Zombies: More Recent Dead

Aftermath Joy Kennedy-O’Neill

I’m driving to Houston when Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” comes on the radio. I have to pull over and watch my hands shake; it’s been years since anyone aired anything like that—no “Reality Bites,” no “Once Bitten Twice Shy”—although I suppose that playing the song is a sign that the nation is moving on. I sit in the car and tremble, feeling angry and nauseous. Love bites, love bleeds, love lives, love dies . . .

After the epidemic, when a few radio stations had finally come back online, it was just news updates, dead lists, and static interrupted by the long silences of power outages. Then when some of the grids got stabilized it was “all Gershwin, all the time,” and then last year, when everyone was digging victory gardens to supplement rations, it was big band tunes. Swing, baby, swing. Pull ourselves up by bootstraps, brother. Moving on and moving up. I can hum “Jump, Jive, and Wail” in my sleep now. When you wake up, will you walk out? It can’t be love if you throw it about . . .

I’m so shaky that I think about turning around for home, but the car has its entire gas ration in the tank and I really need to see an optometrist. I’m starting to squint and tear up when I teach, so my prescription has probably changed. The headaches are awful. They started soon after last year’s Tres de Julio celebration and feel like an elastic band is wrapping around my forehead, squeezing with every heartbeat. Cal has been kissing each eye when I get home. There are no more eye doctors in Lake Jackson but he said there are a few in the city who are taking appointments as best they can around the rolling blackouts. He even heard that Bausch and Lomb’s Argentina plant might be going online again, so there may be contact lenses soon.

I have to pull myself together. An hour’s drive is a luxury that I should be savoring; my calves have grown thick from bicycling to work. H-town’s skyline ahead of me is lovely under the blue summer sky. Of course, the Chase Tower’s top is still left ragged by an airliner’s crash; seeing its scarred bone-beams reminds me of 9/11 and a more innocent time. Back then we thought that three thousand Americans dying by terrorists’ hands was the most horrific thing we’d ever witnessed. We thought HIV and cancer and SARS were the big bogeymen in the closet. But now, with a planet missing nearly one-third of its population, our fears from the last decade seem glamorously bittersweet. When you’re alone, do you let go?

A yellow butterfly is perched on top of a bullet-dented road sign. Things seem almost back to normal—there is no smoke on the horizon, the barricades have been removed, and grass and bluebonnets grow on the side of the road. There are birds singing, red-tailed hawks catching the thermals, and the buzzards are only devouring roadkill. It’s just a possum. Everything is fine.

So I pull back into the near empty lanes as the song ends and a Britney Spears tune comes on—whatever happened to her? Did she make it?—and I know I can’t handle these voices from the past, my past, so soon. I still need baby steps with Benny Goodman. And I’m thinking that I must be the last person in the world who is still having a problem getting over it, but when I walk into the optometrist’s dingy waiting room there are two cases of hysterical blindness waiting patiently for their names to be called.

They now say that the first person who got sick was a sheep herder in Bhutan, which upends everyone’s theory of a terrorist’s biolab accidental release. The man got flu-like symptoms but still felt well enough to attend a national festival and grand opening of a new railway going over the Black Mountains. Later, hundreds of other people in Bhutan, Nepal, and India got sick with the same bug and recovered. It was what they then called the ovis flu, which was supposed to be just a weak cousin of the swine and bird flu. I remember reading about it in Newsweek’s science section while sipping coffee at the kitchen table . . . two years ago that feel like two thousand.

Then it mutated. Patient Zero was a grandmother in New Delhi whose lungs filled up with fluid from trying to fight the flu. She succumbed after forty-eight hours and was placed inside the hospital’s morgue, but the next day there was pounding from within the cooler. An unnerved hospital worker opened the door and there she was—naked, pale, blank-eyed, and blinking . . . and hungry. She had unzipped her body bag and was half out of it. Everyone remembers where they were when they first saw the YouTube video of her attacking the nurses. A security camera captured the grainy image of her staggering down the hospital hallway; one foot was still caught in the body bag and she dragged it behind her like a wrinkled cocoon. Her breasts were long and dangled like fleshy pendulums as she lunged for the first nurse. There were sprays of blood as she bit into the woman’s hospital scrubs, and when the second nurse—a man—tried to intervene, the old woman leaped and threw her whole body on him. She sat on his chest as he shouted in surprise and tried to flip her over. She actually ate half of his neck and one cheek—we could see her swallowing. Her face was devoid of expression.

The video went viral. Most everyone thought it was a hoax but it was hard to dismiss. Her white haunches and her black pubic hair . . . and the way the first nurse fell so hard on the floor that we could see her arm breaking and her pager go flying . . . None of it seemed staged. We supposed it could be CGI’ed but every time Cal and I watched it together the hair had risen on my arms. The video had been soundless but I imagined the sound of that body bag shuffing on the linoleum as she took each step, like a needle off the track of a turntable. Ssh. Ssh. Ssh. The same sound I would later make to Lindy when she had nightmares about the “sick people” outside our boarded up windows. Ssh, ssh, ssh. Go to sleep.

