Immunity: Apocalypse Weird

by E. E. Giorgi

  The sun was high now, the heat from the fire so palpable it made her shirt stick to her back.

  David swallowed hard, squinting at the orange sun. “Are you—are you sure about this? I mean, we could both go to your place, then—”

  “We don’t have that much time,” Anu rebuked. “Let’s meet here in front of the west entrance in an hour.”

  “Fine. Take care of yourself.” He fixed his green eyes on hers and the worry she read in them sent a little twinge down her stomach.

  He’s a sweet guy, she found herself thinking. You were wrong about him.

  You were wrong.

  * * *

  Her side of the dormitory was completely deserted by the time she got to her little studio apartment on the fourth floor. An old, postwar structure that had been quickly dusted off after the H7N7 crisis to host scientists from all over the world, the Oppenheimer building stunk of old wood and worn out carpets. And now of smoke and burnt debris.

  Anu ran up the stairs two steps at the time, stormed down the corridor and then fiddled with the keys in the lock for a good thirty seconds before she could get inside. The white walls were bathed in the eerie orange glow of the sky outside, the desk and all other surfaces blanketed with a layer of dust. She closed the window—not that it was going to help at this point—and then stormed through bookshelves and desk drawers looking for the important stuff she needed to save from the fire. Notebooks, flash drives, papers on H7N7. Her laptop, the most important thing.

  She grabbed a few shirts, underwear, her toothbrush, a couple of pair of jeans and tossed everything into her carry-on. The rest she could buy again. Books, her mug collection, her few pieces of jewelry—she could leave all of it behind.

  No, wait.

  Her mom’s necklace.

  That one she had to take.

  Damn, where the hell did I put it?

  The pressure was killing her. Sirens blasted from the street. Muffled blasts, rattling, tires screeching on the pavement, people screaming. Outside the whole world was collapsing, yet she couldn’t leave the place until she found it—the only clue to her mother’s existence. Everybody else had memories of their mother. Not Anu, though. Anu had a tiny blue box her father had given her when she’d left for college. And now she had to find it.

  With the same determination she had set off to fight H7N7, Anu dug into every corner of the four hundred square foot apartment. She finally found it, at the very back of a drawer, squeezed between socks and a wad of old bills. The box was tattered and lonely. It looked resentful, too.

  Anu, Anu, you’ve forgotten about me for all these years.

  No, Maa. I never forgave you for what you did.

  But what if she’d been wrong, all these years? What if her mother had been right all along? What if… she never meant to kill herself?

  Anu kneeled by her bed and with shaking hands opened the box. Her mother’s necklace was hidden underneath a photo of Anu’s parents on their wedding day, in 1982. Her dad was wearing a golden sherwani and her mother a red saree, her arms adorned by choora and painted in intricate henna drawings.

  She’d forgotten all the lush and beautiful details of the fabric, the dresses, the jewelry. Another explosion, then hurried steps running down the hallway.

  I really have to leave.

  She flipped the picture over, made sure the necklace was still at the bottom of the box, then, as she placed back the photo, she noticed something scribbled at the back. Below the wedding date and place, carefully crafted in Hindi characters, in a different ink, and likely added at a different time, were some letters. “HERV-W, 3-5 muts seg 2 H>N>.”

  What does it—

  The blow to the back of her head sent her tumbling against the desk. She yelped, confused, tried to get up, and yet another blow caught her in the middle of the face this time. She swung backwards, tasting blood on her palate.

  Jeff stood in front of her, his usually kind blue eyes bloodshot and unrecognizable, his face flushed, and his lips—always prone to a kind word—purple and bleeding. Spiteful.

  He was breathing heavily, hissing, almost.

  Anu brought a hand to her face, blood dripping from her nose into her mouth. “Jeff,” she whimpered. “It’s me, Jeff. Anu Sharma. Your colleague. Your friend.”

