Dead City

by Sean Platt

  “Please. The same thing happened with a UPS delivery guy the other day.” Nicole seemed exasperated enough that Alice decided to chance something that might be over the line, but they’d had this discussion before. With Kelly distracted by the bush near the bay window, Alice whispered, “He left the skin of an entire hand under my packages, like a glove.”

  Nicole sighed. “Tell me about it. You should see her sheets.”

  Something pricked at Alice’s reporter instincts as she looked from one woman to the other — the uninfected now turning to herd the infected back home. Something from the package. On the surface, there’d been nothing incriminating in the paperwork, but the meta of it all — the organization behind the papers rather than the papers themselves — clearly pointed to someone trying to pop the top on a Hemisphere secret but not quite willing to go all out. Whoever had sent the thing wouldn’t serve Alice the answers on a platter. She’d have to work for whatever story might be there.

  “Nicole.”

  Nicole turned, one hand on her sister’s shoulder. Kelly was already shambling off, head twitching like a bird’s, jaw slack.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, is Kelly on standard Necrophage?”

  Nicole watched as Kelly crossed the lawn. She was halfway there when she staggered and almost fell. She might’ve broken a bone or snapped a ligament. It had happened before, and having a necrotic as far down the chain as Kelly in a cast wasn’t fun. Some doctors wouldn’t even fix necrotic bones past a certain decay point. Apparently, it was like trying to reinforce papier-mâché.

  She turned back to Alice, presumably confident that Kelly knew her way home.

  “The free kind. Yeah.”

  “Did you consider the other formulations?”

  Nicole laughed but stopped when she realized Alice was serious.

  “For, like, two seconds.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “You know why, Alice.”

  Across the small lawn between the big houses, Kelly reached the door and opened it. Nicole had outfitted her door with a swing knob when she’d taken Kelly in, so the staggering woman was able to easily open the door. She left minimal mess behind. Then the door closed behind her. Based on what Alice had seen, Kelly looked worse than she was. She could hold rudimentary conversations and more or less take care of herself. She could safely make food in Nicole’s modified microwave and entertain herself for hours with the mind-numbing, necrotic-centric programming on the Funtime Channel. She mostly just needed someone to keep an eye on her, but still Alice felt awful for Nicole. Things could have turned out differently. A week earlier, and Kelly might be a less problematic houseguest. A week later, and she’d have gone to Yosemite. Nicole would never admit it, but either option would probably be an improvement.

  “You mean because she’s … ” Alice prompted.

  “Mostly. We might be able to afford the one they call Truth or Beauty, but why? Let’s be honest. Kelly’s truthful and beautiful days are behind her.”

  Alice wanted to prod further, but it seemed rude. “Would you like to come in for a drink?”

  Nicole looked back at the house. Then she pulled out her phone, opened her security app, and pressed something that made about half of the lights in her home click on. If Alice understood the app, it also locked the doors, shutting her sister in for the night.

  “Sure,” she said, re-pocketing the phone. “Thanks.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TRUTH AND BEAUTY

  NICOLE FOLLOWED ALICE INTO HER messy living room. The pizza box was front and center on the coffee table, open, the piece she’d been eating when Kelly had knocked looking like the most delicious slice of a pie chart. The envelope she’d received earlier probably looked like it had exploded; the game of 52 pickup she’d played before deciding Ian Keys was her logical starting point had been merciless and untidy. Once Keys had hung up the first and second times, Alice had begun sifting anew. Given that nothing here was confidential, reading between the lines was hard. Alice had compensated by spreading her mess wider, hoping a pattern emerged.

  “Sorry about the way the place looks,” Alice said.

  “You working on a story?”

  “Sort of, yes.”

  “I saw your Bobby Baltimore interview,” Nicole said.

