Eclipsed

by Kathryn Hoff

  Why wasn’t the clean-up crew finished yet? It wasn’t fair. I was just a kid, a low-paid teen intern. Not a doctor or a nurse or a zookeeper. Molly was a helpless animal, caged and made sick for reasons she could never understand. Gabe was just a baby. Why should he be sick? Or my mom and dad, for that matter. Or my brother John, who’d been only twelve when he was Eclipsed. How was that fair? Or Rico, who’d already been through this in wave two, and now he was going through it all again.

  I knew exactly how it felt: the fever, the weakness, and the coughing that wouldn’t quit. The terrible feeling of being helpless while people poked at you and cleaned up your mess. Being afraid you were going to die. Feeling so terrible you wondered if dying might not be so bad after all.

  Deedee was crying again, and she felt hot to me too. In fact, the whole room felt hot. So hot I was sweating. I bathed Deedee too, because the water felt good. And I put more cold cloths on Rico’s head and put another bottle of water by his good hand, even though he hadn’t finished the one he had. He coughed and watched me with hopeless, exhausted eyes.

  Bottles for the kids. Ape chow for Molly, and an apple. She watched me too, with her wise old eyes. Goddess of wisdom, or was that a baboon?

  I felt dizzy. A bottle for Deedee, and a handful of cheerios scattered on her blanket for enrichment. Encourage natural foraging behavior. And Gabe, coughing and fussing and crying even while he was laying down.

  Laying down wasn’t good. Must be upright to ease the coughing. I took him back to the rocker with a baby bottle of electrolytes and put him on my lap and rocked him and rocked him and rocked him.

  Screaming. Crying. Buzzing. Why wouldn’t anyone let me sleep? Something heavy lay on my chest.

  Eeek eeek eeek.

  Wah ah ah ah.

  My chest hurt. Every breath was a hot stab into my lungs. Each shallow gasp ended with a cough that seemed to push out the tiny bit of air I had taken in.

  I opened my eyes to a strange room filled with medical paraphernalia and started coughing.

  An angry child squirmed in my arms and wriggled off my lap onto the floor. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t stand without spasms of hacking. Gabe righted himself and, laughing with glee, made a break for Deedee. Deedee stood in her crib, bitterly crying and bouncing, ready to launch herself out.

  I managed to catch Gabe and dump him into his crib. He and Deedee instantly reached through the bars to touch one another. The fridge still had two bottles of milk. I gave one to each of the babies to quiet them. They needed baths and changing, but I was too tired to try.

  Rico lay askew in his bed, face sheet-white, eyes closed and breathing with shallow, audible gasps.

  Eeek eeek. I threw half a box of monkey biscuits into Molly’s cage, and tossed a few into each crib. Let the kids teethe on those.

  I was so hot, so thirsty. There must be another bottle of fluids in the fridge.

  Buzzing, like an angry wasp or a furious fairy. The intercom? I tried to remember where it was, but I was too hot to care. I had to get something to drink. The room wobbled as I turned to the fridge.

  All the colors drained away, and something crashed.

  I lay on the hot desert sand. The noon sun beat down on me, dehydrating my body into a light, crisp mummy. Crisp as a soda cracker. Dry as a monkey biscuit. My eyes were too dry to open. My mouth was too dry to close. The smell of disinfectant filled the air, smothering me. I struggled to breathe and wheezed with every painful gasp.

  The sun was so bright, its orange glow shone through my eyelids. The sand made a million little prickles on my skin. Sand blew over me, filling my mouth and nose and choking off the air.

  Nearby, someone else was dying. At least that’s what it sounded like from the crying. Maybe they were drying out too.

  The light dimmed, like clouds drifting over the sun. Something cold touched my arm, making me twitch. It hurt. Why would my mummy-arm hurt? Mummies don’t feel anything. Cold radiated up my arm.

  A stabbing pain filled my chest. The Egyptian priest must have come. He was opening my chest with his obsidian blade to remove my heart. I gasped in pain and tried to call out that I was still alive, but sand had already filled the space where my lungs used to be.

