Contaminated Read online

  “It’s me.”

  “Velvet! I thought you were going to call me!”

  “I am calling you.”

  “Yeah, but…” Tony pauses, lowers his voice. “Earlier. You know. Because of my mom.”

  Tony’s mom has never liked me, not even before the Contamination changed everything. Tony’s mom worked out like a maniac, running miles and miles in any kind of weather. Every day. She never drank anything but diet cola and water, and she never ate anything but salad. She worked so hard at being skinny, you’d think she’d have been more understanding of the Connies, all people who’d been trying to get skinny, too.

  But she wasn’t. Even before the Contamination, I’d heard her make nasty comments about fat people, about anyone who “relied on pills and powders” to diet. I’d heard her make nasty comments about a lot of people, actually. I was sure she made them about me, too, though she was at least nice enough or maybe just not brave enough to say them to my face. During the worst of it, those bad, bad months that summer when the world was ending, I’d taken Opal to their house. I knew Tony would help us.

  But his mother wouldn’t.

  His dad wanted to, but I think she’d beaten him down long ago. I stood on their front porch, our suitcases at our feet, my little sister crying and clutching at my hand. She was only wearing flip-flops, and later I found blisters all over her feet. We’d walked from the temporary shelter the soldiers had put us in, all the way to Tony’s house. Five miles on hard concrete in the heat of August.

  His mother had opened the door only enough to peek out. She was so skinny, she probably could’ve squeezed through that crack, but nothing else could. I knew she knew who I was, but she asked, anyway.

  “Please,” I’d begged. “My sister…”

  “No. I can’t, Velvet. Where are your parents?” She should’ve known. If we were there on her porch, it had to be because our parents had been Contaminated. They were Connies. They were danger.

  I knew I shouldn’t blame her, but I did.

  They are mindless and violent, they are dangerous and brutal and horrifying. They are scary. But they are still human, not undead monsters. They can be held off. They can be killed. They can be defended against. She could’ve helped us, easily. Their house had all the bottom windows boarded up. Connies can’t climb ladders or rip off boards. They’re stupid and uncoordinated. All anyone had to do was hole up and wait—the president had already ordered the massive containment forces that would begin the restructuring. Only a few weeks after we went to Tony’s house begging for shelter, the Centers for Disease Control had pinpointed the source of the Contamination, protein water produced by a single company. ThinPro. It had something to do with the protein in the water, taken from a contaminated source. Basically, they’d all gotten something like mad cow disease, but worse. Much worse.

  “I think she’s in bed,” Tony adds. “I think it’s okay.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t pay attention to the time.”

  I know I should tell Tony about the Connie that almost got me, or at least the trig homework that’s still sitting in front of me. He’d help me with that, even if he can’t do anything about the fact my heart is still skipping beats every once in a while, and my hands are still sweating.

  “I don’t think she heard the phone ring,” he says.

  Boys don’t talk the way girls do. When I first started going out with Tony, we’d spend hours on the phone with me telling him about everything I’d done in the hours I wasn’t with him. I’d talk, he’d listen. In the background I’d hear the stutter of gunfire from one of his video games, hear him mutter “Yesssss!” into the phone, though he wasn’t replying to me.

  I don’t have as much to say as I used to. I see Tony in school every other day when we share an English lit class, but the time we used to spend together during study hall and in the hours after school, at football games, at dances, all that’s gone. I work instead of going on dates. Even if his mother did allow him a little more freedom, the curfew’s in effect starting at 8 o’clock. Even if I didn’t have Opal to take care of, there’d be little time to spend with Tony. It’s no wonder he’s been complaining.

  “I miss you.” I mean it.

  Tony and I have known each other since elementary school, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I started thinking he was cute. We hung out at the pool the summer between sophomore and junior years, and by the time we went back to school, we were a couple. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s sweet. He’s good. Tony’s good, and I don’t want to lose him, because he’s the only good thing I have left in my life.

