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.
Monsters, they call us. Cannibals and vampires or zombies. Sometimes there are riots and fights, but I don’t see the sense in that. After all, the labels are all true.
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.
It started as a diet drug and mutated into something else. Transferred with a bite, incubated quickly, it tore fire across the continents.
Not two weeks after I’d been designated as Rehabilitated and released from the Sanitation Center, I saw a video of what it’d been like. I was standing in the little grocery store at the bottom of the hill from my house and they had the television behind the counter turned to the national news. Suddenly, a pirate TV station hacked into newscasts to air footage from raids and attacks, saying it was wrong to just bury something like that in the name of national peace.
The video showed a group of men in battle gear approaching a warehouse. Everything was cast in a greenish tint indicative of night-vision goggles. The feed followed the hunters inside, and that’s when I saw the creatures.
They were spread across the floors, lounging in heaps, stuffed into the darkest corners. Each one naked and gray-skinned, bald with patches of stubbornly remnant hair. One of them opened his eyes, the red glow like the sun against the green.
The cameraman didn’t see it, but I knew what was coming. I watched the fingers unfurl, long and crooked, tipped with sharpened claws. When the creature ran toward the tiny group, it howled and screeched, showing sharp pointed teeth that glistened with saliva.
Watching that video, I ran my tongue over my own teeth, now ground to a dull flat. My cheeks still calloused against the missing sharpness.
What frightened me most about that video wasn’t the horror and disgust I saw on every other shopper’s face, but the thrill I felt coursing through me.
I’d done that. I knew it to be true based on my own reactions: the way my mouth watered and my stomach twisted.
I pushed out of the little grocery store while the feed looped around again, and I stumbled home with my arms crossed tight, chin tucked to chest so none of the glaring light of day could reflect in my eyes.
In that moment I wasn’t sure where the monster ended and where I began. I know the government just wanted me to go back to the life I’d lived before, but the monster always stretched under my skin as a memory. My nails always a little thicker than before, my hair a little thinner. The taste of animal meat never enough as it used to be.
I wondered why they even bothered curing us. Sure they wanted their world back, but why not kill us instead? If they really thought we were monsters and irredeemable, why go through the trouble and expense?
All they had to do was crash down our buildings, expose us to the light, and be done with it. Killing us by half measures just seemed that much crueler.
He introduces himself as James, and pauses after saying his name as if I should know him. I’d been infected for long enough that there are a few gaps in my memory, and I struggle to place his face in one of them, playing a hesitant smile over my lips to buy time.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t—” I start, but he waves his hand through the air to brush away my apology.
“We had a class together in school.” He fills in the blank for me. “Back before…” He stares off to the side when he says that last word, as if it can somehow offend me—reminding me that the gap between “before” and “now” is filled with monsters and savagery.
I take the chance to glance at the back of his ear, wondering if he tilted his head away for just this reason. No evidence of the bar code tattoo. I force my hands to be still by my sides—they itch to tug my own hair across my cheeks.
“Yes of course.” I prop up my smile, trying not to show my unease. A storm hovers on the horizon, signaling that dark will come earlier this evening. I discovered early on that I’m scared of the dark now, which is funny since I’d spent the last two years needing it to survive.
An awkward silence percolates between us until I offer, “How’ve you been?” and then want to cringe because the answer to that is never very good. Often, in order to stay alive and uninfected, most survivors had to do things more monstrous than the monsters. It’s just no one ever talks about that.
“Good.” When he smiles, I have to look away because it makes something bright crack open inside me—a lust that tastes as powerful as tearing a human body to strips. I bite my lips, feeling the tension of skin under the pressure of my now-dulled teeth.
He asks to walk me home, up the mountain, and I nod my head, wondering how I can ever fill each footstep etched in silence. And yet somehow we do, finding conversations that meander through the easy territory, no talk of monsters or pandemics or the end of the world.
I’m sure there are those who figured out how to move on past what they’d been. Just as there were the ones who couldn’t—who, even though they were cured, continued to hunt the taste of human flesh. I wondered if the real lucky ones were those who’d gone insane, let the disease lay waste to their brain until they could do nothing but parrot back whatever their rehabilitation coach spat at them.
The scientists think we don’t remember. That’s supposed to be part of the cure—amnesia of everything during infection.
