Ophelia Immune_A Novel

by Beth Mattson

  “Well, maybe my Mom; she could be Immune. Haven’t seen her in a while. Maybe she died and is Immune.”

  I wondered if Mom was dead. I wondered if she had let Dad kill Immogen before she had time to show us that she was Immune, like me. I wondered what day of the year it was, if I had completely forgotten when Immogen’s Birthday was. How old was I? Was I seventeen yet? No, wait. Not til Summer, not til Summer. I couldn’t remember when Mom or Dad’s birthdays were. If I wasn’t so angry that they had left me alone in the world -- instead of killing me or keeping me like they should have, one or the other, just pick one -- I would send Hector a package for his Birthday. When was his Birthday? If I could go into a Post Office and put stamps on the presents that I stole for them. Maybe they would all get into trouble for receiving a package of stolen goods.

  I smirked into my coffee and wondered what they were all doing right now, if they were still breathing. If the Post Office was running regularly, if the snow permitted the Letter Sleigh to make deliveries as scheduled, once per month. I doubted that there were any zombies at the Farm right now, because there were no apartment buildings for any to tumble out of. I wondered if Juliet was busy sledding up and down the hills above the stream.

  “My mom wasn’t Immune,” the Scientist mumbled sadly.

  “Huh,” I shook my head and remembered that Juliet was dead and tied to a broken refrigerator in my Squatter’s kitchen.

  “My mom locked me in the house after she was Bitten. She went outside. After a while she pounded on the windows to get back in, until the neighbors saw and came to get me. I lived with my Great Aunt after that. In a Highrise. Everybody else in our Family was dead, but she was safe because she stayed up in her Condo. Until I got this job, I stayed up there, too. Not many zombies up there. I've never met a zombie, besides my mom, besides you.”

  “You've never dealt with zombies? At all?” I stood and paced, “That's not Safe. That’s not right. You should learn about them, to take care of them. You should have learned a long time ago. It's a miracle that you are alive.”

  I leaned over the truly-dead, bath-robed zombie that I had splattered with my fist. I put my foot on its chest, the Scientist followed at a distance.

  “First,” I showed him, “We need to separate the pieces of the body so that they are easy to lift. You have to get the ax point between the bones of the joint and sever the tendons if you don’t want to hack through bone.”

  The Scientist covered his mouth with his hand and made it to a trashcan before he vomited. I chopped the corpse into pieces while I waited for him to wipe off his frothy, acidic mouth. He came back when he was finished, not speaking.

  “Now we lift the torso into the dumpster,” I instructed.

  He bent down to grab soaked fabric near the bare pelvis sockets.

  “No! What are you doing? You are going to grab the bloody parts with your bare skin? Good way to find out if you’re Immune! Never touch an Infected body on purpose.”

  He went limp with shame and stared at his brown, leather loafers. I sighed and slowed down. I pointed to the terrycloth scraps that were dry.

  “Use its cleaner bathrobe.”

  I grabbed the collar, and the Scientist jammed his hands into the ex-robe’s pockets.

  “On the count of three.”

  We swung the torso up and into the dumpster to be collected with the rest of the parts.

  “Hey, not bad for your first time. Don’t worry, you’ll learn. The Highrise won't be a disadvantage forever,” I encouraged him. I wiped my hand on my pants, stuck it out to him, free of black goo, “I’m Ophelia.”

  He wiped his hand on his lab coat. I had never seen hair so shiny and smooth as the tiny locks curling over the band of his silver watch. His white coat wasn’t thick enough for a Winter coat, but he looked Warm anyway. His pink cheeks were flushed. Short waves of heat radiated around his neck. He thought about shaking my hand, but he shook his head at the idea of touching my skin. I let my arm fall. He was right. I could Infect him. He was a Human. Warm. Breakable. I could hurt him just as much as the corpse we had just chopped. What was I thinking? Always the wrong ways of taking care.

  “I’m Jim.”

  “Jim?”

  “James, really.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jim.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ophelia. Will you keep coming back here? We could really use your blood for more experiments. Actually, my job kind of depends on it.”

