Dead City

by Sean Platt

  She sighed then went downstairs. Ana was drawing something on her tablet. Bridget watched her for a while from behind. The girl tapped something, and the drawing came to life, shambling through several other frames of motion Ana must have already stored. It was a nice bit of animation. Something to pass Ana’s time in a way that was both recreational and educational. Definitely better than popping pills.

  Stop it, Bridget told herself. You don’t have a habit. Gabs has a habit. She’d even looked it up. Zen didn’t form physical addictions. And psychological addictions? Well, reliance depended on the user.

  You don’t need them. They’re just nice for quieting worries.

  But then again, that’s what all addicts thought.

  Ana seemed to unsettle, as if sensing something amiss. She turned and half jumped, finding her mother just a few feet back.

  “Mom!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Honey. I was just watching you work. That’s really cool.” She pointed at the tablet.

  Ana’s hand went to her chest. It was flat for now, but in another two or three years, Bridget supposed she’d start to grow boobs. Great. Something else to worry about.

  “You scared me.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I guess I’m just quiet like a mouse.”

  Ana half rolled her eyes at the expression. For now, she was mostly willing to keep humoring her parents, but Bridget had likely given her mother and father several quiet heart attacks in her teens. That was something else that would change soon: her daughter growing distant, thinking her odd if not downright uncool. Her primary companion during summer and afternoons, inevitably lost to better adventures and friends than her boring old mother.

  “When’s dinner, Mom?”

  “When Dad gets home.”

  “Are you cooking, or is Greg?”

  “I am,” Bridget said. “It’s already in. I made that lemon chicken.”

  Ana made a face. She was polite, but still a kid. It wasn’t always easy to pretend you liked something you didn’t, or that your mother’s cooking was a tenth as good as their sometimes private chef.

  “Oh,” Ana said.

  There was a low rumbling from the other end of the house. Ana jumped to her feet and ran off fast enough that she practically shattered her tablet on the ground. She was gone, eagerly yelling for Ian, faster than you could say, “Daddy is more fun than Mommy.”

  But when Ian entered the room with Ana on his arm, Bridget had pushed down all of her annoying self-doubts. She wasn’t a whiner. She also wasn’t a pill popper. She was a woman who’d settled perhaps too deeply into a routine, and who needed to find her way again. She had all the freedom in the world, and Aberdeen Valley afforded plenty of options, especially given Ian’s salary. She just needed to get out. With Ana in school again these past few days, there was no better time than now.

  There was a moment of shame — a sense that she should feel more grateful and alive than she actually was — but then it was gone, and she was back to being plain old Bridget.

  Good mother. Adoring wife. Luckiest woman in the world.

  Ian didn’t merely peck her on the cheek. He set his bag down and wrapped both arms around her at the waist. Hands lingered and interlocked as he leaned in to kiss her. Bridget rubber-stamped the welcome kiss for the first two seconds, but then Ian’s right hand moved up under her hair and his other hand pulled her chest into his. Then the kiss became real, and Bridget felt herself responding. All of her fears and doubts from minutes ago felt suddenly foolish. Even after fourteen years of marriage, Ian didn’t just love her — he was attracted to her, infatuated with her, adoring of her. Bridget had something inside her marriage that Gabriella went outside her marriage to get: a man who’d never stopped taking her for granted.

  With the thought came more guilt. Guilt over where her thoughts sometimes strayed during the endless dull afternoons; guilt over the secrets kept, and the lies Ian had always believed that she could no longer take back.

  The kiss ended. Ian pulled away, gave her a tight little smile, and turned to his daughter.

  As if he didn’t want to talk to her.

  Which was absurd. He’d just given her a kiss from the cover of a romance novel. Seeing that fifteen-second display — about which, she now noticed, Ana was making gross faces to her father — anyone would know this was a marriage worthy of envy. Gabriella may like having affairs, but Bridget didn’t need one. Maybe the touch of another man put the zip back in Gabriella’s bedroom even when she was with Jim, but Bridget’s bedroom had plenty already. At their last house, before Hemisphere had become the juggernaut it was today, the adults’ bedroom had shared a wall with Analise’s. Today, it was clear across the building. They could rattle the headboard all they wanted, and did at least three times a week.

  But still, Bridget couldn’t shake the feeling that something was strange with Ian. There had been an odd look in his eyes when he’d pulled away, as if the kiss had been a requirement but he couldn’t make his words, which were harder, follow suit. Even now he kept looking up at her, asking quiet questions.

  What do you do around here all day, Bridget? Sometimes, I wonder how you fill your time.

  Why aren’t you as cheery or fun as you used to be, Bridget?

  Have you ever considered taking a little “help”? Nothing habit forming, of course. Just something that forms a dependence you follow more days than not.

  Have YOU ever considered having an affair, Bridget?

  But no, no, no. None of that. She had the one little thing she kept shamefully under wraps. If she’d considered having an affair, it was only because Gabriella made it sound so delightfully reasonable, like a spa treatment that a good woman should luxuriate in when she deserved it. She’d never act on it, and even the thoughts (which she couldn’t control; nobody could control their thoughts and shouldn’t be blamed for them) made her feel guilty enough to hide.

