The Infection Read Online Free PDF Page B

recollection of a Greek myth in which sleep and death are brothers.
    His nightmares are exhausting trials of lurid colors and feelings, extremes of good and evil, and symbols of guilt. He finally dreams of a warm evening at home, his wife pink and happy in a cherry bathrobe, holding their daughter on her lap in a rocking chair next to the toddler bed. The familiar ritual of getting ready for sleep. But the walls turn dark and sooty with ash and cluttered with graffiti tags and photos of missing children. A bullet hole appears in the window behind his wife’s head. She is still smiling as she smells her daughter’s hair, but her face has turned gray, her mouth and chin stained black. His little girl is not moving. He does not know if she is breathing.
    His wife licks the back of her head, as if grooming her. As if tasting her.

FLASHBACK: ETHAN BELL
     
    Nine days ago, Ethan woke up in an empty bed with his heart pounding against his ribs. He found his wife in the bathroom, putting on mascara in front of the mirror with her mouth open, while Mary sat on the floor imitating her. Ever since the Screaming three days earlier, he found himself panicking when he did not know where his family was. He suffered nightmares in which they fell down screaming. He tried not to think of his students who actually did.
    “I need coffee,” he said. “Where are you going, hon?” He added a quick wave and grin at his daughter. “Hi, Mary!”
    “Work,” said Carol. “I have to work today.”
    “Hi Daddy,” said Mary.
    “But you weren’t going to go to work until Thursday.”
    “Uh, today is Thursday, Ethan.”
    “No,” he said, then smiled broadly for Mary, who was suddenly staring at him acutely, worried that he was upset. “You should stay home again today. A lot of people are doing that.”
    “Ethan, we talked about this,” his wife said, her own smile genuine. “We’re all still freaked out but the country has to get moving again. Too many things are up in the air. And we need money coming in. We have to eat.”
    Mary said, “No talking.”
    “The schools are still closed,” he pointed out.
    “They need room for the screamers.”
    “Don’t call them that.”
    Carol snorted. “You actually want me to call them SEELS?”
    “We should show a little respect, that’s all,” he grumbled.
    Sudden Encephalitic Epileptic Lethargica Syndrome, or SEELS, was the more formal, if overly broad, term popularly used by scientists to describe the mystery disease. Other than naming it, scientists knew very little about it. Some said it reminded them of Minor’s Disease, with its sudden onset of pain and paralysis caused by bleeding into the spinal cord. Some wanted to explore exploding head syndrome, others frontal lobe epilepsy, others maladies related to the functioning of the inner ear. A group of scientists wrote a letter to the President demanding widespread sampling of air, soil, water and people for novel nanotechnology agents, warning that the worst may be yet to come.
    Equally puzzling was the ongoing exotic symptoms exhibited by some of the victims of the new disease. Echolalia, for example, the automatic repetition of somebody else’s sounds. Echopraxia, the repetition of other people’s movements. And, in some cases, “waxy flexibility,” the victim’s limbs staying in whatever position they were last left, as if made of wax. Nobody could explain why some people had these symptoms and others did not, just as they could not explain how the disease chose its victims, nor how it spread so quickly around the globe in a single day. There were very few real facts, only hundreds of theories that tried to force these facts to make sense.
    “Look, Ethan. They’ll reopen the schools soon. In the meantime, why not go to the school and see if you can volunteer at the clinic? A lot of people need care around the clock.”
    “Maybe,” he said.
    “It might do you some good,” she said tartly, cutting him down with a single