Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

  I opened my eyes slowly when the ocean between my ears had calmed. My knuckles were white and dry on the handle of my hammer where I was strangling it. I released my clammy grip with a smack and set it aside to examine my new gift. An ax that could keep my family even safer.

  It was slim and long-handled, almost the same shade of used blue as my hammer, a worn leather pouch was snapped tightly around the blade, keeping the cutting edge hidden from accidental fingers. The thick snaps tinged open firmly under my dirty fingernails, the metal curve sharpened and polished enough to catch the skinny beam of light poking in through my closet door. It looked sharp. I flicked the back of my thumbnail against the cutting edge and it came away ticked where they had connected. I shaved off a bit of one of my shoelaces. It was sharp. Sharp enough for chopping wood, sharp enough for splicing scalps.

  I jumped when there was a knock at the door of my room. I fumbled for my more familiar hammer, but deliberate knuckles rapped against the closet door. Shave-and-a-hair-cut they pounded. Two-bits I pounded back. No scratching, no rasping or moaning. The coast was clear. Our secret code could only be performed by humans. I popped to my feet and leapt out of the closet into Dad's arms.

  “My goodness, Little Bean,” he said, quietly exasperated.

  I smoothed my braids back against my head and straightened my t-shirt.

  “No,” I said, standing up taller, “You said I'm not Little anymore.”

  “Fair enough, Big Bean,” he smiled, “Dinner's ready. Come on downstairs.”

  “Ok.”

  I clipped the safety leather back onto my axe before tucking it into my belt. He tilted his head and considered me. I stood up as tall as I could. Was he happy or sad?

  His boots shifted heavily on the floor. He nodded his chin at the door of what would soon be our group bedroom.

  “How am I going to keep this warm in the winter?” he asked me, rubbing his chin, “I'm going to have to make some kind of stove with some kind of chimney. Maybe a wide pipe headed out the window.”

  “You'll figure it out. I will help.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  He linked my wrist to his elbow and walked with me downstairs. I let my feet punch the floor like Dad's boots.

  “Yeesh,” Mom put her hand up to quiet me, “You'll wake the dead.”

  “Sorry.”

  I quieted myself. Mom was right. With such a huge windows in the living room, we would have to be very careful. It was a perfect access point for the monsters to bang their way in if we attracted them. We should settle ourselves and have a quiet dinner before it grew dark and our kerosene lamps drew them to us. The golden light of a late Spring day poured in through the giant panes, catching the shiny steel of our propane burner. My new ax handle clattered gently against the floor along with the familiar scrape of my hammer handle as I sat cross-legged in my place in the circle.

  The single burner sat perched atop a tiny can of dented propane. Mom balanced our blackened sauce pot on top, the noodles inside simmering and almost finished.

  “What are we having?” I asked, my stomach growling.

  Hector and Juliet perched on their hands and knees as close as they dared without being scolded or scalded, one on either side of me peering into the hot bubbles. Dad leaned back on his elbows, stretching his legs along the solid planks.

  “Noodles with sweet peas and the last of our bacon grease,” said Mom, “To celebrate our new Home. Ophelia, could you please go get the bowls?”

  She pointed to our new kitchen cabinets.

  The huge, new cabinets were sparsely dotted with our things. Dad had carried in the contents of our trunk. Tarps and his toolbox in one cabinet, food in the one next door. Two cans of corn sat next to three cans of red beans, a jar of pickles and a small plastic bag of rice that was almost opaque with the wrinkles of reuse. The paper-wrapped block of flour was protected from mice by an old coffee can, starting to rust around the edges. Dad said that coffee was like tea but better, stronger, darker. He said that he would get us some one day. I licked my lips.

  “Today, please, Ophelia!” Mom called, “The noodles will get soggy.”

  I grabbed all but one of our six aluminum bowls, leaving Immogen's, and all three of our spoons, one short. Dad whittled chopsticks to make up for our lack of silverware, and I preferred them to the rough, pitted and scratched fake-silver pieces, especially for noodles. I handed out the dishes accordingly, one in front of each of us, marking each seat in our pretzel-style moon.

