Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

They sat in companionable silence for a moment. Dor let it ride out, shaking his head sorrowfully. Then he said, “Yeah, so the-what did you call it? Ragbag?”

“Oh, that.” Kaufman glanced surreptitiously at Malena and her son, then at Cass-she made sure she was looking away, as disinterested as she could manage to appear-and lowered his voice a notch or two. “We’re not supposed to talk about that while you’re in here-but, man, you gotta understand about some of this shit before you see it, y’know? I mean, you don’t want to get taken unawares.”

“Uh-huh, sure.”

“Well-it’s one of Mary’s things.”

“Mary-what is it, Mary Vane?”

“Yeah, she’s been in charge since the start. Anyway, she’s okay. I guess. I mean, some of her ideas are a little out there. They say she was some sort of government scientist or something, I don’t know. But this, see, sometimes someone comes in and it’s obvious they’re infected. It’s happening more lately. People eat any shit they can get their hands on, out on the road. Get hungry enough and they’re not careful and they end up eating blueleaf roots, especially now it’s going dormant and it’s hard to tell which is which.”

Dor’s eyes flickered again, the tiny opening and shutting of the mask. Or maybe the flicker was the fleeting dimming of his true self, ceding to the intense demands of maintaining this other, dampened self. Either way, he didn’t look at Cass.

So the Rebuilders had managed to make great strides ahead, again. Just as with the outlier immunity, they knew things here in Colima that people elsewhere-even in the Box where there was plenty of everything, plenty of smart people-took much longer to figure out. The Rebuilders understood the threat inherent in the dormant kaysev. People on the outside should have understood the danger, should have been wise, allowed fear to lead them. Cass had learned to detect those dormant plants that were dangerous and she had taken pains to teach all of the gatherers how to tell the difference between the edible kind and the blueleaf. She had actually only seen blueleaf twice since moving into the Box, and both times it was raiding parties who brought it to show her, specimens they’d found in drifts far out on the perimeter of their patrols. Anywhere people sheltered, summer vigilance seemed to have ensured that the poison strain had been obliterated.

“That’s bad, man,” Dor muttered, shaking his head.

“Tell me. We got a whole group here don’t do anything but work on that shit. Everything we eat, they grow, even our kaysev. We don’t eat anything from outside. They got them this whole greenhouse they’re building. It’s cool. Just wait until you see it. But anyway, that same test, you know the blood test for outliers?-they can use it to tell if you’re infected, too. But, well…you know how it is. You don’t really need it.”

He looked down at the table, and Cass imagined they were all thinking the same thing. The infected went feverish within hours of ingestion. At first, nearly a year ago when the kaysev first appeared, you might think you had a bad case of flu, that your light-headedness came from the fever’s onset, or something like that-hell, it had been thought a drug like acid at one point-but now everyone knew the set of symptoms that arrived all together: the luminous, jaundice-darkened skin; the fever that could go as high as 106 degrees in an adult, higher in a child; the odd bright luminosity of the eyes as the pigment intensified and the pupils shrank.

“Mary, she won’t take any chances. If they’re infected she won’t put ’em in the infirmary long enough to get the tests back. Too dangerous, you know?”

Dor nodded. The disease was transmitted through saliva, not blood. You could touch the blood, even drink it, as some of the Order had done, and there was no chance of infection. But a bite-even a graze-led to the appearance of symptoms within a few hours. And for everyone but outliers, the disease was irreversible.

“What if they’re immune, though?”

Kaufman shook his head. “It’s too risky. I mean, it’s only one in a couple hundred. The odds of finding one who’s already starting to turn-well, it’s just not worth the risk.”

Cass felt her face go hot. So Kaufman didn’t know about her, didn’t know she was an outlier, or that she’d been one of the ones who turned.

“So what exactly do they do?” Dor asked, interrupting her thoughts. “To the infected?”

Kaufman winced, his mouth tugging down at the corners. “Ah, hell. I guess it’s the most fair thing for everyone, given the circumstances, but…well, they rotate it among the security details. Anyone with firearms training. It’s a firing squad. Out in the PAC courtyard. You know, the old Performing Arts Center…they use it for assemblies and… Things.”

Firing squad . The words buzzed in her mind, forming an image of a blindfolded prisoner shackled to a post. Cass had seen so much, but it was the horrors that “decent” humans inflicted on each other that never failed to shock.

“Yeah, they just bring a dozen or so rifles from the armory, enough for whoever shows up. Only two are ever loaded. They tie the, you know, the infected person up and get it done.”

“Jesus,” Dor said. “So it’s what, voluntary…?”

“Hell, no, I wouldn’t exactly say that. You don’t show up, you damn well better have a good excuse. I mean, there’s a few things that qualify, like if you’re on security, if you’re in the clinic, something like that. But a situation like what we have here-hell, we don’t really need two on staff here at Ellis. It’s mostly so one of us can be in the john or whatever-yeah, it wouldn’t look good.”

Dor thought for a moment, wiping one big hand across his face. “What would happen? Something like that, you don’t show up for your shift?”

“Man, I would not want to be that guy,” Kaufman said. “In theory, there’s this whole review system in place, a whole escalating scale of consequences, but way things are right now-how you have to, like, shortcut the theoretical -let’s just say they don’t hardly ever get to the finer points of justice, know what I’m saying? Most times you fuck up, you’re gonna end up in the detention camp. I mean, something like this, you’d get work detail. I don’t know, maybe you’d get a couple shifts with the diggers or something. But if you screw up too often and end up being tagged a problem-and they start forgetting to check on you? Leave you in there for too long, maybe with the general population? Let’s just say it’s not a place I’d want to be.”

After that, Kaufman turned the conversation to other, easier topics: TV shows they missed, a memorable Giants game from the last season anyone played. Cass tuned out the words and just let the conversation flow around her, savoring the tone, normal in a way nothing was normal anymore. She got Ruthie settled in one of the beds, the sheets stiff but clean, smelling vaguely of lye or some other harsh chemical.

Before, when the power started to flicker differently from the way rolling brownouts normally did, sputtering for a moment or two before going out entirely, Cass sensed a terrifying loss coming, a return of the fear she’d been keeping at bay. It wasn’t unfamiliar, and Cass knew that the way to handle it was to keep breathing, in, out, in…out…until it passed.

Humans had a visceral fear of the dark-all of them, from the smallest toddler to the frailest senior citizen. If Cass had ever doubted that the fear was inherent, those first hours without electricity-literally among the darkest of her life, as the power failed for the last time in the predawn hours back in March-made the point. Electricity and power had been weakening for days, and there had been an uptick in the riots, a surge in the senseless destruction wreaked by the roving bands of angry and restless citizens.