Looking back, that should have been the moment when I realized how bad things were going to get. Danny always looked so happy when one of his obsessions came to a head. I think it was sort of like popping a mental zit for him. He poked and prodded at the problem until it was ready to blow, and then he squeezed it clean.
He didn’t look happy that time. He looked scared, and small, and a little confused, like he couldn’t understand how the universe could be this cruel.
“So?” I asked. “What is it?”
“It’s airborne.”
I frowned. “So? Everything’s airborne. That’s what makes a virus a virus.”
“Not true. A lot of viruses are transmitted through fluids, or fomites, or other mechanisms. Ebola isn’t airborne. Neither is herpes. Rabies has never been airborne before. That’s how we could keep it under control, even a little bit. It’s endemic in the mammals of North America. We’ve never been in a position to eradicate it. I don’t think we ever can. It must have… it must have mutated somehow. It’s spreading without actual contact.”
“So?”
“So rabies is bad.” He looked at me solemnly. He looked so small, and so young, and so afraid. “You know how in zombie movies, suddenly your friends aren’t your friends anymore? Because they got a disease?”
“Yeah?”
“Rabies is sort of like that. It affects the brain. We don’t know as much as we’d like about what it does in people, because when someone gets exposed we try to treat them as fast as we can, before they can get sick, but in animals, rabies causes paranoia, aggression, a fear of light, an aversion to water… and they can still do everything they could do before they got sick. A dog with rabies can still play fetch and remember how to use the doggie door. A person with rabies could probably still do anything a person without rabies could do.”
“So it’s like a zombie virus only people could still use tools?”
“Um,” said Danny. “Yeah.”
“Cool,” I said, and I had never been more wrong about anything in my life, and I’ll be paying for that word until I die. The whole world will. Danny already did.
My little brother was smart—is smart—but he didn’t know everything, because no one knew everything, not then, maybe not even now.
He didn’t know that the new form of rabies is only airborne when it’s carried by canines: dogs and wolves and coyotes. Something about the mutation that makes it thrive in the lungs goes away when it gets into any other kind of animal. So the bats were sick because bats just get sick sometimes, and then the dogs got sick because rabies vaccinations were expensive and most people thought they were a waste of money, since how often is your dog really going to be at risk? And then, once the dogs were sick, they breathed on all sorts of other animals, raccoons and cats and other dogs and even people.
People couldn’t make each other sick by breathing on them, but they could scratch, and bite, and spit, and that was enough. We thought we understood what rabies looked like. We thought it was all drooling and snarling and immediate, obvious rage. We thought it would stay far away, in Arizona, in someone else’s house, in someone else’s life.
Shows what we knew.
They’re not zombies. They’re not monsters. They’re just people with a disease attacking their brains, a disease that makes them want to hurt the people they used to love. A disease that drives them away from the light and into the shadows, until it starts burning out their synapses. The late stages of the infection include coma, spasms, and eventually death, as everything gives way under the pressure of the viral load.
The last thing I remember from the radio before it went dead was a voice saying that we can wait them out, if we don’t get caught, and don’t get infected, and don’t get breathed on by anything that’s already sick. That voice…
It was a grownup voice, and I guess that’s how it could be so wrong. Grownups get used to things staying the same. They believe in the status quo, and the status quo says that sometimes there’s an outbreak, but it always goes away, and everything always goes back to normal.
It doesn’t say that rats can carry rabies. Rats and squirrels and bats and a million small, furry bodies that move through the world unseen and unencumbered and unaware that everything has changed, is changing, will not change back. We’re not going to have movie nights and taco nights and family nights anymore. We’re going to have empty stores with broken windows and strangers watching us warily, wondering whether we have anything worth stealing.
We’re going to have the end of the world.
The strange girl looks at me patiently, waiting for me to agree with her. And part of me, the part that used to pick fights with my brother for the sake of winning, almost does. Danny wouldn’t want to live like this, it argues. Danny was always so gentle, so kind, and the last time I saw him, he nearly crushed my skull with Mom’s old cast iron pan. This isn’t him. I’d be setting him free. I’d be granting him peace.
The rest of me recognizes this for ableist bullshit. Danny doesn’t want to be at peace. Danny didn’t ask to get sick, but he’s smart, and if he wanted this to be over, it would be. This strain of rabies makes people violent and paranoid. It doesn’t make them incapable of committing suicide. Danny could end this any time he wanted to.
“My brother is in that house,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt him.”
“Why not? He’d hurt you. He wouldn’t even stop to think about it.” The girl scowls at me. “They’re not people anymore. They’re the walking dead.”
“They’re not,” I say. “That would be too easy. They aren’t zombies, they aren’t monsters, they aren’t invaders from space. They’re people who got sick.”
She pushes me, so suddenly that it catches me by surprise. I stagger a few feet back, toward the store with its broken windows and unknown, shadow-snarled dangers.
“They’re people who think killing us is just fine because we’re not sick,” she snaps. “They’re people who take everything and leave us with nothing. It’ll be winter soon. What are we going to do when we’re outside and it’s snowing and we don’t have any roofs over our heads or food in our stomachs or sunlight to keep us safe? We’re all going to die out here. Exposure is something you die of.”
“So find a different house,” I say. “Find a house where the owners are already dead.” Of rabies, or rabid people, or anything. Why you die doesn’t matter. Only that you do.
“Other houses aren’t safe. You can’t know if someone’s there until you check.”
But a house with living people in it—living infected people, who would kill to defend what they’d claimed—was safe, as long as we knew how many people and where they were likely to be. Dad is probably late-stage, and Danny’s just a kid. We could take him. We could take him, and I hate myself for even thinking about it.
He deserves to be comfortable for the last few months of his life. He deserves to have his own bed and his own things and to know that he’s safe.
But I deserve those things too. It’s not my fault he got sick and I didn’t. It’s not my fault the rabies is in him, changing him, making him hate me when he used to love me. The Danny from before wouldn’t want me to be cold and hungry and afraid. I know he wouldn’t.
The stranger touches my arm. Her face is understanding. It’s probably a lie, but I want to be lied to right now. I want someone to tell me that it’s all going to be all right.