by Alex Adams
“I hope you didn’t find him.”
“Stay well, Zoe.” He walks away and I watch him leave without saying another word, my arms dangling helplessly at my sides. Something about the way he moves is altered. There’s a slight hitch—a limp, I guess you’d call it—on his right side. How did it happen? I want to know. But it’s too late, he’s gone, and I’m stuck to the ground like I’m trapped in one of my own nightmares. I could call him back, make him tell me, but my mouth won’t work, either.
Nick is alive. That’s good. That’s all I need to know. That’s all I wanted to know, right? I repeat the words: Nick is alive and that’s what matters in this very moment.
Behind me, the librarian clears her throat disapprovingly. Dusty phlegm breaks the spell and I spring forward, study the list just so the librarian doesn’t berate me further. I scan the list, double-check for Nick’s name, just in case his being here was some kind of delusion. But no, he’s not on the list.
But another name is: Theodore Rose.
I bolt out the door, into the freeze, glancing frantically each way. But night has claimed all but the faintest halo from each streetlight, and Nick is lost to me.
Beep.
“Hello? Mom? Dad?”
The tape whirs onward.
Beep.
The Pope Pharmaceuticals lobby is no place for a receptionist. No ringing phones, no vendors buzzing through, no public left in public relations. If we still had one, she’d be filing her nails, flipping through magazines, sipping coffee.
I ride the elevator to my floor. Steel cables whine through pulleys, the brakes bump and grind to a halt. I never knew how loud my world was until there was no one to fill it. The locker rooms are empty. My every move is amplified until I sound like a multiarmed woman running the whole percussion section of a symphony. I clean, just like on every other day. I vacuum, mop, empty the trash into the designated chutes. Some lead to a furnace that belches and bellows in the basement. Others go some place I’m not privy to. And that bothers me when once I didn’t care.
The mice are all gone. Their cage doors sag on bent hinges.
“Did they die?” I ask Schultz. He’s hunched over a microscope, peering at slides.
He sniffs, swipes his dripping nostrils with the back of his hand. “I got hungry.”
I stare at him, wait for him to crack, wait for the punch line. There’s always a punch line. Right?
“You ate the mice?”
“I didn’t have change for the vending machine, okay?”
Every day we work in the same spaces and I can’t read him.
“You ever see Demolition Man?”
“Sure,” I say, “I saw it.”
His head pumps up and down. “They’re not so bad. Better than what’s in the cafeteria.”
There’s nothing in the cafeteria, now. We’re all brown-bagging it. I have no words. No, that’s a lie. I have two: I quit.
I say good-bye, try to leave, but he waves me over. “Lookit this.” Leaning to one side, he makes enough room that I can stand beside him and peer into the lens. Blobs and squiggles swimming on a green sea. Pretty. Alien. Terrifying in its otherness.
“What is it?”
“Opportunistic wanton neoplasm.”
“Neoplasm—you mean like cancer?”
“Aha. Not just any cancer. This one has a mind of its own, goes where it pleases. you never know what you’re going to get with OWN.” He laughs, snorts. “OWN. I wish I’d thought of that.” He snaps his fingers at me. “You get a dose of this and you get OWNed.” He takes in my blank look. “It’s hacker slang, meaning you take some of this and it’s taking over your body.”
“Is that what you’ve been giving the mice?”
“It’s not like people are lining up to volunteer.”
I remember the flu shot Dr. Scott gave me, and I wonder if I’ve been OWNed.
That afternoon I hand in my two weeks’ notice. When I get home I call Jesse and give him his story, because some things are bigger than a nondisclosure agreement.
“But it’s freezing,” Jenny complains a week later. She’s regressed. I have become both parent and sister to a petulant teenager.
“Fine, you cook breakfast.”
She hesitates, weighs the situation, because she knows she asked me to make Mom’s pancake recipe, so I’m already doing her a favor. With a sigh that comes all the way from her feet, she snatches up the quarters I laid out on the counter, shrugs into her coat, winds a scarf around her neck, and slams the door so hard the frame shivers.
