Грег Иган: The Nearest

Gary and Suzanne had been using the microwave, but now Kate saw them walking straight toward her, carrying containers of food.

“Are you hungry?” Suzanne asked. “It’s Chinese, not too spicy.”

Kate nodded gratefully and accepted the meal, then she gestured to the floor and the three of them sat cross-legged on her blanket. Her companions were both around her own age, and though she knew Suzanne had spent time in shelters, both were better dressed than she was.

Gary looked around across the warehouse floor. “This isn’t how I saw myself ending up.”

Kate laughed sympathetically. “Me neither.”

“But when my wife changed, I couldn’t stay in the house. I couldn’t stay there, pretending that nothing had happened.”

Suzanne remained silent, but she was watching Kate intently. “Changed how?” Kate asked.

“Hollowed out,” Gary replied. “The first time I saw her, I didn’t think it was her at all. Everything that made her who she was had gone. Just because her face was the same, how could I recognize her without that spark? But it was her body, I had to accept that in the end. Her body was still there; it was everything else that had drained away.”

Kate stared back at him, unable to speak. He was not infected with the disease that had claimed Reza and Michael; his wife was. Kate had spoken to her for twenty minutes, but to a stranger, emitting the right words in the right order was enough for her to pass as normal.

Had they all been hollowed out—everyone she’d interviewed who’d claimed that it was the missing family member whose behavior had changed? Even Rowan’s mother? Kate struggled with her memories of the interview. It was one thing to be oblivious to the lack of familiar cues that only someone who’d known her for years would expect, but nothing about her fears for her child had rung false.

Suzanne said, “My husband was the same. When I woke up, I thought there was a rapist in my bed. If I hadn’t seen his appendectomy scar, I might have bashed his brains out.”

Kate looked down at the blanket. “It was the same for me,” she confessed. “My husband and my son. Then my sister, and one of my colleagues…”

Suzanne reached over and squeezed her shoulder.

“It’s spreading,” Gary said. “The hollowing is spreading. And it’s so hard to stop, because only the nearest can know who’s been taken.”

Kate said, “We need to go to the Department of Health. If there are enough of us telling the same story, they’ll have to investigate.”

Suzanne responded with the kind of smile that seemed to say they might as well light up the Bat-Signal. “I know two people who did that: a woman and her son. No one heard of them again. It’s spread to the government, it’s spread to the hospitals, it’s spread to the police.”

Kate shook her head vehemently. “But it can’t be everyone. It must be just a few.”

“How can you be sure?” Gary countered. “In someone you know, it’s unmissable. In anyone else, how could you tell? ”

Kate had no reply. She’d thought she was close to turning things around, but all she’d done was send Rowan back to the robotic remnants of his parents, to be treated as if he was the one who’d lost his mind. Everything she’d been taking comfort from was being kicked out from under her.

Gary said, “The only way to fight this is for each of us to do what no one else can. We need to honor those who were our nearest. Prepare ourselves for what needs to be done, then go back to them and grant them peace.”

Kate’s fists tightened, but she spoke as calmly as she could. “Don’t say that. They can be brought back. They can be cured.”

“This is a war now,” Suzanne insisted. “Do you really think it would be merciful to spare them—and just sit around hoping that a cure is going to fall from the sky, while they spread the infection even further? Imagine a world where people like us are outnumbered. Do you have any idea how close to that we might be, even now?”

“So have you slaughtered your family?” Kate retorted, knowing the answer full well. She turned to Gary. “Have you?”

“No,” Gary replied, but his tone made no concession to her stance. “We need to act in concert, all on the same night. They can’t be prepared for this—we need to take them by surprise.”

“That’s monstrous.” Kate was numb. “You don’t murder people just because they’re sick.”

Suzanne said, “It’s the hardest thing you could ask of anyone, but Natalie showed us: If you’re strong, it can be done. If you loved them, and you face up to what they’ve become, it can be done.”

Kate had no words. Suzanne squeezed her shoulder again. “It’s tough,” she said. “You need time. We’ll talk again soon.”

They left her sitting on the tattered blanket. Kate watched as they crossed the floor and met up with Linda and Ahmed.

So this was the brave resistance against the horrors of the plague: people ready to abandon all hope in medicine, and just cull the herd. She could understand how shocking their personal experience had been, but the way they were reading it could not be right. No disease in history had ever spread so fast that the infected outnumbered the healthy.

Kate closed her eyes and saw an image of Beth, the big sister she’d worshipped, defending her from a clique of narcissistic bullies on her first day of high school. But then she pictured the shell of a woman she’d seen standing on the porch, holding the thing that had been her nephew. What were the odds that Beth had been infected at the same time as Reza and Michael, unless the disease had run rampant across the city? What were the odds that Chris Santos would be infected too? He lived on the other side of the river.

She lay down and curled up on the blanket. The world couldn’t change overnight, without warning. Nothing worked like that; it defied all logic.

But she couldn’t deny the evidence of her senses: Reza, Michael, Beth and Chris had all succumbed. Her only hope of proving the catastrophists wrong was to test their dismal hypothesis further. She had to put aside her fears of ridicule and betrayal, and take her story to as many people as possible who she had ever had reason to trust.

Kate slipped out of the warehouse just after dawn, leaving everyone else still sleeping. She’d been afraid that Natalie’s disciples might have had someone watching her, but they could hardly keep all their potential recruits under surveillance. And if she’d tried to turn them in, what would she say, to whom? That half a dozen homeless people were planning an uprising? Did the hollow men and women even understand their own nature well enough to conceive of the uninfected as any kind of threat? If they were just puppets going through the motions of living out the lives that their original hosts would have lived, how could that include any scenario that reflected their own difference?

As she strode down the highway, she tried to stare down her qualms and fix on a choice of confidant: someone who lived far from the center of the outbreak that had claimed Natalie’s family, and who had no more reason to be infected than anyone Kate might have plucked off the street at random.

Emily had been her closest friend in high school, and if they hadn’t met up in person all that often in the last few years, that had only been a matter of how busy they’d both become. She’d visited Kate just after Michael was born, and when Kate thought back over their conversation, she felt sure that she’d be able to tell at once if anything had changed inside her friend’s skull.

Emily was living in Coomera, some forty kilometers south; not exactly walking distance. Kate found a bus stop for the route into the city and joined a small queue of early commuters. She met one woman’s gaze and they exchanged polite greetings. Hollowed or not? Infected or not? If this disease spread so rapidly, so easily, how had she been spared, herself? Some natural immunity? Some genetic quirk? She’d survived sharing a bed with Reza, but how many of the hollowed could she share a bus with before her luck ran out?