Dragon Virus

by Gilman, Laura Anne

  “Frogger.” Josh looked back as they walked around him, eyes narrowed in amusement. “Haven’t had one of those around for a while. Bet Coach has a few words with him before Thanksgiving.”

  “No takers,” Susan said, shaking her head. “He’s been looking for another Jumper since Maz graduated.” Froggers — Jumpers, if you were being polite — were a clarified Change; you knew what you got when the kid came out. No secondary surprises, like Josh, who had developed grappling hook-like claws on his wings when he hit puberty.

  Steven turned while walking to watch the kid, surrounded by his friends while they waited impatiently for him to finish resetting his knees. The Frogger might be coach’s darling for a few seasons, but unless he was really good it wasn’t going to help him in the long run. College recruiters were coming after Normals, not the Changed. “Minority recruitment” they said. “Government requirements,” they said, and Steven’s father went on another rampage about quotas and how he was going to sue the colleges, who were they to keep his son from getting a scholarship….

  Steven figured his grades were good enough to get him wherever he was going. And if not, that Army recruiter kept giving him the eye. They wanted his Change, bad enough to pay for it.

  Someone careened into his path, colliding violently against his bulk. “Watch it, man,” he said in irritation, shifting the book bag slung over his shoulder and glaring at the offender. Josh’s wings flared slightly at the commotion, an involuntary reaction that made the other student back up, stammering excuses.

  Steven pitied Normals for their useless, unChanged bodies, hated them for their reactions to the Changed, ranging from fear to curiosity to too-intense fascination, worried about them, for being so easily breakable. But mostly he avoided them. Ignored them.

  But that was before. Before his little sister was born. So pink and tiny and helpless in her cradle. It was a physical pain to think of her. So perfect. So Normal.

  So doomed.

  o0o

  Homeroom was its usual pointless exercise. Steven and Josh and his lady Melly sat in the back. So long as they didn’t cause trouble Mr. Babcock pretty much left them alone.

  “I’m so sorry,” Melly said. “Josh told me.”

  Steven shot his cousin a glare of toxic proportions.

  “Sorry man, but it’s not like you’re going to keep it a secret. People gonna talk. That’s the way the world is.”

  “The world sucks,” Melly said, her hand reaching out to curl in his in commiseration.

  Her skin was slippery-rough, like a snake’s, and she shimmered faintly when sunlight touched her. A minor Change, but enough to mark her.

  “Yeah, suckage, there’s a news flash.” She’d gotten jumped, back when they were in junior high. Group of Jesusfreaks, wanting to see if she’d regrow a limb if they cut one off. She still carried a scar on her leg, a long ugly slice. The docs tried to get her to repair it but she wouldn’t. “A reminder,” she’d said. Steven hadn’t understood it then, didn’t now. Wasn’t the kind of thing you ever forgot, was it?

  Jesusfreaks and Thumpers, and government regs about minority recruitments, they were all trying to turn the world back into what it had been before.

  Steven didn’t remember a world Before. Neither did his parents. The Dragon was, simple as that. It had been around for generations, digging itself deeper into their DNA, making Changes, and if nobody knew what caused it, they sure as hell weren’t going to figure out how to stop it.

  Every generation, and fewer and fewer Normals being born.

  So why them? Why Bethy?

  o0o

  A week went by. Steven stayed out of the house as much as he could, missing dinners, leaving early for school. His parents didn’t question him, barely even noticed. The lines were back on his mother’s forehead. His dad’s temper was even quieter, like he was walking on eggshells inside.

  Contrary to Josh’s prediction, nobody asked about his new sister. If they had, he couldn’t have answered them. He didn’t go into her room, couldn’t stand to be near her.

  When the telepreacher’s show was piped over the system at their favorite hangout, he got up and left.

  o0o

  It was like that for two weeks. Two godawful weeks of pretending everything was… normal.

  “Did you hear?”

