The Cured (40 page)

Phil’s adam’s apple retracted and bobbed back under the flat of Henry’s knife. “Am I really infected Henry? What’s going to happen to me?”

Henry shrugged. “What does it matter? You’re already dead. Get back in the truck.”

Phil got up slowly. “You’re bluffing,” he said with a slow smile.

Henry didn’t say anything, just prodded Phil toward the truck doors with the butt of his knife. He bent down and picked up the gun as Phil sauntered back to the truck, his momentary doubt forgotten or buried. “You got a blanket or something?” he asked.

“Nope,” said Henry, “it’s a warm night. You won’t freeze. Be thankful you aren’t chained to a post outside without clothes.”

“You saving that one for tomorrow night Henry?”

Henry shut the truck door and leaned against it while he fished out the keys and locked it. He didn’t feel like talking any more. He walked over to the smoldering fire as he stripped his bio-hazard suit off again. He threw another handful of sticks on it, more for the light than the heat and pulled another packet of food from his bag. He half dozed between bites, too tired even to get back into the truck. He sat up confused, a little while later. The fire was barely glowing cinders and Henry was sure he’d heard a rustle in the bushes across the road from him. He gathered everything up and threw it into the truck bed. Except the mostly uneaten packet of food in his hand.

“I don’t know who is there,” he said loudly, “but we don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to hide. There’s plenty. It’s okay if you’re scared. I understand. We’re leaving in the morning, we won’t bother you. I’ll leave this here, just in case.” He placed the food next to the coals and climbed back into the truck’s cab.
You’re crazy Henry. Talking to yourself
, he thought. But he locked the doors before he fell asleep, just in case.

Forty-five

The morning was clear and warm, almost cruelly beautiful. Henry stalled, repacking his bag, putting a fresh charge into the stun gun, sweeping away the cold ashes from the fire. The food that he had left was gone and he thought about looking for who or whatever had crept so close while he slept, but Phil began banging on the side of the truck again and Henry knew it was time to face the place he’d dreaded for so long. He started the truck and double checked his tear gas cannisters and rolled down the last mile and a half toward the Lodge.

It wasn’t the rescue mission he’d envisioned a few months earlier. He wasn’t the same man who’d envisioned it. He shouldn’t be doing this alone. Henry was disappointed to see the log fence was still there, it’s gate standing open, but not hanging off kilter or splintered or torn away. He tried to remind himself that it had only been a few months as he pulled into the driveway.

He’d expected it to be a ruin. Burned or torn down or rotting away. The soil salted and empty. The camp was the same as the last time he’d seen it, even the footpaths worn into the yard hadn’t been shrunken by new grass yet. He parked the truck and got out. The only thing that had changed was the overwhelming silence. Henry walked to the large clump of prefabricated sheds where the Immunes had lived. Some of the doors were open and in a few Henry could see a few bones scattered across the dirt floors. But scavenging animals had taken most of them away. The little huts were still filled with old belongings, some tumbled and broken, but most neatly put away. As if everyone just got up and walked away.
It isn’t fair,
thought Henry,
that this place of misery can exist still, completely untouched, when all the people have vanished. The place should die with the people.
He wondered which had been Dave and Marnie’s, but he didn’t go looking for it. He didn’t want to see what had survived them. He wandered toward the front pens, where his friends had been.

The gate was closed and Henry glanced around, wondering if there were people still living at the lodge, maybe watching him wander through. He didn’t see anyone and decided it was too late to worry about that now. He unlatched the wooden gate and it swung open. His breath snagged in his chest as he caught sight of the line of posts sunk at the center of lonely dirt circles. The chain leashes still dangled from some. Others were anchored to the earth by bones. Henry walked up to one of the bodies, it’s neck still inside the shining metal collar. Henry didn’t know who it was. Just another Infected stranger unlucky enough to wander into Phil’s domain. It’s arms were stretched as far as they could reach. Marnie had let them all go. Someone else had put these people back. Then walked away and let them starve. It wasn’t hard for Henry to imagine how it had felt. Pacing that circle day after day, straining to reach anything that moved, that collar suffocatingly tight for a while, then looser and sagging as time went on. Eventually even the insane rage of the Plague would have lost to hunger. Eventually they must have spent the days lying down, reaching toward the gate but unable to struggle against the chains any longer. Henry crouched on his haunches and sobbed with his hands over his face as if the image were in front of him instead of playing a constant dragging loop in his head. They escaped. Henry could understand them being killed in self defense. He knew that if he looked hard enough in the little huts he’d find jumble of bones, tiny battlefields where people had fought and died and were crumbling away to dust. But these had escaped and someone had recaptured them instead of killing them. Someone had taken the time to not only trap them in the pen, but chained them back to their posts. Without food, without water, without the opportunity to end it for themselves. Henry looked out of the gate to where the brown delivery truck sat glinting in the warm sun. Only one person had been left alive to do it. Only one person had walked away from the camp knowing there were still people trapped here.

