Chapter 5: Decisions and their Ramifications

David woke unexpectedly, not to the early morning sun, but to the unexpected sensation of something cold and wet pressing against his face. As his brain finally kicked in, he realized Lassie was nosing him while whining. Pulling back, he leaned up, stretching his arms over his head.

“Jeez, OK, OK. I take it you want to go out. I’ll take you girl, just hold on,” he told her softly, trying not to awaken the girls. But instead of being calmed, she seemed even more anxious, dancing around as if she were desperate to pee. Figuring she really needed to go out badly, David sat up and glanced at the two girls lying beside him. Alice had been asleep with her face on his chest, and when he’d moved she’d fallen off and was now lying face down on the bed. Mattie, though, was curled up in a little ball beside him. He thought it was cute, but realized it probably reflected how she wasn’t quite comfortable with them yet, and was likely a defensive posture. Lassie, though, wasn’t willing to wait.

She continued to dance, and as David started to climb over Mattie she seemed to get even more upset. David didn’t understand why she was so bothered, since it was obvious he was getting up, but as he continued getting up he brushed Mattie and she rolled over onto her back, revealing her angelic looking face. That was when David froze, and Lassie began barking.

“What the hell?” Alice asked, slowly coming awake to the din she was being subjected to.

“Shit,” David swore. “Alice, stay where you are. Mattie, you need to get up, honey.”

“Umm?” she asked, not really aware of what was happening.

“You need to get up, Mattie,” David insisted, sounding upset. Curious, Alice sat up and looked past her father, trying to see what was getting everyone so excited. It was then that she saw it, and she thought her whole world would come to a screeching halt. She wasn’t ready for this again. Not yet.

“Holy FUCK!” she yelled, which proceeded to scare Mattie half to death, waking her from her early morning sleepiness.

“What the heck?” she protested, rubbing her eyes.

“Mattie, stop that,” David insisted, grabbing her hands to keep her from rubbing her face. “Mattie, you need to remove your shirt.”

She looked at David, confused by his suggestion, finally turning to Alice to see if she could offer any clues, but she looked horrified, and that damn dog just wouldn’t shut up.

Finally Alice just pointed. Confused even more, Mattie looked behind her, but seeing nothing, she looked back at Alice. “What?” she asked simply.

“Alice, don’t point. This is hard enough as it is,” David responded. “Get her a mirror.”

Alice jumped up and ran to the attached bathroom, her frantic pace not making Mattie feel any better about what was going on. Lassie was now running around in circles, barking wildly and looking between Alice in the bathroom, David standing over Mattie, and Mattie herself.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. But David’s attention was distracted when Alice returned.

David turned to accept the mirror and simply handed it to Mattie, as if that was all the explanation required. She again looked at him quizzically, and then hesitantly held the mirror up. She feared what she’d find, already having an idea what it would be.

“Damn!” she shouted, dropping the mirror.

“What the hell is going on?” Tom asked, swinging the door open to find a dancing dog, two upset girls, and David kneeling over Mattie, the single figure seemingly in control of himself.

“It’s Mattie,” he replied. “She’s got the plague.”

“You already said she had it,” Tom said, confused by this change in topic. They’d already told him their histories, so he didn’t know why David was telling him what he already knew.

“No, she’s got different symptoms. She’s got a different disease this time. We must have infected her,” he stated before freezing as the thought grabbed his attention. “Shit. No, I infected her. We touched for the first time last night, apparently I’m still contagious, I’ve killed her,” he responded, sounding shocked.

“You did no such thing,” Alice responded quickly, coming to his defense. “We discussed this before. The viruses are drifting in the air.”

“She’s been exposed to the air for weeks and she never caught it,” David objected.

“Maybe it was something she touched in the house that hadn’t been cleaned,” Tom suggested. “Or maybe one of those bodies or the supplies she picked up. It could have come from anything.”

“No, the last thing she did was to curl up in my arms, and now she’s infected.” David ran his hand through his scant hair. “It’s clear what happened to her.”

“Not to us it’s not.” Alice pushed her father back away from Mattie, who hadn’t recovered from seeing her face. “For all we know, it could have been Tom. After all, we didn’t put him into quarantine like everyone else. He could have brought it in with him.” Alice moved in, attempting to give Mattie a reassuring hug, but held herself back when she drew the parallels between what she was doing and what they were discussing.

“That’s unlikely,” Tom assured them. “Since I have the equipment and am so concerned with potential exposure, I’ve been checking myself repeatedly. I’ve had no symptoms. No fevers, no flushed skin, no increases in heart rate or anything else. What’s more, if you’ll remember, while you were bringing my equipment in, I stayed inside so I wouldn’t rub against anyone. I’ve seen enough death to know to be careful, and apparently you have too. While the two of you carried my stuff in, you sent Mattie to work with the animals, so she wouldn’t be exposed to any of my stuff, or to me or John-John.”

