Dark Humanity

by Gwynn White

  Strings of pink saliva hung from my lips to the ground like spaghetti noodles. Tears leaked out of my eyes. I tried to say I was sorry but only groaned.

  Ano used his soothing voice, the one he only brought out when he was talking down a scared, cornered dog, but his voice was too low for me to understand. He stepped toward me.

  Spencer said something sharp.

  I held up my hand. Don’t come near me. Stay away.

  Ano took another step. Rivulets of blood traveled down his arm and dripped from his elbow onto the ground.

  I crawled away and huddled against the wall. And then I smelled it—new rubber and plastic and pomade and found the courage too late.

  I sprang up, scaring Ano back a few steps.

  “Mary?” he said, an ache in his voice.

  I ran from them.

  The vans were still parked on the curb, and two suits spilled out of the back right then, not noticing me. I willed myself to stop, willed myself not to lose it again.

  I forced my feet to slow down, dropped to my knees. I waited for them to notice me.

  When they did, everything became action and noise and dizziness. People appeared in those blazing white moon suits, covered head to toe, with a transparent mask. They held out a pole with a loop around the end of it. A dog catcher pole with a slip knot.

  The noose settled on my shoulders and then tightened around my neck. My body shuddered. I wanted to fling myself at their throats and bury my mouth into the soft flesh between the shoulder and neck. The pain of holding myself back threatened to make me black out.

  I spit out a glob of mucus and blood and who knows what else—parts of my friends. I didn’t know if I could talk anymore, didn’t know if there were any words left in me.

  “Please help,” I croaked.

  The slip knot tugged at my neck. Get up, the pole told me.

  I rose and staggered forward until the pole brought me up short. The white suit led me into a white tent. The flaps billowed and covered my vision in white like everything had been washed clean.

  “Your name is Mary, right? Hello, Mary, can you hear me?” The helmet obscured the face, and the voice was ambiguous but familiar somehow. My head lolled to the side and everything in the tent tilted. The tent walls, the tray of medical tools, the IV pole and bag with a line inserted into my left arm. I realized there were two moon suits in the room. The one talking and another one standing just inside the tent door, arms at the sides, legs slightly bent, as if ready to tackle anything in the room that moved.

  I couldn’t remember how or when the IV got there. Only that they had used the noose to place me in a chair, and then had strapped me down at the neck, wrists and ankles.

  “Mary, can you hear me? Nod your head. Or, if that’s too difficult, blink twice to let me know.”

  I nodded, even though my neck felt swollen and hot and my skull was top-heavy. I stretched against the wrist restraints, but there was no give. A train whistle cut through the air. People spoke in low voices just outside the tent. The red and blue police lights threw around odd colored shadows.

  “Thank you, Mary. My name is Dr. Ferrad. You remember me, don’t you? I’m so sorry this has happened to you, but we don’t have much time. You must tell us where your friends are, how many people did you injure, everywhere you’ve been and—”

  “Help,” I said, my voice cracking. The h sound groaned under the weight of my tongue. The rest of the word barely made it out around the swelling in my throat.

  “We can help you.” She stood up, unwrinkling the folds so that the suit ballooned out as if air was being blown inside. Maybe it was. She had one of those tanks strapped to her back.

  But something in her words—I didn’t believe it. They hadn’t helped the creep who’d sprayed blood in my eye or the axe murderer who’d bitten me. Or rather, they had helped him, but I didn’t want that kind of help. Not for my friends.

  I shook my head, flinging a strand of saliva onto the ground. Embarrassment filled me as my body betrayed me. I was going to die here. If moon suit didn’t kill me first.

  The guard, for that’s what I decided he must be, stepped forward, a type of stick appearing in his hand. Except it wasn’t a normal stick because it crackled with the sound of electricity.

  “No, Sergeant Bennings,” she said. “It will only trigger an amygdala response.”

  “Your way is not working either,” he said, his voice muffled by the filter as if he talked through a pillow.

  He hovered closer to me, stick outstretched. “It worked before with the other one.”

  “It did not work before. You sent him into a rage that generated enough adrenaline in his body that he broke out of his restraints!”

  “He told us what we needed. There is too much at stake here, Dr. Ferrad, to pretend this is some science experiment. I have been authorized—”

  She stepped in front of the stick, inches away from me now, from my fingers. Her suit billowed at her movement and then resettled.

  Sweat broke out on my face. My palms became slippery. I wriggled my fingers and brushed the plastic fabric. If she stepped close, I could grab it and tear into it and get to what was inside of it and teach her a lesson for locking me up like this.

  “Get out of the way,” he said.

  “I will not.”

  There was a crackle and buzz and then a sharp gasp. She crumpled and fell onto me, enveloping me in a cloud of white. Parts of the suit deflated and parts of her hit me, and parts of me hit her on her way to the ground. She slithered into a heap, as if someone had thrown water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

  He stepped around her and came at me with the stick. I trembled in my chair from excitement. He held it outstretched from his body and pointed it straight at my nose. The electricity raised the hairs on my face and sent an energy thrumming through me. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t eaten all day. Something else was powering me now and all he needed was to step a little closer and I would catch his suit in my fingers too.

