We go in the quarantine houses with gloves on and long shirts. We go in pairs or threes. We go with guns loaded with precious ammunition. One person feeds them. The other person watches, hand on their gun.
No one has cracked. Yet.
20
I am there when Artemis dies. She didn’t last long. She gave up fast. The fever hit her so hard, she couldn’t stand up to it. Her face was slick with sweat. I tried to help her as best I could, but after a while, she just wanted water. And when I gave it to her, she twisted in her bed like it hurt. She coughed up dark, almost black, blood. Worms wriggled from her mouth. I wiped them away, trying to force down my revulsion.
When she dies, it’s sudden. One moment she’s with me, breathing hard, a low rattling sound. Then she stiffens. Her legs wave back and forth as if she’s trying to swim through dark waters. She makes a strangled sound. Her jaw clenches. She bites twice at the air, her teetch clacking loudly together.
And then she relaxes. By the time she looks human again, she’s dead.
She looks peaceful. I feel glad. Her fever was so high and she was so weak, I feared her mind would crack. I was so afraid I would have to kill her. I feel ashamed for feeling glad, and then that too vanishes. I don’t feel anything looking down at her. I thought I would feel something, but I’m only tired.
21
Matt dies a few hours after Artemis. He doesn’t go as peacefully. He cries out. He kicks. He thrashes in his bed. He shouts out names we’ve never heard.
But eventually he dies without cracking.
We are able to burn him on the same pyre as Artemis. I watch my best friend burn with a man who was practically a stranger. I don’t feel anything. I don’t cry.
Maybe there’s something very wrong with me.
22
Peter dies before the pyre cools. Patrick too. His wife, Fiona, is right beside him. She’s in the thralls of the fever and clings to his body and we can’t separate them. We decide to let Fiona have him. Mostly we’re afraid of Fiona scratching us. She just holds to Peter in fevered desperation. We expect her to die in a few hours. We’re watching her closely.
Somehow Beth is still alive.
But now we have to keep someone around all the time.
Our guns are loaded and ready.
23
Wesley is the first one to crack.
One minute he is laying there and the next he’s standing on the bed. His eyes are dark with blood and worms wriggle at the corner of his eyes. He leaps toward us, but Eric is ready.
Eric shoots him three times. The third time strikes him flat on the head as Wesley hurtles toward us. He lands at our feet. Pale worms slither from his head and wave in the air, searching for something to cling onto.
I look up at Eric and see something I haven’t seen in him for years.
Holding the smoking gun, he looks sure and solid.
He almost looks comfortable.
24
Beth dies while I’m sleeping.
When they move her out of the bed, they find worms under the blankets. More pour from her ear when they lifted her, pearly white slithering masses. There wasn’t much left of her, they tell me.
The worms ate her hollow.
25
When Fiona dies, Patrick is mostly a carcass of worms. The smell is like pure death, distilled, horrible. We can’t wrap them both up in blankets. Eric vomits dragging them out to the pyre. I gag, but I haven’t eaten enough in the last couple days, so there’s nothing to come up. We struggle with Franky to get the couple on the pyre.
In death, Fiona still clings to Peter. Her arms clutch at his chest, her leg wrapped around his waist.
In life, they were always fighting about something. When you spoke with them, they complained about each other. They always said how miserable they made each other. Everyone said they should just give up on each other, live separately. After a while, they were a joke to us, like the worst couple you could imagine.
Only now, as I watch them burn, Fiona embracing Peter even in death, that I realize they loved each other profoundly.
Still I can’t cry.
I want to cry. I do.
But there’s nothing there.
26
As soon as we burn one person, it seems that another person takes their place. The days seem neverending. There are more fires, more bodies, more fevers. When I get home, I can’t stop washing. I heat up bucket after bucket of water. I fill the old porcelain tub that Eric dragged into the house a few years ago. I fill it with water that has been boiling for hours. I climb in when it’s still scathing hot and steaming. It burns me, but I don’t care. I scrub and rinse and scrub again. When I finally get out, my skin is sore and hot and steaming.
I can’t stop imagining the worms. If I lay still, I think I can feel them inside me. When I close my eyes, I see them, palely writhing, twisting up to my eyes and ears and brain.
In my dreams, I am being pushed toward a black void. I step on worms. The void is inescapable. It’s in whatever direction I run. Coming from the void is the sound of a song from long ago, the sound of my mother’s voice, but I’m terrified. Just before I wake, I fall toward the distant singing.
27
A week after Crypt’s death, we have burned almost half of the people I used to call my friends, my neighbors, my family. Peter is gone. Wesley. Only Pest is left of the people I used to call the goon squad. The ashes of my best friend is already nourishing the cemetery’s garden. Beth is gone. Patrick. Diane and Amber are both dead. So many others.
And two have entered a different state. They have come out of the fever, but they are not themselves any longer. They just stand all day and do nothing. Rhonda and Sam. They are both a lot older than me. I knew them in the way that everyone here knows each other, but they weren’t close to me. I always thought that the Homestead was so small that we all knew each other way better than we should, but I know differently now. Even in such a small group, we tend to form smaller and smaller groups. The Worm has exposed all the fine cracks that separate us. And I see now, as they all die, how little I really knew any of them.
Rhonda lived in the farmhouse and worked with Crystal in the kitchen. She was quiet, but good-humored, and when I was younger, she always let me in the back door and gave me an oatmeal cookie. She was small and plump and she liked to wear bright colors. Her face was always covered in red blotches and some of us used to call her Patches behind her back. All she did here was make sure we had food to eat. She got up every morning to cook for us, to preserve what she could, to make sure nothing went to waste. I cannot remember a single thing more about her than this.
Sam Jackman was one of the few people here that is (or was) truly lazy. He didn’t do anything. He was always complaining about his back or his constant headaches, but he was always first to sit down at the Lodge for meal time. He was always first with his opinions too, and liked to give them sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed, looking over at us from this position like we were fortunate to listen to his wisdom. He was also lecherous and handy and all of us girls knew to keep away from him. Most of us ignored him. Despite all the evidence, Sam seemed to be convinced he was the greatest thing ever to happen to the Homestead.