Poveglia (After the Cure Book 4)

by Deirdre Gould

  Frank sighed. “It isn’t just me I’m worried about, Nella. Every time I hear you breathe through that thing, my heart clenches a little. We’ve already spent too long here. But if it will give you or them some peace, then I’ll do what I can. Give me some more gloves.”

  She fished around in her pack for a moment and found another pair.

  “Ten minutes, Nella, if it doesn’t start, we’re going anyway.”

  She nodded.

  “Be careful. Don’t touch the blood. Or the oatmeal.” He grimaced. “I’ll get more from the patient wing.”

  Frank backed away from the dead woman on the floor and walked back out of the kitchen. He headed for the end of the patient wing, hoping to find the linen closet. He didn’t want to strip the beds. The room doors were all propped open and he had no desire to look beyond them. Except one. The door was closed and in front of it sat a neatly folded cardboard box. “Ann C.” Was scrawled over the top in black marker and Frank stopped in front of it.

  There’s no cure, he insisted. And from what he’d seen of Ann during the trial, there’d be no diary either. But if he never looked— He sighed and knelt down, ripping open the top flaps. A few institutional nightgowns, some specialty gloves to keep her from chewing on her hands. He threw them aside. A sock puppet of a monkey. Frank picked it up and gently sat it in front of the door. Only her file at the bottom. He flipped through it. There were only the judgment and the admittance papers. No diary, no pictures, nothing about any interrogation of course. He placed it all back in the box, except for the monkey, which he took with him. He gently pushed the door open. He had to be sure. Ann was under the covers, her hair brushed neatly and lying on the pillow behind her. Johnson was lying on the floor on the other side of the bed, curled toward Ann, the hairbrush still in her hand. Wells was sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed, his hand holding one of Ann’s. Though the scene was quiet, Frank felt no comfort in it. It made suicide and death seem more and more inevitable. As if it were the natural course of things. He fled the room.

  The linen closet was at the end, a large empty rolling bin in the bottom for laundry. Frank pulled out the entire contents and dumped them in. He rolled it back down the hall, feeling even more unease. He knew he was on the verge of cracking. They had to get out of there. Nella had to be ready. He broke into a run as he reached the dining room doors. Nella was draping cloth over the burners, spreading tablecloths in a trail toward anything flammable. Frank tipped the rolling bin onto the floor and the linens thumped out in a large stack. He kicked them over, still clutching the stuffed monkey in one hand.

  “Go on, Nella, I’ll be there in a moment.”

  He turned the knobs of the range as high as they’d go. The bitter tang of propane started to fill the air. Nella headed quickly for the back door, afraid to argue. Frank grabbed a large box of matches from the counter and lit one. He threw it onto the range and then tossed the rest of the box after it. It caught with a roar and he ran for the door, not bothering to look behind him. He didn’t care whether it had worked or not, they were leaving. Nella was ahead of him, waiting on the path and they ran down to the street together. They stopped at the van and looked back as one of the kitchen windows shattered and a bubble of dark smoke bulged out. Nella turned back to stare at the van.

  “There’s one still missing. Martha.”

  “She had already turned,” said Frank, “She attacked the guy in the driver’s seat. She won’t be heading for people. At least not on purpose. She’ll wander until exposure gets her. Or an animal.”

  She wanted to yell at him. To shake him out of his casual tone. But she knew he was in shock. She was too, if she was being honest about it.

  “How are we going to warn anyone? I don’t have any paint or anything,” she said, to draw his attention away from the dried blood on the windshield. He looked around at the white panel. He looked back at the blood.

  “How often do you think they change the oil in this?”

  Nella shrugged. “I think it’s probably only when it won’t run anymore. Oil’s hard to come by.”

  He pulled a spare face mask from his pack and leaned into the cabin. He carefully pulled the corpse toward him with his gloved hands, quickly backing out as it tilted toward him and fell onto the seat. He closed the passenger door and crossed to the other side.

