Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (10 page)

“I’ll get a new one the next time they test,” he assures me. We’re tucked up in his single bed, our legs entwined. He smells faintly of soap and his hair’s damp. He got the last of the hot water tonight, but he deserved it.

“How often are they going to do that?”

“I don’t know. I hope not a lot. It hurts, even with the stuff they spray into your nose first to numb it.” Dillon yawns, then turns, stretching, to get the battery-powered
radio from the nightstand. He settles it between us and turns the volume on low, since everyone else has gone to sleep.

“It sounds horrible.”

“It wasn’t so bad.” He pauses. “But they took some people after the test. Ralph from the truck. Good guy. Never heard him even raise his voice. He tested positive. They just put him in zip-tie cuffs and in the back of their truck.”

I’m silent at that. What can I say? Dillon adjusts the station until it comes in clear.

“Hey, hey, hey, all you good gentles, ho.” The Voice sometimes likes to talk in a “Renaissance Faire accent,” which is proof to me that he’s not the terrorist the government would like us to believe he is; he’s just a nerd with a ham radio. “What’s the good word out there in the black zone?

“Yes, you know it.” The Voice switches into a normal tone, not so flip. “Black zone. That’s what they call us. The maps they don’t show on the TV anymore, the ones that used to show us the worst-hit zones. Remember those? Well, we’re in one of the biggest, folks, and they call us black zones. ’Cuz we’re all dead one way or another. Eventually, we’re dead.”

Dillon pulls me closer, and I bury my face in the clean-soap-and-skin scent of him.

“You think you’re safe because you’re still okay? Don’t get too comfy. They have the portable tests now: they
can stick a needle in your eye socket and take out a teeny-weeny piece of your brain, find out within thirty seconds if you’ve got something nasty getting ready to eat holes in your gray matter. And if you do? Say good-bye; they’re hauling people away without so much as a chance to grab a toothbrush and a change of underwear. If you’re lucky, they’ll take you on over to the Sanitarium, where at least, I hear, you get three squares and a cot. I mean, you’ll maybe have to fight a couple of hundred other drooling Connies for that grilled cheese, and the beds are full of bugs, but it’s for science, kids! All for science. Of course, I hear they’re taking anyone they want on over there, trying to figure out what’s going on that makes you turn, ’cuz it doesn’t matter if you’re showing any symptoms; you could become a Connie at any second. That’s what the government believes, and here’s something you don’t know, kids, that they don’t want you to know. You might be Contaminated without ever having had one single sip of ThinPro.”

“What—?”

“Shhh,” I say. “Listen.”

“Yep, yep, yep, that’s right, boys and girls, my fellow black-zone comrades. The poison has spread, and someone knows how, but I don’t. Not yet. I’ll keep on it, though, never fear, the Voice is here.… But I’m not here, not now, not nohow … gotta run, kids, the devil’s at the door.…”

The radio blats with static, and Dillon turns it off. He puts it back on the nightstand before turning to pull me
closer into his arms. We stay that way without talking for a minute or so before I pull away to look at the plastic bracelet.

Earlier, I’d told him about the house, the dead guy. Sandra. Mrs. Holly hiding my mom. Now I touch the plastic on his wrist and wonder what this is going to mean.

“They tested everyone,” Dillon says. “It wasn’t random. We all had to get the test and the bracelets. And it wasn’t at a checkpoint. They came into the office to do it.”

Dillon has a great smile that lights up his whole face. I miss it. He hasn’t smiled like that for a while. He misses his mom and dad, and worries about them, I know. He worries about us here at home when he’s at work, and I worry about him when he’s not here. Everything is worry and sadness lately. It exhausts me.

“Maybe you shouldn’t go to work tomorrow. Or again,” I say. “We should stay out of town.…”

“Velvet, I have to go to work, or we lose our benefits.” Dillon takes my face in his hands and kisses me.

