Ruth’s lips thinned into a bloodless slash, but she didn’t say anything.
“In the meantime, Charlie just gets worse. His hands are torn apart. If he’s awake, he’s furious and starving, even right after we’ve fed him. I know you don’t want to hear this sweetheart, but he’s in pain all the time. He hasn’t had any rest in a long, long time. Neither have you. Neither have I.”
“What is it that you want me to do? Let him go? Let him wander out into the street to attack someone or be attacked by another Infected or shot by a stranger?”
“No, I don’t want him to die alone on the street. He’s still my little boy.”
Ruth took a stuttering breath and squinted her eyes against the sharp tears that sprang upon her. “But we are talking about him dying?”
“If there were some improvement— if there were even periods of calm or moments when I could glimpse the real Charlie, I wouldn’t be discussing it.”
“This isn’t terminal. He’s healthy except for his mind. I know he can beat it, we just have to find the right treatment to help him. He’s still in there, Bill, our Charlie is still inside.”
Bill shook his head and his eyes became red. “I hope to God you’re wrong, Ruth. I hope there’s nothing left of him at all. He would be so confused and frightened and suffering. You think he understands why his mom and dad don’t hug him anymore? Or why he isn’t able to play outside of his room? Christ! Ruth, we shackled him. His own parents. The restraints make sores on his skin. We only touch him to change bandages or clean him or fix the straitjacket. I hope he’s not in there at all. He wouldn’t understand.”
Ruth sobbed. “We’re only protecting him.”
“I know,” said Bill, rubbing the back of her hand, “But it’s become torture. For all of us.”
“I’ll find another restraint system. We’ll make a safe, padded room for him. I can’t just abandon him—”
Bill began shouting. “But that’s what we are doing, one way or another.” He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “Let’s say we continue this way, and let’s say we are very lucky in this bad new world we live in, and we manage to survive for forty more years. So will Charlie. You said he’s a healthy kid other than the brain damage. And his hands. Let’s say we can continue to keep him healthy. We’ll find antibiotics for when he bites himself and prevent him from dying in agony from sepsis. We’ll start tying him to a telephone pole in the street on sunny afternoons so that he can run and exercise. That way he won’t develop seeping bed sores or atrophied muscles when his room gets too small. We’ll sedate him every night and brush his teeth and scrub him and change his diapers so he doesn’t wallow in his own filth. Day after day for forty years—”
“Stop!” cried Ruth, “Stop it! I would do it all for him. Every day. I knew what I signed up for when we adopted him.”
A wail of rage tumbled down the basement steps. Charlie had heard them and was awake. Bill swiped the back of his hand across his eyes as the scream renewed itself.
“I know you would Ruth. I would too. But we became parents in another world. We could do all those things and more, but it will never take away even a fraction of his misery. Listen to that. That is his entire existence. How can you bear to see him in such anguish every day? Even if you could stand it, what would happen to him when we die? There isn’t any institution to take him to when we get too old to care for him. There’re no other relatives to take over. He’ll starve to death. Alone, chained up, his brain still a lost little boy’s. He’ll suffer for days and days before he finally dies. Is that what you want?”
Ruth just sobbed, clutching his hand.
“I worry about it every time we leave him,” Bill continued, “every time we go out to get supplies or medicine, I think, will this be the trip that kills us? Will my little boy be here abandoned and starving or freezing when the generator dies? Will someone break in and hurt him or— or eat him? I can’t do it anymore,” Bill’s voice broke and he dropped his head into his hands.
After a moment, Ruth said, “You’re asking me to murder my child.”
“I’m asking you to help me stop his suffering.”
“There could still be a cure out there.”
Bill let go of her hand. She crossed to the incubator and pulled out the plate. She didn’t even need the microscope. The bacteria had swarmed over the filter disks in milky gray clumps. The medication didn’t even slow them down. Bill could already see the despair in her face. He stood up and walked over to her. He took the agar plate from her hand and put it on the counter. “We’ve done everything that we can do. There’s nothing else to try. It’s time to let him go,” he said.
“Maybe I just need to try a larger dosage.”
“The dosages you tried were already too large for a child.”
