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The boys spend the hour before dawn sitting at the kitchen table with an ancient pack of cards between them. The deck was from a casino in Atlantic City and has a holed drilled through the center of it. They’re in the middle of a game of War, since it’s the only card game they can remember how to play that doesn’t really take any concentration. They’re both distracted and just passing the time in the few minutes before they leave. There are still too many undead in front of the house to ensure they’ll be able to get clean away.
A pair of jacks currently face off on the battlefield. They’ve been there for at least five minutes. Kelly sees them, as if for the first time, and tells Reggie, “War.”
Reggie blinks stupidly at the cards. His attention is elsewhere, split between the living room in the back of the house and the yard out in front. There’s not a sound from the living room, and each passing minute makes him more and more anxious to leave. He keeps glancing out through the kitchen window, urging the sun to rise faster and the undead to go back into their hiding places so he and Kelly can get on with why they’ve come.
“War, Reg.”
“Huh?”
“Jacks.”
Kelly lines up his next three more cards face down on the table and waits for Reggie to do the same. He peeks at the next card in his hand. It’s a queen.
Reggie nods, but doesn’t move. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“I thought I heard a moan.”
“Probably from outside.”
“No. It sounded like it came from the back of the house.”
Kelly shakes his head. “You’re imagining—”
But then he freezes, and his heart nearly stops. He’d heard it that time, too.
Reggie raises a finger to his lips. The look on his face says Not a sound!
Silently, they get up from the table and creep down the hall. The moaning sound repeats, louder this time. Reggie’s palms are starting to sweat. He’d left his machete in the car and now he has no weapon.
They poke their heads around the corner and peer into the living room. Cassie and her mother are both in the same position they were a half hour ago. Cassie’s breathing has become much more obvious. The sound of the air passing through her mouth is hollow and dry. In defiance of absolutely everything Reggie has ever believed, the girl is somehow, incredibly, alive. As they stand there, she opens her eyes and looks right at them. The corneas aren’t so gray anymore. After a moment, she lowers her head and turns it toward the back cushion of the couch. The rest of her doesn’t move.
That was not creepy at all, Reggie thinks.
Doctor White has placed an old towel on the floor over the blood stains. There’s a second one spread out over the front of the couch. The moaning sound repeats. This time they realize it’s not coming from the girl, but from Doctor White. She’s dreaming.
Out through the sliding door, the darkness is starting to lift. The horizon is tinged red. The air stinks of ozone.
“Should I wake her, tell her we’re leaving?”
Reggie shrugs. He can’t seem to take his eyes off the girl. The flesh around the bite on her arm has begun to pink-up, but the bite itself has turned nearly black.
Kelly steps over and places a hand on White’s shoulder. He gives her a gentle shake.
For a split second, she appears dead. Her head lolls off the cushion, and she slumps toward the floor. Before she hits, though, she wakes and catches herself. She grunts, jerks upright, and spins around, suddenly wide awake. Reggie catches an almost feral gleam in her eye. White hisses. Kelly steps back uttering a choked cry.
But then she’s back. The aggression is gone, leaving only the time-weary look of a woman who has spent far too many years crying and too few years laughing. “What is it?” she asks, shakily.
“Y-you were dreaming,” Kelly stammers. “I thought you were...”
White waits, but he doesn’t finish.
“Sorry,” she grunts. She repositions herself, shaking her head and taking in a deep breath. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Kelly’s gaze passes from her to Reggie. He can see worry in his friend’s eyes, alarm, and the same thought crosses both boys’ minds. It sure hadn’t looked like a dream. It had looked—
Kelly shoves the thought away. The girl was the one who was infected, not her mother. He’d just startled her is all.
He kneels down beside her and cautiously asks if she’s feeling all right.
“I’m fine. Really. I just...” She checks in on Cassie again, touching her forehead with the back of her hand. “She’s definitely warmer.” She checks the girl’s cheek next, then her neck and shoulder. Her fingers graze the old bite. Doctor White stares at it for several seconds.