  They were lazing in the sunlight outside during lunch period. Susan, Josh, Melly, Steven, and Wicker. Steven sat off to the side, picking at the bread of his sandwich. Wicker had the news, dancing up and down on his skinny-bone legs.

  “Pauly and whatshisname, the guy he hangs with. Couple-five Norms jumped ’em after school.”

  That go everyone’s attention, and Josh stopped playing with Melly’s black braids long enough to roll over on the table and look at Wicker in disbelief. “You’re shitting me!”

  “So help me, s’true. Pauly says he was just walking home and they came howling at him and — Terrence, that’s his name.”

  Steven recalled Terrence then — almost as skinny as Wicker, no obvious Change until you looked into his eyes and your own reflection looked back. Silvered eyes, could see in pitch black even better’n a cat. His dad grew up with a bunch of Internals like that, but that was the old days, when they still tried to modify the obvious mutes, or hide them.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened? Three’re still in the hospital. Cops’re calling it self-defense.”

  “Well duh, it was.” Susan dismissed the news and went back to her California roll.

  “They don’t get the fact that we’re stronger than they are,” Melly said sadly.

  Josh curled his hand back into her hair and pulled her to him for a kiss, while Steven looked at Wicker, who was still dancing with joy of having had gossip first. Some day they will, he thought suddenly. Some day they will get it. And God help us all, then.

  o0o

  Friday, there was nowhere else to go. He came home reluctantly, walking into the aftermath of another argument. Ugly weight in the air, the echoes of crying, shouting. The scent of exhaustion heavy everywhere. Nowhere to run, no way to get around it.

  “You’re going to do this, aren’t you?” He tried not to sound accusing, but his mom flinched anyway.

  “Steven. Please. My sister can give her a better life than we can.”

  “Bullshit.” His voice cracked. “If we’re going to do this, be honest about it. You don’t want to look at her and think —”

  “And think what?” his father interjected, his temper rising like a snake. “That she’ll grow up to hate us? That she’ll blame us for being different?”

  Steven looked up into his father’s face; the years of living in a Normal world etched on a face that otherwise hid his Changes underneath. Anger repressed until it exploded, or ate him from within. Steven couldn’t afford anger.

  “Or that we’ll grow to hate her,” he said quietly, instead. “Hate her for being different.”

  Bias crimes were on the rise. He’d checked in the library after school that day, after his moment of clarity, idle curiosity that came back now to haunt him. A 48% jump in the past three years. It was getting worse. Lines were being drawn; the ones who used to pass, like his parents, being forced to choose when they were outed by former friends, disowned by family on the other side of the line.

  And in the background, when you really read what was going on, you saw wars brewing, a Science race to find the cure, eating up everything else the money might have been doing. Other countries, without the money, without the media, not treating their Changed even half so well. Telepreachers everywhere, spewing bile the Normals fed on, even as the number of Changed grew.

  “China...” he started to say, when his mother interrupted him, her voice sharp and low. “Don’t talk about China. Don’t even think about it.”

  Denial. His parents were heavy into denial. Don’t talk about it and you can pretend it’s not staring you in the face. All the stuff going on, all the stuff coming do
wn.

  His social history teacher had been the only one who would talk to him about it. She was sixty if she was anything, and she looked like a turtle with her narrow neck, sharp nose, dry-looking skin. But she was honest. Painfully so.

  “The first generation was extreme, but almost all of them died. The virus was a dead end, so they could afford to be kind to the children who lived. And then when the second and third were minor and survivable — It’s almost like it learned. Slow down, let people get used to it, then wham!”

  “Us.”

  “Yes, you.” Her turtle eyes were sad.

  “Sucks to be us.” It would hurt, he thought, if it wasn’t so funny. We’re the freaks, but the Normals are the ones who’re protected.

  “It won’t always. Suck to be you, I mean.”

  That sounded like the usual teacher spew. “You really think there’s a future? Honestly?”

  “Honestly?” She paused to consider it. “Humanity has always adapted. That’s what you are, an adaptation. The fact that there are clarified Changes, that a doctor can identify a specific strain on a birth certificate, can treat and diagnose and predict treatment for specific Changes...

