Chapter 6
SIX
BEE
The black plague.
That’s what they are calling it. At least that’s what they are calling it here at this indoor basketball court and all-purpose rec centre turned quarantine.
With the darkness on her heels, I dragged Tesni in here, her arm hooked over my shoulder, her weight falling into my side, and Nurse Smith came out to usher us to a bed behind a plastic curtain, she called it ‘the black plague.’
Tesni scoffed on her own blood.
I thought she had passed out, leaning into me, Ruby on her other side, taking as much of her weight as she could with her own sickness brewing; Louise following behind, propping up Ramona’s weight all on her own.
Tesni’s lashes were shut over her eyes, and there was a feverish mist to her forehead, and a pallor that reached her lips.
The nurse called it the black plague, and Tesni came to life just to rasp, “That’s taken.”
It wasn’t terribly funny.
And yet, it was.
It was a relief that struck me like a blow to the chest and loosened my grimace into a lazy grin and released a harrowed chuckle—because Tesni woke up, she spoke, just to give that quick retort—burrowed too deep in her nature, to snap without thinking, to correct on instinct not malice.
That eased tension in me.
And we draped her onto the bed.
Louise plopped Ramona onto the only other available bed, across the rec centre.
Less than two hours.
That’s how long it took for Ramona to catch it.
Louise had to drop the supplies on the road in town to drag Ramona back to us, and by then Tesni was a mess.
That RV fast became a biohazard.
Whatever they are sick with, it came from the darkness.
First time Tesni choked on her own blood, the blackout hadn’t yet reached the shore.
The darkness has since spread all over. But the sickness caught us before the darkness was even overhead.
It infects the air.
Nurse Smith said so.
I didn’t need her to tell us that to figure it out myself.
It’s an airborne virus.
A lot of people of have it.
Not me.
Maybe because of my secret.
Maybe I could be immune.
All I know for certain is that I haven’t gotten sick.
Louise caught a bit of it, but it was more like a seasonal cold in her, coughs that never harshened into bloody hacking fits. The coughs lingered a couple of days, then vanished.
I wonder if it’s because she’s one of the healthiest people I’ve ever known. Macros and protein, lifting and cardio, never drinks, never smokes. Maybe she just has a prime immune system.
Ruby isn’t so lucky.
Her coughs started the day before we arrived at this makeshift quarantine—and she is now bedridden.
Just like Ramona.
Just like Tess.
The whole time we’ve been here, I haven’t left Tesni’s bedside for longer than a bathroom break.
I sit here on the hard chair that’s no good for my hips, and I will sit here until she wakes up.
She has to wake up.
I can’t let myself think of any other possibility.
She must wake.
And I wait for that moment, that flutter of her long lashes.
The chair creaks as I shift my weight to the side, as if to ease some of the tension from my lower back.
The quarantine is quiet, the occasional rustling of a curtain, the clang of a bedpan being moved, the flap of a blanket before it’s spread out over a mattress, coughs here and there.
Same noises, hour after hour, day after day.
But it isn’t day, is it?
There are no days anymore. No nights.
It’s only darkness out there.
The rectangular windows of this basketball court line the height of the walls, just at the cusp of the ceiling. I look at them and should see blue skies and the glare of a bright summer sun, or a star speckled midnight drape with the gleam of the moon.
But it’s only darkness beyond the glass.
The blackout has swallowed the whole world.
Yet, it’s the quarantine itself that’s most like hell.
More than a hundred empty beds are lined in rows spanning the whole court, each of them shrouded in plastic curtains.
Not long ago, those beds were a symphony of hacking and moans and raspy breaths.
Now, so many are hidden by the curtains, and there are no sounds to come from them.
Most have died.
Louise helps the last of the nurses, the two still standing, clear the bodies.
There were three nurses who stuck around, but one of them ended up on a bed of her own. The ones who didn’t stay, four to be exact, abandoned the quarantine when the darkness swallowed the sky.
No doctors.
If there were ever doctors here, I don’t know what became of them, if they ran, abandoned ship, or got sick before we even arrived.
We had to drive further inland to find a quarantine, to chase radio frequencies here.
Now, as I run a warm cloth along Tesni’s arm, wedging it between her limp fingers for good measure, I hardly see the point in coming here at all. All it has been is the offer of a bed to die on.
And that’s apparently all I can do, too; offer her some scraps of comfort in her last days.
My movements are monotonous.
