Contaminated

by Em Garner

  That’s why it didn’t happen all at the same time. Just a few cases, here and there. A few people going off the deep end, losing their marbles, going wackadoo, dropping their baskets. The stories made the news, but mostly only locally. At least until a movie star went nuts on the set of his latest film and someone recorded it. That little breakdown ended up circulating on every radio station and social networking site around. It even got set to a catchy dance beat that got played at all the proms that year with the curse words bleeped out. It was one long bunch of bleeps.

  The first wave hit in mid-June, going on two years ago. A heat wave washed over the country. And finally, something broke. First one or two people, then more and more. They woke up and began their days, and somewhere along the way, something broke inside them, and they all just… lost it.

  An “Epidemic of Rage” is what one headline called it, and “experts” speculated it was caused by the hottest spring on record for the past eighty years, along with what was shaping up to be an even hotter summer. Social media specialists said it was because we’d all become too accustomed to using the Internet, that manners were disappearing. Old people said it was young people who hadn’t been brought up right, and young people said it was because old people were too old. Maybe that was all part of it, but the real reason was that ThinPro water had eaten holes in people’s brains.

  We call it the Contamination or the Hollywood virus, but the official name for it is Frank’s syndrome, after the doctor who finally figured out the source. Frank’s syndrome causes loss of impulse control and increased aggression. It mimics the effects of stroke as well as several kinds of drug use. So far as anyone knows, it can’t be cured or reversed, though it can be controlled. Basically, anyone who drank the contaminated water has the potential to get the disease, even now, months and months after they pulled the product off the market. People who drank more had a higher chance of getting it, but all it takes, really, is one bottle.

  When it hit Lebanon, my parents had both gone to work. Opal and I were home alone. I was sleeping in to enjoy the first days of summer break. The house was quiet, until I heard the neighbors’ dogs barking. They barked a lot, but not like this. Not for so long or so loud. I got up, went downstairs. Opal was at the table eating cereal and reading a book.

  I still thought nothing of it until the dogs, two of them from next door, ran up onto our back deck. Snapping and biting, they paced in front of the sliding glass doors, tails tucked between their legs. They were begging to get in—something they’d never done, even when they came over to crap in our yard. Our neighbors’ dogs were Rottweilers, by the way. Nice dogs, but not timid. They’d run off a meter reader or two before our neighbor got electric collars for them. It had never stopped them from running over here.

  “What’s going on with Tooty and Frooty?” Opal asked me.

  Before I could answer, Craig from next door stumbled onto the deck. He was wearing a bathing suit, which wasn’t that unusual since they’d put in a pool the year before, and it was hot out. The lack of balance wasn’t that surprising, either, since if he was out by the pool, he usually had a couple of beers, too. What did make both of us cry out and back up was the way he staggered into the glass door.

  Full on, his head smacked the glass so hard, it broke into stars but didn’t shatter. Bright red blood showed up on his forehead and started streaming down his face. His mouth worked like he was shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything except the barking. The dogs circled his feet, dodging his kicks.

  Craig never hit his dogs. They were as much his children as his real kids were. Maybe more, since the dogs usually obeyed him, and his kids mostly didn’t. His dogs were allowed to sleep on his bed with him. They rode in his truck with him. And now he was kicking at them, screaming so loud, the veins stood out on his bloody face.

  “What’s the matter with Craig?” Opal cried. She took my hand and held it tight.

  “I don’t know!”

  “We need to call Mom!”

  Craig turned. His eyes looked bloodshot. His teeth had blood in them when he grinned. He walked into the glass again. And again. As hard as he could each time, like nothing even hurt him. His nose squashed against his face. The next time he grinned, I saw he’d lost a tooth.

  “He’s going to get in! He’s gonna get in, Velvet! Stop him!”

  I didn’t know how to stop him. I was still in my pajamas, my breath sour, my eyes crusty. I thought maybe I was dreaming until Opal’s fingernails cut into the skin of my hand.

