“Cal!” I removed the bracings and let him in. I tried to hug him and Lindy was shouting “Daddy! Daddy!” but he pushed us back. “Stay inside. Let me unload.”
He had parked the car as close to the front door as possible, as both a barricade and quick escape. He unpacked bags of cornmeal, rice, beans, flour, bottles of vitamins, cans of Sterno, bags of dog food, and boxes of moist cat food.
“Are we going to eat
pet food
?” I asked.
“There’s almost nothing left. But no one has thought of the pet stores yet.”
“What’s it like out there?”
“It’s spreading very fast.”
“But what took you so long?”
“The highways are clogged. People are getting trapped inside their cars. I had to go off-road just to get what I could and I got stuck in the baseball field. There were lots of . . .
them,
wandering around, looking for people. I had to hide in the backseat under a blanket until they were gone. Then I dug out the tires.”
He had a stuffed toy for Lindy and she danced with it into her room.
“There are people jumping off overpasses,” Cal whispered. “There’s no place to go right now.”
I had never seen my husband’s hands shake before.
“We’ll be okay here, right?”
“We’ll be okay,” he kissed me. “We’ll hunker down. I’m glad I thought of the pet stores. The animals were locked up and thirsty. I opened the cages and let them go.”
“Will they be okay?”
“They’re fast; they have instincts. Hell, they probably have a better chance than most of us.”
Later that night, I heard him working in the attic.
I think about what Cal said as I bicycle to work. “We all have to stand together.” I pedal around the broken-down tank that is left on Main Street. The morning sun glistens on the armor plating but the tank’s shadow stretches long and cold. The main gun on the turret points like an accusing finger. How can things get back to normal when there are so many reminders? It’s not fair that Turners don’t have memories of what happened. It’s not fair that they “died” and got to escape, drifting off to some numbing space while their bodies were puppets of the plague. It’s too
easy
for them to say that we can stand together and move on. Clasp our hands in friendship. Hurrah.
I get to campus and lock my bike, right by the new hitching posts. A few saddled horses are here already, blithely munching on the grass and swishing their tails. With gas rations being what they are, the rodeo horses have new jobs as commuters. In Australia they are using camels and in India, elephants. I walk down the sidewalk that professors scrubbed clean, past the fields where we buried bodies, and enter through doors that I rinsed free of bloody handprints. The first jobs for returning faculty and staff were to help clean the campus, and I won’t describe what we saw. Or smelled.
I walk past the computer lab where the “Campus Eight” held their last stand against Turners. Eight students holed up all winter, using the ceiling spaces to reach food in the bookstore and cafeteria. They nearly made it. But a pack of Turners was always pounding, pounding on the doors and they finally clawed their way in. The president of the college says that the students actually died of dehydration first, and then the Infected broke in and ate the remains. But I helped clear out the lab and I know the truth of the battle that took place in there. I found one of the student’s journals and he named, specifically, who was pounding on the doors. Two of the Turners were deans and three were professors.
There will be no engraved memorial plaque for the “Campus Eight.” Hell, there probably won’t be memorials for
anyone
—that’s not how things are done any more. People can’t honor people they killed with their bare hands and devoured. There is no precedent—no historical, sociological, or psychological guidebook—for rabid cannibalization on a mass scale. Sure, there are horror films of zombies (a word we don’t use) but those were what passed as entertainment and not real life.
In real life we’re supposed to forget about it and move on. We’re not supposed to use the expression “pack” of Turners, or “hoards,” or “murder.” It’s “groups” and “causalities.” The slang terms “Turners” and “Moles” should be the Infected (I) and Non-Infected (NI). As faculty, we can’t ask which student was what during the epidemic, nor can we ask who is a legal citizen or not. Students can’t wear T-shirts with logos about the plague, such as “Bite Me,” “One Bullet—One Brain,” “Turner = Turncoat,” or “Moles have Souls.” One logo has the Christian fish, the
ichthys,
with a bite taken out of it and the words “Fish is Brain Food.” Those are worn by the unrepentant eaters. They are a minority, but they are loud. Most of them belong to the anti-Lazarus organizations that suggest the plague absolutely proves there is no God. These are the groups I thought Cal might have joined by now.
