Ruth just kept walking. She’d made the mistake of retorting before. One of the men took a step toward her, but stopped as the afternoon light sparked from the metal edge of the pistol hanging at her waist. An elderly woman farther up the street shuffled toward her with a broad smile. The gray braid that circled her head was fuzzy with fly-aways that caught the sunlight and made a white-hot halo around her. She held a great black bible in her thin arms and stretched it out toward Ruth. She hadn’t been with the protesters before, she was new. Ruth sighed and slowed down.
“This isn’t something I enjoy,” Ruth offered, “The girl is in terrible pain. It never ends. And it never will—”
Father Preston began shouting over her. “Through suffering we are cleansed! If the girl and her father repent and pray, she will be cured. Nothing is beyond God! I was cured—”
Ruth whirled around to look at him. “You stupid, arrogant man. What makes you think you are better or holier than all the people who have succumbed to this? You think you’re more guiltless than children? Than my child?” She was so angry she didn’t notice the massive bible raised over the smiling old woman’s head until the leather cracked with a loud thud into her back. Ruth stumbled forward a step and watched the other protesters begin closing in around her. She swung around and knocked the book out of the old woman’s hand. It skidded across the baking tar and the thin leaves fluttered, their words floating on the translucent paper. Ruth fumbled with her holster and pulled out the gun.
“Back up!” she shouted, swinging in an arc, “All of you back up.”
“You see?” yelled Father Preston pointing a crooked finger at her, “The monster shows her true nature.”
The others looked uncertain as Ruth changed focus between each of them. She didn’t waste her breath arguing. She backed out of the circle of people.
“I wouldn’t waste the blood of the faithful on someone like you, Ruth,” sneered the priest.
Ruth turned her back on them and walked into the silent city, passing into the cool shadow of the rusting buildings. After a block, she put the gun back in its holster and began the long walk to Emma’s house.
The heat was muted between intersections, the sun had given up the battle and partially fallen behind the tall buildings, still blasting through the empty lots occasionally. The flooded subways made it worse, steam curling up from the stairwells, still carrying a foul human odor even after almost a decade. Swarms of mosquitoes hovered around the openings, breeding in the still water. Ruth wondered what they ate. Dogs maybe. There were still lots of them. Or maybe they fed on infected people who still managed to cling to life by attacking rats or pigeons or the occasional person that still wandered the street. She wondered if it was the lack of people or luck that had prevented a malaria outbreak. There were so many things to worry about now.
She’d thought it would stop after losing Charlie and Bill, that she wouldn’t care any more. And a part of her didn’t. But Ruth didn’t like the idea of suffering. Especially alone. At first, she’d just been trying to avoid the most brutal methods of dying. There were so many now. The sick people had roamed the streets for the first few years, attacking and killing anything they found. But winter, starvation, battles with others and secondary diseases had killed off a good portion of them.
Just after Bill had killed himself, bands of scavenging survivors had swept through most of the city, the last wave of people fleeing. They had taken what they wanted, when they wanted it. There were too many weapons just lying around. Everyone was armed. Ruth had hidden until the city was silent again. But the loneliness was deadly. A bad fall while scavenging, allowing a door to close and lock behind her, even letting a fire go out in the winter, death waited in the simplest things now. And that wasn’t even counting the microbial threats. Ruth knew too much about those. Most diseases simply didn’t have a method of transmission now that everyone was gone, even the corpses. But even a rusty nail could be the start of a terrible, unstoppable infection now.
The fear of a painful death had made her seek out the stragglers, the people that stayed. There were hundreds, maybe even a few thousand. But they were scattered all over the large metropolis. Ruth only knew a handful. But many, many of them knew who she was.
She’d come to Emma’s address. Just another row house in the middle of a long string of others. Nothing special. Just like the day. Just like Emma, Ruth told herself. But it was a lie. They were all special, all different. She’d done this dozens of times, kept expecting them to blur, meld, become one nameless face in her memory. But they remained stubbornly unique.
She stood on the top cement step and leaned in toward the front window. The summer sun was too bright and bounced off the glass. Ruth pulled her gun from its holster. She expected that Nick would have told her if Emma was loose, but she had been surprised before. The knob rattled loosely as she opened the door. Emma heard it and began banging somewhere overhead. Ruth put away the gun, satisfied that the girl was restrained. As she closed the door, the growling from Emma’s room bubbled over into a shriek of rage. It was like raw, searing pain spilling into the air. Ruth couldn’t stand that shriek, not since Charlie. She pulled a pair of headphones from her pocket and shoved one into each ear. A second later, Dvorak washed away the screams. But it couldn’t mask the world around her.
The living room was barren, except for a few long clotheslines strung across it. Strips of torn cloth hung from them, the sepia ghost of old, washed blood staining them. Ruth touched one, realizing it was a homemade bandage. There had still been real ones for Charlie. She had thought their lives were so difficult that first year. But they had medicine and gas and food then. It had been almost six years since she’d seen a sterile gauze pad. Ruth ducked beneath the streamers of cloth. The back of the room was also bare, except for a pile of broken furniture and an axe sitting in front of a large old fireplace. It was nothing unfamiliar. They all did it.
