Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) (2 page)

“It’s them or us, babe,” he’d said, “I won’t hurt anyone if I can help it, but I have to protect us. It’s not like they just want to steal your purse.”

“But they’re sick. Just sick people, Bill,” she’d argued.

“So was David Berkowitz. But I wouldn’t gently shoo him away either.”

“Someday soon, they will start getting better. Or someone will come up with a cure. You don’t want to be remembered as the neighbor who beat sick people, do you?”

He hadn’t said anything, just shook his head. That had been almost eight months ago. Ruth tipped the gas can up, listening to the gurgle and slosh. The sharp smell burned the rim of her nostrils in the clean, cold air. She hadn’t realized it then, but she realized now, with a kind of slow dragging depression, what he hadn’t said. He never believed there’d be a cure, not even then. He hadn’t believed that anyone would come back. Not even Charlie.

Swiping at her nose with the back of a gloved hand, she recapped the generator.
It’s because he doesn’t love Charlie the way that I do. This whole Plague is another reminder that he isn’t our biological child,
she thought. The December Plague had swept through the giant metropolis in a matter of weeks. Almost everyone had succumbed, and many of those who didn’t become infected with the plague couldn’t survive the aftermath anyway. It was extremely rare to have immunity, but you had a better chance if a parent was also immune. Ruth knew of only a handful of healthy survivors, and most of them had fled. None of them were lucky enough to have a spouse that was also immune. None of them but Bill and Ruth.
If we’d been able to have our own child, maybe things would be different.
She pushed the thought away. She had thought it almost every day in the past year. She pulled on the generator’s choke and then yanked the cord. It roared to life again, but not before her mind whispered again,
things would be
better
.
She scrambled out of the lean-to and jumped up the steps, expecting dozens of Infected to come pouring down the street at the sound, but nothing came. She wondered sadly, whether there had been many freezing deaths the night before. The ones she’d seen recently had been thin, fighting with each other. She thought of Charlie being out there like that and the agony that hit her heart convinced her, once again, that it made no difference that he had been adopted. She went inside and locked the door behind her.

The armor tumbled off her piece by piece. She picked it up and piled it neatly next to the empty gas can in front of the door. It would remind her to plan a supply trip. They were almost out of peanut butter, too. Charlie’s favorite. She thought she remembered seeing some at the Third Street market the week before. Bill would raise his eyebrows at that. It was one thing to make a hike that long for rifampin, but for peanut butter? She added it to the list anyway. He couldn’t accuse her of spoiling Charlie anymore. The peanut butter was more to make her feel better. After she’d added a half dozen small items to the list and puttered around cleaning the kitchen for half an hour, the pull of the petri dishes became too strong.

The basement light was on when she opened the door. She thought she’d flipped it off, but shook her head and descended into the impromptu lab. Bill was sitting at the table, waiting for her. The harsh fluorescent light added a decade to his face. Ruth smiled uncertainly. “Hi,” she said.

He smiled back, but it was a habitual smile. “Hi, hon.”

“What’s up?”

He slid a pile of bloody bandages across the table toward her. “Charlie bit through the wrappings again.”

“Dammit,” swore Ruth, “His hands were almost healed. All right, let me just check up on today’s test and I’ll go rebandage him.”

“Ruth,” he reached for her hand as she turned to toss the old bandages into the trash barrel for burning. “How long are we going to put him through this?”

She whirled back to face him. “What are you talking about? I have to bandage his hands, we can’t just leave them, he’ll get a secondary infection—”

“I’m not just talking about his
hands
Ruth, you know that.”

Ruth was silent for a moment, stunned. “You agreed to give me time, to let me research. To give his body time to fight the Plague,” she felt her chest start to squeeze in.