Except it doesn’t work that way. At first I thought I was the only one who, when darkness falls absolute, recalls what it was like to wake standing in the corner, fingers flexed, claws dirty with dried blood. So very hungry that the world buzzes with it.
But then one day I was waiting for my check-in appointment at the Sanitation Center, and I watched another Rehabilitated walk over to pour himself a cup of water from the fountain. It was late afternoon and a storm had blown through, and for the flicker of a moment, the lights in the center blinked out while dark clouds boiled outside.
When the generator kicked in, I found myself staring at the man, at the way his hand shook as he gripped the cone-shaped paper cup. At the hunger in his eyes.
And I knew. We both knew. What we’d been—it’s always inside us. Just that some of us bury it deeper than others.
“Is it hard living alone?” James asks. It’s the third time I’ve run into him at the convenience store at the bottom of the mountain and allowed him to walk me home. I grip my fingers around the seat of my bike, propelling it beside me.
“Sometimes.” I think about how I used to be so lazy, my room always a mess. These days the house is immaculate. What else do I have to occupy my days? “I miss the noise of people,” I admit.
From the corner of my eye I see the edge of his mouth kick up, and it encourages me on.
“I had four sisters. There was always drama. Fights, screams.” I realize how bad that sounds, and I temper it back with a laugh. “But it was good in its way. We were crazy about each other.”
“I know what you mean.” His voice seems indulgent. “I had sisters too.”
I turn toward him, to share this moment of similarity between us, and the realization of the meaning of his words is slow to filter through me. Had sisters. The bike wobbles under my grip, veering into his path, and he grabs the handlebars, knuckles flaring white.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I can’t look at him. In that moment I feel the monster keenly within. I taste it against the back of my throat.
I could have been the one to kill his sisters. They’d have been young and fresh, almost ripe like a perfect fruit. It doesn’t matter whether I did or not; I’d killed someone else’s sisters. I’d shredded them open, laid them bare.
And I wonder again why they’ve let people like me live. Before the pandemic, someone like me—a murderer who tortured her victims—would have been put to death without hesitation.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
His hands clutch at the handlebars, grip pulsing like a heartbeat.
“It wasn’t you,” he says. And I know what he means is that it was the monster inside me that drove me to such brutality. Ever since the cure, the scientists have embarked on a massive campaign to explain to the Pure how we are not to be blamed for our actions while monstrous. don’t blame the victim; blame the disease, is emblazoned across every crumbling billboard.
I don’t know how to tell him how wrong he is.
At home, with the bike parked in the garage and nothing but the night surrounding me, I walk through the house and turn out every single light. Before the pandemic we’d had few neighbors—only a couple of properties scattered across the mountain, and beyond, nothing but protected wilderness.
Now the isolation is absolute. The other houses stand barren, their occupants dead or sick. No one’s bothered to even vandalize or squat; we’re too far from the city to be of much convenience.
Besides, the world is still filled with monsters that like the darkness. Only Rehabilitated would choose to live beyond the civilization compounds, with their artificial lights glaring all night. Sometimes when I walk through a dim room I can see the creatures through the window, racing past the trees searching out their prey.
They speak with a clicking sound that sometimes has the timbre of howling. In the daytime it’s easy to spot where they passed, their claws raking divots in the tree trunks.
It’s illegal to hunt them, though that doesn’t stop most poachers. Back before the Recovery, those with the most kills had the highest designations in many communities.
Now the government hands out the tranq darts filled with the cure, urging hunters to use those instead, but sometimes they “forget” or claim an ambush and…Oh, well…another pod of monsters killed. What loss, really, is that to the world?
It could have easily been me on one of those piles of burning bodies. Maybe it should have.
I’ve been thinking about James and his dead sisters for a week, but when I finally see him again outside the store, I’m not sure how to approach him, and so I just assume the familiar pose of chin tucked to my chest, stealing glances as I start walking my bike home.
He falls into step next to me.
“I had a boyfriend,” I tell him, and the awkwardness of the statement strangles me until I’m compelled to explain. “Before. And he was killed. By one of the…them.”
Panic lights a fire inside me that this is coming out all wrong. “It wasn’t me who killed him when I was one of the…them,” I’m quick to add, and that’s what stops the dribble of words from my mouth.
