All the Devils Here

by Astor Penn

  Which is exactly what I’ve been doing. Even attempted a few push-ups and crunches with little success, but at least I’m walking. It’s almost painful when I think of the past months spent out on the road—how pathetic and feeble I’ve let myself become. Raven didn’t let herself go to waste. She carries on no matter what. She defied fate when boxed into four walls and maximum security. My promise is not only to myself, but to her, that I won’t break down again. I’ll find her, and we’ll carry on, like we’re made to.

  In the back of my mind, the part that speaks so softly I barely hear it, I can’t help but think that, in part, Raven is the one who made me weak. Before her, there was me and only me to rely on. I didn’t have to live for anyone else because I had given up on everyone, and this pushed me forward because I became cruel, hardhearted. I had become the person who watched others in times of crisis and turned my back on them. It’s strange how meeting my equivalent in Raven, the ultimate survivor, changed that. Together we could run and live, but as soon as I had to face being alone again, I couldn’t handle it. And for that, that small part of me in the back of my mind hates Raven too. I shouldn’t need her the way I do.

  Love both gives and takes away strength, I suppose. I wonder how much Raven misses me, if at all. Perhaps she has accepted my death the way I had hers. Did she mourn me? She kissed me. I remember it better than I remember anything else, but I wonder. During our brief acquaintance, I had most of the playing cards in my hand—I had the supplies, and given where we were, supplies meant everything. Even someone as crafty as Raven would have been hard-pressed to make it long without at least some water, or something to sanitize natural water. She needed me, more than I needed her, and Raven doesn’t strike me as the type to be above seducing someone for what she needs to survive.

  Was I used? Did she care for me at all? I remember the way her lips felt, too chapped and rough to be anything but dire, and the way she smelled. Her hair brushing my cheek. The look in her eyes before she did it. The warning she gave me as she licked her lips. Mimic everything—the blush in her cheeks and the shiver in her bones. Could she be that good an actress?

  I know I’m not. What I felt was real, and I held nothing back from her. That’s why I walk in circles now, and why I eat everything they give me, because I can’t fake my wellness. Their lack of physical presence aside, I know they still watch me with cameras in the room. The stronger I feel, the more conscious I am of the absurdity of the situation. Here is a group of people dedicated to saving humanity, and yet they hoard their electricity and food. These are the resources that will make the biggest difference to the people still out there, living in the wild, in cold houses if they’re lucky, and if they’re not, outside on the run with nothing. No clean water or heat in the cold. Resources would save them more than a vaccine would.

  With time, I put ten pounds on; it’s mostly fat, no muscle, but it doesn’t matter. Fat will burn to fuel my body when I need it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to steal any food before taking off with Raven. They think I’m eating as much as possible to get out of here as soon as I can, which is partly true, but mostly I eat to have those fatty cells for later. For warmth and energy.

  We’ll be lucky to have food to take with us when we leave the camp, and I find it impossible to believe we’ll be able to lift any weapons off them. Depending on the security, maybe we’ll be able to outsmart a guard of some kind, someone with a gun we can take. There’s only so much I can plan for before seeing the environment at this camp.

  I know it’s almost time when both Barlett and Wyles come to visit me one day. My check isn’t so much heart rate and blood pressure as weight and endurance. Wyles watches me with a smile; it’s disconcerting. He’s wearing a hazmat suit the same as the rest of them today, but I could tell it was him from a mile away. It’s the way he walks, like he owns this place. Which I guess he technically does.

  “We’re going to take a little walk today, if you’re feeling up to it,” he says after Barlett is done collecting her precious data.

  My heart picks up—it sings, actually, in tune of a promise. “What? You mean outside?” My thoughts are of open space, open air, the grass and the dirt. Places to run and hide and live. My home. The last place I really felt safe.

  Wyles laughs. “I was thinking we’d tour the facility, but perhaps we could step outside for a short moment as well. If you’re feeling up to it.”

