Page 14

FOURTEEN

KITTEN

Cipher was awake now and asking questions, still contagious though and very weak. Crenshaw couldn’t predict exactly when we’d be able to see him but she said his doctor was feeling optimistic about his recovery.

“So, he’s going to be okay?” I asked, looking for a definitive answer, but she only repeated what she’d told me before.

“His prognosis at present is good.”

In the meantime, Macon was anxious to get back to our compound, to Artemis and the rest of our family. We didn’t want them worrying about us, and there was no easy way to send a message from base–even Channel 4 was too far out of range. The Humvee was impounded until further notice, so it was decided that Crenshaw and her squad would escort Macon home. Macon told me he’d said as little as possible during his interrogation with Crenshaw and claimed to be ignorant to everything that had happened. And I told him it didn’t matter because I’d confessed almost immediately. I was never any good at lying, something Cipher had always known about me. Cipher would be disappointed, but he’d have to be alive to lecture me about it, and I’d welcome that in a heartbeat.

On the day of his departure, Macon gave me a hearty hug and told me to hang in there. “If I don’t see you back at the compound in a couple weeks, we’ll come looking for you,” he promised.

“Thank you for everything. I couldn’t have gotten through this without you.”

“Stay strong, short stack, and keep up with the lifting. Don’t let my good work go to waste.”

I waved him goodbye and watched the two military Jeeps pull away in a cloud of dust. Then I turned back toward the sprawling compound that lay before me, thinking of Cipher, praying what Crenshaw had told me was true, and that he was really okay and getting better. Macon and I had developed a routine at StarChem, one I’d have to alter now that he was gone, since I wouldn’t have my spotting partner. Instead of going back to the barracks, I walked around outside. While strolling through the vegetable plots, I decided that if I didn’t have an official job, I could at least make myself useful, so I took to weeding the plants in the garden.

Down there on my hands and knees with the sun overhead, I dug my fingers into the earth, picked aphids off the tomato plants, and culled the seedlings that were growing too close to one another. I told the plants all that had happened in the past week, my fears, my regrets, my hopes for the future. Plants were good listeners.

“Hello.”

I glanced up to find a young woman in UF fatigues, one empty sleeve pinned up neatly.

“I hope you don’t mind. I needed something to do,” I told her.

“Appreciate the help. Even better if you could do some hoeing for me. Hard to hold yard tools with only one hand.”

I stood and brushed the loose dirt from my hands and knees. She handed me the hoe, clearly a woman with a plan, and I followed her to where she wanted me to break up the root system on a plot of land that had gone fallow and was now in need of replanting. With pale skin, brown hair, and freckles, she had a manner of speaking that I’d noticed was common enough in the military–short and to the point, at least at first. Her name was Audrey and she’d been in the service for two years now.

“Do you like it here?” I asked, curious to see what her experience had been.

“It’s okay. Mostly I stay on base, tending the garden and feeding the animals. I could do more if I had two hands.” She looked at me with envy. I didn’t take it personally.

“I have a friend who could make you a prosthesis customized to whatever you want. My friend Artemis has a bow attachment and uses it to hunt,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked, sounding interested.

“But aren’t there doctors here?”

“They don’t specialize in prosthetics. Most of our medical workers are devoted to trying to cure the virus.”

It was understandable and I was grateful for their work, but there were still a lot of survivors who needed help too.

Once we’d finished hoeing, Audrey handed me little paper bags marked with “cucumber,” “squash,” and “melon.” Seeds for planting. My mom had a really good pickling recipe. There was nothing like a crisp, tangy pickle in the summertime. If I were still there in a couple weeks, I could help build a trellis for the cucumbers to climb. Cipher would be good at that too, with his carpentry skills, but he might still be in the lab then. How long would it take for him to recover? I didn’t know much about the virus at all, other than what I’d been told or heard on the radio. As it turned out, Audrey was a good listener, and it wasn’t long before I was telling her of the events that landed me there on the StarChem base.

“Sounds like you’re still pretty mad at your brother,” she said.

I may have gone off a bit about how unreliable Santi was, starting with his behavior throughout our childhood and ending with my most recent disappointment. “Yeah, I am. I’ll have to forgive him eventually. I mean, he is my brother. I’m mostly mad at myself for letting it happen.”

“But did you let it happen? Seems to me like the whole thing was out of your control, out of anyone’s control.”

“That’s what everyone keeps saying.” Cipher had been unlucky. Wrong place, wrong time. Still, I couldn’t help but feel responsible.

God has a plan for everyone, my mom used to tell me, but if that was true, why would He let so many of us get sick with the virus? Rabids weren’t a reflection of His creation, were they? To be Rabid was a miserable, wretched existence. Was it our penance? Did we deserve this plague? It was hard to imagine anyone, especially innocent children, doing anything to deserve such complete devastation.

