Carrier
Joan sat on the front steps of her condo, watching the sun start to crest the western hills, sipping coffee brewed from carefully-hoarded beans and listening to bird song, loud and bright from a dozen trees. One of the few ironic graces these days: you heard more birds now.
Halfway through the mug a troop carrier rolled into view. The rabbit woman watched it pull up to block the driveway; Hellman stepped out of the back, two younger rabbit boys in fatigues following close behind. The mouse wore jeans and a gray turtleneck just like the last time she'd seen him, a year before, questioning her about Rob's whereabouts as if she'd heard from the wolf in the last decade. Now he walked up with his faint smile as if nothing had changed. Yet after yesterday's phone call, a lot had changed. Yet again.
Joan had had enough of change this lifetime.
He stopped a few paces away, hands in pockets, as nonchalant as if they were going out for Sunday brunch. "Morning, Ms. Sanchez."
"An ironically pleasant one." Grunting, she took two last gulps of the precious coffee, then set the mug down by the front door and walked to the vehicle.
Two more soldiers waited in the back of the truck; they slid in and sat on narrow green benches, facing one another as the vehicle rumbled forward. Joan felt like an extra in a war movie. She watched houses go by, noting which ones looked newly abandoned.
"We traced the call Corelli made to you and it all checks out," Hellman said.
She crossed her arms. "It's so nice the Quarantine Authority's looking out for me that way."
He laughed. "Just a hell of a coincidence if the first guy with antibodies turns out to be your ex, huh?"
"He's got to be somebody's ex. Or is it odd because you're my ex too, Tom?"
A couple of the soldiers looked sharply in Hellman's direction, and he smiled more wanly.
The truck hit the highway and picked up speed. Joan hadn't been on this freeway since... February? Eight months. The view past the roadbed looked incongruously serene, the reality of the city-population depleted, services curtailed, goods strictly rationed-hidden from view.
"You really think this wolf's immune, ma'am?" one of the soldiers said. He said wolf with a hint of a sneer, as if it had become an epithet.
"I don't know. Yes. I think so." She sighed. "He said he had the wilding plague and recovered."
The young rabbit's eyes widened. "Really? And you believe him?"
"As crazy as it might sound, I do."
"And I trust Ms. Sanchez's judgment," Hellman said, sliding his sunglasses on, off, on again: a nervous fidget she recognized. She patted the back of his hand, and he clasped fingers with her a moment. As the epidemic had spread, they hadn't as much broken up as admitted that trying to save the world left no time for relationships.
It took another five minutes to reach the city limits. High fences straddled the road, marking the first checkpoint. From here on, the interstate shrank to a two-way street, strictly surveilled. The city had spent the last two years slipping from the first world, but nowhere did it become more stark than the "temporary staging area" around its perimeter, a nightmare combination of martial encampment and third-world slum. Roads spread out like dirt serpents, winding between drab gray tents and industrial trailers. Civilian huts marched to the horizon in tight lines, accommodating refugees whose homes, both inside and outside the metro area, had become unlivable.
And, of course, past those lay the holding pens.
She'd seen video of the pens before, huge bare fields fenced in with high chain link and barbed wire, canvas roofs. News shows used to talk about them, after the hospitals and prisons were overrun but before people lost the energy to be outraged. As far as Joan knew, there'd never been an official media blackout. Instead the city, the country (the world), had slipped into collective denial. No one wanted documentary evidence of friends and spouses sickening, going manic-and, if they were lucky, dying.
What the videos couldn't depict is how much the pens reeked, even the empty ones, of blood and vomit and fear. The other rabbits, even the mouse, looked stoic, but Joan began to gag, holding a hand over her mouth and nose. The pens that weren't empty didn't have the wild, manic occupants she'd been expecting, though; whole families of foxes and cats, wolves and jackals, simply watched the truck roll by, silently, eyes dull and submissive. "None of them look sick," she managed to get out.
"They aren't," the talkative soldier said. "We only keep the at-risk ones here now."
"Where are the sick ones, then?"
He just looked steadily at her, and she looked down after a moment.
The pens passed by, and the truck slowed, then stopped, waiting at another checkpoint. Joan's ears folded back. A concrete and steel barrier stretched across the horizon, topped with barbed wire and sentry platforms. She remembered the wall being described in news report as another temporary measure, but this structure looked ominously permanent: the perimeter of a fortress, or the walls of a prison. The transport idled in front of a high chain link gate, red revolving lights indicating its electrification. The driver was filling out a form, which he turned around and passed to Hellman for more signatures and check marks.
