He glanced at the paramedic, wanting to ask for some rubbing alcohol. Hand sanitizer. Anything. But he didn’t want to give himself away. And he’d already thoroughly washed his hands. If there were a virus in his body, there was nothing more he could do about it. His stomach rolled. His head felt light. He could see it, the virus floating through the fluids of his body, little bundles of matter so small and mechanical that biologists still couldn’t agree whether they were truly alive, attaching to his cells, penetrating the cellular walls, rerouting interior production, and tricking his own body into duplicating those undead bundles until the infected cell swelled and burst, flooding his guts with fresh attackers.
On and on until he bled to death in bed, pale and sagging.
The ambulance descended to the back road and swung onto the asphalt. Tim had been his only real-life friend and there were times he doubted Tim had even liked him that much. Tim had died in bed. It looked like it had been painful. Ness believed things happened for reasons. Not for a reason. Not according to the guidelines of a higher power’s plan that was ultimately benevolent and would, in hindsight, be comforting and joyous, no matter how atrocious the individual links of the chain that composed these events.
But he believed things happened according to logical chains of events. He believed that everything could be understood if you looked carefully and closely enough. What chain had ended with Tim’s dead? Except the chain didn’t end there, did it—what did it mean that the next link led to him?
The ambulance’s lights poured over the red brick and blue glass of the hospital. Ness was taken to an exam room and told to wait. A nurse checked his blood pressure and temperature, drew blood, asked him for contact information for his family, and told him to wait for the doctor. When she opened the door, angry voices rang in the hall. Ness waited as he was told. The nurse hadn’t been wearing a mask. Atop the exam table, Ness swung his feet, crinkling the paper he was seated on. The room was cold. Someone had taken his coat as he’d been led into the hospital. He got up and walked around to keep his blood flowing.
The doctor was a thin man with thinner hair, and a goatee clipped as close as a putting green. Ness immediately returned to the exam table.
“Good evening.” The man fiddled with his paperwork. “How are you feeling?”
“Cold,” Ness said.
He looked up sharply. “Shivering?”
“It’s cold in here.”
“But you don’t feel feverish. Okay, Nestor, I’ve got a few simple tests for you here.”
“Do you think there might have been something at the house?”
“Well, that’s what we’d like to eliminate as a possibility.” The doctor directed him to take off his shirt. He complied.
“What are you trying to find?” Ness said.
“Right now we’re just going to do a few simple tests to establish a baseline. That way, if anything changes, we’ll know and be able to respond appropriately.”
“How long do you need me here?”
The man got an otoscope from the drawer and instructed Ness to turn his head. “Well, that’s what we’re going to find out.”
He checked Ness’ ears, his throat, his breathing. At the end, he scribbled notes on his pad and nodded to himself without looking up. “Have you or anyone you know recently been to Africa?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Ness stared at the doctor. Was he being made fun of? “I think I would remember if I had visited the Congo in the last two weeks.”
The doctor nodded. “Wait here for the nurse, please. She’ll only be a minute.”
She was much more than a minute. Ness didn’t know what to make of all this. The procedure, so far, had been little different than a checkup with his family doctor. The thin, balding doctor hadn’t worn a mask, either. Either they weren’t seriously worried about a disease, or the staff hadn’t been informed.
When the nurse returned, a pale green mask was perched over her mouth, a metal clip pinching it to her nose. She wore gloves. She guided him from the exam room to another room with a single bed. At no point did she touch him.
“We’d like to keep you overnight,” she said. “We’ve called your family—your brother? They know you’re here and you’re safe.”
“Can I see him?” Ness said.
“Visiting hours are done for the day. I’m sure you can see him tomorrow. Do you have any questions?”
He wanted to ask what would happen if he wanted to leave, but he didn’t want to put her in the awkward position of telling him he had to stay. He shook his head.
“Great.” Her eye crinkled above her mask. She pointed to a beige intercom on the end table beside the bed. “Just buzz me if you need anything. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Her smile melted. She closed the door. From the outside of the room, the lock clicked. Ness waited two minutes to make sure she’d left, then tried the door. It didn’t budge.
Something had changed.
He didn’t like that. There now existed the non-zero chance that his life was no longer his. If they believed it were a disease, they could ship him to Boise or Seattle or Denver, even the CDC at Atlanta. There would be nothing he could do about it. He would be a public health risk, perhaps even classified as a national security risk. If this were something fatal or unknown, he would be tested until he died of the disease or they determined there was nothing more to learn from him. That process could take—well, he had no idea how long. Months, easily. After his release, followup tests could be ongoing for years.
He didn’t like this line of thinking, but he couldn’t stop his brain from clicking down the rails. Once again, he imagined a single virus penetrating the walls of a single one of his cells. Diverting his resources to double its RNA again and again. Bursting free. Destroying the cell. Attaching to its neighbors. Repeating. He fought to breathe.
Two hours later, the lock clicked, the door opened, and Shawn walked into the room.
“What the hell have you gotten into?”
Ness rolled out of bed and stood straight. The tile was cold under his socks. “What are you doing here?”
