It was like I’d just put together enough of a puzzle to see what picture it was forming, but the picture was horrifying. I had never seen Leon before that night in Betty’s store. I had never seen the two of them carry boxes around. Leon and Nindal hadn’t been a ghost-memory. I’d watched them take the rest of our medicine and I hadn’t done anything to stop them.
The mood in the room shifted. There was still a sense of desire, of fervency, to go after the cure, but the new situation began to dawn on people. We would watch our neighbors slowly turn on us and know our other neighbors had helped it all along.
“But we can get more,” Betty said. “Can’t we?”
Mayor Helen didn’t answer. The silence extended and filled the space like the chatter had just moments before.
“We tried to get more,” Ricker said.
The room stilled, as if we all decided to stop breathing at the same time.
“We should go after the cure!” Betty said.
Mayor Helen nodded slowly, sadly. “That’s a choice you can make. Maybe it’s even the right one, but think about it for awhile yet. If you decide to leave, don’t just disappear on us. We’ll share whatever supplies we’ve got left.”
People broke up into groups, some leaving, some shouting at each other, some just looking around, bewildered. I was one of those. Stunned, dizzy from all of it, trying to work out how I felt and going nowhere with it.
I gathered my courage like I was collecting broken cobwebs and went over to Gabbi and the others. I told them what I had seen Leon and Nindal do. I told them what I had done—nothing.
Gabbi looked at me with hooded eyes. Ricker grabbed my hand and squeezed it before dropping it again.
“Where’s Ano?” I forced my mind not to think about all the horrible possible answers to that questions.
“He’s in the fevers,” Jimmy said. “He got bit by a V.”
Bewildered, I said, “But how’s that even possible? They’re starving out, slow, bumbling around like zombies from Night of the Living Dead.”
“This was a fresh one,” Ricker said. He didn’t look at me with judgment like Gabbi did. Mostly, he looked tired. “It was probably an uninfected that finally got the V virus.”
“Or it was a Feeb turned V,” Gabbi said.
“You don’t know that,” Jimmy said.
“You don’t know that it’s not true either,” Gabbi said.
“But who’s with him?” I asked. “If you’re all here, who’s staying with him during the fevers?” We never left each other alone during the fevers and we never spoke about what we heard or saw when one of us went through it.
“Corrina and Dylan are with him right now,” Ricker said. “I’ll be going back next, and then Jimmy.”
“I’ll take a turn,” I said. “I’ll go next.”
Ricker tilted his head, thoughtful. “There’s something we need to tell you.”
“What happened on the raid?” I should have been there with them, with Ano and Ricker and the others. I should have helped them. But even as I thought the words, I resisted them. The fear came raging back to gulp me down. It wasn’t my place anymore to go out there. It wasn’t where I needed to be.
“There was medicine,” Jimmy said. “The right kind—the kind the healer wanted. But someone else had gotten there first.”
“You went?” I said.
“I’m not a little kid anymore, no matter what you think,” Jimmy said. “I was on the street long before you!”
“Not by much,” Gabbi said.
“Stop it,” Ricker said.
“Jimmy, just tell her,” Gabbi said. “Tell her all of it if you’re going to tell any of it.”
Jimmy opened his mouth, closed it again, then said. “Alden was with them—”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Tabitha’s people or Sergeant Bennings, it was somebody else. But…”
“Alden’s been taken,” Gabbi said.
Noise, like the whirring of an engine rose higher and higher. I realized it was the blood rushing past my ears, drowning out other sounds.
“It was a mess, Maibe,” Ricker said. “We got there and it was crazy. The whole world is pretty much empty with people and yet there was Alden and he was alone—at first.”
“You talked to him?”
“He said he was searching for the cure,” Gabbi said.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” except that it made perfect sense, but I didn’t know what else to say, only that I had to say something to fill the void that threatened to consume me.
“Alden was there,” Gabbi said. “He knows we’re all going Feeb-crazy. He said he left to look for the cure on his own. For you. Then this group of uninfected took him.”
“Sergeant Bennings,” I said. “It must have been his father’s people.”
Gabbi shook her head. “It wasn’t. I didn’t recognize any of their faces. It wasn’t Sergeant Bennings.”
“But who else—”
“The only reason we got out was because of those Vs,” Ricker said. “The uninfected had pinned us into a corner and demanded to know what we knew about the cure—”
“The goddamn cure,” Gabbi interrupted. “People can’t stop talking about it.”
“Because it’s got to be real,” Jimmy said. “We have to help them find it.”
“They had plenty of guns,” Ricker said, ignoring Jimmy. “I figured that was going to be it for us, but all the noise had attracted fresh Vs—maybe ones from their group that had recently gotten infected. I don’t know. But it was enough for us to escape.”
“Except Ano got bit,” Jimmy said.
“We don’t have any medicine,” Ricker said, an anguished look in his eyes that I didn’t understand. The medicine eased the symptoms, made people come out of the fevers faster, made the memories less intense, allowed the Faints to come back enough to help us help them, but there had been no medicine in the beginning. We knew we could make it through without the medicine.
