Natalie, Chloe, and a freshly showered and changed Isabel met them at the SUV.
Natalie said something about “loud” and “spilled my tea.”
“What?” Noah shouted. Jacob explained something through the loud ringing tones, then showed them pictures. “It’s, like, wrecked!”
Noah couldn’t tell what Natalie said about their accomplishment, but she didn’t seem appropriately impressed. She raised her voice and mumbled something.
“What?” Noah replied.
“Emma! Let’s go see her! Now! Before it gets dark!”
Chapter 22
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 53, 1730 GMT (1:30 p.m. Local)
Emma drank another cup of coffee at the cabin’s small dinette. The caffeine stimulated her. Objectives, plans to accomplish them, necessities required for success, the identification and sequencing of subtasks and prerequisites in a hand-drawn Gantt chart—details poured forth. She sat at the table trying to keep track of it all. When she heard her brother call to her from outside, she looked at her phone. Over an hour had passed since she had heard the loud bang. She had been sitting in the same place and position since she had breakfast that morning. Her muscles felt stiff when she rose.
Outside, Noah stood at a distance with Natalie, Jake, Chloe, and Isabel.
“Hi!” Isabel said. A green mask, not the usual blue from the hospital, dangled beneath her chin, but she didn’t raise it before coming over to give Emma a hug, no longer worried by Emma’s significantly lower level of contagiousness. Emma patted her twin sister’s back until Isabel pulled away. “Surprise.”
It wasn’t actually much of a surprise. When Emma heard the helicopter, she’d assumed it was Isabel.
“We brought you some more supplies!” Noah shouted. “And some pens and paper!”
Both would help. “My hearing was unaffected by SED, Noah. No need to yell.” Her brother and his kids each carried sacks. Everyone but Isabel had rifles. Emma jammed her fingernails into her palms and took deep breaths, slowly, slowly, until the worst of the trembling passed.
Noah told the kids to follow him inside with the supplies, but Natalie said to stay outside. Natalie’s look at Noah led him to agree instantly with his wife. She controlled Noah quite effectively. Sex is a powerful tool, the inner voice suggested helpfully. Noah and the kids nodded at Emma awkwardly as each laid their bags beside the front door. Natalie directed everyone to the shade of a steep hillside—outside, not inside the cabin.
Natalie sat on old stump. Noah, fittingly, sank to the ground at her feet. The two kids settled cross-legged onto grassy patches. Jake tossed pebbles down the hill. Chloe stared piercingly at Emma. Isabel and Emma sat on a flat rock outcropping roughly in the center of the semi-circle formed by their family.
Isabel held Emma’s hand, gloved fingers interlaced, just as she had on the Air Force transport from Siberia to Washington after Emma had been infected. Isabel patted and rubbed Emma’s jeaned thigh. “I was so worried about you after you ran off.”
Emma said, “In retrospect, it was a dangerous trip down here.”
“Did you run into any trouble?” Noah asked.
“There was a truck driver. He wanted sex in exchange for the ride, but he was disgustingly ugly.”
“Did he…?” Natalie began before glancing down at her kids.
“Did he what?”
No one uttered a word until Isabel, haltingly, said, “I think she’s asking, you know, whether he, you know…?”
“Raped you,” Chloe explained.
“Oh. No.”
Natalie put a hand to her chest and exhaled loudly. “I’m sorry, Emma. I was just afraid, you know…”
“That he raped me? No. I killed him.” They all froze. Emma looked from face to face. Natalie’s mouth hung open. Chloe’s brow was knit. Jake now stared back at her too. What were they thinking? Why did they react like this? What did the looks and silence mean? “With a screwdriver,” she added, hoping for some more enlightening feedback. Natalie shot her husband a look. He avoided it. “Up through the chin.” Emma demonstrated with a thrust of her empty right hand. Isabel slowly, by degrees, let go of Emma’s left hand.
It was Noah who next spoke. “Anything…else you wanna tell us?”
Emma had no idea what he meant. “There was this family driving to Atlanta. A mother and her three kids.”
