“The number doesn’t matter,” snapped Thomas. “Just one would be enough.”
“You’d think that,” said Elijah, “in general. Because right now, you’re just focusing on one. Maybe the worst one. Maybe just the one you remember best. Maybe just the first one. The rest will come back into focus over time. And when every one is as bad as the next and you can remember them all, the number matters. You always wish it was less. For the people that take longer to remember, they always wonder if there are more that they’ll remember someday, but haven’t yet.”
Danica sobbed and shoved her still full bowl away, her forehead clunked against the plastic table and she wrapped her arms around her shaved skull. Neil awkwardly squeezed her shoulder. He felt strangely detached. And guilty that he couldn’t seem to feel the type of grief and guilt the others appeared to. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, he thought. The struggle to remember was beginning to take on a shade of dread he hadn’t anticipated. It was bad, he’d known that, as soon as he’d woken up to find himself in a strange place with strange people. Without Randi, without his mother, without Dante. But this— anguish— maybe it didn’t happen to me. Maybe I’m different. Maybe I got lucky and just— just what? Wandered around an empty hospital for two and a half years? Let myself starve and rot until someone found me? I remember the woman in the beginning. I remember the way the cartilage in her ear crunched and crackled between my—
“Why’d you wake us up, man?” cried Thomas. “Why didn’t you leave us?”
“They were losing,” said Elijah. “The Immunes. They were losing the world. Not to us, not anymore. I mean, sure, in the beginning they were overwhelmed. It was so fast— or, I should say, the disease hid so well that when people started cracking, everything happened at once. There’s even some video of when things started falling apart still in the City library and of how the world responded. It took too long for the people in charge to realize that something was wrong. And the people in charge were mostly only temporarily sane themselves. We were all infected for weeks before anyone knew. There was no way to contain it. It was everywhere. So right at the start, the Immunes were overrun. Just weren’t enough of them left, they were outnumbered by the rest of us. But it wasn’t so long before they regrouped. Human beings are only as good as their brains and their tools. We don’t have claws, we don’t have armor, we aren’t especially fast, even our teeth aren’t really made for attacking. And while we were infected, we were out of our minds. I had no strategy. I doubt any of you did. I’ve never heard of any Infected that acted with any kind of guile. We didn’t hunt, we only attacked. The only reason the Infected were able to do as much damage as we did was because of our enormous numbers compared to the Immunes. That and what must have been intense shock when the Immunes started seeing people they loved turn into violent killers. As soon as that shock wore off, it was a simple thing to outmaneuver us, pick us off, create safe havens. We are pitiful predators. But other things in the world are not. Without electricity or communications, without gasoline and roads, the people left were dying out. Lack of food, lack of fuel for heat, lack of experts on things like sanitation or how to determine if water is clean— they just couldn’t do more than establish a foothold, like the City. So when the opportunity came to wake us up, they took it. For some, it was purely practical. A way to stop the Infected from attacking their scavenging teams and a way to add to the labor pool at the same time. For some people, it was emotional. Their family members might be out there. They might get them back, if they could find and cure them. Return to some sort of normalcy. For others, it was just a decent thing to do for another human being. You find someone sick or in pain and you have the means to fix it, you’d do it, wouldn’t you? Only a psychopath wouldn’t.”
“Maybe, in the beginning,” admitted Thomas. “But seeing the pain the Cure causes,” he jerked his head toward Danica, “maybe the disease is less painful. Maybe— maybe death is less painful.”
Neil expected a frown or an admonishment not to speak that way, a glance toward the nurses or counselors milling around the tent. But Elijah only said evenly, “Maybe it is, sometimes. Wasn’t for me. It wasn’t for a lot of Cureds. Can’t ever tell until we wake you up and ask. And it’s not always clear right away. You wake up to— this, and you just want to not know. For a while, you think it’s better not knowing. Even if it meant you would have kept hurting people, kept eating. Because you were an animal. Just a beast doing what it needed to survive. No morality. No guilt. No fear for tomorrow. That’s how I felt, too. Spent a week curled up on my cot, just trying to go back to sleep. Hoping the Cure wouldn’t take. Even knowing how much it cost people to bring me that dose of the Cure, I still wished they’d skipped me. Left me. Or shot me.
