The Cure

by Glenn Cooper

  “By the hospital?”

  “Yeah, by the hospital. If there’s power, we can set ourselves up over there. Xbox, play videos, bring our microwave over and make hot food.”

  “What about her?”

  “We’ll leave her sleep. She’ll be all right.”

  They heard a small voice. “I will not.”

  “Girl, you awake?” Shaun said.

  “I wanna come.”

  Shaun told her it was dark out and they were fixing to take their bikes. She said she didn’t mind the dark and that she had her own bike back at her house. She pressed Shaun and Shaun pressed Boris, and when Boris relented, Shaun tied a rag around Keisha’s mouth, helped her with her jacket, and the three masked explorers went off into the night.

  *

  Rosenberg had infinitely more patience for the process than Mandy. As day became night, she took longer and longer breaks to read and to cobble together the semblance of a dinner, while he painted away.

  “How much longer are you going to work?” she asked.

  He replied, “As long as it takes?”

  “We shouldn’t keep the light on,” she said.

  “People don’t live around here. No one’s going to see.”

  “Better safe than sorry. Can’t you finish tomorrow?”

  “I could, but I prefer to finish tonight. For oils, I don’t care how long it takes. For watercolors, I like to keep going until I’m done. It always works better with one session where I don’t spend time in between overthinking a piece.”

  “How much longer then?”

  “If you put your tush back on the stool I can be done in half an hour. If you promise to sit still.”

  *

  The three of them stood beside their bicycles, looking up at the lit windows on the fourth floor of the medical research building.

  “Those are the same windows as before,” Boris said.

  “You think they got TV?” Keisha asked.

  “Maybe,” Shaun answered. “What’s our move?”

  “Let’s go around trying all the doors,” Boris said. “Something could be open.”

  They stashed their bikes and circled the building, tugging at doors along the way. Keisha was enjoying the adventure and demanded she be the one to try each handle. The building, however, was securely buttoned down. As they completed the circuit, BoShaun were debating what, if anything, to do, when they heard cars coming. Two vehicles pulled into the parking lot.

  “Fuck, man,” Shaun said. “It’s K and his boys again. They everywhere tonight.”

  They told Keisha to keep quiet and yanked her behind a low wall. Two sets of green bug eyes peered over the wall, watching the NK crew piling out of their rides.

  “You see that?” Easy said, pointing up at the lighted windows on the fourth floor.

  “I see it,” K said.

  “They got power, man,” Easy said.

  “Maybe they do. Or maybe they just got battery-powered-lights like we do. Only one way to find out. Go check the door, man.”

  Easy delegated the task down the pecking order, and one of the youths returned after rattling the doors.

  “Go get the hammer, man,” K said.

  Another kid ran back to the Escalade and came back lugging a sledgehammer. K passed it to his main man, saying, “Yo, Easy, swing for the fences.”

  Easy shouldered the tool and squared himself to the glass double doors.

  One blow was all it took for a panel of glass to disappear.

  Upstairs, Rosenberg was standing up from his makeshift easel. His neck and shoulder muscles, tight and cramped.

  “Okay, Mandy. It’s as finished as it’s going to be. Want to have a look?”

  Just then she heard a noise, something distant, high-pitched, and musical.

  “Did you hear that?” she said.

  Rosenberg shrugged. “Hear what? I’m an old man with old man’s hearing.”

  “I think someone’s breaking in.”

  32

  Edison thought it was a no-brainer.

  The Villa family compound was superior to his own farm in almost every way. The spacious main house had six bedrooms and it was expensively furnished. It was, by far, the nicest house Edison had ever seen. And best of all, it had a prepper’s cellar, filled with rack upon rack of plastic drums of grains, dried beans, cereal, lentils, peas, pre-cooked and vacuum-packed meals, water, coffee, powdered and condensed milk, peanut butter, cooking oil, sugar, honey, jams and jellies, cheese, powdered butter, dried and canned fruits. There was enough food, Edison reckoned, to last thirty people a year. And the building had generator power, a big-ass Generac with a four-hundred-gallon propane tank buried out back.