  Although sometimes she wondered if Ian had the same thoughts.

  Surely not, because he’d always adored her so much, right from their earliest days. But weren’t sex and love two different things for men, more so than with women? Of course they were. And if he did ever think about having an affair with all that time he spent working, it would be nothing personal. They would be thoughts, like hers. Innocent, harmless thoughts.

  To shake the creeping feeling away, Bridget waited for Ian to finish squatting and talking with Ana then caught his eye, put on a bright smile, and asked how his day was.

  “Oh, it was fine.”

  “Any new Ted stories?”

  Instead of answering, Ian gave her a little thin-lipped smile and turned to grab his bag. As if he figured she was being rhetorical.

  “I can’t live without my Ted stories,” Bridget said, trying again, now behind him.

  “What?” He turned, and his eyes cleared. “Oh, I’m sorry, Bridge. Feeling a little scrambled. What did you say?”

  But the fun was gone. She was hoping for lighthearted banter, but if she had to drag the fun, lighthearted stories out of her husband, it defeated the point.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you have a good day around here?”

  “Um, sure. Same old thing, really.” That almost sounded loaded, so she said, “I planted mums.”

  “Mums? Really? Aren’t you supposed to plant in the spring?”

  “I think the rules are different here in North Carolina,” she said, feeling dumb. She really had planted mums today. Why not? She’d been meaning to since … well, since the time of year that planting made sense.

  “But we got snow last year.”

  “Well, then maybe they’ll die. What am I supposed to say?”

  Again, too impulsive. When he turned around, she put the placid smile back on her lips. She didn’t seem to need the apology because Ian wasn’t paying attention. He’d set his bag on the table and was searching through it, hunting at the bottom.

  “I was thinking, do you want to go for ice cream after dinner? Laura
’s son just got a job at Mr. Frost, and I think Ana likes him.”

  “He’s sixteen,” Ian said, not pulling his attention from the bag.

  “Yes, well, I had a crush on a student teacher in his midtwenties when I was in middle school.”

  “I don’t know that I want her into someone like that,” Ian said.

  “She’s eleven. I’m not looking to arrange a marriage, Ian. I just thought ice cream would be fun, and Ana was asking.”

  Ian didn’t answer. He now had the bag pulled wide open and was pulling items out and setting them on the table, seeming somehow frustrated.

  “Besides,” Bridget said. “What do you mean, ‘someone like that’?”

  More rummaging. She might have been imagining it, but he looked furtive, maybe nervous.

  “Ian.”

  He looked up, one hand deep in the bag like a kid caught raiding the cookie jar.

  “Sorry. What?”

  “‘Someone like that,’” Bridget repeated.

  “Well, he’s infected.”

  “That’s a bit bigoted, don’t you think? Half my friends are infected.”

  “I just … who knows what could happen?” He’d resumed rummaging. Now he definitely looked nervous, as if he couldn’t find something he desperately needed. His eyes flicked to the floor. Like maybe what he was searching for had fallen and been kicked under the table.

  “What do you mean, ‘What could happen’?”

  “I don’t … shit!” His bag tipped sideways at the mercy of his searching hands and spilled dozens of small items, mostly mechanical pencils. Why did he have so many pencils? It didn’t even make sense. “Look, I don’t know, okay? There’s just too much we don’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  Ian squatted and began looking under the table.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Nothing. Never mind. I’m sorry. It’s been a strange day.”

  “Strange how?” But now her thoughts had turned to this idea of Ian’s reservations. The official Hemisphere position on Sherman Pope — the position of Aberdeen Valley as a whole, as home of the cure — stated that the plague was mostly an unfortunate outbreak that rapid intervention and luck had managed to solve. Fewer and fewer people today were oblivious enough to let new bites go until the inflection point was passed, and reports of ferals in populated areas were increasingly rare — though it still happened plenty in the wild. But Ian expressing prejudice like this was so unlike him. It made Bridget wonder what he wasn’t telling her, what might have changed since their last conversation.

  He stopped, seeming to realize how this must look and seem. Calm crept over his features — reluctantly but surely. Only his eyes still betrayed something amiss.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing. Someone shuffled the file tree at work and … well, never mind. It’s all stupid. But I don’t know; I’ve been uneasy. Ignore me. Okay? I just need to get out of work mode and into home mode.”

  “Okay.”

  “And yes, ice cream sounds great.”

  She wanted to ask more about why a teenager with a one-day incubation period might somehow have become an undesirable — especially considering that Laura was a helicopter parent who’d never let the kid slip even an hour from his Necrophage dose. Why there should be any unknowns at all after years under Panacea’s integrated system, Bridget couldn’t imagine. But Ian didn’t keep secrets from her (she had to admit it, even though it made her feel guiltier about her own), so if he had something to tell her, she’d know it in time.

  “Sure.”