  Screams echoed from a few blocks away. My throat rattled. I looked up, in the direction that my ears told me a zombie was chasing someone. The screams continued, loud and long. Shaky. I could take care of that.

  Jim looked up at the noise, too, but he had no idea what to do about it. He could do nothing. He had grown up in a High Rise, with books and a Great Aunt who had no ax. He didn’t know what to do about a zombie chasing someone. But I did. I knew how to kill a zombie. I could walk up to the zombie, turn it around to face me, knock it upright, and put it to rest. The screamer could walk away. I could donate my blood to Science and I could kill zombies. Those were things that I knew how to do.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I'll be back.”

  The Swan

  Even in the dark, it was easy to find the alleyway where a pale, thin teenager was screaming. She was cornered against a rough, broken brick wall with a rolling pin gripped tightly above her head. Her ribs showed through her torn t-shirt and her red curls poked through her ripped wool hat. But there were no zombies cornering her. Zombies were not causing her to scream. There were three men – large, Warm, Human men.

  They wore dingey sleeves with no jackets, no hats. Their heads were bare with loose, oily hairs blowing in the drafts. Their yellow, furry arms were uncovered, and yet they were not freezing. They were agile and flushed, paunchy but nimble, taunting the girl that they circled. Their guts weren’t aching with chilled, heavy sludge. They didn’t have to tighten their scarves and pull down their hats. Their fingers weren’t cold against their faces. They were warm Human men and I was a cold, little zombie girl.

  It wasn’t Warm enough for the girl who was screaming either. Her throat was becoming hoarse and garbled. She clasped one arm around her middle where one of the laughing men jabbed her with a thick finger. He licked the tip and pronounced her delicious. The men cackled wickedly. They were worse than zombies.

  All of her shrieking made my ears pucker with tingles. I jammed the ends of my chipped, green fingernails against my shuddering eardrums to block the noise. She wasn’t attached to a fat man’s leash yet. I wanted to save her, but how? One little zombie and three, large, Warm, Human men – I could not scare them away. They would just smash my skull. But I needed to help her stop screaming.

  I inched closer to her to get a better look, but when I bumped an empty can with my toes, the men whirled to look at me. Their teeth were almost as yellow as mine, but their muscles were much, much bigger.

  “Go on, get. We got no food for you, Squatter Girl,” the one with the longest beard swatted at me.

  “Hey, the more girls the merrier. Let’s sell her, too,” said another of the three, wearing a dirty, white muscle shirt, reaching for me. One of his buddies punched his arm away from me and spat on his shoe.

  “She ain’t ours. Don’t complicate things. Let’s just get ours and go,” the first answered, “I said, ‘Get out of here, Squatter Girl!’”

  The man with the beard kicked the empty can back at me. They turned away from me, circling and circling the skinny, screaming, red-haired girl. They didn’t want to see me. They only wanted to see her drop her rolling pin and fall defeated into their hands. They taunted her with a stained, braided collar that they shook in her face.

  While they threw trash into her curls and tugged on her pants pockets, I tiptoed up to her side in plain sight. The third man, wearing two different kinds of boots, threw a dead pigeon at me.

  “I said, ‘Go away, Squatter Girl!’”

  I looked into the girl’s mottled,
pink face, brushing the pigeon feathers off of my coat. She blinked at my loose teeth, barely held in my soggy gums. The dark didn't fool her. I was just another monster.

  “Stop screaming,” I breathed, turning to the three giants, “Aim for their shins.”

  She shrank and shook behind me. I rolled my eyes. Just another girl.

  The man with the beard snickered and galloped at me. He swung his golf club at my chest. This was a very poor choice. Golf clubs only work on a couple of zombies in a row, and then they dent, bend and break. It crashed into my ribs. It tingled a tiny bit.

  I snorted and stepped towards him to see how badly his club had bent and to yell at him to go away with his stupid weapon. He hit my ribs with it again. I swatted at him with my hammer like he was a fly. I thought that he would bounce back and buzz at me again; that I would just shout fiercely. He and his buddies would listen and then the girl and I would walk around the corner and go our separate ways to our own squalid apartments or her to the Rangers’ Station to report her kidnapping. But when I knocked him in the shin, I heard his bone splinter into shards. I pulled his club from his hands and tossed it to the side of the alley.