  The smaller houses were also pretty sweet, each one a three-bedroom affair with its own smaller generator and stocked pantries. There were plenty of barns and outbuildings too, including horse stalls with four saddle-horses and plenty of hay.

  They found the cherry on the sundae last. The search drove them half-crazy because they knew it was there, somewhere. It was Mickey who discovered it, which amazed Edison because he thought the kid was as dumb as a bag of stones.

  The militia boys were already loaded back onto the bus and Edison and Joe were in the kitchen, stepping over bodies, when they heard Mickey’s muffled shouts coming from the cellar.

  “Hey! I got it! I got it!”

  They clamored down the stairs and saw Mickey pointing to a massive steel door hidden behind a swung-out food rack.

  “It’s a safe!” Mickey said. “They got to be in there.”

  Joe inspected the lock dial and said, “Good work, Mick. We need to find the combination. Maybe it’s written down somewhere.”

  “Look again, boy,” Edison said.

  “Damn,” Joe said, “it’s also got a fingerprint thing. It’s got to be Ed’s fingerprint that opens it.”

  “He’s definitely gonna have one of the magic fingers, but his boys could have ’em too,” Edison said. “These safes can have multiple users.”

  “We gotta haul Ed Villa’s heavy ass down here?” Mickey said.

  “And here I was thinking you were getting clever,” Edison said.

  Joe seemed to be on his father’s wavelength. “Who’s gonna do it?” he said.

  “You better,” Edison said. “He don’t have the experience.”

  Joe made a stop at the woodworking shop at the other end of the basement for the perfect tools, then returned a few minutes later with two bloody hands.

  He held one up to Mickey and said, “Here, shake,” and his friend told him to fuck off.

  Edison selected Villa’s right hand and chose his right index finger to press against the sensor. The safe door popped open with a satisfying thud.

  “First time lucky,” Edison said, pulling at the door.

  It was more than a safe, it was an entire room, and the battery-operated lights that automatically switched on revealed a serious arsenal of pistols, assault rifles, military sniper rifles, even a light machine gun on a tripod. All this, plus lockers of multiple calibers of ammo stacked to the ceiling.

  “I think I just died and went to heaven,” Joe said, picking up an AK-47 with a burled, wooden stock. “It’s going to take us a long time to move all this shit.”

  “Fuck that. We’re the ones who’re moving,” Edison said. “This homestead’s got everything and then some. The only thing we’re missing up here is our cows, and we can load them on trucks and haul ’em easy enough. I only wish that your ma was in a state to appreciate this place. She would love it if she was in her right mind.”

  *

  By the evening, Villa corpses were burning on a huge bonfire and the Edisons and their charges were installed in their stead.

  Edison never told Gretchen Mellon that her son, Ryan, had been in harm’s way that day. And he certainly didn’t tell her that her daughter, Alyssa, had been claimed by Joe. Before they decamped from the Edison farm to the Villa compound, he let her see her twins, but only af
ter she threatened to go on strike.

  She embraced an impassive Ryan then asked, “Is that blood on his shirt?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Edison said. “One of the Snider boys might’ve cut himself.”

  Alyssa was also withdrawn. Neither of them made eye contact. When Gretchen hugged them, their arms hung at their sides.

  Edison fished for compliments. “They been well fed, Gretchen. You can see that, can’t you? You gotta admit that I’m treating all of you extremely well.”

  “What about Trish?”

  Her daughter-in-law was presently locked in Edison’s new bedroom.

  “She’s fine. Want me to get her too?”

  “That’s not necessary,” she said stiffly. “I don’t know what my son saw in her.”

  Edison knew exactly what Craig Mellon had seen in the woman, but he kept his trap shut.

  “Where are the Villas at?” Gretchen asked.

  “We ran them off.”

  “There’s some blood on the kitchen floor.”

  “We might have given them a reason or two to run off.”

