Recoil Read Free Page B

that his eyebrows and
lashes were pale, and his skin was the color of milk — I reckoned this boy saw
the sun even less than I did. He, too, looked to be a couple of years older
than me, and he also wore only an E97 mask. I was beginning to feel like an
idiot, like an overprotected little girl.
    The new guy’s name was Graham. He seemed friendly enough, but I
soon grew irritated by his constant fidgeting. He tapped his feet, fiddled with
the cuff of his gloves and worried at a loose thread in the seat upholstery.
Bruce studied him for a few minutes, asked about his game scores, and then
apparently lost interest and returned to looking at me. Graham told us in detail
all about the formulas and calculations he used when playing.
    “It’s all mathematical,” he kept saying. “It’s a science.”
    He had just said it again when we stopped at a traffic light and Leya pointed out of the window and said, “Look.”
    We all turned to follow her gaze. At once, the driver checked the
doors were locked, then reached for his phone to call in the sighting, relaying
our exact GPS coordinates to the operator while we stared at the man clinging
to the pole of a street light a few feet away from us. On the left side of his
body, he was wearing exactly half of a stained, white PPE suit, which looked
like it had been torn vertically down the middle seam. His right side was
completely naked.
    “Ugh, gagnasty ,” said Graham,
swallowing hard. “Imagine what he smells like.”
    The man’s lips were moving furiously. Was he literally talking to
a lamp post? Then he banged his head against the pole. And again. Over and over
he banged it, perhaps in time to the inner rhythm of some hallucinated music
that only he could hear. The skin of his forehead split open, and blood ran
down into his eyes and mouth and beard and dripped onto the remnants of the PPE
suit and the skin of his chest.
    Without warning, he turned and hurled himself at the van, banged
on its sides and windows, and screamed loudly enough for us to hear it through
the sealed windows and reinforced panels. His bulging eyes were wild, unseeing,
and washed red with blood. His skin was stippled with the purple-red rash and
blotched bruises of the disease. His swollen lips twisted and split open as he
howled. Then he slammed his head against my window, and the driver cursed and
pulled off at top speed. Immediately he called ahead for a decontamination and
disinfectant squad to meet us at our destination.
    “Effing rabid!” said Bruce, his face twisted with disgust.
    I stared at the smear of blood on the window. It looked black
against the tinted glass. My heart was thudding somewhere in the region of my
throat, and I fought the urge to throw up.
    “I’ve never seen a rabid before,” said Graham who looked, if
possible, even paler than before.
    “Don’t call him that. He’s a human being,” I said.
    “Not anymore he isn’t,” said Bruce. “They should take them all
out.” He mimed aiming a rifle out the window and taking a shot, his lips
popping a sound.
    “How can you say that?”
    “What?” Bruce held up his hands. “It’s not like there’s a cure
for rat fever. Might as well put them down and save them the suffering. We do
it for rabid animals, why not people?”
    “ Put them down , dude? Really?” said Leya .
She turned to face Bruce, or maybe she was turning her back on the window so
she didn’t have to see the blood. “Talk about a mouth-fart.”
    “They’re people. They have a right to compassion and proper
treatment,” I said.
    Bruce made a dismissive noise. “What treatment?”
    “President Hawke said they’re making progress with developing a
vaccine.”
    “As fast as they isolate and study the virus, it mutates. My aunt
is an epidemiologist at the CDC, and she told me it evolves in two ways:
gradually through random mutation, and very rapidly as different strains of the
virus. It can even swap genes inside a single animal or person. Nature