It was too much to grapple with myself, so I asked Audrey what she thought about it all.

“I stopped believing in God for a while after this happened,” she said and lifted her amputated arm. “But then, I’m still here aren’t I? I’m here when so many others aren’t. And your friend, Cipher, he’s still here too, despite everything. So maybe that’s God’s plan for us. To survive when so many others haven’t.”

“I guess I sound a little ungrateful,” I said, feeling ashamed.

She shrugged. “We all have our moments. It’s hard for me too sometimes, being stuck here on this base day-in, day-out, but I’m safe here and well-fed, and even though I wish I had a husband and children, I think, maybe one day I will have that. If I keep working hard and praying for it.”

“I should pray more,” I told her, not just for myself and my loved ones but for those who suffered daily under the toil of the plague, even the Rabids. They needed our prayers most of all.

“Would you like to pray now? For your friend Cipher?”

I nodded and took her hand in mine. Audrey said the words for us both. “Dear, God, please heal our friend Cipher who is afflicted with Rabbit Fever. We would be eternally grateful for your help here, God, if you would banish the virus from his body and bring him back to my new friend Joshua, healthy and whole, so that he might be a servant of yours, God, here on earth and in your everlasting kingdom.”

“We pray for the Rabids too,” I added, “that they may know peace and love in your grace and an end to their suffering here on earth.”

“Amen,” we both said. I heaved a big, cleansing sigh.

“Feels good to let it go, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it sure does.”

I’d never know if there was a greater purpose to all of this, whether this plague was part of God’s plan or just some random blight on humanity, but I believed I was meant to be here, to meet the Assholes and make them my family, to love Cipher with all of my heart.

I’d survived when so many others hadn’t, and I’d spend whatever time I had left to try and fix this broken world. We all had to do our part.

I developed a new routine in Macon’s absence. I worked with Audrey in the mornings, and in the afternoons I’d sketch the base, adding more details as I uncovered them, starting over on a fresh sheet of paper when mine became too muddled. Sitting in the mess hall long after lunch had ended, I sketched and thought of Cipher, imagining his body replicating healthy cells while the virus withered and died, and I thought about the day when I could give this to him, watch his eyes light up at the sight of a new map.

“That’s a pretty accurate depiction,” Captain Crenshaw said to me over my shoulder. I hadn’t heard her come up behind me, not surprising on account of my disability. Also because I was in the creative zone.

“I do have one question though,” I said as she sat down beside me. “Where are the labs?”

“Ah,” she said and pointed to the main building. “They’re here. Underground. This compound was built in the 1960’s when the threat of nuclear war seemed imminent. StarChem partnered with the federal government to build a fully functioning lab in a bunker under the base in case operations needed to go underground.”

“Were they making nuclear weapons?” I asked.

“No, biological ones.”

It made sense then, why they were set up for biological testing.

“StarChem was one of the first bases we secured after Rabbit Fever hit,” Crenshaw said.

“Were you there?” I asked.

“I was. That’s where I got this.” She pointed to the scar running along her face.

“From a Rabid?” I asked.

“No. One of my soldiers had been bitten but not yet turned. He went on the defense and had to be disarmed. He was a good one. I was sad to lose him.” She grimaced at what was clearly a painful memory, and I nodded in sympathy. We all had tender spots that throbbed from time to time, but sometimes sharing the pain with someone you trusted could ease it too.

“Was Rabbit Fever developed in a lab?” I asked. That was one of the theories, those who didn’t believe that it had come from the bite of an animal or some other natural transmission.

“I couldn’t tell you. Our intelligence is highly compartmentalized. I’m given information that relates directly to my duties and nothing more.” She paused and gestured at the map. “So, what will you do with this drawing once you’re finished?”

“Oh, probably give it to Cipher. He loves maps. Hopefully it’ll make him feel better about being stuck inside here.”

“His freedom is important to him, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, he’s had some bad experiences with the military and government types.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. There are bad apples in every walk of life, I’m afraid.”

“And sometimes institutions are built to oppress others,” I said, repeating something Cipher had once told me, something I’d seen myself.

“Also true,” she said. “Our mission is to train soldiers so that we might survive as a species and put an end to this plague. In our case, we provide for and protect the medical staff and researchers on base, so that we can get closer to finding a cure.”

“At all costs?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

I turned over her words in my mind. “That’s what Brother Larry had been doing too for his chosen ones. He sacrificed me for the good of the community.”

She nodded and didn’t dispute it. “We’re all making sacrifices so that humanity can have a shot at survival, but I can assure you, Joshua, we won’t sell or trade or abuse you, or allow you to die out there without a fight. We protect our own, as much as we’re able.”