  That stopped Alice. Of course Kelly had seen it; Kelly had a crush on Bobby Baltimore like half the female population, both infected and uninfected. But pieces like that always made Alice socially nervous. Lower-functioning necrotics like Kelly would miss the subtext, but those tasked with caring for them, like Nicole, probably wouldn’t.

  Alice decided to play casual. “Oh?”

  “It was fair.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looked around. “What’s the story?”

  “The usual. Hemisphere. Sherman Pope.”

  Nicole was still surveying the apartment. She looked at Alice. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but … well, what’s left to talk about?”

  “I just want to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “You don’t think someone is telling the truth?”

  Alice pursed her lips. The simple answer was no, she didn’t think someone was telling the truth. Hemisphere’s discovery of Sherman Pope’s cure had struck her as overly convenient from the start. The scientists she’d spoken to all agreed that the company’s solution to regenerative necrosis, as they called it, was perfectly logical once they’d seen it. But on the flip side, who would think of it? Emma Sherman had contracted and begun slowly spreading the rabies-like infection commonly called Rip Daddy three months before it had mutated in Miles Pope and gone bad, and it was only six months after that — long enough to lose Bakersfield and large chunks of New York and Eastern Pennsylvania — when Necrophage had come to the rescue. Of course Panacea’s predecessor had rushed past the FDA to emergency-approve it in no time, but how had a literal death-stopping drug been created from nothing in nine months? Everybody knew all about movie zombies, but the move from silver screen to front page had been a big surprise, so it’s not like research into stopping them had been anybody’s major initiative.

  Nobody denied that Necrophage’s arrival was a miracle, but few people questioned how that was possible.

  “I just want to understand, is all,” Alice said.

  “You were asking about Kelly’s Necrophage. Was it because of this?”

  “Sort of.” Entirely was more accurate, but Alice didn’t want to say so. She pulled a bottle of Zinfandel from the rack on the counter. “Wine?”

  Nicole smiled thanks and took a seat. She had to move some pamphlets to make room. Each was official Hemisphere material, with the company’s tagline on the front: Upgrading Nature. Alice had asked Hemisphere’s reps about that a few times, seeing as the tagline didn’t fit as well now that Necrophage and its helper products constituted the vast majority of the company’s business — and, of course, most of its profits. The drug’s basic form, like large sectors of Hemisphere’s proprietary research both before and after the plague, was free to all who needed it, but the designer versions weren’t. And although nobody official would confirm it, Alice knew that even base Necrophage was purchased (not accepted free) by most of the world outside the US. Sherman Pope had been fully contained by the time the borders were closed, but the world seemed eager to prepare, just in case.

  The answer to the tagline question was simple, according to company rhetoric. Even though Hemisphere’s primary business today was Halting Plagues, it stuck with Upgrading Nature because that had never stopped being Burgess’s vision. Even Necrophage’s roots were in the original life-extension mission. That, supposedly, was the incomplete answer to Alice’s niggling questions about the drug’s oh-so-convenient development.

  “Do you know what I’ve never done an article or blog post on?” Alice asked. “What it’s like to care for someone with arrested Sherman Pope.”

  “You’ve talked a lot abou
t that,” Nicole said, crossing her legs.

  “I’ve talked about the spread, about families who’ve had people clarified in the wrong direction and sent to a camp or Yosemite. I’ve done pieces on the Skin District ghettos. And sure, I’ve interviewed people here and there who’ve had family and friends turn, or at least get infected. But never in the way I’m thinking now.”

  “Which way is that?”

  Alice took a sip of her wine. “Do you mind?”

  Nicole shook her head. “Not at all. What do you want to know?”

  “You’ve gotten used to … how your sister is … right?” The question was rude and uncomfortable, but Alice didn’t know how else to ask it. She’d talked to Nicole plenty before, though, and she liked Kelly. Kelly enjoyed playing sports, and while she couldn’t play normal games, she loved the adapted ones. And Alice, who liked her research immersive, had learned a few herself and played on the same teams. Nicole would know she meant no offense.

