by Mark Tufo
The expulsion might have saved my life.
That was the autumn before the Brisbane strain of H5N1 slithered its way across the planet. That first wave was more immediately lethal than the ones that followed. When the newsies on TV were just starting to turn their wild-eyed mongering to an unusual epidemic exploding in Australia, the new flu strain ambushed the students at the school I no longer attended. Nearly every kid caught it, including my two brothers, Mason and Caden. On Thanksgiving, with the smell of a frozen turkey dinner baking in the oven, they both died, leaving the world the same way they came into it, together.
My mom’s crying found its end and she looked at Dr. Rajan’s face on the computer monitor.
“I assure you,” said Dr. Rajan through the videoconferencing app on the computer screen, “your son is not suffering any ill effects, either from the influenza or from the prion mutation. He’s just different.”
Chapter 168
“You shouldn’t do that.” Levi was back.
I turned away from the gap in the door. “She’s talking to Dr. Rajan.”
“Do you think he’s going to tell her something about you that you don’t already know?”
Looking back into the room, I said, “No.”
“Why spy? You don’t need to know what she says in private to your doctor. You know how she is.”
I shrugged. Maybe I was afraid Dr. Rajan was going to reveal something about me to my mother that he wasn’t telling me.
Levi tugged at my arm. “C’mon.”
I followed him up the hall. I usually did what he told me—we all did.
Mom was the adult in charge of the household, but it was a weird situation. The prion encephalopathy was liquefying her brain, burrowing microscopic wormholes by the million, maybe the billion. She was losing her intellect, morphing from a mother into a middle-aged woman with a child’s mind. Not consistently, either. In some ways, she still sounded like the mother I’d always known, a pragmatic problem-solver trying to hold a family together while managing bills that were always behind. Most nights now, she was afraid of the dark and the noises out in the night. She doted over Levi and me like we were favored dolls. With growing frequency, she failed to make it to the restroom in time, and she’d go to great lengths to hide her accidents—an early sign of the disease—from Levi, me, and Dad. Dad, though, was oblivious to Mom’s potty-training problems, just as he seemed unaware of most of what went on around him.
Levi and I passed through the living room and into the long, narrow kitchen. He stopped in front of the stove and turned to look at me. “I need you to feed Dad.”
I didn’t ask why. Maybe I was afraid to hear the reason. I faced him and leaned on the cupboard in front of the kitchen sink. “Mom usually feeds him.”
“When she was supposed to be cooking the grits for lunch,” said Levi, “I came into the kitchen, and she was stirring an empty pot.”
The pot we usually cooked our grits in was on the drying rack by the sink. I picked it up and examined it—a pointless forensic exercise, a search for an excuse that would let me pretend Mom’s behavior wasn’t tied to that damn prion. “Maybe—”
Levi shook his head. “She thought there was something in the pot. She thought she was cooking for all of us.”
“You, me, her, and Dad?” I asked.
“Mason and Caden, too.” Levi looked down to the end of the kitchen where our dining table sat near the window. “She had bowls set out for them, too.”
“She comes and goes…fades in and out.” But I didn’t really believe that. Levi and I both had seen it once already, the progression of the disease. We’d lost Dad in tiny pieces. He wasn’t dead. He still lived with us, but he was a soulless husk most of the time. Every time Mom lost a new bit of her intellect it hurt me to see. Now she thought Mason and Caden were alive again, which meant she’d eventually come across their graves in the backyard and realize they were dead, or she’d turn hysterical when they didn’t come home at night, and then Levi and I would have to comfort her through the grief of losing her two youngest sons all over again.
Watching from the outside, feeling like a stranger because the pain of their loss seemed to affect me in an abnormally superficial way, I’d seen my parents suffer after the deaths of Mason and Caden. Dad never got over it. Mom, though, felt it anew over and over again, once every month or two. It was difficult to watch.
“I don’t think we can trust her in the kitchen by herself anymore,” said Levi. “We need to make sure Dad gets fed, and I don’t think we can trust her to do that either.”