I want him to understand that I know what it’s like to lose someone you know to them. That I’ve been on both sides, and neither one is bearable. A painful silence settles between us, the click of my bike’s wheels counting out the pattern of our steps.
“My mother killed my sisters,” he finally says.
I form the word “Oh” with my mouth.
“She wasn’t one of them,” he clarifies. “It was after the pandemic started. My father kept a gun in the bedside table. She killed him first, then the girls. I heard the last shot. It’s what woke me up. She’d ground sleeping pills into instant mashed potatoes.” For a moment he pauses. “I hate mashed potatoes, and she didn’t remember.”
He brushes his hand along my hip, stopping me. The bike by my side wobbles and then falls against my leg. He’s not even tentative as he reaches out, sweeps the fan of my hair aside, and takes the edge of my ear in his fingers as if he can read the bar code through his fingertips.
“There are other kinds of monsters in the world,” he tells me.
I want to crawl inside him and never leave.
As I stand in the darkness of my house, I press my hands flat against the plate glass window stretched across the sunroom. There’s a pool carved into the patio below, and a body thrashes in the fetid water.
Her claws scrape uselessly at the night. I know it’s a she because her body still retains some of the curves, her breasts just breaking the surface as she fights for air. Moments ago I watched a pack of them race past the house, a few of them stopping to sniff the air, as if they could smell me tucked away inside.
The others turned away, kept going once they must have realized my blood contains the same sickness as their own. Except one. She stepped closer and then again. She was staring at the window, and the pool swallowed her whole, ripples easing toward the walls before she broke back up to the surface.
I wonder at how she doesn’t realize she could stand if she just moved a bit to the right and stretched her feet down.
I have no idea how long it will take her to drown. I have even less of an idea who she must have been before the pandemic, to have taken such an interest in me standing here.
All I know is that she’s a monster. I could call in the hunters, have her shot with the cure and dragged away. I could load my own gun with the cure-tranqs they gave me the day I left the Sanitation Center.
But what kind of existence is that giving her? Who could ever claim my lonely days are anything approaching a life?
“How have you been adjusting since leaving the center?” the scientist asks. White paper crinkles underneath me as I shift on the examination table. The man places his hand on my thigh, casually, as he studies my chart. As if there’s nowhere else for him to put it. As if neither one of us realizes his thumb stretches too close to nowhere good.
I try to shift again, and the pads of his fingers press against the edge of my putrid green examination gown that does little to cover the necessary bits. My nails dig into my palm. There was a time only months ago when they were as sharp as weapons.
“Fine.” I keep my voice even.
He removes his hand to flip a page in the thick folder documenting my life. Who I was before the pandemic, what I was during, who they want me to be now. His touch then falls back to its familiar place. I’d cross my arms over my chest, but that would only drag the hem of the gown higher up my legs.
“You making friends? Finding a community?”
I think about James. How he’s usually waiting for me outside the store after my sessions here. “Sure.”
“Pure or Rehabilitated?” he asks.
I lift a shoulder. “I thought we weren’t supposed to distinguish between the two.”
“Listen, Vail.” He sets the chart on the table and shifts so that he’s facing me, his abdomen so close that the stray fibers on his white coat tickle my kneecaps. Every time his heart beats, his body barely brushes mine.
There was a time I could have heard that heartbeat from two hundred yards away. He could have hidden from me, crouched in a closet or trembling in a cupboard, and his fear would have sent his heart soaring and it would sing me to his location.
The music of a terrified heart used to be the most beautiful in the world.
“We’ve really found community to be key to reintegration here,” he says. I’m used to his hands that do nothing but wander idly, never too far, and I keep my thighs pressed tight together. He grips my legs so that his fingers slide into the sweaty crevice at the back of my bent knees. “We have sessions here. The notes show that you used to attend some of them but haven’t in a few weeks. I really think…”
I tune him out and try to figure out how old he is. His hair’s sprayed with white, but still predominantly brown. No glasses, clean shaven. A bit of flab around his middle, that I feel as he shifts against me again in his fervor to see me fully rehabilitated. He’s not wearing a wedding ring, but that’s not unusual anymore, with gold being so valuable and most other forms of currency useless.
He doesn’t look like the type that could easily survive the pandemic. And that’s what’s always so confusing to me. It was the Pure who holed up in compounds scattered over the country, trying to hold on to memories of what life had been like before. It was in the remnants of one of the government bunkers that they figured out the cure and designed the recovery.