“Then I must have contaminated the samples,” she cried, and picked up the plastic plate again. “It’s this house! I can’t keep the lab sterile. Everything just seeps in here, no matter what I do.” She flung the bacteria into the trash barrel. She picked up a glass beaker and flung it too. Bill grabbed her arms and wrapped her in a hug.
“It’s over Ruth, there is no cure. There’s nothing else to try. We can’t go on this way. It’s time to let him go.”
“Not today. Not yet,” she cried.
He pulled back from her for a moment. “The longer we wait, the more dreadful this will all become.”
“Please, I just need a little more time. To get things ready. To do it right.”
Bill shook his head, his bristly beard scraping through the hair on the top of her head. “We’ll just keep putting it off.”
“I can’t Bill. He’s our baby. I can’t.”
Bill was silent and the distant shrieks from Charlie poured into the lab, filled the quiet with misery. At last Bill sighed and gently pushed Ruth away. “It took me a long time to understand how much Charlie is suffering. But you’ve been distracted by your work and the hope you had of curing him. Your tests are done. Take some time. Spend some time with him. You’ll see he isn’t the little boy you remember. Eventually you’ll see that the alternative is kinder. I’ll wait.” He didn’t wait for her to answer, just climbed the stairs to the kitchen.
Chapter 2
In February, Charlie and Bill got sick from something they’d eaten. Before it would have meant a day home from school and work. A few slices of toast, flat gingerale and a marathon of cartoons. Ruth’s mind listed all the things it could be now: cholera, dysentery, killer flu. Her thoughts rolled over and over, jagged stones that banged in her head. She went out, looking for something, anything to help them. Toward evening she panicked, slogging through the snow to each store she could remember, but they were all ransacked and even the generic, over-the-counter drugs were gone. She’d been looking all day, trudging from broken glass door to broken glass door in freezing rain and fresh snow.
Exhausted and wet, she thought of going home. But Bill had begged her to find Charlie a sedative instead of stomach medicine. Enough to stop his misery. Ruth didn’t tell him she’d already set it aside. It was locked in the cabinet in her lab, where Bill never went. Charlie’s screams had died into whimpers and toneless sobbing after two days of near constant vomit. She hadn’t thought any of them could be more exhausted than they already were, but she’d been wrong.
Charlie’s weak cries had fooled her into believing he was the boy she’d known a year ago. He had barely even fought when she cleaned him up, she wasn’t even sure he needed the restraints. He’d lain on the floor where she put him when she was finished, dozing and starting, his dark hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, his cheeks bright with fever. She wanted to curl up next to him, to rake her hand through his hair to get it off his skin, to fan cool breezes onto his face and kiss him. She knew that she couldn’t, but it didn’t stop her aching for it. The pain they were all in almost made her agree to do it, right then. But she’d escaped instead, with a made up mission to find medicine that wouldn’t do much a
nyway. If she went back now, she might give in. Then there would be no Charlie, not even the mindless version that had replaced her funny, handsome little boy. Ruth couldn’t go much farther without risking getting lost in the blizzard, though, and she would freeze if she didn’t get back to the house soon. A bookstore was all that was left, but she went in anyway, to delay going home for a few more minutes.
She was surprised to see that the store was almost as badly ransacked as all the others. She realized that most of the books were being burnt to stay warm, because a few of the wooden shelves were broken into splintered slabs and piled in a corner near the door. She looked around at the few remaining books and eventually found one on natural cures. In other days, it might have made her roll her eyes in private. There was nothing, in Ruth’s mind, better than modern medicine. Sure, people had used natural remedies for thousands of years, but the life expectancy of those people was decades shorter before medicine and technology made giant leaps forward. But now— now it wasn’t just a way to stall for time. Now it was an entire book full of things Ruth might have overlooked. A handbook for a city girl after the city was gone. It was armor against Bill and his despair. It was a way to find a cure, maybe. Or for now, at least to ease an upset stomach. But where was she going to get these plants in the middle of winter? Even in the spring she could go weeks without getting a glimpse of grass between the pavement. She shrugged off her doubt. For now, the book was enough.
