The Cure

by Glenn Cooper

  The only one who wasn’t crying was Linda who arrived, spitting venom.

  “You can’t be a pussy,” she shouted. “If you want them to survive, if you want to survive this shitshow we’re in, you’ve got to pull the fucking trigger.”

  “Go screw yourself,” he said. “My dog is dead.”

  “And your daughter’s alive.”

  On the way back to the car, Jamie found a depression in the wet ground at the base of a toppled evergreen. He placed the dog in it and began covering him with branches. Emma imitated him and then Kyra did the same.

  “Say goodbye, Rommy,” Jamie told them, through his own tears. He had gotten Romulus not all that long after Carolyn died. He and Emma had grown up together. There was a lot to cry about.

  “Goodbye, Rommy,” Kyra said.

  Unprompted, Emma said, “I love you, Rommy.”

  Jamie was the first one to emerge from the woods. He experienced a moment of confusion, then disbelief.

  Had they taken the wrong path?

  The Suburban was gone.

  “Where’s the goddamn car?” Linda bellowed.

  The rectangle where he had parked it was wet but not as wet and puddled as the surrounding asphalt. There was a pile of rounded safety glass where the driver’s side had been.

  “You had the keys, right?” she said.

  He held them up in front of her face.

  “You locked it, right?”

  “I locked it.” He kicked at the glass. “Not that it mattered.”

  “There must’ve been a second set in the car,” she said. “I fucking missed the second set of keys.”

  He and Linda didn’t speak for the better part of a minute. He was running through the inventory of disaster in his head and he expected she was doing the same. Their food was gone. Their drink was gone. Their clothes and camping supplies were gone. The guns and ammo were gone. Even the goddamned umbrellas were gone.

  “Did you lose it too?” she finally said. “Your cure?”

  He felt for the sealed plastic tubes of freeze-dried CREBs in his pocket.

  “It’s the only thing we didn’t lose. Now what?”

  “When you’re up shit creek without a paddle, it’s time to get a fucking paddle.” She looked into the sky, cursed the rain, and walked a few paces to the main road. There were businesses across the street and what looked like a hospital. On the same side as the high school was a residential neighborhood. “Stay close,” she called out.

  They walked down a residential street of modest but well-kept houses, most of them duplexes with overgrown yards. There wasn’t a soul about. The girls were still traumatized by their ordeal and they were shivering. Jamie felt powerless to make them feel physically or emotionally better.

  He let Linda call the shots. She seemed to be in her element, casing houses, checking out cars in driveways, peering into garage windows. A Volvo station wagon in the driveway of a house with a screened porch caught her interest. She signaled for Jamie to shelter with the girls under a maple tree. Its bright yellow leaves almost matched the clapboards of the house. She pressed the doorbell then caught herself and rapped on the door with her knuckles. Jamie thought he saw something move in a second-floor window. Linda didn’t wait long before trying the knob then laying her shoulder to the door. She wasn’t a large woman, but she seemed to have a talent for this kind of work, because one perfectly placed slam did the trick. The door splintered open and in a fluid motion, she shifted the rifle from her shoulder to the ready position.

  And then she was gone.

  Jamie looked up and down the street to see if anyone was watching.

  Emma’s lip was still quivering. “I love Rommy,” she said.

  He kissed her. “I love Rommy too.”

  Not to be outdone, Kyra also declared her love for the dog. Then Jamie heard two shots.

  He had Linda’s Glock shoved into his waistband, but he didn’t know what to do with it. He wasn’t going to leave the girls to go running into the house. He pulled the pistol and shouted, “Linda? You all right in there?” He waited and called again.

  She appeared at the door after a very long minute.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “It’s all clear. Bring the kids in. You can put the gun down.”

  “Why did you fire?”

  She didn’t answer. She closed the front door behind them and sat the girls in the front room, a cheerful space despite the dull weather and lack of lights. There was an upright piano, music stands, a violin case on a table, Degas prints on the walls, and an abundance of colorful silk flowers. The framed photos on the piano revolved around two men in their thirties or forties. In one of them they wore matching white suits at their nuptials.

