The Infects

by Sean Beaudoin

  To stay sharp, he palmed his sedatives and coagulants and cell boosters and gave them to Mr. Bator, who gobbled them like cashews and then lay on the front carpet, watching TV in a fetal clench.

  While Petal sat in a cage.

  Just like she’d been doing in the lodge.

  While people above her healed.

  While people above her confessed and repented.

  Nero was not going to let it happen this time.

  Not again.

  Petal wasn’t staying down there.

  Even one second longer than she had to.

  Nero was never going back to Nick. And he didn’t think anyone else should revert either, although most of the others reclaimed their real names.

  Sad Girl (Candy Hayes) worked as an orderly, handing out medication and cigarettes and magazines, her fingernails painted black, wearing rings and jewelry and tight green dresses. War Pig (Reggie Cole) spent most of his time in the smoking room, lighting a new Camel no-filter before his last one was even done, biting his thumbnails, and looking around nervously. He refused to speak to Raekwon (Trishelle Huggins). She couldn’t understand why, often crying and asking others to intervene, but War Pig would get up without a word and walk out of any room she entered.

  Then there was Idle (Patterson Nordstrom Jr.) and Billy (Stanton Auchischloss), who weren’t actually brothers — let alone related at all. They were heavily sedated and kept under lockdown in a special wing, too far gone even for the therapists to deal with. They screamed and clawed at their ankle braces, yelled for their mommies in voices that echoed throughout the halls, pulling hair out in twisted chunks. Both of them were gaunt and pale, tans long gone, braces yanked out by the root in bloody protest. They looked like a pair of darkling ferrets, covered in scratches, covered in feces, now almost entirely bald.

  Nero remained calm, went to all the meetings, ate the Jell-O, offered up his thoughts and feelings. At least the ones he thought the counselors wanted to hear. But filling a bite wound with silicone or lasering a scar changed nothing. He didn’t mention Joanjet, although she wasn’t in the facility and didn’t have a plaque on the wall. He didn’t ask questions, demand answers, or insist on being let out, as some others had — others who were escorted soon afterward to the Heavy Sedation Wing, a place no one had actually seen, and from which nobody had yet returned.

  Nero had been the model patient.

  But he wasn’t a model, and he wasn’t a patient.

  You still need to be patient though, he told himself.

  Just like the Rock would have.

  Except the Rock was gone.

  Nero had woken up the first morning in the facility feeling dull and slow, an IV of antidote and sedatives in his arm, and it was like his attic had been cleaned. Disinfected. Emptied by a moving crew. All dusty floors and bare joists and cloister-quiet.

  The Rock had simply split.

  And Nero hated to admit it, but he sort of missed him (it?).

  Especially during the long hours after lights-out.

  LIKE EVERY OTHER DAY SINCE HE’D AWOKEN in the facility, Nero skipped nuCalisthenics and took a walk around the hallways instead. As head trustee, he was the only one allowed to do so.

  In the interior, there were no counselors.

  There were heavily armed soldiers in black Kevlar.

  A number of them watching the surgical recovery bay.

  Where there was only one person still recovering.

  Swann.

  She lay in a coma on a stainless-steel pallet. Hooked up to dozens of tubes and monitors. Nero stood outside the mesh-lined window, watching her breathe. Without the crazy hair and dried blood, she looked almost normal again.

  Almost beautiful.

  He wondered what she was thinking about beneath those closed lids. What she might be dreaming of.

  If she remembered.

  The night she came to him in the lodge.

  Or maybe it was he who had come to her.

  Right before they came together.

  Nero stared at his badly scarred hand, a thick and ugly rectangle of dead tissue crossed by enormous stitches, like a flag struck by lightning, the faint image of the Stones’ cartoon lips burned beneath.

  Mick’s tongue had finally closed the wound.

  After Swann’s tongue had opened it.

  In any case, she was as (un)popular as ever, the subject of most Nu-Client discussions and meetings and therapy sessions.

  And dreams.

  They called her the Blondmare.

  They called her the Bride of Chunkenstein.

  They called her Pure Fucking Evil.

  No one wanted Swann to wake up.

