Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

He began sitting on the delivered boxes, early in the evening, protecting them from me. He didn’t just take them inside. He could have. He could have simply pulled them inside as soon as they were delivered; it would have been easier. But this Doctor just sat and sat on the boxes, keeping me from making my donations. Maybe he was looking for revenge or information to give the Rangers about the Criminal who was ruining their boxes. He was on the lookout to nab me. Probably he also didn’t want to go back to work. He would rather sit on those boxes than go inside and do important Science.

  I was too full while he guarded the boxes – brimming and sloshing with Infected blood that I should have been donating, being helpful, getting rid of. Instead, it was just sitting. Sitting inside of me, just like he was sitting and not helping the other Scientists who were inside working. I wondered if he was one of the Scientists that was supposed to be working on getting Humans back to the Moon.

  I heard about the Moon on the radio. One of the deafest Squatters in our building blared a Science program through the walls before his batteries ran out and he died of something that made him slow and smelly and yellow as he walked down the stairs and I peeked out through a crack in the door. His radio programs said that Scientists used to know how to get to the Moon, but when the zombies came, they were so busy trying to save us all, that they forgot all about the Moon. Didn’t seem to me like we needed rockets up on the Moon, but then maybe we zombies couldn’t live up on the Moon, and that was the whole point.

  We were never going to get back to the Moon if this Doctor was the one responsible for building the rockets. He sat and sat and sat on the boxes, for hours every night for a week, wasting everyone’s time. He jumped and stirred and shook every time he heard moaning or screaming coming from another street or alleyway, but never enough to give up and go inside. He just sat there, in his lab coat, being terrified and leaving me too full of my own blood.

  Until, finally, one night, a second Scientist came out of the building wearing blue coveralls. They pointed and gestured together to the wall above the Clinic. They took out a toolbox and installed an electric security camera. They made sure that its knobby, blinking head was working and rotating. They waved their hands in front of it. They scribbled on each other’s clipboards and went inside, leaving the boxes behind. Why didn’t they just take their boxes inside as soon as they were delivered?

  I marched up to the security camera. It was much easier to crush than a skull. Its lenses popped and sprayed on my face as they broke. I smiled and ripped open the boxes until I found the large vials that I liked. I wasn’t scared of the small ones that required a needle. They probably wouldn’t even tingle, but I didn’t think that my blood was moving through my veins anymore. It was only marinating all of my organs. That’s what it felt like as they rolled from side to side under my skin.

  I smashed two more little, electric spying machines before they stopped repairing them. Then they left big white papers taped over the boxes with red tape and big black squiggles all over. They ripped as easily as worn out burlap and blew away in the violent River winds. As soon as they were gone I regretted not keeping them for kindling.

  I pulled my collar higher. It didn’t reach high enough, barely up to my chin. My scarves and hats and turtlenecks couldn’t cover everything, and Winter attacked more of me as I rolled up my sleeves to fill the hungry cylinders.

  “Thank you,” a voice said from behind me.

  I spun around. The Doctor in the white lab coat stepped out of the shadows. My liver rose into my throat. I enacted my best emergency plan.

  I made my gait awkward and stumbled towards him, moaning, so that he would run and retreat. I made sure that the low lights of the Clinic door caught the green tint of my skin. He wrinkled his pale pink face in disbelief and didn’t run away.

  “No,” he said, “The Scientists inside have been working with your blood. I know you’re Immune. You’re not a regular zombie. I think.”

  I reached for my ax. I held it tight.

  “Woah, I just want to talk,” he said.

  He put his hands up and took a step closer. He shook his flouncy nutmeg hair. He was younger and taller than I had thought. I’d have to jump to reach his head if I needed to. I was glad that he was testing my blood, but if he wanted to take me inside of his Clinic to become only Experiments and not Juliet’s caretaker, he’d have to fight to drag me inside. I glanced nervously at the heavy receiving door behind me.

