Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (17 page)

“She’s not a real doctor?” Frantic, I try to hold my mom still, but she quakes and quivers. At one point, her jaws snap like she’s trying to bite me. Dexter whines and tries to butt against her, but I push him away.

“She’s a real doctor, but she’s not in a practice, I mean, I don’t know—” Dillon tries to help me, but there’s not much he can do. “She’s, like, not working for a hospital or anything. She’s not supposed to take care of people. I think she lost her license or something.”

All we can do is watch my mom writhe and twist. She calms for a moment, but only long enough for me to think she might be okay. Then she starts again, harder than before.

And horribly, she talks. My name, over and over. Opal’s. Heartbreakingly, my dad’s, in a softer tone of voice that sounds almost normal. Everything sounds almost normal.

“It’s in the pantry, behind the sugar. I want to make something out of that pair of curtains, like Scarlett O’Hara.
Oh, I couldn’t possibly eat another bite. Not another bite.” Her teeth snap. Nothing she says makes sense, it doesn’t go together. Then her words trail off into a string of garbled nonsense.

“We have to take her,” I say.

Dillon nods. “Let’s get her up. We’ll go in the truck.”

“Go tell Mrs. Holly. I’ll get my mom ready.” There’s not much to do but wipe her face again. She’s wearing her clothes from yesterday, and at least they’re not pajamas.

Dillon’s able to carry her as far as the driveway, where he has to set her on her feet. Together, we sling her arms over our shoulders and get her down the hill to the truck parked at the bottom. It’s a little hard to get her over the tree across the end of the driveway, but Dillon lifts her. She leans against me, but her eyes are open.

“Mom. You have to wake up.” I slap her cheeks lightly, and give him a panicked look. “Dillon, how are we going to get her past the checkpoints? How are we going to get her into town?”

Dillon looks grim. “In the back.”

I look in the back of his truck, which rattles with various bits and pieces of junk. A tarp, secured with a bungee cord, covers a few bins we used for packing stuff we find in the different houses. One large bin with a lid stands out.

“In there?” I point, stomach sick at the thought. “She’ll have to curl up on her side, but she’s lost so much weight.…”

Dillon climbs into the back of the truck bed and lifts the lid to dump out the contents—a few stray, smashed boxes of crackers. We get my mom up into the back of the pickup, and urge her first to step, foot by foot, into the bin. She’ll fit, but the question is, will she let herself be put into it?

“Mom, you have to lie down. Curl up, knees to chest. You have to stay in this bin, okay? You have to stay quiet.” I push her shoulder gently.

She starts to shake again as she does what I said to do. She curls on her side, but her body’s convulsing against the bin’s sides, shaking it. I look at Dillon in a panic.

“This will never work.”

“We don’t have a choice,” he says, and I know he’s right.

We cover her with some blankets and towels from another of the bins. I tuck them around her to cushion any spot where her body presses against the plastic. I lower the lid, casting her in shadow. I can’t seal it on. I don’t worry about her not being able to breathe or anything; the lid’s not airtight. But I do worry about putting her in the dark.

“Mama, you’re going to be okay. We’re taking you to the doctor. I promise you’re going to be fine.”

My mom blinks up at me. “Velvet? What’s going on?”

Relief floods me so hard, I go to my knees beside the bin. “Mom. Can you hear me?”

“Of course I can hear you.… Why am I …?” She
struggles to get up but doesn’t fight against me when I push her shoulder.

“You’ve been sick. We need to take you to the doctor in town. But you have to be really quiet. Okay?”

Her gaze is sharp. Focused. She licks her lips with a grimace, like her mouth tastes bad.

“Something’s wrong.”

“I know, Mom. I know.”

She shakes a little, but it’s not out of control. I think she’s just scared. She curls into the blankets with a sigh.

“It’s really important you stay quiet. Even if you hear voices or the truck stops. Or anything. Just stay still.”

She nods. I’m not convinced she understands, but there’s nothing to do but get in the truck and pray we make it through okay.

Dillon’s quiet as he pulls out of the development and heads toward town. We pass the exit for Route 322, which is the road I saw blocked off, where the soldiers were shooting people who tried to get through. There are still barriers closing off the exit. The concrete’s pockmarked with what could be weather damage but I know are bullet holes. I look away.

