“How do I know you’ll come back?”
“Kitten would make me. He’s honorable like that. And you could always come and track us down, for funsies. You know where we live.”
“Funsies,” she said with a slight smirk. “I certainly hope you’re worth the trouble, Cipher. Fine, in addition to your many other demands, you may have a week of leave and begin Basic Training upon yourtimelyreturn. Do we have a deal?” She offered her hand.
“Oh, and I want a gun,” I said.
“Of course you do. Luckily, we are the military.”
We shook on it. And then I had to review the enlistment paperwork and about a million release forms. I read every word before signing, asking questions when I didn’t understand something, not caring that Crenshaw had to sit there and answer every one of them. Two hours later, I was enlisted as a soldier in the United Forces of America, hard to believe, but who in this world hasn’t done something crazy for love?
As we were wrapping up, I realized there was one more question I hadn’t asked her. “So, what’s the mission around here anyway?”
She looked me dead in the eye, a sliver of a smile on her otherwise stone-cold face. “Isn’t it obvious, Cipher? Our mission is to save humanity.”
A couple days later,my cast came off and Dr. Godara and I had an awkward conversation about whether it was safe for me to have penetrative sex with my boyfriend. I askeda lotof questions and Godara ultimately gave me the green light, a literal score. Kitten and I were loaded into the Humvee with the StarChem base getting smaller in our rearview. The goats were bleating in the back, the bells around their necks clanging as the animals jostled into one another.
“Let’s go visit these Asswipes,” I said, excited to be reunited with our family.
“Assholes,” Kitten corrected with a silly laugh.
I smiled and grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him right on the mouth. “Whatever.”
The journey home took less than an hour thanks to the Humvee’s exceptional off-roading skills. The clouds were low, threatening rain. I’d love to see a good summer storm, the first of the season. We saw a pack of Rabids investigating a bit of carrion on the side of the road. They raised their heads, searching with their sightless eyes as we passed by but didn’t pursue our vehicle.
“Would you be immune now if one of them bit you?” Kitten asked.
“I don’t know. Godara said that was one of the things they’d like to test, if I happened to get exposed again.”
“You won’t, not with me protecting you,” Kitten said.
“My hero. Would you want to do that? Study the virus?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I thought I wanted to be a midwife like Marion, but I want to do whatever’s most needed right now, whether it’s delivering babies or helping find a cure.”
“Probably both. I admire your passion.” With a cure, or a more reliable treatment, as Godara would say, everything might go back to normal, or some version of it. Like the Before.
“You have passion too. Security, defense, carpentry. Despite hating the military, I actually think you’d be good at it,” he said.
“I guess we’ll see. It’s funny. This is the first time I thought we might actually see an end to the plague. I’ve never thought much beyond surviving. Thinking about the future is kind of…”
“Scary?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“The future happens one day at a time, too. And you can always change your mind. About some things, at least. I think we’re pretty locked in for the next five years.”
“Is it weird that I find it comforting?” I asked him.
“No, you like a plan,” Kitten said and that was true, but this wasn’t necessarilymyplan. Still, Crenshaw seemed like a straight-shooter. Hopefully she didn’t end up being a two-faced liar like Brother Larry because if so, all bets were off.
“You’re proof of the human body’s ability to heal,” Kitten was saying. “If we can begin to rehabilitate all of the other Rabids out there, just think about the possibilities for a real future, for all of us.”
“I don’t know, babe. Some of those fuckers are pretty far gone.” I recalled my own intake video, how out of my mind I’d been. And some of those Rabids had been living like that for months, even years.
“Sometimes I wake up thinking you’re out there. That you’d escaped or we were never able to cure you,” Kitten said with a worried look on his face.
I took his hand, brought it to my mouth and kissed it. Even though the risk of contagion had passed, there was a chance the virus might come back in another form and fuck me over again. Kitten knew it too. We’d have to be prepared. But for now, I wasn’t going to worry about what may or may not come to pass.