  He tried to kick me again, so I knocked him on his other shin. It shattered just as easily. He wasn’t just Warm, he was fragile. Breakable! And I had broken him. He whimpered and stayed down on the ground. I had forgotten how easily Humans could break. It was a good thing that I was saving this girl, or they might have broken her. I stared at the remaining two men. I moaned a little, picturing them crumpled on the ground. My audible slip shattered their illusions of just another poor, Human, Squatter girl.

  “It moaned. It’s a zombie!” one of them yelled, “Go for its head!”

  The man in the muscle shirt reached for the girl, who was crouching against the brick wall, trying to disappear. When his knuckles wrapped around her shirt, she finally did as I had instructed and hit him on the leg with her rolling pin. It echoed like her weapon was made of marble.

  The man cursed, grabbed for her again. She wriggled out of his grasp and hit him on his wrist, which broke just as easily. He cried out and tried to swing at her with his other fist, but he was too slow and she hit one of his feet, too.

  She stood up and hit him on his back. He toppled sideways. She pounded him again and again, harder and harder. He was going to be in pieces soon, but it was better than her being in pieces. I was glad that she wasn’t the one falling apart.

  The third man, the one who had yelled to go after my head, followed me as I paced backwards down the alley. I didn’t want to hit him. I only wanted to break zombie heads, not Humans. If there had been three zombies attacking the girl, my assault would have been simple. It would have been easy to smash three cold, shuffling zombies. I wished that he was a zombie.

  I considered it for a few slow steps, but when he charged at me, I ran out of time. I decided. I craned my neck to my forearm and slashed it open with my teeth. I sucked some of my thick, black blood out into my cheeks. I spat it into the palm of my hand and launched it at the man. It landed with a splatter on his chest.

  “Oh God!” he shrieked, “Now you are going to die, Stupid Little Brown Zombie Bitch!”

  What had he just called me? I filled my cheeks again and launched more Infected sludge.

  He flailed his arms to block it and slipped in a puddle of my goo. I helped him fall faster by tapping on his shoulder with my blue, wooden handle. He screamed louder than the girl he had been terrorizing, reached up for me, ripped my ax from my belt and swung it at me. The edge connected with my shoulder. My arm landed on the pavement, separated from the rest of me.

  I stared down at him, uncomprehending. What had he called me? What had he just done? What had happened to my arm?

  I slammed my foot across his stubbly chin. His neck popped and he lay still. A black river ran down my side, puddling next to my shoe.

  There was my right arm. Lying on the ground, palm up, fingers curled and still. Limp. And there was my collarbone, hooked right above my ribs, where it was supposed to be, but empty.

  I picked up my fallen right arm. It dripped black tendrils where it ended in jagged bone. I could still see the spot where I had bitten my forearm open. I turned it over and cradled it so that the pale green fingers wiggled slightly, drooping wherever gravity took them. The socket under my collarbone erupted in a volcano of molten tingles.

  “Huh,” I said, wobbling.

  I walked unsteadily past the girl. She had stopped screaming. She was crouched over the unconscious man that she had beaten. She stood up, spidery arms shaking like a web under the weight of her marble rolling pin, face flushed with stress.

  “Thank you. They were going to sell me.”

  “Huh,” I stumbled over the empty silver can.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much. Where will I go?” she asked.

  “Huh,” I shook my head, looking at my arm. I waved goodbye with it, splashing the concrete and the flannel lining of my jacket.

  “I’m only fourteen!” she squeaked.

  I kept walking. She would find a Ranger, probably. I tripped away from the broken men, with my broken arm, all the way home and crawled into my messy closet blanket nest. My scratchy wool covers scraped against the raw edges of my peeling skin. Where was my Mom? Why wasn’t she there to hold me, her long, Brown fingers stroking my silky earlobe? She would bring me a washcloth if I got a fever. She would touch my forehead and tell me that everything was okay, that she knew who I was. I grasped my arm, clutched it against the empty socket where it needed to be. It burned with a forest fire of tingles.

