Immunity

“You almost done in there?”

“Almost.”

The kid in the stall is Riley. He’s ten and has one lung. I’m Marty and I got half a set of ovaries and tubes with some of my intestines missing. I’m nineteen.

“It won’t flush.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.” Riley walks out, his shiny blonde hair almost white against the metal stall. “You got it out?” He points to my arm where my caps used to hang.

“Yeah, told you it was easy.” I hold up the PICC line and wiggle it. He smiles that funny little smile he does when he’s uncomfortable.

“I’m hungry.” He says, scooping up his backpack off the floor. I know he’s thinking about the snickers bar tucked away in there.

“Me too.” I chuck the catheter over my head and hold my hand out for him to take.

“Are we gonna go…” Riley doesn’t finish because he knows the answer. We’d been planning this for weeks now.

“Ry, we’ll die of starvation if we don’t even try to look somewhere else for food.”

“But…can’t you hear them? They’re so close.”

He’s referring to the zombies. That low rumbling noise we pretend is ambience? Yeah, it’s zombies. The kind that eat flesh, stumble about with missing limbs, drool black stuff, and moan and groan, sometimes even scream. Riley’s eyes are tearing up and his nails start digging into my skin. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared myself.

“Listen Ry, I’ll be with you the whole time. And more importantly, they can’t hurt us. You hear me? They can’t hurt us.”

They can’t. They get maybe two feet from us before screeching their heads off. Literally. It’s super messy. Now I don’t have all the answers but it’s like any kid with chemo in them, are zombie-repellent. Like a living, breathing mosquito candle but the candle wick is cisplatin or bleomycin or radiation and the zombie either blows up or stays away from us.

When the world ended, doctors and nurses were at the frontlines. The hospital was inundated with the undead and infected. Then it was pretty much any and everyone getting chomped on. Except for the patients housed in the Danny McLauren Children’s Oncology Ward. There were enough of us still radiated and pumped full of chemo that the zombies couldn’t even make it pass the elevators on this floor.

That was months ago when we still had electricity. After the first big wave, a lot of us died from lack of proper medical attention. The chemo may have been keeping the zombies at bay but a lot of us still needed tumors shrunk and blood cells replenished. When the final generators went out, so did the rest of them. Riley and I are the lucky ones I guess. We’d actually been signing our discharge papers when world went George Romero.

“I know.” He nods and sniffs up snot like only a ten year old can. I give his hand a little squeeze.

“Okay. So what’s the plan?”

“We take the stairs down  to the fourth floor.”

“Because?”

“Because the rest of the way is blocked. So we have to go into the fourth floor and find the emergency stairwell on the opposite side.”

“And if we can’t?”

“We take the regular stairs.”

“But?”

“But we have to head for the emergency stairs again on the third floor to avoid…

“You got it Ry, now put on your mask and turn on your light.”

The mask is for the stank. I won’t go into the detail but let’s just say there’s a pile-up that physically blocks the rest of the way down and has filled the stairwell with a pungent odor. The penlights are for watching our step. The auxiliary lights are down to a soft glow that doesn’t amount to much.

Eight. Pretty chill.

Seven. We hear something fall over that makes us both jump.

Six. Riley slips on something wet. He almost goes down but I manage to grab him around the waist before he sends both of us sailing. We take a second to just breathe. Kind of hard with the masks and smell but yeah.

Five. This was the last floor to get raided for supplies.

Four. The blue number looks back at us like a threat. The groans of the undead come and go in waves but they sound closer than ever. I try to use my softest voice possible. “Remember the plan?” Riley only nods his head, his hand practically crushing mine.

I push in the door’s handle bar and slowly move forward. I can feel my heartbeat inside my ears, it’s so fricking loud. Back when there were more of us Chemo Kids, I never volunteered for the supply raids but was told in great detail how intense they could be. So I had some idea of what to do. Stay low, stay quiet. Zombies may avoid us but if enough of them swarm, you’re basically trapped in a wailing wall of deadmeat.

“Can you…can you see anything?” Riley whispers.

“Almost.” The door inches a little further and I can just make out the hall. I may have gotten too used to our ward’s upkeep but this floor was wrecked. I’m talking busted iv pumps, curtains shredded, bodies and glass all over the floor. “We got one at the nursing station, one leaning against the wall a couple feet away. I can hear movement  but we’re bee-linin’ until further notice.”

Riley readjusts his grip on my hand and follows me through the door’s opening. We both hold it as it closes until we hear the muffled click. We turn to face our destination and start the painstakingly slow journey across the geriatric ward.

