The Cure

by Glenn Cooper

  “Emma and Kyra, do you need to pee?” Jamie asked.

  “No, Daddy,” Emma said.

  “No, Daddy Jamie,” Kyra said. She hadn’t quite mastered their relationship.

  “Well I do,” Linda said.

  “Me too,” he said, leaving his door open a crack.

  They were parked near a wood. He and Linda ducked behind trees a short way off. The rain was coming down in sheets.

  As soon as Jamie disappeared from view, Romulus decided to make a break for it, scampering over the central console and pushing through the gap at the driver’s door, trailing his leash. Emma squealed in alarm, climbed into the front and shoved the door wide open. Kyra followed.

  Jamie and Linda were away from the car for less than a minute.

  “Where the fuck are they?” Linda yelled into the empty back seat.

  The rain was relentless, the light poor. There was no sign of them. They cupped hands and called into the gloom.

  “Emma!”

  “Kyra!”

  25

  BoShaun were running out of food. The supermarkets and corner variety stores were long cleared out. For their supper the previous night, they’d eaten a box of Cocoa Krispies with water instead of milk. They awoke in their chilly house and grumbled about wanting toast and jam or maybe Pop Tarts. Also, the water pressure was getting low and the toilets were flushing sluggishly.

  “Why’s the water acting funny?” Shaun asked.

  “Dunno,” Boris said. “If it stops, we’re gonna be thirsty.”

  “I prefer orange soda, anyway.”

  “Do you see orange soda anywhere, Shaun? ’Cause I don’t.”

  Shaun thought for a while and declared, “We need to do something.”

  “Duh.”

  The solution, they decided, lay inside other people’s houses, and what better place to start than their own backyard? No one in their neighborhood had much money. Most lived paycheck to paycheck, or on disability or Social Security. But every house had a kitchen and every kitchen had potential. While the sun warmed the air pleasantly, they brushed their teeth, got dressed, pulled on their green Israeli gas masks, and grabbed their long Colombian machetes.

  They knew their immediate next-door neighbor, Mr. Alvarez. He had always been nice to them, so they skipped his place and went to the next one. They had no idea who lived in the small white house with aluminum siding. Shaun went to ring the doorbell, but Boris reminded him the power was off, so Shaun knocked. There was no reply. Boris tested the knob, then kicked the door in.

  They saw it right away, the small, bloody carcass.

  Boris’s mask muffled his yell. “Oh shit!”

  Shaun took a step forward to get a better view. “Motherfuckers ate the cat!”

  Then something else made them trip over themselves in terror.

  An old man appeared from a room off the hall and let out a hair-raising scream. His T-shirt was crusted red and yellow.

  Boris recovered first. He raised his machete and warned the man not to get any closer. The man fixed his eyes on the weapon and turned tail. Boris fast-stepped after him but only as far as the open living room door. He slammed it shut and shouted that the man had better stay there.

  The kitchen was in the back. There, they found a few loaves of bread, lots of canned goods, and spoiled milk in the warm refrigerator. But there was also a twelve-pack of Coca Cola. Shaun took a can from the box and cracked it.

  “It’s not cold but it’s good,” he said with his mask lifted. Then he added, “Why the fuck did he eat his cat if there’s all this food?”

  “He’s got the virus,” Boris said. “Son-of-a-bitch can’t remember how to make a tuna sandwich. You bring the bags?”

  “I thought you did.”

  “Fuck you,” Boris said, rummaging under the sink for garbage bags. He found some bin liners and told Shaun to start loading up while he checked the house for other stuff.

  He didn’t find much else of value and picking up one of the full bags, he started to leave.

  “What about grandpa?” Shaun said.

  “What about him?”

  “We just going to leave him to starve to death in there?”

  “For eating his cat, yeah, that’s what he should get.”

  “You don’t even like cats,” Shaun reminded him.

  “I don’t like them, but I don’t eat them. Let’s put grandpa outside,” Boris said. “He can find shit to eat like any animal.”

