The Cured (15 page)

“We aren’t the last ones. There are other people out there. We’ll find them.”

Molly shook her head. “We don’t deserve to. Rickey was right. Nobody’s going to want to live with murderers and cannibals. Everyone would be better off if we were dead.”

“Rickey’s an idiot,” said Henry, yanking a little too hard on the bandage, “Molly, that Cure cost a lot of time and resources. Maybe, in the beginning, they made it to save themselves, to stop sick people, like us, from attacking them anymore. But that was a long time ago. It would be easier to shoot us now. In fact, the people who did cure us had a gun. They shot the guy that bit them. But they didn’t shoot us. They could have left us to starve or freeze while we were sleeping. Instead they brought us in near this warm fire and left us a good supply of food. They even promised to come back if they could. Does that sound like someone who would rather we died?”

“No,” she said quietly.

“I can’t tell you why we woke up and so many others died. I can’t tell you why you wound up in Phil’s camp. But we
are
here, whatever things we’ve done in the past. Maybe there are only a few of us left. Maybe the world finally ripped itself apart with this disease. If that’s true, then we better stop thinking of ourselves as the last people. We better start thinking of ourselves as the first people in a new, better world. Cause nothing’s going to change otherwise. You understand, Molly?”

She nodded and swiped her face clean with one arm. “Good,” he said, turning back to finish bandaging her hand. She was silent for a while, watching the flames. She leaned her head back on the couch. “I’ll tell you what I never want to try again,” she said.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Beef jerky. I never even want to see the stuff again.”

Henry grimaced. “I can agree on that one. Even thinking about the texture makes me queasy.” He stood up. “Okay, I think that will do for now. Try not to knock it around and we’ll check it in the morning to see if we need to clean it again.”

“Promise you won’t tell?” she asked.

“I promise,” said Henry.

Nineteen

Henry worried how they would divide the bicycles and gear. He really knew nothing about the people he was traveling with. He knew they had been chained to posts for the past several years, feral, sick, starving. Even if he’d known them before they’d become infected, the experiences of the last decade were enough to change anyone. Henry was startled to realize that he didn’t even really know himself any more. He was chasing someone else’s daughter because of a promise he’d made when he was a different man. He wondered if he’d ever become that person again. He thought again about the supplies. He was too weak to defend himself if any of the others tried to force something. He looked around at the exhausted, emaciated party. They were too weak as well. It made Henry feel strangely more comfortable to know this.

In the end, it wasn’t the supplies or the bikes they fought over anyway. Everyone seemed to sense that sticking together was better, and everyone agreed that they had to leave the farmhouse and at least find more food. They sat on the front lawn eating their powdered milk and oat mush in the morning sun, arguing about where they should go.

“I don’t really think we have a choice. None of us are cut out for this,” said Molly,scratching at the bandage on her maimed hand, “I mean, it’d be nice if one of us was one of those die-hard living off the land types, but none of us are. We don’t even have a doctor if things go wrong or even a way to get food except by scrounging and thieving. Am I wrong?”

Henry eyed the group, but they were silent, no one wanting to admit just how helpless they were without the cushioning of modern society in their daily lives. Rickey fumbled with another stale cigarette.

“Why are you all hesitant to go to the City? The note says we can find help there, maybe find our families. Why are we even arguing about it?” said Pam, already moving to pack the last bits onto the toboggan.

Vincent glanced at Rickey, but it was Melissa that spoke up first. “Pam, we don’t know what we are going to find in the City. All we know is what the note said. We don’t know how bad things are other places, maybe there are other cities, better places. Or maybe this city is really just a group of scavengers living on the edge of starvation, constantly battling people like Phil’s band.”

Rickey snorted and shook his head. “You guys don’t get it,” he mumbled around the cigarette, “You think people are still going to treat each other the way they did before, like Phil was just a bad egg. You all thought his band was awful, the way they treated us, the way they treated people who happened into their path. Well, I got news for you, folks. Phil was piddling. He was a simple thug with a couple of buddies. This city is organized. They have food. They have medicine. They have a fucking military force big enough to not only protect all that, but to go out and ‘cure’ mobs of infected people. The City could make life under Phil’s lazy rule look like paradise. This isn’t the freaking soccer mom convention we’re talking about Pam. No one is going to hand us the stuff we need.” He flicked his ash into his empty cup in disgust.

