Beyond the Gates

by Jason D. Morrow

  I had told Sarah the truth about the cure to the greyskin virus. I was close. I could feel it. Even when I had said the same thing years before, this time was different.

  I already knew the medicine wasn’t going to cure a greyskin by turning it back into the person it once was. That would be impossible. Once the greyskin virus kills its subject, there is no bringing him back. However, there is a way to kill the virus itself.

  If the medicine works, the greyskin virus should die. That would mean if injected into a greyskin, the greyskin would die. If injected into a person who has just been bitten or scratched, the virus should die within them, saving the person from certain death and reanimation.

  No injection has killed a greyskin yet, but I think the last one came close. Ordinarily wild and doing anything it could to rip me to shreds, when I injected the medicine, the greyskin became docile and barely willing to move. However, it didn’t completely die, so the cure needed modifications. I needed to hunt a new greyskin.

  It had become part of my routine to hunt for greyskins. After injecting one with the medicine, I didn’t want there to be any interference. If it didn’t work, the greyskin needed to be disposed of. I needed a fresh one to make sure the antidote worked.

  The road to creating the cure had been long and arduous, particularly without a proper lab. Experiments such as these would have never been accepted among the scientific community before the virus threw us into an apocalypse. There are far too many unanswered questions for this to be a safe experiment. For instance, if I create something that will kill a greyskin, will it be safe for a person to use? How would I determine the dosage? What would the side effects be for this medicine? Could someone survive it? And how would I test it? I couldn’t very well find someone every day who had the greyskin virus in them so I could see how the medicine affects them.

  That was my biggest hurdle. Human trials couldn’t happen unless there was an emergency. I suppose I could test it on myself, but what would be the point? If it were wrong, then I would die, and there would be no one to finish the project. Sarah was smart, but she didn’t know science as I did. She never had the opportunities to learn like I had.

  It was a noble cause, but that’s not why I did it. It was never for the masses. I wanted to make it so my family would have a defense against the virus if they were ever infected. Besides, I would have no way to bring it to the world. If I tried, someone would steal it and try to profit from it. The only way it would work is if I found someone I could trust to mass produce it.

  These sort of thoughts always played over in my mind. I was close to discovering something great, but farther from it than I liked to admit.

  By the time I reached the meeting, most of the other households within the district were already there. Something else, however, caught my attention and all but confirmed what I already suspected.

  Usually, Gerard would be the only one to deliver news. This time, several Screven soldiers with large assault rifles flanked him.

  “A little over the top, isn’t it?” I said as I approached the group.

  Ned, a man who lived about a mile from me, nodded in agreement. “Doesn’t look like good news.”

  “Look where the sun is,” I said. “Of course it’s not good news.”

  We waited a few more minutes as others from the district walked up or drove in. Finally, Gerard cleared his throat and addressed the crowd of about twenty people.

  “Thank you all for being here tonight,” he said, tugging at his black collar. “I’ve called you here to relay some news about the construction you’ve probably noticed behind me.”

  There was a gate, a terminal with what looked to be electronic panels along the side. Most alarmingly, however, were the machines behind the gate. Barrels on levies and pulls, controlled by the computer terminal, no doubt, pointed in our direction. They were guns.

  “Gates like these have been constructed all over the land,” Gerard said. “They have formed a radius of about 500 miles. Any entrance or exit within the radius is heavily guarded. Where there is not a natural barrier such as rocks or mountains, we have constructed walls.”

  “Right, to help the greyskin problem,” Ned answered, nodding his head.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Gerard answered. “There are more greyskins within this 500-mile radius than anywhere in the world as far as we know. Leadership has dubbed this area the Containment Zone. No one is allowed to leave or enter the Containment Zone without the proper identification.”

  The crowd started murmuring.

  A voice called out, “Why?”

  “Because it’s too dangerous for the rest of the world,” Gerard said.

  “You can’t just keep us in here,” another said.

  “We can, and we will. We have to.” Gerard held up a hand. “I don’t know if this is a temporary measure or a permanent one, but it is for the best.”

  Shouts and screams flew from mouths—the very reason Gerard came with so many soldiers. I could see this becoming a lynch mob.

  “It is possible there will be people allowed to leave,” he said, “but let’s be honest, how many of you planned to leave anyway?”

  It was interesting to me that if Gerard had never told us about being caged into this greyskin-infested area, none of us would have thought about leaving. In fact, our district had been relatively safe for the last couple of years with many of the worst greyskin attacks happening to the south of us. Now, however, one might think Gerard had just foiled our plans for a mass exodus.

  Despite that, it made me nervous that Screven was taking such measures. We had never asked them here. None of us wanted them here. Now we were their prisoners.

  All of us were armed, but the Screven soldiers were much more well-equipped. Besides, most of us here had family back home and wouldn’t want to compromise their safety by starting a fight at the gate.

