“We will be moving you now. It’s best if you cooperate.”
My muscles tensed, but I knew I was too weak to put up a fight. A part of me didn’t care beyond thinking about Dylan’s last betrayal. He had thrown me away and yet I wasn’t angry. I was sad.
The nylon braiding of the noose tightened into my skin. This was their way of telling me to stop while one of them opened the doors. No warning, just the same pressure you might use to rein in an unruly horse.
Sergeant Bennings waited on the other side of the door. He ushered me and my guards outside. “Follow me,” he said.
We left the warehouse, crossed under a cement pathway, and Sergeant Bennings opened the door to another building. I stumbled and anticipated a choking, but the man holding my noose accounted for my stumble and moved with me to keep me comfortable. I did not understand this kindness, but that’s what it was.
Sergeant Bennings held the door open. “This way, please.”
“And do you feel so sure of yourself, you don’t wear a suit? How can you be so sure I can’t infect you from here?”
“I trust my men,” he said.
“Dad? Dad!” A young voice yelled out.
A boy, maybe fourteen, wearing a black jacket and a dark beanie pulled low over his head with little sprigs of brown hair escaping it, ran to us.
“Alden! Don’t come over here,” Sergeant Bennings said. He dropped his hand from the next door and allowed it to close. He nodded at the two men holding me. “Stay here.”
“Yessir.”
Sergeant Bennings loped a few yards away until Alden caught up to him.
Even though Sergeant Bennings lowered his voice, I could clearly hear his conversation. I wondered if he knew that and spoke so loudly on purpose.
The boy had lanky brown hair. A gray stripe circled his dark beanie and set off his dark eyes. He looked young, his features set in that typical angsty, almost sullen, teenager frame, ready to demand something unreasonable and deprecate you for your response. But maybe I was being unfair, maybe I only wanted to think so badly of him because he was the son after all, the son of a man capable of hanging people and doing who knew what else to people like me.
“I told you not to come over this way,” Sergeant Bennings said.
“There’s trouble at the gate,” Alden said.
“Why didn’t someone else come? Why did they send you and not one of my soldiers? And what were you doing at the gate? I told you not to go over there either!”
“I can’t just sit and do nothing. Not with mom…the guards needed me. They sent me because there was no one to spare. And I stayed safe. I stayed out of sight like you taught me. I didn't—”
“Stop, Alden.”
I wondered what Sergeant Bennings’ first name could be. I tried to picture the mother, the woman who could love someone like him.
Alden bowed his head when Sergeant Bennings’ hand touched his shoulder. “Just—tell me what’s happening.”
“There’s a rush of people, of the sick ones. The guards aren’t sure what drew them in, but they’re having a hard time, and it looks like something is organizing them.”
“What did you say?” Sergeant Bennings asked.
“I don’t know—that’s what they said to tell you. It doesn’t look random.”
I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. The cold was starting to sink into my legs, stiffening my knees. My animal handler did not move, other than to flick his eyes at me. Definitely Stan. Even with a mask covering most of his face, the lines around his washed out blue eyes were instantly recognizable.
“It must make you feel so good, knowing you’ve got the best of me now. I left you, and now this is payback,” I said to him in a low voice.
His eyes squinted in a pained expression. “I’m sorry, Corrina. This is not by my choice.”
“I’m sure.”
“We can’t let the sickness spread. Otherwise no one human will be left.”
“How does a sickness turn someone sub-human? Doesn’t it just make them sick?”
He didn’t answer.
I returned my focus to Sergeant Bennings and son. The two of them parted ways and Sergeant Bennings hurried back to us while Alden disappeared around the building.
“Take her to the chair. Strap her down, lock the door. Then get to the gate.”
Without pausing for the “yessirs,” that both men responded with, Sergeant Bennings pivoted and went the opposite direction, following Alden and disappearing around another building.
I thought for half a second about escaping, but the men, even Stan, were good at their job.
The warehouse was a dank, dark building with ceilings three stories tall, skylights yellowed and fogged. They pushed me into a side section, down a makeshift hallway with a lowered ceiling that made it feel claustrophobic compared to before. Multiple doors on either side lined this hallway. Something moaned behind one of them.
The men pushed open the fifth door down. Before they could force me inside, I walked into this plaster-walled, cement-floored, windowless room the size of a walk-in closet. There was a cot, two buckets—one empty, one full of water—and a door on the other side.
The men followed after me. Stan still held my noose. The other man opened the opposite door into a room that gleamed with sterile white light.