  The pain began to ease, as the night breeze cooled my skin. Maybe I was already in my tomb, painted with tiny people to tell the story of my life. It was a short, sad story, filled with excrement. Maybe Thoth, the baboon god, would watch over me.

  I managed to open one eyelid, just a little. I saw only a white and shining blur.

  The embalmer leaned over me to check the condition of his work. I opened my eye a little wider.

  It wasn’t an ancient Egyptian priest.

  It was a space-suited alien!

  I struggled and tried to yell. I don’t want to be abducted! Let me go!

  Its robot-voice spoke to me.

  “Jackie? Easy, honey. Just rest. I’m here now. I’m going to take care of you.”

  CHAPTER 31

  E-7

  At first, Rico and I could hardly stand to look at each other—even with a privacy screen between our red-zone beds, we knew each other much better than either of us was comfortable with. Maybe he wondered if I was going to tell on him for the things he’d confessed when he thought he was going to die. But he was no criminal, and I was no snitch.

  Finally, I white-lied and told him I couldn’t remember anything that happened after we entered the red zone until I woke up, and he said the same, so we got along better after that.

  Sometimes a lie is the lesser of two wrongs.

  It was a lot quieter in the iso lab once Gabe and Deedee and Molly were released, all of them well and itching to get out. I fretted about who would take care of Molly, but Paula said Zeke had sent a teen intern from the zoo to look after her, and she and Barney were happy to be together again.

  By that time, Westerly had all the resources she could ask for. From Gabe and Deedee, Quinn got a dandy harvest of humanized phages to begin making a medicine that would fight Eclipse. The ECA offered to move Quinn and Westerly to a big lab with lots of scientists to produce the Eclipse-eating phage viruses on a large scale.

  At Westerly’s suggestion, they named it the Leonard Mendez Memorial Research Laboratory.

  When I felt well enough to read, Paula handed me a letter. “Someone left this with Mr. Lee at the snack stand at the zoo.”

  It wasn’t much of a letter, just a smudged scrap of paper folded over four times into a little pillow, grubby like it had been in someone’s pocket for a few weeks.

  To Jackie K intern by the flamingos: I just wanted to let you know that I got thru it ok. I been scared all my life to get eclipse but now Ive had it and it wasnt that bad. Just quantine sucked. I went to the zoo to find you and tell you that but they said you was away. So Im leaving this to say thanks cause you stayed when I was sick and everyone was scared of me and shouting to keep me away but you stayed. So thanks. Jamie L (E-6)

  Rico and I were in isolation for a total of four weeks before we were cleared to join the world again.

  By then, the world was a different place.

  The announcement that the ECA had developed a new way to fight Eclipse had been cheered around the world. Before, everyone had dreaded the coming of spring because it meant a new, worse strain of Eclipse. Now, spring was once again a time of hope.

  For the first time since the epidemic began, humans were winning their war with microbes—by enlisting their best allies, other microbes.

  When Rico and I left the red zone, Westerly threw a coming-out party for us in the cafeteria, with a big cake with yellow frosting. Reyna and Charles made a big banner that said, “Welcome Back E-7s.” Even Quinn came for it, and Stonehouse smuggled in some fizzy wine.

  Westerly hugged me, rumbling, “Fine work, young lady.”

  Reyna hugged me too. She handed me a present, all wrapped up. “Here, Jackie. You did good, taking care of the babies.”

  It was her Jackie Kenn
edy doll. I almost blubbered, but only because I still felt weak.

  Chubb turned on some music and danced with me until I got dizzy. Paula danced with Rico and then with Quinn, and Mary Koh showed up long enough to dance with Reyna. Stonehouse pretended he didn’t see her fraternizing with the staff.

  I ate a little cake—not much because everything still tasted a little like crap—and then I told everyone I was tired.

  Paula walked me back to my bedroom.

  “Would you stay a minute?” I said. “There’s something I want to ask.”

  All the time I’d been sick, one question had been worrying me. I’d waited to ask it until I could talk to Paula face-to-face instead of face-to-helmet.

  Paula waited patiently, like she knew how hard it was for me to get the courage to speak.

