Dragon Virus (8 page)

o0o

A week went by. Steven stayed out of the house as much as
he could, missing dinners, leaving early for school. His parents didn’t
question him, barely even noticed. The lines were back on his mother’s
forehead. His dad’s temper was even quieter, like he was walking on eggshells
inside.

Contrary to Josh’s prediction, nobody asked about his new
sister. If they had, he couldn’t have answered them. He didn’t go into her
room, couldn’t stand to be near her.

When the telepreacher’s show was piped over the system at
their favorite hangout, he got up and left.

o0o

It was like that for two weeks. Two godawful weeks of
pretending everything was… normal.

“Did you hear?”

They were lazing in the sunlight outside during lunch
period. Susan, Josh, Melly, Steven, and Wicker. Steven sat off to the side,
picking at the bread of his sandwich. Wicker had the news, dancing up and down
on his skinny-bone legs.

“Pauly and whatshisname, the guy he hangs with. Couple-five
Norms jumped ’em after school.”

That go everyone’s attention, and Josh stopped playing with
Melly’s black braids long enough to roll over on the table and look at Wicker
in disbelief. “You’re shitting me!”

“So help me, s’true. Pauly says he was just walking home and
they came howling at him and — Terrence, that’s his name.”

Steven recalled Terrence then — almost as skinny as Wicker,
no obvious Change until you looked into his eyes and your own reflection looked
back. Silvered eyes, could see in pitch black even better’n a cat. His dad grew
up with a bunch of Internals like that, but that was the old days, when they
still tried to modify the obvious mutes, or hide them.

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened? Three’re still in the hospital.
Cops’re calling it self-defense.”

“Well duh, it was.” Susan dismissed the news and went back
to her California roll.

“They don’t get the fact that we’re stronger than they are,”
Melly said sadly.

Josh curled his hand back into her hair and pulled her to
him for a kiss, while Steven looked at Wicker, who was still dancing with joy
of having had gossip first. Some day they will, he thought suddenly. Some day
they will get it. And God help us all, then.

o0o

Friday, there was nowhere else to go. He came home
reluctantly, walking into the aftermath of another argument. Ugly weight in the
air, the echoes of crying, shouting. The scent of exhaustion heavy everywhere.
Nowhere to run, no way to get around it.

“You’re going to do this, aren’t you?” He tried not to sound
accusing, but his mom flinched anyway.

“Steven. Please. My sister can give her a better life than
we can.”

“Bullshit.” His voice cracked. “If we’re going to do this,
be honest about it. You don’t want to look at her and think —”

“And think what?” his father interjected, his temper rising
like a snake. “That she’ll grow up to hate us? That she’ll blame us for being
different?”

Steven looked up into his father’s face; the years of living
in a Normal world etched on a face that otherwise hid his Changes underneath.
Anger repressed until it exploded, or ate him from within. Steven couldn’t
afford anger.

“Or that we’ll grow to hate her,” he said quietly, instead. “Hate
her for being different.”

Bias crimes were on the rise. He’d checked in the library
after school that day, after his moment of clarity, idle curiosity that came
back now to haunt him. A 48% jump in the past three years. It was getting
worse. Lines were being drawn; the ones who used to pass, like his parents,
being forced to choose when they were outed by former friends, disowned by
family on the other side of the line.

And in the background, when you really read what was going
on, you saw wars brewing, a Science race to find the cure, eating up everything
else the money might have been doing. Other countries, without the money,
without the media, not treating their Changed even half so well. Telepreachers
everywhere, spewing bile the Normals fed on, even as the number of Changed
grew.

“China...” he started to say, when his mother interrupted
him, her voice sharp and low. “Don’t talk about China. Don’t even think about
it.”

Denial. His parents were heavy into denial. Don’t talk about
it and you can pretend it’s not staring you in the face. All the stuff going
on, all the stuff coming down.

His social history teacher had been the only one who would
talk to him about it. She was sixty if she was anything, and she looked like a
turtle with her narrow neck, sharp nose, dry-looking skin. But she was honest.
Painfully so.

