Neil tugged on Elijah’s pack. “You’re carrying too much. Let me take some. My feet aren’t hurting.”
Elijah laughed. “It has nothing to do with the weight. Your feet aren’t hurting because your body’s still used to the almost endless pacing you did while you were sick. After a year cured, it’s begun to wear off for me. Still,” he pointed to the large green road sign a few hundred feet ahead of the truck, “We’ve walked a lot farther in one day than I ever would have done before all this. Half a mile twice a night in patrols around warehouses was about it. At least on foot.”
Neil didn’t say so, but the distance they’d covered seemed tiny in comparison to all the miles they had to go. Eight miles. All day for eight miles. Less than the distance I drove to work. It’s going to take weeks to get to the cabin. And that’s if nothing goes wrong between here and there. “Let’s find somewhere to rest,” was all he said out loud. He might not be especially sore, but it was clear that Elijah was, and as badly as Neil wanted to get to the cabin, to find Joan and Randi, he’d never get there if Elijah were injured or slowing down.
“I remember there’s an old ice cream shack about half a mile up. It’s small and enclosed. I don’t like the big sprawling buildings after dark,” Elijah admitted. “Cottages and gas stations and take out stands, you can see the whole space and still feel safe. We’ll sleep there.” He pushed the truck door closed again and hitched up his pack. Neil stared down into the ditch as they passed the tire iron, half-expecting to see someone injured in it, but all that was there was a thick clump of goldenrod and long grass.
The ice cream shack was barely bigger than a yard shed, but Elijah seemed happy to see it. The ice cream coolers had been lined up outside the door in the small gravel parking lot, all of the lids taken from their hinges and leaned up against the side of the shack.
“Why’d they take them out?” asked Neil.
“Scav team. Must have been looking for parts. Good thing for us, the shack will be clear and there’ll be room for us both to sleep. I was afraid we’d have to spend some time moving things around to get comfortable.” Elijah opened the door. There was a faint smell of soured milk and old bleach, but it was barely there and Neil was able to ignore it after a few minutes. Elijah pushed open the serving window. The dried husk of a spider toppled down the bug screen and onto the sill. “Screen’s still good,” said Elijah, flicking it with a smile. “It’ll be the first time in months I can sleep without getting eaten alive. There’s a lot of things I miss but bug spray’s right up there. I wish they’d get some netting for the camps, but it’s a low priority. Governor says the camps already take too many resources to maintain.” He sighed and dropped his pack onto the low counter. “Guess all that’s not my problem anymore, is it?” He turned to Neil with a weak smile.
Neil hesitated before asking, “Do you regret it? Should we go back?”
Elijah thought, sitting carefully on the floor and unlacing a boot before answering. “No. I don’t want to go back. But I’ll always worry. What if the City gives up? What if they just leave all those Infected out there? Every week more are going to die. Starve or freeze or get some kind of infection. Not to mention any Immunes out there who’ll still be at risk of attack. I was— I’m hoping we can avoid any Infected. I’m not sure what we can do for them and letting them see us would—”
“Can’t we cure them? Didn’t you take some medicine from the camp?” asked Neil.
“It’s not allowed. Not for me, anyway. And there’s good reason for that. I’m no doctor. If we cure them, we’ll have to make sure they stay hydrated and fed while they are under the sedative. Treat any wounds. Then, when they wake up, there’s all the emotional stuff. Weeks of work, just like it was for you. Lots of extra food, extra water, extra medical supplies. We don’t have it. It’ll take a long time to find it out there. And there are only two of us. If we cure an Infected, it’s most likely a death sentence. Sometimes it’s a death sentence even in the established camps. You saw. And it’s unlikely to be one Infected. Someone locked in their house probably starved to death months and months ago. Unless someone’s taking care of them, the Infected are mobile and there are several of them because— because they’re eating each other. When they run out… look, if we leave them alone, there’s a chance some of them survive until the Cure camp gets to them. If there’s someone taking care of them, that’s— that’s a different story, but the loose ones— their best shot is to keep on as they have been until the camp finds them.”