She returned home, ready to face the misery that waited for her.
By the time the storm had cleared, Bill and Charlie had recovered. But something had changed. She didn’t know if it were her own resolve that had weakened or if Bill was more depressed than before, but both of them knew that they couldn’t go on as they were for much longer. Neither one brought it up.
Ruth began going to the botanic gardens, though the usual early thaw didn’t arrive and the streets were a treacherous mix of icy crust and decaying metal cars. She saw few of the Infected, anymore. Most often they would surprise her by stumbling out of an alley or snarling at a feral dog. It wasn’t hard to escape them. Even though they could run as fast as she could, they were weak and clumsy, and Ruth simply threaded in between car wreckage until they lost interest. Most of the Infected that were on the street simply had the bad luck of wandering out into freezing conditions. Some made it long enough to begin to starve, but most were dead within a day or two.
The greenhouses at the botanic gardens were almost as cold as the rest of the city, but the glass was intact and the wind couldn’t whip through them the way it did outside. The sun was only a pale cold coin and the condensation had turned to frost on the waxy leaves of the dead plants. Ruth regretted that the tropical plants were dead, there would be no replacing those, but she combed through what was left for anything she could salvage or recognize before spring. The walkways were a tan, sodden slush of old leaves that hadn’t been swept since the Plague, probably. In just a year, the beds had become tangled and overrun.
She picked through the dead stems holding leaf after leaf up to the pale light to study its shape, one hand on the open herb book, completely forgetting the cold. She was hovering over the agrimony on her hands and knees, picking up the burrs and sealing them in a plastic container when she heard someone clear their throat behind her. Ruth’s muscles froze with a painful jolt.
“I don’t much care if you’re desperate or stupid,” said a woman’s voice, “but the vegetables are needed for others. You’d better put them back and go, while I’m still willing to let you.”
Ruth’s heartbeat was so fast, that she began to feel dizzy. She slowly raised her hands to show they were empty. “I didn’t come for vegetables or any food. I have plenty.” There was only silence behind her and she began to panic. Offer her something, she thought, Offer anything. Just get out of here. “I’ll share with you if you like, just think about what you are doing first,” she pleaded.
“What did you come for then?”
Ruth’s thoughts were sizzling and leaping. She caught one thought a self defense class had taught her years before: Make it hard to kill you. Make yourself more human. “I’ve got a little boy at home, and a husband. They are sick. I can’t find any medicine anywhere, so I came here to make some if I can. See?” she said, holding up the book. She felt the woman take the book from her. “Is it okay for me to turn around?” Ruth turned as she asked so that the woman wouldn’t refuse. If she could see her face, maybe she had a chance.
She was Ruth’s age, softer around the middle maybe, in a jumper and wool tights. She looked like she’d walked here from her second grade classroom. Ruth didn’t know if the woman’s normalcy made her feel better or more frightened. “Are you a gardener?” the woman asked.
Ruth brushed the soil from her hands. “Ruth Socorro. I’m a— I was a pediatrician.” She held out a shaky hand to the woman. The woman grinned and closed Ruth’s hand in both of hers. Ruth almost sighed with relief.
“You’re a doctor?”
Ruth held up her other hand to stop her. “I was a doctor. Now I’m just someone who knows how to apply a bandaid. If I can find one, that is.”
“Oh no, you’re much more than that. You’re the only sane, living doctor I’ve met in the past year. I desperately need your help.”
“I don’t know—” began Ruth, pulling her hand back.
“I’m not after your stockpile of drugs. I just need a little of your time. There are people you can really help, people in pain.”
Ruth stared at her for a long moment. She wanted to believe the woman, but she knew Bill would tell her she was crazy, that people were only looking out for themselves these days.
“Look, if you won’t do it out of the goodness of your heart—” the woman began, but Ruth waved at her to stop.
“Of course,” she said, “Of course I’ll come and help them. But I haven’t got much in the way of medicine.”
The woman nodded and bit her bottom lip. “Maybe we can trade secrets. You teach me a little bit of first aid, and I’ll teach you a little botany. I can’t tell you how to make medicine out of them, of course, but if you find the name of a plant you can use, I can probably help you find it. I know almost every plant in the conservatory and more than half of what’s in the outer garden. I’ve been coming here to take care of them since— since the power failed anyway. My name’s Juliana. I was a Home Economics teacher.”
