“I found it yesterday.” There was a rasp in his voice. He held up the plastic bag that had been lying in his lap and a large handful of pills. “I asked Xolani for these a week or so ago. She said when I was ready, I could just take the pills, put the bag over my head, and I’d go to sleep and never wake up. No pain. But . . . I couldn’t do it.”
Two tears spilled from Gabe’s eyes and plummeted down his cheeks. Rhys’s knees buckled, dropping him to the wet, cold ground. He wasn’t sure how long he knelt there, shivering in the frigid morning air. Long enough for the rest of the Jugs to begin stirring from their tents.
“I guess I’ll ask Xolani to help,” Gabe murmured at last.
Rhys lifted his eyes to see Joe behind Gabe at the far edge of camp, where he’d been standing third watch.
“No. I’ll do it.” Rhys cleared his throat when his voice cracked. “I’ll help you. It should be . . . it should be someone who cares.”
Joe bowed his head and shuffled away.
“Today? Now?” Gabe’s eyes sought his, pleading. “I don’t . . . I can’t make it through the day, waiting. The past couple days, I’ve felt my brain getting foggy, and I’m getting really tired. Xolani says I could go catatonic at any time.”
“Okay.” Rhys knelt there a moment longer, his legs and feet aching with the cold, and finally he turned to crawl back into the tent, grabbing the rest of his clothing: the jacket they’d scavenged for him once the weather turned cold, the belt with the knife sheath and handgun holster.
When he looked up, he saw Darius watching him.
“I can do it, boy.”
Rhys shook his head. “No. It has to be me. Just have everyone start gathering wood. Please?”
Darius murmured his assent, and Rhys backed out of the tent, turning to see Emmy clinging to Gabe and crying. The other Jugs were saying their farewells to him, patting his shoulder or shaking his hand. It was polite and strange and gentle and macabre. Rhys wanted to scream at them for being so sanguine when it felt like a boulder was crushing his chest and pulverizing his ribs. How dare they just accept a world where the best gift they could hope to give someone they cared about was a swift, clean, merciful death? How dare they force him to accept it as well?
A large hand landed on Rhys’s shoulder, and Joe leaned close to his ear. “There’s a clearing about twenty yards that way. It’s within scanner range but private. It’s pretty. Take all the time you need.”
Rhys nodded, feeling hollow, like someone had gouged his heart and lungs out of his chest with a rusty bayonet. It felt as if he was going to his own death. He wished he were. He would rather be Gabe, knowing it would be over soon.
He would rather be Darius, hard enough to do this without flinching.
“Do you know how you want to do it?” Rhys asked as he led Gabe to the clearing, their fingers laced together. The question felt odd and detached, especially for such a peaceful, pleasant place. The closer they got to the river, the more lush the landscape became, the scrub pines of the high desert transitioning back into a rainforest more characteristic of the Pacific Northwest.
Gabe shrugged. “I’ll try to take the pills again, I guess? Maybe you could sit with me until I fall asleep. Put the bag over my head.”
“Okay.” Rhys ran a listless hand over the moist, mossy bark of a fallen tree trunk. His eyes burned.
How could they be speaking of this as though it were so mundane?
Gabe handed him the plastic bag and looked down at his handful of pills, staring at them as though mesmerized.
“Rhys?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think I could have that kiss now?”
Rhys’s breath left him in an explosive gasp, as if he’d been punched in the chest. His throat was so tight and dry he could barely speak, but somehow he managed a quavering whisper. “Yeah.”
Gabe’s lips were soft, damp, and salty beneath his. Rhys brushed his mouth across Gabe’s once, then again. And then Gabe’s arms snapped around him, and Gabe was sobbing into his shoulder. Rhys clung to him with every ounce of strength he possessed, trying to crush Gabe’s ribs, trying to burrow into his skin. He looked up into the clear, cold sky and prayed to God—that bastard who had never once revealed Himself or His supposed mercy in all those years of hell at the monastery—to spare him this.
Finally, Gabe pulled away, wiping at his face. “Okay. I think I’m ready.”
