by T. S. Ward
“A little scratch and you’re down. Always actin’ tough, always so smart, and this is how you go. What glorious fucking luck is that shit?”
“Idiot. What did I tell you?”
“Get your shit together, little girl.”
And when that dies down, when all the rushing, roaring mess of noise and colour and light fades into the dark, there’s Soldier again. Sitting there, hands clasped together like a whole damn prayer circle, like he’s some southern gospel church.
“You’ll be okay, Keely Newell.”
I hear my name. But it’s wrong. And it sounds like it comes from him. It sounds like Soldier. And I don’t entirely hate it. I want to tell him—I want to say Finch, idiot. Newell’s my mother’s name.
I blink, and he’s holding my hand in his, pressing them together against his cheek.
“And if you’re not okay, I’m going to burn this whole damn world to the ground.”
Day Eighty-Eight
I wake up.
Alive, fully, as Ghost rather than the undead version.
The strangest thing is that I don’t feel pain in my back as much. No stiffness in the leg. If not for the remaining fever chills and the headache thrumming in my skull, I’d think it was a dream.
With the quilt wrapped around my shoulders, I leave the room and find the stairs. It feels like early morning. It smells like tea. Chamomile and honey.
Holy hell. I am alive. I’m fucking alive!
And then a thought stops me dead in the kitchen doorway: what if this is just a high before the lowest and most final low?
And then another thought: what if I’m contagious? What if Soldier gets sick? What if I’m immune and I watch him die?
He looks up then, sipping his tea, frowning when he sees me. “You good?”
I turn away and shuffle over to an armchair in the living room, curl up on it, and pull the quilt tighter around me. It is occurring to me rather stupidly, in full blown understanding, that I have found something over the past few months that I don’t want to lose. Something I don’t want ruined. Of course I’d fuck it up by getting at least one or both of us killed. Of course.
“Ghost?” His hand is on my shoulder, briefly, as he passes. He sits on the couch with his tea cupped in his hands. “How are you feeling?”
I don’t say anything for a while. I watch him for signs of infection.
Is he as tired as I was? Is there sweat on his skin? Is he washed out, drained of colour? Is he thinking the same thing I’m thinking or have I lost it entirely?
“I’m fine,” I whisper.
He nods with a frown, like he doesn’t believe me. “Okay.”
I watch him sip his tea. The cup looks so small in his hands it’s almost ridiculous. I can smell the honey, the chamomile. He must have found some here, left over in the kitchen. What the hell is it about honey, for him?
“You about to bite me, spooks?” His lip twitches into a small smile.
I pull the blanket up over my head.
You’re goddamn lucky, I tell myself, you’re goddamn lucky, you’re—goddamn. My stomach twists. There’s a bird in my chest, fighting to escape. Tears spring at my eyes. I don’t cry. I’m not a crier. I respond to this shit in rage and sarcasm and jokes in poor taste, but—I have been fucked up for a while. I haven’t been myself. I have cried, more often than I haven’t.
And here I am now, curled around my knees under a quilt with tears falling freely and silently over my cheeks.
The floor creaks, and then knuckles tap softly against my head. “You’ll be fine, Ghost. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
The classic response is in my mouth, ready to go, like it always is when I’m feeling like this: go away, leave me alone. But I don’t want him to go. I don’t want to be alone. I thought I was going to die and I realized that I have always been alone, that the dying happens alone whether someone is with you or not.
Instead, I croak out, “I’m scared, Benji.”
He pulls the blanket back. He’s kneeling in front of me, looking at me in some kind of way I’ve never seen. Softness on all the hard edges. Pity, probably. “Hey. It’s over. It’s done.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It is. And get this: you’re immune, you little shit. Ever heard of anyone else being immune?”
I shake my head. “What if I’m not?”
“You got bit and all that happened was a little fever. I’d say immune.”
“I’ve been sick like that before—”
“No, no. Look at your leg, Ghost. It’s a bite. I said it wasn’t so you wouldn’t panic. So I wouldn’t. But it is and you’re alright and that’s never happened to anyone else I’ve heard of and I never want to do that again so we aren’t going to test it a second time, okay?”
“Some meth head in the city attacked me. Biting, scratching, everything. Just lost it.” I forgot about it, after Eli, but I remember it vividly now. I watch him clue in to what I’m saying, slowly, with this dawning horror. “About two years ago. And I just brushed it off. Went home. And I got real sick, so my dad called an ambulance, and I was so out of it I thought the paramedics were attacking me. I bit them. Scratched them. And then suddenly there’s this rampant infection spreading and this pandemic and now the whole damn apocalypse. Hospital said I had an infection from the guy but never came back and said what.”
Soldier shakes his head. Laughs, short and unsmiling, and then stops. “No. No, not you. No.”
“What?”
“It can’t be you. You can’t be the whole reason I was—no. God, it’s making so much sense now.” He runs a hand through his hair, staring at me with this grimace.
I’m shivering, colder than ever. I swear to god I’m made of ice. Maybe this is also a fever dream. Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe he’s going to say my name again.
There’s nothing feverish about this, though. Nothing except the mounting worry in my chest.
