The Cure

by Glenn Cooper

  “Bring my daughter back for a start,” she said.

  “You don’t get to make the rules. I know that might be difficult for a policewoman such as yourself—’cause I know you people always like to be in charge—but you’re gonna have to get used to it.”

  She was hoarse from shouting. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  Hands on hips, Edison said, “I’m listening.”

  “Not here. I’m tired of these four walls. Let’s have a drink.”

  He took her down to the living room. All the picture frames that held Villa family photos were now empty.

  “You erased them,” she said.

  “One way of putting it.”

  He fixed her a drink, apologizing about the lack of ice—took too much energy to run the ice-maker. She downed the liquor in one go and held out her glass for a refill.

  “It’s hard to hate you,” he said.

  “Then don’t.”

  He filled her glass even higher this time. “What’s your proposition?”

  After one more sip she said, “We should work together. Or if you see yourself sitting up on your king-rat throne, I should work for you.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever the hell you’re doing, Blair. Town domination? World domination? I’ve got no one, not a soul, except for Kyra. I don’t know Jamie Abbott from Adam. We just met. I don’t give a shit about Indianapolis. I’m going there with him because Emma’s Kyra’s best friend and she seems good around her, especially now. We might as well stay in bum-fuck Pennsylvania as anywhere.”

  Edison roared with laughter. “Dillingham ain’t so bad. Since I took it over, it’s much improved, I’d say. Used to be full of jabbering jackasses. Now there’s only one of them. Me. You’re police so you gotta have more practical talents than just running your mouth.”

  “I was a patrol cop for eight years then I was the first woman SWAT officer in my department. Did that for a while and then I became the SWAT weapon trainer before I got my detective shield. I’m a qualified sniper and I can shoot your eye out at two hundred yards. You’ve got your little army of sickos, but from what I’ve seen, you’re ridiculously thin on the ground in officer ranks. Who do you have besides you and your son?”

  “Well, there’s my son’s dumbass friend, Mickey, but he can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  “You just made my case,” she said. “I suppose you’re wanting to build up your little army.”

  “That is correct.”

  “The virus makes the young men you want the perfect soldiers. Did you consider that?”

  “Of course, I did. I’m from bum-fuck, PA, but I ain’t stupid.”

  “Okay. Then you know, it’s all about training. When you take someone into military training, the prime mission is to break that person down psychologically and physically then remake them into soldiers who’ll follow orders and run toward gunfire. With the virus, the first part’s already done for you. Their minds are empty. All we’ve got to do is train them to be killing machines.”

  “What the hell you think I’ve been doing?”

  “That’s fine, but I can do it better and you need more than one of you to get the job done.”

  “So, joining the Edison militia sounds better to you than going to Indianapolis.”

  “It does.”

  “Why’s he going to Indy anyway?”

  “He’s got a girlfriend there. He thinks they can find a cure for the sickness.”

  His face molded into a pout. “Oh yeah?”

  “Want to know something else? He’s the one who got the disease started in the first place. It was his medical experiment that went wrong and got the virus started. He’s the one who made your family sick.”

  His pout dissolved. “No shit! I’ve got a celebrity in my house.”

  “You’re not angry, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “You don’t want a cure, do you?”

  “Shit, Linda. Can I call you Linda? You are one sharp cookie. Hell, no! I don’t want no cure. I like what’s happened, I really do. All these lumps of clay to be remade into the kind of men and women the Lord intended, not like the scum who make up most of our so-called fellow citizens. It’s an opportunity that’s been dropped in our laps. You think I’m the only one? There’s no way I am. I imagine that men like me are figuring this out all over the country. We’re rebuilding America from its sinful ashes, the way it was intended to be. I want to be one of the King Kongs in the enterprise.”

  “Then let me help you with that.”

  “What’s your ask? What do you want in return?”

  “I want you to give me my daughter back.”

  “That all?”

  “For starters. I’ll think of more.”

  “How do I know I can trust you enough to put a rifle in your hands.”

  “I don’t know, Blair, you tell me.”

  He tugged at his drink and thought for a while before detaching the walkie-talkie hanging on his belt.

  “Hey, Joe, you there?”

  The speaker crackled. “Yeah, what?”

  “Pick out the most pathetic boy we got and bring him up to the house.”

  “How come?”

  “Just do it, for Christ’s sake.”

  Edison took a flashlight and told Linda to find a coat in the closet that fit her. They waited outside. After a while, Joe got out of his truck and yanked out a spindly young man.

  Edison looked the kid over. “Good choice. He can’t shoot for shit, can he?”

  “I doubt he ever held a gun before,” Joe said.

  “Bring him this way.”

  They walked into a field behind the house until Edison told them to stop.

  “Leave him there, Joe.”

  The young man blinked stupidly at the flashlight in his face and said, “I love Jesus.”

  “Who taught him that?” Edison asked.

  “Mickey did. He thought you’d approve.”

  “I do. Tell Mickey he done good for a dumbass. Linda, take my gun and shoot him.”

  Joe said, “What the fuck, Pa?”

  “Shut up, Joe. All you need to do is keep your gun on her.”

