The Alonso Research Center for Studies of the Undead

If you’re going to be cutting bodies open all day, you can’t see them as people.

Not even things that used to be people.

Not even things that were once people, then became walking fleshbags.

That’s what Paloma told me on the first day of internship. After opening the lab door and looking me up and down, eyebrows raised.

The crisp blue oxford shirt that Career Services recommended I wear felt immediately wrong next to Paloma’s severe middle part, black turtleneck under her lab coat, and dark lipstick. She finished her appraisal and turned back around without a word, leaving the door open as my only hint to follow her into the lab.

That moment pretty much sums up the mood of my internship so far. Since then, I’ve learned to listen the fuck up when Paloma speaks, because it could be hours or days before she does again. She’ll only speak if it’s vitally important, and may the tortured souls of the fleshbags help you if you don’t remember it.

It took about five seconds into opening my first body to realize how critical that first piece of advice would be.

Let’s be clear: I’m not squeamish. I was the kid who leaned closer to see the scrape when I fell on the playground, marveling at how the layers of skin gave way to gristle and bone. The teenager who watched the nurse insert the butterfly needle to draw blood for STI testing. In Bio 1 when we dissected the fetal pig, I stayed in the lab long after the other kids left, pulling out organs and feeling their firm squishiness.

But none of that stopped me from sprinting out the door to puke the first time I watched Paloma peel back a scalp in preparation to drill through the skull.

It was nothing like the fetal pig.

This body had been a whole person. And she, like everyone we’d see in the lab, had had the sickness. Instead of layers of pink, healthy tissue, the flesh was blackened and rotting around the edges like a ham left out in the sun.

We know enough about the virus at this point to know the rotting skin means the body was walking around for weeks with the brain essentially shot. Finished. Swiss cheese. The virus is picky. It eats the tastiest parts of the brain first — the ones that deal with creativity and logic and compassion. It leaves the boring parts that control the body, which is why the infected continue to walk around long after their humanity is gone.

Since the brain-eating process takes weeks, rotting skin means nobody was looking out for you. Nobody took you to a hospital, where they could put you out of your misery with a drug cocktail before you got devoured from the inside. Nor did anyone borrow a pistol and drive your shell of a body to the woods, telling themselves it’s not murder if the person isn’t a person anymore. It’s become a real humdinger for law enforcement: at what point are you dead, even if your body’s still walking around?

We’ve gotten more than a few bodies with gunshot wounds to the back of the head, brought in by families with hollow eyes who hope their loved one’s body can help find a vaccine for this shit.

I don’t know how to tell them we’re no closer to finding a vaccine than we ever were, and neither are any of the 463 other labs across the country doing similar research.

I start to check today’s intake forms. When I chose the Alonso Research Center for Infectious Diseases as my internship, I thought I’d be researching the Ebola virus, or bird flu, or another classic. Then the sickness started. Overnight, my work started to impact millions of people. Me, Ella, the fourth-year med student with mediocre grades, whose mentor probably hates her or at least thinks she’s incompetent.

Three bodies came in overnight, their intake forms neatly stacked at the front desk. Paloma won’t be in for another hour. It’s my job to complete the paperwork and prep the day’s bodies for us to take samples of brain tissue. As a rule, I don’t look at the names. Part of the whole not-seeing-bodies- as-people thing. I honestly don’t know why they even include them on the lab intake forms.

But today, the one on the third form catches my eye.

Yamel Villanueva.

I drop the form. My blood feels like it’s made of tiny grains of sand, draining faster than they’re supposed to out of an hourglass.

It can’t be her. Someone with the same name, surely.

Do I wait for Paloma to get in? I can’t see her being much support if it does turn out to be my Yamel. Paloma, who shows less emotion than the still-twitching body we got in last week.

I take a deep breath. Pick up the paper. Read the whole thing as fast as I can.

I can’t process what I’ve read.

I re-read.

Yamel Villanueva. Age: 24. Height: 66 inches. Eyes: Brown.

Brown doesn’t begin to cover the color of her eyes. They’re gold and toffee and ochre and steeped in pain as she listened to me tell her I can’t see her anymore.

“Why? Did I do something wrong?” She didn’t say it accusingly. Just like she really wanted to know.

No, I wanted to scream. That’s the problem. You did everything right and I’m in love with you and that makes me feel like I’m falling into an abyss. I’m not ready for you.

My fingers slide the intake form back into the clipboard where it started. Feet march me out the front door.

When Paloma pulls up in her cream-colored vintage Mustang, I’m on the stoop, four cigarettes into the pack of American Spirits I just bought at the deli across the street. A habit I picked up when my mom got sick. She always had cartons hidden around the house, and would smoke them on the porch when she thought I was asleep. They seemed to calm her. I wanted to feel calm, too.