Finally, the soldiers milling around the vehicle stepped back and lined up behind it, rifles ready. "Clear!" someone shouted, and the red lights went out. The gate swung up. "Hang on," the driver called.
Joan hadn't imagined a truck could accelerate that fast. It lurched forward, jerking hard. The gate slammed down behind it.
Despite the ugly show, the road outside quickly reverted to quiet pastoral countryside. After several minutes the only noise other than the engine was wind whistling through trees; if the stretch of freeway leaving her neighborhood had seemed quiet, out here in the hot zone it had been, simply, abandoned. The roadbed had been resurfaced just four years ago, but the untended edges showed the bites and tears of invasive weeds.
The silence settled in and remained unbroken for about five minutes. Then the driver called, "Ferals at three o'clock." All of the soldiers suddenly had rifles.
Joan looked out to the right of the vehicle. Three tigers-two women and a man-ran along the side of the road, none dressed. They snarled at the truck as it went by.
"They don't look sick," she said doubtfully.
"Once the disease runs its course, if you've survived you're perfectly healthy, other than being a carrier," Hellman murmured.
"And, you know, stupid and homicidally insane," the sergeant added dryly. The rest laughed.
She looked back at the receding figures. "Do you ever wonder who they were?"
The soldiers glanced at her, shifting the grips on their weapons uncomfortably. "That's a bad road to go down, ma'am," the sergeant replied.
"Sometimes you recognize them," the talkative one said, very quietly.
Nobody spoke again for a full twenty miles, not until the driver turned off at the Hazelton exit. Buildings came into view: first a gas station, then an old hardware store, then the expected series of strip malls, fast food joints and small businesses that spread in organic rings from a city's center. Now all stood empty and silent, trash piled against shattered windows. Most were dark, although on some blocks, lights flickered unsteadily. "Is all of the hot zone like this?" she murmured.
"Most of it," Hellman said, voice flat. The terminology had changed in the last two years. At first hot zone was just the district in the city where it started. Then all of that city. Then, as the strategy shifted from trying to contain the disease to just trying to protect the uncontaminated, from quarantining to barricading, hot zone became everything outside the safe metros.
"We hear most of the heartland's pretty much gone," the talkative soldier said. "All wild. Eat or be eaten."
The soldier in the passenger seat cleared his throat, twisting around to face Joan. "Where's the hotel your friend's at, ma'am?"
"Corner of Main and Washington."
"That's where you first met Rob, isn't it?" asked Hellman.
"No, it's where we first screwed," Joan replied, without turning around. A couple soldiers snickered. The mouse readjusted his sunglasses.
The next block was residential, tightly-packed row houses. They were as vandalized as the storefronts, but smelled faintly of blood. Shadows moved behind broken upper floor windows, following the truck's passage. Joan hugged herself tightly, fingers digging into her jacket, curling around a metal-heavy pocket for reassurance.
Another block and they turned left, heading deeper into downtown, approaching a once neatly-manicured urban park. Joan marveled at how far it had already gone to seed; if she hadn't known better, she'd have guessed the park had been abandoned a decade ago. The Washington Square Hotel faced the park's main entrance.
"Our stop, gents," the driver called, swinging the carrier around and parking in the loading zone. Most of the windows remained intact but the sliding-glass front door had been ripped off its rails; trash filled the darkened foyer inside.
"Looks welcoming," the sergeant said as they piled out. "Ain't your friend supposed to be in the lobby?"
"We didn't get to make a rendezvous point before he said he had to go and the line went dead."
"No problem." He stepped inside and waved his rifle barrel at the empty front desk and its dusty, cobwebbed computer terminal. "We'll just ask what room he's registered in."
"Enough, sergeant," Hellman snapped.
The taller rabbit grunted. "First floor hallway. Keep Ms. Sanchez in the middle and protected, because she's the only one who can identify which goddamn pred we're not supposed to shoot before the rest eat our faces."
While the lobby had merely been dark, the hallway quickly became near black, the heat uncomfortable despite the fall weather outside. It stank of musk-mostly wolf-and urine. "Kinda gone downhill since the last time you were here, ma'am, huh?" the talkative soldier murmured.
"It was always pretty crummy," Joan responded.
Stopping about halfway down the hall, the sergeant turned to look at Joan. "We've gotta do a little strategic thinking here, ma'am. We need to let your friend know we're here, without letting the ferals know. Where'd he call you from, anyway?"
"He didn't say."
