ONE
CIPHER
The boywith the golden-brown curls kneeling in the patch of clover was a surprise, and I hated surprises.
Half-hidden by the trunk of a massive live oak tree, I smoked a cigarette idly as I watched the kid—more like a teenager—digging in the dirt with both hands, his little pink tongue wedged in the corner of his heart-shaped lips. The way his unruly hair stuck up in messy tufts reminded me of a cat, or rather, a kitten, which was also how I classified him in terms of threat level. He hummed softly to himself, a daydreamer, a woolgatherer, completely ignorant to his surroundings and oblivious to the fact that he was not alone.
Prey.
An actual calico cat slunk into view, wound its lithe body around the boy’s kneeling form, and flicked its tail haughtily. The cat had only one eye, and its fur coat was patchy in places–mange or perhaps malnutrition. Clearly, the cat wasn’t food but a pet, an indulgence that was practically unheard of these days, rare as a wild chicken, though just as coveted, and not for companionship.
The boy’s expression remained focused as he dug. What did he expect to find there in the dirt? Buried treasure? A dead body? I watched him intently–only because I had nothing better to do. That tongue of his was really working when suddenly, a dazzling grin broke over his face and he yanked out a fat, round potato.
He laughed, a delighted little chortle, and the sound, like his mere presence, unnerved me. What did anyone have to laugh about these days? I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed unless it was tinged with bitterness. A bit of black humor to get me through, the sort of unhinged giggle you released because if you didn’t laugh, you might break down and start crying. But laughter from actual joy? Hardly.
The boy continued to dig, unearthing two dozen more dirt-crusted tubers while I made a few deductions: one, this was his home, his yard, and his garden that he’d been tending to for weeks; two, he had all of his limbs and no visible scars, which meant he’d managed to survive the plague relatively unscathed so far; three, I could have overpowered Kitten with one arm tied behind my back, but I didn’t count on him being alone, which meant there was likely a bigger cat lurking somewhere nearby.
I scanned our surroundings. The neighborhood was a subdivision on the outskirts of Greenville, South Carolina, mostly two-story brick houses with ample lawns now overrun with weeds as well as old-growth trees like the one I leaned against. The subdivision butted up to the woods we’d been traveling for the last several weeks.
My crew and I had stopped here to restock on provisions for our journey south to Atlanta. The forest offered more cover than the main roads where the military patrolled, picking off Rabids and “recruiting” what they classified as able-bodied strays like us. Here, there were roving bands of miscreants such as ourselves to worry about, as well as the rando throng of Rabids that always seemed to pop up when you least expected it, but I’d take either of those threats over the U.S. government any day.
My compadres agreed.
I searched for any sign of my crew, but none were in sight. I turned down the volume on my two-way radio so as not to alert the boy to my presence, then skirted the tree line to the neighboring house. Shimmying through a gap in the wooden privacy fence, I found the usual markers of abandonment—a rusted swing set that had been picked over for spare parts, busted-out windows not boarded up, missing wood siding, and soot and char on the second story where a fire must have broke out. Ominously, there was a plastic dog house too, but no Fido to fill it.
I crossed the neighbor’s overgrown yard and made my way toward the boy’s property. As quietly as I could, I anchored my boot into the chain-link fence separating the two lawns and swung my prosthetic leg over. Awkwardly shifting my weight, I landed clumsily on solid ground–I’d not yet perfected the art of climbing fences with an artificial limb–then sauntered over to his house and tried a window.
Locked.
Glancing up, I saw the second-story window directly above me was open, probably to let in the sluggish summer breeze, but there was no way in hell I was going to scale the side of the house, or even attempt it. My prosthetic leg was good for some things, like absorbing hard impacts, but not climbing brick walls.
I glanced toward the backyard to find the boy still kneeling on the ground with his back to me, some thirty feet away, tending to his garden without a care in the world. His sense of awareness was shit. He wouldn’t last ten minutes alone in Rabid Country—even with all his limbs intact—unless he ran and hid. He didn’t even look up as I rounded the corner of his house and entered in through the back porch.
The house was well-kept. Clean and homey with little sayings on the wall like, “Home Sweet Home” and “Live, Laugh, Love” and the most absurd one of all, “Blessed.” I didn’t know whether to cringe or gag. I passed by the kitchen and spotted a large soup pot and cutting board on top of the counter with some carrots that looked homegrown as well.
Soup.
The boy was making soup, something so ordinary and domestic. So… wholesome. He had a home, he had food, he was surviving, seemingly all on his own. That little kitten wasthriving, snug as a bug in a rug, while the rest of us had to scavenge and hunt for our next meal, hide from authorities while fending off raiders and slaying bloodthirsty Rabids.
What was his secret?
And then I heard an unmistakable groan of agony coming from the second story. Heading toward the sound, I kept my back to the wall as I climbed the stairs and skirted along the upstairs hallway. The walls were decorated with old family photos, and I suspected their family portrait sessions ended around the same time the electricity and internet went out, rendering most of our electronic devices obsolete. I checked the rooms as I passed by them, ensuring all were empty. The master bedroom must be at the end of the hallway, which was also the source of the moaning. The door was open.
Did I really want to go in there?
The odor hit me first, that of rotting flesh and bedsores, gastric acid and infection. I held my breath as I entered the room where the smell thickened like a fog, clinging to my skin, making my eyes water and my throat burn, even with the windows open. I gagged on the stench of human decay and shielded my nose and mouth with my bandana. Christ, I hated that smell.
The poor wretch on the bed was far past the point of saving. Eyes scored with white threads like a gossamer web stared at nothing, flesh so emaciated that it looked like their bones were trying to claw their way out of their skin. Huge blisters had swollen and erupted all over their body, and the open sores now oozed with pus and blood. The poor soul’s chest rattled with every laborious breath, and whatever features once characterized their face were now blighted by the disease.
These were the advanced stages of Rabbit Fever, the highly transmissible asshole cousin of the rabies virus that brought the entire world to its knees roughly seven years ago. No one knew if the virus came from an actual rabbit or some other small rodent, but the scientific name was complicated as hell, so the name stuck. There were conspiracies that it was created in a lab and intentionally leaked by bio-terrorists in whatever nation our government was at odds with on any given day. Or maybe it was an accident. Who the fuck knew? None of it mattered now because we were all dealing with the aftermath. Societal collapse, food shortages, disease-ridden cities, abandoned suburbs, a shit-ton of dead people, and the few of us who remained, barely surviving.
Oh, and then there were the Rabids.
There were three known ways to catch Rabbit Fever–eating the undercooked meat of an infected animal (or human), being bitten by a Rabid, or less common but still possible, contracting the disease through scratches or open wounds that had been exposed to Rabid saliva. Thankfully the disease wasn’t airborne… yet.
If you caught a mild case of Rabbit Fever, and you were young enough with a healthy immune system, you might survive it. Or if, like me, you got bitten by a Rabid, you could stop it from spreading to your major organs—amputate an arm or a leg, and you were golden. But more often, the disease took hold all at once, attacking the brain stem like Genghis Khan’s marauding army, scrambling your synapses and wreaking havoc on your central nervous system. The blisters and rash accompanied the excruciating nerve pain that was a side effect of the virus, and in the case of the person lying on the bed, their window for recovery, if ever there was one, closed a long time ago.
I glanced over to the night table, recently dusted, and saw a framed portrait of two parents, both white, and two little boys, both brown, all of them smiling. The younger boy I recognized as Kitten. The older boy resembled him as well, but neither looked like their parents. Adopted? Judging from the emaciated bone structure of the person on the bed, this must be Kitten’s mother.
