Page 8

EIGHT

KITTEN

There was chaos at the front gate. Macon was firing from the watchtower, Teresa was screaming, my brother was shouting, and Cipher…

“Where is he? Where’s Cipher?” I demanded of my brother, shaking his shoulder to get his attention.

“He’s coming. He’s there.” Santiago pointed down the street to where Cipher was half-running, half-hobbling toward the gate. A bloody Rabid was lying in the street behind him, and more were coming up the road. I took off in a sprint and when I reached him, threw one of his arms over my shoulder, and practically carried him the rest of the way home. As soon as we were through the gate, he shoved me away from him.

“Kitten, don’t touch me. Everyone, stay back.” He held up his casted arm as if to ward us off. His other hand gripped his neck.

“Cipher, what’s wrong?” His panic was starting to get to me too. He was Mr. Calm, Cool, and Collected, but something had him rattled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Macon descending the watchtower ladder with the rifle slung across his back. Perhaps he’d come to finish off the Rabids clustered outside our gate?

“Kitten, I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” Cipher said. He pulled his hand away from his neck. His fingers were covered in fresh, red blood. Had he been wounded?

“Cipher,” I said, my own terror rising. “What is happening right now?”

“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

He grabbed his Glock and put the muzzle of it to his temple.

“Cipher, what the fuck?” I shouted as everyone else went deadly silent.

“I got bit, babe. I’m sorry. I got bit.”

It was all happening so fast. He got bit… by a Rabid? Less than an hour ago, I was kissing him goodbye and telling him not to eat all the strawberries, and now he had a gun pointed to his head. Was he going to…

“Cipher, put down the gun,” I said. I could only handle one thing at a time.

“I just wanted to say goodbye.”

He really meant to do it. He was going to shoot himself in the head, right in front of us all, and leave me behind forever.

“Cipher, put the gun down. We can fix this,” I said.

“No, you can’t fix it, Kitten. Not this time.”

Macon was rounding the circle from behind, slow and steady, on his way toward Cipher. He gave Cipher a troubled look, then turned to me as if prepared to act on my word. But what should we do? I had to keep Cipher talking, try to talk some sense into him.

“Just slow down for a second. We’ll find some other way,” I begged.

“I’m not going to risk hurting you or the others,” Cipher said.

My God, he was a stubborn asshole, always such a goddamn hero.

“Is this what you want my last memory of you to be?” I said, voice cracking. “Of you blowing your brains out in front of me? You want me to have to pick up your brains off the ground and scrub your blood from the pavement? Come on, Cipher, there’s gotta be a better way.”

That at least made him hesitate, long enough for Macon to grab him from behind and lift him off his feet. The Glock wobbled in Cipher’s grip, and Macon knocked it from his hand, then twisted his good arm behind his back. The gun clattered to the ground, and I rushed over to scoop it up.

“Fuck, don’t do this,” Cipher said. He looked utterly defeated, slumped in Macon’s arms, no longer fighting.

“Take the rest of his weapons,” I said to whoever was listening, then turned to Gizmo and Wylie. “Find whatever restraints you can. We’ve got to strap him down.”

“Kitten, you’re making a mistake,” Cipher said with tears in his eyes.

“I don’t care. I’m not giving up on you yet, you stubborn, fucking asshole.”

Cipher had gone silent as we removed his weapons and anything else he could use to hurt himself or others. Gizmo and Wylie retrieved a bunch of leather belts, and we found a way to restrain him to our twin bed, using the wooden legs of the frame to secure him. He could shift around a bit, but he couldn’t undo the straps or get out of the bed. Maybe it was harsh, but I didn’t trust him not to hurt himself.

“You’re just drawing this out,” Cipher said, his face turned away from me so I could examine his neck. I’d donned latex gloves and a face mask on auto-pilot, but I was having a hard time focusing. I needed to keep it together. We needed to come up with a plan.

I ignored him for the moment, not wanting to hear his quitter talk anymore. “Take a deep breath now, this is going to hurt,” I warned, then doused his wound with rubbing alcohol.

