The Cured

by Deirdre Gould

  There was a metallic squeal as Rickey opened a panel on the tractor. Henry picked his way through extensions and wicked looking farm tools to a workbench, hunting for the battery. “Hey, were you an auto mechanic before?” he called back to Rickey.

  “Sometimes. I grew up on a farm. I know about tractors. I won’t blow it up.”

  “I was just curious.”

  “What were you?”

  Henry laughed to himself. “Office worker. I was one of those people that called if you didn’t pay your credit card bill.”

  “Shit. You were a debt collector? No wonder you’re so depressed all the time.”

  There were several batteries on the bench. Henry had no idea which one he was supposed to grab. They all looked the same to him. He tried to lift one, but his arms had lost most of their muscle over the past several months of privation. He looked around for a dolly or wagon to help him.

  “Hey, Henry, did you hear about the two cannibals who decided to split their dinner evenly? They decided to start at opposite ends and work toward each other. Partway through, the cannibal who started at the head said to the one that had started at the feet, ‘how you doing down there?’ and the second cannibal said, ‘Great! I’m having a ball!’ The first cannibal got mad and shouted, ‘Stop! You’re eating too fast!’” There was a wild laugh.

  “You’re disgusting Rickey. How can you laugh about that?” said a woman’s voice. Henry realized that Rickey’d told the joke for her benefit, not his, but he didn’t respond.

  “Relax, I’m just trying to get Henry to lighten up a little.” Their voices floated through the barn and Henry tuned out the words, just appreciating the company, the presence of other people around him. He wondered if he would be able to leave the City to find Marnie once he got there. To turn his back on civilization and go back out alone into the empty world. But he had promised. It was why he’d been spared. And when he and Marnie returned to the City together, what had happened in the past wouldn’t matter quite as much.

  Henry found a toboggan hidden behind some old bikes. It would have to do. And if they couldn’t get the tractor working, at least he’d found the bicycles. He stood looking at the batteries for a minute. He didn’t want to drop them and crack them. He looked around again until he’d found a wide plank of scrap wood. He set it against the bench to use as a ramp down to the toboggan. It took a few tries, but he lifted the first battery and slid it down the plank. It left a smear of brown liquid behind it. Henry frowned. Maybe it was just rainwater. He inched the plank over in front of the next battery. His arms already ached and he was breathing harder than he would have expected. He took a rest. He hefted the next battery and plunked it down on the ramp a little harder than he had meant to as his arms gave up. The wooden bench behind the ramp collapsed in half, spilling tools and batteries onto the floor with a loud crash. Henry stood dazed, looking at the mess. The bench was little more than a cinder, a thin rod of charcoal where the batteries had been. An oily gurgle came from one of the larger batteries and Henry groaned as he realized it was leaking more.

  Rickey came running over, followed by Melissa. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Henry snapped before they could say anything.

  Rickey grinned and threw a bony arm over Henry’s shoulder. “Well ain’t that a pissah,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” asked Melissa.

  “Yeah, just frustrated with myself,” said Henry.

  Rickey shrugged and winked at Melissa. “Don’t sweat it. They were cracked anyway. Probably froze at some point. The acid must have eaten right through the bench.” He took his arm back and leaned forward to look at the batteries. “These have been no good for a while. Eh, it was a long shot anyway. If it wasn’t the batteries then the diesel might not have fired. Hell, I don’t even know how to drive the damn thing.”

  Henry laughed, feeling better. “I thought you said you grew up on a farm.”

  “I did. I didn’t stick around long enough to drive the tractor though.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Melissa, “the others are inside packing. They expect to be leaving in the morning.”

  Henry pointed to the toboggan. “I found some bikes next to this. I don’t know if there’s a pump or anything, I’m sure the tires are flat by now. We could carry our stuff on this though.”

  Rickey shoved the remaining battery off with his foot. “We’re going to want to clean off that acid. Henry, you too, you need to change or it’ll itch and burn.”

  Henry helped them get the bikes out. There were only four. They found a bicycle pump nearby. Henry left them to figure it out and walked back to the house to find another set of clothes.

  Eighteen

  The second floor creaked in comforting patterns as Vincent and Pam shuffled between the bedrooms, looking for backpacks or suitcases to take with them. Henry poked the fireplace with an unlit log and then threw it in, sinking onto the old dusty couch. It was hard for him to stay warm. He felt light and battered like driftwood. Like there was no cushion between himself and the world. He basked in front of the fire and started to doze. A low groan from the nearby bathroom woke Henry with a start. He sat up. “You okay?” he called, no knowing which of them was there.

  “Yeah. I’m all right,” came a shaky voice. Henry got up and walked over to the bathroom.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked through the door.

  “Nothing really, I think my hand has a little infection is all.”

  Henry didn’t know much about medicine, but he was beginning to realize how dangerous any injury could be in this new, ruined world. “Can I come in?” he asked, “Maybe I can help. Or I can go get Vincent, maybe he’ll know better…” The door opened a little. He found Molly sitting on the edge of the tub, her face red and swollen from crying. He sat down next to her and gently turned her wounded hand toward the little window. “How long ago did it happen?” he asked.

