“Are those people?” Nella asked.
Frank leaned forward and gently brushed the ash from a small lump. Skin crackled like cellophane and fell away from a thin white bone. Frank shuddered and wiped his hand on his shirt. He held up the lantern again.
“So many. Why did they stay? Why did they block themselves in?” he asked. Nella carefully climbed onto a clean section of the platform and Frank followed. The far tunnel was blocked with more bags and the benches from the station. They picked their way through the tangle of people toward the stairs. Gold summery sunlight filtered down onto the staircase, glinting in the flying soot that Nella and Frank disturbed with each step. A strange, thick puddle of blackened glass lay at the base of the stairs. Nella stared at it as Frank climbed up before her.
“Why did this glass melt but the bones from the people are still here?”
Frank shook his head. “I think that was more sand, not glass.”
“What?”
“Come and see,” he called grimly. She shut off the lantern and climbed slowly up the stairs. Even before she reached the top she could tell that the light was all wrong. Overexposed, uninterrupted. As if the station emerged into an empty field instead of dense city landscape. Frank was shading his eyes with one hand and she couldn’t see his face. The top of the stairs sunk from her line of vision as she climbed. A ring of sea green bubbles surrounded the stairwell, almost a foot high. Nella reached out and touched it. Cool and hard. More glass. She looked around her. The roads were obscenely exposed instead of tucked behind buildings. There were no buildings. A few square empty sockets, a few walls leaning here and there, a sea of broken concrete at their feet. And everything swirled with ash and grit that caught in her nostrils and the corners of her eyes. She wiped her face and spun around to look behind her. Far behind, she could make out the edges of buildings in the direction they had come from. They were like islands in a fog though, indistinct, wavering. Less real than the rubble she stood on.
“Everyone?” she asked.
Frank nodded. “Must be. It’s miles of this.”
She spun around, looking back the way they had come. The moving ash made a haze, but she thought she could just make out a line of buildings breaking the horizon. She tried to picture the capitol as it had been, tried to remember which parks or monuments she should have been able to see from the subway. It was impossible. Just lumped, huddled concrete rubble in perfect squares. The roads between each demolished city block were the only sign that any human— that any living thing— had ever been there. That they hadn’t suddenly emerged from the subway onto the surface of a barren planet.
“How did it spread so far? Even without firefighters— it should have burned itself out.”
He touched the bubbled glass mound in front of them with his fingertips. “This wasn’t just a fire. Bomb maybe. Not the first. This was a shelter. That’s why those people blocked off the tunnels, to keep from getting sick. Sandbags were here too, that’s what the glass is.”
“Why? Who would bother? Everyone was already dead.”
“Maybe they were scheduled to go off if everyone was dead. What was the word? A dead man’s switch? Or maybe an accident. Or maybe someone was in a facility playing with buttons and pushed the wrong one.”
“Or someone wanted to finish the job?” asked Nella.
“Maybe. It happened after the Plague, that’s for sure. I bet the people downstairs were refugees. Someone built the shelter. Someone warned them to use it. A government? Just a smart survivalist? I don’t know.”
Nella was silent for a long moment. “This is why, isn’t it? They’re all going to be like this. Empty craters, everyone dead or scattered. How did we get missed?”
“We don’t know that. The capitol of any country is the first logical place to attack in war time. Maybe they were auto-targeted here. Maybe this is the only place that got hit. We can’t assume this is the reason we haven’t met anyone.”
“Then what’s your theory?”
He sighed and turned back to the stairwell, pulling her gently back the way they had come. “I think more people died in the Plague and its aftermath than we realized. We were very lucky, Nella. We lived to see a Cure. Almost everyone else has had eight years to fight the Infected, to suffer the breakdown of order and kill or rob from each other, or just to starve. It was silly of me to expect help here, just a dying instinct left over from Before.”
They stepped gingerly past the gray bundles on the platform and back into the subway tunnel. Neither one wanted to explore more. What do we do now? Nella wondered, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. They walked back to the pawn shop in heavy silence and camped there again, not even bothering to pull the security gate down behind them.
