Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book

by Adrian Birch

  So Jason had been planning to drug me and force himself on me. I can’t even imagine what someone like him would have done to me if he’d had me locked up in some jail cell.

  “Thank you, Ian,” I said. “Thank you so fucking much.”

  “You’re okay,” he said. “You’re safe. For now. I was able to pull some strings and get your arrest warrants cleared, but we’re going to have to be careful.”

  I tried to calm down. I still couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight. All I wanted was for Ian to just pull over and hold me in his arms while I cried. I knew I shouldn’t want that—it was wrong—but I couldn’t help it. I took a deep breath and tried to get myself under control. We were passing back into town. Ian slowed to avoid the empty, abandoned cars strewn all over the roadside.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “They took you away, Ian. And now you’re… What are you? What’s going on?”

  Ian drew a deep breath, gave me a look I tried not to interpret as despair, and then stared at the road. “Everything’s falling to pieces,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.” He shook his head. “We’re inside what’s now an officially designated quarantine zone. It covers all of Muldoon and the surrounding areas—about forty miles across. They’ve got the National Guard patrolling the borders. I swear to God the perimeter looks like Iraq: HESCO barriers, concertina wire, the whole thing. And I guess we’re not the only zone. There’s supposed to be four more throughout the West, all in remote, rural areas, like us.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe how fast they set this thing up since the pathogen broke out. I guess no one really understands how to cure it or how it works, except that it’s a kind of venereal disease and somehow it drives people mad with carnal desire. It’s basically an STD that acts as an aphrodisiac.”

  Ian glanced at me. I could hardly believe it, but he blushed a little. He cleared his throat.

  “Officially,” he said, “the federal government’s supposed to lift the quarantines when everyone living inside tests negative for a full twelve months. The pathogen’s supposed to be contained inside the zones, but word is they’re dumping infected people in from the outside. And I’ve sure seen a lot of infected people around who I don’t know. They can’t all be outsiders stuck here from the fair.”

  I couldn’t really believe that everything had changed so fast just because an aggressive disease was spreading. I was finding it hard to comprehend that I wasn’t still living in the same old Muldoon, and that everything about our lives had changed…probably forever.

  “What happened when they took you away?” I looked at Ian’s black combat uniform warily. He still hadn’t told me everything. “What are you now, exactly?”

  “Home Guard.” He scoffed. “Either you join, or you get thrown into detention. Indefinitely. That’s the deal. It’s basically a paramilitary force that’s been granted the rule of martial law over the entire quarantine zone. They conscript a lot people from the inside, because, well, how many volunteers are you going to get from the outside to go into a quarantine zone? They take you to this center they have set up west of town, give you some bullshit, day-long, crash-training course, assign you a rank, and off you go. Because of my experience, they cooked up a medical lieutenant rank for me. Everybody else keeps busy doing the rounds—patrolling residences and taking daily urine tests, then separating out the infected from the uninfected. We were supposed to bring anyone who tested positive to the center of our zone; they were going to keep them all in that Walmart warehouse over there. But now it looks like all the squads are pretty much just ‘expiring’ positives on the spot.” Ian looked at me with a mixture of awe and fear at what he was about to tell me. “They’re getting away with killing people because there’s a legal loophole. Anyone who tests positive is technically already dead.”

  I didn’t understand. “What do you mean? How is that possible? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Do you remember Chris Trevino? That new doctor kid?”

  I vaguely remembered a young doctor who’d started at the hospital just about the time Shawn was finishing up his physical therapy, but I didn’t know what he had to do with anything.

  “Yeah, I remember him. I guess so. Why?”

  Ian had been driving toward my parents’ house, but now he turned off the unpaved road that lead around to the back side of their property.

  “Well, you’ll meet him soon,” Ian said. “Chris’ll be able to explain everything better than I ever could. He’s a good guy—young and a little high-strung, but a good enough guy. We’ve been helping each other out. He sort of defected from the hospital when the Home Guard took over. After Bob Hershel died, he asked me if I knew where he could do an autopsy without anyone finding out. I found him a place.”