Sometimes I think I got off easy. Sure the cancer threw a huge wrench in a lot of my plans but as it turns out, the world was gonna end anyway. But then I survived it, mostly intact and super bald. Then the zombies came and technically, I’m still surviving. It’s some sort of anomaly more so than achievement and Riley stops moving. 

We’ve made it to the halfway point which of course is an intersection. The one direction we need to go through? Crowded with deadheads that have definitely seen better days. They’re sluggish and heavily decayed, moving slower than the zombies we’d seen hovering outside our ward.

“Formation.”

Riley knows what that means and it only takes him a second to wrap his arms around my neck as I crouch down to pick him up. I make sure to wrap his legs around my waist before starting to walk again. This time I have to focus, no time for deep contemplation Marty.

It’s like a slow and awkward dance. Side step, turn, turn, duck a little here. Step over a leg there. Stop and wait for a shuffle, slip on through and absolutely no bumping into anything until I’m staring at the fire door 4A. There’s something keeping it ajar that I’m only acknowledging as a door jam. I’m also certain Riley is crying because my collar is awfully wet. I stick a leg into opening and use all my strength to push it aside, opening it just enough to let me squeeze by before it swings back on the door jam.

“Ok. We’re ok.” I whisper into Riley’s hair. I rub a couple circles around his back. I’m not really the strongest person but there is so much adrenaline running through me right now that I could probably carry twelve Rileys.

“Ok.” He releases his grip on me. His legs slide off me to touch the ground but he doesn’t move away. That’s okay. Part of the plan is to assess and rest. He can rest, I’ll assess.

This stairwell is somehow hotter than the first one but nowhere near as stank. It’s also brighter. I can actually make out the next two flights of stairs pretty clear. “You okay Ry?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I turn back to find him holding something in his hand. A delicate, rose-gold chain with a heart shaped locket at the end of it. “Woah, did it break?” I reach for my own neck to confirm that there’s no longer a necklace.

“I think…I think I squeezed you too tight and, and, and I felt it come loose and I didn’t, I didn’t…I’m so sorry.” He’s spiraling, on the verge of tears again.

“Hey, hey, it’s totally okay.” I go in for a hug, taking the necklace from his hand. “Thanks for keeping it safe. It’s the only thing I have from before.”

We hug for a long time. Probably longer than we should considering we’re trying to make it out of here before nightfall. We just need a few minutes. Only a few.

“My best friend Jo gave me this. We’d been best friends since fifth grade but she enlisted right out of high school. I haven’t seen her since she was deployed.” She bought the locket with her first military paycheck. Had it made to order so that it’d be a simple, thumb sized heart, with our names inside. I didn’t tell Riley this because it would just make me want to cry along with him.

“Is she…”

“I dunno Ry. I don’t want to think about that right now. Besides, we need to…”

The ground shakes. Like earthquake, ground cracks open and tumbles the surface, throwing you off balance, shakes. In an instant, I’m covering Ry with my body and praying it passes soon because there’s no such things as earthquakes in Jersey.

“Move out. Alpha takes ground, Beta second, Delta third, and so on. On my count. One. Two. THREE!!!”

The shaking stops and the footsteps start. Hundreds of footsteps. Maybe only twenty really but more than what I’ve heard in a long time. Doors slam open. Short bursts of gunfire. More footsteps. More walkie talkies. So many footsteps.

“Chemo Kids are immune! Chemo Kids are immune!” Riley’s the one screaming at the masked men in army fatigues. I’m too busy staring down the barrel of four rifles.

“Alpha Leader. We have survivors. I repeat, we have survivors!”

“Eckles, check them.”

“Roger.”

The soldier on the far left lowers their rifle just a fraction. The thick rubber soles of their boots squeak as they get closer. “Can you stand for me?” a question stated more like a demand but not as loud as all the other noises still going on around us.

I nod my head. Riley is clutching my arm. He’s full on sobbing now as we slowly stand up together.

“Have you come into contact with a Lazarus in the last 48 hours?“

“Laza…”

“Zombie.”

“No. Chemo kids…we’re, we’re, we’re…” Riley’s caught in a loop. Time to step in.

“They leave us alone. We’ve never been touched by ‘em.”

“Martina?!”

There’s a soldier I hadn’t noticed behind us. Keeping an eye on the doorway we’d just come through I assume. The voice was as clear as a bell because they'd already ripped off their breathing mask.

“Joanna!?”

“Martina!” More squeaky boots and I’m swept up in a bone crushing hug. She has a nasty scar on her lip and she looks paler than I remember but it’s her. It’s Joanna and she brought the whole cavalry.