A Cure for Madness

by Jodi McIsaac

  The governor’s voice came over the air. “Our health officials have been working tirelessly since the discovery of the Gaspereau prion disease, and I would like to thank them for their commitment and dedication. Our police forces and state troopers have also been doing their best to maintain safety and security of the public in this difficult time. They, too, deserve our thanks.

  “As you know, I have declared a state of emergency so that we can deal with this crisis as quickly and efficiently as possible. We are grateful for the support of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as our National Guard.

  “Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, a treatment for Gaspereau has yet to be found, and the infection rate is showing no signs of slowing down. In order to prevent the spread of this disease to other parts of the state and country, I am quarantining the town of Clarkeston, effective immediately. All travel into and out of the region is prohibited. All flights have been canceled, and as of this time, all roads out of the area have been closed.

  “It is imperative that no one leave the area until we know we have contained this disease. I realize this will be inconvenient for some, but our priority must be the health and safety of the public.

  “I must remind you again, there is no reason to panic. Supplies will be brought into Clarkeston; there is no need for hoarding. Stay home if you can and avoid contact with others. We are going to beat this thing.”

  The DJ’s voice came back on, less confident than before. “And there you have it. That was Governor Angela Preston, speaking to the media, declaring Clarkeston under a state of quarantine. We’ll be following this story closely and will update our listeners as more information comes in.”

  Another country song came on, and I slammed my fist on the dial, shutting the radio off.

  “Fuck!” I screamed, banging my head on the steering wheel. If only we’d left when we had the chance.

  A knock at the passenger window made me jump. A young man in a blue shirt emblazoned with “ParkLine” in white letters was peering in at me, a mask affixed around his mouth and nose. I made sure my own mask was fastened tight and rolled down the window a crack. “What?” I snapped.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, reining myself in. “I just . . . found out about the quarantine.”

  “They’ve quarantined us?” His eyes went wide.

  I nodded. “The whole town. The governor just announced it.”

  “Shit,” he said.

  I nodded again and made to roll up my window.

  “Wait,” he said. “I came over to tell you that this isn’t a parking zone. Are you waiting for someone?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m just waiting for my friend. He’s a doctor here.”

  “Is this his car?” the attendant asked, eyeing the parking decal dangling off the rearview mirror.

  “Yes. He asked me to pick him up.”

  “Staff parking is over there,” he said, pointing back the way I had come. “That’s probably where he’ll be expecting you.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, sounding clueless. “This is the first time I’ve picked him up. I wasn’t sure where to go.”

  “No problem. And don’t worry too much about the quarantine. We’re all in this together.”

  I forced a smile—not that he could see it behind my mask. He stepped back, pointing again in the direction I was clearly expected to head. I didn’t have much choice but to put the car in reverse and turn around. I watched the attendant in the mirror as I slowly drove away. Finally he headed back to a small booth I hadn’t noticed before in the corner of the lot. Dammit. If—when—Kenneth came out with Wes, we’d have a witness.

  I wanted to text Kenneth, but what if his phone buzzed while he was sneaking Wes out of there? I pulled into a parking space in the staff lot and pressed my knuckles to my forehead. I had to get back to the morgue entrance, and that meant I needed to get rid of the parking lot attendant—now.

  I peered out the window, looking for security cameras. I didn’t see any but pulled my hoodie up over my head just in case. Then I rummaged through the glove compartment and found what I needed—a Swiss Army knife.

  There was no way this plan would work.

  I walked a few cars over, gave one last furtive glance around, and stabbed the knife into one of the rear tires of a shiny black Lexus.

  It was harder than I thought it would be, and I had to give the knife a good tug to get it back out. But then the air escaped with a hiss. I did the same with the other rear tire.

  I sprinted back to my car and drove to the attendant’s booth near the morgue entrance.

  “Excuse me,” I said, rolling down my window. He looked down at me. “My friend called and said he had to work late, so I’m going to come back later. But when I was in the staff lot, I noticed a car with two flat back tires. I’m pretty sure they were slashed. I thought someone should check it out, make sure there’s not a vandal working his way around the parked cars. Or, you know . . . someone who’s sick.”

  “Really?” the attendant said, glancing around at the cars near us.

  “Yeah, it looked pretty bad,” I said with a worried nod.

  “Okay,” the boy said as he climbed down from his booth, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. “I’ll get one of the security guys. We’re supposed to let them know about anything unusual.”

  I drove slowly around the lot, waiting for him to round the corner to the staff lot, then raced back to the morgue entrance. It had been almost half an hour at this point. I was about to head into the morgue myself to look for him when the door opened. Someone in a blue protective suit was backing out, pulling a gurney with a body bag on it. My heart forgot to beat for a few seconds, but then the suited figure turned and waved at me. I jumped out of the car.

  “Is he okay?” I asked, as Kenneth unzipped the body bag.

