In fear, we followed the rules. We tried to stay small. We took no risks.
“Stay clean. Stay alive.” It was our mantra.
4
Given how small my social circle became, it’s a wonder that I ever met anyone new at all. Prior to the outbreak, I spent my days as a happy and probably smug bachelor. I think my position of relative power as doctor in a small town gave me too much self-importance. Now that all that was gone, I would sometimes think about how many chances I’d had to make a life with someone else, maybe even gotten married. I was into my sixties, and knew that possibility was dead. I spent a lot of time with my own thoughts, which can make a person unfit for social interactions. Some of my younger neighbors thought of me as a grumpy old man. Then I met Rosalinda. It was random, like many things. As much as we tried to keep to ourselves, there were still the necessities of living. Most notably, you had to get your food somewhere. The city regulated all food production and kept registered production facilities along its borders. Were we eating fresh-grown food or something out of a laboratory? I suspected a combination. But we lived with it. I got mine from the Capitol Hill Community Food Dispersal Center, more commonly called the FDC. The FDC was housed in the large, red-brick buildings that once made up Eastern Market, a popular indoor and outdoor marketplace where people would go to buy a range of fresh foods and other goods before the disease. Now we just lined up for our ration boxes. The Eastern Market buildings worked well for this purpose, because they were big and the government could contain people long enough to push them through the line efficiently.
The woman I would come to know as Rosalinda was a strange sight, rather young, pretty, perhaps a dozen people ahead of me in line. She wore a basic white synthetic t-shirt and matching skirt. In another time, she might have looked like she was dressed for a round of tennis at the country club. Here, her basic outfit was mirrored by several other women. Clothing options were fairly limited, but somehow she stood out. Having done the dance of the government ration line with the same neighbors for nearly 10 years, a new face was incredibly unexpected. Although rare, we still had cases of RL2013 inside the city, and they always involved elements of mystery, like new faces or unknown places. I have to admit, my first thoughts were fear and distrust, but they were mixed with a strange interest. How on Earth did someone new get here, and why? Did we need to be careful around her? Movement around the city was controlled. The government assigned jobs, housing, places to get food. But beyond that there was the self-imposed, self-regulating control of the people. No one wanted anything new, anyone new, because that was change, and change felt dangerous. We were a tremendously paranoid society. I noticed other eyes watching her. She was an outsider. She could be infected. Even 10 years after the outbreak, the disease spread. It was slower now, but it happened. And here she was, where we got our food. What was she doing taking it from us? If the government transferred her here, it said something about their stranglehold on information that they wouldn’t even tell us why.
My rational mind tried to turn the tide. There could be any number of good reasons why she was here. It didn’t happen often, but people did relocate. We all still had to do our jobs, to keep the small wheels of our confined society spinning and to earn a living. Producing food, making and distributing medicine, policing for outbreaks, maintaining the walls, keeping up the government’s elaborate bureaucracy — it was all necessary. If for nothing else than to keep the people’s minds off things like revolt. But sometimes those jobs disappeared.
As I shuffled along in line and got my ration box, I considered these options, but generally tried to retreat into myself, the way we all did so well. Then I heard the muffled sounds of trouble. Looking toward the commotion, I saw the strange young woman surrounded by several angry-looking men. They had their hands on her ration box and were saying something she didn’t like. She hissed back that she just wanted to be left alone, trying to stay as quiet as possible. I could tell this was going to get very bad very quickly. I looked toward the government guards, clad in their pristine navy-blue uniforms, holding their shiny black firearms. No one ever wanted to attract the guards’ interest. It wasn’t good for your long-term health.
Immediately, I rushed over, cutting between the woman and one of the men. “What’s the problem here?” I said.
“Keep out of it, or you’ll regret it,” one man said — a guy I had seen in the FDC probably once a month for many years. He was maybe 15 years my junior, stronger and taller, with a pointed nose and a close-cropped haircut. He squinted at me, recognizing me, but now distrusting my sudden interest in what he was doing.
“They’re trying to take my ration,” the woman interjected.
“Be quiet,” another of the men said, this one a decade or more younger than me, with the same bullethead look as his partner. He closed ranks so that his black-shirted torso blocked some of the guards’ view. I noticed he had a number of homemade tattoos. That told me a lot. A needle could be a very dangerous, dirty thing. There were no formal tattoo parlors anymore, but certain types of people kept up the practice in secret. It was a private little rebellion that made their usually very small minds feel superior. I had to be careful around these two.
But even 10 years into this new world, I guess I retained some sense of right and wrong. Some need for justice and propriety. “She’s with me,” I said.
“What’re you talking about?” the first man scoffed. “She’s never been in here with you before.”
“I’m telling you, she’s with me. Cousin of mine. Lost her job across town and got transferred. She’s staying in my uncle’s old apartment.” In the back of my mind, I was amazed at how easy the lies came.
“Like hell,” he frowned, making another tug at her rations. Behind him, I saw one of the guards tilting his head, looking in our direction. I leaned in to talk quietly.