  In fact, if she weren’t behind wire-reinforced glass, one of them probably would have made sure she didn’t.

  Soon a guard would come and escort Nero into the rear of the facility, past labs and locked offices and a heavily reinforced flight of stairs.

  To see Petal.

  They were allowed to spend an hour together every day.

  She was housed in the sublevel, in a tiny concrete room, behind a thick glass viewing window. She had a bed and a side table, some books and magazines, a small treadmill in the corner, and a steel toilet that extended from the wall. She wore thin, gauzy nightgowns, with her hair up in barrettes. Her bare arms were bruised and pocked and raw from where they drew blood through a metal collection slot. They’d installed permanent insertion points around her neck, over the main arteries, which remained red and wet like a necklace of tiny roses.

  It made Nero so angry, he wanted to fly into a rage.

  Every time.

  Rush the guard. Crack skulls.

  But that would be stupid. He wouldn’t make it ten feet.

  And then they’d both be locked up.

  A pulse monitor went off in Swann’s room. She didn’t seem to move, but a light pinged and blipped, finally tripping an electronic alarm.

  No one came.

  No doctors were summoned over loudspeakers.

  There were no calls for anything stat.

  As Nero leaned closer to the glass, wondering if he should do something, an enormous guard grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away.

  “Is it time already?”

  “Yeah, but not for your little girlfriend.”

  “Then what are you pawing me for?”

  The guard smiled. His breath was terrible, like raw meat.

  “The Man wants to see you.”

  THEY WALKED PAST MOTHBALLED HOLDING tanks and surgery bays, down a long hallway and through a series of thick steel security gates that ended in a vestibule lined with leather and gold trim.

  The guard knocked twice on a dark mahogany door.

  “Enter,” said a voice.

  The guard motioned with his metal baton, and Nero stepped in.

  The room was hot and steamy. Dark. In the rear was a cone of yellow light.

  In the center of that light sat Win Fuld.

  In a leather chair.

  His feet up on a heavy oak desk.

  “Nicky boy!”

  Win Fuld grinned his lipless grin, now completely white, eyebrows gone, his forehead one long sheet of pale, veiny skin. An oxygen tank rested behind his leg. He centered the mask and breathed from it deeply, then spoke through the rubber cone.

  “How’s my favorite Nu-Client?”

  Nero said nothing.

  “Slow on the uptake? Must be the sedatives. They have a fogging effect. But hey, sometimes a little fog feels good, huh?”

  The oxygen tank hissed.

  A heart monitor pounded.

  Win Fuld rose unsteadily and motioned Nero over. “I imagine you’ll want to see this.”

  On the far wall of the office were framed pictures, front pages of the San Francisco Daily Beacon.

  The first headline read “GI’s Chow Super-Chicken on Way to Guadalcanal!”

  “We started experimenting in 1941. Rebozzo’s was given a large government grant to increase poultry produ
ction for the war effort.”

  The next paper said “Worker Riot at Rebozzo Plant, Federal Agents Kill 36 ‘Bezerkers.’”

  “Some of the early trials didn’t go so well.”

  The next said “Atrocities Alleged in Vietnamese Hamlet. ‘Gruesome’ Site Razed in Air Strike.”

  “An unfortunate necessity.”

  The next said “Entire Religious Cult in Waco, Texas, Dies in ‘Accidental’ Conflagration. Branch Davidians Involved in Bizarre Rites.”

  “Still not clear on that one.”

  The final headline, from 1999, said “Ecstasy-Fueled Rave Goes Horribly Wrong; Dozens Bitten and Trampled in Bloody Nightclub Panic.”

  “Kids and their dope, huh?”

  At the end of the row was a framed pamphlet, hand-printed like a religious tract or conspiracy fanzine, with huge fonts and excessive exclamation points. It was riddled with typos. The masthead said “Corporate Meat Is Corporate Murder.” Underneath that was the anacronym CORMICOM. Beneath were articles with titles like: “Rebozzo Aviraculture’s Secret Labs. Govornment Invulved in Genetic Experimentation on Poultry!” “Food Chain Unsafe! Fast-Frood Franchises Found to be Responsible for Mysterious Illness Outbreaks!” “Deadly Chicken Virus Alleged to Have Escaped From Lab!” “Q: What’s Worse Than Mad Cow Disease? A: Even Angrier Nuggets.”

