Quarantine (16 page)

T
he force of the gunshots on my bulletproof vest threw me back against the wall of the apartment block. Slowly, I slid my way down to the pavement.

I fought to breathe, clutching my chest with my left hand, while my right pulled the pistol from my belt. I crawled back to the shelter of the awning, and tried to gauge where my attacker was. I struggled not to cough as my lungs fought for air. Even with Paul's night-vision, I could see nothing more than an empty street—the familiar wasteland of wrecked vehicles and three weeks' worth of packed snow.

I thought of Paul. How long would he last, bleeding back there? Four hours? I hadn't debated the point because of Felicity. But it was obvious he needed help ASAP. Hell, none of us had any time to spare.

In front of me a wrecked car offered another bank of protection. I managed to clamber onto the bonnet, checking to my left and right. I held on, fighting pain, for as long as I could manage. Just when I was about to lose my grip and subside into the snow, I saw them.

Four armed men. Moving close to the ground, fast, down Fifth, to where I'd been shot. I could see my footprints snaking a clear path from them to me. I blasted a few rounds of the pistol straight up into the air. It wasn't much of a threat, I know, but it might have given them pause for thought. Maybe.

I ran the remaining distance to the zoo. In my mind's eye I would always picture my first impression of it—as a secure fortress among the ruined city buildings. I had feared its destruction and wanted to be reassured by its survival. In the dark I could just see the outline of the arsenal building. I was about to descend the steps when the stone pillar with the sign attached suddenly disintegrated into a hundred shards. The side of my face stung and burned.

More gunfire rang out. And then I was shot again, this time in the back.

 

At the bottom of the stairs I was flat on my face. I pushed up, my world spinning from the impact of the hard, icy ground. I could make out soldiers up there in the windows of the zoo's main building.

“Don't shoot!” I screamed at them.
“Don't shoooot!”

I tried to get up but couldn't. I panicked about my pack, about the contagious samples being ruptured, but realized it was too late either way.
Keep going, get it back, send help to your friends . . .

No bullets came my way, but flashlight beams shone down on me. I wriggled out of my pack. I looked up at them.

“I'm back—it's Jesse! I have the sample—please, help me! Rachel!”

The flashlight beams didn't waver.

“Help me!”

Shuffling, up at street level. I heard talking from the building, then—gunfire.

A spray of bullets, loud and unsilenced, blasted at someone up on Fifth Avenue—at whoever had shot me in the back moments earlier.

There was noise at the doors to the arsenal building. I looked up the entry stairs: in the light of more flashlights I saw Rachel burst out, that friendly army major beside her. They raced down to help me.

“Jesse!” Rachel yelled, “Jesse!”

 

I told her and the soldier about Felicity and Paul, gave them the address of the subway station, and the army major got onto his radio to dispatch a medevac convoy.

I passed Rachel the backpack.

“Get this to them, the samples are in there.”

“We will, come on,” she said, “I'll help you up.”

“Rach, I can't. I can't move.”

I looked down and so did she: there was a dark pool of blood in my gut—the bullet had blown clear through from my back. She collapsed to the ground next to me.

“Oh, Jesse,” she said, cradling my head on her leg, my face in her hands, “Jesse, hold on, you'll be okay.”

By now there were a dozen soldiers around us, there to help. One started to uncover and assess my wound.

“Caleb,” I said. “I . . . locked him, in a storeroom, of a store—” I felt faint. I told her where to find him. “Make sure they get him . . . treated.”

She nodded. I was aware of hands pushing a hard stretcher under me. I couldn't feel my legs.

“Jesse . . .”

 

The nurse checked me over. Doctors hovered. I could see through the clear plastic wall. The soldiers heading out. The sun was setting and in the coming darkness I could see fire, the flames enormous, there was an explosion that shook the ground. The sounds of screaming and crashing and then everything went . . .

From hot to black.

 

 

“Jesse?”

“J
esse?”

I looked at the psychiatrist's clock. There were four in the room, so wherever the head-shrinker chose to look she could be sure of the kind of punctuality that probably mattered once. Outside it was dark, but the blinds were drawn, and the overhead light flickered for a moment, then burned steady. It had been almost an hour, so I was sure our time was about up. She'd listened, mainly, as I'd talked, but had followed that up for the past minute or so with silence as her note-taking caught up.

I'd been watching her write, lost in it, didn't notice she was trying to engage me in more conversation. “Sorry?”

“I said,” she repeated, she didn't sound annoyed—more a professional coaxing—“that's quite a story.”

I fingered the gauze above my eyebrow.

“Three friends who carried you through—”

“Then I let them go.”

“Then you let go,” she said. “Then you made three new friends—”

“And I had to leave them, to see what else was there.”

“What happened to Felicity and her brother, Paul?”

“They're fine. They got helped out by a convoy not an hour later.”

