"I'm not going to kill you. I've fought to keep you alive and to restore your humanity. You can keep waiting, but my mind will not change."
Khang would have shrugged, but he could no longer move below his neck. "If you will not provide my death, the world surely will. I will be here to meet it when it comes."
Dr. Taylor was furious but said nothing, flinging himself into the shady interior of the tent instead. Khang's skin began to flake away where it had burned. His throat felt like sandpaper and his eyes stung and blurred. Gradually, as the sun began to set and the shade inside the tent met the evening gloom, Khang could see Dr. Taylor sitting still in his camp chair. He was watching Khang, maybe he had been all day. The two men stared at each other until the sun was gone.
"We were only trying to help," cried Dr. Taylor.
"There is no help for what I've done. There is no return. No matter what I do, it would never be enough. Especially not as a slave to your City."
"I told you, we don't enslave people."
"You do. You may not chain us or whip us, you do it with guilt and with a crippling sense of unworthiness and gratitude. How could the Cured ever be equal to others in your City? You go to bed every night satisfied, smug, convinced that you are good. That you are better. Yet every day you prolong the misery of people who were also good, once. As good as you. Better maybe. And you expect them to grovel before you, to thank you for making them finally realize what suffering they've caused and what evils they are truly capable of. Yet what separates us? You had the good fortune not to fall ill, that is all. It could have been you, sitting here in my place.
"Who could go on after all this? Who could even pretend to be normal? The world is scarred. No one can be happy in it, except those who enjoy making others suffer. The only people who will ever be glad to wake up and remember are the ones who were murderous animals before the Infection," Khang croaked.
Dr. Taylor scrubbed his cheeks with his hands. "I can't believe that. I can't believe that all these people died for no purpose, that there's no reason for their deaths."
Khang laughed. It was a dusty, toneless gasp. "You want to justify all this pain, all the slaughter of the past two years? You are the one who is mad. There is no purpose. No justice to this. No, what you really want to know, Dr. Taylor, is why you're still alive. How can you be good and still survive this when so many better people haven't. What is your point? What is your reason? That's why you can't let us go." Khang fell silent. Dr. Taylor watched him.
The moon rose behind Khang, his shadow stretching between them.
"I forgive you," he said out of the dark. He coughed and was quiet again.
Dr. Taylor watched until the trucks came back. The headlights of the final truck stopped on Khang's form. The truck door opened and then closed with a slam. A soldier walked up to Khang and prodded him with a booted foot. Khang didn't move. Dr. Taylor stood up, startling the soldier.
"Sorry Doc, didn't see you there. This one going to the pyre too?"
Dr. Taylor nodded. "Yeah, the Cure didn't work on him."
The soldier grabbed Khang's cold hand and began yanking him toward the back of the truck. Khang's body thumped sideways onto the ground. It made a soft hiss as it slid through the long grass. Dr. Taylor turned away. He found the box of bullets and his gun in the top drawer of his camp desk without turning on the light. He loaded it in the dark and stuffed the box of bullets into his lab coat pocket. The gun he hid in his waistband under his shirt.
"The Cure didn't work on him," he muttered to himself, "Doesn't work on any of them. It doesn't work."
He walked to the patient tent and dismissed the night nurses. He watched the dozens of sleeping people, already hearing the wails of despair they'd make when they woke in a few hours. That they’d be making for the rest of their lives.
"The only people who will ever be glad to wake up and remember are the ones who were murderous animals before the Infection," Khang had said. Dr. Taylor pulled out the gun.
"Everything has the right to die," he told himself.
A Word from Deirdre Gould
For me, the most terrifying part of the zombie story is the “turn.” Mostly because it always makes me wonder if the person that was is still in there somewhere. The logical side of me (if such a thing as logic can apply to zombie lore) says, yes, there must be something of the person left, because they are driven to violence (or to seek brains or flesh or whatever the act may be). The drive must come from some sort of will, even if it's partially instinctual. And the idea that a person can somehow be transformed by a disease into something either so insane or so evil that they could harm even those closest to them, is horrifying. But biology is showing more and more how small changes in our brain chemistry and even our body's bacteriological content can cause wild swings in emotion, cognition and behavior. Staphylococcus Pneumoniae, the bacteria that the plague in Khang Yeo's world is a variant of, can even trigger an autoimmune response in children that presents as a series of behaviors and tics not dissimilar to classic “zombie” traits. The Plague, of course, causes highly exaggerated extremes of these behaviors.
But the idea of becoming so insane (and my heart says it's insanity, not evil) isn't as bad as realizing what has happened to you. If you are a survival story nut, like I am, you tend to ask yourself what you would be capable of doing in extreme situations. But what we tend not to ask ourselves is what happens when the extreme situation is over? What happens when survivors of truly dire circumstances return to normal civilization? What happens when you know for sure what you are capable of doing to another human being? Unlike shipwrecked sailors trying to cling to life or soldiers fighting in a desperate struggle to return home, Khang Yeo and the Infected don't have the comfort of excusing their actions in the name of survival. Is waking up to face your own deeds a fate worse than death?
That's not to say that I think Dr. Taylor is evil or bad-hearted. Or that the Infected shouldn't have been Cured. It's a natural impulse, to restore those who are ill to health, or those who have had a mental break to their old selves. He, along with the other Immunes in his world, also has to live with the consequences of the Plague. No doubt he and the others killed Infected to remain alive. No doubt he has his own reservations about whether the Cure is compassionate or just necessary. His expectations of the Cured going on to lead normal, productive lives is also not evil, it's just short sighted. Is he good by “default”? Is Khang Yeo evil because of his actions and despite his intentions?
If you'd like to read more about Khang Yeo's world (and a little bit more about Dr. Taylor) you can grab the first in the series, After the Cure, from my amazon page:
http://www.amazon.com/Deirdre-Gould/e/B00BSUFIIA
If you'd like to chat about Khang Yeo or Dr. Taylor or zombies, the apocalypse or happier things, catch me on Facebook or email me [email protected] I love meeting new people!
A Note to Readers
Thank you so much for reading The Z Chronicles. If you enjoyed these stories, please keep an eye out for other titles in The Future Chronicles collection, a series of short story anthologies in speculative fiction. Currently available titles in the Chronicles include:
The Z Chronicles
The Dragon Chronicles
The A.I. Chronicles
The Alien Chronicles
The Telepath Chronicles
The Robot Chronicles
Available later this year will be The Immortality Chronicles, The Time Travel Chronicles, and The Galactic Chronicles.
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