  I thought of a weapon, grabbing a knife or trying to find something else. “Upstairs, Opal, run! Mom and Dad’s room!”

  We ran, reaching the foot of the stairs just as Craig finally broke through it. We went up the stairs on hands and feet, pushing ourselves. I slammed the door to my parents’ room at the top of the hall. I locked the door. We could hear Craig downstairs, screaming. He wasn’t saying any words, just screaming. Loud, sharp bursts of noise. Opal clamped her hands over her ears.

  I tried to shove the dresser in front of the door, but my parents’ TV was too big and heavy. It was really old, still had a VCR built into it, and was twice the size of the big flat-screen downstairs. I shoved, I pushed, but the dresser didn’t move.

  I didn’t think about pushing the TV off. It would’ve broken, and my mom and dad would be angry. How did I know that it wasn’t just Craig who’d gone insane? How did I know that somewhere out there in the street, my dad was doing the same thing to someone else’s daughters while my mom was trying to get home to us, unable to because the roads had all been blocked?

  There were windows in there, but nothing close to the ground. My mind raced through all the scenarios my parents had ever put us through. They trusted me here, alone with Opal. They were counting on me, and so was she.

  Fire? The fire ladder was at the end of the hall. I’d run through flames before I’d run out in front of Craig, who by then was pounding up the stairs.

  Tornado? We were supposed to hide in the basement, in the closet beneath the stairs. Wrong choice for this situation.

  It felt like years before I got it, though it could only have been a few seconds. My dad had a golf club under the bed. Once I’d asked him what it was for, and he’d told me, “It’s for when the serial killer comes in the middle of the night. Or the zombies.” I’d never appreciated my dad’s sense of humor or his preparedness so much as I did right then.

  “Get the club,” he’d said matter-of-factly over pizza and cards one night while my mom was out at the movies with some friends. We were going over all the emergency procedures we should use if my parents weren’t home. “But you won’t use it unless you have to. While whoever’s there is pounding on the door, you take Opal and run into the bathroom. Get into the cubbyhole. Pull it shut behind you; that will buy you some time. You’ll have to pull up the board on the floor, but I left it loose, just in case.”

  “Oh, Dad.” I was laughing, but Opal was all ears.

  “And then what, Daddy?”

  “Then you push out the panel in the garage ceiling just below it. You can jump down into the garage from there. Get out of the house. And then just run. If it’s dark, hide in the woods.”

  “Will a serial killer still be able to find us, Daddy?”

  My dad had looked solemn, though there was a twinkle in his eyes to make all of this less scary. “Not if you’re very quiet and it’s dark. And if it’s daytime, you just run as fast as you can across the street to Garry and Hope’s house.”

  “But, Dad, what if it’s a zombie?”

  “Then,” my dad had said, “there will be more than one, and you need to be extra careful to figure out if they’re the slow kind or the fast kind.”

  “You watch too many scary movies, Dad,” I’d told him.

  Turns out, my dad wasn’t the only one. His plan worked, by the way. It got me and Opal out of the house just fine. In our pajamas, we ran across the street to Garry and Hope’s house. He greeted us at the door with
a shotgun and urged us inside. On the news, reports of all kinds of crazy things were coming in.

  “I’ve never been a religious man,” Garry had said, “but if you girls haven’t taken Jesus as your Lord and Savior, I think maybe you’d better think about it.”

  “We’re already Catholic,” Opal had told him.

  It’s funny what stands out in memories. That made me laugh at the time, what she said, mostly because Garry looked like she’d told him she’d stepped in dog crap and wiped her feet on his living room sofa. What difference did Jesus make just then? Still, it was his wife who shushed him and brought us cold cans of soda to drink while Garry went around to all the windows and boarded them up.

  Craig didn’t come across the street. I don’t know what happened to him. We never saw him again. I do know, though, what happened to my dad.

  We watched the local news team filming a riot in downtown Lebanon. The street by my dad’s office. I caught a glimpse of red hair in the crowd, which was surging like some vicious, wild sea into a storefront, bodies crashing like waves into the glass windows. It might have been anyone, could have been anyone. But I knew it was him.