  “You…” Jeff said, words gargling out of his throat. “You killed my wife. You deserve to die.” He kept his hands raised in front of him, the fingers contracted as if about to hold something, or snap it, rather. Anu crawled backward until she hit the wall and there was nowhere else to hide. Her eyes darted to the desk on her right, desperately seeking anything she could use for self-defense.

  Jeff lunged forward, hands aimed at her neck. She dove to the right and grabbed the electrical wire of her desk lamp, pulling it down. Jeff’s enormous hands came down on her, pounding on her legs and thighs. She crawled under the desk and shoved the lamp in his face. He roared, shielding himself with one arm, while still trying to grab her with the other.

  “Why’d you kill my wife?” Jeff yelled and in a burst of anger lifted one end of the desk and sent it flipping on its side, all her pens and notes and papers sliding down on the floor. His hammering hand grabbed Anu’s hair, pulled, and shoved her head against the wall.

  “Jeff, no! Please!” Sharp, searing pain seeped through her bones and shattered her thoughts.

  She closed her eyes.

  Maa.

  Forgive me, Maa.

  Jeff roared with anger as he laced his mighty fingers around her throat, squeezing, gagging her. She gasped and kicked, longing for air, energy quickly draining away from her. Her body went limp. She couldn’t fight anymore.

  She… just… couldn’t.

  I’m sorry Maa.

  The world came to a stop. All sounds ebbed—Jeff’s grunts and growls, the chaos from outside, the distant whooshing of the fire—distorted as if under water. The pain was gone, her whole body finally numb. Liberated.

  She felt pulling and tugging, but no pain.

  Whatever this was, it no longer hurt her.

  She saw her mother, smiling like in her wedding picture.

  “Anu!” her mother called.

  “I’m here, Maa!” She tried to run to her but her mother grew smaller and smaller the faster she ran. “Maa! I’m here, Maa!”

  “Anu!”

  “Maa!”

  “Can you hear me, Anu? Anu! Please, Anu, please!”

  The pain came back. It sliced through her throat like a scalding blade. She tried to scream but no voice came out of her, just the pain screeching through her body. She jolted and doubled over, wheezing, every intake of air burning through her chest.

  “There you go. Breathe. You’re going to be fine. Just breathe.”

  That’s not Maa’s voice.

  She tried to swallow and it hurt like hell. Through tears she saw a familiar face leaning over her, the hand on her cheek rough and scraped and yet so incredibly comfortable…

  “D—”

  She couldn’t pronounce his name. It didn’t matter. She threw herself in David’s arms and cried like a baby, all the tension of the past forty-eight hours washing down on her, the physical pain, the shootings, the samples she could never retrieve, the virus winning over humanity. Her mother.

  He wrapped his arms around her, his scent rugged and yet warm, strangely familiar, or maybe was the desperation she’d come down to. A salty tear fell on her forehead. She pushed away and looked at him, the golden stubble on his cheeks, the wrinkles of tiredness at the corners of his eyes. David was crying, too.

  He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers.

  “I—” he stammered. “I never killed anyone—anything before.” He smiled, softly and sadly. “Not even the spiders that crawl on my bedroom walls. I consider them pets.”

  Anu turned. Jeff was on the floor, face down, his hair plastered as black blood oozed out of the side of his head and into his ear.

  David whispered, “He was so focus
ed on hurting you that he didn’t even feel the barrel pressed to the back of his head.” He swallowed, tears melting on his cheeks. “Last night he said, ‘If this ever happens to me, kill me.’ And so I did.” His voice cracked. He sunk his face in Anu’s neck and cried. “I squeezed the trigger and killed him.”

  “Thank you,” Anu said, cupping her hands around his neck, his stubble soft and wet against her skin. “From both of us. Thank you.”

  Funny how you can know so little of a person and yet in one split moment find out that you love him so much.

  * TWELVE *

  There was no time to bury the dead or even say goodbye in a proper way. David rolled Jeff onto his back and Anu flattened his clawed hands over his chest. In death, his face had relaxed again and gone back to the Jeff she remembered, the reserved and kind guy she met the first day she’d moved to the lab. She had been disappointed by the old an unkempt look of the place, and Jeff had commented, “There’s no need to beautify the buildings when the landscape is so beautiful on its own account.”