  “There’s always a future, Steven. We just never know what it’s going to look like.”

  He left his parents to their argument and went up into his room. He couldn’t stand it anymore, the silence and the fighting and the knowing what’s coming and not admitting it, not acknowledging it, like there was some way to turn it all away.

  There’s always a future.

  Nobody ever said it wasn’t going to suck.

  o0o

  A Thumper telepreacher — not the one on TV, a smaller, meaner one — came to town that weekend. He had a permit, a tour bus, and a platform they built quickly out of prefab wood, stringing lights and a speaker to it with practiced ease. Stirring up trouble was what he was there for, him with his bus-load of followers, waving signs, thumping their Bibles and getting into peoples’ faces, hogging the camcrews that showed up to cover the scene.

  But things didn’t go the way the telepreacher wanted. Maybe the camspeaker didn’t ask the right questions, show preacherman the right deference. Or maybe he just got into the wrong face at the wrong time. Steven wasn’t there, he was in school, he didn’t know. The newsfeed that night just showed the aftermath: bodies flat on the pavement, blood pooled and signs broken. A riot, they said. A brawl. An unfortunate incident, but even the crazies have their right to speak in public.

  Seven dead: preacherman and four of his followers, two locals who joined in. A cop and one of the camcrew were being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

  The dead were all Normals.

  The general feeling in school the next day was that they got what was coming to them.

  Anyone who felt different stayed low and quiet.

  A quiet that you could feel burn the air.

  Steven sat at his desk in homeroom and let the gossip wash over him. His left hand played with a gel-pen, tapping it against the desk until the teacher, disturbed by the noise, made him stop.

  o0o

  Sunlight came in through the window, touching the mint-green paint and turning it the color of spring grass. Tiny mica sparks glinted in the roses, and made the dragon’s eye seem to glow.

  “Hello there.”

  The baby lay in the crib, pale pink fists clenched over the blanket. Three months old.

  Her face was scrunched, her scalp covered by a faint dusting of pale brown hair. Steven touched one fist, watching in astonishment as the perfect little fingers uncurled and curled again. His hand looked so rough next to hers, the hard, weathered skin making her seem even more delicate.

  He had trimmed his nails close before coming in, and he still moved carefully, afraid of scratching her pinkness.

  “Hello, Bethy. Remember me?”

  One scrunched up eye opened, pale blue staring up at him as though he could actually see and recognize him. She was perfect. Utterly, astonishingly perfect. She could be the poster child for the old Pure Gene Law, from her tiny toes to her sweetly rounded ears.

  Steven picked her up, carefully cradling his sister’s head in the crook of his arm, and rocked her gently.

  “Five farmers went to market, to market to market. Five farmers went to market, o, with a pig under their arms...” He had sung that song to her while she was in the womb. Blue eyes blinked sleepily, and he could almost swear that he saw her smile at him.

  Walking around the room, he kept singing. “The pig went to table, to table to table. The pig went to table and the farmers had none.” They were standing by the changing table when he finished, and his gaze lifted almost against his will to the mirror on the wall.

  “The troll and the princess” he said softly. His strain was called the Rock Change. Tough enough that the army would add a pay grade if he’d enlist when he graduated.

  “Troll” was his nickname in grade school, where he was the only Rock in his year.

  At the hospital, when they put Bethany in her bassinet, behind glass for everyone to watch but not touch, Steven saw four Rock Change babies in the rows next to her.

  Thumpers said he was damned, said they were all damned, all the Changed.

  Maybe the Thumpers were right, and this world was already hell, humanity descended into wolfpacks, fur smelling of brimstone, ready to tear at each other for one small patch of land, some small claim to being top dogs, the only real dogs….

  “And now it is upon us, the cost of our inactivity, the wages of our damnation, that our children must suffer it, and we shall suffer for our inaction at their hands!”

