A New Day in America (6 page)

“We’ll give her right back to you when we’re through. We don’t expect people to have to walk around without protection.”

“I’m here to pay for treatment,” says Nos.

“There’s no danger here, officer.”

“Then you won’t mind if I’m armed.”

“These are lawless times, ya understand me—we need rules here to maintain our services. We got
valuable
resources. We had the clowns running raids on us. Savages takin’ hostages. We can’t have people shootin’ up the fuckin’ place.”

“If you don’t want the place shot up,” says Nos, “It’s best you don’t take issue with my firearm.”

That got under Romo’s skin.

“If you’re looking to intimidate me, you’re more of a dumb-ass than you look. ‘Specially with that lil’ sweetheart of yours.”

“What kind of dumb-ass would disarm himself to a man that decorates his lawn with severed heads?”

Romo is quiet. He wears his grin with less patience.

“These are lawless times,” continues Nos. He offers a roll of hundreds to Romo. “Now you want my gun? Or my money? Full disclosure, the gun comes with a full clip.”

Romo counts the money with his fat hands. He looks to the doctor and nods.

“Take off your shirts, please,” says the doctor in an even tone. He has a quiet face, and his expression hasn’t changed at all. He examines Nos and Naomi: a standard check up he mindlessly performs—throat, ears, chest, heart, reflexes. He shines a fine blue light into Nos’ eyes and then Nay’s.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” says the doctor through thin, scrunched up lips, as though his features are fingertips pressed close together.

Nos lets out a long exhale.
Please
, let her be fine.
Let her be fine
.

“You daughter was exposed, but the strain has yet to metastasize. After a series of inoculations, she will be OK.”

Nos’ face brightens. The smile feels strange on his face. He looks to Naomi with a wave of relief.

“The bad news is you. You have not only been exposed, you are infected.”

Nos tries to remember when he possibly could have been exposed—at some point during the fight? Or when he washed off Nay? When installing the window bars? The disease is treacherous.

Two syringes full of a clear liquid sit on the counter. The doctor presses a third, ungodly-sized syringe into a vial. He draws back the plunger and fills the tube with a thick pink fluid. He sets the pink syringe beside the other two, nearly twice their size.

“Where did this medicine come from?” Nos asks.

“Some kind of air drop,” Romo answers, though he’d asked the doctor. “We found crates under parachutes all over the park. The vaccines, the cure, treatment, antibiotics, the tents, instructions. Someone was watching out.”

And then you snatched up all the supplies and hoarded the medicine. Now you make people pay to save their own lives
.

The doctor swabs Naomi’s shoulder and pricks her skin with the small needle. She winces but makes no sound. She looks fearfully at the doctor, and he doesn’t smile. He removes the needle and holds the swab in place for the Band Aid.

He then takes the pink syringe, turning to Nos.

“I have to administer the cure before I can inoculate you.”

He swabs Nos’ arm, pricks him, and presses the fluid into his vein. The cure runs through Nos, and he feels his whole body expand. Then the pain is gone, and he is euphoric. He feels
good. Damn good
.

The doctor then injects the clear inoculation fluid into Nos’ shoulder, though by this point he barely notices.

“We need to quarantine you two.”

“Quarantine? How long?”

“Twelve hours,” says the doctor. “In twelve hours you get another shot, then another twelve-hour quarantine, and your third and final shot.”

“You’ll be just fine,” says Romo. “Lucky we caught it when we did.”

Quarantine
. Vile word, Nos thinks. But he feels good.

And Nay is OK.

Lucky
.

The guard leads them to a white tent and unzips it Four others are inside. One deadbeat in a dirty overcoat and rags paces, angry, muttering about how he isn’t sick.

“
Just give me my motherfucking shot, stop taking my shit, I got a house, a mortgage, a fly-ass car. I got a house, a mortgage, and a tricked out M6 with the crazy whip-appeal. Give me my shot. Let me go. I got a house…”

He is annoying, but he addresses no one, so no one has to bother with him. Another sits on the bench, sleeping, and another is asleep on the floor. The fourth is Latino and awake. He wears a filthy linen suit and smells of cheap cigars, Black and Milds maybe, like burnt sugar. He has a tan Taino face and thick, round stubby fingers with gold rings. A hard, shining metal cigar case sticks up from his jacket lapel pocket.
Roughneck Ricky Ricardo
, thinks Nos. The suit is crusty and his shirt is untucked, but he still wears it with pride. He rakes the newcomers over with his eyes, nods to Nos, and smiles at Nay.