  Where was Dad? Why didn’t he notice my difference or kill me properly? Why couldn’t he pull on his gloves and clean up the mess of men that I had made in the alleyway and chop them into a neatly constructed Burn Pile? Why couldn’t he take my blood to the Clinic for me, happy that I found a Scientist to work with? Why had he abandoned me and left me alone? Not alone. With my ex-little sister, another failure.

  I could hear her scrabbling across the living room, her nails scraping at the splintering wooden floor – her knobby elbows angled up to her concave back, and her knees bent like a cricket’s, crawling in search of water or something to chew. She found the curtains and ripped them lengthwise. She slammed into my closet door with her forehead. She throttled the box of tea bags that I left on the kitchen counter. I had no dreams to block her from my ears. I clenched my eyes tighter.

  I wished that zombies could dream. I sat up, re-damaging the tentative scabs that were forming around my arm. I needed to make a neater closet nest, like I had been taught. The blankets smoothed out before me, making little pockets for my feet and a pouch that could hold warmed rocks if I had any. The last blanket I rolled and molded into the outline of two knees. I rested my sopping cheekbones against the wooly barbed knee caps, staining them darker grey with my tears. I sobbed, retching and begging for dreams while I pressed my arm to its old place.

  I couldn’t wiggle all ten toes – they were getting too cold – but I knew that I had them all, even though Juliet had bitten one off while I was sleeping in the woods. I had snatched it from her jaws before she could swallow it. It had fit in the palm of my hand, snowflakes drifting down to cover it while I looked up at the sky. I removed my slate grey sock and held the mauled toe against my foot, just to see how it looked, like a cloud, gaudy and standing out like I had painted it eggplant to wear with sandals.

  After a few minutes, the seam where the toe had torn started to scab over, darkly. And then, as I watched, and as Juliet clamoured after a squirrel with my missing boot between her teeth, my green skin began to grow back over the scabs. After three days, her tooth marks disappeared completely from my foot, if never from my ruined boot. My zombie blood preserved me, and my Human parts kept on healing, but I still couldn’t dream.

  I was trapped in my closet, in my head with no sunny image of a garden where my Little Sister could sit cross-legged picking strawberries. There was no meadow with
a little brother to swing by with his sticky, outstretched arms. No dream of a Scientist working to cure the zombie in my living room so that I could run home with her, safe to touch and hug.

  I couldn’t even have nightmares of the storm raging outside. The Late Winter blizzard rattled my windows while I rolled and clung to the arm that was stiffening against my shoulder. My stupor lasted forever as my moans and rattles matched the pitch and tone of the wind thrashing the Early Spring sky. I became aware of the chill gathering around me. I struggled to get vertical.

  My arm was reattached. Creaking and slow like the rest of me, lumpier than it had been, but not a separate piece. I forgot that I couldn’t heal my shirtsleeves and they fell off onto my lap when I sat up. My fingers were too cold to hold onto my shirts and jackets. I was almost too frozen to move. My arm was a deep, dark, naked lizard green. I wondered how long I had been asleep.

  I reached for my Propane, shook all of the empty canisters. My hand rubbed numbly on the metal closet doorknob. I wrapped a wool blanket around myself and pushed. It swung open, and slammed into the wall, greased not to squeak. I fell to the floor with the force of it.

  Juliet didn’t stumble over to me for a welcoming chew. She was lying on the floor near the kitchen. I pushed myself to my feet. I put one foot in front of the other. I fell down again. Twice more. I crawled over to Juliet. She was frozen solid, curled up around her empty water bowl, a glaze of ice across her hands where she had spilled the last of it. Her mouth was sealed shut with the same glassy sheen. She sounded brittle, wobbling against the wooden floor. I was patting her too hard with my numb fists.

  I dragged myself to the refrigerator. Empty. No more Propane canisters. Only two tea bags. Earl Grey. Hardly worth having. Nothing to burn. I had even burned the wooden spoon already.

  I shuffled gingerly to the window. I lifted the curtain with my dead fingers. It was light out. Daytime snowflakes drifted on the gusts.