  “What are you doing?” called Nella.

  “Making paint,” he said and pulled open the driver’s side. He disappeared and the hood clicked up, catching in the bush. She found the catch and shoved it upward. The metal screeched as it scraped through the bush’s branches. Frank ducked under the hood and unscrewed the oil cap. He dunked the spare mask in and looked at it.

  “That will work. What shall we say?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Nella.

  She reached as high as she could, painting in broad streaks: “Infected. All Dead Here. No food, no valuables. Keep out. Burned 7/16/09 Post Plague” Then she drew a large biohazard sign beneath.

  “Wish we had something brighter. Something scarier. But that’ll do it,” she said.

  “I want to go home, Nella,” said Frank. He pulled off the mask and his gloves and tossed them into the yard. She realized he was waiting for her to forgive him. For her to love him again. She took off her mask and gloves and put them into her pants pocket.

  “We have to ditch the clothes too,” she said, “There’s blood on them. We’ve both got a change in the pack.”

  He looked down at the spatter on his shirt. He slowly pulled it off, setting it aside as they changed. Then he picked up the shirt again and tied it to the van’s mirror where it fluttered crimson and dingy white. “It’s bright enough now. And scarier,” he said, his voice breaking in the middle. He covered his face with his hands and sank down in the dust road beside the van. Nella hurried to sit down beside him and slid an arm around his shoulders. “I killed her,” he whispered. “I killed someone who wasn’t trying to hurt us.”

  Nella just held him.

  “And I’m going to have to do it again. Over and over. Innocent people who didn’t do anything to deserve it. Over and over.”

  “No, Frank. We’ve done enough. Let someone else figure it out. Nobody could ask us to do more than we’ve already done.” She pulled one of his hands into her own. “We’ll go back to the boat. We’ll go away. Go south where it stays warm. Find another city. Or a farm. Just go away and not look back.”

  He touched his forehead gently to hers. “We can’t. Even if Sevita and Christine weren’t in there— even if no one we knew would be hurt, it would follow us. We have to stop it here or the entire coastline could be lost. Maybe the continent, if there are enough people still around to spread it.”

  “Why us?” she whispered. “There’s a hundred people at that Cured colony. There are thousands inside the Barrier. Why us?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe because we’re strong enough to do it. Maybe because someone asked us to do it.”

  “But we’re good people. We already saved the City. We did what good people do. We don’t deserve this.”

  “Nobody does. Not the people trapped in the City, not the Infected, not the people who are panicking at the Cured colony.” He took a shaky breath and smiled at her. “I didn’t deserve to find you either, but I did.”

  “I’m not a reward, Frank,” she said dryly.

  “I know. And this isn’t a punishment. It just is.”

  She looked around them at the empty, silent road. The wind rustled the nearby trees and the sun made soft gold spots that shifted like water over the tar. She could see the plump scarlet berries of a raspberry bush bobbing in the breeze across the way. If the smell of the corpses and the roaring crackle of the young fire hadn’t carried down the hill, she could have pretended the day was beautiful. “What do we do now?” she asked, half to herself.

  “Now we need to get help,” said Frank. “I don’t know anything about destroying plagues. The Cured colony is the only place where there’s a c
hance that someone can help us.”

  “They aren’t going to be happy to see us.”

  “If they’re smart, they won’t let us anywhere near. But maybe we can talk to them through the radio.”

  “Sevita never said where it was.”

  “But she said the guy that led the group out was one of the people we cured. There are only two places they might have gone: either wherever they were while they were Infected or where they woke up. Sevita said the reason they left was because the Governor wouldn’t punish the guy who had held them. Why would they go back to where they’d been miserable? They could only have gone to the farm house.”

  “Do you remember how to get there?” asked Nella, “I was too confused.”

  He traced the raised scar on her shoulder with one finger. “I’ll remember that place until the day I die,” he said.