  “Ditch work tomorrow,” he says at once. “I’ll cut out of fifth period. Meet you someplace. We’ll hang out.”

  I want to so much, it hurts. “I can’t.”

  “Velvet.” Tony has a way of saying my name, so soft and low, it sounds like my name is made of velvet. He knows he can get me to do just about anything. “C’mon. What’s one day?”

  One day’s less pay, that’s what it is. The chance of losing my job, too. Just because it’s crap work doesn’t mean there aren’t a dozen other people waiting for it. I hate that I’m only seventeen and thinking this way. I hate that Tony’s a few months older than I am, and yet can’t understand why I do.

  He lived through the Contamination, too. He saw the news reports, the looting and rioting in the street, or at least the aftermath of them. He’s seen Connies lurching down the streets with people running and screaming in front of them, or chasing after to hunt them down. Tony’s seen the memorials the same as I have, as everyone has. But I feel like he hasn’t really lived through it the way I have, with his two parents, his house, his cell phone, with nothing changed, really, except a few more rules and some inconveniences to deal with. So he can’t get pizza bagels from the supermarket, or stay up late watching soft-core skin flicks on cable. So he can’t be on the streets after a certain time, and so there are soldiers on every corner. He never seems to notice.

  There’s a really big distance between us that was never there before, and I hate that, too.

  “I miss you, too,” he whispers into the phone. “I want to see you. Really bad.”

  “I don’t have to work until the afternoon on Saturday. And no school. Maybe you could come over here? We could play some games. Hang out.”

  Tony hesitates. “Yeah. Opal will be there, right?”

  “Yeah, well… she lives here, Tony. I can’t just get rid of her.” I can’t send her out to play in the yard or anything like that. There are other kids in the apartment complex, other Conorphans like us, and they don’t go out to play, either. I know why he’s asking, too, and that annoys me. Like it’s not enough to just come and hang out with me; he has to know if we’ll have time to be alone, like making out is the only reason he wants to see me.

  “Right, right. I know that. Well… I’m not sure if I can come over. My mom…”

  Other teenage boys would probably lie to their moms and come over, anyway. With the new bus system, it would be even easier for him to get here, since he wouldn’t need a ride from her. I don’t think Tony will lie to his mother, though. I mean, what makes him so good can also be annoying.

  “You could ask her, Tony. C’mon. It would be fun.”

  “She doesn’t like me going to your place,” Tony says. “She knows your parents aren’t there.”

  “What if my mom were here? Would she care then?” I say boldly.

  Tony laughs, sounding uncomfortable. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious, Tony. If my mom were here, she couldn’t say there were no parents. Would she let you come over to hang out then?”

  Tony doesn’t say anything for so long, I think he’s hung up. “Velvet, that’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny.” I draw in a breath, then another. I can hear the smile in my voice and wonder if he can, too. “I found her. I found my mom. They said it’ll be about a week before she can come home, but that’s not so
long—”

  Tony breaks into my babbling. “Stop it.”

  “Stop what? I thought you’d be happy for me.” My voice rises, and I look toward the bedroom where Opal’s still sleeping.

  “But your mom’s… one of them.”

  “She’s my mother, Tony.” The words come out stiff and sharp. “I found her. She’s coming home.”

  “But you can’t bring her home!” He sounds shocked. “Really, Velvet? Are you crazy?”

  “It’s safe. She’s been neutralized. They all are.” I think of the Connie coming at me from out of the bathroom and force away a shudder. They’re getting fewer and fewer, though, the wild ones. Somehow this makes it worse.

  “Gross.”

  I know I heard him right, but my jaw still drops. “It’s not gross! It’s my mom!”

  “But she’s not,” Tony says. “She’s a Connie, Velvet. I mean… they’re not… she won’t be…”

  “You wouldn’t say that,” I tell him coldly, “if it were your mother.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing it’s not, then.” This voice comes across the line from Tony’s mother herself. She must’ve been listening since he picked up the phone, silent and skanky in the background. What a bitch. “Tony, hang up now.”