“Still, it’s possible to spread something without getting sick yourself,” Alice argued. “Look at Typhoid Mary. She was fine, but she infected thousands of others.”

“Yes, but she’d gotten sick enough to develop antibodies to it. What I suffered from isn’t what Mattie has now,” Tom pointed out. “I’m pretty sure I’m not culpable here.”

“No, you’re not,” David said, wanting to end this pointless debate. “The best answer is usually the simplest. We spent the night cuddling her, and now she’s sick. While we may be immune to it, it seems we’re still contagious. This changes everything. We’ll have to rethink our entire approach to how we deal with survivors from here on out.”

With that, David took a minute to consider things, contemplating what he’d done.

“Tom,” David asked, seemingly coming out of his stupor, “how long will it take to prepare a plasma infusion from my blood?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I haven’t gotten all the stuff unpacked and cleaned yet,” he replied.

“Well fuck, Tom, I think this qualifies as a priority. Get the damn plasma separator and get it working. She doesn’t have much time, and although she survived once, she’d not likely to survive a second time.”

“Uh, it’s more complicated than that,” Tom argued. “I’ll need to test both your blood types. The chances are she isn’t even the right blood type.”

“Damn, that’s a problem. Both Alice and I are AB-, which means only some people can accept our blood,” David said, fretting nervously.

“No, you’ve got that backwards. Although being AB negative makes it difficult to give blood, the opposite is true for plasma. The very things that cause antigens to concentrate in red blood cells ensures your plasma—where the red blood cells are removed—is antigen free. Actually, AB is considered the universal plasma donor.”

“Hell, I’ve avoided giving blood all these years because no one wanted to accept it, and now it looks like I was simply giving the wrong type. Well come on then. Get your stuff ready, if she can accept my plasma we need to act fast if we’re going to make a difference.”

Tom looked at them both for a moment, then spun and ran down the hall. Lassie, strangely, seemed to finally settle down, as if now that everyone else was upset, things were finally being handled and she no longer had to be upset herself. She continued to look on, watching everything, but she didn’t make any more noise. John-John poked his nose in, curious what was going on, but as was typical of him, he wasn’t about to explore anything he wasn’t familiar with.

“Come on, honey, come with me and we’ll get you some breakfast and we can talk about this. While it’s major, it’s something we’re finally equipped to deal with. We’ll figure this out. It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, even though no one there believed him, not even John-John, who still didn’t know why everyone was upset yet.

“You know, it’s really not that easy,” Tom explained as he inserted the needle to extract David’s blood. “Transferring your plasma won’t transfer your immunity; it’ll just help temporarily, maybe buying her a little more time. In order to do any good, you’ll have to do it over and over. It’s really not a cure, it’s only a temporary treatment.”

“Look, Tom, if we don’t do this, she’s likely to die. She somehow managed to survive once, but she survived astronomical odds doing so, and she’s not likely to do so again. Frankly, I’ve seen too many people close to me die. I’m not willing to let another one go without a fight. If I can give her time, at least enough time for her own body to rally and help fight this, then hopefully it will make a difference.”

“I just think you need to prepare yourself if it isn’t successful, or more likely, if it only works for a little while, and then you find yourself giving plasma time and again in a never ending effort to keep ahead of the inevitable.”

“That may very well be, but at least I’ll have done something. There wasn’t anything I could do with the others, so I didn’t even have the option. At least now I can try, and that’s better than nothing.”

“You can’t blame yourself for her getting sick,” Alice tried to convince her father.

“I’m not so sure about that,” he replied with a sour face. “She was fine while the whole rest of the country died, then after spending a single night touching me, suddenly she gets infected? Somehow I’m not a big believer in blind bad luck. I believe in cause and effect. I caused this, and thus I’m responsible for her.”

“Can you explain what you’re doing?” Mattie asked, breaking the uneasy silence she’d been keeping, watching David make this grand gesture for her, even as they kept telling her it wasn’t likely to save her. She at least wanted to know what was happening, and if she could get them to shut up about it at the same time, all the better.

“Sure,” Tom answered. “We’re drawing David’s blood, we need a fair amount to do this, but we’ll then put it into the separator. Basically it spins really fast, separating the blood. The red blood cells, which are the part that cause the different blood types, the thing that causes people to reject blood from other people, is separated from the blood plasma, basically the rest of the blood. We then transfer the red blood cells back into David, keeping him healthy, while transferring the plasma to you.”

“And just what is the plasma supposed to do? David says it’s supposed to help me, but how does it do that?”