  This is another test, I’m sure, to see how well I am up and about, but it’s more than that. This is an obedience test, to see if I will I stay within their boundaries, because once they ship me off to this camp, they won’t have quite the same visualization on me.

  Wyles distracts me while Barlett opens the giant doors to the hall—he’s saying something about the weather, how cold it’s getting, but I can almost make out the buttons she’s pushing on the panel in the wall. I never had much chance for escape, and hopefully I won’t need to escape from this place any longer, just from the camp, but if I can figure out the door codes, I am one step closer to freedom regardless.

  The hallways we walk through are quieter than the ones I recall from my previous relocation. Are they the same hallways? I hope they are, because if not, something has happened to the people inside the doors. Something for the better or worse, but I think I know the answer to that. The halls certainly look the same, no matter which way we turn—the same off-white walls with strangely green doors. Paint peels from the walls, giving them the texture of tree bark, something familiar to me. When I had nothing else to eat, I would rip bark off and chew it to fool my stomach. I reach out and touch it; it crumbles at the slightest pressure, and flakes float in the air behind me. It’s all too simple to be bark.

  My babysitters trail behind me, matching my pace and saying nothing of it when I slow down to look at something closer. I finally notice it—the faint numbers on the door. The ones that used to be there and have been painted over, long ago.

  “What was this place?”

  “A hospital.” Barlett’s answer is uncaring and to the point.

  “What kind of hospital?” These hallways aren’t wide enough to push gurneys down, nor do I think the bars were placed on the windows recently.

  “A hospital,” Wyles replies vaguely. His voice sounds so different when filtered through the suit, less confident. Now it makes sense why he’s wearing it—when he walked in with it, I thought maybe it was our little secret that he had ever seen me without one to protect him. Now I know it’s not me he’s protecting himself from currently, but from the threat in this hallway. They give me nothing other than a flimsy white mask that goes over my nose and mouth, the same kind that were handed out on the city streets when the threat was first suspected.

  I stop and turn to face a door. Is there really someone behind it? I squint my eyes and will myself to see the number behind the faded, sick-looking paint. It could be thirty-seven. I push myself against it, putting my ear on the wood. I can’t hear anything inside.

  “Did you want to go outside?” Wyles doesn’t exactly crowd me, but I’m not sure he wants me lingering too long. I know the door is locked, but if it wasn’t, would I have the strength to look inside?

  The truth is that over time, especially since Wyles’s first visit, I’ve come to view my prison guards as less of prison guards and more as… well, certainly not friends, or even caretakers as they proudly proclaim themselves, but as people, I guess. People who earnestly believe in what they’re doing, and whether it’s wrong or right in the end, they will have done something or anything, and they have taken care of me. I could have been someone else, though, someone disposable to their cause, and this is what I always remember. I could have just as easily been someone locked up in one of these rooms, silenced by drugs until they didn’t need me anymore.

  Wyles gently steers me away by my elbow. I let him lead me, entranced by the feeling of someone touching me. It’s like my brief time with Raven and Poppy is gone, and for months and months, seemingly e
ven during school, I was never touched. It’s made stranger by the plastic on his fingers, a cold barrier for what should be intimate. More than that, it feels good to be led for once, instead of always leading. I was a child thrust into adult situations, but I always missed someone telling me the right thing to do. Now I make every decision for myself, decisions that mean life or death. No child should have to do that.

  We pass through another set of unremarkable swinging doors, but this time as I feel them breeze shut behind me, I hesitate. We’re no longer in hallways but in a huge open room. There’s a large semicircular desk with a board behind it and wheeled chairs. A few uncomfortable-looking chairs line the opposite wall, waiting for people to fill them, except they won’t be coming, and oh—there are windows. They line all the walls, enough that they might trick visitors into thinking this is a place with windows to let light in. It’s not.

