by James Phelan
No, the light came from a little flashlight, shining brightly into my eyes, as Tom examined me.
“Concussion, and his head’s open—pass me the sutures.”
A needle homed in towards my forehead but I couldn’t protest. I felt pressure but no pain as he threaded through eight, nine times, up close, somewhere around my left eyebrow. His gloved hands moved fast. I smelled coffee and soap.
“Done,” Tom said. “Clean him up and look him over for any other injuries.”
I felt my clothing coming off. My head raised only slightly on a pillow, I saw the lady who’d been working as a nurse yesterday. She pulled off my boots and socks, and used scissors on my jeans and T-shirt.
“I g-g-gotta start wearing a helmet.”
“Shh, you’ll be okay,” she said.
My head ached now. My face felt numb or maybe frozen. I slapped at it, but it just made my hand ache. The nurse pulled my right glove off, but had to cut through the left. My swollen hand had doubled in size since yesterday: all five fingers were now bright scarlet and so inflamed I thought they might pop. It was the second time this week I’d seen that color in nature, the first being a bird back at the zoo’s Tropical Zone. A scarlet ibis? I was glad Rachel couldn’t see my hand now.
Daniel brought me a cup of hot chocolate. “Can he have this?”
The lady shrugged but I nodded.
It was good, so good, and I could just bear to hold it in my shaking right hand. By now, a few people had gathered around to look at me. I hoped I still had my briefs on.
“How do you feel?” Daniel asked.
“How-w-w . . .” my teeth chattered, “d-d-do I look?”
“Like hell.”
“Yep-p-p,” I replied, the steam of the drink sweet on my face. “What happ-p-pened?”
“You slipped, hit your head on the way down, and went out cold,” he said, squatting by my cot and lacing a blanket over my bare torso. “Took me a while to find you in the blizzard, and I had to put you in the bed of the truck—those infected were right on us.”
That explained my frozen coat and face. I hoped they hadn’t cut off my FDNY coat; that thing was an old friend.
“Thanks,” I said. He helped me drink some more of the warm, sweet drink, and my teeth-chattering started to lessen.
I looked around the sparsely populated makeshift medical ward. The nurse seemed to have finished her inspection. I knew she was talking, could see her lips moving. Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” was playing in my mind’s iTunes shuffle—how did that work? Why that song—couldn’t it have been something cooler?
The nurse and Daniel moved me over to a shower stall in a bathroom. There was a small mirror. My face was black, my neck too, hair, all covered with a thick layer of ash and dirt and grime. From the burnt-out hall in the hotel? Just the whites of my eyes and teeth shone through.
Daniel and the nurse wrapped me in a hot, steaming towel. Then she sat me on a plastic seat, and Daniel lifted my feet into a tub of warm water. The woman cleaned my face and hair, the gray water streaming onto the white tiled floor. With a fresh bucket and cloth, she gave my body a sponge bath. It warmed me inside and out. As soon as she stopped I started to feel cold again, and I was stood up, unwrapped, dried off, and moved to a bed. It was a proper bed, with springs and a foam mattress and clean sheets, and they piled blankets on me. They gave me an extra pillow, propped me up a little, and almost as soon as I blinked Daniel handed me a fresh hot cocoa loaded with condensed milk.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” he replied, faintly, but I heard him. I felt the effects of the needles in my head, some kind of local anesthetic.
Tom returned. Paige’s dad. Plastic surgeon Tom. I watched as the nurse spoke to him. He knelt down, took my left hand, and lifted it by the wrist. I felt as detached from the appendage as if it were a piece of dead meat. He held it, turned it, prodded it, looked concerned. Unbandaged, the jagged, deep cut was angry and inflamed.
He put my hand down to my side, and motioned to the nurse. She passed him one of those things that a doctor uses to look into ears—a light and magnifying glass in one little pointy contraption.
“Anyone else hear Michael Jackson?” I asked. Blank faces. Tom checked my ears and went back to prodding my hand. He applied some liquid. Gave me several injections into the meat of my palm.
