Fear: The Quiet Apocalypse

by T M Edwards

  “Then what…”

  “What’s wrong with me?” The girl smiled wryly as she stared down at her food.

  “That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

  Zena shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m autistic. High-functioning. That just means I can talk and act sorta normal. Not all the way normal. Or else I wouldn’t be autistic.” She chuckled at her own joke.

  “That still wasn’t cool for Kiera to say that.”

  “It’s fine. Everybody acts like that. They don’t understand why I seem almost normal but can’t quite manage to not be rude.”

  I speared an egg on my fork and tried it. Again, whoever cooked this stuff was an absolute master of spices and flavorings. I could hardly tell that the eggs were reconstituted. “Well, I don’t think you’re rude.”

  Zena looked up at me and grinned, showing brilliant white teeth that contrasted with her skin. “What’s wrong with you, then?”

  What was wrong with me? Nothing official. I was just scared of my own shadow. I felt the presence of everyone around me pressing in, like bricks on my shoulders. I winced every time someone looked over at me. The pervasive silence of the last few weeks was replaced by the hum of conversations, and an even quieter, ubiquitous hum of what was probably generators.

  “It’s okay. I know, I’m not really supposed to ask.”

  “No, it’s fine. I just...I’m just scared of a lot of stuff, I guess.”

  Zena nodded understandingly. “My brain makes up things to scare me, too. I know they’re not real, but they sure do feel like they are.”

  Exactly. And I always thought autistic people were incapable of empathy.

  In silence, I finished my food. Sam was still nowhere to be seen. Next to me, Zena chattered about various subjects, seeming quite happy just to find someone who wasn’t outright rejecting her. I didn’t mind. She was someone who would talk without expecting me to keep up half of the conversation was a welcome change compared to most social interactions, especially now, being thrust back into society after so many weeks of near-total isolation. I desperately wished for my music player and earbuds, to be able to shove them in my ears and blast my music and drown out the humming of a dozen conversations, a dozen and more different voices that I was unable to ignore.

  When we were both finished, Zena took our trays and handed them to a pudgy man with a red face and an apron that had probably once been white. Then she skipped back over to where I sat, conversing with Kiera, who was also approaching.

  “Are you ready for the grand tour?” Kiera asked, already pulling my wheelchair away from the table, without giving me a chance to answer.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, but Kiera was already talking again.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” This was directed at the teenager who had fallen into step beside us.

  “Nope. I finished it all.”

  “You fini… Zena, there’s no way you finished scrubbing the hydroponics tanks before 8am.”

  Zena began to protest loudly, but I surprised myself by cutting across the burgeoning argument. “It’s fine! I want her to come!” I half-shouted.

  Zena grinned widely, and Kiera sighed. “Fine. You don’t know what barrel of monkeys you just opened, though.”

  I turned in the chair to look at her. “I just walked across a large portion of the US, slept in a tent, and ate nothing but energy bars for days. If all I have to deal with here is someone who talks a little too much, I consider myself lucky.”

  Kiera let go of the wheelchair handles and put her hands up. “Fine, let her show you around, then. Good luck with that.”

  As the girl in the scrubs walked away, and the dark-skinned girl with the cheerful attitude took hold of the handlebars, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d somehow made myself an enemy.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Zena said as she resumed pushing me toward the row of tents that ran along the walls of the bunker. “Everyone is always a bit touchier in here than they normally would be.”

  I suddenly felt drained, and pictured myself sitting in that little tent, looking out at the arid countryside with something akin to nostalgia. I pinched the bridge of my nose, and sighed. “It’s fine.” I’ve never made an enemy in my life, now I manage to do it on my first day here. That’s anything but fine.

  Either ignoring my discomfort or oblivious to it, Zena pushed my wheelchair around the inner edge of the row of tents that lined the bunker walls. All of them were cabin-style, with walls that were nearly vertical, and Zena explained that each family unit or person got a tent. In places, there were spaces left between tents to grant access to doors that led to other rooms. Zena showed me the inside of the hydroponics room, where plants grew in great vats of water. “It’s my job to clean in here.”

  “Well, it looks great,” I responded, and it really did. The space was meticulously organized and every surface was spotless.

  “Thanks. I wish I had a more important job, but they don’t let kids do important stuff.”

  As she wheeled me away, and we resumed our journey along the tents, I watched the people who were walking through the open area, intent on their various tasks. Plenty of people stopped to watch us for a moment, but thankfully nobody approached us. I didn’t know if that was because of Zena, or something to do with me. I did notice that Zena was by far the youngest person here, that I could see. The majority of the people seemed to be middle-aged men and women.

  “I’m sure taking care of the garden is an important job.”

  Zena just snorted.

