Malachi would outlive them. He would see dawns that Ryla would not. Upon that stage, he would be no less than electric to viewers.
“Was the boy informed that he’s to be released soon? Was he given his speech to read over yet?” Aulish demanded.
One of the doctors answered. “Yes, he was informed, and I gave the speech to him this morning. Between his treatments, he added notes of things he wishes to say. About what it was like-”
“No! He should just memorize it as written. Easy enough.”
“Sir, it might be best to-”
“The speech says exactly what he needs to say, and exactly what the people need to hear. Tell you what: he can decide if he wants to give a wave or a thumb’s-up at the end. Or an A-OK, that’s fine, too, even a hang-loose if he likes. But no gang signals.”
Aulish had offered this choice like it was a most magnanimous gesture on his part; the doctor did not agree. “I don’t know if he’ll be willing to-”
“Well, that’s where the therapist comes in,” Aulish said shortly.
Startled, Ryla said, “Excuse me, but I’m neither a PR person nor a media coach. I can’t force him to give a speech.”
“If he’s too depressed to do it, then that’s what you’re for. You aren’t forcing him. You’re helping him so that he wants to force himself. Keep me updated on how he’s doing.”
Unable to find a coherent response to this ludicrousness, she blurted, “And I’m supposed to accomplish this in just a few days?”
Aulish resumed the itinerary with Conlon. “Then once we get him to the midpoint of the main aisle, we’ll give him the dove and he’ll release it from the center of the crowd.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t get a dove. We can get a crow or scrub jay.”
“A dove is a symbol of hope, not a crow or scrub jay! Scratch that part then. He and his family will just go straight down the aisle and across the street to President Satter’s residence for their luncheon. Did you talk to the Ladies’ Squad?”
Ryla had been rendered invisible again.
“Yes, sir, the squad will be stationed there on the front lawn with punch and cookies for everyone else. They’re baking right now. We thought we’d leave the stage up through the luncheon to have the choir sing, and we don’t have helium but we can pass out balloons for the youngest kids to blow up and bat around. Maybe organize a soccer or flag football game over on the field for the bigger kids-”
The next interruption didn’t come from Aulish, surprisingly enough, but the object of their meeting himself. With a violent gasp, like he had been held underwater almost to the point of breaking, Malachi’s body bent in half. Hips driving down into the mattress, his legs and upper torso flew up into the air. His eyelids flew open as well, and everyone but the nurse took an involuntary step away from the bed.
The nurse moved closer and caught his hands. “It’s all right, sweetheart, all right.”
His eyes were two milky white marbles. In each one, a creamier shade like separated fat moved in a large globule over the curved surface. No irises, no pupils, no red veins stretching out like spider legs, his eyes were made utterly nauseating for the absence.
Ryla returned to the bedside as a creamy pool slipped to the corner of his left eye. Very, very faintly under the milky white, she could make out a bleached touch of light brown iris and black pupil. Then the cream traveled back and swallowed it up once more.
The head of the hospital edged over and said in a booming, too-cheerful voice, “Good evening, Malachi!”
“He won’t be lucid for some time still,” the nurse said, resettling him in the bed and fixing his blanket. The boy blinked up to the ceiling and then his eyelids drifted down.
Agitated, Aulish said, “But he can’t go up on stage like this! Looking like he’s still a zombie! He’ll scare the bejesus out of everyone! Will this have cleared up by the ceremony? We have to do it soon or else the storms will put it off for weeks and I don’t want to do this inside without the audience!”
“I can’t say what is going to happen in regards to his eyes,” a doctor said. “His skin is growing back at a measurable, predictable pace, but his eyes have changed very little. They may always be this way. We don’t have enough data to know what’s normal and what isn’t in a post-zombie state.”
“He could wear sunglasses,” Conlon suggested. “Or eye patches.”
Aulish cut through both ideas with a slash of his arm. “Absolutely not! He needs to look like a regular boy!”