  He was right. Nothing matched the crisp blue skies or the golden sunsets that turned the profile of the mountains red and purple.

  “Goodbye, Jeff,” Anu said, pressing her fingers on his eyelids to close them. “You’re back with your wife and children now. Be happy.”

  They stopped to grab a few of David’s belongings as well, his laptop especially—Anu had been adamant about the laptop—and left the building. The streets were deserted, swallowed by thick, resilient smoke. It hid the mountains, the buildings, even the sun.

  “My car is at the parking garage,” Anu croaked. Her head was pounding, her throat burning.

  “You need to see a doctor,” David said.

  She attempted a smile, and every muscle in her body protested with pain. “I called but they couldn’t fit me in ‘til next week.” She winked.

  “Not funny, Anu. There’s an ER station on the way to the parking garage. I’m sure we can find at least a nurse who can see you.”

  She shook her head, the throb relentless. “I’ve got some painkillers with me. We can’t waste time. We need to get out of here.” She motioned up the road, the top of the garage structure hidden by the growing haze. She made to drag the carry-on down the street, yet the minute she pulled, a sharp bolt of pain struck her shoulder.

  “Here, let me do that,” David said, taking the carry-on from her. His eyes lingered on her bloodied shirt. “You never told me what happened to you last night.”

  She read it in David’s eyes that he was worried. She stopped in the middle of the road, pulled down the collar of her shirt and showed him Christine’s bite marks. Her skin was swollen, and the two arcs of Christine’s teeth had turned an angry purple.

  David’s eyes bulged, his jaw tensed. And then he relaxed and a smile sprawled on his face. He tittered, pointed to her shoulder and said, “You’ve been bitten! How much time do we have before you turn into a zombie?”

  A smile escaped her lips in spite of herself. She pulled the shirt collar back up and grabbed his chin. “David. If it were to happen to me for real, you have to promise—”

  “Don’t.” He pressed his fingers on her lips, preventing her from finishing the sentence. He held his eyes on hers, green, like the lawns she used to run in barefoot when she was a child, like the mountain lakes she used to hike to with her dad—where had that time gone?

  “Just—don’t say it.”

  She nodded, silence sealing their unspoken deal.

  He pulled the carry-on and she followed, hiking up the road as fast as they could. “Do you know who attacked you?”

  “I think it was Christine,” she said.

  David’s eyes widened with incredulity. “Christine? Are you sure? Didn’t you say she was held at the medical facility, sedated? Is that where you vanished to?”

  Her throat stung because of the smoke, and her voice sounded like an old pipe after a long drought. She swallowed and tried to collect her thoughts, to spare the words. “No. I—I went to the genomic building.”

  “How did you—” David started but never finished the question.

  Anu closed her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t judge her, he wouldn’t ask her why. The thought of her data still in the fridge stung her. It was her last chance and she missed it. Now the lab was going to be devoured by flames and her samples lost forever.

  “I entered from the back. The door was unlocked.”

  “And that’s when you were attacked? Anu, there’s no way Christine could’ve been in the genomic building.”

  “I never saw her. I couldn’t see.”

  “Nobody could.”

  “But I recognized her voice.”

  “Anu, you said she was in the medical facility, sedated.”

  It didn’t make any sense, yet she knew it had been Christine in the genomic building. It was her voice, her arms that had grasped her from behind.

  The sirens of a fire engine blasted long before the vehicle emerged from the smoky haze. The driver stopped, rolled down his window, and asked them if they were ok.

  “We’re heading to our car,” David replied. “Is help needed with the fire?”

  The firefighter shook his head. “We’re running out of water. Best thing is to just leave as quickly as possible. Good luck!” He waved and soon vanished again into the fog.

  “You don’t think,” David said, as they resumed walking, “that the virus made Christine resistant to the sedatives? That—that wouldn’t be possible, would it?”