Shawn blinked at him. “I broke in, idiot.”
“You can’t break into a hospital.”
“I’m standin’ here, aren’t I?”
“You could be arrested.”
“I’ll play dumb.”
“I don’t think that will require much playing.”
“Good one.” Shawn glanced at the door, then crossed to the bed. “Where have you been? Mom’s gone half crazy. One of her friends said they saw you up in Coeur d’Alene. Your phone goes straight to voicemail. Good damn thing, too. She’d keel over if she heard—they say you found a couple bodies?”
“Tim Rogers and his mom,” Ness said. “They were dead in their house.”
“Well, that’s right fucked up. What happened?”
“They bled to death.”
“Shot? Stabbed?”
Ness glanced at the door. “Spontaneous internal hemorrhage.”
Shawn rolled his eyes. “Try again, minus the asshole.”
“They bled out of every hole in their head. Possibly their rectums, too. I didn’t check.”
“Are you for real right now? What could even do that?”
“Poison,” Ness said. “Or maybe an infection.”
Shawn leapt back. “Did you touch the bodies?”
“Of course not.”
“But you were in the house.”
“Just long enough to see they were dead,” Ness said.
“What’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you say something? What if you’ve got it and now you just gave it to me, too?”
“That’s not how it works. I couldn’t possibly be infectious yet. The virus wouldn’t have had long enough to—”
“Oh, you’re a fucking doctor now?” Shawn mashed his lips together. He took one step forward, fist bunched, then remembered why he was made and got spooked. He backed
toward the door. “What if you’ve just killed me? What’s mom gonna do? You stupid son of a bitch.”
The door opened. Above her mask, the nurse blinked at Shawn, face going hard. “Who are you?”
Shawn whirled. “Nobody. I got lost. Can you direct me to the exit, please?”
“Sir, you need to stay right here.” She melted out the door and locked it.
Shawn rushed up to it, grabbed the handle. He pounded his fists against the door. “Hey! I’m not supposed to be in here!”
“That won’t help,” Ness said.
“I’m not sick!” Shawn pressed his ear against the door. He swore, backed up, and kicked it with all he had. “Hey, morons! I’m not sick in here!”
“That should convince them.”
Shawn kicked the door again, rattling it. “Let me out of here!”
“If they think I have something, do you really think they’re going to let you out?” Ness smiled. He couldn’t remember seeing Shawn put out like this, turned impotent, fearful as a poisoned dog. “We’re being quarantined.”
6
“What kind of sick?” Tristan said into the phone. Across the path, Sather Tower spiked above the campus, its white stone pinked by the sunset. The buildings around it were the same milky stone, propped up by pillars, capped by red roofs. Tristan had never been to Greece, but it looked very Greek to her.
“They don’t know.” Her dad sounded tired. Froggy. Tristan had no doubt he’d kept up his work schedule at the hotel on top of all the visits to the hospital. He was getting older. When she’d lived with them, she hadn’t noticed how her parents aged, but whenever she drove home for the weekend, she was struck by the graying of their hair, the lines on their face. Even her mom, whose face was, she often complained, half her business. They weren’t old old, but she could now see how they would look when they were.
“What do you mean, they don’t know?” she said.
“He’s got a fever. A bad one. Dizziness. Some trouble breathing.”
“From the concussion?”
“That would explain the dizziness. About the rest...”
“Well, I don’t know how they can’t know what it is.”
“It isn’t like they can toss all the sick people into a change-sorting machine and see what shakes out.” He cleared his throat. “A lot of the time, all they have to go by are a few symptoms. It’s like trying to guess what a living brontosaurus looked like when all you’ve got is a kneecap, a vertebra.”
“There’s no such thing as a brontosaurus,” Tristan said.
“What? Since when?”
“Like fifteen years, Dad.”
“Well, that just proves my point.”
“How bad is he? Should I come home?”
“It’s not—critical. Yet.” Her dad sighed into the line. “But if you’ve got the weekend free, I’m sure Alden would love to see you. He looks up to you. Big sister in the big city.”
Tristan smiled at the tall white tower. “I don’t have class Friday. I’ll leave tomorrow night.”
She headed straight home and began packing, mostly to give herself something to do. Connie glanced over from the couch.
“Going somewhere?”
“My brother’s sick.” She rolled a sweatshirt tight and stuffed it in the bottom of her backpack. “I’m going home again tomorrow.”
“The flu that’s going around?”
“What flu?”
“The flu that everyone’s got.”
“I don’t know,” Tristan said. She grabbed spare socks and underwear and returned to the living room. “It sounds pretty bad.”
Enfolded in the couch cushions, Connie wriggled to get her elbows beneath herself. “Whatever it is, you know he got it when he was in the hospital. I don’t know why people even go to those places.”
“Because those people are full of deadly, deadly sickness?”
“Going to the hospital means surrounding yourself with hundreds of people with way worse stuff than you’ve got. And all the doctors want to do is prescribe, prescribe, prescribe.”
“That’s what’s going to kill us,” Tristan said. “Sooner or later, antibiotics will breed a bug we can’t stop.”
