by David Kazzie
“You gonna freak out on me here?” she asked.
He felt his jaw moving, but no words would come out.
“I’m going to count to ten,” she said, “and then I’m going to head on down the road.”
Then more quietly: “Jesus, can I not catch a break?”
“No,” Adam said. “I’m fine.”
“What’s with the needles?” she asked. “No hospitals if you O.D.”
Adam glanced down at the paraphernalia around him and smiled.
“Oh, no. It’s not that. I got bitten by a rabid fox a few days ago,” he said, pointing to the bite marks on his arm. “I finally found some vaccine for it.”
He watched her watch him, staring at him with her fierce green eyes, as though she was trying to decide whether to believe him.
“My name is Adam.”
#
The day brightened around him, the morning cloud cover pushing off to the east. As they stood there in the parking lot, he felt very small, very alone.
“Adam Fisher,” he said again, extending his hand.
Her eyes narrowed as she considered his offer of goodwill. His outstretched hand hung there in the void, suspended, frozen in time.
“Relax, you can’t catch rabies from me.”
It was just the right thing at the right time, and a smile broke across her face. It lassoed them together, keeping the quickly widening gulf between them from getting any bigger. She took his hand and returned the shake.
“Captain Sarah Wells,” she replied. “U.S. Army.”
They fell into a brief silence.
“Sounds silly, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“Captain Sarah Wells,” she said again, this time in a mocking tone. “I don’t even know why I said that.”
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” he said.
“For now.”
Adam allowed a hint of a smile to trace its way across his face.
“That’s good,” he said. “Comic relief. We could use some of that.”
She smiled back, but it was all wrong. A beautiful rock with creepy-crawlies underneath when you lifted it up.
“So we’re in a hell of a bad way here, huh?” she said.
She hitched her rifle onto her shoulder and leaned against a pickup truck in the parking lot of the clinic.
“Yeah,” Adam said.
“Lately, I’ll forget what’s happened,” she said. “I’ll be doing something, eating dinner, whatever, and it’ll seem like it’s something I’ve been doing forever. Then I’ll see something. A body. A pileup. And it all comes back. You know what I’m saying?”
Adam nodded.
“Anyway, I’m headed to St. Louis,” she said.
“What’s in St. Louis?”
She removed a pack of cigarettes from her breast pocket and lit one. She took a long drag; twin plumes of smoke streamed from her nostrils. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.”
She tucked the pack away.
“I was in New York when it went down,” she said. “The Bronx. Couple of days before everything collapsed, we got an order from on high. Said the CDC had set up a testing facility in St. Louis and that anyone still healthy should head there for testing.”
“Why St. Louis?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Anyway, I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got out of New York. I was kind of hoping it was burning itself out the farther from ground zero it got.”
“It’s everywhere.”
She flicked a peg of ash onto the ground.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m figuring out. God damn.”
He expected her to tear up then, but she didn’t. She smoked the cigarette in silence, down to the nub, and then she crushed it under her boot.
“Is the St. Louis thing for real?”
“No idea. But I’ve got to find out for myself. This might be the last thing I do as Captain Sarah Wells, U.S. Army, so I plan to see it through to the end. Probably a wild-goose chase. But I’ve got to do it.”
St. Louis.
“Anyway, what about you?”
“Got my own wild-goose chase.”
“Care to share?”
He was struck by how forward she was and found himself a bit reluctant to talk about Rachel. He was afraid that if he verbalized it, it would sound far crazier than when it was just him thinking about it. Part of what kept him going was that it didn’t seem crazy to think she was still out there, still alive.
“Got a message from my daughter in California,” he said. “About a week ago.”
Sarah scrunched up her face and tilted her face to the sky as she worked out the timing in her head.
“And she was still alive?”
“Said she was headed to her stepdad’s condo in Lake Tahoe.”
The conversation petered out, and they stood there in the August sunshine, an awkward silence pushing a wedge between them. Adam didn’t know what to say. He really just wanted to get back on the road.
“Can I make a suggestion?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Let’s team up,” she said. “Head west together until we get to St. Louis.”
Adam scratched his face as he considered her proposal.
“Look,” she said, “someone needed to say it. It’s goddamn dangerous out here. People are gonna have to start working together.”
Adam tried to analyze the dilemma rationally. But as he did so, he felt his eyes droop, and it made him realize how hard it had been by himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a decent night’s sleep, which had made getting by in this world that much tougher. But was this the right person to team up with? Would it jeopardize his own quest? There was no way to know when or if their interests would diverge, and how they would handle such a development. And then he thought about the fox and how it had snuck up on him with no warning and how next time it might be someone slicing his throat while he slept because there was no one to stop that from happening anymore.
“OK.”
17
At first, Erin Thompson had been relieved when they’d found her wandering across I-235, about sixty miles west of her home in Des Moines. Her fair skin had burned in the merciless Iowa sun, healed and then burned again, leaving behind a ragged quilt of newborn pink skin against sun-scorched ivory. She was starving and dehydrated, but she’d barely noticed, having devolved into a borderline catatonic state in the wake of the plague.
