After the Cure, Deirdre Gould [the beach read TXT] 📗

Frank smacked his open hand on a steel table hard enough to leave a ringing echo. “Enough with the damn posturing. Did you make an incurable bacteria or not?”

Dr. Carton shook as if the chill in Frank's voice cut to his bone. “Yes,” said the old man quietly.

“Has it been destroyed?”

“No. The lab was set to begin trials on it when the outbreaks began. By the time Gerta escaped from her lab to warn us, the social fabric was already failing. Everything changed so fast. You have to remember that people were infected within days, hours maybe, by Ann, and those people infected others. For weeks the Plague was incubating without anybody knowing. When it hit-”

“We remember. There was a massive tide of mob violence and then- and then the world was different.” Nella's stomach clenched. She had woken up to it as the Plague overtook her apartment building. At first, she had opened her door to see her two neighbors fighting. They clawed and bit and bashed without slowing. They didn't seem to register that they were injured. They weren't even swearing at each other, just roaring endlessly from the pit of the throat. Other neighbors came to their doors within seconds. One young man ran at the two brawlers with a yell. Nella thought he was going to try to stop them, to break up the fight. It shocked her to see him simply join in, making fresh wounds on each combatant with his teeth. More people ran from their doors and the apartments around Nella quickly emptied. They were a swirling, jerking mass of cracking bone and splashing blood, snapping teeth and crushing pistons made of limbs. Nella had simply stood, completely uncomprehending for a few long minutes. Then she realized she was the only one left to stop the brawl.

She yelled at the top of her voice trying to cut through the strange, creaking growl that they made at each other. “Hey! Cut it out! What the FUCK?”

The mob stopped and was ominously still for a second. Each member turned toward Nella, untangling the twisted knot into a crowd of people again. Their breathing was a ragged, uneven ocean of sound and the copper smell of blood. She had time to pick out details. Like 4A's girlfriend was missing an eye and didn't seem to notice at all. And 7B's arm hung the wrong way as he reached toward her. And everywhere faces were slick and shiny with dark blood but teeth shone through the crowd like a recurring nightmare of peppermint, maroon and white. They began to run toward Nella. She slammed the door and locked it even as it shivered in its frame. Within seconds the people had turned their attention back toward each other and continued to tear each other apart.

Nella had tried the police several times that day and in the week following but no one ever answered. The brawl had eventually either burnt itself out or moved to another floor leaving a wake of blood and dead flesh behind. Nella spent the week curled in a ball on the floor in front of the television. She didn't start crying until the news anchor turned feral on camera, his voice going from slurry but rational to a low, meaningless groan within seconds. She turned off the television before he could attack the cameraman. The power had gone out later that day. She still tried to call someone, anyone she knew over and over. She got only voice mail until her phone had died for good.

Within a few days, the building began to reek. The hallway buzzed with flies caught in the tacky, rotting mash on the rug. Nella knew that she would have to leave, have to see for herself what was left of the world.

“What? You've never heard of a phone before?” Sevita's voice broke through the haze of Nella's memory and she shook herself back to the present.

“By that time the lines were either jammed with panicked people or maybe Dr. Schneider's phone was dead. I know mine was,” said Dr. Carton, his voice gone whiny and waspish.

Frank leaned into Nella. “Are you all right?” he whispered, and his breath was warm and alive in the well of her ear. Nella nodded.

“Look,” Sevita was saying, “I don't even know why we're arguing about this. At some point Dr. Schneider found you right? And she told you how dangerous this bacteria was and you went back to the lab. That's what happened right?” Nella could hear a bitter edge of panic in Sevita's voice. Dr. Carton rubbed his temple as if agitated. Nella noticed his palsy was more pronounced. She leaned forward to look at him more closely.

“No,” said Dr. Carton, “I mean- yes, she found me. But, I wasn't- I wasn't quite myself when she found me.”

“What do you mean you 'weren't yourself?'”

“He means he was infected,” said Nella, realizing what the shakes in his muscles and confinement to a wheelchair resulted from.

“You were infected? But how is that possible? You cured the Plague.” Frank ran a hand over his smooth head in confusion and frustration.

Dr. Carton began to slowly wring his hands and his voice shifted from petulant to teary. “Actually, neither of those statements is correct.”