More incidents like the one in the New Delhi hospital followed: Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok. Doctors backpedalled, saying it was physically impossible for the dead to rise and what we were seeing were patients who had been prematurely declared dead. Calming sound clips included “Determining death can be difficult . . . ” “The puffer fish, for example, emits a powerful neurotoxin which can induce a death-like paralysis . . . ”

But one beleaguered doctor was adamant. “The patient’s heart had stopped. There was no brain activity. Forty-eight hours later there was still no brain activity, and her tissues had actually started to decay and putrefy.” (I remember his Indian accent and emphasis on putrify.) “And then the patient rose.” This was the sound bite played round the world.

“What did the optometrist say?” Cal asks when I get home.

I present my new black-rimmed glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottles, and wrinkle my nose. “I need a new prescription, but these are the only ones he had close to it.”

He laughs. “Sexy librarian look. How is Houston?”

“Good. Less traffic, that’s for sure. Someone in the waiting room said that the museums might reopen for one day a week.” I don’t tell him about the cases of hysterical blindness, or the new “old” songs playing on the radio.

“I’d love to see the Menil collection again,” he smiles hopefully. “How much were the glasses?”

“Eighteen ration points. I’ll put in more overtime.”

“No worries. I’ll do more.” Our candles are lit because the power is off again and we share a can of chili that only expired two months ago, along with some sliced cucumbers from our victory garden. I can smell the shadows of the house, dusty and waiting. Their silences press on me as firm as a hand. In the back of the house is Lindy’s room, and I suppose her stuffed animals are covered in dust and her plastic fairies all have cobwebbed wings.

The first time I saw a Turner, in real life, was on campus. Cal was teaching his college algebra class in the A-wing and I was downstairs teaching English lit. The black, beetle-like phone mounted on the classroom wall began to ring and I stopped my lecture to stare at it stupidly. I had never heard the classroom phones ring before. Before I could reach for the receiver all the students’ cell phones started buzzing and vibrating, and an alarm in the hallway went off and a speaker crackled: “Emergency alert. Please lock all classroom doors and wait for instructions. Do not use emergency exits. Repeat . . . ”

I rushed to the back of the room and locked the door. The college had installed the phones, alert systems, and the new door locks soon after the Virginia Tech shootings. I told the students to move away from the windows. I thought we had a shooter, or that maybe there had been an accidental release at the nearby petrochemical plants. But a shadow passed by the window.

A girl shrieked and we saw a man’s gaunt face and hollowed eyes. He was shuffling past our classroom to the pavilion outside. There were crusts of blood around his mouth and fingers. A campus security guard cornered him but the man, moving surprisingly fast, rushed towards the guard and bit into his jugular. Both tumbled to the ground and then the man . . . god it’s hard to write this . . . the man bit straight down into the guard’s belly and shook his head, like a dog does, as he ripped out portions of entrails. The guard’s white shirt became blood soaked but it wasn’t like the horror movies, not all red and monochromatic; it was red and maroon and dark brown and then bile green when the bowels were pierced. My students were screaming, hysterical.

I was frozen.

Three police officers ran into the pavilion and shot. One of the bullets pinged against a bronze sculpture of cranes, and I remember how dispassionate the regal birds looked. One bird had been sculpted with its foot tucked up against its body, and now it looked as if it was trying to gracefully avoid the bloodshed at its feet. More shots: once, twice . . . at the third we saw shards of pink pieces of bone explode from the man’s kneecap but he crawled onward, always reaching for the police. He looked ravenous. He never said anything, just groaned, and his eyes were milky and dead-looking, like a shark’s. It wasn’t until they shot him right in the head that he stopped for good. I smelled the vomit from one of my students as it seeped into the classroom carpet.

The blood from the two dead men outside was pooling, running through the cobblestones, being funneled straight toward our classroom’s baseboard. I stood up shakily and pulled the blinds down. We huddled under the tables in the classroom and listened to the squawk of the police radios outside until the alert system blatted, “Please proceed to emergency exits.”

That was our last day at work. Cal and I raced to each other’s offices and grabbed tests and papers to grade—isn’t that funny? I suppose we were thinking that a few days at home and there would soon be a cure. A final alert was being sent out: “To minimize the threat of contagion, all local school districts will be closing. In the aftermath of today’s tragedy . . . ”

“Why is it always ‘aftermath’?” Cal said as we raced to the car. “They never call it ‘after English or after Science.’ ” It was his math teacher joke, and a really old one. But he was trying to comfort me. We were running so fast that we couldn’t hold hands.

“We’ve got to get Lindy,” I said. All I could think about was our daughter.

We saw real horrors on the road getting to her sitter’s. I won’t write about them . . . I can’t; I’ll make myself ill. When we got to the sitter’s she didn’t say anything except “Christ Lord almighty,” and deposited our sleepy four-year-old in my arms. Then she slammed her door shut and locked it.

When we made it home, we ran inside and bolted our own door. And that was the last time Lindy and I were ever outside together.

This morning I watch Cal work his Sudoku puzzles and I wonder if it always took him this long to complete them. He doesn’t seem as quick-witted. He used to be able to make me laugh with just one dry retort, or one silly pun. I haven’t laughed in a long time. Does he have post-traumatic stress? Do I? Does he have permanent cerebral damage from the infection? I listen to him chew his cereal and I feel so grateful he’s alive. And furious too.