Rhys nodded, feeling hollow and cold again. Gabe sank down onto the mossy ground, kneeling, and cupped his hand to his mouth, tossing back the pills and following them with a long drink from his canteen. A moment later, he gagged loudly, falling forward. Rhys flinched as Gabe coughed and retched, spilling the pills onto the ground with a torrent of bile.
“I can’t,” he sobbed brokenly. “I can’t make myself swallow. I can’t.”
“It’s okay.” Rhys sank down beside him, drawing Gabe to his shoulder, rocking him. “It’s okay.”
“What am I going to do?”
Rhys closed his eyes and shuddered, his stomach twisting. He pressed a fervent kiss to Gabe’s temple. He could do this. He could do this for Gabe, who had always taken care of him.
“It’s okay. I’ll take care of you. Just . . . stay where you are. Keep your eyes closed. All right?”
Gabe nodded, sniffling, and Rhys stood, tipping his head back and drawing several deep breaths until his trembling stopped. Gabe knelt there almost prayerfully, his head bowed, his hands open, palms upturned on his thighs. Rhys drew his handgun out of its holster.
There. The base of the skull. He could hear Xolani coaching him. Take out the brain stem. Death is instant and painless.
He thought his hand would be shaking, but it was strangely steady. Gabe wasn’t. He quaked visibly past the short barrel of the gun, tense and ready to flinch away.
“Hey, Gabe?”
“Yeah?”
Gabe’s head came up only a fraction of an inch and, sickened with his own calculated distraction, Rhys pulled the trigger in that relaxed, trusting instant when Gabe stopped anticipating the shot.
Gabe pitched forward, and an anguished shriek echoed through the trees, like the wail of an injured animal. For a horrified moment, Rhys thought he’d missed, that he’d only wounded Gabe, and that Gabe was writhing on the ground in pain.
Then he realized the screaming was his own.
The gun fell from his numbed fingers, and arms of someone Rhys hadn’t known was standing behind him seized him, turning him away from Gabe and into a hard, familiar chest.
He wished he could cry. He sobbed and screeched until he puked, but his eyes continued to burn, dry, as though the pain was too deep for tears. He thrashed and fought against those encasing arms, though, pounding his fists against Darius’s chest and shoulders. Darius withstood it without so much as a grunt.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” He sagged against Darius, vaguely aware of Joe and Titus lifting Gabe and carrying him away. “I can’t. I can’t. Please. Darius, please. Can’t I be done now?”
“No. No!” Darius whispered fiercely, pressing his lips to Rhys’s temple. His arms threatened to crush Rhys. “Not yet, boy. It ain’t time. I ain’t letting you go ’til I got no other choice.”
Rhys did cry, then. He wept as he hadn’t wept since he was twelve and Jacob had set out to make his life hell for every moment of weakness he displayed. He wept for himself, his life so soon to be cut short, and for Gabe, who he’d found only to lose, and for Darius, who would never allow himself to mourn once Rhys was gone. Scalding tears washed down his sweating face in a continuous trickle, creating tracks in the dust and smoke on his cheeks when at last he stood beside Gabe’s pyre.
Then he let Darius lead him back into the tent and hold him while he cried some more.
They camped in that spot another night, until Gabriel’s fire had burned down to embers, and Rhys had slept like he never intended to wake again. The next morning, Darius climbed out of the tent where Rhys still slumbered
bonelessly to find Xolani standing third watch, leaning against a tree and tugging on her braid as she monitored the scanner.
“How is he?” she asked as Darius came to stand beside her.
Darius gave a tired sigh and rubbed his bruised chest. “Don’t know. Don’t know what to do for him.”
“Give him time, I guess. Which is about the most fucking useless advice I’ve ever given.” Xolani sighed, looking exhausted. “Kid’s too damn soft for this life.”
“Isn’t that why we wanna keep him?” Darius laughed humorlessly. “He makes us softer, and it’s been too long since we had that. We miss it. Reminds us we’re human.”
Her mouth twisted. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. And he needs us, because he’s never going to be hard enough. At least I hope not.”
“Oh, I dunno. That was a pretty fucking hard thing he did yesterday.”
