Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (16 page)

Chris stood and led us
over to the opposite side of the dusty grain-elevator engine.

“Have a look at this.”

A pair of bodies, each
covered in a thick sheet, lay side by side on an old door supported by a pair
of sawhorses.

Chris moved to lift
the sheet, but Ian stopped him, faced Bryce and me, and said, “You don’t have
to see this if you don’t want to.”

By now, I didn’t care
what I saw. I was feeling not just emotionally drained, but emotionally blank.
I knew I could see anything right now without being affected by it. And I was
also curious. Learning about the disease was helping me focus my thoughts, and,
surprisingly, even calming me down a little.

“I’m okay,” I said.

Bryce, on the other
hand, had had enough. “Sorry, I think I need to catch my breath,” he said, and
stepped outside.

Chris pushed back the
sheet to partially expose one of the bodies.

I’d thought I could
handle it, but I gagged when I saw what was lying on the table. Chris had only
revealed the body’s torso and pelvic area. The face was still covered, but I
could tell right away that it was Mr. Hershel. He had been cut into and opened
up from his neck all the way down to his pelvis. I hadn’t ever seen human
organs on display like that. The scent of wet offal rose from the cavity like
heat. But that wasn’t the worst part.

The penis was still
erect, as stiff as the rest of the body. The testicles had blackened and
swollen even further.

“Oh my God.” I took a
step back.

Chris uncapped a
scalpel from his breast pocket.

“Stage three is bad,”
he said. “The host body starts to decay, movement becomes awkward, personality
and memory fades, and people start to get, well,
kinda
rapey
. Men
generally maintain a perpetual erection. It’s the last chance for the parasite
to pass its eggs to a new host, so the reproduction impulse goes into
overdrive. At this point, in the case of male hosts,” Chris nodded at Mr.
Hershel’s testicles, “the parasite has replaced all of the human semen with its
own eggs, which are suspended in a kind of honey—a little like bees’
honey—that the new larvae will feed on after hatching in the
new
host.”

Chris carefully
positioned the scalpel over one of Mr. Hershel’s bloated testicles. He
carefully punctured the skin. Immediately, a viscous, yellow substance oozed
from the puncture.

He held a droplet on
the tip of the scalpel blade, displaying it as well as possible in the
granary’s dim light.

“If you were to taste
it, it would taste a lot like honey,” he said, then laughed. “Not that I
recommend tasting it.”

Right away I thought
about Bryce coming in my mouth, and how I’d spit out his semen as an afterthought.
But was I still at risk? What if Bryce was infected? What if I’d felt so
attracted to him because he’d been releasing the pheromones Chris mentioned?
After all, who, in a normal state of mind, would do anything so strange as to
go down on someone while inside a buried coffin?

“How contagious is
it?” I asked. “I mean
,
if you
did
taste it, would you get infected?”

“Probably not.” Chris
shrugged casually. “Not as far as we know, anyway. TGV is only passed through male-to-female
genitalia contact—vaginal sex. So, kids, always use protection!” He gave Ian
and me an ironic thumbs-up. “Otherwise, you’ll end up like poor Mr. Hershel
here.” Chris nodded at Mr. Hershel’s motionless body as he pulled the sheet
back over it. “Or, even worse,” he added, “like
this
guy who you two found at the high school.” He slapped a hand down
on what must have been the knee of the other covered body. “Poor guy cut off
his own
twizzler
when he couldn’t stop thinking about
forcing himself on cheerleaders.” He winced. “Didn’t help him any, though. When
the parasite’s life cycle completes, the colony dies, and the host expires, too,
and that’s what happened to this guy; he finally expired and fell through that
window above the showers. But a host’s natural expiration can take many months.
The only way to stop the process earlier is to destroy the amygdala. That’s why
the Home Guard doesn’t have any qualms about shooting TGV positives in the
head. They
could
keep them isolated
until they expire naturally, but that’s too costly, and, according to them, too
risky. An ice pick in the ear would be neater, but the rangers like their guns.
That’s why they get away with it, though—because TGV positives are
technically already dead.”

