Henry stopped and looked back at him. “Why?” he asked.
“I was the one that killed her mother,” said the priest. Henry shook his head and began pulling the sled again.
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he called back over his shoulder, “I don’t intend on leaving a single one of those monsters alive. And this time, Father, it will definitely be sinning because this time, I’ll mean it.”
Twenty
The thin rope bit into Henry’s shoulder every time the toboggan bounced over the uneven ground. Vincent fell back from the others to take a turn. Henry handed him the rope. “You killed Elizabeth?”
“I didn’t have a choice Henry.”
“I know. She came to tell me there had been a cure found. A long, long time ago. She said she was going to get it for me. For all of us, so we’d get rid of Phil. She never came back. I didn’t know what happened to her.”
Vincent pulled slowly on the sled. “She came back,” he said quietly. “I was in the pen at the front of the camp. She came up the hill and she had a gun. She started shooting the other people in the pen with me. I think she must have had the Cure. She must have been shooting them with darts, like the people at the farmhouse. She had to keep reloading and Phil’s guys caught her before she could get to me. I was the only one left, the others just slumped down on their posts and fell asleep. Phil came up to her and started yelling. I was too far away to hear though. He came up to the palings and looked at the other people in the pen. I heard him say she’d ruined perfectly good ‘dogs,’ that he’d have to kill them now, because how was he supposed to let them live? They’d know what he’d done to them.” Vincent paused to wipe his eye.
“He knew? He knew it was a cure and he knew how it would work. And he still let us stay sick. How many years were we sick when we could have been better? How many more people did we kill?”
“He didn’t just let us stay sick. He killed the people she cured. Shot em. Left them in the pen. Then he pushed her in and shut the door again. He hooked my leash and pulled me back to the palings. Then he unclipped the leash.” Vincent stopped and sobbed, his face in his hands, the toboggan rope forgotten, hanging loose on his arm. “But she ran, and the people he’d just shot, they didn’t. So I didn’t get her first. I wish I had. I wish I’d killed her first before I ate those others. It took days, because I was the only one left. Phil’s guys did come and get most of the dead ones after the first few days, but it still took me a long time to bother with her. The first day, she cried and cried. The girl came out and screamed and cried and stuck her little fingers through the fence to touch her mom. Phil threatened to throw the little girl into the pen too, so Elizabeth told her to go away, begged her not to come back. And then she just sat in the farthest corner from me and cried. I don’t think she slept. But I did. After I gorged myself, I fell asleep. After the first day, she didn’t cry anymore. She didn’t try to escape. The girl’s father came once to the fence. Elizabeth asked him to kill her, before I did. Asked him to shoot her. He was too scared of Phil to do it. She spat on him and turned her back on him and he went away. Finally, after a few days, she fell asleep. She wasn’t given anything to eat and refused to drink from the same trough as me until the last day or two. She must have been so hungry. But in the end, I was hungrier.”
Henry watched the others disappear into the slumped wreck of a house down the lane. He didn’t want to think about Elizabeth. He didn’t want to think about the terrible pens where they had spent the last eight years, and he didn’t want to think about Marnie screaming for her mother. He squeezed Vincent on the shoulder, feeling awkward and nervous, and then walked toward the rotting house without saying anything at all.
