Infected

I knew something was wrong when I poked my finger with a sewing needle––very Sleeping Beauty of me, I know. The blood bubbled up, but I couldn’t feel the stinging pain that should follow. That was on the tip of my pointer finger. I tried poking my middle finger and could barely break the skin it hurt so much. Chalking it up to poor circulation, I went back to repairing my brother’s work pants. The Company wouldn’t be pleased with the hole in his knee. Even though they’re the ones that make him do the work that wears holes in his pants. Thinking about it gave me a headache. They’d been getting worse. The fluorescent lights at the primary school always caused headaches during the workday, but they’d been getting worse and more frequent. I’d be woken up in the middle of the night with piercing pain enveloping my whole head. I could keep working despite the pain, and that’s all that mattered. I had to take care of my mom and brother; there were no other options.

A few days later, I jammed my thumb in my desk drawer. Nothing. No biting pain that makes it hard to breathe. No throbbing. Just surprise on my part. A sprinkle of fear started to fill the hole where the pain should be––could be CMD-1. It couldn’t be because I was vaccinated. I bite my lip and furrow my eyebrows. CMD-2? They haven’t even confirmed it yet. But there are murmurs on the web. Whisperings of paralysis so painful you’d rather die than keep living. Would the Company even admit that CMD-2 was out there? And what if I did have it? They’d kill me. They say it’s just a rehab facility they the Infected to, but everyone knows what happens. We’ve seen the pictures of the bodies piled in the mass graves. CMD-1 isn’t deadly, but the Company is. Would my brother keep his job? He would be blacklisted from every job application if they fired him for having a family member Infected; it wouldn’t matter if he knew. How could he manage the hospital bills for our mom without my income or his? We had savings––not enough. Would they kill him, too, in fear of contagion? It wasn’t that contagious, but the Company wouldn’t take that risk.

“You okay, sis?” My brother asked, pulling me from my spiral.

How long had I been sitting there? When I slammed my finger in the desk drawer, it had been early morning. My brother shouldn’t be back until the end of the day. Had I just been lost in thought for a whole day?

My fear must’ve looked close enough to pain that my brother believed me when I said, “Just slammed my finger in my drawer. Just hurts.”

I pushed out of my chair to get ice.

It wasn’t anything to be worried about, just a weird day.

A week later, my fingers were completely numb. I had accepted I had CMD. Didn’t matter the strain, I had it. Symptoms were there: gradual loss of feeling in fingers, headaches that make migraines look like child’s play, hours of lost time they call “blackout periods.”

I picked at my cuticles all the time by that point––I couldn’t feel them, so what did it matter? The paralysis wouldn’t set in for another month. The numbness would climb up my arms until it reached my brain, then it would spread. That’s why they called it the Central Motor Disease. It ate away at your senses until you couldn’t move. How could I teach if my hands went numb? I’d have to quit. That’s fine, as long as my brother kept working. Turning myself in now would mean my brother would be fired. I was sure of that. It was all over the news––people laid off by the Company for even talking to an Infected. The Company offered rewards for those who called in an Infected––money, vacations, job security. If I could just manage to make it another couple of weeks, I could come up with a plan to keep my brother’s job and my mom’s treatments.

Two weeks passed, and I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t really have any more time either. I couldn’t feel my arms and the migraines were nearly constant. I was in blackout periods longer than I was lucid. Quitting my job, eased some of the symptoms, but it wasn’t like they were gone. I just didn’t notice them as much.

On a Saturday morning, I pulled my brother into the kitchen.

I rubbed my hands together, trying to compose the best way to break the news. It’s an odd sensation, knowing your hands are touching, but not feeling them.

“Stop.” My brother stilled my hands with his. “You have it, don’t you?”

The air evacuated the room. “How…?”

A sad smile crossed his face. “You almost cut off your finger the other night. Any normal person would have been a mess, but you just said ‘ow,’ like it was an afterthought.”

Anything I thought I would say just disappeared. Shock, not a blackout period––I had trouble distinguishing the two at that point. My brother’s thumbs rubbed comforting circles over my hands. At least, he was trying to comfort me, not that I could feel it. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought about what I was really losing. All the times I messed up my brother's perfectly styled hair, feeling the soft strands and the crunch of the gel. The calluses that marred his hands would never again scratch against my hands as he passed the just-washed plate to me to dry. I would never feel human touch again.

“What do we do?” My voice was barely a whisper.

“We keep going.”

“But your job.” My vision blurred with tears.

“It’s a job. If I quit now, I can’t be fired. They’ll let me teach at the primary.” He wiped away a tear on my cheek. “They’ve already offered me your spot, actually.”

A sob escaped. His thumb scratched my cheek, and I could feel it. I filed the feeling away to replay when I couldn’t feel it anymore. I said, “You’ll have to take care of both me and Mom.”

“That’s fine.”

Relief washed over me. He would take care of us.

A week later, I couldn’t feel anything at all as Company workers pulled me from my bed. I couldn’t feel their gloved hands pull on my arms, nor the coldness of the metal sheet they put me on to load me into the back of their van. I couldn’t feel the tears running down my face.

My brother watched the whole thing, phone in hand.