  “Why didn’t you just open the box labeled ‘large vials’?” he asked, “How quickly do your cuts heal? Do you feel aggressive?” I walked past him, shoving him against the brick with one hand.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  I paused, glanced over my shoulder. He was holding a Propane canister out to me. I squeezed my ax and went back for it. I grabbed it and shook it gruffly. It was full. A free, full Propane canister.

  “Thanks,” I gurgled out of old, polite habit.

  I began walking more briskly away.

  “You can talk,” he said, “The Virus didn’t destroy your vocal chords.”

  I ran away.

  He called after me, “I told them they should try testing the blood you have been leaving. I thought you might be Immune. I’m glad that you are. Thank you for finding us!”

  He wasn’t there when I peered around the corner the next two nights. Nor was there any more Propane. But I left him more blood, hoping that he would keep testing it, hoping that he would leave me some more Warm things. Give me more Propane for the blood that I needed to get rid of. I hoped that I could watch him pick up my blood and take it inside for testing – real Science. They were using my blood. I was helpful and not just a roving thief who couldn’t save the girls being dragged behind by the big, fat, one-legged men.

  On the third night after the Doctor told me I was useful, there wasn’t a box of vials for me to use. I checked all of the boxes. Opened them up and dumped their contents. No large ones, no small ones. No vials. No needles even. Only cotton balls. I sighed, rubbed my gloved hands together and repacked the six boxes that I had torn open. I turned to leave.

  “You can’t read, can you? In any language?” he asked, coming from behind the dumpster.

  I gritted my teeth, reached for my ax.

  He held out a thermos. He unscrewed the lid. It steamed, white heat billowing into the freezing air. He set it down on the ground and backed away from it.

  “Do you know how to read?” he asked me again.

  “Read?” I gurgled, mostly to myself, reaching for the thermos. I took a sip. It was water, Warm water. He knew that zombies drank, and that we were cold. I turned to leave with the hot fluid.

  “You can’t read,” he frowned.

  “I like coffee,” I told him, the words sticking in my throat.

  His eyes widened.

  And there it was, my first full sentence to a real, live Human being in six months. I had spoken to the Doctor who took my blood. I was getting chilled with less liquid between my ribs. I had given him some of my Warmth, another piece of me. I needed to get back to my closet. I turned to go.

  “Goodbye,” I said, enjoying my garble as it wafted through the air.

  He smiled. He held out another gift. A book.

  I frowned. What was that for? Maybe it was it a map. Or kindling. I took it and eyed him suspiciously. I turned to leave, rolling the sludge about in my throat, but before I could move my feet, my scratchy chords threw more words at him.

  “Does my blood help with real Science?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I had heard that there were Humans who were Immune to the Virus, but that most of them were Impaired, Frozen, or Violent.”

  I poked at him with my eyes.

  “There are more like me?”

  “Somewhere, I guess. I’ve heard of them. But you are the only one that I know of. Will you keep coming back here?”

  I nodded, took a few more steps.

  “You could come in,” he offered, “Where it’s Warm and
we could run more tests.”

  I jumped. No way. Giving them small, poisonous gifts was one thing, but trusting them was a whole nother. I’d never go in there, inside the big Clinic, with the huge, banging doors, where they wanted to put all of me – every last drop – inside of a clear, glass vial where I couldn’t look out for Juliet. I took fast steps away from him.

  He raised his arm to say something more. I panicked. I ran away.

  When I got home, Juliet was rubbing her face on the curtains. She turned around when I came in, arms outstretched. She moaned for me. I hugged her and let her chew on my jacket, but she lost interest in it when I took it off and it fell still on the floor.

  “Ok, ok, Bean. We can wrestle later. I Love You, too.”

  I tethered her to the refrigerator with the rope that had pink ribbon at the end. I sat down at the dusty dining room table with a cup of hot water and lit a stolen candle. I licked my lips. Jumping shadows lurched and stumbled across the pages of my new gift. I would thoroughly examine the kindling before I burned it.

