What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose)

by Beaumont, Delany

  Larkin prefers to sleep by himself. He sleeps in short intervals and is easily awoken. It’s never easy for him to stay asleep. Sometimes I’ve stood outside his door and listened to him whimper while in the throes of a bad dream. I’ve asked him if he can remember what he dreams about but he’s never told me if he does.

  I peel the sticky sheet from my body and fumble around for the rifle. At first I’m not worried, thinking I must have kicked it away from me in my sleep. But I can’t feel it anywhere. As my eyes adjust more to the dark, I can’t see it, the shape of it, at all. I’m completely awake now, worried. It could be a game, the kids might have hidden it, but I doubt they’d do that. I’ve yelled at them so many times not to touch it, refusing to let any of them handle it.

  Then there’s the low growling again. It sounds like its coming from right outside the door. The door’s been left open a crack and some hungry creature could just push its way in if it wanted to. But how could a wild animal get inside the house? I get to my knees, listen, then rise to my feet. I check again for any sign of the rifle but there’s nothing, no glint of the barrel in the starlight.

  I gingerly make my way to the door, stepping around the sleeping children. I reach out and touch the doorknob. This close to it, the growling starts to sound more like troubled breathing, like someone drawing ragged breaths through fluid-filled lungs. But it’s so loud, it seems to fill the house, as if the house itself is breathing. I force myself to push the door all the way open and the sound stops.

  Out in the hallway I hear nothing. I shuffle slowly to Larkin’s door. He refused dinner and has stayed in his room. I’ve checked on him a few times, brought him something to drink. He keeps telling me he’ll be all right in the morning.

  The door is closed. I knock softly, hear no reply and ease my way inside. There’s an odd smell in the room now, unfamiliar to me. It reminds me of an injured raccoon that got under our house when I was younger. I remember having tried to pick it out in the dark crawlspace with a flashlight, the stink of it, the raccoon’s eyes gleaming and the way it thrashed out at me.

  A little light creeps in through the curtains. It takes a while until my eyes are able to pick out any shapes in the murk of the room.

  I steal softly to the edge of Larkin’s mattress. I stub my toes against it and I’m frightened of waking him. The smell is stronger, filling the air, a compressed animal scent, like I’ve wandered into some critter’s underground den. Then I hear the growling again which turns into Larkin’s ragged breathing. It’s so loud. It sounds like his lungs are being ripped to pieces. I kneel down on his mattress, bend over him.

  “Larkin.”

  There’s no response.

  I try to touch his forehead and poke him in the eye instead. Cursing the darkness of the room, the smell, the stifling closeness, I go to the window and push back the curtain, lift up the lower pane as high as it will go. There’s little breeze outside and the open window does nothing to clear out the room. I look out at row after row of dark houses, not a soul anywhere.

  Then Larkin begins to moan. I hurry to the mattress, lean over him and grab his hand. His hand is dry—his flesh feels like paper. “You’ve got to drink something.” I reach for a bottle of water near the bed. I lift his head up and try to get him to take a sip. I run my finger across his lips and they feel hard and cracked. I pour out a little water and it dribbles down his chin.

  “Damn it, Larkin. Don’t do this.” I want to slap him, pound on his chest, shock him back to life. His breathing is slow, one tortured breath after another. How could he have gotten so ill so fast? Only a few hours ago he was rubbing berry juice across his chest, throwing berries at me, crushing them into my hair.

  I notice that my nose is running, my eyes are wet. I go back to the window, burbling like a baby. Looking out, I wonder what I would do if I did finally see another light out there, somewhere far across town. There must be others, somewhere. Larkin helped me to feel so self-sufficient, so in control of everything. Now my helplessness engulfs me.

  I stare outside at the abandoned neighborhood, at all the dark houses, and listen. From behind me, one ragged gasp after another, the breaths slowing, coming farther and farther apart.

  Is he dying?

  Just as I’m turning around to see, Larkin sits bolt upright and screams. The sound is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.

  Eight

  I remember when Larkin told us his story. Part of it, anyway. All he would tell. It was that first night we spent together, the start of our little family, he and Emily and I huddled around the smoky wood stove in the house we’d found in Potterville.

  Emily and I didn’t have much to tell, very little that Larkin couldn’t already guess for himself. We had been abandoned, deliberately or accidently and left to hunt for food and shelter. To try to survive. After telling him where I was from, Larkin asked me where my father worked.

  “It was called Formammon Laboratories. It was a medical research facility. They did some sort of anti-aging, cellular regeneration stuff.”

  “He actually worked there, huh? Was he a scientist, a research scientist?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “It’s interesting, is all. My dad taught biology. I grew up south of you, in Clarence.” Clarence was a city at the far end of the valley, the second largest in the state. “My dad taught at the university there.” He stretched, looked around the room. He seemed to be trying to decide how much he wanted to say.

  “I had my life all mapped out,” he said. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? I’d attend the university with a nice tuition reduction courtesy of my dad. I thought maybe I’d get an engineering degree. I always liked building stuff. Get a job somewhere overseas and see the world. My older brother…” He fell silent.

