What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (4 page)

“I had my life all mapped out,” he said. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? I’d attend the university with a nice tuition reduction courtesy of my dad. I thought maybe I’d get an engineering degree. I always liked building stuff. Get a job somewhere overseas and see the world. My older brother…” He fell silent.

Emily and I waited for him to continue. “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” she said.

He laughed but it was clear that he thought none of it was funny. “Sometimes when I wake up in the night, just for a moment I have the idea that all that stuff I thought about my future could still happen.” He shook his head.

“Clarence was wild until the National Guard came. People went insane—stealing, looting, torching stuff just for the hell of it. The Guard stopped some of that but after a while there were too few troops to maintain order. My parents died quickly, didn’t suffer for long. My brother and I tried to give them a proper burial but they made us take their bodies to the public crematorium set up just outside town. The burn pits they called them.”

Larkin looked at us. “You were lucky you were both from some place smaller. Everybody just kind of left where you were, didn’t start turning on each other. My brother and I decided to get out. Thought we could find a place in the country somewhere, grow our own food, hunt our own game. Live like mountain men. We found a farm that wasn’t too damaged but winter was coming on and there wasn’t much food.

“Then my brother got sick. The white fever. The blood plague. That was what people were calling it in Clarence, even on the radio when you could hear anything through the static. My brother couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. He was in some kind of horrible pain that just twisted him in knots.”

Larkin got up and began pacing the room. “And he changed, his skin, his eyes. The color drained from his hair and it became like dry bristles, like a brush covered with talcum powder. I couldn’t do anything to help him, nothing. You know there is no cure. No one had time to find one.”

He stopped and squatted down by the stove, rubbing his hands, holding his palms to the heat. He reached for a few more shattered chair legs and poked them deep into the stove’s iron belly.

“What happened to your brother?” Emily asked him. “Did he…?”

“Yes, he died,” he said softly. “He didn’t survive the fever. I was almost grateful. No one knows what happens to those who survive it, do they? Just that they’re not really like us anymore. They become some sort of
thing
, not human.”

“Not human,” I repeated.

He shook his head. “But that’s probably just a rumor. I’ve never seen these survivors, if they exist.” He stopped talking, stared at the crackling wood.

After a while Emily asked gently again, “What happened then?”

“I buried him. He weighed like twenty pounds when he died. I have no idea where the rest of him went. He was a big guy, healthy one day, then there was nothing left.”

He turned and studied us carefully. “I think we’ve all got it, the sickness. It’s in us. They said it was a blood-borne pathogen on TV, transmitted from person to person. I’ve thought a lot about how I handled the bodies of my parents, my brother. There’s no way I don’t have it, too.”

I looked at him, started to say something but decided not to.

“Emily probably got it from her friends who got it from their parents,” he said. He looked at me and said softly, “And if you didn’t have it before you probably got it from her. We’re always cutting ourselves, scraping ourselves. It’s impossible to keep clean.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Keep heading north. Find someplace where there are more people. See if someone has an answer.”

He touched my hand and stared into my eyes so intently I wanted to look away. “If what happened to my brother starts to happen to me, I want you to take that rifle.” He squeezed my hand. “You know what I’m asking.”

“I couldn’t ever—” I started to say.

“You could. You could because I won’t be me anymore.”

I awake a
few hours after Larkin’s scream in the night, lying on his mattress. A little morning light is just starting to seep through the window. I think at first I’m still in the room with all the other children but soon realize that I’m alone.

Alone.

Larkin’s not beside me. I haul myself to my feet and look around the room as if he might be lurking in a corner.

My rifle is sitting propped against the windowsill and I know Larkin must have put it there. He knew what was happening to him. And he retained his instinct to survive. And he survived long enough to drag himself from the room, from the house. I wonder if he really thought I’d try to shoot him once I saw how he was suffering. But hiding the rifle meant—

He
believed
he might survive.
He wanted to survive.

But if he’s still alive, he’s become some sort of
thing
, alien and unknowable. That was what he said all those who didn’t die right away became. No longer human. If the stories were true. He and his brother had heard many stories from panicked people in their hometown.

What’s better, no Larkin or a Larkin who doesn’t know me anymore? A Larkin who can’t communicate, is as mindless and crazed with hunger as one of the feral dogs howling in the night? But I can also imagine all too well stumbling across his poor, empty shell of a body, like all those we’ve found in the backrooms of cold, dark houses. Seeing such a thing would kill me.

I look out the window as the sun starts to rise over the rooftops. Larkin’s out there somewhere, probably very close to where we are. On the slightest chance he has survived, I decide that we will search for a few days, maybe a few weeks, then wait out the summer to see if he makes some sign, to give him a last chance to contact us.

I have a
secret that I’ve told no one, not even Larkin. It marks me as different from him, possibly different from every other person still alive in this world.

My father and his team of researchers worked frantically to find a vaccine. An inoculation that could prevent the transmission of the disease. And he thought he had. He couldn’t be certain but he
believed
he had. I won’t know if he was right for another year or two.

He gave me an injection the very last time I saw him—the experimental vaccine.

He hadn’t been home for over a week even though the research facility wasn’t far away. For months he had only been able to come home for a few hours at a time. School had closed. By then, the bank where my mother worked had also shut its doors and she was home with me. The bank’s customers had withdrawn as much money as they could but, she told me, their money was now as useless as old lottery tickets.

One time my mother had driven over to see my father at his lab when he hadn’t been home for several days and he had become very angry. It wasn’t safe on the roads, he had said. Someone might attack her. Crazy people were on the loose.

