Moonlight Medicine: Inoculation

by Jen Haeger

  “It’s good to see the sun again.”

  In the wake of Evelyn’s preoccupation, Kim’s words sounded foreign in Evelyn’s ears. “What?”

  “The sun. It seems like I haven’t seen it in weeks, even though I know it’s only been a day or so. Don’t you think so?”

  Looking up, Evelyn had to shield her eyes from the glare. The sun was indeed shining as if the fate of humanity didn’t hang in the balance. At first this annoyed Evelyn. She wondered how the world around her could appear so bright and cheerful while inside her world was bathed in the darkness of sorrow, pain, loss, uncertainty, fear, and guilt. “Mmmm.”

  “Yeah, it did seem like we might never see it again.”

  Glancing at David, Evelyn found that he was looking right at her as he spoke. Locking eyes with him, Evelyn’s cheeks prickled as blood rushed to them. She dropped her gaze to stare at the forest floor instead, not knowing exactly why David’s attention was making her so uncomfortable.

  He cleared his throat. “I know that Roberto wanted us to stay remote until this cycle is over, but I don’t think that I can just hang out around here all day and spend another night in these woods. What do you guys…sorry gals…think about heading home, waiting until later this afternoon, and then driving out somewhere to change?”

  Evelyn wanted nothing more at that moment than a bit of normalcy. “I think that’s a brilliant idea.”

  “Yes, definitely,” agreed Kim.

  53

  During the unremarkable drive back to Lansing, Evelyn gave into her drowsiness and dozed, although she still felt unrested by the time they arrived at the condo. Piling out of the SUV, the mundane world stood out starkly around them. Children played in a yard across the street, running and screaming with delight; next door a man mowed the lawn, and several doors down another neighbor watered her flowers. Evelyn longed for their ignorance of the dangers of the world around them and wondered what she would be doing at that moment if David had never found her. Would I be treating patients at the clinic? Realizing she didn’t even know what day of the week it was, Evelyn abandoned the fantasy. It wasn’t helping anything anyway. Following Kim and David into the condo, Evelyn took off her boots and was suddenly at a loss for what to do next.

  “I’m going to put this stuff away and make some lunch.” David carried the box of foodstuffs from the safe-house towards the kitchen.

  “I’ll help you,” said Kim, trailing in his wake.

  It wasn’t a two-person job, let alone a three-person job, and Evelyn couldn’t bring herself to go with them, even though her stomach twinged with hunger. She’d intended to go straight back to her research, not at the lab, but at her desk in the basement. Sighing, she headed upstairs, used the facilities and washed the grime of the past twenty-four hours off her face. Staring at her own face in the mirror, she waggled a finger at the morose countenance she found there.

  “Hey, you could be dead, or worse, in the hands of the Vulke. We got lucky. We’ve got a month to regroup. A month more of research.”

  A month. A month for the Vulke to do God knows what before we have to face them again. Steal more lives, rebuild their armies while our losses are irreplaceable? Evelyn thought of Bill, such a good soul, now gone. Hopelessness oozed through Evelyn’s veins, so cold and empty. Her legs weakened and she had to grab the counter to keep from collapsing. Then a child’s delighted shriek rang from outside, its mirth piercing the barrier of the bathroom window. Evelyn turned her head towards the sound, straightened, and walked to the window with renewed strength. Peering down at the children in the yard, her thoughts turned to Katie and something within Evelyn changed, something vital. She couldn’t explain it, but all of the fractured pieces of the past two years of her life tumbled into place and what had happened to her made sense for the first time. I’m not going to abandon you, Katie. Nor would she abandon her own nieces and nephews to the whims of the Vulke. How could I? Evelyn found that she could accept that the situation was hopeless, yet still resolve that she wouldn’t stop fighting. Not ever.

