Ophelia Immune: A Novel

by Mattson, Beth

I could see lanterns bobbing up and down the highways. I thought about all of the Hikers heading to the city while Juliet’s barely thawed jaws worked rhythmically against my shoulder. I held her closer. All of those Hikers had Propane and mittens and matches and lighters and scarves that we could borrow and she only grew harder and harder to control while I walked farther and farther from our paths to find kindling.

  I found the Highway, alone first, and then with Juliet in tow – just to sniff it out, see what it was like, try our luck until it grew too dangerous. Then we could head back into the wilds when we needed to.

  There were a few trucks moving along the yellow lines, their six wheels rumbling mightily past the Hikers, who were hauling their backpacks and sleds full of supplies into the city, sick of the Winter weather. I licked my cold lips and warmed my hands over the small fire that I built for us a few fields away from the road, willing myself not to go and grab some of their hot tea, which I could smell brewing over their grills next to their sweet meats. I remembered how awfully stuck in my stomach the bread had felt. It made it easier for us to follow them from a safe distance, melting plain snow to drink as they trudged into Turington in front of us, with their perfumed presence.

  The Turings ignored the Hikers when they reached the city limits, the broken barbed wire barriers that were unguarded. Or the resident commuters muttered at them with their strange, Northern accents. I wondered if the Hikers could understand their insults. They paced past the outdoor Market stalls, heads held down, hoping that nobody would push them around or steal the venison out of their sleighs. But the City Folks didn’t know to look for fresh meat on the backs of the grubby, sloppy Hikers – they let them go past with only sneers and rude gestures. They had probably never been Hikers or Drivers and didn't know our tricks. I hid us behind bushes and trees and crept slowly up behind them, a few ditches behind, until the Hikers entered the city and split up into smaller bands, on their weary ways.

  I chose a small family with sharpened spears to follow. At least when they caught us, they would either dispatch us expertly or there would be few of them for me to escape; whichever I decided. I hid us behind the overflowing dumpsters and roof-high piled trashcans that they plodded past in front of us. Nobody wanted to see us. Nobody looked around during the day and nobody came out after dark. Nobody even twitched a muscle below the fifth floor of any of the buildings after the sun went down. Turington fell asleep and locked up early.

  Every neighborhood – the Markets, The Old Wharf, The Factories, The Houses – had empty buildings. Some were burned, others just abandoned into a perfect beehive for Squatters. Those who could pay rent lived in the buildings that still had front doors, but the poorest of the poor – the Hikers, the Squatters, the freshly Bitten – scurried to make themselves personalized holes in the abandoned walls, stealing electricity and water from the Civilized establishments. Snaking cords and makeshift pipelines were built and maintained faster than the Cannery, Rope Winder, Propane Filler or Electronics Stores could scrape them away.

  The under-staffed Factories didn’t want to deal with the Squatters’ buildings. The richer citizens were happy to let them drain the riffraff from the rest of the city. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t want to go into Squatters’ Quarters either, but Juliet needed walls and a roof. I needed to steal some things to hold her together. She was starting to fall apart.

  I watched the small family that we followed for a week, pinning us behind the trash and Infected rubbish while I watched how they moved around the City Folk. They lugged their packages and belongings as high up in the buildings as they could go, all the members of every size helping out, and then they blocked the gaping front entrances with large pieces of broken furniture and sleighs, which was foolish. They could have burned those to keep Warm until anything would actually stumble into a building well after the first Spring thaw. It was more likely that they were blocking newly Infected zombies inside with them.

  I dragged Juliet over their barriers, hurriedly, on our seventh night in the city, with not even a half moon to illuminate us. We scooted past the half-couch in the doorway of the maroon, brick building, ten stories high.

  “Hustle. Come on, let’s get inside,” I dragged her past the broken foyer tiles and up the splintered, creaking staircase, where a broken bulb thunked softly against the peeling wallpaper. On the second floor, there were two apartments that still had attached doors, both gaping open. The rest were hingeless and empty. They smelled like rats and cat boxes.