Nella felt her throat tighten and lift and her chin ached with pressure. “Oh God,” she managed and ran to the nearest sink. Dr. Carton frantically wheeled after her trailing a bewildered Frank and Sevita.

“Dr. Rider, please understand, I didn't know what caused the Plague until much later, not until Gerta told me. I didn't know how it worked on the Infected, I was only trying to sur-”

Nella retched so violently that the world went a hazy noiseless ash color and she missed the end of the word. She tilted her head sideways so that she could get a breath of air. Sevita was trying to keep Dr. Carton in her shot, still unsure what was happening but knowing it was important to catch on film. Nella reached up and turned the tap handle. She wiped her face with the cool water, but she could still feel her disgust as burning acid at the base of her throat. She turned back to Dr. Carton.

“You were a scientist. A doctor. How could you do-”

“I never killed anyone,” Dr. Carton interrupted, speaking quickly, “Not then. I thought if I smelled like them, if I acted and looked like them, if even my sweat blended in, then I wouldn't be attacked. I only ever-” he paused and began again in a low voice as if he did not want the world to overhear, “I only ever ate the leftovers.”

Nella retched again, but this time it caught in her gut, a spiky ball of horror stretching painfully against her innards.

“You mean you ate the dead?” Frank asked. He was pale as chalk. Nella could hear a sudden rattling of plastic as the camera shook in Sevita's hands. Frank tried to calm himself. “You mean you were infected,” he said, “like everyone else. It's okay, it wasn't you, it was the disease-”

“No, Mr. Courtlen. I wasn't ill. At least not ill with the Plague. I felt no compulsion to eat humans. It was- it is abhorrent to me both in theory and fact. I couldn't keep it down the first few times. I didn't slur or stumble or have any tics like the Infected. I had to adopt those. I hid in the lab for about a week, watching what they did. I felt it was necessary for me to blend in as much as possible if I was to survive.”

“But you must have seen them attack each other too,” said Sevita.

“Only when they were hungry. I followed a group of them after I left the lab. As long as I was careful to stay in places with- with rich pickings and didn't move quickly, they ignored both me and each other. They only went into a frenzy when the pica returned. It worked, here I am, eight years later.”

Frank held his own face in his hands and Nella thought he might be crying. Nella cleared her throat, her breath scraping against the raw spots where her stomach acid had lain. They were all silent for a moment, the dripping sink echoing with a metallic ping and the florescent bulbs buzzing like mad flies trying to escape.

Nella folded herself onto the cold floor. She brushed her sweaty hair off of her forehead and felt as if she were wearing away, eroding under the weight of the world. “So Dr. Schneider eventually found you in this- condition?” she asked wearily.

“Yes, Dr. Rider. It took almost a year. You can imagine I wasn’t completely in my right mind by then. I was ill with something and despite my best efforts, I'd been attacked and bitten several times. I was close to starving when Gerta found me. We made it to what was left of military headquarters. Gerta didn't tell anyone what we'd done and as soon as I was well enough, we left and set up a lab in secret to work on the Cure. Gerta didn't want to waste time with testing procedures.” Dr. Carton paused, rubbing his temple again. “She said she had to fix it, that it was all her fault and she had to fix it. It was my job to pull in Infected to test on. The first tests- they didn't go very well.” Dr. Carton swiped at his eyes and sniffed, and his voice was wheedling and teary again. “Gerta told me to get rid of the bodies. She said we had to emerge from this thing with a clean image. And we couldn't do that with dead patients. So, I did what I knew how to do. And Gerta promised not to tell anyone, as long as I did what I was told, she wouldn't tell anyone what I was.”

“You mean you continued to cannibalize the dead?” Sevita asked, her voice dry and papery.

“Yes. Once I was used to it, it was easy.”

“If you did all of these terrible things to keep your secret, why are you telling us now?”

Dr. Carton closed his eyes and sighed. “Because you already know the worst secret and you know it's still out there, waiting to kill everything. Because I've become convinced that one more old villain like me will just fade into the woodwork in this beat up corpse of a world. Because I'm tired of pretending to be the savior of mankind. At best Dr. Schneider postponed our deaths with the Cure. I was nothing more than a lab assistant. But Gerta threatened to tell the world what I had become if I didn't claim the Cure for my own. She didn't want to be found. She still doesn't.”

“But she knows where the incurable strain is?” asked Frank.

“She said she was going after it. She was going to return to the lab if