  A fierce smile forced its way onto her lips and Evelyn found that she was crying, but for once, they weren’t tears of grief or self-pity. They were cleansing tears, clarifying tears. No more would she worry about awkwardness between her, David, and Kim or some mad Vulke savior. In fact, she reeled at how selfish she’d been since the battle. She’d been almost completely focused on her own level of comfort and she felt ashamed. Letting the tears flow freely, she watched the children in the yard below until a beaming mother stepped out onto the front porch and called them in for lunch. Then, after wiping the tears away, she went downstairs, grabbed an apple on her way past, nodding to Kim and David eating sandwiches at the kitchen table, and went down into the basement to work.

  *

  Evelyn stood in a natatorium with an Olympic-size swimming pool. The scent of chlorine filled her nostrils and the warm humidity of the place was making her sweat. As she walked closer to the pool, she realized that Katie and Kim were swimming there; Kim expertly cutting through the water in laps and Katie flailing around with water wings. The Vulke who’d rescued her from the fire—Nicolas, she remembered—was standing by the edge of the pool with a bell and a box on the table next to him. He rang the bell and Kim and Katie got out of the pool. They approached Nicolas, Kim holding Katie’s hand, and he gave them each a wrapped bar from inside the box.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We need recruits to be healthy and strong,” he replied, looking Kim up and down approvingly.

  “What about Katie?”

  Nicolas frowned. “Mistakes were made.”

  Power bars!

  *

  Waking with a start, a loose paper stuck to Evelyn’s face as she lifted her head from her desk. As dedicated as she’d been to going over old data and trying to find patterns and correlations in the viral sequences, her body had demanded sleep, and in her dreams Evelyn had an epiphany. She awoke with the last words that the real Nicolas had said to her fresh in her mind: power bars. It seemed utterly ridiculous yet ingenious at the same time. Of course the Vulke would want to ensure their recruits were young, healthy adults, and what better way to guarantee that in an oral administration than by targeting a food consumed almost solely by health-conscious adults? Nicolas had given her the answer to what the Vulke were using to spread the mutant virus, but why? He’d said that he wanted to help her, but Evelyn couldn’t think of a single logical reason why he would. Peeling the paper from her face and rising clumsily, pins and needles attacking her stiff legs, Evelyn decided it didn’t matter as she stumbled up the stairs in search of Kim.

  Finding both the kitchen and the living-room empty, Evelyn climbed the stairs to the second floor, hastening her ascent by pulling herself along by the railing. The bathroom door stood open, as did the doors to both bedrooms, but Evelyn didn’t stop her search until she’d turned the lights on in the bedrooms and confirmed that they were both empty. Where are they? Evelyn headed back downstairs and peered out into the driveway to find the SUV still there. Confused, she headed back into the kitchen to check the backyard and nearly missed the note stuck to the refrigerator with a pizza delivery magnet.

  Gone for a run, back soon. D and K

  “Dammit!”

  Evelyn dug in her pocket for her cell phone and touched the dial icon next to Roberto’s name. The phone rang twice before an irritated voice answered.

  “Evelyn, I am very busy rig—“

  “Power bars!”

  Silence, then, “Power bars? I am going to make a rather large assumption that you are not insane, so please enlighten me.”

  “That’s how that Vulke infected the strays.” The words spilled eagerly from Evelyn’s mouth before she fully realized that she was going to have to tell Roberto how she had come upon the information.

  “You found evidence of the mutated virus in one of the stray’s boxes of power bars? I do not remember power bars being on the inventory lists.”

/>   Evelyn grunted in frustration and began pacing. “They weren’t. Okay, so I had an…encounter with a Vulke in the fire…and he offered to help me. He gave me a number to contact him on and then he said “power bars”. It didn’t make any sense at the time, but now I think he was trying to give me a clue about the mutant virus.” Evelyn rushed on before Roberto could interrupt. “I mean it makes sense. The Vulke wanted young, healthy, strong recruits, so they targeted a product made for young, healthy adults.”

  She could picture Roberto rubbing his temples. “Perhaps. However, we did not find any power bars in any of the strays’ homes that we’ve been to, so how will you test your theory.”