“Ahhhh, fuck,” he hissed. Some of the blood was washed away by the alcohol, and I dabbed at the rest with a warm cloth. The bite was bad, still oozing blood in some places. The marks were distinct, the outline of human teeth as clear as day. There was no mistaking, it was the bite of a Rabid. The wound itself looked as if it were already infected with pockets of pus and red inflammation. That was unnaturally fast for infection to set in, another bad sign.

“Well?” he said in my silence.

“It’s not good,” I told him. I may have strapped him down and forced treatment upon him, but I wasn’t going to lie to him too.

“I don’t want to turn into that, Kitten. I don’t want to hurt any of you,” he said with panic in his voice.

“I won’t let that happen.” I tried to stay calm despite the growing terror and dread coursing through my body. “Wylie and Gizmo are going to get a hold of Captain Crenshaw. Channel 4, remember? She told me they’re working on a cure at the lab.”

“You’re living in a fantasy land, Kitten,” he said sadly.

I gritted my teeth, still pissed at him for that stunt he pulled outside. “It’s better than giving up at the first sign of trouble. I can’t believe you thought blowing your brains out was a good idea.”

“I should have done it back in the street as soon as I’d gotten bitten,” he said with remorse.

“No, you shouldn’t have. That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” I was yelling at him now. Fear and panic were making it difficult to concentrate, and his defeatist attitude wasn’t helping. “Maybe you’re immune. You were infected before.”

“And I had my leg cut off before it could spread,” he said.

The unstated was obvious. We couldn’t cut off his head. He huffed and fell silent, squinting his eyes against the light from the window as if it bothered him. That was one of my mother’s first symptoms. Was the virus already taking hold?

My vision blurred with tears as I stared at his wound, helpless and overwhelmed. I tried to clean it. I needed to take care of him. I reached for a tube of expired Neosporin and slathered the ointment over the infected bite with a Q-tip. I’d dose him with antibiotics as well. A few of the deeper cuts could probably use stitches, but I didn’t want to seal it up until it was clean and germ-free. How could I possibly reverse the damage?

“Is he okay?”

I hadn’t heard Santiago’s approach. My brother hovered in the doorway, useless as always. What could he possibly want now?

“No, he’s not okay. He got bit by a Rabid because you left him in the street. Big surprise.” I was pissed–at Cipher, at Santiago, at the dead Rabid who bit my boyfriend. I felt like a cornered dragon, spewing fire in all directions. My brother deserved it though. This was his fault.

“Kitten, we were ambushed,” Cipher said.

“And he left you,” I snapped, then glared at my brother. “You could have gone back and helped him, but you saved your own ass instead, like always.”

“I’m sorry, Joshua. It all happened so fast.”

Fucking excuses.

“Get out,” I said, not in the mood to make him feel better. When he didn’t move, I stood and strode over to him, shoved him out the doorway, then kicked the door shut, slamming it in his face. I hoped he’d get the message.

“Kitten, it wasn’t his fault,” Cipher said again.

“Whatever, I’ll deal with him later. We’re making a plan here.” I stared at Cipher, the plan-maker, but he was unnervingly silent. His plan had been to kill himself, but we’d shut down that plan already, so I supposed it was up to me now. “You’re going to take the medicine I give you, and lie here as still as you can and rest. I’m going to get a hold of Captain Crenshaw and see about some medicine for you. We’re going to fix this, Cipher.”

“Okay but, babe, what if we can’t?”

What if we couldn’t? What if there was no medicine and Cipher turned Rabid? I couldn’t watch him suffer like that, strapped to a bed and out of his mind. We couldn’t risk him endangering the others.

“If it comes to it, I need you to do it,” he said, reading the thoughts behind my eyes. “Just like we talked about, put me out of my misery, okay? Like I did for your mother. Humane. You have to promise me, Kitten.”

I blinked and began to cry. What else could I do? A cure would be a miracle. Most likely, this would end in death. His death.

