Authors: Sarah Langan
He tucked the sheet around the gore like a bedtime story. He hoped his mother wouldn’t find out about the mess. She lay in the bed. She’d seen what he’d done, even though he’d wanted to protect her. He couldn’t stop cry- ing now, because he wasn’t imagining it. He’d never imagined it. All these years, the carpet really had been thick with blood.
Feel that, Fennie?
He leaned over the bed. The woman was watching him. He picked up the saw. He wanted to shut her up. He wanted her to stop looking. But then he saw her purple hair. Did Sara have purple hair?
A trick!
He charged down the hall. Threw open the door. Her eyes were wide, and guilty. The sneak. She’d do any- thing to tear down his house. “Fen,” she started, but she
didn’t have time to finish. He pinched her nose and shoved a tube sock down her throat. “Stop your games,” he said, and then slammed the door shut.
He went back to Maddie’s room, and sat in his chair. He kept vigilant, and protected his women, as the last man on earth.
T
he sun was one of the few things that rose Monday morning in Corpus Christi. No cars patrolled. No televisions emitted a spectrum of color as Regis and Kelly traded insults. No toasters popped. No pans siz- zled. No eggs fried. No children coughed, cried, laughed,
or even screamed.
The infected slept. Graham Nero’s daughter, Isabelle, would never learn to walk. During the night she’d crawled from her crib, and now lay next to her mother, where she’d found sustenance. They slept in their homes, they slept underground, they slept on gurneys in the hospital near the doctors upon whom they’d fed, they slept in their cars that clogged the highway.
The thing formerly known as Lois Larkin lay in her childhood bed, where snooping eyes would never find her. While the others rested, she began her search. She scanned the minds of the slumbering infected. It was easier to read them when they slept. Their thoughts were not guarded. She accounted for the sick, the devoured, and the missing. She found their friends, their newspa- per boys, their carpool buddies, until finally she had a list of those who remained, and remembered the name Lois Larkin.
On Micmac Street, car alarms resounded for hours, until batteries drained, and silence persisted like a new form of entropy. There were seven healthy people left in Corpus Christi, and none of them dared make a sound.
A
s soon as daylight filtered across her forehead, Lila Schiffer pulled her son’s bike from the garage and headed for the hospital. She didn’t bother with a car. They slept during the day, but who knew for sure? She didn’t want to attract their attention. The infected had gotten into her house last night, but she’d hidden in her basement, and they hadn’t looked for her there. It was then that she’d noticed that her wrist was beginning to pus. Blue-red streaks spun out from the wound like bi- cycle spokes. Dr. Wintrob’s antibiotic ointment wasn’t working; she needed penicillin. It had dawned on her then that there wasn’t anyone nearby to take care of
her. She had to take care of herself.
The town was empty, but she guessed that a few peo- ple were still alive, only hiding. If the infection had started here, then she needed to get out. An island off the coast was probably her best bet, but she didn’t have a boat.
Alice, Aran
, a little voice said. Their names were a mantra repeated over and over in her mind. She couldn’t picture their faces, or her memories of them over the last fifteen years. She wasn’t thinking about their first steps or toothy grins. Just their names. The order of
their loss was wrong. She should have gone first. Good mothers always find a way to die before their children, don’t they? The tape was coming off the handle bars of Aran’s bike, and its brakes squeaked. It shamed her that his bike had not been better cared for. It meant no one had taught him respect.
At the hospital there weren’t any coughers left. The halls were empty. Here and there, she spied the slumped body of a goiter-necked corpse, or sleeping infected. They lay on the floors and in gurneys. She’d avoided the front entrance and come in through the emergency room. She hadn’t wanted to see her children’s remains. She hardly remembered doing what she’d done. Only that she’d had to do it, to let their spirits rest.
Growing up, her mother had made her work part- time and cook dinner twice a week. But in Corpus Christi, Aran Senior had explained, if you wanted your kids to be
Ivy League material
, you drove them to soc- cer practice, and piano lessons, and made sure their clothes were never wrinkled, or even frayed. You sent them to Europe in the summer, and let them explore their inner emotions. Instead of setting rules for them, you
negotiated.