  Emily and I waited for him to continue. “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” she said.

  He laughed but it was clear that he thought none of it was funny. “Sometimes when I wake up in the night, just for a moment I have the idea that all that stuff I thought about my future could still happen.” He shook his head.

  “Clarence was wild until the National Guard came. People went insane—stealing, looting, torching stuff just for the hell of it. The Guard stopped some of that but after a while there were too few troops to maintain order. My parents died quickly, didn’t suffer for long. My brother and I tried to give them a proper burial but they made us take their bodies to the public crematorium set up just outside town. The burn pits they called them.”

  Larkin looked at us. “You were lucky you were both from some place smaller. Everybody just kind of left where you were, didn’t start turning on each other. My brother and I decided to get out. Thought we could find a place in the country somewhere, grow our own food, hunt our own game. Live like mountain men. We found a farm that wasn’t too damaged but winter was coming on and there wasn’t much food.

  “Then my brother got sick. The white fever. The blood plague. That was what people were calling it in Clarence, even on the radio when you could hear anything through the static. My brother couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. He was in some kind of horrible pain that just twisted him in knots.”

  Larkin got up and began pacing the room. “And he changed, his skin, his eyes. The color drained from his hair and it became like dry bristles, like a brush covered with talcum powder. I couldn’t do anything to help him, nothing. You know there is no cure. No one had time to find one.”

  He stopped and squatted down by the stove, rubbing his hands, holding his palms to the heat. He reached for a few more shattered chair legs and poked them deep into the stove’s iron belly.

  “What happened to your brother?” Emily asked him. “Did he…?”

  “Yes, he died,” he said softly. “He didn’t survive the fever. I was almost grateful. No one knows what happens to those who survive it, do they? Just that they’re not really like us anymore. They become some sort of thing, not human.”

  “Not huma
n,” I repeated.

  He shook his head. “But that’s probably just a rumor. I’ve never seen these survivors, if they exist.” He stopped talking, stared at the crackling wood.

  After a while Emily asked gently again, “What happened then?”

  “I buried him. He weighed like twenty pounds when he died. I have no idea where the rest of him went. He was a big guy, healthy one day, then there was nothing left.”

  He turned and studied us carefully. “I think we’ve all got it, the sickness. It’s in us. They said it was a blood-borne pathogen on TV, transmitted from person to person. I’ve thought a lot about how I handled the bodies of my parents, my brother. There’s no way I don’t have it, too.”

  I looked at him, started to say something but decided not to.

  “Emily probably got it from her friends who got it from their parents,” he said. He looked at me and said softly, “And if you didn’t have it before you probably got it from her. We’re always cutting ourselves, scraping ourselves. It’s impossible to keep clean.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Keep heading north. Find someplace where there are more people. See if someone has an answer.”

  He touched my hand and stared into my eyes so intently I wanted to look away. “If what happened to my brother starts to happen to me, I want you to take that rifle.” He squeezed my hand. “You know what I’m asking.”

  “I couldn’t ever—” I started to say.

  “You could. You could because I won’t be me anymore.”

  Nine

  I awake a few hours after Larkin’s scream in the night, lying on his mattress. A little morning light is just starting to seep through the window. I think at first I’m still in the room with all the other children but soon realize that I’m alone.

  Alone.

  Larkin’s not beside me. I haul myself to my feet and look around the room as if he might be lurking in a corner.

  My rifle is sitting propped against the windowsill and I know Larkin must have put it there. He knew what was happening to him. And he retained his instinct to survive. And he survived long enough to drag himself from the room, from the house. I wonder if he really thought I’d try to shoot him once I saw how he was suffering. But hiding the rifle meant—

  He believed he might survive. He wanted to survive.

  But if he’s still alive, he’s become some sort of thing, alien and unknowable. That was what he said all those who didn’t die right away became. No longer human. If the stories were true. He and his brother had heard many stories from panicked people in their hometown.

  What’s better, no Larkin or a Larkin who doesn’t know me anymore? A Larkin who can’t communicate, is as mindless and crazed with hunger as one of the feral dogs howling in the night? But I can also imagine all too well stumbling across his poor, empty shell of a body, like all those we’ve found in the backrooms of cold, dark houses. Seeing such a thing would kill me.

  I look out the window as the sun starts to rise over the rooftops. Larkin’s out there somewhere, probably very close to where we are. On the slightest chance he has survived, I decide that we will search for a few days, maybe a few weeks, then wait out the summer to see if he makes some sign, to give him a last chance to contact us.

  Ten

  I have a secret that I’ve told no one, not even Larkin. It marks me as different from him, possibly different from every other person still alive in this world.

  My father and his team of researchers worked frantically to find a vaccine. An inoculation that could prevent the transmission of the disease. And he thought he had. He couldn’t be certain but he believed he had. I won’t know if he was right for another year or two.