  Ian’s hand went with sudden inspiration to the side of his thigh. He slapped the fabric above his pocket then his face visibly relaxed. The hand stole into the pocket and grabbed something. His relief clicked another notch forward. He palmed whatever he’d found, slipped it into the bag, then shoved the bag away and turned to Bridget.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Lemon chicken.” Her eyes flicked to the bag, to the unknown but very important thing.

  “Sounds good.”

  “I hope it’s good.”

  “I’m sure it will be.”

  “I do try.”

  “And then ice cream afterward.” His hands went to Bridget’s waist. She could still see something wrong on his face — some concern from the day’s strangeness that hadn’t been totally assuaged — but his earlier panic was gone.

  He still hadn’t mentioned whatever was bugging him, or acknowledged the vital missing thing that, until thirty seconds ago, had Ian about to upend the house in search. Did he think she hadn’t noticed? Were they really going to pretend that hadn’t happened?

  “Are you okay?” Again, she looked at the bag. Asking him to explain. To tell her about the thing she wouldn’t care about, just so she wouldn’t stay curious.

  “Yes. Of course. I’m fine.” He pulled her closer. “I’m home.”

  In Ian’s other pocket, his phone began to vibrate. She wanted to laugh. It was a private joke between them: he was on Hemisphere’s time so much, all work stopped hard at the front door. There were no emails other than those that couldn’t wait. No books, no computers on laps in front of the couch. And certainly no phone calls. Whoever that was, they’d have to wait.

  He was home. Until morning, he was hers.

  Ian slipped the phone from his pocket and looked at the screen.

  Then a new look crossed his face, and he excused himself to take the call.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A KNOCK AT THE DOOR

  ALICE TRIED THE CALL AGAIN. As before, Keys hung up. The first time he’d hung up on her, she’d thought it was annoying. The second time it struck her as odd, and this third time, it was flat-out amusing. Alice had been hung up on before, but Ian Keys did it in grand dramatic fashion. It was possible that the Keys family had a landline that rang into the house, but Alice seriously doubted it was more than a service extension. She was calling his mobile. So after the first time he hung up, he should have declined future calls and sent them right to voicemail, where she’d at least be able to explain herself. But instead, Keys was answering each call, letting her get out a few words before killing the connection. It was like a kid tempting fate by peeking repeatedly into the dark closet to make sure the boogeyman was still there.

  To Alice, he sounded guilty.

  She’d tried to get Archibald Burgess on the phone dozens of times and had been rejected by his army of gatekeepers, but the one time she’d used some underground connections to sniff out a personal line, he’d done as she’d expected: given her a few annoyed words then declined and eventually blocked all calls to follow. Ian Keys didn’t sound like Burgess or the other Hemisphere reps she’d contacted. Usually, they were terse and annoyed — something Alice supposed she understood, given her reputation of giving the company a hard time even though everyone else treated it like the nation’s darling. But Keys? He sounded jittery. Unseated. As if her call was almost expected in the most unwanted way.

  The fourth time she tried his number, Keys didn’t answer and did, mercifully, finally let the call go to voicemail. She left a message with her name and credentials (entirely unnecessary) and the skeleton of her query (vague and undefined). Bothered more than she expected, and in the most unsettling way, Alice settled back with what remained of her pizza, not bothering to stop at one slice too many.

  There was a knock at the door, followed by another. Finally, there was a sort of banging preceding the sound of a sack of grain being dropped.

  Alice opened the door to find her neighbor, Kelly, slumped on the stoop. She was mostly on the ground, reaching for Alice’s doorbell. Not because she wanted in, but because it was a little bright light that might be fascinating to Kelly’s addled mind.

  “Hi, Kelly,” Alice said, looking down. She considered extending a hand to help her neighbor up, but she’d spent too long at Yosemite with Bobby to be fully reintegrated into the normal world just yet. Of course Kelly wouldn’t attack her, but between
Yosemite’s hunt, the package she’d just received, and the fact that it was already dark outside, her skin was crawling.

  There was a shuffling from across the yard. Alice looked up to see Kelly’s sister, Nicole, rushing over, a mostly open sweater flapping as she beckoned impatiently for the slouched form at her door with both arms.

  “Kelly!” she barked.

  Kelly looked back and moaned.

  “I’m sorry, Alice,” Nicole said, still waving her arms for the woman on the stoop. “I left the back gate open.”

  “It’s no problem. Really.”

  “She just likes you, is all. She saw your interview with Bobby Baltimore.”

  “Bobby,” said Kelly.

  “Kelly. Get up, Honey.” Nicole extended the hand that Alice hadn’t. She pulled her sister upright. Kelly stood easily on her own but continued to sway as if in a breeze, looking at Alice with a happy but vacant expression.

  “I’m really sorry,” Nicole repeated. Then: “Oh, and now there’s crap all over your door.”

  Alice looked down at the mess on her door’s front. Part of it was blood, but part of it was just the offal that further-along necrotics shed as the Necrophage in their systems fought to restore the cells that Sherman Pope kept killing off. The result was a bit like full-body pus. Supposedly, a human body refreshed itself every seven years, but for necrotics the process was much faster. They were more like snakes, constantly rotting on the outside while new cells tried to keep pace on the inside.