“Easy, there. Easy. You’re alive, but just barely. You’re going to need to rest and regain your strength. Trust me, it’s going to be a while before you go overthrowing any more frontier regimes.” He says it like all of this is a lark, a poker game and he’s just pulled four aces.
“Why are you in such a good mood?” I grumble, reaching for the water with my right hand, my good hand, and downing it so fast that it nearly comes back up.
He just smiles as he takes the cup and goes back to the kitchen to refill it. I lean against the back of the settee and focus on breathing. Turns out that when you’re mostly dead, doing any sort of living is harder than getting a shambler to waltz.
I turn my head to the side and look out the windows. The dead meander through the streets, walking in slow patterns that mean nothing to me. But what is of notice is that not a single one seems inclined to come through the window and try to take a nibble out of us.
Gideon returns and hands me the cup of water. I sip it this time and tilt my head toward the window, where dead seem completely unconcerned with us. “What’s that about?”
He takes his seat once more and puts his spectacles on. It’s like those glasses change him somehow. The mirth drains away and he sits a bit straighter, his brows knitting together as he speaks. “The antibodies the vaccine has helped to create in your blood are now fighting off the infection, and one of the side effects of that process, I’ve discovered, is that the dead are no longer a threat. Something about it suppresses the feeding instinct. I haven’t had the time or opportunity to parse out why yet. Basically, they see you as one of them. Well, us. They see us as one of them. Or, two of them?”
I remember his limp, the brace he sometimes wears. “You got bit.”
He nods. “A year ago, back in Baltimore. I was assisting Professor Ghering in the lab—I had been experimenting with my own variations on his serum, and I made a fatal error. I was bitten . . . but instead of dying, I survived. I went through much of the same suffering you went through, and when it was over, I had a terrible scar—and an immunity to the dead.”
I laugh low, the sound bitter. “All this time they’ve been saying that Negroes are immune to the bite of the shambler, and here it was that white folks held the key to surviving the bite.” A thought passes through my mind and I look up. “Unless you’re really a Negro?”
The question causes Gideon to stiffen. He adjusts his glasses, taking them off again and cleaning them before resettling them on his face. His hair is long enough now that his curls fall into his eyes, and he pushes them back impatiently. “I am not. But it wouldn’t matter. Human anatomy is identical across color lines.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m still thinking about all the colored folks who have had their lives stripped away from them for a lie told to keep certain folks safe. Meanwhile, Gideon and his like are traipsing around the country without a care in the world, turning people left and right in pursuit of science. “Is this why you bolted in Summerland? And why you kept to the back of the fight when we had to take on the dead?”
Gideon nods. “I think it might also be why the dead’s behavior changed that night of the skirmish. Something about my presence maybe muted the feeding response. I haven’t quite puzzled out the limits of this, yet.”
I finish my water, and gesture toward the window with my empty glass. “I don’t suppose any of your other test subjects survived?”
He face goes blank, his expression flat. “You were the only person I found that wasn’t dead or turned.”
I laugh, the sound harsh and bitter. “So you murdered an entire town as an experiment.”
His expression is stricken. “My vaccine works, though.”
“On me!” I yell, leaning forward and nearly falling off the settee again. “Who else, Gideon? Who else?”
He bites his lip and shakes his head. “I had tried to tweak the formula to potentially lessen the aftereffects of a bite. The ones you’re experiencing now. But the process is delicate, and when I had to make a new batch in haste . . . Something must have gone wrong. As I said, it was a mistake.”
“You turned the folks from Summerland! The Duchess! And poor, poor Thomas!” My voice cracks as I remember his small frame, shuffling down the street, growling like an animal. “How is any of this worth whatever it is you’re after?”
“It will be,” he says, eyes wide. “Trust me on this. It will.”
I want to believe him, to fall into whatever madness sweeps him along, but I can’t. I’m tired of watching folks die.
“Maybe the damn thing just doesn’t work, have you considered that? Perhaps you and me are a goddamn fluke, immune on our own, and it has nothing to do with your serum.” Yelling feels good despite my pounding head and all over malaise, so I keep at it. “You didn’t listen to me or anyone else, you risked the lives of every person in this town and everyone who managed to survive Summerland on a hunch! Because you were so certain that you were right even though you didn’t have a lick of solid evidence to prove your point. I ain’t a scientist, but even I know that one success does not prove a hypothesis true!”
My outburst leaves me retching once again, and Gideon gets the bucket, just fast enough at sliding it under me that I don’t vomit all over my boots. He steadies me while I empty my stomach, holding my braids back out of the way until I’m finished. It might be a tender moment if I weren’t so furious.
I fall backward, and tears leak out of my eyes. Gideon puts the bucket away and brings me another cup of water, one which I nurse while he begins to pace, his long legs taking him back and forth across the small room. Three steps left, and then back, and then left again. Watching him gives me something to focus on besides my roiling emotions and traitorous flesh. I’m so mad, so broken inside that I can’t even speak anymore. It’s like someone took out all the things that made me Jane—all the good parts, and the bad—leaving nothing but rusty razor blades in their place. And everyone I’ve ever cared about is either dead or in the wind. If they even made it out of Nicodemus alive. And if they did, what then? I remember how that horde harried us all the way from Summerland, and we’d had a wagon to make the going faster. There’s little chance that they could outrun that horde on the open plain, and that thought makes me wish I had truly died. Maybe this is what despair feels like, a slow descent into an infinite abyss.
I’ve failed everyone.
“You’re right,” Gideon says, and my head snaps up, terrified that he can now add mind reading to his list of talents. But he wasn’t responding to my dark thoughts. He hasn’t stopped pacing, and his hands gesture wildly as he speaks. “I did jeopardize this town based on faulty science. I should’ve been more precise. I have to control for strength, maybe elapsed exposure time.”
“Good on you,” I say, voice clogged with tears. “You learned a damned lesson. I’m sure the fine, dead folks of Nicodemus would be thrilled to know that their town was not destroyed for nothing. Maybe we can have a party, invite the dead folks from Summerland as well. It’ll be a potluck. Come one, come all, to the first annual celebration in honor of Gideon Carr’s experiment yielding a useful result! It’ll be marvelous.”