He pauses in front of a cabinet filled with delicate glassware, test tubes and beakers. They are clean but he feels a primitive fear of touching them. Germs are the greatest threat to his survival right now, and his instincts are not very discriminating. In the corner, an emergency liquid nitrogen tank catches his eye. He stares at it for a long time. The nitrogen is stored under pressure, so they might be able to siphon some of it off into a container to make a crude explosive. If they don’t blow their own hands off first. They might dump it on the Infected and flash freeze them. As long as they don’t freeze their own arm solid in the bargain.
Liquid nitrogen is a dangerous laboratory material, he reminds himself. Probably best to leave it alone. He considered it worth thinking about, however. In this world, everything must be evaluated as a potential weapon. Out of the five basic survival needs, security now ranks first.
Ethan fiddles with a fluorescence microscope but it sits dark, inert, lifeless without electricity. The room is filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in deteriorating lab equipment. He recognizes an incubator, decides not to open it. It strikes him again that scientists studied disease here. Not scary diseases like AIDS and Ebola, no, not in a lab like this, but dangerous nonetheless: cancer, diabetes, emphysema, bone disorders. The pathologists examined tissues and blood and urine to figure out what was wrong with people. Doctors used these tests to treat people with all sorts of disorders and extend their lifespan. Researchers looked at the smallest living particles in the human body and tried to understand what hurt them and how they adapted to being hurt—knowledge that could be used to diagnose some diseases more easily, treat others, and even cure. Now the healers have all gone, possibly never to return.
Ethan tries not to think of all the great things they might have accomplished.
He once thought he understood what severe stress was like. He and Carol both worked hard at their jobs. They juggled dinner and daycare and doing the dishes. They survived the dramas of raising a little girl who was deep into her terrible twos. Life was full of responsibilities and bills and little errands and phone calls and annoying bank mistakes and miscommunication and petty conflict. It was hard, but he would consider that sort of stress a breath of fresh air after what he has been through in the past ten days with the Sword of Damocles poised over his head, hanging by a thread. The human body was not meant to experience this level of fear for this long. Getting this close to death for too long can turn your hair white, break your mind.
He and Carol would cope as best they could but every so often their frustrations boiled to the surface and they bickered. They bickered as they prepared dinner and as they ate it and as they cleaned up and put Mary to bed. They each knew how far they could go, and no further, to needle the other person without getting a major reaction that would upset their toddler. Every once in a while somebody would go too far, and there would be hurt feelings. When this happened, the bickering escalated and either Ethan or Carol would storm away from the table out of fear of shouting in front of Mary.
One night, nobody walked away, and, without really understanding what he was doing, Ethan started shouting.
“Carol, stop it, stop it, just stop it.”
Carol sat back, stunned, while Mary, busily pouring her glass of water into her mashed potatoes, stared at him with eyes like saucers, her mouth hanging open.
Ethan smiled at his daughter quickly, trying to reassure her.
“How dare you shout at me in front of her,” Carol hissed.
“I said I don’t want to argue. So stop it.”
“I’m not the one shouting.”
“STOP IT.”
“Why don’t you shut up?”
They shouted over each other for the next minute until he could not take it anymore and he stormed out of the house, seeing red. He walked for an hour, his mind boiling as he played the argument over and over in his mind, hating it. As his anger began to dissipate, he felt the first wave of panic over what they had done to Mary. He needed to talk to Carol. He hurried home.
Ethan found his wife and daughter upstairs on the rocking chair in Mary’s room. Carol was reading her a story from a hardcover compendium of Curious George stories.
“Are you happy, Daddy?” Mary said.
“I’m very happy,” Ethan said, close to tears.
They gave her a glass of water and tucked her in with her dollies, then turned out the light and left her to sleep.
Carol went downstairs for coffee and Ethan trudged after her.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said.
The next thing he knew he was bawling with his head bowed and his shoulders shaking and Carol was holding him, telling him everything was going to be okay.
“I didn’t like the look on Mary’s face,” he said.
That heartbreaking look of confusion, fear, guilt that her parents were fighting.
He had surprised himself by crying. He had not cried in at least ten years, when his mother died. But that look haunted him. That look of broken trust and loss.
“Kids blame themselves for everything,” he added. “I don’t want to fight in front of her. I don’t want to ever fight in front of her again. We’re supposed to be protecting her.”
Carol understood. They promised each other it would never happen again. They made up and went to bed feeling better about their marriage. As Ethan lay in the dark that night, trying to sleep, he vowed to preserve Mary’s pure innocence and joy as long as he could. She would slowly learn over time that the world was a hard and terrible place. But he would fight that world as long and as hard as he could to protect his little girl from its dark truths.
In the third-floor lounge, the other survivors sit around a small table and share a breakfast of peanut butter on crackers and wash it down with instant coffee sweetened with honey and lightened with powdered milk. An espresso machine gathers dust in the corner next to a small refrigerator nobody is interested in opening. Corporate art decorates the walls. The stale air smells like dust. The LED lantern casts long shadows behind a fake potted plant.
“I think we can all agree we need to continue searching the building,” Anne says. “I’d like to lead a team to look for supplies. Food, water, drugs and anything else we can use.”
“If it’s all right with you, I need to sit that one out,” Sarge says.
“Got to work on the Brad?”
“No, I’d like to take my boys and find the emergency generator. We might get some lights going again. Charge our electronics. Maybe even get some news of the outside world.”
“Wow,” Wendy says, smiling. “That would be nice.”
“Hooah,” says Sarge.
“Don’t tell me you have to go into the basement,” Anne says.
Sarge shakes his head. “There ain’t no generator in the basement. If a water main broke or there was some type of disaster where fire hoses or sprinklers would have to be used, it could get flooded out too easy. Hurricane Katrina taught everybody that. No, this hospital has a mechanical penthouse. High and dry on the top floor. That is where it will be. Me and the boys will take care of it.”
The survivors eat quietly. Sarge pours himself more coffee, smiles and adds, “So don’t you worry about me. The only people going into the darkest, most dangerous parts of the hospital today will be you.”