  “Paula, why did you choose me?”

  “From the teen home?”

  “Yeah. You could have taken a kid who was cuter or smarter or more talented.”

  She fluffed a pillow for me. “Don’t sell yourself short. You have a lot going for you.”

  I waited, stroking the long hair of the stuffed orangutan, avoiding looking at her. Maybe she’d flipped a coin and got stuck with me. Or lost a bet. Or maybe it was just pity for the kid least likely to find a home.

  “You really want to know?”

  I nodded.

  She sat on the side of the bed. “When I went to the teen home, I was still very uncertain. I told the proctor I wanted to help out an orphan, but I wasn’t sure how much of an emotional commitment I could make. I was willing to share my home with a child, but it would have to be someone who was independent, not too clingy.”

  Her finger made little circles on the blanket. “The proctor was a little disgusted, I think, and rightly so. She said, ‘I get it. You want a cat, and not a puppy.’ Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but essentially, that was what I was asking for. The child equivalent of a cat—independent, unemotional, self-reliant. The proctor told me in no uncertain terms that all children need emotional support and maybe I should go home and think a little more.”

  It was so quiet I could hear strains of music and laughter, drifting all the way up from the cafeteria.

  “I was ready to walk away,” Paula said, “but then the proctor stopped me. She said there was one child there who reminded her of a tough little alley cat. She said you needed someone to take a chance on you, to look past the attitude and the surly face. She said all your fights were fending off bullies—that you hated to see the big kids push the little ones around. You were always ready to help the underdog and weren’t afraid of a tussle. The proctors had tried many times to present you to prospective fosterers, but you deliberately made yourself less attractive so some smaller and weaker child could have a home.”

  She looked up. “I thought I could live with someone like you.”

  Even if her story was a lie, it was a good kind of lie.

  I snuffled and hugged her. Then I cried and she did too, but it was a good kind of cry.

  By June, everything had changed. People came out of their homes and greeted each other with friendliness instead of suspicion, not even wearing masks. People began to do something they hadn’t done for a long time: plan for the future. White-suited inspectors who’d spent years imposing quarantines now geared up for the process of clearing households, neighborhoods, cities, and whole countries as safe. Businesses began to talk about opening the trade routes again. Politicians talked about how best to use the thousands of rootless, poorly educated, unemployed young people to rebuild abandoned homes, shops, and factories.

  Westerly took over fostering Gamma and Delta and officially renamed them Gabriel Leonard Westerly and Deborah June Westerly. She hired a couple of hard-working orphan teens to run after them. They earned their pay—Gabe ran and jumped and climbed like a monkey, which Paula said was perfectly normal, and Deedee was always right behind him. They no longer looked anything like Quinn, but I thought they looked a little like Mendez.

  Paula told me that Westerly and Quinn had been short-listed for a Nobel Prize until Westerly had a private talk with some of the selection panel about the potential for embarrassing details to come out. After that, nobody brought it up again. After all, discoveries that win prizes get a lot of attention, and some things should remain private.

  Paula got a job at one of the ECA’s new phage production facilities, where she oversaw the lab that poured out doses of phage-laced norovirus in capsule form. Anywhere in the world that Eclipse kicked up, the ECA would ship crates of capsules to the population. Paula said thirty percent was the tipping point: once a third of the population in any area took the capsules, the natural contagiousness of the norovirus, bonded with the Eclipse-eating phages, would give everyone the trots and ensure that Eclipse couldn’t gain a foothold.

  Quinn took an international posting, going from one obscure place to another to monitor Eclipse hot spots for any new strains. Any time a new strain popped up, he’d ship it to Paula and she’d tweak the phage DNA to go after it. She didn’t seem to mind that Quinn wasn’t around. She started going out with one of the doctors from the new lab, one who was actually nice and who liked kids.

  We had a new place to live near Paula’s job. It was a big apartment, although there still wasn’t much furniture in it.

  I worked on my studies—history still being for the birds—and Paula signed me up for a biology lab class. It was a real class with a live teacher, just like there used to be, and I was learning a lot there.

