Nina and said child were sitting on an uncomfortable sofa in the pediatrician’s office, waiting outside the lab for yet another round of immunizations after a quickie visit with Dr. Whatever-Her-Name-Was or maybe it had been a nurse practitioner this time. She couldn’t keep up with the carousel of medical professionals spinning around each visit here. Then there was the prickle of Internet-fueled anxiety about all these vaccines, fears she often kept at bay with thoughts of Adam, even all these years later. Adam, a doctor himself, loved studying the history of vaccines and immunity, and few things drove him battier than the anti-vaccine loons on the Internet. Whenever she gave him an update on their daughter’s well-being, he always asked if she was all up on her shots.
The faint lemony smell of hand sanitizer hung in the air. Around her, nurses flitted to and fro like bees, escorting patients here, carrying medical charts there. The movie Toy Story played on a flat-screen television above her head. Across from her, twin boys, about three years old, sat with their mother and watched the movie enraptured. They were fidgety but quiet, their faces flush with fever, their noses runny. She peeked up at the TV, smiling as Buzz and Woody argued at the gas station.
Nina glanced over at her own daughter, Rachel, fourteen years old now, getting ready to start high school. The bespectacled girl was engrossed in a book, as she often was. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her one concession in their ongoing grooming battle. Hard to believe, and yeah, it was a thing people said too often, but it really was hard to believe that her sweet little thing was a ninth grader now. It was a cliché, no doubt about that, but where DID the time go? She had just been born, like yesterday, right? Just yesterday, the sun had risen and set on Mommy, but it wasn’t quite like that anymore. From the day her daughter had set foot in middle school, something had changed.
“Mom?” the girl asked, breaking Nina out of her daydream.
“What?” Nina said, her finger throbbing.
“How much longer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out?” the girl asked, never looking up from her book. “I’m late for school.”
Nina bristled with annoyance.
“You’re not the only one who’s late.”
Her daughter rolled her eyes so hard they nearly popped out of the side of her head.
A few minutes later, a nurse popped up behind the counter separating the lab and the waiting area. She was young and pretty and wore her blond hair short. Nina was not surprised to see the ID badge clipped to her breast pocket identified her as Katie. Of course it was Katie.
“Rachel Fisher?” she called out.
“Here.”
“Follow me, sweetie.”
Nina and Rachel followed Katie to a corner of the lab, where the nurse directed Rachel to a stool. There were three needles lying on the nearby counter, accompanied by three cotton balls and three bandages bearing little dinosaurs.
“Three shots today,” Katie said.
“Three?” Nina said. “I thought it was two.”
“Oh?”
Katie glanced at her iPad.
“Oh, I see what happened,” Katie said. “There’s been an update. This third one was added last week.”
“What are they for?”
“Let’s see. Meningitis and Hep A.”
“Yeah, I knew about those. The other one?”
Katie’s lips pursed in puzzlement.
“It’s only identified by the code,” she replied. “If you want, I can look it up.”
Nina looked at the time again. Nine forty.
“No,” she said. “Let’s get it over with. I’m really late for work.”
Rachel sat quietly, lost in her book while Katie cleaned her arm with an alcohol wipe. The nurse, who four days earlier had been paid ten thousand dollars in unmarked bills by a man she had never met to not only administer this third injection but to make Nina wait long enough that she wouldn’t ask too many questions, then vaccinated Rachel Fisher against meningitis, hepatitis A, and a third disease that a few years down the road would kill Nina, Katie the nurse, and nearly everyone else on Earth.
1
The boy studied the Monopoly board carefully, the tip of his index finger jammed between his teeth even though his mother had told him a thousand times to keep his hands out of his mouth. Germs, she’d say, and then she’d laugh about it a little because they had washed their hands and lacquered themselves with hand sanitizer, and in the end, it hadn’t made a lick of difference. Besides, Will had been chewing that fingertip for his entire life, and he wasn’t any worse for it. She didn’t bother telling him anymore because he wasn’t doing it on purpose; she’d check on him while he slept and there it would be, wedged right at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m gonna put hotels on it,” he said, looking up at her with those eyes, wide and blue and endless like the ocean.
Rachel Fisher sighed softly. Either her son didn’t know, or he had conveniently forgotten he needed to build four houses on each property first. Or maybe he knew all too well, and he was trying to pull one over on his mother, who was too tired and knew too much about how things were, how they really were, to say anything. She didn’t always let him win, and he was probably too old for his mother to be letting him win in the first place, but sometimes she did because so many things had not gone the boy’s way in his eleven years on Earth.
“OK.”
He thumbed the stacks of ragged bills, tucked under the edge of the board, the purple and red and gold slips of paper that were worth about as much as the real currency that had once powered the engines of the world’s economy. She didn’t see paper money often anymore, but every now and again, a greenback would rear up in a house they’d scavenged or flutter along a desolate street, and she’d instinctively grab it even though it had been thirteen years since Medusa had rendered all of that quite pointless, thank you very much, forever and ever, Amen.
