The street was empty. The temperature was only in the upper eighties but the sun beat into you if you dared stand in it.
Laughter filtered from Betty’s, the convenience store across the street—it acted as an informal hangout and supply center. I rarely went there. Too many Feebs who thought they knew me and wanted to thank me for rescuing them.
Freanz and Molly and the twins were waiting for me. I pictured climbing the wooden stairs, my weight making the planks creak. The door hinge would squeak while opening. I would smell egg and oatmeal because Ricker wouldn’t have remembered to clean up.
Ricker.
He would ask how the meeting went. He would wait and listen and not say anything to make me feel bad, but it would be all over his face. He would try to swallow the disappointment. He would try to smile. But it would be in his eyes because he never could hide anything from me, especially when he was really trying to hide it.
My shoes went past the hotel without stopping.
Not quite yet. I could not face him quite yet. Even the stares I might get in Betty’s would be better.
The front of Betty’s was a mix of different cement structures from different decades. Slanted stairs on one side, a cracked handicap access ramp on the other. The rail painted with flaked red and green and silver. The windows were single pane and unbroken except for one that Betty had boarded over. I stepped across the threshold—just a piece of wood wide enough to hold the door in place. Signs proclaimed the store's historical significance as a trading hole and post office in centuries past. Inside, the place smelled sour, like overripe fruit.
Those first few months in town, when we’d all gotten back together and were pretty much the only ones around except for the few Faints in town, this place had smelled like a freezer gone really bad, which was exactly what had happened. The electricity was off and half the store was fouled. The smell still lingered, even though Betty had given the place a strong dose of bleach and elbow grease when she moved in.
Betty stood behind the old counter, a waist-level thing of peeling Formica. It wrapped around her in a blocky U. Alcohol and cigarettes lined the shelves behind her, like convenience stores of old—but she only took barter.
Five Feebs sat at a little card table pushed near the back wall. They had mugs of coffee and a deck of cards out. One was lost in a memory-rush and the others waited patiently, chatting, lounging, looking around. I recognized most of them, seeing as I’d had a hand in each of their rescues. I couldn’t remember their names except for two of them, Bernice and Nindal—rescued at the same time from under Sergeant Bennings’ nose, with Alden’s help. I wondered where he was now, if he was safe, if he was infected. My heart ached. Alden had been missing for months and I hadn’t even known.
A woman and small child wandered the two meager aisles of supplies Betty got through salvage or trade. The woman nudged her daughter. The child then turned to me with wide eyes and stuck a finger in her mouth. The woman grabbed her hand and toddled her over to me. I waited, knowing what was coming.
“Thank you,” the woman said. “You rescued us from Camp Eagle.”
I pressed my lips together and forced a smile.
She waited as if hoping I would say something and I would have said more, except if I started talking I wouldn’t stop until I told her that she shouldn’t be thanking me because I got people killed, and then I would launch into the story and describe the family of four and it would bring them back and it was too much to deal with. I looked at something just past her shoulder.
She frowned slightly. The little girl rocked on her heels, little green socks covering her feet, and then pulled on her mother’s arm. They wandered over to Betty’s counter and the woman whispered something to Betty, but Betty only shook her head. The pair left and Betty turned her hazel eyes onto me. She wore a royal blue shirt, buttoned, spotless. Black shorts. Her hair domed her head like a gray helmet. She smiled, as if I were just another Feeb. A little part of me relaxed. Betty knew all about my stories. She knew all of our stories. She ran the alcohol headquarters after all.
I sat on one of the bright green bar stools.
“What can I get for ya’, darling?” Betty asked.
“I don’t have anything to trade,” I said. “I just need to sit for a minute if that’s okay.”
She nodded and turned away. I scratched at the counter with my fingernails and stopped when I starting flaking up bits of the laminate. The next part would be hard—facing Ricker—but once he was gone I could pour everything out to my Faints and they would be the best listeners and then we could pretend that nothing had changed.
Betty set an empty glass down in front of me. In one hand she held a liquor bottle halfway full of brown liquid. The other held a coffee pot full of black liquid.
“I don’t—”
“I know.” She filled the glass with half of each. “This one’s on the house. You look like you need it. It’s the least we can do after all you’ve done.”
Before I could protest she went to check on the card players. I stared at the glass. Nobody cared about age anymore when it came to drinking. Not with the whole world fallen apart and everyone having to grow up fast. Still it saddened me that it was so normal not to care about how things used to be. I was only sixteen after all.
I took a small sip of the drink and forced it down even as my nose felt lit on fire. She might as well have dumped rubbing alcohol into the coffee. But this was Betty and I couldn’t bear to offend her. I kept drinking it, even as the coffee turned bitter and a buzzing noise rose in my brain. Ano and Gabbi sometimes obliterated themselves with this stuff when they wanted to forget. Maybe what was good enough for them was good enough for me this afternoon.