“We’re going now,” Kelly says. “The roads are almost clear.” He turns to leave.
“I did this to her.”
“Excuse me?”
She glances up at Kelly, then at Reggie. “You deserve to know.”
“Look, we don’t have—”
“I want you to understand why I did it.”
Reggie shifts anxiously. He has a feeling this is going to be a long and drawn out confession. He’s not so sure they need to hear it, but she sure looks like she needs to say it.
“It was the beginning of the outbreak,” she says. “There was... confusion, chaos. So much damn confusion. Some people thought it was an animal disease at first, before the truth became known. Right in the middle of it, Cassie got sick. But we were so wrapped up in everything else going on that we didn’t notice it right away. When we finally did, I thought she’d contracted it somehow.” A sob escapes her throat. “But it wasn’t what we thought. It was so much worse.”
What could be worse than this? Reggie wonders.
“I thought she was going to die. No, I knew she was. It was inevitable. I was going to lose my little girl forever. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Doctor White,” Kelly starts to say. “You don’t have to—”
“No, I do. I did this to her, and everything I’ve done since that day has been to make it right again.”
“The cure will help everyone,” Kelly says. “Kyle and me. And now your daughter. Think of the people out there getting infected. Think of the people in here who already are.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anyone else!” she snaps. “Don’t you see? I don’t care about them. I don’t care about your brother! Or you! I never did!”
Kelly doesn’t move. He feels like he’s encased in ice.
“I did all of it for my little Cassie. Everything!”
Reggie feels his skin go cold at the raw, dangerous look in her eyes. They’re dark, almost black. They’re the eyes of the dead, someone without emotion. Someone without a soul. Someone who’s incapable of feeling.
But inside his own body, he’s feeling everything. He’s bubbling with fury listening to her try to rationalize what she did, what she’s suggesting she did.
“The man whose bone marrow infected your brother,” she whispers. “That was my husband.”
Kelly still doesn’t respond. He’s still trying to parse what she’d said before that. He can’t seem to process any of it.
Reggie steps into the room. The confession has had the opposite effect on him, confirming his own long-held suspicions that she’s not the woman Kelly thinks she is. “Your husband?” he cries. “Bone marrow? What the fuck are you talking about? Who infected Kyle? Was it on purpose?”
Kelly cuts him off. “Kyle’s organ donor was your husband?” he asks. His voice is flat, emotionless. “Are you telling me— Are you saying the man from Seattle, he was your husband?”
“After the outbreak, there were a lot more of us working to find a cure. Ramon’s group was in the lead, but he didn’t trust me. They kept me close to keep an eye on me, but they just gave me nothing but busywork. They were holding me back. I was so frustrated with the pace of Drew’s — with Halliwell’s — research, almost as much as I was with my husband’s. Both of them absolutely refused to consider using human subjects, but I told them we would never know for sure unless we could test our treatments on people, on the infected. The day Ramon came to me saying he had the cure, he looked so sure of it. But he still only wanted to test it in animals. I knew it would fail, because it wouldn’t work on anything but an infected person. The virus is too specific for humans.”
Something’s happening to Kelly. He seems to be filling up, growing larger. His face has turned red. Now it’s becoming crimson. “What are you saying?” he whispers. His voice starts to shake with fury. “Are you saying you infected Kyle on purpose?” He looks like he doesn’t want to know. He acts like he needs to.
“I infected my husband. It was a very weak form of the virus, meant only to get him sick so that he’d be forced to test his cure on himself. He went to Seattle, and when he returned a few days later, he was starting to show the first symptoms. He thought he’d just caught the flu. I knew otherwise. I had planned to urge him to administer his cure on himself, sending the osteopathic surgeon a message to postpone the transplant. But it never reached him. He went ahead and harvested Ramon’s marrow and injected it into Kyle before I could stop them. And I—”
“No!” Kelly backs away from her, his eyes wide with horror. All the color has bled away from his face now, leaving it as white as a sheet. He’s beyond fury. This is a level of anger he’s never felt before. “No, you didn’t do that. He...”