“He’ll come out of it,” I said. “Maybe it’ll take longer than it used to but we always come out of the fevers.”
Gabbi didn’t respond. That wasn’t like her and it scared me.
Chapter 8
The inside of the Methodist church looked different in the daylight. Less spooky but more depressing. Its wood-planked floors, high windows, arched ceilings, and stonework walls was the only place big enough and secure enough to set up lines of beds dragged in from surrounding houses.
The church-turned-hospital was small, but had plenty of room for us Feebs injured or sick by regular diseases like the flu. It was where we cared for moms and new babies, those born infected—seeing ghosts and dealing with memory-rushes even before they could speak. The hospital was also for the town Faints who could be triggered into eating and drinking and using the old outhouse. The Faints who were so comatose that they refused to eat or drink—there wasn’t much we could do except make them comfortable and make their end as painless as possible.
Most of us took shifts in the hospital at some point, as if we could somehow get rid of the guilt of surviving when our families and friends hadn’t.
The church smelled like old wood varnish, decades worth of dust, and a vinegar disinfectant. Lines of baby food jars, some empty, some filled, were set out on two tables near Corrina’s experiments. Not more than half the beds were filled. We’d lost five Faints to dehydration in the last heat wave and to a general sense of giving-up-ness that had taken over, as if the bacteria in their bodies had surrendered.
Gabbi marched across the creaking wood boards, passing by all the Faints in beds covered in bright colored sheets—striped, solid, animal print. She stopped at a bed near the back. Ricker and Jimmy trailed after me. Ano lay in the bed, his sheets sweat-soaked and tangled, his hands and feet bound to the bedposts by rope. Corrina sat alongside him in a stiff wooden chair, applying a damp cloth to Ano’s forehead. His brown eyes were closed, his lips pressed together, his forehead wrinkled and h
is thick brows pinched as if in deep concentration, or pain.
“How is he?” Gabbi asked.
Corrina shook her head. “He’s been in the fevers all night.” There was a hunch to her shoulders and dark circles under her eyes as if she’d been awake most of the night.
The first fevers after infection sometimes stayed for weeks, but after that, the fevers hadn’t ever lasted for more than half a day.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Sit with him,” Corrina said. “I can tend to a few others if you sit with him for awhile.”
“You need help,” I said. “I’ll stay, I’ll put in more shifts. I’ll—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dylan said, coming up behind Corrina. He rested his hands on her shoulders. She leaned back into him.
“They won’t eat or drink without the medicine,” Corrina said. “We’re losing people everyday. I thought things could get better. I really did.” She stood up and wandered off as if in a daze, shuffling her feet like a zombie. Dylan followed her.
I took Corrina’s chair and grabbed Ano’s hand. He strained against the ropes, eyes wide and wild and unseeing, looking out past the beds and the church walls. He began talking in Spanish. A fast, guttural Spanish that dropped vowels and cut off words. He gripped my hand, squeezing the bones until my fingers twisted and I yelled out in pain.
Gabbi tried to push down his chest. “Ano, Ano, be calm, be calm…shshshsh.”
Dylan and Corrina rushed back. Between us all we managed to get Ano back down, but he wouldn’t stop talking. I didn’t understand most of what he said, but he sounded like a child again. Someone was hurting him and someone else he loved. My heart constricted. This was a sentence worse than death for someone who had not once in these past three years given up on doing what he thought was right.
“He keeps remembering this…this moment with his stepdad.” Dylan drew his hand across his face. I realized he must be able to understand Ano. Every word of it.
“Don’t say anything,” Gabbi said fiercely. “He wouldn’t want anyone to know. He—”
“I know,” Dylan said. “I know it. I will never say anything.”
“It won’t last for much longer though.” I hoped by saying it out loud it would come true right then. Guilt cut me deep and I began to babble. “He’ll come out of it. It’ll stop any second now.”
Gabbi stared at Corrina until she looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Corrina said. “I just knew things were so hard for you, I didn’t want to make it harder. It’s not like we can do anything about it so what’s the point?”
That look passed between Dylan and Corrina again—the one they’d shared the night I hurt Jen. When we had worked by candlelight and I swore Corrina wanted to tell me something else.
“Tell her,” Dylan said, looking at Ricker.
“You knew about this?” I stared at Ricker in disbelief.
“Corrina didn’t want you to know,” Ricker said. “She knew you were taking things so rough, she didn’t think this would help. I promised her—”
“What’s going on?” I almost screamed the question.
“We were hoping for the new drugs,” Corrina whispered. “Then there would have been nothing to tell.”
“The fevers aren’t lifting anymore,” Gabbi said. “If you get bit by a V you don’t come back out anymore.”
Chapter 9
Sometimes my uncle would hold back a word I needed for a crossword puzzle, the one word that was just out of my reach, because he wanted to see the light that would dawn on my face—that’s what he called it, the light—when I discovered what I needed.
“If Alden was going after a cure,” I said, “maybe he knew something we didn’t—”
“Or maybe he’s desperate and stupid,” Gabbi interrupted.
