by Astor Penn
“I’m sorry,” I say, regretting my words as I say them, but I feel her fierce determination in my bones. “I’m still going. And then I’m coming right back to you. I promise.”
“Brie.” It’s the most defeated she’s ever sounded.
“I’m serious. It’s going to be fine.” I try a different tactic. I step as close to her as possible and gently trace a finger up and down her arm. Goose bumps follow my touch. She shivers. I smile. Seduction is such a strange power to have over someone, and it’s certainly not one I employed much before.
“I’ll be right back. Stay low.” I remove the gun from her hand with both of mine, and she lets me.
“You care for her more than me?” It’s a new fragility I see to Raven.
“Of course not.” There’s something between us, something very tangible, that not even this doomsday can touch. “I’m doing this for myself.”
This is the closest to distressed I’ll probably ever see Raven; there’s still a viciousness in her eyes, but it’s not directed toward me. It’s directed for me, a distinct difference I can feel. She’s ready to grab me and tether me to her side. The truth is—I’m ready to be tethered.
“Just wait for me.”
“I’ll come.”
“No, you won’t.” She’s already taken enough chances. “I need you to be my eyes and ears from a vantage point, all right?”
I swap her my knives for the gun. I have a feeling she’ll be adequate at throwing them. Better than I am with my shoulder, anyway. Really, the gun will have to be a last defense as well, because my shooting hand is unable to lift itself. I’ll have to make do with my left, but I have no hope of hitting anything unless it’s close to me.
I squeeze her fingers one last time and head over the little hill that gives us shelter from any spying eyes on the river. My crouching walk down the slope does nothing to ease the pain in my constantly throbbing foot, but nearly as soon as I start my downward descent, I land eyes on Poppy. She looks much the same—still wrapped in our blanket, the top of her red hair the only thing truly visible at this moment.
There’s nothing else really to see. The river is a quiet background symphony, the wind its instrument and the water its strings. There’s nothing suspicious about the scene. It’s serene, the setting peaceful, the mood quiet. Someone, in another time, might pass by this area and see Poppy in her blanket and think nothing of it. Maybe she was on a picnic. Maybe she’d lain down for a nap.
My hand is shaking; I’m physically exhausted, of course. I’m carrying the gun in my right hand, although I’ll have to switch it to my left to raise it and aim. It’s more than that, though. Did I ever think I could do this? Shoot a little girl in the head? A girl I’ve known, even for a short time, to laugh and cry? A day in this life feels longer than a year, two, or even three years in my old life. Therefore, Poppy means more to me now than many of my school friends did. After all, they didn’t have to face the thought of death on a daily basis, nor did they stand by my side while staring down their own sanity.
Our plan had been to ease Poppy’s burden by shooting her if need be, effectively ending what looked to be a slow and agonizing death, then leave the area immediately. No time for burial. I’m nervous to see her now. When I left her just shortly ago, her breathing had become labored. Wet sounding, too, as if blood were filling her lungs. It’d make sense—the blood she coughs up has to come from somewhere. I just wanted to hope it wasn’t as severe as her body drowning itself.
She could be dead already. From the illness. Maybe even from our mysterious visitors.
One last deep breath and I slide down the damp hill to her side. Our bag is just as I left it, and Poppy herself doesn’t seem to have been disturbed any further, although I couldn’t swear to this. I was distressed last I saw her—I didn’t have time to properly observe her.
Observation is key. Observation is like moving; it means life or death. Now, when I look at her, I observe several things very quickly. She’s still breathing. That’s very plain to see. Her hair is plastered to her forehead in sweat, but her color is better. Much better. There are roses in her cheeks and a tiny spot of brown on her nose from the sun. Her eyes roll underneath her eyelids and her nose twitches, and it’s silly, but I want to jump for joy. This is the most activity I’ve seen from her in the past twenty-four hours. She’s dreaming. Clearly. All I hope is that they’re good dreams, full of things far from here where picnics and naps in the sun might still exist.