  The book from the Doctor was not a map. It was a lot of pictures inside of a flimsy, bright yellow cover. There were pictures of buildings and towers and gardens. There were boats the size of houses and cities built over water. And people. So many people. I could see their faces, and the sun that warmed them. A droplet ran down my lips and chin, landing with a small splash on the pages. I brushed it off with my sleeve and closed my drooping jaw.

  There were pictures of deserts and oceans and animals with spots. There were animals with long noses, with long legs, with no legs, hanging by their tails. There were trees with curly branches and trees with green snakes of leaves running all down their sides. There were real snakes too.

  There were machines I had never seen before. There were people. Old men leaning on walking sticks, babies suckling, children playing a game with a ball and their feet. They were eating and dancing and working on clearing trails. They had knives as big as my ax. They had farms even smaller than ours had been, with beans all tangled around the pumpkins and red, ripe fruit. Mom had grown squash like that. Dad had called us Beans. Hector has smashed pumpkins with his purple, clenched fists.

  The best picture was of a woman who could have been family. She was young and Brown, almost the same age and color as me – seventeen and the same color I used to be, except her eyes were a little more golden. They glistened. She was wearing a quilted jacket. It hung open against her bare chest while she bent over the dirt, smiling up at the camera. In her left hand was a neon orange melon, fat with seeds and dripping in the Warm air. In her right hand was a knife, gripped tightly under her knuckles, glinting in the dappled light. I touched her face with my fingers until it was morning. The glossy paper didn’t smudge.

  “See, Juliet,” I pointed for my tethered sister, “This is what our home used to look like. We didn’t have jungles, but we had vegetables and we didn’t used to be green. We used to look like her, and we could eat fruit with knives and carry them back to our house, like this, and eat with our family like these people are doing. Before they wanted to kill us. Before we were already dead.”

  Her shoes squeaked against the linoleum as she strained against her leash, claws reaching to rip my new pages if she could get at them.

  “They didn’t kill us, though. They missed. They didn't notice that I was Immune. They let us leave to wander alone forever,” I whispered, stroking the image of a small boy cutting a path between vines and swarming flowers.

  A piece of paper fell out of the back of the soft slippery book. It tumbled out of the spine, folded in half and bright white against the moldy boards. I opened it with my dirt-packed fingernails. There were a series of squiggles on the left, and a series of pictures of medical supplies on the right. Between each squiggle and each medical supply was a line. I stared at them until I had memorized the pairs, which squiggles matched which supply, and then I looked through my new, sunshine yellow book again, stopping at the paper of squiggles at the end. I smoothed the shiny pictures, memorize the squiggles. Touched the faces of the Humans, learned the lines for the medical supplies. Explored the forests of far away people, concentrated on the shapes that meant Petri Dish. This was reading.

  At sunset, I gently wiped my finger and nose prints from the glimmering pages of my new, floppy book. I put it up on top of the refrigerator, where Juliet couldn’t reach it. I was glad that I hadn’t used it as kindling, but there was also nothing else new to burn. All that was left in the apartment was our furniture. The furniture was necessary to block the door with, and to sit on once in a while. I loved having furniture. And we needed our clothes, we needed our blankets, we needed our floor boards. Burning Juliet’s rope and ribbon leash was out of the question. But a wooden spoon from the kitchen drawers might do.

  It smoldered under the water pot until the water was almost lukewarm. I set a bowlful on the floor for Juliet. She drank it heartily. I wiped the cold drops from her chin and promised to find her something warmer soon.

  The steam grates outside of the Clinic were churning hot plumes into the night while the Scientists inside were busy doing Experiments on my blood. If I could help them out, if I could be good for Science, maybe they could go to my family for me as a trade. They could explain to them that they hadn’t shamefully abandoned their daughters to wander alone forever. They could tell them that I was different, that I was Immune; that it was okay that they hadn’t killed me because I was different and didn’t need killing; that if I stumbled towards them, I just needed Warm water and a hot fire, not a crowbar to the brain.

