Harmonious Hearts 2017 Page 14

  Dad stepped in front of me. “What do you mean, just Gillian?”

  “I’ll only take a moment,” the man said, lifting his hands. “There’s something I have to corroborate. I promise she’ll be returned safely!”

  “No,” Dad said, with a hard edge that seldom crept into his voice—an edge reserved for the time Owen ran away and got picked up by a cop three miles away, for the time I scraped his car with mine the first day after I got my license, for the time our doctor, hungover, wrote the wrong prescription for Mom’s medicine. “I’m not letting her out of my sight. If that isn’t good enough, you can—”

  “Wait!” I interrupted.

  They turned.

  “Gillian?” the scientist prompted quietly.

  Dad’s vitriol evaporated. “What is it, Gill?” His voice quavered, and it made my stomach drop out. This was my father. This was my daddy. He used to be an oak tree I could barely wrap my arms around. Now here he was, a rag doll treated too roughly, threads fraying, moments from flying apart.

  I turned to the lab-coated man.

  “What exactly do you need me for?” I asked. Breathe. Breathe.

  “I would like to repeat your blood test,” he replied.

  Dad inhaled sharply. Owen’s fists knotted in my shirt. I felt woozy.

  Repeat my blood test.

  Well.

  That couldn’t be good.

  “Why can’t my family come?” I asked as calmly as possible. Throwing up right now was something I really wanted to avoid. “Are their blood tests okay?”

  “I only need to redo yours,” the man replied, gently but firmly, “and afterward, no matter what, I promise your brother and father can come inside.”

  Free passage. My heart seized up. On one hand… finally. We’d waited so long.

  On the other hand, I really didn’t like the sound of “no matter what.”

  But, almost as if from far away, I heard my own voice. Surprisingly strong. Surprisingly steady. “Let’s go.”

  Dad’s fingers were sweaty enough that I slipped right through them. His hand stayed suspended in midair, reaching for me even after I was gone. As the man unlocked the bars and ushered me inside, I looked back. Dad swallowed and ducked his head.

  “You come back to me,” he said hoarsely.

  As I passed through the gates, I was shaken. I couldn’t erase my father’s expression.

  Lost.

  THE ROOM beyond Station 111’s front gate was white and well lit. An overpowering scent of antiseptic clung to the air. Gone was the hum of desperate voices, the stench of sweat.

  It was… peaceful.

  I jumped at a soft touch at my back. “My bad,” the scientist said, recoiling. Up close, he looked even more rumpled, as if his lab coat was draped on a hanger with him still inside it. “Shouldn’t have touched you. You… seemed apprehensive.”

  I met his eyes. “Shouldn’t I be?” You don’t have to lie to me.

  But the man looked aghast. “Oh no, my dear—no! We’ll finish this in a half hour and go get your family immediately. I don’t mean to alarm you. But this is important. No—it’s of the highest importance.” He adjusted his glasses. “Hakim Hussein,” he added, offering a haphazard smile and a hand. “Forgive my rudeness.”

  “You’re not rude!” I said, shaking his hand.

  He beamed, rubbing his nose with the clipboard. “Very kind, Gillian. Very kind. Well. Now that we’re acquainted….” He gestured to a cot. “Have a seat.”

  Dr. Hussein worked swiftly. He displayed far more confidence in medicine than in conversation, his posture straightening, clever hands falling into familiar rhythms. He swabbed my arm with a cold alcohol pad and retrieved a syringe. I breathed deep as he drew my blood, knotting my fists in the crinkly paper on the examination table.

  “How’d you end up in Station 111, Dr. Hussein?” I asked quietly. Take my mind off it. Please.

  He pushed his glasses up his nose and chuckled helplessly. “It’s, ah… a funny thing. Let’s say my first vacation in years didn’t go as planned. And I thought Iceland would be such a lovely trip. I was here when the borders closed. And here I’ll stay.” Dr. Hussein withdrew the needle and handed me a cotton ball. I pressed it against the prick, which welled up and over with bright red drops. He ejected the sample into a machine. “But as Allah says, ‘Verily, with the hardship, there is relief.’ Now I’m right where I’m needed. Isn’t that the important thing?” His eyes twinkled warmly as he tapped me above my heart. “Maybe that’s why you’re here, too.”