Ruth and Bill had raided the hardware stores first, but that didn’t last long, almost everyone else had the same idea. After Bill and Charlie died, Ruth raided the empty neighboring homes for anything wooden. But wood was getting scarce in the city. The stairs were just beyond the fireplace. Ruth climbed them slowly, examining each picture that hung beside them in the gloomy half-light. She pulled Emma’s fourth grade school picture from its frame. One of Emma’s front baby teeth was missing, its replacement half in and giving her smile a slightly crooked look. There was a star barrette pinning her hair back. Her white shirt was startling against the fake leaf background.
Ruth put the photo into her pocket, sliding it carefully under the slim MP3 player so that it wouldn’t bend. She reached the top of the stairs. The hallway was narrow but surprisingly bright, one side studded with large, dusty windows. Three doors sunk into the opposite wall. There was a blue five gallon bucket in front of the middle one, and a heavy hydrant wrench lay beside it, its red paint flaking in spots.
Ruth pushed the bucket and wrench back to the top of the stairs, and opened the middle door, to see a small bathroom. The window was cracked and stuffed with rags to keep the breeze out. Wax ends of candles slumped over the edges of the sink and puddled in disks on the floor. Ruth picked two that were still large pillars and lit them. The wallpapered walls were dented in half a dozen places where they had been struck. The paper hung in thin, horizontal strips. where someone’s nails had dragged down the wall. The mirror over the sink was long gone, leaving behind a lighter mark and a shallow, naked cabinet.
Ruth ignored the obvious signs of struggle and turned to the bathtub. She found the drain plug and squeezed it into place. Leather mittens hung from long straps that were bolted into the tile and a grey plastic hockey mask hung from the shower head, its inside dark with flakes of dried blood. Ruth quickly looked away.
Bill had always held Charlie while Ruth bathed him. She’d never had to strap him into anything. But she’d also had sedatives. Every time she did this, she became more convinced that Bill had been right
. Charlie was better off this way. Ruth was better off. It didn’t stop her from aching for both of them though. Ruth pushed back from the tub and left the room with the candles still burning.
The door to the left shuddered. Ruth ignored it, turning her music up. She opened the far door. A large mattress remained in the center of the room, but the rest was bare, the carpet still dented with the footprints of heavy chairs. A small pile of clothes sat where a dresser ought to go. The doors to the closet were also gone, burned some winter before. Ruth could see dresses still hanging inside and a thin pile of blankets and sheets stacked beneath. It occurred to her to wonder where Emma’s mother was. She’d never asked. It was easy to assume Nick had done for her what he could not bring himself to do for Emma. It disturbed Ruth that it was far easier to imagine someone killing their spouse than their child— as if one life were less worthy than the other. She slowly flipped through the dresses and remembered how angry she’d been at Bill.
If he’d just waited until she got back— even if he hadn’t believed her, even if it were just to let her say goodbye. Instead, twelve years of laughing together, fighting and loving all gone in one cold little line on a slumping notebook in front of Charlie’s door. Why didn’t she join them? Why seven more years doing the same penance over and over? Because that’s what she was doing here, and all the other times before. Penance. Doing what she had failed to do for Charlie. She didn’t have an answer for herself.
She pulled out a light summer dress, one that should have floated down the boardwalk at the beach. Ruth knelt down and found an untorn white sheet. Smacking the dust out of the cloth, she brought both into the bathroom. Then she picked up the bucket and hydrant wrench and headed back downstairs.
She stopped the music as she reached the front door. Emma still pounded on the floor above, and her cries had become plaintive. She sounded more like a small child who wanted her mother than a raging young woman. It deepened the ache in Ruth’s chest, but she couldn’t risk going into the street without being able to hear. She ground her teeth and stepped outside. The day was softening, leaking away. The cement world gave its heat back to the sky and Ruth knew she only had an hour before Nick returned. She opened the hydrant and let the sluggish water tumble into the bucket. She left the music off as she carried the water to the bathroom. It was time now anyway. The water sloshed into the dusty tub, but it took two more trips to get a decent amount. Then she pulled the picture from her pocket, reminding herself one last time what the little girl had been like, the face that should be remembered, not whatever paced behind the first door. She slid the photograph into the edge of the doorframe so she could focus on the girl smiling out at her as Ruth checked the bullet in her gun. Her eyes blurred, just as they always did at this point. She sniffled and blinked hard. She took a deep breath and raised the gun with one arm. Her free hand turned the door handle.
The door sank away into the room. For a second the dust hung sparkling gold in the afternoon light from the windows. Ruth exhaled and the dust bounced and spiraled in the tiny breeze. Then there was a low gurgling growl from the far corner. The light pad of bare feet on wood and Emma’s face sprang up just beyond the barrel of Ruth’s gun. The girl was grown up now, grown old. All the round softness chipped away from her face. Her sleepless eyes sunken and darting, looking for something. They never focused, never were still. Emma’s hair hung in strings, caked with food and dirt, sweat and old blood. Her clothes were soiled though Ruth knew that Nick changed her every day. Her hands and arms were bandaged to the elbows, but Ruth could smell an infected wound. The secondary infection would kill her even if Ruth didn’t.