  “Wait here with them,” she said, leaving the room.

  “Look, Linda—”

  “No, wait.”

  She came back with an armful of striped bath towels from a downstairs linen closet and quickly dried the girls.

  She motioned Jamie to come with her to the kitchen. He followed with a sense of foreboding.

  There was enough blood on the floor for an abattoir. The two men—the two from the photos—had been each dispatched with a head shot. A pair of chef’s knives lay on the floor within the blood pool.

  “You saw that no one answered,” Linda said in a rush of words. “When I was inside. I called out, ‘police, anyone here?’ When I came into the kitchen, this one lunged at me with a knife. He missed, and I fired. The other one came at me and I fired again.”

  Jamie had been holding his breath from the moment he walked into the room. Air-hungry, he let it all out through his nose and filled his chest again. He didn’t believe her, but he knew there would be no inquiry. There would be no crime scene investigators, no forensics. No one would ever know if Linda’s fingerprints were on the kitchen knives. Did one of them say, “Who the hell are you?” Did the other say, “Get the hell out of our house?” Did she execute them because she liked the look of their car? Was that the same way the Suburban fell into their hands?

  He said nothing and left the kitchen. That sent Linda into orbit.

  “What, Jamie?” she said, angry on his heels. “You don’t believe me? Say what you’re thinking to my goddamn face.”

  He wouldn’t say what she wanted, and he didn’t say what he wanted. He wouldn’t tell her that he believed her, because he knew she was lying. Nor could he tell her that he thought she was a cold-blooded killer and that he wanted her out of his life. He had to stay focused. He had to get to Indianapolis, and he had to keep Emma safe. Linda Milbane was a perfect instrument for what the world had become. She was ruthless. Built for survival.

  She was right. He couldn’t pull the trigger. But she could. If he was going to find a cure for this madness, he needed her.

  He said wearily, “Linda, all I want to do is get back on the road.”

  They emptied the house of its food. They took some bedding and pillows, flashlights, batteries, heavy coats, and rain gear. The homeowners were wine drinkers and Linda took a dozen bottles. They loaded the Volvo and soon they were on the highway again, heading south toward Connecticut.

  They left Romulus in the woods.

  They left the musical couple on their kitchen floor.

  Jamie drove in silence. He fought the urge to weep.

  Almost overnight, people had become either predator or prey.

  The thing was, Jamie didn’t want to be either.

  28

  Tyrone Burbank went by the street name, K9, or K for short. He didn’t have his pit bulls anymore—it had been a few years since he kept a dog. The name stuck because these things do, and because he was something of an attack dog himself. Powerful, squat, ferocious when angered, apt to literally use his teeth in a fight. The only people who still called him Tyrone were his mother and grandmother, but that was until they got sick. Now they no longer knew who he was, or for that matter who they were. He kept them safe in his mother’s eastside house along with his uninfec
ted little sister. The teenage girl kept an eye on the confused, mute women, and K stopped in a couple of times a day to keep an eye on all of them.

  He kept the women together in a bedroom. They each retreated to a corner when he unlocked the door.

  “Hey, Mama. Hey, Grammy. It’s me, Tyrone.”

  They both stared at his empty hands instead of his face. He knew what that meant.

  “When’d you feed ’em last?” he called out to his sister.

  “Few hours ago, I guess.”

  “You guess or you know?”

  “I know.”

  “What’d you give ’em?”

  “Each got a can of Chef Boyardee.”

  He noticed some blood on the hem of his grandmother’s nightgown and crept toward her.

  “I ain’t gonna hurt you, Grammy. You got some blood on you. How’d that happen? Oh, look there. You’ve got a cut on your knee. Let me fix that for you.”

  He wet a cotton ball in the bathroom sink and got a Band-Aid. Talking low and gentle, he was able to get a hand on her and move her onto the bed where he cleaned the cut and bandaged it. His mother watched suspiciously from her corner.