Chapter 9
Most of the freshness had evaporated from the morning by the time Ruth reached the hospital. The bulbous bellies of the clouds above her and the wind rushing past as she rode her rust-spotted bike had fooled her into thinking it would stay cool. Instead, she was heavy with sweat by the time she’d hidden the bike in the overgrown shrubs.
She looked up at the building. It sprawled over the grounds like the clawing roots of a great tree. An old Kirkbride model, it must have housed almost a thousand patients at some point. But it had been abandoned even before the rest of the world emptied out. The stone walls, once naked and clean, were overgrown with climbing trumpet creeper, in some places several inches thick, so that even the outline of the structure was softened. Parts of the far wings had collapsed and the hollow sockets that had been patient rooms were carpeted with moss and rotting leaves. The whole building reminded Ruth of a corpse mid-decay, half melted back into the earth, with all the secret parts glaring out at the world.
The central building had survived, and it was here that Juliana had brought her almost seven years before. The glass in the doors had been covered with large sheets of plywood and the doors were barred with a long piece of heavy scrap metal. Ruth thought it looked like an old beam axle. She wondered where the small woman had found it and how she had gotten it to the hospital.
There was a loud screech of rubbing metal whenever Juliana opened the door, and the shrieks would start immediately. Seven years ago, it had shocked and horrified Ruth. It had been a sort of hell to walk into the place surrounded by screams. Now, though it shamed her to admit the thought, it felt more like walking into the local dog pound. The thick vines and shadowy stone made it look cool and peaceful from the cement walk. Ruth tried to persuade herself that it wouldn’t be so bad, helping Juliana, if Father Preston just stayed away.
The door was unbarred now, which meant Juliana was inside. Ruth wondered what would happen if a fire started while Juliana was gone. There were people out there who would do it. People who thought the hospital was insane and dangerous. People who actively hunted the Infected.
Ruth had met them. Some of them tried to idolize her. One of them had even showed up to the police station a few years earlier. He’d passed a string of blackened, leathery lumps through the receiving window without saying anything.
“What’s this?” she asked, staring at the string. It was looped, like a necklace, each lump knotted into place so they wouldn’t slide.
“It’s for the bounty,” hissed a reedy voice. The window was too smudged with greasy prints to see who was out there.
“What bounty?”
“The bounty for the Zombies. Joe Mackey said you’d pay a can for each ear. I caught these in a back alley where they had cornered a bunch of wild dogs. I sliced them off the ones that I took care of myself. Amateurs might try to pass you ears they’ve swiped from corpses, but Gray will always bring you the real deal.”
Ruth jerked her arm back from the receiving tray. She wiped her hand down the side of her pant leg. “N-no, that’s not me. I don’t pay bounties. I don’t hunt people either. And I don’t know any Joe Mackey.”
“Now don’t be like that. You want fresher ones? Next time I’ll bring them in quicker.
You’re hard to track down and—”
“No. I don’t want fresher ones. I don’t hunt people. I don’t pay bounties. I offer a way out for the chronically ill when they no longer have someone to take care of them.”
“Listen, lady,” hissed the voice and the owner drew close enough to the glass for Ruth to see dark leather clothing but nothing else, “I don’t care how you get to sleep at night. You want me to tell you I put them out of their misery? Fine, I ushered them into heaven with a soft kiss. Would you rather I saved a pack of school kids from ravening hordes of Zombies? Then next time, those are the ears I’ll bring you. But I came to trade and I did a lot of work to get you that little bauble and I expect to be paid.” The voice was a rumble now, quiet and vicious. Ruth pressed her hand against her hip, looking for the gun she had locked in the safe.
“Take your trophies and leave,” she said.
“Not until I’m paid.”
“I told you, I don’t pay bounties.”
“Joe Mackey told me you did. So either he’s lying or you are. I don’t really care much who is, but you’re here and he’s not and somebody is going to pay me, or the situation is about to get really nasty.”
