The next day, I paced the old hotel room for hours. Freanz, Molly, and the twins seemed to sense the tension. They reacted to my every movement with involuntary twitching. There were no new broken windows, just the gaping hole as a reminder, but every time they settled down enough for me to leave and check on Jen, one would start up again.
By the end of the day, the walls felt like they were closing in on me. The wallpaper was faded and dirty, the floor covered in scratches, food was ground into the cracks. Why hadn’t I noticed any of that before?
I filled a bucket with water, took a rag, and spent the afternoon scrubbing every surface until all of it shined, but my mind strayed to Jen again and again.
When I finished feeding everyone dinner and settled them down for the evening, I sat by the broken window. A slight breeze gave some relief to the stifling heat. I drummed my fingers on the sill, watched the sunset change colors.
Just as I decided to chance leaving there was a scratch at the door. Molly mumbled and her foot slipped out from under the covers. I repositioned the sheet on my way to answer the knock.
Corrina stood there, smiling, but the smile did not reach her eyes. She was taller than me and her wild hair was long and dark and framed her face almost like a lion’s mane.
“Is it Jen?” Fear struck me like lightning.
“She’s okay,” Corrina said quickly. “Not any worse, at least. I thought you might want to see her.”
I closed my eyes and breathed out the knot that had formed in my chest.
“Also—”
“What?” I said.
“I thought you would want to know. Ano and Gabbi are gone.”
“Gone where?” But even as I asked, I knew the answer. Ano and Gabbi had gone for the new drugs without me. I was a coward for not going with them.
“These new drugs might be exactly what we need,” she said.
“But we still have plenty of the old drugs.”
“We have enough for the next few months, if we’re careful,” Corrina said. “But they’re not working the same as before.”
“But they’re still working.”
“For now.” Corrina’s face was drawn as if she hadn’t been sleeping much. The orange light from the sunset cast a weird, sickly glow on the lines and wrinkles of her infected skin. “I’ll watch your Faints for you if you want to see Jen.”
I tumbled out of that cave of a room, down the stairs, and onto the wooden sidewalk before realizing I hadn’t thanked Corrina. But it was too late to go back and I thought maybe even if I tried my body wouldn’t let me. The air felt cool and clear outside. The openness shocked me awake and I couldn’t return to that dark room. Not yet.
I hurried down the block. The sunset cast the sky and buildings in an orange glow. Ghost-memories crowded the streets. It was like a silent movie, except this movie ran in color. Jen stood in front of me, her face contorted in rage, both eyes staring at me. Leon and his crowd milled around, opening their mouths as if shouting, but no sound came out. I hurried past all of it. I couldn’t bear returning to the hotel room, but I feared becoming frozen in the street, my brain betraying me, freezing me in one spot until someone else put me away with the other Faints.
I took deep breaths and broke into a run, hoping the exercise would beat back the symptoms. And it did a little bit. The ghost-memories became just a little more transparent.
I pushed myself into a sprint and hoped that somehow I would find Jen in her bed, awake and feeling better, her eye suddenly healed and all of this a bad dream.
When I got to the church, I skidded to a stop and took in gulping breaths. Even though the air was cooling off, my run made me sweat. Stone blocks propped open the church doors. The sunset changed everything to pink now with hints of gray. With the remaining light, I could see Dylan and a few others inside, moving from bed to bed.
I stopped before my shoe hit the first step. Suddenly I couldn’t go in there. My brain dipped into the Garcia family memory-rush. My muscles trembled and I felt that familiar cry on my lips. I was able to step back, and then take another step and another. I was down the walkway and back onto the street before I could force myself to stop. I silently cursed. If I ran away now what would that tell Jen? She’d think I didn’t care. She’d think maybe I did this to her on purpose.
Dylan and the other Feebs still hadn’t seen me outside yet—too busy with their patients. The outhouse was around back. I decided to give myself a few minutes to make sure the memory-rush was gone.
The dry, yellowed weeds crackled under my footsteps until I reached the path worn to bare dirt behind the church. The outhouse was next to this shed where we stored a lot of the medical supplies. The shed was a dark green. The outhouse was painted white like the church. I hurried to the outhouse door and grabbed the shovel and bucket of sand and wood shavings.
Suddenly Leon and Nindal appeared. It felt like the double infection was laughing at me. I had run just a few blocks, but even so the memories felt overwhelming. My skin crawled as I told myself this wasn’t real. They weren’t real.
The green shed doors were open, the lock dangling, broken from one handle. Leon passed a box into Nindal’s waiting arms. Nindal shifted from foot to foot as if dancing to an imaginary song and passed the box onto someone in the shadows. The beard that had grown in on Leon’s face made him look rougher, meaner, like maybe he wouldn’t think twice about hurting you if you got in his way.
I told myself to move. I told myself to ignore the tricks my brain was trying to play on me. Another part of me whispered this really didn’t feel like a trick. Except that’s what the infection fooled you into thinking—that what you saw was real.
