I dropped the energy sticks off at the nurses’ station—they practically lived on the stuff—and knocked on Beth’s door.
If you squinted at it right, quarantine looked like a hospital, although none of the doors had windows, and bullet-proof glass gated the hallways every thirty feet or so. The poured concrete of the wall and floors glinted behind a polymer sealant no fungus, virus, or mere germ could penetrate. Keeping an underground city healthy took extreme containment measures.
“Come in,” the speaker set in the doorframe said. It gave patients the illusion of power to buzz their visitors in at this last step of the process.
I’d learned early on in the process that Joel had already unlocked the door from the security gate. Only staff and approved visitors were allowed behind the massive slab of concrete that separated Beth from the rest of the city, and only security could open or close the doors. I pushed it open and forced my face into a suitable expression.
“Jesus, Henry. I’m half-blind and even I think that smile makes you look like you had a stroke. Shut the damn door and stop faking it.”
I dropped into the chair on my side of the clear plastic quarantine wall. It was probably the only reasonably comfortable seat in the entire facility. Beth’s great-grandfather had carried it on his back when he’d evacuated from the city above, the chair stuffed full of clothes and diapers. He’d carried it down four miles of tunnels while pushing his twin daughters in their stroller. Years before, his wife had reupholstered the chair in the same brown leather that squeaked beneath my cargo pants. She hadn’t made it to the underground.
It went without saying that the chair was never going to leave this room. Beth’s dads were going broke paying for quarantine, for round-the-clock nursing, for every half-tested drug the docs were trying this week, and on top of watching their daughter—my girlfriend—die in a box, they were going to lose their best chair. Life in the apocalypse was awfully fucking unfair.
“Glad I can stop pretending I’m happy.” I put one of the citrigel fruit squeeze tubes into the transfer box mounted on the plastic barrier and then activated the air seal. “I had a lousy day at work.”
The monitor sitting beside the bed flashed a smiley face. The monitor and the speakers attached to it were Beth’s primary mode of communication since the fungus had grown over the majority of her face. Sensors implanted in her tongue and throat allowed her to subvocalize instructions to the computer. It made virtual faces and an approximation of her voice. I had gotten used to it, I guess.
The next part, though, I could never get used to. I slid my hands into the bleach-moistened gloves built into the q-wall and reached into Beth’s world. I could never feel anything besides the clammy grip of the gloves, but goose bumps never failed to rise on the back of my neck. Such very thin pieces of plastic between me and inevitable death.
They think it was her gloves that had killed Beth. She’d only been a sophomore in college, but she’d been approved to join the advanced students testing materials that Expedition 81 had brought back from topside. She had a theory she was desperate to test about chromosome mutations after exposure to nerve gas. In the lab, she’d followed every protocol. Bleached every last inch of her hazmat suit in the decontamination lock. Nevertheless…
When she woke up with a gray rash on her knuckles, she was the first to guess what was wrong.
On her parents’ request, the university went under review by the city’s top health officials. Everything but the gloves passed with flying colors. One hundred and fifty years is a long time to keep rubber gloves in perfect condition.
It’s a long time to keep a city in perfect condition, too, especially one that wasn’t designed to last more than a few decades. The history types always said the end had come too fast for anyone to really be ready for it: the floods, the storms, the wars over water and air and food. But even as a kid, whispering with Beth on our little sleepovers, I hadn’t believed it. The world didn’t get hot without somebody knowing. If we’d been there—awesome girl scientists that we had decided to be—we would have done something about it.
Not that as adults we were actually saving the world. Beth might have had a chance at it before she got sick, but me? At least I’d gotten a chance to indenture myself to the Oregon Institute of Science and Technology for a specialized degree and the promise of all the underpaid lab time I could ask for.
“Earth to Henry,” Beth cooed, pulling me out of my thoughts. “I am waiting for a treat like a very good girl.”
I had to contort myself to open the air seal on her side and fish out the citrigel. The top snapped open easily, or as easily as my bumbling gloved hands could manage, and I carefully poured its contents into the robotic delivery system attached to her bed. I looked away from the tube as it maneuvered toward the blackened orifice of Beth’s mouth. The nurses used a laser to cut it open every four or five days. Someday the fungus would spread to her gums or her tongue and then there would be no more mouth and no more lasers. At that point, fungalized patients were usually offered the option of lethal injection.
The microphone picked up her gulp and satisfied sigh. Then: “So. No new breakthroughs in the latest starch project?”
I grew starches in a lab. I’d rather be working on a cure for fungal infections, but I was fresh out of school, and frankly, new food strains were the government’s top priority. We couldn’t just import stuff from California anymore. The underground cities down there had gone silent ten years ago. Viruses, probably. Fungus, maybe. We didn’t open the airlocks on the south side just to be safe.
“I managed to make a formerly tasteless goop poisonous, if that’s what you mean by ‘breakthrough.’”
Her laugh sounded something like a dry cough. I tossed the empty citrigel tube down the waste hatch and reached for her pillow. “Need that fluffed?”
“Eh.” She subvocalized something to the computer that didn’t translate to the speakers and music crackled on in the background. Her hands had been the first casualty of the fungus, her fingers fusing into the plated mass that continued to coat her body. “Go ahead and fluff me.”
I activated another mechanism on the bed. “I’ve been fluffing your pillows a long time. Remember that God-awful company pillow my mom would put out whenever you spent the night?”
She made her rasping noise again. “I hope they have something better these days.”
“I don’t know; you were our only guest.” I cocked my head. “What are we listening to today?”
“Nirvana. Late twentieth century band, very focused on gloom and doom.”
“Isn’t their acoustic album supposed to be one of the best in all rock history?”
“I’m still not sure about that. Can any whiny grunge band compete with the vocal stylings of Elvis Presley?”
I rested my forehead against the glass, laughing despite myself. I’d known Beth since we were four years old, and even then she’d been a militant fan of Elvis Presley. She’d downloaded every Elvis compilation in the community database, but it had never been enough. The one decoration in her whole q-room was a framed album her parents had found on the black market.
“You look tired,” she said. “Have you been going to the dance clubs and making out with hot chicks again?”
I made a face. “Ha-hah. No, I was up late at the lab and went straight home to check on my parents.”
Her monitor flashed an angry face. “You can’t be so scared of actually living, Henry. You’re twenty-four years old. You need to get out and grow up and all that shit I’m not going to get to do.”
“Shut up.” I stuck out my tongue at her. “I do plenty of living. It’s just budget living.”