by Pike, JJ
Anyway. Back to the present. We’re down to fifteen people.
Miller didn’t have answers for me when I quizzed him about the possibility of MELT being DONE with this part of the country. He confided that most of his men/women were infected but that he saw no option but to carry on.
That means we interacted with infected soldiers who weren’t doing anything to combat MELT. How long are they going to last? Why aren’t they dead already? Is MELT slowing? Shit, is this a second wave? Surely not. Then again, Baxter called it a “virus” and we all know what viruses do. They live. On and on and on and on. We haven’t found a cure for the common cold FOR A REASON. They’re more adaptable than us. Which is why I need to keep a closer eye on the people around me.
DAY THIRTY-NINE
Stumbled on a CLEARLY infected rabbit (limping, large puss-filled hole in his side) while I was out hunting. Had to pull Maggie-loo off the poor beast. Please don’t let Maggie-loo get MELT. I would never forgive myself. Why did I bring her with me? It was selfish. I wanted a companion. I wanted to prove to myself that I’d [two paragraphs crossed out and scribbled over].
The rabbit got me to thinking. There has to be a den. And more rabbits. They’re not famous for keeping it in their pants. Didn’t take me long to find an entrance to the warren. I had to tie Maggie-loo to a tree to stop her from “helping” me dig. (I covered my hands as best I could, but there’s no way to keep the moisture out when we can’t use plastic/rubber anything. We’ve been rained on, walked through streams, rolled in mud; if MELT is out here, we’re covered in it.) I’d forgotten how deep rabbit holes go (which I suppose explains the English idiom “going down the rabbit hole”).
After an hour or so Wallace and Kazowski joined me with a shovel and a trowel. I didn’t ask if they’d been sent to look for me or had come on their own. What did it matter? We are all enemies/spies/infect/not infected to the same degree. No one trusts anyone. And nor should they. I kept my distance from Kazowski who has been showing signs of slowing down (and who I suspect is infected), but by the end we were all covered in sweat and dirt and he probably coughed in my general direction half a dozen times.
Here’s hoping Christine is right and I’m immune.
When we reached seven feet we got our answer. Dead rabbits galore. They hadn’t been dead long. We re-routed ourselves FAST. A live patch of MELT means certain death.
Not sure what this means for our food supply.
FINALLY managed to finagle my way onto a call with Hoyt and Baxter. I did most of the talking, but there were a couple of interesting takeaways.
We’ve been getting coordinates. The whole time. This isn’t a random march south. I don’t know why I’m pissed about this (perhaps because it would have been such an EASY and MORALE-BOOSTING fact to share? There are people out there who are LOOKING OUT FOR US).
Indian Point is a complete wash. Not just a dumpster fire, but a dumpster fire of such prodigious proportions there are no words to adequately describe what’s going on down there. How this doesn’t translate into, “Turn around, the mandate has changed” is a puzzlement, but there were no such orders.
Colonel Livio, grilled me about my observations. We have no video, but her voice was that of a younger woman who’d worked on dropping an accent (just as I did) and who made an effort to sound kind when asking the most brutal questions.
How many dead?
How many infected?
Notes on flora/fauna.
Notes on water: How does it taste? How does it feel? Are you washing in it? Collecting rainwater? How are you staying hydrated?
Any skin reactions to rain? Sun? Wind?
Food: taste, smell, appetite. (NOTE TO SELF: Uh-oh. What does this remind you of?)
I told her what I’d observed about MELT not acting on the bodies of the rats (back at Wolfjaw); not being on many/most of our catch as we’ve traveled south; and why this warren find was anomalous. As for the rest: We have no way to test the soil or the water. Food tastes fine. I have nothing to report on that score.
As for skin? Professor Baxter interrupted, saying, “Samples will be returned in the usual way.”
Once again, I find I am monumentally annoyed to discover that Baxter has been keeping things from me. What’s the POINT of me being here if she doesn’t treat me as an equal?