Henry stood up and left the pen, gently shutting the gate behind him to keep scavenging animals out. He was going to burn the camp down when he was done. Make it burn until the whole place was a gray smudge of grief being swallowed by the forest. But first Phil was going to understand what he’d done here. Henry walked to the back of the lodge where the old shed and his own dirt circle orbited a tall splintering post. He wondered what good it would do to revisit the place where he had suffered so much, but he was drawn to it anyway. Haunted by an older self. Compelled to touch the dirt circle that had been the circumference of his entire world for so long. He ran his fingers down the length of the cool chain, hearing again the soft clinking as it moved. He could still see his own bare footprints where they had frozen and then baked into the mud. He had intended to put Phil here, at the end. To let him see the world as Henry had seen it, to bake in the sun without water or food as Henry had. But after returning, Henry didn’t know if he could go through with it. He didn’t know if he could calmly chain another man, even one who had done the things he knew that Phil had. He didn’t know if he could sit here day after day and watch him go mad first with fear and then thirst and finally die. Henry sat in the dirt and leaned his back against the warm post and looked up at the lodge beyond the fence palings. He could hear the metallic ringing of Phil banging on the truck. It was no use pretending that he didn’t know what he was there for. He knew Phil deserved what was coming, probably more than what Henry had planned. He tried to muster up all the old anger and hurt he had felt since waking up, but returning to this place had been a mistake. All he felt was sorrow. He turned his head. The old woodshed was there, its tin door still closed, the dark seeping out of the bottom cracks. There was no point to putting it off any longer. It was time to do what he had promised himself and the others he would do.

The shed was still lined with plastic and Henry could still see flecks of dark matter that the hose hadn’t reached. It was sweltering inside and he was surprised at the lack of smell, but then, it had been six years since he had been kept inside. No windows, no light, no air. Henry backed away from it and left the door propped open. He returned to the truck and struggled with the plastic suit for what he hoped was the last time. He used his right sleeve to conceal the choke collar and a leash restraint he’d picked up from the pens. He unlocked the back doors and leveled the stun gun as they shot open and Phil threw his weight out toward Henry. Henry took a quick step back, allowing Phil to fall into the dirt in front of him.

“You ought to be more careful now,” he said, “Your body won’t do quite what you tell it to any more. You’ll overestimate distance or put your foot in the wrong spot and down you go. It gets worse and worse.”

Phil glared up at him. “I’m not sick.”

“You ready to cooperate?”

Phil slowly stood up and dusted himself down. He started walking toward the lodge. “Nope. Not that way,” Henry said.

“Fuck you. What are you going to do about it? Hit me with your useless shock gun? I’ll just beat the shit out of you when I get back up.”

“Try it and see,” said Henry, his voice cool, his mind calm now that things were in motion. He let the choke chain and leash slither down his sleeve and into his palm where Phil couldn’t see. Phil sneered and turned back toward the lodge. Henry shot and Phil fell shuddering back into the dust. Henry leapt onto his back in a perverse replay of the night he had escaped. He wrapped the collar around Phil’s neck and snapped it closed while Phil was still twitching. Then Henry stood up and began dragging Phil behind him toward the back pens. Phil scrabbled to get his fingers between the chain and his throat. Henry let up to give him a breath, but as soon as Phil’s fingers touched the collar’s clasp, he took off again, Phil gasping and turning purple behind him. Henry let up again as they rounded the corner for a few breaths and dragged him the remaining distance to the open door of the shed. Henry lifted the gun again and unclipped the leash but left the collar. He waited until Phil’s breath evened out.

“Get in.”

Phil rolled his head to the side, looking at the dim interior of the shed. “No way,” he said, his voice harsh and ragged.

“If you want to do this the hard way, we can.”

