After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (5 page)

“How have you been adjusting since leaving the center?” the scientist asks. White
paper crinkles underneath me as I shift on the examination table. The man places his
hand on my thigh, casually, as he studies my chart. As if there’s nowhere else for
him to put it. As if neither one of us realizes his thumb stretches too close to nowhere
good.

I try to shift again, and the pads of his fingers press against the edge of my putrid
green examination gown that does little to cover the necessary bits. My nails dig
into my palm. There was a time only months ago when they were as sharp as weapons.

“Fine.” I keep my voice even.

He removes his hand to flip a page in the thick folder documenting my life. Who I
was before the pandemic, what I was during, who they want me to be now. His touch
then falls back to its familiar place. I’d cross my arms over my chest, but that would
only drag the hem of the gown higher up my legs.

“You making friends? Finding a community?”

I think about James. How he’s usually waiting for me outside the store after my sessions
here. “Sure.”

“Pure or Rehabilitated?” he asks.

I lift a shoulder. “I thought we weren’t supposed to distinguish between the two.”

“Listen, Vail.” He sets the chart on the table and shifts so that he’s facing me,
his abdomen so close that the stray fibers on his white coat tickle my kneecaps. Every
time his heart beats, his body barely brushes mine.

There was a time I could have heard that heartbeat from two hundred yards away. He
could have hidden from me, crouched in a closet or trembling in a cupboard, and his
fear would have sent his heart soaring and it would sing me to his location.

The music of a terrified heart used to be the most beautiful in the world.

“We’ve really found community to be key to reintegration here,” he says. I’m used
to his hands that do nothing but wander idly, never too far, and I keep my thighs
pressed tight together. He grips my legs so that his fingers slide into the sweaty
crevice at the back of my bent knees. “We have sessions here. The notes show that
you used to attend some of them but haven’t in a few weeks. I really think…”

I tune him out and try to figure out how old he is. His hair’s sprayed with white,
but still predominantly brown. No glasses, clean shaven. A bit of flab around his
middle, that I feel as he shifts against me again in his fervor to see me fully rehabilitated.
He’s not wearing a wedding ring, but that’s not unusual anymore, with gold being so
valuable and most other forms of currency useless.

He doesn’t look like the type that could easily survive the pandemic. And that’s what’s
always so confusing to me. It was the Pure who holed up in compounds scattered over
the country, trying to hold on to memories of what life had been like before. It was
in the remnants of one of the government bunkers that they figured out the cure and
designed the recovery.

But it was the Infected who ruled the world. Every day the ranks of the Recovered
grow, and yet in everyone’s eyes, including our own, we’re worthless.

As James walks me up the mountain, he tells me about his days at school. “Pretty much
like before.” He shrugs. “Smaller classes.

And the teachers are a little more lenient. I mean, once you live through the end
of the world, getting sent to detention really isn’t that significant.”

I laugh, and he turns to me. We’re at the top of my driveway, where he always leaves
me, and he slips his fingers around mine. “I wish you were there.” His voice is soft,
earnest.

There’s an intensity to his eyes, in the stillness, that makes everything inside me
unfurl. “You could go again, you know. Those first few weeks, everyone was just trying
to figure it all out. There’s a rhythm to it now—you wouldn’t stand out as much anymore.”

I shouldn’t stand out at all. That’s the thing. According to the government, there’s
supposed to be no difference between me and James, except after that law there’s a
footnote as long as a football field about how the Infected are to be Recovered and
what we must do to prove our ongoing Rehabilitation.

They’re even allowed to kill us under certain circumstances. If they suspect the cure
will fail, legally they can do whatever they want to us.

I tilt my head, wishing there were a way to explain to James just how very different
we are. “You know, before the pandemic, if you had a male doctor, once you put on
the gown, he wasn’t allowed to be in a room alone with you. They always called in
a nurse just in case.”

He frowns. “In case of what?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “It was just one of those rules I always thought was sort
of unnecessary. But either way, they don’t do that anymore with us. The doctor just
comes in when he wants. No nurse.”

It’s clear James is confused. “Maybe they’re short-staffed at the center.” And then
he smiles as if about to make a joke. “Population isn’t exactly what it used to be.”

I try to mimic his grin, but all I can think about is the desperation in the scientist’s
eyes as he gripped his fingers against my pulse, counting out every heartbeat as if
it could tell him a secret about the end of the world.

I think it surprised everyone that the cure actually worked. Sure, lab testing seemed
positive, but it’s different to load up tens of thousands of cure-tranq rounds and
go off hunting monsters. Suddenly they had piles of people on their hands, and they
rushed to set up the Sanitation Centers to take us all in.

It kept us in one location in case everything failed. Then they could just firebomb
the place and be done with us.

They contained us for as long as they could in those centers, but space became an
issue, and finally they opened the gate and let us trickle out into the world.

The world went nuts. Enraged communities prohibited Rehabilitated from settling there,
vowed to shoot on sight anyone Infected or suspected of having been Infected.

Every time one of us committed a crime, it was because of what we once were. That
we shouldn’t be saved. They didn’t want to see that we were just like them: some of
us good, some of us bad.

A few political parties rose up, rumbling about colonizing an island with us, making
sterilization part of the cure. Some suggested flat-out murdering us, but of course
they never called it that, because we were less than animals. It would be
preemptive self-defense
.

And then one of the self-governing communities by the capital seat dragged a Rehabilitated
down to the town square and charged him with murder. He demanded proof; he’d been
a model citizen since being Recovered, he claimed. They pointed to the bar code on
the back of his ear. He’d been a monster, and the only way a monster could survive
was by killing.

The case made it into what was left of the court system, and he was found guilty.
The defense took it to one of the remaining four circuits, and the ruling was overturned.
It was headed to the Supreme Court, the defense claiming insanity, when the President
stepped in and put an end to it.

We were pardoned for any crime committed before we became rehabilitated.

No one ever tried to bring charges against the survivors for what they did.

Her body floats in the pool. She’s on her back, arms trailing out by her sides. She’d
sunk at first, right after giving up the fight for air, but then sometime later, when
I was asleep, she bobbed to the surface and has been drifting through the stagnant
water ever since.

I am so so lonely that I consider attempting school in the morning.

In the middle of the night I feel something thundering through me, waking me up in
the darkness as though I’d been hit. My breath is ragged, dreams of sharp teeth and
succulent skin still clinging to the edges of my vision.

My ears ring, and as they clear I hear the clacking sort of howling that’s as familiar
to me as my own heartbeat. I push from bed and stumble into the living room, pressing
against the cold glass window.

The horizon glows fire, and at first I think it’s the sunrise, but then black clouds
billow through the brightness. I watch it for a while, the sky undulating as goose
bumps spread over my arms and up my neck.

I’m pretty sure I know exactly what just happened, but even so, I reach around the
corner and flick on the television. There are only two channels, one fuzzier than
the other, but the news confirms what I expected.

An explosion at the Sanitation Center. Clearly on purpose. A purification group has
already claimed credit. The entire place ablaze, likely no survivors. The fire engineered
to start tearing through the woods, where the monsters sometimes hole up at night.

I watch the inferno boiling in the distance, knowing how dry the season’s been and
how thirsty the trees are for flame. I’m sure the town will find a way to stop it
before it reaches the city proper. But I doubt they’ll do much to keep my little mountain
unharmed.

Why save a mountain populated by nothing but monsters?