“What?” he asks, noticing me looking at him.

“Nothing.”

“Mmm.” He keeps chewing his cereal. He’s stopped complaining about the watered-down milk because he knows we’re lucky; places in Europe and South America haven’t had milk supplies all year. He looks at his watch and pushes his bowl away. “I gotta run. I’ll be in late tonight.”

“No problem.” I start clearing the dishes. “Me too.”

There is a lot of work to be done when so many people are gone. We volunteer to deliver mail three times a week; the U.S. mail is starting to creep along but the international deliveries are still dicey. Citizens must mow their yards plus maintain any adjacent abandoned properties. We do pothole repair, trash collection, and food delivery.

There isn’t enough demand at the college for Cal to teach algebra again, so he is working at the local airport doing helicopter maintenance. He complained bitterly when he received his Citizen’s Orders. “I worked on helicopters twenty years ago! What will I remember?” But the U.S. Council for Recovery must have found his old Army records, and flying workers out to the Gulf’s offshore rigs is a top priority.

As he works in the hangers I do street cleaning, dig in our victory garden, and teach basic English at the college. There are no more literature classes; the liberal arts may have gasped their last breath with the plague. English as a Second Language isn’t really my field, but since half of the students are now Spanish-speaking, it’s needed. Especially after the second Tres de Julio celebration and the borders declared open indefinitely. The hot jobs of the future will be elementary ed (for the upcoming baby boom), medical care, and industry. To add to my load, I also take a Spanish refresher course taught by one of my colleagues.

With teaching, volunteering, studying, and digging in the dirt, I’m tired all the time. I crave sleep but it’s full of nightmares. Ever since Cal mentioned wanting to see the Menil collection in Houston, I dream of Greco-Roman statues, deathlike in their pale and marbled skin. In my dreams they are cold to the touch, as white as bones.

“You look tired,” he says, as if reading my thoughts.

“I’m fine,” I lie. “When will you get in?” I run water over the dishes as he gets his toolbox.

“Maybe midnight.”

“That is late.”

“Well, I’ve got mail deliveries, street repair, then work at the hanger.”

“But midnight? You’re going to the Lazarus meetings, aren’t you?” I hadn’t planned to ask that, but it just came out and I can’t pull the words back into my mouth.

“What? Of course not.”

I stop washing the dishes and turn to him. “If you need a support group, I understand. I just want you to be honest with me about it.”

“I’m not hanging around with a bunch of Jesus freaks. You know that.”

“Do I?” My words can’t stop themselves. I think to myself shut up, shut up, shut up but I still go on. “Yesterday you said that Revelation had predicted the rising of the dead. And that communion is a type of cannibalism.”

“I don’t have to go to a meeting to know that.”

“But then you were talking about how Christians believe God forgives everything, no matter how horrible, and you seemed to be admiring the idea. Don’t you remember how you used to laugh at that?”

“Can you blame people for wanting to hear some comforting words now?”

“But you’ve never believed in a god.”

“I still don’t! Christ, after everything that’s happened you think I believe in some white-bearded grandpa in the sky? And just because I’m thinking about some things out loud, trying to wrap my head around what has happened, philosophically, you think I’m going to meetings?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you mad at me for something?” he asks. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

His question is so big that my brain turns off.

“No.”

“Look,” he says. “The only thing that the Lazarus loo-loo’s have right is that it’s not the Turners’ fault what happened. It was the virus’ fault. Right?”

“Right.” I stand with my arms crossed over my chest. I know he thinks that I’m self-righteous, just because I never turned. I was an NI. A Mole. A scared but healthy citizen hiding in the dark with my head between my knees. But even though I was a Non-Infected, I have just as much guilt as anyone else.

“We all have to stand together,” he says.

He’s echoing the President, the former U.S. Secretary of Education, who seems to channel Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Thatcher, and even Winston Churchill on her good days. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he says. I expect him to come over and hug me in reconciliation but he doesn’t; he just leaves. The front door still has the deep drill bit holes in it left over from the two-by-four bracings. When it slams shut, it looks like it’s been crucified.

The first thing Cal did was board up the house. We were lucky that we already had the hurricane plywood and boards in his garage shop; by this time there was already looting at the lumber stores. Then I heard grinding. When Cal came out of the garage he had made arrows for his recurve bow and sharpened an old Civil War sword he had found at a flea market years ago. I kept Lindy occupied and away from the TV, where live reports of outbreaks were showing horrific scenes. Cal said we needed food. I begged him not to go but he took the longest of the kitchen knives and the sword. He was gone for two days. I only allowed myself to be hysterical when Lindy was asleep. Cell phones weren’t working and there were sounds of gunfire in the distance. When the car finally screeched back into the driveway, it was full of supplies.

“Cal!” I removed the bracings and let him in. I tried to hug him and Lindy was shouting “Daddy! Daddy!” but he pushed us back. “Stay inside. Let me unload.”

He had parked the car as close to the front door as possible, as both a barricade and quick escape. He unpacked bags of cornmeal, rice, beans, flour, bottles of vitamins, cans of Sterno, bags of dog food, and boxes of moist cat food.