Emma strained against the thick canvas ropes around her wrists and ankles. The muscles in her neck and shoulders jumped and pulled as she snarled. She turned red with the strain and her teeth snapped shut over and over with a nauseating click.
“It’s okay,” said Ruth, “Your daddy sent me. It’s all done. No more crying. You can rest now, Emma.” She took a step forward as she was speaking, the gun barrel brushing lightly against Emma’s forehead as she struggled to bite. Ruth pulled the trigger and Emma fell to the floor like a marionette whose strings had suddenly snapped. She put the gun away and wiped her hands quickly down the front of her shirt without even thinking about it. She pulled the picture from the doorframe and slid it back into her pocket. Then she picked up the bony girl, her arms and chin resting on Ruth’s shoulders, the way a sleeping toddler would.
Ruth tried not to look at her, fighting to keep the image from the photograph in the front of her mind. Emma seemed even lighter than Charlie had, though he had been just nine when Ruth had carried him down the stairs to the gaping hollow in her tiny lawn.
She placed Emma on the cool tile in the bathroom and removed her soiled clothes. Then she lowered the girl into the water and did her best to erase the damage of the past eight years. Now that the snarling rage had gone out of Emma’s face, she looked younger and pensive. But the rest of her body betrayed her. The scars on her hands where she had bitten them, the wound on her arm, the bruises from the restraints all shattered the peace in her face. Ruth drained the tub and gently dried the body before sliding the airy summer dress over it. She wrapped it in the dusty sheet and then looked around her. The light from the window seeped russet around the rag. Almost time. She blew out the candles and carried the stiff gray bundle back to Emma’s room.
There was no bed to lay it on; Emma had torn it to shreds years ago. Ruth laid the body on the floor, then she looked around for a moment at the wreckage of the room. The furniture was gone. The carpet long ripped away, leaving the bones of subfloor beneath. The dry wall was mostly pounded into dust in the semicircle that Emma had been able to reach in her restraints. The studs stood like matchsticks gleaming in the wall. She thought how close to Charlie’s room it must once have been and then tried to push the thought away. She wiped away a few slow tears and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She fled the silent house as the sun disappeared below the far end of the street.
Chapter 7
Juliana was up to her knees in the pond outside the conservatory. A thick film of algae clung to her jeans at the water line and to the outside of the buckets she filled. Ruth picked up two more empty buckets and kicked off her hot shoes before wading in behind her.
“This heat is killing everything but the tropicals you revived,” said Juliana without turning around.
“Too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. We’ve got to get out of this city. It’s the asphalt that does it,” said Ruth, pouring a bucket full of scummy green water over her head.
Juliana slogged out of the pond and set the full buckets onto the concrete, breathing hard. She sat on the warm walkway, her face lost in the twilight. “How can I leave?”
Ruth picked up her own buckets. “We could find a bus. One with restraints, like a prison bus—”
“Even if we could get one started, there hasn’t been usable gasoline in this city for years.”
“Sedatives then.”
Juliana shook her head. “Too risky. Besides, there’s a hundred of them and two of us. Can you imagine us trying to get them down the road before the sedative wore off?”
Ruth sat down beside her and was silent for a long moment. “No one could blame you if you just walked away tomorrow, you know. They survived for eight more years because of you. They aren’t even yours. You don’t owe anyone anything.”
“If I leave, I’ll have to either let them all go or leave them to starve. That’s monstrous. I can’t do it.”
“There’s another alternative, Juliana,” said Ruth quietly.
“You mean we could kill them.”
“It could be quick and quiet. The dried poppies we already have should be almost enough. Another month and this year’s will be ready. They’re in pain, Juliana. And you are wearing your life away to keep them that way. We can’t stay here, Julie. The city is dying. Another winter and there’ll be no food and nothing
to burn. How many times have you chased looters from the vegetable garden already this year? And it’s not even enough to support the people that you already care for. Relatives don’t stop by to help anymore. They don’t have anything left to bring you. Things are going to get violent again, just like when the looters swept through six years ago. Are you going to risk being killed for a cucumber? Or starving with the Infected? Why? They’re just dying in slow motion. It can be over in one night, no more hunger, no more rage, no more agony. It should have happened years ago. Every day is just prolonging their misery and yours.”
Juliana scowled. “That’s the trouble with you Ruth Socorro. You think there’s no value in suffering. That we ought to spend all our lives without pain or fear or sorrow. I don’t remember hearing that an easy life was the only one worth living. We aren’t entitled to a painless existence,” she snapped. “Now come on, or all the plants will die of thirst and we’ll all begin to know real suffering.” She picked up her buckets and started into the steamy conservatory. Ruth followed after, wondering what had really caused her friend’s sudden fury.
The heat made it a struggle to breathe, so they splashed the neat rows of herbs, but didn’t talk. Every once in a while Ruth would stop to pull a stray weed, watching Juliana out of the corner of her eye. The conservatory was already filled with shadows and the solar garden stakes glowed dimly.
“Do the bandages on the red headed boy need to be changed?” Ruth asked, to break the thick silence.
Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) Page 7