“It’s been over a year. He’s not getting better. He’s not even fighting it. Nobody is. You said it yourself, his body isn’t even recognizing it as a threat. There’s no cure, Ruth. It’s time to talk about alternatives.” He held out a hand to her. She didn’t want to take it, thinking it would be like agreeing with him. But what they were discussing was so distressing that she
needed
him. She slid a hand into his warm one and let him run a thumb across the skin on the back of her hand.

“I have one more test Bill, this could be the one.”

He nodded. “But it won’t be. And then what? You move on to herbal remedies? Raid university chem labs to find forgotten research?”

Ruth’s lips thinned into a bloodless slash, but she didn’t say anything.

“In the meantime, Charlie just gets worse. His hands are torn apart. If he’s awake, he’s furious and starving, even right after we’ve fed him. I know you don’t want to hear this sweetheart, but he’s in pain
all the time.
He hasn’t had any rest in a long, long time. Neither have you. Neither have I.”

“What is it that you want me to do? Let him go? Let him wander out into the street to attack someone or be attacked by another Infected or shot by a stranger?”

“No, I don’t want him to die alone on the street. He’s still my little boy.”

Ruth took a stuttering breath and squinted her eyes against the sharp tears that sprang upon her. “But we
are
talking about him dying?”

“If there were some improvement— if there were even periods of calm or moments when I could glimpse the real Charlie, I wouldn’t be discussing it.”

“This isn’t terminal. He’s healthy except for his mind. I know he can beat it, we just have to find the right treatment to help him. He’s still in there, Bill, our Charlie is still inside.”

Bill shook his head and his eyes became red. “I hope to God you’re wrong, Ruth. I hope there’s nothing left of him at all. He would be so confused and frightened and suffering. You think he understands why his mom and dad don’t hug him anymore? Or why he isn’t able to play outside of his room? Christ! Ruth, we shackled him. His own parents. The restraints make sores on his skin. We only touch him to change bandages or clean him or fix the straitjacket. I hope he’s not in there at all. He wouldn’t understand.”

Ruth sobbed. “We’re only
protecting
him.”

“I know,” said Bill, rubbing the back of her hand, “But it’s become torture. For all of us.”

“I’ll find another restraint system. We’ll make a safe, padded room for him. I can’t just abandon him—”

Bill began shouting. “But that’s what we are doing, one way or another.” He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “Let’s say we continue this way, and let’s say we are
very
lucky in this bad new world we live in, and we manage to survive for forty more years. So will Charlie. You said he’s a healthy kid other than the brain damage. And his hands. Let’s say we can continue to keep him healthy. We’ll find antibiotics for when he bites himself and prevent him from dying in agony from sepsis. We’ll start tying him to a telephone pole in the street on sunny afternoons so that he can run and exercise. That way he won’t develop seeping bed sores or atrophied muscles when his room gets too small. We’ll sedate him every night and brush his teeth and scrub him and change his diapers so he doesn’t wallow in his own filth. Day after day for forty years—”

“Stop!” cried Ruth, “Stop it! I would do it all for him. Every day. I knew what I signed up for when we adopted him.”

A wail of rage tumbled down the basement steps. Charlie had heard them and was awake. Bill swiped the back of his hand across his eyes as the scream renewed itself.

“I know you would Ruth. I would too. But we became parents in another world. We could do all those things and more, but it will never take away even a fraction of his misery. Listen to that. That is his
entire
existence. How can you bear to see him in such anguish every day? Even if you could stand it, what would happen to him when we die? There isn’t any institution to take him to when we get too old to care for him. There’re no other relatives to take over. He’ll starve to death. Alone, chained up, his brain still a lost little boy’s. He’ll suffer for days and days before he finally dies. Is that what you want?”

Ruth just sobbed, clutching his hand.

“I worry about it every time we leave him,” Bill continued, “every time we go out to get supplies or medicine, I think, will this be the trip that kills us? Will my little boy be here abandoned and starving or freezing when the generator dies? Will someone break in and hurt him or— or
eat
him? I can’t do it anymore,” Bill’s voice broke and he dropped his head into his hands.

