FREAKS FOREVER

2049, 27 years after infestation

I use my forefinger to remove the last traces of blood from Alex’s chin, rubbing ever more frantically into his jaw until the stain goes from red to brown. He was my girlfriend, once, but now he’s my husband. Husband is a loose term - we are married in the weight of our history, in the way that our commitment is sturdy and boring and beautiful, in the way that he could pick my scream or my laugh out of a pit of a hundred others. I can’t remember the last time I saw a piece of paper, nor have I ever signed one. Sometimes I can’t even remember my own name. I don’t hear it very often, apart from when Alex and I argue. Ayshu, pronounced like Eyesh-you. I wasn’t aware of any meaning to it, and I was content with my meaninglessness, until a little while ago Alex realised that it must have been the word my mother was reading aloud in her delirium when she died pushing me out all those years ago, just a year after infestation. ICU.

“Stop pressing so hard,” he says, catching my wrist. “You’re hurting me.”

“We can’t go get more water now that it’s dark, and you know if we leave even a trace of it on you they’ll come. And then we’ll both be dead.” I snap. I spit on his neck and continue to rub with the sleeve of my coat. The moon is heavy and tinged pale blue, the woodland surrounding us quiet with the exception of small but distinguishable howls in the mountains.

They called it an infestation rather than an infection because those affected were observed to be hosting a colony of something just underneath the surface of the skin. They are presumed to be worms or perhaps some form of centipede, the way they edge slowly around the body, but no one knows for sure. No one has ever been able to survive long enough around an Infested to check. The creatures inside of them expand and multiply as the host ages. When someone has been infested for a long time they resemble a pulsing ball of fat and skin, no markers of humanity visible, the outline of the face and body all swallowed by parasites.

Infested don’t really behave any differently to regular people, other than the fact that when they smell blood - rabbit, human or otherwise - it spurs them to charge at you, teeth bared, dark, wriggling creatures jerking wildly inside the large gape that is their throats. You can interact with them when they’re not bloodthirsty. Have a conversation, share a joke, and whatever is inside of them will lay dormant until that scent hits their nostrils. You can’t even really see the worms under their skin when they’re dormant like that, either. When I was six or seven, my father threw me onto the back of a pickup truck with a handful of strangers heading up North as three of them enshrouded him. Just before, they were all speaking about the state of things - not much else to talk about that early on, I suppose, other than the state of things. We were all packing things into the truck to move to a commune my father had heard of in the Adirondacks. He chewed at a hangnail as he spoke, small drop of blood beading at his fingertip, and suddenly I was being thrown into the car.

I remember his eyes, the way he didn’t scream. He was always a quiet man, even in death. There were eight people in the back of the truck, all filthy and panting. Alex was one of them. He was only a couple of years older than me, but he spoke like an adult. He extended a mud encrusted hand out towards mine, then pulled me in close to sit beside him, covered my eyes so I would not have to see my father’s body being pulled apart as we were carted into mountain country.

Now, Alex takes the water I was saving to cook the rabbits he had shot earlier this afternoon and cleans the last remnants of blood from his face. They’re strung around his neck, like a scarf. It’s harder for us to hunt these days. Not for lack of food, but for the prospect of people seeing us. Not Infested - I can handle them if I have a gun or a knife. Regular people are what scare me the most.

When Alex told me he was a boy I stared numbly out of the window until it was dark, watching the villagers dance around a burning crucifix in the town square, all of them singing Glory to Him, Glory to Him. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t love Alex as he was, the problem was that I knew in the commune we were already outcasts, and I was frozen and sick at the possibility of them hurting him, of them taking him away from me. We were the suspected dykes on the fringes, always looking over our shoulders and double bolting the doors, always insisting that we were just friends, which we had gotten away with. Since Infestation, extremism and evangelism have only worsened. Everyone who wasn’t us blamed us - gay people, trans people - for the plague that had stopped the world. They burnt the flags and started painting Bible verses about the end of days and repenting on trees and old buildings. And though they could never prove it, the villagers had a suspicion of what we were. Once, someone (I suspect The Leader’s wife) drew the word FREAKS in thick charcoal over our front door. Alex used a piece of coal to write FOREVER underneath, then scrubbed it off and fucked me for three hours in our bathtub. Freaks forever, I smiled into his open mouth, his fingers inside of me. Forever and ever and ever.

When he started dressing in boy clothes, the villagers weren’t so kind as to just write on our door. They knocked it in, then burnt our house down with us inside. They chased us smokey and dazed deep into the forest, where we managed to lose them in the dark. We set up our home in the old meat shed at the edge of the woods. Alex skinned some sheep for us last winter so we wouldn’t freeze, made us a rug and some coats. We keep the guns by the door and sleep in shifts, just in case. They don’t bother us here, probably assume us dead, but I want to be ready if they come. I have imagined it so many times: I say something like you dumb, boring bitch to The Leader’s wife and then open fire on them all, Alex sleeping somewhere far away, somewhere soft and silent.

I wrap my arms around his neck, around the rabbits, feel the fur brush against my forearms. He rests his forehead against mine and starts to hum. He’s done that since we were kids, the humming. I don’t know what he’s singing and he doesn’t either, but he says it’s a song he heard on a TV once. He was only five when the world became Infested, and he often tells me about that glowing square, the people inside of it spinning stories from everywhere, playing pretend, moving illustrations. I saw one, a long time ago, but can’t imagine what it would look like turned on. The moon, Alex said once. It looks like the moon is trapped in a box.

We jump, still holding each other, as a sound hits against the door, then turn to face it - a splash of something thick, the rushed scamper of running feet. I peer through the crack of the frame and see the hem of a white dress vanishing into the woods. It’s her, The Leader’s wife. She’s the only one allowed to wear white in the village - some rule that The Leader came up with when Alex and I were still living down there. The Leader’s family wear white, and we all wear brown or black. She’s always had it in for us. She couldn’t prove that we were lovers then, but a woman presenting as a man was finally enough evidence to burn us both. The metallic stench of pig blood wafts through the walls. She’s just marked us for dinner.

As if they have stepped out of an invisible doorway, I hear them. Squealing, shrieking. That beat of heavy steps against a frozen forest floor, rushing towards us. They must lie in wait somehow, unseen, drifting around woods and cities and perhaps even in oceans, resting until they are called upon by the siren of bloodspill. They’re young ones from the sound of it, nothing like the sluggish, aged Infested who are mostly harmless. Desperately scraping at the walls to get inside. Alex keeps humming as they scrape at the house. I inhale him deeply, fear sitting cold in my chest. He smells like him. Like blood and kindness, like hardship and carnelians. I pretend that the things outside are just the villagers painting cruel words on our front door. I pretend that they will leave us here when they are finished, that I will keep dancing with Alex late into the night, that later we will watch the moon wax and wane inside an electronic box.