  Stores had been broken into—and the people who were trying to run away with whatever they could carry, armfuls of clothes and iPods and watches, they weren’t Contaminated. Connies don’t care about stuff like that. The people who were looting the stores weren’t sick, just greedy and awful.

  “What we seem to have here,” said the wild-eyed local police chief, “is a genuine zombie outbreak!”

  He sounded more excited than worried. In the background, Connies staggered around, their clothes sometimes ripped, their bodies bruised and bleeding because nothing seemed to faze them. They’d walk into a brick wall, fall down, and get back up again with bone showing through the cuts on their heads. That was why everyone assumed they were the walking undead, just like in the movies. That’s why the police gunned them down without warning, or ran them over with their cars. That’s why they tossed them by the dozens into the back of trucks and drove them to fields outside of town, where they dug giant ditches and poured the bodies in, covered them with concrete, and pushed dirt over them. They didn’t burn them because they feared “airborne contagion,” but nobody seemed to think about what an undead corpse virus might do to the environment, encased in concrete in a farmer’s field.

  People are really, really stupid.

  Eventually they’ll make memorials out of those ditches, the ones filled with concrete and bodies. Nothing too fancy. There’s supposed to be money coming, sometime, for that. But for now they built metal rail fences around them and planted flowers on top. Plaques without names on them. Nobody’s really sure who’s in there, and while there’s been a lot of noise about digging them up, nobody’s managed to get the authority to do it yet.

  It seems people don’t like the fact their loved ones were dumped in ditches, even if they did try to bite off their faces.

  We never got official documentation saying my dad was one of those people killed in the first wave, the one that stretched on through those awful summer months and turned parts of the world into a George A. Romero movie. He never came home. My mom was finally able to get to us the day after Craig slammed himself into the glass door. She took us home from Garry and Hope’s house. She told us not to worry. She told us everything would be okay, and I don’t think she was lying. She didn’t know any better.

  My mom was lucky. By the time she fell sick, they’d figured out what was causing the disease. They weren’t automatically killing all the Connies, just capturing them to deal with them the best they could.

  We never saw my dad again.

  SEVEN

  NOW THAT I’M GOING TO GET MY MOM, I SEE them everywhere. Neutralized Connies, with their collars. Regular lobotomies make people calm, but the collars do more than that. Blank faces, slack jaws, dead eyes. There’s one in the grocery store, shuffling along behind a grim-faced woman who must be his wife, their cart stacked high with jars of baby food and adult diapers. One at the post office where I go to pick up the assistance check, standing in front of the display of free shipping boxes and waiting patiently while the man with her buys stamps. It’s not that suddenly there are so many of them, but that I didn’t notice them before.

  The worst is the little boy I pass on my way to work every day. The first time I see him, I think he’s hanging out in the backyard, maybe playing with the trucks I see stacked up around him. It’s cold outside, but he’s bundled up pretty warm. Hat, scarf, gloves, boots. It’s more than what I have, anyway. I wave when I pass by the yard, and he looks at me but doesn’t wave back.

  The next day, he’s there again. Same place. I’d think he hadn’t moved at all, but that’s silly, because he had to have gone inside overnight, right? But on the third day, as time is spinning slowly closer to the day when I can pick up my mom and bring her home, I stop and look over the fence at him.

  “Hi,” I say.

  He’s smaller than Opal. Maybe six, or small for an eight-year-old. His nose and cheeks are red. He’s still staring, but he doesn’t react when I speak.

  “Hi, what’s your name?” I don’t know why I’m asking. Why I care. I shouldn’t blame him for not answering; after all, I’m a stranger and any kid these days should know better than to talk to strangers. Even ones like me, who are hopefully not so creepy.

  He gets up then. His first step kicks a truck out of the way like he doesn’t even notice. I hear the scrape of chain on concrete. The kid’s moving faster now, heading for the fence at not quite a run.