  I thought about Ian shooting Mr. Hershel that night. It seemed like Morgan had fallen into her coma so long ago. The last I’d seen of her, she’d been hidden away in my dad’s hayloft.

  “And Morgan?” I asked. I was terrified that she wouldn’t have known what to do when neither Bryce nor me had come back to the loft. What if she’d been caught by the Home Guard?

  “Morgan’s…safe,” Ian said.

  But he didn’t say anything further, and I could tell he was holding something back.

  Ten minutes later, Ian pulled up toward the ramshackle barn that’d been standing precariously by the river for as long I could remember. It was on the Hershel property, across the river from my parents’ ranch. I got out to open the barn doors, and Ian parked the SUV inside, hiding it from view.

  “We’ll leave it here in case anyone tries to track it,” Ian explained. He locked the doors.

  Bryce and I followed Ian toward the low concrete dam that spanned the river from bank to bank. As kids, my sister and I used to take our shoes off and cross through the ankle-deep water that spilled over the dam’s edge, but now Bryce and I followed Ian’s lead and sloshed through in our shoes, too tired and shaken to care about getting our feet wet. I had no idea where Ian was taking us. We were more than a quarter mile from my parents’ house.

  My dad used to raise grain before I was born, and an old corrugated tin granary still stood on the flats along the river, more or less hidden behind the bluff. I hadn’t seen it in years. My dad used to make Danielle and me swear we wouldn’t play inside the tall, barn-like structure that housed the old grain elevator. It was connected to a row of six squat silos, long since empty. Every surface of the granary was corrugated tin, and by now it had all rusted to a dull orange. Ian walked through the weeds toward the granary’s door.

  “I’ll take you to the house in just a sec,” he said. “I just need to check in on Chris real quick.”

  I looked around at the old rusting structure. An arrow-shaped weather vane creaked at the rooftop. “Does my dad know you’re using this place?” It made me a little nervous that Ian was hiding bodies from the Home Guard on my parents’ property.

  “I told him I needed to use it,” he answered. “I also told him I couldn’t tell him why. He agreed. He swore he wouldn’t tell a soul about anything going on down here. I know he won’t.”

  Ian was right. I knew that if my dad swore not to say anything to anyone, he wouldn’t. He could keep a secret, even from my mom. Once he’d taken me on a cross-country horseback-riding trip into the mountains way beyond town, and we stumbled onto an abandoned village of ancient Native American cliff dwellings while passing through a gully. We spent the afternoon walking up and down the stone steps and exploring the network of rooms carved into the rock. We even found petrified corncobs. He made me swear to keep it a secret; he didn’t think anyone other than us knew about it, and he didn’t want backpackers ruining the place., He never, ever said a word about it later, not even to me.

  “What about my mom?” I asked Ian. I knew she wouldn’t be happy about him using the granary. “Does she know you’re using it?”

  Ian shook his head. “No, just your dad.” He opened the granary door. I
t creaked on its wire hinges. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to. You’ve seen a hell of lot today. I wouldn’t blame you.”

  I was feeling so numb that I didn’t think about it; I just followed Ian inside. Bryce came in, too. I think it was mostly so he wouldn’t have to stay outside alone.

  The interior was dark, shot through by points of light coming in through tiny holes rusted into the tin walls. Everything was covered by decades-old grain dust.

  “Hey, Chris!” Ian called out. “It’s me. I have company.” His voice echoed strangely through the massive tin building.

  As my eyes adjusted once again to a dark space—though this was far more cavernous than the last—I recognized the doctor sitting at a makeshift desk in the far corner. The desk was surrounded by medical supplies, from boxes of antibiotics to a battery-powered defibrillator to empty IV bags hanging on nails. There was even an old heart monitor, though it appeared to be missing a power supply. Ian had obviously been busy bringing Doctor Trevino more than just cadavers to study.

  The doctor stood as we walked in. He was even younger than I remembered—not much older than I was—small and thin, and he was waving smoke from the air.