  He handed her his sidearm.

  “One in the chamber?” she asked.

  “Yeah, course.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know their names.”

  “Hey, Jesus boy,” she shouted. The young man looked at her and she fired before Edison or Joe were prepared for it. He fell backwards with an angry hole in his forehead.

  “Holy fuck!” Joe said. “She did it.”

  She offered the gun back, but Edison told her to hold on to it.

  “You passed the first test. Now let’s see if you graduate.”

  He went over to Joe and whispered something out of her earshot.

  Edison and Linda stood in the dark field next to the corpse for a few minutes until Joe returned. Edison kept sweeping her with his light, seemingly interested in whether she was going to show any emotion, but her face was immobile, her jaw clenched.

  Joe came back, pulling someone along by a sleeve, and when they were close enough, Linda could see that it was Mary Lou, the one who was always weeping. She was sobbing now, saying, “No, no, please leave me alone.”

  “You did a retard,” Edison said. “This woman ain’t one.”

  “You think there’s a difference?” Linda said.

  “You don’t?”

  Linda fired again at close range.

  “There’s no difference,” she said. “Do I get the job? Do I get my daughter back?”

  Edison nodded and said, “Joe, bring Kyra up here. She’s gonna stay with her mother. Linda here’s getting the same rank as you. As of now she’s a colonel in my army.”

  Later, when Linda took Kyra upstairs, he and Joe had a nightcap.

  “You really trust her?” Joe asked.

  “She’s a stone-cold killer. Hell no, I don’t trust her. That’s wh
y I took the gun back and it’s why I locked her in again. I may come to trust her. It’s entirely possible. Let’s just see how it goes. I want to make a move on Clarkson soon, pick up more men and more supplies, and we’ll see how she does in action.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “By the way, I don’t want you saying nothing about you and Kyra. I assume you been a red-blooded male.”

  Joe smirked. “You assume correctly. I’ve got to say, she was kind of creepy. She kept saying, ‘I want Rommy,’ all the time.”

  Edison chuckled. “Girl prefers a dog to you.”

  40

  In her dream, Derek was angry for something she had done to him. The nature of her transgression was unclear, but it must have been something terrible because he was exacting a painful revenge. He had forced her left hand into a carpenter’s vise and he was working it, turn by turn. The pain was unbearable, and the sound of small bones crushing sickened her.

  She heard herself calling out Jamie’s name.

  Where are you?

  Why aren’t you here?

  Why won’t you save me?

  The voice she heard in reply was small and high-pitched.

  “Mandy, wake up! Wake up!”

  She opened her eyes, expecting the darkness of night, but it was daytime and Keisha had a hand on her knee over her blanket.

  “Oh.”

  “You were shouting in your sleep,” the girl said.

  “Was I?”

  She tried to sit up and made the mistake of pushing off with her bandaged left hand. She groaned loudly.

  Shaun shuffled into the bedroom.

  “You don’t look so good,” he said.

  “I don’t feel so good. How long was I asleep?”

  “Few hours.”

  “Help me up. I don’t want to spend all day in bed again.”

  She couldn’t understand why her bandage felt wet because there was no blood seeping through. In the bathroom, she flushed the toilet with a bucket and had a look at herself in the mirror. She was flushed and there were beads of sweat on her forehead. The medicine cabinet was a disaster of old toothbrushes, mold, and a brush, replete with Boris’s hair and dandruff that almost made her gag.

  “Do you have a thermometer?” she called out the door.

  “Nah,” Shaun called back. “I’ll put it on the list.”

  As she was unbandaging her wound, she noticed red streaks extending up her left arm, nearly reaching her elbow. She was dreading pulling at the gauze touching the wound, but it peeled off easily and she could see why. The area where the bullet had penetrated, the fleshy part at the base of the thumb, was oozing thick, yellow-green pus. She still couldn’t move her thumb; she was scared the bullet had caught a nerve.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck. You got any alcohol?”

  Shaun called out, “We got Bourbon and we got beer.”

  “I mean rubbing alcohol.”

  “I’ll put it on the list.”

  “I’ll take the Bourbon for now.”

  When he came in and saw her wound, he showed his dismay by crying, “Oh man, that’s real bad.”

  “Are there any antibiotics in the house?”

  “Like penicillin?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll put them on the list. Can I leave?”

  Alone, she doused the wound with liquor and screamed in pain.

  *

  Shaun took Keisha by the hand and took her into the yard, so she wouldn’t have to listen to Mandy’s suffering.

  Bare earth was modestly heaped up over Boris’s grave. Shaun was still sore and blistered from the hours of digging.

  “It don’t look too bad,” Keisha said.

  “I don’t know. It don’t look too good either. It needs something.”

  “Needs a stone,” she said.

  “I mean, I could haul a rock over, I suppose, but I can’t put his name on it.”

  “How ’bout a wood cross?”

  “I think he was Jewish.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll think of something. I don’t think he ever expected winding up in the backyard.”

  “It’s kinda nice here,” she said.