This room had a chair. An all metal, dentist-like chair, in the center. Various cords and wires attached to it and snaked across the floor to the opposite wall, to a bank of windows and a type of control room. This one looked triple the size of the last room and while it was still a makeshift setup, a lot more care and equipment had been used.
Lights on floor stands created a halo effect around the chair. A set of metal roller trays with tools laid out on sterile blue hospital paper were positioned near the chair. Leather straps were attached at the arm and leg rests.
My legs jiggled with fear and I almost lost my balance. Stan grabbed my arm and lifted me up. The other man helped him position me in the chair.
I rested the crown of my head on the cold, metal surface behind me and looked forward to nothing, a blank wall. The chair was turned away from the windows and control room.
The two men strapped me down. I held my breath, anticipating the too tight straps, the way it would cut off my circulation, a way to cause me pain just because. But that didn’t happen. Yes, the straps were secure, but they were not too tight. Instead, both men took care to make sure the straps did not dig into my skin, or pinch it, or otherwise hurt it. Once they were done strapping me down, they pivoted the chair so it faced the windows where more lap equipment and computers were setup.
I started rattling off questions, hoping this would stall the two men, keep them from leaving me here alone to dwell on what would happen to me next.
They worked in silence except once. Stan said, “We used to put your type in the cages along with the comatose ones, but you all talked too much to each other.”
And then the second guy elbowed Stan and he shut up and it didn’t matter what I asked or that I had begun to shout my questions. They finished their work in silence and left through the door to the windowless closet.
I waited for what seemed hours, but may have lasted only minutes. In these moments of stillness I inventoried my body, its dry, cracked, aged skin, its looseness, its papery texture. My mind, its fragile state, as if it balanced on the middle of a teeter-totter and while I stood in the middle, everything was clear, but weather or people or my own miserable balance threatened to push me onto one side, into memory-fevers or ghost-memories or a memory-rush.
But my mind was still sharp, and my heart still pounded, strong and regular. I did not think it had also aged, I would not think so. I could still run, I could still fight, I could still think. Those were what mattered.
The door clicked behind me. I did not bother to look.
“Hello, Corrina.” Sergeant Bennings had returned and brought along with him a middle-aged female doctor who wore a stereotypical white lab coat, sneakers, blue jeans. A stethoscope lay on her collarbone and she held a clipboard.
She was as tall as the sergeant's shoulder. Her brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun. Her eyes glinted with intelligence when she looked up. Her gaze slid over me, past my eyes, down, around, as if I wasn’t really there. As if there wasn’t a person strapped to the chair, only a specimen to observe.
“Let me introduce you to Dr. Ferrad. She will be conducting a number of tests on you today.” Sergeant Bennings paused, as if his next words pained him to say them. “She is infected, like you.”
My heart pounded. The bright lights had washed out the telltale lines, but I saw it now. The ashy paleness, the almost papery quality. Dr. Ferrad did not look me in the eyes at first, but then as if by some internal decision, she stiffened her back and met my gaze. “It is my job to find a cure, or a way to contain this, or a way to destroy it. If you have any sense of responsibility left, you will cooperate.”
Confusion surrounded me. They treated the infected like animals, like less than human, like vermin to exterminate, yet here was an infected doctor, standing alongside Sergeant Bennings, as if they were almost equals. She was ready to experiment on me and he stood there unprotected—
But I realized he wasn’t unprotected. His hand rested on his holster and another guard I had not noticed before was standing silent against the wall with a gun leveled at the doctor.
“Yes, I can see you have questions,” Sergeant Bennings said. “It would be easy to dismiss us as monsters from your viewpoint. It would be easy to label me a tyrant or a murderer. But you may come to see that I do all of this out of a deep sense of responsibility, a deep love for humanity, a…” He trailed off and looked away, into the shadows. “The more we learn about your kind, the more dangerous we know you are to keeping humans human, yet some of you can be reasoned with still, and so we must try, must we not try?”
Dr. Ferrad reached out to touch Sergeant Bennings’ shoulder.
“Sir!” The guard in the shadows yelled and stepped into the halo of light.
Dr. Ferrad withdrew her hand as if struck by lightning. Sergeant Bennings stepped between Dr. Ferrad and the guard. “Hold it right there, soldier. It's fine.”
“I will find a cure for this. I will,” Dr. Ferrad said.
They stood there for a long moment. Sergeant Bennings and Dr. Ferrad locked in a staring contest.
“She is your wife,” I said.
As if my words broke a spell, Sergeant Bennings flicked his eyes at me.