  Shaun thought that was a pretty good idea, so they opened the living room door and chased the old fellow all the way out of the house where he disappeared between two lots.

  They stashed the supplies back at their house and found their next target across the street, one of the few two-stories on the block. A youngish couple had recently moved in. The guy had given them a death stare once as they rode past on their bicycles. They were renovating. A half-full dumpster took up most of their driveway. Boris had to kick the heck out of the strong door to gain entry. The place was a mess of drop cloths, stepladders, paint cans, and covered-up furniture.

  “Yo, anyone here?” Boris shouted.

  Shaun was already scouting the ground floor.

  “No one,” he said.

  Boris was checking out the sound system under some clear plastic sheeting. In a world with electricity, he’d already be unplugging the components and carting them out the door. “What’s the story in the kitchen?” he asked.

  “There’s like foreign beer with names I can’t pronounce. Some bullshit cereals. Tons of brown rice and a bunch of shit I never heard of. What’s wrong with these fucking people?”

  Shaun could always be counted on to make Boris laugh. “Take it anyway. We can always chuck it. I’m going upstairs.”

  The upstairs landing was a mess too. Boris picked his way through the do-it-yourself items to the master bedroom, called out again and opened the door.

  They came at him faster than he could react and knocked him on his ass. The wife was more violent than her husband; she was the one who got his wrist with her teeth. He couldn’t shake her off and he couldn’t lift his machete off the floor.

  “Help me!” he shouted, “For fuck’s sake, Shaun, help me!”

  The husband started to kick him in the gut but fortunately for Boris, he was shoeless.

  Shaun flew up the stairs, waving his machete and shouting like a lunatic. He didn’t want to see blood, so he deliberately swung it blunt-side down. The man and woman yelped at the beatings and ran down the stairs and out the open door.

  Boris got to his feet, agitated, freaking out over his bleeding wrist.

  “The skin’s broken! I need a tetanus shot! I need iodine! I’m going to lose my fucking hand!”

  Shaun was breathing hard. He lifted his mask to get more air. “How about, thank you, Shaun?” he said.

  Boris found some ointment in the medicine cabinet and washed his wrist under the trickle of water that came from the tap. Shaun helped him bandage it with a roll of gauze.

  “Can you believe it?” Boris said. “Those retards were probably in there for days. They couldn’t figure out how to let themselves out.”

  “I think they were hungry,” Shaun said.

  After fortifying themselves with some foreign beer, they pressed on with their quest for sustenance.

  The next house in their sights was small and blue with a chain-link fence. From time to time they’d seen a kid playing in the front yard and her mother unloading groceries from a beat-up, old car, but they didn’t know anything about them. The front door was sturdy, and Boris had run out of steam, so Shaun broke a window, crawled through, and opened the door for his injured friend.

  The African-American woman whom they had seen before, was cowering in the living room. He was drawn to her shoes. They were red—Wizard of Oz ruby red.

  “Hello? Lady? You okay?” Shaun said, raising his weapon, just in case.

  “She’s fucked, I think,” Boris said. “Lady, you fucked?”


  The woman flinched at his raised voice.

  “Her head’s as empty as a ping-pong ball,” Boris concluded. “Least she ain’t violent.” He pointed his machete at her, holding it in his unbitten hand. “You stay right there. You get up, you’re gonna get one.”

  Shaun said he was going to look for the little girl. A few minutes later, he returned, not quite empty-handed.

  “Couldn’t find her but I found this.”

  He held up a full bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “Give me a hit,” Boris said. “My wrist’s a bitch. Go ahead and load up the food. I’ll keep my eyes on shit-for-brains.”

  Shaun took the bottle of booze with him and started swigging. The cupboards were well-stocked with tasties. This little family liked the same stuff he liked. There was a cooked chicken in the warm fridge. He broke off a leg and tasted it. Still good. Near the sink, there was a jar of creamy peanut butter and a jar of strawberry jam. A spoon with a mixture of peanut butter and jam lay on the counter. He used to double-dip spoons like that when he was a kid.