  “Of course.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “She was after the big plague. Three years?” She shook her head. “Hell, has it been that long?”

  “How did she get infected if it was after containment?”

  “Oh, you remember how things were back then. Panacea hadn’t contained the worst-hit neighborhoods yet, so there was still infection spreading under the radar. Clarification wasn’t fine tuned, so sometimes they’d select for someone, dose them with Necrophage, and they’d turn anyway. We were from rural Montana and came to Raleigh after Mom got bitten. She had to be put down, unfortunately, God rest her soul.”

  Alice said nothing while Nicole crossed herself.

  “But after Mom, we didn’t really want to move back. We didn’t come here until after it was already a mecca for the infected, but we did decide to stay in Raleigh. We weren’t used to how things were in the cities. With the Internet still mostly shot and TV still half-reactionary, we were afraid all the time, with no idea what to do. Panacea wasn’t in businesses yet, or in schools, or widely distributed enough to even hang fliers where we were. We went on a mission trip. We were way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, and Kelly was bitten by a rabid dog.”

  Alice sat up. She hadn’t heard this part of the story.

  “A rabid dog?”

  “Well, not literally rabid. The new rabid. It must have eaten parts off of an infected body because it had that mad disease. Rip … ”

  “Rip Daddy.”

  “Right. But we didn’t know animals could get it, or that it made them bite. The thinking at the time was that if they couldn’t get full-blown Sherman Pope, what did it matter? So we treated the wound and got on with it.”

  “How fast did she turn?”

  “We knew she was sick right away, like, the next day, but again we figured it was something less severe. Maybe three days later, we got back and the doctor told us what she had. She was clarified on the spot and given her first bolus.”

  “Three days?”

  Nicole nodded. “They should have a different scale for different types of infection. I’m told it translates to a normal incubation of around eighteen days. They said that if we’d taken one more day to get her in for her first Necrophage bolus, she’d have been past the inflection point — even as conservative as they were estimating inflection points back then.”

  Alice almost whistled, her face hopefully conveying the surprised sympathy she felt for Nicole. She’d thought Kelly had been bitten by a feral. That still happened plenty, even today. Not in cities and never inside a place like Aberdeen Valley, but there would always be people who refused government help or felt Panacea was evil no matter how necessary its powers seemed for containment. There would always be hippies too good for medicine and hillbillies ignorant of it. But for Kelly’s condition to have come down to being bitten by a vector animal? It was an aspect of spread that even Alice often forgot existed.

  “And how has she been since Necrophage?”

  “You see how she is.”

  “I mean, has she changed since she’s been on it?”

  “Changed how?”

  “It’s supposed to halt her progress. Has it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But it affects the brain. So does she still learn?”

  “She learned how to work the swing lock on the door. She learned how to use that monstrous new keyboard on her computer.”

  “Do you think she’s improving?”

  Nicole shrugged. “I think she’s not getting worse. That’s enough. It’s not supposed to improve her, is it?”

  “Supposedly, the advanced formulations might.”

  Nicole sat up straight then set her wine on the table. “I hadn’t heard that. Are you sure?”

  Alice wasn’t sure at all. Part of this was a hunch, but part of it was a lot of still-not-classified information contained in the packet left at her door. The packet was a big, obnoxious tease. It felt like someone who wanted to say something but wouldn’t speak, like a friend who wants you to guess what’s different about them without any hints. And there was a lot in there about Ian Keys and how upstanding and moral he is — part of Hemisphere PR that might matter to someone looking for a potential whistleblower. And there was a lot about August Maughan, Archibald Burgess’s erstwhile protégé. The man who used to push Burgess’s work that final, optimized 1 percent and who was rumored to be using Hemisphere drugs in his own exclusive life-extension practice … wherever he’d disappeared to.

  But she wanted a reaction from an everyday user, and now she had one. The response was predictable: desperate hope, requiring no basis in reality to be worth pursuing.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just something I’ve heard.”