It had sounded sensible until she woke up one morning and realized that she’d left the trailer park, only to become a rich man’s cleaning lady.
The generator wasn’t humming anymore, and except near windows, the hospital corridors were dark. She wandered, looking for the pharmacy, but she didn’t see any signs. Suddenly she heard a bird whistle—but the birds were all dead, weren’t they? She couldn’t help her- self, she broke into a smile. Here, of all places, a bird still lived. Its whistle got louder, and her smile faded. It wasn’t a bird. The sound echoed, and she wondered if her chil- dren’s spirits had returned. They would never forgive her, but that was fine. She would never forgive herself.
She peered into the darkness, and a figure walked to- ward her. The tune was familiar, an old Beach Boys song that she remembered hearing Dr. Wintrob hum. Was that he, down the hall? The figure was tall, and it walked on two legs. She ducked into the first doorway she could find. The office was a mess of broken glass and scattered papers. When she saw the Dali painting of melting watches on the floor she let out a breath of air like a sagging sail: Oh, no. She’d walked into his office. Too late to turn around. She spun in a circle, headed for the closet—but there wasn’t time! He was right out- side the door. She squatted behind the leather couch. He walked inside. She cowered behind the armrest. She couldn’t see his face, but it was daylight and he wasn’t coughing, so he probably wasn’t sick. Still, his clothes were covered in blood. Then again, so were hers. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she reminded herself
that unlike many, it was at least still beating.
Aran! Alice!
her mind screamed, because it would always scream those names, for the rest of her life.
As he reached into the desk drawer, she bumped her knee against the coffee table. He spun around, fast, and pulled something from his belt loop. A hammer. She held her breath. He looked under the broken glass coffee table and she almost shouted, “Don’t swing!” But he didn’t see her. He turned back around, opened a drawer from his desk, pulled out a set of jangling keys, and left the office. He was whistling the same tune, and now she remembered it: “Feel Flows.” It had an eerie quality amid the silence, like a hospitalwide requiem.
She got up and started out of the office. He was headed for Admitting. She knew she should walk in the opposite direction. He’d gone mad—she could tell by the way he moved too carefully, like he hadn’t figured
out that that the whole world was already broken. But then again, he wasn’t infected. He was a rich doctor, too. He might have a boat. She followed him. The halls were so dark that she slid her feet instead of lifting them in order to keep from tripping over the soft objects (
Aran! Alice!
) that lay on the floor.
Funny, the people who died from infection didn’t get eaten. The only bodies left were the ones with swollen necks and bloody rashes. Maybe they didn’t have a taste for their own kind. He was standing near the window. It was raining a little, so the light that came through the windows looked wet. On the ground was Dr. Wintrob’s secretary, Val. Lila recognized her rubber band pony- tail. She wasn’t dead, just infected. Her chest was mov- ing and her lips were red. Strange that she’d come here, of all places, to sleep. Maybe it was where she felt most safe. Or, like Lila, a small part of her had been looking for Dr. Wintrob, hoping he’d tell her what to do, and forgive her what she’d already done.
Aran! Alice!
a voice inside her screamed, and she wished she could reach inside herself and flip a switch, because she was beginning to remember their faces.
Dr. Wintrob stopped whistling. He shoved Val’s body with his sneaker. Then he pressed his hammer against Val’s forehead. He tapped once, lightly. Flesh against metal; it sounded like a slap. “Just kidding, Val. You know I’d never hurt you,” he said. “Guess Canada wasn’t such a good idea after all.” Then he walked ahead, still with a bounce in his step.
At Admitting, he used the key from his desk to open the cabinet. Took out a few bottles of something, then locked it shut again. It alarmed her that he’d done this, instead of breaking the glass and taking what he needed. It meant that unlike everyone else, he was still follow- ing the rules.
Dr. Wintrob turned and saw her. She stopped. The hall was dark, and it was just the two of them. She swallowed and thought about running, but he might have a boat. Better yet, he might hold her hand and tell her that she was having a bad dream.
Alice! Aran!
When she left them yesterday, she’d forgotten to close their eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Dr. Wintrob, because it was all she could think to say.