Steps shuffled in the back. I set the drink down and turned. The players were helping the Feeb coming out of his memory-rush to get on his feet.
“Walk it off,” Bernice said.
The group made him do several circuits around the aisles. Once the light came back into his eyes and he seemed able to see things in the present again, the players led him to the counter. They took up the stools around me and suddenly the room seemed overfull.
I decided I didn’t want to finish the drink after all. I began to get up.
“You heard the rumors?” Nindal said in my direction.
Betty scowled at him while returning to her side of the counter. “Don’t talk about that here. No sense in stirring things up for a bunch of made-up hooey.”
“But the camps have been working on a cure since this all got started,” Bernice said, his shoulders hunched under Betty’s short harangue.
“So, what does that have to do with anything?” Betty said.
“It is possibly the truth,” Nindal said. The other Feebs took their turns chiming in.
“Dead is dead,” I said and the whole room stopped talking. Corrina’s ghost-memory appeared on the bar side next to Betty, looking exactly like she had when Anthony had said those words three years ago in the surplus store—when we’d been running scared and not yet infected.
“What you talking about?” Bernice said.
“We’ve been turned and there’s no going back. There’s never been a movie that had a way to go back once you’ve been turned.” I wanted to use the word zombie. It was on the tip of my tongue and I could see it in the air between us and it was so obvious I didn’t understand how they could be blind to it, but they were, and if I said it, they’d stop listening altogether.
“You do not know,” Nindal said. His dark slashes of eyebrows drew down and almost met between his eyes. “You cannot say one way or the other if there is this cure. You cannot.”
“There’s no going back,” I said. “There’s no undoing it.”
The door squeaked open and boots stamped the floor. “It’s real enough. I met a Feeb who’s been cured.”
All heads swiveled to the door, even Betty’s. I couldn’t help but look myself. A Feeb, no doubt, with his telltale lines and ash and a light bruising around the neck. Not one I recognized. Not someone I had helped rescue. Someone who had been rescued after I’d locked myself away.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“That’s Leon,” Betty said. “You just get back? You found something?”
He nodded. He was tall and lean and was maybe in his forties before the Feeb-skin took over. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid shirt, all he needed was a cowboy hat. As if on cue he brought out a dingy beige one from behind his back and held it down at his side.
“Did you ride in on a horse or something?” I said, and felt shocked at my words. It was something Gabbi would say, not me.
But the words were out there and he squinted a smile at me and said, “If you know where I can get one, I will next time.”
Everyone laughed. I flushed.
Betty wiped down an empty spot at the counter and poured a drink. “Your usual.”
“Thank you, Betty.” He sat on the stool next to me, set out a can of creamed corn in trade, then examined the drink before throwing it down his throat.
Bernice held up his hands. “Now, now. Don’t keep us waiting. You can’t drop a bomb like that and not speak another word.”
If I had been Corrina, I probably would have pressed him with my own questions. Gabbi would have probably started a fight over his lies. But I was neither one of them so I just waited with the rest for his answer.
Leon took his time. His arm was covered in coarse hair that obscured the worst aspects of the infection. He twisted his wrist this way and that, examining the dregs in the glass. There was a heat in the air that wasn’t there before. A certain tension like a string pulled taut. If he didn’t say something fast I didn’t know what that would set off.
He peered at them over the rim of the empty glass.
“Fill it for him, Betty.” Bernice plunked down three cigarettes.
We waited, holding our breath, as Betty poured the drink and swiped the cigarettes off the counter. Leon tilted the glass back and finished it in one go. “I said, I met someone cured of being a Feeb but he ran off. I can track him, but I need help. I’m going to find him again and make him tell me where to get a cure of my own. So who’s gonna help me?”
The store roared to life like he was a magician who’d done his final reveal. They surrounded Leon, pushing me aside like I’d become invisible—but that trick wasn’t what they wanted to see. Nindal ran out of the store, yelling over his shoulder that he was getting others to come along. Another one said they should let the whole town know and form a search party with supplies. Bernice wanted to leave right then, because who knew where the cured Feeb was headed or if he was in danger and they better get started. Their voices raised in pitch and intensity. Leon too, there was a shine in his eyes that spoke of a conviction that scared me more than a little bit. It was the kind of light I’d seen often enough in my aunt’s eyes before she worked herself up into the righteous indignation that came before a beating.
Their voices got louder. Two of them had now fallen into a memory-rush, but it was as if no one cared all of a sudden. They wandered the store, knocking over supplies and glass jars and then one of them punched the other. It was as if they’d turned invisible too because what mattered all of a sudden was the cure and finding it and everything else could go to hell.
I backed away until my shoulders hit a shelf of cans. I jumped, shock making my heart pound. Betty glanced my way and I saw the half-crazed look on her face and a certain slack to her jaw, but then she said, “You going?” And I knew that she was still barely all right, but I didn’t know for how much longer.
I shook my head. No, not in a million years. Never.
Dead was dead.