“But they cured us, Rickey. Why didn’t they just shoot us if they didn’t want us?” asked Vincent. He leaned on a bike next to Henry and watched Rickey intently.

Rickey shrugged. “Maybe they needed slave labor. Melissa said there had to be hordes of us to wipe out the deer, maybe there just aren’t many regular people left. Someone’s got to make the place run. And if they make it look attractive enough, they don’t have to round us up, we just walk into it willingly. Don’t forget, these people left us for dead for years. Or they shot at us themselves. If you think you’re just going to waltz into this town and be greeted with open arms, you’re crazier than I gave you credit for. Molly just laid it out clear as day- none of us have any skills in this world. The fact that we’ve been infected is obvious to anyone with eyes, and as far as we know, we have no friends left alive. We have no value to these people. And I think you’ll find Vincent, Christian charity seems to dry up where it’s most needed in hard times like these.”

“What’s your big plan then?” asked Melissa, crossing her arms.

Rickey shrugged. “Who said I had a plan? I just think this one is stupid. Why don’t we take our time, look around first. This place isn’t so bad. It’s not leaking, it’s got a fireplace. Even we can probably figure out where the well is. We can forage for food until spring and then see if we can scavenge some vegetable plants from neighboring farms. We might even find a cow or two we haven’t eaten yet.”

“And when someone like Phil comes along, and decides he wants it for his own?” asked Henry.

“Look Henry, I know you have it in your head to get a posse together from the City and go after Phil’s band, but I’m telling you, it’s not going to happen. And I sure as hell am not going to get dragged into an ass kicking just because you have a hard-on for some little girl–”

Henry shot up, and Vincent put a hand on his shoulder to keep him from leaping at Rickey, who just smiled and sucked on his cigarette.

“We obviously all have different ideas of where we want to go and what we plan to do next,” Melissa said quickly, to forestall a fight, “and there’s certainly no law that says we have to stick together. But I think it’s better if we do, at least for now. I’m going toward the City, but not directly. There’s a strip of hotels a few miles to the east in what used to be the suburbs. The stores and restaurants will probably be all cleaned out, but maybe no one thought of the hotels. We can hit the houses around here too, this one hasn’t been looted yet, maybe the ones around us have food and supplies. That’s where I’m going. You can come with me, or you can keep on arguing. It’s up to you.” She held the handlebars of her rusty bike and steered toward the grassy lane that used to be the road. Pam and Molly followed her.

“Shit,” said Rickey grabbing the last bike, “They might be the last broads in the world. I can’t let ‘em leave without me.” He wheeled after them. Henry grabbed the toboggan’s rope and slung it over his shoulder and began pulling it over the dead grass.

“I understand why you need to go back for the girl,” said Vincent, “and I’ll go with you when you do.”

Henry stopped and looked back at him. “Why?” he asked.

“I was the one that killed her mother,” said the priest. Henry shook his head and began pulling the sled again.

“I appreciate the sentiment, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he called back over his shoulder, “I don’t intend on leaving a single one of those monsters alive. And this time, Father, it will definitely be sinning because this time, I’ll mean it.”

Twenty

The thin rope bit into Henry’s shoulder every time the toboggan bounced over the uneven ground. Vincent fell back from the others to take a turn. Henry handed him the rope. “You killed Elizabeth?”

“I didn’t have a choice Henry.”

“I know. She came to tell me there had been a cure found. A long, long time ago. She said she was going to get it for me. For all of us, so we’d get rid of Phil. She never came back. I didn’t know what happened to her.”

Vincent pulled slowly on the sled. “She came back,” he said quietly. “I was in the pen at the front of the camp. She came up the hill and she had a gun. She started shooting the other people in the pen with me. I think she must have had the Cure. She must have been shooting them with darts, like the people at the farmhouse. She had to keep reloading and Phil’s guys caught her before she could get to me. I was the only one left, the others just slumped down on their posts and fell asleep. Phil came up to her and started yelling. I was too far away to hear though. He came up to the palings and looked at the other people in the pen. I heard him say she’d ruined perfectly good ‘dogs,’ that he’d have to kill them now, because how was he supposed to let them live? They’d know what he’d done to them.” Vincent paused to wipe his eye.