  Win Fuld chuckled. A patch of skin curled down over his eyebrow like a strip of old wallpaper. He fished a safety pin from a bowl on his desk and tacked the flesh back in place. Nero noticed another pin just above the line of his collar. And one on the back of his wrist. “In a speech ten years ago, our dipshit president actually labeled CORMICOM a terrorist group. Terror? Mostly they break into farms and free cows from their pens in the middle of the night. Then, of course, the animals starve to death or get hit by cars. Another victory for the people.”

  Nero recognized the pamphlet. He’d seen protesters outside Rebozzo’s gates trying to hand them to workers, yelling things like “Murderers!” and “Solidarity!” He’d never paid them much attention.

  Fuld went on: “You’re a hero to them, you know. After your . . . liberation of the Rebozzo Fryers? You were very briefly the Che Guevara of chicken.”

  “The who?”

  Win Fuld laughed. “My point precisely.”

  Nero looked at the newspapers again. “You’re telling me there’s been zombies since, like, before Hitler?”

  Win Fuld wheeled his oxygen tank back to the desk.

  “The walking dead? Rising from the grave, that sort of thing? Ridiculous. No, we are just a people of insatiable appetites. A hungry mob is an angry mob. Sometimes that hunger metastasizes. You can call it a plague, you can call it the End-Time, or you can call it Tuesday. Mostly it’s just lazy R & D.”

  An egg timer went off. Win Fuld’s gums began to bleed. He slid a leather case from his top drawer. Inside was a hypodermic needle. He carefully filled it with a black liquid and then plunged it into his arm.

  Blood into blood.

  Blood into Fuld.

  Petal’s blood into Fuld.

  Nero wanted to vomit.

  Instead he watched, mesmerized.

  Win Fuld’s eyes closed.

  His entire body shivered.

  He growled for a second, drooled, slapped himself in the face, and then continued.

  “It’s impossible, in any case, to control the virus. Are birds meant to be penned and caged at all, let alone on an industrial scale? No. But the demand for their crunchy goodness is too great to be denied. Production outpaces reproduction. And so, modifications are necessary.”

  “Prototypes.”

  “Exactly. I myself ate hundreds of them. You, your father, your sister. The other men on our R & D team. Including Anton Gazes.”

  “Petal’s father worked with you?”

  “Until his breakdown. Not unlike your own father’s. Ingestion affected us all differently. You seem to have developed a limited resistance. I, on the other hand, must continually reinject the cure. Young Petal, as far as we can tell, is fully immune.”

  Nero looked down at his hand. The cut. Swann’s tongue. He never turned, but he should have.

  “I want to talk to Bobo Rebozzo.”

  Win Fuld laughed. “Highly unlikely.”

  “What, he’s not here?”

  The reoxygenation system clicked. A mist of vitamin A fell from the ceiling.

  “There is no Bobo Rebozzo.”

  Nero rubbed his temples.

  “At least there hasn’t been since he died in the outbreak of ’53. Rebozzo’s a marketing prop. A clown in a yellow suit. I own all this.”

  “But Swann is his daughter.”

  “Swann is my daughter.”

  Nero tried to imagine someone actually having sex with Win Fuld.

  “You sent your own child to Inward Trek?”

  Win Fuld wiped his gums with a silk handkerchief. “I had no doubt she would . . . survive, even prosper, in adverse conditions.”

  “You know what she did out there, right? If she wakes up, she’s never going to be the same. No matter how many surgeries she gets or classes she takes. No one could be.”

  Win Fuld inhaled from the oxygen mask. His gums seeped darkly. He didn’t blink, didn’t twitch, barely registered a pulse as he spoke in a funny helium voice. “That’s okay. She was sort of an entitled brat before, don’t you think?”

  The heating vents dripped sweat. The walls beaded with it.

  “So why did you call me here?”

  Win Fuld spread his hands, palms up. “I want to offer you a job.”

  “That’s funny. Really.”

