The Cured (33 page)

“Well I was taking care of a lot of sick people. You know, keeping them safe so they wouldn’t run off and freeze or starve or get into fights with each other.”

“That’s mighty kind of you,” said Henry.

“Aw, any man would’ve done the same if he had the chance.”

Henry’s hands shook around the rope of his bundle. Phil shrugged. “Anyway, this little
twist
got it into her head that I was abusing them. She couldn’t understand that without me, they’d have been dead months before. So one night, she gave my men some drugged food and extra alcohol. And then she crept through the camp and let all the sick people out of their– their rooms. She didn’t warn nobody. She locked away some of her little friends in the big building and left my men out in their tents, all fast asleep and drugged. The sick people didn’t know what they was doing. They just did what come natural. By the time my men woke up, it was too late. They had to shoot most of the sick people and some of my men got hurt pretty bad. My woman too, she got killed.”

“What happened to the rest?” Henry asked.

But Phil lifted his chin toward the Farm gate. “Looks like the darkie’s calling you. We’ll talk again later.”

Henry tried to calm down before he reached Amos who was staring at them intently. He took a spot at the seed table without saying anything. Amos didn’t ask him anything, just went back to sorting. It was a good hour before either one spoke.

“We need to get these seed packets out to the workers. It’s time to start planting the early stuff. Next week I’ll take you to the greenhouse,” said Amos, handing him a tray of seed envelopes.

“Any particular order these should go in?”

“One tray is one crop and should do one square of the field. Light and water’s pretty even, so doesn’t matter which plot gets which crop. Except these,” said Amos, pushing a few trays to one side, “those are corn and wheat. They go in back, too tall for everything else.”

“Have you been doing this a long time? Farming I mean?”

“Since before the Plague. Not always here though. Been all over the world building irrigation ditches, finding high yield plants, fighting vermin.” Amos grinned.

“Think you can teach me some? Not everything, I know I can’t learn it all, but say, enough to start my own garden?”

Amos squinted at him. He seemed about to ask something, but then he waved Henry away. “Go start trucking those seeds out and we’ll talk about it later. You can buy me a beer.”

Henry jogged out into the sunny, sweet smelling fields. He tried not to look over at Phil, tried to forget the dark, frozen past and look forward to the quiet, hay filled barn and the unfurling leaves of a wide garden near a still pond at the farmhouse he had woken in.

Henry tried to corner Phil again, but they were never left completely alone. He didn’t dare to ask anything else around other people, so Henry just shrugged and assumed Phil would be late again the next morning anyway. Most of the workers bolted at the last bell, but Stephanie, Amos and Henry stayed until dusk covering the planted plots with thin, tattered tarps.

“Going to have to patch these again,” scowled Amos.

“What do you patch them with?” asked Henry.

“We used to just sew the holes closed, but when the tears got too big we’d patch them with other old tarps. Past few years I’ve started using rags. Plastic’s kind of hard to come by now. I don’t like the cloth, it rots in the rain, but it gets the job done for one season anyway. Keeps the seeds from freezing in case we planted too early.”

“Is that my first tip?” asked Henry.

Amos stopped fiddling with the tarp and looked intently at him. “When are you planning on planting this garden?”

“Next month. Maybe the month after.”

Amos nodded and looked disappointed. “You won’t need tarp then. You’ll have to worry about frost at the end though.” He studied Henry for another minute. “Do any of you have a clue how to do any of this? Or you just trying to wing it? ‘Cause this isn’t the Mayflower Henry. No one’s going to come bail you out in the spring with a big shipment of food. Or in the middle of winter for that matter.”

“I know.”

“I’ll teach you what I can, but there’s a big difference between hearing and doing. And between gardening as a hobby and farming for survival.”

“I know, and I’m grateful for the help.”

Stephanie walked up, shaking the soil from her jeans. “Why are you two so serious? What are you talking about?”

“Whether this quarantine’s going to slow beer production,” rumbled Amos.

“Oh, that
is
serious,” said Stephanie, “We better get to Margie’s before they run out.”

“Race you,” said Amos, locking the iron gate behind them.

Thirty-eight

Rickey was already at Margie’s by the time Henry arrived. He was sitting with the soldier that they had met during orientation. The soldier looked exhausted but greeted Henry warmly and shook hands with Stephanie and Amos.

“You look like death warmed over,” said Amos.

“I’ve been assigned to the dental clinic, I just rotated off.”

“The one they made into a quarantine station?”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe how many people thought they had it. Hell, tired as I am, you could almost convince me that I was infected too, if I didn’t know better.”

“Was anyone really infected?” asked Henry.

“Nah, I doubt it. We ruled out most of them anyway, just because they didn’t have any contact at all with anyone involved. There are a few family members, friends of people in the courtroom, that sort of thing, but the doctors tell us they’ve pretty much narrowed down the window of infection to that one court session. Still, we’re holding on to a few of them, but they don’t have any symptoms that they didn’t cook up in their own heads.”

“It’s just people getting scared. Can’t blame anyone for that,” said Amos.

The soldier nodded. “The symptoms are so vague, too. Someone doesn’t sleep enough, has kind of a clumsy day or is a little cranky and they suddenly panic. A person could go crazy just from a few suggestive incidents.”

The words echoed like tossed rocks in Henry’s head. He didn’t say anything, but he saw the glance that Rickey shot him and knew he wasn’t the only one who would remember what the soldier had said. Amos finally spoke up when the others got up to play a round of pool and the bartender turned the television up a level.

“I take it the Governor isn’t going to pursue the matter of the gravedigger?”

Henry shook his head.

“So you’re leaving. How many people are you going to take with you?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. I assume just us four plus Molly. I don’t think Pam will want to go, her family is here. But we’ll take anyone that wants to go and is willing to work I guess.”

