Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

  The Ranger loaned the waxy cowboy a pen for the Petition for Special Protection. When the cowboy had finished, he and the Ranger stood jovially, joking about the shape of the mud on the hood. It looked like a cow, a butchered cow. They loved it.

  The Ranger banged the Zodiac's mud happily, slipped his hand once more over the sleek, shiny Smithson G4, and then he made the Move Over sign to the Brown family in front. The Brown father stuttered and thought enough to reach for the pad of Petition for Special Protection forms, because they clearly had more than three children, whom he swept his arm at broadly. They obviously needed Special Protection. He held up his fingers to show their ages. He opened his trunk to show that it was empty of supplies and that he needed to barter work for food. He begged and bowed on one knee, but the Ranger gripped the pad of papers more tightly, signed “Move Over” one more time, and strode away, fingering the keys to the last two sites that he had already given away.

  The Smithson G4 and the ragged Zodiac eased around the other Brown family’s wagon so that they could back up and go find someplace else to park. We didn’t look up to wave at them and we didn’t catch anybody else’s eye either. It was sad, but they probably knew how to handle themselves and didn't need our pity. Or what if we spoke up and had to go with them? What if we invited them in and then the Ranger was mad at us and also one of them was Infected and bit us in the night?

  We just shivered and pretended to be asleep at 3:00am when we heard them scream and their windows shattering – a chorus of voices in different ages and pitches, ringing in our ears for only a few minutes.

  They should have known better. Why didn't they know better? If you can’t get a Campsite, you don’t sleep in your Car. You find a tree that the beasts can’t reach you in, and then they leave your Car alone, because you’re not in it. But we never missed getting a Campsite. Dad was obsessively early to the line until the ground froze.

  When the ground froze, all of the zombies froze too, so you didn't need bars to protect you. And that was when Juliet arrived. Juliet, another baby to keep us busy. Hector and I were not destined to be alone. Mom was finally on a roll. Our Little Sister Juliet was born in icy weather – only the year after Hector. I was eleven. I was counting time now, and we were farther North, just outside of the big city of Turington. We couldn't afford the Clinic that we could see, with its big red cross painted on its frosty bricks, so Mom just used the front seat again.

  We couldn’t open the windows to dry out the Car. If we did, the wet spots on the upholstery would freeze and chap our skin. So we stayed balmy and wrinkled, smelling of umbilical cord and tasting briny for days.

  Hector and I sat in the back sipping from glass jars of melted snow that I had sweetened with honey. All of the adults older than sixteen hiked the hillsides putting pikes into zombie heads and pulling the frozen corpses through the snow into Burn Piles. Except for Mom, who sat in the front seat giving birth to Juliet. She wailed and the insides of the Car steamed and baked with the effort of the new baby.

  I took care of Hector, like Immogen would have me. When he couldn’t laugh at my funny faces anymore, I slathered some crackers with jam. We didn’t get much jam, but the sugar would be good for him, I thought. It would help him fall asleep before Mom really started to push. Besides, he was going to have to get used to Mom’s milk being for somebody else.

  He did fall soundly asleep but I stayed awake to see Dad come back to The Car just in time to scrub himself with alcohol and a towel to pull Juliet up from somewhere down near the floorboards of Mom's passenger side. In the morning, we chucked the bags of afterbirth and ruined towels on top of the Burn Piles with the corpses. Dad thought we should bury them near a tree to help it grow, and that the tree could be named Juliet. Mom told him not to be such a gross Romantic and looked around to see if anyone heard him say something so Uncivilized. Nobody even looked up. Juliet wailed in the stiff chill. Immogen would have Loved her.

  She was a sweet baby, who cried more than Hector did, but she made the Car smell better, like flowery drool instead of poopy fingernails. Hector stared at her a lot, chattering instead of talking. He taught her how to stick out her tongue before she could smile. Mom wasn’t so happy about that.

