by Lia Habel
This was the bad part.
“Tell me,” Nora said, her voice thick. Was she crying? My guts wrenched at the idea that she was crying again. It’d been hard enough to listen to the first time.
“He … kept her. For a few months. He wanted to see if he could come up with some kind of cure. She responded well to his methods, for a while. He thought everything would be okay, that he could put it all back together somehow. But sometimes, with the Laz, it just messes too much with the brain. After a while she wasn’t your mother anymore, she was just a host. Like the things that came after you. A little reasoning power, ability to follow orders, not much else.”
And then she was definitely crying, mewling sobs that tore at my insides. I almost tried the door to see if it was still locked. The only thing I wanted to do, the fiercest instinct that I had at that point, was to take her into my arms again and comfort her.
A dark, sulky part of my mind reminded me that even if I could have done that, it would have only terrorized her further.
“Miss Dearly … Nora?” I asked, scooting closer to the door.
“Please … don’t … talk,” she pleaded in hiccups.
I nodded, not that she could see. For what seemed like forever, I listened to her cry. The sound—and not being able to stop it—made my muscles tense, my jaw clench.
“That’s why no one would let me look in her casket … Oh, God,” she eventually panted out. “He killed her.”
“No!” I didn’t mean to shout, and made an effort to lower my voice. “He didn’t kill her, Nora. Your father is not a murderer. Do you know how many years he’s devoted to trying to save people’s lives?”
“Years he devoted to …? He made my mother sick! Are you saying … he never told her? Told her what had happened to him? He never told me!”
“It was an accident!” I hushed my voice further. “He never would have hurt either of you, if he could help it. That’s why he didn’t tell you. He loved you both so much. For as long as I’ve known him, you’re all he’s talked about … he’s missed you so much.”
Wait.
Crap, I’d just gone and told her.
“What do you mean, I’m all he’s talked about?” she asked.
Crap, crap, crap.
“Nora …” I could fix this.
“What do you mean, for as long as you’ve known him? You’re a Punk! You were never in the army with him! You said you were in the army with him when we met on the street, but you’re a Punk!”
Her voice was starting to do that hysterical thing again. Before the entire base could hear her and descend upon my hallway, I fought out, “He’s one of us. He’s one of us, Nora … Nora, listen to me. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you the truth—”
“He’s not one of you!” she screamed. “He’s dead! He’s really dead! They buried him. I buried him! I put him in the freaking ground!”
She tried to compose herself then, with several deep breaths. I gave her as long as she needed, all the while mentally designing my tombstone. R.I.P., Captain Abraham R. Griswold. He was completely useless and made girls cry.
When she spoke again, she’d lost the battle with her lungs and was sobbing. “They kicked me out of his room the minute he died. They wouldn’t let me be with him …”
“Because they knew he was going to wake up,” I said.
“They carried the shrouded body from the house on a stretcher, and they wouldn’t let me follow,” she wept. Her voice was shaking.
“He was awake under the sheet.”
“He said something about his body, just before he … oh my … no … no …”
I began to worry that she was going into shock. I touched the door. “Nora, let me in. I swear, I won’t hurt you. That’s the last thing I’d do.”
“No, no, no …”
“At least open the door, Nora. Let me see you. Okay? Open the door.”
“No, no, no!”
I took a breath and summoned up the scary zombie voice. I didn’t want to do it, but maybe it’d get her attention. “Nora, open the door!”
Sudden silence.
“Nora, are you all right?”
Nothing.
“Nora?”
I kept talking, but she didn’t respond for a good ten minutes or so. When she finally did, I was on my feet and pacing, wondering if I ought to fetch Evola or Isley—did she need a living doctor, or a priest?
“What about me?” Her voice sounded broken. It frightened me to hear it, out of nowhere, in the quiet of the hall.
“Huh?”
“What about me? My … immunity?”
I forced myself to sit again. “What happened when you came home for your mother’s funeral?”
“What? I …” It hit her. “My hand. I broke a porcelain doll, and it cut my hand …”
“He subjected your blood to testing. By that point he’d begun to think there might be a slim chance he’d managed to pass the ability to carry the Lazarus on to you—and if he had, he couldn’t send you back to your school. But you surpassed his wildest expectations. Test after test, your blood refused to ‘take’ the Laz. I mean, the disease proteins themselves wouldn’t even replicate.”
“So, after her funeral …”
“Everything went back to normal.”
I heard her draw in air. “He went back to the outback after that—I only saw him at holidays. But at some point I had to have been exposed.”
“Yep. Trust me, there are vials of your blood down in the lab … cloned for research. We could probably do a full body transfusion with what we have. You’re immune.” I couldn’t help but smile. “No matter what, you’ll never become one of us. You might be one of the only people on earth guaranteed to die for good.”
“Why?” she choked out.
“Genetics. Sheer, stupid luck.”
She actually laughed a bit, bitterly. “I suppose this makes me just as big a freak as you are, then.”
I bristled. “I am not a freak.”
“Oh, you’re not?” she shot back.
