AFM Presents: SMALLPOX SUE by Clay Waters

“Relax," the nurse said, unflappably. "It's not contagious. Just a bad reaction to the injection.”

Ten minutes ago my new friend Jim and I had been talking music. Now he was covered in a white sheet. Even before his shuddering death I'd been nauseous; the nurse had drawn my blood to confirm I was AB Negative, the rare type the lab required. Despite my main source of income, I really hate needles. Being strapped into a chair beside a corpse didn't improve my disposition. Even if I could have hopped up, it would have been a bad idea; the Health Authority has martial law in research labs. I'd seen the dart guns while checking in.

The nurse placed a gloved hand over my locked wrist and injected a blood-colored solution cleanly into my arm, “Just one more. This one is perfectly safe."

After a long minute, when it seemed I would not die, I noticed my nurse was rather pretty inside her protective suit. A tuft of blonde hair peeked out from a gap in her faceplate. In Manhattan, where the death rate for SmallPox C averages 4% a year, where holding ungloved hands in public is a faux pas, you take the thrills you get.

“Is there a bathroom for tourists?”

“Area dwellers only.” Public toilets not only cost scrip, they’re high-maintenance and disinfected after each use, they’re invariably open only to sector residents—to discourage people from wandering the city, spreading disease.

I didn’t really need to piss. What I wanted was access to the lab’s codeine. That was why I’d signed up for the antidote test in the first place. The library business isn’t what it was since book borrowing got banned as a potential spreader of smallpox. Sometimes I get enough scrip together to buy a black-market hardcover; sometimes I have to sell one. It’s life, which is better than the alternative.

What makes these antidote volunteer gigs sweet for a dealer is not only the 100 scrips into your lifepad. The testing lasts 10 days, enough time to scope out drug availability. You can’t just wander into a lab, especially one in Oxley Tower. That’s a good way to get a poison dart courtesy of the Health Authority—they used to use bullets, but there were health concerns over blood spatter.

Another positive: meeting people. Six other volunteers were waiting outside, and one girl was cute, in a druggy way.

Overhead vids monitored the daily protests outside Oxley, wacky banner-holding types huddled and unmasked in defiance of all safety measures. They accuse the government of inventing the Smallpox C strain as a bioweapon. Fact is, the US was attacked with primitive smallpox and retaliated in kind. During the battle of mandatory inoculations, antidotes and stronger strains, the disease became invincible—science still can’t touch it.

So the protests are nutty. Still, it takes guts to protest in the shadow of Oxley, I’ll give them that. With Manhattan under permanent quarantine, the tower is mounted with laser cannons, to vaporize anyone trying to escape into New Jersey. The bridges had been detonated long ago.

The nurse released me from the chair, “Now all you need is the stat chip.” She pushed a button, opening a hole in the floor that propelled the corpse in the chair down a chute. As routine as garbage collection, and more efficient.

One might imagine nurses in a plague era would be germaphobic. But I’d learned that once they were assured you were clean and free of disease, their clinical mindset worked to your advantage. Nurses themselves, being notoriously hygienic, are of course the safest makes in Manhattan.

But before I could start anything, there was a distraction. She was looking up at the vids.

“What’s up?”

“The cops are dispersing the protest.” On the monitors, the sky crowded with black bugs: police choppers. “They’re running this way,” she said, removing her helmet—she really was pretty, in a vacant blonde way, even with the worried frown. Then the frown turned to open-mouthed panic.

“What? They can’t fire a laser this close!”

A klaxon went off and whirling emergency lights bathed us in red and blue. A door slid silently open behind me.

If the nurse had looked my way—if only out of fear—I’d have had to stop. But her attention didn’t leave the vid. I backed in and the door closed and I was in a service elevator.

It hit bottom in a few seconds. The door slid open and a stale whiff of antiseptic blew in. I stepped into the white hall, which managed to smell both clean and old, broken up into rooms of machinery and ending at a steel wall with an intercom and a thick slab of plexiglass that functioned as a window.

Inside lay a white room with a bed which held in its deep cushioning a moon-colored girl with dull brown hair and IV's protruding from both wrists and a leg.

“Are you a doctor?” Her voice was squeaky through the ‘com.

Feeling awkward, I leaned into my ‘com. “No, sorry. I’m Dan. Why are you in there?”