Dr. Ferrad turned her head down as if ashamed. She returned her focus to the clipboard and began taking notes. She looked up at me every few seconds with that impartial, emotionless stare that made me feel like an apple in a still life painting.
“She is not my wife,” Sergeant Bennings said finally. “My wife is in a coma from the bacterial strain. Dr. Ferrad and I have worked together for many years. She happens to be the best doctor we’ve got and whatever part of her is still human, it is enough to allow her to continue her work, to help us save what is left of the rest of us.”
“So she's sick like me, less than human, but gets special treatment because you slept with her once.”
Sergeant Bennings flinched at my words. “You cannot be trusted, yet there is no one else to do this work, and the work must be done, and so—” Sergeant cut himself off and shook his head slightly. “It is so easy to try to reason with your kind. The spark is missing, yet you act so—”
“Let me get on with my job,” Dr. Ferrad interrupted. “We are wasting time.”
Without another word, Sergeant Bennings left.
The guard remained at his post against the wall and faded into the shadows. The doctor lowered her clipboard. I smiled tentatively. She would tell me the truth now. She was like me. She would help me escape, she would understand—
The clipboard snaked out and hit me alongside the head. The blow was more of a shock than anything. My ears rang, blood rushed to my head, my ear became hot.
“Let’s begin.” She set the clipboard down and grabbed a needle from the blue-papered tray. She held the needle high over her head like a maniac before plunging it into my shoulder and drawing out what felt like a pint of blood.
When she finished she deposited the needle in a case and the case in a bag. She unwrapped the stethoscope from around her neck, listened to my lungs and heartbeat, cuffed my arm, took my blood pressure, poked and prodded me in a dozen other ways, all in silence. If I could convince her, reason with her, there might still be a way out.
Though the sting of her clipboard would say otherwise.
“When did you get infected?” I asked quietly so the guard could not hear.
She froze for a moment, then continued her work.
“Oh,” I said, trying to connect the dots. “You were part of the vaccine program.”
A muscle in her cheek twitched.
“You were infected from the very beginning, even before they all started killing the old people. How come Sergeant Bennings wasn’t vaccinated. How come—”
“Do you remember the numbers from your last checkup? Blood pressure, cholesterol?”
“Maybe.”
She sighed. “I could ask the soldier over there to make you more cooperative. Just like we would a dog.”
I glanced at the man staring woodenly at us from yards away. He gave no sign he heard either of us, but maybe he was trained to do that. “You don’t have to threaten me, “ I said. “Answer some of my questions. Give me information, I’ll tell you what I know.”
She set the medical equipment down on the blue paper, grabbed both sides of the tray with her hands as if to steady herself. Anyone who knew anything about the co-infection could see she was fighting back a ghost-memory right then.
“Do they know you see the ghosts?”
Her arm snaked out and she slapped me on the other side of my cheek. Anger lashed up in me. Only one other person had slapped me in my entire life and I had punched her in the ear for it. Any thought about reasoning with her flew out of my mind. How dare she help them, how dare she act like she was better than me, how dare she—
“No questions about me. Otherwise you have a deal.”
I stopped straining against the straps. My anger cooled, but my distrust remained. She was crazy and she was working for them. For the people who would as soon kill me as experiment on me. For the people Dylan was with now.
I closed my eyes and forced that thought away. This was not a good time to think about him.
“Why do you want to know my numbers,” I asked, my eyes still closed.
“To compare them now that you are infected.”
“What do you think you will find?”
“If it matches the pattern, your numbers should be the same, even improved, from before you were infected.” She said this matter-of-factly, as if this bit of information were rather inconsequential.
“But I’m old now,” I exploded. “How could it, how…”
She looked up. Her eyes were brown, a hard brown, there was still no softness present. If anything, I swore I could see a crazy glint in them.
“The co-infection changes many things about the body and mind. Most are detrimental, some are neutral, or may even be considered an improvement.”
I tried to digest this information. My skin might be old, my mind might fail me too many times to count, but, “The rest of me, my insides, my heart, my muscles, that all will still be normal, like before?”
“If you fit the pattern we’ve seen so far, yes,” she said. “I must always confirm, although I have yet to see an exception.”
“But…” I tried to think this through. “What about all the times my knee gave out? All the times I felt sore and stiff and old, just plain old—”
“You were likely out for a couple of weeks after being infected. Laid out somewhere, immobile, muscles atrophying, and then when you awoke, did you give yourself any rest? Did you build up your muscle strength and stamina slowly, or did you overdo it?”
I opened my mouth.