  Something crackled. He looked away, down onto the heap of cloth that had become a person sitting up, legs straight out, gloved hand holding a radio to the helmet face.

  Another moon suit opened the flaps and ordered the stick-man out. The stick-man left as if lit on fire.

  “That is not the way to get what we need,” new moon suit said. “Please proceed. I will remain as your second for now.”

  “Thank you.” She rose up from the ground and brushed the dirt off her formerly-pristine suit.

  “Hold,” he said, command filling his voice. “There is damage.” He said this in a quieter voice, but it sounded like judgment raining down.

  She froze, arms outstretched, body like a marshmallow. “Oh my god, where?”

  “In the back. Near your hip. A three-inch-wide slit. I can see the garment underneath—it’s also damaged…There is blood.”

  A long silence and I wondered if I had ripped it. I didn’t think I’d touched her suit. I only imagined it. She had stayed out of my reach. It must have been when she fell. It must have been.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I have not been near the subject. Nowhere close.”

  “You would risk…?”

  “I…” She turned away, back again, in a circle, looking for a way out and finding none.

  “You will get the best care. We will not rest until we have solved this.” He held out his hand for the radio still in hers.

  She drew her arm away.

  “You have witnessed the research. You know there is not much time,” he said.

  Even though a suit covered her body, something about her posture changed. She slumped down in defeat. She handed him the radio. “I understand.”

  He walked to the far end of the tent and spoke quickly.

  She began undoing the various layers, removing the gloves, unlatching the helmet, lifting it off her head to reveal thick chestnut curls cut close to her scalp. Her blue eyes under the orange-rimmed glasses looked haunted, her lips
were set in a grim line, stress wrinkles surrounded her mouth. She looked like she was in her late thirties. She looked competent and authoritative and like a lost little girl all at once.

  “You must tell us,” she said again, no helmet distorting her face or voice anymore. She reached for what I thought had been a tray of medical tools, but now saw held a container of hypodermic needles. She tore a needle from its sterile packaging, inserted it into a vial, and drew out the liquid.

  “I am going to tell you the truth and it’s not going to be pretty,” she said. “We can’t save you. Too much time has passed. But there is a cure…There’s a way for us to help your friends, or anyone you’ve infected—”

  “I am…no…snitch—”

  “We have to give them the injection within two hours or the initial infection gets too much of a head start. That’s our window. You have to let us fix this before it spreads any further. You have to tell us where your friends are.” She injected herself in the arm and winced as she pushed down on the plunger. She withdrew the needle, tossed it into a metal receptacle, and rubbed the injection. Then she just waited.

  My brain felt like it was full of blood-soaked cotton. She was asking me to lock my friends up. She was asking me to destroy their dreams, their freedom, to be the one who put them back into the system we’d all run from.

  Then I realized I had already done worse to them than that, by my own hands, my own mouth. I’d infected them with this virus. I had waited too long to run.

  Now my friends had to pay with everything that still mattered to us.

  “When it’s Time to Go”

  Posted August 10th at 8:49PM on Do More Than Survive: How to THRIVE as a Runaway.

  Become a really good observer. Notice when people start staring at you (time to go). Notice when a cop gives you a second look (time to go). Notice when the other runaways and homeless and prostitutes you are used to seeing are no longer around (time to go).

  Notice when the friends you make on the street become worse than the family you left behind (time to go).

  Notice when you are the friend on the street worse than the family they left behind (time for you to go).

  Remember that no matter how big or small your dreams are for your life and your future and for the people around you that you care about—the street will eat them all and there won’t even be crumbs left behind for your dog to lick.

  Chapter Four

  “Shed.”

  “You last saw them at a shed?”

  “Here.”

  “At a shed here at the train station?”

  I nodded.

  “How long ago?”

  I shook my head even though it made the tent spin.

  “You don’t know. Okay, that makes sense. The virus distorts perception of time. How many have you infected?”

  I tried to think back, only my friends, all my friends, all our dreams for the future. “Six. All of them.” A tear slipped down my cheek, but I couldn’t wipe it away with my hands strapped down. It stayed there for all the world to see, to know, to despise.

  She counted out the vials and separated them from the box.

  The other suit returned and she filled him in. He rested a glove on her bare shoulder for a moment.

  “You will need to decontaminate that now,” she said.

  He returned to the far side of the tent and spoke again into the radio. The responding voice, crackling with static, was recognizable. Officer Hanley.

  A keening noise started, and then I realized it came from me, from my throat. I thrashed in the chair, raising my hips and stomach, lurching like a caterpillar rising from a leaf, but the straps kept me in place even as the moon suit jumped back into the folds of the tent.

  Someone outside yelled, and then there were footsteps. I settled back into the chair, my tantrum doing nothing. Moon suit shouted everything was fine, it was fine, stay away, and then the steps went away.

  “I promise you this will save your friends. They will be getting the same treatment as me,” she said. But something else hitched in her voice and told me that whatever this treatment did, it wasn’t much better than death.