So when she got too sick to crave them, I picked them up. She wasn’t there enough to object by then.

In any case, I doubt I’ll be around long enough for lung cancer to get me. So I might as well indulge a bad habit.

I watch Paloma unfold out of her car, with her signature all-black outfit, slicked-back hair, and impassive expression. My mental reel of Yamel memories is on its third loop: dark hair and her heart-shaped locket falling in my face as she leaned over me, snort-laughing on the bus, how small she looked sitting on the fence when I walked away for the last time. My body feels floaty and my throat numb.

Paloma looks at me and stands still for a moment, head cocked slightly to the left, exempt from the rules normal people have about staring. She takes slow, deliberate steps towards me.

I’m shocked when, instead of sliding past me, she settles next to me and pulls a small tin out of her bag. I suck down the last of my cigarette and put it out on the cement step, watching her sprinkle tobacco in the two rolling papers and seal them into perfect cylinders. She hands one to me.

I light and inhale, surprised at how smooth it feels, considering the work I’ve put into destroying my throat so far today.

“Someone you knew?” Paloma says. Her voice is low and not quite raspy. Gravelly.

I glance sharply at her.

“How’d you know?”

“Your face.”

“Yeah. My, um, someone I used to be involved with.”

Paloma nods, gazes out across the street that’s just starting to get trafficky. The way she’s looking makes it seem like she’s staring across the ocean, not at the gray facades of the deli and the laundromat and the apartments above.

I take another breath, then pause. Do I really want to share any more with Paloma? We don’t have that type of relationship. It’s not close, not even what you could call friendly. But I have all this shit swirling around in my head, and where the fuck else can I put it? I can’t sit here chain-smoking for the rest of my life, and I can’t do anything else until my brain’s at least a little unscrambled. I wish I could call mom.

“I lost a lover to the sickness as well,” Paloma says.

She would use the term lover. But also...wait, what? Is Paloma opening up? Paloma, of the unflappable gothic energy?

My turn to stare. Her profile is impossibly neat, nose perfectly in proportion to lips and chin. Her lipstick leaves the tiniest shadow of evidence on the end of her cigarette.

“It was in the initial wave, before we understood the early signs. Gemma had always been forgetful. So I wasn’t worried at first when she started leaving her phone in strange places, like the fridge. Then she couldn’t make sense of the morning paper. Then she got mean.”

The classic progression of the virus as it eats your short-term memory, your logical reasoning, your compassion.

“I wanted to be the one to take care of it when the time came. I didn’t want her moving on in a hospital, surrounded by strangers. We put her in the backseat of the car, between two friends. We drove to the forest. We said our goodbyes. And I gave her the pill. The man who sells me tobacco has quite the thriving side business.”

She takes a long drag and exhales. Her voice hasn’t shaken, but her hand is trembling.

“Gemma took the pill, quiet as a lamb. We buried her there, in the moonlight. ”

She looks at me, expression as placid as ever. Like she didn’t just tell me she watched her partner disintegrate before mercy-killing her in the forest. Something hot falls on my wrist, and I realize I’m crying.

“How do you do it?” It comes out a croak. “Keep living?”

The corners of her mouth creep upward.

“Maybe my logic is starting to go, too.”

Did Paloma just make a sickness joke?

“I work. I watch you. You give me hope.”

“Really?”

“You’re young and you’re learning. You ask questions I wouldn’t think of, because I’ve been going through the motions for so long. That’s how we’ll stop this thing.”

Paloma’s stare is intense as ever, but this time it doesn’t make me feel like I’ve done something wrong. I feel like she’s seeing me. Almost the way mom used to.

“The cycle continues,” she says, simply. “We learn from the pain and we find joy and hope where we can.”

I nod. Everyone’s been talking about the sickness like it’s changed everything. And in some ways, it has. Everyone has someone they love who’s died from it. The collective trauma in the world has increased in scale.

But in other ways, everything’s the same. I still wake up in the mornings and come to work and try to relate to my classmates. You think a crisis of this scale will solve your smaller problems, or at least make it so you don’t care about them. But I’m still stressing about whether Paloma thinks I’m doing a good job. I’m still too scared to talk to the cute girl from Chem. I didn’t magically go back and fix things with Yamel. There’s no divine scale that says, hey, enough is enough.

Paloma neatly puts out her cigarette on the step.

“Come. Let’s go say farewell to your…”

“Yamel,” I finish.

“Yamel.”

She stands and reaches a hand down to pull me up, then steadies me when my head spins. I lean against the railing for a moment, watching the cars pass. Moving forward, always.

I’m not ready. But I follow Paloma through the open door.