But it was the Infected who ruled the world. Every day the ranks of the Recovered grow, and yet in everyone’s eyes, including our own, we’re worthless.
As James walks me up the mountain, he tells me about his days at school. “Pretty much like before.” He shrugs. “Smaller classes.
And the teachers are a little more lenient. I mean, once you live through the end of the world, getting sent to detention really isn’t that significant.”
I laugh, and he turns to me. We’re at the top of my driveway, where he always leaves me, and he slips his fingers around mine. “I wish you were there.” His voice is soft, earnest.
There’s an intensity to his eyes, in the stillness, that makes everything inside me unfurl. “You could go again, you know. Those first few weeks, everyone was just trying to figure it all out. There’s a rhythm to it now—you wouldn’t stand out as much anymore.”
I shouldn’t stand out at all. That’s the thing. According to the government, there’s supposed to be no difference between me and James, except after that law there’s a footnote as long as a football field about how the Infected are to be Recovered and what we must do to prove our ongoing Rehabilitation.
They’re even allowed to kill us under certain circumstances. If they suspect the cure will fail, legally they can do whatever they want to us.
I tilt my head, wishing there were a way to explain to James just how very different we are. “You know, before the pandemic, if you had a male doctor, once you put on the gown, he wasn’t allowed to be in a room alone with you. They always called in a nurse just in case.”
He frowns. “In case of what?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “It was just one of those rules I always thought was sort of unnecessary. But either way, they don’t do that anymore with us. The doctor just comes in when he wants. No nurse.”
It’s clear James is confused. “Maybe they’re short-staffed at the center.” And then he smiles as if about to make a joke. “Population isn’t exactly what it used to be.”
I try to mimic his grin, but all I can think about is the desperation in the scientist’s eyes as he gripped his fingers against my pulse, counting out every heartbeat as if it could tell him a secret about the end of the world.
I think it surprised everyone that the cure actually worked. Sure, lab testing seemed positive, but it’s different to load up tens of thousands of cure-tranq rounds and go off hunting monsters. Suddenly they had piles of people on their hands, and they rushed to set up the Sanitation Centers to take us all in.
It kept us in one location in case everything failed. Then they could just firebomb the place and be done with us.
They contained us for as long as they could in those centers, but space became an issue, and finally they opened the gate and let us trickle out into the world.
The world went nuts. Enraged communities prohibited Rehabilitated from settling there, vowed to shoot on sight anyone Infected or suspected of having been Infected.
Every time one of us committed a crime, it was because of what we once were. That we shouldn’t be saved. They didn’t want to see that we were just like them: some of us good, some of us bad.
A few political parties rose up, rumbling about colonizing an island with us, making sterilization part of the cure. Some suggested flat-out murdering us, but of course they never called it that, because we were less than animals. It would be preemptive self-defense.
And then one of the self-governing communities by the capital seat dragged a Rehabilitated down to the town square and charged him with murder. He demanded proof; he’d been a model citizen since being Recovered, he claimed. They pointed to the bar code on the back of his ear. He’d been a monster, and the only way a monster could survive was by killing.
The case made it into what was left of the court system, and he was found guilty. The defense took it to one of the remaining four circuits, and the ruling was overturned. It was headed to the Supreme Court, the defense claiming insanity, when the President stepped in and put an end to it.
We were pardoned for any crime committed before we became rehabilitated.
No one ever tried to bring charges against the survivors for what they did.
Her body floats in the pool. She’s on her back, arms trailing out by her sides. She’d sunk at first, right after giving up the fight for air, but then sometime later, when I was asleep, she bobbed to the surface and has been drifting through the stagnant water ever since.
I am so so lonely that I consider attempting school in the morning.
In the middle of the night I feel something thundering through me, waking me up in the darkness as though I’d been hit. My breath is ragged, dreams of sharp teeth and succulent skin still clinging to the edges of my vision.
My ears ring, and as they clear I hear the clacking sort of howling that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat. I push from bed and stumble into the living room, pressing against the cold glass window.
The horizon glows fire, and at first I think it’s the sunrise, but then black clouds billow through the brightness. I watch it for a while, the sky undulating as goose bumps spread over my arms and up my neck.
