Page 91 of Juniper Unraveling

Unlike Damian, Albert isn’t married to anyone but the Legion. What was once a hellion of a kid, getting into trouble with his friends, has turned into a stiff and humorless guard dog. Admittedly, he’s one person in this community that gives me the creeps, and he’s had it in for me ever since the day he attacked me.

The Ericssons are the only crack in my armor. The only part of my life that feels out of my control—a string that flits around my head, taunting me to grab hold, but I don’t want to because of the truth that lies at the end of it. It was Ericsson Senior who first yanked at my innocence, and his son Ivan, Albert’s older brother, who tore it out of my hands completely.

Thankfully, the two of them are rarely seen on this side of the wall, so it’s only Albert’s occasional acts of intimidation, and his bouts of punch-worthy gloating for having stolen the only thing in the world powerful enough to penetrate my stony heart.

Six.

I can’t even say his name in thought without the chasing ache. It was because of him that I finally learned the secrets Papa had been hiding for a good three years of my life. Memories I repressed.

I learned that my hive, in particular, had been targeted for the raids, based on it’s proximity to an old Indian reservation. The prion that caused the widespread outbreak had been harvested from the soil there, and taken to an underground lab, where it was placed into a virus to be used as a biological weapon. According to Papa, it’s the distant descendants of those natives who carry the alpha gene, along with the pheromones that allow them to walk amongst the Ragers.

None of the boys from my hive survived.

Papa still works in the lab, though much of his study is carried out at home now, due to the debilitating effects of the illness, which he’s managed to keep at bay with daily injections of the antibodies. Unfortunately, the prion changes the surface of the virus, making it nearly impossible to find a cure.

And so I wait for the day he slips into Stage Two of the illness and can no longer remember who I am. At that point, I vowed to kill him myself.

Arriving home, I park the truck in the driveway and pause before exiting. Out across the sky, pillars of smoke billow upward, off in the distance, and as the knots of guilt twist in my stomach, and I have to look away.

Sometimes, I feel like the rest of the ignorant bastards in this place who refuse to see them. They refuse to believe, or accept, that innocent people are being hurt and tortured just beyond their perfect little existence. People who didn’t ask to be removed from their families and murdered. The Szolen community views them as savages, animals. Uncivilized, and unworthy of compassion. To them, they are the monsters, no different from the Ragers, simply because they’re carriers of the Dredge.

But there is no monster more terrifying than the human being who lacks compassion.

I was a savage, before I was assimilated into the Szolen way of life. Now I’m just a prisoner trapped in their mindset. The savages disgust them because they represent a terrifying reality. Without these walls, they’d be one of them. Dirty. Starving. Infected. Struggling to survive in a harsh world.

If not for Papa, secretly toiling away on a cure in one of the only facilities left standing in this part of the country, if not the world, I’d send a fiery cocktail over that wall and burn the place down myself. He’s worked too hard, though, and his time is running out. He says he’s close, but I fear the only thing he approaches with any certainty is death.

I enter the house, storing the bird away in the refrigerator meat-box to keep it cold. After turning the temperature down in preparation for lights out, I make my way toward Papa’s study.

With a knock, I swing the door open to find his head against the desk and a string of blood dangling from his lips.

“Papa!”

I rush forward, dropping to my knees, and shake him, until his eyes flip open and he sits up from the desktop.

“Oh, God, you scared me. I thought you were ... ” Dead. I stroke my hand along his arm to release some of the panic still coursing through my blood. “Are you all right? You’re burning up!”

With the back of his hand, he wipes the blood from his lips and covers his mouth in time to capture a horrific bark of a cough into the tissue crumpled in his palm. When he pulls it away, speckles of blood dot the white paper.

“C’mon. You need to lie down.” I slip my arms beneath his and tug him to a stand. “I’ll start a cool bath.”

He stumbles, hanging off of me, until we reach the couch in his office that’s become his bed for the last six months. “Wren, I think it’s time.”

“I think you’re full of shit,” I counter, lying him down against the cushion. I cross the room to the small fridge, throw back the door, and search through the many syringes, looking for the ones not already pre-packaged. The ones with handwritten labels. “Where’s the antibody?”

“I stopped using it.” Another cough throws him upright, and he slams the tissue to his face once more. “How ‘bout you find me a syringe full of cyanide, instead? That’ll cure it.”

“Stop.” It’s an inside joke between us, but one I don’t find funny. “And what do you mean you stopped using it?” My voice carries a combination of irritation and panic. “When?”

“A month ago. I can’t … keep up with the mutations. The proteins are constantly changing.”

“So, what are you saying? There’s no cure? You’re … you’re just gonna lie down and die?”

“Thought I’d smoke a damn good cigar first.”

I scowl back at him, wishing he’d quit with the jokes.

He waves me over to him, and I kneel down at his side. “You’re the cure, Wren. It’s taken me a while to understand and accept it.”