Phil turned to look at him. “You’re really going to do this? Put me in there, wait for me to die? Are you enjoying this?”

“I could chain you to a post instead. Bind your hands and keep you on a leash. I would enjoy that more. I thought this was marginally kinder for both of us. You’ll be free to move around inside the shed, able to relieve yourself when you wish, for as long as you’re sane enough. Be able to change positions, be out of the elements. All things I was denied. And I won’t have to look at you or wear this suit until you die. I thought it was a fair trade, but again, I’d much rather chain you outside, like a bad dog waiting to snap.”

Phil slowly stood up, the shock and near suffocation had taken a toll on him. He stooped to enter the small shed. Henry shut the door behind it and slid the bolt home. He shucked the plastic suit and hung it on the door of the shed. He walked away toward the big house, not sure if he was going to return and need it again or not.

Forty-six

The lodge had changed during the years Henry had been ill. It had been expanded and winterized, the well had been fitted with a hand pump and most of the modern appliances had disappeared. Still, nothing had been done to make the place sustainable in the long term. There was no garden, no work rooms and Henry had seen no hand tools of any kind except for a hammer and saw that must have been used to improve the lodge. These people weren’t creators. They didn’t produce anything. They lived off the lives of others, either scavenging goods from abandoned homes or raiding nearby camps and taking what and who they wanted. There was always more, so what they had they didn’t care for. The inside of the lodge was not the spare, clean place Henry remembered. There were piles of trash in the corners and thick dust lay over almost everything. There had been struggles inside the house, leaving scratch marks and broken furniture, but most of the mess had been there for a long time. Empty liquor bottles rolled over the kitchen floor as Henry opened the back door to enter. He started to pick them up and stack them neatly on the counter but then realized what he was doing.
What’s the point? It’s going to burn in a few days anyway,
he thought. He waded through a few inches of trash to get to the living room, not sure what he was there for. He didn’t know if the living room had been converted into some kind of camp clinic that nobody ever cleaned or if it had been the scene of a very bloody battle the night of his escape. The once gleaming wood floor was dark and chalky with dried blood and the only furniture were some overturned cots blocking the front door. Henry wondered if this was where Marnie had hidden with the people who couldn’t defend themselves. A breeze blew the tattered curtains from the front window. He walked up to them and looked out of the missing pane at the bright summer day. He remembered stapling plastic over it from the other side, trying not to hear the news bleeding through the walls from the television as he did. There was a green wire hanging down from the upper sill. Henry reached out, careful not to touch the jagged glass and gently pulled on it. The wire fell into his hand, one chili pepper light still hanging from it, the rest of the strand long gone. Henry walked farther into the house, its addition becoming a warren of bedrooms made of warping plywood. They were dark without windows, just simple boxes with a dirty mattress in each. Whether they had been used by Phil’s men or as hospital beds or for more twisted purposes, Henry wasn’t sure and didn’t try to determine.

Light came from the very back cube and Henry walked toward it, curious. It was even smaller than the others, but it had a small square of wood cut out from the back wall. Plastic sheeting, probably from the very same roll Henry had used, was stapled over the hole to make a crude window. The little box was tidy, unlike the others. It didn’t have a mattress, just a few thin blankets carefully spread over the splintery plywood. There was a short stack of books in one corner and a dingy piece of red velveteen hung from a nail on the wall alongside a tiny whisk broom that had evidently been used in the room since it lacked the grunge all the other rooms were covered in. Henry sat down in the hallway and took off his shoes. It felt wrong, somehow, to bring in the dirt that had been kept out for so long. He walked up to the piece of velveteen in his socks and picked it up. It was an old Christmas stocking, the kind that used to come prefilled from the drug store. Henry placed it gently back and turned to the window. He was surprised to see that it looked out into his pen. With the gate open he could see his old post clearly. He didn’t need any more clues to know whose room this had been, but his foot brushed against something soft and lumpy beneath the edge of one of the blankets. He leaned over and pulled the blanket back. It’s stuffing had clumped and fallen into it’s lower paws and the battery for its light had long ago died or corroded, but Henry recognized Marnie’s bear as soon as he saw it. He sat down on the pile of blankets and closed the flimsy plywood door to shut out everything else. The saggy bear sat on his stomach staring its disappointed one-eyed stare at him as he lay back on the dusty blankets. Henry tore a small strip of frayed blanket and tied it around the bear’s forehead, covering it’s missing eye.