by David Kazzie
Her breathing was becoming a bit ragged; she stopped and set her hand against the wall. Calm yourself, girl. Calm yourself. This was a Hail Mary pass anyway. She had nothing to lose. If she failed, Will would be lost to her forever. But maybe that was for the best. She wouldn’t be able to take care of him or keep him safe.
Perhaps there was a medical clinic somewhere, a separate building deeper on the grounds of the compound. On the move again, back into the stairwell, down to the main level, outside. It was snowing lightly and she was cold. She edged her way along the building’s façade, the dusting of snow crunching under her shoes.
At the corner, she turned right and continued up a slight incline. She felt small here, alone. This was what her father had done for her. Alone. Afraid. Cold. Her father, dead now, her father who had died with his daughter hating him. She was sorry for what she had said at his funeral. That should have been between them. Instead, she had embarrassed his memory in front of so many to whom he had meant so much.
All those years and she hadn’t said a word to him. She had chosen to be afraid, to take the easy way out. And now it was too late. The only thing she could do now was finish this. Find the answers he never could. Save his grandson, save all of them. She could do that for him. After all, it was only because of him there even was a Will.
Will.
The easy way out. She had done the same with Will, hiding him from the way the world was. Look where that had gotten them. A young man woefully unprepared for the world in which he lived. Unprepared because she had been too afraid to do what needed to be done. All these years, she’d lived her life in fear.
She shut off her If-Then machine. That thing could wreak untold devastation if you let it. The past was past and could not be unwritten. The future was still open, at least for the next little while.
A deep breath, and she was on the move again, around to the back of the chalet. The pathway cut up into the hillside toward another building, also bearing that Bavarian motif, but far smaller than the main chalet. She followed the path, caution fully tossed into the wind swirling around the mountain tonight. At the entrance, she paused, glancing around, feeling like a teenager sneaking out for a night of revelry.
As she opened the door, a bright light filled her field of vision, the pop and hiss of sulfur filling the air. It rendered her temporarily blind as wide-open pupils absorbed the blast of white light. She held up a hand and sought darkness, anything that would help her regain her bearings.
“Awful late for a stroll, isn’t it, Rachel?”
Despite the cold icing her skin, Leon Gruber’s metallic voice chilled her soul at a depth she couldn’t have previously imagined. With that one statement, her whole world went up in a mushroom cloud around her. Her vision was still impaired, but she could just make out some activity around her, shapes and blurs. Then a crack, a sharp shooting pain to the head, and the world went dark around her.
#
Concrete.
Sleep.
She dreamed.
She’d been having the same dream for years.
She dreamed about Will playing in an elementary school recorder concert, standing in the front row, making sweet and terrible music. They sat in the school gymnasium, in metal folding chairs that ruined spines, crowded together like sheep, watching their children make terrible music through smartphone screens, making videos they would never watch.
Then afterward, she and the other moms would take the kids for ice cream, and the boys would ditch their little clip-on ties and blazers and run around the shop’s patio, annoying the other customers, chasing each other, dribbling little trails of melted ice cream behind them. It was springtime and the evening air glittered with the light of fireflies, a world where the plague had never happened. She always woke up when she started to yell at him.
It was so routine that she knew she was dreaming, but it always ended the same way, getting up to yell at Will, drawing the side-eye of her fellow moms who were content to leave well enough alone.
A shower.
She woke up, but her eyes remained closed.
Another shower.
Her head was pounding where she’d taken the wallop.
Ice-cold water slithered up her nose and she began coughing, as it raked her airway, big, hacking coughs that served only to make her headache worse. The coughs vibrated in her skull, amplifying the pain exponentially. Another shower, a chilly spray of water blasting her face, making her cough and sneeze, spraying mucus everywhere. Her head bobbled from one side to another until she focused all her efforts on stabilizing it.
“She’s awake.”
“Just kill me and be done with it,” she muttered. Her words came out in a sticky, clumped mess, owing largely to her terribly dry throat.
“So brave.”
She opened her eyes slowly. It seemed to take an unusual amount of effort to complete such a simple task. One managed to come to half-mast, but the other remained closed, puffy and gummed shut with goopy crust and dried blood.
A drab, empty room, damp and cold. Square, gray walls, gray concrete flooring. Her head resting against a cold wall. She was in a metal folding chair (poetic, really fucking poetic). Her hands were bound together with a pair of zip ties. She was dressed in pants and a short-sleeve t-shirt. She shivered.
There was an empty chair set immediately opposite her. While she waited for someone to fill it, she sighed, the totality of her failure laid out before her. Her insides ached, a scar on her soul, knowing she had fallen short, that Will was gone now, forever, that she would die here and he would never know what happened to her.
Footsteps.
She looked up with her one good eye to see Leon Gruber taking a seat before her. He wore a heavy parka and snow pants. Just seeing him dressed warmly made her feel even colder.
