“Yeah,” I say as I sit back, so I’m facing him. “I guess. Are you?”
Derek wraps his arms back around his knees, still shivering periodically. “Do I look okay?”
“No,” I tell him honestly, trying for my best mocking voice. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” Derek says, smiling weakly.
I move in to sit next to Derek, wrapping my arms around his legs. He wraps his arms around me, and I hope that, together, we’ll be able to warm up a bit faster.
After a few minutes, once the teeth chattering has subsided, Derek speaks up again. “It was probably good that Kyle stayed down. Maybe he and Erin got out after all. I’m glad... I’m glad he’s not going through this.”
I can feel him nodding his head, but don’t turn to look at him. What’s he talking about? How could Kyle have - and then it hits me. Derek was in the back of the truck by the time the soldiers reached Kyle and me. He was banging on the doors and shouting to the heavens by the time that the soldiers dragged me away and issued the final shot. He was hauled away before we had the chance to talk in the truck. He doesn’t know what happened. That, or he’s not willing to accept it.
“Katie?” Derek asks, awaiting some sort of response.
For an instant my chest tightens and I stop breathing. I have to tell Derek what happened to Kyle.
“Katie?”
I turn to look up at Derek, his eyes are shining and pleading, his brows furrowed deeply and his forehead creased with worry.
I shake my head, and then rest my cheek on his knees, wrapping my arms even more tightly around his legs.
“No…” Derek says, shaking his head.
“We were just goofing around, but they... they thought that he... that he was...” I pause, trying to steady my voice, tears sliding down my cheeks and onto his legs as I continue. “They thought that he was one of them. They thought that he was infected.”
“But...” Derek says, and I can hear that his voice is as shaky as mine, “… he was my little brother.”
“I know,” I say quietly, holding tightly to Derek’s legs. “I know.”
Chapter 18 – I Hate You
Without a clock, music, or sunlight, it’s hard to gauge the passing of time, but it seems like a long while that we’re left alone in the cell. The only sound that I can hear, now that I’ve cried myself out and Derek has gone quiet, is the inhabitants of the neighboring cells yelling, growling, and clanging against their doors. From here, it sounds like many of them are infected, if not all of them. Part of me wishes that I’d paid more attention as I walked down the hall... and another part just doesn’t want to know.
Derek and I agree that we are definitely in the North End Hospital. He adds a theory that ‘B Block,’ as the soldiers refer to it, is part of the forgotten psych wing of the hospital, a place where patients were boxed up in tiny cells for observation and treated with unorthodox and often cruel procedures to cure various ailments. That was, of course, back in a time when lobotomies were all the rage.
After agreeing on our location, we don’t really talk anymore, resigning ourselves to silent waiting. Waiting for what, I’m not sure.
When someone does finally come along, we can hear them from all the way down the hall. Not because they themselves are being loud, but because it’s easy to follow the cacophony of noise emanating from the other cells as someone walks by. It’s the same sort of thing that you hear in dog kennels when someone walks past the cages.
Derek and I remain seated against the wall farthest from the door, looking up at the window, to see who approaches.
A man stands there now, peering in at us. He’s not a doctor, a guard, or a soldier. He’s a large man, but not tall. His hair and eyebrows are thick and gray, and his cheeks sag down around his mouth, reminding me of a ventriloquist’s dummy. I wonder who pulls his strings.
“Welcome to the Middleton Military facility,” he says in a smooth, even voice.
“Welcome?” I say aloud, to no one in particular. “Seriously?”
The man ignores me and continues. “I’m the captain, and this is my facility.”
“It sucks.”
Derek elbows me in the side, obviously not amused by the comment.
“Well, it does,” I insist.
The man behind the door opens his mouth to respond, but whatever sadness is left in me quickly boils up into anger at the situation - and now, at this man. I jump to my feet, and walk to the door so that I am almost eye level with the captain. When I get to the window, I see that the doctor’s standing behind the captain, clipboard in hand. He looks pained and worried. I return my attention to the captain.
“Why are you keeping us here like prisoners? What have you done with the other people that you’ve taken?”
“My dear,” the captain says, flashing me a round smile, “we don’t keep prisoners.”
“The cage begs to differ,” I growl at him.
“This is our quarantine wing,” he replies, his voice even and void of all emotion, like our conversation bores him. He turns to the doctor. “You tried to give her a clean bill of health, but she’s clearly injured. Look at that man. What do you see?”
The doctor approaches the window, looking past me at Derek. “He’s symptomatic. Second stage, I’d say twenty-four hours in, maybe a little more.”
“What?” I look back at Derek, who’s pale and shaking; he looks haggard.
The captain ignores me. “And the girl?”
I look back at the doctor, our eyes meet and he looks quickly down at his clipboard. “Clear.”
“What was that?” the captain says, voice still level, but full of venom. “Clear? You’d risk sending an injured girl with an infected companion into A Block with the others? You’d risk what little progress we’ve made here?”
“She’s -” The doctor stops, squeezes his eyes shut, then makes a decision. “She’s been immunized. She’s not a risk to anyone.”
“Oh, thought you could keep that little detail to yourself, did you?”