  A true zombie, slow and staggering with chill, not helping the Scientists like I was, not taking care of anyone or anything, pawed and clawed at the Clinic’s grate, where the steam from their fancy, electric machines pumped out into the night. The beast didn’t notice me, it just grabbed for the clouds that it felt moving across its face. It was missing all of its fingernails and the metal slats were smeared with its black goo.

  The Clinic only used three floors of the tall building that it was inside of. The other fifteen floors above were empty, void of all useful things. Only Squatters were up there. One of them had Turned and stumbled out of its window, down to the alley. It was only wearing a bathrobe, open and flapping in the steam. Little drops of water condensed on its slick grey green breastbone.

  I held my hand up next to its head. Warm steam condensed on my grey green palm as well. When the monster turned its head to bite me, I drove my fist into the nape of its neck and smashed its skull against the grate, pushing again and again until I felt brick through its face and it stopped moving. I stepped back to let it fall. My hand was dripping.

  The Scientist gulped loudly from behind me. He was staring at me. He gulped again. His eyes were huge, the size of trashcan lids. He staggered and panted. He reached out to lean against the Clinic door. He cowered. From me.

  I hid my fist behind my back, relaxed my shoulders, wiping my hand on the back of my jacket until it was clean. I tried to clear my throat. It rattled.

  The Scientist’s pants quivered around his legs.

  I showed him both of my hands, as clean as they ever were, trying not to look dangerous. I took three slow, clumsy steps to the boxes of supplies and slowed down, to show him that I was calm and not too murderous. I used my lungs and tried to focus my eyes. I looked for the squiggles that he had written down for me and that I had memorized. I hoped that I had memorized them rightly. I wanted to demonstrate that I had not used the book not for kindling.

  I found the squiggles that had been paired with the drawing of large vials and plunged my hand into the box. I pulled one out and triumphantly spliced my arm open, running some of my black goo into the container, sealing it, wiping the drips onto my sleeve and setting it back in its holder. I patted it securely into place, and smiled lopsidedly at him.

  He gripped the solid dumpster that stood between us.

  A thermos caught my eye, set carefully on top of one of the other
boxes. The squiggles on the box said that there should be gauze pads inside. I perched on top of the gauze pads and opened the thermos, smiling a hopeful thank you to him. I noticed its smell. It was not water. It was coffee.

  I took a sip. It was so hot that my tongue tingled against my teeth. Amazing. My nostrils told me that the beans had probably been very recently roasted in a nice, big drum, cooled evenly, stored in the dark, ground in a burr grinder and brewed at about two-hundred and ten degrees, perfectly, inside of the fancy Clinic. Maybe grown in Java. Dad had told me about Java. I wondered if any of the pictures in the book had been of Java. I only knew how to find it on a map. I remembered that Dad had traded for coffee from Java once.

  I swallowed a rich mouthful, closing my eyes and imagining the lush forests where the beans had been grown. I jumped when remembered that it was not the big, green coffee leaves that were rustling. It was the Scientist shuffling his feet. I panicked and opened my eyes to stare at him while I drank. He eyed me too.

  “We're quite the pair, my Mom used to say,” I mumbled.

  “Do you know if anybody else in your Family is Immune?” he asked, “Has your mother, grandmother, a sister, a cousin, or anybody been Infected and retained any cognitive abilities? Probably the females.”

  “Nope,” I said, “Nope, none of them are Immune. Not unless my big sister was Immune, and they took care of her before we could find out. Isn't that a shame? Or is that best? Do I wish that she had been Immune or that I had walked off with her when I had the chance? Or that my Dad killed me as rightly as her either way? … But there are more like me? Can you tell me where there are any more like me?”

  “I don’t know of any. I’m sorry.”

  I was sorry too. Even the Human, the Scientist, didn’t know of more like me, to tell my Family about, to give them an example. Of what? Maybe there wasn't anybody else who I could live, steal, and talk with ever again. Maybe I didn’t need them. Maybe they were Violent or Impaired like he said. Maybe Juliet was enough. Maybe we should all be dead. Maybe I could just talk to the Scientist. I rolled the coffee around in my mouth. It gurgled as I swallowed.