When I asked Colonel Livio what the samples were telling us she passed the buck. “Prof. Baxter can fill you in. Tell me about the people. Psychologically speaking, how are you coping?”
That possibly counts as the most idiotic question anyone has ever asked in the history of mankind. How are we coping? We’re stressed out of our minds. You’re dropping food and medical supplies, but for how long? We just met some infected soldiers, putting us all at risk. How do you THINK we feel?
Of course, I didn’t say any of that.
“Is there evidence that MELT has a second wave?” I asked. “Is that why you were asking about taste? Is that a symptom?”
Interestingly, that’s when the call ended.
So I guess I have my answer.
DAY FORTY-FIVE
Kazowski’s sick. It’s been a little less than a week since we dug up the burrow which (sadly**) coincided with our interaction with Miller et al. Our acting doctor (who, come to find out, was a pediatric nurse in the real world) says no one should touch him. (Not that I’ve touched another human being, voluntarily at least, in over a month.) I’m going to watch from a distance. If my job is “to observe and report” that’s what I’m going to do.
Maggie-loo and I sat fifteen feet from Kazowski while he fought MELT.
He tied himself to a small bush, “So I don’t crawl away and infect you good people.” As he deteriorated, the stories poured out of him. His mother was from Brooklyn. She’d refused to leave her house, even as Manhattan fell into the East River, because she would have had to leave her own (invalided) mother and she refused to do that. His father had died years earlier something Kazowski was glad of, because he didn’t have to see his wife and mother-in-law die in agony. He’d volunteered and joined General Hoyt as a way to make his mother’s death “count for something.”
“All those people,” he said, “who didn’t need to die. What happened to the evacuation orders? Why did no one come for them? Was it because it was a Jewish neighborhood?”
I told him that wasn’t what happened. It was all so chaotic; so fast. People either got out right away or paid the price. MELT didn’t care about neighborhoods or ethnicity or race or religious persuasion.
“I want a bagel with cream cheese and lox,” he said. “There’s a place on Atlantic Avenue that has the best lox. Can we go there?”
I told him we could and we would.
He bled from his nose first, but eventually he was bleeding from his eyes.
That was only after he made me promise I would bury him. “A real burial. It matters. It’s religious. Can you do it? I know you can’t sit shiva, but if you bury me; that will mean something.”
I got the shovel from Wallace and dug Kazowski’s grave while he watched. Maggie-loo helped (much to Kazowski’s delight). He told me she was a “good girl” and “you should get her out of here.” I cried. For him. For me. For Maggie-loo.
He untied himself from the small bush and crawled into the pit I’d dug. “So you don’t have to touch me.”
He screamed for his mother long into the night.
We didn’t touch him.
We filled the hole in, burying him under a mountain of dirt, at dawn. Mitzy started to sing “Rock of Ages,” but I explained that he was Jewish and that wasn’t appropriate. She sang “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof which, for reasons I can’t put into words, wasn’t wrong.
Will any of us get to “grow older?”
**I have no way of knowing whether Kazowski was infected by the rabbits or the soldiers; whether this was the first or second wave of MELT; or if Wallace and I are next. Whatever took Kazowski down, we’re screwed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MARCH 2022
Jacinta didn’t wait for Abbie to chat to God. She couldn’t. Now that her inner circle knew what she was planning she had to set things in motion. Any one of them could blab to their friends or family and that would mean the end of Jacinta’s reign as Wolfjaw Down’s leader. Having just stepped into power, she wasn’t about to allow them to force her to step down.
She selected three men and one woman, all with military backgrounds, for her mission. She sent word to them via her private runner, Chrissy, a kid no bigger than a hound dog. Chrissy had been left at Wolfjaw’s gates a few years earlier along with her kid sister and a note that read “Please Love Me Good” pinned to her chest. The kid sister hadn’t made it, but Chrissy had latched onto Wolfjaw like a tick and made it her own.