I accepted the truth of it with a nod. Mom was going to end up like Dad. With Levi and me to take care of them, at least neither of them was going to turn into one of the prion degenerates that roamed the streets, seeming to have lost every memory that had made them human.
Levi opened a cupboard near the stove, empty except for a single box, which he took out and sat down. “This is the last of it.”
The partial box of grits had been a pressure I’d not mentioned. Our weekly allotment had gotten so small it was hard to stretch it across seven full days. Neither Mom nor Dad was capable of working, so we had no money to buy food on the black market. The odd jobs Levi and I had been doing around the neighborhood weren’t going to be able to keep us fed if the cuts continued. I asked, “You got a new ration ticket last time, right?”
Levi nodded.
“When do you go?” It was Wednesday, our scheduled day for ration pickup, but Levi hadn’t gone that morning at the usual time.
“Six o’clock tonight.”
“Six o’clock!” It came out as a shout. The change in time made me angry. “It’ll be dark by then. You know how it gets.” Some of the people in the advanced stages of the disease turned violent, and when they did, they always seemed to do it more at night than during the day. Then there were the riots. We’d been lucky in our neighborhood, the closest riot had run through the subdivisions over by the high school, a few miles away. But the riots all over Houston were erupting more and more frequently, and they usually started around sunset.
Sometimes the riots were small things—a few dozen people with too many prions eating away at their brains and not enough food in their bellies would beat up a car, attack a house, or run together howling at bystanders. Unfortunately, the police didn’t have the manpower anymore to maintain control. The cops ignored the small mobs they hoped might burn themselves out by dawn. The police concentrated their resources on the big riots, which they’d attack in lines behind their shields, shooting teargas grenades and beating the degenerates with their nightsticks until the rioters dispersed. Some of those riots went on for days and left scores dead in their wake.
Into my anger and silence, Levi said, “They don’t give you a choice on what time you pick up your rations. You know that. They give you a punch ticket. You show up at the time they tell you, or you don’t get anything.”
“I’ll go with you,” I told him. “We’ll be safer together.”
Levi inched closer to me and made a point of looking down to emphasize his height. He was every bit as tall as Dad, though where our father was thick through the arms and chest, Levi was as thin as a skeleton wrapped in Christmas paper. It wasn’t the food shortages that made him that way, he’d always been skinny. He’d never played sports—never had any interest. He was born for a life of books and computers, for never going out into the sun. “One of us has to stay here, and it should be you.”
The point he was trying to make by imposing his height over me was lost. If anybody was going to go to the ration center alone in the dark, I was the best choice. “Give me the card,” I told him. “I’ll do it.”
Levi shook his head. “You have to be eighteen.”
“Give me your driver’s license,” I argued. “I’ll tell them I’m you.”
“No,” Levi said it firmly. He turned his back to me and poured the grits into the pan. “I’m twenty. You’re sixteen. You can’t pass for me. Hand me
that jug of water over there.”
Only two of the gallon-sized plastic jugs we kept on the counter by the sink had any water remaining. We had nearly a hundred recycled plastic soda bottles full of water in the pantry, so we weren’t in jeopardy of going dry. I said, “This is the longest the water’s been off.”
“It’ll be on again tomorrow,” Levi assured me.
He had no way of knowing. Still, it was good to hear him say it, if for nothing else than the mildly contagious strength of his faith in a system that otherwise seemed to be slowly collapsing. I said, “You take the shotgun when you go, then.”
Levi shook his head and poured water into the pan. “It’d be nice if we had something to mix with the grits. Is Oscar’s cat still around?” He looked back at me and smiled to let me know he was joking.
“No.” Oscar’s cat had gone missing a few weeks back. When I’d asked Oscar about where it was, he was weird about the answer, weird enough that I suspected his dad had added the cat to their rations. “You really should take the shotgun.”
Levi stirred the grits in the pan. “You need it here, just in case.”
