“But you knew before this,” I argued. “You never wanted me to take the segment. You came with me.”
She came with me to save me at the last second. That was too strange to think about.
She looked absently across the scene they were building, slid the strap of the book bag through her fists.
She said, “I know what a setup looks like.”
I thought how real it had looked on film when the groom fell back from the gunshot; how I had never seen him again. I thought how stunned Bree had looked in the pictures as she bent over the body, tears falling from her wide-open eyes.
Let those who would be fooled, be fooled.
When I nodded, Bree’s shoulders sank with relief.
“What do I do?” I asked.
She slid the strap of her book bag into my hand.
“Hope you’re faster than the grips,” she said, “and that your memory’s good.”
I was already looking at the ground, that sloped away beneath us. Down was faster than up, and if I made it to the city, then…then…
I glanced back at her. “What will happen to you?”
She shrugged, half smiled. “I was supposed to die at the church door, too. I know how to handle myself.”
Suddenly, I didn’t doubt it.
“When you reach the city,” she said, “get work on the trains, if you can. By the time you’re over the mountains, there’s decent work for Lowers, and you’ll be too far for us to find you.”
When I reached for the bag, I clasped her hand for a second, and she jerked back in surprise before she could get hold of herself. (Everybody has their tells.)
“Can I have a bathroom break?” I asked, loudly enough for the director to overhear.
Prentis raised his hand. “Seconded.”
The director checked his watch. “Fine. Meet back here in five.”
Bree gave me one searching look; then she was walking back up toward the director. Her face was in perfect light, and as she started talking, he was already grinning.
I swung down behind the first of the outcroppings and headed for the forest.
Five minutes from now, when they realized I was gone, Bree would be as surprised as anyone, and she’d throw a fit and slow them down, but she had nothing to worry about—I’d be under tree cover by then.
What took everybody else five minutes, I could do in three.
AFTER THE CURE
by Carrie Ryan
I WAS SHOT WITH THE CURE IN THE DARK. LATER, SOMEONE would tell me it was a Tuesday, but before the tranq dart I didn’t know such a thing existed. It was either day or night, hungry or sated, alive or dead.
Then there was the cure and I was hauled to the Sanitation Center to be processed: our identities to be confirmed, and if forgotten, to be assigned a name, a registration number, date of birth, address.
There were so many abandoned kids after the pandemic stormed through that they changed the age of majority to sixteen, so in one fell swoop I became a legal adult female. They gave me my father’s house on the mountain outside of town. They hadn’t located him yet, and by law I’d have inherited it anyway. They told me it wouldn’t matter if he somehow found his way home unrecovered—they’d figured out early on that infected didn’t bite those who were cured. Once someone was Recovered, they were pulled back to human again even though they still had the infection in their blood.
At the Sanitation Center there were Reintroduction Classes on everything from basic algebra to civics and manners. I sat off to the side, pulling the old information from the part of my brain that’d never been touched by all of this. Others in the room watched the teacher, rapt, and I swear I saw one or two of them lick their lips or suck their teeth.
I wondered if there was a part of them still hungry or if it was just habit. Sometimes at night, in the darkness of the barracks, I’d hear my own teeth rattle and my stomach grumble.
It was like a secret shared by all of us. We knew that to report the stirring sensations would be to ask for more time locked away. None of us at the Sanitation Center had seen the sun since our first bites. Few of us were willing to give up the possibility of freedom by admitting the truth. I wanted to be back home. Even if my parents weren’t there and my sisters were missing, I wanted the familiar surroundings.
I wanted the smell of my old life: Dove soap cooped up in closets with crisply folded sheets.
Like the other Recovered, I suffered through the tests and the bar code tattoo along the back of my ear. Some kept their hair short, at least cut away from the mark. It became a sort of status symbol, like a gang marker, and rumor had it that people who’d never been infected would get similar tattoos in underground parlors or color them on with permanent ink.
Not me. The first thing I did after being released was grow my hair long. I didn’t want the reminder of what I’d been. It’s enough that in the brightness of the afternoon, sun will reflect oddly through my eyes, creating a faint glow of red.
That’s how they recognize us. That’s how everyone else knows to shun us.
I was a monster. I did hunt and kill other people, leaving them to infect in turn when my hunger was satisfied.
To me, vampire seems like too easy of a word for what we were.
For what I sometimes still am.
What was left of the government urged for level heads and acceptance. They handed out grants to public interest groups bent on studying us and integrating us. They introduced laws protecting us and incentives for hiring us.
None of that mattered. One flash of light into my eyes and everyone would know at a glance what I’d once been. It became common for stores and restaurants to install searingly bright bulbs above entrances just to catch us on the way inside.
I tried going back to school for about a week, but it became pretty clear I wasn’t too welcome. Classes were segregated, ostensibly to help catch up those of us who’d been “disoriented.” When I explained to the principal that none of us—the infected or the pure—had attended a single class for the last five years, so we were pretty much all in the same boat, he just shrugged.
“Legally, I can’t treat you any different from them.” He was good with his sneers. “But I get extra money for hosting rehabilitation classes, and if that means I get to throw y’all in a different classroom, away from everyone else, all the better.”
I walked right out of his office and off school grounds after that. It felt strange just being able to leave. But I was seventeen now, legally an adult, so what could they do?
Half of us—the Recovered—couldn’t figure out who we’d once been and where we’d come from. The longer you’d been infected, the more it ate away at your brain until there was hardly anything left. Just gaping holes through old memories so that you might remember half a name, part of a face, a hint of who you were.
They assigned new identities according to the alphabet, the same way they’d once named the hurricanes. If you wanted something different, you had to petition for it and wait.
In the beginning they tried to shield us from the worst of it: what we’d been and what we’d done. But you can’t hide something that big for forever, and it didn’t take long for us to understand two things: first, the world we’d once known was decimated, and second, we were the cause.