  “Which one should we take? Eh, which one?” I asked my sister.

  I poked my head into the first one, and then into the second. The second door had better locks with a deadbolt and a chain. It also had some shelves, mismatched chairs, a scarred dining table and glass in both of the windows. I closed the panes. The wind rattled through, but they remained in one piece. Why hadn't anyone burned all of this stuff as fuel?

  I stopped to listen. There were no noises except for the scraping of rodent toenails on the ceiling above us. Nobody lived low in the building, not even the two floors above us. They would never see us if I only went out at night. They would never notice if I didn’t steal from them. I only would only thieve from other buildings that I could climb into by the fire escapes, or empty buildings that had Infected items left behind by Humans too scared to touch them.

  I snatched armfuls of smeared, woolen blankets from the trash bins outside and folded them into our new apartment closet. I made myself a nest to sleep in while Juliet roamed across the wooden floors all night long. She never slept, but I tried. Mostly I just I just listened to her shuffle and thrash when she caught a worthy dust bunny. When I did sleep for a few hours, I couldn’t dream. When I managed to pass out into cold unconsciousness, Juliet always woke me up again with her thumping and growling. She always wanted some more water or another bite of my arm. She never got tired or sick of chasing the fuzz that stuck to the soles of her own feet.

  First, I found things in the trash bins outside or in the abandoned apartments on our second floor. I dressed Juliet in a buttoned up pink sweater that Mom would have liked, with its fuzzy bows and glossy snaps. It had a few black stains and it was a little bit tight over the other layers that I had her wrapped in, but she would freeze less quickly that way. I wished that she would leave the hat on her head a little bit longer. It was brightly striped fleece with a tail and a pompon that Hector would have loved to chew on.

  Whenever Juliet saw it flapping above her eyes she ripped it off, I thought of our stupid, silly brother. Was he still alive? Should I care? Was he still living with the family who had left us to wander alone forever? Why hadn't Dad killed us? Wasn’t he a good shot with the gun? How had he missed? Had he missed on purpose? Couldn’t he have turned on the Yard lights and killed us even in the darkness? Wouldn’t he have felt better knowing that we were on the warm, flickering Burn Pile? Why hadn’t he noticed that I was Immune? What had all of his training been for?

  Juliet grunted against the end of the ribboned rope that I used to tie her to the fridge and stretched her arms out towards me, her shoes squeaking against the grimy linoleum floor. Our building didn’t have electricity, and we didn’t need to put anything in the icebox to stay cold, so it was just another nice shelf to hold stolen Propane, another cabinet to hold pots that I filled with water. It was a heavy enough object to tie Juliet to so that she couldn’t pull it away with her.

  There weren’t enough people left in the city to steal all of the appliances and fill up all of the apartments, so even mostly abandoned, ours was a nice building. We had three whole rooms, four if you counted my closet, but we never went in the bathroom much. After I saw myself in the bathroom mirror I didn’t want to go back in. I used the kitchen for water, and the closed door kept Juliet from splashing in the toilet.

  During the day, when we hid and I couldn’t sleep, much less dream, I lay against my scratchy covers and remembered how my blood was black, how my gums were black, but how my skin was grey an
d green. I no longer matched my family, my family who let me go, except for my Little Sister who was an It – an It that was a shameful danger to everybody but me. An It that still shared the golden flecks in my eyes.

  I rearranged the dried flowers on our table. I hung my ax and hammer on the wall in the living room, in a way that Dad would have approved of. I got the angle just right, and then sat back to look at them while Juliet cried for me to fill her mouth. I cried for much more. We both just rattled and moaned.