  He put his sister down and risked touching her perfect pink forehead with his lips. “I love you, Bethy. Remember that. Always remember that.”

  Wolves took care of their own, the old and the sick, the weak and the doomed.

  Wolflings should do the same. So he picked up the tiny pillow, and did what had to be done.

  o0o

  …it was summer when they closed the beaches the final time, the contamination too widespread to contain. We could only sit and watch while the others went into the water, splashing and calling out. The children cried, not understanding why they were being punished, when their friends, the changed ones, could go in.

  Some old-style tried, anyway. Surely it couldn’t be so bad? But it was. The illness swept through communities like a plague, their mucus dripping red and thick from raw nostrils, their skin drying and cracking no matter what we did. Some podcasteer asshole called it the Dragon Virus, and it stuck.

  Mid-summer, people who knew better started to listen to the cults, say the dragons had done it. The dragons were killing us. That was when I took everyone out of there, packed up the entire house, and headed for the woods.

  It got hotter, and hotter, and pools and hydrants weren’t enough to cool the cities down. —from a letter found in the remains of a Settlement House, just south of Orchard Beach, ME, year 7 (Anno Horriblis).

  Six

  When we found the body stuck up on the signpost, we figured for sure the Howlers were back. I mean, who else would leave all that meat there to burn?

  Jody wanted to leave him there. Once Howlers have their paws on meat, who knows what’s gotten into it? But you don’t waste. No profit to it. So while Roo and Nance stood guard, I got to shimmy up and unhook our corpse. All the joys my Changes have brought, slinging a dead weight over my shoulder ain’t one of them. And the flies kept getting into my nose and mouth.

  Landing hard, I dropped the corpse on the ground. Flat white face stared back at me. I hadn’t noted that before. He was white. Pure white. The dark hair had me fooled, I guess. Like a signpost: dumb bunny here.

  “Howlers caught him wandering,” Jody guessed, standing behind my shoulder and watching like the corpse was gonna get up and dance. I shrugged, cracking my fingers back into human-normal shape. Joints would hurt like hell, next time a storm blew up, but it was nice to be useful. Jody couldn�
�t have done that. Not Nance either. Roo could do anything it wanted, but it never did want. Couldn’t figure out why the Olders kept it around, except it was a cruel hunter, and we always needed the meat.

  I toed the body, trying to decide if it would be worth stripping it. Roo rummaged, poking, prodding. Checked pockets, just in case, but wasn’t nothing there. The cloth looked flimsy, like something a townie would wear. Which scanned — that white, dumb bunny corpse was a townie.

  Had been. Was meat, now. Roo gave a claws-up, meant the flesh scented clean. I gave it a fade.

  Nothing more boring than meat once it’s been found.

  Nance came back with her Stick, and we slung the corpse wrist and ankle. Roo hefted it, muscles flexing under the burden. Stronger than sin, that was Roo. You never wanted it mad at you. Not that it ever even snarled at me. We’re both Changed, and Change makes strange bedfellows, the Olders say.

  They mean it kind. I don’t care. I’m useful, and useful gets fed first.

  o0o

  Back home, the corpse was dropped in the kitchen for Leah to deal with. I don’t want to know where it goes. Meat is meat, but some things you better just to call stew. Anyway, we had to make our report.

  Drew was in the office when we got there, waiting for the news. He’s the oldest Older in our House. I think he’s my parent, ’cause he never quite looks me in the eye. The ones who’ve got kids are like that, like it’s all their fault.

  Well, it is. But what can you do?

  Nance tells it like it was, and Drew nods thoughtful like, moving markers on the map he’s got tacked against the far wall. They track Howlers, townies, anybody comes into range. I don’t know what good they think it’s gonna do, someone decides to oust us. Home’s twenty-three bodies, counting Annie who’s old, and the baby Simon. Twenty-three won’t do shit a howler party come a knocking. But I don’t think about that. I follow Nance, and she’s the brains for all of us. Us four: me, Roo, Nance and Jody. I don’t always like ’em, but I love ’em.