I wanted to believe her, as I’d believed others before her, but only time would tell if she was telling the truth. There was only one person I trusted fully. He was somewhere in this building, fighting for his life.

On the morning of day ten, Crenshaw gave me the good news. Cipher was no longer contagious. I could visit him that afternoon. For the rest of the day, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

I spent some extra time getting ready for our visit in the shared bathing facilities. I’d been given a basic kit of toiletries on my second day on base, but it didn’t include a razor, so I borrowed one from one of the soldiers to shave off my peach fuzz. Cipher had been the one to show me how to shave, teasing that I hardly needed to at all, but I’d wanted him to see me as grown, so I’d insisted he teach me. I smiled at the memory as I rinsed my face and patted it dry. There were still dark circles under my eyes on account of not being able to sleep very well at night, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

What if he doesn’t recognize me?

It didn’t matter, as long as he was healthy and well. Whatever else was going on, we’d figure it out together.

I met Crenshaw after lunch in the mess hall and she took me down a series of dimly lit corridors where I knew her office was, until we reached the door that led downstairs to the lab. There we were met by a woman wearing medical scrubs who introduced herself as Dr. Aparna Godara. Middle-aged and of Indian descent, she had shiny black hair threaded with gray, pulled back in a low ponytail. She wore thick eyeglasses and conservative heels–church shoes, my mother would have called them–and like Crenshaw, she was careful with her words.

Dr. Godara unlocked the door to the medical wing with her badge and we followed behind her. My first observation was how different the lighting was down there, so bright I had to squint. The hallways were spotless with a faint chemical smell and the walls were bare–it more resembled a scientific lab than a hospital. All of the equipment I spotted along the way looked very high-tech. They must have had several generators running to make all of this electricity possible.

“How many patients do you have?” I asked Dr. Godara.

“Twenty to thirty at any given time,” she said as she led us down a long hallway with doors on each side. Each door had a small window and a whiteboard with the patient’s name written on it. Most of the “names” were a series of letters and numbers that I figured were meant to identify them. They probably didn’t know the names of the Rabids they brought in, but I hoped they’d used Cipher’s name and not just a number.

“Most of our patients have been infected with the virus for months, even years,” Dr. Godara told us as we slowed our pace. “Some of them expire in the process of administering the initial dose, simply from shock and trauma. We’re reluctant to infect healthy people just to test our treatments, so Cipher’s situation is an ideal one for our research purposes.”

Of course I wanted a cure for Rabbit Fever as much as the next guy, but I didn’t care for the way she made Cipher sound like some kind of test case.

“Does that mean he’s cured?” I asked the doctor.

“We’re careful about using the word “cured.” Cipher is no longer contagious or exhibiting symptoms of Lyssavirus cuniculus, but like most viruses, it’s likely lying dormant in his system. It may come back as another variant, similar to the way chickenpox can resurface as shingles. Unfortunately we don’t have enough data to know what might trigger a reactivation.”

The fact that Cipher might get sick again was not a comforting one, but he was alive and not Rabid, and that was an incredible blessing.

“Will he have to stay here for observation?” I asked as my brother’s words came back to haunt me. Cipher would hate being stuck in a lab.

“That’s to be determined. At a minimum, we would need to check his vitals and draw blood samples from him periodically. He may also need additional treatment. We’re continually making refinements to our pharmaceuticals as we get new data. There’s so much about the virus we still don’t know.”

She sounded excited by it, by the fact that there was a virus ravaging the human population, but maybe that was just the scientist in her. One man’s plague was another man’s Nobel Prize.

I sounded like Cipher.

We stopped in front of a room with “Cipher” written on the whiteboard outside of it. Dr. Godara reached for the door’s metal latch.

“Wait,” I said, suddenly in a panic, remembering the state he’d been in when I last saw him. He hadn’t known who I was or who he was. He’d been so out of it, desperate and wild, not to mention how I felt about my own inability to help him. “Is he… himself?” I asked the doctor.

Dr. Godara smiled in a kind way. “Cipher’s cognitive function doesn’t seem impaired, a miracle really, but there are gaps in his memory. You could probably help him with that more than we can, but you must remember to be patient and not overwhelm him. It’s best if he remembers things on his own, and if he sees you getting upset, then he’ll likely get upset as well. He’s quite emotionally intelligent.”

“Yes, he is,” I agreed.

“You’ll have an hour with him. We’ll be monitoring you the entire time. It’s necessary, I’m afraid, until he’s fully recovered. If at any point you need to leave, just call out and we’ll unlock the doors.”

I nodded, trying to keep track of everything she’d said, but all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart as she reached for the door and opened it.