Ophelia Immune: A Novel Read online

  “Set in a dystopian world where a young girl must learn to survive without her family and friends, Ophelia is a compelling and riveting novel filled with breakneck action, feisty, unforgettable characters, and stunning plot twists. Yet within these thrilling moments, Mattson offers searing observations of young adulthood in an insecure world, meditating on the possibilities of humanity, loss, gender, and sexual identity. She accomplishes all of this with wit, imagination and humor.”

  – Aimee Phan, author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

  "Ophelia Immune is a true accomplishment, a book about zombies that is both terrifying and heartening, funny and frightening. The world-building is vivid and intense, and Ophelia is a kickass hero worth rooting for: strong, real, and like nothing you've ever seen before."

  – Sonia Belasco, author of Speak Of Me As I Am

  “No one writes about ex-humans as humanely as Beth Mattson. Ophelia Immune announces a major talent, and we are lucky indeed to be alive in the time that Mattson is writing. In elegiac, unsparing, and incandescent prose, Mattson offers us a heroine as tender as she is fierce, as timeless as she is perfect for our time. I cherish Ophelia, and you will, too. None are immune to the ravages of love, as this gorgeous debut makes clear.”

  – Elizabeth Ames Staudt, author of Nosy Girl

  "Ophelia Immune will swell your heart, race your pulse, and push your face up against what makes us gain and lose our humanity. Essential."

  – Nan Enstad, author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure

  "Beth Mattson is a wildly imaginative writer and Ophelia Immune is a terrific read."

  – Tom Barbash, author of Stay Up With Me

  For Terence L. Duniho, the best penpal ever,

  for offering to run his hand down a cheese grater.

  Ophelia Immune

  a novel

  by Beth Mattson

  Copyright © 2018 by Beth Mattson

  ISBN 978-1-7323810-0-1 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-7323810-1-8 (Kindle)

  First Edition

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or classroom setting. Fans who share their works alike may create derivative art works non-commercially if Beth Mattson is credited for the original work.

  www.BethMattson.com

  www.OpheliaImmune.com

  Edited by Charles Schams

  Cover design by Alexey Kotolevskiy

  Cover image by Wilhan José Gomes

  The Car

  My older sister, Immogen, died wiping her little hands on her little eyes to clear them, her fingers filthy from clawing at the face of a zombie who had been trying to eat her. I was six, she was eight. When my father saw that she was most certainly Infected, he said to me, “Ophelia, close your eyes,” and he hammered her skull in, just like he had the zombie’s.

  We buried Immogen along the side of the road, under billowing, yellow grass. We knew that we shouldn’t, but Dad said that he was pretty sure that he had put her to a Final Rest. We should have cut off her pigtailed head, closed her big, brown eyes, and burned her all the way to a crisp, to make sure that she couldn’t climb out of the ground and walk around again. But we didn’t. We wrapped her up in the best wool blanket we had. We dug a hole six feet deep. We put her in and we covered her up with dirt. I left her a daisy that I found, and then we were back in The Car. The Car that Immogen and I grew up in.

  We never had a house. I couldn't remember the apartment that Mom said we had before the zombies came. I could only remember my sister, with me in the backseat, in the arms of a ghoul at a rest stop, and then in the cold, wet ground. The ground was too damp and chill for her warm fingers that passed me used crayons, so I imagined her still next to me, sharpening the ones that I broke. But the colors just built up in a pile on the empty seat, while Mom cried and Dad clenched the steering wheel on our trip ever North. We were driving to the Far North in our rusty, maroon sedan – the Far North, where at least the zombies froze every winter and we could buy a real house, on The Cheap, from The Government.

  “Does anyplace up North really freeze,” I asked Immogen’s ghost, “Will we really be safer in a wooden house without iron cages? Will I be alive to see it? Will I be alone forever without you?”

  The empty seat said nothing. My crayons rolled onto the floor and the billboards faded to violent pastels as we chugged past.

  We drove and drove as far as we could every day, past Government Contingency Plans, past Rangers with their uniforms and badges, their mottled pressboard signs with warnings and instructions and abandoned Hospitals shrouded in barbed wire. There were never enough supplies for the Government Contingency Plans. There were holes in fences. No more plywood to cover the windows. Screens had to be repaired every morning, the sound of hammering nails drawing the walking dead even closer. They would eat you if they got a chance. They would steal your bigger sister while she gathered kindling.

  There were bricks piled along the ditches, awaiting sturdier construction projects, but there was also constant gardening and cooking to be done. Those who had foolishly bought houses where the zombies never froze had to do their chores under the threat of teeth and claws. There was wood chopping and clothes sewing and water fetching and diaper changing. With all of the living going on, it was hard to have time to prepare for the dead. So people got eaten.

  Dad worked on water pumps or grain elevators whenever we came upon dangerous mechanical jobs that needed doing. He was so tall and his arms were so wide that everybody with a broken machine wanted him to fix it. We kept his hammers and axes and big tools on hand for hitting the zombies on their heads when they ambled over. We drove as far as we could on every tank of gas, ignoring the pits full of swarming flies, laying their eggs on who knows who. We weren’t lucky to find gas stations within range; Dad always calculated the gas to the minute and the mile.

