by Haga, A. H.
At the host’s death, every worm except the ones nestled in the brain and stomach dies from starvation.
21
“You called this meeting, so what is it about?” Kenneth, my NAV counselor, asked.
“I’m worried that you do not fully believe Katerina’s situation,” Dr Mathias, my doctor, answered, leaning his folded hands on the table.
“Of course I’m taking her situation seriously, but there is only so much I can do,” Kenneth answered, glancing at Shadia and me. We were sitting at the other end of the table, Shadia behind me.
“So what can we do?” I asked. “You said I would get disability support this time, that there was no way they couldn’t give it to me.” I motioned to my crutches before pushing my sunglasses higher on my nose. I was wearing them and a hat inside, the roof lamps too bright today. I hadn’t really slept last night, too worried about this meeting. The tiredness could only work in my favor, though, couldn’t it? Making me look half as sick as I felt.
Kenneth sighed. “I really believed it would go through this time.”
“But it didn’t,” Shadia answered. “They used the fact that they don’t know how sick she is against her.”
“Now, I don’t–” Kenneth began, but Shadia shook her head, and he closed his mouth.
Satisfied, Shadia found the notification letter and started reading out loud. “… Decline your application for Disability Support. It is our opinion that you do not meet the qualifications needed for this support. You have not been through Work Clarification on the basis that you are too sick to keep to the program. But without the program to estimate your sickness percentage, we do not know if you are more than fifty precent disabled or not.” She put the letter onto the table and looked at Kenneth. “It says right here that they can’t give her disability support because she is too sick to figure out how sick she is.”
I put a hand over Shadia’s to quiet her. “The point is that there is a way to fix this: I go through Work Clarification.”
“I really do not think that is necessary,” Kenneth said, leaning back in his chair. “We know how sick you are.”
“But they don’t,” I said. “The caseworkers in Tønsberg don’t know, and that’s the point.” I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. “I don’t think Work Clarification will be good for me. I’m afraid going through with it will use up what little energy I have left, but that must be better than this limbo I’m in right now. I can hardly leave my home because I’m too sick. I spend most days in bed, and I can’t even walk from my bedroom to the bathroom without support. Sometimes I even need help getting up from the toilet.”
“And that’s why we won’t go through with Work Clarification,” Kenneth said as I drew a deep breath and hurriedly dried the tears that had escaped my eyes. “We complain about this decision, we fight it, but we won’t make you sicker to do so.”
“But they don’t believe me.” I hiccupped, angry at myself for crying and angry at the system for putting me in this position.
“Then we make them believe.” Kenneth turned to Dr Mathias. “On your last evaluation, you wrote that you don’t see Katerina getting better any time soon. Do you still believe that?”
Dr Mathias nodded. “Yes. Katerina has a severe case of M.E. If she starts getting better, which I do not believe will happen any time soon if at all, it will be a long time before she can consider returning to work. Even if she woke up tomorrow and was completely healthy, there would be months, possibly years, of physical therapy before she could get back to a normal lifestyle.”
“Understood,” Kenneth said. “So we complain, we …”
My stomach turned. Heaving, I fell to the floor, skinning my knees on the stone steps, and fought not to throw up.
I blinked awake, for a moment thinking I was actually going to throw up before I realized the sounds weren’t coming from me.
Groaning and moaning and heaving echoed down the hall.
Almost falling, I hurried out of bed and into my chair, not caring that I wasn’t wearing any pants, and made my way into André’s room. He was tossing and turning on the bed, bloody vomit dripping from his mouth as he choked. Where was Shadia?
Cursing, I hurried forward, the chair hitting against the bed and almost pinching my hand before I flipped the brakes and reached for André. Twice, he twisted out of my hands, his arms and legs dancing around. Finally, I got a grip and turned him over. Vomit oozed from his mouth and onto the pillow, and I gagged at the smell.
“Come on,” I begged, stroking his shoulder. “Just get it out and breathe.” I didn’t dare think about the way his body twitched. It was minor now that I’d gotten him on his side and he wasn’t drowning anymore, but it was still there. I could feel it ripple just under his skin.
The ooze of vomit stopped, and André started breathing a little easier again.
“There you go,” I mumbled before I carefully eased him onto his back.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs reached me, and I turned to see Shadia enter the room. She almost walked into my chair before she noticed us.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He started vomiting,” I answered and scooted away from André, letting my arms rest.
Shadia’s jaw tensed, but she didn’t say anything, just moved my chair out of the way.
Together, we dragged and pushed until he lay with his back against the wall. If he started throwing up again, it would fall right out of his mouth instead of choking him.
When he was secure, Shadia started cleaning up. He’d soiled himself as well as vomited. I wanted to help, but Shadia asked me to rest, and I didn’t complain. My arms were weak and numb after holding him on his side. He wasn’t heavy, but I couldn’t take much.
It took Shadia twenty minutes to get all the filthy clothes out of the room. It lessened the smell a little, but we still needed to clean his body to get it all away, and we didn’t dare open the window, in case Nicholas or some of his men drove by and heard André mumbling or something. Chances were small that it would happen, but we didn’t want to take the risk it. We didn’t even use a flashlight as Shadia cleaned up, relying on the light of the moon.
