“So funny …” she mumbles. “It’s so funny.”
“What is?” I ask, propping her against the tiled wall and wiping the wet hair from her face.
“They break so easily. They just snap. Like twigs.”
I don’t think I want to know what she’s talking about. “Let’s get you dry,” I suggest. I feel like a fucking retard, trying to look after someone when I can barely look after myself. I’ve never dealt with a sick person before.
Her temperature seems better now though. I grab her only towel and carefully wipe her dry. Her head lolls onto her chin with a loud clack of her teeth. Her clothes are wet, but I think this might help to keep the fever down. I carry her back to the bed and lie her down. Then I get her a glass of water and sit it beside the bed.
She’s got a couple of books scattered around—old paperbacks from what look to be the Bronze Ages. It’s rare to find real books these days, and I wonder how she managed to acquire these. I pick up her copy of Douglas Adams and cheer myself up with a bit of hitchhiking through the galaxy.
I’m sprawled across the floor and deeply involved when I hear, “You need reading glasses.”
Josephine is lying in bed, watching me sleepily. Her color is a lot better and I sigh in relief. “You’re alive.”
“I don’t feel particularly alive,” she mutters. “Why am I all wet?”
“We took a little dip. You were about to spontaneously combust.”
She presses her face into the pillow.
“Is this normal?” I ask, dog-earring my page. “Do you always burn a thousand degrees?”
“Around this time of year.”
“What else?” I crawl over to the bed.
“Nothing else.”
Her shirt has ridden up and I catch sight of a strip of skin. Her lower back is blue and purple. “Shit, Josi!” I reach out to lift her shirt up but she recoils, scurrying away so that her back is against the wall. She looks at me like I’ve just tried to attack her.
“Sorry. You’re really badly bruised,” I tell her slowly, hands up to placate her. “Why?”
She doesn’t answer. I realize she doesn’t know why.
“All right. Well, do you have any food? You’ll need to eat after that fever. And drink lots of water.”
“I can look after myself. Can you go home so I can have some privacy? I don’t even want to think about how many intimacy levels we skipped today.”
I stand up and fold my arms. “Okay, fine. Where’s your phone?”
“Why?”
“Because, Miss Suspicious, I’m going to give you my number.”
“Why would I want your number?”
I roll my eyes.
“I don’t have one,” she admits.
“You don’t have a phone,” I repeat skeptically. “Fine. I’ll write it down for you.”
“I don’t have a pen either.” Her lips twitch at my expression.
“Are you just trying to avoid getting my number?”
“Just tell it to me,” she laughs. “I’ll remember it.”
“No you won’t.”
“I will—I have a photographic memory.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
I shake my head, but she starts speaking, and then I catch her say, “…an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive …”
As she continues, I stare at her, slowly realizing that this is the opening paragraph of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and I only know this because I was reading it twenty minutes ago. “You could have just memorized that first part,” I argue weakly.
“Okay, give me a page number. Any will do.”
“Uh … One hundred and fourteen.”
“In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were—”
“—Holy shit.”
Josephine smirks. I’ve never seen anyone look as sexy as she does wearing that smirk.
“The periodic table—go!”
“Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen—”
“Too easy—do it backwards.”
“Lawrencium, Nobelium, Mendelevium, Fermium, Einsteinium—”
“Einsteinium? That is not real.”
“Number 99. It’s an Actinides, which is a metal—an inner transition metal to be precise.” We stare at each other and she starts laughing. “You will have to learn not to underestimate me.”
“I’m officially intimidated,” I mutter as I head for the door. “Oh—210418993421.” I say it as fast as I can. “Got that?”
“Easy.”
“I expect you to call first thing tomorrow. And I know you won’t forget.”
I’m out the door and down the steps before I hear her call my name. She’s still damp, her clothes clinging to her body as she runs after me in bare feet. “Wait.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I …” She stops, flushed. I’m not sure if her pink cheeks are from her fever or because she’s embarrassed. She drops her eyes to the ground and says, “Thank you. For … the shower, and … you know … the rest.”
For the first time all day I feel a real smile consume me. She looks up at that precise moment and flashes me the glimpse of a grin, then turns and runs back up the stairs. It’s when I know I’m in trouble.
September 13th, 2065
Josephine
“I was sick with embarrassment after that,” I tell Anthony. “I couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d just … watched me while I was delirious. It was weird.”
“You don’t trust Luke?” Anthony asks.
“I do now. But that was, like, the second day we’d met or something. I didn’t trust anyone back then.”
“That’s a completely normal response, given you’d had no one in your life you had previously been able to trust.”
“Don’t shrink me.” I roll my eyes. “I realized pretty soon that what he did wasn’t creepy—it was the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
Anthony looks unconvinced, so I sit forward. “Really, it was. He didn’t know me. I was a strange kid who told him I’d killed people and then fainted. He stayed for hours to make sure I was all right, and that apartment wasn’t exactly the Ritz. He looked after me.” My voice falters and I hesitate before shrugging, “No one’s ever looked after me except Luke.”