  He gave me an injection the very last time I saw him—the experimental vaccine.

  He hadn’t been home for over a week even though the research facility wasn’t far away. For months he had only been able to come home for a few hours at a time. School had closed. By then, the bank where my mother worked had also shut its doors and she was home with me. The bank’s customers had withdrawn as much money as they could but, she told me, their money was now as useless as old lottery tickets.

  One time my mother had driven over to see my father at his lab when he hadn’t been home for several days and he had become very angry. It wasn’t safe on the roads, he had said. Someone might attack her. Crazy people were on the loose.

  There was a babble of constant news broadcasts informing us of a breakdown of social order, martial law, curfews, government orders, empty food banks, power shortages, hospital closures, recovery centers. And where to take the dead. Then the television stopped working. Then the power went out for good. We had our generator but my mother was frantic to try to conserve fuel.

  On the day my father paid us his last visit, we heard the sound of a truck coming down the road and it scared us. My mother grabbed a rifle and watched the truck approach through a pair of binoculars. It didn’t take long before she relaxed and passed the binoculars to me. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s your father.”

  Once inside the house, he was jittery, couldn’t stop moving. He didn’t say much. His face was drained of color, his eyes red. He hadn’t slept for days. He went to the basement and checked our supplies. He inspected the car in the garage and noted how much propane we had left. He asked us if we needed anything, then laughed. “I don’t know why I said that. I couldn’t get you anything at this point even if I wanted to.”

  “Is it bad out there?” my mother asked.

  “It’s bad. It’s both a blessing and a curse that we live way out here, in the middle of nowhere. You’re probably safer for now. But later…” He held up his hands. “I had to promise them the moon to get them to let me out for a few hours. They’ll come looking for me if I’m not back soon. It’s all government people there now.”

  My mother had tried to make him something to eat, a sandwich and some soup, but he refused to eat any of our food. It took her a long time to finally stop offering him things. He washed his hands carefully before he touched us. He even wore latex gloves.

  At last my mother sighed and said, “So the plan is, we stay here while you go back to the lab and finish what you’re doing.”

  My father looked away, out the kitchen window. The three of us were leaning against the counters near the stove. The counters were littered with the cans and jars my mother had kept pulling out of the cupboards. My father looked so thin and weak, as if all of his strength was draining away. His hair kept getting grayer every time I saw him and his face more deeply lined, his cheeks sagging.

  “I’m afraid there is no plan,” he said. “No one could have predicted this. When I leave today, I won’t be back for who knows how long. They’re taking us to a larger complex in Raintree. The airport’s there, the river, all major highways. We’ll do what we can.”

  He had set his briefcase on the counter, the well-worn, brown leather bag my mother had got for him right after they were married, his initials in three silver letters mounted above the clasp. He picked the briefcase up, pulled the straps free and opened the flap.

  “I have to ask you something,” he said. He was searching our faces, making sure the importance of what he was about to say sunk in. There was no time to waste on anything that wasn’t important.

  He retrieved a small glass vial from the case. It was the same type of vial that I’d seen nurses take from refrigerators in nursing stations when preparing to give me an injection. I’d never seen my father handle one. “This is experimental. It may not work. I believe it will but I can’t be sure.”

  “You want to inject us?” my mother said softly.

  “If they knew I had this…” He shook his head. “It’s a chance. It’s a virus that might make you sick, might mutate into something even more deadly but it just might alter the structure of your immune system enough, genetically, to keep you safe.”

  My mother and I said nothing. We stared at the little
vial with its rim of silver metal. It was half full with a liquid the color of iced tea.

  He said, “We ran out of time to do any more trials. This is all I have left.”

  My mother put her hand on my shoulder, rubbed it gently. “Maybe just me,” she said.

  My father pinched his eyes closed and took a deep breath. He had to work hard to keep his voice steady. “She’ll get sick, too. You’ll both have to leave here eventually, when you run out of food. Maybe by that time things will have calmed down. I will try to reach you somehow if I can. You can start looking for other survivors, find a rescue station. We can make contact.”

  “But what if it…kills us?” She let her voice trail off.

  “Maureen,” my father said gently. We knew there was nothing more to say.

  My father washed his hands again and took out a plastic bag packed with syringes and more latex gloves. He worked quickly with well-practiced motions, drawing the serum into each syringe. He told us that he’d only given injections of this to lab animals before. They had survived.

  My mother offered her arm first, then I stepped forward. I felt the prick of the needle, looked away as my father pushed what he’d helped to create at his lab into my bloodstream, then back at his worried eyes as I felt him gently swiping my skin with a sterile swab.

  My father stooped to kiss my forehead, thought better of it. A few minutes later, he was gone.

  Eleven

  I keep my eyes fixed on the sun rising over the houses of Oxbow Ferry, rubbing the spot on my left arm where my father had given me the injection. Almost two years have passed. I wonder if the fact that I’m still alive and unchanged is proof that the vaccine worked. But I’m a year younger than Larkin. There’s still plenty of time for the disease to reach me.