“Soldier,” I whisper, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
He sits on the edge of the coffee table, elbows on his knees, and his hands held loosely together. He drops his head to stare at the floor instead of looking at me. “It makes so much sense now.”
“Just say it, for fuck’s sake.”
“I lied, just a bit, Ghost. I’ve heard of immunity, they said they had at least one case of it. They were trying to make a cure. That’s why we were there. They didn’t tell us who, just where. That floor. Someone was supposed to take out the—take you out, before they shot everyone else. But—that would have been so much worse.” He stands up and starts pacing, back and forth across the room, between the window and the hall.
He’s angry. Pissed. That’s obvious, clear in that look on his face, clear in the set of his shoulders, his hands curled to fists, and it’s making me nervous as all hell.
“Ben?”
He stops pacing and kneels down in front of me again. His eyes are wild, tired. “You’re immune. And the way I heard it, making a cure could kill you, or… They’ll force you through that fever a thousand times or more, however long it takes to replicate whatever it is that your body does to fight it, and they won’t stop until it’s done. Nothing will stop them. They killed civilians. Dropped bombs. And you… you’re one person.”
I look at him, at how long his hair is getting. It’s the only thing I can focus on. I’ve hardly known him a few months but it feels like years. “How do you know so much about it?”
He scratches his beard, eyes slipping somewhere across the room. “I know the person in charge of making the cure.”
“Well enough to know all this?”
“Yeah. Pretty well.” He looks sick. Like he’s about to throw up. There’s sweat on his temples. “That ended well before they sent me to the hospital. I haven’t heard anything else since.”
“Soldier,” I say quietly, “Are you okay?”
He backs away, waving me off when I reach out. He’s breathing hard and shallow, hands shaking
. He’s biting a nail.
“I’m fine,” he says, “Really. I’m fine.”
I nod. He’s lying, so I get up, leaving the quilt behind. I walk into the kitchen without a word, top up his mug of tea, stir in some honey. Even make one for myself.
I nearly jump out of my skin when I turn around and he’s standing there, leaning against the fridge with his arms crossed.
“Hard to tell if I’m just contagious or if you’re having an anxiety thing. Here,” I say, holding the tea out to him.
He nods, opens his mouth to say something, and thinks better of it, shaking his head. He follows me as I walk out the back door onto a closed porch.
“This is a nice place,” I muse, “Might commandeer it.”
Day Eighty-Nine
We ditch the farmhouse.
It isn’t safe to stay in one place for too long, says the guy who disappeared for two weeks and left me in the same place. Right. Sure.
“I thought it was me they were after,” he tells me, “But it’s you.”
There’s one town left between us and my family. One more, and I recognize it when we come up on it. Seeing it, I start walking slower, reluctant to get closer. This whole thing has made me nervous to do much of anything, but bringing the whole tolling bell to my family really doesn’t sit right with me.
Soldier’s breath makes a cloud in the air. “You getting tired?”
“No, just…” I sigh, shaking my head, “Don’t want to bring this to Adam and Sadie. Or Crystal, really, though I would sacrifice her with minimal hesitation if it came to it.”
“Crystal?”
“My mother. Crystal Newell. I use my dad’s name for a reason.”
He nudges my arm with an elbow, slowing down to walk next to me. “I think that’s one step closer to knowing your name.”
I look down at my feet and grip the straps of my pack. “Had a fever dream about it. You were sitting there in that room beside me and you said my name.”
“Did you hate it?”
“If you got it right, might not.”
I stop next to the town’s welcome sign, looking behind us rather than ahead. It makes sense to me now, all of Soldier’s vigilance, his constant need to be on the move.
“What do we do now?”
He runs his fingers through his hair and shrugs. “That’s up to you. We could find a place to hole up. We could go straight to your family. We can take our time doing both. Your call, Ghost.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to bring this to them.”
“That might have already happened, you know. What address did you have on your documents?”
“Adam’s. I never changed it, but—legally I haven’t changed my name back to my dad’s. What would… what would happen to them? If they got to them?” I cross my arms, which is hard with the straps of this bag, more of a nuisance than it is comfortable, so I let them hang loose again.
Soldier sets his hands on my arms. “I don’t know. I’m just saying, it’s a possibility. Don’t be afraid to go. Sadie’s what, eight? She’ll be better with all of us there. Right?”
I nod.
“And besides,” he says, “The woman in charge, she’s not… She has this kind of… fundamental flaw. She hyper-fixates on one tiny little thing and doesn’t see everything else. I think she’s just focused on you.”
“That’s… hardly reassuring,” I say, nearly laughing at the absurdity of it. “I’m the hottest commodity in town for no reason other than nothing’s killed me yet.”
Not even these goddamn nerds slinking down the road toward us.
Soldier pulls his axe from its place and walks up to them, bringing the axe down on one, wrenching it from the still corpse, and then he takes out the next one the same way. They’re slow-moving, these ones. It goes well. But I know it won’t always. I’m just too goddamn lucky for it to be shit for me yet.
“What are we looking for here?” I ask, coming up behind him.
He squints against the sun that breaks through a small part in the clouds. “Canned goods. First-aid supplies. Anything you think you need, grab it.”