“A letter from an attorney, huh?”
She shrugged.
“Not a bad story, to tell you the truth,” Gruber said. “And I was sitting there, wracking my brain, trying to figure out where the hell you had come from. I mean, it was such an impossibility that you would ever find us. And I almost went for it. Can you believe that? You almost had me fooled. But since you were here, it was as plausible an explanation as any.”
“What gave me away?” she croaked. Her throat was dry and the words came out harsh and sticky.
He grabbed her arm and flipped her wrist over.
The tattoo. The phoenix rising from the ashes.
“You were at the Citadel.”
She nodded. There was no point in obfuscating. It was time to lay it on all the table.
“Is Chadwick dead?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Some years ago, I took a trip there, saw the ruins. Did you see the explosion?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why did I get the vaccine?”
“Your grandfather. It was part of the deal.”
She shivered.
“What deal?”
He leaned to the side of his chair and held up a silver metal briefcase.
“Do you know what this is?”
He unfastened the latches and set the open case on her lap. It was padded, a deep velvety red, divided into dozens of smaller compartments. He withdrew a small vial and handed it to her.
She studied the affixed label carefully.
PB-815, Lot 522, Human Vaccine
12-dose vial 2.0 ML
070894
The Medusa vaccine.
She gently rolled the small vial between her fingers. This was it. The future of the human race was in her hands. Erin Thompson. All the women who had lost their babies.
“Your grandfather wanted you to survive the plague.”
“No.”
“You don’t want to believe he was involved,” he said. “I can understand that. But without him, none of this would have been possible. Oh, he had his doubts, of course. And he made me promise to vaccinate you.”
“When was I vaccinated?”
“About th
ree years before the outbreak. We bribed a nurse at your pediatrician’s office to slip in an extra shot during a school physical.”
Guilt ripped through her. Like an arrow in flight, her life had been soaring toward the plague since the day she was born, toward the end of all things. Everyone she had ever met, ever become friends with, from the first boy she kissed to her high school biology teacher to the guy who delivered her Chinese food her freshman year at Caltech, had been a walking corpse, ghost in the flesh, already dead. The world was dying, a hidden tumor tucked away, as her survival had been planned and bargained for. It made her feel dirty, used, a pawn in some grand game that she wasn’t even aware was being played.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
“You shouldn’t judge your grandfather,” he said. “He did this partly for you.”
Her stomach roiled at this.
“He wanted a better world for you. For your children.”
“I never asked for this,” she said. “The world was doing fine before you deleted it.”
“That’s such naïve thinking. This idea we were all equal, that we were all in it together, it was so destructive. What’s that old joke?”
“What joke?”
“Half the people in the world are below average? I couldn’t have that. We needed to evolve from our troglodyte existence. Mankind was stuck in first gear, the one percent held back by the rest.”
“So you killed everyone.”
“I simply added a catalyst to the system. I let natural selection take it from there.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You’re no different than Chadwick. I had this exact conversation with him thirteen years ago. Kill everyone, and you too can live in this utopia! Hooray!”
He shook his head, but she went on.
“Besides, what’s the point of living in a world like this? Do you know what it’s like out there? It’s all-out war. People are starving to death. Every day.”
He smiled.
“You’re thinking about this all wrong,” he said. “There’s much more.”
“What else is there? The food is running out. You’ll all be dead soon. I wish Chadwick was still alive just so he could see how badly you all screwed up.”
He dropped his chin and shook his head, tsking her for her shortsightedness.
“I’m disappointed in you. What’s the point of going to all this trouble if I’m going to be dead in a few years? If I didn’t make contingency plans for our survival?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know why we have the Lottery?”
“No.”
“I believe in chaos theory. In entropy. The idea that left to their own devices, systems will act unpredictably, usually to their own detriment. Usually to the point of collapse. We prepared for every eventuality. Do you know why the crops stopped growing?”
“The nukes, probably.”
“Very good. We ran an algorithm that predicted a ninety-eight percent chance of a nuclear exchange within twenty-four days of the initial outbreak. A ninety-four percent chance of the global temps dropping by eight degrees Fahrenheit. We had to be prepared. We developed hybrid crop strains that would thrive in a world where the temperature dropped twenty degrees.
“But we had to make all this worth the effort. That we would be the stewards of this new world for a lot longer than one might think possible.”
Her head was starting to ache, and she was having a hard time following his line of thinking. He was telling her something important, something vital, but her brain wasn’t putting it together. Bits and pieces of a larger picture.
“There were two vaccines,” she said. “Two.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Chadwick’s responsibility was to develop and produce the virus,” he said. “He was a brilliant doctor, brilliant. But he was a bit unhinged. I never really trusted him. I didn’t know what he would do. I knew I would never be able to control what he did in Nebraska. And so your grandfather worked with Dr. Rogers to create the second vaccine. We knew the Citadel would come undone after they discovered their vaccine had sterilized the women.”