“Listen. In about 30 seconds, that guard is going to decide he doesn’t like the look of this, and all of us are going to end up nothing more than a bad memory. Either you let go of the box and she and I walk out without trouble, or I make sure we all go down together.”
He leaned back, eyes widening. “Are you threatening me?” He was taken aback by my boldness. He balled his hands into fists. It looked like a common practice for him. That was another sure sign that he wasn’t bright: The infected were violent. Most sane people avoided any semblance of violence, for fear of a one-way ticket to government confinement.
“You’ve got about 20 seconds to decide,” I said. The guard was definitely staring in our direction. The man started to turn around to see if I was telling the truth. “Ah, ah — you turn around and he’ll know we don’t want him over here. That’ll be the end.”
He paused. His fingers loosened as the tiny wheels in his mind spun. “Fine. But get the hell out of here. Now.” He shoved the box back into the young woman’s hands and faded into the crowd coming out of the building. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the guard had turned his head away — someone else had done something that distracted him.
“Let’s go, before this gets worse.” The young woman just nodded and followed me.
* * *
“My name is Rosalinda,” she said as we walked hurriedly away from the building. I grunted a response. She continued walking beside me, then after a pause said, “Thank you.”
Rounding a corner and putting the FDC out of view, I turned to her. “What are you really doing here?”
“Huh?” She was surprised at the blunt question. “I... uh...”
I stopped. “Who are you? Why are you here? The trouble doesn’t end just because I helped you out back there. People don’t like strangers.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she said. “Don’t you think I feel the same? I had to come here. It’s my mom.”
“What about your mom? Is she someone from the neighborhood? What’s her name?”
“Sonya Menendez. 12th and D.”
“Don’t know the name,” I sa
id. “What does she look like?”
“You wouldn’t have seen her for a long time. She’s been housebound, barely surviving on handouts from a couple of kind neighbors. But now she’s dying.”
I stepped back without thinking. “Oh shit.” What had I gotten myself into?
“It’s not that!” Rosalinda looked panicked, and angry, too. “She doesn’t have the disease. She’s just old. I lived in Northwest ever since the walls closed. Seemed close enough to mom so that we could both live our own lives. I didn’t know how bad off she was until a friend at work passed along the message from a coworker who lives here on the Hill. So I had to come. To help her. I applied for transfer and my office accepted. I do medical research.”
I knew there was a small lab in the area, but I was skeptical. Rosalinda pleaded silently at me with her eyes. I looked her up and down, trying to assess her trustworthiness. That’s when I noticed her bracelet. Little tiny bits of colored fabric woven together, red, yellow, blue, green. Just wisps. I assumed she did it by hand. I tried to think if other people wore similar things, and came up with nothing. It was simple, but unique. It made me think she was somehow more... human.
She saw me staring at it and cocked her head to the side, as she moved her arm and tried to shield the bracelet from my view. She seemed embarrassed that I’d noticed it. I’m sure she was trying to get a read on me, too.
“I’m here in this neighborhood now,” she said. “And I really could use an actual friend, so the neighbors don’t start thinking I’m some crazy loner, here to take all their food and infect them.”
I looked at her. And she smirked. So that’s how I, at the ripe age of 63, became friends with a beautiful 32-year-old woman. But it was really her mind I most admired.
5
The Garden of Eden. Paradise. Utopia. Shangri-La. Ours was called “The Oasis.”
Somewhere out beyond the city walls, The Oasis was a place where people were said to live freely, without fear of government, infection, dirt, attack. A community from the time before, where none of today’s worries penetrated inside. Heaven.
In other words, a fantasy.
There were plenty of rumors about The Oasis, but of course, not one of the people talking about it had been outside the walls in 10 years. In office break rooms or playing chess in the park, they would say with utter certainty, “It’s in Mexico.” “No, Brazil.” “No, it’s in Kansas.” I ignored the nonsense.
Rosalinda — who I had come to call just “Rosa” — and I spent a lot of time together, at least after work. There were too many doctors in DC for me to have continued my practice, according to the government hack that decided such things, so I was shifted to a large government pharmacy, filling prescriptions. It kept me alive, so I guess I didn’t mind too much.
But Rosa was kind of important. She worked as a microbiologist with the National Institutes of Health, in a small lab they’d set up in Southeast. She was working with the government to find a cure. Once the initial wave of paranoia swept past, she made a few friends in the neighborhood. People constantly asked her what she knew — were we close? Any luck today? But in reality, she was told very little about the big picture, and just tasked to focus on the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis, which cause leprosy. She would tell me of minor triumphs, sometimes major failures, and the doldrums of working day after day on something that seemed to have little purpose or goal, and no discernable outcome.
We had dinner together often, and you might think that a romance was blooming. Maybe it was, but I was twice her age and never truly pushed it. We would talk for hours, and then I would head back to my apartment. With her mom’s health in rapid decline, I was also useful to have around, simply to help out with day-to-day chores.
We just liked to talk. Our backgrounds in science and medicine gave us a similar mindset that made conversations feel comfortable. When we weren’t discussing The Oasis, we’d wonder about the world outside the walls, or remember the time before the outbreak, or just chat about the latest news. Anything to keep our minds occupied. And sometimes it seemed like we’d keep a conversation going just to spend time together.