“Colored contacts,” someone said peaceably as Ryla watched Malachi. “As soon as we’re done here, I’ll head down to the optometrist and see what she has.”
“Go now. If there’s nothing in this settlement, we’ll have to send drones to Settlements 2 and 4 and that will take a while.” Still distressed, Aulish walked out of the room with Conlon and the hospital staff following. Then it was only Ryla and the nurse.
There was a protective stance to the nurse’s posture as she tucked Malachi’s hands under the bedclothes. “What do you think of him?” Ryla asked.
It was only when the voices in the hallway faded to nothing that the nurse threw a glance to Ryla. “I think they would do better to call in a clinical child psychologist, not a marriage and family therapist. But we don’t have one of them here.”
“No, we don’t, unfortunately,” Ryla said.
“He was all of seventeen when he got changed. Five years of roving around out there didn’t mature him, not in his head, not in his heart. His body is twenty-two, but he is still very much seventeen. A young seventeen at that.”
“I noticed you reacting when it was said that Malachi is walking and talking normally. Is that not true?”
The nurse gave her a long look. “He is walking. He is talking.”
“Then what is the problem?”
The woman shrugged with a little hostility. “It was one thing to talk over his head when he was still sick. He didn’t comprehend a word of it, couldn’t. None of them in the locked ward’s experiment bays do. They’re just zombies through and through, hearing noise in place of words. But that hasn’t been true of Malachi for some weeks now, and people are still talking over his head with him wide awake below them and listening.”
“He understands.”
“He understands everything these days, and it makes him angry. Yes, he walks; yes, he talks. But he’s not a science project.”
“Of course he isn’t.”
“You heard them just now. That’s how he’s being treated, in his opinion. No one asked him what he thought about the speech or being on stage; he was just told that that was what he was going to do. How do you imagine he reacted?”
“Not well.”
“Not well.” The nurse looked away. “I had kids once.”
So had Ryla. She looked away, too.
“Four of them,” the nurse said. “Had two girls, tried one more time for a boy, got twin boys. So I know kids. I know the terrible twos. I know the eights, the tens, the tween attitude, and I know seventeen. He has a voice, and it’s not being heard. He has thoughts, and no one cares to listen. Throwing him the bone of a thumb’s up or hang-loose isn’t going to fly with him. He’s smart. And he’s got a keen eye for bullshit, even if you can’t see his eyes. So if you’re planning on how best to bully him into giving this speech, good luck. You’ll need it.”
“I’m not planning that.”
The nurse scrutinized her even more intently than Aulish had done with Malachi. Sensing that she was not going to be believed, Ryla said, “None of mine made it to seventeen.” Her heart began to pound in her chest. She didn’t speak of these things to anyone. “But I did know thirteen. I might not have agreed with everything she said, I might not have allowed her to do certain things, but she knew I would listen. She knew I’d be fair.”
After a moment, the nurse’s aggressive stare died. It had been the right thing for Ryla to say. Now they were just mothers, and not at odds over this man-child bet
ween them.
“How is he coping with all of this?” Ryla asked.
“It’s hard for him, just like it has been for all of us. He’s upset about his dog out there lost and likely dead somewhere, tremendously upset. He kicked us out of his room the day he understood that so he could cry in private. I brought in a Comfort Dog the next day, a little worried that he might reject it, but he loved to have a friend. So I’ve brought her back every other day since then. He can be sullen, withdrawn, but the dog brightens him like nothing else can. He even saves part of his lunch for her. His treatments are painful, and she just sits by him, keeping him company and sleeping beside him afterwards. The one time I couldn’t check out the dog, I brought a Comfort Cat. He was just as pleased to see that tubby old purr-monster as he was the dog. He loves animals, told me that he used to plan to go to college and become a vet.”
“He can still work with animals.”