I’m pretty sure I know exactly what just happened, but even so, I reach around the corner and flick on the television. There are only two channels, one fuzzier than the other, but the news confirms what I expected.
An explosion at the Sanitation Center. Clearly on purpose. A purification group has already claimed credit. The entire place ablaze, likely no survivors. The fire engineered to start tearing through the woods, where the monsters sometimes hole up at night.
I watch the inferno boiling in the distance, knowing how dry the season’s been and how thirsty the trees are for flame. I’m sure the town will find a way to stop it before it reaches the city proper. But I doubt they’ll do much to keep my little mountain unharmed.
Why save a mountain populated by nothing but monsters?
Even though I’d promised James I’d give it another try, I don’t bother with school that next morning. There’s already the taste of smoke in the air and the television chirps with news of the uncontrolled fire. I sit in the sunroom and watch the clouds billow in the distance, hazing out the sun. Below me, the dead girl bobs in the pool, her skin liquid white and loose, sloughing off to drift across the surface.
There’s an uneasiness rippling through me, as if I can sense the distress of the monsters hidden in the woods beyond. Every now and again I’ll hear the report of a gunshot. Today, there are no such things as hunting restrictions.
I used to have hobbies. I must have before the pandemic, but it’s hard to remember now what they were. I pace restlessly through the house, trying to piece together how I once spent my time.
Most of it was dominated by school, class piled upon class. Bags stuffed with bloated books, lockers smelling like week-old bananas and new-binder plastic. I once took piano lessons, but now my nails are so thick that even when I chew them short they still clack against the keys.
Everything is a reminder of what I was.
My eyes drift closed. We were wretched beasts, but still we felt a sense of community. There were only so many buildings that refused the sunlight and were safe to hide inside. Somehow we’d find our way to them, and we’d find each other in the dark.
When we hunted, we were sleek and beautiful in our unity, calling to each other as we ran, no such thing as an obstacle in the night.
In our own sick way, we all meant something to one another. Each one lost, indistinguishable, to the pack.
Smoke chokes back the light, sending the day skittering into evening faster than usual. The sun’s a diffuse ball through the haze, burning the sky a sick orange, when I hear a knock on the door.
I stand in the middle of the living room, listening to the slicing silence that follows. There’s a knock again, urgent and pounding, and then I hear his voice.
James calling out, “Vail? You in there?”
A fleeting sensation of joy passes through me at the sound of him. When I throw open the door, he’s standing with his hands shoved in his pockets, shoulders curved in a bit.
We stare at each other, me awkwardly trying to smile, until he breaks first. “I was worried,” he explains. “After the explosion, and there are reports of hunters and you’re up here alone, and I didn’t know if they’d come after you, so…” He trails off, and his eyes slide to the side. The color of his irises is muffled in the darkness, and it takes me a moment before I taste his unease.
Then it hits me, so full in my chest that I take a step back. His features are blurred because of the darkness on this side of the house, the front facing away from the fires along the horizon. Overgrown shrubbery clings to the decayed porch, plunging the front walk into a gray blackness.
The night’s coming faster because of the smoke choking the sky.
Beyond, in the fading trees, I hear the clicking of the monsters gathering.
“Shit,” I murmur, balling James’s shirt in my hands and tugging him inside. That’s when the wailing begins, thick down along my back, as if it could still call me to action. The sound of the monsters calling to the others about their located prey.
I stand mute in the hallway, my steps stuttering as I try to plan the next move. Beside me, James trembles, the edge of my knuckles scraping against his chest as I hold him tight.
At first I start toward the back of the house, thinking about the closets without windows, but then I double around, heading for the stairs into the basement.
It’s a risk, I know. If they make it down the stairs, we’re trapped. They’ll gather around us, bodies so thick there’s no such thing as escape.
I start tearing down the blinds over the windows, tossing them to the floor. We just have to make it through the night. In the morning, with the light, they’ll be gone. I could coat him with my blood, I think. Hope it masks the scent of his freshness with one of disease.
That’s when I realize he’s been calling my name. “Vail,” he shouts, hands on my shoulders. He forces me to face him.
In that split second, while the monsters wail and chatter and the darkness seeps in, I stare at James’s lips. I wonder, for just the barest moment, what they’d taste like. How they’d feel pressed between my own and if I could ever resist sinking my teeth into their tender flesh.
