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

her for the soap, quietly clearing his throat. “Real soap. Are you ready?”

It wasn’t as bad as she had expected, now that the initial shock of the water had worn off. She was sore, but clean, feeling hollowed out and left to dry in the sun. The heat of the water soon made her dizzy and another wave of nausea passed over her, forcing them out of the warm bathroom. The cool, dry air of the exterior office was a relief, though Frank still had to help her sit beside the large desk. Dr. Schneider looked grim, but she was relatively gentle.

“You know,” she said as she inspected the stitches in Nella’s shoulder, “The Recharge bacteria was never meant to harm anyone. I don’t know if Dr. Pazzo ever told you that. It was meant to help. It was supposed to change everything for the better.”

“But you didn’t follow normal procedures. Ones that were set up to avoid disaster like this,” Nella said gently.

“It wasn’t stubbornness or greed that made me speed up testing,” Dr. Schneider snapped. “All the primary tests were exactly, exactly as predicted. Robert assured me there was nothing abnormal at all. This method was supposed to help people. It was supposed to help police and medical aid workers and firemen make it safely through crises. No more injuries due to fatigue or slow thinking. No more lives lost because of careless mistakes due to overworked specialists. It was supposed to help lift depression and alleviate all the ills stemming from exhaustion, stress and trauma. All without drugs. No risk of abuse or addiction. Very low cost, much lower than other treatments. Can you imagine the changes in society when everyone, down to the poorest could be treated for mental illness? Can you imagine the happier, healthier, perhaps even less violent place it could have been? This was something we needed immediately. The world was tearing itself apart and this bacteria faced years, decades even, of further testing and verification. It would have been lunacy not to test a more powerful strain at the same time.”

Nella drew in a hissing breath as Dr. Schneider became more vigorous in applying antibiotic cream onto her shoulder. Frank grabbed Dr. Schneider’s wrist to stop her and the doctor looked up. “Sorry,” she said, “surely you can see why I’d want to move the testing along? People needed this technology as soon as we could produce it. Not ten years later. You must understand how beneficial it was supposed to be. It was going to change medicine forever.”

“It did, Dr. Schneider. Here we all are, almost a decade later, and I’m in danger of dying from an infection which would have meant a simple trip to the pharmacy before. Medicine has changed. It’s been set back by a century. Maybe forever.”

“Not just medicine,” Frank broke in, “Civilization, in fact. Our grandparents had easier lives than our children will. Than our grandchildren will.”

Dr. Schneider unrolled a gauze bandage around Nella’s arm. “I hardly think that’s a fair judgment,” she said quietly, “I did do my best to fix it.”

Nella sighed. “It’s not us you have to convince, though I can’t say you are even doing that. Help us find the lost samples and maybe the world will find you more persuasive.”

Frank’s color rose and he glanced toward the bathroom door again. It was so quick that Nella barely saw it. Dr. Schneider taped the end of the bandage down and cleared away the first aid kit, walking away from them. Frank leaned against the large desk and watched Dr. Schneider. Nella watched him.

“You know where it is.” Nella was shocked to realize it.

Frank looked shaken and she could see small points of sweat glittering on his head. “No!” he said loudly and then lowered his voice to a whisper, bending toward her. “I swear Nella, if I did then I’d tell you. I’d tell everyone, consequences be damned.”

“Then you guess.”

“Not even that.” He glanced at Dr. Schneider to be sure she wasn’t watching them. “I promise, the moment I know something, anything for sure, then I will tell you. My hunches though, would only do harm.”

He leaned back as Dr. Schneider returned. She handed Nella a pill bottle. “These will help with the pain. No more than two at a time.”

“That’s my cue,” said Frank grabbing the lantern, “I’ll be right back with the pack.”

Dr. Schneider looked nervous as Frank left the room. Nella was too exhausted to wonder why. She dry swallowed a pill and winced at the bitter powder it left on her tongue. She thought about slipping the sling back over her neck so that she wouldn’t move her shoulder in her sleep. But then her elbow creaked and cramped in protest and she decided against it. Dr. Schneider had already slipped into her sleeping bag and was facing the empty wall. Assured that no one would interrupt her thoughts for a moment, Nella looked back at the bathroom door. What was so important about it? It was just a door. It wasn’t special in any way, and she racked her brain trying to think if they had seen an identical one any where. No memories were triggered. It was just a door. But that wasn’t right. He hadn’t been looking at the door. He had been staring at the doorknob. Nella stood up. She took a few steps toward the bathroom when she heard the elevator chime down the quiet hall. Her limbs tensed as a painful jolt of adrenaline shot through her. It’s only Frank, of course, she thought, but she retreated to the seat by the desk again, still puzzled.

