Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  “Find a cure?” says the professor. He laughs a bitter laugh and peels off his glove.

  “It’s in him, for ’s sake,” someone says. “You can’t just chop off his hand.”

  “Aware of that,” says Thurley. “Go and get some morphine.”

  The someone stomps out of the room at high speed.

  Everyone else just stands around, looking at Beardy’s hand.

  I’m too far away to see properly, but I swear there’s hardly a scratch on it. It’s not as though he’s bleeding to death in front of us or something…but the room falls completely silent.

  It must be clawing its wiggly-tentacled way through his veins, through his arteries. Gorging on what it wants—the food of red blood cells—that’s what everyone got told when the rain first fell. The too-late Emergency Public Service Broadcast told us: it eats human blood cells. It wants the iron. Inside Professor Beardy, it is already replicating, replicating, replicating—smacking its greedy bacteria lips, spurting out living selfies, and chowing down for more.

  He has a first-class ticket to death. They are just waiting for the professor to die.

  I cannot stand it. I cannot stand a single thing about any of this thing. I go back to watching Scooby-Doo.

  After a short while, the professor speaks…in a most un-professorly way:

  “It’s a phage,” he says. “I told you. I told you it could be. I told you, I bet you anything it’s a phage. .”

  Phage. That’s not a word I’ve heard before, but I’m guessing other people have. They just don’t seem to believe him. In the silence, people are pulling these scrunched-up don’t-know-about-that faces—apart from the snarler, who looks totally, seriously off.

  Apparently, Beardy is not dying. Not at all. He punches the air—with his needle-stabbed hand.

  “It’s a phage!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I get left alone for most of the rest of that day. This in itself is fairly shocking and weird because I haven’t actually been left alone since I got picked up off the tarmac and dragged in here. There has always—always—been someone in the room. Being alone there feels strange enough to be frightening. I don’t like it. They check on me (“How are you doing, Ruby?” “I’m fine, thank you.”) and they come to give me food, but I don’t want anything to eat.

  “Is that guy OK?” I manage to ask them.

  “Oh, yes,” one of the nurses says, like she’s sick of the whole thing already.

  “Well, did he—is there a cure now and stuff? He seemed kind of excited.”

  “Didn’t he just.”

  I’m guessing it’s no to a cure, then, or else surely everyone would be jumping for joy—and even more surely SOMEONE WOULD HAVE TOLD ME. But maybe, under the circumstances (apocalypse), it’s better to check, not guess.

  “Well, is there?” I ask.

  The nurse shrugs. “He’s a little away with the fairies, that one,” she says.

  I know she means she thinks he’s crazy, but that makes me smile in a sad way, because it makes me think about my mom, who whispered on about fairies to me so much I believed in them with all my heart. Where are they now? Sipping nectar from acorn teacups as they discuss science with Professor Beardy?

  I put the TV on and watch it with the sound turned right up. I want the noise to blast every thought from my head. I don’t want to think—about anything at all, fairies included. And most especially not about my family, because even the very edge of a thought about them being sampled makes me white-hot sick with angry disgust.

  I concentrate on feeling numb. Numb’s OK.

  The next morning, when the nurses come, they’re dressed how nurses normally dress. All the scary bio-garb stuff…it has gone.

  No one told me this was going to happen, no one explains why it is happening, and it has quite a peculiar effect on me. I could sort of detach myself from the hideousness of it all until I got to see their faces…because, their faces? They’re not just NORMAL; they’re actually pretty cheerful. I had thought the attempts at the happy “And how are we?” voices were just that—attempts to make the being poked around marginally less completely dreadful…but no. These people have gone back to how they seemed when I first arrived. They are actually fairly chirpy.

  This, instantly, me right off.

  “Excuse me?” I start up, as they start taking my cage apart around me. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know,” says a nurse.

  Yeah, right. Did you catch that 0.1 micrometers of a second delay before she said that?

  Something is up and I don’t like it. What I also don’t like is…seeing all these people looking normal, carrying on like normal. I realize all over again how not normal I am. And I realize how angry I am about it. And how sick I am of being treated like a moron/child (these are the same thing to these people).

  I am a freak with attitude.

  It starts with a huffy sigh or two and ends with me refusing breakfast. I now haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. This doesn’t seem to cause any great alarm, which annoys me even more.

  Don’t get annoyed, I beg myself.

  off, myself swears back.

  This is a state I have never quite been in before. I mean, I’ve talked to myself plenty. I’ve tried to make myself think positive thoughts a billion times—and when that failed, I learned to unthink the negative ones. And when that failed, I wallowed…but I have never been like this: swearing, angrily, at myself. My head feels…like a hurricane, gathering itself, gathering everything around it. Getting ready to just—

  “Don’t get annoyed,” I beg myself out loud.

  When Dr. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB—who is also about the only one who doesn’t seem particularly cheerful—arrives, she notices the hurricane. Big time.