  “See that, Mama? Grammy got herself cut but it ain’t no big deal. Tyrone made it better. I’m gonna get you some more to eat ’cause you are definitely on the hungry side.”

  Back in the living room he asked his sister how the old woman came to be cut.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the one watching them.”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “Their clothes are dirty,” he said to the girl. “You gotta change ’em, hear?”

  “It’s ’cause they eat like farm animals, K,” she said.

  “Don’t fucking call ’em animals. They still your ma and grams. I’m going out for shit. What you need?”

  “Milk, for one thing. For cereal.”

  “Milk’s gone bad everywhere.”

  “They got that no-spoil milk. It’s called UHT.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a thing.”

  “I’ll look for it. Be back later tonight. Where’s your piece?”

  She showed him the 9 mm pistol he’d given her for protection.

  “Anyone touches the door—”

  “I know, K. Pop a cap in ’em.”

  The virus had decimated the Naptown Killerz. Only six of his gang were present and accounted for. He had them holed up at his house a few blocks away—safety in numbers, he figured. But he did not want those boys anywhere near his sister, so he was shuttling between houses, trying to work the angles, keep everyone alive. Before the epidemic, the NKs more than held their own against the other eastside gangs. They did their share of business moving meth, pills, heroin, whatever, and controlled a lot of blocks.

  His crew was lounging, smoking weed, drinking warm malt liquor, generally talking smack.

  “What up?” K asked, pulling his bandana down.

  His main boy, Easy, scratched his head through his red do-rag and said, “Nuttin’. Seen anyone out there?”

  “Hood’s empty. Everyone lyin’ low.”

  Easy offered up his joint. “Wanna hit?”

  K said he was cool and went to the kitchen to do inventory. They were going through food like locusts.

  “Cupboards are bare, man,” he said, back into the living room. “Time to restock.”

  All of them snapped to it and stuffed their waistbands with their semi-autos. Early on, they had scored a big box of molded surgical masks from a looted pharmacy and each NK customized his mask with drawn-on lips, fangs, nostrils, or NK tags. They completed their new looks with pulled-up hoodies. K preferred a bandana—it made him feel like the outlaw he was.

  The NKs moved from house to house, slowly, deliberately, with swagger. When the power went down, when houses burned and no one came to put them out, K told them that they were at the top of the animal kingdom now, the lions of the jungle. The police were out of the picture. Sure, there were other crews on the eastside, but he figured they were hurting for manpower too. No one was going to be stronger than the NKs. We’re the law now, K told them. You want something, you take it. You want a bitch, you take her. You want to waste someone, as long as I give the okay, that dude is dead.

  They had already cleaned out most of the houses in their strongest blocks, so they were throwing a wider net, filling laundry bags with food and drink and tossing bulging sacks over their shoulders like bizarro Santas. They made quick work of the empty houses. Inhabited ones took longer. Depending on their mood, if there were sick people inside, they might just muscle them out of the way or keep them shut in a room, but if one of them made an aggressive move toward an NK, they took them out fast. K didn’t want them wasting ammo so unless they had to shoot in an emergency, they used hammers or knives. K told them not to fuck the sick girls; there was no telling if that was safe. But the healthy ones were up for grabs and sometimes that slowed down their hunting raids.

  On this day, their Escalade and Range Rover were bursting at the seams with loot. They could have declared victory and gone home, but K was still in search of the elusive UHT milk.

  “Turn there,” he told Easy. “We haven’t hit this block yet.”

  BoShaun saw the fancy cars drive past their house at an ominous crawl. They ducked below window level.

  “NKs, man,” Boris said. “That’s K9’s ride. They come in here, they’re gonna rip us off and fuck us up.”

  Their neighborhood was solidly NK turf. BoShaun had never been a threat to the gang, but they’d been hassled and taunted by NKs more times than they cared to remember.

  Shaun moaned, “Should we hide?”

  “Where? Under the beds? They’re gonna be strapped up.”

  Shaun moaned, “We’re fucked.”

