TWO YEARS AGO
When we received word of a mandatory meeting at the Red Rock Trail, I had a feeling more bad news was on the way.
I strapped my pistol to my belt on the right side, and on the left hung a sharp hatchet. My wife, Sarah, held hands with our nine-year-old, Skylar, as they waited in front of the house for me to leave. The meeting was in an hour, and the walk would get me there just in time.
I had seen construction at the Red Rock Trail entrance a few days ago, and I assumed the meeting would be to explain what that was about.
Our district was under control of a man named Gerard. I didn’t know much more about him than that. He was a Screven official, which meant we had to listen to him. Sometimes he would warn of a high concentration of greyskin herds roaming about. Sometimes he would tell us about new policies to be implemented by the Screven government.
Those of us under Gerard’s leadership weren’t bound so much by his directions. Not like other colonies, villages, or settlements. People in this district like my family and me were spread out, too far apart to form specific communities. And none of us had ever asked for Screven to take control of the area, yet here they were. This district had been taken over by them, and they had allowed us to live here so long as we bent to their rules.
None of us liked it. None of us wanted them to be here. But we didn’t fight it. There was no point.
Sarah stood next to me, looking toward the horizon. The meeting was scheduled too close to sundown, but I figured it to be a strategy. No one in the district wanted to be out after dark. Greyskins weren’t always the loudest creatures, so it wasn’t unheard of to walk up on one and not realize it until it already had its teeth in your flesh.
Gerard wanted the meeting to be short and sweet, and the lack of light would keep him from having to answer a lot of questions. The later the meeting, I thought, the worse the news. But I couldn’t imagine what sort of news he could bring us. We barely lived under Screven’s rule. None of us really knew who was in charge. To us, Screven soldiers were just another clan of raiders looking to expand their territory, though a bit more organized in their endeavors. The best we could do was to stay out of their way.
Sarah hated these meetings and would have preferred me to stay at home, but skipping out on the meetings was not permitted.
“It won’t be long,” I said. I tousled Sky’s red hair and leaned in to kiss Sarah. Her soft lips pressed into mine and she set her hand at the nape of my neck.
“I don’t like being here alone with that creature in the basement,” she said.
I didn’t like it either, but it was safer than the three of us traveling so close to dark. If the meeting were in the middle of the day, I would have taken them with me, but I wasn’t going to risk it.
“It’s locked away. Just keep the gun with you. There is no way it will be able to get out.” There had never been an incident before. There was no reason to think there would be one now.
“I hate it as much as you do,” I said. “But I’m so close. I’ve got a new development that I want to try tomorrow. I think it might actually work.”
“You’ve been saying that for years,” she said.
I swallowed and looked toward the ground, then at Sky. “But I have to keep trying, don’t I, Sky?”
“Yep,” she said. “You’re going to save the world.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, my eyes meeting Sarah’s. “I’m trying my best.”
“And you will get there,” she said. She kissed me again. “Now, go and find out the terrible news Gerard has to tell us this time.”
My feet felt heavy and slow. I hated leaving them behind more than anything. I would have considered not going to the meeting, but that would have probably resulted in Gerard showing up at my doorstep asking why I hadn’t been there. It would be a slap on the wrist, but a Screven official coming to my house was an unnecessary danger. If for some reason they found out about the greyskin in my basement, I could get in a lot of trouble. I don’t know what kind of trouble exactly, but it wouldn’t be good.
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.
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.
Skylar fell asleep in Sarah’s arms. Then Sarah followed. I couldn’t separate them. There was no danger of Skyler getting the virus until…until Sarah died and reanimated.
I didn’t sleep. There was no moment in the night where I was tempted to even close my eyes for a little while. I had never stared at someone for so long. The sweep of her curly hair as it fell across her shoulders. How her hands gently caressed the cheek of our daughter. Sarah was the essence of beauty and grace, never throwing blame at me for her catastrophic situation.
Throughout the night, I would reach out and check for a pulse, finding a steady heartbeat every time. When morning came, I touched her hand and she woke with a faint smile—something greyskins didn’t do. Given the amount of time that had passed since the attack the evening before, most people would have been in a state of incoherence or would be completely unresponsive. Here she was, smiling at me.
Was it possible the medicine had worked? Had I finally come up with a cure for the greyskin virus?