  I couldn’t even think about that right now. I wanted to get out of here, to see Dad and Owen, to have a warm bath someplace safe and sanitary. “Hey,” I tried to joke, “don’t overestimate me.”

  The screen blinked. Dr. Hussein scanned the results. Then he scanned them again.

  My heart leaped. “What is it?” All five stages of grief hit at once. Symptoms. Tainted. Plague.

  Dr. Hussein turned, eyes gleaming.

  “You’re not a carrier,” he said. “I don’t mean that you’re merely not… exhibiting symptoms. The virus hasn’t gotten into you. Your body… it’s as if the plague never happened at all. You’re clean, Gillian,” he said, wonderingly, before I could begin to comprehend what this might mean. “You’re clean.”

  III. Sunburn

  THE WHOLE world used to glimmer.

  The night sky was pillars of light, hundreds of satellites and rockets trailing glowing tails across the sky. Daytime was chrome televisions and automated housekeepers and the red leather seats in Dad’s car. “We’re living in the new Space Age!” proclaimed the TV man in the pinstriped suit.

  Years passed in needles. Flu—eradicated. Acne—cured. Monthly cramps—negated. Visiting the clinic was like getting an oil change, regular as clockwork.

  “We’re living in a medical Renaissance!” cried the anchor on Channel 11.

  My memories of those days come in snapshots. Orange ring cakes and jump rope on Sundays, dandelions turning brown in the grass and blowing away, reeking of chlorine from the public swimming pool; the white picket fence between our house and Mr. Rodriguez’s—each moment immortalized in photographs captured with the vintage Polaroid I got on my sixteenth birthday.

  Now that everything’s gone sour, I try to remember how it all started, but… the snapshots won’t come. No matter how I walk myself through those early days, it’s all broken. A hopelessly tangled ball of yarn I can’t unspool into threads.

  I’m not sure anyone can quantify the Great Collapse.

  For me, it began the day of the AXI shot. The newest medical masterpiece, the newest glittering cure—this time for sunburn. It helps humans produce astaxanthin, the chemical in algae that protects them from sunlight. The waiting room was white and clean and smelled of sanitizer. An elderly lady in a pink housecoat thumbed through a magazine. Two young women with sunglasses in their hair chatted in giggling tones.

  “Gillian Larchwood?”

  My name had been called. Just as I stood, the doors behind the nurse banged open. A doctor appeared, breathing hard.

  I thought there might’ve been blood on his gloves.

  “I… we’re sorry.” He gripped the doorframe, eyes darting. “But you’ll… you’ll have to return tomorrow for your AXI.”

  Behind him, just before the doors swung shut, I glimpsed two nurses restraining a man in a pinstriped suit. The next day, flipping through the channels and doing the dishes, I noticed the usual anchor wasn’t on Channel 11.

  The next week, I was fetching the mail when an ambulance screamed to a halt in front of our neighbors’ house. I froze, bare toes burning on the tar. They dragged away Mr. Rodriguez on a gurney; his wife was screaming. The EMTs wore face masks.

  After that, there were no more shots.

  The neighborhood was half-empty by the end of the month. In three months’ time, all flights were grounded and most island nations had closed their ports. The plague that mutated from AXI was taking down humanity
’s hearts and lungs and livers one by one—men and women stumbling in the streets and falling to their knees, hacking up bits of organs onto the asphalt….

  God.

  We were killed by sunburns.

  Dad paid off a helicopter pilot using all our first aid kits and all the clothing we could spare. I clenched my Polaroid camera in white-knuckled hands while we boarded. As we lifted off the ground, abandoning the little cul-de-sac where I’d jumped rope and danced in puddles and peddled lemonade my entire life, I raised it to the flames and took a snapshot.

  IV. Jacqueline Gray

  I MET her in the rations hall.

  It was cramped, hot, and miserable, all of us jostling each other en route to a window cut out of the steel wall, where a woman in a hairnet distributed vitamin wafers. It was reminiscent in the worst way of my high school cafeteria, but there, people only pretended they’d starve if they didn’t get their milk carton or chocolate chip cookies. Here, it was true.

