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

paperwork easier you can claim I turned myself in. I want my day in court. The world will see I’m not the villain I’ve been painted as,” She glared at Nella, “So have your guards read me my rights or whatever you’ve got to do, and let’s get this over with.”

The Warden shrugged and told the guards to take Dr. Schneider to his office. He turned back to Frank and Nella. “You look like you’ve been drug down a gravel road on a dry day. Where have you been?”

Frank shook his head, “Sorry Warden, if I was allowed to say, then I would.”

The Warden threw up his pudgy brown hands. “Okay, not trying to poke my nose where it isn’t wanted. But I see Dr. Rider is injured. Perhaps we can have the infirmary look at that while I pick her brain about our new inmate.”

Frank thanked the Warden so effusively and looked so relieved at the prospect of proper medical care for her, that Nella felt another wave of panic about her shoulder slam into her. After letting the Warden know that she didn’t believe Dr. Schneider needed a suicide watch, she was handed over to the uniformed medical staff. She felt grungy next to them in their clean rooms with the bright lights and cold beds. Frank disappeared with the Warden, but she was too worried about what the doctor would find to notice. But the doctor’s eyes crinkled behind his mask and he told her not to worry. She didn’t even protest as the nurse injected her with a powerful sedative.

 

The Cured

She woke up in the passenger seat of Frank’s car, with no memory of how she got there. They were rolling slowly through the long spring dusk toward Frank’s house. Nella hadn't seen the other side of town since she was a poor graduate student. Since things like poor and wealthy had mattered. Now, she guessed, it was immunity that separated people. She had felt slightly depressed when she had been forced to choose a row house during school. All those people around her, she always felt so claustrophobic and unable to concentrate. Nella had felt like one tiny insect among many then and it had irritated her. Now, as row house after row house unrolled before the car, like an unending snake skin long shed, Nella was overwhelmed with loneliness. She kept expecting to see a mother on each porch yelling to their kids to come in for dinner. Or a couple of old men leaning on the metal fencing around their yards impassively watching the car pass by. But no one appeared. The houses were dark and the paint on the brick and doors were chipping, but it was the lawns that gave Nella an odd feeling of panic. People had been proud of their yards here, small as they were. Saturday mowing had been a ritual more likely to be kept than Sunday worship. It had been miles of smooth green squares without variation. Now the weeds had overrun the concrete sidewalks, pushed and tumbled the front stairs of homes, become long whorls matted by frost. Nella saw the faded pink plastic of a small child's tricycle reaching out of a silver tangle of old grass as if it were gasping for breath before being swallowed forever. She turned away from the window, tired of the emptiness outside.

Frank glanced over at her and and smiled. “Are you awake?”

“Sort of. How long have I been out?”

“Just long enough to look at your shoulder and put in a few more stitches. The doctor said you should be fine, the infection is passing.”

Nella sighed. “That’s a relief. Where are we going?”

“I needed to pick up some of the case files to work on. We can stay at my house or go back to your apartment if you like.”

“Do you live near here?” she asked, mostly so she wouldn't have to think of the house windows like opening eyes as their curtains rotted into dust.

“Just one more street up,” Frank said, “they opened this part of the City after the rest filled up. Maybe I wouldn't have chosen the house for myself before, but it's reassuring that there are enough people left to fill up the rest of the City. And my neighbors are nice.”

“You know your neighbors?”

Frank laughed and glanced at her surprised. “You don't know yours?”

Nella shook her head. “I honestly wouldn't even know I had any except for the occasional thump on the wall or the ceiling.”

Frank shook his head. “Don't you miss people? I mean, I know you talk with people every day for work, but don't you just miss having normal conversations about things that don't matter? Things like the weather and people's jobs and what their kids have done lately?”

“More than you know,” she replied, “But no one talks about those things anymore. Unless it's to worry about them. And if you get friendly with your neighbors, they might want something that you can't afford to give them.”

“Ah, I see now. You're still in the bunker.”

“What?”

“Your side of town are mostly Immunes, right? You, the people around you, had to survive through their neighbors becoming monsters, the government breaking down and looters taking what few supplies were left.”

“So did you.”