  Molly shrugged. “A few weeks ago, I think. I’m not sure. After the last cow.”

  Henry let her go and stood up to look in the medicine cabinet. “How did it happen?”

  “Is it important?” Molly asked, already tearing up again.

  “Sort of. Did your fingers freeze? Did they get cut in rusty wire?”

  “They got eaten,” Molly sobbed, “but you can’t tell anyone.”

  Henry froze, a bottle of old vitamins in his hand. “Did one of us do it? Did I–”

  Molly shook her head. “Not you. It was Pam. Don’t tell her. She already feels so badly about having to tell her kids the things she’s done. I know she didn’t mean to. She was hungry. We were all so hungry. Please, Henry, don’t say anything.”

  “I won’t. But if we can’t stop the infection we’ll have to tell the others so they can figure out how to help.” He shoved the vitamins back into the cabinet with a rattle. “This place has been cleaned out. Probably for the psychiatrist. She was bleeding.”

  “So what do we do now?” Molly sniffled.

  “We’ll clean it as best we can and hope that we can find some supplies tomorrow. I can’t see in here though.” He pulled her out into the living room in front of the fire. The gold and red of the flames only made her swollen hand look worse, but Henry was relieved to see that thick scar tissue had already grown over the wound. He pulled a warm pot of water out of the fireplace and looked around for something clean.

  She was watching her hand intently. She flinched before the wet cloth even touched her skin. “You don’t have to do this, Henry. I know it’s awful, I can go do it myself.”

  “You don’t have to do it by yourself. That’s why we’re all here together. Don’t look at it, it’ll only hurt worse.”

  She flinched again as the cloth touched her. “What did you say you did before? You worked in a grocery store, right?” asked Henry, trying to draw her eyes away from her hand. She took a deep breath and then focused on him.

  “Yeah. I mean, I was still in school, but my weekend job was at a grocery store.”

/>   “What’d you do there?” asked Henry somewhat absently.

  “I was just a stocker. I hated it. The palettes were always so heavy and sorting the produce was the worst. We had to pick out the stuff that wasn’t perfect before we’d put the rest out. I used to think it was icky.” Molly let a slow sob out and Henry looked up. “Now I’d give anything to touch all that food again.”

  Henry started wrapping her hand tightly in a strip of clean t-shirt. “You know what I miss?” he said. Molly shook her head, like a kid. “Grilled cheese sandwiches. I haven’t had a piece of cheese in a decade. I used to eat a grilled cheese almost every day since I was little boy. How about you?”

  Molly winced as he tied the strip but tried to play along. “Peanut butter,” she said.

  “Peanut butter? I’d bet we can still find peanut butter,” said Henry with a grin. But she burst into tears.

  “I don’t want to be the last person to eat peanut butter. I don’t want to be the last person to do anything. Everyone is gone. What does the rest matter? Why did they wake us up, Henry?”

  He looked up from her hand. “You didn’t want to stay the way we were, did you?”

  “No. I just wanted to go with everybody else. Why did Phil have to keep us? Why couldn’t we just die like everybody else? Why didn’t those people just shoot us? What did we do to deserve waking up alone in this dead world? Why do we have to be the last ones Henry?”

  “We aren’t the last ones. There are other people out there. We’ll find them.”

  Molly shook her head. “We don’t deserve to. Rickey was right. Nobody’s going to want to live with murderers and cannibals. Everyone would be better off if we were dead.”

  “Rickey’s an idiot,” said Henry, yanking a little too hard on the bandage, “Molly, that Cure cost a lot of time and resources. Maybe, in the beginning, they made it to save themselves, to stop sick people, like us, from attacking them anymore. But that was a long time ago. It would be easier to shoot us now. In fact, the people who did cure us had a gun. They shot the guy that bit them. But they didn’t shoot us. They could have left us to starve or freeze while we were sleeping. Instead they brought us in near this warm fire and left us a good supply of food. They even promised to come back if they could. Does that sound like someone who would rather we died?”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “I can’t tell you why we woke up and so many others died. I can’t tell you why you wound up in Phil’s camp. But we are here, whatever things we’ve done in the past. Maybe there are only a few of us left. Maybe the world finally ripped itself apart with this disease. If that’s true, then we better stop thinking of ourselves as the last people. We better start thinking of ourselves as the first people in a new, better world. Cause nothing’s going to change otherwise. You understand, Molly?”

  She nodded and swiped her face clean with one arm. “Good,” he said, turning back to finish bandaging her hand. She was silent for a while, watching the flames. She leaned her head back on the couch. “I’ll tell you what I never want to try again,” she said.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Beef jerky. I never even want to see the stuff again.”

  Henry grimaced. “I can agree on that one. Even thinking about the texture makes me queasy.” He stood up. “Okay, I think that will do for now. Try not to knock it around and we’ll check it in the morning to see if we need to clean it again.”

  “Promise you won’t tell?” she asked.

  “I promise,” said Henry.

