The Infection

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 a glance at his tangled, curly red hair and stubble. “Get out in the sunshine a bit. It’s time, Ethan.”

“All right, I probably will,” he lied. He had no intention of leaving the house. “Leave Mary here, then. Last night, when I was up watching some TV, there was some kind of rioting going on all over the west coast. I’d like to keep her close to home.”

“We live in Pennsylvania. And Mary misses her friends at daycare. They’re holding a special candlelight vigil today for the SEELS.”

“No talking!” said Mary, upset that her parents were talking to each other and not to her. “My talking!”

Carol got down on one knee to talk things out with their two-year-old, asserting their adult right to have a conversation, but the fact was the conversation was over.

Ethan made a cup of coffee, kissed them goodbye, and went back to bed.

He woke up, feeling uneasy, to the sound of sirens in the distance. Sitting up, he yawned and pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Sunlight shined into the second floor bedroom picture window, which offered a spectacular view of downtown that had cost them an extra twenty thousand dollars on the house list price. Ethan and Carol moved to the city from Philadelphia during the previous summer, and she insisted on having a view. It was early afternoon. He needed another cup of coffee. Then he glanced out the window and saw plumes of smoke rising up from downtown, over which helicopters swarmed. There were a lot of sirens.

“Goddammit, I knew something bad was happening,” he said, searching frantically for the TV remote before finally finding it under the bed. He clicked the television on and pulled on his glasses, blinking.