After a long silence, Noah said, “Did you…?” Once again, an inchoate question.
“Did you kill them too?” Chloe supplied.
“Oh. Thank you. No. I did not.” Noah, like Natalie before him, heaved a sigh, which he slowly let out as he looked up at the sky. Emma quickly checked. There was nothing above them but a sheet of stratocumulus clouds.
“Do you think it’s possible,” Natalie asked, “that you might have infected them?”
Emma shook her head. “Probably not. They kept their windows open. One of the children had problems with flatulence.”
Jake and Chloe laughed, but Noah and Natalie caught each other’s eyes before returning Isabel’s gaze. They were communicating—something—without words. Emma began to grow anxious again. She dug her fingernails into her palms and tried to deepen her shallow breathing.
“Did you meet anyone else on the way here?” Isabel asked.
Emma nodded. From the pause in the questioning, she surmised that they wanted details. “A tall, gangly man with a van and yellow teeth. He wanted sex too, so I also killed him. Then a college student. A cute freshman boy. We had sex, and he did get sick, but survived, I think.”
“Did he go to George Mason?” Chloe asked. When Emma nodded, Chloe burst out, “That’s the guy we saw on TV! Under arrest! You’re practically famous now.”
“And I also met a family living in the woods.” That, apparently, was less exciting news. “They fed me, but then they recognized me from the DHS video.”
“You didn’t…?” Noah began.
Emma wished these people would finish their sentences. She turned to Chloe. “Did you kill them too?” she translated.
“Nope.” Natalie sank from her stump to the ground next to Noah, her cheeks puffing out as she exhaled. She hugged her knees to her chest and Noah put his arm around her. Since no other questions immediately followed, Emma added, “The family in the woods had better weapons than the screwdriver, so I ran away.”
Natalie looked at everyone in turn until she finally said, “Emma, how many people have you killed?”
“On the trip down here? Just the two: the guy with the truck, and the guy with the van.”
“So,” Chloe said, “those two creepy guys tried to have sex with you, and you didn’t want to, so you killed them? But you had sex with the college boy? Uhm…why?” Now Chloe, too, had stopped making sense. Emma had already covered that ground.
“Because I didn’t want to have sex with the first two, but I did with the third, who as I said was cute.”
Chloe pursed her lips and nodded slowly. “Makes…sense, I guess.” There, commented the voice. She understands.
“Emma?” It was Noah. “You qualified your answer, that you’d only killed two people, ‘On the trip down here.’ Does that mean…have you killed anyone else?”
“Yes. But those two were the only people I killed on the trip here.”
Again, there was a long silence.
“I think he means who else did you kill?” Chloe interpreted again.
Before Emma could answer, Isabel slipped off the rock that the two sisters had shared and seated herself on another nearby ledge.
“I killed a boy at your neighbors’ house. The Nicholses’.”
Chloe gasped. Everyone stared at Emma so intensely that she felt a trickle of blood cross her palm. Jake casually lifted the rifle that he had leaned against the rocks and placed it across his lap. “Did he t
ry to rape you, too?” Chloe asked.
Emma shook her head and pinned her bloody hands under her thighs. “He was only a boy. He had a rifle. I needed a better weapon, but all I found in the cabin was the butcher knife, which was good enough for the boy.”
Noah startled Emma by rising, throwing his arms in the air, and slapping his thighs in a confusing jumble of vaguely aggressive gesticulations. “You killed that Nichols boy? Emma, he was fourteen! A child!”
Emma nodded. “Yes, a boy. It would’ve been a lot more dangerous to try to kill a grown man with only a butcher knife. Maybe, with enough surprise, but…”
“Emma!” Isabel shouted.
Emma rose to her feet to pace like Noah, but Chloe, Jake, even Natalie reached for their rifles, and she froze—the only safe response to feeling the sudden torrent of anxiety. Her breathing became panting. Her heart pounded. Her ears popped. Her muscles quivered. They thought she might kill them too, but that was ridiculous. There were too many of them. They were armed. Her rifle was hidden behind the folded cots. She only had four cartridges. But she concluded she should focus instead on her last point. “That boy wasn’t family,” she said.