  “We know that those strays’ houses were ransacked, or at least the kitchens, so probably the Vulke were trying to hide the evidence. We can ask the strays if they remember purchasing power bars…and I can buy a sampling in the areas that we know some of the strays came from, but it was probably a limited batch…” Evelyn stopped and bit her lip, thinking. Then it came to her. “Katie! What happened to her kitchen? I mean, was it ransacked? Who owns the house now? Did they clean it out?”

  “Katie is the Wolfkin child?”

  “Yeah! You have to talk to Caroline or Zachary I guess. They removed Katie after she was infected and put her with a Wolfkin family, but her mother was a single mom I think and I don’t know what happened to her old house. I don’t think that the Vulke got there before the Wahya did, so maybe there’s still some evidence left?”

  Roberto’s sigh hissed through the cell phone. “Evelyn, assuming that this Vulke contact of yours was being honest and not misleading you, or just crazy, how does this information really help us? Would it help your research? Can we prevent the public at large from buying power bars? Perhaps, if we knew the brand, we could try to shut down their operations somehow, but that would not stop the Vulke from contaminating a water supply, as they have threatened to do. At best it would stymy their recruiting, which at this point is a lesser concern.”

  Considering Roberto’s initial questions, Evelyn frowned. Finding the infectious virus particles in a power bar wouldn’t really help her research, since she was looking for a way to treat or cure those already infected with Languorem luporum, not prevent people from becoming infected by it. Really she just wanted to confirm that the Vulke had been trying to help her, even though deep in her gut she knew that he was.

  “It wouldn’t help things directly, Roberto, but if I knew he wasn’t lying about this, maybe I could contact him and get some information that is useful.”

  “Do you think it wise to trust a Vulke?”

  A bitter laugh escaped Evelyn’s lips. At this point, what have we got to lose?

  “Haven’t you heard? David, Kim, and I are Vulke.” Pausing, Evelyn shook her head. “But seriously, Roberto, Nicolas seemed, I don’t know, different.”

  “What did you say?”

  There was a deathly seriousness to Roberto’s tone that made Evelyn swallow. “A-about what?”

  “His name.”

  “I think he said it was Nicolas, why?”

  Evelyn thought that she heard a very faint curse, possibly in French.

  “This…I will contact Zachary about the girl’s home. You should hear back very soon if we can confirm the…the Vulke’s…information. In the meantime…where are you?”

  Evelyn’s cheeks turned hot. “Well, I know you wanted us far away from other people, and we were in a national forest last night, but we…we came home for a while. But we plan on driving further away toni—“

  “Fine, that is fine. Just do not go too far without contacting me first and do not contact the Vulke without telling me.”

  Evelyn’s pulse quickened as she listened. Roberto’s interruption sounded devoid of anger, but was full of anxiety. “Alright, but—“

  He cut her off again. “This may be…you are sure he said Nicolas?”

  A clear clip of memory flashed through Evelyn’s mind of the Vulke thrusting out a hand towards her. ‘I am Nicolas.’ “I’m sure.”

  “I must go, but you will hear from Caroline and Zachary on this matter very soon.”

  Wanting to ask more, Evelyn was disappointed when the call ended abruptly. Who is this Nicolas? Frustration rose as Evelyn pocketed her cell phone. She had no way of finding out who Nicolas was or why Roberto was freaking out about him, and she couldn’t make any more progress on the power bar lead until she heard back from Zachary and Caroline. Running her fingers through her hair, Evelyn’s mind scrambled for something useful to do. She could ask Kim about the power bars when she and David returned from their run, and maybe she would tell David about Nicolas while Kim was showering, or tell both of them in the car on the way to…wherever they were going to spend the night. Pulling her phone from her pocket, Evelyn headed into the living room to wait for David and Kim. There was at least one thing she could accomplish before they returned; she could research a good place for them to wolf-out tonight.

  54

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Soon we won’t have to do things over the phone.”

  “What? In another month? I did what you asked! I want to talk to her now!”