“How are you, Ms. Schiffer?” he asked. She was wear- ing a sweat suit, but suddenly it wasn’t warm enough. She nodded at him, because she was too frightened to speak.
“Lovely to hear it.” He pulled the hammer from his pocket again. A chunk of hairy scalp was embedded in its sharp end. “It’s dark in here. You like the sun, do you?” he asked.
She nodded. He came closer, hammer in hand. He held it tightly in his fist, like he meant to do harm. “I came here for penicillin.” She rolled up her sleeve and shoved her arm out, like evidence.
He tried to touch it with his free hand, but jammed inside his fingernails was dried blood. Without think- ing about it, she drew back. He acknowledged the slight by cocking his head, but for now at least, he didn’t strike her. “Lovely body on you, Ms. Schiffer.”
“I know,” she answered.
The two of them stood, while around them at least twenty corpses lay sprawled on the floor. Pieces of bones littered the hospital like dust. They littered her lawn, too. And Micmac Street. The infected were play- ing knick-knack paddy-wack.
“Do you want something?” Dr. Wintrob asked. Normally she might have grinned at him and told
him he must have seen some awful things.
My, Dr. Wintrob, aren’t you brave!
she would have said with a come-hither grin. Instead she motioned at the orderly slumped in his chair, and then at Val, and the rest of the infected. “You know most of these people, I guess,” she said.
He stopped smiling. He ran his hands over his face, and when he finished, he looked more familiar. He went back to the cabinet, opened it, grabbed another couple of bottles, and gave them to her. She put them in her purse without looking at them. “Lock yourself up somewhere,” he told her, “until this passes.”
“It will pass?” she asked.
He shrugged and nodded at her purse. “One way or another.” Then he popped a pill into his mouth. As he crunched on it, he moaned, like it tasted better than a Milky Way, and she realized that the guy was an ad- dict.
He reached out like he was going to pat her shoulder, but then pulled back, and patted the hammer in his jacket pocket instead. “I’m sorry about your kids . . .”
It took her a moment. She didn’t remember.
Aran! Alice!
And then she knew why her wrist was infected. Sawing Alice’s head with that scalpel had reopened the wound.
His voice got gruff. “My kid is sick, too.”
“Sorry,” she said, even though she wasn’t. She didn’t care about his kid, or even him. She only cared about Aran and Alice, who were dead, weren’t they? Yes, she’d murdered them.
Dr. Wintrob began walking. She watched as he left the building. She wanted to follow him, but he’d gone mad, so instead she walked in the opposite direction.
The air was still and rank. She followed the red tape
to the blue, and then to the yellow. She got to the front door, and then remembered: Alice and Aran were here, too. She forced herself to look. They weren’t her chil- dren anymore. Just messy shells. She took some sheets and laid them across the mess. The sound of the sheets opening was like flapping wings, and she hoped it was their souls, set free.
Then she backed out of the hospital, and into the day. She left Aran’s bike and walked to Micmac Street. Store-front windows were broken, and wooden doors splintered wide. She walked inside them, and took what she needed: rubbing alcohol, Tic Tacs and shaving cream. A brass knocker shaped like a lion for the front door, and gold wrapping paper and bows, because it was always
some
one’s birthday. A pretty necklace for Alice. She dropped them as she walked, like a trail of
breadcrumbs, because her arms were so full.
She cried as she walked.
Aran! Alice!
If it weren’t for her, they’d still be alive. They’d be living with their father, who surely had got- ten out by now. Who surely was on the island where they used to spend their summers, eating fresh blueber- ries and combing the beach for shells.
But if he loved them so much, why hadn’t he come for them? Because he was dead, or worse: He’d aban- doned them. So maybe he wasn’t such a good father, either.
Her wrist was hurting so she opened her purse. She opened one of the bottles and swallowed a pill, then re- membered to look at the label: penicillin. Then she took out the second bottle and gasped: cyanide.
It will pass?
One way or another.
She tossed the bottle on the ground and kicked it.
Then followed where it landed, and kicked it again. And again, until the plastic split open, and with her feet she crushed the pills into dust. It was only then that she re- alized that even though her children were gone, she wanted to live.