"A cell phone," Hellman said.
The sergeant rubbed his chin. "I'll be damned. Well, see if you got cell service."
She pulled out her phone, and furrowed her brow. One bar of signal. She exchanged glances with the sergeant, who nodded once, and redialed the last number.
No one answered by the third ring. Instead, on the second floor, a wolf howled, in a way no sapient wolf had howled for the last two thousand years. A dozen other howls, all around the building, joined in.
"Shit," both the sergeant and Joan said simultaneously. All the soldiers raised their rifles.
A door down the hall opened, and a wolf stepped out. Rifles swung around. "Hold your fire!" the sergeant barked.
The wolf took another step forward, staring at them. He bared his teeth, but didn't move forward. And didn't say anything. Foam flecked around his lips, and he breathed raggedly.
"That's the final stage," Hellman murmured. "Before they're completely wild."
The wolf took a step backward, then fell to his knees with a feral, guttural growl. For a moment, his eyes met Joan's. She had grown up around carnivores, worked with them, ate with them, slept with them. This was the first time one had ever looked at Joan and clearly seen prey.
Then the hallway exploded.
Doors flew open, left and right, shapes hurling themselves toward the group. Rifles fired. Someone threw Joan to the ground. She rolled over, panic-struck, to see one of the soldiers had pulled her down out of the line of fire. She relaxed, for a split second, before a grey hand wrapped around the soldier's throat, yanking upward. Blood sprayed, and a burst of weapons fire came from close by. She couldn't tell which came first. The rabbit-and the wolf that had grabbed him-fell on top of her again.
Joan scrambled backward, fumbling at her jacket, then flattened herself against the musty carpet as bullets cracked into the wall behind her. She could see two more soldiers down, one being dragged through a door headfirst, screaming, until the screaming stopped abruptly, wetly. More wolves were down, though, at least half a dozen. She couldn't see where Hellman had gone.
"Move!" someone shouted. She didn't realize he was shouting at her until claws sank into her shoulder, spinning her around and up. She saw jaws coming for her, closing on her, and she reacted before she could even think about it. The shot momentarily deafened her, the recoil slamming her back into the wall.
The sergeant-the one who'd shouted-had his rifle pointed at the wolf, but as the body toppled over he reached out to steady her, glancing down in clear shock at the smoking revolver she held. "Marry me," he said.
"We'll talk," she gasped. Other wolves circled, but now stayed back, snarling at the armed rabbits. They outnumbered the soldiers two to one-but they weren't armed, and now they weren't close enough to leap, either. The two other fallen rabbits had disappeared, fresh blood smears leading to closed doors.
A groan made Joan glance down and see Hellman, sliding up the wall to steady himself. Blood ran freely from a wound on his shoulder. She reflexively checked her own wounds; blood had been drawn by both tooth and claw, but the gashes were shallow.
"Joan!" a voice yelled from the darkness at the hallway's end. A figure hurried from the shadows, and the wolves encircling the rabbits started growling in a lighter, confused fashion.
"Hold your fire," the sergeant repeated hoarsely.
As Rob approached, he growled back at the other wolves. They crouched, submissively.
"What, you're the goddamn alpha?" Hellman wheezed.
"I'm not the strongest, but I'm the smartest," Rob replied, edging toward the rabbits.
"How big's the pack?"
"Fourteen." He swallowed, gaze sweeping the floor. "I guess eight now."
The rabbits started backing down the hallway, with Rob appearing to herd them along. "So what do we do?" Joan said.
"We get out before the pack turns on me."
"What do you guys eat now that you've eaten all the herbivores here?" the talkative one muttered.
"Forest animals."
"And you? You munched any bunny kids?"
He just glared in response.
One of the wolves suddenly leaped forward to snap at Rob. One of the soldiers shoved her with his rifle barrel, and all of the pack bared their teeth, snarling. Rob snarled back, but none of them looked submissive this time.
"This isn't good, isn't it?" Joan murmured.
"Not good," Rob agreed in a hiss, keeping his eyes locked with the closest feral's.
"New plan," the sergeant announced. "Hit the lobby and run like hell." As soon as he finished speaking, he fired off a burst of rounds over the wolves' heads, and the pack fell back, yelping.
Then they ran like hell.
When the wolves ran after them, they leapt for Rob, not the rabbits. He went down under two of them, one of them sinking his teeth into Rob's shoulder before the sergeant blew half his head off. Joan and the talkative one hauled Rob forward as another round of gunfire held off the remaining wolves.
