I turn to leave but she has gripped my hand. Her eyes are welling up with tears and we hold hands over the circulation desk top; the granite is as cold as marble. We share the solidarity of the hidden. There is a sentence in the journal where the student wrote, “We know our families are gone but we still love them. We know hope is gone too but we still have it. We’re starving. We’re too weak to fight them off. Whoever finds this, please know that we were here. We hope the world makes it.”
The cure stayed in the air, like magic. The sunlight made it shimmer as golden dust motes. Soon the sprayer trucks used for mosquito repellent were fogging the neighborhoods with it as well. All over the country, the hidden emerged from basements, cellars, attics, safe rooms, and offices. We were skeletal, rib-worn and pale. We squinted in the bright sunlight, like the moles that we were.
I had asked Maria if her uncle could get something for me. I whispered the name of the item in her ear, terribly embarrassed. “No problema,” she said.
I thought it would come wrapped in paper or disguised in some way. But when one of Narvaez’s workers on the flatbed truck hands it to me, the pink plastic is obvious. I slip the pills in my purse and give my ration card for him to slide through his handheld debit machine. Technically, what I’m doing is wrong. The President has announced a temporary ban on all birth control items, hoping to boost the recovery boom. But Narvaez’s worker doesn’t bat an eye. I wonder what other things Maria’s uncle gets for people, legal or not.
“Hello, professor.” I turn around and it is Felix Narvaez himself.
“Hi.”
“Have you everything you need?”
He must know what is in my pocket. Probably nothing about his businesses escapes his attention. “Yes, thank you.” He is looking at my wedding ring.
“My husband was a Turner,” I say, as if that might explain anything. We watch each other and I hold my chin up, like Maria does. I too can be unrepentant.
“It must be difficult sleeping with betrayal, no?” he says.
I was nearly too weak to go find him. To be honest, I was so upset over Lindy that I didn’t even look for him; it was a colleague from work who called me, telling me there was someone who looked like Cal at one of the Recovery Centers. I found him lying on an army cot.
The medicine from the planes and foggers had cured the Infected, but many were dying. Once the body was reawakened and the immune system started working, massive infections took over. Turners had broken teeth, with bits of gristle and bone lodged in their gums. Many died from oral infections. There was a shortage of antibiotics. Cal was lucky. He would be okay. Many people had been shot or knifed; some injuries were too horrendous to be cured. People were dying all over. Non-Infected were shooting themselves, jumping off of bridges, hanging themselves in closets—they were wracked by the guilt from “putting down” an Infected loved one. Imagine the ones who had shot their own children in the head and then saw the cure come sprinkling down from the sky, like a prayer answered too late?
In those early weeks of July, the Infected and the Non-Infected looked alike. We were all stuck in the lacuna of being half-alive.
Cal saw me and reached out from his cot. I instinctively backed away. He looked hurt.
“Lindy?” he asked, looking around.
“She’s gone.”
Cal began to wail and a volunteer nurse rushed over. “Hush,” she said sternly. She knew if one person let go it would snowball from cot to cot, town to town, nation to nation—a whole world gone mad with hysteria and grief. Once it started it would never stop.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
Felix has asked me to dinner. I haven’t given him my answer yet.
Summer is coming along nicely and the victory garden outside is producing well. I dreamt of the statues again last night but they turned into Lindy. I had left the attic to find more supplies, but she had followed behind me. I didn’t know. She got too close to an opening in a window and something yanked her. I dreamt I’m trying to pull her back inside the house but the thing outside won’t let her go. It sounds like an animal. There is blood. The dream goes soundless. I’m holding a statue’s feet, no . . . they are Lindy’s feet and they are going cold. Her little toes twitch. I feel for a pulse at an ankle. Her feet become drained of blood; they turn as white as bone, as still as stone.
Cal chews his cereal and sees me deep in thought. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Felix has procured extra gas rations for faculty, so I get to drive the car to work. It’s sunny and I put on my sunglasses—I have contact lenses now, also thanks to Felix. When I turn on the radio they are finishing a replay of the President’s State of the Union speech: “To persevere is to live—to live together as one country, one nation—together in health, hope, and liberty. Forgiveness is not forgetfulness, but rather an acknowledgement of the innate need for security, survival, and the necessity of recovery. We shall all be reawakened to see a new vision of our nation . . . ” After she finishes there is applause and then a John Lennon song starts playing. I listen to the chorus: “And we all shine on . . . ”
I drive slowly around the commuters on bicycles and on horseback; people wave to each other and smile. I pass by the tank on Main Street and there is a tiny tree sprouting up from the turret. A cardinal warbles and sings on the strongest branch, as red as a drop of blood.
Someday maybe the world will “make it,” as the writer of the Campus Eight had hoped. I don’t know if it will involve remembering or forgetting. I don’t know what languages our silences might speak. But maybe it will be okay. Maybe someday I will tell Cal that I dreamed of him crouched over the body of our daughter, taking bite after loving bite.
A Shepherd of the Valley
Maggie Slater
The low-lying fog across the tarmac made it difficult to be certain, but the figure moving toward the tower limped like a roamer. James Shepherd lifted his binoculars—it was a girl, a young girl, wearing a jacket so large its cuffs hung over her hands and the waist almost down to her knees. She favored her left leg, or perhaps her ankle. No doubt she’d been walking on it unconsciously for weeks, maybe even months.
I can fix that, Shepherd thought, and it made him smile. It had been a while since a roamer wandered onto his ground space. He’d have to give her a good name. A sweet name. Perhaps Esther. Little Esther, he thought, and tapped in the command for Peter to intercept and incapacitate.
Luke was also in the area, not a hundred meters off by Hanger B.
Adding Esther would make his group an even dozen, and that too made Shepherd smile. He pulled off a piece of masking tape and pressed it beneath the others on the control panel. With a marker, he wrote her name.
Twelve was a good number. A holy number, if the Good Book was right. Peter, Matthew, David, John, Paul, Mary, Luke, Bartholomew, Joseph, Martha, Mark, and now Esther. Yes, twelve was right.
As he watched Peter tromp toward the newcomer, Shepherd heard a strange noise over the radio. At first, he thought it might be a breeze caught in Peter’s microphone, but it grew steadily stronger. The moan reached him across the speakers in the air traffic control tower just as the little red button next to Peter’s name began blinking ferociously.
Not a moment after that, Luke’s light started flashing, too.
Shepherd stared at the lights, hardly remembering what they were meant to indicate. It had been so long since one had flashed.
He snatched up his binoculars and looked out at the three figures, now visible and moving toward one another. As he watched, the girl lifted what he’d mistaken for a long stick at her side and pointed it at Peter’s head.