  Sans spacesuit, she’s the only one not doing the whole white coat/uniform thing. It doesn’t make me like her more. She wears a different kind of suit: dull, but business-y, like she’s going to work in a bank or something. And her nails and her makeup and her hair—all of it—while not exactly glamorous, are super-perfect.

  I feel angry at the sight of her. I feel like a total “UG!” cavewoman scruffbag. I’m still wearing the stupid gown that shows my butt (in BIG, BAGGY, FLOWERY hospital-issue underwear) to everyone.

  “Is there something wrong, Ruby?” she asks about ten nanoseconds after she’s walked into the room—which has been enough time for me to think all those things about her, but not enough time to think what scathing words I might wish to speak upon the subject.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you still upset about what happened yesterday?”

  “Nope.”

  “Would you like to talk about it anyway, Ruby?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is there something else you’d like to talk about?”

  “Nope.”

  “I expect you’re wondering where everyone is…”

  I can’t “Nope” this, because I am.

  “What you need to know is that we are working very hard indeed to find a cure here, Ruby. And you are such an important part of that. You are the most important part. We are so grateful to you, Ruby. So grateful! Everyone thinks you are brilliant.”

  Ha! It takes me a few moments to get my head around what’s going on, because, basically, no one has ever spoken to me like this in my entire life. And man! She’s good at it! I could almost believe it myself. I mean, obviously it’s true in all sorts of ways but—HA!—I realize a thing. I realize that Dr. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB thinks I’m going to snap out of it if she keeps this up. I don’t blame her for thinking that—apart from yesterday’s outburst of rage, she has only seen a silent, sniveling shadow of a girl. The sort of girl who’d suck this stuff up and then ask politely for a spoon to scrape the bowl with.

  “…because what you have to understand is that you are really, rea
lly special to us. You are really special and important and…”

  I am tempted to let this go on. This is the apocalypse. Everyone could do with a bit of praise—take what you can where you can get it, huh?—but I have the most hideous feeling this particular praise is being laid on too thick. It is being laid on with a knife. I am being buttered up. For what? I don’t know and I don’t care.

  “…yes, everyone—everyone—here wants what you want.”

  I doubt that. I mean, obviously, I’m not some total loon like Xar. Obviously, I would be delighted if there was a cure. How could I not be? But, also obviously, what I want, really, is to have my life back. (“And then I woke up.”) Obviously that is not a possibility. So, failing that, I’d just like…to get out of here. That would be good. To at least get some kind of a life again. I hate this place. A whole lot less obviously I…

  “I want to know what’s going on,” I tell her.

  For the first time in my life, I really, really want to understand something. I don’t want to be palmed off. I want to know.

  “I want to know why I’m a freak.”

  “Oh, Ruby, we would never call you that! That’s not what you are!” Dr. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB coos.

  “I want to know what a phage is,” I tell her.

  She pauses. I see her brain behind her eyes. I see it calculating stuff. I step it up:

  “That’s what I’ve got, isn’t it? A phage. What is that?”

  The calculation is complex for her, I can tell.

  “I think I’ve got a right to know,” I say.

  I am immediately scared I have blown it. Teenager + rights = NO.

  I try to fix it: “I just want to understand,” I say softly.

  “We would too,” she says, calculating.

  She arrives at her answer.

  THE RUBY MORRIS GUIDE TO THE ROCKETY THING

  Basically, I wish I’d never asked.

  This is The Ruby Morris Guide to the Rockety Thing (Phage), and, trust me, if you want to skip it, you can. Knowing all this, which is what I was told at the time, plus what I had taken in during my library studies, plus a tiny bit of stuff I learned later, won’t make a single bit of difference. It won’t change the situation, and it certainly wouldn’t have changed what happened next.

  But still, for the keen types, here we go…

  About my person, there was some other hideous kind of bacterium. Not the one that came in the rain, but another one. Specifically, Prof Beardy suspected it had been lurking up my nose.

  That in itself is fairly disgusting, but before you go “Euuuw!” and stop reading, let me tell you that you and your nose, like everything else on this planet, are also SWARMING with bacteria—every single bit of you, inside and out: SWARMING. And astonishingly, no one, not even Prof Beardy, has the slightest clue about what most of them do, or whether they’re even friends and help each other out, or whether they hate each other and fight.

  It’s a little like people, really—only there’s a whole lot more of them. If your body were a planet—which I guess it is, to the bacteria that live on you (Ha! Planet Ruby!)—people would be saying that it was seriously overcrowded. But somehow, most of the time, all the bacteria just muddle along. Some get along, some don’t; some do good things, some don’t, but it’s so complicated and so mysterious, how they work—let alone how they all work together—that it is quite possible for a “bad” bacterium to end up doing good (because it’ll make other bacteria pull themselves together and do the right thing). That’s how complicated and mysterious the whole thing is.

  The bacterium I had…it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t particularly anything. How it even came to be on me is a complete, total, and utter mystery. It was just there, sitting around (up my nose), minding its own business. Until I stepped out into the rain.