Henry walked around to the backyard so he wouldn’t have to see the others and to look for a shed, a garden, anything that would help them. There was a broken window in the back, so he could hear the others talking behind him. It was pleasant background noise. He knew that he should feel sad for Elizabeth, for Vincent, but it was distant, like an old scar, long healed. He was overwhelmingly relieved that she hadn’t come to find him first and that she hadn’t been thrown to him to eat. An old wood shed sat in one corner of the yard. Henry suppressed a shudder as he started toward it. He ought to have left Phil to die in the first shed, to bleed to death after his “accident.” The shed door was padlocked. Henry tugged on the rusted hasp. It pulled loose after a few yanks but he hesitated before opening the door. Part of him insisted that there was someone infected behind it, kept like him. He opened the door. An old riding mower and a few garden tools were all that lay inside. There was an old red gas can but it smelled like turpentine and Henry didn’t have anything to put it in anyway. He shut the door and turned back to the house. The others had found some old shoes to replace the layers of socks some of them had resorted to, but not much else. They walked on to the next house without really speaking much. Melissa led them over fields and through fence gaps, somehow knowing where they were going without following the crumbling road. It was only a few hours before they’d left the rural farms behind and began seeing small clusters of houses as the neared the suburbs outside the City. They’d found very little in the farms, most of the food was gone, eaten by animals or long rotted away, even the one basement they found lined with jars of preserves had mostly crusted with rust or turned to vinegar inside the glass. The group had turned glum, as even Rickey started to realize how helpless they would be without outside help. Henry had taken the toboggan back from Vincent and lagged behind the others a few paces. They reached the first small cluster of houses, and Molly suggested that they split up, since the afternoon was quickly wearing away. Melissa looked doubtful, but everyone else seemed too weary to care much. The only thing that moved was an old plastic ribbon that flapped from one of the porches, the corpse of some long ago birthday party. Henry had an overwhelming desire to tear it off. There were no birds, no dogs, no car horns. He had been able to push it out of his head before. There had at least been bird song at the farm. He hadn’t expected much more from the other farms, they were isolated, rural. But here– he had a dreadful, passing instant where he feared he had gone deaf. The spring wind still sounded in the hollow places between the houses. When Henry was little, his mother had read him the story of the Pied Piper. It had given him nightmares for years. Standing in the suburban street, Henry realized that the scariest part was not the fate of the children who got swallowed up by the mountain. It was being the little lame boy who had to turn back all alone. And here they were, the leftovers, the gleanings. He understood now, why Molly had been crying.
“All right,” said Melissa, interrupting his thoughts, “leave the sled here so we can just dump what we find onto it. Ten minutes and then we’ll meet back, if anyone finds a jackpot, call out.”
Henry stood next to the toboggan for a moment as the others wandered away. He was reluctant to leave it. What little they had was all packed on it. There’s nothing there, Henry. A few cans, a box of milk, some old rags. Let it go. He looked around him. Everything was quiet except a few curtains rustling where the others were hunting for more. He turned away from the sled and walked to the house next to it. It was blue once, now beginning to peel in spots. The roof looked solid though. Feeling foolish, Henry knocked on the front door. He waited for a moment and then tried the door. Locked. He began walking around the house. The living room window was one solid pane. He felt badly about breaking it and decided to find another way. The bathroom window was too small and the kitchen window was too high off the ground. He looked around for a rock, but on his way back he found the basement bulkhead doors. They were loose. He opened them onto a very dark hole. “Hello?” he called, and swung himself down onto the ladder.