  “Miss Gazes, as you should have figured out by now, is filled with something extremely valuable. It literally pulses through her. But lately she’s been less than cooperative. Not eating properly. Refusing the needle.”

  “You don’t need her permission. You can just take what you want. Which is exactly what you’re doing already.”

  “Ah, but that’s not so. Nothing sedates her. Nothing knocks her out. The techs are afraid to enter the room. Putting her arm through the collection slot of her own volition just makes everything so much easier on everyone.”

  Nero said nothing.

  Win Fuld tried to smile. A needle holding the corner of his lip together slipped out and tumbled to the floor. “We can break the cycle of the virus. We are close to synthesizing the antidote. Isn’t that worth a few months of your girlfriend being locked up?”

  “While I just forget everything that happened?”

  Win Fuld shrugged. “Until it all happens again.”

  “And you keep making money selling poison.”

  “But people love poison. They crave it. If we didn’t sell it to them, one fried nugget at a time, then there’d really be a revolution.”

  Nero stood. It was almost like Fuld had wanted the outbreak to happen. Was having a building full of Nu-Clients the point all along? There were other things besides an antidote you could develop. But you’d need infected subjects to experiment on first. Maybe the clients themselves were where the real money was. You couldn’t do human research — even in Cambodia — anymore.

  “No deal.”

  “Of course, you could stay here with us. Rehabbing. Getting in touch with yourself. Living a comfortable life. Eating at the cafeteria . . . forever.”

  Nero flexed his hand, watched scar tissue strain against healthy skin. “None of the Nu-Clients are ever getting out, are they?”

  “Are you interested in the job or not, Mr. Sole?”

  “What’s it pay?”

  Win Fuld smiled. “Your real life. Some of it, in any case. You can go home. Back to school if you wish. Another successful IT rehabilitation. All you need to do is report here daily. Visit Miss Gazes. Keep her happy and productive.”

  Nero hated himself for being so easily manipulated, while at the same time unable to hide his excitement at the chance to get out of the facility. To go home. See Amanda. Breathe real air. Laze a
round the house like a regular tool, even for a day.

  Even for an hour.

  “Deal.”

  “Hard bargaining, but I think you made the right choice.”

  Nero ignored the disgusting yellow thing that Win Fuld called a hand.

  “Your father will be informed that you have completed your IT sentence on time and are coming home soon, fully rehabilitated. I will instruct the nurses to ease off on your medication. In the meantime, Miss Gazes’s cooperation must improve a hundred percent.”

  Nero shook his head. “She’ll never forgive me for this. And I don’t blame her.”

  “For what, exactly?”

  “I got her arrested. I got her sent to IT in the first place. If I hadn’t let that first load of fryers get to packaging —”

  Win Fuld waved for the guard. “She didn’t get arrested because of you.”

  Nero closed his mouth. It took every bit of strength he had to open it again. “What did you say?”

  “Miss Gazes got arrested for trying to set the Blue Room on fire.”

  Win Fuld opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of half-burned CORMICOM pamphlets.

  “And she tried to light it with these.”

  The guard opened the door, grabbed Nero’s shoulder, and escorted him through.

  NICK SAT IN THE BACK OF THE CLASSROOM AS Miss Smollet mwa-mwa-mwa’d her way through a biology lesson. He’d missed three months and was given triple homework every night in order to catch up. It was either that or stay back a year and repeat the grade.

  He didn’t have a year to spare.

  Next to him sat Jett Ballou, who’d had to hustle to get the seat, since pretty much everyone was dying to sit next to Nick.

  A girl across the room, Katie Wells, kept texting him her phone number.

  He was mobbed at his locker, mobbed at the caf, mobbed while not playing dodgeball in the middle of games of dodgeball.

  “What happened in prison?”

  “Dude, did you shiv anyone?”

  “Were you tier boss?”

  “How about the rape? Was there rape?”

  “Did you get a homemade tat?”

  “Did you meet Charles Manson?”

  Nick tried to explain that it was just a lame juvie camp, that it wasn’t like in the movies, wasn’t at all what they thought. But the more he talked, the more they winked and nodded as if in on some unspoken secret, like, the first rule of doing time is that you never did time.