  He looked in the small mudroom leading to the backyard, opened a broom closet, and then the largest cupboard under the sink.

  On the way back to the living room, Shaun had another pull of bourbon.

  He lied to Boris. “She didn’t have shit in the kitchen.”

  Boris backed away from the terrified woman. “All right, lots more places for us to go to. Let’s roll.”

  They went from house to house until they were exhausted, and in Shaun’s case, drunk. It took less to get a skinny kid loaded than a fat one. After knocking, if someone shouted at them to get away, they did. When they forced entry, they kept their distance from the scared or passive sick people, fought off aggressive ones with the blunt sides of their machetes, and did their pillaging. They shuttled back and forth to their house, carting off their edible loot, until Boris announced that he needed to rest his throbbing wrist. Shaun was too giddy with bourbon to stop. He left Boris on their sofa and told him he would be back in a while. He took the sledgehammer he had found in one of the garages and went back outside. The autumn afternoon had turned splendid. Yellow leaves floated on the breeze and settled onto unmowed grass. Wielding his mighty hammer, he went door to door, smashing them open and shouting, “You’re free, little birdies, fly the fuck away,” and by nightfall, the streets of his eastside neighborhood were filled with roaming packs of hungry and confused men, women, and children.

  *

  After taking stock of their supplies, Mandy and Rosenberg decided to explore the laboratory building to see if they might improve their situation. They had enough food to last perhaps a week, but with the taps declaring imminent failure, they needed water. Mandy found a universal pass key after she broke the internal window of the security office, and they went from lab to lab, picking up whatever they could find to eat and drink. Mostly it was junk food, the kind of snacks that powered late-night research, but they hit the jackpot in one lab with a big stash of microwaveable ramen.

  They also scored a big hit in the basement. Near the generator room, they found the closet where vending-machine stock was kept. There was enough bottled water to satisfy their needs for at least a couple of weeks unless, Rosenberg joked, they bathed in it.

  Carrying everything up the stairs to the fourth floor was hard work, but once the job was done and the supplies were neatly stashed, they had some lunch.

  “Now what do you want to do?” Rosenberg asked.

  Mandy threw up her arms. “I don’t know. Any ideas?”

  “You go ahead and do your science. I can amuse myself.”

  “Except that I don’t have any science to do.”

  She had finished all her prep work. All her adenovirus vectors were back in the –70ºC freezer, ready for the arrival of Jamie’s CREBs.

  “Silly me. I thought the world needed saving.”

  “I’ve done as much as I can before my friend arrives.”

  “You’re worried about him, I can tell.”

  “It’s impossible to know what the conditions are like out there. On the road, I mean.”

  “Well, here’s what I think. He’s motivated up the wazoo.”

  She laughed at his choice of words. Rosenberg was old-school. “Up the wazoo?”

  “You know, up the keister, up the rear.”

  “I know what it means, Stanley.”

  “Of course, you do. A smart cookie like you knows just about everything. What I mean is, he’s doubly motivated. Maybe triply—is that a word? He’s motivated to help his daughter. He’s motivated to help the world. And he’s motivated to see you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  She looked out the window. The afternoon light was soft and golden. “How can you know that?”

  “Am I right?”

  “You’re right.”

  “Look, I understand that your Derek has just passed, and I don’t mean any disrespect to his memory, but I could tell by the way you say, ‘my friend,’ and the way you say his name. I think maybe he’s more than a friend.”

  She turned her face to him. “You’re a wise man, Stanley Rosenberg.”

  “You’re partially right. I’m a wise old man. So, want to play cards? I brought a deck that I’m pretty sure has all fifty-two.”

  He put an old brocaded satchel on the bench and began sorting through it. Her eye caught a small case with a suspicious shape.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

  The case was leather, dry and cracked with age. He unzipped it. It was a pistol, as she suspected.

  “It was my father’s. He carried it in the Great War. He was in France and he said he used it a lot. It’s a Colt Model 1917. Standard doughboy issue.”

