At the kennel, I was greeted by Copper and Sunny, who sniffed me vigorously. Copper flattened his ears and whined.
I reached down to rub him. “It’s okay, boy. I’m okay. I’m okay.” It seemed that the more I said it, the more it had to be true.
Sunny licked my filthy cheek, and I broke down. The bit of sympathy that the dogs showed me was enough to cause me to sit on the ground and sob. The terror and adrenaline drained out of me in my tears, shaking through me.
After I reached hiccupping, dry sobs, I scrubbed my sleeve across my face. I forced myself to stand and walk my bike into the barn.
The darkness made my skin crawl, but I reminded myself that I was safe here. I was no longer Outside. I unpacked the contents of the basket. The dogs investigated the bag of dog food, noses quivering. I lifted it and the cans up high on a rack, where they couldn’t reach.
“That’s for later,” I told them.
I gathered the antibiotics and headed back to the last paddock.
The young man—Alex—lay sleeping peacefully on the straw. I tore open a carton of the antibiotics, read the instructions twice. I removed three pills from the package, added a couple of ibuprofen. I propped his head up on my knee and forced the pills into his mouth. He gurgled and sputtered when I poured water past his lips.
“Antibiotics,” I said, curtly. “Take them.”
He did as he was told, swallowing the pills. His glazed eyes followed me as I sat back against the wall of the barn, a shaft of sunshine warming my back.
“There are enough for you to take for the next three weeks. Don’t lose any. There aren’t any more.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. His eyelids began to drift shut.
“No.” I shook him, hard. Anger burned brightly in my voice. I wanted answers. My Amish reticence faded in the darkness of what I’d seen, the urgency of needing to know: “Wake up. You need to tell me what happened Outside.”
His eyes opened, and he took in my disheveled appearance. “You saw?”
“I saw. Now, tell me.”
***
“At first, I didn’t realize there was anything wrong. I don’t think that anyone did.”
I loosened my grip on the young man’s collar. His head thudded back to the straw, and his gaze landed somewhere on the ceiling. He blinked hard, and I thought for a moment that he was going to try to lose consciousness again. My hand balled up. I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him slip away that easily, leaving me without answers.
But then I realized that he was blinking back tears.
“You’re not from around here,” I prompted, my voice softer.
“No. I’m from Canada.” That explained the slight rounding of his vowels.
“Why are you here?”
“I was looking at graduate schools.” His mouth twitched. “I wanted to get my PhD.”
“To be a doctor?” Plain folk didn't go to college. Children were educated through the eighth grade, most often in one-room schoolhouses like the kind I had gone to. I remembered my mother telling stories of forced busing to public schools back in the seventies, but the Amish had eventually won a Supreme Court case that allowed them to educate their children as they saw fit in the name of religious freedom.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Before, I’d resented it, wanting more than my teacher, the fifteen-year-old sister of a friend, could give me. I had to sneak away to the library and pester the librarians to answer questions that she could not. But right about now, thinking about Mrs. Parsall’s children, I didn’t resent it so much.
“Not a medical doctor. Not any kind of useful doctor. My undergraduate degree is in anthropology.” His gaze flicked to me. It seemed that he was weighing me, deciding how much I would understand about Outside. Trying to figure out how naive I really was.
“I know what anthropology is,” I said quietly. “You study people. Other cultures.”
“Yeah.”
“I have a library card,” I said. What I wanted to say was I’m not an idiot.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you were . . . that you didn’t understand.” It came out a bit haughty. “Sorry.”
I nodded and waited for him to continue.
Eventually, he licked his lips and went on: “I came to the U.S. a week ago. I told my family that I was looking at schools.”
My sharp ears detected the slight change in his story. “Why were you here, really?”
A smile crossed his lips. “Well, that wasn’t the only reason. There was a girl.”
I didn’t prod him. There wasn’t a girl now.
The smile faded. “I visited two schools. The first one was just . . . meh. They’d offered me a partial scholarship, but their program wasn’t very good. Snotty private school. Even with the scholarship, I’d be paying off the tuition until I was sixty. Not worth it for a professor’s salary.”
“You want to teach?”
“Yeah. Folklore.” He gave a small shrug. “The second school was better. The head of the department had published a lot, was a nice guy. Public school, cheaper tuition.”
“And . . . the girl?”
“Cassia.” His eyes softened when he said her name, and his eyes crinkled. I had never seen Elijah’s eyes do that when he said my name. “She was there. Studying biology.”
“How did you know her, if you were in Canada?” I was suspicious, looking to pick apart the threads of his story.
“We met on the Internet, fragging enemy soldiers.”
I looked at him blankly. He didn’t look like a soldier to me.
“Playing video games,” he amended.
It was unfathomable to me to know someone who lived hundreds of miles distant. “You met playing video games?”
“Yeah. My parents thought it was pretty outrageous too, but”—he gave another of his small shrugs—“two of my friends met their girlfriends on online dating sites. I figured that it was just as legitimate as that. We talked every day for about six months.”
“And you . . . fell in love when you saw her?” I knew about the concept of online dating sites from my peeks at magazines, but I had never actually used the Internet, so it was hard to understand exactly how they worked.