  Anu shook her head no.

  “But then how—”

  He froze, the thought finally crossing his mind. Anu nodded. “Somebody fiddled with her medications,” she said.

  “You sure of that?”

  “I can’t prove it. But there’s no other explanation.”

  Five ambulances were parked at the ER station David had mentioned. People had clustered around, the injured bleeding and wheezing and the rest going back and forth with IV packs and oxygen bottles. One of the ambulances started beeping and backing up, an EMT pushing people away so the vehicle could come through.

  “Make way!” he shouted. “Critically ill on board!”

  A man rose from the blanket he’d been sitting on and clasped the EMT’s arm. “Where is it going?”

  The EMT hesitated. “To Albuquerque. We don’t have the equipment to treat them here. The medical center had to be evacuated because of the fire.” He made to step away, but the man squeezed his fist around the EMT’s arm.

  “Please let me get on that ambulance. I’ve nowhere to go, no car to take. Please.”

  Another EMT came over to talk to the man. “This way, sir. We’re taking names of people who are unable to evacuate on their own.”

  “Thank you. Thank you,” the man whimpered, his voice swallowed by the blast of the ambulance speeding away.

  “Come on, Anu,” David said, motioning her toward the line of people. “The adrenaline may trick you into thinking you’re ok, but you were out for a good three minutes.”

  She held back and shook her head. Standing in that line Anu recognized an elderly professor who had once given a colloquium on quantum cryptography. He was holding a facemask to his mouth, the tip of his bony fingers blue and cyanotic. A little farther down, a woman held a man who’d been shot in the leg and was profusely bleeding. In that line, Anu saw hope, desperation, and fear. She saw random stories of people who had been strangers until the day before and now were united in the fight for survival. EMTs, nurses and volunteers assisted as best as they could with whatever they had, heedless of the smoke, the looming fire, or the H7N7 contamination threat.

  “These people need medical assistance more than I do,” Anu said. “Let’s get my Subaru, then come back to see who else needs a ride away from this inferno.”

  A rhythmic swoosh beat the air, the sound waves lapping along the ground beneath their feet. Anu craned her head up only to feel the sharp pain in her neck and shoulder again.

  David
squinted, the eerie glow of the sky wrapping everything around them in orange. “It’s a chopper. And—and it’s got water!” He pointed to the sky, like a kid who’s seen the moon for the first time.

  The sight brought a new beam of hope to Anu’s heart. “A Sikorsky crane with water! Finally! Communications must have been restored. The reservoir down in Albuquerque is still running, that’s the only place where the water can come from.”

  “Then that’s where we will be heading to,” David said. He grabbed her hand and pressed her to walk faster.

  “I have colleagues there. We can resume our work on the virus.”

  David sneered, but in a sweet way. “You just can’t get it out of your head, can you?”

  “My mother,” she said, words burning in her throat. “She left me a clue. I—I don’t know what it means. Yet.”

  The Sikorsky crane they had spotted earlier dumped its first load of water onto the blaze, right as they arrived at the parking garage. The structure was so close to the fire, hot air and ashes started blowing in their faces.

  “Ground floor,” Anu said, blinking away dust.

  Anu leaned across the parapet and watched the fire hiss and crackle, heedless of the gallons of water and fire retardant just dumped by the crane. A new wave of smoke and vapor loomed high in the sky. Agni, god of fire, she thought, as repetitive prayers hummed around diya lamps to awaken the good gods and burn the demons resurfaced from long forgotten memories. Watching the flames loom so high Anu felt like they had a mind of their own, capricious and relentless as they devoured everything along their path.

  The Subaru was covered in a layer of ash and debris. They loaded the trunk and wiped the windshield, not speaking a word as the fine dust caked their throats and faces. Anu stared at David from the other side of the car and chuckled.

  David frowned. “What?”

  “You look like the chimney man.”

  He smiled and tossed a handful of ashes at her, white swirls of powder curling between them. She backed away and coughed, enjoying that he instantly went ashen, regretting the joke.