by Alex Adams
“She’s a whore, I’m a whore, your mother’s a whore. We’re all whores.” I am going to die and I don’t care. I just want him to shut up. “You knew I worked for Pope Pharmaceuticals. Is that why you helped me save Lisa?”
“I had to see, America.”
“See what?”
“I had to know how a nobody, a janitor, is the only Pope Pharmaceuticals survivor. When all others died, why did you live? You are nothing special.”
My fingers feel around for the blade in my pocket. I hold it there like a blood-slickened talisman.
“You are not stupid. I thought you would be, you know. A janitor. A stupid janitor. Someone who cleans rat piss from the floors.”
There’s no pain now. Just warmth enveloping me in its fluffy pink blanket. I want to snuggle down and lose myself in its hold. Soon.
“You’re the stupid one, assuming people are only one thing. We’re an amalgamation of things we’ve collected along the way. I was never just a janitor.”
“What else were you? A whore?”
“A daughter, a sister, a wife, a lover, a friend.” I thought I was going to be a mother, but I’m not going to make it. I’m sorry, baby. I’m unable to sustain life. Your incubator is broken. “A killer.”
“You? I do not think so.”
Am I still bleeding? It’s too wet to tell. “You don’t know anything, you overgrown piece of cheese.”
“I know everything. Things a creature like yourself could never imagine.”
I laugh, because that’s all I’ve got left. This is how I’m going to go, not kicking and screaming like some dying animal, but laughing. I’ll die with a side stitch and tears streaming because the Swiss actually believes he knows it all.
“What is so funny?” he says.
“Because.”
“You make no sense, America.”
“George P. Pope was a coward. He couldn’t stand to live another minute with his disease. He couldn’t stand what it was doing to him—what it might do to him if he kept on sucking oxygen.”
“I do not see the humor in this.”
Saliva bubbles between my lips. “You wouldn’t. You weren’t there. It’s so funny. It’s so damn funny.”
“Tell me.”
I’ve never giggled, but now, at the end, I do. The Swiss shifts on his haunches; attack is imminent. His breath comes closer. I feel him. My bloody hand reaches out and touches the end of my world.
DATE: THEN
There is only one way to do what I do next: remove my emotions, place them in my pocket, keep them safe from the rest of me.
I look up at Jesse. I’m sorry, I want to say. I thought I was doing the right thing by talking to you. But I’m not sure if that’s true or if it’s just another story I’m telling myself to feel better about him being dead. But for the sake of coping, I try to believe it.
I want to be different-good, not different-bad.
Nothing. I feel nothing. My psyche has flatlined. That’s a good thing. That makes it easy to heft the long-handled ax I wrenched off the white wall. It’s little more than a feather in my hands. I pull it up high, behind my head, and let it fall. Gravity does my dirty work. Gravity hugs the blade close. Together they disconnect George P. Pope’s head from its body.
I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
Just a hole where my soul used to be.
DATE: NOW
I will not die with my eyes shut and my heart in my throat. Not this far have I come to die a coward. My hand is ready, the scalpel tucked away in my palm: my bloody ally.
In the dark the Swiss grabs my throat, shoves me so hard against the wall my jaws snap shut on my tongue. Blood fills my mouth. I spit it into his face and laugh.
Can’t control the laughter. Merriment is helium in my balloon. My nitrous oxide.
“Why do you care? It won’t do you any good. Nothing can help any of us now. Soon we’ll be dead, too.”
His fingers are a ring tightening around my throat. One good squeeze and my laughter dies, bottling up below the seal. I see stars. I see a light hurtling toward me, and voices whispering just beyond. I have seconds until the end, and I’m taking the Swiss with me on the ride.
“Pope just had to screw with me one last time. And you’re wrong, you know.”
“I am never wrong.”
“This time you are.”
There’s a perverse pleasure in withholding what I know is true from this man in his final moments of life. So I do not speak of Pope’s final request: it might bring the Swiss joy.
There’s not enough room for a bold thrust, but the scalpel’s edge is more deadly than a razor. The blade skates across his throat, shudders as I scrape up the last of my energy to drag it sideways. The Swiss gasps; his pupils widen enough that even I can see them in this dim space.
His hand tightens. This is it. The end. Lights out. Ladies and gentlemen, Zoe has left the building. But he slackens and slumps to the ground and his fingers slap against the concrete. I reach out, shove his face with my foot as hard as I can muster.
The voices are getting louder. The light is drawing near. This is it, my tunnel, my emergency exit. Sorry, I tell my baby. Sorry I didn’t get to be a good mother, or any kind of mother. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our tiny family safe.
Then my world flashes yellow and I see maybe the world has a surprise left in her yet. There’s no tunnel, and the voices belong to actual people.
Hopefully they will bury us far away from the Swiss.
SIXTEEN
DATE: THEN
Are you for real?” Sergeant Morris asks the question across her desk.
A slow nod through air soup.
She pulls the vials and packets from the bag and lines them up. Soldiers marching across paperwork mountains.
The ground undulates beneath my feet. Or maybe I’m the one swaying to and fro. One palm flat on the desk doesn’t make a difference. My world is shifting sands.