Leon passed another box to Nindal and left the shed with a third box in his arms. He shut the doors and the two of them walked away, disappearing into the twilight like they really were ghost-memories. Because that’s what they had been. That’s what I told myself, even if part of me didn’t believe it.
I set the bucket and shovel down. I hurried into the church to check on Jen. I didn’t say a word to anyone except to repeat in a whispered voice, “I’m sorry.” But Jen didn’t hear me. She slept with that bandage around her head and I couldn’t bear to wake her.
For the next three days, I stayed holed up with my Faints.
I went through the motions of the meals. I pointed them in the direction of the bathroom and let their memories do the rest. I chatted about nothing that mattered. I put them to bed and tried to read a book in the last of the light, but kept not understanding what I read. I tried to decide if what I had seen at the shed had been real.
When the sun woke me on the fourth day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Corrina needed to know about what I had seen, even if it turned out to be a ghost-memory.
Once the rope had linked us all together, waist-to-waist in a train, I led my Faints down the three flights of stairs and left them in the care of the church-turned-hospital. I was the only one in town who took care of Faints full time. Everyone else willing to help rotated through the hospital on shifts.
The morning was crisp and cool. There was a wet smell of dew in the air. The pale blue sky was cloudless. Birds chirped in several trees that shook with their movement. I saw the community hall from down the block. It was over two stories tall, though it only had one level.
I entered that cavernous space and yet it somehow still felt claustrophobic. The hall was used mainly for morning exercises. Today it seemed as if less than half the town was there—maybe fifty people. Many had yoga mats and spaced themselves out in rows. Gabbi stood on a little stage that had probably once held piano recitals and school plays. She often led the exercises because of all the classes she’d taken at the fitness centers during her time as a runaway.
My heartbeat increased as I took a position in the back row.
So they were back and no one had bothered to tell me. Not even Ricker.
Gabbi kept everyone moving, even while we focused on breathing and thinking, but thinking in such a way as to put obstacles around memories and to flex mental muscles that could push back anything that crept forward. Every moment flowed into the next without stopping. We worked from our head to our toes. My breathing deepened and moved like a waterfall up and down my spine. She changed the elevation a number of times. Bends, planks, lunges. The muscles in my arms and legs woke up, my head cleared. Our breathing filled the empty space above our heads, all of us silent and working together toward a common goal. To control the zombie in us.
Sometimes we lost someone anyway. The person would go still, but eventually returned, and resumed. No one spoke, and yet we were together. My body opened up and so did my heart. I had not felt such belonging in a long time.
Mayor Helen took the stage after Gabbi finished. She had been middle-aged when she turned and her plumpness made her very grandmotherly. The town had elected her during a group vote last year. Gabbi didn’t like her and Mayor Helen didn’t have much use for how Gabbi went about things either. Corrina always played interference between the two of them.
Ricker, Gabbi, and Jimmy stood together in a huddle off to the side. Only Ano was missing this morning, but I didn’t think much about it. Everyone skipped morning exercises at some point. I hadn’t attended them for months.
“I have an announcement,” Mayor Helen said. “People have been leaving and I know some of you are considering it.”
Conversations erupted.
“There’s a cure!” someone shouted.
“There might be.” She held up her hands for silence. “There’s rumors of it, yes. But that’s all it is right now. Rumors. Notwithstanding the few people taking care of the Faints this morning, or those in the fevers right now, who you see around you—that’s our town now.”
People gasped, including me. Several dozen people had left, just like that, over some rumor, after we’d done everything we could to rescue them and give them a safe place to live.
“The first group left three days ago.”
This comment unsettled me. Three days ago was when I had left the hotel to visit Jen. Three days ago was when I had seen Leon and Nindal’s ghost-memories at the green shed.
“More left the day after, and a third group just last night. They’ve taken supplies, stuff we had been holding in trust for the entire town. Food, medicine.” Mayor Helen looked like she saw something so broken she couldn’t see any way to put the pieces back together.
“But if they find the cure—it’ll be worth it,” Betty said from the middle of the crowd.
“We should have given them more,” said an older man I didn’t recognize.
Others joined in, their talk crowding the air.
“They just took it,” Mayor Helen said in a loud voice, chastising everyone into silence. “We would have supplied them. We would have—but fairly. But they didn’t ask, they didn’t care, they just took it and didn’t think about what it would mean for the rest of us still here, still trying to keep all this together.”
“What she’s saying to you,” Gabbi said, separating herself from Jimmy and Ricker, “is they took all the drugs. They left nothing for the Faints or for us if we go into the fevers.”
It was like I’d just put together enough of a puzzle to see what picture it was forming, but the picture was horrifying. I had never seen Leon before that night in Betty’s store. I had never seen the two of them carry boxes around. Leon and Nindal hadn’t been a ghost-memory. I’d watched them take the rest of our medicine and I hadn’t done anything to stop them.