  Bad enough we were living in our soiled Car until Dad could make the rest of the money that we needed to buy an abandoned house on The Cheap from The Government, worse yet that my little brother could barely walk or talk better than his year-younger sister who he kept giving bad habits to. Juliet sprouted, lean and coordinated from the beginning. She spoke before she turned one, her favorite phrases delighting us almost as much as her long, curled eyelashes did.

  “Honey, please. Hug me. Happy Birthday. Be careful. Hector, no.”

  I watched them grow, instead of staring out of the window by myself. I had two toddlers to watch out for. I threw them Birthday parties with extra beans spread across their sesame buns. We counted to ten and then twenty on our fingers and then toes. We played pat-a-cake until they could clap the most complicated versions with their eyes closed.

  I had to make sure they developed despite our pinched quarters. Hector finally took to walking, two years after he should have, once we had the space to move around in the largest Campsite cage any of us had ever seen. Dad got a Long Term Job at a river with a dam that was falling apart. Most people were too scared to go near the water, because everybody knew that the zombies and the horrible, slimy, Infected fish were in it, but Dad said he could balance on the dam, bash in heads, and fix the girding beams all at once. We spent more seasons than we wanted to count patiently waiting for him to come home and be locked inside with us before dark. He always made it safely, whistling with something delicious thrown in the sack over his shoulder.

  He came home with fresh venison haunches, snow hares, or duck eggs and when he shared with the Rangers, they gave us an expensive, deluxe Campsite that we could roam around in, free of worry. Mom and I wore our backs out, hunched over, working three and four-year old muscles, stretching Juliet and Hector until they could move all their joints like they should. We dusted their blankets so their noses didn't run constantly and braided their hair so that they didn't look like Ragamuffins, until Dad showed up one afternoon, well before dusk, with his burlap goodie bag fuller than usual.

  The first item that he waved before us and passed around gingerly was a rolled up scroll of paper. Paper is expensive, but I didn't see why it was so exciting or why Mom was crying until Dad told me what it was. It wasn't a receipt or a scrap of nice kindling that he had found, it was a Deed to our new House. The dam was finished and we finally had Cash to spend on a Real House.

  Our new House was an abandoned one outside of a small town even a little bit farther North, in Nasmyth. Hector galloped around like a maniac and Juliet skipped steadily back and forth between Mom and Dad, all of us chanting “Nasmyth” until the Ranger asked us to Simmer Down. Didn't want us scaring people, or provoking them to rob us.

  Dad handed Mom two paper packages, one full of powdery beige flour, the other brimming with sugar, dark brown and sticky sweet. She beamed at him and let us each lick one finger full of the amber crystals before she hid them under the front seat. Dad gave Juliet and Hector each a wooden pull toy attached to a long twine – a painted green duck and a etched grey goose that flapped their feet as their wheels turned. I high-fived Hector and then Juliet and then Dad, agreeing that these were the best gifts ever. But there was more. Dad wasn't finished yet. There was something for me.

  He reached into the bottomless sack and handed me my very own, brand new, bright blue hammer.

  “You're going to need this hammer, Ophelia – for building and for killing – there are going to be a lot more zombies to kill on The Farm in Nasmyth. There won't be a cage. Just wide open spaces and fresh air. You're going to have to learn. I'm going to count on you. You can help me make our home.”

  I loved it. I could build the Future and defend my Family with its sturdy handle and shiny steel head. I ki
ssed it, which made Dad laugh, and then I propped it in the back window where it wouldn’t fall on anybody’s little head or fingers accidentally. I was fifteen and I thought I could handle a heavy hammer, especially such a beautiful one. But we were all still too small for our ages. Perhaps the fresh Northern wind sweeping through our own windows would help us sprout and straighten our teeth.

  With a tank full of gas and our Deed in the glove compartment, we couldn’t sit still for the last of our Car ride North. We whisper chanted “Nasmyth” until we got too loud and Mom scolded us. She wondered if we’d stolen and eaten all of her sugar. I tickled the kids until they couldn't giggle anymore.