“Daniel, help me out, man,” I said. “‘Man in the Mirror’? No?”
He shook his head.
Paige and Audrey appeared next to Daniel. I remembered how Paige had looked when she’d fired my gun. Now . . . now, she looked hot, dressed in tight track pants and hoody. She pulled back her hood—she’d dyed her hair. It was darker now, black-brown, contrasting with her red lips. Hot damn . . .
I lifted my knees a little to adjust the blankets, looked over to Tom and watched as he pulled a jagged splinter of steel the size of a two-inch nail from the heel of my palm.
“Ouch.”
He looked at me, as if he was surprised that it had hurt, and went back to cleaning the wound.
“I’ll give you a tetanus shot,” he said. The nurse came over with a few pills and a cup of water, while Tom administered another injection. “Take those for the pain and inflammation, I’ll give you a penicillin shot to kick-start things. All this may make you drowsy.”
I took the pills. Tom prepped yet another syringe.
“Really?” I said. “Another one?”
He didn’t answer, just swabbed my upper thigh and jabbed me.
“Gee, buy a guy dinner first.”
It all seemed kind of comical, as if I were not really participating, let alone in pain and discomfort. No one was laughing, though. Audrey held onto Paige’s shoulders. They both looked concerned. Especially Paige. It was really great.
“Paige, can you stay with Jesse?” Tom asked his daughter.
“Sure,” she replied, beaming. She came and sat on the floor next to my mattress—to my right, away from my gruesome hand. I gave the thumbs-up to Daniel. He cracked a smile through his bandages.
“Hey, you guys,” I said to Tom and Daniel, who were standing there. As well as feeling weirdly upbeat I felt a new kind of confidence to speak out. “You figured out your differences yet?”
Tom looked from me to Paige and then to Audrey. She gave him a look in return that revealed her influence over him. He turned to Daniel and briefly extended his hand. The hand was ignored. Instead, the preacher leaned in and embraced the surgeon, and the pair let go just as quick.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I know.”
That was as much as they were willing to concede to one another, but perhaps it was enough. Glancing at me briefly, maybe reproachfully, Tom took his medical gear and left the scene. Daniel looked at me too, those swollen eyes through the slits of bandages, his broken smile speaking of so much. He and Audrey left a moment later.
I felt sleepy. I was so warm and felt as if I didn’t have a care in the world. Paige stroked my face and I forgot my hand. I closed my eyes and I think I fell asleep for a second or two. When I opened them I didn’t know where I was—I loved that feeling, could have been anywhere. Paige leaned forward on her knees, brought her face to mine, looked close into my eyes. She kissed me. The sensation was so familiar.
“I remember you tasted of strawberries,” I said, the heavy dark blanket of exhaustion falling upon me. The drugs were doing their thing. My mind working its magic. “I’m so sorry I left you behind . . .”
“Jesse?” She held my hand and watched me as I drifted to sleep.
“Sorry, Anna. I didn’t mean to. I should have been there, with you, forever.”
“Jesse—it’s me,” she leaned forward and was close to my face. “You haven’t left me anywhere.”
I smiled, my eyes closed. “And . . . I won’t. I won’t leave my friends, not here, not again.”
13
I’d fallen asleep in the medical room. I think it was
mid-kiss. Paige didn’t seem to mind. She was there when I woke, four hours later, according to my new watch. Its face glowed in the dark, the hands and dial luminescent under my blankets. She was reading a book.
“Hey.”
“Hello,” she said, putting her book down and getting from her chair to help me sit up. “How do you feel?”
“How do I look?”
“Kinda cute.”
“Oh, right,” I said, feeling my face flush red. “Well, I feel like crap.”
“Can I get you something?”
“First-class Qantas flight home?”
“Hmm, anything else?”
“Hot drink?”
She nodded and left the room.