Setting aside Chris’s
callousness, I tried my best to understand.

“But how are they
dead?” I asked. “I mean
,
I get that they’ve
technically died, and that the parasite takes over the brain. But if a person
is awake, and has the same personality, memories, and thoughts, how is that any
different than being alive? Especially in the first stages?”

Chris shrugged. “It’s
not any different. Not really. That’s why I defected from the hospital when the
Home Guard took over. That’s why I’m stuck hiding out in this fucking granary.
I don’t see how it’s okay to go around whacking innocent people SS-style. Even
if they
are
dead.”

Now that Chris had
finished his explanation, Ian touched my arm solemnly.

“Ash, I have to show
you something,” he whispered. “I didn’t think you’d be ready for this, not
after everything you’ve been through today, but now I’m thinking maybe you
are.”

I braced myself. I’d
thought I couldn’t be affected by anything else after what I’d seen, but seeing
Mr. Hershel split open and pulled apart had proved me wrong. I wasn’t actually
so sure that I could handle any other surprises today.

Ian reached into his
pocket and took out a white plastic applicator, just like the ones the Home
Guard used to test for infection.

“I know what that is,”
I said. “I watched Jason use one.”

“It’s an instant-read applicator—an
Insta
-Read. Unfortunately, this was our only one,”
Ian explained. “They’re hard to come by. They work by taking a urine sample.”

He pressed a button,
and a three-inch needle extended from the applicator with a
click
.

“They’re designed to
take a quick sample from the bladder by piercing the abdomen in case someone
refuses to give urine. But they work just as well by peeing on the needle. You
don’t actually have to stab anyone.”

He clicked the button
again, and the needle withdrew.

“This one is Morgan’s.”

Ian handed me the
applicator. He and Chris both waited silently for me to read it.

Just like a pregnancy
test, there were simple instructions. One blue line
meant
“stage one TGV.” Two blues lines
meant
“stage two TGV.”
Three blue lines
meant
“stage three TGV.”

Morgan’s test had two
blue lines. Stage two TGV.

I had to have known on
some level, listening to Chris’s explanation about how the pathogen worked,
that Morgan was infected. She’d been sleeping with Mr. Hershel for weeks even
before he’d raped her. She’d gotten sick, and I’d watched her stop breathing
and lie still without a heartbeat for at least ten minutes before waking back
up. But I hadn’t really let myself accept it until now—until seeing the
brute fact of two blue lines on the applicator.

“Sometimes stage two can
progress pretty quickly,” Chris said ominously.

I looked back at the
granary door. “She’s here, isn’t she? Somewhere?”

“I’ll take you to her
now,” Ian said.

I followed Ian and
Chris outside.

Bryce was sitting
beside the granary, his back against the corrugated tin wall. He stood upon
seeing us. I handed him the applicator.

“It’s Morgan’s.”

He read it and nodded
slowly.

Chris lit a cigarette—a
Camel Light—as he led us all toward the second of the six round silos. He
offered the cigarette to me, and after a moment I accepted it, taking a long,
trembling drag before handing it back over.

Ian took a few cautious
steps toward the long row of silos and somberly motioned for us to follow him.

He whispered, “Before
we go in, you should know that Chris has been trying to help Morgan. He’s been
giving her a cocktail of antibiotics.”

“It’s still early,”
Chris broke in. “So we really don’t know how well it works. But, for now, it
seems to have some effect halting the progression of the disease.”

This was good news. I
needed good news. It gave me a little hope for Morgan. Maybe if there was a way
to slow the disease, there was a way to cure it completely.

“But the cocktail’s a
combination of some pretty powerful antibiotics,” Ian said. “It has some side
effects. Morgan’s gotten pretty weak. Chris says it’ll probably get worse
before it gets better. She’s also not sleeping because of the hallucinatory
nightmares the antibiotics have been causing. She’s exhausted. And the kicker:
we’re already running low on the antibiotics Chris needs. Problem is, I don’t
have clearance at the pharmacy even as a medical officer. They keep it pretty
closely guarded. Jason is one of the only rangers in the Home Guard with an
access card because the pharmacy falls in his squad’s residential patrol zone.
And he’s not exactly going to do me any favors, not after today. I can’t even
order him to give it over because I don’t outrank him in that way. And if I
ever tried to just take it from him, his squad would back him up.” Ian gave me
a stern look. “Look, Ash. I’m telling you all this so you know why Morgan’s in
the state she’s in. I don’t want you to get your hopes up. We’re doing all we
can, but there’s not much more we can do for her. Our hands are pretty tied.”

