Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) (32 page)

“No!” cried Juliana.

“There’s no other way,” said Ruth, holding her hands out toward the vicious splatter of the Infected. “He’s dying. Do you want me to save him or not? No other choice Juliana.”

Juliana hesitated, then nodded. Ruth yanked the head of the closest Infected backward by his hair. She pressed the knife against the rough, stubbly skin of his neck. His throat was already sticky with Father Preston’s blood. The front door swung open, and the foyer was bathed in bright morning light. Two figures stood in the frame. One of them leapt at Ruth. “Stop,” cried the other, “Stop, we have the Cure!”

The knife was pulled from her hand and slid, skittering across the floor. The man who had leapt at her pulled the Infected man away from her. He stabbed the man’s neck with a shining glass tube and backed down the hallway, dragging the man with him.

“These doors lock?” he yelled.

Ruth was in too much shock to answer. “Yes,” answered Juliana shakily, “just close the door.”

“Help me,” commanded the woman in the door frame. She ran forward and pressed a handful of glass tubes into Ruth’s hand.

“Wha— where do I?” stammered Ruth, the cool weight of the glass slowly dissolving her disbelief.

“Anywhere,” said the woman, “the closer to a vein the faster it works.”

Ruth stabbed it into a nearby arm, not even certain whose it was. She grasped and pulled. Juliana helped her drag the Infected off the priest and down the hallway. The woman took the last one biting Father Preston, leaving only the two who were still squabbling over him.

Ruth slammed the cell door. Juliana bent over, breathing heavy. “How is this possible?” asked Ruth.

“Later,” gasped Juliana. They went back for the last of the Infected, but the two strangers had already subdued them. Juliana pulled the hospital door shut. Ruth looked down at Father Preston. He was mangled, needed stitches probably. But he’d live. Ruth looked at the dart in her hand.

“Is there a sedative?” she asked the man. He nodded, trying to catch his breath. “How long?”

“Roughly three days. It takes the Cure that long to work.”

“Will it hurt healthy people?”

He shook his head.

Ruth knelt near Father Preston. “This is more than you deserve,” she muttered and injected it into his arm.

“Are you Ruth and Juliana?” asked the man.

Juliana nodded.

“I’m Frank, this is Nella,” he said, pulling the woman close to him. “Bernard sent us. We need to get you out of here.”

“Okay,” Juliana started but Ruth cut her off.

“No. We aren’t going anywhere.” Juliana stared at her. “Those people we injected? We fed them for eight years. Listened to them scream for eight years. Changed their diapers, cured their wounds, lost sleep, lost food, lost friends for them. Well, except this one,” she nudged Father Preston with a toe, “and you burst in talking about a Cure after all this time. There’s almost a hundred of them out in that field. Been waiting just like us, all this time. If it’s really a cure, we aren’t leaving until we track down every last one of them. And before we go anywhere with you, I want to know where you came from. Where have you been? How long have you had it?”

Nella glanced at Frank. She pulled a few handfuls of darts from her pocket. Frank handed Bernard’s sling to Ruth.

“It really is a cure,” said Frank quietly. “I’m living proof.”

“
You
were infected?” asked Juliana, “Ruth, what if he’s like Father Preston?”

Ruth shook her head. “The odds are almost impossible.”

“You have a Cured person here?” asked Nella.

“We have a survivor. His body cured itself after a massive bout of pneumonia,” answered Ruth. She took a few of the vials and rolled them in her palm, the glass glittering as her eyes filled with years of unshed tears. “How long?” she asked again. Juliana put a hand on her shoulder.

“Later.”

Ruth wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She opened the door. The fog had mostly burned away and the field was a matted wound, the trampled grass clotted with ash and dust. Some groups still struggled but the ground was littered with the unconscious and the wounded and dying.

“Maybe you should go get your kit,” said Juliana, already bending over Father Preston’s wounds. Ruth nodded and ducked back into the interior. She picked up her knife where it had landed. The steel beams were already hot to the touch, but she went from one to the next, cutting the ropes and slowly lowering the bodies down as she passed. If only she could have taken it back. It all seemed so pointless now. She wandered from one injured person to the next, injecting them, bandaging them, dragging them into the cool shade of the hospital. She didn’t really notice anyone. She just went on. It wasn’t connected to her. She was lost somewhere between Charlie’s death and that morning, still lost in that neverending loop of shrieks and hunger and cruel, hard survival.