The sergeant slid into the driver's seat as Joan and the soldier lifted Rob up into the truck, the vehicle starting to roll forward even as the last rabbit leapt on. It wasn't until they left the hotel behind that Joan began to shake. Hellman put an arm around her, resting her head on his shoulder as she held to him with blood-streaked hands.
No one spoke on the way back. Rob looked between Joan and Hellman and mostly at the floor; the soldiers looked at Rob with unreadable expressions: wolves, just by being wolves, were part of the other now. She wondered how the last two years had undone the thousand before it so easily.
As soon as they rolled to a stop, two doctors and four soldiers whisked Rob away, ignoring his protests, the wolf ignoring Joan's half-hearted reassurance. Hellman gave Joan a hug and hurried after them.
And that quickly it was over, she realized. A nurse gave her a cursory once-over, bandaged her wound and told her to keep it clean, and assigned an intern to drive the rabbit back home with sincere thanks and a polite refusal to commit to keeping her informed about what they found. The mouse would let her know what they found, though. She hoped.
A week passed, long enough for her to settle back into an uneasy routine, the wound healing but continuing to hurt. Then, one evening at sunset, after an afternoon of a severe headache, two men came to her door. She couldn't tell what species they were; they wore orange jumpsuits.
"Joan Sanchez?" one said, voice buzzing slightly through the suit.
She nodded warily. "What's this-"
"Standard protocol, ma'am." He raised a pistol and shot her in the neck. She raised a hand to feel the small dart there, and got out an obscenity before she collapsed.
When Joan woke up the headache was still there. She blinked, disoriented, remembering fragments of dreams: dreams of hospitals and needles, of sickness, blood and pain. Fevers, vomiting, delirium-memories of her small-town childhood and middle-class cosmopolitan life. Of Rob, now distant; of Tom, urgent.
The urgency stayed with her. She rubbed the spot the dart had been, and tried to focus, pushing herself into a sitting position and nearly toppling forward again.
"Easy," a voice said. A hand reached out to steady her. "How do you feel, Ms. Sanchez?"
The hospital room was empty but for monitoring equipment, her bed, and a squirrel woman in a white lab coat, gently lowering her hand as Joan steadied herself. She looked startled to see the rabbit awake.
"Terrible," she said weakly. Her mouth was dry.
"Given your last month, that's miraculously good."
"Month?" She blinked her eyes shut and opened them again, taking a deep breath and staring at the woman incredulously. "I remember being... kidnapped, yesterday."
"I'm sorry for that, but we had reason then to believe-" She stopped, and clasped her hands together. "We've learned how Mr. Corelli survived the wilding plague, Ms. Sanchez. He had a different strain of it."
"A new one? And it's... weaker, then. Because he survived it?"
"As did you."
Joan began to feel dizzy. She closed her eyes, starting to hyperventilate.
"The known version only affects carnivores. Corelli's strain affects everyone."
"But it's not fatal, then!"
The squirrel hesitated, looking away, then held out her hand. "Come with me."
She led Joan out through what she realized was an airlock, across the hall to an observation window, looking into a room identical to the one the rabbit had been in.
Hellman sat curled up in a corner of that room, nude, eyes dull. Dried foam crusted around his muzzle.
The doctor pressed an intercom button. "Mr. Hellman?"
He twitched wildly, staring at the speaker in fright.
"Ms. Sanchez is here. She's all right. She made it okay."
Hellman turned to the window, then past it. Joan stared numbly, touching her hand to the glass. "Tom?" she whispered.
The mouse met Joan's eyes and stretched out a hand toward hers, pawing at the air, his eyes seeming to light up for a split-second. Then he dropped to all fours, chittering miserably. Joan's vision blurred with tears.
"One of the soldiers who came back with you is like this, and one of our researchers who came into contact with Mr. Hellman." She looked down, speaking more softly. "Most of us didn't agree that Mr. Corelli should be brought in, you know. We figured he'd be another dead end, and to be blunt, we stopped trying to save the carnivores a year ago. But Hellman insisted." She swallowed. "If-when-this strain becomes widespread..." She trailed off.
Joan's ears flattened. "No. Look. R-Rob and I both have antibodies! We've survived! It's a weaker strain, and we've survived!" Her voice became desperate.
"I know. I know." The squirrel rubbed her temple, sounding very tired. "And we might find a vaccine before we're all too stupid to use it. If not, at least we won't understand everything we've lost."
She walked out of the room, leaving Joan staring through the window at the future.