“The Immunes in my camp wouldn’t just let me die. And I hated them. I still hate some of them. It was the first camp, far too early to have anyone who’d been infected like us. There was only a handful of Cured who’d woken just two weeks before me, and none of them wanted to volunteer for camp work. None of them wanted to see more of what they’d just been through. So there was no one to talk to. Only other people as confused and hopeless as me. There were a lot of suicides. Most of the first people cured were already dead by the time I woke up. The Immunes didn’t know how much we were going to remember. They didn’t even know for sure that the Cure wasn’t going to kill us at that point. So when it worked, they didn’t know what to do with us. There were an enormous number of people who decided they didn’t want to wake up. Every morning while I was in camp, ten or twenty people would just not be there. Just gone. It still happens, if I’m being honest, though we’re more careful now. But I— couldn’t find a way quick or painless enough. I just wanted to go back to sleep. Not wake up again. There was this lady, next cot over from me. She wasn’t there much. She was up a lot more than me. Off looking for answers. Or for something to do. Never complained to me though. Used to smile at me at night when she came back to bed if she saw me awake. Offered me food a few times that she’d saved from the meals I kept skipping. Never cried. She never cried. There were almost a thousand in that round of cures. Three tents filled. And even with the suicides, the sound of the crying didn’t stop for weeks. Kids, women, men— didn’t matter. They all cried. Some quiet, some not. Even when I hauled myself up off the cot for a little, it wasn’t uncommon to watch someone in the bathroom brushing their teeth or changing bandages just— stop in the middle and break down. As if just breathing overwhelmed you. It was like a fuse, like a sudden surge that tripped the circuit. Not this woman though.
“Until this one morning. The tent flaps were open, they were laundering most of the linens that day. I remember all this light streaming in, gold and heavy with that spicy smell that summer air gets in a large field. It was the first day I felt like maybe it was worth staying alive to see. Really see it, like a human being instead of what I’d been. Almost everyone was outside, at the camp mess. Not this woman though. I looked over and she was finally crying. Didn’t feel right, just leaving her alone there. I assumed that she’d had bad news about her family. The ‘found’ list was much shorter then. It only took a few days to hear back from the City about whether anyone was looking for us or not. It’ll probably take another week for you guys. There are a lot more names to go through now. I thought maybe this woman didn’t see any names she knew. So I just sat there and said, ‘Maybe they just didn’t write their names down. Or maybe they haven’t come to this city yet. Maybe they’re looking for you somewhere else.’ She just shook her head and asked, ‘Who?’ I told her I’d meant her family, that she shouldn’t worry about them yet.
‘Wasn’t thinking about my family,’ she told me. ‘I was thinking about my cat.’
I wasn’t sure what to say about that. I was never a big pet person. Just— didn’t have the space, you know? So I told her that cats were smart animals, it was probably fine. Maybe a little hungry, but it would likely just clean up the rat problem in the surrounding area.
Bullshit. I was just trying to make this woman feel better when I couldn’t even make myself get up and face the day. She said, ‘No, he’s not okay. I ate him. He was the first thing I killed.’ What do you say to that? Especially when I thought it was nowhere near what I’d done. How could I understand how significant eating her pet had been to her? So I didn’t say anything, and she just started talking. Just started spilling this stuff out of her. She said when she woke up from the Cure, she’d had trouble living with herself. Just like the rest of us. But she listened to the counselors who told her we weren’t responsible for what we’d done. That it was just instinct, like any other predator. Just— us reverting to the primal brain. But the night before, she’d been thinking about her cat. Her cat hadn’t attacked other animals. Not the way we attacked other people. Not to consume. Not even to kill. A catfight is usually about territory in some way. They fight until one withdraws. And that’s it. They don’t chase down the losing cat. It just leaves. And a cat will help other cats in its colony that are injured or sick. They hunt for each other. Protect each other. Show compassion. Most social animals do. Dogs, cats, crows. They have empathy.