“But Emma, for God’s sake,” Noah shouted, “he was…!” Again. Noah was a successful lawyer, and one would imagine normally reasonably articulate. Natalie reached out and grabbed his forearm. Noah met his wife’s eyes and fell silent. What are they saying with those looks? Emma’s pulse throbbed audibly in her ears. She dug her nails deep.
“Your hands are bleeding,” Isabel said softly, slowly approaching Emma. “You should trim your nails.” Her sister’s manner was calming. Emma began first to breathe, then to relax. Cutting fingernails is a good idea, said the voice.
Time passed before Noah said, “Emma, if you see anyone—anyone other than family—you need to…you need to run, okay? There are people out there who think you’re…dangerous.”
“I am dangerous,” Emma explained, hoping that would clear things up. But they all stared back again as if at something unexpected she’d said. “To them,” she added.
“But not to us?” It was Natalie. “You won’t hurt us?”
“No.”
“You promise?”
The voice in Emma’s head remained silent. Emma said, “A contract?”
They all looked back and forth between each other.
“Yes, a contract,” Isabel replied. “And we agree not to hurt you, and to share our food. Deal?”
Emma said, “A contract. Yes. I agree to that.”
* * * *
Isabel brimmed with thoughts about—and fears for—her sister. But the banter of her niece and nephew on the walk back down the hill distracted her.
“Can you believe it?” Jake said to Chloe. Both exploded in nervous laughter. “She was like, ‘He wanted to hook up, so I killed his ass. What-ever.’”
“I know!” Chloe exclaimed. “She’s so freaking badass. A player, and a killer!”
“Stop it!” Natalie snapped. Her two children shot sheepish looks toward Isabel and Noah. Chloe mouthed an exaggerated, “Sorry!” Isabel absolved the teenager by flashing her a smile.
Natalie asked Isabel, “Do you think we can trust her?”
Isabel, the world’s leading authority on the behavior of Pandoravirus victims, decided not fritter that status away by betraying uncertainty. “She kept saying, in the lab, that she wanted to talk to you, Noah, about contracts. From reading her notebooks, it seemed like she was considering, I don’t know, founding a society based on social contracts. She seemed especially focused on how to make sure one side doesn’t do its part first, then be forced to rely on the other side to live up to some future end of its bargain.”
“That’s actually a pretty common…”
“How does any of this,” Natalie interrupted, “have anything to do with whether or not Emma will kill us all? Jesus!”
“Well, I guess,” Noah said falteringly, “we keep supplying her with food, and….”
“And as long as we do, she doesn’t kill us?” Chloe asked.
“No one’s killing anyone!” Noah snapped.
“That’s hardly true,” countered Chloe. “Aunt Emma killed, what, three people that we know of? It sounds to me like everybody is killing everybody.”
“Everyone,” Noah corrected. “Everyone is killing everyone.”
“And everyone,” Chloe continued, “is infecting everyone, like Aunt Emma and that college boy.”
“I thought you claimed she wasn’t contagious,” Noah said to Isabel.
“I said she wasn’t shedding the virus prodigiously, like by breathing. I didn’t say someone could safely have presumably unprotected sex with her.”
“Come on, Isabel,” Noah said. “Just admit you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Isabel halted. The others turned her way. “Excuse me kids, Natalie, but fuck you, Noah!” She turned and headed back up the hill toward the cabin.
“Where are you going?” Noah called out.
“To continue my research!” she replied over her shoulder.
Noah first objected, then told her to be careful and to get back inside the fence by five p.m. “It gets dark earlier in the mountains!”
As Noah’s family continued downhill, Chloe asked if she and Jake could visit Emma too. “Absolutely not,” Isabel heard their mother reply before they disappeared.