  As we passed a tent in the corner that was taller than the others, and blue, I asked “How did you end up here?” It was more blunt than I usually managed to be, but Zena’s open and honest personality made me feel that she might accept the question without offense.

  The wheelchair slowed for a moment as Zena hesitated. “My mom and dad left me.”

  I tried to turn and look at her. “What?” I put down my good foot to force the wheelchair to come to a stop. “They just left you here?”

  Zena shrugged, and looked off into the distance. She chewed on the end of one of the many curls in her dark hair. “They got scared. Like everybody else. They weren’t thinking right.” There was a hard expression on her face that looked out of place on her childish features. “It’s fine. They didn’t want me, anyway.”

  “Surely that can’t be true.”

  The girl spit out the hair she was chewing on, and resumed pushing my chair. “They didn’t want a retard. They wanted a normal daughter.”

  That harsh word sounded so foreign in Zena’s voice. Unbidden, I felt like crying. Maybe it was fatigue, or the spores, or all of the change. “You are not a retard! And that is a horrible thing for a parent to call their child!”

  “I know I’m not. You know, Kiera isn’t nice to me, but she’s my sister? And I know she loves me. If she’d known Mom and Dad left me behind, she would have come for me. She just didn’t know. She thinks she’s protecting me by not letting people talk to me. She thinks if people think I’m weird, they’ll be mean to me. But I’m not as clueless as she thinks.”

  “I don’t think you’re clueless at all.” And I’d thought my life of anxiety was rough. Here was a girl, barely more than a child, living with a condition that obviously didn’t impact her intelligence in the least, having to deal with cruelty not only from peers and strangers, but her own parents. I had the sudden realization that my life hadn’t been nearly as tough as I had thought.

  Oh, how ironic that it was us, the broken and rejected, the ones called weak and stupid, who were the only people capable of withstanding the effects of the object in the desert.

  “Thank you, Deidre. It’s nice to have a friend.”

  But how awful that she has to believe that anyone who merely shows her kindness is her friend, because normally people are so horrible.

  ***

  After the tour, Zena returned me to the hospital tent. She had been subdued since our conversation involving her parent
s. I wished I knew how to make her feel better, to apologize for the pain I felt I’d caused. She held the handles of the wheelchair as I stood up and got awkwardly into the bed.

  “I’ll leave this here in case you have to go to the bathroom or something.” Then, without a goodbye, the girl was gone.

  I collapsed back against the pillows in utter exhaustion. It was like an entire month’s worth of extra exercise, little food, and sleep deprivation were hitting me all at once. I was finally where I’d wanted to be, and there was an object out there emitting mind-altering spores that needed to be stopped. There were people depending on me to be able to work and help support the community. I didn’t even know how many of us, the ones resistant to the spores, there were. As far as I could tell, no one had any sort of viable solution. Everybody seemed to just be waiting for someone to tell them what to do and working on maintaining the bunker in the process. Except the resources in here weren’t going to last forever. They might be growing tomatoes and carrots and whatever else, but there was no way they had fields of oats and wheat and dozens of livestock just waiting to be processed for food. To top it all off, winter was approaching.

  I heard the tent door-flaps rustle, and looked over to see Sam enter.

  “Sam!”

  “Hey. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you got back for breakfast.”

  I pushed myself into a sitting position, even though my arms were trembling with fatigue. “That’s okay.”

  Sam walked over to his cot, and sat down on it heavily. His face was pale, and there were dark circles under his eyes. He unbuckled the sling that was holding his injured arm in place, and tossed it onto the table.

  “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer, just began to unwrap the brown bandage that was wrapped around the arm. It was splinted with two small lengths of wood, and there was a white gauze bandage taped to a six-inch long portion of his skin. I cringed at the sight of the colorful bruises that mottled his arm.

  Sam peeled away the gauze, and I gasped. A deep gash had been sewn closed, but it was the angry red shade of the skin around the wound, and the way it was swollen, that made my stomach drop.

  “Sam, you need to have Dr. Haroun look at that. It’s infected.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, and swayed where he sat on the cot. His face went even paler, and he looked like he was on the verge of passing out.

  “Sam? Sam!” I swung my legs down and stumbled toward the cot as he collapsed forward, sliding off the cot onto the floor with his injured arm beneath his body. He lay there, ghostly white, so still that I wasn’t even sure if he was breathing. I couldn’t even kneel down to him because of my own splinted limb.

  “Help!” I shouted, as I turned and started to limp toward the wheelchair. “Dr. Haroun! Help!”

  Just as I’d grasped the arm of the wheelchair and was lowering myself into it, I heard running feet, and Dr. Haroun appeared in the doorway, followed closely by Kiera. “Deidre? What’s wrong?”

