“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.
“Who is that?” he asks, leaning over.
“It’s you.”
Cal jumps. “Bullshit.”
The picture shows a gaunt figure on the bed. The eyes are hollow, sunken. The gums are pulled back from the teeth. An IV tube of antibiotics and fluids snakes over his arm. “That’s you. That’s a few days after I found you at the rescue center.”
“It looks like a Civil War soldier,” he says, “like one of those daguerreotypes of the dead on the battlefield. Look at that beard! No, that’s not me. I never grew a beard.”
“Yes you did. In the attic. You stopped shaving because we didn’t have any extra water. Remember?”
“No. I always shaved.” He looks at the picture. “That’s me all right. Look at the tattoo. But if I grew a beard that means I wasn’t Infected after all. The Infected were dead—they couldn’t grow hair.”
“You were Infected. I saw you get sick. You grew that beard in the attic, you got sick, and four months later when I found you it was still the same length. It didn’t grow any longer because you were . . . ” I can’t say “dead.” It’s true, but I can’t say it to him. It’s too cruel.
“I always shaved.”
“Are you crazy? You got sick. You Turned.”
Cal jumps up and paces the room. He walks towards Lindy’s room but stops himself. “Things happen for a reason!” he says.
“What? Another quote from the Lazarus brochure?”
“Things happen for a reason!” he says again.
“Okay, so what’s the reason?”
“If we hadn’t had the plague, we wouldn’t have had the cure. The cure is likely to prolong human life indefinitely. Just think of it, now we know how it suspends cellular decay and we know how to manipulate it. The bubonic plague had massive benefits in the fourteenth century—there were huge developments in technology, medicine, and mathematics. This plague will be the same. The sacrifice of so many people leads to better lives in the future. This virus may be the promise of an eternal life!”
His hand is resting on the doorknob to Lindy’s room.
“Sacrifice? Eternal Life? You have been going to the Lazarus meetings.” I walk into our bedroom and slam the door.
Cal came back to the attic. He brought some cans of food and all seemed well, but two days later he began coughing. I searched him for scratch or bite marks but he was clean. We didn’t know then that the virus was also airborne, and not just transmitted by saliva and bodily fluids. We had heard on the radio that some people were claiming they were bitten and didn’t get sick, but we didn’t understand what that meant. Now we know that the reason Moles didn’t get sick was because many of them had a natural immunity, like me. And Lindy.
It had started with a random mutation that jumped from sheep to human, but who knew that plastics—plastics of all things—were responsible for the flu’s gruesome effect? It’s hard to believe. BPA, the chemical Bisphenol-A that is in everything from plastic bottles to Tupperware, is what the scientists call a “xenoestrogen endrocrine disruptor.” It became the catalyst for the prions of the mutated ovis flu to hijack the infected brains and circulatory systems.