I like the kiss, but not the reason for it. He’s trying to quiet me, but I push away and sit up with my legs over the edge of the bed. “I drank the ThinPro. Not a lot. But enough, right? All it takes is a sip, we know that from before, and the Voice just said—”

“The Voice says a lot of things.” Dillon sits up behind me, pulls me back against him. Tucks his chin into the curve of my shoulder. “You’re fine. You’re going to be okay.”

I think of the cheerleader I put on the ground. How easily I’d done it. How much I’d … liked it.

I know he’s trying to calm me, but it’s not working. My mind’s whirling. I can’t stop thinking of Sandra. The collar hadn’t kept her from turning violent, but had it really been her fault when the soldiers taunted her into it? They’d killed her as surely as if they’d put a gun to her head.

But my mom wasn’t like that. With the collar, she’d shown signs of recovering, and without it, she should’ve died or turned into a raging Connie, but she hadn’t. I lean against Dillon, finally softening.

I think about when things first started to go down, how he picked me up and took me to the grocery store so we could stock up. It was a good thing he did, because what we bought that day had lasted us until the new ration cards were handed out. “We need to be ready, though. For winter. For everything. I think we should start stockpiling stuff even more. Stripping out the houses around us. Fortifying this house. We should’ve done it before now.”

“Yeah. But it felt …” Dillon shrugs. “Wrong.”

It doesn’t feel more right now, but it does feel necessary. “Me and Opal can start tomorrow. The closest houses first.”

“I can help.” He looks determined.

“You have to work.”

Dillon shakes his head. “For what? Medical benefits we’ll never be able to use? Ration cards we can’t redeem?”

“No. So you can keep an eye on what’s going on in
town. And find out what happened to your mom and dad.” I touch his arm, and he pulls me close for a hug.

“Okay. But I’ll help when I get home. And on my day off …”

“Dillon.” I squeeze him. “We’ll figure it out. I can handle it.”

He grins. “I know you can. You can handle anything.”

“Even if we only took all the food and supplies from the house where I found Sandra, we wouldn’t have to go into town for a long, long time. At least not until things start to get better.”

“Velvet, do you really think things are going to get any better?”

I twist to look at his face. Dillon pushes my hair off my forehead, and I remember how it felt the first time he kissed me. It still feels that way, even if we are in this weird legal marriage thing that doesn’t make me feel at all like a wife. I let him kiss me, but it doesn’t make everything all better. It’s not magic.

“Do you think they’re going to get worse?” I ask.

Dillon’s expression tells me everything. “It can always get worse. Can’t it?”

He kisses me then. Again and again. And we let ourselves get lost for a while in the kissing, but later, when I’m trying to sleep, I can’t stop thinking about what he said.

Listening to the soft sound of his breath, I stare at the ceiling for a while. Then I get out of bed and make my
rounds. It’s silly to check the windows and doors when the people who’d want to get in wouldn’t care if anything was locked, but my mom always used to do it and now I do it instead. I check on the puppy curled at the foot of Opal’s bed. Then Opal, who sprawls with her mouth open, her hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. I crack the window for her, thinking with longing about air-conditioning and electric fans. Down the hall, I peek in on Mrs. Holly, who’s silent and motionless in her bed. Then my mom. Always my mom, who hardly ever sleeps anymore.

She’s sleeping now, though. Her windows are all wide open, and I wonder if she did that herself. She surprises us all the time with what she’s capable of doing.

I think about the soldiers and what they did to Sandra. I think about the man I found in his den. And I know what Dillon said is true.

It can always get worse.

“
IT’S YOUR TURN!”

“No, it’s your turn!”

We push and shove, wrestling, though I’m a lot bigger, and Mom and Dad will yell at me if Opal gets hurt. Which she does, the baby brat, in a minute. She bumps her elbow on the chair and starts yelling. I’m gonna get in trouble, but I don’t care because it
is
her turn.

“It’s your turn,” I tell her. “I did it yesterday!”

“Mama!”

“Check the chore chart,” Mom says from the laundry room. She shows up in the doorway with a basket loaded with towels and stuff. “One of you, do the dishwasher. One of you, feed the dog and make sure she has fresh water. Both of you, gather the trash.”

