Before The Cure (Book 2): The Infected

by Gould, Deirdre

Neil grew dizzy as soon as he leaned over to draw on the first sock and his hand found Elijah’s shoulder. It was a slow process, but Elijah didn’t complain. And when Neil ran out of breath after finally getting the too-loose boxers on, Elijah didn’t rush him into the rest.

  “You were sick too?” Neil gasped, collapsing onto the bench and staring at the pair of pants beside him.

  “I was, yeah. Close to the City though, so I was in one of the first batches of Cured.”

  “First batch? How many were sick?”

  Elijah immediately changed the subject, unfolding the shirt on the bench. “Here,” he said, pulling it gently over Neil’s head. “I remember feeling really cold. This kind of skinny can never seem to get warm.”

  “But—”

  “We can talk about it in a few days,” Elijah warned.

  “You all want me to just accept everything without question. I don’t even know where I am. Or who you are.”

  “No,” said Elijah, “no, we don’t expect you to just blindly accept things. At least, I don’t. But I’m not a counselor or anything. I’m a— was a security guard. I don’t know anything about trauma or memory or any of that. There are people here who do. And some of it’s going to come back on its own, without you having to ask anything. You’ll eventually remember it all, except for the few days you were sedated. Simon’s going to come by and talk to you about some of those questions soon. If you want someone to talk to afterward, I’ll be here until you’re released and the Cure camp moves. Let’s just— let’s just handle the haircut for today.” He shook out the pants and held them open for Neil.

  By the time Elijah helped him out of the bathroom truck and into the bright summer sun, all Neil wanted to do was go back to bed. His mouth ached and his joints were creaky and sore. Elijah helped him sit in a camp chair under a flapping canopy. A woman wearing a large apron puttered nearby. She had no visible scars, the way Elijah did. She wasn’t grim or sad the way Simon or the doctor had been. Neil found her almost alarmingly pretty next to both the sleeping skulls of the people in the tent and the workers he’d seen so far. It was jarring to see her smiling as she worked. And oddly comforting.

  “This is Frances,” Elijah told him. “She’ll take care of your hair. You’ll feel a hundred times better afterward, I guarantee it. Better than the shower even.” He turned to go.

  “You’re leaving?” asked Neil with a sort of panic.

  Elijah stopped and patted Neil’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m just going to get your breakfast cooking.”

  “I’m not hungry,” protested Neil.

  “You are,” said Elijah gently, “you just don’t feel it anymore. Dehydrated too. I’ll be back soon. Frances doesn’t bite. She’s just going to take the clumps out of your hair. Trim your beard a little. She can probably save most of it.”

  “I can,” agreed Frances, “if you want me to. Let’s look at you first though.” She came around the front of his chair, blocking his view of Elijah leaving. “Hi,” she said, sticking out a hand. “Elijah said your name is Neil.”

  “Yes,” said Neil, absentmindedly shaking the hand she offered to him.

  “We have to do something hard now, Neil,” she warned him.

  His attention snapped back to her and he forgot about Elijah for the moment. “What are you going to do?” he asked, feeling his legs cramp painfully as they tried to tense in preparation.

  “I need to show you what you look like.” She pulled a small mirror from her apron pocket and kept its reflective surface to her chest.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” she said brightly, but her smile was strained.

  He held out a hand for the mirror but then pulled back a little. “Why?” he asked.

  “It’ll make things more— real. We could have shaved you while you slept. It would have been faster, more hygienic. We used to do that a few months ago, but the counselors say it takes away proof of what you’ve been through. Proof your brain needs in order to heal. We can’t— leave you like this. Some of the Cured have wounds. Some wouldn’t take care of it on their own. So this is a compromise. Except for where absolutely necessary— like the patch where your throat was bitten and had to be treated right away,” she carefully touched a soggy bandage that lay on his neck, “your hair isn’t cut until you have a chance to see. So I’m going to show you yourself and then we’ll clean up, okay? After this, you never have to think about it again. It’ll be gone. Over. But you need this picture to add weight to reality. Do you understand?”

