Chapter Three

When the flames died down in the clean room, anything remotely biological burned away, those toxic ashes flushed down the drain, the guards stood, delivered Jory and Timothy to the guards in the hall. They hooked their arms under Jory’s arms, their faces stone, and dragged him and Timothy to the showers, for scrubdown.

“Three hundred eighty-eight days without an accident…” Jory heard Timothy singsonging from somewhere behind him, and Jory wanted to smile, wanted to be like that, to just be able to take the next thing in stride.

In his former life, Timothy had been an elementary school custodian. Maybe that had conditioned him to deal with messes.

Jory had taught high school biology. There, life was messy, sure, but there were organizing principles. Textbooks with the answers in back, at least.

That was all over. Now you made it up as you went.

But that handler—Jory closed his eyes.

The way the handler had wanted to get out. To get off this assembly line.

Jory’d never asked where they came from, but always imagined some max-security lockdown kind of prison way out in the Midwest, or down in Louisiana, or Arkansas, one of those places where the inmates would be especially brutal, hard to kill.

The prison would be tall and grey, Jory knew. A medieval castle, the walls slick-poured concrete, the tops dripping barbed wire. Guard towers, the trees all buzzed down for a half mile all around it, no major highway even close to close.

That kind of place. Where the guards in the breakroom—a hairsbreadth from being inmates themselves—would have seen the first reports of people eating people, of the dead walking the streets, and would have gotten on their internal radio system, shut that mother of a place down. Because it was a prison, one for the worst offenders, locking it down wouldn’t take much. Just cutting the phone lines, the shortwave. Pulling the drawbridge up and keeping it up for the next eight, nine years, until the military came knocking, asking for some men who knew how to use their hands, and maybe weren’t afraid to.

The line of volunteers—especially considering what they had to have been eating for years now—would have wrapped all the way around the yard. Not a single one of them expecting that part of this big escape they thought they were making, it was getting a chrome spike to the brain stem. Living for months in a vat. Forgetting your name. Laying down on a wide black belt as a man, getting up a monster, not even able to think for itself.

Once or twice, Jory had seen crude tattoos on the arms of a handler, the ink faded and, now that the arm was juiced to twice its size, the anchor or woman or name all stretched out, smeared.

They were children, though, the handlers. Enormous infants.

In the public demonstrations, the faith sessions—mandatory on base—Jory had seen the soldiers handling the handlers. Showing how they could drop them to their massive knees with the touch of a button. How they could slap them back and forth, get no response. How they didn’t even feel it when a blade cut into the thick meat of their shoulder. The handlers just kneeling there, head down, built to please.

Built by Jory to please.

It had been a step up from Disposal though. From trolling the restricted zones, knocking down any building that looked like it was falling down anyway.

It was good, Disposal, most of the time spent on the truck, really, but there was always the chance of flushing a leftover zombie too. Of not coming home to Linse. Of Linse just sitting there waiting for him to come home.

So he’d taken the promotion to the shiny new factory, learned the procedures. Met Timothy. Probably not even by accident, both of them being from the school system.

The military took everything into account, when it came to handlers.

Everything except pushing one off the belt.

Jory shook his head, half in wonder. What had he been thinking?

In the shower with him and Timothy now were the two guards who’d slid into the clean room on their knees, saved the day.

Jory squinted, went rag doll so his clothes could be peeled off. So the brushes-on-poles could be scraped across his skin.

Beside him, his showerhead already on, already steaming, was Timothy, some amateur inkwork on his back Jory’d never have suspected—tic-tac-toe lines. A grid of blue from scapula to scapula, then a crude handprint on his shoulder, like he’d just been pushed.

The tattoo wasn’t about resistance, Jory knew. It was about solidarity. A we-will-never-forget kind of thing, for all the children sacrificed to the plague.

Jory closed his eyes.

“Dudes!” Timothy was saying beside him, to the two guards scrubbing them down. “It’s not like—he wasn’t even infected, right?”

“It,” Timothy’s scrubber corrected, his voice a dial tone.

“Handlers are inoculated with a nonvirulent strain of the virus,” Jory’s scrubber recited. The handle of his brush was six feet long.

“Exactly,” Timothy said, wincing from the water, ducking the wire brush.

“It’s supposed to make them taste bad,” Jory’s scrubber went on, Jory submitting to the brush. Hoping it would hurt worse, even.

“And you weren’t inoculated,” Timothy’s scrubber said to Timothy. “Now turn around.”

“But I was, we were, we were holding our breaths the whole time, see? We were—”

“Just shut up,” one of the naked guards said, getting the scrubdown as well.

Timothy flashed his eyes up, started to step across to that guard, but Jory stopped this naked fight from happening, turned Timothy around like the scrubber wanted.

“Let it go,” he said to Timothy. Both of them leaned against the wall now, legs spread, forearms pillowed between the tile and their foreheads.

“He better hope I don’t see him on the street,” Timothy mumbled.

“Guy who saved your life, you mean?” the guard said.

“I’m sorry,” Jory said then. To Timothy. For all this.

Timothy just smiled his jangly smile.

“She’s not coming back, man,” he said. “Not from there, not from them. Nobody does. But that doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself either. Now, just—” but for a moment he couldn’t talk, could only grind his teeth, sway his back in. From the brush. “Yeah, yeah,” he called back to his scrubber, “definitely, you’re right. I probably did get some virus there in the crack of my ass, let me just spread a little, like, yeah, yeah, you mind if I call you Sheila? That work for you?”

Ten more minutes of that, and then the locker room again. Jory and Timothy each shave-headed now, their skin raw and angry.

On each of their locker doors were reassignment slips. Just blank, not filled out.

Timothy crumpled his. “Man,” he said, looking sidelong at Jory. “Guess I’ll see you in the next life, yeah?”

“Think I want to come back?” Jory said, letting his slip fall. Not saying anything about the razor cut on Timothy’s head. A mole or something gone. One thin line of blood, stopping no time soon.

“What say we skip a few, then?” Timothy said. “Get ahead of all this?”

Jory opened his locker door one last time, and by the time he looked up he was in the back seat of a topless jeep, crawling across base.

Is there a pit to throw defective survivors in, he wondered, or do they just get escorted over the fence?

He smiled, covered it with his hand, then forgot he was smiling.

They were in Housing. At the front of Jory’s block.

“Five, four, three…” the soldier at the wheel was counting. Staring at Jory in the rearview.

“What?” Jory said.

“Oh-seven-hundred,” the soldier recited. “Right here.”

“Thought I was being reassigned?”

“Oh-seven-hundred,” the soldier said again, enunciating very clearly, then let the clutch out so Jory had to plant a hand on the spare tire behind him, vault over the side. Run for a couple of steps, then lose it, the unmaintained asphalt tearing into his knee. But good asphalt would have done just the same.

So.

Home again, home again.

It had to be a trick of some kind.

You don’t screw up like Jory did and get a ride home, right?

Oh-seven-hundred, though.

Maybe this was part of the punishment, having to spend the night not knowing what kind of hammer was going to fall.

Definitely that. Jory could already feel it. Like the evil jailer in that old story, telling his prisoner he’s going to be executed in the morning of one day next week, he’ll know when, when it happens, ha-ha.

Jory was the guy in the cell here. His own living room.

He sat there until dark, smoking cigarettes, no radio, no Linse, no nothing.

At midnight, not able to sleep, coughing up tar, he shouldered a pack—an unopened carton of cigarettes in it—and took a place under the second-to-last light before the gate.

Soon enough, a transport rumbled to a stop. Jory swung his pack around, held the carton up to window level.

Like always, the door opened.

It didn’t make base feel any less like a prison.