“Nothing specific?”
“Food and first-aid aren’t specific enough?”
I shrug.
This town isn’t much, but it is off the main way, and we find that it hasn’t yet been looted to the dust. We figure that there isn’t much distance between one end of town and the other, and we’ve got our radios stuck to our belts, so we split up. He takes the apartments and offices down the main stretch of road and I head for the grocery store across the residential side.
These houses aren’t quite suburban like the place Soldier lived. More like Adam’s neighbourhood, far from the trailers I lived in, but still a hell of a lot less manicured than any of them. Bushes and overgrown shrubs are everywhere. Vines climb trees. But everything is all dead, dead, dead. Brown and shriveled and crunchy and cold.
I keep swearing I see snow falling but every time I stop to look, there’s nothing but a cold wind.
The grocery store is small and shares a lot with a gas station. Windows are smashed and the doors hang open in the wind. All the nozzles are hanging loose on the ground without a single drop staining the pavement.
I know what I’m looking for. I didn’t need to ask Soldier. But I’m nervous to be alone, nervous with the goddamn military fucking psyops after us, after me.
What I’m looking for is honey for Soldier, and a menstrual cup. I’ve been looking for a while now. Having to ration tampons when I don’t know the next time I’ll find any is hard enough as is. I’d rather not have to deal with it every damn month.
The apocalypse as a uterus-having woman has a main quest: find a fucking menstrual cup.
Fuck me.
The grocery store’s door is propped open with an old water damaged and sun-faded sign stuck to it that keeps catching the wind. Take what you need, it says, so I walk in, knife at the ready, whistling.
Only silence answers.
I shrug to myself, sighing loudly, and start walking up and down the small aisles. We used to come here, when we stayed with Crystal. Adam and I would walk two hours, or ride bikes if no one had stolen them—although I always suspected our mother had sold them for drug money.
I trail a finger through the dust on the metal shelves and almost gag at how much collects and falls to the ground.
There’s a jar of honey tucked into the back of a shelf. Bea’s Bees. A local brand with a poorly designed label. I recognize the street name. The corner where Adam always stopped to wait for me. I smile and slip the jar into the side pocket of my bag. We’ll have to stop there on our way.
Soldier can have his three jars and then some.
I step out of the aisle and flinch when something moves to my right. A slight movement, barely there, low to the ground. But there’s no sound other than the quiet whisper of the wind through the door, so I chalk it up to that. The wind catching something. Except I don’t see it happen again.
I move a little more quietly, soft and sure-footed, in the opposite direction. Where I need to go. The pharmacy aisle, thankfully, is farther from the shadow movement than I am now.
The only shit left on the shelves here are adult diapers, moisturizer, and dental floss, and I almost laugh to myself. If all else fails, diapers. But.
Today is shaping up to be a good day, because not only do I find exactly what I’m looking for, there’s also some acetaminophen and ibuprofen on the pharmacy counter that I crack open and dump into a baggie. I roll it up and shove it into my coat pocket, shaking it a little to test the rattle.
Far quieter than a plastic container.
“Hey, Margot—”
I have my knife up and ready as someone rounds the corner of an aisle. Both of us are like deer caught in the headlights. It takes me a moment to think, seeing the size of them, to put my knife back and hold my hands up, palms out.
“Hey, kid, hey,” I say quickly, eyes catching the glint of a knife in a small
hand. Good god, that makes me nervous. Kids with knives. I let him hear it in my voice. “It’s okay, bud. I’m not a threat. You got people around? Some adults?”
He nods slowly and starts to back away. He can’t be any older than Sadie. “A whole bunch of ‘em, so don’t even try nothing, lady!”
“Oh, no, sir. I wouldn’t dare. I was just doing some shopping. That alright? Y’all just passing through town, or…?” I take a step toward the closest aisle, and the kid backs away again. “I’m just passing through myself, me and my friend. Can I ask you something?”
He stands there, eyes darting around, and nods.
“I’m looking for my sister. Girl about your age. Name is Sadie, she looks like me, just pint size. You seen her around?” My shoulders drop when he shakes his head.
The world’s a big place sometimes and I didn’t expect a yes, but it’s still discouraging.
“Alright, then. Not a problem, bud. I’m gonna be on my way then. Got to get back to my friend. Good luck—”
Something smacks me up the back of the head pretty hard, and I duck forward, cursing. The kid turns and bolts, and another pushes past me after him.
“Goddamn, fucking gremlin—” I start to shout, but then I see her look back at me, fear in her eyes, and see she isn’t much older than him. About the same size as me, but still just a kid, so I just groan and walk out of the store after them.
At least I got some drugs to deal with the headache that’ll come of that.
I start walking, choosing a different way back into town than the road the kids run down.
“Soldier?” I say into the radio.
There’s no answer, not even a crackle, so I figure we must be too far away from each other for them to reach. I give it until this road meets the main through-street to try again, but change my mind just before I get there.
Another street cuts down around behind the area Soldier was going to check out, so I start that way instead. It looks like it’ll come up against the alley that goes between the building he had his eye on and the next one.
A crackle at my hip slows me down a little.