Now my plans have to change.
Or should they? It’s a selfish, bitter voice that shakes up my insides. She looks so much better than the day before, but my paranoid side persists. I’ve never seen the illness from start to finish—what if this is completely plausible within the confines of the virus? What if this disease was so perfect it fooled us into having hope for a moment? Many diseases engineer themselves to make their victims look better before they get worse.
If this were indeed the case, I would have to think it’s the perfect disease, so perfect it would have been handcrafted in a lab somewhere—a thought that has crossed my mind several times. Designed to make us despair before we inevitably catch it too. Hell, maybe my lack of speedy symptoms is designed too; maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
It doesn’t really matter. If I’m infected, I’m infected, and all I can do is make good on the time I have. Unfortunately, if I’m infected, then Raven must be too by now. I nearly blush, but can’t; I never had mono, but perhaps now I can say I’ve had a kissing disease.
I struggle to throw the loop of the supply bag around my good shoulder while bundling Poppy up in my arms, the gun now tucked into my waistband with the safety carefully switched on. At first, she’s limp, limbs and head swaying in the direction of any movement. Then something feels off—harder. I’m struggling to stand, and I realize it’s because there is resistance against me.
Poppy, eyes open wide and bright, looks up at me for the first time in days, and whispers one thing. “Run.”
There’s a moment when things are suspended, transcended even. A moment that I’m in shock just a second too long. Her eyes are a strange blend of murky coherence; she clearly recognizes me. She’s addressing me. She just doesn’t make any sense, and her eyes are rolling back into her head just as quickly as she opened them.
Then that moment is over. It’s like a burst of color from the drabbest painting I’ve ever seen. Suddenly, from out of the colors of natural camouflage in the woods, there are bright whites and yellows. Marshmallow men. Hazmats.
The first thing I observe this time is that I’ve never seen so many hazmats, nor have I seen them in so many colors before either—white and black and orange and yellow. This is about all I have time to observe before there is screaming.
And running. Although the running is short-lived, whereas the screaming is not. When my ankle twists under me and we crash to the mud, I scream. When the hazmats circle in on me from every direction, I scream. When Poppy rolls her eyes open and a tear slips out, I scream.
They tear at me with their plastic arms and separate us. I’m screaming, screaming, screaming when they inject a needle into Poppy’s neck. She folds in half, limp, and I see another needle out of the corner of my eye. I flop around helplessly in the arms of multiple people—men, women, monsters—all while still screaming.
Eventually, I can stop screaming, and the eerie quiet and beauty of this place can press down on me again.
Because two hazmats in yellow are carrying something down the hill. It’s a long, plastic, black tarp-like material. They’re walking from the direction where Raven had agreed to wait for me.
I don’t feel the injection so much as I see the needle pull out from my neck. I’m conscious just long enough for the body bag to get close enough to see the square window in the plastic.
Raven’s face inside is slack. Dead, or asleep. I can’t be sure. But I guess they don’t put live people in body bags.
BEFORE I open my eyes
, I feel how wrong my surroundings are. The air is too still, too stale. There’s an artificial buzzing in my ears and light threatening to burst through my eyelids. I don’t need to look to know where I am. I’m indoors. I’m in a camp. My throat clenches, my heart stops, I can’t breathe. I am drowning.
It takes a long minute for my eyes to adjust to the bright lights directly above me. My head can’t turn, and it’s only then that I realize I can’t move any of my body, even though I’ve been squirming since consciousness. In my head, I imagine handcuffs and shackles around my feet, but I can’t bend my neck to actually see what it is keeping me down.
My sight burns like someone poured acid in my eyes. Maybe it’s just the lighting—manmade lighting. I’m no longer used to it. From my limited view, I see the long, rectangular lights of a public building. A school, maybe, or a hospital. The walls are a startlingly boring white with cracks in the plaster. From the corner of my eye, I barely make out a slight color difference in one area. It looks almost like a bulging flesh-colored cocoon coming from the wall, and the only thing that should logically be there is a window.