“Are we going to eat pet food?” I asked.

“There’s almost nothing left. But no one has thought of the pet stores yet.”

“What’s it like out there?”

“It’s spreading very fast.”

“But what took you so long?”

“The highways are clogged. People are getting trapped inside their cars. I had to go off-road just to get what I could and I got stuck in the baseball field. There were lots of . . . them, wandering around, looking for people. I had to hide in the backseat under a blanket until they were gone. Then I dug out the tires.”

He had a stuffed toy for Lindy and she danced with it into her room.

“There are people jumping off overpasses,” Cal whispered. “There’s no place to go right now.”

I had never seen my husband’s hands shake before.

“We’ll be okay here, right?”

“We’ll be okay,” he kissed me. “We’ll hunker down. I’m glad I thought of the pet stores. The animals were locked up and thirsty. I opened the cages and let them go.”

“Will they be okay?”

“They’re fast; they have instincts. Hell, they probably have a better chance than most of us.”

Later that night, I heard him working in the attic.

I think about what Cal said as I bicycle to work. “We all have to stand together.” I pedal around the broken-down tank that is left on Main Street. The morning sun glistens on the armor plating but the tank’s shadow stretches long and cold. The main gun on the turret points like an accusing finger. How can things get back to normal when there are so many reminders? It’s not fair that Turners don’t have memories of what happened. It’s not fair that they “died” and got to escape, drifting off to some numbing space while their bodies were puppets of the plague. It’s too easy for them to say that we can stand together and move on. Clasp our hands in friendship. Hurrah.

I get to campus and lock my bike, right by the new hitching posts. A few saddled horses are here already, blithely munching on the grass and swishing their tails. With gas rations being what they are, the rodeo horses have new jobs as commuters. In Australia they are using camels and in India, elephants. I walk down the sidewalk that professors scrubbed clean, past the fields where we buried bodies, and enter through doors that I rinsed free of bloody handprints. The first jobs for returning faculty and staff were to help clean the campus, and I won’t describe what we saw. Or smelled.

I walk past the computer lab where the “Campus Eight” held their last stand against Turners. Eight students holed up all winter, using the ceiling spaces to reach food in the bookstore and cafeteria. They nearly made it. But a pack of Turners was always pounding, pounding on the doors and they finally clawed their way in. The president of the college says that the students actually died of dehydration first, and then the Infected broke in and ate the remains. But I helped clear out the lab and I know the truth of the battle that took place in there. I found one of the student’s journals and he named, specifically, who was pounding on the doors. Two of the Turners were deans and three were professors.

There will be no engraved memorial plaque for the “Campus Eight.” Hell, there probably won’t be memorials for anyone—that’s not how things are done any more. People can’t honor people they killed with their bare hands and devoured. There is no precedent—no historical, sociological, or psychological guidebook—for rabid cannibalization on a mass scale. Sure, there are horror films of zombies (a word we don’t use) but those were what passed as entertainment and not real life.

In real life we’re supposed to forget about it and move on. We’re not supposed to use the expression “pack” of Turners, or “hoards,” or “murder.” It’s “groups” and “causalities.” The slang terms “Turners” and “Moles” should be the Infected (I) and Non-Infected (NI). As faculty, we can’t ask which student was what during the epidemic, nor can we ask who is a legal citizen or not. Students can’t wear T-shirts with logos about the plague, such as “Bite Me,” “One Bullet—One Brain,” “Turner = Turncoat,” or “Moles have Souls.” One logo has the Christian fish, the ichthys, with a bite taken out of it and the words “Fish is Brain Food.” Those are worn by the unrepentant eaters. They are a minority, but they are loud. Most of them belong to the anti-Lazarus organizations that suggest the plague absolutely proves there is no God. These are the groups I thought Cal might have joined by now.

In class, I watch my students and I can’t help but wonder who turned and who hid. Every closed-lipped smile I see makes me wonder if there are cracked teeth behind it, broken from biting on bones, buttons, and jewelry. I look at fingers, trying to find disfigurements left from clawing through barricades. I wonder who ate their sisters, their parents, their pets. I look at scars. But sometimes I teach an entire class not looking at them, simply rolling the chalk through my fingers and feeling the gritty dust on the old chalkboards that were wheeled into the classrooms. (The rolling blackouts often knock out the projectors.) The chalk is as smooth as the Grecian statues in my nightmares. Those marbled feet; those stony veins that I hold in my dreams . . . sometimes I think I’m losing my mind.

But there is one student. Maria. There is something different about her. She is defiant. Her eyes flash and she holds her chin high. Her brown hair is lustrous and her smile is dazzling with white perfect teeth. There is something untouchable about her, as if she has weathered everything with a grace and haughty anger. When she enters the room and says “Hola, profesora”—in a tone both icy and warm—it sounds as if she is saying: “This is nothing to me.”

I wish I were more like Maria.

After work I slide my ration card into the scanner at human resources and it adds my daily work points. I immediately type into the keyboard and remove four of the points, sending them directly to the National Institute for Parentless Children.

It is late afternoon when I pedal for home; the shadow of the tank still inks the asphalt on Main Street. I try to veer around it, but I end up wheeling into its darkness, as if I’m rolling into a well.

