After the Cure by Deirdre Gould (year 7 reading list .txt) 📕

He kissed her too roughly, almost biting and his hand clamped shut just below her wound and she yelped as a jolt of pain sizzled up her arm and into her neck and breast. He dropped away from her as if she’d shoved him. “Oh, God, Nella, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He gently lifted away the soaked bandages with fingers light as leaves. The wound was unbroken, but he was shaken and reluctant to touch her. She turned his face away from the red scar that laced her skin until their eyes met. She smiled and felt his frame immediately loosen. The shower plinked like a metronome in the quiet. She stretched as tall as she could. Her lips brushed the ragged scar on his cheek.

“It’s too cold in here,” she whispered. Her hand slid gently down his arm and her fingers tangled in his. She led him out into the bedroom. She kissed him, her cool hand making a slow current down his chest as she gently backed him to the edge of the bed. He sat down, his hands spread over her hips in long streaks of warmth. She eased him back and hovered over him, her thighs touching the outside of his, her wet hair like cool grasses passing over his baking skin. He closed his eyes. Nella paused to look at his face. She traced the gentle ridge on his temple, feeling the fragile bone beneath, the frail globe that held everything she cared about. She leaned in closer, her breasts grazing his chest. She closed her eyes. Her breastbone ached as if it were too small to hold everything in. Her cheek rested lightly against his.

“I love you Frank,” she said softly and with one small movement, enveloped him, like a still lake closing over a stone. He cried out and his eyes flew open to meet hers. She kissed him, her hips were like the currents in the maps above them, moving endlessly over the same hidden rocks and trenches, without pause. He twisted one arm around her back, needing her ever closer, as if he could dissolve into her. His other hand smoothed her hair from her face as she kissed him. He arced up toward her, a stone bridge that shattered and then collapsed into something new. He pulled her down with him and turned sideways so that she lay beside him, their faces level with each other. She watched the great breaths pulsing in his chest. He pulled her chin up gently with one hand. She glanced at his face and burst into tears. She pressed a sob into the back of her hand.

Frank pushed himself up one arm. “Nella, what is it? Are you hurt? Is it your shoulder?”

She shook her head and slipped a hand into his. “I can’t help thinking about the missing samples. Even now. It hangs over everything. Maybe this is the last day. Maybe this is the last time I get to touch you. For a while I could pretend we were going to find them. That everything would turn out all right. But now, when it matters most of all,” she brought his hand to her cheek, warming her face, “now I doubt. Now it seems impossible and everything seems closer to an end.”

He curled himself over her, his too thin chest, his patchwork of scars suddenly beautiful to her. His thumbs smoothed the tears from her face. “Nella, we are going to find them. I will find them. This isn’t an end.” A broad smile spilled across his face, “Trust me, we’re going to be making love hundreds of times. Thousands.”

She laughed in spite of herself. He touched her forehead with his own. “The whole world had to die before I found you. I’ve been through hell. I even became the devil himself for a while. I can’t lose you now. The universe can’t be that unjust.”

He made love to her again, slow and powerful, until she forgot the samples, forgot the trial and the loneliness of the empty world. Until she was lost in the sharp, clean smell of him, the rough, sandy feel of his hands on her skin. Until every touch was a splash, a little ripple growing inward and colliding with each other, colliding and merging and smoothing again into stillness.

 

Nella Knows

Nella woke up in the early morning hours and slipped quietly out of the bed. She padded to the bathroom to relieve herself and soak in the shower. She pressed the small tab in the center of the knob without even glancing at it. More second nature than modesty, she didn’t even think about it. Twenty minutes later, she changed the bandage on her wound gingerly and then turned the doorknob. The automatic click of the lock releasing was minuscule, but in her brain it was as loud as a gunshot. She looked down at the knob half turned in her hand. She realized that Frank was already days ahead of her and she cursed her slow thought process. How could she have missed it? It must have been on the video- how had she not seen it? Even if not, common sense should have told her. Even her fevered unconscious had made the connection. Closets don’t lock with a key from the inside. They lock with a button or a knob. The key only opens it from the outside.