The morning came and went. I made breakfast for Skylar. Understandably, Sarah didn’t feel like eating, and neither did I. Skylar ended up not touching her food, but it didn’t matter. It was strange for me, not knowing what to do with myself. Was I supposed to be saying my final goodbye? Was I supposed to be reminiscing about the past? There was so much darkness in our history. Anyone and everyone we’d ever known and loved had died. Our family was all any of us had left.
Sure, there had been sweet moments in our lives. When Skylar took her first step, it was toward me, but in the back of my mind, I had cautioned against expressing my elation too loudly. What if something heard me? What if the greyskins came tearing into our home?
Some of our biggest worries together were trying to keep Skylar quiet as an infant. How many times had we stifled her in the name of caution?
Every step of the way brought painful memories. Thoughts of anxiety. Fear. Depression. I didn’t want to think about the past. I wanted the future to come. I wanted Sarah to get better.
I wanted the cure to work.
At first, it seemed like it was going to. Sarah’s eyes had lightened. Her face had gained more color, her skin became less pale. My heart started pounding when evening came, and she was still talking with us. There was no doubt she was still sick, but the medicine was doing something inside her.
The twenty-four-hour mark quickly approached. Never had I seen someone stay conscious for this long after the virus entered their bloodstream.
As though it were some cruel joke, however, Sarah’s health deteriorated in the last hour. Her eyes darkened. Her skin lost its color. When she was about to lose consciousness, I decided to inject her with more of the medicine. I didn’t know what that would do. I didn’t even know if it would help, but I had to try.
I felt sick to my stomach. I swallowed my tears, but Skylar was back to weeping, clinging to her dying mother. Almost as if I had never administered the medicine, Sarah died within twenty-four hours of her scratches.
As a family, each of us knew what had to happen if any one of us died from the greyskin virus. We had a few moments to deal with the loss as we could, but only a few.
Skylar held to her mother, wrapping her arms around her neck, burying her head into her chest, weeping loudly enough for something to hear outside. I didn’t stop her.
I was in too much shock to stop her. Too much shock to cry. Too much shock to do much of anything. But I knew I had to do something. Minutes passed. For a moment, I thought perhaps the medicine, though another failure, would at least stop her from reanimating.
Skylar didn’t notice when Sarah’s finger began to twitch. I knew then it was time.
I set a hand on Skylar’s shoulder. “Sweetheart. I have to…”
“No!” she screamed. “Please no!”
“Skylar, it’s time.”
She turned to me, her hair glued to her face with her tears. “Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t your stinking medicine work? You said it would work!”
I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t swallow my tears, and they flowed freely. A groan escaped my lips, and my stomach heaved as I pulled Skylar close to me. She tried to pull away, but almost immediately she let go of her mother’s body and clung to me tightly as if she knew I was all she had left.
We only had each other.
I told Skylar to go to the basement, shut her eyes, and put her fingers in her ears until I came back to get her. I didn’t expect she would listen to my instructions, but there was no sign of her when I carried Sarah’s body to the yard. I stepped over the greyskin I had dragged out earlier, trying my best not to look at it, swallowing my regret for bringing it into our home.
There would be plenty of time ahead for me to regret all I had done—the danger I had placed before my family.
The sun was setting in the west, and I thought about the previous evening how terror had moved through me when I discovered the light on in the house after the meeting about the Containment Zone. That terror had turned into despair. How was I going to raise Skylar alone? We were supposed to do this together.
I carried Sarah as far away from the house as I could without losing too much light. The small twitch in her finger had turned into more significant spasms throughout her body.
With tears in my eyes, I set Sarah’s body on the ground, horrified about what I had to do next. I pulled the gun from my belt and cocked it.
If Skylar wasn’t in the equation, I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have turned the gun on myself. There was no way to know how much closer to the cure I might be. Other than my daughter, finding the cure was all I had to live for. I had given years of my life to the work, and all it had brought was sorrow. False hope.
I raised the gun and pointed it at Sarah’s head. This wasn’t killing her. She was already dead. But it was like killing me. With a pull of the trigger, I felt like I had lost everything I had ever lived for. I had lost my partner. My friend. My love.
The echo of the gunshot seemed to travel into infinity. There may have been some roaming greyskins around to hear the shot, but that didn’t mean they would come for the house.
I looked at the gun in my hand, considering for a moment joining Sarah in another plane of existence. But no. I had been put on this earth to do two things: ensure the safety of my daughter and make a cure for the greyskin virus.