I nodded. “I
understand,” I said. “Just let me see her.”

Ian took a key from
his pocket and stepped toward the silo door. I hadn’t realized it was locked.

“You locked her
in
?”

“It wasn’t our idea,”
Ian said. “She made us promise to lock her in. She was terrified of what she’d
do as the disease progressed. She was worried she would leave.”

Ian pushed the door
open.

Morgan was sitting on
the concrete floor beside a little, unlit kerosene lantern. She smiled at me
sadly. She tried raising a hand to motion for me to sit beside her, but she was
obviously weak. She struggled to hold her arm up.

I sat beside her and
hugged her for a long time.

“What the hell, kid?”
I said, holding back my tears. “We’re going to get you better.”

Morgan shrugged and
nodded without much hope. She wasn’t saying anything.

I suddenly realized
that she couldn’t speak.

I knew that she’d be
in a bad state, but I hadn’t fully prepared myself for her to have completely
lost the ability to talk to me.

She grabbed my shoulder,
pointed toward the ground, and gave me a sad, terrified look. Then she hugged
me again.

“I told her what
happened to you the other day,” Ian said, “in the coffin.”

I understood. I hugged
Morgan back. “Thanks, kid.” I said. “I’m okay now.”

Morgan tried to tell
me something else. She pointed at
me and then Bryce
.
When she couldn’t express herself by pointing, she tried to speak, but only
hollow gibberish came out of her mouth. It was like her lips were numb, and her
jaw seemed stiff. She couldn’t form words or sounds at all. She started to cry
in frustration.

“We’ll get you
something to write with,” I said.

Morgan gave me yet
another look of despair.

Ian said, “Writing’s
not so easy for her, either. We tried that. Her fingers are getting pretty
numb.”

Morgan turned away and
slammed her hand against the tin wall. The loud
bang
resonated in the silo’s confined space.

She started to cry
miserably, still without making any sound. I moved closer to her and held her
while she cried. She started to rock herself back and forth, and I let myself
rock with her.

Then, slowly, Morgan
started to breathe more deeply.

She turned her head so
her lips were against my ear, and I could feel the warmth of her suddenly tense
inhalations. She moved her leg just a little over mine. Then she pressed her pubic
bone into my hip, rotating her pelvis. She let out a soft little moan of
something close to pleasure. It was the first understandable sound I’d heard
her make. Then she started grinding even harder into my hip. She gently bit my
ear lobe, breathing even more deeply and moaning again.

She was trying to get
off on me.

“Morgan,” I said. I
pushed her away as gently as I could.

Ian stepped over and
helped me up, pushing Morgan back as he separated us.

As if waking from a
trance, Morgan suddenly realized what she’d been doing. She looked mortified.
Suddenly she slammed the tin wall again, curled up into a little ball with her
head between her knees, and started sobbing.

Ian pulled me farther
away from her.

“She can’t help it,”
he reminded me.

Morgan looked up. She
waved us away, tears spilling from her eyes,
then
made
a locking motion at Ian, reminding him to make sure to lock her inside.

We all stepped out.

There was nothing else
I could do.

It was getting late.
The sun was setting over the mountains. I felt completely hopeless. For a
moment, I didn’t see the point of living. What were we all going to do?

Ian quietly closed the
door and locked the padlock.

“That’s the thing
about this disease,” he said. “It takes any outpouring of emotion, even sorrow,
and turns it into sexual attraction. Not just love and affection, like normal,
but anger, gratitude, humor—everything. It all comes out as lust.”

Bryce and Chris walked
on ahead. I wasn’t sure, but I think Chris may have been hooking Bryce up with
some weed.