Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

She’s really a stranger, then, not just another neighbor I never took the time to know. “A couple blocks over,” I say.

“It’s not safe to stay so close to home.”

I rankle at the faint disapproval in her tone. She’s right, of course: we all figured that out fast. Most of my friends have run as far away as they could, seeking sanctuary in the unfamiliar. Unless something changes, I’ll never know whether they made it.

Nothing’s going to change. This is the world now. Danny saw it coming. Danny tried to warn me. Maybe there were other Dannys, older Dannys, Dannys in white coats with letters after their names, and maybe there’s a bunker somewhere filled with scientists and government officials, all of them working around the clock to find a cure or a vaccine or something, some way for them to take the world back. Probably, even. My brother was special, but he wasn’t unique.

I guess it should make me feel better to think that this isn’t the way humanity ends. It doesn’t. It just makes me more tired. What does it matter if there are still humans in a hundred years? Danny won’t be there. My friends won’t be there.

I won’t be there.

“It’s not safe to run, either,” I say. “I don’t know where to find food anywhere else. I don’t know where to find shelter. Where are you from?”

“Hillsdale.”

I blink slowly to muffle my surprise. Hillsdale is an hour’s drive from here. “Do you have a car?”

“No.”

Of course she doesn’t have a car. Some of them have cars. They drive around at night, windows down, plates of bacon in their passenger seats, like anyone who’s stayed alive this long is stupid enough to give it all up for a few strips of fried pig. If it still is pig.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen a truck pull up behind any of the local grocery stores, and I know the shelves aren’t being restocked, and the power’s been out for weeks, so it’s not like anyone still has a freezer full of squirreled-away supplies for a rainy day.

People are supposed to taste a lot like pigs. I bet we’d make pretty good bacon.

“So how did you…?”

“I walked.” She looks at me defiantly. “I didn’t want to stay where they knew me.”

“Sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be here if this is where you’re from. They know you. Unless…” She pauses, gives me a thoughtful look. “Orphan?”

That would be the easiest answer. If there’s no one who can lure you in with a smile or a plate of bacon or the whisper of your name, you might be almost safe staying where you feel like you belong. Most of the people I see clustering in the brightly lit places are orphans. Some are self-made, but that doesn’t change the word, only the way you got there.

I shake my head. “No. My father and brother are still in the house where I… where I used to live. I mean, they were last time I checked. My father was… he was one of the first around here. He’s probably late-stage by now. My brother may be alone.”

Danny always hated to be alone. My heart clenches at the thought.

The stranger looks at me, calculation in her eyes. “No one else is in there with him? Just your brother and your father, who’s probably late-stage?”

“Yeah.”

“So if we kill them, we could take the house?”

She says it so calmly, like it’s the solution to all our problems. I stare at her, silent in my horror, and wonder how we got here. Will it really matter if we stay uninfected?

We’re all going to wind up monsters anyway.

Danny stayed interested in the rabies outbreak in Arizona. It was always so hard to predict what would interest him, and once something did, he tended to grab and hang on as hard as he could, like learning everything there was to know about some new kind of robot or battery or disease would make it something he could control, something he didn’t have to be afraid of. Sometimes he would come to my room, eyes grave behind his glasses, and try to explain it to me.

“Rabies is scary,” he said.

I laughed at him. When I think about it now, it makes me sick. He was my brother—is my brother, no matter what else has changed—and when he tried to tell me something that mattered to him, I laughed. Maybe I deserve everything that’s happened to me. Maybe I’m being punished for laughing.

But he should never have been punished that way.

I’d been laughing at him since we were little kids, since I’d been the first one to figure out that with Mom gone, Dad’s love was all we had, and he didn’t have enough for the both of us. Undaunted, Danny pressed on.

“Rabies is scary, but because it’s only transmitted through fluid contact, it’s never been scary enough to be a real threat. Even when we’ve had bad outbreaks, people could mostly stay safe by staying away from wild animals and seeking medical attention immediately if they thought they might have been exposed. Look at how often people decide not to vaccinate their dogs, even though a dog that gets infected will always have to be put down. It’s stupid. It’s shortsighted and it’s stupid.”

I sighed and pushed myself away from my desk. “What does this have to do with you being in my room on a school night? You didn’t even knock.”

“The bats in Arizona.”

“Uh-huh. You keep bringing them up.”

“There’s this outbreak there—it’s huge. Biggest one we’ve ever seen, and it’s been affecting all sorts of other local animals, even ones whose owners swear that they never came anywhere near a wild animal. Researchers have been trying to figure out how this is happening, and they finally did.” He paused dramatically.

Looking back, that should have been the moment when I realized how bad things were going to get. Danny always looked so happy when one of his obsessions came to a head. I think it was sort of like popping a mental zit for him. He poked and prodded at the problem until it was ready to blow, and then he squeezed it clean.

He didn’t look happy that time. He looked scared, and small, and a little confused, like he couldn’t understand how the universe could be this cruel.

“So?” I asked. “What is it?”

“It’s airborne.”

I frowned. “So? Everything’s airborne. That’s what makes a virus a virus.”

“Not true. A lot of viruses are transmitted through fluids, or fomites, or other mechanisms. Ebola isn’t airborne. Neither is herpes. Rabies has never been airborne before. That’s how we could keep it under control, even a little bit. It’s endemic in the mammals of North America. We’ve never been in a position to eradicate it. I don’t think we ever can . It must have… it must have mutated somehow. It’s spreading without actual contact.”

“So?”

“So rabies is bad .” He looked at me solemnly. He looked so small, and so young, and so afraid. “You know how in zombie movies, suddenly your friends aren’t your friends anymore? Because they got a disease?”

“Yeah?”

“Rabies is sort of like that. It affects the brain. We don’t know as much as we’d like about what it does in people, because when someone gets exposed we try to treat them as fast as we can, before they can get sick, but in animals, rabies causes paranoia, aggression, a fear of light, an aversion to water… and they can still do everything they could do before they got sick. A dog with rabies can still play fetch and remember how to use the doggie door. A person with rabies could probably still do anything a person without rabies could do.”

“So it’s like a zombie virus only people could still use tools?”

“Um,” said Danny. “Yeah.”

“Cool,” I said, and I had never been more wrong about anything in my life, and I’ll be paying for that word until I die. The whole world will. Danny already did.