Which means they’ve sealed up the windows. This is a prison.
Feebly, I struggle against my invisible constraints. My injured shoulder barely budges, and it’s almost a comfort because I can hardly feel it. My ankle won’t rotate, but it jerks enough that a flame licks up the skin there. I wince; my feet are freezing cold, almost to the point of numbness. Someone put ice on my ankle. I can’t imagine why.
This must be some kind of isolation room for those infected. I wonder how many similar rooms there are; I wonder if Poppy or Raven might be in another room somewhere. I wonder if Poppy is still alive. It’s impossible without daylight to tell what time of day it is, and even if I could, there’s no way of telling how long I’ve been unconscious. Days might have passed, and the window of survival is most likely shut after a few days once symptoms begin.
Then I remember Raven inside the body bag. Did they shoot her? Maybe they stunned her. She is too young to waste, and out of the three of us, she was the healthiest. Surely there is a chance. I have to believe and hope.
In the stark silence of the room, my tears won’t go unnoticed. I have nothing to do but lie in my lonely room and mourn the loss of sunshine, of wind and water, of Raven, Poppy, Bryant, even Aaron. I mourn the loss of my old life. I close my eyes and try to imagine I’m in my bed in my dorm room at school. If I open my eyes, I’ll see my desk, piled with homework and family photos. I mourn my family, who I’ll clearly never see again.
A door creaks open and shut nearby. My eyes snap open, no pause for adjustment to the light. There’s movement—very audible footsteps—in the hallway outside the door to my room that I cannot see. More than one pair of footsteps, I realize, and they’re getting closer. From the sound of it, the hallway must be a long one, because they seem to walk forever, and just as I think my heart will burst, I hear voices.
“I’ll take this one if you get room twelve.”
“Room twelve is awake already.”
“I know. Her vitals are dropping, though.” They chuckle, deep and distinctively male. I cringe. “I was offering you the easier case.”
“Deal. I’ll see you later. Mine probably won’t take long.”
“Right.” The voices are close, but I have no idea how close until the door just some feet from me rattles open. It’s on my right side, I note dimly, before the footsteps are inside the room with me.
Quickly, I shut my eyes and hope the man won’t hear my ratcheting heartbeat through my chest. He steps closer and stops. Papers shuffle somewhere above me. Do I have a medical chart, as if I were a patient in the hospital? It’s a laughable notion, for these men wish me no well-being.
A long pause of silence stretches above me, and all I can do is count the seconds and hold my breath. A rustle of material close to the top of my head startles me into what would be a jump if I could move at all. That’s the good thing about the plastic suits—they’re loud. It’s easy to track his movements in the room.
He’s going to touch me, I know it. I’m waiting for it, the pain of waiting worse than the pain it will inevitably cause. Instead, what he does next deafens me to his noises and makes me only hyperaware of my own.
A high pitch beeping drowns the room in near constant alarm. I jerk against my constraints, and this time can’t help it when my eyes jump open in surprise. Above me is the hazmat, his front angled over me. From here, it’s difficult to see a face in the suit, but I make out a chin with much stubble over it and dark eyes with darker hair.
He looks simply ordinary. Most monsters do, I suppose.
The new noise is drowning out the sound of blood rushing into my ears, so it takes a moment for me to realize that the beeping is in time to my heart. He’s turned on a heart monitor.
Even if I could, there’d be no point in trying to pretend I’m still unconscious. Unconscious patients probably wouldn’t be going to cardiac arrest quite like I am now. The hazmat watches the monitor, scratching down things on his clipboard, completely ignoring me for the moment. I wish it would last.
“How long have you been awake?” he asks, emotionless. He’s much easier to understand at this distance; the mask over his head distorts his voice.
I remain silent, dumbstruck. He doesn’t seem fazed by it, though, because next he’s leaning over me with his giant, perfectly white fingers. The plastic grates on my skin like toxin, and I can do nothing to move away from it.