For the first time, Henry got lucky. In the thin gray light from the bulkhead he could see several flashlights hanging neatly from a post. He tried one and was relieved to find that it worked. He gathered up the rest without even checking. He swung the fl
ashlight around until he found a cardboard box. It was filled with empty jars. He pulled them out and dumped the other flashlights in. Placing the box on the wood stairs, he walked around the basement. Tools and a furnace, a washing machine and dryer. Just a typical house. He wondered for a moment whether he ought to go through the tools. He decided anything other than the essentials would be too heavy for their wasted frames for now. He dragged the box up the wooden stairs and into the kitchen. There was a rustling and scrabbling as he shut the basement door. Henry froze. “Hello?” he said. There was a squeak and Henry laughed at himself. He prepared himself to be disappointed, expecting that the mice had gotten to any food left in the house. Most of the cabinets were empty, the contents carried away either by the former owners or looters or in tiny bits over the years by rodents. But he found a few ceramic cannisters sitting on the back of the sink. Rice, coffee, sugar, pasta noodles. He smiled to himself as he put them in the box. He had no idea whether they would still be okay, but for the moment, it didn’t matter. A jar of bouillon cubes and a few containers of spices were swept into his box as well. Other than that, the kitchen was empty. Henry took one more moment to sift through the silverware drawer until he found a can opener. His flashlight sparkled on the silver refrigerator front. Henry put his box down on the kitchen table and moved closer to the refrigerator. There were photos of a family taped over the front, but they didn’t bother him. It was like the photos that used to come already inside of picture frames. Not real, distant, strange. And it wasn’t the crayon Christmas cards or the clunky homemade magnets covered in seashells. They weren’t connected with anything. Just something to pack away in a box. Someone else’s history. It was the torn envelope that made Henry stop. Just a normal business envelope, it’s little cellophane window peeling inward, the top flap ragged where it was opened. The return address was what caught his eye. It was his old work address. There was a yellow sticky on the front of the envelope. “Last Payment! Let’s celebrate!” it said. That was all. Henry hadn’t thought about his job much. Not even when he was working there. It wasn’t something he really liked or disliked. It was just a job. He wasn’t terrible at it, though he didn’t much like harassing people for money they didn’t have. He’d still done it. Regularly. People that managed to pay off their debt completely just didn’t happen very often. Closing an account had always been one of Henry’s secret joys, though it meant less money for his company. He imagined the utter relief these people must have felt with that last payment. Like a thousand pounds lifted off their backs. And then– Henry shook his head. He hoped they had celebrated before it didn’t matter any more.
He turned away from the refrigerator and made his way with his box into the living room. There wasn’t much of immediate use, and Henry was getting nervous about the others, so he hurried past and into each of the home’s bathrooms, emptying the medicine cabinets into the box without even looking at what he was doing. He wondered if anyone else would remember toothpaste and soap and grabbed them too, narrowly avoiding a nasty bite from some mice that had made a nest in old toilet paper under the sink of the upstairs bath.
Henry opened the door to the first bedroom, looking for blankets and towels, but then quickly backed up. The curtains were torn down, letting the deep yellow of late afternoon in. The room was purple with dried blood, the whole coated in a stiff, chalky layer of it. Furniture was tipped, bedclothes torn to streamers and dragging nail marks raked the walls. A heavy wall mirror lay smashed, face up, where it had fallen, reflecting the gore and the terrible, breathless stillness in a thousand different pieces. “I’m sorry,” said Henry, as if he’d caught someone naked in the bathroom. He shut the door. He looked toward the other bedroom, but decided to skip it and headed quickly down the stairs. He unlocked the front door, took a quick glance around the room to make sure he wasn’t missing something vital and then picked up his overflowing box and opened the door.
There was a small boy climbing over the toboggan, pulling things off. He couldn’t be more than five or six, probably not even born yet when the Plague had hit. An odd sensation of missing time hit Henry again. He put the box down on the front step, just as the boy looked up and saw him standing there. The boy froze, a dented can in one hand, his knees already tensed to spring away. Henry held up his hand, “Wait,” he said.
The boy began running. “Infected!” he screamed, “Infected! Infected!”
“Wait!” Henry called after him and began running down the steps. He made it halfway across the street before he heard gunshots blast around him. He should have run back to the house. Instead he threw himself over the sled, as if they were trying to shoot the supplies instead of him. Henry held his arms over the back of his head and winced into the pavement. The cans jittered and clunked and poked him as his stomach tensed over them with each shot. Whoever was shooting wasn’t very good at it, and they didn’t waste many bullets on him, for which Henry was very thankful. He wondered if it was actually the little boy himself. He pushed the thought aside and sat up, still shaking. The others were running toward him, and Henry’s relief that they hadn’t just abandoned him almost overwhelmed him.
“Are you hurt?” asked Pam as she reached him.
“No, but I think we’re missing some stuff.”
Rickey scowled and picked up a shovel from the sled. He brandished it and made a move to go after the kid. “No, don’t,” said Henry, “it was just a little boy. I think he might be alone. He probably needs it more than us. I tried to talk to him, but I guess I scared him.” He picked himself up from the street and rubbed the side of his face with one hand. “I guess I look worse than I thought,” he said with a rueful smile.