  “Mom—”

  “Now, Anthony.”

  He does. There’s silence on the line, and I listen to her breathing. I’ll give her the chance to say what she’s going to, I guess because I need to hear it. I need her to say it, get it out of the way once and for all.

  “I think it would be better if you didn’t call here again, Velvet.”

  “Does Tony want me to stop calling?”

  “My son does what I tell him to do,” Tony’s mother says smugly. “And I’m telling you to stop calling here. You’re not welcome. I don’t want you with my son.”

  “Why?”

  She sounds surprised that I asked and stutters out a reply. “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why don’t you like me, Mrs. Batistelli? What is it about me you hate so much?”

  “I don’t need to give you an answer to that. Rude,” she mutters at the end of it.

  “I’ll tell you what I don’t like about you, if that makes it easier.” The words spew out of me before I can stop them, but I don’t care. I close my eyes, then open them. Nothing in this apartment’s changed, but I feel different.

  “You… little… what a little…!”

  “You can’t say it’s because of my parents. My mother. You can’t even say it’s because of this apartment, or the fact I have to work at a low-paying job, and you can’t say it’s because I’m fat, because I’m not. So what? Tell me!”

  “I don’t have to tell you a thing, you disgusting, trashy brat!”

  “And you’re a wrinkled, spray-tanned, control freak,” I say evenly. “Why do you run so much? Is it because everyone around you is always trying to get away from you and you think it will let you catch up?”

  The sharp hiss of her breath lets me know I hit her someplace tender. I shouldn’t know something like that. I definitely shouldn’t say it. My mother raised me better than that, but right now I don’t care. I’m a disappointment, just like with the laundry.

  “Don’t you call here again. Ever.”

  She hangs up on me. I stare at the phone for a few seconds, then put it back in the cradle. I should feel worse about what I said, except that it was true. Maybe I should feel worse about what she called me, but if “disgusting, trashy brat” is the best she can come up with… well, I can handle that.

  It’s really time for bed now. Six in the morning comes early. I go to the bedroom I share with Opal, but pause to look into the other. There was a leak in the ceiling when we moved in, so the drywall’s got a hole in it covered over with a dirty sheet stapled into place. The carpet had been ruined and torn up, leaving bare plywood. The window’s cracked. It’s why we share a room instead of having our own. I’ll have to clean up this room, since Mom’s coming home. Maybe find some curtains, a floor rug. Get a bed, for sure. She won’t sleep in a nest of rags.

  My mom’s coming home.

  FIVE

  THE FIRST WAVE OF THE CONTAMINATED WAS slaughtered by overzealous soldiers, police officers, firefighters. Also by neighbors and by strangers. People had seen too many horror movies, read too many “survival” guides. When the first cases started getting reported, people made jokes. A few days later, when the massive waves of Contaminated started losing their minds, those same people were already armed and ready to shoot, no questions asked.

  That first wave lasted about two weeks, followed by a couple of weeks of chaos. Then the second wave hit. By that time, disease control experts had done enough autopsies to figure out what was causing people to randomly and suddenly go homicidal, and the second wave of Connies was “neutralized” by simple lobotomies, many done in the field by untrained staff who’d managed to wrestle Connies to the ground. They used ice picks. Shoved them through the eye sockets into the brains. It calmed the Contaminated down, but it killed some, too. Left others permanently damaged, some blinded. It’s hard to be careful with an ice pick.

  By the time the third wave hit a couple of months later, they’d figured out the source of the problem, but it didn’t matter. People were still drinking the water, or had been drinking it, and only now the disease had caught up with them. The news called it prion disease. Not a virus. Mutated, twisted proteins that somehow ate holes in the brains of those infected. This time, instead of killing the Contaminated or lobotomizing them in the field, the disease control experts collected them. Took them to the labs. They perfected electric-pulsing shock collars that subdued them rather than further scrambling their brains. It was less brutal and more controversial.