“And Caleb?”

I smiled. “They worked up the antidote and by the next night they were spraying the entire city with it. Caleb was where I'd left him, and they got him out. He's—he's doing okay, as well as any of them.”

She sat silently, made a further short note in my file. The silence went on; clearly I was meant to fill it.

“What do you want me to tell you?” I asked. “That Caleb turning into a Chaser and disappearing from my life was some kind of motif for—what?—my mom leaving?”

She watched me, silent, still.

“Or maybe you think that the three friends from the subway are my family? That each symbolizes someone?”

“Does it?”

I shook my head. I didn't think that. Did I? Hell, you could make something from nothing if you looked at it hard enough, right? Was killing that Chaser a killing of my former self, or a separation from my childhood? And I'd blamed Dave because I couldn't admit to doing it? And what of Caleb, of not being able to kill him . . .

I stopped thinking, because she had got back to her note-making, creating her own conclusion to my story. It was comforting to listen to the sound of her pen scratching across the pages in the folder on her lap. She looked up at me, her eyes settling for a moment on my clenched fists.

I said, “I don't know what you want me to say.”

“Say what you need to.”

I looked around me, not exactly searching the walls for inspiration, but more as a distraction from her demands to drag more stuff from deep inside me—stuff that I'd left behind, or maybe hadn't even begun to think of. On the wall to the right of the curtained windows, I noticed an old print, a poem titled
The Tyger
.

“What does that mean?” I asked her. “Why a ‘fearful symmetry'?”

“That?” she looked at it, smiled, looked at me. “What does it mean to you?”

I remembered how I parroted Felicity when I'd first met her, as I looked at this poster: a tiger walking under a tree, the handwritten poem's verses separated by branches.

“Symmetry might have something to do with beginnings and ends, who knows?” I said. “I wonder, why a
tyger
? I mean, the spelling?”

“Maybe it's not about a tiger, or T-Y tyger, at all.” She looked at me closely. “Maybe William Blake intended it as a metaphor.”

She went to her bookshelf and pulled out an old, much-read volume. The cover just tattered red cloth, faded. I thought of Caleb, who loved books. What would he make of this one? She flicked through it but she seemed to know what she was looking for. She handed the book to me, opened at the correct page.

The poem was sweet, simple, yet profound in some way.

“Really, a metaphor?”

“Most stories and poems are.”

I smiled at her. She was trying to catch me out. I liked it, this. Could stay all day, going round and round. I handed the book back to her.

“Reminds me of a Poe poem,” I said, “ ‘Alone,' I think it's called . . . The line that sticks with me, is
Of a demon in my view
.”

I looked at her. She sat and watched me, pen poised, expressionless.

“You have an idea what that demon might represent, don't you?”

I nodded.

The doc asked, eager now: “What are you thinking about it?”

I closed my eyes.

“What do you get?” she coaxed.

It was a good question. I wanted to answer it privately before sharing it with the shrink. I thought about my friends, as if they were once again lined up in front of me, come to check that I was okay. You get friendships that never end—eternal, infinite, everlasting—whichever way you look at it.

“Sorry?” I said. Now I looked at her.

“What do you get?” she repeated. “From the Blake poem?”

I looked at the tree, its branches holding the weight of words.

“More than anything,” I said, “it makes me wonder if I'm the lamb or the tyger . . .”

“Does it matter?” She wrote as she spoke. “Do you need to be one or the other?”

I shook my head. She looked up at me and I waited for her to put the pen down.

“We're all the same,” I said. “We're all capable of anything, everything.”

She watched me.

I said, “What does it mean to me? It's just art.” I tried to shrug it off. She didn't need to know it all, did she?

“Just?”

“It means we're alive. It means someone out there is thinking, creating, putting something down for us to ponder. To create empathy, if just for a moment—isn't that great?”

I laughed, moved in my chair, leaned forward and, elbows resting on my knees, looked at my useless feet.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“No, Jesse. Go on. Tell me.” She tried another tack. “Okay, why not tell me about the poem that
does
mean something to you.” She nodded. “ ‘Alone.' ”

“What do you want to know about it?”

“How about you start by reciting it for me.”

Was she serious? I hadn't come here for a poetry recital. But I found the words easily enough, which was a surprise. I wasn't sure how much stuff from my old life would come back to me, or if it would all seem like some kind of weird dream.

“It starts:
From childhood's hour I have not been, As others . . . as others were . . .
”

I stopped. Stared at the floor, searching. Had I forgotten it? What else had I forgotten . . .

“I think I know that poem,” she said. “Want me to—”

“No. I remember it now, all of it.”

I smiled, lost in a memory.

She asked, “What is it?”

“It's just, I get it now—it makes sense,” I said, seeing not the floor beneath me but a collage of memories playing out. Every one of them a keeper.
“And all I loved, I loved alone . . .”