It’s no big thing, just the newspaper. You know, the newspaper that should contain Jesse’s article. The one that would make him different-good to his disapproving father. I need to know what he’s written. Every day I’ve been down at that newspaper dispenser, depositing my quarters, flicking aside the pages of the United States Times with no result. The paper is slimmer each day. Stories dwindle with the population.
One at a time, the pancakes turn that perfect pale gold. Soon I have two neat stacks that want to be eaten. Jenny isn’t back. The way she’s been acting, she should have been flouncing in by now, complaining of the cold. I experience a shiver that has nothing to do with the weather.
Porkchop, the day doorman, is in the lobby peering through the glass. There’s a mouth-sized patch of mist on the glass below his nose. I think he’ll turn when my footsteps tap across the floor, but he keeps on staring through the door.
He grunts when I ask him about Jenny.
“Saw her leave, but she hasn’t come back yet. She stomped on through here with her nose in the air.” He looks abashed. “Sorry, ma’am, I know she’s your sister.”
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t rightly know. There was a noise but I don’t see anything.”
I inch up to the glass door beside him, peer through. The world outside my window is dead. A ghost town. Light wind rolls suburban tumbleweed down the street. The United States Times. There is no other.
Cold seeps through the windows, absconds with the heat.
Porkchop clears his throat. “Friday’s my last day. This place can’t support two doormen with just five apartments being occupied. Can’t support one. Don’t know if Mo said anything, but he’s a goner, too.”
A plastic bag rolls by. The letters have faded to yellow. When Porkchop’s words register, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Just five?”
“Uh-huh. Herb Crenshaw passed couple of days ago. His wife last week. Their son’s over in India or someplace they wear bandages on their heads. The way the news is, I doubt the kid even knows yet. Hell, could be he’s dead, too.”
He leans forward until his nose presses against the glass.
“Huh, look at that. Someone lost their scarf. Dim days, Miss Marshall. Dim days indeed. And they’re only getting darker. Those scientists did something to the weather, because this ain’t right. We’ve been playing God and now God’s having His fun with us.” His mouth keeps on flapping, but his words fade to static, because that scarf—I know that scarf. Last time I saw it, Jenny was winding it around her neck, tucking the ends into her coat.
“Miss Marshall? You okay?”
No, I’m not.
Maybe I shove him out of the way, or maybe he steps aside. Later on, when I think about it, I can’t remember how it happened. One way or another, I push through that door to where the arctic wind bites my face. I go right, because that’s the direction from which the scarf blew. I go right, because that’s where the newspaper dispensers are. I don’t have far to go.
There’s a heap on the ground wearing Jenny’s coat and I hope it’s not her, that some homeless person stole her clothes. But what are the odds they’d have her same hair?
Oh God … I can’t take this. I can’t. Mom and Dad are bad enough, but losing this other part of me is something I cannot bear. I don’t have strength enough to hold this hurt.
“Jenny,” I whimper. “Jenny? Get up. Please, get up.”
Sh
e doesn’t. She just lies there in a dead heap, the red circle on her forehead signaling that this is The End of sisterhood. I am orphaned in every way.
“Jenny?” I kneel in her bloody halo, lift her head and cradle it in my lap. I try but I can’t scoop her brains back into her head. I keep trying, but the hole is too wide and the pink stew pours out faster than I can ladle it back in.
My mind cracks like the jar when I beat it with the hammer.
Fractured thoughts from a madwoman’s head. I can’t believe she did this to me. How dare she leave me alone? My sister deserted me. Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you for not just coming down here when I asked the first time.
Fuck you. My balled-up fists press into my brow bone. Her head is heavy in my lap like a cantaloupe. There’s a growing ache in my head that won’t quit. Fuck you, Jenny.
“You idiot!” I scream. “We were always supposed to be there for each other! I wasn’t looking out for you so you could die, too!”
I keep yelling, pelt her with my anger. Then there are voices, and a moment later hands and arms grabbing me, pulling me away from Jenny.