  And now, less than two years later, they’re releasing those people back to their families.

  I don’t see Tony in school the next morning. It’s not the day we have class together and I get there just before classes start because I have to make sure to get Opal to her before-school care. The time I used to spend walking the halls with him hand in hand is now spent switching from bus to bus or running if I’ve missed one.

  I take a zero for the math homework. My teacher, Mr. Butler, looks sympathetic but doesn’t question me on it. I listen to the lesson and even pay attention, but it’s like he’s speaking a different language. One made up of numbers instead of letters.

  Phys ed is required in order to graduate, and it’s my second and final class today. Unlike math, which I’m convinced I’ll never use, this class makes sense. Instead of playing volleyball for weeks on end, or learning how to bowl or golf, we spend the class time navigating special obstacle courses. We jump over gymnastics horses, crawl up and over nets. At the end of the course we grab up bows with special, soft-tipped arrows and try to hit the targets set up across the gym. We also have to run sprints.

  This is because most Connies can’t run very fast for very far. You have to outlast them. Most of the girls in my class complain about the sprints, but I like them. Legs pumping, fists clenched, back and forth in zigzags on the polished wood floor. My sneakers squeak. The girl beside me, Tina, she’s a Conorphan, too. Her face is set in concentration. She runs faster than I do. She also hits the targets dead center, every time.

  “I don’t know why we have to do this crap,” Bethany, one of the popular girls, says with a toss of her long hair. She’s tied the back of her gym shirt with an elastic band, like anyone in here cares how flat her belly is. “My dad says it’s all just ridiculous. And I hate to sweat.”

  “You wouldn’t mind sweating if some brain-dead freak started coming after you,” Veronica, her best buddy, says. She curls her fingers into claws. “Rawr!”

  “My dad says all of this is going to be over in another few months, anyway. They’re going to catch all the rest of the Connies out there and we won’t need any of this. This is outdated.” Bethany tosses her hair again.

  Tina, looking grim, pulls back her bow
and lets an arrow fly. It hits dead center. “Maybe.”

  Bethany and Veronica share a look. It’s not a nice one. I don’t know Tina’s story, but she looks pretty determined to kill anything that gets in her way. I wonder what happened to her. Probably something like what happened to me in the woods behind my house… but I don’t want to think about that.

  “All I know is,” Tina says, turning to the other girls, “is that I’m never, never going to be caught unprepared again. Ever.”

  She hands the bow to Bethany and jogs away to start the obstacle course over again. Bethany looks to see if our teacher’s watching but she’s not; she’s helping some girl who got tangled in the net. Bethany hands the bow to Veronica, who hands it to me.

  “Like this is useful,” Bethany says. “Who keeps bows and arrows around, anyway?”

  “What they really should teach us is how to use a gun,” Veronica offers.

  I take aim, let fly. I’m not very good. My arrow bounces off the bottom of the target. We’re not allowed to retrieve them, even with their rubber tips, until everyone’s gone through the line.

  “You’d still have to get a gun,” I say.

  “Oh, well, my dad says we don’t need to worry about this crap, anyway, because all the wild Connies are rounded up, and all the ones that are left have been neutralized, right? My dad says it’s too bad they repealed the Lobo Laws.

  He says the shock collars aren’t as reliable.”

  “They’re fine,” I say. “They work.”

  “I don’t know,” Veronica says doubtfully.

  Neither of them knows me that well, though they probably know that I’m a Conorphan. I don’t think it really means anything to them, though. Neither one of them seems very smart.

  “I know.” I pass the bow to the girl behind me and go back to my sprints.

  Lots of kids look at me with envy when I get out of school early, but I wish I were one of them, sitting in a boring class and daydreaming about my boyfriend. As it is, I spend too much time trying to find Tony when the classes are changing. I don’t see him, but I miss the bus I need to take to work.