“No. I fell in love way before that. Love without first sight.” He gave a grim chuckle. “I killed three batteries on my cell phone talking with her in those months.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around falling in love with someone from afar. I was accustomed to seeing Elijah every day, felt affection out of sheer force of familiarity, force of habit. For me, that was love. Tangible. Love was what was in front of me, not a distant fantasy.
He blinked and looked away. “Anyway, I got to campus the day that the news reports started to come in. The reporters said that something had happened in DC. Some kind of dirty bomb. A biological weapon had been detonated in a bus station, supposedly.”
“Supposedly? They didn’t know for sure?”
“It was certain that something blew up. There were photographs of the destruction. Half a city block cratered. But there were other reports, unofficial reports on the Internet, that something had happened at the CDC.”
“CDC?”
“Centers for Disease Control. They study infectious diseases, in Atlanta. Just rumors . . . there were all kinds of rumors. Rumors that aliens had landed, rumors that something climbed out of the Sarcophagus at Chernobyl.”
I hated to admit my ignorance, but I needed to know what was happening more than I needed to protect my pride. “What’s Chernobyl? And why do they have a sarcophagus?”
He explained to me patiently, without condescension. I could see some of what might make him a good teacher. “Chernobyl was the site of a nuclear disaster in the Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated and relocated, and thousands of deaths were attributed to the radiation, depending on who you talk to. The ground is still contaminated with radiation. They covered the reactor with a lead structure they nicknamed the Sarcophagus. It’s been degrading for years.”
I nodded. It sounded like the plot of one of the movies from the newspaper, but I accepted it. “Go on.”
“There was even a story that some bored Satanists got drunk at a science fiction convention and managed to summon some supernatural evil that took over the whole convention center.”
My frame of reference was already stretched to its limit. I had no idea where to begin with questions about that statement.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I don’t know what was actually true. What I do know is that the news started showing videos of rioting. And not just in DC—it cropped up everywhere. I guess I thought it was some reaction to the terrorism, but it defied all logic. It wasn’t just a religious or political site that was burnt. It was schools, libraries. When I saw an Internet report of a tour bus of senior citizens turned over and . . . and eviscerated . . . I knew that it was much worse.”
“How did . . . how did it spread?”
“Cassia thought it was a result of transportation—airplanes, cars. It had spread within hours. And the contagion seems to have an absurdly short incubation period . . . less than two days.”
“Cassia sounds like a smart woman.”
“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth turned upward. “She’s freaking brilliant. That’s what I love about her. Biology fellow at the university. Gonna be a scientist.”
“Hmm.”
His gaze met mine. “What?”
“That’s just . . . the first time I’ve heard a man say he loved a woman for her brilliance.” I was used to hearing about men who loved women for their eyes, for their smiles, for their ability to work hard, for their gentleness and kindness. Not for their brilliance.
“Yeah, well. Women are different out there.” He let out a snort of derisive laughter.
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive about your dating life.” I lifted my chin in defiance. “But I want to know more about ‘out there.’ Why, with all those brilliant people, is there no more ‘out there’?”
He flinched. I felt a momentary sting of satisfaction at taking him down a peg. We Amish did not suffer pride well. Normally, I’d have accepted his condescension with a thin smile, but not today. Not after the world had ended. No one was observing the rules anymore.
“It’s not as if we weren’t working on it. I went with Cassia to the biology lab, slept in the hallway while all these people in their plastic suits stared into microscopes.”
“You went to protect her?” That was a feeling I could understand. Though I knew very little about his world and the things he spoke of, I understood human emotion.
“Yeah. And I had nowhere else to go. The university went into quarantine. I wasn’t sure if it was to keep the rioting out, or to keep us inside. They closed the iron gates, blocked off the roads. Campus police started shooting anyone who wanted in or out. Hell, I didn’t even know those guys were armed.” His voice was thin.
I sucked in my breath, thinking of Mrs. Parsall’s children, at their own distant colleges. “Go on.”
“I thought it beyond barbaric, until I saw a pack of rabid cheerleaders take out some cops in a patrol car. It was like they peeled open a sardine can, then dragged them out and chewed them up on the pavement.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.
“The lab was barricaded while Cassia and the other graduate students tried to figure out what the hell they were. The National Guard came in. They were better shots than the campus P.D.
“Odd thing was, they only came out at night. During the day, the streets were empty, almost peaceful. Cassia said that photophobia—extreme sensitivity to light—was a symptom of rabies. That perhaps we were seeing a mutated, sped-up version of that.”
His breath quivered when he blew it out. “I’ve seen rabies. This was . . . Jesus. This was something else. Something more atavistic in its power. Something . . . beyond science.”
“Something evil,” I whispered.
“I said they were vampires.”
My heart froze. “Vampires?” I wanted to say, They aren’t real—but the destruction of a world didn’t seem real, either.
“Yeah. Cassia laughed at me. A plague of vampires? She said that it would be impossible for the human digestive system to adapt to survive on blood in the space of two days. Eventually, the Guard brought a corpse into the biology department for them to cut up. She said that it had a gullet full of blood. Cassia thought it was due to internal bleeding, that the key had to be some blood-borne infection. Maybe rabies with a bit of hematological fever mixed in. I didn’t understand all of it.”