“One day I squashed a spider in here and he shouted ‘no, no, not my Comfort Spider!’” The nurse laughed. “It was a joke. He got a kick out of pulling my leg. When he’s in a good space, he’s got a sense of humor.”
“Does he remember how he was changed?”
“I don’t know. He hasn’t spoken about it. His parents brought it up when they were here. I was in the room at the moment, and he just looked away from them. The reunion was . . . up and down.”
“How so?”
“Mr. Harris and Malachi got into it a little. A lot. I couldn’t hear much since I’d gone out to the nurses’ station by then, just raised voices and Mrs. Harris trying to calm them down.” Her smile was sad. “Just like nothing ever happened, a father and son butting heads like they have since time began.”
It was exactly the same as the first time, the desperate gasp, the body folding in half and the eyelids flying open. When Malachi settled back, his eyes stayed open and unblinking. Seeing that Ryla was about to address him, the nurse said, “No, he won’t be able to talk yet. Were you given his schedule?”
“No.”
“There are more copies of it sitting on the nurses’ station. Take one when you go.” Dipping into the pocket of her scrubs, she pulled out a folded paper and handed it to Ryla. “You can see it on mine. His treatments are strictly timed. From twelve to three, he’ll be fully awake and in no pain. You must be pretty busy over at the Therapy Center, but if you miss his time for some other person, you’ve missed it for good all day.”
Ryla skimmed it, noting big blocks of time allotted for hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and tiny ones for her. “His appointments with me are only half an hour! Thirty minutes over three days? What am I supposed to do with that? I need to speak with his doctors.”
“They won’t give you more. Come hell or high water, he’s going to be on stage and ready to go. And it wasn’t the doctors’ decision how this was planned out. That schedule came from President Satter’s office. It was Doctor Hansen who thought to bring in someone from Psych and crammed you into the schedule.”
Returning it, Ryla said, “Does Doctor Hansen have specific concerns?”
“His concern is how Malachi is coping. We’ve had five years to adjust to this. In Malachi’s head, it was practically yesterday. But to the vice-president your time is just about ensuring the speech goes off as planned.”
Malachi gasped. The nurse caught his hands and said soothingly, “It’s all right, honey.” He flailed, head lashing back and forth as his body twisted. Letting him go, the nurse stepped to the cabinet and withdrew an ampoule of medication. Another nurse poked his head in to see what was going on and then entered to assist.
Ryla was going to be in the way. She backed out of the room, collected her copy of the schedule, and went home.
Chapter Two
After four morning appointments and a break for lunch, she set off for the hospital. The roads along the way held weary, silent rivers of people carrying baskets from the fields, the food destined either for storage or the kitchens. Helicopter drops would bring more for winter, along with heating elements to be distributed among the houses. There was no way to leave the settlement to chop down trees.
By day, one would get changed. By night, one would get eaten. Either way, that aspiring lumberjack was not coming back. The miles of woods around the settlement were crawling with zombies, drone estimations running into the tens of thousands. North, south, east, and west, there was nowhere to go that was not seething with them. That was true of every settlement, each burning like a candle flame to the mindless legions of white-eyed, black-patched, shambling and devouring ill.
She hadn’t watched the drone videos herself, just heard about it from others. She didn’t want to know.
She veered to the cracked sidewalks to avoid the harvesters, and finally made it to the bridge. The hospital was in view on the other side. There she stopped for breath while looking over the railing. Two corpse fishers were walking along the shore with long poles extended over the water. Each was clamped to a body, the fishers drawing the dead zombies along.
Ryla didn’t linger on the details of the corpses, or the fishers either. She didn’t linger on much of anything these days, pushing food into her mouth without tasting it, sleeping in a bed of indeterminate size, color, and comfort. She saw but she was blind; she heard but she was deaf. It took quite a lot to jolt her out of this gray, senseless and featureless fog, and she almost resented what did. Malachi Harris had been a jolt.