  Thirty-eight

  The barn was sweltering, even with the doors open at his back. The dead SUV and the tractor had been cleared out weeks before and the families living temporarily in the barn had rolled up their blankets and pulled down their clotheslines to fit everyone in. The kids looked down from the hayloft and Father Preston’s group huddled to one side, still nervous among the others. The crowd murmured among themselves, passing bottles of cool water and small snacks. They were tired and hungry, ready for dinner and bed. Henry couldn’t blame them. They’d already been pushing hard to get the crops planted and the rows of little cottages built. Having to add on to the wall had made things even harder. And they didn’t even know why yet.

  Amos stood up and waited as the crowd hushed each other. “Before we start, I just wanted to say that you’ve surprised me. When Henry originally asked me if half a dozen people could survive out here, I said yes, but I had my doubts. When Vincent kept coming to me day after day adding to our numbers, I’ve got to be honest, I started to sweat a little. And Stephanie and I only had to worry about feeding you. And when we got here, and I realized that the field hadn’t been plowed in almost a decade and that we’d have to do it by hand— well, let’s just say, I didn’t sleep well the first few weeks.”

  There was a gentle wave of chuckles from the crowd.

  “But here we are, just a few months later. Because of your hard work and intense carefulness, we not only have every plant in the ground, but Rickey’s crew has completed the first half a dozen shelters, the defensive wall grows every day, and Melissa and Vincent have organized work and supplies for everyone here, including our new additions.” Amos nodded toward Father Preston. “I’m proud of us. I’m happy to know all of you. Which makes what I have to tell you so much harder. A few nights ago, Melissa picked up a signal on the radio.”

  There was a light rain of applause, but it withered when Amos didn’t smile. “It was coming from the City, but it wasn’t one of the official channels. It leapfrogged through whatever’s left of the old emergency broadcast system. By now, I hope it’s halfway across the continent. The City is experiencing an outbreak of a stronger version of the December Plague.” He waited for a moment, expecting an uproar, but the crowd stared back at him in silence.

  “Where’d it come from?” someone finally shouted. “Thought those court people stopped it.”

  Amos shook his head. “I don’t know, the message didn’t say. But I know the people who tried to stop it. They were as convinced as we were that they’d stopped it. Maybe the old plague mutated. Or maybe somebody besides the original scientists got their hands on it. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters, is that the City is sick. The group that sent the message said they tried to close off the exits and entry to the City. But it’s a big place and people are going to get out. They probably already have. And the first place they’re going to come is here.”

  There was a quick flurry of shouts that melted into one another. Amos raised his hands. “One at a time— we can’t answer everything at once.” He pointed to a woman in the crowd. “We’ll start here.”

  “What does it matter?” asked the woman, “We’ve already been cured, we can’t get it anyway.”

  Amos glanced at a young man sitting up in the loft. The man called from the loft, “Actually, we can. So can the Immunes. This one is different. More powerful. My dad—” his voice cracked, but he went on, “my dad was one of the people who sent the message. He and mom and I, we were all Cured. He told me not to come back for him, that they were already sick. The woman in the message said they knew that it made no difference this time whether you were Immune or not last time. They’re all contagious. They all have it.”

  “We have to help them,” said a man near the back, “we’ve got friends there, relatives— everyone we know. We have to rescue them.”

  Melissa stood up from her seat near the door. “We can’t. They are already exposed. They’ve been exposed for weeks, it must have spread through the whole population by now. We just barely avoided exposure ourselves. There’s no cure. There’s nothing we can do by going to the City except die with them. I intended to let you listen to the broadcast yourselves. So you’d be convinced how hopeless even the people in the City realize it is. But— the signal stopped this morning. I can’t pick it up anywhere. The City is gone. We can never go there. Not for help, not for supplies, not to find people. We are on our own.”

