and reassuring tones, like the viral before her is a stray dog, she makes her approach. Dany slips the key from her neck. And then she gets close enough to see him. To take in his face. His eyes. His expression. And as she unlocks his jacket, she knows that she is doing something wrong. Something awful. Shameful. She wants to wrap this man in a blanket, but she has none.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, and she means it. “I’m sorry.” But she takes his jacket anyway, because she has to.
The plague jacket is old, weathered, the plastic cracked and worn at the seams. The seams are spackled with dirt, a deep unyielding brown. As she shrugs it on, the plague jacket stinks of sweat, as foul in its own way as turned meat. The jacket stinks of something else, too, something worse, a smell that sets her on edge. The smell that precedes death. Still, with this jacket on, she is as good as invisible. The guards will never see her now.
The grounds are dark and keeping to the edges, she can make her way around the prison. She’s taken a step away from the fence when she hears it, that distant engine. At first she thinks it’s an old film projector – that it’s movie night at the prison – but a moment later, the power kicks in, and she knows the sound for what it is, the rough cycling of a portable generator, a sound she will, in time, come to hate. A sound that will infiltrate her dreams and dog her waking moments. A sound that, in the days ahead, locked inside a concrete box, will become her sole companion until the darkness finally comes for her.
She hears the sound of a whirring motor – and a moment later the perimeter lights flicker to life. Dany stands pinned.
Heart fluttering, all of her is illuminated by a beam of light.
Twenty feet overhead, one of the panels is aimed her way. Every last inch of her is lit up inside that spotlight. Around her, she senses the many-eyed prison stir into wakefulness. And then Dany remembers. None of this matters, because she is invisible.
All except for her N95 face mask.
And though it goes against every instinct, Dany tears off the mask and tucks it into the back pocket of her jeans.
Dany hasn’t just seen the walk. For years, she lived with it.
When the disease has progressed to its final stages, the infected walk like this.
Her own mother walked like this, with a strange clockwork gait. When Dany was eight or nine, her mother was hospitalized for a staph infection. It was there, at the hospital, that they told her mother that something in one of her skin lesions had likely leached into her blood, causing the pain in her lower spine.
Phil never walked the same again.
Dany didn’t know why. If it was the drugs or a side effect of her meds or if it was the osteomyelitis or if, as far back as that, undiagnosed, her mother was already infected with the virus. It didn’t matter. Her mother walked like a late-stage case long before she was taken from Dany, her joints stiff, her back almost fused.
So, yeah, Dany knows the walk.
Her mother moved on unoiled joints.
She moved like her spine was slowly fossilizing.
She moved like she was thirty-five, but her hips were eighty-five.
For a moment, there is a flicker. An image of the woman in the back alley, the one with the shopping cart. But Dany pushes the picture down. Then, slowly, like one of the broken clockwork dolls that dot this hospice, Dany walks on unoiled legs through the prison grounds, aiming for the shipping containers at the back. That’s where, the math tells her, her aunt is most likely to be. Most of the prisoners are locked up in metal boxes for the night, and Dany plans to open every last can of prison worms.
| Chapter 0 = X + 24
The day her aunt’s parole was revoked, Norah said a strange thing. She’d been arrested at a protest – the police called it a “riot” – and Dany went to the police station to see her. The lawyer brought her into a little room, where her aunt was cuffed to a desk.
“Sometimes you have to set your pain aside,” her aunt said. “Set love aside, set anger aside, set all of it aside and just deal with some basic facts.”
Her aunt was trying to tell Dany and her sister to go and live with Antoine.
Dany looks at the facts.
Fact. Along the back fence of the prison, there are a half-dozen shipping containers, the kind that once floated into ports on enormous freighters. The day of the picnic, she wondered what those metal boxes were for.
The next day, Jasper told her.
It was an afterthought, the question. Not important, a curiosity. More urgent, at the time, were her questions about the plague jackets. Jasper was rifling through his desk, looking for the hex key he would give to her, the one she wears around her neck.
“It’s weird,” she said, looking at all the junk in his drawer, the little wire kittens, shaped out of paper clips. “Those metal containers at the prison. What do you think they’re storing back there?”
Jasper paused, the drawer forgotten, his hand still.
He turned and gave Dany a searching look. Touched her hand. It was gentle, this touch. She could have broken the contact with a blown breath.
“Did you lose someone?” he asked. There weren’t any other people in the room, Lauren Ko was long gone. Dany glanced around self-consciously. But they were alone.
She nodded once.
“Oh, Dany,” he said, searching her eyes. He shook his head, looked away from her and told her the truth. “Those shipping containers, those metal boxes, that’s where they keep the prisoners. They lock them in at night. I’m told the cells are quite comfortable really,” he said, a question in his eyes. “But no, they don’t keep patients in there.”
He was asking – she could see it in his eyes – if she’d lost someone to the hospice. But her aunt was a prisoner, not infected. At least, not so far as Dany knew.
“Memory is a strange, strange thing,” Jasper told her. “Mutable, subjective, strange.”
He looked at her then, for a long beat. His chest rose once, twice, and then, some invisible decision made, he went on.
“Memory has a kind of half-life,” Jasper told her. “Memories are incredible. They are these transient, mutable, changeable things. When we remember something, when we call it up, well, we set that memory down again. Reinscribe it. And the next time we remember? It’s a copy. And then a copy of a copy … and so on. Over time, imperceptibly, the memory fades and blurs.”
Jasper’s hands had fallen still, the drawer forgotten.
“No one mourns what they’ve forgotten,” he said.
“Our perception of the past fades just like our memories of it. So, in a way, the people who’ve contracted the virus are the only ones who aren’t holding on to what’s gone.” Jasper looked at her out of eyes filled with helpless empathy. “I don’t know if that comforts you,” he said. “But it helps me, it helps a little. When I think of those I’ve lost.”
But yeah, no, it didn’t help. It didn’t help at all.
Dany stands outside the first shipping container. But Jasper’s in her head. And the night around her is alive with small sounds. With danger. And then it’s not just Jasper in her head, but fear, too.
She stands, looking at the door, her heart pounding.
She’s read books. She’s made herself ready for the kinds of cryptography systems they might throw at her. But reading is different from doing. Standing here, with her palm flat against the door, all alone in the dark, is different from picturing it, from sitting there with her nose in a book. And worse, the noises she hears, they’re not just from out there, in the night, around her. Some of the noises are coming from inside the box. A banging sound. Dim at first, but growing louder. As if the metal box has felt her touch and is waking now. As if the metal box has grown a beating heart.
The banging is rhythmic. And suddenly, she’s just a kid again, living with her mother in the basement flat, staring at the popcorn ceiling and trying to understand the noises that come from the apartment above. The yells, the screams, the bursts of violence.
Dany takes a deep breath. Makes herself focus.
She can remember reading the book on locks, the book on cryptography systems.
She can picture each cover.
But all of the pictures that book had held? A jumble of lines in her head. Somewhere, in a book, there are codes and cyphers scribbled in ink. There are pictures of the kinds of locks some jail cells have. All those weeks spent studying schemata, and now she can barely remember the basics of an electric strike.