  It was chilly, but Shaun only had a T-shirt on. He lifted it to dab his stinging eyes. “Yeah, I think you’re right, short stuff. He come from a lot of brothers and sisters. He never even had his own room, but then he grew up and he got his own house.” He used the shovel to smooth the mound some more. “We gotta go hunting for shit for Mandy. Wanna come?”

  *

  Mandy rebandaged her hand with her good one and wrote out the names of some antibiotics and painkillers.

  Shaun got his machete and his mask and he and Keisha headed out on their bicycles. There were two bullets left in Rosenberg’s gun, but Shaun left it behind. He didn’t want to ever fire it again.

  They rode past the yard where Shaun had unceremoniously dragged K’s body, leaving it covered by bags of smelly garbage, ripped apart and picked over by dogs. He chose houses they hadn’t scavenged yet on a street parallel to his. Shaun knocked on a door to be sure there weren’t normal folk inside, and if there was no answer, he would break a window. If there were infecteds, or if there was something gruesome, he had Keisha wait outside. Some of the sick were too weak to pose a problem. If they were aggressive, he waved his machete and made them retreat into a room he could close off, or he high-tailed it out if they were too deranged or there were too many of them. The empty houses were the best. He brought Keisha in on those to help with the hunt. They raided medicine chests first, then kitchens, and filled two large plastic bags before deciding it was time to head home.

  Riding along, Shaun spotted something and told Keisha to hold back on the sidewalk. He put his bike on its kickstand and crept toward the walkway between two houses where a couple of municipal trash bins were stored. It was the ruby red shoes that caught his eye. As he got closer, he saw one of the trash bins moving a little. He raised his machete and charged, screaming his head off.

  “Get the fuck outta here! Get out!”

  Two frightened men, one old, one young sprang to their feet and ran away, disappearing behind one of the houses.

  The feet with their red shoes were the only part of Keisha’s mother still intact. The rest of her was devoured and rotting. He turned away and gagged inside his mask. There was nothing to do, nothing to say.

  “Who were you shouting at?” Keisha asked when he got back on his bike.

  “Just some retards, is all.”

  Mandy was sleeping again, her cheeks flushed. He told Keisha he’d let her rest for a little while longer then show her all the pill bottles and antiseptics they’d found.

  He had something in his big bag of goodies he wanted to take outside.

  It was something he found in a vase in one of the looted houses, a bunch of colorful plastic flowers with pretty stems with thorns and bright-green leaves. He placed them on Boris’s grave and the two of them sat down on the frayed nylon beach chairs that were his backyard furniture, squinting at the harsh midday sun.

  “They’re gonna last all through the winter,” Keisha said. “Real flowers won’t.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” Shaun said. They didn’t talk for a while until he said, “You know, we make a pretty good team.”

  She nodded emphatically. “Uh-huh, we do.”

  “You know what I think people gonna call us?”

  “What?”

  “KeShaun.”

  Her smile was as brilliant as the sunshine. “I like that.”

  41

  On the fifth day after Jamie drilled her skull, Brittany opened her eyes and moaned.

  He had been sitting in a chair, marinating in a stupor of inactivity when he heard her. He sprang up and sat beside her to run through an examination.

  “Brittany, can you hear me?”

  She nodded once.

  “My name is Jamie. I’m your doctor. You’ve been sick but you’re getting better.”

&n
bsp; She nodded again.

  He touched her good side. “Can you raise this arm?”

  It lifted well off the bed.

  “Now the leg.”

  Another good lift.

  “Now this arm.”

  He wouldn’t have been surprised if she was completely paralyzed on the right side, but she was able to manage an inch of movement of her arm and her leg.

  “That’s super. Really good, honey. I’m just going to tap you here and there and shine a light into your eyes, okay?”

  When he was done, he told her that her daddy was going to come and see her, and then he shouted at the door for Edison.

  Gretchen called up from the kitchen that he wasn’t there, but Jamie saw him through the window heading back toward the house from one of the outbuildings. He rapped on the window and gestured for him. Edison started running and was soon unlocking the door.

  He was panicked. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s good news, Blair. She woke up.”

  Edison started blubbering and ran to hug her and tell her how much he loved her.

  The girl moved her lips.

  “Say it again, baby. Your papa can’t hear you.” He put his ear close and said, “Where’s mommy? Don’t you remember, sweetheart? Your mama’s sick. She’ll come see you when she’s better. So, Doc, what do you think?”

  “I think this is a significant milestone. I took the tube out day before yesterday when it stopped draining and I was hopeful this day would come. And here it is. She’s got weakness on her right side, but the fact that there’s some voluntary movement is pretty damn good at this point.”

  “I been praying,” Edison said. “I been praying real hard and it appears the Lord has listened. I’m gonna get Joe up here to see his sister.”

  “Before you go, let’s talk about my situation. I did my bit. Now it’s your turn. Bring Emma to me, give me my car, and let me go to Indianapolis.”

  Edison got up from the bed and started wagging his finger. “You’ve done part of your bit, Doc. Don’t you remember what I told you? I said that you can go once she’s up and doing her little ballerina twirl for me. Can she twirl? If she can, go ahead and show me.”

  Jamie tried to keep himself under control for the sake of the girl.