“We’ll be fine.” I looked out the kitchen window to get a glimpse of dad sitting in his weathered plastic chair in the backyard. “I’ll bring Dad in and stand him by the front door. If anybody tries to get in, he’ll scare them off.” Dad had never been a mean man, but his disappointments had worn lines in his face that looked like anger. Coupled with his imposing size, strangers had always been intimidated by him.
“Dad won’t do anything.” Levi turned away from the pot on the stove, and he put a hand on my shoulder. “He’s not like he used to be. You know that, don’t you, Christian?”
I nodded. Of course I knew that. Dad hadn’t been good for much of anything for at least half a year. He’d fallen ill with H5N1 back when he was caring for Mason and Caden, keeping them quarantined in a makeshift ward he’d hastily put together in the garage. After the twins died, Dad stayed in the garage until he’d recovered. A self-imposed quarantine because he wanted to protect his family. None of the rest of us caught it. At least, not then.
By the time Mom came down with the Brisbane strain of the flu four months later, Dad was already showing signs that something wasn’t right with him mentally. That was in the early days when people were still calling the deadly new influenza the Black Virus and nobody had come close to guessing that the virus was leaving a tiny but menacing mutation in the PRNP genes of most of the survivors.
Globally, people were dying by the millions, and none of the hurriedly prepared vaccines was doing anything to curb the mortality rate. Fear was in the air, thicker than the virions that carried the disease. People were funneling fortunes into the pockets of anyone unscrupulous enough to throw up a website that promised a cure or a method of prevention. Bunker wars broke out, as gangs of people who’d banded together in their desperation to escape the cities sought out the hideouts of those who’d prepared for the end. Every night the news carried video of massacres caught on camera.
The economic infrastructure started to collapse as inflation ran rampant. Nobody wanted to part with their valuable goods for mere paper money. Distribution systems slowed to a crawl. Not enough food made its way from the farms into the cities, and people started to starve.
One of the hundreds of things governments hastily did to stave off total collapse was to rebrand Black Virus into something a little less apt to engender alarm. Almost overnight, the words BLACK VIRUS disappeared from use on television, radio, print, and the Internet. Taking its place was either the scientific classification H5N1 or the name based on the location of the first major outbreak, the BRISBANE STRAIN.
By the time Mom started showing signs of what some people were referring to as post-virus dementia, Dad lost his job because he screwed up every engine he tried to repair. He was having so much trouble finding his words when he spoke that half the time he couldn’t name a fork if he had one in is hand. He got confused when any of us talked to him, and he took to spending most of his time sitting in a rickety plastic chair in the backyard.
To answer Levi, I said, “Dad doesn’t have to do anything. He just needs to stand up straight. He’ll frighten any troublemakers away.”
“I’m not taking the shotgun,” said Levi. “If I see trouble, I’ll run.”
I mocked him with a mean laugh. “You, run?”
Levi wasn’t fazed by my petty derision, and as though stating a fact, said, “I’m faster than you, I’ll bet.”
“We can go out in the street and find out right now if you want.”
Levi shook his head and turned to stir the grits. “We need to get Dad and Mom fed before I leave. I’m going to pick up the rations by myself. You’re staying here with the shotgun and keeping them safe. That’s how it’s going to be.” He glanced back at me and in a stern voice asked, “Got it?”
It was the same tone Mom always used to end the negotiations. “Got it.”
Chapter 169
Dad’s plastic chair sat with another beneath the boughs of a giant sugarberry tree that shaded most of the backyard. From his chair, Dad stared at two grassy, rectangular depressions that had once been mounds of dirt along the back fence. At the head of each stood a wooden cross, painted an off-white that matched the walls inside the house. To make them, Levi and I had used three boards we’d pried off the cedar fence. We’d painted them with a can of paint the landlord had left in the garage. Mason and Caden’s names were written with a black Sharpie on the rough wood, but the sun had faded the ink, and the letters were hard to read.
Mom had tried to get a funeral home to take the twins but none would. Nobody wanted anything to do with a Brisbane victim back then, and we didn’t have the kind of money that would make a funeral director forget what had killed my brothers. Communal gravesites had been set up for the indigent and unclaimed bodies. Anyone could bring their deceased loved ones wrapped in plastic and sealed with tape.