“I live here.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Susie. Can you fix my viddy?” She pointed a bony arm at her dead vidscreens.

“Something happened upstairs. Did you see it?”

She shook her head. “I was watching Puzzy Swad.”

I turned on my lifepad. “The lab exploded.”

“Is everyone OK?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are they going to come see me?”

I didn’t reply. No matter how old she was—twelve?—she was obviously still a baby. But whose baby? A president’s daughter, raised in a bubble to protect her from C? Maybe a convenient orphan for the government to poke and prod.

“How do I get inside?”

“I don't know. No one ever comes inside.”

There was no door, but I found a laser cutter and after a few scary false starts managed to make a hole in the plexiglass and crawl in. I pried off the tubes and wires and helped her out of bed. She almost stumbled on her spindly legs, which were pocked with pinpricks.

“Geez. How many shots do they give you?”

“They took out eight things of blood yesterday. Boy I felt bad. Are you taking me away?”

“I have to.”

She was taller than I’d figured, an emaciated colt of maybe 15. The elevator wouldn’t go so we took a back staircase. She got winded and I had to carry her up the last three flights. Surprisingly, the last door opened not into the hospital but into an old subway tunnel; she winced at the sunlight.

I could see a smoking hole from the hospital even from four blocks away. Flashing red and blue lights of emergency and police vehicles had already congregated, and even more ominous--the black Health Authority trucks. That usually meant an impending threat of a Smallpox C outbreak and a localized quarantine.

Susie seemed OK: No telltale coughing or sudden outbreak of rash, familiar harbingers of a C infection—nothing for a cop with an itchy vaporizer to notice. But everyone else did. Everyone else wore at least simple air masks, including me, but she breathed the air freely. And she pointed at everything: The clunky gear some people walked around in, the gray trucks backing into the vaporiums with their hauls of corpses. We got to my place on Avenue E and I switched on my lifepad for news.

“What does it say?”

I couldn’t tell her, yet. Maybe it was nothing. “We have to stay inside for awhile.”

The first night was noisy with klaxons and trucks and choppers. “I want to go outside."

“No. It’s dangerous.”

“What does your watch say?”

“That it’s dangerous to go outside.”

It was. Things were bad outside; people were falling over, choking and dying in the street. But I wasn't going to tell her that yet. She didn't even suspect. Like a child, she was resentful but trusted me utterly.

I locked the bathroom door and stared at myself naked in the mirror, checking intently for impending outbreaks of the rash. But I looked clean. No coughing either. Susie seemed fine too. I got her to talk a little—for her sake and mine. She remembered being under a white sheet crying and wanting her mother; later, of blurry years of nurses and massages by machine.

The second night was silent. Like when I’m low on scrip and unplug the fridge and it’s not just quiet, but dead, without even a background hum. I turned my pad off. The news was too bad to take in. I had to see the horror for myself, to reconcile myself to it, perhaps get a clue as to what had caused it. On that point, I had formed a vague but horrible suspicion.

"I'll be back soon," I told her. "There's food in the fridge if you need it."

I stepped past stalled cars with drivers slumped over. Past everyone who hadn’t found a dignified corner to die in.

I kept walking, breaking a window into my old Lower East Side library haunt and reading up on smallpox, smallpox A, smallpox B, and the current strain. But it was an archive on “Typhoid Mary,” a notorious figure from19^th century New York, which I think explains the puzzling fact of me and Susie being alive.

This is what I think. Susie is a 'healthy carrier' of Smallpox C: Infected, given up for dead, but somehow surviving a disease which had killed the healthiest and strongest without mercy. The lab nurse injected me with a solution derived from Susie's blood—some kind of vaccine—so I’m immune too. But for everyone else in the city, with no defense, Susie was a walking virus. Letting her walk the streets was like dropping cyanide down a well. Not her fault, and not really mine. But together we'd annihilated Manhattan—and who knows what else.

Not me, that's for sure. I haven’t turned on my lifepad for a day. I'm afraid to.

Susie's looking over my shoulder as I type this, but it doesn't matter. I don't think she can read.

Coming back I made a detour to Central Park, on a hunch. The fish were still lively in the ponds. Susie likes the animal drawings in my Aesop’s Fables. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take her to see the fish, and try and explain the other things she sees on the way. Right now, I’m typing this to explain it to myself.

It's a fable, starring the two of us.

Smallpox Susie and Pandora Dan.

End.