“But that’s— they’ll slaughter more people—”
“I know, brother, I know. It’s awful to think about. It’s an awful thing for us to do. But I don’t— I don’t see an alternative. Do you?”
Neil closed the shack’s flimsy wooden door and leaned against the counter. He stared out at the small gravel lot and the deep gold light on the trees around them as the sun slid slowly away. But it was Dante he was really thinking of. Had it been kinder to leave him? Shay had told Neil that Dante would die. Was dying. But Neil hadn’t been able to finish it. He was two years wiser. He’d seen what the infection did. He knew how Dante likely died. How Neil’s own mother had likely died. “My best friend got sick before me,” he told Elijah at last. “We were in that hospital together. Shay and I found him. We didn’t know, then. Not anything about the plague. Not how it spread, not if it would kill someone, not if they’d just snap out of it. But we knew— we knew at that point that no help was coming. That the Infected would likely starve or kill each other before anything saved us. I left him. I thought maybe he’d have a chance. Kept expecting some miracle.” Neil cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Well, the miracle’s here. For us, anyway. The truth is… I’m not entirely sure how miraculous it really is. I can’t decide if it was better that I left him or if I should have— if I should have finished it. He wasn’t in the camp. He’s gone. But if he was— would he have wanted to wake up?”
“I told you,” said Elijah, “We can’t ever tell until we wake you up and ask. Some people don’t want to wake up. Even people who were guarded and kept from doing the most horrific things. Some people do, even if they killed those closest to them. And some people, like me, think they don’t and change their minds. I don’t know what you should have done about your friend, knowing what you knew then. I don’t know that there was a right thing to do. It’s different now. You know for sure there’s a cure. You know when they wake up, they have to live with themselves. And with the world as it is now. Or— not. Maybe there’s no right answer now, either. But we’re still going to have to decide in the next several days. Better if we agree beforehand.”
Neil rubbed his eyes again. “Did you ever kill someone before you were sick?”
“No, brother. Not before I was sick.”
“Knowing what living like that was like, that constant, blinding anger and how painful the hunger was, how not me, I was— I— I am grateful to have been cured, Elijah, I don’t want you to think—”
Elijah just shook his head.
“If I could have had a coherent thought during that time, if I could have asked someone sane for one thing, I think I might have asked for them to kill me.”
“Yeah, I think I might have asked for that, too. I remember what it’s like to be Infected. It’s sanity that I’m not so familiar with anymore. This might sound cold, but it’s not just the Infected who worry me. It’s us, too. Death’s easy to find these days, for Infected and Immune alike. I— the camps weren’t a guarantee either. We had to make some tough decisions. And now that I’ve left that, I don’t know if I want to make those decisions anymore. I don’t know if I can, when there’s a choice. And I’m not so sure about you, either. Maybe— maybe that’s cruel. It probably is. And maybe it’ll change when we’re in the moment. Could I do it to save myself? To save you? I— think so. And it’s not a religious thing. I just— I don’t know if I could live with it afterward. So that’s my decision, then. If you find you’re c
apable of killing them, I don’t think I’ll stop you. But that’s as far as I go. For now.”
“I told you about the woman I killed before I lost myself,” said Neil. “It’s the one that’s hardest to carry around. I don’t want to do it again.”
Elijah let out a shaky sigh of relief. “Okay then. We do our very best not to draw any attention to ourselves. And maybe the cold winter last year cleared out most of our route. Maybe we get a little lucky. And hopefully the City’s right behind us with the Cure for anyone we pass by.” He sank down, using his pack to cushion his head. “Come on, Neil. Leave this for tomorrow now. We need the sleep. We won’t see any Infected tonight. Or tomorrow. Let’s take the rest while we can get it.”