There was a babble of constant news broadcasts informing us of a breakdown of social order, martial law, curfews, government orders, empty food banks, power shortages, hospital closures, recovery centers. And where to take the dead. Then the television stopped working. Then the power went out for good. We had our generator but my mother was frantic to try to conserve fuel.

On the day my father paid us his last visit, we heard the sound of a truck coming down the road and it scared us. My mother grabbed a rifle and watched the truck approach through a pair of binoculars. It didn’t take long before she relaxed and passed the binoculars to me. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s your father.”

Once inside the house, he was jittery, couldn’t stop moving. He didn’t say much. His face was drained of color, his eyes red. He hadn’t slept for days. He went to the basement and checked our supplies. He inspected the car in the garage and noted how much propane we had left. He asked us if we needed anything, then laughed. “I don’t know why I said that. I couldn’t get you anything at this point even if I wanted to.”

“Is it bad out there?” my mother asked.

“It’s bad. It’s both a blessing and a curse that we live way out here, in the middle of nowhere. You’re probably safer for now. But later…” He held up his hands. “I had to promise them the moon to get them to let me out for a few hours. They’ll come looking for me if I’m not back soon. It’s all government people there now.”

My mother had tried to make him something to eat, a sandwich and some soup, but he refused to eat any of our food. It took her a long time to finally stop offering him things. He washed his hands carefully before he touched us. He even wore latex gloves.

At last my mother sighed and said, “So the plan is, we stay here while you go back to the lab and finish what you’re doing.”

My father looked away, out the kitchen window. The three of us were leaning against the counters near the stove. The counters were littered with the cans and jars my mother had kept pulling out of the cupboards. My father looked so thin and weak, as if all of his strength was draining away. His hair kept getting grayer every time I saw him and his face more deeply lined, his cheeks sagging.

“I’m afraid there is no plan,” he said. “No one could have predicted this. When I leave today, I won’t be back for who knows how long. They’re taking us to a larger complex in Raintree. The airport’s there, the river, all major highways. We’ll do what we can.”

He had set his briefcase on the counter, the well-worn, brown leather bag my mother had got for him right after they were married, his initials in three silver letters mounted above the clasp. He picked the briefcase up, pulled the straps free and opened the flap.

“I have to ask you something,” he said. He was searching our faces, making sure the importance of what he was about to say sunk in. There was no time to waste on anything that wasn’t important.

He retrieved a small glass vial from the case. It was the same type of vial that I’d seen nurses take from refrigerators in nursing stations when preparing to give me an injection. I’d never seen my father handle one. “This is experimental. It may not work. I believe it will but I can’t be sure.”

“You want to inject us?” my mother said softly.

“If they knew I had this…” He shook his head. “It’s a chance. It’s a virus that might make you sick, might mutate into something even more deadly but it just might alter the structure of your immune system enough, genetically, to keep you safe.”

My mother and I said nothing. We stared at the little vial with its rim of silver metal. It was half full with a liquid the color of iced tea.

He said, “We ran out of time to do any more trials. This is all I have left.”

My mother put her hand on my shoulder, rubbed it gently. “Maybe just me,” she said.

My father pinched his eyes closed and took a deep breath. He had to work hard to keep his voice steady. “She’ll get sick, too. You’ll both have to leave here eventually, when you run out of food. Maybe by that time things will have calmed down. I will try to reach you somehow if I can. You can start looking for other survivors, find a rescue station. We can make contact.”

“But what if it…kills us?” She let her voice trail off.

“Maureen,” my father said gently. We knew there was nothing more to say.

My father washed his hands again and took out a plastic bag packed with syringes and more latex gloves. He worked quickly with well-practiced motions, drawing the serum into each syringe. He told us that he’d only given injections of this to lab animals before. They had survived.

My mother offered her arm first, then I stepped forward. I felt the prick of the needle, looked away as my father pushed what he’d helped to create at his lab into my bloodstream, then back at his worried eyes as I felt him gently swiping my skin with a sterile swab.

My father stooped to kiss my forehead, thought better of it. A few minutes later, he was gone.

I keep my
eyes fixed on the sun rising over the houses of Oxbow Ferry, rubbing the spot on my left arm where my father had given me the injection. Almost two years have passed. I wonder if the fact that I’m still alive and unchanged is proof that the vaccine worked. But I’m a year younger than Larkin. There’s still plenty of time for the disease to reach me.

I wonder what it’s like, the first symptoms. You can’t eat, can’t drink, can’t hold anything down. Only want to sleep. That much I know. But the first time it touches a person, what’s that like? I imagine a hollowness inside, a scooped out feeling like someone’s just opened you up and is removing your insides. Like you’ve been put under and are being operated on without your approval.

For the first time, I hope my father’s experiment turns out to be a failure. The notion that I might be cut off from Larkin forever makes my heart hurt. I can’t make myself accept what’s just happened. There isn’t time to understand, to adjust to it. How do I go on from here? I look at my rifle leaning against the windowsill as if it holds a clue.

It can’t be true that the vaccine was effective. If my father’s lab had created a miracle serum capable of saving thousands of people, of allowing their bodies to fight off the plague infecting their blood, there would be healthy people out there right now. They would have found us. They would be organized, hard at work at the task of cleaning up the world.

But there aren’t healthy people out there. There’s only a few stragglers, a few kids with the disease lurking within them, biding its time. A ticking time bomb flowing through their veins and arteries.

I want Larkin to have survived and I want him to contact us, as changed as he is. I want to see him again, touch his skin—his white, dry, altered skin. I won’t care about any of that, just that he’s alive. I know I won’t care that he’s changed.

Larkin.

The Black Riders

The city to
the North announces itself with a small green sign. It’s a battered sign, peppered with bullet holes and hanging loose from one steel post along the edge of the highway.