Erin and her husband, a pastor named William Thompson, had been living with their twin four-year-old boys in the small two-bedroom ranch subsidized by the First Presbyterian Church in Des Moines when the plague had hit. Jason, her youngest by eight minutes, had succumbed first, on August 13; his brother Billy had followed on August 14. By then, the pastor himself was gravely ill, and Erin had been absolutely out of her mind with grief. Willie had tried to soothe her, even when he’d been in Medusa’s death grip, assuring her that it was all part of God’s plan, that He was bringing them all home.
And when they were all dead, all laid up in their beds because she didn’t know what to do with them, and they’d long since stopped responding to emergency calls, she sat there with Willie’s body, cursing him for leaving her here, unsaved, while the three people she’d loved best, whom she’d given her life for, were rollicking with Jesus. And when she didn’t get sick, she hated God, she hated Willie, she hated everyone and everything and she believed she had been forsaken. Apparently it hadn’t been enough to be a doting mother and loving wife, giving up her career as a schoolteacher to do her duty as a Christian homemaker, even going through marriage counseling with Willie after she’d found those e-mails he’d exchanged with their nineteen-year-old neighbor, who, along with her three brothers, mother and abusive stepfather, were now dead, like everyone else she’d ever known.
She stayed in the house for another week, barely eating or sleeping, consuming just enough to stay alive. She drank from the tap, neither kno
wing nor caring whether the water was safe to drink. One day, she wandered the three blocks to their church, where she found it full of the dead. People who had come seeking salvation, relief, cure, something and received nothing but a nice hot cup of Fuck Off. The hours slipped by in a foggy haze as sounds and screams from only God knew where peppered the night and the day. The power didn’t go out in her neighborhood until August 22, and so as long as she kept the doors closed, the smell didn’t get too bad. Not that you could really escape it anyway. She’d cracked the windows one morning to circulate some fresh air, but then the smell hit her, the thick, rich, dead smell barreling through like an invisible and angry presence. Then the power had gone out and the smell was everywhere.
With barely a thought in her head, she packed Willie’s backpack with clean underwear, her Bible, and some beef jerky and hit the road on the morning of August 24. Like many other survivors, she left her home because she simply couldn’t stay there any longer. She didn’t know where she was going, or what she would do with the rest of her days. She was only thirty years old, and the prospect of another five decades in this dead world loomed larger with each passing day.
Her plan had been to take Willie’s ancient Camry, but she abandoned that idea after she put the car in drive rather than reverse and placed the front end squarely into their garage door. Embarrassment and shame flooded through her as she climbed out, fully expecting to see her neighbors poking their heads out of their front doors to see what the hell all the racket was. But there was no sound other than the ticking of the engine and the hiss of the cracked radiator. She stared at the crumpled garage door, behind which was the accumulated detritus of eight years of marriage, the garage Willie had been talking about cleaning the same weekend he’d gotten sick.
So she’d left the car there, buried in the garage of a house she would never see again, and walked east. A week on the road, with no destination in mind, no plan, no nothing at all, had driven her close to madness. Outside Windsor City, she’d been approached by two middle-aged women who’d asked her to join them. “Strength in numbers,” they’d said, but she hadn’t even acknowledged them, she’d barely even looked at them, and now that she thought about it, they’d made hay pretty quickly away from her.
But she hadn’t gone with them, and so she was by herself when the black Suburban had pulled up alongside her along I-235 right about the time the sun was at its highest, roasting and broiling. Until the door had swung open and she’d felt the chilly air spill out of the passenger compartment, she didn’t really care whether she lived or died. But it felt so good, even with the furnace of the Iowa sun beating down her neck, and she wanted more of it.
The tinted window slid down, revealing the face of ... an angel? Maybe she was dying, Erin had thought, somewhat hopefully, and this was how God was sending for her. A black SUV. A fresh face there in the window, young, her thick brown curls tied back in a ponytail, studying her, perhaps even pitying her.
“Oh, sweetie,” the woman had said, clapping a hand to her mouth as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. This poor wretch.
The woman disappeared from view for a moment, and behind her, Erin saw a man at the wheel, facing forward, smoking a cigarette. When the woman re-appeared she had a bottle of water in her hand, the condensation glistening in the afternoon sun. Erin stared at it the way a pyromaniac might stare at fire.
“You thirsty?”
She held the bottle out for Erin, who approached the car like a frightened puppy being offered a treat. Erin took the bottle and drank it down in one fell swoop, unaware of how severely dehydrated she was.
“I’m sorry, but do you have some more?” she croaked out, the words slurred and muffled behind cracked, sunburned lips.
“Sure,” the woman said. “Why don’t you come with us? You look like you need a break.”
Erin found herself nodding without the slightest reservation. They had cold water. What other treasures might they have?
The doors unlocked with a decisive ker-chunk, and she climbed in. A delicious chill rippled across her body as she settled into the cool leather backseat.
“What’s your name, honey?”
“Erin.”
She yawned.