  Neil didn’t. Not really. But he nodded anyway. She handed him the mirror.

  Iron Hans. That’s what he thought when he saw the face in the mirror. The old fairytale his grandmother used to scare him with as a child. I’ve turned into Iron Hans. A wild man. What little skin was visible was a maze of welts and divots from old injuries. Most of his face was thankfully hidden, at least for now, by thick patches of matted beard and clumps of blood-caked hair on the top of his head that still dripped pink water from the shower. There was no part of him that was familiar. His nose had been broken at least once and was bent strangely. What he could make out of the actual shape of his face was too thin and angular. Some other man’s, not his. Even his own eyes were strange. The sockets were too deep, too shadowed. He looked— ancient. And dangerous. Iron Hans. Someone Joan or Randi would avoid if they saw him on the street. What’s happened to me? he thought, closing his eyes. He tried desperately to find some memory of what had happened. Rage was what stuck out first. Rage and a flash of razor wire and bullet-riddled plywood. He’d been trapped. Not trapped. Quarantined. With Shay. There were others too, who—

  “It’s okay,” Frances’s voice broke through the thought and he opened his eyes. She took the mirror and he was shocked to see his hands were shaking. “You don’t have to look anymore. We’re going to start bringing you back. The image is just there to prove what you went through is real.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said. “It all feels far more unreal now. Why did you leave me like this? What kind of hospital lets a patient deteriorate like this?”

  “Things aren’t the way they were when you got sick. The place you were found— it hasn’t been a real hospital for a long time.”

  “Then why was I left there?”

  “You should talk about this with your—”

  “God damn it! Stop putting me off and telling me to wait until later! I want to know what I’m doing here. And why I’m like this. Where is my wife? Where’s my daughter? Who are all those starving people in there? What are you doing to us?”

  “I’ll get Simon,” said Frances. She seemed calm. As if she’d expected his outburst. As if maybe this happened several times before. It only made him angrier, but he let her walk slowly back into the large tent without calling after her.

  Why a tent? he wondered. Some kind of disaster relief? Had there been a hurricane? Some kind of huge landslide that cut him off from aid? A month. That’s what that soldier said. The quarantine was supposed to last a month. Not two and a half years. What happened? He tried to look around, wondering if he should just make a break for it. He didn’t know what these people wanted. If it had been a natural disaster, the staff would have told him something. Think. They don’t want you to remember, but you have to. He closed his eyes.

  A near-empty pool, he could remember that. The last thing before waking up in this place. Dark. The pool had been dark, though the windows above the pool streamed dusty shafts of gold light. No, he corrected, not dark. Filthy. The dry pool was filthy. He had fallen down the wide steps into it, banged his knees. They’d hurt, he remembered that, though, at the time, it hadn’t mattered much. He’d been thirsty. So thirsty. And at the far end of the pool was a puddle. Nothing but the water at the end of the room had mattered. He’d made it to the water, fallen to his aching knees, and bent to suck up the filthy water. Something had struck him, pushed him over. An enraged face hovered over him and then lunged. A bloom of pain in
his neck as he struggled to shove the creature off. And then— a blank. Nothing. Like the consciousness just shut off the way a light switch would. Frustrating. There had to be more. Before the pool— spoiled meat and scrabbling over bloody linoleum toward another shrieking man. More than one, he realized. Why were they screaming? Sick. Sick like me. We fought. About what?

  “Neil,” Simon’s voice jarred him out of the thought and he opened his eyes. “Frances tells me you’re anxious to talk about what happened while you were ill.” Simon pulled a slim bag from behind Frances’s camp table and began unfolding it into a canvas chair. “I’ll stay with you while Frances works if you’d like. And I can start answering questions.”