  Mom ladled noodles and the canned peas into our bowls, each with a spoonful of bacon grease and cracklings smeared on top. Her spoon clanked against the empty glass jar before she got to her own bowl. Her noodles would only be coated in peas juice and hot water, but she wouldn't say anything about it. I scooped half of my bacon grease into her bowl when she looked away to turn off the burner and secure the propane tank.

  The drifting steam reminded us to let the pasta cool before we picked up our thin metal bowls. Only Hector regularly forgot and burned his fingers and tongue almost nightly.

  “Yeesh,” Mom sighed, scooping him onto her lap, telling him again, “Blow on it first.”

  When we were finished and too full and lazy to hold ourselves up, we lay across each other on the wooden boards, basking in our new space – even me. Mom leaned a bent knee against Dad as she squeaked the dishes clean with her fingers in the leftover noodle water. Juliet nuzzled her chin into the crook of my elbow while I wound her hair between my fingers. Hector sprawled akimbo, just as mellow as the rest of us, but not quite touching anyone.

  I could barely keep my eyes open. It was a relief when Dad stood, wrapped Mom in his arms with a kiss, and announced, “Come on. Let's all go to bed.”

  My feet were heavy on the stairs, but I remembered to skip the squeaky sixth step. I lingered in the doorway to my new room, gazing at my space through heavy eyelids. The blue was creamy and purple in the near darkness.

  “Come on,” Dad said, “Bedtime. You can explore more tomorrow.”

  I was too tired to ask if we had barricaded the lower doors, if the lantern was all the way out, or if I should sit awake at the window, a sentry over the yard, to see if any stumblers stalked towards us during the night.

  In the large duckweed bedroom, Dad had carried all of our blankets and clothes into a pile in one corner. Mom spread two thick wool blankets onto the floor: one for her and Dad, the other for Hector, Juliet and I. She rolled and placed one of each of our sweaters near the top for our pillows and gently smoothed down a second wool blanket on top, ready for us to crawl beneath. I flopped myself down with my head on my sweater and patted a soft place near my shoulder for Juliet. She snuggled into place, tucking one of her feet into my denim pants pocket as she always did.

  Hector stood with his back to us at the window where he was gazing out at the giant twilit yard, his fingers splayed at the first twinkling stars, leaving prints on the glass. If he saw a zombie he probably wouldn't even wake us up to tell us about it. Mom sighed and folded the small, ratty, extra blanket around his feet, so that when he slid down asleep, at least he wouldn't be directly on the floor. He had always preferred the footwell of the car to the seats as well.

  Mom kissed each of us on the peaks of our ears and petted our cheeks with her fingers before giving the bedroom door one last check. Despite ourselves, without any surrounding iron bars, against our best, guarded instincts, Dad let out a deep rumble of exhaustion and we all fell soundly asleep.

  Dad only got up twice during the night, to stand up in the boots that he never removed and sneak down the stairs to kill zombies in the yard. In the morning, we woke to the sounds of Mom scrubbing and then snapping our clean clothes above the wash bucket and hanging them to dry on a rope stretched across the living room. When Dad saw us dawdling downstairs, he whistled to call Hector, Juliet, and I onto the lawn to see what his night had been like. Mom grumbled about this, but it was Safe, because Dad said so.

  The long grass was
still bent with dew and it wetted us up to our knees in a humid Spring balm. Two bodies lay in the grass, both belly-up as Dad had left them, finally at peace from their wanderings. I gripped Hector and Juliet tightly, away from the corpses. I felt my empty pants loops and wished that I had grabbed my hammer and axe to stand this close to contagion. I thought about running to get it from our bedrolls, but I didn't want Dad to notice that I had forgotten them. Foolish.

  One of the ex-humans sprawled before us had been an elderly woman and one had been a teenage boy. Both had smashed temples where Dad had hit them. One day, while they had been hanging their laundry out to dry or painting over the rust spots on their vehicles, a zombie had snuck up on them and sank its teeth into them. Or they had seen it coming and didn't know how to fight it. Or there were too many and the humans lost the fight. The ex-old woman's thin calico dress and ex-teenage boy's grubby denim overalls had offered no protection at all. Zombie teeth ripped right through their clothes and injected sickening spit into their wounds.

  Then they turned into the same abomination; almost green, always hungry; lips always pulled back in search of something that moved or smelled good or made interesting sounds. Their families had been too cowardly or dead to do them the favor of killing them and they had wandered alone and miserable, scratching oozing gouges and festering valleys into their legs as they wandered dumbly together. Until Dad gave them their peace.

  He pointed around their wrinkles and pimples with the handle of his crowbar.

  “See? Here is the blow that killed them. Right through the skull. Hitting them lower in the guts won’t kill them. They bleed from there, but only as a pile of goo. They are all mush and bones below the head. You have to crush the brain. And then to be sure it won’t get up and come after you again, you have to cut the head off. Just to be sure. Then, even if the jaws still snap, at least they can't get up and chase after you.”

  We watched him cut off their heads and throw them in the stream down the hill, to keep them well-separated from the bodies until he could clear an area for a proper Burn Pile.

  “Ophelia, you help me keep the Little Ones out of this stream. The Virus that makes the undead can’t live in the water, but the zombies can. And fish, too.”

  Juliet and I shuddered.

  “If you ever see a fish you do not touch it. Ever. If anyone offers you fish, you run away and tell me or your mother, right away. They are not Safe. Do you hear me? Fish are dangerous. They started the zombie plague.”

  Juliet nodded and focused on the lesson. I clenched Hector’s hand until he looked up and nodded too. I wondered if he was listening. He should be listening. Fish could make you sick faster than a bite to the throat. Everyone knew that they could. In drawings, on warning signs, they looked evil – pale and slimy. Slippery, foul creatures with white bellies, grey-green scales and dead, vacant stares. But I had never seen a real one. Most of them had been killed when the plague had started. Fish probably didn’t even exist anymore.

  “Ok then,” Dad clapped his hands, “Go help Mom with Chores.”

  I sprinted across the Yard, encouraging the kids catch up in the House and use all of their muscles to scramble up the stairs. I collapsed in a pile with them on my lap near the blankets that Mom was trying to shake free of the dust from The Car. While she shook and folded and swept, she told us stories of Televisions and Shopping Malls and Vacation Travel while Hector and Juliet poked each other and jostled for the best view of the Lawn. From the window, we could see Dad clearing a spot for the new Burn Pile.

  “We didn't have to boil our water before the zombies came. We just filled up crystal clear, real-glass glasses with cold water right out of the spouts in kitchens. Water shaped like tulips. The stoves worked and the refrigerators kept things cold as ice all year round. Food stayed in the same buildings as people because nothing was chasing after good smells. Good smells like you!”

  She reached out to pinch our scrawny legs. We screamed and laughed and rolled in the blankets that she had just cleaned. She shooed us back out of the House and put us to work cleaning out an old wood shed that she wanted to turn into a Kitchen. It took us a week. Hector, Juliet, and I hauled the rotted wood to the new Burn Pile to see if it would burn, but it barely mouldered. We trapped one rat who had lived underneath the pile and used him for soup. Dad dragged the stove from the House outside and set it on top of an old steel ring that was already sooty from bonfires. He propped a pipe like a chimney out of its back and out through the green ruffled roof, so that Mom could cook by burning wood in the bottom ring and draw air that would make the oven hot.

  The first thing she baked in the Kitchen were cookies with the real, refined sugar, instead of honey. We ate every single crumb of the cookies, and Dad dipped his in a fresh cup of coffee. Mom was concerned when Dad revealed that he had traded a whole bag full of nails and screws for the fancy coffee from Gods Know Where, but he said that it was important to have quality Beans in his life. He winked at me when he said this, because he liked to call us all his Beans. Mom said that if he ever managed to trade for a cow and some salt, she would use those beans to make some coffee Iced Cream that people would want to come taste all the way from Chile.

  “That's true, that's true. Virginia, you make amazing Iced Cream. Ophelia, you take a sip of my coffee here and imagine it cold and creamy and sliding slowly off of a spoon. Your Mom will make Iced Cream someday and you can all taste it.”

  The coffee was as bitter as a thimble of Ranger's moonshine, but I marked Chile with a brown coffee bean on my big map, which I tacked onto the wall in my bright sky-blue dayroom with halves of bent and broken nails. It looked perfect, the oceans matching the paint. I pounded two hooks to hang my blue hammer, basking in the enclosed indigo walls. Dad knocked the secret knock and surprised me by dropping two more hooks into my open palm, grinning with his eyebrows almost in his hair.