“I promise, I won’t let you suffer,” I said, hiccuping through my sobs. I collapsed into the chair and cried like a baby. I couldn’t even hold it together for him. Cipher was stoic, gazing at me with sympathy. I wanted to crawl into bed with him, but I couldn’t. I might never be able to hug him again.

“Kitten, please breathe. Inhale, exhale. Just remember… I love you.” His dark eyes steadied me, an ocean of black. My sobs subsided and my breathing calmed as I stared back at him. Even facing down his own death, he was offering me comfort.

“I love you too. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to fix this,” I said.

He nodded encouragingly, going along with it even though I had no idea how to fix this, and we both knew it.

I sat with the other Assholes around the dining room table while the B-holes hovered nearby, listening in. There weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them yet, and they didn’t have voting rights anyway, but our decision would affect them too. All of them, even my brother, were respectfully silent. I’d situated myself so I wouldn’t have to look at Santiago. I needed to avoid him until the urge to punch him in the face had passed.

Teresa was the first among us to speak. “Maybe he won’t catch it,” she said, trying to be optimistic. We all loved Cipher in our own way. For Teresa, he was a protective older brother, always reminding her to brush her teeth and take her vitamins, bringing her back gifts of candy and toys, encouraging her to have the childhood she’d been denied in her former life.

Artemis shot me a questioning look, since I was the closest thing we had to a medical professional. “That’s the best-case scenario,” I said, “but we should make a plan assuming that he’s already infected.” The wound on his neck was unlike anything I’d seen before. Unnatural.

We sat in gloomy silence as they took in that information. I was glad I’d gotten my tears out earlier; we needed to have this discussion without me falling apart.

“We’ve been trying to reach Captain Crenshaw on the radio, but unfortunately, we haven’t heard anything back yet,” Wylie said.

“Keep trying. She said they were working on treatments there, maybe even a cure.”

“Even if they had a cure, it’s not like they’re going to just hand it over,” Santiago said, unhelpful as always.

“Why not?” I asked, turning to glare at him.

“They’re going to have conditions. They’re going to want payment or a trade. And they’re going to want to monitor him to see if it works, run all sorts of tests, study him under a microscope. They’ll make him their lab rat, and I don’t know Cipher all that well, but it seems like he’d hate that.”

As much as I hated to admit it, my brother was right. Cipher would hate being locked up like that, but it’d be better than him being dead… wouldn’t it?

“At what point do we start deciding for him?” Artemis asked.

“Seems like we already have,” Macon said. “Starting the moment I grabbed him.”

We’d broken our own rule by preventing Cipher from doing what he wanted with his body, a violation of his consent, and we’d all gone along with it.

“Someone should be in charge of making decisions for him,” Artemis said. “Officially, I mean. How about you, Kitten?”

“Yeah. I’ll do it. Seems like I already have.”

“So, what do we do now?” Teresa asked, wringing her hands together. Her big blue eyes searched our faces, looking for a leader among us. Cipher was always the one with a plan, the one who rallied us together around one course of action, the best one.

“I’d like to monitor him overnight, see if he improves,” I said. I needed to be near him, especially right now. I already felt the loss with him being upstairs.

“He needs to stay strapped to that bed with round-the-clock supervision,” Artemis said.

“Yes, you’re right,” I agreed.

“No matter what he says, Kitten, you can’t release him,” Artemis warned, then glanced around the table at everyone else. “No one can.”

“I wouldn’t. I know how dangerous that would be to everyone else,” I said.

“What will we do if he turns Rabid?” Macon asked, grim-faced.

I thought about the promise I’d made to Cipher. “If it comes to that. If there is no cure, no treatment, and no other option, I’ll do it. I promised him I would.”

Us vs. them, Cipher had told me. He’d rather be dead than be Rabid. We all knew that.

“I’ll help,” Macon said, giving me a short nod.

“Listen, can you be in charge of the compound while he’s sick?” I asked Artemis. “Make sure everything runs smoothly around here? I think it will make him feel better to know that we’ve got it handled.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that, of course I will. You’re not alone in this, Kitten. We all love him and want what’s best.”

“I know. We’re his family.”

“So, let’s just take this one day at a time,” she said.