A mile farther is the roadblock. Traffic’s light, only one car ahead of us. The soldier who taps on Dillon’s window looks tired and bored.

“Purpose for travel?”

“Work. I’ve got to report in to the sanitation team, and
she”—he jerks his thumb toward me—“is signing up for over-eighteen assignment.”

I tense, waiting for him to pull me out, jam a needle in some soft part of me, and dig around in my brains to test me for Contamination. Would it be a relief, in a way, to finally know for sure? But though the soldier gives me a solid, long perusal, I guess I don’t look threatening or dangerous, or they just don’t care at this checkpoint. He waves us through.

Dillon drives slow and careful, making sure to obey all the traffic signals, though we are now the only car on the road. I stare out the windows at the gas station, the motel, the strip mall. Lots of buildings are boarded up. Grass grows in the parking lots.

I turn to him, stunned. “This all happened in a few months?”

“Yeah.” Keeping his gaze on the road, Dillon makes a careful turn down a side street.

We go past the city high school, closed for the summer but looking more alive than any of the other buildings. Someone’s hung a banner across the letters of the school name. It used to say LEBANON HIGH SCHOOL. Now it says TESTING FACILITY.

“That’s where they take people?”

Dillon nods and makes another turn. We’re in a small neighborhood of little brick houses, most of them alike. They look as empty as the other buildings we passed. A
lot of them have boards over the windows and doors, with spray-painted symbols on them.

“Emptied,” he says quietly. “Places that had people who kept Connies. They took the people out. The government confiscated them. The houses, I mean.”

“The people, too.”

He gives me a quick look. “Yeah. The people, too.”

We pull into a driveway that circles around the back of a brick house with a green roof. It has a separate garage and a large paved area with a basketball hoop that’s become only a metal ring with a few ragged shreds of rope hanging from it. A tall fence divides the backyard from the houses on either side. There’s a light on in the kitchen, and inside, a shape moves, twitching the curtain.

The back door opens. A tall, thin woman with cropped gray hair is in the doorway. She wears jeans and a man’s button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She comes down the three concrete steps to the truck.

“Can I help you?”

“It’s my mom …” God, I hope this is the doctor or someone who knows her, not a stranger.

The woman smiles. “Is she sick?”

“Yes.” Dillon’s already out of the truck, heading for the back. He leaps up into the bed. “She’s here.”

“Hurry.” The woman, the doctor, looks from side to side. “Take her inside.”

She leads us to a finished basement, which is cozy and
cool and smells faintly of disinfectant. There’s a grouping of battered, out-of-style furniture gathered around an ancient TV set and a bar made out of giant barrels, the top covered with black leather. There’s a dartboard and a wagon-wheel table with matching chairs.

“Through here.” She pushes on a section of paneling that opens with a squeak to reveal a white-painted room complete with a steel examination table and a cabinet full of medical supplies. “What’s her name?”

“Malinda.”

My mom has been quiet this whole time. Either she can’t speak or she’s staying silent because we told her to. Now she looks up.

“Come sit here,” the doctor says gently.

I lead her to the table and help her sit. “C’mon, Mom.”

“Hi. I’m Ellen.” The woman shakes my mom’s hand, holding it carefully. She turns it over to examine the palm. She has to straighten out my mom’s fingers, which curl stubbornly, to do it. Keeping her gaze on my mom’s face, she says to me, “Tell me about what’s been going on.”

Before I say anything, it starts to happen again. My mom’s eyes roll back. Her muscles go tight. Ellen grabs her to keep her from falling off the table, lowering her back. My mom’s feet thump against it.

“Shhh,” Ellen says. “Here. Hold her down.”

Dillon and I do, one on either side. Ellen prepares a hypodermic needle and syringe with some sort of clear
fluid, uncapping it with her teeth and then tapping it with her finger before she slides the needle into my mom’s arm. It seems to take forever, but eventually, my mom goes still. Her eyes close.

“What did you give her?”

“It’s a mild sedative.” Ellen carefully puts the used syringe in a red container and then washes her hands at the bar sink behind her. She turns to us, leaning on the counter with her arms crossed. “Where’s her collar?”

