Daylight.
After hours of running and hiding, here is what we
know for sure: Dr. Camille is dead, and Billy is in a pretty bad way. His shoulder is bleeding again, and it just won’t seem to stop.
We’re maybe two or three miles away from the truck, and I’m not sure if Billy’s
got it in him to keep running.
Uh,
yeah…this is bad.
We’ve
been on our feet since the blighted took the bowling alley, and I think the
plan is to catch some rest here if we can. There’s some bedding up here that actually
hasn’t been completely ruined by all of the rain, and the roof is still mostly
in tact over the bathroom and the little kitchenette. Billy’s already crashed
out, and Dad’s pretty close. He’s holding Billy tight against his chest—holding
him the way I imagine he must have when Bill was a baby and he and Mom kept him
in their bed with them every night.
Dad
keeps asking me to grab some rest, but I’m just too amped up. I’m too scared
and too wired to do anything but get this down here, and I don’t have much
time. I just dipped under the 50% mark on battery power, and I’m kind of
doubtful of finding another plug-in. Might not ever happen again. It’s really sad
to write that, but there’s no use in sugarcoating it. That’s kind of where
we’re at…
We
found this X-NET hotspot in the ruins of an old Red Lion. Something must still
be working down in the guts of this place. It’s pretty creepy, hiding up here
in one of the penthouse suites while the blighted scurry about below us, doing
in Portland exactly what they did in Seattle. The eastern façade of the
building is gone and there are hundreds of rooms exposed to a sheer drop down to
the rubble below.
The
sun is out, just now peeking above the edge of Mt. Hood. It’s darned beautiful
and, if this is it for us, then at least we had that.
I’ve
got to try to stay on task here. Sorry about the digressions. Mrs. Cranston
would be seriously pulling her hair out reading this thing....
So
here is the sad reality of it all—just a week ago we had it all and we didn’t
even know it. Sure, we were a little hungry, but there was food and we had each other.
Well,
that is we had everything but Mom.
And
we changed that. I mean, I haven’t even gotten that far yet in talking about
all of this, but the thing is that we found
her. Dr. Camille’s team brought her back to the RZ, and we even spoke with her
before things completely fell apart.
Now,
I simply wish that we had never come. Billy’s got blood trickling out of his
mouth. It’s not much, but it’s there all the same and it was like that with Dr.
Camille just before he died. Which was just after
he told us about the hormones.
The
danged hormones!
Here’s
my shot at spelling it—auxin. I’m
pretty sure it’s not “oxen,” so there you have it. It’s a plant hormone that
stimulates growth in foundational cells—stem cells and t-cells and stuff like
that. Dr. Camille and his research team were using trace amounts to augment the
reconstituted blood. Mr. Marshall said something before Camille died about an
“immune system on steroids,” so it must have had a pretty big impact on the
blighted.
The
only problem was that it created a very specific set of side effects.
Behavioral
side effects.
“They
first manifested in cohort one nine days ago,” Camille said. He coughed, a fine
crimson mist speckling his filthy smock. He’d been shot in the stomach and,
despite the best efforts of Captains Ward and Perez, he was hurt really badly.
“What
are we talking about here?” Dad said.
We
had reunited with Marshall, Camille, and Perez (in addition to about a dozen
soldiers and civilian survivors) in an alley behind the ruins of the old Donut
Queen on East Burnside. Man, I’d once had donuts and chocolate milk there after
playing soccer in Buckman Park!
“Aggression,”
Camille said. “Diminished cognitive abilities. They…they attacked each other in
their barracks. It was bad. The second cohort was beginning to exhibit some of
the…some of the same behaviors when Owens opened the gates on us.” He fell into
another coughing fit and emerged on the other side of it wearing a macabre
smile. “It’s a fitting end for them, I suppose, given everything that has
happened in the reclamation zone.”
“But
is it total?” Dad said. “Are these…behavioral changes presenting in all of the treatment subjects?”
Marshall
nodded solemnly. “Auxin has a history of triggering some pretty extreme genetic
responses. We just…we didn’t know until after the fact. It was still a pretty
experimental supplement when the blight came screaming out of Asia…”
Dr.
Camille’s head lolled on his shoulders. He pulled Dad close and whispered
something in his ear, and then he locked eyes with me and Billy and fell back
on the concrete. Perez and a couple of the soldiers carried him inside what was
left of the restaurant, and we learned an hour later that he was gone. Just
like that, any hope we’d had for a treatment to the blight had vanished.
This
was just…ah shoot, let me go back here for a minute and check my history.
Yeppers—did
it again. Left out quite a bit, and now I’m backtracking. Sheesh, apologies…
Let’s
go back to our first day in the RZ.