“I gave Kyle Ramon’s cure. But it didn’t work, obviously.”
Doctor White leans toward him, pleading with her eyes. “But I saved your brother, Kelly. I treated him with Jessica’s blood, kept him alive. My own concoction that I had developed without them! All these years, refining the method, learning. And now you can see it’s working. I knew it would. I mean, I had no proof, but your brother’s cured. Now we know for certain it works!”
“You fucking—!”
He stops himself before he can hit her.
She doesn’t even flinch. She points at the girl on the couch. “I infected myself, too. Of course I did. That’s all I’d ever asked of the others, so how could I not expect the same sacrifice from myself? Look at me. I’m alive. It’s been more than a week, and I’m okay.”
“WHAT DID YOU DO?” Kelly screams. Tears roll down his cheeks. His hands are balled up into fists. His body is shaking. “Oh my God! Oh my God, you did— You infected my little brother!”
He leaps at her now, finally unable to restrain himself. He wraps his hands around her throat. Reggie doesn’t move. He doesn’t try to stop him. The doctor’s confession has shocked him to the core. He’d strongly suspected the woman was unbalanced, but he’d had no idea just how badly.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” Kelly growls as he bears down on her.
She has her hands on his, trying to pull them away from her neck. She kicks and thrashes beneath him, but he’s beyond reason now, beyond any sort of sensibility. He isn’t aware of what he’s doing anymore, just acting on pure animal instinct.
Years of pent up fury, of simmering anger tearing him up inside, confusion over his feelings for the girl he married— the love and the resentment he’s always felt because of what her family did and caused to happened. It all comes to the surface at once. He sobs in anguish for his brother, whom this madwoman had sentenced to death on some flimsy pretense of saving the world from the scourge, which she had then inflicted upon him.
Her face turns blue and her struggles weaken, yet Kelly’s hands squeeze even tighter. He doesn’t know how to let go of her. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, and he doesn’t want to. In this moment, he only knows that he needs to stop her.
Tears of fury and pain spill from his eyes and splash onto her face. Her lips are purple-gray. Her tongue is nearly black. It protrudes from her mouth, as if swollen to a size too large to fit inside anymore. The woman is dying. As her body strips the last oxygen from her blood, her eyes begin to bulge from their sockets. Her brain is starving.
Movement on the couch catches Reggie’s attention. The girl has woken again. She sits up. Her eyes are pearly white with cataracts, but she seems to see everything. She turns downward, toward Kelly and her mother. Her lips, chapped and blackened with rot, are starting to bleed fresh, unclotted blood. She opens her mouth and bares her teeth. “Maaa... maaa...?”
Doctor White’s hands slip off Kelly and drop senseless to the floor.
“K-kelly?” Reggie stammers. He’s not sure he actually spoke loud enough to be heard, so he tries again. So does the girl:
“Ma...ma? I... had... nightmare.”
A shiver passes through Reggie. He wakes, as if from a trance, and steps over to the couch. Doctor White’s struggles have ceased. She’s gone completely limp. Reggie shakes Kelly. He doesn’t respond. “Kelly?” he reaches for his friend’s hands. “Kelly, we have to go. Now! Goddamn it, Kelly! Stop!”
He grabs Kelly by the shoulders and pulls him off the woman. She starts to come with them, still in his grip, before he lets go. She falls to the floor.
“Get up, Kelly!”
Kelly staggers to his feet. A moment later, Doctor White sucks in a huge gasp of air.
Reggie pulls Kelly away before he can attack her again. “Listen to me,” he hisses into his ear. “Cassie’s awake! She’s awake.”
“It’s not fair!” Kelly wails.