  “Is it loaded?”

  He popped the cylinder. Four of the six chambers were full.

  “Once he got home, he never fired it. I’ve never fired it. These bullets are over a hundred years old, so God knows if they still work.”

  “I hope we don’t have to find out,” she said.

  He zipped up the pistol case. “That makes two of us.”

  26

  Pastor Snider lived at the edge of Dillingham in the last house before the residential part of town surrendered to gently rolling farmland. His house was an old Victorian with gables, flourishes, and broad porches with wicker furniture. The family forty-foot camper-bus was parked in the driveway, idle for years, but Snider kept it up with air in the tires and a trickle-charger on the battery. Snider had used it quite a bit when his brood was younger, and he and his wife planned on resurrecting it when he retired. He performed his spiritual duties at the Heavenly Joy Church for one dollar per annum, and he made a show of accepting a crisp dollar bill at a yearly ceremony with the congregation.

  His weekday job was as a real estate agent in Dillingham and Clarkson, but most of his income came from collecting rent at apartments he owned, mainly in a down-and-out area of Clarkson. For courage, he carried a little .380 pistol in a waistband holster, but in the spare-magazine pouch, he kept miniature copies of the New Testament and the US Constitution. Better protection than bullets, he would say.

  When the epidemic started, the pastor sheltered in place with his wife, Monica, five sons, and one daughter. In earlier years, Snider had kept Monica busy with her matrimonial duties—she birthed one baby per year for six years straight. Their youngest child, the girl, was fifteen. The sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen-year-old boys were still at home; the oldest one had just graduated from high school and was studying for his real estate license, so he could join the family business. Two other older, unmarried sons who lived in Clarkson fled back to the family home to ride out the outbreak. The oldest drank a lot and couldn’t hold down a job. The second oldest was thinking about joining the army.

  Edison and Joe arrived at Snider’s house with Mickey following in Joe’s truck. All three were armed. Mickey had tired of wearing a mask. He figured that by now, he was safe. And
besides, he helped himself to one of Joe’s joints he found in the truck’s ash tray, and all his worries had evaporated.

  “What’s the plan?” Mickey asked, a cloud of marijuana smoke escaping the car.

  “Go in hot, try not to get killed,” Edison said.

  “You high?” Joe asked him.

  “Little.”

  Joe spat onto the ground. “Ask next time before you smoke my shit.”

  Edison marched up the stairs, put the barrel of his Colt against the lock and pulled the trigger. One small shove and he was inside.

  Monica Snider was the first to show herself. She was halfway down the front stairs and shouted at the intruders, “What are you doing in my house?”

  “Where’s your husband at?” Edison said.

  “Leave us alone, Blair. You’ve got no right.”

  “I got whatever rights I say I got.”

  “I’ll get the police over here. We’ll see what the chief says.”

  “Believe me when I tell you, no one’s coming. Where’s your husband? Where’s the others?”

  If she was scared of him, she didn’t show it. “There’s no point to what you’re doing. Jim’s sick and so are my children. Lord knows why I’ve been spared.”

  “Where are they?” Joe asked.

  “Jim and the boys are in my bedroom. I throw food in. It’s not safe for me in there.”

  “Why’s that?” Edison asked. He knew why, but he wanted to make her say it. That day in church, she’d labeled him a bigot and a blasphemer. Getting called out in public by a woman hadn’t set well.

  “They attacked me,” she said. “They don’t know who I am. They’re out of their minds, Lord help them.”

  Edison goaded her. “Attacked you how?”

  She glared back.

  “With their dicks?” Joe scoffed.

  “Look at that pious face,” Edison said. “You know that’s what happened.”

  “When your time comes, Blair Edison,” she cried, “the Lord will cast you down to Hell and you will burn there for eternity for your wickedness.”

  “Well, you go and scout it out for me, Monica. I expect it’s crowded down there but you know how I’ll find you? You’ll be the one sucking Satan’s cock.”