16
His arm was broken. He could feel it throbbing beneath the thick cast. The woman pinned by the heavy plaster snarled at him. Her gums were a watery red where saliva mixed with somebody else’s blood. Neil knew he should be frightened of her, thrashing and clawing underneath his arm. Instead, he was just crushingly sad. The woman’s face morphed into one far more familiar. It was his mother choking against his arm instead of the infected woman. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, even as he pressed harder. A jolt of pain arced up his arm to his jaw, but he kept his arm where it was. “I don’t want to do this,” he said again. His mother’s arm flailed and he could see the glint of a gun in her hand. “Do it, Mom,” he told her, “I can’t stop. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want to—”
“Neil!” Elijah’s voice jarred him and he found himself on his back staring at the cobwebbed ceiling of the ice cream shack. He was overheated and gasping for air. The fragile skin on his hands and face where he’d been burned throbbed in the too-warm air. Elijah’s hand gripped his shoulder hard enough to hurt. His grip slowly relaxed when he saw Neil awake. “Just a nightmare, brother. You’re here, now. You’re sane.” He let go and rustled beside Neil for a moment who just stared at the ceiling and rasped. “Here,” said Elijah, pressing a bottle of water into his hand. It was cool and soothing against Neil’s skin. When he took it, Elijah got up and swung the shack door open. A breeze swirled through. It smelled better than the shack and prickled over Neil’s sweaty face. He sat up. He could hear crickets once his breathing slowed. Elijah sat on the edge of one of the coolers in the parking lot. “Okay?” he asked when Neil joined him.
“Yeah. Thanks. Just a bad dream.”
“Think about something else. Something you have to really concentrate on. Math or— I don’t know, every country name you can remember. Or some task that’s really intricate. I used to think about the Cured registry. Tried to remember all the names I copied down that day. Guess I’ll have to find something else now. Maybe what kind of house I’ll build when we get to your cabin. How I’ll do it. What tools I need to look for. Think of that. Your cabin. Summer house?”
Neil nodded, took a drink of the water.
“It’s going to need some work to make it livable year-round. If your wife hasn’t already done it. Going to need a garden. Seeds, tools, fertilizer maybe. Think about plowing. Think about planting. Weeding. Go through the whole thing. You understand?”
“I get it.” But his mind kept wandering back to the terror in his mother’s face. It wasn’t her. She wasn’t there, he told himself, but it didn’t seem to matter. Elijah didn’t notice his discomfort.
“Good,” said Elijah, “because we need to go back to sleep, or we’re going to be hurting in the morning.” He slid down off the cooler and went back into the shack. Neil spent a few more minutes in the breeze and then returned to his spot. If he had the dream again, he didn’t remember it in the morning.
It grew harder not to notice the quiet by the next afternoon. They’d reached the outskirts of a fairly sizable town by then. The houses were simpler to ignore. Neil was still used to night shift work. Houses had been empty while he was out and about, almost everyone gone to work or to school, there weren’t that many people around until he was already at work. But once he and Elijah started passing the gas stations and the breakfast diners and the grocery stores, the dark windows, the empty lots, the dead traffic lights began to wear on him. It was the silence that really gnawed at his edges. He could hear his own breath, his own footsteps too loudly. And Elijah’s next to him. No vehicles rumbling. No tinny music from an open window. No voices or honks or rushes of wind from a bike rolling by.
“Does this get— better?” Neil asked, trying to ignore the unsettling sight of several dozen shopping carts scattered across an almost empty lot. Most of them were on their side. The few cars that sat in the lot made him wonder what happened to their owners. Were they still wandering around inside the grocery store? Lying dead between the cereal shelves and the pancake mixes? Course not, he told himself, Elijah said this part’s already cleared. They were burned or buried or— anyway, all the cereal and pancakes are gone or Elijah’d be leading us in there. He shuddered at the idea that soon they’d have to do just that.
“Which part? Your feet hurting?”