“But even besides that,” I said. “Whoever took him is looking for the cure. They took the drugs we need with them. If we go after the cure, we’ll find Alden AND the medicine that Ano needs—that we all need.”
Jimmy looked at me like I was finally making sense, and that scared me. I didn’t look at Ricker.
“There’s got to be other places that have the drugs the healer wants,” Ricker said.
“Where?” I said.
Ricker looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face.
“You know there isn’t,” Gabbi said quietly. “It was a brain research lab. It was their experimental stuff.”
“How did anyone even know it was there?” Jimmy said.
“The healer was one of the uninfected,” Gabbi said. “He was part of the camp system working on a cure for them until he turned into a Feeb. The uninfected had all those spots mapped out.”
“So whoever took Alden—they must have been part of the camps,” I said, thinking it through. “He didn’t recognize them, but they knew who he was.”
“We have no idea where Alden is,” Ricker said.
“We’ll go back to the research lab. We’ll go back to where he was taken,” I said. “Maybe there’ll be clues.”
“Maybe we’ll get ourselves killed for someone who’s already dead,” Ricker said.
“This is for Ano,” I said.
“Is it?”
Fury rose inside me. “Don’t even. You know me, Ricker. You know—”
Ricker closed his eyes. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“We have to find them for Ano,” I said. “And if we find Alden and we’re able to save two people we care about and who’ve helped us survive this far, then what’s wrong with that?”
Ricker didn’t say anything.
“You keep saying we.” Gabbi spoke carefully, as if testing each word in her mind before letting it out. “But you’ve already told us a million times that you aren’t going anywhere. Why do you keep saying we?”
She knew the answer. The look in her eyes told me she knew the answer to that question, but she wanted me to say it out loud—to commit to it in such a way that I couldn’t back out. Maybe if I said it out loud, maybe the fear that made my insides quake would settle down enough for me to breathe again.
“I’m going too. I’m going out there to get the drugs for Ano.” I glanced at Ricker. “And to look for Alden. With or without you—I’m going.”
I put as much force into the words as I could. The roar of my heartbeat settled down enough for me to hear Ano’s hallucinations again. This was the right thing to do, I felt that, even if it brought my world crashing down around me. “But I really want you to come with me.”
Gabbi smiled, almost vicious. “Since you asked so nicely—I think I’ll come along for the ride. Someone has to keep you from getting killed, after all.”
“Come on.” Ricker avoided looking at me and rested a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “We need to pack.”
“I have something that might help,” Corrina said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to go.”
“I need to go,” I said. “I have to go.”
Corrina nodded. “I’ll bring you what I have.”
Everyone left except for Gabbi. She settled into the chair next to Ano. I knew she wouldn’t budge from his side until one of us took her place. It was just me and Gabbi again, like old times. I should have been uncomfortable, what with the waves of judgment coming off her, but that had never stopped me before. I wasn’t going to let it start now.
Alden
The halls were dark in this section. Emergency lights halfway down the walls glowed red behind their hard plastic casings. The bucket made his arms ache from the weight of the food inside—packet after packet of dehydrated food brought back to life with water. Even though the food wasn’t meant for him, his stomach grumbled because he hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. The metal handle bit into his hands and turned them numb. He wished his brain would go numb, but it never stopped.
He walked down the hallway until he came to the next door. At head height there was an opening with a metal grate. The noises from the other side of that grate always disturbed him
because they sounded so human even though he knew—they were chimps.
He banged on the door with his fist. The noise reverberated down the cement hallway. The chimp chatter increased until it filled the whole world.
He checked to make sure the two young chimps had gone into their feeding cage. He liked the chimps. They were usually caged in pairs or even trios. They would screech and chatter and play together, tumbling around on the ground because they had no idea how terrible the world was now. He envied them for that.
He slowly turned the steering wheel-like handle on the wall. He wanted this part of his morning chores to take as long as possible because he was dreading what came at the end.
Finally metal clanged shut on the other side. Everything smelled like monkey piss in this section even though their cages were open to the sky on the other side. He rested his hand on the door and grabbed up the bucket again, but then stopped and stared at his skin.
His uninfected skin.
Clear, smooth veins and bruising beginning to fade. His head was clear, his memories under control—though he would never forget how the double infection had made his brain betray him again and again.
They had put him under anesthesia and everything went blank for the longest time. He woke up and swore he heard echoes of someone screaming and they said it was side effects from the infection that would dissipate because they had cured him. They had the cure.
But it only worked for Feebs, not for Faints like his mother. It had something to do with blood and saliva and all the fluids that made his stomach feel queasy. He forced himself not to dwell on any of that. Maibe could be cured—if he could figure out how to escape with it. Whatever it was.
That was the problem. He had been cured of the Feeb infection, but he didn’t know how.
He opened the door, left the food, released the chimps from the feeding cage, then moved to the next one until he repeated the process over a dozen times. This was a chimp research facility back before the Lyssa virus even existed. The place had lasted all this time under Dr. Stoven’s care, all other research projects abandoned except for whatever might lead to a cure—and then Dr. Ferrad had showed up.
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