Any contact is enough to make me freeze. I count to ten and there’s no pain, no teeth in my shoulder or knife in my side. Slowly, I turn.
The girl behind me must have been pretty, twenty pounds and a bunch of showers ago. Now she’s gaunt and filthy, like everyone else. They don’t like water, but they got to keep all the showers, all the warm, comfortable bathrooms and soft, clean towels.
Nothing about this is fair.
“Wait,” she mouths, and she isn’t hurting me, so I wait, because everyone who isn’t attacking is an ally now: that’s the way you stay alive.
I wait, and all is silence, and I’m about to shake her off and follow my stone into the store when I hear it. It’s a small sound. I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t been standing in silence for so long.
The clap of a palm against a shelf, soft and moist and undeniably human, too high up to belong to a dog, too quick to belong to an unthinking creature.
Something in me deflates. The store isn’t safe. “Thanks,” I mumble, and I both mean it—I’m still alive, still uninfected, still me—and I don’t, because part of me is waiting for the day when I slip. Remember that they have to win only once.
I can’t give up. I can’t surrender. For Danny. For the way he used to laugh in triumph when he unsnarled a particularly tough problem, for the way he was teaching himself how to code, for all the things he was never going to have the chance to do—for the way he tried to warn me, before everything went wrong, when we thought we’d have our entire lives to learn how to safely love each other, allies and adversaries and gladiators in the same ring, competing for the safe harbor of our father’s affection. Because he didn’t have this chance, I have to keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting, until something takes the fight away.
But I’m so tired. I’m so tired, and I’m so lonely, and sometimes I just want it to be over.
“Don’t worry about it,” says the unfamiliar girl. She looks me over, measuring, assessing. We’re going feral, one day at a time, locked out of the civilized world our ancestors spent their lives creating. “You from this neighborhood?”
She’s really a stranger, then, not just another neighbor I never took the time to know. “A couple blocks over,” I say.
“It’s not safe to stay so close to home.”
I rankle at the faint disapproval in her tone. She’s right, of course: we all figured that out fast. Most of my friends have run as far away as they could, seeking sanctuary in the unfamiliar. Unless something changes, I’ll never know whether they made it.
Nothing’s going to change. This is the world now. Danny saw it coming. Danny tried to warn me. Maybe there were other Dannys, older Dannys, Dannys in white coats with letters after their names, and maybe there’s a bunker somewhere filled with scientists and government officials, all of them working around the clock to find a cure or a vaccine or something, some way for them to take the world back. Probably, even. My brother was special, but he wasn’t unique.
I guess it should make me feel better to think that this isn’t the way humanity ends. It doesn’t. It just makes me more tired. What does it matter if there are still humans in a hundred years? Danny won’t be there. My friends won’t be there.
I won’t be there.
“It’s not safe to run, either,” I say. “I don’t know where to find food anywhere else. I don’t know where to find shelter. Where are you from?”
“Hillsdale.”
I blink slowly to muffle my surprise. Hillsdale is an hour’s drive from here. “Do you have a car?”
“No.”
Of course she doesn’t have a car. Some of them have cars. They drive around at night, windows down, plates of bacon in their passenger seats, like anyone who’s stayed alive this long is stupid enough to give it all up for a few strips of fried pig. If it still is pig.
It’s been so long since I’ve seen a truck pull up behind any of the local grocery stores, and I know the shelves aren’t being restocked, and the power’s been out for weeks, so it’s not like anyone still has a freezer full of squirreled-away supplies for a rainy day.
People are supposed to taste a lot like pigs. I bet we’d make pretty good bacon.
“So how did you…?”
“I walked.” She looks at me defiantly. “I didn’t want to stay where they knew me.”
“Sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be here if this is where you’re from. They know you. Unless…” She pauses, gives me a thoughtful look. “Orphan?”
That would be the easiest answer. If there’s no one who can lure you in with a smile or a plate of bacon or the whisper of your name, you might be almost safe staying where you feel like you belong. Most of the people I see clustering in the brightly lit places are orphans. Some are self-made, but that doesn’t change the word, only the way you got there.
I shake my head. “No. My father and brother are still in the house where I… where I used to live. I mean, they were last time I checked. My father was… he was one of the first around here. He’s probably late-stage by now. My brother may be alone.”
Danny always hated to be alone. My heart clenches at the thought.
The stranger looks at me, calculation in her eyes. “No one else is in there with him? Just your brother and your father, who’s probably late-stage?”
“Yeah.”
“So if we kill them, we could take the house?”
She says it so calmly, like it’s the solution to all our problems. I stare at her, silent in my horror, and wonder how we got here. Will it really matter if we stay uninfected?
We’re all going to wind up monsters anyway.
Danny stayed interested in the rabies outbreak in Arizona. It was always so hard to predict what would interest him, and once something did, he tended to grab and hang on as hard as he could, like learning everything there was to know about some new kind of robot or battery or disease would make it something he could control, something he didn’t have to be afraid of. Sometimes he would come to my room, eyes grave behind his glasses, and try to explain it to me.
“Rabies is scary,” he said.
I laughed at him. When I think about it now, it makes me sick. He was my brother—is my brother, no matter what else has changed—and when he tried to tell me something that mattered to him, I laughed. Maybe I deserve everything that’s happened to me. Maybe I’m being punished for laughing.
But he should never have been punished that way.
I’d been laughing at him since we were little kids, since I’d been the first one to figure out that with Mom gone, Dad’s love was all we had, and he didn’t have enough for the both of us. Undaunted, Danny pressed on.
“Rabies is scary, but because it’s only transmitted through fluid contact, it’s never been scary enough to be a real threat. Even when we’ve had bad outbreaks, people could mostly stay safe by staying away from wild animals and seeking medical attention immediately if they thought they might have been exposed. Look at how often people decide not to vaccinate their dogs, even though a dog that gets infected will always have to be put down. It’s stupid. It’s shortsighted and it’s stupid.”
I sighed and pushed myself away from my desk. “What does this have to do with you being in my room on a school night? You didn’t even knock.”
“The bats in Arizona.”
“Uh-huh. You keep bringing them up.”
“There’s this outbreak there—it’s huge. Biggest one we’ve ever seen, and it’s been affecting all sorts of other local animals, even ones whose owners swear that they never came anywhere near a wild animal. Researchers have been trying to figure out how this is happening, and they finally did.” He paused dramatically.