  She was seated at a table, surrounded by about a dozen other teens. Me, I’m Finnish and English meeting somewhere in the middle, with copper hair and a dusky spread of orange freckles. But her… she’s masses of kinky, curly hair, full lips, dark skin, and thick brows, and there is nothing like her in the thrall of a story—gesticulating wildly, eyes glimmering.

  In the end, it wasn’t high school. You sat where you sat, lucky if it wasn’t the floor. This was my first time coming here without Dad or Owen—we were settling into our new lives and the people were exceedingly kind, but I was still itching to get back to our small living quarters as soon as possible.

  There was a seat at her table. And so I sat.

  “It’s predictable!” she was saying. “This pattern’s played out a million times. Don’t get me wrong, the medicine, it’s swell, but it was for profit, right? That’s the start.”

  “No way,” a boy with bruised, scarred knuckles said. “The vaxx companies had good motivations! Don’t you know what they did for the world? They cured AIDS! I mean—they definitely blew it in the end,” he added hastily at the dark expressions on his peers’ faces, “but it was in the pursuit of good. Yeah?”

  “Ahhhhh,” the girl said, “but that’s just the thing. Even Daedalus was running from something, with the labyrinth pressing at his back—”

  “The hell you talking about?” the boy asked disdainfully.

  “Daedalus!” she exclaimed, spreading her arms. “Icarus and the wax wings! It’s hard not to make the connection, right?”

  He squinted.

  “I mean, I… never thought about it,” he said.

  “Icarus!” I interjected. Something normal. Something I knew—Mrs. Stowe’s literature class, senior year. “Big pharma is Icarus. They only thought about escaping the labyrinth. They never considered what might be waiting in the skies.”

  The girl watched me, tilting her head, a smile ghosting across her lips.

  “My point precisely,” she said. “And AXI… AXI’s the wings. Instead of trying to get closer to the sun, we were trying to get away from it.” With one fell swoop, her fork descended, spearing straight through her chicken patty. “And we all got burned.”

  The girl was smiling so broadly—so insistently—that it was hard to notice the flicker of sadness in her eyes. And it worked, I suppose, because on that first day, I wasn’t watching her eyes. I was watching her brown mouth and the sad twist in its corners. I was watching her Cupid’s bow, the dusting of freckles on her lower lip, and the wide gap between her two front teeth. I was finding it a little hard to breathe.

  Then, all too soon, she was unfolding her long legs, pushing away from the table.

  “Gillian Larchwood!” I called, heart pounding.

  She stopped. She turned slowly, quirking her head to one side. After a moment, her dimples deepened and rows of brilliant white teeth peeked out from her smile, like sun breaking from behind the clouds.

  “Hey,” she replied, in a way that made hey so much more important than hey. That made hey sound like Let’s lie down on the roof at night and talk about entropy and lemonade and the universe. “Jacqueline Gray.”

  She winked, turned down the rows of tables, and was gone.

  PROGENITORS WERE required to attend classes twice a week.

  “We start Tuesday,” Dr. Hussein explained. He didn’t seem to mind me sitting on the counter, legs swinging, watching him work. “You’ll get to meet the others.”

  “The others I’ll be spending the rest of my life with. In the future,” I clarified bravely. “Right.”

  When Tuesday rolled around, I arrived at the science wing. The white linoleum and white walls and circle of white folding chairs uncannily resembled some AA meeting. In the days to come, I would memorize the names and cryopods of those in attendance—Ingrid Millstone (the Slumber), Arthur Poole (the Nicodemus), little Noa van Deventer (the Hitchhiker), Daiki Nakamura (the Ferdinand Magellan)…. But that first day, before I could as much as say hello, I braked hard.

  Sitting by the window, sunlight catching in her cloud of curls, was Jacqueline Gray.

  My mouth popped open. She gasped, a grin hooking across her face all at once, optimism incarnate.

  “Gillian Larchwood!” she cried. “You’re a progenitor?”

  “Jacqueline Gray!” I exclaimed. “You too?”

  We had no time to marvel. Hakim appeared in the doorway.