Ruth agreed to meet her at the greenhouse the next day, after she had gone home to Bill and Charlie. She hurried back through the icy streets feeling lighter, purposeful. Better than she had in weeks. Maybe she just needed other people. Maybe help would convince Bill they could do this, if Juliana’s community was a good one.
But Ruth got a nasty shock when she returned home. Bill was slumped on the top step, holding a bloody towel to his side and watching the front door shudder in its frame as a series of loud thuds exploded behind it.
“What happened?” Ruth ran up the steps to help him.
“Charlie got loose. He must have chewed through the straps or something.” He drew in a hissing breath as Ruth lifted the cloth from his wound to inspect it. “I went into his room to give him lunch, and he leapt at me. I tried to push him back and shut the door, but it was too late. He bit me and he wouldn’t let go. I tried everything. It hurt like hell and he wouldn’t stop. I had to hit him.”
Ruth drew back a little to look at Bill’s face. He shook his head. “I didn’t want to. I slapped him. I slapped Charlie. But it didn’t do any good. He started whipping his head back and forth, like a puppy with a toy. Like he wanted to take a chunk out of my skin. So I hit him in the head with that vase thing in the hall. You know, the one he made at that day camp, that’s squashed on one side?” Bill was crying, wiping his face with a sleeve. “The pain was so intense, I couldn’t think of anything but getting him to let go. And Charlie’s vase was in reach. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He sobbed. “I’m sorry, Charlie,” he yelled toward the door.
She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that everything would be fine. That he’d only done what he had to. But instead she thought secretly, I would have found another way. I wouldn’t have hit him. I love him more. The wrongness of it overwhelmed her. So the rational, doctor side of her stepped in to save them all.
“Come on,” she said, “We have to get you out of the cold.” She wished she’d said something more loving, something to make him feel better, but she didn’t know what.
Bill shook his head. “Charlie’s still loose. I can’t go back in there and risk doing something even worse.”
“We can’t stay out here. You need stitches and it’s so cold. And what would happen to Charlie?”
Bill was silent, still crying. Ruth knelt down and squeezed his hand in her own. “Okay, I’ll get Charlie to his room. Don’t fall asleep out here, I’ll only be a few minutes.” She took off her heavy coat and wrapped it around him. Charlie was still banging on the door and Ruth decided to use his distraction. She went into the yard and climbed carefully onto the rickety generator shed. She tried to ease open the living room window without making too much noise. She could see Charlie now, flinging his little body at the door. His head was caked with drying blood. Ruth wasn’t sure she could forgive her husband for that, despite realizing that he had done only what was necessary to survive. The window wiggled and Ruth pushed it up inch by inch, holding her breath. It was a long drop, but there wasn’t anything she could use as a step. She jumped down as softly as she could, the thud lost in Charlie’s own pounding. Ruth scanned the room for anything she could use to restrain him. Most of the furniture had been pushed back to make space for the wood they’d scrounged to burn in the fireplace. Otherwise, the room was empty. The restraints in Charlie’s room were broken. She had to keep him still long enough to fix his wound and get him safely back where he couldn’t harm anyone. There wasn’t really any choice. She slid the window closed and held her breath as she crept behind Charlie to the kitchen. The lab door squeaked and Ruth winced but a glance back at Charlie told her he wasn’t noticing anything but his own rage. She closed the door behind her and went down to open the cabinet. The tray of small glass bottles glittered like something sharp and hot. She pulled one out. It rolled in her hand, smooth and heavy. She unwrapped a syringe and looked at it. I could finish it now, she thought, just a little extra and all this misery would be over for him. For Bill too. But not for me. It’ll never be over for me. She pulled the right dosage into the needle and stopped. Not today. Not on a bad day, I’ll wait for a good one, when we aren’t all trying to hurt one another. Bill would have told her that there were no more good days, but he wasn’t there to argue, so she went back into the kitchen and found an old tablecloth.
Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) Page 2