“Well, David’s got something in his blood that seems to fight the infection. We’re not sure quite how it works yet, but if it’s an immune response, then transferring his plasma to you will transfer his healthy immune response to you so it can fight the infection in your own body. However, since your body can’t produce its own, it can only provide protection for so long until it wears out, so it’s not a long term solution.”

“OK, I think I got it,” she said. “But if he’s got something in his blood that fights the infection, then why was he sick for so long? I mean, if he can fight the infection, then shouldn’t he have recovered sooner?”

“Ah, good question. I’m guessing that what he has is only part of the answer. When he got sick, his body had no immunity to it. No one had any immunity to it yet. But when he got it and suffered through it, his body managed to find a way to fight it, and that’s what we’re hoping to transfer to you. Hopefully, if it can keep you healthy long enough, your body will have time to develop its own defenses.”

“Right, like it has for the millions of other people who’ve had it.” Mattie sounded bitter about being fed a bill of goods they couldn’t pay for.

Lassie walked by and nudged David’s arm, the one they were extracting blood from. The animal was really an odd duck. For some reason she wouldn’t go near Mattie, even though she loved the dog and could use the attention, but she was suddenly warming up to David for no clear reason. Meanwhile, Tom’s neurotic dog, John-John, didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone, spending it’s time hiding between his legs, which made his working with all the delicate equipment precarious at best.

“So if it’s a strain taking too much blood from Dad, couldn’t you also take it from me?” Alice asked, worried about what her father might do to himself in a misguided attempt to rescue someone that he couldn’t actually save.

“You both have the same genes, we’re assuming, and you both survived the same plague elements. Plus you both have type ‘AB’ blood, so I’d assume so. But again, we don’t know whether the immunity is transferable. It really depends on how his immunity works. If it works by strengthening the immune system, it would make sense, but it’s not like healthy people survived while the unhealthy died. Instead everyone died, healthy or not, rich or poor, previously exposed or not. If his immune system attacked the infection directly, then it would also help, but I seriously doubt it will be that simple, because otherwise we’d have had more survivors. Thus I suspect there’s more involved in the two of you surviving all the strains other than your immune response. If that’s the case, then this probably won’t have much of an effect.”

“You know, you’re a real chipper guy,” David quipped. “Couldn’t you say something encouraging?”

“Not if it isn’t true,” he replied.

“In that case, the honorable thing is to lie a little. Tell them it will help until you know it won’t. That’s called encouragement. You make them feel better about their chances so they have a better mental attitude, which will hopefully allow them to resist the sickness that much longer.”

“Yeah, yeah, I understand the whole concept behind lying, I just don’t believe in it myself,” Tom answered. “But in your case, yes, this will not only cure everything it touches, but it will make your blood smell minty fresh as well.”

“Now that’s why you don’t lie. Not because it doesn’t work, but just because you’re so bloody bad at it,” David responded with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“How long is this going to take?” Mattie asked, again trying to keep the people from fighting over her. As badly as she felt about what was likely to happen to her, she really didn’t want everyone else to fall apart over her. She’d really expected to fall ill eventually. After all, everyone else had, and it was only a matter of time until she did as well. As much as she appreciated the help, she didn’t want to hurt these wonderful people if she could avoid it. After having watched everyone she knew and loved die, one by one, death—while still terrifying—didn’t seem to be quite as horrific as it once did.

“It won’t take long,” Tom assured her. “A little while to finish collecting the blood, only a little while to separate the plasma, and then we pump it back into him. Once that’s done, we can start your treatment.”

“And how long until we know whether it works or not?”

“In your case, you’re currently showing symptoms, but you haven’t actually gotten sick yet, so we probably won’t see much of a reaction. But chances are you’ll get sick pretty soon, within a day or two. So if you last that long without getting sick then we’ll consider it a success.”

“Alice, could you turn on a movie or something?” Mattie asked. “I think I know everything I need to know, and frankly, any more will just upset me. I think I’d rather watch some cartoons just so I don’t have to think about what’s happening anymore.”

Watching Sponge Bob chase Patrick across the seafloor, Mattie’s mind was distracted, the cartoons couldn’t keep her mind at bay. Tom had started her infusion, and the adults had finally shut up, but Mattie’s mind continually flashed back to what she knew was coming.

Despite Tom’s assurances that they’d know if this treatment worked if she lasted for two days, she knew that was just a load of bull. Towards the end the Great Death had gotten more efficient, and most people rarely lasted as long as two days. When she’d gotten ill, she’d only been sick for a couple of days. While it was true that she had symptoms for longer than that, it still didn’t erase the fact that two days seemed completely unrealistic. She’d been horribly sick, but it hadn’t lasted as long as Tom was now suggesting. If she lasted all of two days, she’d consider the treatment a cure, as she’d have lasted much longer than she could possibly dream of doing otherwise. But it only showed that Tom, for as ‘honest’ as he was, had simply been putting a brave face on what they all knew was going to occur.

