The Nearest

11

“I’ve been wondering about something,” Kate said. She was sitting with the other runaways: Linda, Gary, Suzanne and Ahmed, huddled in a circle away from the merely homeless, who were hostile or agnostic when it came to their cause. “Exactly where did this disease come from? And exactly how does it spread?”

“Does it matter?” Linda replied. “We know it’s spreading fast, whatever the route.”

But Suzanne was less dismissive. “It could be important. Did you have something in mind?”

Kate said, “My yard has a couple of fig trees, right at the back. And those fig trees are full of fruit bats. I don’t actually go down there and roll around in the guano, but our dog was doing that all the time.” She looked around the circle, hunting for any sign that this scenario, based on what she’d seen at Natalie’s house, might be describing a shared condition. “Remember the Hendra virus? It went from fruit bats to horses, then people. What if this is something like that—but with dogs instead of horses as the link?”

The group was silent for a while, then Ahmed said, “My dog was acting strangely for a couple of days before I left. But my wife had nothing to do with him; she wouldn’t even let him in the house.”

“Do you have fig trees?” Kate asked.

“No. But our neighbor does, and some of the branches hang over the fence.”

She waited, but no one else volunteered their own zoonotic risk profile. If the details didn’t match, why not say so?

Gary said, “In any case, we know it must be jumping straight from human to human now.”

Kate frowned. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because of the speed,” Linda interjected.

“But what exactly do we know about the speed?”

Linda was starting to lose patience. “My mother, in Sydney, was already affected the very same day my husband changed. I called her up to try to tell her something was wrong, and she was… gone.”

Kate nodded soberly. “It hit my sister, the same night as my husband and my son. But this morning…” She steeled herself, ready to find out the hard way if her own revelatory experience could sway anyone else. “I called a friend who’s been in America for the last two months—”

Everyone turned away from her to look across the warehouse floor, back toward the loading bay. A woman was approaching the circle. Her eyes were lowered, and she’d shaved her head, but as she crossed into the yellow light of the hurricane lamps, Kate recognized her by the shape of her face.

Her four companions rose to their feet, and Kate followed them. Each of them embraced Natalie in turn, and then Gary introduced her to Kate.

Kate shook her hand in silence. Natalie didn’t meet her gaze. The six of them sat on the tartan picnic blanket that Gary had spread on the concrete floor.

Natalie said, “It has to be tonight.”

“Are you sure?” Gary asked. “Once we tip our hand, there’ll be no going back. And I still think I can get more recruits. Rowan’s gone missing, but he might turn up—”

“No. We can’t wait any longer.” Natalie spoke calmly, but with a tone of authority. “We need to send a signal to all the people who are still unreachable. We need to let them know that they’re not alone, that there’s an army on their side, and an example they can follow.”

“I understand.” Gary looked around the circle. “Is everyone ready?”

Everyone but Kate nodded, but Kate saw Ahmed glance her way uncertainly. If she gave him more reason to doubt, there might be a chance that she could break the consensus.

She said, “Please, can I share a story with you? It will only take a minute.” Forget Emily and her voicemail. She needed to cut closer to home.

Gary looked to Natalie, then said, “Of course.”

“The night I left my family,” Kate began, “I was driving around for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Then I thought: I’ll go to my sister. She’ll help me, she’ll understand. I didn’t have my phone, so I couldn’t call her. But as I drove toward her house, as I got closer and closer, the more I thought about what would happen once I knocked on her door, the more certain I was that she’d already gone the way of my husband and my son. I knew she was exactly like them—without even seeing her, without even talking to her.

“So I thought: I’ll go to my friend Chris. He lived much farther away, but I trusted him. So I set off south, heading for his apartment, glad I still had someone I could turn to. And the same thing happened. I never arrived; I never saw him, I never heard his voice. But I was absolutely sure that he’d been hollowed out.

“What does that mean? Do I have some magical sense of who’s changed, that I can know that without even meeting them?”

Natalie said, “You made a guess, that’s all.” Her manner was growing brittle and defensive. She was an intelligent woman; she knew there was no intuition that could work like this, no presentiment that could be trusted in the absence of a single fact to guide it.

“But the feeling was so strong,” Kate insisted. “As strong as when I saw what my husband had become, lying beside me in my bed. I never let him speak, either. I just knew, because it was so clear to me. But now, if I’m honest with myself, I’m afraid that it wasn’t him who changed. I’m afraid—”

Natalie snapped. She started screaming, then she leaned over and began pummeling Kate with her fists. Linda and Ahmed took hold of her, pulling her back, but she kept shrieking and thrashing. Suzanne began sobbing, staring at Kate in horror, as if she’d just stabbed all five of her comrades through the heart.

Kate kept talking, sickened by the cruelty of what she was doing to a woman already annihilated by grief, but determined to finish the job for the sake of anyone still tempted to follow her.

She said, “I’m afraid I’m the one who changed. The dog dug around in the bat shit, then she got sick, and I let her lick my face. My face, not my husband’s, not my son’s. I thought they’d lost everything that made them human, but now I know that it was all in my head.”