“No. A freak is something rare. There’s an entire company at this base, over a hundred of us. There are more roaming the countryside, and still more under the command of General Whoever, out there. Now, feel free to call me what I am—call me a corpse, call me dead, call me a killer if you want. I’ve killed people in battle, I’ll admit it. But don’t call me what I’m not. I am not a freak, and I am not a cannibal, and—”
I would have added, I’m not a monster, if it hadn’t at that moment hit me that I was going all self-righteous on a girl whose world I had just turned upside down.
Smooth, Bram. When will you learn to shut up?
She was quiet for so long that I honestly started to fear she would never speak to me again. “Miss Dearly?” I eventually said.
“You can call me Nora.” Her voice was tearful again.
“I’m sorry for going off on you.” I felt like crawling off and finding a way to kick myself in the rear. One twist of the leg, might not be too hard. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts.”
“How did you know I was thinking?” She sounded wary, as if she now suspected me of mind reading.
“Your voice goes breathy when you are, I’ve noticed. My hearing’s actually pretty sharp. Some of the doctors think we have slightly heightened senses, since the illness wants us to hunt.”
“I’m sure being blind helps with that, too.”
“Huh?” I was confused. “I’m not blind.”
“You’re not?”
I realized what she meant. “No, no. Almost everyone’s eyes cloud over after death. Mine are just worse than usual. My vision is fine. Well, mostly. The world’s a little foggy, but given the things I’ve seen, I figure that has to be called an improvement.”
“You’re … very resilient, for someone who’s dead.” Her voice was a little steadier.
“And I think you’re far stronger than any of us were prepared to give you credit for.” I kept shooting my mouth off li
ke an idiot, telling her things I’d been ordered not to, and she kept going with it. I was impressed, honestly.
I heard one of the locks moving back, and then another. The door opened slowly, as far as the single safety chain left connected would allow it. The room was dark beyond, and I couldn’t make out anything aside from her tearstained face as she leaned close to the gap from her position on the floor. Her dark eyes were red-rimmed, but also so serious, so stern.
“So my father is a zombie?”
“Yeah.”
She blinked hard and swallowed. “Then where is he?”
“Come away from the window.”
I didn’t move.
“Pamela Roe, you come here this instant.”
Two cub reporters had begun camping outside our house the evening before, digital notebooks open wide in anticipation. One had a camera, and kept it almost obsessively pointed at our front door. I wondered how many reporters were hounding Nora’s Aunt Gene.
I studied them with a mixture of apathy and burning defiance. A part of me wanted to march out there and give them a show they’d never forget—cry and beat my breast, tear my clothes, beg for the return of my best friend.
The other part was so numb that the world seemed to be drifting by, as in a dream. Everything seemed inconsequential; everything seemed destined to rot. We were all going to die, or have something horrific happen to us, so what difference did it make? What could possibly have kept those questing men outside from their warm beds, aside from hunger for a scoop? Fear of the Punks? Concern for Nora’s well-being? Greed or ambition?
I was terribly, painfully present in the world, and so far removed from it.
“Pamela!”
“Yes, Mother.”
I took a slow step back, the hem of my skirt caressing the carpet. I hadn’t opened the curtains, but had watched the reporters from a gap between them, through the inner drapes of threadbare gauze. Through a veil.
“You mustn’t let them see you, Pamela,” my mother fretted. “They’ll get a picture of you, and what will it do to us to have your face on the news?”
She was right, of course. I would do well to listen to her. It was my fault that she was in the house to begin with, condemned to idleness. My mother, Malati, was a broad, strong woman, and was normally employed in helping my father in the bakery. Since Nora’s disappearance, however, she had to act like a “respectable” woman, and that meant being sequestered in the house with me.
We could not call on anyone. We could take calls, but they must be brief. We could not be seen working, in any capacity. The ideal female heart was to be so sensitive, so flooded by shock and sadness in a situation such as this, that listless grief could be the only response. To be seen as carrying on with life would mark us as strange, cruel, masculine—and, for me, it would be social death.
We’d not had these rules before I started at St. Cyprian’s. My parents had sent a scholarship application to the school eight years ago in an attempt to get me to stop crying over the fact that Nora had been sent there, away from me. It cost them nothing to indulge me, and they never imagined anything would actually come of it. The desire not to be separated from my sister-by-choice had changed the course of our lives forever.
Nora and her mother (and Dr. Dearly, I suppose, but he had always been away) used to live in a town house one street over from my father’s bakery. I remembered her now, tiny as I had been, creeping in several times a day to sniff about the tarts and cookies. I was jealous of her at first, because she had prettier dresses and the naturally curly hair that had been my ultimate worldly desire at that age. In fact, when our mothers initially introduced us, I had chosen to greet her by yanking on a fistful of her hair to see if it was real. Her response was to deck me in the nose.
It had been love at first fight.
After that violent first meeting, we played together, attended the public grammar school together, practically lived in one another’s houses. Even once Dr. Dearly attained his share of status, and his family moved to the mansion underground, we found ways to see each other every day. A day without one another had been incomprehensible. The longest we were ever without one another had been the two months between the time when she was shipped off to school and my acceptance there. Charity cases took a while to process. Those were the most tortuous two months of my short and uninteresting life.