Dillon and I share a panicked look, but I take a chance. “We took it off her a few months ago during one of the first sweeps. Some soldiers came into the house, looking for collared Connies.”

“You had a key?”

I shake my head. “We used a paper clip.”

Ellen barks out laughter. “You didn’t.”

“We did.” Dillon squares his shoulders. “My mom had a key, but I wasn’t able to get it from her before they took her away.”

“Your mom worked in a kennel?” Ellen frowns, not angry, but like she’s putting the puzzle pieces together.

“Yeah.” Dillon straightens the hem of my mom’s shirt, pulling it down where it had ridden up to show her belly.

I burn with love for him because of that kindness.

“Was your mom’s name Jean?”

“Yes!” Startled, he raps his knuckles on the table, but my mom doesn’t so much as murmur.

“I knew Jean. She was a good woman. I did a lot of work for the kennels in the beginning. They took her away?”

“Yeah. When they started cracking down on everything, they came and got my dad. They took my mom after that. She was fighting the soldiers who came to get him.” His voice cracks.

I take his hand, and he looks at me gratefully. “We haven’t been able to find out anything about where they took her. Do you know?”

Ellen shakes her head. “No. Your dad, was he collared?”

“No. But he’d been ice-picked.”

“Ah.” Ellen nods. “Was your mom Contaminated?”

“No. At least … I don’t think so.”

“If they took her away and tested her,” she says, “and found out that she was, then she’ll be at the research facility.”

“The Sanitarium,” I say. “And if she wasn’t?”

Ellen hesitates. “To be honest with you, she’s probably there, no matter how she tested. They’ve been doing things to people for a long time. Things they … shouldn’t.”

“How do you know this?” Dillon sounds angry, but I know him well enough to know that he’s more scared.

“Because I worked there.” Ellen scratches her chin for a second or two before looking each of us in the eye. “The things you hear on the radio? That’s only half of it, what goes on there. So … I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think
you need to accept that you’ll never see your mother again. I’m sorry.”

Dillon lets out a low, soft sigh and stalks away, turning his back to us. “She’s dead. My dad, too.”

“If they’re lucky,” Ellen says quietly.

We’re silent at that, looking at my mom. Ellen goes to her, testing her pulse with two fingers at her wrist. Lifting her eyelids to look at her pupils with a white light, which doesn’t even make her flinch. Ellen smooths my mom’s hair for a moment, like she’s petting a cat, before she turns back to us.

“This will keep her quiet for a while. But you’ll need to give it to her regularly, at least fifteen to twenty minutes before it wears off, so she won’t have time to become violent—”

“She’s never violent,” I interrupt.

Ellen looks dubious. “They’re all violent. What’s your name?”

“Velvet. This is Dillon.” I lift my chin at her tone.

“They’re all violent,” she says again in a flat voice. “It just depends on how much and when and what they do. But trust me, Velvet. All of the Contamination victims succumb to their rage. All of them.”

“My mom’s different.” Surely she can see that.

Ellen looks at her again. “You say you got the collar off using a paper clip?”

“Yeah. We straightened it, the way you’d do to reset
a computer modem or cell phone,” Dillon says, turning to face us. He has himself under control, but his eyes are red.

“That’s not supposed to work, you know. That’s supposed to trigger the collar into Mercy Mode.”

I shrug, knowing I’m giving her a little bit of attitude, but not caring. “Well. It didn’t. Obviously.”

“Obviously.” Ellen looks sad. Then mad. “There could be proper treatment, preventive measures, especially for the people not showing any symptoms, but nobody’s bothering with that research anymore. Nobody’s working on a cure or a way to reverse the progress.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” Dillon says.

“I was a researcher. The Sanitarium. Did you know one of the biggest research facilities in the whole country is right here in Lebanon? Hardly anyone does.” Her lip curls. “This little brown stain of a town in the middle of farm country. Who’d have thought it? I worked with some of the best researchers in the world, and now here I am, working like some kind of basement butcher.…”

She stops herself, though she’s breathing hard and is clearly angry. She clears her throat and looks at both of us again. “I can give you a month’s worth of the drug. One syringe a day. But after that, honestly I don’t know if I’ll have any more. I can’t just pull up the Web site and place an order, you know what I mean?”