I pretend I don’t even see him and stride on.
A few seconds later, I hear the spat of rifle fire and the thud of a meaty body hitting the pavement, and I know that the SWAT team just took out Ragged Carhartts. They’re never far away, not in this part of town. And once they’ve taken out one Type Three, they don’t need much excuse to kill another, even if you’re just trying to see your doctor like a good citizen.
“Oh, God,” a lady says. She and another fortyish woman are standing in the doorway of an art gallery, staring horrified at the scene behind me. They’re both wearing batik dresses and lots of handmade jewelry. “That’s the third one this month.”
“If this keeps up, we’ll have to close.” The other woman shakes her head, looking gray-faced. “Nobody will want to come here. The whole downtown will die. Not just us. The theaters, the museums, churches—everything.”
“I heard something on NPR about a new kind of gel to keep the virus from spreading,” the first woman replies, sounding hopeful.
I keep moving. Her voice fades away. People still talk about contagion control as if it matters, as if masks and sanitizers and prayers can stop the future.
The truth is, unless you’ve been living in some isolated Tibetan monastery, you’ve already been exposed to Polymorphic Viral Gastroencephalitis. Maybe it gave you a bit of a headache and some nausea, but after a few days’ bed rest you were going out for Thai again. Congratulations! You’re Type One and you probably don’t even know it.
But maybe the headache turned into the worst you’ve ever had, and you started vomiting up blood and then your stomach lining, and when you came out of the hospital you’d lost the ability to digest most foods and to make certain proteins. And in the absence of those proteins, your body has trouble growing and healing. The enzymes your DNA uses to repair itself don’t work very well anymore.
Sunlight is no longer your friend. Neither are X-rays. Even if you quit smoking and keep yourself covered up like a virgin in the Rub’ Al Khali, your skin cracks and your body sprouts tumors. Your brain begins to degenerate; you start talking to yourself in second person. Sooner or later, you develop lesions on your frontal lobe and hippocampus that cause a variety of behaviors which will lead to your friendly neighborhood SWAT team putting a .308 bullet through your skull. That means you’re a Type Two, or maybe a Type Three, like me.
If you’re Type Four, we aren’t having this conversation. Unless you’re a ghost. You aren’t a ghost, are you? I don’t think I believe in them. But if you were a Type Four, your whole GI tract got stripped. I hope you were lucky and had a massive brain bleed right when it got really bad, and you never woke up.
I’m pretty sure I woke up.
“Do you find yourself having any unwanted thoughts or violent fantasies?” Dr. Shapiro asks.
“Of course not.” I try to sound mildly indignant.
There’s one upside, if it can be called that. If you lived past all the pain and vomiting, the symptoms of your chronic disease can be alleviated, if you consume sufficient daily quantities of one of a couple of raw protein sources.
If the best protein source for you is fresh human blood, congratulations, you are a Type Two! Provided you have a fat bank account, or decent health insurance, or are quick with a razor and fast on your feet, you can resume puberty or your athletic career. Watch out for HIV; it’s a killer.
If, however, the best source for you comes from sweet, custard-like brains … you are a Type Three. Your situation is much more problematic. And expensive. You better have a wealthy family or truly excellent insurance. Or mob connections. Otherwise, sooner or later, you’ll end up trying to crack open someone’s skull in public. The only question then is if you’ll get that one moment of true gustatory bliss right before you die.
I have excellent health insurance. There’s no bliss for me. What I and every other upstanding, gainfully employed, fully-covered Type Three citizen gets is an allotment of refrigerated capsules containing an unappetizing gray paste. Mostly it’s cow brains and antioxidant vitamins with just the barest hint of pureed cadaver white matter. It’s enough to keep your skin and brains from ulcerating. It’s enough to keep your nose from rotting off. It’s enough to help you