“Yeah, and it might just have broken him.” She groaned. “Jesus, I’m maudlin. Get me the fuck back to base, would you? I want a blunt the size of my forearm and a ringside seat to an orgy.”
Darius chuckled, this time with a little more conviction. “Wouldn’t say no to some of Titus’s hooch right about now.” He shuffled, hanging his head. “How much longer you think he’s got? It’s been over eight weeks, and he’s still not a Jug.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have Beta or Gamma yet, either.”
“Matter of time, now, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not.”
Darius stiffened, staring at her sharply. “Explain.”
“Eight weeks is a statistical outlier as far as the timeline for infection goes. The vast majority of infections manifest in the three-to-six-week window. The fact he’s made it to this point without manifesting any of the strains might suggest he’s immune to all of them.”
“Keep talking.” Darius heard his voice get rougher, more demanding. His fingers dug into the damp bark of the tree.
“My best guess—outside the very real possibility of another mutation—is that Houtman had a minor exposure to Gamma and limited exposure to Alpha. Neither was sufficient to confer immunity to the other, so he wound up infected with both.” Darius nodded, and Xolani’s braid snagged on the rough trunk of the tree as she rolled her head to the side to look at him. “Now, keeping in mind that—again—this is guesswork, it stands to reason that Rhys, who was the one tussling with the revs with blood all over him when we found them, had more exposure to Beta and Gamma, and combined with his massive exposure to Alpha, could get immunity to all the strains. Maybe he built up antibodies to both simultaneously so they . . . canceled each other out, for lack of a better explanation. Or maybe the continued Alpha exposure is acting as a—I don’t know—a suppressant of some sort, preventing the Beta or Gamma from manifesting. We’ve seen that in the past with chronic viruses. Viral inhibitors could prevent outbreaks, even if they couldn’t cure the infection.”
“Is that really possible?” Darius stared at her, too stunned to care how urgent he sounded.
Xolani snorted. “Fucked if I know. This goddamn virus is so erratic and unpredictable, and our knowledge of how it works so limited . . . Darius, I can’t do more than make guesses based on suppositions based on radical hypotheses that would make my microbiology and immunology professors slit their wrists if they weren’t already dead. Another possible explanation is that he has some sort of inherent immunity, and if he does, he is—as far as we know—quite literally one in almost five hundred million in this country alone. It’s possible that survivors who haven’t been found yet or who made it to Colorado Springs have the same immunity, but we’ll never know because they’ll never be exposed. I sure as hell hope that’s the case because if it’s hereditary, it means that as long as they keep growing the gene pool, a few generations down the line most of the population will be protected. Either way, my best guess, as far as Rhys is concerned, is that if he hasn’t manifested any of the strains by now, he’s in the clear.”
Darius tightened his jaw against the ache that tried to take root in his chest, as though relief and distress were having a tug-of-war with his internal organs. “So he can go. He can go to Colorado Springs with the other civvies.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.” Xolani shook her head decisively. “We don’t know what’s living in his blood. Or what he may be shedding as an airborne pathogen, for that matter. There’s a chance that he’s simply asymptomatic rather than immune. If that’s the case, he could still be able to transmit the disease. Ever heard of Typhoid Mary?”
“So we have to keep him away from the civilian population for the rest of his life.”
Xolani nodded, smiling softly. “Lucky us.”
“Jesus, Xolani. He can’t stay with us. He’s not a Jug. If you’re right, he’ll never be a Jug. He’ll never be able to keep up. He’ll never be safe with us, doing what we do.”
“Who else is equipped to protect him and keep him segregated from the uninfected population? The fact that we don’t want to give him up is a happy coincidence, but I’m not sure he’d be wild about leaving us, either.” She sighed. “It’s entirely possible we’ll benefit from this a lot more than he will, but it’s a pretty fucking imperfect world.”
“I don’t like telling him he has to stay no matter what he wants.”
“Yeah? How many of us got a choice about where we ended up?” Her expression became slightly bitter at that. “Besides, he’s known from the beginning that he’d be with us for the duration. I like to think maybe he wants to stay.”
Darius nodded slowly. “Guess I should go find out.”