Back at the cabin, Isabel saw that Emma had taken the bags of supplies inside. She stopped herself from going straight to the front door, and like Noah had done called out to her sister from some distance away. Emma appeared, saw it was Isabel, and stood aside.
When her eyes adjusted to the gloom of the cabin, Isabel noticed that notes already covered several loose pages spread across the dinette. “Back at it, huh?” Emma tilted her head in confusion. “Your notes? More epidemiological research on Pandoravirus?”
“Oh. No. I finished that.”
Isabel edged closer to the table, but didn’t feel comfortable turning her back on her sister. She pivoted awkwardly, exuding a pleasant demeanor as if to allay any suspicion over her odd maneuver. But she saw no alarm in Emma’s blank face. Isabel slid a page with a few notes off another covered top to bottom with words, figures, and diagrams. “So what’s this, then?”
Before Emma could reply, Isabel saw that she had hand-drawn, in the midst of her text, a series of lines with numbers corresponding to the local state highways and more distant Interstate, all connected to the names of towns and cities, though not to scale.
“It’s my plan for surviving the arrival of SED.”
“Okay. And when, do you expect, that will happen?”
“It already has happened.”
“You mean you. No, I meant, when do you think it will break out, you know, in the rest of the population?”
“As a rough guess? Tomorrow, most likely.”
“Tomorrow!” Isabel snorted, though it wasn’t funny. “But, Em, they’re still fighting in New York City. It hasn’t even made it to Philadelphia, much less the D.C.-area.”
“Yes, it has,” came her sister’s innocent-sounding reply. “We just don’t know about it yet.”
Isabel found the prediction so disconcerting that she had to hold onto the kitchen countertop. “So, it’s what? Everywhere?”
“No. But it’s everywhere between here and New England. It’s in the refugee camps. The private homes of people who took relatives in. Charitable shelters at churches and community centers. Long-haul drivers, aircraft and train crews, and emergency and security personnel and troops.”
“And tomorrow it’ll be here.”
“And a few days after that,” Emma explained as if it were a mathematical certainty, “the authorities will know about it, word will leak out, and the killing will begin.”
And that’s that. Isabel had thoug
ht they had more time. She’d thought her only worry for the next couple of weeks would be whatever godawful hell it was to which they sent Rick. Turned out the godawful hell had followed her there.
Emma’s musings on paper had a section entitled, “Militia.” Under it were notes about organization: keep units small, look for veterans to train and lead, equip with light arms and large vehicles, feed well. “Looks like you’re clairvoyant.” Emma clearly had no idea what she meant. “The sheriff showed up today at the gate to the main house with a militia. They were looking for you—or, rather, for the murderer of that boy. They said they’d seen some woman jogging in the hills.”
“I’m trying to stay in shape.”
“Emmy, you can’t kill people.”
“Not the bigger, stronger, or better armed and prepared people.” Emma’s face remained uncreased by any cares, concerns, or guilt.
How could Isabel explain ten thousand years of human moral development to her brain damaged sister? Why would an Infected even care about morals with zero empathy and no self to be held to account to any standards of conduct? “This sheriff’s militia,” Isabel said, “is out there looking for you right now.”
Emma strangely exhibited absolutely no sign of anxiety even though, this time, it was warranted. “The loud explosion today,” Emma asked, “was that Noah blowing up the ridge road?” Maybe she’s calm, Isabel thought as she confirmed her sister’s speculation, because she’s already worked out how she’d kill me. She resolved never again to return to the cabin unarmed. Rick would admonish her for such an error. Emma said, “Sheriff Walcott probably doesn’t know the old way up here. It’s overgrown.”
“You know that sheriff?”
“I met him,” Emma replied. “He seemed reasonable. Professional.”
“But the neighbor—Nichols—won’t be reasonable. And some of his good-ole-boy militia buddies might side with him. That militia is a huge threat to you.”
“That’s not the militia I’m writing about. Although…” she began, then leaned onto her elbows and resumed taking notes. Isabel followed along, mumbling, “Consider…reforming…Walcott’s…militia…after…”
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