When Shadia had all the supplies she needed to clean his body, I moved to leave. André wasn’t twitching anymore. His arms and legs lay limp, but he was still in the grip of a fever, mumbling in his sleep and tossing his head weakly.
“You’ll be OK?” I asked quietly.
Shadia only nodded, her jaw set but face otherwise empty.
“Sure you don’t want my help?”
She turned and looked at me, forcing a smile. “You’ll help me more by taking care of yourself, so I can focus on taking care of him.”
I nodded and left, more than ready to get myself cleaned up. It felt like my whole skin was crawling with germs.
When I was done in the bathroom, I checked in on Shadia and André, but she was still cleaning him, a disgusted look on her face. In any other situation, that expression would have been funny, but it wasn’t now. I left them in peace.
Exhausted, I pushed myself into our bedroom and crawled onto the bed.
It was as my eyes closed that I remembered the ending of my dream had been wrong. The meeting had dragged on and on, trying to make a plan that in the end didn’t work.
NAV was a rollercoaster that had given me more anxiety and taken more energy than anything else in my life. They were supposed to be there to help the sick, but there were so many rules and loopholes that the patient didn’t stand a chance. Luckily, I didn’t fight alone. I had Shadia and my parents, but it was still a long fight we didn’t know when we’d win.
Sleep was poor after that. I woke multiple times. Sometimes it was my own fault. I’d fallen asleep on top of the covers and woke when Shadia tried to move them over me. Another time, I was sure someone was trying to get into the house, but the sounds were gone the moment I woke up. It was André that woke me most of the time, mumbling and raving. Sometimes he would screa
m or groan so loud it made me jump almost out of bed before I was even awake. In the end, I gave up on sleep sometime before dawn.
I was preparing breakfast when André screamed again, followed by a hard thud. Dropping the can I’d been opening, I rolled toward his room so fast I almost missed the door and sailed down the stairs.
André was face-down on the floor, his body rigid and vibrating. Shadia was by his side, trying to turn him over.
Cursing and calling his name, I stopped beside them and slid out of the chair. Touching him, I felt the muscles under his skin. They were taut as a rope, every muscle in his body tightened as far as they could without breaking a bone. Even as I thought it, I heard a snap from his arm followed by a gurgling sound, like screaming under water.
“No, no, no, no,” Shadia mumbled.
André’s face was just as stiff as the rest of his body, lips drawn back, bared teeth pressed together so hard I heard them grind, and his eyelids were wide open, his eyes jumping around without seeing anything.
“André,” I said, gripping his face with both hands and trying to get him to look at me. “André, come on.” There was no reaction. I looked up at Shadia, but her eyes were empty.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
There was another snap, this time from André’s chest.
My eyes flew back to his face. “Please, relax!” His eyes suddenly stilled on me, staring. I wasn’t sure if he was seeing me or not, but I forced a smile to my face, just in case. “That’s right. Look at me. I know it hurts, but you need to breathe. It’s hard, I know, but try, OK?”
A tremor ran through him, starting in his chest and spilling outwards, like the ripples on a lake after someone threw a stone into it. His breathing was ragged and hard, barely there and shallow, like there wasn’t room in his lungs for any air with the muscles so tight. Then he stopped. He just stopped breathing.
“No! Don’t you dare! Don’t. Please.” My voice was barely a whisper.
His body slumped, his head resting heavily against my hands. His eyes were more empty than I’d ever seen them.
At his stillness, Shadia seemed to snap back to reality. She pushed me away and checked his pulse. I knew it wouldn’t be there, but I was calmed by the action. It proved Shadia knew what she was doing. She rested her ear against his mouth, then pushed her hair away from her eyes as she sat up, starting CPR. His chest looked loose, somehow, like his ribs were too broken to offer up even a semblance of resistance.
I don’t know how long we sat there, trying to get André to wake up, to live again. I started crying. I didn’t know André that well, but he deserved better than this. Deserved better than to die in some unknown person’s bed, two strange women by his side, the world outside teeming with zombies and men hunting us. He deserved better.
When Shadia gave up, we sat on the floor for a time, looking at the empty body before us.
“I’m going to prepare him for burial,” Shadia said, her voice hoarse but in charge. “He deserves that.” I nodded. “Can you write this down in the book?”
When I looked up at her, she nodded to the notebook that André had started and Shadia had taken over. I nodded again.
Shadia forced a smile and turned away.
Keeping my eyes on the notebook, I scribbled down what had happened while Shadia cleaned and dressed him again. André hadn’t had anything left to soil himself with this time, but he had sweated through his clothes and the bedding.
I was about to leave the room, Shadia still not done, when a thought struck me. My bet was on the bite being the cause of his death, but there was no way for us to be sure, as he’d walked around with it for so long. But what if it was? And even if it wasn’t, what if this parasite was like the virus in The Walking Dead? What if we all had it, and it takes us over when we die anyway?