“I didn’t want -”
“I know what you didn’t want. But I’ve seen the bloodwork.” The captain looks back at me. “They’re both infected with the HT2 strain.”
At this, Derek looks up sharply. We both know that HT2 is the Gov’s name for the Aggressor strain of the virus. His eyes dart quickly between the man in the window, and me. I know that look: he’s assessing, deciding how to process the information. Only instead of arriving at a quick conclusion like he usually does, Derek just keeps looking back and forth, before finally turning his eyes back down to his knees, like he’s forgotten what he was trying to work out.
I turn back to the door. “You’re lying.”
“My dear,” he says in his maddening, calm voice, “I assure you that my only interest here is the truth. So let’s find it, shall we?”
He doesn’t wait for my response before continuing. “HT2 begins turning its host within twenty-four hours, with full transition by seventy two. He’s right on schedule, but you are not. When were you infected?”
I look down at my arm, where the scars are under the sleeve of my gown. “November.”
The doctor breaks in. “You mean you were immunized in November?”
I falter, not wanting to think back to the day that Dale and I were attacked by the Aggressors, or the day that I was immunized. Because it was the same day. Quietly, I answer, “Both.”
“Testing then?” The captain asks, immediately jumping to a logical, but ultimately incorrect, conclusion. “You said you were from Middleton, but that was a lie. You arrived on the West Highway, which puts you in... Carnassey. But there was no testing in Carnassey, so who gave you the serum?”
No testing in Carnassey? Try telling that to all of the people that Dr. Ashmore infected while trying to work out an inoculation. The Ims were there, they saw, although they were never used for the testing. But the captain isn’t lying... so either the testing Dr. Ashmore did was not Gov regulated, or else this man simply
doesn’t know about it.
“I found it.” That’s mostly true.
The captain laughs. “So you inoculated yourself, and then what? Went out and got yourself attacked? Thought that you’d be safe? That they wouldn’t come for you?”
The doctor jumps in again, growing more and more agitated. “It can’t be both! If she were infected, she’d be dead by now! If she was bitten after being immunized, she wouldn’t be infected!”
The captain considers this, then looks over at me. “Unless, you were bitten first. That’s it, isn’t it?”
I nod my head in confirmation. The doctor looks horrified; the captain looks like he just won the lottery.
“Thank you, my dear, that’s all I need.” The captain turns and begins walking away.
The doctor blinks a few times, as though waking up from a very intense dream. “You can’t leave her in there!” He begins chasing the captain down the hall. I hear them shouting, then the door of B Block slams and they’re gone.
I sit down next to Derek again, noticing the subtle shaking in his hands, the chattering of his teeth, and the way he squeezes his eyes shut every so often, as though shutting out a painful memory or thought.
But how did Derek become infected? And when? The doctor said that it happened in the last day and a half.
I cover my mouth with my hand, shaking my head. I want to deny it, I want to say that it must have happened some other way, but once the theory has formed in my head, the evidence stacks all around, and it’s hard to deny.
I infected him. The night that we snuck out, the night that I was attacked... the night we kissed. I’m not immune to the virus; I’m infected by it. Somewhere, deep down inside and repressed by a serum that was supposed to be taken before an attack, not afterwards, I am one of them. An Aggressor.
That’s why they come for me. And that’s why the Passives don’t care, why I’m invisible to them, because biologically, I am one of them.
Derek was right; we’re both going to die in here. But it’s not the Gov that’s killing us. It’s me.
“Katie,” Derek says, between clenched teeth.
“Yeah?” I ask, looking over at him. His eyes are squeezed shut again, and the shaking in his hands is bordering on convulsions.
“Can you sit a bit further away from me?”
I shuffle over a bit so that I’m no longer touching him. I suppose, with the news that I have sealed his fate, he no longer wants me so close.
“Further,” Derek says, eyes still closed.
I move another foot, and then another, before Derek opens his eyes and sighs with relief. His hands relax and he lays them on the ground, resting his head back against the wall.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him.
“It’s not you,” he says. “It is... but... it hurts. It hurts to be near you. My head....”
This is how it starts, the end of us. How long can Derek hold on?
We sit in silence for another immeasurable increment of time until a guard arrives with our lunch. It’s the same man who was sitting at the doors leading into B Block.
He knocks on the window, and then slides the tray through the slot at the bottom of the door. I walk over to examine the tray, which has two paper plates on it, each covered in a brown, gelatinous blob. I recognize the stuff as being the same Gov issue meal substitute that Dale and the soldiers ate when they had first arrived at the MegaMart.
Dale made it for me once. It’s this brown powder that you mix with water to create a calorie dense meal substitute that tastes not unlike gravy. Cheap, easy to store, and providing everything that a person needs to survive, it was a logical choice to give us. It’s not like they’re about to waste good food on anyone in the quarantine wing. On study subjects.
I place one plate on the ground where I was sitting a moment ago, then bring the tray with the other plate over to Derek. He accepts it with shaking hands, keeping his eyes closed until I have returned to my own meal. I take a bite. I’m not sure whether to chew it or not, so I just swish it around in my mouth for a few seconds before swallowing.