In class, I watch my students and I can’t help but wonder who turned and who hid. Every closed-lipped smile I see makes me wonder if there are cracked teeth behind it, broken from biting on bones, buttons, and jewelry. I look at fingers, trying to find disfigurements left from clawing through barricades. I wonder who ate their sisters, their parents, their pets. I look at scars. But sometimes I teach an entire class
not
looking at them, simply rolling the chalk through my fingers and feeling the gritty dust on the old chalkboards that were wheeled into the classrooms. (The rolling blackouts often knock out the projectors.) The chalk is as smooth as the Grecian statues in my nightmares. Those marbled feet; those stony veins that I hold in my dreams . . . sometimes I think I’m losing my mind.
But there is one student. Maria. There is something different about her. She is defiant. Her eyes flash and she holds her chin high. Her brown hair is lustrous and her smile is dazzling with white perfect teeth. There is something untouchable about her, as if she has weathered everything with a grace and haughty anger. When she enters the room and says “Hola, profesora”—in a tone both icy and warm—it sounds as if she is saying: “This is nothing to me.”
I wish I were more like Maria.
After work I slide my ration card into the scanner at human resources and it adds my daily work points. I immediately type into the keyboard and remove four of the points, sending them directly to the National Institute for Parentless Children.
It is late afternoon when I pedal for home; the shadow of the tank still inks the asphalt on Main Street. I try to veer around it, but I end up wheeling into its darkness, as if I’m rolling into a well.
They came at all hours of the day and night. They scraped along the side of the house, moaned at the doors, ran their fingernails over the boards. Lindy cried and acted out—who could blame her? We had to be quiet. When the power went out we had candles; when the gas went out we had blankets. Our world got smaller and smaller. And colder. By late December, they were breaking in. Cal protected us as best as he could—he aimed for their eyes with his arrows; he aimed for their throats with the sword.
But there were too many of them. And not just the Infected either, there were looters too. The sick and the non-sick alike were trying to kill us. We moved up to the attic.
Cal had already prepared everything. He had made a rain-tight hatch for the roof that we could open and let light in, when the weather wasn’t too frigid. He had drilled peepholes and ventilation tubes. He had paints and colors for Lindy to draw on the low-hanging rafters, and he had hidden little toys for her to find in nooks. We had games. The attic stairs could be easily pulled up and secured behind us. He had black-out covers for every hole, window, and gap.
We even had a hand-crank radio that was our only link to the outside. Every nation had the flu. It was a pandemic. That December we learned about the quarantine camps for the Infected. In January we learned about the military bombing those camps: New York, L.A., Chicago, San Antonio . . . We heard about North Korea using a nuclear bomb on China. The dust from the bomb was making the winter even colder.
In February we heard about a rebel group of survivors across the border who were refusing to hide. They were fighting.
Today my student Maria is as haughty and beautiful as ever. After class a man is waiting for her outside and I do a double take. He looks like Felix Narvaez, the leader of the Mexican rebel survivors, the man for whom
Tres de Julio
will forever be known.
“This is mi tío,” Maria tells me proudly.
“Hello, pleased to meet you,” Felix Narvaez says in perfect English and shakes my hand.
I’m dumbfounded. I had heard rumors that he was setting up a business on the Texas coast, but here? In our town? Students walk by staring at him and tittering. A few people are waiting nearby for autographs.
“My niece tells me that she enjoys your class.”
“Thank you.”
His dark hair is tinged with gray. His teeth are gleaming and perfect. Like Maria, he is tall and stands straight. They share the posture of the victorious. It’s true—he looks like Zorro. I think of the famous picture of him as he stood his ground on the Reynosa Bridge in McAllen, Texas: his right hand holding a rifle, his left hand making the peace sign. They say his legs straddled the Rio Grande and his heart straddled two worlds: he embraced both the living and dead.
“Mr. Narvaez, it’s such an honor to meet you. What are you doing here in Lake Jackson?”
“I am starting my shipping business nearby, in Freeport.”