  “Are you saying Kelly could come back to how she was?”

  “No. No, I’m not. I’m sorry if I implied otherwise.” Alice held up a hand, and Nicole slowly sat back. “What I meant was that the advanced Necrophage versions might restore parts of the body. Temporarily. Like a trick, even — not all that different in concept from applying makeup to hide bad skin.”

  “We got some to sample once. Some of Beautiful, I think. But the pharmacist told us it would be wasted on Kelly because most of her facial muscles have decayed beyond saving. He said the advanced formulations only work on young necrotics. Ones with short incubations, I mean.”

  “But you got it anyway?”

  Nicole nodded. “The pharmacist was right. Cost a fortune and did nothing. It was a two-week course. At the end, I asked Kelly if she liked it, and she nodded. Then I asked her why, and she had nothing to say. I poked around the edges. Asked if it made her feel beautiful, like the promise in the name. I ran through the other supposed benefits. I don’t remember them all, but one was supposed to make her hair shine. But hell, you know Kelly. Her hair just sloughs off because her scalp is falling apart. It grows like fuzz on normal Necrophage, and all Beautiful did was to make it grow faster and look a bit better, but what help is that when it just pulls right out, same as before?”

  “Did Kelly notice her hair being nicer?”

  “Sure did. She combed it, even. But it just came out, like I said. I was willing to keep buying it if there was a point, but there wasn’t. We have the money — not money for the super-high-end formulations like Stardom, of course, but for the good-good, not amazing-good ones. I asked Kelly again and again. She said, ‘Pretty,’ but she just wasn’t, and you know I love my sister no matter how messed up she is. Whenever I tried to explain it or ask Kelly for details about what it felt like — ‘improvements,’ if there were any, like you said — she always got angry.”

  “Angry?”

  Nicole flapped a hand. “Oh, you know how they rage. They’re like babies.”

  Alice hoped Nicole didn’t use that word often: rage. It was the word Yosemite officials used to describe the point at which a doomed necrotic stopped “grazing” and became truly feral. It was the point at which, in a televised segment of her Bobby Baltimore
interview, Bobby had told the world that his hunters knew they were legally allowed to shoot to kill.

  Nicole finished her wine and fished her phone from her pocket. Something she saw on her app made her stand, preparing to leave.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “She just wants me to change the channel. Are You Smarter Than a Zombie? is on, and she can’t find the remote. It’s like having a kid, I’m telling you.”

  Alice blinked. “She likes that show?”

  “Bless her dead heart, she doesn’t understand the many levels on which she should rightly be insulted. Unfortunately, I do. But I’ve learned to pick my battles.” Nicole gave Alice a little smile. “Thanks for the wine. And thanks for your interest in Kelly. I think people like to pretend there aren’t people as advanced as her still out there and still being treated every day, but there are, and they’re American citizens, same as you and me.”

  Alice smiled back, feeling melancholy.

  “So, hey — if you find out that there’s a Necrophage out there that actually turns back the clock,” Nicole said, “you let me know. Is it a deal?”

  Alice nodded, but it was suddenly hard to concentrate. Several innocuous ideas were colliding in her mind, turning into something new.

  Hemisphere was the only company that had come close to solving the problem of the Sherman Pope plague, and they’d solved it entirely, and without any help.

  The company didn’t make money on its base drug, though it did receive subsidies. Still, the real money was in the designer formulations with pretty names and in preventative sales to foreign markets. Both were lines of business that relied on emotion more than results: the emotions of hope and fear, respectively.

  And lastly, her envelope leaver had given her a lot of publicly available information on August Maughan, who might know more about how the drugs worked than Archibald Burgess himself.

  Maybe her questionably helpful tipster hadn’t been pointing her toward Ian Keys after all.

  Maybe she should have started where Burgess did: with chemist-turned-healer, August Maughan, secret weapon of the ultra-wealthy.