by James, Guy
What he wouldn’t do for a Twinkie right now, or anything resembling one, even though he wouldn’t have been caught dead eating one before the outbreak. It would have wreaked havoc on his midsection, something he’d been trying to avoid in his former life as a seldom-exercising office dweller.
And then there were the hungry days and months after the outbreak when he’d wished to God that he had some more padding on his body, when he’d have eaten just about anything that held the promise of a few extra calories, and he’d eaten more than a few questionable items to try to stay alive. Every survivor had a list of unsavory perhaps-edibles that they’d eaten tucked away in some dark corner of the mind, and he was no exception.
Could a food really go for twelve years without going bad in some way? Alan wasn’t sure, though he knew it depended on the fat content, the amount of processing, and the preservatives that had been injected in the stuff.
Be that as it may, had he been a betting man and had there been anyone to bet with, he would’ve put his chips on the card that said that some of tomorrow’s traders would bring a food relic and try to sell its expired—but supposedly still edible—goodness. He shrugged. He’d be in that line too, and he knew it.
The HP Pavilion’s motor buzzed unhappily, and Alan looked over his shoulder at it. There was a woman’s face on the screen, her expression somewhat dulled but speaking clearly of pain and fear, her cheeks crisscrossed with the paths of tears that had run out and dried. She knew what was being done to her, in a vague, drugged-up-to-hell sort of way. She was being studied, and her time was about to run out.
51
The virus was taking its time with her. Usually, if you were infected you’d die and reanimate within minutes. The turn was startlingly fast, usually. But, with this woman who’d lived on in Alan’s HP laptop for going on twelve years after her actual death, it was taking hours.
In the field, Alan had never seen anything like it. There were a few times he’d seen it take longer than normal, but never more than five minutes. This was dragging out for hours.
The scene he was watching may have been the result of a slow-acting strain of the virus that the government had been able to isolate or develop, and sometimes he suspected that was the case, but he’d never been able to confirm that theory. It would never matter, anyway.
All the experiments and attempts at cures and antidotes had come to nothing. The only good that had come out of all the tests was a set of data points for survivors to use, and the more they knew about the virus, the better job they could do of staying away from it, but that was really all.
The woman offered few clues, if any. She was barely lucid, and the close-up shots of her face revealed that her teeth had been extracted and her tongue removed, leaving cauterized gums and a blackened nub as reminders of what had been there before. She wouldn’t have been able to speak to tell Alan what it felt like, not well, anyway, but she didn’t try, either.
The body…modifications were typical precautions, except that they were usually done after the turn, not before. Nails were often removed or whole fingertips severed, but the hands of the woman were whole. Maybe they were trying to spare her some pain, or maybe they’d just been too rushed to do it and would see to it later.
Just make sure you chop off the fuck-you finger first. It’s the longest, after all, and the better to scratch you with, my dear.
Zombies always clawed at their prey, that was true, but if you had a zombie tearing at you with its nails, then its fingers and nails, no matter how sharp they might have been, were the least of your worries. It was the saliva-spewing and biting mouth that you were most concerned with.
Alan turned back to the bowl of oatmeal and stared at the flakes. He hated oatmeal. He hated everything about it: the taste, the texture, and the lack of satisfaction that he felt after eating it.
The light was mostly faded from the world outside, and he had a peripheral awareness of the creeping darkness as it got braver and braver in its forays through the window and into the kitchen. He walked to the solitary window and looked out.
The moon was up, looking sickly as ever, and it made him remember looking up at it long before, before all this had happened. He could remember wondering up at it from a different time, but that time was long past. The moon, and the oatmeal, got him missing the old foods.
It had been more than nine years since he last had real meat for dinner. There had been the occasional wild bird in the years immediately after the outbreak, but that had only lasted so long. The virus had found a way into the birds, too, as if the people and cattle and fish hadn’t been enough. The menu had been completely revised before he and Senna ever stepped foot in New Crozet, but not since then. They could be thankful for that much.
Senna had a lot of success with the fruits and vegetables and grain she grew on the farm, but those things didn’t fill him up the way meat used to, and that was why he was making oatmeal now, even though he’d already eaten dinner and the snack Senna had put together for him.
There was a constant gnaw in his belly, his body crying out for something it wasn’t getting. Nell’s stuff would’ve helped, but he could barely keep it down. Oatmeal had some protein in it, and it would sit in his stomach and distract it from what was missing, at least for a while.
He turned on the burner on the stove, lifted the kettle and turned it from side to side so he could hear the water sloshing, then set it back down and stood over it for a moment while the water heated up. Then he began to pace between the window and the stove, looking at the moon when he was by the window and glancing at the burner coils turning orange and red under the kettle as they got hotter.
The kettle emitted a meek rattle, like the bleat of a very shy sheep, except tinny. The water was beginning to boil, that was what that usually meant.
Alan stopped at the window and regarded the moon’s surface.