Halfway through his meal, Derek speaks up suddenly. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t prepare you better.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I tell him, “You know that, right?”
Derek shrugs, and then takes another bite. He seems to have chosen a similar swill and swallow method of eating.
“You’re a brilliant leader,” I admit. “I didn’t think so in the beginning, but you are.”
Derek nods his head; not agreeing with me, but just, accepting the statement. I don’t try and push the idea any further. We spend the rest of the day talking, and not talking, and mostly sitting still and far away from each other.
When I awake the next morning, Derek has moved into the farthest corner of the room from me. He sits there, arms wrapped around his legs and a deep look of concentration on his face.
“It comes and goes,” he says, relaxing again. “Like waves. One minute, I hate you... so, so much that it hurts. And then the next, I can tolerate it again. But it’s getting harder.”
“Hey,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “They’re gonna separate us. When they come back this morning, they’ll see that I’m okay and they’ll move me someplace else. You’ll see.”
Derek nods his head towards the door where a pile of clothes sits. A new tray is there as well, a fresh - if you can even call it that - plate of brown meal substitute on it. I notice that Derek is now wearing his usual clothes, minus the jacket, which is sitting at his side, next to an empty plate.
“They’ve been back,” Derek says roughly. After a minute, his eyes slam shut again and his nose curls up, and he speaks between clenched teeth. “You can’t imagine what’s running through my head.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Derek takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “When the waves hit, I want to... lash out. I think about... I think about hurting you. I want to come over there and -” He lets out a sharp growl, clawing his fingernails into his legs.
I look around the room quickly. I’m already as far away from Derek as I can get. There are no windows, no vents, nowhere at all for me to escape to. The door’s locked shut, and my only means of defense against the much taller man is a plastic lunch tray and a soggy paper plate.
After a minute, the wave seems to subside. Derek’s face and hands relax and he swallows hard. “Okay, it’s okay.” He opens his eyes. “You should get your stuff now.”
I carefully walk over to the door, collecting the pile of clothes and the paper plate of ‘food,’ then go back to my corner to change and eat. My arsenal of weapons now includes the plastic lunch tray, two soggy paper plates, and two hospital gowns.
Derek once taught us now to strangle an attacker with your own clothes, but I don’t want to think about that right now.
“When the time comes,” Derek says meaningfully, “remember that when they turn, they aren’t people anymore. They’re nothing.”
“You aren’t one of them.”
“Not yet,” he says, gulping slowly and with effort, “but when the time comes, remember.”
I shake my head at him. “They’re people, Derek. Maybe you’ll remember, I can talk to you and -”
“You can’t think like that!” Derek shouts, making me jump on the spot. “Remember Kenny and that man. You’re Kenny, I’m that man. You made the right choice then, and when the time comes, you’ll make it again.”
I don’t reply.
“Swear it!” Derek says aggressively. His eyes are wild as he stares across the room at me. “Tell me you swear it!”
“I swear,” I tell Derek. I’m not sure if I’m lying or not, and I don’t want to find out.
The time stretches by so slowly, it’s maddening. It seems like the whole day passes before the guard arrives again to deliver another meal. He gestures for me to bring him the used tray, so I hop up and trade it for a fresh tray of ‘food.’
As I do, Derek shou
ts at the guard from his corner. “You see?” He yells, pointing at me. “She has no symptoms. Your tests were wrong, you have to get her out of here!”
The guard, now holding the empty tray, looks from me to Derek and back again. His impartial expression falters, eyebrows pulling up as he compares Derek’s degrading state and my static one. “I... I have no say in it.”
“She has no symptoms.”
I look over to Derek, who’s slowly getting to his feet, then back to the guard. “Please.”
“She has no symptoms.”
I take a step back from the door, knocking into the uneaten tray of food, the brown goop splattering onto the floor.
Derek stalks his way to the door, and slams a powerful fist against the window. “She’s not going to turn!” He reaches one hand through the slot in the middle of the door and swipes at the guard, two of his fingers hooking onto his shirt and slamming his body against the door with a surprising amount of force.
The tray clatters noisily to the ground, drawing more shouts from the surrounding rooms.
“You’re killing her!”
The guard cries out in surprise, twists his way out of Derek’s grip and jumps back out of reach.
I take another step back, bumping into the wall, then make quick eye contact with the guard. His face has grown pale as he takes in my tiny frame, my frightened face, and the large, aggressive man locked in the room with me. The full gravity of the situation has dawned on him. He opens his mouth, as though to speak, then slams it shut again, turns, and dashes out of view. The noises in the hall suggest that he’s running away very quickly.
“You’re killing her!” Derek cries, pulling his hand back inside the room and reaching down to grab the plastic tray from the ground, dumping the brown slop off of it in the process. He sticks part of the tray through the slot. He shoves down on the tray, at first bending, and then cracking it, a large piece of plastic clattering to the ground on the outside of the door. He shoves another corner of the tray into the slot and repeats the process, creating a very large and sharp edge out of the otherwise harmless tray.
Derek presses both hands and the tray up against the window. “Get her out of here!” he bellows at the empty hall before turning to face me.
Population: Katie Page 21
