The End Has Come

I didn’t want to. But she had been willing to talk about Nicole before, willing to remind me (of the gray, the gray eating away at her, my little girl, her skull clean and polished and smooth in my hands) what had happened to her. She didn’t know the details. She didn’t need to know the details. Anyone who had access to my files would be able to figure out that my wife and daughter were the most important things in my world. Rachel had died early. If Nicole wasn’t with me, then she was dead too, and it was my fault, because I had been the lab manager for Project Eden. This was all my fault.

I opened my eyes.

Commander Handleman was dripping with mud. It was splattered liberally all up and down her uniform, but was thickest around her feet, where it was packed on so thick that the fabric was no longer visible. Tracks led back to the door, marking her progress across the room. She smiled when she saw me looking at her. Then she lifted her right foot and calmly, casually, stomped it on the floor. Mud splattered off of her in thick sheets, dark and terrible.

A high, keening noise sliced through the room, like a teapot announcing its contents were boiling. I realized belatedly that it was coming from my own throat. That didn’t mean I could stop myself from making it.

“I’ve read all your files, Dr. Riley,” she said, still smiling as she stomped her other foot and sent more mud cascading to the floor. “You always did an admirable job of managing your OCD. One of your colleagues — Henry Tsoumbakos, I assume you remember him — left a full confession before he succumbed to the R. nigricans infection. He attempted to absolve you of blame, said you hadn’t been told about the contamination because of your disorder. He said you would have shut down the project over hygiene concerns. Wasn’t that kind of him? He wanted to clear your name, even as the monster he created was stripping the flesh from his bones one cell at a time.”

“Please stop,” I whispered.

“So we looked a little deeper. This has been your personal hell, hasn’t it, Dr. Riley? Did the death of your wife upset you as much as the sudden untidiness of the world? Mold everywhere, and nothing that was capable of killing it. Nothing but fire, anyway, and since there have been no reports of uncontrolled burns from the area you were known to be in, it’s clear that you didn’t take that route.” Colonel Handleman abandoned her smile for a look of exaggerated, insincere sympathy. “Couldn’t you find any matches?”

I didn’t say anything. Asking her to stop wasn’t doing any good, and if I opened my mouth again, the taste of mud would clot my tongue and stop my breath. It would kill me, I knew it would kill me, and I also knew that it would do no such thing, and that didn’t matter. My pills had been gone for months. Nothing to put a fine pharmacological veil between me and the mud that was falling, in splats and blobs, to the floor.

“It’s interesting. Most people with your sort of disorder fear germs, or obsess on little rituals. You got hung up on cleanliness. Everything had to be just so around your lab, every protocol had to be followed, every rule had to be observed. It’s no wonder your people decided to stop telling you anything. Working under you must have been like following a preschool teacher to the ends of the world.”

“There’s no one true way to have OCD,” I whispered. It was an old argument, one I’d been having over and over again since I was in high school, usually when some teacher wanted to say that the concessions I required were just me being a prissy little princess, and not a genuine function of my mental health. I didn’t count. I didn’t have a lot of really obvious rituals. Most of mine involved thinking of the right sequence of numbers when I dropped something, or always eating my food in a clockwise direction, no matter what sort of terrible food combinations that entailed. It was about separation, cleanliness, order, because when I failed to be perfect, that was when the walls would crumble, and the monsters would come.

I had known that simple fact all the way down to my bones for what felt like my entire life, even though I hadn’t been formally diagnosed until I was eleven: if I slipped, even for a moment, if I allowed one speck of disorder to enter my life, then everything would fall apart. People had been telling me I was crazy for what felt like just as long. Well, guess what? I had slipped. I had allowed disorder to enter the world, and everything I loved had been burned away and buried in the gray. I wasn’t crazy.

I was the only person in the world who was genuinely, unforgivingly sane.