  Nasmyth came before our new House. High, pitted speed bumps announced the edges of the incorporated part. It looked like every other small town we had passed through. The first floors of any houses left standing were vacant; the second floors of most were turned into shops and businesses and living quarters for the owners and tenders. Dad gave a solid wave to the Hikers and Townies that we passed, moving very slowly so as to not frighten anyone, but they just looked at us with frowns and tilted their heads.

  “They don’t know us yet,” he said.

  Mom pointed out the Fabric Store to me, the Church and the Post Office. They all had nicely cleared first floors with sturdy gates sprawled across their entrances and solid ladders up to their working sections. There was the Baker, the Smith, the Priest. That was where we would mail our letters once a month; that was where we would go to the Funeral Feasts of our new Neighbors. At the end of Town, a small, fair boy with freckles loaded his slingshot and sent a pebble in our direction with his tongue stuck out. I smiled and waved to show no Hard Feelings.

  I pushed the squirming and shouting little kids off of my lap and traced the final crayon line on Immogen's old, tattered map. I drew a thick, waxy blue star over the small town of Nasmyth with a little arrow, pointing to the plot an hour away where our House would be. I folded up the map and tucked it into my back pocket as we pulled off of the road, onto our winding gravel driveway. We parked and turned off the engine. A quiet terror settled over me as we stared at our huge, new home out of the old Car’s windows. I gripped my new, blue hammer harder.

  The House

  Our new House froze me in its glare as it slouched around the last curve of our new, long, gravel road: two stories of wooden shingles hunkered over a rickety front porch that pulled the whole shack forward. There were certainly zombies inside, stuffed into closets, smearing themselves across the abandoned floors, their pocked rubber skins collecting the dusty glass they had broken and dragged in with them.

  I could see two floors full of wide-open, un-padded rooms that made my palms sweat, even from my seat. We all had little accidents in the Car – hangnails or knocked heads or cramped ankles – but the accidents we could have in the House would be so much bigger. The door that I could see had no bars or fences or even locks. Nothing is as soft and padded as the backseat or as forgiving as the familiar dirt of a Campsite. How long it would be before Hector or Juliet or I would fall down and break a bone on the hard wooden floors? Would it be a wrist or a knee? I was fifteen and could probably handle it. They were only five and four. Could I keep them safe in the wide-open spaces?

  A short, uneven porch sloped before the front door, which opened without creaking because Dad was already out there greasing it as his first chore. He was always thinking and working. Mom was stretching in the long grass of the yard, her hands on her toes, but her head still tilted, her eyes always searching for something that would stumble and lurch at us. After she peered over each cardinal direction, she waved at me to go ahead and bring the kids out.

  I couldn’t swallow around my fat tongue. Zombies could be anywhere. They were everywhere, every day, all the time. They were in the thickets and brambles to each side of our new gravel driveway. I was sure of it. They will hide behind the old wooden shed, perched at the top of our vast, weedy yard. A horde of zombies could easily clamber up over that little hill to the south that I couldn’t see beyond.

  “There,” Dad pointed with the tip of his oil can, “There's a little stream flowing just below that hill.”

  I could almost see the scaly fish swarming around the swollen ankles of a staggering ex-human. Cold sweat trickled down my back when I sat up straighter to scan beyond the fence of the overgrown garden to the East, searching for anything swaying and green but not a plant.

  Mom and Dad left us in the Car, opened the front doors of our new house and stepped inside of the thin, wooden frame, their ax and crowbar raised high. They disappeared into the mouth of the huge house, completely out of sight. It swallowed them whole.

  I clenched Juliet's hand and strained to hear every breath that Hector took, so that I wouldn't have to focus on my own. Immogen's ghost whispered warnings to me. Sweat dripped from my chin down the collar of my ratty flannel. I buried my nose in the dirty denim stretched across my folded knees. Bells and emergency whistles pounded inside of my head while I counted the number of seconds until a zombie pawed at our window to pull one of us out backwards and screaming. Minutes passed. Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside of the car.

  Dad reached for the handle to open it. I shook my head wildly and pressed my fingers down on the lock button as hard as I could. Hector whooped like a monkey to get out and go play, thinking this was a safe Campsite. Juliet sat quietly on her haunches, watching to see what would happen next, until Mom opened the other back door and scooped my little sister out into her arms.