I wash her with the cloth as I do every day, but I wander my attention around the repurposed basketball court.
So many dead. So many drawn curtains with no signs of life behind them, no coughs, no wheezing.
The ones who do moan, whisper, wheeze, there are only two nurses left to tend to them, and Louise.
She stepped up the moment we arrived, since being a gym teacher means having first aid training.
She takes care of both Ramona and Ruby; she uses the gas stove in the kitchen to make whatever food we have left here; she helps cart the dead into wheelbarrows and take them outside where they are dumped.
Just dumped out back in an old car lot.
I should be helping.
I should be doing something for them.
But I find I only care about Tess.
So I tend to her, washing her with a warm cloth, spoon-feeding her soup whenever she is lucid enough to swallow, brushing her hair, reading magazine articles to her in her deep, feverish sleep.
Small things.
What else can I do for her?
There is no treatment for this new virus, a poison in the darkness. There is nothing beyond waiting, replenishing her IV fluids, and keeping her as comfortable in her agony as I can.
The fever has plunged her into a sleep for hours, now. No rousing from it. Its grip is too tight.
I swap out the cloth for the bottle of cocoa butter.
Tess always preferred the unscented stuff, not tested on animals, organic and environmentally friendly. Vegan since the day I met her, not once wavered in that, and long before it was a trend.
But options are limited around here, and she’s deep in a fever sleep, so it’s cocoa scented moisturiser I rub along her damp flesh, and she can’t say a thing about it, she can’t question how it was made or tested or ask anything about palm oil.
She’s far too comatose for cognitive function.
Makes it easy for me to coat her in moisturiser, getting her arms and face and neck and legs.
And still, she doesn’t stir.
Beneath her shut eyelids, movement swerves back and forth, up and down, matching the erratic beat of her raspy breaths.
And I just sit here.
Washing her, reading to her.
Pointless. All of it.
It doesn’t do any real good.
Of all the people that have gotten sick, all the beds occupied in the rec centre, only two have gotten back up.
Two. Out of hundreds.
One, I wasn’t here for.
The nurse told me about him when she was trying to comfort me. So it might not even be true. Could just be a kind lie, a thread of hope in darkness.
The other survivor was a woman in her fifties. That did give me some hope before the fever really stole Tesni.
Maybe it’s three plague survivors, if I count Louise, but I’m not so certain it was the black plague that got her… even if she was exposed.
Her sickness was so curt, so fleeting, so nothing.
I watch her now.
That muscle mass she’s built, painstakingly crafted over years of lifting at the gym, is fading. Hunger eats away at us. The rations are slight, and attention to nutrition is out the window.
Not like we’re like monitoring protein intake these days. A thing of the past.
Still, there she is, moving from one bed to another, lifting bodies and draping them onto the wheelbarrow, then carting them out through the double exit doors, then returning—and doing it all over again.
I wonder how she fought it.
The sickness.
Could it not thread into her because of her strength?
Louise has been a ‘gym junkie’—as Tess calls it—since I met her.
Is that what saves her from the black plague?
Is it what saves me, that I am fit, that I take care of my physical body?
And that might be why Tesni is so ill, because her idea of hydration is ‘water is in my coffee’ and nutrition is ‘potato is a vegetable’ when she’s stuffing her face with fries.
Vegan she might be, but the unhealthy sort.
She’s always been that way.
And it shows.
Skinny-fat. Slim, but not strong.
Now, she’s just skinny.
I can’t get her to each much in the moments she’s lucid, and those moments are fewer by the hour.
This virus works fast.
If I estimate it right, this is her last day.
That’s the longest anyone has endured the black plague before their hearts have given out: Five days.
The nurses track it.
Time it.
And so that’s what I do.
I lift my wrist and eye the face of my watch.
The analogue hands tick to meet at twelve.
Midnight or midday, I can’t tell. Time is blended, woven together, an impossible task to untangle.
A sigh sags my shoulders as I reach for the notebook with the pen stuck in between the pages. I flip it open and, clicking the pen, mark a line next to a row of seven lines.
There.
Exactly eight lots of twelve-hour periods. Four days—and now, she’s entered her fifth.
I hold the notebook a while, fingers gripped so firm that the thick stacks of paper start to bow and dent.
I only snap out of my trance when the identifiable soft thuds of orthopaedic shoes hit the hard floor.
I lean back in my chair, angle my chin, and watch as Nurse Smith marches, urgent, for the double swing doors all the way across the basketball court.