  Reyna was staying with us while she went to art school. She and I shared a room, and her fairies and pixies were all over. I didn’t mind. Now that she was studying art history, she’d added sketches of famous paintings—mostly lovely women draped in robes and holding chubby babies. She and Mary Koh were still seeing each other when Mary’s duties gave her time. I kidded Reyna that all the madonnas she drew looked like Mary, and all her babies had big mouths and cup-handle ears like Gabe and Deedee.

  Rico used his scholarship to go to nursing school and said he wanted to work in an emergency room. From time to time, he texted me gross pictures of severed legs and crushed bodies with messages like, “This made me think of you.” Paula thought it was funny. I texted him back pictures of the back end of a baboon.

  Sergeant Hank Stonehouse drifted out west somewhere to take over an old ranch and raise sheep.

  Charles took the money that Mendez had left him in his will and bought up a little shop next to the bus station. He sold coffee and donuts and gum and candy and magazines and headache pills and umbrellas and sunglasses and a hundred other things to people as they rushed to and from work, and he studied on-line business school classes during the slack times. His business was already profitable enough that he had an orphan teen intern working for him, and Charles was teaching him the business. He called his shop Chubb’s Emporium.

  On a rainy Thursday afternoon, I took the bus to the zoo, something I liked to do by myself at a time when there wouldn’t be many people there. The kid at the entrance who checked my pass did a double-take when she saw the tats on the back of my wrist: two rare ones, E-3 and E-7. I wore them with pride—there would never be an E-8, not for anybody.

  I walked past the reptile house, the elephants, and the squawking flamingos. When I nodded to Mr. Lee at his snack stand, he actually smiled at me.

  The primate house stank, like always.

  I waved to Henry and Tika Orangutan as I walked past, and to Larry and Lola Gibbon.

  Eeek eek eek hoo hoo hoo!

  “Hello, Molly.” Sidling up to Molly’s enclosure, I hooted and held my hand, palm up, next to the glass.

  Molly returned the greeting, pressing her shoulder against the glass and touching her knuckles to the glass next to mine. Barney wagged and looked happy to see me.

  When Molly had first moved to the zoo, she’d cowered in a corner and burrowed under her bedding straw. But as Barney eagerly explored their new space, she’d gained
confidence from him. She’d quickly figured out that the keepers had treats and that the gibbons and orangs and even the visitors could be fun to watch.

  She deliberately ignored Jayjay Chimp, who postured and grinned and hooted in the next enclosure, desperate to gain her attention. Chimp love.

  Now Molly was strong and confident. With a big cage for her and Barney to romp in, access to a sunny outdoor enclosure, and plenty of heavy ropes to climb and swing from, she’d put on muscle and her shaggy coat had filled out.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but Molly’s brown eyes, peering out from under her black brow, seemed to light up in recognition when I came to visit.

  A little kid in a yellow rain slicker pointed. “Look, mommy! The monkey has a dog!”

  “Ape,” I whispered.

  Molly yawned to display her teeth: a warning to the rude, staring public.

  The people didn’t bother Barney. He grinned his silly dog-grin at the children while Molly absently stroked his ears with the back of her long black fingers.

  The child tugged on his mother’s jacket. “What’s the sign say, mommy?”

  As his mom read it out loud, I whispered the words I knew by heart.

  Chimpanzee, pan troglodytes

  Native to Central and Western Africa.

  Molly was crucial to the efforts of the

  Eclipse Control Agency to eliminate the

  Eclipse plague as a threat to humans.

  The world is grateful.

  Author’s note

  If you enjoyed Eclipsed, please, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads or your favorite site.

  Like all science fiction, Eclipsed is a mix of fantasy and reality, but you may be surprised at some of the science underlying the story.

  Bacteriophages and phage therapy:

  Medical science has known for more than a century about the power of bacteriophage viruses to attack bacteria. While substantial research into phage therapies was done in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century, in the West, the development of antibiotics—and the profit potential from their sale—largely diverted research away from phage therapy. We have reaped the consequences of our dependence on antibiotics: overuse and misuse have given rise to increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria.