White Horse

The tray lands on the table with a clatter. The table barely registers; it’s fastened to the wall with bolts big enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Everything else could vaporize, but they’d be here, too stubborn to quit biting the concrete blocks.

“This ain’t no Holiday Inn,” she says.

“Gosh, I hadn’t noticed.”

She lumbers away, back to her food cart. It’s a tall, thin insulated box in beige, which makes me think it fell off the back of an airplane. This whole place is filled with things borrowed, begged for, or stripped from institutions.

The food, however, is five-star. There’s no Jell-O salad and brown slush with graying chunks of meat on the plastic plates. Instead what we have is homemade ravioli filled with ricotta and spinach, tossed in a browned butter sauce. There’s a small bowl of salad greens, crisp and fresh and tangy with a vinaigrette that knows nothing about plastic bottles. And fruit salad with delicate bites of fruits the local supermarket doesn’t stock.

They brought me here after Jenny was killed. For observation, the woman in uniform said. Military. Somewhere along the way the president declared martial law and nobody bothered to let people know. They patrol the streets, watching, waiting for someone to cause a ruckus, which I did. They saw that. They pulled me away from my sister. But they can’t tell me who shot her or why. I don’t get that. When I ask, they keep telling me they don’t know. “Do you think I did it?” I ask them repeatedly. “We don’t know.” They’ve gone from being An Army of One to being an army of We Don’t Know.

There are footsteps. Combat boots with a woman’s light foot shoved inside.

“Zoe Marshall?” The dark-skinned woman’s voice is larger than her body. She’s a Pez dispenser in fatigues, holding a clipboard and cup of coffee. She gives me the coffee.

I nod, because who else would I be?

“Sergeant Tara Morris. You can go. But I want you back here tomorrow to see the shrink.”

“Back here? I don’t even know where here is.”

She reels off the address.

“That used to be a private school.”

“Not anymore. We’re a low-security halfway house of sorts. We help people. At least until…”

“Everyone comes back to life?” I rub my forehead, wonder why it’s hole-free when my sister can’t say the same. “Did you find out who killed Jenny?”

“No. I’m sorry. It’s not good enough, but that’s all I’ve got,” she tells me. “We’re a militia at best, not a police force. You’re not in any trouble, so you can go home.”

“Then why the locked doors?”

“You were kicking my men. How do you think that looked?”

I close my eyes. “Like some asshole had just shot my sister and they were trying to drag me away from her.”

“It looked bad,” she says. “Real bad. You could’ve been sick, crazy, maybe, or a delinquent. I have to keep my people safe.”

“She was all I had left. Our parents—”

Schultz hunched over the microscope. “I ate the mice.”

“Try and see from our side, would you? We’re seeing the worst of everyone. Jumping to the wrong conclusion is going to keep us alive. If we assume everyone’s a friend, we could lose more people, and that’s not acceptable.”

“Where’s my sister?”

“We burned her. We’ve got more dead than we know what to do with.” For a moment she looks scared. “We’re dying in droves. Not just us. Everybody.”

Not just us. Everybody.

I take a cab back to my apartment. The cabdriver wears one of those flimsy protective masks. He takes my money with a gloved hand, eyeing the note suspiciously. I half expect him to spray it down with disinfectant, but greed wins out and he stuffs it in his pocket.

“I work for myself now,” he mutters as I watch the bill disappear. “No one to be accountable to out there.”

Porkchop is gone already, so I let myself in with my key, ride the elevator, listen to the lonely hum that seems to chew up the available air and leaves me covered in a thin sheen of cold sweat. I am a robot performing the door-opening routine. The shards and bones I took from the box those weeks ago are still in the plastic Baggie. I cram them into my pocket and leave again.

Pope Pharmaceuticals considers you part of the family.

No one stops me. The lone security guard grunts as I show him my ID card. He doesn’t look me in the eye, nor do I look into his. We both know why. We’re here when so many aren’t. That’s not a badge of honor, just a sign of otherness.

The lab where there used to be mice is empty. Schultz’s usual seat is pushed away from the bench. The microscope is an old man hunched over a glass-covered lap.

Time is ticking. I do what I’ve seen them do before, or at least a bastardized version of that process. I scrape the bones onto a slide, shove them onto the microscope’s waiting arms.

“What are you doing?”

The voice is inhuman, but the face is still Schultz. He lurches toward me. “You can’t do that.”

“I thought you were—”

“Dead?” He laughs. “This is a hard-core game, man. I’m holding on to the end, otherwise I’m gone for good. We don’t come back. Dust. That’s where we go. So whaddaya have for me?”

He reaches for the slide. When I pull away he feints, and without thinking I move the other way, leaving him free to snatch my prize.

He shoves it into place under the microscope’s all-seeing eye.

“Suh-weet,” he says. “Look.”

Deep breath. Press eyepiece into socket.

And I see it: the disease.

Noises live inside the phone, now that have nothing to do with dial tones.

Something waits and listens. For what, I don’t know.

“Hello,” I whisper.

Hello.

FIFTEEN

The scientific community has been busy while people die. But they’ve been confounded until now. And from the way this mouthpiece scratches his thinning hair, I’d say there’s still a measure of uncertainty. He doesn’t believe his words, but neither is he convinced they’re false.

He stands there on his podium, a half dozen microphones shoved under his mouth to catch his words like some electronic bib, and tells us that we’re dying of some viral form of cancer.

You got OWNed.

What he doesn’t say is how we got it. When a journalist from CNN asks, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand and mumbles about how maybe it’s something common that mutated into this mass killer. Like the 1918 Spanish flu that mutated from a killer of the weak to a slayer of vigor during its second wave.

But I know. I know. This all began with a man named George P. Pope.

That thought fills me with fear.

This time when I call the CDC, a sound file asks me to leave my name, number, and reason for calling. They’re busy, it says, they’ll get to me. But for now I have to blow my whistle in a virtual