They came at all hours of the day and night. They scraped along the side of the house, moaned at the doors, ran their fingernails over the boards. Lindy cried and acted out—who could blame her? We had to be quiet. When the power went out we had candles; when the gas went out we had blankets. Our world got smaller and smaller. And colder. By late December, they were breaking in. Cal protected us as best as he could—he aimed for their eyes with his arrows; he aimed for their throats with the sword.

But there were too many of them. And not just the Infected either, there were looters too. The sick and the non-sick alike were trying to kill us. We moved up to the attic.

Cal had already prepared everything. He had made a rain-tight hatch for the roof that we could open and let light in, when the weather wasn’t too frigid. He had drilled peepholes and ventilation tubes. He had paints and colors for Lindy to draw on the low-hanging rafters, and he had hidden little toys for her to find in nooks. We had games. The attic stairs could be easily pulled up and secured behind us. He had black-out covers for every hole, window, and gap.

We even had a hand-crank radio that was our only link to the outside. Every nation had the flu. It was a pandemic. That December we learned about the quarantine camps for the Infected. In January we learned about the military bombing those camps: New York, L.A., Chicago, San Antonio . . . We heard about North Korea using a nuclear bomb on China. The dust from the bomb was making the winter even colder.

In February we heard about a rebel group of survivors across the border who were refusing to hide. They were fighting.

Today my student Maria is as haughty and beautiful as ever. After class a man is waiting for her outside and I do a double take. He looks like Felix Narvaez, the leader of the Mexican rebel survivors, the man for whom Tres de Julio will forever be known.

“This is mi tío,” Maria tells me proudly.

“Hello, pleased to meet you,” Felix Narvaez says in perfect English and shakes my hand.

I’m dumbfounded. I had heard rumors that he was setting up a business on the Texas coast, but here? In our town? Students walk by staring at him and tittering. A few people are waiting nearby for autographs.

“My niece tells me that she enjoys your class.”

“Thank you.”

His dark hair is tinged with gray. His teeth are gleaming and perfect. Like Maria, he is tall and stands straight. They share the posture of the victorious. It’s true—he looks like Zorro. I think of the famous picture of him as he stood his ground on the Reynosa Bridge in McAllen, Texas: his right hand holding a rifle, his left hand making the peace sign. They say his legs straddled the Rio Grande and his heart straddled two worlds: he embraced both the living and dead.

“Mr. Narvaez, it’s such an honor to meet you. What are you doing here in Lake Jackson?”

“I am starting my shipping business nearby, in Freeport.”

“He knows how to get food and gas,” Maria says. “You need anything, he’s the go-to hombre.”

“I have workers here on campus.” He motions to a flatbed truck in the empty parking lot full of cardboard boxes, crates of bottled water, and baskets of fruit. “My people have just signed the contract for food services here, and for the main supply runs in the county.”

“That’s wonderful.”

I’ve already heard the rumors that Felix Narvaez can get anything; that he used to be a higher-up in the Los Zetas cartel before the epidemic. He claims that he was “a simple farmer,” but everyone knows that he had access to weapons, lots of them, and when the plague broke out he saved all the Non-Infected that he found, from Monterrey to Reynosa. They moved as a unit up towards the border on horseback, in ATVS, in trucks towing wagons—mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children, all hungry and dreaming of getting to the Valley, that Eden of grapefruit, oranges, tangelos, melons, and cattle. From there they dreamed of rebuilding San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Houston. In each town along the way it was Felix Narvaez who kicked the doors down, saved the Non-Infected, and fought off the Turners either by hand or by bullet. But when they reached the Rio Grande they were met by four thousand Infected who had shambled from McAllen, Mission, Edinburg, and other border towns until they mindlessly reached the river. The water was a natural barrier that had them shuffling aimlessly along the banks. Aimless, that is, until they smelled the fresh flesh of Narvaez’s people. They groaned in hunger. They say that the sound of that groaning hoard shook the walls in McAllen. They say that birds flew away. They say the water in the Rio Grande trembled. It was here where Felix Narvaez met the horde head-on, on the Reynosa International Bridge, on the third of July.

“I saw you on the broadcast from New York,” I said. There had been a parade for him on the first anniversary, down what was left of Wall Street. The President had given him a medal.

“Ah,” he shrugs modestly. “Sí.” He looks at me and it is as though he is looking right into me. I can tell that he has already pegged me for a Mole, and I smile widely so he can see my teeth. I’m blushing. I take off my ugly black-rimmed glasses and pretend to wipe the thick lenses.

“It was nice to meet you,” I say, and he actually gives me a short bow. The mayor of the town and college’s Board of Regents are clasping his hand, patting his back, moving him towards the college’s entrance sign to pose for pictures. The deans smile for the cameras with closed lips. Feliz Narvaez and Maria make the peace sign. I take my bike from the rack and Señor Narvaez is still watching me.

I race home, pedaling like I’m pumping the blood back into my heart.

Winter went on forever. By March it had even snowed. We used the roof’s hatch to get fresh air and turn out our buckets of refuse, “night-soil” as they used to call it. When we ran out of water Cal made furtive trips to the pond in the backyard. We boiled a half-gallon at a time using Sterno cans.

