I was grateful for an excuse to get out of that kitchen. I kept trying to focus on the aroma of strong black coffee, but the scent of Danny’s oozing leg kept worming its way into my nose and down the back of my throat. I also wanted to get away from the crazed look in his father’s eye, not that I could blame him. I was just relieved it wasn’t my little sister with the infected holes in her leg.
“I hope there’s a hospital near here,” said Nemesis when she saw the golf cart. They were the same kind we used around our complex, except our domed city was small enough to cross on a single battery and there were charging stations all over the place. They made Doom speculate that the Parasite invasion was started by a bunch of environmentalists instead of Russian scientists uncorking a twenty-five million year old underground lake and unleashing its murderous contents on the world. I smiled when I thought of Doom’s unintentionally funny enthusiasm for conspiracy theories and then grimaced when I remembered what happened to him.
“Houston,” Nemesis whispered, “what are we going to do if there isn’t a hospital nearby? I mean, Ghost would have studied the area before we left, if there was one nearby, he would have said so, right?”
I loved it whenever Nemesis said my name, so much so that I almost didn’t catch the tears that were starting to fill her beautiful brown eyes. Without even thinking about it, I crossed the short distance between us and enveloped her in my arms. I was afraid she would pull away from me and I would be left with a golf cart and a gulf of awkwardness, but to my body’s delight she melted right into me. I almost had to hold her up to keep her from sliding to the floor. I could feel my shoulder getting wet as she cried into it. This was so unlike the tough and sassy Nemesis that I knew so I held her tighter, unsure of what to do next. I didn’t want to lie to her and say, “There, there, everything will be alright” because I knew it wouldn’t. Instead I said with all sincerity, “We’re going to be alright.” In that moment I knew that the cute but smelly kid back there might not make it, but all that mattered to me was that Nemesis and I made it.
Nemesis tried to talk through her tears as she clung to me. “My grandma told me a horrible story about her aunt and what happened when her appendix burst. She said there was nothing they could do in those days to help her. They just sent her home to die. She said they put her in my grandmother’s bedroom because they thought she might appreciate the view of the mountains outside her window during her last moments of life.” She took a deep breath, laid her head on my chest, and carried on. “My grandmother said she stayed downstairs and never went up because she didn’t want to see a dying woman in her bed, but no matter how far away she stayed, she could smell her aunt rotting away from gangrene. There was moaning and crying and the smell and then her aunt was gone…but that smell stayed on and reminded all of them of the awful way that woman died. The stench of pus and death never left no matter how much they tried to clean the house. No one ever slept in the death room again.” She shivered as she told her story and I felt sick imagining Danny going the same way.
“Your great-aunt did not have resourceful people like Ghost and Margaret by her side. I’m sure between the two of them, they will sort it out.” That was the best thing I could come up with at the moment. I found myself staring out the small decorative windows in the garage while searching for something better to say. That was when I noticed the electric fence.
It was kind of hard to miss, which made it all the more surprising that we missed it the first time. It seemed to be made up of long horizontal red lasers broken up by the occasional post, something we probably mistook for telephone poles. I can understand how we missed it in the daylight, but how on earth did we get through it? And was it there to keep something in or keep something out?
I gently turned Nemesis around to show her the previously hidden fence. Her eyes grew wide as she took in its ferocious glow. I don’t know why I bothered to ask, but I had to say something to fill the uncomfortable silence. “Do you think it’s there to protect us? What are the chances of getting past it?”
“As my uncle Charlie used to say, ‘Chances are between Slim and None, and Slim just left town,” she replied without a hint of hope.