He’d missed it again, and he knew it. The instant just before the rattle had come and come without his knowing. It was the instant that had in it the telltale sounds that heralded its coming. Telltale sounds were everywhere, but he wasn’t able to spot them.
The rattle grew louder, but the kettle’s whistle was open so there was little chance the faint noise would disturb Senna. Alan went back to the stove and watched the steam rise upward. It was an inkblot of normalcy in an overthrown white parchment of a world, and he let himself be sucked into it.
After a few moments, he turned the kettle off. He poured boiling water over the oatmeal and watched the flakes swirl and settle into new positions. From a cupboard he took a mason jar of peanut oil and set it next to his bowl.
The kettle’s rattle was almost imperceptible now, but the water was still moving it slightly. He opened the jar and used a scratched tablespoon to measure out three tablespoons of oil, each of which he poured over the steaming oatmeal, whose flakes were growing as they soaked up the hot water.
The better to fill your stomach with. And that was all they were: filler.
From another cupboard Alan took a bag of coarse, brown sugar, unclipped and unfolded a corner of the bag, and tilted it so that sugar poured over the surface of the oatmeal until only sugar was visible at the top of the bowl.
He looked at his creation and sighed. He didn’t understand how there had been men and women who’d lived this way not out of necessity but by choice, but that was a long time ago, and now just about any man or woman might jump at the chance to eat any sort of meat, so long as it was uninfected, and turn a blind eye to its source. Others would even take their chances with untested meat.
Alan picked up the bowl, keeping his fingers at its edges, and returned to his seat at the table. He set the flakey snack down in his lap, then pressed play and the video blinked back into action.
There was one physical sequence that spotters had been trained to look for, and that sequence was the entire point of this video. It was the break.
The break was the transition from dormancy to rampage. It was an a
brupt change from feigned weakness to strength, speed, and savagery; a viral trap, ingenious in its ability to spread the disease. And the disease had spread, like a wildfire of blight and damnation. It had been near unstoppable.
But then, Alan knew, the spread had never been stopped definitively. It had never been stopped at all, only slowed.
It was called the break because—the mouthful of oatmeal had suddenly become a lump of sour clay in his mouth—he didn’t want to think about that, not right now, and if only he could change the world and its past, not ever.
52
The virus was out there, beyond the town’s borders, living out there in its own perverse way. It hadn’t even come close to being stamped out, before it was no longer practical to keep going trading human lives for a few less of the replicating…things.
It was still there, lurking, and its numbers were far stronger than those of people. People had learned to go quiet, and to hide, but that didn’t change the fact that the virus had proved itself far stronger. It lurked only because it couldn’t see them, and couldn’t get through their barriers, for now.
Alan often wondered at the survivors who talked and acted as if the virus actually was gone, and the threat over. Would he be able to sleep better if he could convince himself the way that they did?
But he could never lie to himself like that and learn to believe it, and that was probably because he’d been a cleaner, and they hadn’t. They’d seen plenty, as all of the survivors had, but they hadn’t seen everything.
They hadn’t seen the way the virus can make its victims seem harmless to ensnare the uninfected, the increasingly intelligent deviousness that had sent Alan an unequivocal message: the virus will not be overcome, and will complete its mission with the passage of time, so long as it has hosts whom it can move through the world like pawns. People will be forced to leave their quarantine zones at some point, the law of entropy seemed to dictate that, and the virus will be there, outside, ready to take what’s left of its prize.
He focused on the screen just as the camera was zooming out. The woman and the metal chair she was sitting in were now fully in the frame.
There were restraints clamped around her bare wrists and ankles, keeping her in place. If she’d struggled against the restraints before, she wasn’t doing so now.
Her nose was running, and mucus was dripping a dark amoeboid shape onto the front of the light blue patient’s gown they’d put her in. The camera zoomed out farther, and more of the isolation room came into view. It was lit by two large and bright overhead fluorescents that were hanging behind wire mesh cages on the ceiling. The glare had given a silver sheen to the mucus amoeba on the woman’s gown. Then her mouth lolled open, and a saliva string began to trail from her lips, its sights set on the growing spot on the gown.
A heart monitor was beeping in the background at intervals that should’ve been more regular. To Alan’s sensibilities, it was disgusting that something like this had been done to someone.
Of course, it was true that zombies were almost impossible to capture, but what had been done to this woman, that was one of the worst kinds of torture. She wasn’t a zombie yet, she was still human, a woman, and a suffering, dying one.
On many prior occasions of video watching, this was the moment when Alan’s feeling of disgust would become an unfocused loathing. Today, he was far less dialed-in, and felt little.
Meep said the heart monitor.
Meep.
Without looking away from the screen, Alan stuck his spoon in the oatmeal, piercing the cover of brown sugar. He dug the spoon around and raised it to his mouth. He blew on it, still without looking away from the screen, then put the spoon in his mouth.