  (Or possibly before. All those things I thought of? All those risks I took? Maybe no one is that lucky.)

  The point is, my bacterium…it knew the bacterium in the rain.

  Or rather, it remembered it.

  It has a very long memory.

  This planet has been thumped and bashed and smashed into by stuff—meteorites—from outer space since way before people were here to worry about it. There is no telling when my bacterium got here. It just smacked into the Earth on a meteorite and then sat around somewhere dark and damp (most recently, a nose), waiting.

  The keen types, headed by Prof Beardy, will no doubt be quick to point out that bacteria don’t “know” anything, don’t “remember,” and most certainly don’t “wait,” but this is how I think of it—and it may as well be true. My bacterium had met the rain bacterium before. And it knew how to take it out. Destroy it. Annihilate it.

  It had a phage. A phage is a virus inside a bacterium.

  Forget your regular antibiotics, made in a factory. This is a target-specific killing machine. Secret weapon job.

  It looks like this:

  I promise you, this really is what it looks like.

  My bacterium used to casually fire off a few of these rockety things, but they had nothing to do. Just fizzled away, like crummy fireworks.

  When I stepped out into the rain, my bacterium went crazy. It went to battle stations. Think microbiological Star Wars.

  Small, slow things might look like they stand no chance, but let me tell you, they do… It’s the tortoise and the hare, isn’t it? The tortoise, my bacterium, and the hare, the one that came in the rain, raced.

  My bacterium, dear tortoise, had waited patiently, peacefully, but now it released stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of phage. I am covered in a coat of furious bacteria and protected by an invisible force field of microbiological phage rage.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!

  WAY TO GO! TORTOISE! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!

  The phage is tinier than tiny. Smaller than a nothing. But it is a nuclear missile.

  This tinier than tiny rockety thing, this phage—it is “night-night, baby” for the wiggly-legged space- in the rain.

  There, that’s pretty much all you need to know…according to Professor Ruby. I think I’ll give myself another A+—but wait! A conclusion, we need a conclusion!

  Conclusion

  People don’t tend to look at the small things. They also do not like slow things. People tend to look at the big, fast stuff.

  In my opinion, this may not always be the smartest thing to do.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  (PART TWO)

  “What would really help us,” Dr. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB says, “what would really help everyone, is if you could just think hard about how you might have acquired the phage.”

  I would quite like to know the answer to that myself.

  “I would quite like to know that myself,” I tell her.

  “Great!” She smiles and shoves a pen and a pad of paper at me.

  “So now you need to think, Ruby, don’t you?”

  Right at that second, I notice a thing: she uses my name A LOT. (Like during the spacesuit phase, I suppose it was OK, because it reminded me I had a name and that she was remembering there was a person at the end of whatever needle was poking into me, but right now I feel like I don’t need reminding, thank you very much. I know who I am.) (I am a FREAK.)

  “We just want you to think hard—very hard—about that. About a time you…came into contact with something the rest of your family wouldn’t have come into contact with. A place you went where they didn’t go, for example. Anything you did that was unusual in any way.”

  That’s mad that is. I shrug. I look bewildered. I know I do. I feel bewildered.

  She smiles, picks up the pen, hands it to me. “Just try, Ruby.”

  (See? See what I mean about the name thing?)

  She smiles at me. She has good te
eth. My teeth are train tracked. One has deserted me. And I stink, and my hair’s in a state, and…and…I feel like I am being patronized. The Rage-O-Meter tips into red. I put down the pen.

  “But why do you want to know that stuff?” I ask.

  Uh. I have just done the worst thing any teen anywhere can do. I have just questioned an adult in a position of authority. Now is not a good time for that, I can tell—instantly—by the look on her face. But I cannot pretend I have not just said what I just said; I’m going to have to stand by it. I am going to have to stand by myself.

  “Just asking,” I say—oh so lightly.

  “It might turn out to be important,” she says.

  Uh—it’s worse than I thought: I am going to have to think. (That sounds stupid of me, doesn’t it? I think about a lot of stuff… What I mean is, I am going to have to think what on Earth it is they are thinking—about which, I have no clue. It must be BIG, FAST stuff, I suppose—stuff that is way bigger and faster than me.)

  “But if you’ve got the phage thing, why would you even be bothered? Doesn’t that mean there’s a cure now?”

  It seems like a reasonable question, it seems like—

  THWACK!

  Dr. TVSOYMMSTTVCOMB slaps me across the face.

  It is, in fact, the first time in my life that another human being has hit me.

  I gasp in shock—and pain. Clutch my face.

  “You need to think, Ruby,” she says. “You need to think.”

  “I don’t know! How would I know?! I can’t remember!”

  “You’re going to have to try harder.”

  I swear…I see every second of every minute of every hour of every day since the rain first fell flash before my eyes. “You want…me…to try harder?”

  “Yes.”

  It upsets me so much that I feel tears roll from my eyes. They creep between my fingers to soothe my stinging cheek.

  “I just want to go home,” I whisper.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  They come in the night.