Jacinta hadn’t adopted her, she was single and singletons were not permitted to adopt. Stupid rule as far as she was concerned. She’d been raised by a ravening wolf of a mother and she hadn’t turned out so bad. Even though she couldn’t call Chrissy hers legally, she’d taken an interest in the kid’s education. She taught the girl practical things: How to set a snare, how to track varmints, how to get maple syrup from a tree. Things that were no use now, except they’d made her alert to her surroundings and infused her with an independent spirit. She was nine, going on ninety.
“You speak to no one else, understand? Just the three people I told you to find.”
Chrissy nodded.
“Tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Walk, don’t run. Find Meredith…” She grinned up at Jacinta. “Meredith is a man, not a lady.”
Jacinta smiled back at her littlest recruit. “Good.”
“I tell Meredith Hoffelder that you have extra shifts for him and his friends and he’ll know what to do. I don’t have to whisper and I don’t have to make it a secret. I just tell him, like that. ‘Jacinta has extra shifts. She needs you.’”
“Good. Remember, walk, don’t run.”
“And if I see my teacher, Miss Charis, or your friend, Miss Abbie, I don’t tell them.”
Jacinta hated the fact that Abbie had forced her hand this way, but she was still in prayer mode and the operation couldn’t wait for God’s rubber stamp. She had to do this for the good of Down. “Run along.”
Chrissy frowned. “You said don’t run.”
“You’re absolutely right, sweetie. When you get back, you can choose your reward.”
“Chocolate,” said Chrissy.
Sugar was being rationed, which meant chocolate was high on the list of goods that were desired, but not to be found by ordinary civilians.
“You can have a whole bar all to yourself,” said Jacinta. She meant it. The little girl was the perfect envoy. No one would suspect her of using a child as an undercover gofer.
Chrissy walked to Jacinta’s door with an air too relaxed and nonchalant, her strides long and slow. Anyone looking at her would think she was doing an impersonation of one of Monty Python’s silly walks, though she was far too young to know what that was. She was just a kid trying (and failing) to look nonchalant.
Jacinta closed the door and returned to her desk. She didn’t want anything in writing. Not even cryptic scribblings. Anything consigned to paper could (and would; she knew how the world worked) be used against her later. Everything would have to be verbal. She unlocked her top drawer and scanned Alistair’s papers. She hadn’t decoded them, but she planned to once this operation was taken care of and the Downers were all safely in quarantine.
She slipped a bar of chocolate into her pocket. You’re only as good as the promises you keep, she knew that.
There was a sharp knock at her door. Nurse Patrice didn’t wait for permission to enter. “I’m busy. This better be important. We’ve got some fungal infection going on…”
Jacinta held up her hand for silence. “You can brief me later. I need you to prep the quarantine suite.”
“Who’s sick?”
Jacinta already knew what she was going to say, but the words stuck in her throat. Patrice had had the hots for Liam Bradstone when they were teenagers. They’d known each other on the outside, as in the real world beyond Wolfjaw Ridge’s walls. Trish said Patrice had followed Liam to Wolfjaw, hoping he’d see the light, but he never had. Not when it came to Patrice, anyway. He’d been a heartthrob back in the day, according to Trish, but he’d been happily married for years (to Allison who was everything Patrice was not: sweet, understated, gentle, given to laughter). Jacinta knew it was unkind to use the nurse’s feelings against her, but it had to be done if she was going to run Down the way Alistair had trained her. He’d have used every last shred of data to meet his goals. She had to be as ruthless as he would have been if she was going to succeed.
“Liam’s coming back inside.”
The nurse flushed and looked away. It was involuntary. “I thought we were voting on the door issue, tomorrow.”
“Name a single person in Wolfjaw Down who doesn’t want Liam Bradstone back inside these doors.” Jacinta pointed at the wall where the moisture gathered and ran, leaving a green and gray streak down the wall. “He knows water. He can save us from flooding.”
Patrice stared at the wall for a good minute. “Is it true, then? We’ve sprung a leak?”