Our
first day with her.
Dad
wrote the letter and we took a long walk. It was a great way to spend our first
day back in civilization. There was a commissary and a large cafeteria. There
was a school (alas, only elementary, but it’s a start, right?) and a little
make-shift library. There was a fitness facility where people inside were
playing basketball and volleyball!
Ward
showed us the medical district—four imposing square blocks quarantined behind thick
coils of razor wire where people in clean suits (they looked like Earth
astronauts—seriously) moved between the buildings.
We
hiked up to the northern edge of the West Hills and found folks working together
to clean out some of the nice old homes up there off 23rd. They were
rebuilding, and we pitched in until a siren sounded at noon and everyone walked
back down into the heart of the RZ for a lunch of hot potato soup and crunchy sourdough
bread and even a bit of savory bacon and cheese. Criminy, it was so good to have
seconds!
We
were back in our room after lunch when Ward brought us the good news. I’d spent
the time surfing the X-NET while Dad and Billy played chess.
“Your
wife is here, Mr. Keane. She came in on the daily transport,” Ward said,
smiling at my father. “If you and the kids are okay with suiting up, she’d like
to see you all before taking the next step.”
Dad’s
smile in that moment had been as bright as the sun over Mt. Hood was this morning.
Man, it was just awesome to see that! We grabbed our coats and were on our way.
They
doused us with that fogging chemical stuff and we shrugged into clean suits and
then we were following a nurse through a warren of antiseptic hallways. Most of
the doors were open and I saw patient after patient connected to machines. Most
were sleeping, but some just lay there weakly in their beds, looking at the
ceiling, or straight ahead at seemingly nothing at all.
“Room
319,” the nurse said. She opened the door, and there she was.
Mom.
“You
have ten minutes. I wish it was more, but her condition is pretty fragile. We
need to get her on a platelet drip as soon as possible in order to get her prepped
for her treatment.”
Mom
smiled weakly as we piled into the room. Her eyes were wet, and she put her
arms around me when I went to her. She was so
thin. Her chest, when it rose, felt as brittle as parchment paper.
“Allie,”
she whispered, the tears now sliding down her cheeks. “Allie bird, you’re so
thin. What happened, sweet girl?”
“I’m
okay, Mom,” I replied, my voice shaking. “I’m fine. Dad and Billy are taking
good care of me. We…we came back for you,
Mom. We’re going to bring you home—back to the cabin with us.”
“I
know that, Allie bird,” Mom said. “I knew you’d come and find me.” I’d never
seen someone so thin up close. Her eyes were threaded through with little red
veins, her once-beautiful hair now incredibly thin. When she smiled, her
cracked lips did nothing to pad the cheekbones that protruded from her skin.
Her
collar bones, her arms, the tiny bones in her neck—I’ve never seen anything
like it.
“Send
your brother over here, Allie bird.”
“I
love you, Mom.”
“I
love you too, Allie. So much, bunches and bunches.”
I
lost it then. She’d said that to me every single day for as long as I could
remember. Careful not to hurt her, I gave her another hug and let Billy slip in
for his own reunion. They spoke for three or four minutes, and then Dad went to
her and he held her hand. He traced the curve of her jaw, tucked a wisp of hair
behind her ear.
They
just held hands, saying nothing and crying a little. When the nurse came back,
Dad leaned in and told her he’d stay with her through the treatment. She wiped
the tears away and nodded at him, and that was the last we saw of her.
That
was three days ago. Three days ago, when things had seemed like they might
actually work out.
We’d
eaten dinner—tofu tacos and refried beans and honest-to-goodness pasteurized
cow milk—with the rest of the community and then Billy and I had gone back to
our room while Dad spent the night at Mom’s bedside.
“This
is going to work,” Billy said. I’d been whooping his butt at chess again and he
was going through the motions of falling on the sword. “I can feel it, Allie.
We’re going to get her back, and then we’re getting the hell out of here.”
“I
sure hope so,” I said. I remember now, just typing this out here, having this
really dark feeling down deep inside that things wouldn’t be okay—that things, in fact, were going to get much, much
worse before it was all said and done.
And
I hate to say I told you so.
Oh,
oh…there’s a yawn. Been up way too long yet, and there’s still such a long way
to go. I’m going to (yawned again—can’t stop once you get started, right?)
close my eyes for just a few minutes here. Got to rest up if we’re going to get
back to the truck, after all.
It’s
our only chance.
Who
knows? Maybe things will go our way after all. Despite everything I’ve seen in
the last few days, maybe everything will come out okay in the end, right?
Right?
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