Nay looks tired.

“You sleepy, sweetie?” Nos asks softly.

“I can stay awake,” she insists. Still, she can tell there is a different kind of safety here that they haven’t felt since they left home. Even at Jake’s they didn’t sleep. Despite the decapitated heads mounted outside the tent just yards away, Jake and his daughter were somehow creepier. Nos doesn’t expect Romo will hold a grudge about the gun. If he’d given it up, he might never see it again, and without the gun there would be nothing he could do about it. They are captive enough as is.

“Relax, hon. You can sleep.”

“It’s cold.”

“Yeah.” Nos knows it is cold, but he doesn’t feel it.
Could be worse
. Could be wet
and
cold. Ask any BUD/S trainee in hell week.

He takes off his coat and spreads it on the cold ground. Nay hesitates and then lays down inside. Nos folds the big coat over her twice. She smiles at him with her eyes before they shut. She is off to dreamland.

“Beautiful
niña
,” says Ricky in a thick Dominican accent.

“Thanks,” says Nos, guarded. He thinks of Jake and how Nay’s pretty face in this ugly world could mean trouble. He won’t sleep, he decides. He doesn’t feel like he needs to.

He feels fine.
Better than fine
. The feeling is familiar.
Too familiar
.

“Where were you when it happened?” Ricky asks.

“Brooklyn. You?”

“Washington Heights,” he says.

“Still stands, then.”

“Fort Washington survived the revolution.
Si
, it survived this, too,
pero
the people were not so lucky. The blast spared the buildings, but the
inferma
was not so charitable.”

“You lost your family?”

“Everyone. Three daughters.”

“I’m sorry. I lost two sons, my wife.”

“I’m sorry, too. But grief will not keep us alive, will it?”

“Won’t it? There is life in grief,” says Nos, almost to himself. “It’s apathy that kills us.” Even as Nos speaks, he thinks of his father’s skeletal corpse dangling from the piano chord.

“Ah, a warrior and a philosopher,” says Ricky.

“Death makes us all philosophers.”

“Not all.” Ricky nods to the silhouette of police guarding the tent. “So grief has brought you this far?”

“And a basement overstocked with imperishable foods and a small weapons cache.”

“Ha! You were prepared. And people thought you paranoid,
si
?”

“They did. But I wasn’t preparing. Just how I lived. I liked to put food in my body as quickly as possible. Living on military rations ruined my appetite. I would have lived on an IV if I could. I never felt like sitting and eating. Waste of time.”

Ricky is incredulous. “Was your wife’s cooking so terrible?”

“I’d lost the taste for it. Now I’d kill for some roast pork.”

“Don’t speak such words—saying ‘roast pork’ while men starve. You are yelling ‘
fire’
in a crowded theater. That is
unconstitutional
.”

They share a laugh. Feels like a lifetime since he’s shared a laugh.

“How did you survive?” asks Nos.

“I’m a doctor. When I saw so many people dying so quickly I took the necessary precautions. Gas mask, isolation. Like they tell you on the airplane—when the masks drop, secure yourself, and then your child. I secured myself. For
mi familia
, I was too late. And now, I fail to secure even myself.”

Ricky removes his jacket and shows Nos a horrid rash that creeps up his arm and grows bigger as it disappears beneath his shirt.

“They say they have a cure. I gave them my last dollar, the last of my wife and daughter’s jewelry, all my gold but these rings. They eye my rings like these will be theirs soon as well. They have given me two shots and I await the third. My rash has not stopped growing. I do not feel the pain any longer. For that, I am thankful. They have cured the agony of dying, if nothing else.”

Nos also does not feel any pain. Nor cold nor hunger nor care.

It was 2008. Utterly alone and wounded and hunted in the impossible Afghanistan mountains of the Hindu Kush, Nos would consider this his second death.

