Quarantine
by Pan
2:
“Honey, I don’t understand why you have to go.”
Mike sighed. Sasha had been a good wife, a good mother to his children…but, truth be told, he hadn’t married for love.
In a colony of 8 000 people, marrying for love wasn’t really an option.
He’d wanted a good wife, and so he’d married for a good wife. What he hadn’t married for was brains.
“I told you—it’s not just me. It’s everyone affected.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. You’re not affected—you haven’t so much as sneezed.”
“It’s not that kind of virus, sweetie.”
It wasn’t that she was stupid, not exactly. She was just very…practical. Give her a patch of land and a decontaminator, she could farm as well as the rest of them. Ask her to describe her dreams, and she’d just look at you blankly, “Why?” written all over her face.
“But I thought everyone in the colony had it. What’s the point of separating husbands and their wives?”
This had all been covered in the pamphlet, of course. But Sasha hadn’t read the pamphlet—she’d just waited for her husband to get home and explain it to her.
And so the first she’d heard of his leaving was now, as he was packing his bags to leave.
“It’s simple, sweetie—I’m a carrier. You might have it, but it doesn’t affect you and you can’t spread it. They’re just moving all the carriers into a separate little town, just for the next few months. Once they’ve established that it’s safe, or they work out a cure, they’ll bring us back.”
“Oh.”
There was a short silence as Sasha processed Mike’s words. Or hell, she could have been planning meals for the week—in over twenty years of marriage, he’d never managed to work out just what she was thinking when she went silent like that.
“And carriers are…”
“Any male over 14.”
Mike winced at Sasha’s response—when she was surprised or angry, her voice came out in a shrill tone that never failed to injure his ears.
“But that means…Nick!!”
“That’s right, hon,” he said soothingly, but it didn’t matter. Sasha was already out of the room, running to her eldest child’s room, presumably to wrap her arms around him and then try to devise some way to hide him from the government.
Not that it mattered. Even in a colony the size of Deltasol, there wasn’t anywhere to hide. Not really.
Deciding to let his wife’s insanity run its course, Mike tracked down his daughter and hugged her goodbye.
“I’m going to miss you, Daddy,” she whimpered into his shoulder.
“I’m gonna miss you too, Pepper. But it’s only going to be for a couple of months, okay?”
I hope, he mentally added.
The truth was, two months was a conservative estimate. The virus had come from an unmanned delivery ship, all the way from Sector 9—that was a long way to travel with no radiation shielding. It could have started as a common cold and mutated into anything by the time it reached the colony.
Just one packaging manager failing to do a thorough scan; that was all it took. Maybe quarantine would end in two months, maybe the virus would be cured.
Maybe it would be years…or maybe they’d go the way of Quadrant Red, and the entire planet would be written off.
Only time would tell.