It had my Rachel first, devouring her in the relative comfort of a sealed hospital room. She died surrounded by men and women who had done everything in their power to save her. They’d failed, and she hadn’t been the last—far from it. Before the newspapers stopped printing and the newscasters went off the air, hundreds of people had joined her, and their conditions had been much less palatial. There had been quarantines, lockdowns, even firing squads posted around so-called “clean zones,” and it hadn’t done a damn bit of good. You can’t quarantine a spore. You can’t prevent transmission of something that thrives on organic matter, sleeps unseen before it sprouts, and can travel through the open air.
All you can do is stay dry, keep the lights turned on, and pray that the wind will pass you by.
Our current safe haven was parked at the bottom of the hilclass="underline" a mid-sized U-Haul truck with a generator in the back and a full tank of gas. I unlocked the back while Nikki checked the cab to be sure that no one had tried to interfere with the truck while we were away. I hated letting her out of my sight for even the few seconds that this required, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Keeping ourselves alive was too much work for just one person, and Nikki needed to be involved with her own survival. It was the only thing that kept her moving. That kept either one of us moving, really. If we stopped, even for a second, we would both die.
“Clear,” she said, trotting back over to where I waited. I nodded, undid the padlock, and lifted the back gate of the truck.
The inside looked like something out of a paranoid fantasy. Tin foil lined the walls and floor, covered with a layer of Saran Wrap, so that everything was slick and gleaming in the overhead light, which came on as soon as the gate was lifted. The bulb was UV, and Nikki and I waited outside for a full count of ten before stepping inside and pulling the gate closed again behind us. Every moment in the open was a risk, but so was entering the truck before it had been decontaminated, however poorly. We couldn’t leave the lights on when we were gone—not without running out of fuel and possibly burning out our precious, hard-to-replace bulbs—and so we had to take the next best option. Everything was a risk these days. It was all a matter of knowing which risks were important enough to be worth taking.
“Pool,” I said. Nikki nodded, and ran across the truck to awkwardly peel a plastic kiddy wading pool off the stack leaning against the far wall. We’d pilfered them from the downtown Target, before it became so thoroughly riddled with mold that even setting foot in the parking lot would have been a death sentence. Each one had been washed down twice in bleach and then wrapped in plastic, and we still disposed of them after we used them. Anything else would have been taking unnecessary risks. I was all about avoiding unnecessary risks. Especially now.
We dumped our bags of pilfered goodies out into the little pool, stirring them with glass rods from the modern art studio that had been across the street from our house. Mold couldn’t grow on glass. It was one of the only truly safe surfaces we had, and even it had to be constantly cleaned and sterilized to keep particulate matter from building up that the mold could grow on. After spending my life running from the specter of my own unending need to clean, I was stranded in a world where cleaning and compulsion were the only things that stood a chance of keeping me, and Nikki, alive.
We flipped each candy bar, each pack of chips and tiny packet of pills three times before we were content to accept that it was devoid of visible mold. Then I picked up each one in its turn with a pair of tongs and dunked them in a bucket full of rubbing alcohol. Again, not perfect, but every precaution took us a millimeter closer to safety. Maybe if we took enough of them, we’d live.
“Mom,” urged Nikki.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I said, and dunked another bag of chips. “If you’re antsy, change your suit.”
Nikki shot me a venomous look. Then she turned, whipping her head in a way that would have snapped her ponytail at me, back before we’d both cropped our hair short, and stalked to the relative privacy of the chemical shower.
I was endlessly fascinated by the way she could change from terrified obedience to petulant rebellion in the blink of an eye. As soon as she felt safe, she withdrew into the persona she’d been constructing for herself ever since high school started: too cool for the situation, and far too cool for me. I didn’t really mind anymore. It gave her something to focus on that wasn’t our situation, and I was the mother of a teenager. I could handle a little scorn.
I pulled the last bag of chips out of the rubbing alcohol and added it to the pile of safe supplies. “Dinner’s ready,” I called. We would eat our fill, and then load the empties into the wading pool and dispose of the whole mess by the side of the road. It was an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, and it was the best thing we had.
Nikki emerged from the shower, wearing a fresh set of surgical scrubs and carrying her shucked-off “moon suit” in a plastic garbage bag. She dropped the bag into the wading pool as she walked past me to the food, where she then sat, cross-legged, and began ripping into our haul.
I thought about telling her to take it easy, and decided that for once, we had enough: she could eat her fill, and maybe we could both go to sleep without feeling our stomachs knotting themselves against our spines. I watched her for a moment—my Nikki, my precious little girl—and then I walked to the chemical shower to begin stripping off my own layer of plastic film and tape. It was time to start cleaning up our mess. Only when that was done would I be able to celebrate surviving another day in an unsurvivable world.
Nikki was the reason I kept going. There was nothing left to fight for.
After a dinner of Doritos and beef jerky and a single-serving tube of honey roasted peanuts—sweet and salty at the same time, like tasting the past—we had disposed of the trash and gone to sleep on our opposite sides of the truck. We had no blankets or bedding. They would have been too tempting a growth medium for the mold that shaped our every waking moment. But we had pads of folded plastic, and exhaustion was a cruel mistress, making sleep easier than it had any right to be.
While I slept, I dreamt of oranges, of walking under the Florida sun with Rachel’s hand in mine and the citrus groves growing all around us, untouched by blight or decay.
Something in the air woke me, something connected to the faint but undeniable scent of oranges. I opened my eyes, blinking rapidly as I tried to adjust myself to the glare from the single UV bulb still burning overhead. Then I breathed in.
The dry, dusty smell of mold was like a slap to the face. I sat bolt upright, barely feeling the muscles in my stomach complain, and looked frantically around. Nikki was still asleep, her face turned toward the wall, her short-cropped golden hair uncovered to let the UV do its work.
There was an empty bottle on the floor next to her shoulder. The cap was off, and the smell of oranges had spread to fill the truck. If there had been any juice left when she was done with her illicit treat, I couldn’t see it. Gray mold had filled the bottle, wiping any trace of color away.
“Nikki?” My voice was a strangled squeak, too small to be heard at any distance. I took a deep breath, horribly aware of the spores that I was pulling into my lungs. The mold-smell made my throat clench, bile rising in a vain, wasteful attempt to wash it away. “Honey? Can you hear me?”