I looked up to see him gazing at me thoughtfully. “Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “You don’t get hysterical. You don’t take it all personally. You’re not an asshole.”
His eyebrows went up. “Okay, I feel better now. Thanks for the pep talk.” His face was sardonic but his voice let me know he was kidding. He stood up, hunched over, and came to see what I was working on.
I’d opened an old suitcase, but instead of the usual clothes and personal things, it was full of books. They were mostly for kids, and some of them were really, really old, like from the 1990s. There was one about a kid who lives on a farm. It showed them harvesting their wheat, which was totally normal, but then they just sold it themselves to another company, which was crazy. They didn’t turn it over to the United for the collective or the Co-op. It was beyond weird to think there was a pre-System time when the United didn’t exist.
There was one about a bunny and how much his bunny mom loved him. For some reason it made my throat hurt, but it passed. I logged the books’ titles and the date they were published, handed them to Tim, and he stowed them in the Keep Because It Might Be Important But Sure Doesn’t Seem Like It pile.
“I like seeing the old-fashioned clothes and cars and everything,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” he said, then coughed. He coughed more and I watched him solemnly. Was this the first sign of illness?
He saw me looking at him and frowned. “We’re surrounded by hundreds of years of dust,” he pointed out.
Yeah, okay. I’d give him that.
At the very bottom of the suitcase, I found a thin book wrapped in stained and faded tissue paper. The paper disintegrated when I opened it. Inside was another book, but this one had been partly burned. Across its singed back someone had scrawled, Lies! Destroy! Is that why someone had tried to burn it? It had been saved so carefully.
Trying to keep the covers from falling off, I opened the book.
Its title was Adam and the Plague, and it had been published in 2037.
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ADAM AND THE PLAGUE WAS obviously meant for kids—it was short, not too many words, and had pictures on almost every page. But it was incredibly dark and depressing. Like, if you wanted to make a kid cry themselves to sleep every night for a week, give ’em this book.
“Geez, Tim, look at this,” I said, and read out loud: “‘One day Adam’s sister, Amy, came home from school early. She felt terrible. Her throat hurt. Her eyes were red. She had a fever.’”
Tim made a face and coughed again.
For Tim’s sake I skipped the whole middle part, with the illustrations showing exactly how Amy’s symptoms progressed. I mean, the kid died in three days, and by the end of the third day Amy barely looked human.
I put it into a Keep pile and wandered casually to the dinky, inadequate bathroom. As soon as I shut the door I peered at my face in the mirror, feeling my neck for swollen glands. They felt fine. Then I looked at my skin everywhere to see if I had weird blisters or pustules. I didn’t. So far.
When I came out, h
e was working his way through what looked like a homemade pamphlet—printed poorly, stapled together. Its title was FIGHT BACK NOW!
“It says that the New World party infected everyone in the United States with the plague on purpose,” he said, looking disgusted.
“Yeah, we knew that,” I reminded him, then leaned over so we could read the pamphlet together.
Here are the facts!
• The plague has been disseminated by the New World party.
• Their goal is to reduce the population to a “manageable” number of people with strong immune systems.
• Their final goal is to restructure society. Everything is run by them, and the rest of the people provide for them.
I frowned. Like, in cells? Farming cells, manufacturing cells?
The final paragraph of the pamphlet said:
People! Fight Back! Drop off the grid! Build self-sufficient homes and hide them! Live on your own, don’t connect with anyone! Never let anyone know where you are! Don’t depend on the government for anything! Self-sufficiency is your only chance.
“I’m getting such a bad feeling about this,” he said.