Frank slowed to a stop in front of a well kept block of row houses. “Not exactly. I mean, I was technically one of the last people infected, so yes, I was aware that things were bad, but I was already in my shelter when things started to fall apart. Most of these people,” he said, waving his hand around toward the houses, “never saw that. Once the infection took over, a person didn't think about how dangerous things were or how scarce things had become. They would have walked right by a fully stocked grocery store without even looking at it. They didn't notice that the government had failed everyone or that the streets were dangerous. The worst thing that could happen had already happened. The Infected didn't have the brain processes it takes to worry while they were sick. Now that we are the Cured, nothing can be worse than what we've been and what we've done, so there is really nothing worth worrying about anymore.”

He turned toward her. “We're all the same here. There's no reason to fear each other, because we know, in some sense and with a little variation, what each person living here has done. People that were Immune- they had to do all sorts of things to get by. Things maybe they aren't proud of, because those things are as bad as anything the Infected did, except the Immunes don't have a brain altering disease that will explain what they've done.”

Frank slipped a hand around hers before she could interrupt. “I love you, Nella. I don't care what you did to survive this long. I'll never ask and you don't ever need to say. Whatever it was, I don't think it could be as bad as what I've done, what the Infected did. But not everyone could say the same. The people around you avoid each other, not only because they may be ashamed of what they have done in the past or frightened of what they will find out their neighbors have done in the past, but also because they are still afraid of what they may have to do in the future. They're still in the bunker. Like Mr. Grant. They think somebody is going to come along and fix the world any day now, and they can forget this nasty spell and move on. No one is coming. We're the ones who have to fix the world. You know that right?”

“Of course. What else have we been trying to do all this time?” she asked.

Frank smiled and touched her cheek. “We can't always be running after rogue diseases and conducting trials. I know it feels like those things will take forever, but soon this trial will be over and we'll find the bacterium and the world will be safe. But it won't be fixed. Sometimes you have to do really brave things, like make friends with your neighbors. That's how the world gets fixed. Little bit by little bit.” Frank sighed. “Listen to me, going on and on. Must be the lawyer part of my brain gearing up. Sorry about that.” He let go of her hand and opened his door. Nella took a few seconds to look at the house they had stopped in front of before getting out of the car. The bricks had been whitewashed, like the others on that block, and recently. The fence had been uprooted, not just around his house, but around all of them on the block. Frank's yard was a little weedy, speckled with the old brown husks of naked dandelions, but most of the other lawns had been tilled, their dark innards thawing in the warm spring night, waiting.

“People are growing gardens out here?”

“Yes, the block has decided to grow herbs and aromatics for medicine or soaps, luxuries. The Farm just doesn't have enough space for things like that, but the old stuff is almost completely gone, even the furthest ranging scavengers are having trouble finding some things.”

“Are you going to grow them too?”

Frank sighed. “I wish I could, I've just been so busy with the trial. I haven't even cared for the grass that was already here. But Mrs. Nichols- she's one of the neighbors, asked if she could try a pair of fruit trees in my yard. It's still too cold, but in a month we'll plant some apple seedlings we traded the Farm for. That way we won't have to go all the way there for fresh fruit.” Frank laughed. “She wanted to find a citrus tree, she's afraid we're all going to die of scurvy. I told her it was too cold, we'll have to take our chances with other produce.”

Nella smiled faintly. “We'll send her crates of oranges when we move to New Guinea.”

A metal door clanged shut a few doors down and a teenage boy ran across the street and started knocking on another door. The pretty girl who came out to talk with him was on crutches because she was missing a leg.

“Gangrene,” Frank said seeing that Nella had noticed. “Bites from other humans are unsanitary and they festered, sometimes for months on the Infected before they received medical care after the Cure. Sometimes amputation was the only option. You'll see it a lot here.”

“I know. I was part of the medical team that went first administered the Cure, remember?”

“Of course,” Frank shook his head, “sorry, I'm just used to people staring.”

“I guess that I was staring, but that wasn't why. I'm just not used to seeing anyone between six and twenty anymore.”

Frank nodded. “There aren't many of them are there? It must be really tough.”

“They would have been, what? Eight or so when the Plague hit?” Nella shuddered, thinking of how frightened they must have been before they were infected and