“Fresh clothes,” Frank said with a grin as he walked through the door.

“Bed,” Nella said with a smile. Her limbs felt like giant kelp floating in a current and there was a buzzing tingle behind her eyes. She wasn’t sure if it was fatigue or the drugs. She let Frank help her dress in something clean and then crawled under the sleeping bag. She managed to wait until he was lying beside her, his hand curled around hers, before she fell down the smooth grey well in her mind.

 

The Vault

The windows were blocked, so Nella had no idea whether it was day or night when she woke, but she sat up with only one idea in her head. It wasn’t the door Frank had been fascinated with. It wasn’t the doorknob either. It was the lock. But why? Nella looked around her. Both Frank and Dr. Schneider were still asleep. She thought about taking another painkiller to stop the gnawing grind in her shoulder, but the idea that Frank was bothered by the lock had grown enormous in her mind. Something important hovered just beyond her groggy thoughts. If she could concentrate, she knew she could find out what it was. She had the overwhelming feeling it was something she ought to know.

Nella fumbled in the dark for the lantern. She switched it on, blocking the light with her body and slipped out of the quiet office. The hall and the world outside were pale gray with early morning light. She switched off the lantern and left it just outside the door. For a moment she was at a loss. What was she doing? She decided to go to the vault. If anything in this place had to do with a lock, it must be there. She was no detective, but she had an undeniable urge to see it for herself, to see if there were any clues about who had been there before her. She walked down the hallway toward the elevator. When she got to the smooth little panel with the call button, she began to feel distinctly creepy. What if she called the elevator and it arrived with someone already inside? She told herself not to be ridiculous, but once she had imagined it, there was no shaking the idea. She became more and more certain that if she called it, there would definitely be someone inside. Would it be a decomposing corpse simply jumbled like an abandoned marionette against the back wall? Or a Looter armed to the teeth and ready to grab whatever, whomever he wanted? Or just an Infected, mad and starving, stretched hide over the empty drum of its ribs, all jaw and talon? Nella backed away from the elevator doors almost without realizing it. She decided to look for the stairs instead.

The stairs were almost worse. With a slim window every other floor, the weak morning light was barely a glow against the concrete floor. Every step Nella took was echoed three times in the small stairwell so that it sounded like there were a crowd running after her. She forced herself to keep climbing, more from shame at letting the idea of the elevator defeat her, than in any real desire to get to the vault alone. Nella was grateful that it was only one floor. She had to rest at the top, sitting on the last step in front of the stairwell door. Her shoulder pounded and her breath was harsh and loud in the stairwell. She worried briefly at her body’s weakness, wondering if the infection in her arm might truly kill her. She’d been exaggerating the night before, trying to drive a point home with Dr. Schneider, but now it hit her as true. The drugs to help her were simple. Simple enough that they were still being reproduced in a rudimentary way, but not for public consumption. Not for an affordable price, anyway. Nella sighed, startling herself with the echoes. Her body was just going to have to shake off the infection by itself. And climbing stairs when it was unnecessary wasn’t going to help her do that. She stood up and opened the staircase door.

She felt tiny ants of unease creep over her skin as she faced a rounded silver door surrounded by contamination instructions and biohazard warnings in bright yellow and black, like hornets descending upon her. The door, which was supposed to be failsafe, airtight, unbreachable, was propped open with what looked like an old shoe. Nella felt a dryness creep from a patch in the back of her throat until it filled her chest with desert sand. Don’t be stupid, she told herself, those doors haven’t been necessary for years. Dr. Schneider, the scavenger scouts and whoever took the sample have all been inside and they are fine. Still, she couldn’t argue the instinctual dread she had of entering. It was so palpable that Nella could imagine the smell of infection, could almost convince herself that she smelled a slight sourness, like fruit turning or like the clinging scent where roadkill once died, years before. She knew infection didn’t have a smell, but she almost smelled it anyway. She thought if she moved her head just right, she’d catch a whiff in the breeze her movement made.