Em Garner - Contaminated

She turns at the sound of my voice. Her smile’s crooked, but real. She’s looking at me, not through me. She tilts her head like she’s curious. “How are you, Mom?”

She blinks rapidly. She lifts a hand, tilts it back and forth. Then she touches her forehead with the tip of one finger in two places, once on each temple. Then she touches the collar and her smile tips into a frown.

“You want to take it off.” It’s not a question.

She blinks again, eyelids fluttering. Her fingers fall away from the collar. Her gaze is a little blurred when she looks at me again. I don’t know how sophisticated the technology is, if they can somehow trace something in her brain that’s reacting to her thoughts, but something’s definitely happened.

Then she shakes her head sharply. Once, twice. She slaps her face next and I’m so startled, I don’t even move to stop her. The sound of her palm on her cheek is loud enough to get Opal’s attention, too.

“Mom, don’t.” I catch her hand before she can do it again, and her fingers twist in mine. There’s a red mark in the shape of her hand on her face.

But her eyes are clear again. I don’t understand this. Something is going on with the collar, with my mom. She’s trying to tell me something with the motion of her fingertips, sign language I can’t figure out. Opal’s been better at interpreting than I am, but even she doesn’t have a clue.

My mom stops. She clings to both of us, hugging tight. When she pulls away, she looks so much like the way she used to that I have to swallow hard against the rush of emotions threatening to choke me.

They told us the Contaminated would never be the way they were. There was no cure. You can’t fix a brain, you can only hope to rewire it. But what if the scientists and doctors and government officials are wrong?

“I can’t take off the collar, Mom. It’s programmed to go off if anyone tries to get it off without a special key. I don’t have one.”

She nods. She touches her head again, once and twice. Then she touches her throat, just above the collar. Then her lips, almost like she’s blowing a kiss.

“What’s she saying, Opal?”

Opal tilts her head just the way my mom did. She’s such a little minimom. “She wants to talk, but she can’t. Something in her throat is wrong, and her mouth won’t work.”

“From the collar.” It has to be.

My mom opens her mouth. Noises come out, but they’re not words. I can see the frustration in her face. She tries again. And again.

The green light blinks.

“Mom, enough. You’re going to hurt yourself.” An idea strikes me. “Opal. Pen and paper!”

Opal jumps at once to the junk drawer, where she pulls out a pad of paper and a dull pencil. “Mama, can you write?”

“Can you draw a picture, maybe?”

My mom takes the pen and paper and looks at them like she’s not sure what they are. My heart’s falling, but Opal takes our mom’s hand and puts the pen to the paper, demonstrating. Mom brightens. The pen skids across the paper, leaving an unsteady black line.

We’re all excited now, the way we used to get when we played Pictionary. My mom’s scribbling. Opal and I are calling out possibilities. My mom keeps drawing.

“House! Um… boat? Noah’s ark!” Opal shouts.

I’m trying harder to make actual sense of this. “House? Our house?”

It’s a square with a pointed top added, but beyond that, I really can’t tell what she means. My mom shakes her hand and lets the pen drop. She flexes her fingers and reaches for the pen again, but it won’t stay still in her grip. She lets out a long, low groan of frustration.

The yellow light’s started blinking. I gently take the pen from her grasp and fold my hands around hers.

“You don’t have to do this now,” I say. I think of what Dillon told me. “It’s going to be okay, Mom. It’s all going to be okay.”

Her eyes are bright with tears, but she nods. She gathers us close again. I can shut my eyes and pretend this is like it used to be, but that will only last until I open them. We squeeze one another hard.

I didn’t believe Dillon when he said it, but somehow, I believe myself.

I’m not expecting him the next morning so early, but Dillon shows up before any of us have really even managed to get dressed or brush our teeth. He’s so early and unexpected that I don’t answer the door right away, and we all freeze at the knock. I open it, bracing myself for a uniformed cop or worse, a couple of soldiers. My breath rushes out of me in a whoosh when I see it’s him.

“You scared me, Dillon!”

He tugs my arm to pull me into the small formal living room we never used back then and don’t bother with now, either. “Velvet, get dressed. Get whatever money you have. I think you should come to the store right now.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

Dillon shakes his head. “I’ll tell you on the way there.”

It takes me only a few minutes to get dressed, and we’re on the highway in another five. Then… traffic. Backed up all the way to the entrance to the neighborhood.

“More roadblocks?” I ask.

Dillon nods. “Something’s going down. Nobody is saying anything, nothing on the news. But last night…”

His voice breaks, and I’m glad we’re not moving because there’s no way he could drive with his head against the steering wheel. He’s comforted me so many times and now it’s my turn, but I feel like I’m doing a really bad job of it. I rub his shoulder.

“What?” I ask.

“Last night, my mom didn’t come home from work on time. I thought she was just, you know, staying after to take care of the Connies because she had to fire Carlos—”

“You didn’t tell me that!”

Dillon shudders a sigh. “Yeah. Funding’s been cut. She had to let Carlos go, and the docs who usually help out, volunteering, were suddenly not showing up. She thinks they were told not to.”

“By who?” Ahead of us, the line moves the length of one car.

“She doesn’t know. The government, maybe. Anyway, I thought she was just staying late, and I was going to go in and help her, even, but my dad… I know he can be left alone and stuff, but I don’t want him to be alone for so long. He gets worried.”

“Yeah. I know.” I squeeze his shoulder again.

Dillon’s eyes are rimmed with red. I’m not sure what I’ll do if he starts to cry. “Turns out, she was kept after work because they came and took them all away. All the Connies she had left.”

“All the unclaimed? But… why? What would they be doing with them?”

“Mom doesn’t know. They wouldn’t tell her. Soldiers came and rounded them up, told her she’d be shut down by the end of the week. Velvet, Mom says she thinks this is just the beginning. Those rumors about them rounding up all the Contaminated, even the neutralized ones? She thinks they’re happening. The news isn’t reporting it now, but she’s sure this is just the start.”

I think of what he said about mandatory testing. “She thinks they’re going to start taking people in for testing to see if they have any Residual Contamination?”

Dillon nods. “She saw some paperwork when the sergeant or whoever wasn’t paying attention. That’s what it looks like. Velvet, you had some, right? You drank the water.”

My stomach leaps into my throat. “Yeah.”

“And you never went in for voluntary testing.”

“No.” I shake my head. “Never seemed to be a point in it. They said they can’t do anything about it.”

The line moves again. Our car creeps forward. Nobody passes us going the other way. Dillon stares grimly ahead, then at me.

“They also said, after that third wave, that there wouldn’t be any more outbreaks, that it had all been contained. Now I’m even hearing stuff about how maybe there’s more Contamination, not just in the ThinPro, but other stuff.”