  If what Gerard was saying were true, and I had no reason to think he was lying, then there were hundreds of these meetings happening all over the place—within a 500-mile radius, at least. With such a large scale setup, it made me wonder what Screven was up to. It had to be more than Gerard was letting on.

  The Screven official and his men offered no more words and immediately went back to their vehicles and took off in a hurry, leaving a crowd of angry and confused people.

  Ned thought it was a good idea to discuss what we’d just heard and others felt inclined to voice their opinions as well. I had no interest.

  “They are going to do what they want to do,” I said. “It’s getting dark. We need to go home.”

  “You’re fine with being locked in here?” one man asked.

  I shrugged. “No, but I have no plans of leaving my home.”

  Maybe it was the fact that I had something up my sleeve. If I really needed to get out of this new Containment Zone, I would soon have a cure to bargain with. If it meant the life of my family, then I would give away the cure to anyone.

  But I didn’t have that leverage yet.

  Soon. Very soon.

  The first alarm bell went off in my brain when I saw the lights on in the house. The sun was already down and the first rule of the night was never to use a light unless it was an emergency.

  When I saw the light from my vantage point atop the hill, I sprinted as fast as I could to get to the house, heart pounding.

  The second rule was to make no noise. As I got closer, I didn’t hear any screams or shuffling about, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to hear over my labored breaths.

  I pulled the hatchet from my belt when I reached the front door, praying I wasn’t about to walk into a bloodbath of some kind. A million thoughts raced through my head, none of them good. I swallowed and swung open the door.

  To my horror, an image burned into my brain that I would never forget. There was a body in the middle of the floor, a bloody heap of rotten bone and flesh. Black blood pooled around its head. It was unmoving, which meant it was probably dead.

&nb
sp; In the corner of the room sat my two loves, Sarah and Skylar, clutching each other tightly. Sarah held a gun in her right hand.

  When they saw me, Sarah set the gun on the floor and stared up at me, seemingly in shock. Skylar put her face in her hands and wept.

  “Are there more?” I asked, raising the hatchet up.

  “No, Liam,” Sarah said.

  “How do you know?”

  She pointed to the door on the other side of the room. It creaked back and forth on its hinges in response to the draft wafting through the house.

  Blood drained from my face, and I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. “Is everyone okay?” My words caught in my throat and barely came out above a whisper.

  Sarah stood from her spot on the floor, revealing long gashes in her forearm. My heart nearly leaped out of my chest. I rushed toward her, screaming in my mind that I could fix this.

  “We need to cut it off now! It will hurt, but I can put together a numbing agent.”

  I pulled her by the wrist to the table on the other side of the room. I never imagined I would have to do such a thing, but it was better to cut off her arm than to let the virus take her from me.

  “Liam, stop!”

  I was about to protest when my eyes traveled down to her torso. Long gashes spread across her stomach. They looked deep. Painful.

  Defeat washed over me like a waterfall. The hatchet fell from my grip and clanked in the floor. My head swam from the drainage of blood, my mouth drying up like a desert at noon.

  I must have done something wrong. I had never failed to lock up the greyskin. I always experimented so carefully. There was no way it could have gotten out. There was no way it could have gone up the basement stairs, much less gotten through the bolted door.

  “How?” was all I could get out as tears dripped down my cheeks.

  Sarah shook her head, her eyes focused on mine. “I don’t know, Liam. It doesn’t matter. This is no one’s fault. It surprised us both.”

  My eyes traveled to Skylar who sat with her face in her hands, still weeping.

  I couldn’t wrap my head around the greyskin getting loose. This had never happened before. With my security measures, I had made the basement inescapable for a greyskin. Yet its rotted body lay on the middle of our floor.

  Regret for everything I had ever done found its way into my heart.

  “I should have…”

  “Stop,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “But if I had never brought it here,” I said. “You told me from the start not to do it, that it was too dangerous. You were right.”

  “Liam, stop.”

  My eyes widened at my next thought. “Wait here just a minute.”

  Before she could stop me, I was already plowing down the basement stairs. The room was wide open but for a table in the middle. The shelves lining the walls were messy and cluttered, full of old science journals and some of my writings. Lab equipment filled other shelves in no particular order and placement.

  At the other end of the room was the transparent glass cage where I had kept the greyskin.

  The cage door hung open. There was some shattered glass on the floor where the greyskin must have run into some of my equipment before making its way to the stairs. Judging by the look of the debris, however, it almost looked as if there had been a struggle.

  I would have to investigate the greyskin’s escape later. Now, I had to get the cure to my wife.

  I had not tested this version of the cure. In my hands was a vial of the newest formula, altered only by a few elements to try and make it work.

  I was confident in this version’s ability to work better than the last, but would it be enough to kill a greyskin entirely? Possibly. Would it be too strong for a person who had just been infected by the virus? Impossible for me to know.

  I drew the contents of the vial into a fresh syringe.