“Aren’t you breaking the bad-guy code?” she asked, smiling, a little punch drunk.
“What do you mean?”
“Telling me your whole plan?”
His face darkened as he leaned in close, his lips at her ear. His warm breath tickled her skin.
“I wanted you to know. I wanted you to know that you owe whatever life you’ve led for the past thirteen years to me. I wanted you to know your grandfather paid for your life with the human race.”
Her stomach clenched as he spoke, his words like dark clouds raining blood and death on the ground of her soul. In that moment, she was glad her father was dead, that he would never have to know this terrible truth about his own father, about their family. Death would be better than having to walk around with this knowledge in her head. This was worse than survivor’s guilt, a feeling that this was somehow her fault, that the dead world around her was her fault.
“Anyway, back to the Lottery,” he said. “We carefully control the number of births because the babies born here are going to live a very long time.”
“What?”
“The nanovaccine does more than protect you from PB-815.”
“I’m not following.”
He smiled strangely at her.
“Rachel, have you been sick even once in the last fifteen years?”
Her brow furrowed as she considered the question.
“I, uh. Yeah, sure.”
“When?”
She scoured her memory banks, thinking back to the last time she’d been under the weather, fighting off a cold or stomach bug.
“Think back to the last few years before the plague. Did you miss a single day of high school because you were sick?”
No.
She had not.
At her graduation, the principal had handed her a certificate for never having missed a day of high school. It was the only time, Principal Greyson had said, the school had ever awarded that certificate. Her freshman year in college, less than a year before the outbreak, a stomach bug had ravaged her dorm, but she had remained healthy. Every single person on her floor had come down with it except her. She escaped outbreaks of mononucleosis, influenza, even ringworm.
“No.”
“And after the epidemic, did you ever get sick, even once?”
Cold and flu had still circulated during their years at the warehouse; there seemed to be enough human contact to keep the bugs moving, especially in the absence of annual flu shots. And they had dealt with other illnesses, cholera, even an outbreak of typhoid fever. But again, she had never gotten sick, not once.
Her three months with Millicent unspooled like a home movie. She’d had sex with dozens of men, and she had never come down with so much as a urinary tract infection. Every one of the girls had contracted at least one sexually transmitted disease – but not Rachel. Not once.
And Will had never been sick in his life. Never once. No ear infections. No croup. No sniffles. Not one runny nose. He had never thrown up, had never even run a fever. How had she never noticed that before?
“No,” she said through gritted teeth. She didn’t want the answer to be no, she didn’t want to believe what Gruber was telling her.
“You’ve received the ultimate gift,” he said. “The gift of life. A hundred years from now, I’ll still be here. Five hundred years from now. All these people, you’ve met, they’ll still be here. That’s why I don’t care about this bleak world you’re so despondent about. All those people will die. In time, even the skies will clear, and we will have this beautiful, pure world to call our own.”
Rachel simply stared at him, her mouth hanging open.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why did you come?”
“I wanted to know the truth.”
“And now that you know it, was it worth it?”
>
“Yes.”
“You could’ve lived the rest of your very long life in peace.”
Her head was spinning. She was dead; Gruber was going to kill her, probably in the next few minutes. But Will. Her heart broke for him. Bad enough he’d grown up in this world. Worse was knowing he might be wandering the earth out there alone for God knew how long.
Should she try to cut a deal?
Bring him in?
Tell Gruber about him?
If these people didn’t know the truth about the plague, then maybe Will could live with them in beautiful, blessed, blissful ignorance. His conscience would be rightfully clear. He could be around other kids for the first time in his life. He could be happy. Maybe Gruber would spare her too. Will would have his mother. They could have a life.
And she would carry this secret about the plague to her grave. And when she died, if there was a Maker to meet, if there were debts to be paid, they could settle this matter then.
Throwing her lot in with Leon Gruber.
That was a tough pill to swallow.
But she could someday try to make it right. To make things better. There were women out there right now who could become mothers again. That valise with the vials of vaccine, she could take it one day, take it out into the world and vaccinate women so they could have kids again. If Gruber was right, they could wait for the climate to stabilize again and maybe the crops would grow again.
But would he even want to cut a deal?
He might kill Will just to spite her.
She sat there, mulling it over, this terrible choice. Will. It had to be about Will. Since the day he’d been born, every choice was for him, to make his life better, to fill his toolbox as best as she could so when the day came, he could take care of himself, protect himself, perhaps extract some joy from this mine of misery in which they lived.
But she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t bring herself to say the words to Gruber. She didn’t even want him to know Will existed. He didn’t deserve to know about Will. She was afraid it would bring him joy to see her grandfather’s wish granted at yet another level.