While Mattie was tired of fighting, and was more than willing to go ‘quietly into the night’, she knew it wouldn’t be like that. She’d seen it too many times already. Simply going to sleep and not waking up was easy, but the Great Death was anything but. No, it was painful, horrifyingly painful. Excruciating was a more fitting term. She’s watched her family suffering their last few days, and although she’d been relieved when they’d seemingly lost consciousness, she now knew from David and Alice that they hadn’t been, that they’d continued to suffer even then.

What’s more, as much as a quick death would be preferable, and as much as she wanted to believe she’d be made whole again in heaven, there was a part of her that simply couldn’t believe it. She desperately wanted to believe that her family and friends weren’t gone for good, that God would rescue everyone in the afterlife and that they could all be together again, but after everything was said and done, she knew that death was death, and there were no do-overs in life.

No, there were the quick and the dead, and the dead weren’t quick and they didn’t dance or reminisce about their past lives. Once you were gone, there was no way back. There was no way to become whole again. There was no way to suddenly wake up, whole and healthy again. Death was the absence of life, not the continuation of it. As comforting as heaven was, she couldn’t shake the terror dying held, the fear that once she was gone she’d exist no more. She’d be no more than a distant memory in the minds of a few people she’d only met a couple days ago, people who already had too many dead to remember, and who already seemed to be forgetting those who’d already passed away. They had more important things to do than worrying about those who no longer demanded their attention, and they weren’t haunted by their demons like she was.

So, for as much as she didn’t believe a word of what the others told her about her chances, she was willing to grab onto what they were offering with both hands. Even if she could survive only a few hours more, she’d take it. After all, a few hours meant that much more of a chance of surviving. She’d survived a couple days of hell, so if she could survive that long again, by any means possible, then it would mean she’d be likely to survive again. Thus even if this treatment didn’t amount to much, it meant a hell of a lot more than the alternative offered, and that was all that counted.

“OK, we’ve done the blood transfusion. It’ll either work or it won’t, there’s no sense sitting around wondering what’s working and what’s not,” Alice complained about everyone sitting around fretting about whether it would help Mattie or not. “Let’s get out and do something. There’s still a lot more that we can do. There are more crops to collect, more seeds to protect, more animals to discover, more people to connect with, and more facts to check. How about we get off our asses and do something?”

David looked hesitantly at both Tom and Mattie. Tom merely shrugged and Mattie nodded that she agreed with Alice.

“If I’m not going to make it, I’d rather go down fighting rather than simply having given up,” she explained, as if that covered everything, but David seemed to accept it.

“All right, that makes sense. There are a couple of farms that I’m interested in visiting farther out. I guess I’ll drive my SUV, and Alice will take the dead truck as usual, but it would help if Tom takes the horse trailer so we can bring back anything we find. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, but I don’t have any training in how to drive a trailer,” Tom cautioned.

“You don’t need a license anymore, and you don’t have to worry about traffic. If you get stuck, I’ll switch vehicles and pull you out. You should be fine,” David assured him as he got up, finally tiring of his own pointless fretting. For once, it seemed ignoring the most obvious problem was the best choice.

As David turned off the main road onto a rough unpaved private drive, a large sign proclaimed where they were heading:

Deerbrook Farms

Growing Food for America

Corn

Potatoes

Wheat

Alfalfa

The drive there had taken them on a route familiar to both Alice and Mattie, as it took them beyond Mattie’s former home. She’d stared out the window as they passed by, but didn’t say anything. What David was afraid would be an awkward silence was instead filled with Tom grilling everyone on a variety of topics, keeping the walkie-talkies in the SUV busy with questions. Despite David’s insistence they each wear bulletproof vests and personal communication headsets they’d gotten from the armory, he wouldn’t let them use them in the car, wanting to ensure they’d have a full charge if and when it was necessary

Tom wanted to know things they weren’t aware of, like mean elevation, Ph balances, populations, ethnic breakdowns, average incomes, home values, and a whole variety of topics that David couldn’t decipher any overriding theme from. Instead it just sounded like Tom was a random facts guy. He just liked to accumulate details in the hope that it would eventually prove useful someday.

The others answered as best they could, but finally David promised they’d stop at another library so he could research the answers. That seemed to satisfy him, although David wasn’t sure they’d have enough time if they hoped to get back home in time for their evening’s broadcast, especially with as much work as he knew would be facing them.