  “No!” I shouted.

  I scrambled to pull Juliet back in by her shirt. Hector scrambled into the front seat for his own escape into the great wilderness. I tried to keep my foot pressed against the lock button on my side, but I slipped and Dad cracked my door. It only opened a tiny sliver, while Dad reach down to get a good hold on Hector, who was trying to crawl away crab style along the gravel, but it was enough for Immogen's ghost to leak away.

  She drifted loose and free, a tiny puff of steam in the wind. First, the top of her head and face faded, smiling at me as she disappeared, whipped into peaks. Her neck stretched and craned to follow the breeze, then her slight shoulders, chest, belly and neatly folded hands. She drifted up and away into the summer blue, finally just a glimmer against the cool yellow sun. I tried to grab at her feet, but she was weightless and far out of my reach. I landed in the gravel on my hands and knees.

  “My goodness, Ophelia,” Dad crouched down to my level, nearly toppling backwards with Hector squirming on top of him, “What are you doing? The house is great! You're going to love it. Come and see.”

  He didn't know that we had just lost Immogen for good. How could she leave me now? I gripped a fistful of dirty pebbles and flung them back at the ground, jamming as much dirt under my nails as I could.

  “Really, Ophelia,” Mom said as she passed me, toting Juliet into the new house, “Act your age. Be a young lady. You're fifteen, not five.”

  Fifteen? Am I that old? I was six when Immogen died. Nine years ago. Nine years I had carried her ghost. All in the car. No more.

  They left me standing there, by myself by our safe Car. I couldn't remember the apartment that we lived in before the monsters came, nor the preschool teacher who had called me off of the playground to get into my parents' car with my older sister already buckled in, the trunk full, barely enough space left for two little butts next to the cooler and a box full of tools. That was my home. All of our food and clothes and tools were in The Car, all the way until now. But Mom and Dad just walked away, like they had never needed the dented red egg. Like they didn't have anything left to keep safe.

  A twig snapped behind me. I whirled on all fours to see what it was, but it was only a squirrel, darting from tree to tree. I picked up my hammer and ran to be nearer Dad's axe. If I couldn't stop them from moving on, at least I could go and die in the house with them, swinging all together.

  “Come on in,” Mom said, “See our new home, Ophelia.”


  She forced little piles of dust and scraps across the wooden floor with harsh strokes. The floor was nearly level but dirtier than the hard-packed mud of campsite ground. As Hector scooted his bottom across the floor, he gathered loose soot and rodent droppings with his pants. I forced myself ten paces past the threshold and scooped him up in my arms to clean him off. His knobby knees clattered against my ribs and forearms. His wet thumb grazed my ears and neck, giving me the chills. He had just been starting to improve in the campsites. Would he ever learn how to speak in this harsh, flimsy tinder box or would he forever coo like a drunken pigeon? Five was too old not to be talking. Maybe this cabin would be good for him.

  I held him up by his armpits, forcing his scrawny legs to extend and walk instead of crawl. Juliet met us at the back door, directly across the plain rectangle room from the front door.

  “Window,” she said, smiling up at me, “Mine.”

  The glass was unbroken, smudged and cluttered around the sills with dead flies, but not shattered. Not caved in or bashed or otherwise clawed at. Just empty panes of glass standing around our living room in three pairs. So much unbroken glass in one place. They would cut themselves if they broke it.

  Juliet and Hector applied their fingers and nose prints against the panes, marking their territory. Hector's dusty crown of fluff bobbed just above Juliet's neat brown twists. How was it possible that she was only a year younger than him? Juliet was walking, talking, and making eye contact. But she was still very small. Maybe if they had grown with enough food they might not be such runts, like me. I'm fifteen but I still look like I'm eleven, more shrunken than even Mom's ballerina genes can explain. I'm very knobby and I stoop a bit. There isn't much space to grow in the backseat. Not a lot of places to store food. No steady jobs to get money to buy food. Maybe this house and land will be good for some things.