  She wavered on her feet, as if swaying to slow music. She pressed her hand to the back of her forehead and closed her eyes. “It works so quickly, so damn quickly.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at me, as if trying to read whether there was anything human left inside of me. I thought there was, but not much, not enough.

  She grabbed a needle, emptied a vial into it, plunged the liquid into my IV, then did this a second and a third time.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “We are losing control over this thing. We can’t waste our resources.”

  “It probably won’t work,” she said, not really answering him, I think, but more answering the question in my eyes. “It hasn’t yet worked this long after, but I had to try…” The needle and vials fell out of her hands and she swayed again, this time with her eyes closed, as if she had fallen asleep standing up. Moon suit caught her just as she went down, softening her fall to the ground. He laid her out carefully and then jumped back and checked over his suit as if it were covered with red fire ants.

  When he could not find a tear or hole, his hands came to rest at his sides. He heaved deep breaths, almost sobbing, but there was no sound except for the rustling of his clothes and the low, soft hiss of his air tank.

  I closed my eyes and swam in a sea of red. Metal dinged against metal, steps sounded, a plastic tent flap rustled.

  I opened my eyes and saw he was gone and had taken the tray of vials with him.

  She sat up and crawled a few feet away, her hands and knees dragging in the dirt like she had weights tied to them.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  My throat closed up again. My damn throat. It itched but the straps kept me from relieving it and this set a fire in my stomach and I pulled hard on the straps.

  The left strap loosened an inch.

  She looked around, dazed, as if not seeing who spoke and then locked eyes on me before drifting away to look at something on the tent wall. I craned my neck and saw nothing. There was nothing to see, nothing that deserved the attention she gave it, as if she were watching someone who was about to die.

  But she wasn’t looking at me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this,” she said. Talking to the tent wall. “I know,” she said, as if in response to someone. “I understand, we all understand. It was an unexpected mutation. Clearly, no one thought—”

  She looked to the side, as if ashamed. “It’s the only chance you’ve got, but it will make it impossible not to remember. You’ll remember everything and sometimes all at once and—”

  She went silent, as if listening. Then, “That’s a possibility. But the psychologist will be here. There’s no guarantee, but you’re strong. You’re not going to go crazy.”

  I worked at the left strap and it relaxed a little more. A low buzzing started in the tent as if someone had flipped on a generator from far way. I looked around, trying to place the direction. A roar of blood rushed into my ears and should have blocked the buzzing, but it didn’t. The noise grew louder.

  I realized the buzzing came from inside me. Inside my mind.

  “We have a plan,” she said, barely cutting through the noise in my head. “Camp Mendocino. We’ll be taking you there and it will be okay. We’ll find a real cure.” Tears streamed down her face. She kept her eyes open, unblinking, and didn’t wipe away the wetness. She pantomimed giving someone a shot in the arm. She caressed the air and moved her fingers as if pushing aside a stray tendril of hair. “Drink some water while you still can.” She grabbed an imaginary cup and gently, like handling a baby, brought it to someone’s mouth and tipped the cup in her hand. “I’ll be here the whole time. I won’t leave. I promise.”

  She set the cup down on the dirt and the tears kept flowing and she crossed her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth.

&n
bsp; As if someone had flipped a switch, she slumped over. Her breath stayed heavy and uneven. Her forehead glistened with sweat and flushed with fever.

  She’d gone crazy, but I felt crazier, because the buzzing kept rising, became insistent and I needed to do something, anything to make it stop.

  A hazy pink film lay over my vision like a vintage photo filter, but somehow it made everything clear. No wavy lines, though the fire in my stomach and my head remained. The buzzing was there too, but more pleasant now, tickling me. A woman lay on the dirt. A slight breeze moved the tent flaps. Voices rumbled outside.

  My eyes felt lazy, as if waiting to lock on to something, as if something important was about to happen. Saliva filled my mouth and part of me understood that it dripped down my chin and dribbled onto the dirt. Most of me did not notice.

  I felt distant from my body, as if down a long tunnel from the me I used to be. The girl who laughed and made her friends laugh, the girl who had been hurt and then loved anyway. The girl who always put herself between her friends and danger. The girl who dreamed about living in a Garden of Eden with her friends. The girl who will forever be upset with herself for not finishing high school, for not going to even one school dance. But this desire, this regret danced away into a hot fog and I couldn’t remember why I felt it.

  Figures blocked the tunnel path. Shapes, bodies, six of them, and another, a seventh body in a white suit. The others were dark, even though the light shined.

  The others were familiar.

  I knew them from somewhere. Dark boxes, rumbling train wheels, laughing at an oogle—memories on the tip of my tongue and then I swallowed and they disappeared and the pain in my throat returned. Confusion buzzed up like a bee. I shrank away from it, flinching, swatting at it. But my hands didn’t move. The buzzing increased and filled my head as if a swarm of bees kept running into each other, running into the sides of my skull, darting backward and forward again.

  “She told us where you were,” white suit said.