She’d never be free.

The sun was setting as she pulled the last body inside. It was Gray. She thought about leaving him outside with the corpses of his victims, but they had been her friends. If anyone were to blame for their deaths, it was her. She didn’t want to leave him near the sleeping Infected; it was like leaving a wolf among sheep. She left him inside with Father Preston and the Infected who had attacked the priest. Let them sort out what to do with the two of them once the Infected woke up and found out what they had intended. Ruth wanted nothing else to do with either one.

Juliana collapsed on the front step of the hospital. Her eyes were puffy and red, but she smiled at Ruth. “They are almost all here. I checked.”

Ruth nodded. “Good.” She stared for a moment at Juliana, as if she had suddenly lost her place. She shook her head. “You should rest. You shouldn’t have done as much as you did.”

Juliana laughed and brushed sweat stuck hair from the edge of her face. “Ruth, I’m dying. I’ll have plenty of time to rest soon enough. This morning I thought most of the last decade would be wasted. That everything I’d done, everyone I’d cared for would be gone by this afternoon. And then, at the last second, I found myself doing the very thing I’ve dreamed about for eight years. We cured people Ruth, we ended this awful disease! This is one of the happiest hours of my life. How can you think I’d rather be lying in my bed?”

Ruth sank down beside her. She was silent, but her thoughts raged. She knew she ought to feel happy for the Infected, for Juliana. Instead she was crushed with guilt and terrible sadness. Frank and Nella emerged from the hospital.

“Your friend, Bernard, will be worried,” said Nella gently.

Ruth glanced at Juliana. “I don’t know if we can go as far as the docks tonight,” she said, “besides, what happens when everyone wakes up?”

“That won’t be for a few days.”

“There are bedrooms on the third floor. We’ll go in the morning.”

“We don’t have to stay any more Ruth. We can go where we want,” said Juliana.

“These people will be confused when they wake up, they’ve lost eight years of their lives, they aren’t going to understand what’s happened.”

Juliana exchanged a long glance with Nella. She patted Ruth’s hand. “Come on, I’m up for it. And Bernard’s bandage probably needs changing. Besides, I’m sure he’s worried sick.” She stood up and walked down the front steps. She looked back once at the silent hospital, its edges turning lavender as the sun sank away. Frank and Nella followed. Ruth pulled herself up and plodded along behind them, all the fear and fire of the past few days drained out of her, like a hard-wrung rag.

Chapter 32

Ruth sat on the rotting pier in the dark. Bernard and the others were behind her in the restaurant, sleeping deeply. She liked it here, on the edge of the city. It was almost separate, almost free of the baking concrete and slumping steel of the crowded buildings. She should have visited the docks sooner. She should have done a lot of things sooner. The pier shifted and creaked. Ruth turned around. Frank walked up to the edge and sat down beside her, his long legs folding until his feet dunked into the cool water.

“You’re a doctor?” he asked.

“I
was.
A pediatrician.”

“Nella’s a psychologist.” He was quiet for a moment. “It wasn’t in time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Cure. It wasn’t in time for your son. Not in time for a lot of people. Juliana said that’s the question that would keep you up. It wasn’t discovered before your son died.”

“When was it found?”

He looked up at the pale, moonlit clouds. “Six years ago. By the same people that made the disease in the first place. There was no way you could have found it. Nobody could. Just them.”

“Six years? Do you have any idea how many people I killed in the past six years? And all those people, waiting, for what? Where have you been?”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t know. Before a few months ago I assumed our governor had sent out people. I thought the Cure was winging its way over the whole country. But your city is the first place we’ve found anyone alive. The capitol is gone, the coast is empty. Maybe the people in charge just thought our home was all that was left.”

Why couldn’t you have waited one more week? Why couldn’t you have missed us? I need never have known,
she thought, but she knew it was selfish and brushed the thought away.