“The first generation was extreme, but almost all of them
died. The virus was a dead end, so they could afford to be kind to the children
who lived. And then when the second and third were minor and survivable — It’s
almost like it learned. Slow down, let people get used to it, then wham!”

“Us.”

“Yes, you.” Her turtle eyes were sad.

“Sucks to be us.” It would hurt, he thought, if it wasn’t so
funny. We’re the freaks, but the Normals are the ones who’re protected.

“It won’t always. Suck to be you, I mean.”

That sounded like the usual teacher spew. “You really think
there’s a future? Honestly?”

“Honestly?” She paused to consider it. “Humanity has always
adapted. That’s what you are, an adaptation. The fact that there are clarified
Changes, that a doctor can identify a specific strain on a birth certificate,
can treat and diagnose and predict treatment for specific Changes...

“There’s always a future, Steven. We just never know what it’s
going to look like.”

He left his parents to their argument and went up into his
room. He couldn’t stand it anymore, the silence and the fighting and the knowing
what’s coming and not admitting it, not acknowledging it, like there was some
way to turn it all away.

There’s always a future.

Nobody ever said it wasn’t going to suck.

o0o

A Thumper telepreacher — not the one on TV, a smaller,
meaner one — came to town that weekend. He had a permit, a tour bus, and a
platform they built quickly out of prefab wood, stringing lights and a speaker
to it with practiced ease. Stirring up trouble was what he was there for, him
with his bus-load of followers, waving signs, thumping their Bibles and getting
into peoples’ faces, hogging the camcrews that showed up to cover the scene.

But things didn’t go the way the telepreacher wanted. Maybe
the camspeaker didn’t ask the right questions, show preacherman the right
deference. Or maybe he just got into the wrong face at the wrong time. Steven
wasn’t there, he was in school, he didn’t know. The newsfeed that night just
showed the aftermath: bodies flat on the pavement, blood pooled and signs
broken. A riot, they said. A brawl. An unfortunate incident, but even the
crazies have their right to speak in public.

Seven dead: preacherman and four of his followers, two
locals who joined in. A cop and one of the camcrew were being treated for
non-life-threatening injuries.

The dead were all Normals.

The general feeling in school the next day was that they got
what was coming to them.

Anyone who felt different stayed low and quiet.

A quiet that you could feel burn the air.

Steven sat at his desk in homeroom and let the gossip wash
over him. His left hand played with a gel-pen, tapping it against the desk
until the teacher, disturbed by the noise, made him stop.

o0o

Sunlight came in through the window, touching the
mint-green paint and turning it the color of spring grass. Tiny mica sparks glinted
in the roses, and made the dragon’s eye seem to glow.

“Hello there.”

The baby lay in the crib, pale pink fists clenched over the
blanket. Three months old.

Her face was scrunched, her scalp covered by a faint dusting
of pale brown hair. Steven touched one fist, watching in astonishment as the
perfect little fingers uncurled and curled again. His hand looked so rough next
to hers, the hard, weathered skin making her seem even more delicate.

He had trimmed his nails close before coming in, and he
still moved carefully, afraid of scratching her pinkness.

“Hello, Bethy. Remember me?”

One scrunched up eye opened, pale blue staring up at him as
though he could actually see and recognize him. She was perfect. Utterly,
astonishingly perfect. She could be the poster child for the old Pure Gene Law,
from her tiny toes to her sweetly rounded ears.

Steven picked her up, carefully cradling his sister’s head
in the crook of his arm, and rocked her gently.

“Five farmers went to market, to market to market. Five
farmers went to market, o, with a pig under their arms...” He had sung that
song to her while she was in the womb. Blue eyes blinked sleepily, and he could
almost swear that he saw her smile at him.

Walking around the room, he kept singing. “The pig went to
table, to table to table. The pig went to table and the farmers had none.” They
were standing by the changing table when he finished, and his gaze lifted
almost against his will to the mirror on the wall.

“The troll and the princess” he said softly. His strain was
called the Rock Change. Tough enough that the army would add a pay grade if he’d
enlist when he graduated.

“Troll” was his nickname in grade school, where he was the
only Rock in his year.