  Edison claimed the master bedroom on the first floor of the main house for himself. Delia Edison got an upstairs bedroom all to herself. Brittany got her own room too. Gretchen and Cassie shared one. Gretchen wanted Ryan and Alyssa to stay in the main house too, but Edison told her they would be taken care of elsewhere, and that if she behaved, she could see them from time to time.

  Joe and Mickey set themselves up in one of the smaller houses on the property, and Mickey installed the Snider girl into his room. Joe kept Alyssa Mellon for himself in the largest bedroom.

  Edison’s militia was down to pitiful numbers—only four soldiers left. He kept Ryan and the Snider boys locked up in Villa’s hay barn. If they were curious about what had happened to Evan Snider, whose body was burning in a meadow along with the Villas, they didn’t show it.

  Edison didn’t want to use the generator for more than essentials, so after their supper, he shut the lights and lit a log fire in the living room. He sat Delia down on a fireside chair and watched her watching the flames.

  “So, old girl, we haven’t talked much since all this shit happened.”

  She seemed more interested in the fire than him.

  “Did Gretchen teach you that I’m your husband? Well, I am. And I’m gonna take care of you and when you learn enough words, we’re gonna have a good old talk. This house is your house now. You always wanted a nice place and this one’s top-of-the-line, all the way. I hope you come to appreciate it in time. I also hope you appreciate that your husband’s becoming an important man in these parts. I’m finally making my mark. You’ll come to know that.”

  He called Gretchen down to take Delia to bed. He was dead tired, but he called Joe and Mickey in from the kitchen, and after he topped up Joe and Mickey’s glasses from one of Villa’s fancy bottles of whiskey, he declared the day an unqualified success.

  “If we’re gonna hold on to what we got and go on to bigger things, there’s one thing we’re gonna need,” he said. “I’m the general of this army; Joe, you’re the colonel; and Mickey, I don’t know what the fuck you are, but we’re gonna need a lot more cannon fodder. Know what that is, Mickey?”

  “I do not, Mr. E.”

  “It’s soldiers who’re expendable. Know that word, son?”

  Mickey grinned. “I think it means they’re apt to get seriously fucked up, but we don’t care if they do.”

  “Man, that is the dictionary definition. So, listen, get as much or as little sleep as you want tonight, if you get my meaning, but starting tomorrow, we’re going on a recruiting campaign.”

  *

  Edison was finding more good uses for Pastor Snider’s bus.

  He slowly drove it up and down Main Street in Dillingham with a bullhorn he got from the police station. With the bullhorn out the open window, he blared, “Folks—those of you who aren’t sick—this is Blair Edison. If you haven’t heard, Chief Martin is dead. Deputy Kelso is dead. The mayor is dead. Pastor Snider is dead. This is my town now. I am coming house by house. Do not challenge my authority. Do not take up arms against me. If you do, it will go badly for you.”

  Mickey and Joe followed behind in a yellow bus, the Dillingham school bus that was used to transport students to the regional high school in Clarkson. Edison commandeered it after he found the keys hanging on a nail of the service station where it was parked.

  By Edison’s estimate, there were about a hundred-thirty dwellings in town. He wanted to search all of them in quick order to make sure not to miss any pockets of resistance that could come back to bite him.

  He had a rough idea how he wanted his operation to proceed and he perfected it at the first few houses. He showed up at the door with Joe and the militia boys. Mickey was not one for violence, so his job was to guard the buses from any rear-guard actions.

  It didn’t matter if someone answered and invited them in or whether he had to break down the door. Things played out much the same. The people he wanted most were able-bodied, infected men—his cannon fodder. Attractive infected females were also on the menu. Joe wanted to call them their harem, but Edison thought the term foreign and unsavory. Concubine was a better word. It was Biblical and therefore wholesome. The last category of interest was uninfected women who could help Gretchen manage the cooking and cleaning at his new hilltop compound.

  Everyone else was either going to be a threat to him or just useless mouths to feed. Those were the ones he branded bad men. Jacob Snider was Edison’s go-to reaper. The boy impressed him with his quick action and ruthlessness.