OK, no, that didn’t make sense, but what about the baby I saw? I’d forgotten to ask him about that, but I was too tired to curse my awful memory. My brain was jumping to conclusions because I was so tired. But even if he wouldn’t, I didn’t want to take any chances.
Rolling into the master bedroom, I found a set of ugly sheets and used a knife to tear it into strips.
I rolled back into the bedroom, where Shadia had just pulled a pair of jeans onto André’s body. She looked up from her work when I rolled to the head of the bed and started tying one of the strips of fabric to the bed-leg.
“What are you doing?” she asked, voice low. As if afraid to wake him.
“I don’t wanna risk him coming back to life while we sleep,” I said, not looking at her.
She stiffened. “You think he will?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not taking any chances.”
I looked up at her, almost expecting her to stop me. Instead, she put out a hand, and I gave her one of the improvised ropes. She bound it around his left wrist and snuck the end down between the bed and the wall. She’d have to crawl under the bed to fasten it, but I didn’t say anything, just returned to my own wrist. It was all floppy, the bones inside crushed by the seizure. I could feel the bones move when I touched him. It almost made me start crying again, but I was able to keep the tears at bay as I moved to his legs, where I was able to secure both.
Shadia still wasn’t quite done with her cleaning, so I left her to it, trusting she would let me know if something happened.
22
Car doors slammed, forcing me out of my slumber, and I turned to wake Shadia. The room was dark, the sunlight kept out by thick curtains, and I was alone. I’d cried myself to sleep and had apparently slept for hours. My face was dry and sore after the tears, but the fatigue in my body had lessened.
Voices drifted through the open window, and I froze. I knew I’d heard car doors, but for some reason, I blamed it on a dream. I hadn’t really believed there was a car outside.
Hurrying as silently as I could, I made my way into my chair and rolled to the window. Moving up under the curtains, I tried to look out.
The sky was that pale blue of a just set sun. No stars or moon yet, but they were just around the corner. The light was weak enough that I didn’t need sunglasses, which was good, for they lay on my bedside table, forgotten in my rush. Squinting, I turned my gaze to the road.
Two black cars stood there, idling. All the doors were open, and only the drivers were left in their seats. I couldn’t see anyone else, but I could hear men talking.
“… they’re here?” one of them said.
“No. Can’t picture them hanging around, but they may have left a clue as to where they were going,” another answered.
“Why does he think they stopped here?” A third voice asked. Crap, how many were there?
“The door. The blood in the driveway. That strip of blood there. He said it looked like what a wheelchair might leave behind. It’s clear someone passed through here not long ago, and it might as well be ‘em, right?” The second voice again.
As if on cue, I heard something crash into the front door, and one of the men cursed. “They’ve blocked it from the inside,” he said.
There was a lot more bumping and cursing before someone yelled for Nicholas.
Shadia appeared in the doorway, a rope of shredded fabric in her hands. I’d sunk down along the wall as they tried the door, not wanting the drivers to see me. Our eyes met at the name, and I stopped breathing for a second. What would he do with us if he found us?
Shadia waved for me to move, forming words with her lips that I couldn’t understand. However, her movement shocked me out of my frozen state, and I started looking for our bags. They’d stood beside the door, but they weren’t there now.
“I got them,” Shadia whispered when I looked up at her. “Come on.” She started down the hall as quietly as she could.
The voices still drifted through the window, but I couldn’t hear any words. Taking a deep breath, I rolled into the hallway and opened the door to André’s room.
André lay as we’d left him, but the sigh
t of him sent a chill through me. It took me three more deep breaths before I was able to roll into the room and look through the window.
Two men were in the garden, standing at Max’s grave. As I watched, Nicholas came limping into view, supporting himself on a cane. He stopped at the grave, listening to the other two men talk. I couldn’t hear them through the closed window, and I didn’t dare open it.
Below, someone banged at the kitchen door.
Shadia hissed my name, and I turned to see her standing in the doorway, bags flung all around her, and my sunglasses and hat in hand.
“Come on,” she hissed.
“Where are we going?” I whispered back.
“Getting out of here.”
“How?”
“I made a way while you slept.”
“What? Why?”
She sighed and knelt before me. “I heard them drive by a few hours ago and figured we should have a way out in case they came back. We couldn’t leave earlier, but now …” Her eyes jumped to André’s still form before moving back to me.
“There’s nothing holding us back anymore,” I whispered.
She nodded.
The banging stopped, then came a thump of something hitting a wall.
“Please, just go,” I whispered, praying to a god I didn’t believe in. “Just leave us alone.”
Shadia slapped the hat on my head. “Come on.”
I nodded, throwing a final look at André before I let her pull me away from the window. The door closed behind us with a strange finality.
We were halfway down the hall when someone knocked at the front door.
We both stopped, and I heard Shadia give a quiet yelp. Turning, I saw she’d clapped one hand over her mouth to stifle it.
“I know you’re in there,” Nicholas called, his voice muffled but clear enough through the hole in the door. “We just want to talk.”