  “Welcome, progenitors!” he said, smiling. “Let me be transparent with you. This training will feel… incredibly rushed. But there may not be much time left to prepare you. Twice a week we’ll meet here for crash courses in medicine, survival, teamwork, and cultural preservation. You’ll also learn everything you need to know about the cryopods. But before we begin… why don’t you introduce yourselves?”

  Jackie leaped to her feet and shoved her hands in her pockets.

  “Hi!” she said. “Jacqueline Gray. Call me Jackie. I’m nineteen and I’ll just get this out of the way up front—I can be a real sack of shit. My mom once told me that I could probably get the Pope cussing if you gave me enough time with him. I’m probably going to piss you off at some point during all this. On the upside! I can make really good grilled cheese and I adore the sky, and when I love, I love real hard.”

  Everyone blinked.

  “What’s your pod?” grunted Arthur Poole.

  Her expression clouded. “Ooh. Shit. Ah….” She turned to Hakim. “What was it again?”

  “Excelsior,” he said, and somehow the word held the timbre of prayer—a prayer that echoes in my ears even now, even through the cryogel encasing my limbs, even through frozen eardrums and frigid membranes. “‘Ever upward.’”

  “FUCK AXI!”

  “Fuck AXI!”

  Our glasses clinked, sloshing lemonade beer into the grass. The ocean breeze ruffled the soft grass on the hill and snagged strands of hair from my ponytail. The view was gray and dotted with ptarmigan droppings, the Icelandic landscape stretching forever—acres of scrubby grass and shrubs, cropped yellow-green fields, wide-open horizons. White-capped waves crashed against distant crags.

  “Oh my God,” I laughed, leaning back. “Jackie. Dr. Hussein is going to go ballistic.”

  She snorted. “If I hadn’t known that, I’d’ve brought you out the front door.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Climbing off the roof wasn’t much better.”

  She waved a hand. “Oh, c’mon. Hakim’s too worrisome! The virus isn’t airborne. It’s no more dangerous out there than right here. Besides,” she added with a glimmer in her eyes that let me know I had already lost, “you made my point for me. We’re it, Gillian. These are our last chances to make memories. So. Why aren’t you drinking?”

  I set my glass down on the ground. “C’mon, Jacks,” I said as sternly as I could.

  She snuggled up close. “I didn’t nick these from the kitchen for nothing.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Whaaaat! Gillian Larchwood! If you do not drink this right now,
you will regret it foreveeeeer.” She shook the bottle temptingly.

  I sucked against my teeth, eyeing the dewy glass. “I’ll just… have a sip,” I offered.

  “Auugghh!” Jackie’s head rolled back. “I’m falling for a square. Here we are, at the end of the world as you know it, and you can’t even bring yourself to have a shandy. In a hundred years, there won’t be any, and then you’ll feel awfully silly.”

  My stomach zinged. I ran my hand through her hair. “Hey,” I said, “what… what was it you said right there? That you’re falling for—”

  She grinned. “Don’t you twist my words, Gillian Larchwood!” she scolded, pressing a kiss to my temple. The warmth ran straight to my core.

  I took my allotted sip. As the sour liquid stung the inside of my cheeks and settled warmly in the pit of my stomach, I stretched out. Back in 1999, that so-called end of the world, romance blossomed. Longtime partners wed; strangers gave it a go. I understood them now—love and doomsday like to kiss.

  I am Gillian Larchwood, and this is the end of the world.

  I exhaled slowly and compiled a list.

  Jackie and I were to be left in cryogenic stasis for over one hundred years, separated from each other by a process we weren’t sure we’d actually survive. When we awakened, we’d be thrust into a tainted world unadapted to human life and unshaped by humanity’s will—a world she’d be suited for, a world Jacqueline Gray would take by the balls just like she did everything else—but me? I was clean, yes, I was a progenitor, yes, I was one of the few who didn’t carry the plague—whatever. Everyone else had pertinent skills. I’d been a photography major.

  I wasn’t… good enough. Not alone. Jackie was a cactus who’d flower and thrive wherever she was planted, but me, without Dad, without Owen, without Dr. Hakim?

  How could I survive?

  “Jacks,” I started, but the insecurities got stuck in my throat. I rerouted midthought. Somewhere it got lost and barreled down a different tunnel, this one dark and deep, and even I couldn’t predict what came out next.