Will plucked eight hundred dollars from his stash and placed them in the bank. Then he carefully planted a hotel, the red fading with each passing year, on each stripe of blue, equally faded, there on Boardwalk and Park Place, turning both plots into very pricey real estate, yet another anachronism of the world gone by. All the real estate anyone could ever want, almost anywhere on God’s not-so-green-anymore Earth, all you had to do was move in.
As her son lined up the hotels, Rachel pulled her blanket tightly around her and glanced out the window of the trailer they shared with Eddie Callahan, Will’s father. The woodstove at the center of the trailer bled its heat into the room as best it could, but even still, she always felt chilly. That was the thing about the cold; once it got in you, it was damn hard to shake, no matter how many layers of long johns or blankets or cups of hot water flavored with anise seed. It set in your bones, became part of you until you couldn’t remember not feeling cold anymore.
They were deep into autumn now, the trees bare, the few remaining grasses dormant. It was late in the year, probably early December, but they weren’t exactly sure because somewhere along the line they had lost the thread of the calendar and once it had been lost, there had been no way to pick it up again. Another thing lost among so many things lost. Instead, they marked the time by the seasons and the phases of the moon and the movement of the stars and that would have to be good enough.
“Mommy!”
She started at the sweet, tinny sound of his voice. He pointed at the board.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just daydreaming.”
She rolled the dice and it came up double sixes, boxcars, and wasn’t that just her luck because that dropped her right on Boardwalk and its unwarranted hotel.
Will clapped and threw his head back with glee.
“Yes, yes, yes!”
Sportsmanship was something else they needed to work on. Maybe that was a good reason to let him win, so she could teach him to be graceful in both victory and defeat. Theirs was a world long short on grace.
Wasn’t rationaliz
ation the best?
She counted out her remaining funds and saw she wouldn’t have enough to cover her debt to him.
“Looks like I’m out,” she said.
“I win!”
He leapt to his feet and did a funny little dance in their tiny living room.
“I win, I win,” he repeated in a sing-songy voice, and there she saw in full the little boy he still was.
She climbed to her feet, pins and needles, and shook out the sandy tingling in her right foot. Then it looked like they were both dancing and what she wouldn’t have given for a camera to capture this moment so she could have it forever.
The screen door screeched open behind her, cutting their dance party short.
Super.
The man of the house had returned. Eddie came in and staggered toward the bedroom, swatting her on the bottom as he passed by, leaving a moonshine-drenched vapor trail in his wake.
“Hey, Dad,” Will said, his sweet little voice spiced with hope.
Eddie treated his son to an imperceptible nod of the head and continued toward the bedroom.
“Can you come to dinner with us?” Will asked.
“Not tonight, pal,” he said, not breaking stride.
“Eddie,” she said firmly.
He paused and turned to face his family.
“What?”
Rage bubbled up inside her; it didn’t take much to set her off anymore, a constant simmer ready to boil over.
“Will, go wait outside,” she said, keeping her gaze fixed on this man she had once loved so fiercely.
Will was familiar with this tone of his mother’s voice; he wordlessly slipped outside, closing the door behind him. She waited until the screen door clattered shut again, ensuring Will was out of earshot before speaking.
“Jesus, Eddie, he’s your son,” Rachel said, her cheeks hot. “You get that, right? The only one we’re gonna have, I might add.”
“Don’t remind me,” he said.
Rachel massaged her temples. It was important for Will to have his father in his life, right? He didn’t run around with other women. He didn’t beat them. He just wasn’t around a lot. It wasn’t all that different from the way her father had been. And her dad was a hero around here!
But standing here now, it all seemed utterly ridiculous. No woman in her right mind would put up with this nonsense. She had to be the stupidest woman alive. And you didn’t have to hit someone to hurt them. What Eddie did was hit them on the inside, where no one could see. It didn’t leave bruises or cuts or physical scars. But it hurt all the same.
Eddie Callahan was thirty-four years old, give or take, about three years older than Rachel. He’d been with the group almost since the beginning, hooking up with them a few months after they’d taken the compound, which they called Evergreen, an homage to the former home of roughly half of their community, a little town in Oklahoma that had burned to the ground years earlier. That was when the group was still blissfully unaware how much trouble they were all in.
A spotter had seen him staggering toward the outer perimeter, where he collapsed. At first, they thought it was Medusa, back to finish them off, which had set off a tremendous panic. He was feverish, barely coherent. But then they saw the jagged shard of bone poking out of his forearm, up near the elbow. Said he’d been living alone on a farm about thirty miles west of Evergreen, out on a supply run on his bicycle when he’d gotten hurt. Hit a pothole, went headfirst over the handlebars.
It would have been easy to turn their backs on someone who wasn’t injured. But Edie had been delirious, his skin a ghastly grayish color. Turning him out would’ve been cruel, worse than killing him straight out. They took him to Adam Fisher, who got to work immediately. It had been one of Adam’s proudest moments, yanking Eddie back from the precipice of death. He’d carefully reset the arm, closed the wound, flooded Eddie with antibiotics. It had been touch and go for a few days, but eventually, Eddie had turned the corner. His arm was never quite the same after that, sporting a permanent crook, but the fact he still had a pulse let alone his arm was nothing short of a miracle.