  “Get in the backseat, quickly,” Kenneth said to Wes, who looked barely conscious. I helped him off the gurney and into the car, where he collapsed onto the seat. “He’ll be okay,” Kenneth told me. Then his eyes tightened. “Where the hell were you? I looked out the door a few minutes ago and you weren’t here. Do you know how dangerous this is?”

  I glared at him. “I’ve been waiting for you. I had to get rid of a parking attendant who was wondering why I was lurking around the morgue. And yes, I know perfectly well how dangerous this is.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I’m on edge. They were keeping Wes sedated. He’ll come out of it in a bit. Made my job easier, for sure.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Turns out people tend to stay away from you when you tell them you’re carting around a Gaspereau-infected body with several open wounds. I kept my face covered as much as possible—not hard with this getup—so I don’t think anyone knew who I was. But I’d better get back in there and give myself an alibi. You just get Wes out of here.”

  “I’m going to kiss you so hard the next time I see you,” I said without thinking. My hands flew up to cover my mouth. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Forget it,” he said. I wished I could see his expression better. But he didn’t sound angry. “You’d better hurry.”

  “Kenneth, I just heard it on the radio. They’re totally quarantining the town. No one can leave.”

  A heartbeat of silence passed between us.

  “I’m not surprised, but I’m sorry for your sake. I know you wanted to get Wes out of here.”

  “Yeah. Well . . . I’ll think of something. Thanks again for your help. I owe you.”

  Our eyes lingered on each other. I was the first to look away.

  “I’d better get back inside,” he said. “Good luck.” Then he wheeled the empty gurney into the morgue without looking back.

  I drove away from the hospital as fast as I could. How long would it be before they discovered Wes was missing? Would they think he had walked off by himself? Would they send people to look for him, or would the
y just replace him with some other person with schizophrenia?

  “Clare?” Wes groaned from the backseat.

  “Hey there, big brother. How are you feeling?”

  “Gross. Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere safe.”

  “Are you working with them?”

  “What? No! Of course not.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Wes, I’m serious!” I tilted the rearview mirror so I could see him better. “I came back for you. I should have done more to keep them from taking you in the first place. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t say anything, just stared out the window.

  “Hey, listen.” I softened my tone. “You have to stay with me, okay? I’ll stand up for you. If you go off on your own, they’ll find you.”

  “Do you know what they did to me?”

  I wasn’t sure how he was going to react, but lying wasn’t the way to regain his trust. “I don’t know all of it, but I think they extracted some cerebrospinal fluid.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest, but it has something to do with the brain.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Kenneth told me. He’s the one who got you out of the hospital.”

  “Did he, now? And since when do we trust Kenneth?”

  “I do.”

  “Bully for you. I don’t trust anyone.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “Says the girl who skips town whenever shit hits the fan.”

  I pressed my lips together. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

  “Want to know what I think?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think they want to study me. They know I’m one of God’s chosen warriors. They think it’s something in my brain, but it’s not. It’s something in my spirit. And they can’t cut that out of me.”

  I knew it would make things worse, but I couldn’t help it. “When was the last time you took your medication?” I asked.

  “This has nothing to do with my schizophrenia!” he shouted, lunging forward between the two front seats and making me swerve into the other lane.

  “Hey!” I said sharply. “Are you trying to get us killed? Sit down and buckle the hell up.”

  He slumped into the backseat, but he didn’t buckle up. The anger rolled off him in waves. What was I supposed to say? “Yes, you’re a spiritual warrior chosen by God to rid the earth of demons?” I didn’t even believe in God, let alone demons and angels. Bad things happened to good people all the time, and there was no rhyme or reason to it, no battle for souls going on behind the scenes.

  In my opinion, if there was a God, he was an asshole. If God had the power to create the world, but he chose to ignore the cries of little girls being raped, mothers who sent their kids to school and picked them up in body bags, and little boys forced to kill their own families as child soldiers, then he wasn’t the kind of God I wanted to know. And if he wasn’t all-powerful, what was the point?

  But I knew better than to tell Wes any of that. The last thing I needed was for him to decide I was under a demonic influence that needed eradicating.

  “Where are we going?” he asked again.

  “Mom and Dad’s first,” I said. “I need to get my things.” I kicked myself for not bringing everything with me. “Then we’re getting out of here.” An idea started to crystalize in my mind. The quarantine had been declared only minutes ago. Surely they didn’t have every road blocked off already. It was now or never.

  “You ever heard of a FEMA camp?” he asked.

  “Um . . . no. FEMA like Federal Emergency Management Agency?”

  “Yeah. They’ve got these concentration camps set up in old military bases and shit. When the world starts ending, that’s where they’ll round everybody up.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, not everybody, probably just the people they want to keep an eye on. They’ve got a list.”

  “Okay . . . so?”

  “I’m on the list.”

  I actually snorted at this. “How could you possibly know that? I’m assuming that if this list actually exists, it’s top secret.”