“No, no, no. That’s my sister.”
“Go look for the shooter,” someone says.
“Leave us alone,” I cry. “I’ve got no one else.”
But the hands don’t care; they just keep tugging me further away from what’s left of my family.
Why would anyone shoot Jenny?
DATE: NOW
I am staring down the barrel of a long, dark channel. The light at the other end rushes toward me as the passage compresses, then telescopes to some unfathomable distance. Time and space shift. Rationally, I know I’m still sitting in that warehouse, separated from the Swiss by olive oil. Knowing that doesn’t make the tunnel feel any less real. Is this what it’s like to die? Is everyone I’ve lost waiting for me at the other end? Have they forgiven me? Do they still care for me like I care for them?
“George Pope? Why do you care about him? He’s dead.”
His voice is jubilant. “Is he? Good. I do hope it was painful. Do you know?”
“Know what?”
“Did he die in great pain? Was it this disease that took his life—this disease he helped create?”
“No,” I say. “It was quick.”
“How quick?”
“Tell me what you found inside Lisa.”
“I found nothing inside her. Nothing. Her womb was empty. Yours is, too.”
DATE: THEN
Who knew the sun could be so cold? Its brittle glare paints my face, filtered through murky glass. I am in a plain room with a stained wood door, no bars, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a cell. Iron does not make this a prison.
“I need a newspaper,” I tell the woman who brings my lunch.
The tray lands on the table with a clatter. The table barely registers; it’s fastened to the wall with bolts big enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Everything else could vaporize, but they’d be here, too stubborn to quit biting the concrete blocks.
“This ain’t no Holiday Inn,” she says.
“Gosh, I hadn’t noticed.”
She lumbers away, back to her food cart. It’s a tall, thin insulated box in beige, which makes me think it fell off the back of an airplane. This whole place is filled with things borrowed, begged for, or stripped from institutions.
The food, however, is five-star. There’s no Jell-O salad and brown slush with graying chunks of meat on the plastic plates. Instead what we have is homemade ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach, tossed in a browned butter sauce. There’s a small bowl of salad greens, crisp and fresh and tangy with a vinaigrette that knows nothing about plastic bottles. And fruit salad with delicate bites of fruits the local supermarket doesn’t stock.
They brought me here after Jenny was killed. For observation, the woman in uniform said. Military. Somewhere along the way the president declared martial law and nobody bothered to let people know. They patrol the streets, watching, waiting for someone to cause a ruckus, which I did. They saw that. They pulled me away from my sister. But they can’t tell me who shot her or why. I don’t get that. When I ask, they keep telling me they don’t know. “Do you think I did it?” I ask them repeatedly. “We don’t know.” They’ve gone from being An Army of One to being an army of We Don’t Know.
There are footsteps. Combat boots with a woman’s light foot shoved inside.
“Zoe Marshall?” The dark-skinned woman’s voice is larger than her body. She’s a Pez dispenser in fatigues, holding a clipboard and cup of coffee. She gives me the coffee.
I nod, because who else would I be?
“Sergeant Tara Morris. You can go. But I want you back here tomorrow to see the shrink.”
“Back here? I don’t even know where here is.”
She reels off the address.
“That used to be a private school.”
“Not anymore. We’re a low-security halfway house of sorts. We help people. At least until …”
“Everyone comes back to life?” I rub my forehead, wonder why it’s hole-free when my sister can’t say the same. “Did you find out who killed Jenny?”
“No. I’m sorry. It’s not good enough, but that’s all I’ve got,” she tells me. “We’re a militia at best, not a police force. You’re not in any trouble, so you can go home.”
“Then why the locked doors?”
“You were kicking my men. How do you think that looked?”
I close my eyes. “Like some asshole had just shot my sister and they were trying to drag me away from her.”
“It looked bad,” she says. “Real bad. You could’ve been sick, crazy, maybe, or a delinquent. I have to keep my people safe.”