We did calculations on the disease outside the cities. Three hundred million left outside, 10 years ago. The disease seemed to be 100-percent infectious if a person was bitten or wounded by a zombie, resulting in a 100-percent mortality rate, eventually, from what we knew. But if you could avoid the zombies, maybe keep your own little space clear of the filth that stirred up the disease in the first place, you’d have a chance, or at least we thought so. Nonetheless, before the outbreak, around 3 million people per year died in the United States. Imaging a landscape without medical treatment, without any guaranteed food, we guessed that number might be much, much higher, maybe 25 million a year. Sure, there were likely births to offset some of that, but even putting the attrition rate at 20 million a year, the U.S. had lost 200 million people. That was our guess. More than half the country, gone. But that still left 100 million potential zombies to carry on the infection. And that wasn’t counting the possibility that animals could carry it as well. Looking at the trajectory, we could see the outbreak couldn’t last forever. The problem was, neither could the human race.
When the discussion would get overly serious and scary, we’d change the subject to something lighter. Dealing with an ill family member is a grueling affair, so there was comfort in just falling into a chair and talking about anything else with someone who understood the value of distraction. I asked about her bracelet. She laughed.
“Yep, I made it. I was just so bored of everything looking the same. When something wears out — a shirt, bed sheet, whatever — I like to take a little sliver of it before it goes to the recycling center. I keep it small, so it doesn’t attract too much attention. And I make little things, bracelets.”
“You have more than one?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she stood up and walked to a small table, opening a drawer in the front. Inside, I saw dozens of little bracelets, in an array of colors.
* * *
Her mom died of natural causes a little more than five weeks later. There was a small, unassuming ceremony monitored by two bored-looking government agents who failed miserably in their attempt to blend in. This was common practice at funerals in the city — to ensure that the death wasn’t related to the outbreak.
Rosa was devastated. Even in our world of hardship and fear, the loss of a parent was the permanent shutting of a door. At the same time, it opened another door to the realization that, after all, we were mortal; we all died.
Everyone says they know this, but losing a parent makes it hit like a hammer blow.
I kept going to Rosa’s mother’s apartment for dinners and other visits, and in short order just thought of it as Rosa’s apartment. Sometimes Rosa would come to my place, since there was no one left at hers who needed attention, but we rarely tempted fate by having her walk home alone at night. Sometimes our conversations would turn to The Oasis.
One night at Rosa’s apartment, after a light dinner, as she and I finished meticulously cleaning, drying and storing the dishes, she turned to me. “Wouldn’t it be amazing? Just to stop all this. To go back to something normal?” I stopped, lowering the plate I’d been about to place back on its shelf. There was a twinkle in her brown eyes as she looked away, past me. I could see the dream meant something to her. It gave her hope. There was no way I was going to laugh and take that away from her.
After that, the topic came up more frequently. It seemed Rosa was organizing — in her head — a sort of compendium of thoughts about The Oasis. The most important detail she worked to figure out was simple: Where was it? Just answering that one question would be life-altering. For that alone would mean it really existed. The details of how people lived there, how many were there, all that would be far less important. Just where was it?
When people would say Kansas or Brazil or Mexico, it wa
s clear they were generalizing. Brazil is a rather large place, and it was unlikely that the haven of all humanity set up shop in the deepest rainforest. Without any government backing, it seemed more likely that natural diseases like malaria would have a devastating effect there. That was one aspect of our situation that always amused me; in the midst of the most horrific outbreak in human history, we were still on the hook for such everyday maladies as the common cold, even athlete’s foot or gingivitis. But these things were rare in the pristine society of the city — and if you did have anything unusual, you kept it quiet, for fear of disease rumors. Besides, you had to think fate was a twisted, cruel mess if you died from a zombie bite because you couldn’t run away fast enough due to the discomfort of athlete’s foot.
Because she worked as a government researcher, Rosa would sometimes get “Official Government Communications” — I’ve added the capitalization because somehow that’s how she pronounced it every time. In her research, she had access to several computers, linked together with her colleagues and connected to some sort of repository of data — things the government had collected, other research that was useful as reference. She had extremely controlled access to email. She was allowed to send and receive messages from her colleagues related to work and office interests, but anything social or personal was forbidden. Breaking this rule could result in suspension or even termination. And you didn’t want to be unemployed in the current world setting. The Internet seemed long dead, and even if it were still around, random browsing would have been forbidden as well. I imagine Rosa was tempted to search for The Oasis in her data systems, although I’m sure she could guess the outcome would be quite dangerous. In any event, Rosa did get messages from the government, usually in the form of email, but sometimes it required a real human being to deliver it to the lab where she worked. Because she was based on the Hill and not at NIH proper, the messengers often stayed for a while, whether to rest or just simply avoid their superiors for a while. On these occasions, when she could either hear something in their conversation or even ask a direct question without seeming like she was collecting information, Rosa would learn what she could about The Oasis. Actual news that wasn’t from the know-nothing people in the neighborhood.