Lawrence Rosso is gone now. The house is dark except for one lamp in the living room, where his widow rocks slowly in a creaking recliner, a pen gripped in her veiny fingers, moving across the pages of a diary. She looks up as we enter, and I barely recognize her. That incongruous youthful vitality has drained from her face. She finally looks her age.
I can tell by her squint that we are just blurs at this distance, and I can tell by her scowl who she thinks those blurs are.
“What the fuck do you want?” she snaps. “Doesn’t Balt have anything better to do than bother sick old ladies? Tell him and his bosses to—” She cuts off in a fit of coughing.
“Ella,” Julie says.
Ella goes still. Her fit subsides. Julie steps into the lamplight and crouches down next to the old woman’s chair. She smiles, and her voice quavers as she says, “I’m back, Ella.”
Ella reaches out with trembling fingers. She touches Julie’s cheek, as if testing a mirage. Her eyes roam across Julie’s many cuts and bruises and come to rest on her finger stump.
Julie pulls it away. She tries to maintain her smile, though her eyes are glistening. “It’s been a rough month, hasn’t it?”
Ella grabs her, pulls her into a tight embrace, and they let the tears flow. I keep a respectful distance, but I can’t help joining them in this release. It feels good to cry. It feels curative, like washing out a wound.
“Where did you go?” Ella says, straightening up and wiping her eyes. “What happened to you?”
“It’s a really long story,” Julie says.
“But what are you doing here?” Ella is regaining her composure, and the anger of a few minutes ago comes flooding back. “Why on earth would you come back to this shit hole? Do you have any idea what’s happening?”
“Tell us,” Julie says.
Ella springs out of her chair and paces the room, not quite as infirm as she looked. “Well, where to begin?” she says venomously, and counts off on her fingers, starting with the thumb. “They’ve converted all the gardens and livestock pens into munition factories. No mention of where our food’s going to come from when the warehouse is empty.” She adds the index to the thumb, making a gun. “They’ve sent ‘acquisition teams’ to invade Portland, even though they’re barely holding Post together.” Now the middle finger, and an extra surge of vitriol. “They’ve put ‘Captain Balt’ in charge of Security”—she lowers the other fingers, leaving the middle one stiff—“so that’s been fun.”
Julie shakes her head.
“But Julie…it gets crazier.” Her venom congeals into fear. “They’re doing something with the Dead. They’re changing them, making them docile, and they’re giving them jobs. They have these facilities…”
“We know that part,” Julie says. “We’ve toured a few of those facilities.”
“But do you know it’s not just zombies now? Do you know they’re using anyone they get ahold of, Living or Dead? Turning them into these ‘human resources’?”
Julie and I look at each other sharply.
“They’re making more arrests every week than John and Lawrence did in seven years, but they don’t even use the prisons anymore. Everyone goes straight to—”
“Where?” Julie says sharply. “Where are the facilities?”
Ella’s face crumples as understanding creeps in. “Oh,” she says. “Oh no. Nora?”
“Ella, where are they?”
“They’re in the schools—I mean the Morgue. Or where the Morgue used to be.”
Julie stands up. She grabs Ella’s hand and squeezes. “We have to go.”
Ella looks frightened. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to get Nora out of there and end this bullshit.”
Ella raises her eyebrows. “All of it?”
Julie steps back and links her arm in mine, looks up at me, then down at my briefcase. “As much as we can.”
WE
ADDIS HAS EXPERIENCED most varieties of pain. He has been cold, hungry, bruised, burned, and impaled by a spear of bone. But none of those simple signals ever troubled him as much as the torment of a fever. Physical pain can be isolated and ignored; a fever makes pain your whole reality, a distorted universe of nauseous colors and warped physics. A little taste of insanity.
He feels himself sinking into that universe now, through the floor of the Orientation building and down into some shuddering esophagus. The “school” in New York was just an antechamber. Now he’s inside.
He can’t begin to identify all the things stuck into his body. He can’t find categories in which to place the sounds and images, so they slip past his brain into deeper lakes of consciousness. They reach all the way to us. Black droplets of sickness splash up from the Lower and stain our books. Our pages curl, our words blur, whole pages become illegible.
We have never seen this before. We didn’t know there was a poison that could penetrate so deep. No mere machinery could do this; no amount of chemicals and psychological torture could stain the very roots of consciousness.
What did those old men discover while their bones buzzed in the dirt? What deep well did they tap?
Addis sees other people around him. Many are strangers, but a few he recognizes. Joan and Alex, his friends. Nora, his sister. And a big man who was once a monster and now insists he’s not. All strapped into chairs, stuck full of tubes pumping pink syrup from someplace he can’t see. All shaking, shuddering, eyes wide or squeezed shut. They are sinking faster than Addis. He has wrestled the plague before and managed to pin it down, and though this is a new and more insidious strain, he has a resistance that slows its advance. But the others…
A long moan rises from Alex’s throat.
Joan is crying.
“Addis!” Nora screams through gritted teeth. He looks at her, but her eyes are shut. Sweat pours from her forehead. “Addis!”
Addis is a child, and so his life has been passive. He’s been nourished, taught, and protected, and he’s been neglected, abused, and abandoned. He has been either a beneficiary or a victim of other people’s actions; he has rarely ever acted. So he assumes his sister is calling out to make sure he’s okay, but as her screams continue with increasing panic, it hits him in a horrible, disorienting flash—she isn’t screaming because she wants to help him. She is screaming for his help.
The world is upside-down. Everything is slipping.
On the far end of this shadowy warehouse, a door creaks open. Two men push a girl inside. Addis’s eyes strain toward her, fighting their way past all the video screens and flashing lights. Happiness and despair squeeze into one emotion.
“Where’s my dad?” Sprout shrieks at her captors. “My dad said he’d be right back!”
“Your father’s busy right now,” says a man in a white coat.
“But he said to stay at the home and wait for him!”
The man reaches down and ruffles her hair. “Sometimes grownups don’t know how to say what they really mean. So we have to read their actions.”
Sprout scowls up at him. “He doesn’t want me to be here!”
The man shrugs. “Your father wants you to be safe.” He waves a hand around the facility. “This is where we make people safe.”