  The Clinic

  It was difficult, keeping things that were safe to gnaw between Juliet’s jaws. She went through all of the toys I could snatch out of already picked over dumpsters too quickly. Close to our new building, I could twist ragdolls out of shredded bag handles and could roll frozen corn cobs across our floor, but they didn’t last more than an afternoon each. And I had to keep finding material to burn, starting fires to keep our veins pliable, wrapping her in soft tethers that wouldn’t rupture her thin skin, trying not to raise a hand against her. No matter how often she chewed on my shirts, or knocked over chairs, or banged on the floor loudly. No matter how often a swirling funnel of debris came whipping around a street corner and plastered me against a grungy concrete wall in a terrible neighborhood, I kept rummaging and thieving to keep us in good shape.

  The wind was worse in the City than it had been in the woods, maybe because Turington was on a river. The River was in a far away part of the city. It took more than an hour for me to walk there from our apartment, but the dumpsters were less picked over, and there were fewer Humans to see me. Nobody else wanted to walk there. Nobody wanted to be near the water or the fish, even when they were frozen. Our apartment was in a neighborhood closer to the Highway and the Markets, far away from the rotten, ruined River, but if the nice people saw me, that would be it.

  Only the worst of the Squatters lived near the River – the old men with no legs, or one leg stump that itched and peeled and never stopped scratching, the fat men who shouldn’t be fat because nobody had enough food to stay more than skinny. What were they eating to stay so roly-poly? Maybe the old men with the leg stumps. Or the skinny, naked little girls that they sometimes dragged around behind them. They might as well have used a leash to pull those girls along. Sometimes they did, their feet stumbling and cold as they disappeared into the Squatter buildings. When their cries bounced off of my ears, it was hard not to go to them, to cup their faces like I would Juliet’s and send their owners flying out of their rooms and back into the obscene night.

  The buildings near the River were all missing parts of walls and the air reeked of the lingering plastics and waxy scraps that the vile men burned to stay Warm. The factory buildings near the Old Wharf on the River stank like the Propane that they manufactured and pumped into used and dented canisters. Sometimes a dangerously aged canister would explode and fly out of the factory yard, through the wall of the dilapidated Squatter’s buildings. The fat old men raced to the site of the explosion to see if there was anything that they could use or steal from the charred villain that it had crushed. The ragged men with leg stumps hobbled in after the fat men, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything when they crept away from the carrion.

  Nobody sat in the Old Wharf’s Park. The concrete slabs where the old benches had anchored were empty, long robbed of their burnable furniture. A few Humans muddled through the frozen, crispy grass on their way to bribe Rope Factory workers for the broken and short leftovers that their bosses would have been happy to try and sell if they hadn't been pilfered. The factory workers counted their filthy money, kissed it, shoved it into their pockets and scuttled back inside to ruin their cracked and bare fingers with more twining and braiding.

  Those who didn’t have enough money to buy rope scraps huddled around cooking barrels in crowded corners, sharing flammable scraps and bartering for mitten shards or tin mugs full of weak broth. Those who had enough money to buy proper rope from the Hardware Stores, and to pay rent, and to buy cans full of food didn’t come out after dark at all. They left the night to those of us who needed to move around without being seen. They didn’t want to notice the girls being pulled on leashes and the scrambling for rope scraps and bare pigeon bones.

  The rich slept in their tall buildings with real doors and fortified lower floors while I trudged about, drinking water and rubbing my fingers together to stay Warm and pliable. The rich slept until they heard me break their sixth floor windows and climb in, after I got sick of scrambling with the River scum. They thought about fighting me off, but when they heard me moan and rattle, they hid and shivered behind their bedroom doors, thinking that I would bite them instead of steal their firewood and fuel. I didn’t laugh at their foolish fear of one little zombie; my chortles would have given me away before I could escape back to my apartment with the loot. But any Healthy Human could have just copied my strategy and made out like a bandit without even being sick.

  I never saw the rich people. I hid during the day, they hid from me when I moaned into their broken windows, and it was only us Desperates out after dark. Us and the zombies, whom I showed no pity. They were easy targets, so easy, and maybe the good I could do by killing them would make up for all of the bad I was doing.