“She was all I had left. Our parents—”
Schultz hunched over the microscope. “I ate the mice.”
“Try and see from our side, would you? We’re seeing the worst of everyone. Jumping to the wrong conclusion is going to keep us alive. If we assume everyone’s a friend, we could lose more people, and that’s not acceptable.”
“Where’s my sister?”
“We burned her. We’ve got more dead than we know what to do with.” For a moment she looks scared. “We’re dying in droves. Not just us. Everybody.”
Not just us. Everybody.
I take a cab back to my apartment. The cabdriver wears one of those flimsy protective masks. He takes my money with a gloved hand, eyeing the note suspiciously. I half expect him to spray it down with disinfectant, but greed wins out and he stuffs it in his pocket.
“I work for myself now,” he mutters as I watch the bill disappear. “No one to be accountable to out there.”
Porkchop is gone already, so I let myself in with my key, ride the elevator, listen to the lonely hum that seems to chew up the available air and leaves me covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat. I am a robot performing the door-opening routine. The shards and bones I took from the box those weeks ago are still in the plastic Baggie. I cram them into my pocket and leave again.
Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family.
No one stops me. The lone security guard grunts as I show him my ID card. He doesn’t look me in the eye, nor do I look into his. We both know why. We’re here when so many aren’t. That’s not a badge of honor, just a sign of otherness.
The lab where there used to be mice is empty. Schultz’s usual seat is pushed away from the bench. The microscope is an old man hunched over a glass-covered lap.
Time is ticking. I do what I’ve seen them do before, or at least a bastardized version of that process. I scrape the bones onto a slide, shove them onto the microscope’s waiting arms.
“What are you doing?”
The voice is inhuman, but the face is still Schultz. He lurches toward me. “You can’t do that.”
“I thought you were—”
“Dead?” He laughs. “This is a hard-core game, man. I’m holding on to the end, otherwise I’m gone for good. We don’t come back. Dust. Tha
t’s where we go. So whaddaya have for me?”
He reaches for the slide. When I pull away he feints, and without thinking I move the other way, leaving him free to snatch my prize.
He shoves it into place under the microscope’s all-seeing eye.
“Suh-weet,” he says. “Look.”
Deep breath. Press eyepiece into socket.
And I see it: the disease.
Noises live inside the phone, now that have nothing to do with dial tones.
Something waits and listens. For what, I don’t know.
“Hello,” I whisper.
Hello.
FIFTEEN
The scientific community has been busy while people die. But they’ve been confounded until now. And from the way this mouthpiece scratches his thinning hair, I’d say there’s still a measure of uncertainty. He doesn’t believe his words, but neither is he convinced they’re false.
He stands there on his podium, a half dozen microphones shoved under his mouth to catch his words like some electronic bib, and tells us that we’re dying of some viral form of cancer.
You got OWNed.
What he doesn’t say is how we got it. When a journalist from CNN asks, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand and mumbles about how maybe it’s something common that mutated into this mass killer. Like the 1918 Spanish flu that mutated from a killer of the weak to a slayer of vigor during its second wave.
But I know. I know. This all began with a man named George P. Pope.
That thought fills me with fear.
This time when I call the CDC, a sound file asks me to leave my name, number, and reason for calling. They’re busy, it says, they’ll get to me. But for now I have to blow my whistle in a virtual queue.
The week dribbles by.
Every day I listen to the elevator rattle to the bottom floor. When the doors open I say, “Good morning, Porkchop,” because it makes me feel better to imagine he’s still there. I don’t drop quarters in the dispenser now: it opens freely. I take a paper, try not to notice the faint Jenny stain on the concrete.
Upstairs I go, not bothering to set my apartment alarm. It’s pointless. There’s no one to call and verify that I’m me. The newspaper goes in a pile. War, more war, and mass death fill the front pages now. The secret is out. People finally noticed everyone they know is sick or dead. The other pages are thin on content and advertisement-free. Even the funeral home ads have tapered off, their employees buried in their own coffins.