She held up her hand. “Don’t bother, that was a rhetorical question. Of course you didn’t. Any normal person would have experienced strained muscles and joints, along with pain from the sudden amount of exercise you likely engaged in, and you did all that after laying out somewhere practically comatose for weeks.”
I couldn’t argue with her logic. I had jumped out of buildings and fought people to the death. I had feared the last few weeks of injuries weren't the normal consequences of an overworked body but instead a horrible part of the disease I lived with. And here she was, smirking at my ignorance.
She asked again for my numbers and I rattled off what I could remember. I hadn’t had health insurance for months. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to satisfy her. She wrote it all down on her stupid clipboard, left the room with my vials of blood and returned a few minutes later.
“So,” I said. “Is it true, are my numbers the same?”
“Too fast to know, it will take 24 hours to get the results back, but everything else I’ve looked at says yes.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If I’m so normal, if so much of me is like before, if I’m so goddamn normal, why are you all treating me like I’m not even human anymore?”
The light cast weird shadows across her facial features. It deepened the bags underneath her eyes, but smoothed out the wrinkles and webs of her skin. The corner of her mouth lifted in a small smile, as if she was telling herself a silent joke.
“Because you are not human anymore. Or, you are not JUST human anymore. The virus has made sure of that.” She looked about to explain further, then stopped. A coldness seemed to wash over her face. I wondered who or what she saw instead of me. It felt strange to see this happening so clearly in someone else. It felt as if I were invading her privacy.
“Who did this?” I said in a quiet voice.
“We don’t know,” she said, her answer automatic, as if she’d had to answer this question a million times and had gotten bored with it.
“We just happened to discover a mutated rabies virus and also happened to discover a bacteria that can fight it off?”
“Oh no, we genetically engineered the bacteria. That was us.”
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. The only compatible bacteria was in the family that causes Lyme disease. It fights off the Lyssa virus, but buries itself in the nervous system. Specifically the memory center of the brain.”
I knew all this. Well, I hadn’t known it was a genetically engineered version of Lyme disease, but this wasn’t exactly new information. “When it’s just the bacteria that infects somebody, it turns them into Faints—”
“Into what?”
“Puts them in a coma. That’s our name for them. Faints.”
“Okay,” she said.
“How is that possible?” I thought about Matilda and her family, and how they had saved me and Maibe, and how they had burned themselves down soon after. “How does something that puts people into a coma end up infecting anyone if it’s not being purposefully injected?”
“Normal Lyme disease spreads by way of the tick. Maybe something like that,” she said.
“So you don’t know. Not for sure.”
She shook her head. “Not for sure. But we’re working on it.”
“So this entire camp of people could be turning into Faints and you wouldn’t know it.”
“It’s a risk. But it’s one that Sergeant Bennings and the other camps have decided is worth it.”
“What other camps?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said in a clipped voice. She collected her equipment, put away her notes, took off her gloves.
“Wait,” I said. I felt deflated. This woman was playing games with me somehow. She was getting a twisted satisfaction out of providing partial answers, half-truths, leading statements. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t telling the truth, that didn’t mean she wasn’t right. She acted so sure, and she was like me. Infected. And she acted like it was this easy thing to just go ahead and judge herself now as something less than human.
The straps being undone from my wrists wrenched me from my thoughts. She was going to help me after all, she—
But it was the guard. Dr. Ferrad had left and the guard was taking me back to my room. To my cage with a cot, two buckets, and four dingy white walls.
I lay in the cot that night in total darkness. They'd turned off the single bulb that hung precariously rigged from the center of the room. Moans filtered, muffled, through the walls. My muscles ached, my joints ached, they always ached, but for once I did not assume it was a result of the infection. Maybe it was normal.
What did it mean to be human? I could still think and talk and love. Yes, I lost myself sometimes, but I came back. I came back.
Tears leaked, leaving cold trails down my cheeks. I did not make a sound, I would not give into such weakness, but I could not keep back the tears. I balled up the rough blanket and tucked it under my chin. No one, not Dylan, not Maibe, not the pup-boys, no one could get me out now. A part of me thought I deserved this.
I turned my head to the side. Snot leaked out of my nose. Memories of past moments of despair threatened to rise up and take over—grieving for my parents, for Dylan, for not trying harder—
A scratching noise broke through and allowed me the strength to push back the memories. I stopped breathing. I listened. Groans from some other prisoner in pain, the clomp-clomp of steps in the hallway outside my room.
There.
A scratch, and then another. Somewhere in the darkness, but very close. In the room with me. The scratching increased, became more insistent.