Nella flung the door open and paced naked from the bathroom to the bed and back, wondering if she should wake Frank. Threads of questions shuttled by her so quickly she couldn’t grasp any of them for long. Was it an odd lock? Had she seen it? Would he have had the mental capacity to open the door if it didn’t need the key? Yes. She could answer that one with certainty. The Infected could turn doorhandles, could probably even remember to turn the lock knob. Nothing more complicated. In fact, the revolving door at Dr. Carton’s lab would probably, had probably, defeated them unless they stopped pushing at the right spot by mere chance. Keys were definitely out. The thought of Dr. Carton brought the next thought crashing down on her like ice water on her shoulders. Had Dr. Pazzo even been sick at all? Was there a person keeping him and Anne alive or had it just been him the entire time?

Nella sat on the foot of the bed and bit her nails without realizing it. She jumped up and shook Frank awake, rather more roughly than she intended. He sat up, but he rubbed his eyes and looked ready to slump back. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“The lock wasn’t a key lock was it?”

“Huh?”

“The lock on Dr. Pazzo’s side of the closet. It was a push button wasn’t it?”

Frank’s eyes snapped open and he stared at her. “You know? Did I-”

“No, you didn’t talk in your sleep or anything. I realized it just now, in the bathroom.”

Frank sagged with relief. “I wanted to tell you, but I have to protect my client-”

“Never mind that,” interrupted Nella, “I know why you didn’t tell me. It’s not important now. What is important is whether or not that door lock was weird and locked from the inside with a key. That’s what you were looking for in your notes wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but I need the video. It’s not in the notes, I never thought it was important. I’m still not entirely sure that it is. He was ill when he finally found out about the resistant strain. We saw the infection take over. There’s no way he could have gone to steal the samples at that point. Besides, they found him and Ann locked in the lab still.”

Nella raked a hand through her hair. She was shaking and her lungs threatened to close in the thick panic of the room. “Frank, he wasn’t sick.”

“What are you talking about? We saw it happen.”

“No Frank,” her voice was razor thin and insistent, “he wasn’t sick. He was pretending. Just like Dr. Carton. Except he didn’t need to go as far.”

“Nella, calm down. You can’t possibly know that.” He pulled her onto the bed and wrapped the warm blanket around her shoulders.

“Remember the food system of his? We agreed that an Infected wouldn’t think to open packaged food, even if they were starving. And it couldn’t slide through the ramshackle tubes he made without clogging somewhere else- you said that.”

“I remember.”

“So either someone was feeding him and Ann, or he was. He wasn’t sick.”

Frank rubbed his forehead and Nella knew he was convinced despite himself. “Why would he do all that though? Why the elaborate set up, the tube system, the key sliding underneath the door? Why the complete breakdown on camera? Why lock Dr. Schneider up? What could he possibly have hoped would happen?”

Nella was silent for a moment, torn between panic and confusion. She felt stupid and slow, as if she were in a bad dream where she could never reach her destination no matter how long she walked.

“He knew. He knew before they locked themselves in. He knew about the samples, he knew about the severity and communicability of the original, he knew that millions were going to be infected. We just assumed he didn’t know until the day Dr. Schneider broke out because that’s what he showed us. But Ann said he watched all the tapes. He had to have seen Dr. Carton. He had to know. We just took it for granted that he found out at the end. Just the way we assumed he was safely sealed away because he made a point of showing us the key to the door and how he put it beyond his reach. He distracted us just enough.”

“Why film it in the first place?”

“For exactly this sort of situation. What is it they used to call it? Plausible deniability.”

“There’s no way he could have known what would happen. Assuming he knew about the incurable strain and the severity of the original Plague, the way that you say, he would have believed the world would be destroyed completely. That there would be no one left who cared how it started or no one left with the technical know how to discover how it started. He’s just not that smart. No one is.”

“Yes, he is, Frank. Maybe he didn’t know he’d be facing a world tribunal, but he had to know that in the end, someone’s head was going to roll, and he was going to make damn sure it wasn’t his. He might not have believed that anyone would survive after seeing the violence and lack of self care that Ann showed and that probably came through the news reports in the lab, but he probably would have hoped that someone would stop it, that something would be left. I would have, if it were me. I believe him,