The feel of the oat flakes was unpleasant, as always, so he focused on the coarse particles of sugar, their sweetness, and the video. After two perfunctory chews, he swallowed the mouthful.
Meep.
He was counting her movements now, keeping a separate tally for each of the behaviors he could see. There were her slight movements against the clinical plastic of the restraints, the drip of mucus from her nose, the progress of the saliva strings, the irregular gasps for air, lackluster and sedative-muted sobs, and, of course, the sharp, high pitched bleats of the heart monitor. He didn’t have to count them anymore, know as he did the video by heart, but he did anyway.
Meep.
It was about to happen. Alan worked one more spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth and stared, unblinking, at the screen.
The woman tensed.
Blood vessels were constricting. Pallor was rising to the skin’s surface.
The last shallow breath was drawn in.
A stiffening.
Then limpness and sagging into the metal chair.
Alan took another mouthful of oatmeal. It was tasting worse with each bite.
Meep.
The woman in the chair remained motionless for exactly six of Alan’s heartbeats. Then she began to raise her head, except it wasn’t just her raising it anymore. Mostly, it was the puppeteer of the outbreak, of the deadheads, and soon, of the free world.
Pallor was becoming something much worse: a drying out and turning grey. Her face looked like it was in the beginning stages of becoming a jerky that no reasonable person would eat, and not any dog that had its sense of smell intact, either.
The spaces between the meeps were growing longer.
Meep said her dwindling vitals.
Meep?
Her eyes sank backward into her head and seemed as if they were retreating from the world, and that was because they were. The better to not see you with, my dear.
53
Meep.
Of course the virus didn’t need eyes to see, so there was that, too. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
Meep.
Alan kept staring though, as he always did, straining his eyes, and his mind, to see those damned signs.
Meep.
The woman—well, she wasn’t a woman anymore, she was in the turn and was in between us and …them—kept her gaze trained on her lap. The beats of the heart monitor were becoming erratic now, fewer and farther between.
Sometimes when you expected a beat to come, it just wouldn’t. You’d still hear it in your head, because you were anticipating it, but it wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere but in your mind.
Meep.
Then she stopped breathing, and the heart monitor redlined, emitting its familiar bleat of death. It was familiar to Alan, anyway, because he’d watched the video so many times, and because he’d seen enough TV shows and movies before the outbreak to know what a heart monitor was and what noises it made. Now the device was a thing of the past, like most human-made contraptions that were still sitting in the world, or lying, more likely, strewn about and gathering dust.
Were the uninfected humans a thing of the past, too? Was Alan himself a relic? Was he a vestige of an extinct civilization? Probably.
No, more than probably, almost certainly. But what was the good in thinking like that?
So what if he was an artifact, then what? How would that affect the way he lived his life in New Crozet? In the only appropriate way, he decided whenever his thoughts went down this depressing route, which was no way at all. Life was for living and making the best of your few moments, no matter what.
On the screen, the woman who was now a zombie began to slip into a state of dormancy. That was because she was sitting in a silent room, with no noise to attract her.
She gazed directly ahead of her for a moment, but she didn’t really look, she just seemed to gaze, and had you been in her line of sight you would have realized, very quickly, that those shriveled eyes saw nothing, and that, in fact, they weren’t eyes at all, but portholes into the boiling depths of hell.
Then her shoulders shrugged, cranking her neck lower in its droop. There was more cranking, and more, until her eyes were pointed at her lap, not staring or looking at anything, just pointed that way. She sat still, adding a staccato of twitc
hes to the background noise of the redlining heart monitor.
Finally, after what seemed like too long a time, the heart monitor was turned off, though the echo of its scream continued to hang in the air of the kitchen. Alan sat in silence, waiting for the lingering sound to fade.
He was watching her, trying to focus with an untapped part of his perception, scanning the screen for subtle movements. He knew how Senna and the other spotters did it, having had the honor of working with some of the best in the country, and possibly in the world, and they all explained the skill in a similar way.
It was a way of seeing subtlety without concentrating on it directly. Direct application of focus, the spotters insisted, made one miss the real hints of the coming break.
It was as if they were trying to sense a change in mood, or to hear a faint rustling of leaves that was too far away to be heard by most people. Alan had always felt that spotters took a quasi-metaphysical, Zen-like approach to their work, and he understood that it wasn’t really his eyesight that was the limiting factor, even though that was what had technically kept him from the training.
What Alan lacked, he knew, was the gift the spotters had, and even though he’d gotten marginally better at spotting since the outbreak, he couldn’t do anything near what Senna did.
What he did well was tread lightly, and he’d done so from the start. That was a skill all the survivors had by necessity, because if they hadn’t had it to begin with, or learned it as soon as the outbreak hit, they’d be gone. Most people could move quietly if they tried, and be still for a long time while the zombies passed by, but you had to be one of the ones who realized, in the early days of the outbreak, that keeping quiet and staying still actually made a difference.
In the chaos, it had been near impossible to figure out what was what.