And now here I was, alone, without her—with an interminable, Noraless future a possibility, hanging there above me like the sword of Damocles, ready to drop. It wouldn’t have been half as terrible if the messenger who arrived at our house the previous morning, stiff of bearing and stony-faced, simply told us that she had died. That would have been the end of it, book Z in the series, nothing left to do but mourn, or curse her into the afterlife.
But not knowing, and not being able to do anything about it, that was worse. Every time it hit me, the awful scrabbling sensation of not knowing, that feeling of helplessness, I wanted to pull my own hair and scream.
My mother sat down in her worn rocking chair and took up her embroidery. Her hands were dry and callused from working; they were unused to the dainty pastimes of high-bred ladies. The handkerchief she was working on now was the same one she had been working on for the past three years. “I’m as worried as you are, but that’s no cause to act like a person possessed. Let God give you strength.”
I slowly closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. My body had seemed beyond my control in recent hours, heaving and tearing, home to strange phantom pains—as if Nora was a part of my flesh that had been severed off. I obeyed my mother. I prayed for God to look upon us with pity.
I prayed for God to bring Nora back.
That afternoon, three uniformed army investigators came to speak to me. I sat next to my mother on our overstuffed satin sofa, the newest bit of furniture in our parlor. Beside it stood our Christmas tree, its wax candles unlit. Only our kitchen and the bakery were electrified.
The investigators were tired-looking men with tobacco stains on their hands. They filmed me with a portable recorder as I answered their questions. They didn’t accuse me of anything—they didn’t even appear particularly interested in my responses. I probably held a fairly low position on the suspect list.
No, I hadn’t heard anything from Nora after she and her aunt had dropped me off at home. Yes, I was accustomed to receiving calls and e-mails from her, and I hadn’t gotten any. Yes, they could download the contents of my phone. No, she hadn’t seemed troubled, outside of the usual. And even that hadn’t been as bad as it normally was.
“She seemed a little better,” I said.
“Better?” one of the investigators asked.
“She lost her father last year, and she was still depressed. But that day, she looked better.” That did it. My shoulders began to jerk. My mother moved closer and wrapped me up in her arms. “We went visiting. She said she didn’t want me to worry about her any longer. I even felt mad at her for not paying attention to my worries. She wasn’t a hundred percent, I know that. But I felt like I could be mad at her!”
“I’m afraid I must ask you gentlemen to leave,” my father said. He’d been roaming in and out of the bakery, keeping an eye on the proceedings. He was still wearing his apron, and his arms were covered with flour. “As you can see, she’s terribly troubled by all of this. She’ll get ill.”
“Of course, Mr. Roe. We’ll be in touch if we learn anything, or if we need to inquire further.”
Once they were gone, I gave in to the tears. My mother stroked my hair. I couldn’t even answer a series of simple questions. I wanted to go out there and find her—dredge every lake, comb every forest, interrogate every suspect. I wanted to help, I wanted to do something.
But I couldn’t even answer a series of simple questions.
My father knelt beside me and took my hand in his. He was an active man with dusky, freckled skin and dense, curly white hair. He had the smoothest voice. “Here, pet. Calm down. They’re wor
king as hard as they can. Everyone’s worried. It’s all right.”
“I want her back,” I sobbed.
“We all do,” my mother said. By then, she was crying herself.
“Pamela,” my father said, “do you think it would make you feel better or worse to watch the news?”
My mother had mandated that I not be allowed to watch or read the news, lest it upset me. I lifted my head and saw her bite her lip. But she didn’t argue.
“Better,” I said. “I want to know what’s going on.”
We only had one tiny screen, which normally hung on the wall of the bakery for customers to watch while they waited in line. My father left, and came back with it a few minutes later. There was a space for us to mount it on our own wall, hidden, when not in use, by a yellowed etching in a frame of crazed enamel. He handed me the screen’s archaic wood and brass remote device, the lettering on many of the buttons worn down from frequent use, and ran a cloth-covered cord to the kitchen for power.
The first channel I landed on was showing a “daily visual novel,” or DVN, as they were commonly called. So was the second. My blood ran hot at the idea that we’d apparently been attacked, that my friend was taken hostage or killed, and some people were still following their stories. My tears dried on my cheeks.
On Channel 3 a New London television personality, Madame Maureen Winters, was interviewing …
… was that Mink?
Yes, it was! I sat up, gaping at the screen.
“Here we have one of Miss Dearly’s schoolmates, Miss Vespertine Mink. Her mother has been good enough to agree to this interview, in the interests of informing the public and aiding the ongoing investigation. Good morning, Miss Mink.”
Vespertine had tried to don an expression of mourning, but she just looked pouty. She was wearing an ivory satin glengarry hat topped with an enormous black feather. “Good morning, Madame Winters.”
“Tell us, how was Miss Dearly the last time you saw her?”
Vespertine pretended to think. “Well, she was very agitated. She and her roommate were heading home for the holidays. Ah, her roommate is a scholarship girl … I doubt anyone would know her name, so I shan’t mention it. Always so giving, Miss Dearly. Always going out of her way for the less fortunate.”