“Maybe we can still make it to the light of the compound,” he whispers.
I finally understand that he doesn’t hear them. Not yet. His ears aren’t tuned to the monsters like mine are. He doesn’t know how close they’ve come. How desperately they want him, and how their need sears through me. “No,” I muster. “It’s too late for that.”
The gun cabinet sits in my father’s closet, and I spin the dial, kneeling as I begin to count out the bullets. James reaches for a case on the top shelf, the label wrapped around a bright blue box with orange stripes.
“Cure-tranqs,” he says, running his hand over the label. When he looks at me, his eyes are wide.
I lift a shoulder as he pries open the lid. “They gave them to me at the center,” I explain. “Sometimes the pack will go looking for the one they lost, and just in case my pack came after me, the scientists wanted me to…you know.”
“The box is full?” He asks it like a question, as if I need to explain why I’ve never used them. “So your pack never came back?”
I focus on my hands, sorting destruction into neat piles. What I don’t tell him is that I can already hear the pack pushing against the air outside the house. They know there’s someone pure inside.
I can already feel the way their mouths water for him.
At night, when they race past the house, is the loneliest I’ve ever felt. Except for now.
“You shouldn’t have come up here.” I stand, angry, shoving a box of bullets in my pockets. My shoulder brushes against him as I walk past, and he doesn’t even hesitate before following.
It all comes back in my dreams, almost more vivid than my day-to-day life. The first one was probably six years old and plump with her baby fat. She smelled like melted ice cream and tasted like salt and misery.
When we came upon her in the park, she seemed unsurprised, almost as if she’d been expecting it.
“Are you my sister?” she asked calmly when the first of us fell upon her. She asked it again as she whimpered with her last breath, still clinging to the hope that one of us would know her, remember her.
Sister, I thought to myself. We are all sisters and brothers in the pack, I wanted to tell her, but I knew that she’d become aware of it soon enough. Once the infection took hold and brought her to us.
And maybe one day she’d be out on a hunt of her own, and a scent would catch the air, and she’d hesitate. Are you my sister? she’d be wondering, the clicks of her tongue unable to form the words.
Even as the pool water poured down her throat, that’s what she’d be asking. Are you my sister?
And I’d stand there mute, wanting to answer “Yes,” but knowing it was a lie.
We’ve gathered every object capable of emitting light and shoved it into the tiny utility room in the basement, but even so it barely creates enough of a glow to sting my eyes.
Which means all we’ve accomplished is knowing that when the monsters break down the door I’ll be able to see clearly as they shred James’s flesh, sinking their teeth into his limbs.
I pace back to the door, candle wax dripping from my fingers as I set trembling flames to wicks.
“Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be one of us?” I ask him as I stand with my hand pressed to the wall. I hear the vibrations of them pounding upstairs. Three months before the pandemic, my father replaced all the windows with double-paned glass, which only causes a moment’s hesitation in the monsters’ assault.
James moves behind me, coming so close I feel the tremor of each exhalation on the back of my ears. “One of you?” he asks, brushing my ponytail aside and pressing his lips to the ridges of my spine.
I close my eyes. “A monster. Creature of the night.”
“Have you ever thought,” he asks, teeth scraping lightly against skin, “that you’re the lucky one? You can live out on the edge, past the compound, in the darkness. You’re free.”
“Hunted,” I tell him. “Alone. Shunned. Hated.”
“I can’t sleep in the darkness.” His hand has been resting on my hip, and now his fingers curl around the bone, pulling me against him until there’s nothing separating us. Above, I hear the crash of the monsters, my blood spiking.
Tears begin to edge my eyes. James holding me makes me remember what it was like to mean something to someone else. “I belonged to something before.” My voice quavers as I tell him the lie that I wish were truth. “They’ve been searching for me. Asking me back. No one else has done that. No one from before ever cared.”
His hand slips up along my ribs, skimming the edge of my bra until he cups my throat, nails trailing lightly over my jaw. “I came looking for you, Vail.”
There’s this moment as they pour down the stairs when I think about calling out to them that I am here. That they have come for me at last and that I’ve been waiting.
Except they’ve known where I am for weeks. Months. And they have never cared.
I stare at the gun in my hand and the two boxes on the table shoved against the door. Bullets or cure-tranqs. That’s the question. Death or salvation.