The overt threat snapped Ruth out of her unease. “The glass is bulletproof. So are the doors. I’m locked in here. There’s nothing you can do, so take your stuff and leave.”
A sleeve swiped a few times across the glass and its owner’s eyes appeared an inch outside. The man’s gaze darted around the small office, resting at last on Ruth. The corners of his eyes crinkled with his slow, sleazy smile.
“You can’t stay there forever. You have no supplies and no water. I can wait.” He turned and leaned his back against the glass and began whistling.
The man was right. Ruth was not prepared for any type of siege. This was simply where she spent her days until someone needed her. She couldn’t shoot him. She’d never shot a healthy person before. Besides, the glass was just as bulletproof for her as it was for him. There was a back exit, but even if she slipped out when he wasn’t looking, then what? He could just wait her out and attack her when she came back.
Ruth sighed. “A can for each?” she asked.
The man whirled around, his leather jacket brushing more of the grime away. She could see most of his face now, but didn’t recognize him anyway. The sleazy smile was back. “That’s right, twenty cans for twenty ears.”
“And then you leave and never come back.”
“I swear,” he said, making an x over his chest, “I will never darken your door again.”
Ruth hesitated, but then reached under the desk for the pile of tin cans she had put there. The labels were torn off, but Ruth knew what they were. She’d picked them up at a vet’s office when she raided it for medicine. She’d used them to make the wild dogs around the station friendlier. She hoped he wouldn’t know they were dog food until he was long gone and far away. She piled them, a few at a time, into the receiving drawer and then pushed her side closed.
“What is this?” asked the man, holding up a shining can.
“Food,” she snapped, “Take it or leave it, it’s all I’ve got.”
He scooped them up and dropped them into a backpack.
“Don’t forget your…memento,” she said, pointing at the pile of shriveled skin and tendon. The man sneered as he reached into the drawer. Ruth grabbed his arm and yanked. His shoulder hit the edge of the drawer with a meaty thunk and he yelped. “You’re thinking that maybe I’m not so tough,” she said, “That you could have taken more with a little more pressure. You think I’m scared right now, and you think maybe you’ll come back later and try for more.”
He was struggling, pulling against her, trying to free himself. Not paying attention. So Ruth slammed her hip against the drawer, catching his wrist with the sharp metal edge. He howled, but she kept the pressure on while her free hand grabbed a sharp pair of scissors off the counter top. “Listen closely,” she said, smacking the scissors onto the glass in front of his face, “I survived hordes of slime like you. And I’m not talking about the Infected. The looters that came through are all gone now. Most of them dead. I’m not. And I’m not frightened of you or of anyone else. If you ever show up here again— I don’t care if it’s because you think you can extort more from me, or because Joe Mackey told you something even dumber, or if you’re just ‘accidentally’ passing by— if I ever see you here again, I’ll rip your ears off with this and string them up next to the others for you to wear.” She let his arm go and he stumbled backward. She expected him to swear at her, maybe try to throw one of the waiting room chairs at the window. But he only went very pale and picked up the pack. He stared at her for a long moment and flexed his arm. Then he walked out. And Ruth quickly sat down in her chair so her legs would stop shaking.
She hadn’t seen him since, but she knew there were dozens like him out there. Ruth blinked and realized she was still staring at the hospital door. She had always assumed that Juliana kept the doors barred to keep the Infected from breaking out and running rampant into the city. Now she wondered if it were to stop people from getting in to harm the Infected instead. She opened the door without knocking to prevent a fresh round of shrieks from the Infected. It was much quieter than she’d expected.
Juliana must have just finished feeding time, she thought, as she always did, and was immediately ashamed. She knew they weren’t animals. They were special to someone, or they wouldn’t be here. They’d all been somebody’s children. But deep down, in the part of her that society didn’t regulate, she thought of them like wild dogs or bears. They were dangerous and unpredictable, unable to recognize anything beyond their own hunger and rage.