“Look at that.” I can feel him pulling back my clothing, except it’s not my clothing. From what I can hear and feel, it’s a flimsy half-cloth, half-paper gown they usually have at hospitals. “Your shoulder looks much better already.”
He writes more on his clipboard. It’s in my line of sight now. The papers on top of it are thick and numerous; it seems ridiculous to think they could have acquired so much information on me already. Unless they somehow dug up all my previous health records.
This thought chills me when I thought I was already numb.
“It’s good. That means we can move on.”
I bite my tongue to keep from asking what he’s moving on to; silence is my only defense left in the situation. I stare determinedly up at the ceiling, because where else can I look, and even if I could, why would I stare my death in the face?
He leaves the room suddenly, but before I can take a deep breath of relief, he reenters again, this time pushing a squealing metal tray with rattling items on it in front of him. Now I don’t stay still—I thrash about as much as possible. I imagine I must look as pathetic as the insect under the microscope attempting to wiggle and crawl to salvation.
“Just relax. You’ll hurt yourself otherwise.” He rolls something away from above my head, something that must have been sitting there this entire time. It’s the fluids for an IV I’ve only just now realized I have—I can’t even see where the line is connected to my body.
From the metal cart, he hangs up a new bag on the stand. It’s clear, like water, but there’s nothing for me to read what it actually is. It looks just like the bags they used to hand out at carnivals, a goldfish inside with large, blinking black eyes and a gaping mouth. No matter how careful I was with them, they always ended up dead a few days later.
The same can probably be said for me now.
“We’ve rehydrated you with a mild sedative. You shouldn’t fight it; it’ll make you sleep through some of the process.” The words should be comforting, but in his mouth they sound like acid boiling. “This way you won’t feel that shoulder as much.”
He slips the needle of the new bag into a tube that runs to the insertion point already in my arm; I feel sick in shame that I can do nothing to stop him, and the only thing between us is a flimsy piece of paper and his plastic gloves.
While he shuffles through items unseen to me on the cart, I feel whatever it is kick in; my heart finally slows, my limbs feel like lead, and my eyes slip shut without any initiative. I stru
ggle to fight it; I can’t afford to let myself fall asleep in the hands of my enemy. My tongue burns with the inquiry of Raven and Poppy, but I don’t allow myself any words, even when the sedation is pulling me back down in the dark where I’m not sure I’ll ever come back.
I fight for consciousness, and the man keeps moving around me in the tiny room. The plastic fingers grip my arm and painfully rotate it against the confines. I jerk and scream, and finally the man reacts to my presence. He jumps, not enough to let go of my arm, but tightens his grip on me. I barely notice the new, thicker needle before he’s pushing it toward me.
“No!” I scream, but the words slur and ring, vaguely reminding me of my shattered eardrums. “Don’t touch me!”
It feels like I’ve been thrown into a sea of molasses and quicksand; even if I did have the liberty of much movement, my limbs won’t quite cooperate, and the more time goes by, the more I’m being sucked down. I gulp in the air desperately.
I barely feel the prick in my arm, but I see him push the plunger in.
“What is it? What are you doing?” My words slur and trail off by themselves. I can’t even look at the hazmat any longer because my eyes roll back into my head. I can’t or won’t see anything other than the corner of the crumbling ceiling. There’s no one and nothing here, no one and nothing to be.
Chapter 11
THE NEXT time I realize I’m awake, it’s from the same restless sleep I suffered on the outside. I must have already been awake for some time. Minutes. Maybe hours. The room isn’t just an off-white any longer but a frightening mix of glowing yellows and grays. It pushes the reality from my eyes, and without shutting them, I can pretend I’m wrapped in a strange cocoon. I choke on the air as if I’d lacked breath until now; my limbs are trembling and so heavy that when I attempt to move, I realize the restrains are gone but rendered unnecessary now. I can barely move; my muscles are seized up, all taut and tight, and no matter how I try, I can’t relax them. How could I relax here?