Except that I can’t figure out which is which. It seems worse to damn them to this life, of loneliness and exile. It’s taking a part of who they are from them, even if that part is the monster.
But to kill them, the finality of it, seems to make my fingers tremble. All the times I’ve taken lives without a thought other than hunger and now such cold ambivalence fails me.
I’ve always wondered if the one who cured me felt righteous. If he left his compound on a Tuesday morning with his pack full of cure-tranqs and thought, Today I will save the world, and instead he found me.
If he could see me now, hesitating, would he think it was worth it? All the monsters’ dens he waded into, all the risks he took, just to preserve us.
Thinking he was saving the world when really he was just giving us greater access to destruction. Letting us loose to be despised and cast aside in a manner that absolves humanity of its guilt.
As monsters we were pitiable—it was beyond our control. As Rehabilitated we are just like everyone else except in every way that matters, which means we could be discarded without a second thought. Alive but only allowed to live among the fringes.
I stare at how James trembles, his chin dimpled with terror, and I wonder if that’s what’s left of us. We uphold the weak and push down the survivors. He was right: the living sequester themselves in compounds while the rest of us roam the world.
One day, we could own the world if we devised it to be so.
There’s a moment when I think about opening the door and letting them have him. Making him one of us. Giving him the ultimate freedom.
The most perfect kind of love.
And then the first creature strips the wood from the frame and they are upon us, and all I can do is shoot, over and over again, as the bodes pile around me. For a moment there is screaming, a painful kind of rage that goes beyond the normal wails in the night. The air fills with the smell of terror and regret, and eventually silence wraps around us both.
They had names once, before, the creatures spread around me. Then they were pack, which meant names became useless. And now we are nothing, lesser than. How many of the bodies lying still at my feet would have chosen this? If they’d had the choice, what would they have wanted?
Will any of them stand in the darkness of a Sanitation Center and listen to the howls of those still out there and feel the tug of their blood, calling them to a home that can never be theirs again?
There were reports shortly after the cure was first administered, of Rehabilitated trying to reinfect themselves. They wanted to go back, they explained; though it didn’t take long for them to realize there’s no such thing. Once you’re cured, you’re cured forever.
The scientists locked them in cells deep in their research labs to study their brain patterns, to subject them to endless rounds of therapy, trying to understand why anyone would choose to become a monster.
None of those scientists ever understood what it was to exist in the between of something, and none of us could ever explain it, so we gave up trying. We learned to keep our dreams to ourselves, to swallow back the way our mouths watered when we heard the wail of monsters in the darkness.
We learned to survive alone, with a wanting deeper than hunger.
“I’m sorry.” James kneels behind me, vomit pooling around his knees. “I didn’t know how fast the darkness would fall under the smoke tonight.”
Absently, I shake my head. One glance of sunlight kills the monsters. We knew the turning of the earth in a way more intimate than our own blood. It’s what kept us alive, and it’s unfathomable that the Pure can’t do the same. As if they can’t understand true fear and mortality.
“Will they be okay?” he asks, eyes trained on the body of a girl wedged in the door frame, her breath coming in short pants and eyes wavering behind lids.
I have no idea how to answer that question. There are a million definitions of okay, and none of them seem to fit this moment. “They’ll send someone from the Sanitation Center.” And then I remember the fire, and add, “If there’s anyone left. They’ll all become Rehabilitated. Like me.”
James pushes to his feet and skirts the puddle of spreading vomit. Already the cure’s finding its way into their systems, fighting against the monster and turning them back to the closest thing to normal we can decipher.
“Did you know them?” he asks.
I shake my head. As human beings, we were as diverse as the days, but as pack, we were one. The moment I was shot with the cure, they became strangers.
He must sense the despair threading through me, because he slips his fingers around my own and holds them tight. “Why did you save me? You could have let them in. Let them take me and then released them back out to the darkness.”
For a long time I think about his question: whether I’d have loaded the last cure-tranq into the gun and leveled it at his back as he ran. What it would have been like to lose him to the pack. At night he’d have streamed past my house with the others, and just like them, he’d maybe pause to sniff the air at something passing familiar before pounding on until dawn.
As a human, he knows me in a way he’d never remember as a monster.
“Because you came for me when none of them did.”