I nodded. Hour by hour, minute by minute. There wasn’t much more for us to discuss, and I was anxious to get back to Cipher, so we ended our meeting, and I headed toward the kitchen to fetch some supplies. Santiago stopped me on my way there.

“Joshua, listen to me. We were trapped inside the house. I pulled him out, he set off a grenade, then we both ran like hell. I didn’t know he’d fallen behind.”

The resentment I held toward my brother had been building, and at this moment, feeling the rage of all the times he’d let me down over the years, I wasn’t in the mood to forgive him, and his words felt hollow anyway.

“You always have an excuse, Santiago, some justification for your selfish behavior. You didn’t know he’d fallen behind because you never looked back, because you’re out to save yourself, always.”

“Joshua–”

“I don’t want to hear any more. I need to get back to Cipher now.”

I bounded upstairs to return to my favorite person, terrified of what I might find, resolved to do whatever I must.

“How’d it go?” Cipher asked. He was sitting up in bed, both bound wrists at his sides. His broken arm still had a cast on it, so we’d had to secure him at his elbow as well. He’d cut his good hand on some glass in his fight with the Rabids, so I’d cleaned and bandaged that for him too. I’d brought some broth for him to eat but he’d only sipped a little before asking me to set it aside because he wasn’t hungry. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead, and I dabbed at them with a cloth. Despite the antibiotics and ibuprofen, he was running a fever.

“We made a plan,” I told him. “We’re going to track down Captain Crenshaw, ask about some medicine and go from there.”

“I’m sorry, Kitten.”

“Don’t be sorry.” I grabbed his shoulder and gave it a good squeeze. “You did nothing wrong. My brother should have protected you. I should have gone with you. I should have never let him–”

“Babe.”

“Yeah?”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I frowned, not believing it but not wanting to argue with him about it either.

“I’m so glad I met you,” he continued. “You’re the best thing to ever happen to me. You’ve made me so happy.”

“Please don’t talk like you’re dying. My heart can’t take it,” I said.

“I just want to make sure that I say to you all the things that need to be said. You’re so strong. And brave. And you care a lot about other people. Don’t ever let them take that from you, Kitten, ok? You’re just a really wonderful person, my favorite person.”

“You’re my favorite person too. And I have plans for us to grow old together, to watch the trees we’ve planted bear fruit, to perfect my sourdough recipe, and adopt way more fussy stray cats that you pretend to dislike but secretly love. Please don’t give up on us yet, Cipher. We still have a future together.”

He sighed and shook his head sadly. “I feel it already, sweetness. The sunlight…” He squinted toward the window, where I’d already closed the curtains. “My body is changing. I’m changing.”

“You don’t know that for sure. There are new variants all the time. Maybe this will be a mild one.”

“It would kill me to hurt one of you, especially after I’ve spent all this time protecting you.”

“We won’t let that happen, I promise.”

He sighed in defeat and we lapsed into silence. Cipher stared at his hands. I worried what he was thinking, or rather, plotting. I needed him to stay positive, to believe that he could be healed.

“Listen, I have a stock of extra bullets for the rifles in a bucket in the toolshed out back, and the gate hinges need to be oiled every couple of weeks or they’ll start to stick. The engine on the Humvee should be turned over at least twice a week so the battery doesn’t go dead, but even if it does there are jumper cables–”

“Stop. Just stop,” I interrupted. “There is nothing you need to worry about right now. All you have to do is rest and be a good patient. I’m going to take care of you. We’re all going to take care of you. I know it’s hard for you to give up control, but you just have to trust me, okay? Can you do that?”

He nodded, his mouth a terse line. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“I’m going to be with you the entire time. I’ll never leave you, Cipher. Never. ”

His lower lip wobbled and he started to cry, slow silent tears dripping down his cheeks. I’d only ever seen him cry once before, when he first told me about his sister Aiko. He fell apart the same way he did everything else: with quiet, private strength. Gently, so as not to hurt him, I grabbed his hand and held it.

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.

He nodded, his beautiful brown eyes swallowed up in sadness. “I know.”