At the hospital, when they put Bethany in her bassinet,
behind glass for everyone to watch but not touch, Steven saw four Rock Change
babies in the rows next to her.

Thumpers said he was damned, said they were all damned, all
the Changed.

Maybe the Thumpers were right, and this world was already
hell, humanity descended into wolfpacks, fur smelling of brimstone, ready to
tear at each other for one small patch of land, some small claim to being top
dogs, the only real dogs….

“And now it is upon us, the cost of our inactivity, the
wages of our damnation, that our children must suffer it, and we shall suffer
for our inaction at their hands!”

He put his sister down and risked touching her perfect pink
forehead with his lips. “I love you, Bethy. Remember that. Always remember
that.”

Wolves took care of their own, the old and the sick, the
weak and the doomed.

Wolflings should do the same. So he picked up the tiny
pillow, and did what had to be done.

o0o

…it was summer when they closed the beaches the
final time, the contamination too widespread to contain. We could only sit and
watch while the others went into the water, splashing and calling out. The
children cried, not understanding why they were being punished, when their
friends, the changed ones, could go in.

Some old-style tried, anyway. Surely it couldn’t
be so bad? But it was. The illness swept through communities like a plague,
their mucus dripping red and thick from raw nostrils, their skin drying and
cracking no matter what we did. Some podcasteer asshole called it the Dragon
Virus, and it stuck.

Mid-summer, people who knew better started to
listen to the cults, say the dragons had done it. The dragons were killing us.
That was when I took everyone out of there, packed up the entire house, and
headed for the woods.

It got hotter, and hotter, and pools and hydrants
weren’t enough to cool the cities down.
—from a letter found in the remains of a Settlement House,
just south of Orchard Beach, ME, year 7 (Anno Horriblis).

When we found the body stuck up on the signpost, we
figured for sure the Howlers were back. I mean, who else would leave all that
meat there to burn?

Jody wanted to leave him there. Once Howlers have their paws
on meat, who knows what’s gotten into it? But you don’t waste. No profit to it.
So while Roo and Nance stood guard, I got to shimmy up and unhook our corpse.
All the joys my Changes have brought, slinging a dead weight over my shoulder
ain’t one of them. And the flies kept getting into my nose and mouth.

Landing hard, I dropped the corpse on the ground. Flat white
face stared back at me. I hadn’t noted that before. He was white. Pure white.
The dark hair had me fooled, I guess. Like a signpost: dumb bunny here.

“Howlers caught him wandering,” Jody guessed, standing
behind my shoulder and watching like the corpse was gonna get up and dance. I
shrugged, cracking my fingers back into human-normal shape. Joints would hurt
like hell, next time a storm blew up, but it was nice to be useful. Jody couldn’t
have done that. Not Nance either. Roo could do anything it wanted, but it never
did want. Couldn’t figure out why the Olders kept it around, except it was a
cruel hunter, and we always needed the meat.

I toed the body, trying to decide if it would be worth
stripping it. Roo rummaged, poking, prodding. Checked pockets, just in case,
but wasn’t nothing there. The cloth looked flimsy, like something a townie
would wear. Which scanned — that white, dumb bunny corpse was a townie.

Had been. Was meat, now. Roo gave a claws-up, meant the
flesh scented clean. I gave it a fade.

Nothing more boring than meat once it’s been found.

Nance came back with her Stick, and we slung the corpse
wrist and ankle. Roo hefted it, muscles flexing under the burden. Stronger than
sin, that was Roo. You never wanted it mad at you. Not that it ever even
snarled at me. We’re both Changed, and Change makes strange bedfellows, the
Olders say.

They mean it kind. I don’t care. I’m useful, and useful gets
fed first.

o0o

Back home, the corpse was dropped in the kitchen for Leah
to deal with. I don’t want to know where it goes. Meat is meat, but some things
you better just to call stew. Anyway, we had to make our report.

Drew was in the office when we got there, waiting for the
news. He’s the oldest Older in our House. I think he’s my parent, ’cause he
never quite looks me in the eye. The ones who’ve got kids are like that, like
it’s all their fault.