“Do you feel you need to be looked after?”
“No, Doc,” I reply, my voice growing hard. “I don’t. But it was nice, for the first time in my life, to have someone want to.”
He nods and pretends to write this down.
“Can you organize a solitary room for me?” I ask him.
He meets my eyes but doesn’t say anything.
“Or move Maria. Find her somewhere else to stay for a couple of days.”
“I believe we are at full capacity,” he says, dropping his gaze. “There are no other rooms available.”
“What? That’s bullshit!”
He shrugs like he doesn’t care if I believe him or not. I feel sick, thinking about poor Maria, trapped in that tiny room with me. No windows to escape through, no way to override the locks on the door. “I don’t care where you put her, just make sure she’s not in that room with me.”
“You suggest I remove a dangerous criminal from her confines and have her out in the open for days at a time?”
“Well you didn’t mind shutting her in with me.”
This doesn’t get a reply.
“What did she do, anyway?”
“That’s confidential patient information.”
“So I have to live with her, but I’m not allowed to know why she’s dangerous? That seems like great safety protocol.” I shake my head. “Whatever. If anything happens to her—and it will—it’s on your hands.”
“Of course. I’ll take responsibility for that. Will that allow you to feel better? More relaxed?” He’s actually asking as though this is a reasonable question.
?
??No, you dickhead. It won’t. Just protect your goddamn patients!”
Anthony winces at the sound of my voice like he’s forgotten what rage is, which he has. I can see in his face that my words and tone don’t make sense to him anymore. I am an irrational monster and he can’t relate to me at all.
“Let’s get back on track,” he says.
I’m going to have to come up with some other plan. Otherwise Maria’s a goner. Then there’s my therapy time to take into account, when Doyle will open my door and let me out, and then everyone not locked within a cell is a goner. All the staff—the security guards, the doctors and the nurses. The patients in the common area. All goners. There’s no telling how long the change will last, but I’m pretty sure it’s been at least twelve hours before, and I think it’s getting longer each year.
“Tranquilizers,” I say. “Could you give me some of those? The highest dosage you’ve got?”
“That would kill you.”
“Trust me—I’m not sure it will even hinder the woman I become. She’s not like me, and she’s certainly not like you.”
“She’s superhuman now, is she?”
“Not superhuman. Just … more than we are. Stronger. Faster. She doesn’t seem to feel pain.”
“I thought we’d moved past referring to this part of yourself as a separate person,” Anthony says. “You did a hell of a job convincing me that you don’t have split personality disorder, but we can go back to that diagnosis if you’d like.”
“Fine. I’m stronger and faster. I don’t feel pain—not until the next day, anyway. Then it’s a whole bundle of laughs.”
“What do you mean? Are you physically hurt after these episodes?”
A tiny spark of hope comes to life in my chest—he has never asked me about the aftermath. I suppose he’s never wanted to indulge me in the idea of it. “I’m a zombie after the episodes. Dead flesh and delirious moaning and all.”
“What causes this?”
“You tell me.”
“Well, at a guess, Josephine, I’d say you’re harming yourself due to your condition, and then your mind is blacking out the trauma of it.”
“Perhaps you should stop guessing and actually find out if that’s true or not.”
“I will on the 16th.”
“No, on the 16th you’ll be dead.”
There is silence in the room. The rain has finally started to slow. The air outside is exhausted and flat. The smell of rain on grass has filled the room—I concentrate on it rather than thinking about what I said to Anthony.
The doc rests his elbows on the desk and peers at me. “I find it quite astonishing that you can say something like that, and then turn around and argue against the cure. You say that rage doesn’t cause crime, but you’re the only uncured person I know, and you’re also the only person who threatens my life.”
“I’m not threatening you,” I say woodenly. “I’m trying to warn you. My anger and the blood moon have nothing to do with each other. It’s not my anger that makes me kill. It’s something much darker and much colder.”
“Let’s take a look at the handbook, shall we?” he suggests, tapping a few things on his tablet.
“Oh yes, why don’t we!”
In a moment, the first medical journal on anger is projected onto the wall behind him. In heavy black letters, it says:
‘What was once known as a normal human emotion can now be categorized differently—namely, as a disease that is contracted upon the development of the brain in early childhood.
Anger’s symptoms include:
Irrationality
Violence
Aggression
Malice
Intent to harm
Loss of appetite
Breathing irregularities
Heart conditions
Death
Humanity, as a race, would function at a far superior level, both physically and socially, if this disease could be cured.’
“Phew,” I sigh. “I feel a lot better now, thank you.”
He shoots me an exasperated look.