Dad wouldn’t take them there.
Even though we were renting, he believed our house was the last we’d ever live in—that’s a scary thing to hear when you’re a kid. Were we going to be here that long, or was life going to be that short? In a biting cold wind under a stark blue sky, he dug the holes while Levi and I built and painted the crosses in the garage.
When Dad still had a job, he spent a lot of time in the evenings sitting in the backyard watching the graves. At first, Mom did too. After a few weeks, I guess she’d shed all of her tears, and she stopped going into the backyard.
Nearly two years had passed since Mason and Caden died. Dad didn’t speak anymore, but sometimes as he stared at the graves, he cried without making a noise, never raising a hand to wipe the tears away from his cheeks.
I sat in a chair beside Dad, happy that the cold nights over the past few weeks had killed off most of the mosquitoes for the winter. I handed him his grits and sat my bowl in my lap. He accepted his bowl and quietly placed it in his lap without giving it a second glance.
“C’mon, Dad.” I rattled my spoon around in my bowl and got Dad to look at me. I scooped up a spoonful of grits and put them in my mouth. “Eat.”
Dad followed my example. He almost always did.
I didn’t say anything more as we ate. In fact, the words I’d already used were just habit. Back at the beginning, I thought continuing to talk to him might be therapeutic in some way. Through the months, I came to realize I was talking at him rather than to him. Eventually, I stopped doing even that.
“Hey, man.” My buddy, Oscar, from next door, was leaning through the gap in the fence where the three boards were missing.
“Hey,” I responded.
He stepped through the fence and came over.
I pointed at the patio where another plastic chair sat against the back wall of the house. “Get one if you want.”
Oscar veered toward the patio, fetched a chair, brought it over, and sat it in the grass across from me. “Did you talk to Levi?�
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I didn’t answer.
“You didn’t, did you?”
That was how it started, with questions. I put my attention on Dad because he’d stopped eating. I took a slow-motion spoonful of grits up to my mouth, making sure Dad was looking at me when I did. He started eating again.
Oscar said, “That law passed.”
Not knowing what law Oscar was talking about I looked at him with a silent question on my face.
“The one about the degenerates.” Oscar sighed and slumped in his chair. “I told you about it five or six times already. My dad complains about it all the time. He says he’s going to shoot anybody who comes and tries to take my mom.”
“What law?” In truth, so many new laws were being passed to deal with the Brisbane strain’s effects I wouldn’t have been able to keep up even if I had spent more time watching TV and surfing the web.
None of that was on my schedule, though. And even if it was, the electricity was out frequently and it was getting harder and harder to get an Internet connection.
Most of my time was spent taking care of Mom and Dad or working to get odd jobs around the neighborhood. I cleaned gutters, cleaned houses, turned the soil and weeded backyard gardens, and I even repaired windows and doors that were broken in the last burglary. I came across an old push mower, the kind that ran on kid power not gasoline, and I maintained lawns for the few old couples in the neighborhood who still wanted a presentable front yard.
I preferred to trade my services for goods, some squash or green beans from the backyard garden, a can of SPAM when I could get it—even some flowers for Mom would do because she always smiled when I brought some home. When I couldn’t get goods, I accepted paper money even though it grew more worthless by the day.
Most importantly, I was getting to know the people in the houses up and down my block and I knew which ones had suffered through the influenza and had tested positive for the PRNP mutation it left behind, and were slowly turning degenerate. The more resourceful were growing vegetables in their backyards. Some had hoards of canned goods stashed to supplement their diets. Others were just like my family, living off their ration cards, wholly dependent on allotments of food doled out by the government. One old couple always smelled of alcohol and I knew they had a stash of liquor and wine. I hoped they wouldn’t guzzle their way through all of their booze before they turned degenerate—we could trade that for a lot of food once they were gone. Most of the houses had at least one firearm and the ammunition to keep it loaded.