“He knows how to get food and gas,” Maria says. “You need anything, he’s the go-to hombre.”
“I have workers here on campus.” He motions to a flatbed truck in the empty parking lot full of cardboard boxes, crates of bottled water, and baskets of fruit. “My people have just signed the contract for food services here, and for the main supply runs in the county.”
“That’s wonderful.”
I’ve already heard the rumors that Felix Narvaez can get anything; that he used to be a higher-up in the Los Zetas cartel before the epidemic. He claims that he was “a simple farmer,” but everyone knows that he had access to weapons, lots of them, and when the plague broke out he saved all the Non-Infected that he found, from Monterrey to Reynosa. They moved as a unit up towards the border on horseback, in ATVS, in trucks towing wagons—mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children, all hungry and dreaming of getting to the Valley, that Eden of grapefruit, oranges, tangelos, melons, and cattle. From there they dreamed of rebuilding San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Houston. In each town along the way it was Felix Narvaez who kicked the doors down, saved the Non-Infected, and fought off the Turners either by hand or by bullet. But when they reached the Rio Grande they were met by four thousand Infected who had shambled from McAllen, Mission, Edinburg, and other border towns until they mindlessly reached the river. The water was a natural barrier that had them shuffling aimlessly along the banks. Aimless, that is, until they smelled the fresh flesh of Narvaez’s people. They groaned in hunger. They say that the sound of that groaning hoard shook the walls in McAllen. They say that birds flew away. They say the water in the Rio Grande trembled. It was here where Felix Narvaez met the horde head-on, on the Reynosa International Bridge, on the third of July.
“I saw you on the broadcast from New York,” I said. There had been a parade for him on the first anniversary, down what was left of Wall Street. The President had given him a medal.
“Ah,” he shrugs modestly. “Sí.” He looks at me and it is as though he is looking right into me. I can tell that he has already pegged me for a Mole, and I smile widely so he can see my teeth. I’m blushing. I take off my ugly black-rimmed glasses and pretend to wipe the thick lenses.
“It was nice to meet you,” I say, and he actually gives me a short bow. The mayor of the town and college’s Board of Regents are clasping his hand, patting his back, moving him towards the college’s entrance sign to pose for pictures. The deans smile for the cameras with closed lips. Feliz Narvaez and Maria make the peace sign. I take my bike from the rack and Señor Narvaez is still watching me.
I race home, pedaling like I’m pumping the blood back into my heart.
Winter went on forever. By March it had even snowed. We used the roof’s hatch to get fresh air and turn out our buckets of refuse, “night-soil” as they used to call it. When we ran out of water Cal made furtive trips to the pond in the backyard. We boiled a half-gallon at a time using Sterno cans.
The Infected never stopped. They shambled outside and even dug through our shit. We slept a lot and ate very little. Lindy had regressed into speaking baby talk.
“Do you think she’ll remember this?” Cal asked.
“I hope not.”
“She could turn into a writer and write a book about it. It could be like
The Diary of Anne Frank.
”
“There are a million Anne Franks out there right now,” I said.
Cal sang to her softly and held her hand. When he finished, he said, “I need to leave for more supplies.”
“That’s crazy!” I whispered. “You’ll never get through the streets.”
“I’ve been thinking I could crawl under them, using the big drainage pipe that runs from the pond over to Second Street. There’s a gas station there, and an office supply store. I know the store had vending machines and I bet more food was in the employee lounge.”
I begged him not to go. I told him we had enough to last a few more months, and that he was just bored and starting to get careless. But he left.
“I don’t get people’s fascination with Felix Narvaez,” Cal says. “There were hundreds of other people who did similar things: Laurent de Gaulle in France, Anahi Mendez in Bolivia, that Chinese woman who saved all the children in her province . . . ”
“But Felix Narvaez is ours. He’s
our
country’s war hero.”
“It wasn’t a war. It was a
virus.
Besides, the cure was being distributed that same day. It would have been a national day of celebration with or without him.”
I don’t argue with him, but I’m annoyed. We have power and I’m at my computer. I don’t know why I do it, but I open up a file that has a picture that I took of Cal a few weeks after the cure.