Deborah Landau

Some things are easier.

In the first days there was food, plenty of food-- forewarned is forearmed, as they say. They ate it out of cans and cooked it on bunsen burners; they were safe underground. They were safe everywhere. Now they go outside for it, growing modest vegetable gardens where they can and shooting the odd stray animal where they can't.

There are not very many odd stray animals.

Deborah marks the days. This is a task she has appointed herself; in the beginning she had a desk calendar, a birthday gift from her unimaginative accountant brother. Now, of course, it has run out, and she has been forced to fashion her own of white, white printer paper. It's not really a calendar, not a real one. But it does its job.

Deborah does not approve of office politics in the bunker. Some have suggested attempting to find a boat and sail out of Maryland to ... Brazil? Venezuela? Somewhere unlikely to have been struck by a nuclear attack. Some have advocated simultaneous suicide, Jonestown-style. (Or perhaps with guns.) A bushy-bearded, slightly cross-eyed biochemist whom Deborah has always disliked suggested that so long as it was the end of the world, she may as well sleep with him. She declined.

It hasn't been a total waste, being here: She's gotten very good at solitaire. Also cooking on a bunsen burner, and pilates. Deborah likes pilates and yoga; both are disciplinary practices; both are practical exercise. Deborah writes frequently in small notebooks, her handwriting cramped and meticulous: She remembers having read that in dire situations, situations from which an individual is not likely to escape alive, one experiences a well-documented urge to chronicle one's misfortunes for whatever posterity there may be. She remembers a man did that who was trapped on a sinking submarine.

Deborah is trapped on a sinking submarine.

When Deborah leaves, it is the dead of night. She takes a single change of clothes (no lab coat, as that would no doubt provoke unwanted questions); a trash can stocked with toilet paper, canned and dried goods, and a bunsen burner for cooking; and her briefcase, containing pens, her notebooks, the shabby deck of playing cards, her makeshift calendar, identification, papers of varying academic and nonacademic nature, rubber bands, a knife from the staff kitchen, and all the sugar packets she could find. Finally, she has a gun and bullets, which the men taught her to use. Deborah has been planning this escape for a long time.

There's a car that has been kept up fairly well: Scientists always like a contingency plan. Deborah loads her things into it-- it took her days to find out where the key was being kept, but here it is, resting safely in her palm-- and gets in, and drives away.

It is that simple.

(A few miles out of town, she observes that the shuffling herds of degeneratives are beginning to thin out. They appear, on the whole, more sluggish than she remembers them-- also, rather than hunting fresh meat, a good number of them seem to be eating each other. Vaguely disappointed, Deborah drives on: north, and west.)

Deborah is back in the New Mexico lab, the fortified, sequestered lab meant for keeping people out. Her heels click against the neat linoleum floor, echoes bouncing off the cool hospital green of the walls.

Dr. Landau?

Yes, doctor: She has earned it, after all, she has done grunt work all through grad school. Advanced her research credentials, made sure those bloodsuckers scrabbling for tenure couldn't sink their hooks into her.

Dr. Landau.

Deborah has a clipboard. She is tapping on it with her pen, a neat counterpoint to the click-clacking of her shoes. The hallway is long, very long; she can see it fade to a vanishing point in the distance. Her door, however, is on the left: The placard says 323. It is not, in the grand scheme of things, the most important door.

This is where she loses time.

She has an impression of white, the walls glowing phosphorescent with white, white, whitewash. She knows there are restraints-- not chains, not ropes, those provincial, distasteful terms are not applicable here-- she knows there are things that need to be restrained.

Please--

It's the neck Deborah remembers: long and straining, the tendons taut-- the subject, the owner of the neck swallows. That throat is always working somehow. Deborah takes notes.

Calmly, "How are you feeling today?"

A growl from the chair. There is a chair-- it has manifested itself, materialized out of the light. The woman in it is twenty-four years of age, caucasian, with damp, dark tendrils of hair falling over her face. She pulls at her restraints, hands and feet flailing wildly-- Deborah remembers the feet, too. They twitch now, like fresh-caught fish.

This is not a healthy specimen.

"Blood work again." Deborah's voice is brisk, and comes from a great distance; it echoes emptily in the cavernous white. "Not that I anticipate any change physically-- this is complete cellular deterioration."

The twenty-four-year-old caucasian snarls, the expression twisting and distorting her features. Deborah is not impressed. Her shoes click-clack over the floor as she approaches the chair, removes a needle from her white, white jacket; her subject is swallowing, neck convulsing in twitches and jerks. The signs of decay are already on her face.

Deborah jams the needle into the upper arm, and the flesh gives like air. There is no reaction.

Tsk, tsk.

She sighs. Casts the needle aside, while her subject, the specimen kicks and howls-- wreaking havoc on her throat, which is decomposing under the force of her breath and vibrations. Of her facial features the eyes are the first to go, hollow and yellowed and dribbling over sunken cheeks. The skin cracks; the sweat dries; the smell of rot grows stronger.

Deborah feels as if she might cry.

"Oh, Rachel," she whispers, smoothing down lank, brittle hair.

Adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine ...

"Why are you doing this to me?"