  “For now,” said Amos. “We’re on our own, for now. But people are going to come. People that escaped. People that don’t even realize they are infected. Maybe people we know. Maybe relatives and friends. And they’ll be here soon. Maybe some of them will be Immune. Maybe some of them will recover on their own somehow. But most of them are going to turn. Most of them are going to live through what you’ve already experienced. We have to decide what to do with them when they get here.”

  There was a long silence. Someone coughed, but the silence stretched on. Finally, Molly peeked around one of the large beams that held up the loft. “Can’t we just— can’t we just send them away again?” she asked.

  “No.” Vincent’s voice rolled over the quiet crowd. “We can’t send them away. We can’t even allow them to leave if they want to. There are other people out here. Other groups who may not know, who are vulnerable. The refugees from the City are dangerous even if they don’t know it. If we turn them away, they will spread the infection. Those that turn will hurt unsuspecting people. We cannot let them go.”

  “So what do we do?” asked a woman in the corner. She slid an arm around her husband’s waist, pulling him a few inches closer to her. “Are you asking us to shoot them on sight?”

  A woman standing near Father Preston began to laugh. It was low and gurgling at first, creeping into the silence that had fallen over them. Gray stared at her. He clutched the smooth tube of the cure dart in his pocket. He knew what was about to happen. He was going to give Father Preston just enough rope to hang himself, but he wasn’t going to wait around to be caught in it too.

  Henry glanced at Vincent. Vincent saw him and put a finger to his lips. Henry was uneasy, but he stayed silent. The woman’s wet laugh stopped with a cough. “Why are you so distressed? You should all be rejoicing! Father Preston will heal anyone who approaches for help, just as he cured all of us.” She glanced around at Father Preston’s people who were nodding in agreement.

  Henry watched his own people. Most of them avoided looking at the woman. Some blushed. Henry knew how they felt.

  “I know the cure felt pretty miraculous to all of us, but—” began Rickey, looking for support from Henry.

  “But we’re just having a hard time believing it came from— from faith rather than medicine,” supplied Henry, afraid to say more. There were nods and murmurs from one side of the crowd.

  Father Preston raised his hands, as if the crowd was shouting instead. “I know it seems hard to believe. It took me a long while to believe it myself. I know that not all of you are Christian. Maybe some of you don’t belong to any organized religion.”

  Henry was a little surprised. Vincent had worn his religion like a co
mfortable suit, something he expected to fit himself alone. But Henry had expected Father Preston’s to be more like a blanket, something the priest assumed everyone else must fall underneath.

  “And those of you that do believe must have been severely tested in the past several years. But my ability isn’t much different from the medicine that cured you.”

  Gray, too, was surprised. Where was this going? He let the dart fall deeper into his pocket and crossed his arms, waiting for the flourish on the priest’s magic trick.

  “I was Infected, just like you. I grew ill from pneumonia. I should have died, but instead, the Plague was beaten as I overcame the pneumonia. The doctor that treated me— she was— confused.”

  Henry saw an angry scowl flash over Father Preston’s face, a slip of the mask, and then it was gone. It was so fast that he thought he imagined it, except that he could tell from Vincent’s reaction that he had seen it too.

  “She said it was just an isolated incident, that I was lucky. That it couldn’t be of use to anyone else, because she no longer had the technology to make a medicine from my blood. And I believed her. For years. A few months ago, the people that are with me were Infected. They were being cared for in an asylum. There was— there was an incident and they were all released at one time, still Infected. In their madness, they couldn’t help but attack whoever was nearby, as I was. But upon biting me, they became unconscious, as did I. When we awoke some days later, all of them were cured.”

  A swell of questions began and grew until Father Preston’s group was surrounded, mixed with everyone else, each corroborating his story. Except for Gray. He leaned silently against his post. He wasn’t watching Father Preston anymore. He was watching Henry and Vincent. Neither one looked particularly shocked. Why were they letting this charade continue? What purpose did it serve?