A Broken World

Sixty-Eight

Morning came grudging and gray, like the sky had been argued into it. The prison had a hangover. Every footstep sounded louder. Every cough crackled like static on a radio you couldn’t turn off.

I made the first pass through the quarantine hall with a bandana over my mouth and a bucket full of bleach water. The cloth turned my breath hot and stale. The bleach turned my eyes to sand. Karen slept with her arm flung over her face. David mumbled nonsense at the ceiling, words slipping off the edges of his fever. The boy in the last bunk didn’t move. His mother sat on a folding chair with her hands locked together, whispering a prayer so softly you could mistake it for the hum of the fluorescent light.

Hershel worked without looking tired. He never looked tired until later, when he let the day sit on him. He traded my bucket for a fresh one and nodded toward the hall. Translation: go, before that mask stops being a suggestion and starts being a lie.

Outside the door, Tyreese leaned against the wall with his flowers. They had wilted into paper. He turned them stem-up and stem-down like maybe one way would make them look more alive. He watched the window in the door with the steady, brutal watchfulness of a man who’d decided the world could try and he could try harder.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Hot,” I said. “Breathing’s rough.”

He nodded once. “She’s strong.”

“She is.”

He swallowed. “I’ll bring these when they let me in.”

I didn’t tell him flowers do nothing against fever. Symbols matter because people do. I squeezed his arm. The muscles jumped under my fingers, a tremor he’d never call fear.

In the corridor around the corner, Carol shook a stack of masks out of a pillowcase and handed them to me. No craft talk. No “see how I reinforced the seam.” Just the exchange. She had two knives on her belt and a thimble on her thumb. I didn’t know a better picture of the world.

“Kids’ bunks are staggered now,” she said. “Heads and feet alternating. More space between beds. It will help.”

“Parents?” I asked.

“They hated it until I glared at them.”

“Effective approach.”

“Every time,” she said. A beat. “You tell Rick about the box?”

“Last night. He’s dusting it with ash. Small watch. Quiet.”

She tipped her head. “Good. Quiet is best.”

I thought I heard something under that. Not approval. Not even agreement. Just the small acknowledgment of a plan she’d already worked through ten ways and chosen not to argue about because there wasn’t time to argue about anything.

We were halfway back to C-Block when the first scream ripped the hall. Not panic. Not horror. Something worse. A name turned inside out.

“Karen!”

Tyreese’s voice. The flowers hit the floor and scattered. He ran past us before either of us could catch his sleeve. I chased the shape of his back, boots skidding on a wet patch we hadn’t sopped completely clean. The scream came again. The second time it broke.

He wasn’t at quarantine. He was in the yard.

I hit daylight and the smell hit me, too—sweet rot and char, a fat, choking smoke stink burned into the gravel itself. Tyreese was stumbling toward a scorched patch by the outer fence, his arms out like he had to feel his way through the air. Two shapes lay there. Black. Small. Wrapped in heat warps that made the space above them wobble even though the fire was long dead.