  3

  Neil glanced at Frances who only waited calmly, pulling a small set of clippers from her apron. He nodded and she moved behind him, the clippers clicked on and broke the warm air with a low buzz. She tipped his head forward gently. “Tell me if anything hurts,” she told him. “Sometimes the matted clumps hide wounds. I’ll be as careful as I can. I’ll save as much as I can—”

  “Don’t,” said Neil. “Take it all away. I can’t take the smell or the itch or— It’s like I’m stuck to a corpse. My whole body is like a rotting corpse.” A few weak tears escaped him. Simon’s hand folded over his.

  “It’s okay, I’ll take it all off. Start over fresh,” said Frances. They were quiet a while as Neil calmed down. Clumps of filthy hair began tumbling down his back onto the grass below.

  “Where should we start?” asked Simon after Neil’s breathing had evened out. Neil tried to look at him without lifting his head. He could tell, now, that this man was a school counselor. The way he leaned slightly forward and tried to look nonchalant, the slightly patronizing tone that had leaked into his voice. Doesn’t matter, Neil thought. He seems to mean well and he has information that I need. I don’t have to take his advice, just hear about what happened in the past few years.

  “How about who you are. This place, the people working here, are you government? Nonprofit? Crazy kidnapping cult?”

  He couldn’t see Simon’s face, his head tipped too far forward, but Simon’s hesitation to answer was enough.

  “Some days, I’d say ‘crazy cult’ sounds about right,” muttered Frances behind him, the clippers whining and chewing away near his ear.

  “You can— think of us as governmental, I suppose. Yes, that’s probably the closest thing,” said Simon.

  “Think of you as government? Are you or aren’t you? This isn’t comforting.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Simon quickly, “It isn’t as easy a question as it might appear. We’re— from a settlement nearby. Some doctors found a cure for your illness and we started setting up Cure camps like this one to distribute it. We have a governor and some office workers organizing things. And we have scavenging teams—”

  Frances cleared her throat and Simon immediately changed tack. “So, yes, I guess we’re from the government.”

  “A settlement? You mean this city you keep talking about? You said the governor was involved— I didn’t vote for the guy, but I expected him to do a better job than this. If it was bad enough to set all this up with so many people in that tent— why is a local government the ones to distribute this cure? Where’s the CDC? Why are we in tents and not in a giant hospital? Why were all of those people allowed to be so filthy and neglected? They’re starving.”

  “There is no CDC anymore, Neil,” Simon said gently. “And most of the hospitals were used during the worst of the December Plague. They are either occupied with the Infected or were destroyed as the military tried to contain the epidemic. The world isn’t what you remember but surely, before you got sick, you must have heard something in the news or seen people exhibiting strange behavior.”

  Neil shook his head and Frances swore softly as the clippers caught and stalled out. She firmly repositioned his head.

  “Why were you taken to the hospital?” asked Simon.

  “I was in a fight. Damnedest thing. I was at the Children’s Parade. You know, the one on tv every year. This guy who was leading us, he just— lost it. And then a few of the people around me lost it too. I got bitten trying to help. My friend and I were sent to the hospital to clean up our bite wounds,” he told Simon. “They kept me overnight for observation. I thought it was just an excuse to keep me available for a police statement when they finally got around to collecting them.” Frances lifted his chin gently and Neil was relieved to be able to watch Simon’s face.

  “And when the morning came?” asked Simon. “Did they release you?”

  “No. The nurse told me my blood work had come back with a strep infection. I was supposed to be given a prescription and sent home but they kept making excuses. The doctor wasn’t in yet. They wanted to do more lab work to make sure they were giving me the right antibiotics. They considered giving me shots for rabies. The guy who bit me— they wanted to do an autopsy. I was scared. So, for a few hours, I was patient. After that, I slowly realized that whatever was going on, wasn’t normal. I tried to leave my room and found it locked. After that, the nurses and doctors stopped coming around. I should have acted sooner. I should have insisted on leaving before they locked us in.”

  “If you had,” said Frances, tipping his head gently to one side, “You probably wouldn’t be sitting here. You’d still be wandering the streets. Or dead. Or worse.”

  “Frances,” hissed Simon in warning.