“It’s like if Jesus carved his own cross,” Connie laughed. Her eyes went wide. “How weird would that have been?”
At Thursday’s meeting of Blue-Grass: Drugs, Depression, and the Soul of the Musician, three of the twenty-odd students were missing. Two others coughed rhythmically. Halfway through, a shaggy-haired boy rose, mouth pursed in the awkward way of someone who has to spit but is in polite company, and walked swiftly from the room. He didn’t come back.
Afterwards, she walked home under a half-clouded spring sky, a cold western wind slicing through the houses. She packed her toothbrush and deodorant and the hairspray Connie disapproved of and drove north to Redding. Cars dammed the freeway, opening up only when she was well free of the city.
Her parents’ house was empty. She called her mom, who explained she had an open house, but that Tristan’s dad was down at the hospital if she wanted to visit. Tristan promised she would, then hung up and went to the fridge for some orange juice, needing a few minutes of quiet and stillness before she got back in a car. She sipped the sweet juice, losing herself in the kitchen. It always stunned her. She’d last seen it less than a week ago, but the contrast between it and her dingy apartment kitchen with its scratched linoleum and grease-stained walls made it hard to believe the two specimens belonged to the same species of rooms. Cherrywood cabinets mounted above pearly marble counters finished with elegant chair rail. A different marble tiled the floor, this one the warm brown of commercially-brewed espresso, veins of pink quartz matching the pink highlights of the counters. Potent steel appliances kept sentry over the beauty.
How much had it cost her parents to create this kitchen? $30,000? Enough to keep Tristan alive for two years in the city, provided she ate plenty of pasta. Their kitchen was worth roughly one-fortieth of a human lifetime. Where had that wealth come from? People paying for a place to stay in her dad’s hotel? The commission her mother earned selling others homes containing kitchens of their own? Bought with money earned through thousands of hours spent pouring foundations and driving trucks and bagging groceries. All that money, all that labor, all those life-hours, funneled into the creation of a kitchen that probably wasn’t measurably better at its core functions—storing and preparing food—than her own filthy, worthless, rented rathole.
She set her empty glass in a dishwasher that would have paid two months of rent and drove to the hospital, where she texted her dad for the room number. He sat in a chair beside the bed, eyes baggy behind his glasses. Alden was asleep, a clear tube running from a stand to his arm.
“How’s he doing?” she said.
Her dad shook his head. “No worse. Fever’s pretty high.”
“How high is pretty high?”
“If it were a quiz score, he’s earned extra credit.”
She frowned at Alden. He was pale and his brow was wrinkled tight, as if he were in pain. She touched his arm, then sat beside her dad, whose head drooped toward his shoulder within minutes. His gentle snores whooshed uncannily like Darth Vader’s breathing.
Very quickly, and against all sense of propriety, she was bored. She should have brought a book. Her iPod. She felt terrible, being bored while her brother fought his fever—potentially, fighting for his life, a thought she quashed as quickly as she had it—but couldn’t help wondering what good it really did Alden for them to sit several feet away from him while he slept. This was for their own benefit, wasn’t it. The confidence that comes with the illusion of control.
She listened to the heating ducts for thirty minutes before Alden stirred. He woke angry, blue eyes bright, the skin around them folding into rills of pain. She laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he croaked.
“The way you squint. You look like Lil’ Clint Eastwood.”
“Maybe Clint Eastwood feel
s like crap every minute of his life.”
“Sorry.” She composed herself. “Do you not feel good?”
He sat up, scowling at the tube in his elbow, and reached for the glass of water on the table beside the bed. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“That’s the great thing about college. You’ve already paid for it. They don’t care if you actually show up.”
“Sounds way better than my stupid school.”
“Middle school’s the worst,” she said. “High school will be better. You’ll see.”
He drank the glass to the bottom, eyeing her skeptically. “Why’s it so much better?”
“The girls are cuter. Or the boys, if that’s your thing.”
“It’s not!”
She smiled at his culturally-endowed homophobia. “High school’s better because of the freedom. You get to choose more of your classes. You’ve got a car. Some of your friends are really starting to think for themselves. And then you get to college, and it’s like that a hundred times over.”
“What about after college?”
She laughed. “Then you work for someone else until you die.”
He smiled, pain relaxing from his face. “Maybe you should just stay in college forever.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. They call that becoming a professor.”
Alden laughed, then turned away and coughed violently, skinny ribs wracking. Tristan snagged his glass and went to the sink for water. Once his coughing settled, he drank heavily, eyes watering.
“Mom and Dad seem pretty worried,” he said.
“That’s because their darling baby boy is in the hospital,” Tristan said. “A very fine hospital. Which I’m sure you’ll leave very soon.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because thirteen-year-olds are universally infected with the Annoying Virus. This virus is so powerful that it overwhelms any other disease that tries to enter the thirteen-year-old’s body. That way, he can be back on his feet Annoying others in no time at all.”
Alden laughed again, then coughed again. “I’m glad you’re not a doctor.”
“I’d be a great doctor,” she said.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 110