“No, it isn’t. But you can’t take her mother away from her now. She’s alive. And for better or worse, regardless of what’s she’s done, Doctor White needs to live. She needs to be a mother again.”
Kelly leans against Reg. As Kelly cries, the strength leaks away from him. Reggie holds him up, absorbing the sobs wracking his friend’s body. He stares at the girl on the couch, who says nothing more, only stares back without emotion.
* * *
“What would you do to save the life of your only child?”
Kelly doesn’t respond. He’s retreated deep inside of himself.
Doctor White takes another sip of water and grimaces as she tries to swallow. Her voice is little more than a whisper, cracked and broken, without strength or inflection. Just like the woman it comes out of.
She’d confessed everything— how she’d been secretly conducting her research on Kyle until she figured out how to use Jessie’s stem cells to counter the disease. How she’d finally, at long last, tested the experimental cure on herself, injecting herself more than a week ago with the same attenuated virus she’d injected into her husband years back. All to save the daughter she’d left here over a decade before.
As if that hadn’t been horrifying enough, she then told them how she’d found the infected child in a house down the street and forced it to bite Cassie to save her from dying of rabies. Reggie hadn’t thought his horror could get any worse; he’s wrong. In all of his life, he’s never met anyone so depraved. It stuns him into silence.
But not inaction.
If it weren’t for the girl on the couch, he’d gladly finish what Kelly had started. He’d have choked the life out of the woman, leaving her just shy of dead, and then thrown her out into the street to be taken by the infected. There’s seemingly no more fitting end for her than to spend eternity as one of them.
But the girl had spoken a complete sentence, and that changed everything. She’d recognized her mother, after all these years, despite her blind eyes. She’d vocalized that one thing that every terrified child expresses at least once, in their most vulnerable moment: “I had a nightmare.” How could he not sympathize?
He understands that what Doctor White has done over the years strains credulity, patience, and one’s sense of morality. And in the absence of any other consideration, it would have been more than sufficient to warrant the worst kind of punishment. But nothing happens in a vacuum. She had a daughter— has a daughter once again. And she’s somehow alive. And she needs her mother.
He can’t take her away from her, not now when the girl needs her the most. When they need each other.
But neither can he be a part of this anymore. He needs to go, to put distance between this and himself. He needs to not think about any of this, not the living dead girl or the mother who made her that way. Not Kyle or the thousands of infected here on the island. Not the infected anywhere.
Not Ashley. Or Micah. Or Jake.
Because to think about them would be to admit that they really aren’t dead and beyond saving. They’re still out there somewhere, alive, their souls trapped inside their murdering bodies. The little girl has just proven it. The part that made her real, made her her, somehow still existed. It had survived. And what does that tell him about all the rest?
God, how many of them has he killed, thinking they were gone, nothing but empty shells filled with nothing but hunger? How many people has he watched slaughtered in The Game?
The woman’s still trying to explain herself, but Reggie has blocked her out of his mind. He stands up and goes over to Kelly. He pulls him out of the chair. Kelly comes willingly enough, responding to Reggie’s touch almost like he’s a Player and Reggie is his Operator.
“We’re leaving, brah. Now.”
He starts to guide him toward the garage. They make it to the door.
He can feel Doctor White’s eyes on them, on his back. If he were to turn around, he knows she’ll be standing right there. He doesn’t want to see her, and yet he almost does turn. He wants to believe it was all just a terrible joke, that she’d lied about it all. The truth would be in her eyes.
But he knows that’s a fantasy.
He reaches for the knob.
“She’s pregnant,” Doctor White says.
Reggie stops. He has no idea who the woman is talking about. Clearly she can’t possibly be talking about Cassie.
He gives Kelly a gentle push in the back to get him moving again down the steps into the garage.
“I was getting some anomalous results with her latest blood test,” White continues. “So I had it checked. And then double checked. Jessica— Jessie. I think you both should know: she’s almost two months along now.”