I got out of the cot and followed it to the opposite corner of my cage. The wall felt smooth and cold to my hands as I searched down it until I almost hit the floor.
There.
An edge of something rough and uneven. It moved and I gasped and shrank back.
“Hello?”
“Shhhh.” Someone said through the walls.
I sat back on my heels and waited. I could not see a thing other than the faint outline of the walls, but I could feel.
When the scratching was done. I returned my hand to the wall. The slight lip I felt earlier was now more like an inch. Big enough to grab and pull. I did so, and a small section of wall, just a couple of square inches, came away in my hands.
My calf muscles tensed and I waited for what would happen next. I thought it must be the prisoner next door, someone like me. Someone I wasn’t supposed to talk to. Someone who may have found a way to escape.
The scratching noise started again, different in timbre. An almost hesitant sound. Something white uncurled from the gap in the wall and fluttered to the floor.
“Close it,” said a female voice. “It's from Spencer. Say nothing.”
I quickly returned the piece of drywall to its hole and grabbed up the paper.
I explored every inch of the room, looking for a hint of light strong enough to allow me to read the words I knew must be scrawled on the paper. But I found none.
My heart pounded with excitement and frustration. What good was a message if I couldn’t read it? I scrambled back to where I thought the hole had been made and tried to find the lip, but I had returned it too neatly. My fingers grazed the wall a dozen times and found no purchase and I couldn’t be sure I was even in the right spot anymore.
I thought about banging on the wall to get next door’s attention and had raised my fist in the air when I scolded myself for such stupidity. I would bring the prisoner to the wall, along with who knew how many guards.
I forced myself back to my cot and lay with the paper pressed between my hands and chest. I thought of a million things the message could say: maybe it was warning me to get ready for an escape attempt, maybe it was directions for escaping on my own, maybe it revealed the secret for taking down this whole farce of a refugee center.
I decided to force myself to stay awake until there was enough light to read the message. And I did manage to keep sleep at bay for several hours. At least, I think it was several hours.
Something poked into my chest. I was walking alongside a faceless friend. It felt like this friend had just elbowed me in the ribs. “Look,” the faceless friend said. “Look at that.”
I looked across the street, to where she pointed, but there was nothing except fog, even though on our side it was a bright, sunny day.
My friend elbowed me again in the ribs, harder now.
“Ow,” I said.
My eyes flew open.
The one bulb still hung from the middle of the small room, swinging gleefully, as if on holiday. Dr. Ferrad loomed over me, not afraid to touch me, yet still treating me like a dog about to bite. She carried a stick, a short one, some broken off handle from a broom or rake or something, but a stick all the same. This is what poked me.
“Get up,” she said. I thought about jumping her. There was no guard with her. But then I heard the faint crackle and sizzle and saw where the noise came from. A taser in her other hand.
I pushed myself up on my elbows. The threadbare blanket fell away. Something white fluttered onto the cement floor.
The note.
“What’s this,” Dr. Ferrad said.
I jumped off the bed to grab it. My heart rocked in my chest. I had been so careless. She used the stick to poke me back, but I resisted.
She held out the taser, its crackle of electricity clicking like an insect. I backed up a step. Dr. Ferrad took the paper, began to uncurl it.
I bowled into her and the taser. The paper fluttered to the floor. The taser clicked like an insect. My body went rigid with pain. Everything turned red and then the pain vanished.
The taser hit the ground next to my face. I didn't know when I had fallen to the floor, only that I was there, gasping for air alongside Dr. Ferrad's unconscious body. The paper tickled my nose. I snatched it up and read the words:
We have a plan.
That was the message? That's what I had gotten tasered for? Another guard burst into my room. I stuffed the note into my mouth and mashed it into something swallowable. The paper edges scratched my throat on the way down. Without thinking it through, I tripped over Dr. Ferrad and charged the lone guard. He held a stick and taser and wore a white suit. One of the uninfected. I blocked his stick and smashed my fist into his temple.
He fell like a rock, his head bouncing on the edge of my cot railing. Blood began to pool underneath his head, onto the cement. Light from the hallway cast ugly shadows across his still form.
He looked dead.
No, no, no, no.
He was someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s son.
The guard groaned and twitched. His eyes fluttered.
I thought about grabbing the taser and running, but he needed help. My hand itched for the weapon. My body demanded I run. My mind screamed at me to escape.
I yelled for help.
I backed into the opposite corner of the room as three men rushed in.
One guard took Dr. Ferrad's and the unconscious guard's pulses. The other two advanced on me. I held up my hands to show I was defenseless. They tasered me into unconsciousness.