  Nineteen

  Henry worried how they would divide the bicycles and gear. He really knew nothing about the people he was traveling with. He knew they had been chained to posts for the past several years, feral, sick, starving. Even if he’d known them before they’d become infected, the experiences of the last decade were enough to change anyone. Henry was startled to realize that he didn’t even really know himself any more. He was chasing someone else’s daughter because of a promise he’d made when he was a different man. He wondered if he’d ever become that person again. He thought again about the supplies. He was too weak to defend himself if any of the others tried to force something. He looked around at the exhausted, emaciated party. They were too weak as well. It made Henry feel strangely more comfortable to know this.

  In the end, it wasn’t the supplies or the bikes they fought over anyway. Everyone seemed to sense that sticking together was better, and everyone agreed that they had to leave the farmhouse and at least find more food. They sat on the front lawn eating their powdered milk and oat mush in the morning sun, arguing about where they should go.

  “I don’t really think we have a choice. None of us are cut out for this,” said Molly,scratching at the bandage on her maimed hand, “I mean, it’d be nice if one of us was one of those die-hard living off the land types, but none of us are. We don’t even have a doctor if things go wrong or even a way to get food except by scrounging and thieving. Am I wrong?”

  Henry eyed the group, but they were silent, no one wanting to admit just how helpless they were without the cushioning of modern society in their daily lives. Rickey fumbled with another stale cigarette.

  “Why are you all hesitant to go to the City? The note says we can find help there, maybe find our families. Why are we even arguing about it?” said Pam, already moving to pack the last bits onto the toboggan.

  Vincent glanced at Rickey, but it was Melissa that spoke up first. “Pam, we don’t know what we are going to find in the City. All we know is what the note said. We don’t know how bad things are other places, maybe there are other cities, better places. Or maybe this city is really just a group of scavengers living on the edge of starvation, constantly battling people like Phil’s band.”

  Rickey snorted and shook his head. “You guys don’t get it,” he mumbled around the cigarette, “You think people are still going to treat each other the way they did before, like Phil was just a bad egg. You all thought his band was awful, the way they treated us, the way they treated people who happened into their path. Well, I got news for you, folks. Phil was piddling. He was a simple thug with a couple of buddies. This city is organized. They have food. They have medicine. They have a fucking military force big enough to not only protect all that, but to go out and ‘cure’ mobs of infected people. The City could make life under Phil’s lazy rule look like paradise. This isn’t the freaking soccer mom convention we’re talking about Pam. No one is going to hand us the stuff we need.” He flicked his ash into his empty cup in disgust.

  “But they cured us, Rickey. Why didn’t they just shoot us if they didn’t want us?” asked Vincent. He leaned on a bike next to Henry and watched Rickey intently.

  Rickey shrugged. “Maybe they needed slave labor. Melissa said there had to be hordes of us to wipe out the deer, maybe there just aren’t many regular people left. Someone’s got to make the place run. And if they make it look attractive enough, they don’t have to round us up, we just walk into it willingly. Don’t forget, these people left us for dead for years. Or they shot at us themselves. If you think you’re just going to waltz into this town and be greeted with open arms, you’re crazier than I gave you credit for. Molly just laid it out clear as day- none of us have any skills in this world. The fact that we’ve been infected is obvious to anyone with eyes, and as far as we know, we have no friends left alive. We have no value to these people. And I think you’ll find Vincent, Christian charity seems to dry up where it’s most needed in hard times like these.”

  “What’s your big plan then?” asked Melissa, crossing her arms.

  Rickey shrugged. “Who said I had a plan? I just think this one is stupid. Why don’t we take our time, look around first. This place isn’t so bad. It’s not leaking, it’s got a fireplace. Even we can probably figure out where the well is. We can forage for food until spring and then see if we can scavenge some vegetable plants from neighboring farms. We might even find a cow or two we haven’t eaten yet.”

>   “And when someone like Phil comes along, and decides he wants it for his own?” asked Henry.

  “Look Henry, I know you have it in your head to get a posse together from the City and go after Phil’s band, but I’m telling you, it’s not going to happen. And I sure as hell am not going to get dragged into an ass kicking just because you have a hard-on for some little girl–”

  Henry shot up, and Vincent put a hand on his shoulder to keep him from leaping at Rickey, who just smiled and sucked on his cigarette.

  “We obviously all have different ideas of where we want to go and what we plan to do next,” Melissa said quickly, to forestall a fight, “and there’s certainly no law that says we have to stick together. But I think it’s better if we do, at least for now. I’m going toward the City, but not directly. There’s a strip of hotels a few miles to the east in what used to be the suburbs. The stores and restaurants will probably be all cleaned out, but maybe no one thought of the hotels. We can hit the houses around here too, this one hasn’t been looted yet, maybe the ones around us have food and supplies. That’s where I’m going. You can come with me, or you can keep on arguing. It’s up to you.” She held the handlebars of her rusty bike and steered toward the grassy lane that used to be the road. Pam and Molly followed her.

  “Shit,” said Rickey grabbing the last bike, “They might be the last broads in the world. I can’t let ‘em leave without me.” He wheeled after them. Henry grabbed the toboggan’s rope and slung it over his shoulder and began pulling it over the dead grass.

  “I understand why you need to go back for the girl,” said Vincent, “and I’ll go with you when you do.”