The clamp lost its grip on the decaying meat of one of the corpses, a fisher stopping to regain a hold on the largest shard of rot. The rest sank into the dirty brown water. In the beginning, drowned and decomposing bodies had slipped in upon the deep undercurrents of the river that bisected the settlement. They bubbled to the surface and beached themselves, from full bodies to headless, limbless torsos; they got tangled in foliage growing beside the shore and bobbed there, baking in the sun and calling to insects with their foul odors. A child splashing in the shallows might bring up an arm or leg; a true fisher of fish could find a hook embedded in a gaping, all too human mouth.
Giant grates were installed beneath the water at the fence to keep them out. But the bodies piled up on the other side, forming a grotesque dam and leeching their rot through piece by piece. Nobody could go outside to remove them. So the grates were removed and now the surfaced bodies were walked through the entire settlement, the corpse fishers pulling them with the current to the far side where they could be pushed under the fence and out.
The bodies passed out of view. She crossed the bridge and entered the hospital. It was busy, a woman in labor being wheeled one way, a man with bone protruding from his leg being rushed another, doctors calling for nurses and nurses calling for attendants and a child wailing at top volume behind a curtain. The settlement had power but it was strictly conserved; the hospital elevator was used only for the direst of emergencies so she took the stairs.
On the top floor, she stepped into a smaller scene of pandemonium. Beside the nurses’ station, Conlon was berating a threesome of assistants and gesturing wildly to an array of suits on a rack. “We can take it in if it’s too big, but what are we supposed to do with too small? Look at these! He can’t fit into any of them!”
“You said a boy,” an assistant ventured defensively. “We’ll take them back.”
As deferential and toadying as Conlon had been with the vice president, to his assistants he was as imperious and impatient as a dictator. “No! Deliver this rack to Gertie and see if one will fit the younger brother, of course! Did you get the dresses for the girls?”
“We haven’t had time! We’ve been looking for suits!”
“Why are all of you doing this together like you’re attached at the hip? You, take this down to Gertie, and you, get on the dresses, and you, get out there and find me larger suits! Fast!”
Conlon looked over to Ryla and then immediately away as the rack was rolled past her to the stairs. For a moment the blindness parted and she saw him, an unattractive fellow in his th
irties with a receding hairline and equally receding chin. Beady eyes, an upturned, piggish nose, there was an aura of weakness around him that his stiff shoulders and angry gaze could not overcome. His words had been full of command, but his voice was whining and thin from that grass-stem throat.
Then the curtains fell and she could not have told him apart from anyone else. Or perhaps she could. It made no difference. They did not concern one another.
The disappearance of the assistants had not reduced much of the noise. Voices were crackling with anger in Malachi’s room as she approached the open door. “I don’t want to cut it more than that! I hate how it looks and I’m sick of talking about this!”
“You look like a girl!”
“It’s my hair, Mom, and I don’t look like a girl. Just to you. He can’t buzz it all off! He can trim it up to here and that’s that! Stop being such a hair fascist.”
“Malachi!” a man roared.
“No, Dad! Knock it off!”
Wanting to go back to the Therapy Center, Ryla walked in to a crowd of people. Malachi was in the bed, which had been propped up to let him sit. His head turned to Ryla, who held back a shudder of revulsion to see his white eyes. Hair clean and combed, it tumbled over his shoulders. He had a finger halfway up his neck, indicating to the barber how long he wanted his hair.
His father wore the camouflage blazer and holstered gun of a fence guard; his mother had on the pale pink nursery scrubs for the orphanage. They were lined and thin, though this was not particular to them. Even the children were lined and thin in Settlement 3. Mrs. Harris rapidly exchanged her furious expression for a polite smile to Ryla, though her husband remained stern upon their son.
“I’m Ryla Terrance, the therapist,” Ryla said.
Malachi’s finger dropped from his neck as he gave an eyeless glare to his parents. “You see? You argued about this for so long that now the barber has to leave so I can have therapy.”
“Malachi-”
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