The mood in the room shifted. There was still a sense of desire, of fervency, to go after the cure, but the new situation began to dawn on people. We would watch our neighbors slowly turn on us and know our other neighbors had helped it all along.
“But we can get more,” Betty said. “Can’t we?”
Mayor Helen didn’t answer. The silence extended and filled the space like the chatter had just moments before.
“We tried to get more,” Ricker said.
The room stilled, as if we all decided to stop breathing at the same time.
“We should go after the cure!” Betty said.
Mayor Helen nodded slowly, sadly. “That’s a choice you can make. Maybe it’s even the right one, but think about it for awhile yet. If you decide to leave, don’t just disappear on us. We’ll share whatever supplies we’ve got left.”
People broke up into groups, some leaving, some shouting at each other, some just looking around, bewildered. I was one of those. Stunned, dizzy from all of it, trying to work out how I felt and going nowhere with it.
I gathered my courage like I was collecting broken cobwebs and went over to Gabbi and the others. I told them what I had seen Leon and Nindal do. I told them what I had done—nothing.
Gabbi looked at me with hooded eyes. Ricker grabbed my hand and squeezed it before dropping it again.
“Where’s Ano?” I forced my mind not to think about all the horrible possible answers to that questions.
“He’s in the fevers,” Jimmy said. “He got bit by a V.”
Bewildered, I said, “But how’s that even possible? They’re starving out, slow, bumbling around like zombies from Night of the Living Dead.”
“This was a fresh one,” Ricker said. He didn’t look at me with judgment like Gabbi did. Mostly, he looked tired. “It was probably an uninfected that finally got the V virus.”
“Or it was a Feeb turned V,” Gabbi said.
“You don’t know that,” Jimmy said.
“You don’t know that it’s not true either,” Gabbi said.
“But who’s with him?” I asked. “If you’re all here, who’s staying with him during the fevers?” We never left each other alone during the fevers and we never spoke about what we heard or saw when one of us went through it.
“Corrina and Dylan are with him right now,” Ricker said. “I’ll be going back next, and then Jimmy.”
“I’ll take a turn,” I said. “I’ll go next.”
Ricker tilted his head, thoughtful. “There’s something we need to tell you.”
“What happened on the raid?” I should have been there with them, with Ano and Ricker and the others. I should have helped them. But even as I thought the words, I resisted them. The fear came raging back to gulp me down. It wasn’t my place anymore to go out there. It wasn’t where I needed to be.
“There was medicine,” Jimmy said. “The right kind—the kind the healer wanted. But someone else had gotten there first.”
“You went?” I said.
“I’m not a little kid anymore, no matter what you think,” Jimmy said. “I was on the street long before you!”
“Not by much,” Gabbi said.
“Stop it,” Ricker said.
“Jimmy, just tell her,” Gabbi said. “Tell her all of it if you’re going to tell any of it.”
Jimmy opened his mouth, closed it again, then said. “Alden was with them—”
“What?”
“It wasn’t Tabitha’s people or Sergeant Bennings, it was somebody else. But…”
“Alden’s been taken,” Gabbi said.
Noise, like the whirring of an engine rose higher and higher. I realized it was the blood rushing past my ears, drowning out other sounds.
“It was a mess, Maibe,” Ricker said. “We got there and it was crazy. The whole world is pretty much empty with people and yet there was Alden and he was alone—at first.”
“You talked to him?”
“He said he was searching for the cure,” Gabbi said.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” except that it made perfect sense, but I didn’t know what else to say, only that I had to say something to fill the void that threatened to consume me.
“Alden was there,” Gabbi said. “He knows we’re all going Feeb-crazy. He said he left to look for the cure on his own. For you. Then this group of uninfected took him.”
“Sergeant Bennings,” I said. “It must have been his father’s people.”
Gabbi shook her head. “It wasn’t. I didn’t recognize any of their faces. It wasn’t Sergeant Bennings.”
“But who else—”
“The only reason we got out was because of those Vs,” Ricker said. “The uninfected had pinned us into a corner and demanded to know what we knew about the cure—”
“The goddamn cure,” Gabbi interrupted. “People can’t stop talking about it.”
“Because it’s got to be real,” Jimmy said. “We have to help them find it.”
“They had plenty of guns,” Ricker said, ignoring Jimmy. “I figured that was going to be it for us, but all the noise had attracted fresh Vs—maybe ones from their group that had recently gotten infected. I don’t know. But it was enough for us to escape.”
“Except Ano got bit,” Jimmy said.
“We don’t have any medicine,” Ricker said, an anguished look in his eyes that I didn’t understand. The medicine eased the symptoms, made people come out of the fevers faster, made the memories less intense, allowed the Faints to come back enough to help us help them, but there had been no medicine in the beginning. We knew we could make it through without the medicine.
“He’ll come out of it,” I said. “Maybe it’ll take longer than it used to but we always come out of the fevers.”
Gabbi didn’t respond. That wasn’t like her and it scared me.