After the Truth (Book One)

Ten

Tabatha Penn was one of the 'survivors' of the California cluster and she was as scared as all the others.

Evelyn had become part of that cluster. The infection was still dangerous, and had spread. It was that simple. Deputy Director Fallows talked to me in a professionally sympathetic manner of his regret at her death, but at the same time he had made it clear it was our fault. We had broken quarantine protocols by taking off our suits when we talked with Edward.

Of course, I was infected too.

I was extracted from the airport and put into isolated quarantine. The children were returned as well. Having worked in pandemic infection regions, and also taken part in terrorist biochemical attack exercises, I was less afraid of the sterile conditions of quarantine, but to teenage children though, it was a hell they were living through a second time. I was the sole adult who was human to them.

Edward had told Evelyn and I so much of the truth that day we spoke with him. And it was that simple. It was the truth. Everyone knows when they are telling the truth and when they are lying. We control the words we speak or we write, and we have a choice whether we speak the truth or lie.

More and more it has become easier, and more powerful, to speak in lies. But once you know what Edward and I and others know, the choice between a lie and the truth is no longer a choice of what is easy, or what will get us what we want quickest and with least effort.

For all of us in that quarantine the truth had become a choice of life and death.

The website, the Ten Commandments, the gibberish word in the middle of the ninth commandment, it was as dangerous as Edward had feared in his madness.

In my first days in quarantine I relived those last moments at the airport. As soon as Evelyn collapsed I was beside her, treating her and trying to save her life. There was no pulse. There was no responsiveness from her eyes. I tried CPR until paramedics arrived, but I knew, even as I repeatedly pressed on her chest, that all I was doing was for nothing. It was the same as for Father Cardoso, Evelyn had simply stopped living. Her switch of life had flicked off, just as a light bulb does.

'I'm scared. Joshua,' Tabatha said quietly as she stood in the doorway of my cell in the quarantine zone, just like each of the children had in those first few days. 'I don't know what to do.'

At first I was a stranger to be feared, just like the members of HASMAT suited monster figures from the CDC and the FBI who had taken all the children away from their parents and shut them away behind noisy filtration fans and plastic quarantine tents for a second time.

After I had explained exactly what all the noises were and the exact procedures being followed outside our constrained and limited lives I was seen as the oracle or all that was happened.

Tabatha had been the first child to ask me directly why we were all here.

'What is wrong with us?' she asked just before midnight on that first day back in isolation and it became a question repeated by the others.

No one had of course been able to tell them that before, but I now had to. I had watched Evelyn die and I knew why. Lies now cost us the ultimate price.

'What can I do?' Tabatha asked again as she stood in the doorway.

'There is only one thing to do,' I said, looking up and seeing her sorrowful eyes, red from tiredness and fear. 'We all have to always tell the truth from now on.'

She tried to comprehend the simple enormity of what I had said and then she became distracted. Her eyes turned from me, looked down the corridor and became wide with fear before she scurried off.