The Infected never stopped. They shambled outside and even dug through our shit. We slept a lot and ate very little. Lindy had regressed into speaking baby talk.

“Do you think she’ll remember this?” Cal asked.

“I hope not.”

“She could turn into a writer and write a book about it. It could be like The Diary of Anne Frank.”

“There are a million Anne Franks out there right now,” I said.

Cal sang to her softly and held her hand. When he finished, he said, “I need to leave for more supplies.”

“That’s crazy!” I whispered. “You’ll never get through the streets.”

“I’ve been thinking I could crawl under them, using the big drainage pipe that runs from the pond over to Second Street. There’s a gas station there, and an office supply store. I know the store had vending machines and I bet more food was in the employee lounge.”

I begged him not to go. I told him we had enough to last a few more months, and that he was just bored and starting to get careless. But he left.

“I don’t get people’s fascination with Felix Narvaez,” Cal says. “There were hundreds of other people who did similar things: Laurent de Gaulle in France, Anahi Mendez in Bolivia, that Chinese woman who saved all the children in her province . . . ”

“But Felix Narvaez is ours. He’s our country’s war hero.”

“It wasn’t a war. It was a virus. Besides, the cure was being distributed that same day. It would have been a national day of celebration with or without him.”

I don’t argue with him, but I’m annoyed. We have power and I’m at my computer. I don’t know why I do it, but I open up a file that has a picture that I took of Cal a few weeks after the cure.

“Who is that?” he asks, leaning over.

“It’s you.”

Cal jumps. “Bullshit.”

The picture shows a gaunt figure on the bed. The eyes are hollow, sunken. The gums are pulled back from the teeth. An IV tube of antibiotics and fluids snakes over his arm. “That’s you. That’s a few days after I found you at the rescue center.”

“It looks like a Civil War soldier,” he says, “like one of those daguerreotypes of the dead on the battlefield. Look at that beard! No, that’s not me. I never grew a beard.”

“Yes you did. In the attic. You stopped shaving because we didn’t have any extra water. Remember?”

“No. I always shaved.” He looks at the picture. “That’s me all right. Look at the tattoo. But if I grew a beard that means I wasn’t Infected after all. The Infected were dead—they couldn’t grow hair.”

“You were Infected. I saw you get sick. You grew that beard in the attic, you got sick, and four months later when I found you it was still the same length. It didn’t grow any longer because you were . . . ” I can’t say “dead.” It’s true, but I can’t say it to him. It’s too cruel.

“I always shaved.”

“Are you crazy? You got sick. You Turned.”

Cal jumps up and paces the room. He walks towards Lindy’s room but stops himself. “Things happen for a reason!” he says.

“What? Another quote from the Lazarus brochure?”

“Things happen for a reason!” he says again.

“Okay, so what’s the reason?”

“If we hadn’t had the plague, we wouldn’t have had the cure. The cure is likely to prolong human life indefinitely. Just think of it, now we know how it suspends cellular decay and we know how to manipulate it. The bubonic plague had massive benefits in the fourteenth century—there were huge developments in technology, medicine, and mathematics. This plague will be the same. The sacrifice of so many people leads to better lives in the future. This virus may be the promise of an eternal life!”

His hand is resting on the doorknob to Lindy’s room.

“Sacrifice? Eternal Life? You have been going to the Lazarus meetings.” I walk into our bedroom and slam the door.

Cal came back to the attic. He brought some cans of food and all seemed well, but two days later he began coughing. I searched him for scratch or bite marks but he was clean. We didn’t know then that the virus was also airborne, and not just transmitted by saliva and bodily fluids. We had heard on the radio that some people were claiming they were bitten and didn’t get sick, but we didn’t understand what that meant. Now we know that the reason Moles didn’t get sick was because many of them had a natural immunity, like me. And Lindy.

It had started with a random mutation that jumped from sheep to human, but who knew that plastics—plastics of all things—were responsible for the flu’s gruesome effect? It’s hard to believe. BPA, the chemical Bisphenol-A that is in everything from plastic bottles to Tupperware, is what the scientists call a “xenoestrogen endrocrine disruptor.” It became the catalyst for the prions of the mutated ovis flu to hijack the infected brains and circulatory systems.

Our ignorance of the viral nuances proved a disaster. Families let in other survivors, who had unknowingly picked up the bug. Cal had met other people holed up in the office supply store. One of them must have been a carrier.

His fever rose. “It’s probably from crawling through that freezing culvert,” I said. “It’s probably nothing.” His face was pale and sweaty; he hadn’t shaved in weeks.

“I can’t Turn,” he said. “I can’t hurt you or Lindy. I can’t be up here with you.”

“You won’t Turn. You’ll be fine. Hush.”

I fell asleep curled against him and Lindy for warmth. Some time that night I heard the attic stairs descend then pop back up.

He was gone. He had written on one of the rafters, right by Lindy’s drawings. “I love you.”

Cal gets into the bed during the night and holds me. “I don’t like it when we fight,” he whispers.

