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

claimed that we were trying to trick him. He said that the world was finally clear to him, that he could only survive and grow stronger by killing and eating his enemies. He was convinced we had drugged him and we were trying to lull him with false security. He swore he'd kill all of us so that he could be strongest. Of course, we kept him in restraints. And they passed him on to me. It was a very hot day in the middle of summer when I finally met him again. I sat by his cot although he stank more and more with the heat. He had been sedated, so even after he woke up he wasn't really sure what was happening. He recognized me before I recognized him. He was convinced I was a hallucination.

'I know you,' he said, 'but you aren't really here. You're back at the old hospital. Back before the world showed its true self. That was a nice dream.'

'Do you know what happened after you left the hospital?' I asked him, 'What happened when the world showed it's true self?'

He leaned in closer to me, but was pulled up short by the restraints. Still, his breath was so foul with old gore, that I thought I might pass out between it and the heat.

'Everyone took off their masks,' he whispered, 'and the last supper finally began. I won though, I ate them all. I'm the strongest. I was filled with righteous wrath. I ate so many I became God.'”

Frank shuddered with his whole body and Nella paused. The soft drip of tap water into the ceramic mug filled the room. She twisted her own cup back and forth on the wooden table.

“I didn't even try to convince him that he was delusional. I listened to him for a while as he went on about how the other doctors were trying to weaken him or hurt him. But he went on for hours, becoming more and more angry as the sedative wore off. And I eventually tuned him out, even though I stayed seated near his cot. I was thinking about how hard it was going to be to find medication for him in this dead, broken, stand-still world. About how little it had helped him before. And I wondered if he were ever really Infected at all, or if he just became absorbed in the way the world had become. I thought about how many people he must already have killed and how many he would continue on to kill if he were ever to be released or escape military custody. Dr. Taylor's words kept coming back to me over and over.

Eventually, Martin burnt himself out, like a small child after a tantrum. When he was asleep, I got up. I very clearly remember filling the syringe with too much sedative. It was so still in the plunger, no bubbles at all, no droplets left on the needle. I went back to Martin and didn't even hesitate, not even to clean the site of the injection. I just pushed through the layer of grime on his arm. It was so smooth that he didn't even feel it. I sat next to his cot for twenty minutes or so, until he stopped breathing. I was calm and rational and entirely without remorse. And then I got up and reported myself to the captain in charge of my medical unit.

I was never arrested, never tried, for Martin or anyone else that I'd killed during the Plague. They just rotated me out of the Cure unit and I never bothered to go back. The military found excuses for me, sending me hard to treat patients at my own clinic, one at a time and then, eventually assigning me to this trial.

It wasn’t Martin’s fault. I could have found him a bed somewhere they could have kept an eye on him. Eventually someone will start making the right medications again. I didn’t dislike him. I’m not even sure that I really felt sympathy for him. I’ve asked myself for years whether I did it for his sake or the world’s sake or just my own. I still don’t know the answer for sure.

Don't let the world convince you that you are somehow inferior to the people that were immune, Frank. The things you did were out of your conscious control, like breathing. The people that never got infected- we can't say that. Every life we took was because we chose to take it. Sure, we can say it was for survival, and I think that's mostly true. But it wasn't involuntary, and we'll have to wake up realizing that every day forever. That's the price of free will I guess.” Nella was finally quiet, drawing in a slow breath as if she were reversing a sigh. Frank was silent leaning forward in his chair, but his face was drawn and tight, a hundred angles of worried. Nella smiled at him but her mouth tasted bitter and dry, as if she'd swallowed all the ocean.

“Ah. You thought I was someone else, someone different. I did too. Once. But all around this little shard of the world people are having the same revelations. We can barely stand to interact with each other. It's no wonder there has to be a government agency on human reproduction.”

Frank looked up at her, his face breaking into living curves again. “No,” he said, “I think you did what you thought was right. Whatever your doubts now, I can’t believe that you weren’t convinced then. And that's what I would expect, that you do what you believe is right. That's who I think you are.” He stood up and gently pulled her out of the chair. “You are different. You're the one thing that didn't get broken after all that mess.” He kissed the bitter taste out of her mouth.