  Right now, I’m blinded by the direct sunlight coming in. It’s more than disorienting; I used to live a life detecting time by manmade clocks, then by light, then just what they told me in here. Now I’m seeing the light again after being shut in a room with no windows and relying on others to tell me when a day has passed. Shouldn’t I be able to remember what a day feels like? After spending the last week focused on convincing myself that I feel stronger, I suddenly feel very ill indeed. I am pale, still too thin, and already my lungs burn with fresh air, and I’m only inside the waiting room.

  Now I know exactly what I’m looking at right across from me. These doors are the biggest in the building, the ones inside my modified room notwithstanding, and there aren’t any control panels on the wall next to them. They are simply front doors, and outside them, I will be free of my confines. For the moment.

  The doors rattle and squeak with such protest and dust I wonder if they are ever used; do they have other doors people usually come through? Loading docks, even, for the vans with victims they carry? Outside, directly by the door but hidden from my view previously, are two armed guards in hazmat suits. They are black, I notice, just like the ones that perform the checks on the scientists in the atrium. Now I really know the scientists lack creativity. Black suits for security, just like SWAT teams.

  It’s cold out, freezing almost, I think. Captivity began in the fall, so it must be full-fledged winter now. Wyles steps behind me and wraps a puffy coat around me; I’m wearing only the thin cotton pajamas one would expect a patient to be wearing. Numbly, I push my arms through the jacket and step forward. Really, the icy air feels good, even though I feel washed-out and weathered by my little room.

  There’s a courtyard made of cobblestone, and high stone fences with an old-fashioned cast-iron gate, but beyond it I see the trees, all bare in the chill, and a single paved road flanked by damp fields. There are a few birds chirping somewhere above me, and all signs of life still exist just the way I remember them. Nothing has changed except me.

  “We’re expecting snow soon.” Wyles stands beside me, not too close anymore. Barlett walks in small circles just a few yards off. Bored or stretching her legs. How often does she get to come outside?

  “When it clears, it will leave room for new life. Things will bloom again,” Wyles continues. “But this spring will bring back old life for us. We will inoculate the population so that it can rebuild. This tragedy has almost come to its end.”

  I see it all so perfectly: the vans, freshly painted with Invo logos, driving down the barren streets and seemingly offering salvation. There will be impromptu clinics opened streetside. The doors of the vans open, with hazmats injecting anyone who willingly comes out, and busting down doors to get to people who won’t come out. Once things have been rebuilt enough that news is carried in the paper again, people will call Invo heroes, and if their dubious past is ever exposed, people will excuse it because there were no laws, no malpractice. They did what they had to for the greater good, to save the people who still could be saved. No one will ever know about the screaming in the maze of unending hallways.

  These thoughts do not encourage me, because they must have the same question in their minds as I do: will I keep quiet about everything I’ve seen? If I did talk, would anyone believe me? I don’t think anyone would care, so long as they and their loved ones are provided for, but would a corporation rising from the ashes like a phoenix, a new hope, take the chance? They will undoubtedly be a major power in the next civilization, and I won’t know my place any longer. Before it was easy—I was a teenager, a boarding school student on her way to college. Now I’m a survivor, but there’s no room for the ones who can’t let go of the war, not when peace has settled and no one wants to remember otherwise.

  Wyles shoves his hands into the pockets of the hazmat suit, much the same as if it were a three-piece suit. Nonchalant. He’s never struck me as someone particularly dangerous, but he’s got resources and all the cards in this situation, and that does make him dangerous. If it came down to it, I wonder if he would kill me. Not he himself, certainly, but he could order it to be done by some anonymous benefactor. For the greater good, they’d say.

  When I look down that broken road leading up to the gates, I wonder if I’m really going to a rehabilitation camp. Maybe they’ll drive me out somewhere and leave me, no supplies. Maybe they’ll put a bullet in the back of my skull. I suppose I’ve never been particularly trusting of anyone, but it seems now like there’s no reason to be.

  “Do you know what day it is?” I ask. He’s right; the air feels like it might snow any moment. That heaviness in the wind sits on my shoulders, and the biting breeze chaps my lips. I can’t imagine being out there on my own now. I don’t think I would have made it this long in the cold.