It wasn’t, but Jacinta didn’t need to say that. The water was from an underground stream and nothing to worry about. It sprang from the rock at the east end of the kindergarten and ran underground for a mile before popping back out near the pantries. It made for an outstanding cooler. It was no more a threat to their safety than anything else that was naturally occurring in an underground city: Mites, mice, mushrooms, etc. Jacinta shrugged. Best keep the lies to a minimum. “All I can tell you is what you already know, Liam is vital to our survival.”
Patrice rolled up her sleeves, another involuntary gesture. “Who else? You’re not opening the doors for one man, no matter how skilled he is. If you were, you’d have done it already. Who else is coming back?”
Jacinta was pleased Patrice wasn’t going to kick up a fuss. She’d been right to use Liam as bait. “When we sealed the doors there were twenty-five people out there, seventeen of whom were Downers. If they’re still out there, we’re bringing them home.”
“Seventeen?” Patrice let her mouth fall open and stay that way.
Jacinta came around her desk and patted the nurse on the arm. She wasn’t much for hugging or touching, but she could see Patrice was in shock and she needed something to bring her back into her body and get focused.
“How am I supposed to quarantine seventeen people?” She blinked several times while the questions piled up. “What am I treating them for? They’ve been out there for months. If they had radiation blockers on hand, they’ll be okay, but who had those in their med kit? I did, but I’m the most conservative medical planner in the joint. I doubt Liam Bradstone’s wife thought of that.” She couldn’t say Allison’s name. She still had it bad for her former beau. Good. That was good. It meant she’d work doubly hard to make the mission a success.
“If they didn’t—and let’s assume and prepare for the worst—what are we looking at?” Jacinta used a voice she’d heard coming out of Alistair’s mouth a thousand times. It said, “We’re confidants. I trust you. I’m leaning on your expertise.” People loved it. The more you seemed like you needed them, the more they stepped up. But not in a bad way. She did need Patrice to be giving this operation her all and she was no nurse; she couldn’t bring these people back from the brink of death, if that’s where they’d gone. She wasn’t faking it. She was only using a tactic that any seasoned politician would use. “Let’s say they’re sick, really sick…what would you expect?”
“Depends which way the wind blew. If the Hurricane was unkind or if there were more storms during the winter or if Indian Point is still leaking poison into the environment and the wind is bringing it this way…” She put her hand to her chest to calm her breathing which had gathered pace. “U
nless they had protection or they were very lucky with the weather patterns, they’ll be dead. If they had radiation blockers they might still have radiation sickness. We’re not set up for this, Jacinta…”
“I know you’ll find a way. You always have. Alistair promoted you over Heather and Jason for a reason. You have the best medical mind in the joint, bar none.” It wasn’t a lie. Patrice was a healer, down to her bones. But it wasn’t radiation sickness she was worried about.
Jacinta saw the precise moment—flushed cheeks, dilated pupils, lips fading to white—when Patrice realized they were inviting MELT into their midst. “Who else will work the ward? Do we have protective clothing? Has there been a breakthrough? Is there a cure? Am I going to be able to treat their symptoms if they have…that? If they have MELT? Is that what it’s called? Is the disease called MELT, too? We’re cut off down here. I think that’s a mistake, Jacinta. We need word from the outside. We’re sealed away and anything could be going on out there…I don’t know the first thing about treating this new disease…”
“Listen to me…” Jacinta had held it in reserve so she had something positive to end on. It was her negotiating chip, the one fact that made treating seventeen people with radiation sickness seem like an easy-ask. She put her hands on Patrice’s face and steered her back so they were eye to eye. “No one with MELT will be allowed into Down.”
“Not even Liam?”
It was Jacinta’s turn to look away and think. Hard. What would she do if her key people had been infected with a disease that had no known etiology, no mapped prognosis, no known cure? Was she prepared to leave them outside? She’d said she would, but when it came down to it, it was a hard row to hoe. “Not even Liam.”
“I’ll do my best.” Patrice trembled under Jacinta’s hand, fighting back tears.
“It’s all I ask. We can only do our best.”