Everything had gone to shit. He had been shot in the shoulder and caught the peripheral blast from an RPG. He had fallen so many times he’d nearly broken his neck, and he was bleeding badly. He had no radio, no medical gear, and the trauma of watching his teammates massacred was still fresh. The Taliban was tracking him with way more terrain savvy than he could hope to learn. There was no flat ground. His shoulder made it near impossible to climb. He tumbled down escarpments and hills and made an easy trail to follow. He would glance down long drops to the abyss below. He was sure the Kush would soon kill him. The mountains cut huge prehistoric shapes into the backdrop. Damn, if it didn’t feel like of the End of the World.

He could hear them following with that slow, methodical walk of theirs. Nos had his M4 and his Sig Saur nine and his knife, plus three magazines and one grenade. It was time to make a stand.

He retraced his last fall, laboring up the mountainside. There were two large rocks that sat together in such a way as to make decent cover. He climbed inside and crouched.

His body knew how to deal with shock, even if his mind never would. Training kicked in.
Calm down. Stay alert. Control your breathing. Don’t move a fucking muscle. Maybe you won’t die
.

The Afghans approached, quiet as mountain goats. They did not speak to each other, but their footfalls gave away their position.

He pulled the pin on his grenade and tossed it. If they did react, they were too late. The frag blew, and Nos popped up and gunned down the last two standing. Two lay motionless on the ground. They had taken the brunt of the grenade. Another two writhed in the dirt, and Nos drew his pigsticker knife and opened both their throats.

Nos exhaled. The Taliban soldiers were no help as far as clothes. Way too small for him. He took a shirt to reset his bandage, and took a canvas pouch and stuffed it with four more Russian grenades. He took a cloth
pakol
hat and fit it on his head sideways. He then tossed the bodies off the farthest side of the mountain and watched each one tumble and plunge off the same precipice that once seemed his destiny. Felt pretty fuckin’ good.

Nos searched the canvas Taliban pouch, hoping to find some kind of food. He was starving. What he found instead was a bag with what looked like green bread dough inside. It smelled like tobacco and earth and some sort of odd chemical. He knew what it was: the opium that sustained the Afghan economy, the stuff they gave suicide bombers to get them high enough to blow themselves up.

The pain bit like a savage fang in his shoulder. He was weak and light-headed from the massive amount of blood he’d lost. He took a pinch of the tobacco opium and slipped it inside his lip.

The wave hit him first in the back of the legs, then his neck. The pain was gone. Its juices immediately spread through his mouth and got inside him quicker than any kind of relief he’d ever felt. Better than the morphine he’d had at hospitals. It was the moment after a freefall, when the clatter of the rotary and the scream of the upshot wind stops, his chute springs and he is drifting to the warm mother earth.

Almost as quickly the feeling shrank, and the outlying spaces became terrifying. The horror was just beyond his field of vision, and no matter how he turned his head he could not see it. A series of pictures flashed through his head like an old reel movie, a red-roped sky lounge overlooking all of New York City, a ditch dug deep in the dessert and piled with uncountable burning corpses, a male lion tearing at the hindquarters of a bison with lionesses clung bloody to the prey’s belly and throat. He felt the looming crush of death.

Nos slipped another pinch of opium inside his mouth.

Ricky Ricardo died during the second night in quarantine. Nos told the guards, and they took his body away. Nos realized he had never asked him his name.

Nos has known for some time that their cure had some powerful opiate in it. Makes sense to give morphine to people who are suffering, though he wonders how effective this cure can be. The three people that were in the tent when Nos and Nay arrived were all dead, replaced by four more. Nos keeps to himself. He’s learned his lesson about befriending the terminal.

He is worried about himself. He knows Nay will not survive if he dies. But the cure maintains him with that feeling of wholeness in the Hindu Kush. He has not developed any sort of rash. He doesn’t get as high, but the comedown is easier, and he soon gets his second shot, then his third. They keep him quarantined for another twelve hours before they call him back into the lab.

Romo somehow looks fatter. The doctor examines Nos and confirms that he has no rash and appears healthy. He is cleared to leave.