Opal and I stare at each other, both of us frowning. Opal crosses her arms and kicks her foot against the chair. This stubs her toe, and she hops up and down, hollering.

“Settle the kettle,” Dad says from the living room. He’s putting together a bookcase from Ikea for my room. He told me it’s supposed to be easy because it comes with all the tools you need, but he’s been saying a lot of bad words.

“Velvet, it’s your turn,” Opal whispers really loud.

I don’t want to empty the dishwasher. I know it’s not my turn. I know it’s Opal’s turn, because yesterday, while she watched cartoons on Daddy’s computer, I emptied the dishwasher and I put a sticker on the chore chart. I could prove it to her. I could point it right out, and she’d have to do it for two days in a row because I did.

But suddenly, I don’t really care so much. If she wants to be a baby booger brain about it, she can. I’ll unload the dishwasher, because I’d rather do that than open the stinky can of dog food and put it in the bowl, and then rinse the other one and put clean water in it. Jody slobbers all over everything and gets her fur all over it, and when you’re trying to feed her, she sometimes bumps into you so hard that everything spills. And she steps on your feet with her dirty paws, and I just got new white sneakers.

“I’ll do the dishwasher, Opal.” Sugar wouldn’t melt in my mouth, my mom would say.

Opal doesn’t even look suspicious. She just wiggles and laughs. I bet she thinks she’s getting the best of me, but guess what: ten minutes later, when I’m finished with the dishwasher and she’s covered in dog slobber, I’m the one who’s laughing.

“Yeah, Dexter, I’d like that chore chart back.” I sigh. The puppy sniffs my foot and then whines at the back door to go out, so I open it for him. At least he’s housebroken.

The memory isn’t a bad one. It is less about the dishwasher than about the time when we all were a family, and that’s what makes me sad as I rinse the dishes and put them in the drying rack. My dad built me that bookcase, and it’s still in my room. But my dad’s gone. The towels my mom was folding that day are probably still in the linen closet, but my mom’s not the same as she was back then.

Everything’s different, and it shouldn’t surprise or upset me anymore, but right now it does.

I don’t have time to mope, though. Opal’s pounding down the stairs, taking the last two at the same time with a leap, one hand on the railing to keep herself from falling. She thunders through the living room.

“Jeez, elephant feet. Settle the … kettle,” I finish, thinking of my dad. I tell her to brush her teeth and wash her face. To at least try to comb a few of the tangles from her hair. “And eat some breakfast. We have a lot to do today.”

Opal rolls her eyes. “Like what?”

I lay it out for her. “So we’re going to go through each house, room by room, and get anything we need.”

“It will feel like we’re stealing.” She looks around the kitchen with a guilty expression.

“You’re the one who thought of it. Don’t worry, it will
be okay.” I want to reassure her, because I understand how she feels. It
will
feel like stealing. It will also feel like salvation. “We’ll only take from the empty houses. And we don’t have a choice, Opal.” I don’t want to scare her, but I need her to understand how important it is. “Dress in long pants and long sleeves, too.”

“But it’s hot!”

“Yeah, and we don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with in any of these houses. There could be … stuff.”

Opal perks up. “Gross stuff?”

“Maybe.” I eye her. “Maybe you should stay home.”

“No! No, Velvet, I want to go!” She hops out of her chair, dancing in an agony of not wanting to be denied.

“It’s going to be hot and sweaty, and yeah. Maybe gross.” I keep my smile hidden.

Opal nods. “Like the dead pig.”

“Or worse, Opal.” I’m not smiling now. I’m serious. “You have to promise to listen to me. Do what I say. We have to be careful, because there could be—”

“Connies. I know.” Her expression darkens.

“Or other things,” I say gently. “There could be regular people.”

Opal frowns. She’s grown so much taller over the past few months that pretty soon she’ll be looking me in the eyes. Her hair’s still too long, and her pants not long enough.