  “It’s December 4,” he says. Of course they would know the precise day; for them, they never lived in a time without calendars. They didn’t have to scratch off the days like tally marks into a bracelet, because they don’t have to hold each individual day so preciously.

  I am resolutely sure these people will never save the world, because they haven’t lived in it. How could they know the answer? They know nothing. They will never find everyone to cure them, because if there are still people out there alive on their own, they won’t be easy to find. You can’t know the secrets of survival, where to hide, what to eat, how long to stay in one place—until you’ve lived them yourself.

  I’ve lived it. That’s how I know that there are people out there, good people, who will survive regardless of a synthetic cure. They won’t be found by the hazmats, not all of them. Even if their vaccine works, I’m glad there will always be people who won’t be found. I hope they stay strong, stay away, even if it possibly costs more lives. They have options the rest of us don’t.

  Now I know it’s past my birthday—I’ve turned eighteen, a legal adult, many days ago and never knew it. It passed in obscurity, and I can’t say I mind. I have no one to celebrate with, nothing to celebrate except that I was emancipated from my youth months ago already. I feel one hundred instead of eighteen, like a whole lifetime has passed.

  “We should head back inside,” Barlett comments from the other side of the enclosed front. There’s a half-frozen fountain near where she’s standing, with stone birds sitting on top of cracked, marble twigs. Despite the inner chill of the halls, I’d always considered this place full of some kind of life, a half-life maybe, but the way the water has frozen to the wings of the birds reminds me I’m in a place better suited for a mausoleum.

  “Just a little longer.” I can’t make demands, but Wyles nods anyway. He gestures behind me; when I turn, I notice a previously neglected bench near the entrance doors. It’s closer to the assault rifles than I’d like, but I sit down on the cold seat anyway.

  After another five minutes or so, Barlett leaves us to return indoors. I wonder if she was ever a kid who liked spending time outside. Wyles sits next to me patiently, as far from me as possible on the bench, as if I’m still contagious. At this point, my fingers are white and numb, and it’s uncomfortable to s
niffle my nose. Hurts to breathe.

  It feels wonderful.

  When we head back inside, it’s only after I mutely stand and initiate it. Wyles doesn’t rush me, and for once, I don’t doubt his motives. This is something he’s given me when he didn’t have to, nor did he have to sit with me. I remember what he said about his children, and while he didn’t break down and sob about the situation, I have to remember not everyone feels things the same. I never cried for my classmates or teachers. I barely cried for my parents, mostly because I forced myself not to think about them. I’d like to believe Wyles is more similar to me than I previously imagined, but he can’t be. For all his years and his wealth, he’s not lived like me. Like them. Like the rest of the world he wants to save.

  “Karen told me you wanted to be a doctor,” Wyles comments. We’ve passed the first set of swinging doors, the inviting ones that hide the rusting ones behind them.

  It takes me a moment to figure out Karen must be Barlett. “Wanted to. I guess they’re one of the few things left that we really need.”

  “You shouldn’t say that. We’ll need everything again soon—bankers and bakers or police and teachers.” He sounds optimistic. It must be a good day for him—maybe they’ve finished a vaccine, even.

  “I guess.” Even if things go according to plan, those things will be needed long from now. The lawless govern themselves.

  “What I am trying to say is—” He pauses, frowning. “—it may be a while before schools are in session again, and I want you to have the option of a continued education.”

  I stop walking, realization dawning on me already.

  “If you would like to stay here, we are prepared to take you on as a special project.”

  That’s funny—what else have I been to them?

  “We’ll give you the expedited course in medicine you need to know now to help cure people. You could be on the front of our inoculation movement. And when there’s more time, the men and women here—Barlett especially—will teach you other practices. Not just vaccines; Ringley’s specialty was actually in oncology, you know. They can teach you the math and science of it, whatever you’d like. Just until there are schools open again.”