After a moment, Ruth said, “You’re asking me to murder my child.”

“I’m asking you to help me stop his suffering.”

“There could still be a cure out there.”

Bill let go of her hand. She crossed to the incubator and pulled out the plate. She didn’t even need the microscope. The bacteria had swarmed over the filter disks in milky gray clumps. The medication didn’t even slow them down. Bill could already see the despair in her face. He stood up and walked over to her. He took the agar plate from her hand and put it on the counter. “We’ve done everything that we can do. There’s nothing else to try. It’s time to let him go,” he said.

“Maybe I just need to try a larger dosage.”

“The dosages you tried were already too large for a child.”

“Then I must have contaminated the samples,” she cried, and picked up the plastic plate again. “It’s this house! I can’t keep the lab sterile. Everything just seeps in here, no matter what I do.” She flung the bacteria into the trash barrel. She picked up a glass beaker and flung it too. Bill grabbed her arms and wrapped her in a hug.

“It’s over Ruth,
there is no cure
. There’s nothing else to try. We can’t go on this way. It’s time to let him go.”

“Not today. Not yet,” she cried.

He pulled back from her for a moment. “The longer we wait, the more dreadful this will all become.”

“Please, I just need a little more time. To get things ready. To do it right.”

Bill shook his head, his bristly beard scraping through the hair on the top of her head. “We’ll just keep putting it off.”

“I can’t Bill. He’s our baby. I can’t.”

Bill was silent and the distant shrieks from Charlie poured into the lab, filled the quiet with misery. At last Bill sighed and gently pushed Ruth away. “It took me a long time to understand how much Charlie is suffering. But you’ve been distracted by your work and the hope you had of curing him. Your tests are done. Take some time. Spend some time with him. You’ll see he isn’t the little boy you remember. Eventually you’ll see that the alternative is kinder. I’ll wait.” He didn’t wait for her to answer, just climbed the stairs to the kitchen.

Chapter 2

In February, Charlie and Bill got sick from something they’d eaten. Before it would have meant a day home from school and work. A few slices of toast, flat gingerale and a marathon of cartoons. Ruth’s mind listed all the things it could be now: cholera, dysentery, killer flu. Her thoughts rolled over and over, jagged stones that banged in her head. She went out, looking for something, anything to help them. Toward evening she panicked, slogging through the snow to each store she could remember, but they were all ransacked and even the generic, over-the-counter drugs were gone. She’d been looking all day, trudging from broken glass door to broken glass door in freezing rain and fresh snow.

Exhausted and wet, she thought of going home. But Bill had begged her to find Charlie a sedative instead of stomach medicine. Enough to stop his misery. Ruth didn’t tell him she’d already set it aside. It was locked in the cabinet in her lab, where Bill never went. Charlie’s screams had died into whimpers and toneless sobbing after two days of near constant vomit. She hadn’t thought any of them could be more exhausted than they already were, but she’d been wrong.

Charlie’s weak cries had fooled her into believing he was the boy she’d known a year ago. He had barely even fought when she cleaned him up, she wasn’t even sure he needed the restraints. He’d lain on the floor where she put him when she was finished, dozing and starting, his dark hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, his cheeks bright with fever. She wanted to curl up next to him, to rake her hand through his hair to get it off his skin, to fan cool breezes onto his face and kiss him. She knew that she couldn’t, but it didn’t stop her aching for it. The pain they were all in almost made her agree to do it, right then. But she’d escaped instead, with a made up mission to find medicine that wouldn’t do much anyway. If she went back now, she might give in. Then there would be no Charlie, not even the mindless version that had replaced her funny, handsome little boy. Ruth couldn’t go much farther without risking getting lost in the blizzard, though, and she would freeze if she didn’t get back to the house soon. A bookstore was all that was left, but she went in anyway, to delay going home for a few more minutes.