I wait for him to appear in the opening, Sissy’s silver locket in one hand, Chris’s revolver in the other. In one hand, the past. In the other, the future. That’s one way to look at it.
Maybe if I play possum he—or it—will move on. I watch the opening through slits for eyes.
And then he’s here, a thick, black pupil in the crimson eye, swaying unsteadily as he leans inside the tent, three, maybe four feet away, and I can’t see his face, but I can hear him gasping for breath. I’m trying to control my own breathing, but no matter how shallowly I do it, the rattle of the infection in my chest sounds louder than the explosions of the battle. I can’t make out exactly what he’s wearing, except his pants seem to be tucked into his tall boots. A soldier? Must be. He’s holding a rifle.
I’m saved. I raise the hand holding the locket and call out weakly. He stumbles forward. Now I can see his face. He’s young, just a little older than I am, and his neck is shiny with blood, and so are the hands that hold the rifle. He goes to one knee beside the cot, then recoils when he sees my face, the sallow skin, the swollen lips, and the sunken bloodshot eyes that are the telltale signs of the plague.
Unlike mine, the soldier’s eyes are clear—and wide with terror.
“We had it wrong, all wrong!” he whispers. “They’re already here—been here—right here—inside us—the whole time—inside us.”
Two large shapes leap through the opening. One grabs the soldier by the collar and drags him outside. I raise the old revolver—or try to, because it slips from my hand before I can lift it two inches above the blanket. Then the second one is on me, knocking the revolver away, yanking me upright. The aftershock of pain blinds me for a second. He yells over his shoulder at his buddy, who has just ducked back inside. “Scan him!” A large metal disk is pressed against my forehead.
“He’s clean.”
“And sick.” Both men are dressed in fatigues—the same fatigues worn by the soldier they took away.
“What’s your name, buddy?” one of them asks. I shake my head. I’m not getting this. My mouth opens, but no intelligible sound comes out.
“He’s gone zombie,” his partner says. “Leave him.”
The other one nods, rubbing his chin, looking down at me. Then he says, “The commander ordered retrieval of all uninfected civilians.”
He tucks the blanket around me, and with one fluid motion heaves me out of the bunk and over his shoulder. As a definitively infected civilian, I’m pretty shocked.
“Chill, zombie,” he tells me. “You’re going to a better place now.”
I believe him. And for a second I let myself believe I’m not going to die after all.
THEY TAKE ME to a quarantined floor at the base hospital reserved for plague victims, nicknamed the Zombie Ward, where I get an armful of morphine and a powerful cocktail of antiviral drugs. I’m treated by a woman who introduces herself as Dr. Pam. She has soft eyes, a calm voice, and very cold hands. She wears her hair in a tight bun. And she smells like hospital disinfectant mingled with a hint of perfume. The two smells don’t go well together.
I have a one-in-ten chance of survival, she tells me. I start to laugh. I must be a little delirious from the drugs. One in ten? And here I was thinking the plague was a death sentence. I couldn’t be happier.
Over the next two days, my fever soars to a hundred and four. I break into a cold sweat, and even my sweat is flecked with blood. I float in and out of a delirious twilight sleep while they throw everything at the infection. There is no cure for the Red Death. All they can do is keep me doped up and comfortable until the bug decides whether it likes the way I taste.
The past shoves its way in. Sometimes Dad is sitting next to me, sometimes Mom, but most of the time it’s Sissy. The room turns red. I see the world through a diaphanous curtain of blood. The ward recedes behind the red curtain. It’s just me and the invader inside me and the dead—not just my family, but all the dead, all however-many-billion of them, reaching for me as I run. Reaching. Running. And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead.
On the third day, the fever breaks. By the fifth, I’m holding down liquids and my eyes and lungs have begun to clear. The red curtain pulls back, and I can see the ward, the gowned and masked doctors and nurses and orderlies, the patients in various stages of death, past and future, floating on the gentle sea of morphine or being wheeled out of the room with their faces covered, the present-dead.
On the sixth day, Dr. Pam declares the worst over. She orders me off all meds, which kind of bums me out; I’m going to miss my morphine.
“Not my call,” she tells me. “You’re being moved into the convalescent ward till you can get back on your feet. We’re going to need you.”
“Need me?”
“For the war.”
The war. I remember the firefight, the explosions, the soldier bursting into the tent and they’re inside us!
“What’s going on?” I ask. “What happened here?”
She’s already turned away, handing my chart to an orderly and telling him in a quiet voice, but not so quiet I can’t hear, “Bring him to the exam room at fifteen hundred hours, after he’s clear of the meds. Let’s tag and bag him.”
I’M TAKEN TO a large hangar near the entrance to the base. Everywhere I look, there’re signs of the recent battle. Burned-out vehicles, the rubble of demolished buildings, stubborn little fires smoldering, pockmarked asphalt, and three-foot-wide craters from mortar fire. But the security fence has been repaired, and beyond it I can see a no-man’s-land of blackened earth where Tent City used to be.
Inside the hangar, soldiers are painting huge red circles on the shiny concrete floor. There are no planes. I’m wheeled through a door in the back, into an examination room, where I’m heaved onto the table and left alone for a few minutes, shivering in my thin hospital gown under the bright fluorescent lights. What’s with the big red circles? And how did they get the power back on? And what did she mean by “Let’s tag and bag him”? I can’t keep my thoughts from flying in every direction. What happened here? If the aliens attacked the base, where are the dead aliens? Where’s their downed spacecraft? How did we manage to defend ourselves against an intelligence thousands of years more advanced than ours—and defeat it?
The inner door opens, and Dr. Pam comes in. She shines a bright light in my eyes. Listens to my heart, my lungs, thumps on a couple places. She shows me a silver-gray pellet about the size of a grain of rice.
“What’s that?” I ask. I half expect her to say it’s an alien spaceship: We’ve discovered they’re the size of an amoeba.
Instead, she says the pellet is a tracking device, hooked into the base’s mainframe. Highly classified, been used by the military for years. The idea is to implant all surviving personnel. Each pellet transmits its own unique signal, a signature that can be picked up by detectors as far as a mile away. To keep track of us, she tells me. To keep us safe.
She gives me a shot in the back of my neck to numb me, then inserts the pellet under my skin, near the base of my skull. She bandages the insertion point, then helps me back into the wheelchair and takes me into the adjoining room. It’s much smaller than the first room. A white reclining chair that reminds me of a dentist’s. A computer and monitor. She helps me into the chair and proceeds to tie me down: straps across my wrists, straps across my ankles. Her face is very close to mine. The perfume has a slight edge today over the disinfectant in the Odor Wars. She doesn’t miss my expression. “Don’t be scared,” she says. “It isn’t painful.”