“So I’m sitting there, for the first time in several days not focusing on my own despair but trying to figure out how to help this person that I didn’t know, that I had no interest or curiosity about, no reason to keep trying except that I could see she was in pain. Like me. I didn’t know what to do. I told her the cat would understand. That it was a predator, too. I told her that if the cat had been hungry enough, it would have eaten her, instead. It was probably the stupidest thing I could have said. She just sobbed and sobbed and finally just said, ‘I wasn’t hungry. And my cat would have waited until I was dead. He would have waited until I was dead.’ I realized then, that we weren’t just beasts. We weren’t just animals following our instincts. We were worse. It didn’t make me feel better about being Cured. Not then. Like you, I thought they just should have killed us, instead. Nothing I do from the day I was Cured to the day I die will ever make up for what happened while I was infected. Nothing. Why should I try? Why bother?”
“That’s my point,” said Thomas. “There’s no going back, so why wake us up? Just to agonize over what we’ve done? Just to be crushed by guilt for years and years?”
Elijah shrugged. “Maybe. Can you really argue against it, if that were why? Seems to me, what people want most from any sort of justice is for someone to acknowledge their wrongs. To feel just a little of the pain they’ve caused another. Can you argue that we don’t deserve it? I can’t. Some can. They repeat the lie the counselors tell us. That we were just beasts. That we had no control of ourselves. It’s a good lie. It keeps what’s left of humanity together. Lets most people paper over what was and start again. But some of us know better. I know we weren’t like beasts. And I’ve often wondered if I could have resisted that— rage in the beginning. If I hadn’t given in to it, if I’d just—” Elijah broke off and shook his head, making his mouth a tight, closed line. Neil was startled to see his eyes begin to redden with tears. “I wonder. That’s all. I can’t begrudge the punishment, if that’s what the Cure is. It’ll never be enough or help the people I killed, but my sanity can help other people after. Not just Cured like you and me, but everyone. More than ever, my work makes other people’s existence easier. One of you is going to be a doctor who can save someone. Or a farmer that helps us feed ourselves. Or an electrician or a plumber or a carpenter. The thing that keeps me trying is the same thing that saved me in the camp. Helping other people cope with what I can’t cope with myself. I help other Cured decide to keep waking up. And, in turn, it helps to convince me, too. We wake you up because we need you. We wake you up because we miss you. We wake you up because misery loves company. Pick one. Pick all three. They’re all true. Move past it and decide why you want to stay awake because that’s all that’s going to determine what happens to you from here.”
6
Neil knew Danica was trailing him, even as she tried not to be obvious about it. He caught her staring at his neck several times. For as many people as were in the camp, it was ultimately quite small, and there were few places he could truly escape her vigil. He understood that the camp design was deliberate, another method of watching the Cured to be sure they didn’t harm themselves. It still grated on his nerves. He wasn’t certain what she expected from him or what was left for him to say, nor how to comfort her. He understood that what had happened was more akin to a sudden tornado or a rockslide than it was to assault. She hadn’t been in control and neither had he. At least— that’s how he felt about it. After Elijah’s conversation, he wasn’t certain that it was quite how the others thought of the time before they were cured. He didn’t want to think about it, not deeply. For a few hours a day, that was a possibility. More checkups with the doctor. With the dentist. With Simon who led him deftly away from any consideration of his time in the hospital.
But there was too much time to fill and no real tasks to complete. He felt more like an object on an assembly line than anything else. One morning after Dr. Gibson replaced the bandages on his throat, she unceremoniously dropped him off the end of that assembly line and left him sitting on the edge of his cot, staring at the flapping canvas wall while others milled around him. Talking with other Cured usually only lead to swapping sad stories or furtively exchanging small bits of information about this city and what life there meant. Neil tended to sit at the edges of these conversations since he couldn’t even truly remember his own past, which worried him more than he’d let on. He flexed his right hand. Dr. Gibson seemed to believe he’d had a break in that arm and that it hadn’t healed quite right. He hadn’t noticed until she’d said so. There wasn’t much to be done about it, apparently. Not these days.