“He
knew
? He
knew
it was a cure and he knew how it would work. And he still let us stay sick. How many years were we sick when we could have been better? How many more people did we kill?”

“He didn’t just let us stay sick. He killed the people she cured. Shot em. Left them in the pen. Then he pushed her in and shut the door again. He hooked my leash and pulled me back to the palings. Then he unclipped the leash.” Vincent stopped and sobbed, his face in his hands, the toboggan rope forgotten, hanging loose on his arm. “But she ran, and the people he’d just shot, they didn’t. So I didn’t get her first. I wish I had. I wish I’d killed her first before I ate those others. It took days, because I was the only one left. Phil’s guys did come and get most of the dead ones after the first few days, but it still took me a long time to bother with her. The first day, she cried and cried. The girl came out and screamed and cried and stuck her little fingers through the fence to touch her mom. Phil threatened to throw the little girl into the pen too, so Elizabeth told her to go away, begged her not to come back. And then she just sat in the farthest corner from me and cried. I don’t think she slept. But I did. After I gorged myself, I fell asleep. After the first day, she didn’t cry anymore. She didn’t try to escape. The girl’s father came once to the fence. Elizabeth asked him to kill her, before I did. Asked him to shoot her. He was too scared of Phil to do it. She spat on him and turned her back on him and he went away. Finally, after a few days, she fell asleep. She wasn’t given anything to eat and refused to drink from the same trough as me until the last day or two. She must have been so hungry. But in the end, I was hungrier.”

Henry watched the others disappear into the slumped wreck of a house down the lane. He didn’t want to think about Elizabeth. He didn’t want to think about the terrible pens where they had spent the last eight years, and he didn’t want to think about Marnie screaming for her mother. He squeezed Vincent on the shoulder, feeling awkward and nervous, and then walked toward the rotting house without saying anything at all.

Henry walked around to the backyard so he wouldn’t have to see the others and to look for a shed, a garden, anything that would help them. There was a broken window in the back, so he could hear the others talking behind him. It was pleasant background noise. He knew that he should feel sad for Elizabeth, for Vincent, but it was distant, like an old scar, long healed. He was overwhelmingly relieved that she hadn’t come to find him first and that she hadn’t been thrown to him to eat. An old wood shed sat in one corner of the yard. Henry suppressed a shudder as he started toward it. He ought to have left Phil to die in the first shed, to bleed to death after his “accident.” The shed door was padlocked. Henry tugged on the rusted hasp. It pulled loose after a few yanks but he hesitated before opening the door. Part of him insisted that there was someone infected behind it, kept like him. He opened the door. An old riding mower and a few garden tools were all that lay inside. There was an old red gas can but it smelled like turpentine and Henry didn’t have anything to put it in anyway. He shut the door and turned back to the house. The others had found some old shoes to replace the layers of socks some of them had resorted to, but not much else. They walked on to the next house without really speaking much. Melissa led them over fields and through fence gaps, somehow knowing where they were going without following the crumbling road. It was only a few hours before they’d left the rural farms behind and began seeing small clusters of houses as the neared the suburbs outside the City. They’d found very little in the farms, most of the food was gone, eaten by animals or long rotted away, even the one basement they found lined with jars of preserves had mostly crusted with rust or turned to vinegar inside the glass. The group had turned glum, as even Rickey started to realize how helpless they would be without outside help. Henry had taken the toboggan back from Vincent and lagged behind the others a few paces. They reached the first small cluster of houses, and Molly suggested that they split up, since the afternoon was quickly wearing away. Melissa looked doubtful, but everyone else seemed too weary to care much. The only thing that moved was an old plastic ribbon that flapped from one of the porches, the corpse of some long ago birthday party. Henry had an overwhelming desire to tear it off. There were no birds, no dogs, no car horns. He had been able to push it out of his head before. There had at least been bird song at the farm. He hadn’t expected much more from the other farms, they were isolated, rural. But here– he had a dreadful, passing instant where he feared he had gone deaf. The spring wind still sounded in the hollow places between the houses. When Henry was little, his mother had read him the story of the Pied Piper. It had given him nightmares for years. Standing in the suburban street, Henry realized that the scariest part was not the fate of the children who got swallowed up by the mountain. It was being the little lame boy who had to turn back all alone. And here they were, the leftovers, the gleanings. He understood now, why Molly had been crying.