“Amy… even if we wanted to risk a breach of the quarantine, do you want me to point out all of the military vehicles surrounding that place? Plus whatever aircraft this video came from? You heard me say it’s a gun camera, right?”
“Then I’ll go myself. That’s what I was trying to do, get them to take me to that place. That’s what I was doing and you stopped me and now I’m here and David is there and they’re going to heat it to four thousand degrees.”
“Amy… if that’s really him, and he’s in there with those…
“Uh huh. So how soon can we be down there?”
6 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum
TJ claimed it was around 9 P.M., which he said he could tell by looking at the moon. That sounded like bullshit but it didn’t feel like he was off by much. He and Hope were in my room, the latter heating a coffeepot full of water over a Sterno can. She said, “The last bunch of supplies had boxes of macaroni and cheese but we don’t have enough heat to boil the water that long. You know it never occurred to me until now how much energy it takes to heat water. I mean, I’ve had science classes and I understand that’s why they use water to put out fires. But like when you’re at home you don’t think about it. You run a hot shower or let hot water run in the sink while you brush your teeth and you don’t realize that somewhere down the line it took like several pounds of coal to make enough electricity to heat it. We are soooo wasteful.”
TJ said, “Goddamnit, Hope, why did you have to mention hot showers? You wagin’ a psychological torture campaign against me tonight. Don’t know what I did to offend you.”
She dipped her finger in the water. “Okay, we got two flavors of Ramen and they both taste exactly the same.”
There was a moment soon after that, as we sat around the room eating noodles out of coffee cups, hearing muffled conversation from the hall, when everything seemed normal again. We could have been camping. I felt a strange sense of calm and realized what I was feeling was the release of responsibility. Nobody expected me to be at work the next day. Nobody was trying to call me. I had no e-mail to check. Ghost enthusiasts weren’t stalking me on Facebook. Our responsibilities were stripped down to the bare biological basics: thirst, hunger, cold. All at once I could see why lifelong convicts got to where they couldn’t function outside of prison walls. You’re almost functioning more at a level for which the human brain was intended.
I asked TJ, “What’s the deal with the colors? The red and green? How’d we wind up on teams?”
“Well, that’s the thing. Nobody knows. Everybody went through decontamination and when you stepped out of the chemical shower you were handed coveralls. Half got red, half got green. They didn’t tell us nothin’ or put us in different sections. Just, ‘here, put this shit on.’ But it don’t take Dr. House to figure out that the reds are way more likely to spider out. Carlos was a red, Sal was a red. Danny, Marcus, that fat Muslim dude. It’s not a hundred percent but it’s not within margin of error, either. Red means ‘high risk’, seems pretty common sense. Everybody figured it out before anybody said it out loud. The colors started separatin’ to themselves. As colors tend to do.”
“Owen has the only gun?”
“Yep. Until somebody finds another. Owen has appointed himself the de facto President of the Quarantine based on the fact that he happened to find a sidearm that got left behind in the melee. Lot of human history works like that.”
We had boarded up the broken window, but could still hear the bonfire crackling down in the yard. TJ continued, “The lobby and the bit of yard outside the lobby, that whole patio area, that’s shared territory. The second floor, that’s where the hospital still functions as a hospital. The doc and two nurses got left behind, they’re treatin’ the sick. The regular sick, you know. People keep cuttin’ themselves on broken glass, about a dozen people got them nasty shits that’s goin’ around. You ever talk to the doc, by the way? Since you been back?”
“No. Tomorrow.” I had a thing about doctors, for a very good reason.
TJ continued, “So, then the third and fourth floors are all red territory. We’re here on the fifth and up, those are the green floors. The two sides, we don’t shoot each other on sight but it gets tense, as you saw. And you can tell which side has the gun, by who got the lower floors.”
“Why?”
Hope interjected, “No elevators. Nobody wants to tromp up and down a million stairs to get to their room. Everybody would prefer to just pile down at the bottom. Owen declared his people got the good floors.”
I said, “Why did I wind up back at the asylum?”
TJ shrugged. “Like they’d tell us. Loudspeaker came on and said you needed to go to the gate. Truck hauled you away. That was Friday morning. Now you’re back.”
“How long can we keep this up? Before the food and everything runs out?”
TJ said, “They dropped in supplies. Truck dumped out boxes of stuff. I assume they’ll do it again.”
“Yeah, but I’m saying… let’s say that hypothetically they can’t figure out a cure or even a reliable test for the infection. They keep dumping the suspects here in the quarantine and… what? We’re still here ten years from now? Somethin’ has to give, right?”
Looking into his cup, TJ said, “What would you do?”
“Drop a nuke on it. Write a letter of apology to the surviving family members. Send ’em some coupons to Outback Steakhouse as compensation. Rest of the country breathes a sigh of relief.”
He shrugged. “That rumor started about two minutes after outbreak. I was hearing that shit everywhere. Man, people got a low opinion of the armed forces, don’t they? Watch too many zombie movies. No way they get away with that in the real world.”
Hope said, “What if they cover it up? Make it look like something else?”
I said, “What, like fake a gas line explosion?”
“No, all they have to do is poison our food. Then say the infection did it.”
That brought silence to the room.
TJ said, “Both of you think you bein’ cynical, but you’re not. Reality is, if they wanted us dead, they don’t have to do anything. Situation we got here is what cops call a self-cleaning oven. Some gang neighborhoods, they’d just let be. Come back in five years and it’s all quiet, all on its own. You know, because everybody shot each other. It’d be just like that here, because instead of organizing and figuring out how to work together, we all got paranoid, like Owen.”
He stood up.
“It’s early, but I’m goin’ to bed. No TV and it too dark to read. What else am I gonna do?”
Hope said, “Ugh. The nights are the worst. I’m to where I can tolerate the days as long as nobody dies. But the nights go on
TJ said, “I agree. And yet, the night comes just the same. Like the rotation of the Earth don’t give a shit what we think.”
Hope was making a huge freaking understatement when she said the nights were the worst. I realized when TJ left that I was also exhausted, but it was only after I went to bed that it became screamingly apparent that we had no lights and no heat and were basically living in a third world gulag. I tried to remember what day TJ said it was. Sunday? So the rest of the country was probably watching Sunday Night Football. Or were they? Maybe it was like this everywhere. Everyone in America huddled in the dark, waiting.
TJ and Hope left the room to me at bedtime, so I guessed it was my room. I wrapped myself up in as many blankets as I could find. I knew exactly where to find them, just as I knew where to find the hunk of particle board we used to cover the broken window. My specific memories never came back but a lot of the automatic stuff was still programmed in. I suddenly remembered that I had broken the window by throwing a little television out of it. I couldn’t remember why.
I shivered and wrapped up the covers a little tighter.
We had a bunch of emergency kerosene space heaters that had been left behind in a storage building, but