“I’m not going to rebreak it to reset it now,” she’d muttered, “and surgery’s a death wish. Can you grasp this?” She’d shoved her flashlight into his hand and frowned at the way he held it, had him repeat it a dozen different ways and then raise and lower his arm a few times. She’d concluded he wasn’t too damaged, and Neil admitted it hadn’t bothered him until she’d said something. It still didn’t. A little lumpy near his elbow and it pinched a little, but compared to the rest of him… It was the memory of it that troubled him. It was slowly emerging from the red haze of impressions. The original break was distant and clear, that wasn’t the part that he’d had trouble remembering. He hadn’t known he was sick yet. It was bad, falling down the stairs in a terrified attempt to escape Dante, but what happened later, after the cast— that was worse. And he couldn’t blame it on the Plague. He’d still been sane then. Slipping, but still rational. He rubbed the lump below his elbow. He could still feel the crackling ache of his forearm when he’d shoved the cast up under a woman’s chin, pinning her against a wall as she struggled to bite him. It had been him. All him. His own free choice. He flexed his hand again. One of Shay’s friends. What was her name? She’d been the first one. The rest— the rest were after. The cast— he’d used the cast again. Not the same way. Less plan and more punch. He’d smacked it across a man’s snarling face. He could remember the chalky screech the man’s teeth made when they scraped across the plaster and the painful vibration the blow had caused along the length of his arm. It hadn’t stopped him. He’d used it as a club to smash whoever was around him.
It had gotten wet several times. Submerged in the pool when he’d fallen in. Or when he’d held another Infected under the surface. Neil could see the face staring up at him from below the water, eyes wide and darting and the mouth gaping and snapping even as they thrashed and drowned. He closed his eyes trying to retreat from the memory. There were more, he could feel them building up against the thin wall of his conscious thought. He rubbed his face. The shape of it still felt wrong under his palm. Better to remember now, he told himself, Elijah and Frances both said it’s better to remember now. It got soggy, the cast. Clung to his skin and flaked off slowly. It had stopped several bites. He�
�d woken from a dead sleep once to find a man chewing on the plaster instead of the rest of him. He’d lunged up and bitten the man’s shoulder. And then more of him. He’d left the corpse on the pink tile floor of a locker room with a large shard of cast still between the man’s teeth. That had been the first flake. It left his wrist bare. Most of the rest had sloughed off when he’d gotten cornered once. It had again been in the pool. He’d been looking for water and had wandered back. Knelt by the side and dipped his face to the dirty water. He’d been tackled, tipped in. His attacker had fallen in after him. She’d clutched at his arm, trying to rise out of the water. Choking and growling at the same time, sputtering maroon water over them both. His cast had disintegrated in her clawing fingers and she’d fallen away, her head clunking against the tile siding. He’d watched her sink out of sight, too full and slow to think of grabbing her for his own prey. No remorse. No sorrow. Nothing. Until now.
It’s like a debt, finally come due. All this grief saved up and waiting, Neil thought, slapping his hand over his mouth when a sob surprised him. Monster. I still don’t care now. Not really. Not the way I should. But his body felt otherwise. He added his other hand, smashing both against his lips to muffle the cry that yanked out of him. It was like the growling. Entirely beyond his control or wishes. After several seconds, when it seemed he couldn’t catch his breath, his cot dipped and a bony arm poked into his back and around his shoulder. He resisted the urge to throw it off. It took a long time to stop. To force his breath into a regular rhythm, to stop his skin from shuddering and pry his hands away from his face. The arm stayed around him, but he didn’t look to see whose. A dark impulse, darker than all the rest made him hope that Randi hadn’t survived. That she’d never know what he’d done. What he’d become. What almost everyone around her had become. Better for her never to know what people could turn into. That the world was now full of monsters. For an instant, he hoped she’d just— he hoped she’d run out of her little study carrel and down the library steps into the guards’ line of fire. And then he shut out the thought. Or tried, though he knew it would creep back eventually. She knows. About what happened to the Infected. She already knows. Lived two years of terror and pain without me. If I stick around, if I find her, at least then she’ll know it won’t be this way forever. That there’s some hope.
Before The Cure (Book 2): The Infected Page 6