And then one pair of gloves got one microscopic abrasion, and all of that was taken from me. We’d had so little time to really be together.
The rage that had been heating inside me ever since Noor told me about Beth’s prognosis boiled over. I grabbed a chunk of broken concrete off the ground and leaped to my feet.
I threw it as hard as I could.
It smashed into the wall of a crumbling gray building, ricocheted off and crunched on a small shrub I had no name for. Something small and gray shot out of the bush and darted into the undergrowth.
“Holy shit—Beth, there are mammals.”
“What?”
“Probably a rat, I think.” I dropped down beside her so I could see the damp slit of her eye. “They never said there were rats.”
“Henry.”
“I’ve got to take samples. It might have left some droppings or even some hair. A DNA sample could tell us so much!” I ran toward the bush, scrambling over the broken slabs of concrete and fallen metal beams that must have once been the subway station.
“Henry!”
I spun around.
I had forgotten the little monitor Beth had inside her cart, the camera that allowed her to see around herself. She had a far better view of the creature standing on the other side of the train station than I did.
I froze.
It stared at me, its eyes dark yellow and enormous, its four legs a pale and dirty beige, its snout as long as a wolf’s in a fairy tale. It stood more than half as tall as I did, its ears shaggy and hairy and twitching.
If it jumped on Beth’s cart, it would certainly kill her.
“Get away!” I shouted. “Go!”
It took a step backward. I grabbed a length of metal off the ground and swung it in front of me. “Go!”
Its top lip pulled back from its teeth. I had never imagined teeth so long, so white, so horrible. Animals were supposed to be cute. We had killed most of them in our ignorance and stupidity and if they existed again, they should be our friends, not this dirty, hairy, terrifying thing snarling at me and my dying girlfriend.
I wouldn’t let it get her.
A scream of rage rose up in my throat and I leaped off the old platform, running even as I touched the ground. I choked up on the metal bar like a baseball bat.
The creature spun around and raced away. I could hear it crashing through the bushes as it ran up the hill.
I dropped the metal bar and doubled over, grabbing my legs. My chest hurt. The air filter on my hazmat suit wasn’t meant for a runner’s oxygen uptake.
“Oh, Jesus, what the hell was that?”
A weird, dry sound made me stand up and turn around. Beth’s monitor flashed a laughing emoji at me.
“What’s so funny?”
“You.” Beth’s laugh turned into a cough, but she stifled it. “That was a coyote.”
“No, it wasn’t. I’ve seen pictures of coyotes. That was… a werewolf or something.” I very studiously turned my attention to the cart’s remote control and turned it on. The cart started rolling.
“An admittedly large coyote, but a coyote.” She paused. “Where are we going?”
“I’m not sure.” I looked around. Beyond the train station, the city streets I’d studied on the maps were cracked and buckled with trees shooting up through the broken places. Squared-off hills surrounded us—hills that a hundred years ago had been office buildings and apartment complexes, now so covered in plants and vines they were indistinguishable from the mountain we’d just walked out of. Shimmering stands of mushrooms sprang from the smaller hummocks that had to have been cars and trucks. “It’s not what I expected.”
A few feet away from us, a square of bright yellow caught my eye. I paused the cart and walked to it. A lamp post still stood, as out of place in this wild territory as I was.
And beside its base, someone had left two neatly folded yellow hazmat suits.
“Look at this!” I held them up for Beth to see. I tried to remember how many people had gone out in Expedition 82. More than we’d found by that airlock, that was sure.
Beth’s camera motor whirred as it focused on me. She was quiet a moment. Her monitor flashed a crooked arrow.
“What is it?”
She was quiet again. Then: “You should sit down.”
“Why?”
“I have something to tell you, but it’s hard.”
I sat down on a slab of concrete. I wondered what it sounded like out here. My suit had a very good pick-up mic, but there had to be so many sounds it was missing. I felt so trapped and small like this.
I thought of Beth inside her plastic bubble for so many years, and wished I hadn’t.
“If a coyote can live out here,” she said, “so can a person.”
I stood up. “Well, maybe. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t live a dramatically shorter, cancerous life.”
“I don’t know if that’s so bad, really.”
For the first time in a long time, I made myself look at her. Really look at her. The shape in the bottom of the cart more closely resembled a large, lumpy loaf of bread than a human being. Tubes and hoses ran out of the flaking grayish surface, circulating fluids of several different colors and textures. The only skin still showing was the small lasered cut-out beside her right eye, and that sweet pink tip of her nose.
I did not let myself look away. I had looked away for too long.
“You’re bleeding.” A thin liquid—it was a stretch to call it blood—puddled around her shoulder area.
“It started when they hoisted me out of the bed. Noor warned me it was going to get worse.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you didn’t know.” She paused. “You didn’t know they were sending me up here to die.”
“What?”
“Remember all those health meetings your mom’s been going to? It’s because there are a lot of sick people in the city.”
“What are you talking about?” I remembered the family checking in at the security desk. I’d never run into anyone else coming to visit the quarantine facility before, but I saw four other families while Joel and I were working on Beth’s cart.
“Why do you think Noor had to cover that other nurse’s shift? The nurse was sick, Henry. They needed a quarantine room to put her in. A room I didn’t really need anymore.”
We were both silent for a moment, and then she made a wet sound in the back of her throat.
I let my head smack against the plastic sheeting. “No.”
“I thought you’d be okay, but when I saw those bodies in the airlock, I knew they were never going to let you back in again.”
My head shot up. “Why not? My suit is fine. I’ll just go through decontamination and everything will be okay.”
“I’m sure that’s what Expedition 82 thought, too.”
“Yeah, but their suits were wrecked, you saw them.” I was pacing now, shaking my head.
“What about the ones you found out here? They looked just fine, didn’t they?”
“We don’t know that,” I spat. “Think about your gloves. They looked fine, too.”
“Exactly. Think about my gloves. You’re way too dangerous now.”
I sat down, just like she’d asked me to do in the first place. “No.”
“I have a couple of hours left and then I’ll suffocate. I want you to be far away before that happens. You can see if anybody from Expedition 82 is still alive out here.”
“No.” I shook my head hard. “No!”
The monitor showed a cherry red mushroom with white spots, straight out of one of the video games we’d played as kids. “I can feel changes starting inside my body. I think it’s the UV light. I don’t know if the fungus is advanced enough to make spores, but I know I don’t want you to get this.”