Em Garner - Contaminated

“Mom—”

“Now, Anthony.”

He does. There’s silence on the line, and I listen to her breathing. I’ll give her the chance to say what she’s going to, I guess because I need to hear it. I need her to say it, get it out of the way once and for all.

“I think it would be better if you didn’t call here again, Velvet.”

“Does Tony want me to stop calling?”

“My son does what I tell him to do,” Tony’s mother says smugly. “And I’m telling you to stop calling here. You’re not welcome. I don’t want you with my son.”

“Why?”

She sounds surprised that I asked and stutters out a reply. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why don’t you like me, Mrs. Batistelli? What is it about me you hate so much?”

“I don’t need to give you an answer to that. Rude,” she mutters at the end of it.

“I’ll tell you what I don’t like about you, if that makes it easier.” The words spew out of me before I can stop them, but I don’t care. I close my eyes, then open them. Nothing in this apartment’s changed, but I feel different.

“You… little… what a little…!”

“You can’t say it’s because of my parents. My mother. You can’t even say it’s because of this apartment, or the fact I have to work at a low-paying job, and you can’t say it’s because I’m fat, because I’m not. So what? Tell me!”

“I don’t have to tell you a thing, you disgusting, trashy brat!”

“And you’re a wrinkled, spray-tanned, control freak,” I say evenly. “Why do you run so much? Is it because everyone around you is always trying to get away from you and you think it will let you catch up?”

The sharp hiss of her breath lets me know I hit her someplace tender. I shouldn’t know something like that. I definitely shouldn’t say it. My mother raised me better than that, but right now I don’t care. I’m a disappointment, just like with the laundry.

“Don’t you call here again. Ever.”

She hangs up on me. I stare at the phone for a few seconds, then put it back in the cradle. I should feel worse about what I said, except that it was true. Maybe I should feel worse about what she called me, but if “disgusting, trashy brat” is the best she can come up with… well, I can handle that.

It’s really time for bed now. Six in the morning comes early. I go to the bedroom I share with Opal, but pause to look into the other. There was a leak in the ceiling when we moved in, so the drywall’s got a hole in it covered over with a dirty sheet stapled into place. The carpet had been ruined and torn up, leaving bare plywood. The window’s cracked. It’s why we share a room instead of having our own. I’ll have to clean up this room, since Mom’s coming home. Maybe find some curtains, a floor rug. Get a bed, for sure. She won’t sleep in a nest of rags.

My mom’s coming home.

THE FIRST WAVE OF THE CONTAMINATED WAS slaughtered by overzealous soldiers, police officers, firefighters. Also by neighbors and by strangers. People had seen too many horror movies, read too many “survival” guides. When the first cases started getting reported, people made jokes. A few days later, when the massive waves of Contaminated started losing their minds, those same people were already armed and ready to shoot, no questions asked.

That first wave lasted about two weeks, followed by a couple of weeks of chaos. Then the second wave hit. By that time, disease control experts had done enough autopsies to figure out what was causing people to randomly and suddenly go homicidal, and the second wave of Connies was “neutralized” by simple lobotomies, many done in the field by untrained staff who’d managed to wrestle Connies to the ground. They used ice picks. Shoved them through the eye sockets into the brains. It calmed the Contaminated down, but it killed some, too. Left others permanently damaged, some blinded. It’s hard to be careful with an ice pick.

By the time the third wave hit a couple of months later, they’d figured out the source of the problem, but it didn’t matter. People were still drinking the water, or had been drinking it, and only now the disease had caught up with them. The news called it prion disease. Not a virus. Mutated, twisted proteins that somehow ate holes in the brains of those infected. This time, instead of killing the Contaminated or lobotomizing them in the field, the disease control experts collected them. Took them to the labs. They perfected electric-pulsing shock collars that subdued them rather than further scrambling their brains. It was less brutal and more controversial.

And now, less than two years later, they’re releasing those people back to their families.

I don’t see Tony in school the next morning. It’s not the day we have class together and I get there just before classes start because I have to make sure to get Opal to her before-school care. The time I used to spend walking the halls with him hand in hand is now spent switching from bus to bus or running if I’ve missed one.

I take a zero for the math homework. My teacher, Mr. Butler, looks sympathetic but doesn’t question me on it. I listen to the lesson and even pay attention, but it’s like he’s speaking a different language. One made up of numbers instead of letters.

Phys ed is required in order to graduate, and it’s my second and final class today. Unlike math, which I’m convinced I’ll never use, this class makes sense. Instead of playing volleyball for weeks on end, or learning how to bowl or golf, we spend the class time navigating special obstacle courses. We jump over gymnastics horses, crawl up and over nets. At the end of the course we grab up bows with special, soft-tipped arrows and try to hit the targets set up across the gym. We also have to run sprints.

This is because most Connies can’t run very fast for very far. You have to outlast them. Most of the girls in my class complain about the sprints, but I like them. Legs pumping, fists clenched, back and forth in zigzags on the polished wood floor. My sneakers squeak. The girl beside me, Tina, she’s a Conorphan, too. Her face is set in concentration. She runs faster than I do. She also hits the targets dead center, every time.

“I don’t know why we have to do this crap,” Bethany, one of the popular girls, says with a toss of her long hair. She’s tied the back of her gym shirt with an elastic band, like anyone in here cares how flat her belly is. “My dad says it’s all just ridiculous. And I hate to sweat.”

“You wouldn’t mind sweating if some brain-dead freak started coming after you,” Veronica, her best buddy, says. She curls her fingers into claws. “Rawr!”

“My dad says all of this is going to be over in another few months, anyway. They’re going to catch all the rest of the Connies out there and we won’t need any of this. This is outdated.” Bethany tosses her hair again.

Tina, looking grim, pulls back her bow and lets an arrow fly. It hits dead center. “Maybe.”

Bethany and Veronica share a look. It’s not a nice one. I don’t know Tina’s story, but she looks pretty determined to kill anything that gets in her way. I wonder what happened to her. Probably something like what happened to me in the woods behind my house… but I don’t want to think about that.

“All I know is,” Tina says, turning to the other girls, “is that I’m never, never going to be caught unprepared again. Ever.”

She hands the bow to Bethany and jogs away to start the obstacle course over again. Bethany looks to see if our teacher’s watching but she’s not; she’s helping some girl who got tangled in the net. Bethany hands the bow to Veronica, who hands it to me.

“Like this is useful,” Bethany says. “Who keeps bows and arrows around, anyway?”