“You just rest,” the woman had said.
She fell asleep almost immediately, the promise of cold water, endless bottles of cold water lulling her to the deepest sleep she’d had in days. How easy it had been to lure her in, no different than a gullible child lured by promises of delicious candy and lost puppies.
And maybe, she thought to herself two days later, strapped to this examining table, it would have occurred to her that she could’ve found plenty of water on her own, that she hadn’t had to let it devolve to such a state. If any of these things had occurred to her during her self-imposed death march, she might still be out there, pulling herself together.
Or maybe they’d been her only hope.
She just didn’t know. No one spoke to her or explained to her what she was doing here. At first, she had thought that these had been government health officials rounding up healthy people for testing. But when they’d etched the inside of her wrist with that strange tattoo, she quickly realized that this was something else entirely. No one wore protective suits, and there was none of that urgency she saw in those last terrible days, on the street, in the hospitals, on the news.
They were in a brightly lit antiseptic room, which resembled one of the examination rooms in the urgent care clinic she’d once frequented with the boys, as they’d negotiated the rough-and-tumble world of ear infections and croup and impetigo. The long counter was stocked with bottles of hand sanitizer, cotton balls and the various and sundry items one might expect to find in a doctor’s office. But the walls were bare, bearing none of the full-colored glossies with an artistic rendering of the human heart or the inner ear canal. She wore a paper-thin hospital gown and nothing else. It was itchy and barely reached all the way around her waist. Her feet were in stirrups, restrained, leaving her exposed and about as modest as a porn star waiting for the cameras to roll.
Footsteps clicking along the tile floor drew her attention. She looked over to see the woman from the SUV approaching her, but with far less mirth on her face. A small medical kit was tucked under her arm, which she set down on the metal tray mounted to her hospital bed.
Erin smiled at her, but she did not get one in reply.
“So what’s this all about?” she asked in as brave a voice as she could muster.
Still the woman didn’t speak. She tied a tourniquet around Erin’s arm and promptly drew three vials of blood. The vials were labeled and went into a plastic tube rack. Then the woman snapped on a pair of latex gloves, retrieved a speculum from the bag and set up shop between Erin’s legs. Instinctively, Erin tried snapping her legs shut, but to no avail; the restraints held them fast.
“Hey, what the hell is going on here?” Erin barked. “Don’t you touch me!”
Her pleas fell on deaf ears, and she felt a strong pinch as the speculum opened her up. She looked at the ceiling and bit down hard on her lip, hard enough that she tasted blood. She tried telling herself this was no different than her routine visit to her OB/GYN, with the super-friendly Dr. Brady, a young doctor who’d been about the same age as Erin. Her daughter had been about the same age as Erin’s twins.
(ALL DEAD NOW ALL DEAD NOW)
But she couldn’t. This felt bad, very bad, and she felt shame for letting herself be hoodwinked by the promise of fresh water and food and a nice place to lay her head. She squirmed and twisted; hot tears ran down her cheeks. The long cotton swab entered her, scraping at her insides, and she felt her breath coming in ragged gasps.
She closed her eyes and thought about her sons, her sweet, sweet boys who had loved Thomas the Tank Engine and Lightning McQueen and now lay dead in their bedrooms. Jesus God, why hadn’t she buried them? Did she think they were going to bury themselves? And it all came to her, all at once, tha
t her little boys were dead and gone and she would never again see them in this lifetime. The sobs exploded from her, so ferociously that the woman examining her scampered backward half a dozen steps. As she lay there, weeping, all she could hope was that one day they would be reunited in heaven.
Then a terrible thought broke loose in her mind, a runaway meteor breaking free of its asteroid field, and turned her veins to ice; the horror of it was so deep, so profound, that she began to shiver.
What if she were dead and this was hell?
The sobs evolved into howls now, as though the woman were murdering her.
“We’re all done here,” she said.
She packed away the swab sample and the vials of blood and fled the room like it was possessed by all the demons of hell.
Erin continued wailing as the idea took deeper root in her mind and continued to flower. The more she thought about it, the less far-fetched it seemed. What was more likely, that she had somehow miraculously survived a global plague, the mother-loving apocalypse, that she had really hailed from the very deepest end of the gene pool? Or that she was now facing the thing that she had feared above all else?
Damnation.
A lesson from a college class came roaring back to her. Her freshman year at Iowa State, she had taken philosophy, during which they had studied the principle of Occam’s Razor, which posited that all things being equal, the simplest explanation was usually the correct one. No, she thought, that couldn’t be. Hell was a place of fire and brimstone and eternal pain.
Fire and brimstone. Fire and brimstone?
What had been more fiery than the Medusa virus, burning its way through humanity like a candle left near a musty old curtain? And what judgment could have been worse than watching your sons, the very lights of your life, die before your eyes within hours of each other, with no way to help them, with no one there to help them? Rattled with fear, bleeding from every orifice, screaming for their mommy, who could do nothing for them but watch them die. And now left here with no one and nothing but her thoughts, free to replay the last two weeks until she died or went insane.