  He was holding a joint, and not entirely guiltily.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “This is Doctor Trevino.” Ian eyed the joint warily. “Chris,” he said disapprovingly. “What is this? Really?”

  “Hey, man, when you come to a bum-fuck town in the middle of nowhere for a one-year residency and end up stuck in a quarantine zone, probably for life, you want to allow yourself a joint every now and then. That’s my medical advice.” He shook my hand, then Bryce’s. “Hi, how are you?”

  Ian waved away the smoke. “Ashley wanted to know why the Home Guard can shoot the sick at will,” Ian said. “I told her you could explain it better than me.”

  “Because they’re not sick.” He shrugged. “They’re dead.”

  “Go easy,” Ian whispered. “They’ve been through a lot. Remember? I told you what happened.”

  “Oh shit! I’m so sorry.” Chris covered his mouth. “You guys were in the…buried…thing. Right. Shit. I’m so sorry.” He touched each of our shoulders apologetically and stepped back. “Well, you’re alive. So congratulations for that. That’s better than the TGV-positives can say, because, like I said, they’re not. They’re dead.”

  “Okay,” Bryce said. He’d been in a state of shock for the last hour or so, and now he was losing his patience. “You’ll have to explain this. I’m not a doctor, but what the fuck do you mean, dead? Like fucking zombies or something? Bullshit.”

  “No, not like zombies.” Chris sat down at his makeshift desk. “They’re totally conscious. They don’t feel any different—not at first anyway.”

  He leaned back, took a drag from his joint, and then released the smoke, eyeing us.

  “Okay, so,” he said, “here’s the deal. Have you ever heard of Toxoplasmosis? The disease that’s caused by Toxoplasma gondii? It’s a parasite that reproduces inside cat intestines and causes infected mice to be sexually attracted to cats, which makes it easier for cats to eat them. It’s real. I’m serious. Look it up. Well, as far as we know, the plague pathogen is a mutation of Toxoplasma gondii, one that’s evolved to use humans as hosts instead of mice and cats. Normally it causes higher rates of risk-taking behavior and suicide in humans, but, like I said, this is a mutation. They think a strain got into a bunch of chickens in one of those giant factory farms—probably from cat shit in the chicken feed. That’s where it mutated, and then somebody somewhere must have eaten some undercooked chicken. The Home Guard’s been going around incinerating every chicken in Muldoon, but it’s a waste of time because the parasite mutated again after it got into the human population. Now it’s Toxoplasma gondii five—TGV. This strain’s transmitted among humans entirely through sexual acts. In fact, in women and men both, the parasite is only released through orgasm. After sleeping with someone who’s infected, people get flu-like symptoms and slip into a coma. Anywhere from a few hours to a few days later, they die.”

  Chris took one last drag from his joint before stubbing it out in an ashtray made from the bottom of a soda can.

  “This is where it gets weird,” he said. “Death triggers the parasite to take control of the amygdala in the limbic system, where all the most basic, primitive functions are located. The infected person wakes up feeling healthy with all of the brain’s original personality and memory centers intact. They’re basically normal, but with two exceptions: number one, they’re dead, and number two—just like in mice where the original strain first evolved—the host’s libido is stimulated. That’s because the parasite has begun to lay its microscopic eggs in the tissues of the host’s reproductive organs. We don’t really understand how, but it makes infected humans do virtually anything to…do the wild thing. To get it on. The humpty dumpty. Know what I’m saying, people? There’s evidence that a pheromone is released along with the eggs, which attracts even uninfected people to the host. This is stage one, and it lasts no more than about five days. In stage two, things go downhill, and the sex drive gets even stronger. People start to lose verbal skills and go numb at the fingers and toes. This is because the parasite’s larvae feed on the outer brain matter. It slowly begins to eat everything but the amygdala. Meanwhile, the colony lays millions more eggs in the host’s reproductive organs.”

  Chris stood and led us over to the opposite side of the dusty grain-elevator engine.

  “Have a look at this.”