“We all do,” said Melissa. “Let’s get out of here before the kid’s big brother shows up. Everyone grab your stuff, we’re going to find a place to hole up for tonight at least.”
“Wait,” said Henry, “did anyone find a wagon or a wheelbarrow or anything? This sled is starting to splinter on the broken tar.”
“I found two of those bike stroller things,” said Molly, “And more bikes. But I need help hooking them up.”
“I’ll pull this stuff to you then,” said Henry, jogging back to retrieve his box. The others drifted off to get their things. Henry followed Molly back to a garage and felt immediately better as they pulled the sled inside. In the end, they had found so much that it filled both of the small trailers and a hiking pack that Molly volunteered to wear for a while. The sun was setting as they headed out of the small suburban street and onto the main road. Melissa assured them that they’d be at the hotel by the time the light was gone, so they put their tired legs through a little more and rode into the thickening dark.
Twenty-one
Melissa led them into the alleyway between two hotels. “We’ll go in the back way, far from the lobby,” she said softly, “by the pool. We can lock ourselves in there if anyone else is living here.”
They wheeled their bikes through the glassed in hallway. The pool was empty long ago, but it still smelled faintly of chlorine. Henry felt a little exposed in front of the large plate-glass windows, but they overlooked an empty courtyard between them and the lobby, and everything looked dark and still. Melissa led them into the large, windowless women’s locker room. She swept a flashlight beam over the area before Pam flipped the light switch. There were a few gasps as the light flickered on. “I thought so,” said Pam, “I hope no one else knows.”
“How did you know?” asked Vincent.
“There was a really bad storm several years ago,” said Pam, “everyone in the area was without power for weeks, except this place, the hospital and the high school. Those got power back first. This hotel just happened to be on the same line as the hospital. They could have made a killing. Instead they housed the electricians who were fixing the lines for free and opened their doors for anyone that wanted a hot shower or to do laundry while they waited for the power to come back on. I brought my kids swimming here for a few weeks.”
“But why would it still be on now after all these years?”
Pam shrugged. “I assume the City restored power at least to itself. It’s been a long time. Someone would have figured out how to get it running again. And they’d probably power the hospital first. We aren’t that far away. We’re just lucky that the hotel happens to be on the same line.”
“You mean we can have hot showers and sleep in our own rooms in an actual bed? Maybe we can figure out how to run the hotel videos,” said Rickey excitedly.
Melissa shook her head. “Sorry, but we can’t do any of those. The boiler probably ran out of oil ages ago, so the showers will be cold, if we’re lucky and the pipes haven’t burst yet.” She walked over to the sink and twisted the tap on. It chugged for a moment and then spat brown water that gradually ran clear.
“Why can’t we sleep in the hotel rooms?” asked Rickey.
“The battery packs on the door locks are all dead. That’s why we were able to get in here. We couldn’t lock any of the bedroom doors either. And every one we open to sleep in, we risk finding someone hostile. Plus we’d be farther from a quick exit.”
“And separated,” said Molly, with a panicked look.
“The pool entrance and these locker rooms have manual locks, and we’re close to an exit with all of our gear nearby. And–” Melissa walked over to a wooden door and opened it, flicking another light on. “There is a pass through here that used to be a sauna, so we can use both locker rooms and still be together.”
“Why are you so convinced that other people are here?” asked Rickey, “we didn’t know about the electric until Pam turned the light on. And what are the chances that anyone else is left alive that knows or would expect that the electricity has been restored out here too?”
“The only reason we didn’t know is because we came during the day,” said Henry with a dull groan. He sat down on a changing bench. “The parking lot lights, the lobby lights, any lighted signs that aren’t broken, they’re all on timers aren’t they? And now the sun has gone down. This place must look like Vegas in the middle of the desert. We should leave now-” he started to stand up, but Melissa shook her head.
The Cured Page 12