The other patients seemed to be asleep. I wasn’t entirely sure of the extent of their injuries but I could see one had a leg splinted. The nurse came in and helped me dress in some fresh clothes. I think Paige must have picked them out for me while I slept. They were all black: jeans, T-shirt, socks and jocks, with a zip-up leather jacket and boots. They were all new, still had the store creases in them, more spoils of the situation in which this city gave up everything material for its survivors.
Paige brought me steaming hot tea, and the nurse checked my hand and my temperature. My hand was feeling a little better but still resembled an overstuffed lump of meat, and I was told not to wear gloves until it healed. Fat chance of going against that advice—my palm was still swollen to about double its usual size. I swallowed another few pills, and was ready to get out of there. “Do you want to come and join the others?” Paige asked.
“Yeah,” I said as we walked down the hallway. “Sorry I skipped out this morning—I mean, without saying good-bye.”
“That’s cool,” she said. “I guessed you’d headed out with the guys, which was good: my dad needed that space. Where’d you go?”
“We went to go see about a way out . . . then this snowstorm.”
“Bob’s still out there—”
“Yeah, I know,” she said, holding my good hand as we walked. “He’ll be okay.”
I nodded. “Hair looks good like that.”
“Thanks,” she replied. “I figured you prefer brunettes.”
I’m not sure—did I? I shrugged.
Daniel was leading a prayer group seated in the little chapel. Audrey was there, in the front row. Her mouth moved and her eyes were closed as she prayed. I heard Daniel say, “God will be our judge.” They nodded and smiled to show they got it, while I didn’t understand it at all. I understood why and how they liked Daniel, taking comfort in his words and presence; I found that reassuring too, but I relied on a congregation of one. I wanted to be responsible for my own actions, however difficult they were to bear.
Another group, in the dining hall, was being addressed by Tom. I immediately sensed that the division between this group and Daniel’s remained. I hoped it’d sort out, fast.
Paige took my hand, and I followed her out to a covered terrace where the wind blew snow in all directions.
“It’s like snowmageddon out there,” I said. I wondered if Bob was sheltering someplace or still pushing on.
The other teens were out here too, huddled on plastic chairs, looking out at the snow-covered driving range as if it were a movie screen, blankets around their shoulders and junk food in their laps. These guys were not like my friends Anna, Mini, or Dave, nor the girls at the zoo. This group was a little bit whack—right now, a couple of them were saying this was the End of Days or some such.
“The infected are evil—it’s God’s work.”
The guy who said that was about fourteen. Maybe they’d had it too easy here, being remote from what was going on outside these walls. What would I be like if I’d stayed any longer at 30 Rock? Then again, maybe it was because they were simply younger than me. At fourteen I felt I knew everything, and I only knew half of that now. Wow—what’ll be left when I’m twenty? Thirty?
“They’re not evil,” Paige said to him. “They’re unfortunate. Until their sickness, they were our friends, our family, our neighbors—”
“Yeah, well, we’ve seen them kill!”
“And we’ve seen some of our own here kill, and I wouldn’t label them as evil either,” Daniel joined in. I wondered if he was thinking of me as he said that.
He’d taken off his bandages, and he looked better than I’d imagined, despite the black eyes and the cut lip, a dark bruise on his cheek, and wadding stuffed in his angry-looking broken nose. Yeah, he looked a wreck, but I’d seen far worse injuries these last couple of weeks. The bandages reminded me of what could have been.
“No one will ever fully fathom the strangeness of Man, nor the compassion, nor the love and hate that we succumb to,” he said. He took a chair and dragged it over to join the group. “Give it time, my friends, live as you are meant to, act as if the less fortunate you see are your brothers and sisters, for that is surely what they are, what we all are, in this challenging time.”
Paige and I wandered the complex. We came to another room where several people were quizzing a science teacher. He was animated, using a whiteboard, while the young kids all had paper and pens and were seated on the floor over in a corner as if their lesson was over. There was a buzzy atmosphere between the few adults and kids there to listen and ask, and this man who was prepared to give some answers or at least steer conversation.
