The End Has Come

When I could scrub no more I dropped the sponge and collapsed where I was, face against the floor, surrounded by the good clean smell of bleach. For the first time since I had held my daughter’s frail, fungus-ravaged skull in my hands, I did not dream.

I did not dream at all.

* * *

Colonel Handleman woke me with a toe to my ribs, prodding hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to leave a bruise. “How’re you feeling there, Dr. Riley? A little better? A little more like being a reasonable human being? Or shall we leave you to wallow in your own regrets for a few more days? I warn you, my superiors won’t like it.”

“Your superiors sent you to find me and arrest me for treason.” I rolled over onto my back, staring at the ceiling, the blessedly clean, blissfully sterile ceiling. There wasn’t so much as a spider’s web to break the lines of the walls. Paradise. “I’m not sure what they could tell you to do to me.” Even as I spoke the words I knew that I was wrong, and felt the weight of my mistake press down on me like a mountain.

They could lock me in a room filled with sewage. They could talk about the six billion dead, the end of civilization, and when that didn’t hurt enough, they could find every picture of Nikki and Rachel that had been preserved on computers and in school records. They could play me an endless slideshow of what I had lost. They could sit down and explain, in slow, cruel detail, how all of this was my fault, and I would believe them, because they would be telling the truth. There was so, so much that they could do to me, and I would deserve every agonizing bit of it. I always had.

“They could tell me to release you,” said Colonel Handleman calmly. “You would always know that there was a safe haven somewhere in the world, a place where things were still — what’s the word? Ah, yes. Clean. You would know that you had been rejected, and when we inevitably fell to the rot, you would know that it was your fault. The world would collapse, and if you lived long enough to see it, you would be fully aware that every person who succumbed did it with your name on their lips.”

I stared at her. “You wouldn’t.”

There was no mercy in her eyes; no forgiveness. There was only the same bleak look that had graced the black dog before I brought the crowbar down on its skull; the emptiness that had lurked in Nikki’s face as the softness leeched her life away. “Try me.”

I sat up, hands slipping on the still-damp floor. “What do you want? You say I should start acting like a reasonable human being, but you haven’t given me anything to be reasonable about.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Dr. Riley; I assumed that you would have figured it out by now, a smart lady like you.” She leaned closer. “You made this mess. We want you to clean it up.”

I blinked at her slowly. “What?”

“We want you to fix it. Whatever you require will be provided, and at the end, you’ll walk away a free woman. No charges, no consequences, just your own conscience. We’ll even keep your role in the original outbreak quiet. It’s easier now, with most of the media destroyed. You could be a hero, if that was what you wanted.”

It wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was a little house with an art studio in the spare bedroom, and a laughing, dark-eyed woman eating the melon I couldn’t bring myself to touch. What I wanted was a teenage girl curling her lip at the sight of her mothers dancing around the living room like goons. What I wanted was dead and gone and buried, and it was never coming back.

But there was a mess to be seen to. There was a mess, and there was a secret somewhere that would give me the right combination of chemicals, the right sequence of enzymes, to clean it up and beat it back. I sat up.

“You said that two percent of the population had the right combination of cytokines and specific enzyme expression.”

“Yes.”

“What degree of the population has one of the two, and what percentage of them showed resistant traits before succumbing?”

“I don’t know, but I could get you the figures.”

“How many people are left?” This was the big question: this was the one without which nothing else mattered. Too few, and we might as well be like Nikki, like Rachel, like the black dog — we might as well go into the gray, and let the softness have dominion over all.

Colonel Handleman smiled slowly. “Enough.”

This wouldn’t make amends. This wouldn’t bring back what had been lost. I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon, I had allowed Nikki to steal the juice; I had done this to the world. It was only fair and just that I should have to set it right.

I picked myself up from the bleach-covered floor, watching Colonel Handleman all the while. “I’m going to need some clothes,” I said.

“That can be arranged,” she replied. “Welcome to the cleanup crew, Dr. Riley.”

“Thank you,” I said.

There was work to do.