That damn journal has become like a bible to people over the last ten years. Every household has several copies, so that they can quickly check a symptom and make sure they haven’t been ‘re-infected’. As far as I know re-infection is impossible, but there are always warnings popping up for people to get regular checkups and to monitor themselves in case they need a second dosage of the cure. I can just imagine people rushing to the journal and shrieking ‘I’m not hungry! I must be turning into a rabid monster!’ And to say that anger causes death just makes me want to punch the guy who wrote that article and prove that I can walk away perfectly unscathed.
It’s all a big joke, but everyone’s forgotten how to laugh.
“Well if you won’t take note of the truth, then—”
“Actually, Doctor,” I say, “that journal was written by Harold Connolly who has a PhD in philosophy, not a medical doctorate. So it’s all personal conjecture, with no scientific basis. What makes anger a disease if happiness and love are not as well?” I smile at Anthony and add, “Doctor Harold Connolly was also a religious fanatic—something that causes far more irrational thought than an emotion could. So how about we both refrain from calling this piece of dribble the truth?”
He stares at me. It takes him a while to recover his composure, and then he’s apparently desperate to find something hidden within his desk drawers. Eventually he just says, “Do you want me to call Luke or not? Continue with the story.”
*
My window faces west. West, where everybody died. I imagine what’s out there a lot. I dream about walking through scorched earth and running my fingers over the diseased trees. Sometimes I wonder if this would be better than the hell I am living now, in a prison of dull wretchedness. I think perhaps the living are dead, too.
I imagine Luke in the west. Walking, walking, impervious to his surrounds, walking until he reaches the sea, where he could be free. I imagine him entering the swelling ocean, clean of any poisons, and swimming out and out and out. I keep imagining this, because it makes my heart swell.
Chapter Four
September 20th, 2063
Josephine
When he knocks on my door I am surprised by my reaction.
“You didn’t call!” he accuses the second he sees me.
I look him over. He’s wearing a black V-necked cardigan and faded black jeans. He looks a lot nicer, although his flip-flops kind of wreck the outfit. He also looks healthier, like maybe he finally got a good night’s sleep. His eyes are clear and his skin isn’t as pale. On the whole, I am slightly outraged by how gorgeous he is. I am also thoroughly amused at his words. I smile slowly and allow myself to savor the moment. “Did we, or did we not, have a conversation just yesterday about the fact that I don’t own a phone? How, therefore, do you propose I should have called you?”
Luke stares at me and starts to laugh. “You might have pointed that out last night.”
“The time you sat at home waiting for my call earned me a few extra hours of peace and quiet.”
He rolls his eyes. And damn if the bastard doesn’t do it as well as I do. “Diabolical,” he mutters, motioning for me to follow.
“Where are we going?” I ask, grabbing my old red jumper and pulling it on over my jeans. I can’t really criticize Luke for not putting effort into his appearance, since my own clothes are full of tears and holes and I still haven’t bothered to brush my hair.
“To my place.”
My feet falter. He sees this and grins. “You’re the murderer, remember?”
“Yeah, thanks,” I mutter. “And by all means, be flippant about the fact.”
He doesn’t answer, just waits.
“So this is actually happening?” I ask. “We’re forming a crime-stopping duo?”
“It sounds fun when you put it that way. Come on.”
I sigh, following him. “Okay then. On your head be it.”
His car
is expensive. We strap in and Luke scans his thumbprint before pressing a button that presumably navigates the car to his place. He then turns to me. “How are you feeling today?”
“Effervescent.”
He shoots me a sideways look that seems to beg me not to be sarcastic twenty-four hours a day.
I take pity on him. “No delirium, you’ll be pleased to hear.”
“That does please me. Any fever?”
“No, Mom.”
“Well, I went home and did some thinking.”
“New for you?”
“I have a list of questions to ask you.”
My shoulders slump. This is not my idea of a pleasant outing. I do not want to think about any of my ‘episodes’, and I really don’t want to talk about any of it—especially with Luke—but I have to keep reminding myself that the more I face it now, the more likely it is that we’ll find an answer. I’m not going to hold my breath though—I’ve spent a lot of time looking for answers to my condition, but it’s hard to find anything that isn’t appallingly biased against any kind of aggression. There’s also the problem that I don’t know much about what it actually is that affects me.
The car pulls itself to a smooth stop and we climb out. We’re outside an enormous block of apartments; Luke is obviously a man with wealth. A lot of wealth. I start to feel nervous as he leads me inside, into an elevator and up to the top floor. Great. He lives in the penthouse.
The security is good—Luke not only has a fingerprint scanner, but a retinal scanner as well.
Inside, I freeze. I feel like I’ve just walked into a page from an interior design catalogue. The space is huge, the ceilings high. Everything is white, black and silver. He has beautiful, clean furniture, white floors and marble benchtops. There is artwork on the walls, but it’s minimal and stark. There are no possessions anywhere—no pieces of Luke lying about. I can’t see any shoes on the floor, or jumpers thrown off, I can see no junk or trash or clues to who he is. I have no more idea now than I did the first night I met him.