“He just got here yesterday,” Paige whispered into my ear.
I leaned against the doorway, listened to him.
“So they’re not zombies?” someone asked.
“I really don’t think so,” he replied. “I mean, for a start, zombies don’t have beards.”
He let it hang for a sec and then cracked into laughter and his audience joined in. I liked this teacher.
“Zombies don’t exist, or at least they’re extinct or something,” he said, and everyone laughed again. “Okay, but seriously: what is this? I don’t know. I have ideas, opinions, but I have no way of proving anything. So let’s talk about what we know for sure.”
“It’s a strain of the Shanti virus.”
The teacher laughed. “Too much TV for you. Next?”
“It was an attack,” an adult said. “Biological and conventional.”
“Yes,” he replied. “It was an attack—”
“By who?”
“We don’t know.”
“I bet it was those—”
“Opinions—we all have them, so let’s stick to what we know,” the teacher said. “It was an attack and it was partly a biological infection of some kind, right? It was airborne and contained to the initial ten, maybe fifteen minutes of a large-scale simultaneous attack on the city. What else do we know about it?”
“It killed the very young and the very weak,” someone said.
He looked at the floor, nodded, as if he’d seen some such event firsthand.
“It can’t be transferred from person to person, and it can’t—”
“How do we know?” the teacher asked. Every face in the room seemed open, awaiting answers, scared. “How do we know it cannot be transferred?”
No one spoke. Even I wasn’t so sure about that. I’d seen no evidence either way . . .
“Look, what I do know is that the future is up to us,” the teacher said. “We here, and others like us, have to think about the generations to come after us, and say we want to make it a better place for our children and our children’s children—we have to make it a better place.”
“He’s right,” I said, and they all looked at me. “The choice is ours—we get to make this better, if we choose to. But not here, because it will get worse— we’ve seen that. Here’s what I know for sure: can you catch this virus still? Yes. Are the worst of the infected still out there, ready to kill for what runs in your veins? Yes. Do the other Chasers, the infected, present a danger? No. I’ve met them, up close. They are doomed here, and that sucks, but we can’t do anything about that. I’m not gonna lie to you; when Bob comes bac
k with good news, I’ll be the first in line to leave here, because I want to see my dad again. I want to go home.”
14
“I like what you said to them,” Paige told me as we found a quiet space in an office. We sat on the carpet, leaning against the wall. It was an hour or so before dinner and we were eating a packet of peanut M&Ms.
“I meant every word,” I said.
Paige nodded. “If Bob comes back with good news, they’ll leave straightaway.”
“But we still need your dad to come around.”
“Daniel and all his friends and followers are working on my dad and a few of the skeptics.” She paused, as if unsure whether or not that would work. “My dad was going to put it to a vote, to leave or stay.”
“When?”
“Like, ASAP, probably tonight at dinner.”
She studied a red M&M in her fingers. Her arm was touching mine.
“And he wants what, a majority vote?”
“I don’t know. He wants a consensus, I guess.”
“Maybe he wants to cover his butt in case you all go and something bad happens—sorry, I didn’t mean to sound mean.”
“He just wants everyone to stick together.”
“And that’s great, I think that’s best—to stick together.”
“What you mean is, we should stick together and leave together.”
“Well . . . there’s something I haven’t told you—”
I couldn’t meet her gaze at that moment, and so she looked concerned. “Jesse, what is it?”
I told her about the soldiers. “One of them said that they’d found a way out to the north.”
Again she nodded. This wasn’t news, after all—Caleb had come here and shared that. She studied my face closely.
“Caleb was a good friend of mine.”
She shook her head. “Was?”
I let out a deep breath, blinked away the residual delirium from my medical treatment.
“The soldiers had an unexploded missile in the back of their truck—left over from the attack.” I looked at the tub of multicolored M&Ms between us. “Caleb and I were close by, and there was an attack and the missile went off.”