  Joe said, “That kid was mean as hell before his mind got wiped out and he’s still mean as hell.”

  And Edison agreed. “You are who you are, I guess.”

  All the keepers were loaded onto the buses—males in one, females in the other. He knew from personal experience how aggressive some of the men got with the women. When the buses were full, they transported their human cargo back to Camp Edison (as he took to calling it), locked them up with some food to keep them quiet, and carried on with their house-to-house.

  That evening, Edison went to the largest barn to take stock of their haul.

  The ranks of his militia had swollen to almost forty—teenaged boys all the way up to middle-aged men. All of them were pretty-much known quantities. Edison and Joe knew which ones hunted and which ones didn’t. The hunters got rifles since these fellows had the deep-stored memory of how to handle firearms. The others were issued pry bars or ax handles or hammers; it would take too much effort to teach them how to shoot.

  Using a bushel of sliced apples for positive reinforcement and a piece of wood for negative reinforcement, they worked their new recruits into the wee hours of the night in what amounted to, a greased-lightning boot camp. They were taught that Edison was their father. They were taught what they were supposed to do to bad men. They learned about rewards and they learned about punishments.

  Edison told them, “You boys won’t understand this yet, but you will come to understand it. The Lord has cleansed your minds for a purpose. He has cleaned away all of your filth. He has washed away all of your impurities. I will be his instrument to fill your minds with righteousness. I will be the one to show you the way. You have all been born again.”

  While the militia was training, Gretchen huddled with her two new helpers. She knew both women from town life, although they worshipped at different churches. One of them was named Mary Lou. She maintained a grief-stricken silence, having witnessed the murder of her uninfected husband and the abduction of both her infected teenage sons. The other, Ruth, was stoic—she had used a clothing iron to bash her infected husband when he violently attacked her, and when Joe Edison executed the comatose man that morning, it was more or less a mercy killing.

  Brittany was playing with Cassie on the rug. When Edison’s daughter roughly pulled a toy from Cassie’s hand, Gretchen told her off.

  “Leave
her be, Brittany! You’ve got all your other toys.”

  “What’s he want with us?” Ruth asked.

  “Household chores, mainly,” Gretchen said.

  “That’s what we do anyways.”

  “He’s got me teaching his sick children and his wife, Delia, too. Of course, I’m also trying to teach my Cassie.”

  “Teach ’em what?”

  “How to talk, mainly. It’s slow-going.”

  “He hasn’t tried anything on you, has he?” Ruth asked over her glasses.

  “Thank the Lord, no.”

  The mute woman, Mary Lou, finally said something. Through sobs, she said, “Why did he take my boys?”

  “He took my children too,” Gretchen said. “My twins. He lets me see them sometimes if he’s happy with how I’m taking care of things. It’s how he keeps me in line, the son of a bitch.”

  “What’s he want with our children?” the sobbing woman asked.

  “To be honest, I don’t know,” Gretchen said, “but I am worried sick. All I can do—all any of us can do—is pray to God and bide our time. That man killed my husband and he killed my oldest boy. I want him to pay, but right now, he’s holding all the cards.”

  When Joe and Mickey were finished with militia training for the night, they got a bottle of rum from Villa’s liquor cabinet and paid a visit to the barn where the newest concubines were locked up. All five of the women looked lost. A few were crying. Most of them tried to hide when the men opened the door.

  Joe pretty much knew what he wanted to do beforehand. He had Alyssa Mellon locked at his house and he was happy to stand pat for now. None of the new ones were cuter. Mickey, on the other hand, gave it quite a lot of thought, and finally decided to swap out little Jo Ellen Snider for an attractive older woman, the wife of a local insurance salesman he used to fantasize about when he saw her coming and going from the grocery.

  “I don’t know shit about epidemics,” Mickey told Joe, after he made up his mind, “but this epidemic we’re in is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  *

  After breakfast the next morning, Edison decided to muster his new, improved militia. There were still many houses around town that hadn’t been plundered, and they represented a real-world testing ground for his boys. He charged Mickey with staying behind and guarding the women folk.