Father Preston wandered out of the admitting office holding a bible and mumbling to himself. Ruth thought about darting back outside, but she’d promised Juliana help, and she was worried about her friend’s increasing fatigue.
“Good morning Father,” she said, knowing he’d seen her.
“Why do you come here, Ruth?” he asked, looking up, “Are you making a list of future victims? Is the hospital just a catalog of anticipated thrills for you? I have tried to tell Juliana that it is only a matter of time before murdering the Afflicted becomes routine and boring for you. Then you’ll move on to healthy people and it will naturally be she and I who are first—”
“Save the fire and brimstone, Father. There’s no Congregation here to win over. You know that I’m not killing for pleasure. Certainly, I think that what I do is kinder and more rational than what you are trying to do here. But the Infected, sorry— Afflicted— who are here aren’t my family. I can’t make that choice for them.”
Father Preston closed the bible around one thumb to mark his spot. “And are you certain the people that you’ve already killed would have chosen to die? How many have you killed?”
“Fifty-seven,” she answered, not certain whether he’d be shocked that it was so many or so few. The number meant little to her, just an internal clock of sorts. In her mind, she only did what she had to.
“Fifty-seven,” repeated Father Preston, “And you don’t think even one of them might have chosen to keep waiting for a cure, despite their pain?”
“There is no cure,” snapped Ruth.
“I’m living proof that there is. You did it. With your own hands. You could do it again if you just tried. But you won’t, because it would mean you killed your son and all the others for nothing.”
Ruth could feel heat rising into her face and the force of her anger made her dizzy. “Why do we keep arguing about this?” she cried, “You weren’t cured by anything except sheer, dumb luck. Your body responded to a secondary pneumonia infection and stumbled on the correct antibody for the December Plague. Someone else’s body would react differently. I can’t just go around infecting people with pneumonia and hope it works out—”
“But you can give them my blood instead— a, what’s that called? An anti-something.”
Ruth sank onto a ne
arby bench. The old argument had worn a rut in her, a fragile, over heated streak that weakened a little more every time. “Even if an antiserum would work, it would take a team of experts and some high-tech machinery to create it. If there had been time in the beginning, someone should have done it with the blood of an immune person. But everything fell apart so fast. It was already too late. I’m not a hematologist or a microbiologist. And I had trouble even keeping my own lab sterile enough to test already existing antibiotics.”
Father Preston stood over her, unrelenting. “So study. The library is still here. You’ve had almost seven years to figure out how to use my blood, but you prefer to shoot people instead.”
“You don’t think I tried? I’ve not only ransacked the public library, I’ve been to every medical school, doctor’s office and even vet clinic in a hundred miles. It’s taken me years to check them all. I’ve been chased by Infected, shot at by looters, I’ve even risked getting too close to wild fires to get the information. But there are so many pieces missing. Just gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
“So much of our lives weren’t written down. Or at least, not on paper. So much of humanity was what passed between people. I can read the pieces that are left, but I still don’t know what a lab tech would know, because I wasn’t shown. And I’ve yet to meet a surviving lab tech. I could fumble through with a book and maybe kill some more people before I found a proper method, the way I would have if Juliana hadn’t been in the conservatory to show me which plants were the ones I was looking for and which were dangerous look-alikes.”
“It’s better than shooting them without trying. As long as there’s hope of finding a cure, how can you claim to be on the side of mercy if you keep killing them instead of trying to cure them?”
Ruth ran a hand over her face and sighed. “Have you forgotten what it was like to be Infected, Father? The uncontrollable rage, the need to harm someone, anyone, even your loved ones? The unceasing urge to eat, even if it’s human flesh? I’ve never pried, Father, because it’s your life to share or not, but certainly you must have harmed people to survive before you were brought here. These people have endured seven more years of unrelenting madness and pain than you did. Every day is agony, not just for them, but for their caregivers too. Sure, Father, there’s always hope. But sometimes that just isn’t enough.”
Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) Page 9