  He doesn’t make it even halfway before he’s jerked off his feet. Flat onto his back. He sprawls, arms and legs out like he’s trying to make a snow angel, though so far, the winter’s been bitterly cold and snowless. The chain is stretched out behind him, attached to a ring set into the concrete.

  Horrified, I gasp and cover my mouth with my cold fingers. Before I can say anything, the back door opens and a woman comes out, with a baby on her hip. She’s barely dressed, wearing only a pair of sagging pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. Slippers. The baby starts to scream and, no wonder, brought out into the frigid air wearing only a diaper. I’d scream, too.

  “Oh, God, Tyler. Get up. Get up, get up, get up,” she chants, leaning over the boy on the ground. “Please, get up.”

  Her head whips around to stare at me. “What are you looking at? What did you do to him? Don’t you know any better?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  She ignores me. The little boy on the ground, Tyler, sits up slowly. He doesn’t look at his mom. He doesn’t look at me. He crawls on hands and knees back to the pile of frozen sand and his trucks, where he sits and stares at nothing.

  His mother has snot running out of her nose, and it looks frozen, too. “It’s the only place he’s quiet! It’s the only place he’ll stay quiet!”

  I hold up my hands and back away from the fence. I’m not judging her. She puts her hand over the baby’s face, kissing its head, and, watching me warily, ducks back into the house. I can see her through the glass even after she closes the door. She’s watching me, making sure I go away.

  So I do.

  * * *

  “Okay, hon, I have to go over some paperwork with you first. And you’ll have to watch a training video, okay?” Jean’s as nice as ever. She smiles at me, and I know I should be smiling back but I can only manage a grimace. “Don’t you worry about anything. It’s real easy to take care of her. The new collars are wonderful, just wonderful. Really.”

  “Really?” I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Fortunately, she doesn’t notice, or if she does, she’s too nice to show it.

  Jean pats my shoulder. “Really.” She takes me to a small room with a flickering TV, which plays a DVD showing me how to take care of my mom. The narrator’s careful to refer to the Connies as patients and I realize this movie was made for hospitals, not civilians, to use.

  At any rate, the movie shows me how my mom’s b
een fitted with a surgically implanted pair of electrodes, connected wirelessly to the collar she’ll always have to wear. The collar takes a dual battery-pack system that has to be recharged at regular intervals. Two batteries guarantees that one will always be working while the other recharges, or in case it needs to be replaced. There’s no information on how long the batteries last or how much they cost to replace. But you do get the charger included, “for free.”

  The movie demonstrates with diagrams and close-ups of someone’s hand on how to replace the batteries. The explanation is painfully slow, and I’m sort of afraid to think what sorts of doctors and nurses were so stupid, they weren’t considered smart enough to get this. I’m only seventeen and I figured it out before they even got halfway through the explanation.

  The narrator is something else, too. Perky, bubbly, entirely annoying. “Bathing the patient can be accomplished through the use of sponge baths or limited showering. Though the StayCalm collar is waterproof and water-resistant up to four feet, it’s not recommended it be submerged.”

  Another diagram. I wonder if the collar will simply stop working underwater, no longer sending its electrical pulses to the parts of the brain they want to damage on purpose to counteract the ones ruined by the disease. The next diagram shows me what happens instead.

  “If the collar is submerged in water for more than seven minutes, the unit will be sent into Mercy Mode.”

  The diagram shows a Connie underwater with X’s for eyes and lightning bolts shooting out from the collar.

  “Likewise,” the narrator says in soothing tones, “Mercy Mode will also be triggered if the collar is removed by anyone other than a licensed technician, if the battery power fails for longer than seven minutes, or if the unit is triggered to fire more than thirty-two times in a twenty-minute time span. Mercy Mode is announced by a single beep from the unit, followed by color-coded lights. Steady green means the unit is functioning appropriately. Flashing green indicates extraneous activity. Yellow indicates unexpected surging, while flashing red indicates the introduction of Mercy Mode.”