“There’s more where that came from. But if you want it, you’d better move fast. There’s no security now, and the CEO is dead. It’s just a matter of time until the place is gutted.”
“I’ll send some people over. It would help if you’d go with them. We need all the meds we can get.”
“Okay.” My words tilt. I slap my fist on the desk, next to my hand. It’s heavy. The air is stew. No, I’m holding something. A white sack. Not a sack—a lab coat, the ends tied together to form a crude swag that would make Huckleberry Finn proud.
Sergeant Morris grimaces. “What’s in the sack? Shit, girl, it’s bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
“Nothing, my ass. Nothing doesn’t look like Aunt Flo came to visit and wound up moving in her furniture.” She tries to take it from me but it’s my burden to carry.
I sit, trapping the swag between my knees. “It’s nothing.”
DATE: NOW
I don’t die. At least, not then. And for a time I’m not sure if I’m sorry or glad. My baby still lives, though, and that is something. It dances inside me, celebrating our victory. We are still two.
The sun beams at me through a window. See? it says. But I don’t. Not really. So I mirror its smile while I try to discern which of us is the village idiot.
The groan comes all the way from my toes when I sit, press a hand to my sutured wound so I won’t pop open like a worn teddy bear. I am surrounded by women. They watch me with wary eyes and sullen faces.
“What is this place?”
No answer. They chatter amongst themselves with foreign tongues.
“What happened to the man?”
They stare at the oddity in their midst. I have nothing more than cobbled-together sign language—mostly obscenities.
“Jesus Christ.”
The women cross themselves. Head to sternum. Shoulder to shoulder. Religious figures—those they understand. One of the squirrels breaks away from the pack. The rest of
them stare at me as though I’m a spaceman. Maybe I am. I’m from another world, I know that much. We look at each other, all of us trying to find a way to bridge the language chasm. My language is, in part, descended from theirs, and yet the pieces that now belong to the English tongue are useless to me here.
I drag myself to my feet, one hand on my arm. Pain slices through me. I am white-knuckled, dizzy, displaced in this reality. Hands grab me, hold me steady. Mouths tsk.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. I have to keep going,” I say.
“You are going nowhere today.”
My head jerks up, because those are words I understand. Amongst the static they are clear and bright and shiny. They belong to a boy not yet old enough to scrape a blade down his skin.
“I went to the English school in Athens,” he explains. “My name is Yanni. In English, I am John.”
His hand dives into his pocket, retrieves a pouch filled with tobacco and a box of white papers. He crouches on the dirt floor, pushes the tobacco into a neat line on the paper using his leg as a table, seals the edge with his spit, and lights up. One of the women reaches out, flicks his ear. Screeches at him until his head sags. He offers me the hand-rolled cigarette, one end soggy with spit. “Would you like?”
Humanity has crumbled, yet here are people who would still instill good manners in their children.
“No, thank you.” I watch as he shoves the damp end greedily into his mouth and sucks deep. He can’t be more than eleven, maybe twelve.
“Where am I?”
He speaks with the women. Arms flap until they reach a noisy consensus.
“Not far from Athens. My people found you. They were looking for …” He puffs on the cigarette, drawing deep like he means it, flipping through his catalog of English words, looking for one that fits. “Supplies. Clothes and things we can maybe swap with other people.”
“There are others?”
Again he consults the women.
“Some,” he says. “And some …” He shrugs, tries to look cool as he flicks the cigarette ash. “My people do not talk to strangers.”
“You’re talking to me.”
“You are sick. When you are well, you will go.”
Sounds of children scooting a ball across the ground end the conversation. He drops the cigarette, grinds it into the dirt with a worn boot heel, his body humming with tension. Wants to run and join his friends.
“Wait.”
He stops.
“The man—the one who was with me. What happened to him?”
More talking. Solemn words.
“Your husband lives. But for how long, who knows?”
He must be mistaken.
All this world is theirs to live in now, yet the Roma choose to stay here in their familiar nest of lean-tos and shacks with their suspicion of outsiders to keep them warm. But who can blame them? My clothes are brown with the blood of three. I wear blackface made of sweat and road dust.
They are wary; I am wary. Too many faces twist diabolically of late. My faith in my own kind has evaporated to mist. But when I reach out, my bag is beside me untouched. That small gesture lends me some hope that I am among those still as human as me.
DATE: THEN
Cups of steaming tea come and go. Voices swim around me like I’m fish food. Faintly, faintly, I’m aware that my sanity is going walkabout, that I’m acting as though I’ve got one foot in an asylum and the other in a pool of blood. How much can a human mind take before it breaks?
Then he is there.
And here I am.
The desk groans as Nick clears an ass-shaped space and sits. I don’t look, but I feel the air divide as he leans forward and fills what was empty. He’s close enough for me to smell. No cologne, no aftershave. Just Nick. Made of sunshine.
“What’s going on, Zoe?” His voice caresses my cheek.
“The sky is falling.”
“Feels that way, doesn’t it?”
“It’s going to kill us all, one by one, one way or another.” My hand that is not my hand rubs my face. “He started this. All of it. We were an experiment. My apartment was his Trinity Site.”