“No, no, I mean all— this. The quiet. It’s driving me crazy. Makes me feel like something’s about to happen.”
“Oh. I don’t know. Like I said, I haven’t been out here completely alone since I was sick. I imagine it must. After a while. Otherwise, there’d be more places like the City. People would have reached out, tried to find each other. Maybe they have and we just haven’t seen them yet. Hard to know. We’ll pass the outer boundary this afternoon and see a few people then. It’ll be easier to sleep for a night. After that—” Elijah shrugged, the pack bouncing on his back. “Anything could be out there. Even good things. And there’s always me when it seems too quiet. We seem to talk easily enough. Can’t sing, but I could whistle if it gets bad.” He smiled and it made Neil feel better.
It was an hour later that the sound began to return to the world. It was exciting at first. The chug of some engine. Neil looked around for it, expecting to see some movement around the large box stores that had taken the place of the diners. Or smell some kind of exhaust in the clean air. “You hear that? We should find them. Sounds like it’s just around the corner,” said Neil, drifting toward the parking lot of a bookstore, the posters faded to thin ghosts of color in the windows. The sound was coming from that direction.
“I think it’s a lot farther, Neil. Probably the scav camp. They’re still a mile or two ahead, unless they’ve moved, but it’d be farther out, not closer. Sound carries a lot now, without all of the other noises people make to conflict with it. You’ll see. That’s probably one of the supply trucks loading up or maybe they needed to run a generator for some reason. Anyway, it’s no one that’ll hurt us. Everyone this side of the outer boundary is part of the City. They’re talking about moving up the wall next week. They never do that until the area’s been scoured at least three times.” He tugged Neil’s elbow and drew him back to the middle of the road. “And as much as I’d like some new paperbacks, that store’s cleared. Mateo brought me the books I’ve got from that place almost two months ago.”
Neil followed him, the constant sound of the engine a sort of comfort under the slap of his own shoes on the pavement. He barely realized how much of a comfort until it abruptly stopped. Distant voices soon replaced it. Inarticulate shouts that made Neil prickle with unease, but he glanced over at Elijah and could see no distress in the man’s face. Conversation, he told himself, Just friends shouting to each other. Maybe coworkers. One on the truck or—
“If you’re healthy, stop there a moment.” The voice crackled as if it came from an old banged-up speaker. It sounded young, nervous. Elijah stopped, completely still in the road.
“Was that for us?” said Neil, turning back to look at him.
“Think so.”
“Stay there a minute, Someone’s coming to check you. Move and I don’t envy the hangover you’ll have when you wake up,” said the speaker voice, though it was markedly more relaxed and cheerful than the first statement had been. Neil looked a
round them for the source, but obeyed the direction and stood still. A parking garage loomed ahead on the right and a domed government building on the left. The only movement he could see was a little flutter in the shadows of the parking garage.
“No Infected in that garage, right Elijah?” he asked nervously.
“Not anymore. It’s a good place for one of the scav lookouts though. Few entrances, good height to watch the streets below. That’s probably where they’re at.”
“Is it Shay’s group? I thought they were supposed to be farther on. They aren’t really going to shoot us, are they?”
“Only with a Cure dart if they did. They’re just checking. Not entirely unheard of for an Infected or two to make it back behind the boundary while the scav teams break and move. That’s why they’ve got lookouts. They’ll be on edge this week, especially, until the boundary wall moves. Got to make sure there’s no threat left when it does. Even if it’s not Shay’s people, it’ll be alright. Just stay calm. We’re not in danger here.”
The squeal of a door erupted ahead and a woman emerged from the parking garage, jogging down the road toward them. She rattled as she ran, and Neil could make out a plastic helmet and what looked like the bulky pads of a baseball catcher’s gear. She stopped a few yards from them.
“You sane?” she asked.
“Don’t know about sane,” said Elijah, “But we’re not going to bite you, if that’s what you mean.”
Before The Cure (Book 2): The Infected Page 15