  I gestured across the tent to where Sam lay. “I don’t know! He just collapsed! He took the bandage off of his arm, it looks really bad.”

  Dr. Haroun quickly approached Sam and knelt down next to him. “Mr. Harrison?” she called, shaking his shoulder gently. “Can you hear me?”

  When he didn’t respond, Dr. Haroun waved Kiera over. “Go get John and Tom, and tell them to come help me get him on the bed. Then I need you to run to Supply and tell Laura you need a bag of broad-spectrum.”

  Kiera nodded and ran out. I opened my mouth to ask what I could do, but Dr. Haroun interrupted me. “Ms. Scott, I’m sorry, but the best thing you can do right now is leave us the room to help your friend. I promise I will come and give you an update once we have one.”

  With tears burning in my eyes, I nodded and rolled the wheelchair out of the tent. I looked out across the open common area, too exhausted and too upset to figure out where to go or what to do. I sat there, a few feet from the hospital tent, a headache starting to pound behind my eyes and my hands shaking, unable to decide what I was supposed to do now. People stared at me curiously, but nobody offered to help or tried to talk to me. They probably thought all of us “resistants” were just crazy people, and crazy people did weird things.

  “Deidre?” I looked to the side to see Zena walking toward me. “What’s going on?”

  My voice broke. “Sam collapsed. He’s really sick.”

  Zena glanced toward the tent. “What’s wrong with him?”

  I shook my head and looked down at my shaking hands. “I don’t know.”

  I felt the girl grab the handles of my wheelchair, and it began to move. “Come on. I know a good place where all the people won’t be looking at you.”

  She pushed me toward the far end of the bunker, where the half-circle wall was punctuated by the tall blue tent in the corner, a couple of smaller tents, and a door on the left side. I realized that Zena had never shown me what was beyond the door, or told me where it went. “But...I need to stay here, in case they need me.”

  “Dr. Haroun is the best doctor. They will take good care of him.” Despite my protestations, Zena kept pushing me across the common area until we reached the door. She pushed it open, revealing a wide ramp that led upward, and flicked the doorstop down to keep it from closing. Then she wheeled me through, and closed the door behind us before starting to push me up the ramp. At the top was a wall with another door, and two windows that showed daylight and a blue sky.

  I tried to help her by pushing on the wheels myself, but Zena was still breathing hard by the time we reached the landing and the second door. We repeated the sequence: open door, wheel the chair through, close door.

  The door opened out onto a large concrete pad. A gravel road ran away from the left side, and the rest was surrounded by dry brush and brown grass. Off to the right, half-hidden by a small rise, were two blue plastic-looking water tanks that were as tall as two-story houses. A pickup truck that had probably once been white was parked next to the spot where the gravel road ended at concrete.

  The fresh, cool breeze hit my face, and the hum of conversation and electronics faded away as the door closed behind us. The only sound was the rustle of brush in the wind, the hissing of sand as it blew across the concrete, and the sound of Zena’s tennis shoes on the ground as she shifted. I closed my eyes and listened to the silence, raising my face to the sunlight.

  Zena walked around, and sat on the concrete cross-legged a little ways to my left. She gazed out at the desert with her hands clasped in her lap. The breeze teased at her thick hair.

  “I thought you might be like me,” she said after a while. “The walls echo back all the sound, and it never stops. Nobody can ever be alone. None of them seem to mind.”

  I was still tired, and still worried, and still in pain. Yet it all seemed to fade away a little, without the constant presence of several dozen other people. “I used to live alone,” I said after a moment. “I had my own house. I only left a couple times a week.”

  “Mom and Dad made me go to school. Nobody liked me. They wouldn’t let me tell anybody what was wrong with me. I never did my school work very well.”

  I looked at the slight figure of the girl sitting on the concrete. She had drawn her knees up and had her arms folded around her legs. Her dark eyes held incredible pain.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She looked up at me in surprise. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  No, maybe not, but on some small level, I understood. I knew what it was to be different in ways that nobody can quite define. I knew what it was to be an outcast, yet never able to grasp what I was doing so wrong.

  “I’m still sorry that it happened.”

  She stared off into the distance. “Isn’t it odd?” she mused after a moment. “We’re the people that got looked down on, and now they need us. They’re the ones that can’t handle the way the world works now.”

  I watched tumbleweeds roll across the gravel road, driven by
the breeze. I didn’t need to answer her question. We both knew the answer. It was odd, and also strangely empowering. We, the broken and the rejects, we had become indispensable in the fight to save humanity.

  Day 45

  At breakfast that morning, I looked up to see Kiera standing next to me with a tray of food. “Mind if I join you?”

  I nodded, though I couldn’t imagine why she wanted to sit next to me. Our last interaction had left me with the feeling that she rather thoroughly disliked me.