Turners say that the first thing they remember is their chest pounding when their hearts started beating again and the cold, quick breath of air back into the lungs. Some say they remember floating to a heavenly white light and being jerked back, but Cal says he remembers nothing. They can’t remember the screaming or the taste of blood on their teeth, like warm copper pennies. It’s up to the Non-Infected to remember. It’s up to me.

The nation’s economy is nearly nonexistent, and the only million-dollar selling product is a little plastic bracelet that says, “Jesus rose. Jesus forgives.”

I watch Cal in the dark next to me and I want to hit him. I want to smoother him, choke him, bite him, kiss him. I hate him; I love him. He’s my husband. He was Lindy’s father. He saved us. He was once undead and now he’s back.

“What’s on your mind? Why don’t you ever talk to me?” he whispers.

Surely he must know. But I say nothing and we make love instead. I think of Felix Narvaez.

Cal was gone. One day I heard shuffling below us in the garage and looked through a peephole in the attic’s floor. It was him. He was standing in front of his workbench looking blankly, as if he had forgotten something. He moaned. Then he shuffled out through a broken gap in the door and joined the other Turners, slowly walking down the streets looking for blood.

Two months later Lindy and I had eaten all the dog and cat food. Cal’s idea had saved our lives so far; there were people starving all over the world. I was going to have a make a plan.

Cal has erased his picture from my computer. I was looking for it this morning but it’s gone. I don’t blame him for not wanting a reminder of what he looked like post-infection, but it was mine. He had no right to destroy it. I check the message boards and realize that I miss the old Internet, full of silly videos. The U.S. Council for Recovery has set up Neighbor-Board, the only social networking site we have, but it’s not the same. There is no YouTube or video sharing. The last thing the Council wanted was someone posting old footage of attacks. The feeling I have knowing that Cal got on my computer and deleted his picture is the same one I have when I use this new “net.” It feels likes some sort of violation, or censorship.

I ride my bike to work and it’s a fine spring morning. There is even a sprig of green sprouting from the dirt and grit in the tank on Main Street.

I had climbed out of the roof’s hatch, screaming for Lindy. The roar in my ears turned out to be planes zooming in from the horizon: crop dusters. A yellow mist came streaming out from them. One of the planes flew so close that the pilot waggled his wing tip at me. He probably thought I had been on the roof, shouting for joy.

At this same time, Felix Narvaez was on the bridge in McAllen, facing the four thousand gruesome hungry dead. He had been listening in on the radio contact between the military and heard the cure was on the way. He refused to fire on the Infected. He stopped right where he was. His people had enough firepower to destroy the whole hoard but he ordered them not to fire. Instead, they fought them off by hand until the planes soared overhead and released their loads. They could have died in their act of compassion, and they nearly did. Narvaez watched the dust settle and the slow shift of consciousness begin.

That was the day I lost Lindy. That was the day the world came back alive. It was the third of July.

This morning when I get to campus I go to the faculty break room first. Sarah, the psychology teacher, is talking with the Spanish teacher, Kay. “It’s not anorexia,” Sarah says, “but something near to it. I’m sure it’s based on guilt and not physiology. Clinically, I’ll be interested to see the long-term effects. Some of the people I’m seeing can’t keep anything down, and it’s not just Turners either. There is a subset of people who didn’t get infected at all but are claiming that they did, and that they can’t remember anything. They are also vomiting when they think of food.”

Poor Sarah. Not only does she teach classes and volunteer like the rest of us, her Citizens Orders have her counseling post-traumatic shock victims. Kay sees me and clears a space for me.

“Buenos días. ¿Cómo estás?”

“Hola. Muy bien. ¿Y tú?

“Así así,” Kay smiles. She has always been something of a quiet seer. When Cal and I got married she gave me a beautiful candelabra and her handwritten note said: Something to help light your way. Kay has told me that in less than ten years more than half of the country will not speak English. I had asked her what would happen if the borders closed and the English-speakers got ticked off about being outnumbered. She had said, “Perhaps another Civil War, no? Neighbor against neighbor, yet again.”

Kay listens quietly while Sarah talks about her patients. I put my lunch in the faculty fridge and excuse myself. “I have to go to the library. Adiós.”

I know what I have to do. I dreamed about it last night. I dreamed I was teaching Daniel Defoe’s tale of the bubonic plague, Katherine Anne Porter’s tale of the 1918 flu, Albert Camus’ tale of cholera, Randy Shilts’s tale of HIV, Richard Preston’s tale of Ebola . . . There were so many books on the lectern that they spilled over. I leaned against a marble bust of Giovanni Boccaccio and it fell, crashing to the floor. I knelt to retrieve the pieces but found only marble feet instead, tiny and delicate, like a child’s. “What will they write of us?” I asked the class. “What will they write of us?” The students tried to answer but their voices only beeped and blared like the campus emergency alerts. When I woke, I knew what I needed to do.

I’ve timed my visit carefully, when I know the head librarian will be there. She was a Mole. She and her husband made it out to their deer lease in West Texas where they survived on venison and canned fruit, but they ran out of heat and nearly froze in the winter. She lost two toes.

“I have something for the library,” I tell her. “But not everyone should see this. Not everyone would understand.”

I slide her the journal that I found in the computer lab, written by one of the Eight.