After he recovered, no one could bear to put him out. He kept to himself, pitched in, never complained. Hard work was valuable currency in their world, and after a while he was one of them. Their relationship blossomed slowly, over the course of a few months. Working the same shift at the warehouse, thinking nothing of it at first and then finding herself looking forward to the days they were on together, slightly annoyed when they weren’t. Then one night at dinner, it had been the three of them, she and Erin Thompson and Eddie, and when he’d made a joke and Erin had laughed, she had laughed and placed her hand on his arm all familiar, and the jealousy stabbed her like a knife. Right then and there, her goose had been cooked. Was it love? Who knew? What did that even mean? Rachel didn’t even know if Erin was interested in Eddie, but she wasn’t going to wait to find out.
She kissed him first, one morning not long after the moment with Erin, after they’d come off duty and they had walked home in the dawn. They were tired and sweaty and she pulled him inside the front door and a few weeks later, she was pregnant with Will.
“This whole thing doesn’t make any sense,” Eddie said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
Girl, you’re brewing for a fight, aintcha?
“I don’t know what happened to you,” she said. “I mean, it’s fine. We’ll be fine without you. I don’t know why you checked out the way you did. Remember what it was like when he was first born?”
He stood at the window with his back to her, scraping the windowsill with a thumbnail. She looked at the outline of his back, his thick arms straining against his work shirt, the pieces of him she’d once loved with all her heart.
“I remember,” he said. “It’s just that…”
A long pause.
“I thought there would be others.”
Her head dropped.
“Well, that is just great.”
He turned back toward her, his face silhouetted in the dark.
“I don’t understand how this is even possible,” he said. “How he is even possible.”
“And that’s why he needs more of you, not less,” she said. “He’s starting to ask questions.”
Eddie’s eyes were fixed on the floor.
“What do you tell him?”
“That there are other kids.”
“You lie.”
“I lie.”
Silence again.
“It’s scary, you know,” he said.
“What is?”
“You. Your dad. Will.”
She stood there, not knowing what to say, not sure there was anything to say.
Eddie followed Will outside, headed for wherever it was he went when he wanted to pout.
It was all clear now. All this time, stupidly thinking that Eddie was simply a shitty father like all the other shitty fathers that had preceded him. Producing shitty fathers, that had sort of been mankind’s thing. And it had been easy to lump Eddie in with all the others, her father too. It had even been understandable on a Psychology 101 level. Adam had been an absentee father when she was growing up, before the plague, so it made sense she had ended up with an absentee father for her own son. But now she saw that it something else entirely.
Scary, he’d said.
As if Rachel didn’t know how scary it was. As if it were somehow lost on her that Will had been the last baby born in their community to live to his first birthday. As though it had slipped her mind that for all anyone knew to the contrary, William Fisher Callahan had been the last person to live to his first birthday anywhere.
2
Rachel tended to the low fire in the woodstove and then went outside, locking the door behind her as she went. Will waited at the fence behind their trailer, gazing west, his little fingers curled around the chain links. They had a clear view of the western horizon, of the sunsets that helped them bid farewell to another day on their l
onely planet. A sharp tang in the air burned her nostrils, a swirl of woodsmoke and cold reminding you winter was on its way. The air stank of rain yet to fall. The sun, veiled by vaporous clouds, was setting like a balloon drifting to earth, looking for its nest beyond the Rockies a thousand miles to the west. It was a weak sun, barely breaking through the cloud cover perpetually blanketing the Midwest sky.
They walked north toward the employee cafeteria, past the main complex housing their food supply, a two-million-square-foot monolith, roughly the size of two city blocks. Will kicked a faded Pepsi can as they strolled across the dusty roadway, his path meandering as he followed the can’s unpredictable bounces and skips. The Warehouse, as it was known, was made up of three interconnected buildings forming an S shape, and seemed to go on forever. It took a full thirty minutes to walk its perimeter. Inside was the community’s lifeblood, the canned goods and non-perishable packaged foods that had sustained them through the years. It still amazed her that the food had remained viable for this long, so many years since the end. But as her father reminded her, if the cans remained intact, the cold, tasteless food inside could last indefinitely.
The cafeteria was housed in a low-slung rectangular building west of the Warehouse. Linoleum floors, the blue-and-white checkerboard tiles cracked and peeling. Years of water damage had stained the ceiling with yellowish-brown blooms that looked like dying flowers. Inside, away from the chill, the smell of cooking vegetables wafting from the kitchen made Rachel’s mouth water. These were canned veggies, the kind she’d turned her nose up to before Medusa but that now literally kept them alive.
The crowd thickened as they neared the cafeteria. Familiar faces, the same people day in and day out, like waves on a beach. Never the same face, not exactly, as the days, the months, the years did their work, hardening and etching the faces with wear. The faces were changing, growing longer, bearing new wrinkles, the eyes a bit dimmer. Muted chit-chat after a day’s hard labor, patrolling the grounds, shoring up the perimeter, doing inventory, disposing of garbage and waste. Later, those who were off duty would gather at the bar and drink their rotgut booze until the memory of another day was wiped away.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 55