She gave him a wicked grin. “Take your time. I’ll oversee breaking camp.”
Darius sat for some time simply watching Rhys sleep. There were still crusted tracks of salt around his eyes, and his mouth was slack. An occasional grimace hinted at troubled dreams.
Xolani was right. He was way too soft for this life. Darius wasn’t sure when he’d come to need that softness, but he didn’t want to give it up. The problem was, Rhys might have to stay with the Jugs, but Darius couldn’t count on Rhys wanting to stay with him. Not when he was so young. Not when he had a whole new lease on life and so much living to explore.
Eventually, Rhys’s eyes blinked open, immediately filling with a sadness that suggested he would rather have remained asleep.
Instead, his gaze slowly moved to Darius, somber and expectant.
“I’m glad you’re awake.” Darius hesitated a moment, though not as much as he might once have done, before covering Rhys’s hand with his own and squeezing it. He could give Rhys the roughness he needed. The softness, though, that came a bit harder, but he was willing to try. Xolani had threatened to break Darius’s jaw if he didn’t follow Rhys to that clearing to be there to catch him after his friend died, but now he was glad he’d done it. He wouldn’t trade the tears Rhys had shed in his arms, needing him, for all the pleasure in the world.
He’d do anything to be what this boy needed, to give him what little joy they could find in this life they were stuck with. Maybe that was twisted, but like Xolani said, it was a pretty fucking imperfect world.
“We need to get on the road?” Rhys mumbled.
“Eventually, yeah. But first, we need to talk about your future.”
Wariness crept into those guileless hazel eyes. “Is something wrong? Am I . . . Does Xolani think it will be me soon?”
“Well, that’s the thing. Xolani doesn’t think it’s gonna be you at all.”
“I don’t understand.” Rhys’s voice barely rose above a whisper. Darius suspected he might have screamed his throat raw in those first few minutes of catastrophic grief.
Taking a deep breath, Darius gave Rhys a rundown of Xolani’s latest theories. Rhys took it in silently, nodding slowly, not speaking until Darius had finished.
“What will I do?”
“I suppose that’s up to you,” Darius fixed his eyes on a spot above Rhys’s head. “You have to stay with us. Eve
n if you never show a symptom, you might still be able to transmit the viruses, infect other people. But aside from that, you can make your own choices. You don’t . . . you don’t have to stay with me. It’s not necessary anymore.”
Rhys stared at him in disbelief and with something uncomfortably close to hurt. “You want me to go. Since you don’t have to help me anymore.”
Darius shook his head quickly. “No.”
Rhys blinked and continued staring, waiting for more. But Darius couldn’t put the more into words.
Rhys would never have the strength to be evenly matched against him. He’d never have the strength to reassure Darius that he wasn’t taking unfair advantage of a weaker, more vulnerable man.
All Darius had was Rhys’s determination that he knew his own mind well enough to decide.
It wasn’t perfect. Not even close. Or maybe it was fine and Darius just needed to get over his hang-up about the lack of parity between them.
“I just want to make sure you have the freedom to choose what you want to do,” he finally said in response to that expectant expression on Rhys’s face.
“I told you what I wanted.” Something raw swam just under the surface of Rhys’s eyes. Fear, maybe. Of what, rejection? “When I was getting over that infection and I asked you what would happen if I didn’t end up dying. I said I didn’t want things to change. I wanted them to stay the way they were, to stay . . .” His throat bobbed visibly. “With you.”
Darius sighed. It had been easy to acquiesce to that request before, when Rhys had been weak and recovering, and when it looked like the possibility of his survival was getting dimmer all the time. Now, though, Rhys had an actual future riding on the answer. And Darius wanted to agree far too much to trust whose best interest he’d be serving if he allowed himself to do so.
“I’m not sure you really knew what you were saying. You were sick. You’re young, and I know you’re scared of things being different just when you’re starting to find your feet. What’s familiar feels safe, but—”
Rhys surged up from the blanket, shoving Darius and nearly toppling him over in an assault so unexpected Darius didn’t have time to brace for it. Rhys’s eyes blazed with fury.
Strain Page 32