“I’m a murderer,” was what she said out loud, her tone flat and dead.

“We all are,” said Frank, “be grateful you had a choice about it. Not all of us did.”

“But if I’d just waited— if I’d just listened to Juliana—”

“Did you do it for yourself? I mean, to get things? Or did it give you a kind of thrill? Did you enjoy it?”

“No, never.”

“Then why?”

“Because when my husband asked me to kill my son, I couldn’t. Not even knowing what he was going through. I couldn’t do it. So my husband did it for me. But no parent should have to do that. Since I couldn’t do it for mine, I did it for others. So they wouldn’t have to.”

“The man that recovered, did he ever tell you what it was like? What it was like to be Infected?”

Ruth shook her head. “I don’t think he remembers.”

Frank cleared his throat. “He remembers. He remembers everything. And when those people wake up, they’ll remember everything too. Everything they’ve done, everything others did to them. Do you want to hear the truth? Do you really want to know what you’ve done?”

Ruth stared at him for a moment and then nodded, swallowing the lump in her throat.

Frank sighed, rocking back slightly on the splintering board. “For some reason, the people who were immune always seem to think it’s like being forced to watch as someone or something else takes control of your body. Most of the time, it’s kinder to let them go on thinking that way. But it isn’t true. I knew what I was doing. I even, sometimes, knew it was wrong. But I didn’t care. People get the wrong idea when I say I was ‘compelled’ to hurt someone, to eat them. They think it means I had no control. Did you ever have the Chicken Pox? Or poison ivy when you were a kid?”

“Sure,” said Ruth.

“Imagine that urge to itch enhanced by a power of one hundred. Or— or a pregnancy craving, that’s more the feeling, but stronger, so much stronger that you felt yourself going mad the longer you held out against it. And once you give in that first time, it’s impossible to go back. It’s worse. But it was still
me
that killed my wife, not some alien that had possession of me. It was still your son inside. It was torture not to be able to find— to find meat. It was torture not to be ripping or chewing or fighting. My teeth ached for it. My arms and legs bristled with adrenaline and no way to run it off. Every second that I wasn’t doing those things, I
hurt.
I
ached
. So did everyone else. All those people in the hospital. All those people you killed. They all hurt for every second of every day.”

Ruth felt her chest contract as she listened. She wanted to cry, but she found she couldn’t.

“The thing is,” continued Frank, “as much as being Infected hurt, being Cured hurt worse for a while. While I was sick, I knew what I was doing. I thought that I had to do what I did. But I didn’t care. I was caught up in this passion, this rage. Even though the civilized part of my mind knew, deep down, that what I was doing was terribly, unforgivably wrong, I didn’t care about the consequences. I didn’t care what would happen in the next year or tomorrow or even the next hour as long as I could get what I wanted. But waking up after the Cure— it all hit me. It was like my conscience was dead for a year and suddenly revived, way too late. I killed my wife while she was trying to help me. I ate the body of a little boy. I destroyed everything I loved.
I
did that. No one else. And the worst part is, every day I think, if I’d just summoned a little more willpower, if I’d just been less weak, I could have stopped myself. We all could have. Managed it somehow.”

Ruth shook her head. “I don’t believe that. If it were that easy, someone would have resisted. Someone would have stopped themselves.”

“Don’t you understand?” asked Frank gently, “it doesn’t matter how much you or the other Immune people protest that we weren’t in control, that it wasn’t our fault. In our hearts, we feel— we
know
that we were. We have to carry that around for the rest of our lives. I was lucky, compared to some. Locked away in a bunker, I got sick late and cured early. I didn’t have a chance to hurt too many people. Most of the Cured around us were only sick for a few years, two or three. Nella used to work distributing the Cure and helping people come to terms with themselves and the new world. Even with hundreds of people supporting them, many, many of the Cured killed themselves. They
still
kill themselves six years later. I can’t imagine enduring a moment longer than I did, but the people in this city have been ill or cared for the Infected for six more years.” He shook his head. “I don’t think what you did was murder. It was mercy, Ruth. For the Infected, and for their families.”