“Where they conducted the first nuclear test?”
“He wanted to test his drug. No, not a drug: a weapon.” I tell him the things George Pope related to me in the last few minutes of his rotten life. Nick listens with the attentiveness of his profession. When my words fade to ellipses, he remains taut, alert. And when I look up to him he is still wearing that old familiar mask, the one that stops me from knowing him. So many questions. Who are you? What happened to you on the battlefield? Do you cry for your brother? Did you think of me while you were gone? But the questions stick to my tongue like sun-warmed gum to a shoe sole.
“What’s in the sack, Zoe? Can you show me?”
Penitent and afraid, I kneel before him, the bleeding sack a guilty offering. “Are you sure?”
“Show me.”
His is a command wrapped in silk, but an order nonetheless. Somewhere deep in my soul a gong strikes; I have no choice but to obey.
Stiff fingers untie the knot binding the lab coat. The fabric is soaked with blood and sticks to the contents. Wet red cotton peels away from the cold flesh inside.
Meat. Just like beef or pork or lamb. The lie that dams the bile in my stomach. If I stop and think about where it came from, I will run screaming from this room.
Meat. Just like the supermarkets used to stock.
Nick inhales. I close my eyes and wait. He doesn’t state the obvious, doesn’t ask the stupid question. He can see the coat contains a severed head, so he doesn’t need to underscore and bold.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Whose is it? Does anyone need medical attention?”
I shake my head. Just meat, Zoe. Chicken and ham. “He was dead already. I was following instructions.”
“Whose?”
“His.” I nod at the just-meat-maybe-turkey. “George Pope.”
He sits. Processes. Then he asks why. And I tell him how Pope was afraid that he’d rise in death.
“Do you believe he would have?”
“I have to.” Otherwise I chopped off his head for nothing.
Nick pulls a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. Without looking at me, he begins to scratch words onto the page.
I look at him. “You’re making a shopping list.”
“I’m making a list.”
“A list.”
For ten more beats of my heart—I tick them off—he scribbles, then pockets the pad.
“I’m going to help you. That’s what I’m here for.”
“I’m fine. I can deal alone.”
He crouches in front of me, wraps the head so it’s no longer staring up at us.
“We might all get our fill of alone. Take companionship while you can, Zoe. I’m reaching out my hand. Don’t slap it away.”
Nick and I are not done.
Jesse makes the front page that day—and the second. The United States Times has turned him into a different-bad person. A villain. A criminal who tried to pin the blame on a company committed to saving us from, not just this disease, but a whole host of ills.
That night a preacher from the South gives the disease a name that rolls easily off tongues and sticks inside heads.
“This disease is a white horse coming to claim the sinners. The end isn’t nigh, it’s here.” He speaks to an audience of dying millions where his words find purchase and flourish.
White Horse. It gallops amongst us.
DATE: NOW
A week passes before I can walk more than a few steps without my vision fading to black. During that time I eat better than I have since before the war. These fringe people are smarter than the rest of us. Forced to exist on the periphery of society, they’ve developed skills suburbanized people allowed to devolve. They grow what they eat. Each member of their clan performs tasks to help the whole. While the rest of us were mourning junk food, they kept on doing what their people have done
for generations. Cogs in a simple, elegant machine.
Another week passes before I seek out Yanni. I don’t believe the Swiss survived. He can’t have. Unless my mind fabricated his death so I’d go to my grave victorious.
“What does the man look like?” I ask the boy.
If he thinks my request is strange, he doesn’t show it. Every word is a chance to show off his English skills.
“He is”—Yanni waves a hand over his head—“white. His hairs is white. Not like old man. Like a movie star.”
It’s the Swiss; it has to be. I don’t know how he survived, what Gypsy magic they wove. I don’t know how I failed.
“Blond,” I say with a thick, numb tongue. “We call that color blond.”
He tries the word on for size. “Blond.”
“I want to see … my husband.” A gallstone, bitter and bilious, rolling around my mouth.
Two women come, both clad in tie-dyed T-shirts and tiered skirts that hang like tired draperies. They talk to the boy, stare openly at me without social propriety. To them I am a curiosity, both a foreigner and an outsider.
“Is he alive?” I say. Please let him be dead. Although it goes against everything I believe, and makes me a little less human, I want that to be true. Can I still look myself in the eye?
“He is not good,” the boy says.
“I need to see him.”
“Okay, I will take you.” His arm links through mine. Stronger than he looks. Wiry. We go slow.
A man cuts across our path wheeling a barrow heaped with watermelons. It’s warm here. Feels like high summer. A caterpillar of sweat hunches across my upper lip. I can’t help but wonder what the weather is like at home. Although it no longer exists, home stands still in my memory, a monument to what it was before the fall. My heart has been rubbed raw with steel wool. Words need to come out of my mouth, and soon; otherwise I’m going to lose it. I swallow. My throat stings with the big gulp of clean air.
“There are lots of people here.”
“Yes. Many people.”
“Did they get sick?”
A pause as he translates on the fly. “Some. Not as many as the city.”