  The zombies that I killed were always near Warm spots. Vents, grates, open doors, or their own heated homes. There was a whole ex-family of six trying to break out of their sealed apartment while I robbed them of their movement and took all of their heating oil, too. They didn't need it anymore. I left them piled near their family bed, as a mercy, and slipped away into the night with their blankets wrapped around the outfits and toys that I was carrying home to Juliet. She went through these things so quickly.

  I found three zombies in our own building without even going up to the third floor. I never went above the second floor. Ever. Not where my Human neighbors could see me. I just took the three ex-Squatters who had turned after hunkering together in our hallway, dragged them down the stairs by their collars, out into the alleyway and held them over the dumpster while I spilled their biology into the rubbish. They deserved it for not taking care of themselves.

  I kept my ax polished and sharpened against the solid, black brimstone edge of one building's exposed cornerstones, about a mile from our own place. One night, I looked up above the thick foundation block that I was rubbing and noticed a big white square with a bright red cross. Before Dad had failed to take care of me, before I had failed to take care of everyone, when we were back in the Car, he used to point to the red crosses on our maps and say that a different kind of Engineers were inside – Doctors and Scientists – working to save us all. That had probably all been hogwash, but I wondered if they could save me right then by leaving their Propane unattended.

  Down the Doctor's dark alleyway, there were some newly delivered boxes sitting beside the receiving door. It was dim enough for me to approach them without being seen. I hoped that the fresh, un-opened boxes would be holding gas canisters wrapped in canvas sacks with bows made of matches and lighters. Or maybe recycled cardboard logs. One rich family that I had robbed had given us a few of those. They had smoldered for two whole nights in a row.

  Glancing over my shoulder for the Doctors who should be collecting their delivery, I ripped open the boxes. They were full of empty receptacles – syringes, vials, test-tubes, petri dishes. Science supplies. Doctor's tools. The other Engineers. I looked around. Nobody was watching.

  I held a knot of my dirty hair out of my face and reached deeper into the box. I held a piece of the smooth, clean, glass tubing in my palm. Scientists used these on Humans. To collect their blood. And do the Science that Dad had talked about.

  I wondered how my blood would look inside of it. Black and greasy. Slimy. Sick. I wondered if the Engineers inside, the Doctors and Scientists, could use it for something, an Experiment maybe. I wondered if they would scream if they saw it mixed with their supplies. Or if they would be dumb, touch the zombie blood and get Infected. Or if they would be
smart and use it for something Good. They could use it, test it, for Science. I could be useful. Or just disgusting.

  I rolled up one of my sleeves, took a long, opaque vial and held it under my arm.

  Black blood welled up as soon as I cut my skin with the corner of my ax. It tingled and seeped. It looked like I was injured and bleeding to death, but it didn’t hurt and I didn’t get light-headed. I was happy to give something away. Something that I could give instead of stealing. Get rid of some of my own weight.

  The black goo dripped down my elbow and into the little, plastic vial. The stopper squished back onto the top and the vial clattered back into its holder. I resealed the box and stepped away, admiring the container of liquid onyx that I had left behind. It would probably be helpful for the Scientists and Doctors to have the blood of somebody who was Infected and Immune. I hummed with speculation as I rolled down my flannel sleeves.

  I came back the next night and did it again. I ripped open the boxes and then my arm. I dripped my slippery, sludge-y blood into another large, opaque vial and moaned with joy as I walked away. I was lighter. I was giving somebody something. I had dirty blood to give. I couldn’t give anything else, but my filthy blood I could give again and again. I could kill zombies and I could vandalize the Scientists’ boxes with my midnight stains, making them furious or curious. I wasn’t sure which. I couldn’t tell. Maybe I would meet somebody else like me, who was doing the same thing. It was a good idea.

  I watched over the Clinic for an indication. Every night after I donated my sample, a Doctor with shimmering, auburn lion hair would open up the service door and reach his arms out for the delivery boxes. One by one he dragged the boxes inside, until he got to the ones that I had ripped open to find the vials. Then he would stop and look for me, searching for the vandal. He never saw me in the shadows, but I saw him.