  A pair of bodies, each covered in a thick sheet, lay side by side on an old door supported by a pair of sawhorses.

  Chris moved to lift the sheet, but Ian stopped him, faced Bryce and me, and said, “You don’t have to see this if you don’t want to.”

  By now, I didn’t care what I saw. I was feeling not just emotionally drained, but emotionally blank. I knew I could see anything right now without being affected by it. And I was also curious. Learning about the disease was helping me focus my thoughts, and, surprisingly, even calming me down a little.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  Bryce, on the other hand, had had enough. “Sorry, I think I need to catch my breath,” he said, and stepped outside.

  Chris pushed back the sheet to partially expose one of the bodies.

  I’d thought I could handle it, but I gagged when I saw what was lying on the table. Chris had only revealed the body’s torso and pelvic area. The face was still covered, but I could tell right away that it was Mr. Hershel. He had been cut into and opened up from his neck all the way down to his pelvis. I hadn’t ever seen human organs on display like that. The scent of wet offal rose from the cavity like heat. But that wasn’t the worst part.

  The penis was still erect, as stiff as the rest of the body. The testicles had blackened and swollen even further.

  “Oh my God.” I took a step back.

  Chris uncapped a scalpel from his breast pocket.

  “Stage three is bad,” he said. “The host body starts to decay, movement becomes awkward, personality and memory fades, and people start to get, well, kinda rapey. Men generally maintain a perpetual erection. It’s the last chance for the parasite to pass its eggs to a new host, so the reproduction impulse goes into overdrive. At this point, in the case of male hosts,” Chris nodded at Mr. Hershel’s testicles, “the parasite has replaced all of the human semen with its own eggs, which are suspended in a kind of honey—a little like bees’ honey—that the new larvae will feed on after hatching in the new host.”

  Chris carefully positioned the scalpel over one of Mr. Hershel’s bloated testicles. He carefully punctured the skin. Immediately, a viscous, yellow substance oozed from the puncture.

  He held a droplet on the tip of the scalpel blade, displaying it as well as possible in the granary’s dim light.

  “If you were to taste it, it would taste a lot like honey,” he said, then laughed. “Not that I recommend tasting it.”

&nb
sp; Right away I thought about Bryce coming in my mouth, and how I’d spit out his semen as an afterthought. But was I still at risk? What if Bryce was infected? What if I’d felt so attracted to him because he’d been releasing the pheromones Chris mentioned? After all, who, in a normal state of mind, would do anything so strange as to go down on someone while inside a buried coffin?

  “How contagious is it?” I asked. “I mean, if you did taste it, would you get infected?”

  “Probably not.” Chris shrugged casually. “Not as far as we know, anyway. TGV is only passed through male-to-female genitalia contact—vaginal sex. So, kids, always use protection!” He gave Ian and me an ironic thumbs-up. “Otherwise, you’ll end up like poor Mr. Hershel here.” Chris nodded at Mr. Hershel’s motionless body as he pulled the sheet back over it. “Or, even worse,” he added, “like this guy who you two found at the high school.” He slapped a hand down on what must have been the knee of the other covered body. “Poor guy cut off his own twizzler when he couldn’t stop thinking about forcing himself on cheerleaders.” He winced. “Didn’t help him any, though. When the parasite’s life cycle completes, the colony dies, and the host expires, too, and that’s what happened to this guy; he finally expired and fell through that window above the showers. But a host’s natural expiration can take many months. The only way to stop the process earlier is to destroy the amygdala. That’s why the Home Guard doesn’t have any qualms about shooting TGV positives in the head. They could keep them isolated until they expire naturally, but that’s too costly, and, according to them, too risky. An ice pick in the ear would be neater, but the rangers like their guns. That’s why they get away with it, though—because TGV positives are technically already dead.”

  Setting aside Chris’s callousness, I tried my best to understand.

  “But how are they dead?” I asked. “I mean, I get that they’ve technically died, and that the parasite takes over the brain. But if a person is awake, and has the same personality, memories, and thoughts, how is that any different than being alive? Especially in the first stages?”