  “Look, man, if it looks like they’re coming in, our only chance is to book it out the back and just let ’em take our shit. Better hungry than dead.”

  “What if they cover the back?”

  “Then we’re just plain dead.”

  K pulled his Range Rover to the curb of a house three down and across the street from BoShaun’s. With Boris watching from his living-room window, the crew got out of their cars. One guy stayed behind to guard their stuff while K and three bangers went to the front door and one circled around to the backyard.

  Boris told Shaun what he was seeing.

  “Maybe we should leave now,” Shaun said.

  Fear was making Boris indecisive. “I don’t know, man. They might see us. Maybe they won’t come here.”

  A couple of minutes later BoShaun heard screams and a single gunshot. The NKs poured out of the house and invaded the next one down the line. BoShaun knew the pickings were going to be slim because they’d already worked them over. Their anxiety soared as the gang swarmed from one house to another.

  K was getting frustrated.

  He couldn’t find milk and it was clear that someone else was cleaning out his territory.

  “One more and that’s it,” he said to Easy whose hoodie was blood-stained from hammering a man. “How ’bout that one?”

  Boris saw him pointing directly at their house. He fell below window level, melting into a blob of terror.

  “What? What is it?” Shaun said, cowering.

  “They’re coming, man. They’re coming.”

  “Let’s get out!”

  “I can’t move, man. I can’t.” With that, Boris threw up.

  The NKs were halfway across the road when the kid watching the cars saw something and began shouting to get K’s attention.

  “Fuck man, fuck! Behind you!”

  K heard him and swiveled around.

  They were pouring around the corner, maybe thirty of them. They had been walking aimlessly but they broke into a run when they saw the NKs. There were men and women, a few kids. Some of them were screaming. Anguished wails.

  K couldn’t know they were starving, and he didn’t know they were scared and be
fuddled. But he quickly got the idea that these people meant business. They were in some kind of survival mode and there were a lot of them.

  “Shit!” Easy shouted, “Retards!”

  Shaun heard the screams and peeked out the window. He recognized the horde descending on the NKs. These were the folks he liberated.

  “My homies,” he said.

  K started shooting and he and his boys started running and gunning back to their vehicles. Bodies fell. Some scattered. Some kept coming. K climbed into the driver’s seat and his crew piled into both cars, but the youngest NK, a kid who was seventeen and skinny beyond belief, got caught by a heavy-set predator who dragged him kicking and screaming from the Escalade. The big man disappeared behind the fence with the kid. From the blood-curdling screams, K knew things were not ending well.

  “Should we get him?” Easy asked.

  K shook his head. “He gone.”

  As K and the NKs sped away, the horde kept following until Shaun could no longer see them. He got some paper towels from the kitchen to clean up Boris’s mess and let his friend pick himself off the floor and restore his dignity as best he could.

  *

  There were no curtains or blinds in her lab, so Mandy was hesitant to use the battery-lamps beyond essential purposes. But Rosenberg asked if he could have a few more minutes with his sketch pad before turning in for the night. She could have told him to sit in the hall, or even the toilets, but he seemed so comfortable, even happy, perched on a stool at one of the benches, humming Beethoven.

  She wished she had work to keep busy. Working was her default mode. It had driven Derek crazy; he was always going on about making their home a work-free zone and jawboning her into all manner of leisure pursuits. He pressed her into cooking classes, to a co-ed volleyball league, even once, to ballroom dancing—a particular disaster. The truth was, she used work as an excuse to keep their lives as separate as possible. She tried not to think about it, but the fact was, she hadn’t really loved him. She wasn’t convinced she ever did. She met him on rebound from her affair with Jamie. He was a safe harbor. But once they were entrenched in marriage, she couldn’t bring herself to end it. It would have killed him. It literally would have. Derek swung to depression at the drop of a hat, serious, drug-defying depression. Leaving him would have precipitated a disaster she would have to live with. Now he was gone, she didn’t feel grief. She didn’t feel relief. She just felt guilty.