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Bernadette was behaving in an extremely chirpy manner for someone who was in the middle of surviving the apocalypse.
That was Amy’s odd thought, straying through her brain like old, incredibly facile bit of hindbrain reason that used to help her coast through her day. Had she fed the monkey before leaving the house? Was May We Make Them Proud going to be airing tonight or tomorrow night on the small, local UVH station that barely operated on a beamable frequency? What’s the story behind Leslie’s new gun? What did Amy need to know today, and what could she forget? Who was she going to spend time with, hunched over her MREs, waiting for her shift in the shower, in bed, at the microscope?
“What do you think looks more promising?” Bernadette was suddenly holding up two petri dishes in her gloved grip. One had neon orange colored bacteria growing within it, the other had bright pink.
“I doubt you need my help facilitating an answer,” Amy said. She knew that she didn’t - Bernadette was brilliant. She knew everything about immunology, and sometimes Amy felt like a novice wading after her, a study of useless parts poorly strung together.
The door to the lab buzzed, and a fully sterilized Howard made his way into the room. “Hello, wife,” he said, deepening his voice into some false-macho tone. They couldn’t kiss in a sterile area, but Amy could see the desire pulse between them and flushed, turning back toward her microscope. They chattered about dinner as she finished marking the changes on her clipboard – growth, decay and death.
She finally interrupted them. “I think there’s been some promising cellular growth on slide four.”
Bernadette and Howard gathered around her, and suddenly the air in the room cleared like the sun coming out over a hilltop in Walnut Grove.
****
The line to the only working pay phone on the entire base was miles long, so Amy tried to avoid tangling with it unless absolutely necessary. “Necessary”, naturally, came into play when Sheldon needed to know how his Meemaw was, how Missy faired.
She called her own parents less frequently, but understood that they were surviving.
She’d been standing right beside the booth when the radio strapped to her belt crackled to life. “Amy. Amy? Amy???”
Sheldon was on guard duty on the roof, and he’d been ordered to keep it light on communication, yet still he tried to communicate with her. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Absolutely nothing. With a lack of internet capabilities and a complete and total absence of my complete Doctor Who DVD set, I lack entertainment. I thought you might wish to pick my brilliant mind for help with the continuing
She’d made “I love you,” Sheldon said. And his tone was more sincere than it had ever been. She paused and drank the words in.
There wasn’t anything but the sound of Sheldon’s breathing on the other end of the line for a very long time.
Then, out of the blue, a loud caw. Sheldon said, quietly, “excuse me. There’s an enormous hawk relieving itself on Howard’s car in the parking lot and Penny insists I hold her gun while she takes a picture.”
Amy laughed.
And it felt so good just to laugh.
***
She was aware of how low the supplies were getting, but low enough to send out a scavenging party to Avery? The notion was enough to keep her completely distracted from work. Suddenly, she was filled with doubt – a deadly condition for any scientist.
The questions circled her mind like a whirling piece of paper caught in a humid updraft. Maybe they should be concentrating on bioengineering more food instead of vaccinating humans or curing the disease. Maybe it was more important to make life livable for the living, instead of protecting the future.
If there was a future.
Amy had tried to avoid falling down that emotional rabbit hole. Thinking negatively would get her nowhere – she needed to stay strong, stay focused.
Which was impossible to do when the radio operator informed her that Leonard’s party had been attacked by the infected.
She was there when Bernadette told Penny. She managed not to cry when Leonard was returned to them.
The MRE she ate that night tasted better than it usually did. Maybe that was because she knew her family was safe.
***
She felt awfully happy for someone who was in the middle of surviving an apocalypse.
Perhaps it was because the scavenging party – with their forged-in-the-metal-shop machetes and nickel-plated bullets – had managed to make their way to a grocery store and brought back enough canned and packaged food to feed an army. Perhaps it was because the little garden they’d begun to cultivate out in a makeshift greenhouse had begun to sprout strawberries, grapes, squash and tomatoes. Perhaps it was because she had figured out how to connect her phone’s wifi to a thready signal pulsing from the top of the comm building’s roof. But life seemed to be improving. That wasn’t to say that a giant’s metaphorical hand might not descend from the sky and crush her spirits, but for the moment she was content and ready to face the future with some sense of style and grace.
When the slide passed by her jaded eyes, she almost didn’t notice the difference.
She blinked. Turned the camera on to the isolation room, where their latest test monkey had been given a preventative serum. He sat calmly in his cage, picking his belly button and plunking grapes into his mouth.
“Bernadette,” she said. “Can you look at this?”
Bernadette did. And when she did she shrieked in joy. Then there was Howard right behind her, grinning.
When the military man who would authorize the vaccinations of thousands, who would save the lives of millions of humans, came to validate the vaccine the three of them had created, she was trembling, slightly, with relief.
“What do you have here?” he asked.
Amy sat back heavily. She breathed out, just one, and then composed herself. Nonetheless, tears actually filled her eyes.
“It’s been two weeks,” she said, and then with great dignity added, “and sir, this monkey is clean.”