 

 

Frank's House

They decided to stay at Frank’s house. Nella didn’t yet know how to tell Sevita that the bacterial samples were still lost, and it depressed her to think about facing her failure. She scolded herself for being a coward, but it didn’t make her feel differently. She was hesitant to leave Frank as well, and she wasn’t sure he’d go with her to her apartment. He had been absorbed in case notes since he’d brought her up to the office.

He apologized, but Nella could see he was itching to look back at something in the case. She was more convinced than ever that he knew more than he was telling her. That frightened her. It meant that he would either try to find the samples himself because he thought it was too dangerous for her, or that it had something to do with his client. Both ideas were equally opaque and unsettling to Nella. She had let him read his notes in peace, claiming to have medical reports on Ann to go over. She did have the reports, they had been delivered to her at the prison, but she only made a show of reading them, watching Frank’s body language instead.

Whatever he was looking for, he hadn’t found it even after an hour of frantic reading had passed. Nella could tell by the way his hand smoothed against the back of his head over and over, and the way his legs waited to leap from the chair when he found it. The evening slid on and Nella grew impatient. At last, she couldn’t take the way cold panic was crawling over her with a million sharp legs and filling the shadowy space between them with visions of plague and death and loss. “Why don’t you ask me about what you are looking for?” she asked, “Maybe I can remember. I have a good memory.”

Frank turned and smiled at her, as if realizing she were there for the first time. “I’m sorry, you must be exhausted. You still need lots of rest. Why don’t you get some sleep, I’ll be done in a bit.”

Nella laughed at the obvious dodge. “Okay, you don’t have to tell me, I just want to help.”

“I know you do. I wish you could, but I’m not even sure I remember it correctly. I need the tapes of the lab.”

“Did you give the only copy to the Judge?”

“No, but I don’t keep evidence here. It’s at the prison, in the Warden’s vault, for safekeeping.”

Nella looked confused. “Is that normal?”

Frank shook his head. “This case was so large that no one wants to be accused of tampering. The Warden agreed to keep the defense’s documents and the Military Governor is keeping the prosecution’s items in his office.” Frank sighed. “Well, I don’t think worrying about it is going to help tonight.” He stood up and stretched, his palms almost grazing the ceiling. Nella put down the unread report on Ann Connelly. He led her into the cool, dark bedroom. Before he even flipped the light on she knew the bed would be perfectly made, the floor would be bare and there would be little to no extra furniture in the room. She felt particularly gritty and sweaty after their trip. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep there. When the light snapped on, Nella laughed in surprise.

“What is it?” Frank asked.

“I just wasn’t expecting this. It doesn’t look like the rest of the house.”

Frank shrugged and blushed. “This is where I spend most of my time. Do you like it?”

A massive bookshelf stood on the far wall. It was filled with books on shipbuilding, with a giant atlas and novels of exploration and shipwreck and discovery. The ceiling glowed blue with nautical maps that covered every inch of it. There was a desk with a half finished model sailboat sitting on it. She looked back at Frank. “You weren’t kidding when you said you wanted to sail to a tropical island when this was over, were you?”

Frank’s face relaxed and dropped a decade, even with the thick beard shadowing the bottom half. For a moment Nella thought she saw him as he was before, wholly beautiful, happy, in love. It shocked her for a moment to realize she was the one that he was in love with this time.

“Can you imagine how wonderful it would be? To rediscover a place?” he waved a hand toward the map, “these places are all lost, as if they never were found in the first place. There’s been no communication with them for almost a decade. Chances are, most of them haven’t found a cure. Chances are, few, if any people have survived. The people that have, well they must have their own ways of doing things by now. New laws, new rituals, new ideas. We could visit them, you and me. We could be the next explorers.”

“Aren’t you afraid? Other people could have turned to piracy or slave holders or people who worship dead computers. We don’t know what’s out there.”

“That’s exactly the point. It’s exciting, not frightening. Well, of course we’d