Her eyes open wide. “I heard rumors about this!” She fingers the bloodstained pages. “I’ll put it in the archive,” she whispers. “Only I have the key.”

I nod. “Maybe later, people will want to know.”

“Does it name names?”

“Yes.”

“Was Cal . . . ”

“No. He wasn’t one of them.”

I turn to leave but she has gripped my hand. Her eyes are welling up with tears and we hold hands over the circulation desk top; the granite is as cold as marble. We share the solidarity of the hidden. There is a sentence in the journal where the student wrote, “We know our families are gone but we still love them. We know hope is gone too but we still have it. We’re starving. We’re too weak to fight them off. Whoever finds this, please know that we were here. We hope the world makes it.”

The cure stayed in the air, like magic. The sunlight made it shimmer as golden dust motes. Soon the sprayer trucks used for mosquito repellent were fogging the neighborhoods with it as well. All over the country, the hidden emerged from basements, cellars, attics, safe rooms, and offices. We were skeletal, rib-worn and pale. We squinted in the bright sunlight, like the moles that we were.

I had asked Maria if her uncle could get something for me. I whispered the name of the item in her ear, terribly embarrassed. “No problema,” she said.

I thought it would come wrapped in paper or disguised in some way. But when one of Narvaez’s workers on the flatbed truck hands it to me, the pink plastic is obvious. I slip the pills in my purse and give my ration card for him to slide through his handheld debit machine. Technically, what I’m doing is wrong. The President has announced a temporary ban on all birth control items, hoping to boost the recovery boom. But Narvaez’s worker doesn’t bat an eye. I wonder what other things Maria’s uncle gets for people, legal or not.

“Hello, professor.” I turn around and it is Felix Narvaez himself.

“Hi.”

“Have you everything you need?”

He must know what is in my pocket. Probably nothing about his businesses escapes his attention. “Yes, thank you.” He is looking at my wedding ring.

“My husband was a Turner,” I say, as if that might explain anything. We watch each other and I hold my chin up, like Maria does. I too can be unrepentant.

“It must be difficult sleeping with betrayal, no?” he says.

I was nearly too weak to go find him. To be honest, I was so upset over Lindy that I didn’t even look for him; it was a colleague from work who called me, telling me there was someone who looked like Cal at one of the Recovery Centers. I found him lying on an army cot.

The medicine from the planes and foggers had cured the Infected, but many were dying. Once the body was reawakened and the immune system started working, massive infections took over. Turners had broken teeth, with bits of gristle and bone lodged in their gums. Many died from oral infections. There was a shortage of antibiotics. Cal was lucky. He would be okay. Many people had been shot or knifed; some injuries were too horrendous to be cured. People were dying all over. Non-Infected were shooting themselves, jumping off of bridges, hanging themselves in closets—they were wracked by the guilt from “putting down” an Infected loved one. Imagine the ones who had shot their own children in the head and then saw the cure come sprinkling down from the sky, like a prayer answered too late?

In those early weeks of July, the Infected and the Non-Infected looked alike. We were all stuck in the lacuna of being half-alive.

Cal saw me and reached out from his cot. I instinctively backed away. He looked hurt.

“Lindy?” he asked, looking around.

“She’s gone.”

Cal began to wail and a volunteer nurse rushed over. “Hush,” she said sternly. She knew if one person let go it would snowball from cot to cot, town to town, nation to nation—a whole world gone mad with hysteria and grief. Once it started it would never stop.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

Felix has asked me to dinner. I haven’t given him my answer yet.

Summer is coming along nicely and the victory garden outside is producing well. I dreamt of the statues again last night but they turned into Lindy. I had left the attic to find more supplies, but she had followed behind me. I didn’t know. She got too close to an opening in a window and something yanked her. I dreamt I’m trying to pull her back inside the house but the thing outside won’t let her go. It sounds like an animal. There is blood. The dream goes soundless. I’m holding a statue’s feet, no . . . they are Lindy’s feet and they are going cold. Her little toes twitch. I feel for a pulse at an ankle. Her feet become drained of blood; they turn as white as bone, as still as stone.

Cal chews his cereal and sees me deep in thought. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

Felix has procured extra gas rations for faculty, so I get to drive the car to work. It’s sunny and I put on my sunglasses—I have contact lenses now, also thanks to Felix. When I turn on the radio they are finishing a replay of the President’s State of the Union speech: “To persevere is to live—to live together as one country, one nation—together in health, hope, and liberty. Forgiveness is not forgetfulness, but rather an acknowledgement of the innate need for security, survival, and the necessity of recovery. We shall all be reawakened to see a new vision of our nation . . . ” After she finishes there is applause and then a John Lennon song starts playing. I listen to the chorus: “And we all shine on . . . ”

I drive slowly around the commuters on bicycles and on horseback; people wave to each other and smile. I pass by the tank on Main Street and there is a tiny tree sprouting up from the turret. A cardinal warbles and sings on the strongest branch, as red as a drop of blood.

Someday maybe the world will “make it,” as the writer of the Campus Eight had hoped. I don’t know if it will involve remembering or forgetting. I don’t know what languages our silences might speak. But maybe it will be okay. Maybe someday I will tell Cal that I dreamed of him crouched over the body of our daughter, taking bite after loving bite.