  My ascent up the stairs was slower than my descent. I wanted to be careful with the syringe. I also needed the time to think about its implementation. Is it too soon to administer? The virus would have barely been in her. How sick did she need to be before this went into her bloodstream?

  As I thought about the situation, I realized how far behind I was in my research and how unlikely it would be for this to work.

  But it was all I had.

  When I got upstairs, I walked to the kitchen and set the syringe on the counter. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying not to let my mind go in too many directions.

  Back in the main room, I opened the front door, walked to the greyskin in the middle of the floor, and grabbed it by the ankles. Its skin felt squishy as my fingers dug into its flesh a little too easily. I dragged it through the entrance as quickly as possible and out into the front yard, leaving a trail of thick, black blood on the floor and ground as I went.

  Everything in me wanted to hack the greyskin to pieces. I wanted to dismember it and burn its flesh. But I had a daughter inside, weeping. I had a wife inside, bleeding. Even if I was the one who created this mess by bringing this hideous creature into our home, they needed me there with them. Holding them. Loving them.

  I went back inside, grabbed several rags and towels, wet some, and began cleaning the spot where the greyskin had fallen. Skylar continued weeping as Sarah watched me in my manic state, mopping the floor until there was no sign of a greyskin left. I would deal with what was in the yard the next day.

  When the floor was clean, and there was nothing left to do but look up at Sarah and listen to Skylar’s sobs, I crawled onto my hands and knees and wrapped our daughter in my arms.

  “You need to stop crying, sweetheart. I’m going to cure her. I can fix this.”

  “Don’t tell her something you can’t know for sure,” Sarah said in a whisper.

  I looked Sarah in the eyes, almost angry at her for giving up what hope we might have. She didn’t know if it would work or not. She didn’t…

  She knew. I knew. I hadn’t had time to extensively test what was in the syringe. But if the medicine worked, all I would need is one test subject. All I needed was Sarah.

  The gashes in her arms and torso looked deep, but she told me she wasn’t bitten, only scratched. In my experience, a bite from a greyskin that breaks the skin was always fatal with a one hundred percent certainty. However, given the nature of scratches, it wasn’t always certain death. It depended on how much fluid passed from the greyskin to the person through the scratch. A bite always had fluid. A scratch that didn’t infect was known as a dry scratch.

  Even if Sarah’s scratches were deep, even though she was bleeding, it didn’t mean she was infected. It could have still been a dry scratch, and she would only have painful scars.

  Eventually, Skylar calmed down enough so the three of us could sit together and wait, talking for the next couple of hours. I bandaged Sarah’s wounds gently, trying not to make her wince at the stinging pain. We still had to take precautions and disinfect the wound from bacteria in case it was only a dry scratch.

  We didn’t talk about the incident for the next two hours. We didn’t talk about the greyskin. We did, however, turn out the big lights in the house and sit together by the light of a small kerosene lantern. I told them about the meeting held by Gerard. I had debated not saying anything about it, but Sarah and Skylar both had insisted, and the results were looks of shock on their faces.

  “I hate saying that I saw something like this coming,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I didn’t see it coming,” I said. “But if I can get this cure to work…” I stopped myself too late, the words already hanging in the air. There was a brief pause, but Sarah came to my rescue.

  “Then you will have leverage,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I nodded.

  I looked at her eyes in the lamplight. Had her pupils dilated or were her eyes turning black?

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  She shook her head. �
�I think they were dry scratches.”

  Skylar let out a sigh and smiled. I felt immediate relief as well. But then, Sarah started talking about the past. About days when Skylar was just a small baby.

  Memories.

  When we come to the end of our lives, we want to remember the best parts. Our lives had been so full of fear and hopelessness, yet through it all, the three of us were still a family. We had made wonderful memories together.

  Sarah’s focus on memories made my heart sink, and I was unable to contain the floodgate of tears that came to my eyes. Silent tears. The kind without the heaves pushing through my stomach. Just, small streaks of raindrops sliding down my skin one after the other.

  I sat back with my head leaned against the wall so Skylar didn’t see my face. She would notice me if she looked back, but she focused on her mother, who was in the middle of a story about Skylar finding a banana slug and offering it to me to eat it.

  I could see Sarah’s strength waning. Sweat droplets formed at the top of her brow and on her upper lip. Her eyes were not dilated, instead, they were turning the dark black coal color of a greyskin’s eyes.

  Skylar noticed it too and immediately looked at me. I nodded, half-wishing I didn’t have to witness the failure of the medicine, half-trying to push away the thought that if I hadn’t been trying to make the medicine in the first place, Sarah wouldn’t be infected.

  I grabbed the syringe from the countertop and made my way back into the common room. I took Sarah by the hand. She felt hot to the touch. A fever. She slumped against the wall behind her and tapped the side of her arm.

  “Right arm has a better vein,” she said.

  I nodded and tied a rubber band to her bicep and tapped the vein near the crux of her elbow. With a deep breath and a silent prayer, I slipped the needle into her vein and injected the medicine.