  “Come on now,” she snapped, the clippers leaving Neil’s scalp and waving in the air with a buzz that seemed as irritated as her. “All this pussyfooting around doesn’t help them. How many times have I listened to you do this whole song and dance? They always freak out anyway.” She came around the chair and stood in front of Neil. He could feel a warm breeze on the back of his neck where she’d already cropped his hair. The heat had flushed her face, made wisps of hair loosen around her temples. Reminds me of Joan. Doesn’t even realize how pretty she is, he thought. She’s not, really. Not unusually so. She’s normal. In all this. That’s better than pretty. He shook off the intense longing for more normal images. For his own face to look filled out and flushed. For something recognizable.

  “Look, you got sick, okay?” Frances stopped the buzz of the clippers and stared at him. “Not just you. The whole world got sick.”

  “Frances, I think—”

  She raised one hand to stop Simon. “Those nurses who locked you away did you a favor. Your family too. In a day or two, the last of the medication is going to wear off. You’re going to start remembering what it was like being sick. Right now, it’s just— groggy and a bad taste in your mouth. Some bruises. This.” She pulled a clump of hair from where it had fallen into his lap and held it up to show him. “I know that’s all it is right now. But soon, you’ll remember more. If you’d been let out of the hospital and gone home to your family, you would have killed them or they would have been forced to kill you.”

  “That’s insane,” protested Neil. “I’d never—”

  “You would. That’s what the disease did. Think about the parts you do remember. What’d you see? I’d bet it was similar to what sent you to the hospital in the first place. Do you remember what happened when someone finally unlocked your door and released you? Because they did, or you would have starved over a year ago. What did you do? Think.”

  “I— I can’t—” he started, but it wasn’t true. He could remember the days after he escaped the room. The cop who’d been bitten to death in front of him. Meeting Shay. Discovering they were in quarantine. He remembered all that. Even that last desperate run for the door by the pool. And then a woman’s ear between his teeth. She’d screamed.

  That was all Neil wanted to remember at the moment. More than he wanted to remember. He knew there’d be other, worse things. He could feel them lurking under his consciousness. He forced himself to focus on the long, sun-browned grass at the foot of the camp chair and the battered derby shoes on Simon’s feet, the smell of cam
pfires somewhere nearby.

  “You remember how it started?” asked Simon.

  “I remember what happened at the hospital. At least— a few days of it.”

  “Then you remember how it started,” said Frances, turning the clippers back on and bending over him again. “Same things happened everywhere. People started showing up in hospitals with injuries from brawls or as mental cases. Domestic violence reports shot through the roof, riots— just chaos for a few days. And then all hell really broke loose.”

  “But it was one guy,” Neil protested. “And they shot him. Right there at the parade. Everyone else was in the same ward as me. Nobody got out. There’s no way they could have bitten anyone outside the hospital—”

  “You didn’t get sick from that bite, Neil,” said Simon. “That’s not the mode of transmission. By the time that man bit you or bit anyone, you were already infected. If you flew in a plane, rode a bus, went to a shopping center— and we all did. If you did any of that, you had already come in contact with the December Plague. That parade— usually happened a week before Christmas, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Many people had already been infected for weeks by then. A month or more. The best we’ve been able to determine is it started spreading just before Thanksgiving.”

  “What is it? Terrorists? Bird flu?”

  Simon glanced over Neil’s head toward Frances before answering. “It was strep. A mild form. You probably never even felt it. It was designed that way. But over time, it has some serious effects on a person’s brain until it gets knocked out with the right kind of antibiotics. We couldn’t find that antibiotic until recently.”

  “Designed? You said ‘designed’.”

  Simon nodded. “We don’t know much yet. The original scientists have just been found and cured themselves. We know it wasn’t meant to do what it did. It wasn’t meant to be a weapon. More than that—” Simon shook his head. “I’d say it doesn’t particularly matter after all this except it’s comforting to know it won’t happen again. There just— aren’t enough of us left to cause a pandemic if the bacteria were ever to mutate.”