  “For my ax?”

  “For your ax,” he confirmed.

  “I'm ready now,” I said seriously.

  “I'm sorry there's anything to be ready for, Ophelia.” Instead of hugging or high-fiving me, his head hung down to his chest. “I don't know if you can be ready. I don't know how to … There are some things you can never be ready for. Your sister, Immogen, …You, and … Hector and Juliet … I just want to keep you safe. And I can't. There is no Safe anymore.”

  I wrapped myself around his belly.

  “I can help. I can help keep us Safe.”

  “You always help, Ophelia. You help me everyday,” He wiped his eyes, patted me on the back, “Come on,” he said, “Let's get back to chopping wood for that oven.”

  Not only were there endless trees to chop so that Mom could bake in her new Kitchen – keeping all of its enticing smells and sounds far from the places that we would try to sleep – but there was an overgrown Garden that Mom had started to weed while we had been carrying wood. She found beans and peas and tomatoes and carrots and corn and melons and squash of all kinds.

  “No way was this a bachelor pad!” she grinned and grinned, “Some wonderful lady planted all this for us and just left it here.”

  Dad cut the grass all around it with a scythe that he found behind the shed and had scraped the rust off and sharpened with his whetstone. Then he mowed the grass with a rotary mower until it was short enough to prickle our toes and soles with every step, and we could see all around our green and Garden, fifty yards in every direction – the house to the West, with the driveway curling North beyond it; the Kitchen slightly uphill to the North; trees, trees, and more trees, plenty of them with apples to the East; and downhill to the South, a steep bank and then the cold water creek that we all avoided, in case their were any fish.

  I relished chopping wood into kindling on the stump in the center of the Yard, next to the Garden, where I could watch over everyone. I could see the Mom in Kitchen shed at the top of the hill, struggling to build herself shelves and a counter and scolding Dad when he tried to help.

  “I
can do it myself, dammit! I can do this! Go watch the babies.”

  “I'm watching the babies,” I called.

  I could see Hector and Juliet picking the smaller weeds amongst the vegetables, the ones that popped up every night and block the sun and water from our precious food's roots. I could see Dad behind the Garden, before the trees, hauling a dead body to the Burn Pile on a flat metal sled with a chain handle. It was a heavy sled, but he found it for free in the Yard, and it kept his hands, even in gloves, off of the Infected flesh whenever he caught a beast trying to stumble onto our property.

  Chopping wood was difficult at first. I missed more often than I hit the wood, and I barely made it split, my arms were so weak. Even with gloves on, I gave myself blisters, and blisters on top of those blisters. They popped and oozed and seeped onto the washed rags that Mom wrapped around them. And then they healed into callouses and my arms and back started to turn into weapons that could actually crack a skull if they had to. Wood was my target practice and my exercise. Spring drifted away as the Wood Pile grew. We put a canopy of woven, green branches over it, to help it stay dry in the early Summer storms.

  As it started to grow hot and sunny, Mom set Hector to work, picking things as they ripened, first only lettuces then early peas, radishes, asparagus, and small beans. Juliet scrubbed them in pails full of water and passed them to Mom, who sometimes wrapped them in damp towels, or strung them to dry, or put them into jars of vinegar for canning.

  Dad walked past and pointed a happy finger at Hector.

  “Such great Beans I’ve got!”

  Hector hooted and screeched. He stooped his knobby, mahogany back under the blazing morning sun to pluck a handful and hold them up, dancing giddily. He dropped them into his bucket and then copied the noise that each made. He was pretty good at mimicking their pling-twang, pling-twang. Better than he was at speaking real words.

  There were plenty of leaves hiding the tiny beans to keep restless five-year-old fingers and eyes busy – it could be hard to find the light yellow, dark yellow, green yellow, short plump and skinny string ones that looked like him, hiding among the twigs. Birds and rabbits kept eating the berries and nibbling on the melons and carrots. Dad tried wrapping them in a curl of wire mesh to keep them out, but we didn't know yet if it would work. But corn, squash, radishes, turnips, tomatoes, sun flowers, and sour crabapples were growing even faster than the weeds. Mom had high hopes for the potatoes, too.