  He glared at me from the backseat. “I can see the future, okay? I know this is going to happen. And it’s going to be soon.”

  The hair on my arms rose. Normally I would have brushed this off as one of my brother’s many delusions. And it wasn’t like I believed he could tell the future. But the idea of the end of the world coming soon was suddenly not such an outlandish idea.

  “Hey,” I said. “You don’t need to worry about that. We’re going to find a way out of town, then we’ll drive down to Bangor and get on the next flight. You can come back with me to Seattle for a bit.”

  “Whoa, no way. I hate flying,” he said.

  “Whatever. We flew lots as kids.”

  “Why not fly out of here?”

  “They’ve canceled all flights and quarantined the town. But they probably haven’t had enough time to block off every single road out of Clarkeston. We’ll take one of the dirt roads by our old home in the country.”

  “I’m not doing it. I don’t trust you.”

  Ouch. “You want to stay here and go back to the hospital? Come on. You’ve never seen my place in Seattle. You’ll like it there.”

  “You don’t want me on a plane, Clare,” he said ominously.

  “I’m trying to help you! You’ll be right beside me. It will be fine.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  I couldn’t tell if it was a promise or a threat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nine years ago, Wes and I sat across from each other, a small square table between us, as nurses and orderlies bustled around, going about their business while keeping a close eye on the visitation room. He’d only been in the psych hospital for a month.

  “So, listen, I’m, um . . . moving,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “New apartment?”

  “No . . . well, yes. But I’m moving to London. England.”

  He scowled at me, as though he wasn’t sure he had heard me right. “What do you mean?”

  I laughed nervously. “I mean I’m moving to London. In a couple of days. I came to say good-bye.”

  He stared at me, dumbfounded, for a moment. “Do Mom and Dad know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about your friends?”

  “I’m going to tell them all soon. I wanted to tell you first.”

  His face hardened. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I need you here!” he said. A couple of nurses looked in our direction.

  “You’ll be fine,” I whispered, hoping that would coax him to keep his voice down. “You have really good care here, and Mom and Dad will visit lots, I’m sure.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? After what I did for you? I kept it a secret because I promised you I would. And look where it’s gotten me! If you’re going to take off, the least you could do is tell them the truth, and maybe they’ll let me out of here earlier. They’ll know I’m not crazy.”

  But you are crazy. You need this place.

  “It wouldn’t change anything,” I said. “It doesn’t matter why you did it—or even what you did. You’re not here because you beat up Myles; you’re here because you’re sick and you need help.”

  “So that’s it? You’re just going to leave me?”

  “It’s not like you’ll be alone. Like I said, Mom and Dad will visit you lots. I bet Uncle Rob will, too. I’ll call and send postcards. I might not be gone that long.” This wasn’t true. I didn’t ever want to come back.

  His voice changed. It was no longer defiant. He was begging now. “Clare, please. You don’t know what it’s like in here. If you don’t want to tell them what happened, the least you could do is stay.”

  “What, in here?” I asked, alarmed at the thought.

  “Hell no. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Here in Clarkeston, where you ca
n visit me . . . and I can call you if I need you.”

  “You can still call me if you need me,” I said, tracing the grain of the wooden table with my eyes.

  “What good will it do if you’re in fucking London?” he said, slamming his hand down on the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I love you. This is just something I have to do. For myself.”

  “You bitch!” he screamed, his chair clattering to the floor as he jumped to his feet. “This is the thanks I get for protecting you?”

  “Wes, calm down,” I urged. A couple of orderlies were making their way toward us. “I’ll come back and visit, I promise. I just don’t know when. Don’t . . . let’s not say good-bye like this.”

  “How dare you!” he yelled, and lunged toward me. The orderlies were close enough to grab him by now, one on each arm.

  I put my hands out. “It’s okay. Let him go.” I wanted to calm him down, give him one last hug before I left. But as I got close enough to touch him, he bared his teeth and snarled at me.

  “Ma’am, you should go,” one of the orderlies said.

  “But . . . it’s the last time I’ll see him . . . for a while.”

  “Go!” Wes snarled. “Go on, get out of here. Go enjoy your precious life.”

  “I love you. I do. Please believe me. I just . . . have to take care of myself now.”

  He snarled again. I walked away without looking back.

  I pulled into the driveway of our parents’ home, glancing behind to make sure we hadn’t been followed. I considered asking Wes to stay in the car, but figured it would be safer if he was inside with me.

  “Grab a suitcase from the storage room and put some stuff in it,” I told him. “Your things are still upstairs. And change out of that, obviously.” He was still wearing a hospital gown, which was open at the back.

  While he was doing that, I went into my dad’s office and locked the door. I filled a backpack with the gold and silver coins, the hockey cards, and a roll of bills I found stuffed in the back of the safe. I didn’t need the money, but I figured it might help me get Wes set up in Seattle—and maybe pay off whatever debts my parents had incurred.