  “Patience. The casualties were much less than we had hoped.”

  “That’s not my fault. You can’t expect me to control the weather, to control a forest fire.”

  “No, but we do expect a little more initiative on your part.”

  “I did what you asked.”

  “And we expect you to do what is necessary. Victory is all but assured, but that’s no reason to take any risks.”

  “I’m not the one in charge over here.”

  “You have power enough.”

  “I think Roberto suspects there’s a traitor.”

  “He’d be a fool not to.”

  “I don’t know what else you want me to do!”

  “For your daughter’s sake, I hope you figure it out swiftly.”

  *

  Now that the wolf was out of the bag, Evelyn decided that she needed to tell David and Kim about her encounter with the Vulke named Nicolas; David because he would take it personally if she didn’t tell him and Kim because she would be working with Evelyn in the lab and would need to help her sort through any further information on Languorem luporum that Nicolas provided. After interrogating Kim as she came through the door, and learning that she did remember purchasing some power bars that had been on sale a few months ago but didn’t recall what brand they were, Evelyn went into the basement to research different power bar companies. She didn’t believe that she’d be able to track which one the Vulke had infiltrated, but it gave her something to keep her occupied while Kim and David showered.

  An hour later, Evelyn had decided that there were far too many power bar types and companies to narrow down a search, but did file away in her mind brands that had factories in Europe. Closing her computer, she headed back upstairs and met Kim and David in the living room.

  “Why this sudden focus on power bars, Evie?” David’s knitted brows gave away his irritation at being out of the loop.

  “I’ll tell you all about it in the car. I did some research while you guys were on your run, and I think that we should head to Sleepy Hollow State Park. It isn’t far, but it’s pretty big and isolated. I’ll drive.”

  Evelyn headed towards the front door, and picked up the car keys from the table next to the door.

  “Whoa, Evie! Can I grab something to eat before we rush off?”

  Anxiety making her twitchy and irritable, Evelyn glanced over her shoulder at David and tried to keep her voice even.

  “We’ll drive through McDonald’s.”

  She opened the door and stepped outside before David could protest, and stretched against the car while she waited for him and Kim to follow her. Soon David and Kim appeared at the door and David, still frowning, locked it behind him. When the sun hit his face, she noted that the blond of his hair was darkening at the roots and wondered if they should al
l make hair appointments to freshen their disguises, or if it even mattered anymore.

  *

  Waiting until she had finished her own cheeseburger, and David and Kim were well into their meals, Evely dove right into the story of her encounter with Nicolas. David and Kim remained silent until she finished, but then David asked the obvious question.

  “Why didn’t you tell us before?”

  Evelyn sighed. “Okay, well, a couple of reasons actually. One, it just seemed so unreal, that I couldn’t really even wrap my brain around it, let alone explain it to someone else. Two, it just didn’t seem all that important with everything else going on, just something really weird. It wasn’t until today that I thought that Nicolas might actually want to help us. And three, it’s just plain embarrassing. Also, not to be a jerk, but you didn’t ask.”

  David scowled, but said nothing. Kim, however, sided with Evelyn.

  “No, you’re right, Evie, I’m not sure that it’s something I’d be able to immediately bring up and talk about if it’d happened to me…So, you really think the virus was in power bars?”

  The tension in Evelyn’s shoulders loosened. The band-aid had been ripped off and she felt better.

  “Yeah, seems pretty stupid, yet genius. Targets the right kind of people to make up an army. I just wish that knowing how it was spread helped us more right now. I mean, I don’t know exactly how rich and powerful Roberto is, but I don’t think that he can stop production of a very popular product. Besides, if the Vulke knew that we knew, they could just switch to some other vector, like…Gatorade. Hopefully, Nicolas will be able to give us something more useful next time.”

  “Wait, what do you mean next time?” David stared at her.

  “I mean, he gave me a number to contact him on.”

  “And you’re going to?!”

  Refusing to look at David, Evelyn concentrated on the road ahead. “Why wouldn’t I?”