“You know there’s been talk of starting a colony somewhere outside the City, right?”

“Yeah I heard. I don’t know if we’ll have any way to defend that many people. I wasn’t planning on starting another town, just leaving this one. We don’t even have a doctor. Or a farmer. Unless this is you angling for an invite. In which case, pack your bags.”

“No one has ever left the City before, Henry.”

“What? That can’t be true.”

“I don’t mean no one has ever gone beyond the Barrier. Plenty of people have. No one’s ever made a permanent break with this place though. There are people from Cure Camps that took a while to come in, but once a person is here, they tend to stay.”

“I saw people at the gate the night they announced the new Plague risk.”

“Yeah, those people would have been turned back or gone to stay outside for a few weeks. They won’t stay gone forever, I guarantee that they all left most of their possessions here. And this isn’t the kind of world where you leave what you own.”

Henry shrugged. “Okay, so no one has left before. What’s your point? If you are trying to warn me that I’ll regret it, believe me, we’ve discussed it at length. It’s better than living here with
him
.”

Amos shook his head. “I’m not trying to persuade you of anything. No one’s ever left before, but there’s been plenty of talk about it. Especially among the Cured. People are tired of being treated like they caused all of this. I don’t blame them. I’m just saying, if you go about this open and honest like it seems you want to, don’t be surprised if there are more people waiting at the gate to go with you than you expected.”

“Why would anyone decide to come with
us
? If there are people talking, then there are people planning. Which is better than what we’re doing.”

“Planning and doing are two different things.”

“I don’t even know if we’ll make it through one winter, just the five of us. How would we do it with
more
mouths to feed?”

Amos shook his head. “You
won’t
make it, just the five of you. Even if you raise or scrounge enough food, you’ll just get raided by looters. Or one of you will get sick or have an accident. There’s power in numbers. It may be the only real power left in this tired out world. That’s why people have waited for so long to make a break with the City. We aren’t stupid. We know things are rotten here. And getting more rotten by the day. But we’re scared. A group like yours– it might seem small to you, but it’s a start. Like a piece of grit in an oyster. You let enough people get drawn to you, and you’ll have a real shot. Of changing things. Or just starting over.” Amos looked around at the tired, sad faces watching the television screens. “Yeah, that’s what we all need. It’s time to start over. Pull out the leftover weeds from the old world. Burn off the chaff and be left with a blank field.”

“So you’re coming?” asked Henry.

“It’s going to be hard to give up Margie’s beer,” he said leaning back in his chair. He looked over at Henry and his face broke into a slow grin. “It’s going to be rough you know. Not just the farming part. All of it.”

“I know.”

“And you haven’t the slightest clue what you’re doing.”

“I know that too.”

“Yeah, I’m going too.”

Henry laughed. “Why?”

“Because I’m tired of looking at that damn Barrier and wondering if there are more people behind it somewhere. And I’m tired of living under someone else’s rule. I grew up a free man in a free society. My kid– if my daughter were here, I’d want her to be able to choose what she wanted to do when she grew up. I’d want her to be able to decide when she’s ready to have her own kids, if ever. Not assigned to a mate at thirty by some government department just to reproduce her immunity. I hope she’d be upset by the way we treat the Cureds. I hope she would understand that I did terrible things to survive, but that she didn’t have to and that it wasn’t acceptable any more. That people like Phil don’t belong among good men. And that good people don’t do the things we’ve done. Not now, not again. I want to be a
good
man again. Live among good people. So I’m going with you.”

Henry stared into his beer. Amos chuckled. “Don’t start sweating. I’m not hitching my moral star to you or anyone else. I just want the chance to try to be someone different. You can still keep your nefarious plot, whatever it is.”

“Why do you think you aren’t good?”

“Because I’ve seen too much and stopped too little of it. I’ve seen the food distributors short Cured families in skimpy harvests, when we should all be shorted. But Immunes never are. I don’t say anything, because I always figured maybe they should stand up for themselves. But they never had anyone to appeal to. I never hired a Cured to be a food distributer or a supervisor. I just wanted to go with the flow, not cause waves. Figured it would be bad for whoever I hired first that wasn’t Immune anyway. Didn’t want the hassle for me or for them. My wife would have been ashamed of me for that. I’m ashamed of that. Then there’s this place,” he said, glancing around.

“What’s wrong with this place?”

“Nothing. It’s just– safe. It’s neutral ground. I can pretend I’m not friends with any Cureds even if they show up here, because this is the Immune side. I don’t have to defend my actions or claim anything but a passing acquaintance with Cureds here. If I was really friends with people like Stephanie, or you, I’d visit your houses, babysit your kids, meet you at your speakeasies. If I really value you, that’s what I ought to do.”

“Being friends shouldn’t be anyone’s business but ours.”

“It shouldn’t be, but it is. It also shouldn’t be true that Cureds can’t get jobs they are qualified for or homes that aren’t falling to pieces. It shouldn’t be true that the Immune kids get to go to highschool but Cured kids and kids who were born on the Cured side of town can’t find a desk past elementary. Or that Immunes who get caught stealing from a Cured or beating up on them are given far less severe punishments than the other way around. But some places have seen so much bad, there’s just no fixing them. No matter how much you want to. You either let em stay bad or you destroy them trying to change it.” Amos shook his head, “It’s time to start over. Somewhere new. Somewhere with less bad memories. It’s a big empty world out there. There has to be some space to try again.”

The pool game broke up and the others rejoined them. Henry kept thinking of what the soldier had said about the people at the dental clinic. He started to form a plan that night, surprised at how very simple it seemed. He slept in the bed meant for Marnie without waking until the first bell.