  He listened to the radio to hear which stations still advertised their supply and then I marked them with a magenta crayon on my big map. Immogen had started it before me. She traced our path North with bright orange, a tangerine line stretching farther and farther North, a mottled portrait of years full of panicked breaths between gas stations. Nobody mentioned when we had to go backwards, back South, for Dad to find work or fuel. Immogen's ghost begged us to hurry, the hole where she used to sit clenching its jaws and forcing us into the Future.

  Without Immogen, I lost track of time. I was growing slowly but the windows of our sedan remained the same, only one set of nose and finger prints coating them. Mom patched and stitched my too-short clothes, her nimble fingers making the needle dance across the fabric. She dressed me in Immogen's three outfits and then stitched and patched those when they became too small for my frame, which was delicate like hers. The silence and patience muted us and the hordes of contagious beasts were winning until Mom could get pregnant and give me a new sister. She said I didn't fall asleep early enough in the backseat, but it was hard to sleep after the boredom of counting my own fingers and repackaging my own crayons.

  When Mom's belly started to grow round and tight against the seatbelt, I hoped that Immogen would pop out again, fresh as a baby, unbitten and alive. But I knew it wouldn't be her. I was pretty sure. She was gone and it was a good thing. When a zombie bit you, you lost your mind and became just like them, all teeth and jaws and chewing, unless somebody hit you in the head. If Dad hadn't clubbed her and buried her, she would have been just like the foul creatures that pressed themselves against the bars of our Campsites at night, wandering alone forever.

  Immogen and I used to like the Campsites. Being locke
d into an official Campsite was a comforting sound – the heavy slam of the security gate closing, and the jangle of the Ranger walking away with the keys on his belt. Each family or car-full that could pay got their own cage until the camp was full for the night. Then I was allowed to get out and stretch my legs, which were painfully skinny after all of my seasons in The Car. I could hardly jump. Certainly not high enough to reach the top of the Campsite cage. Not even when I stood on the top of The Car's roof, which I also wasn’t allowed to do.

  I pitied the Hiking families. They always got to stretch their legs walking from Camp to Camp, but they had only tent roofs to keep the slime off of their heads – the slime that dripped down from the zombies who climbed on top of the cages at night, after pushing themselves into a pile like a ramp. My knees didn’t move so fast, but at least we Drivers only had to wipe down a real, solid roof in the morning. We wiped after the grown-ups and Rangers had slaughtered all of the undead that had piled up around us during the night, with rubber gloves duct taped up over our elbows.

  Maybe you’d be okay if their blood landed on your clean, unbroken skin, but I once saw a Ranger with a little, tiny sliver that she didn’t even know about get splashed on her fingers, and before she could even wash her hands, she was grey and sweating with the fever. She had to hand over her key ring before she was clubbed by her fellow Ranger in his beige uniform and carefully adjusted, leather work gloves.

  “Ophelia, stop staring off into nowhere. You look crazy.”

  Mom called me to her and handed me warm beans spread to the edges of a stale sesame bun, the thing we had traded for the last of our coins. The girl in the cage next door looked at me while she spooned juicy canned peas into her mouth. It was only canned food, but peas were harder to find than the black beans on my fresh bun. I traded her a bite for a spoonful. And then we inched away from each other, neither convinced that we were safe strangers.

  We are always on the lookout for something evil that will bite us or someone sneaky who would steal us away from our parents and sell us to somebody looking for a wife to give him babies. We girls are worth a lot of money. We could give babies to those who want to buy us or we could fill the houses of ladies who got coins when we entertained men too scared to press themselves against girls who hadn't been checked for Infection. Girl Grabbers snuck out of the pine trees and stole any girl silly enough to leave her safe cage and supervision.

  Dad smoothed the worry lines from my brow with his rough thumbs and pulled me onto his lap, this was harder than it used to be despite my withered frame – neither of us realized how old I was getting. My stunted legs and insomniac eyes never really woke up until he sang. Or whistled. Something cheery in the middle of the cramped boredom.

  “If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land.”

  When he went to bed early to get up and find work the next day, Mom took over humming into my ear and patting the new sister inside of her finally pregnant belly.

  “Now I know a refuge never grows from a head in a thoughtful pose; gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.”

  She snugged the ragged wool blanket around my knees and tugged me down flat on the backseat so that I wouldn't crick my neck using the door for a pillow.

  “Ophelia, you are my rose. So pretty. And we'll grow a garden someday.”

  She patted my unborn sister again and reclined in her own seat to sleep.

  But I didn't receive a new sister. I was given a new brother, born in a Campsite with horrible, Infected blood dripped onto the windshield while Mom panted in labor. It was really kind of exciting. The smells of healthy, scarlet, Human blood just barely seeping from who knew where beneath her. Her groans that were not terrible, but rather guaranteed that I would finally be a Sister again. And when I woke up the next morning, I was. Maybe I had slept through the entire Car ride up until then. It was exhausting hoping for the Future, but I woke up when he arrived, and I cursed the dreams that I had been having about my crayons melting and disappearing into the upholstery. There he was. Wrinkled and braying at the top of his lungs, flushed a beautiful, glowing Brown.

  All of our neighbors cheered when Mom stepped out in the morning, happy for her that she no longer had only one child to lose. They hadn't been sure, until they saw the baby, what her moaning had been all about. She beamed from ear to ear, her hand firmly on top of my head, pivoting me with her to show everyone in all directions that she had two healthy children. Then Mom ducked back inside The Car to teach Hector how to nurse and to tell us tales of the Civilized world, before the zombies had come.

  “I used to work in Department Stores that sold beautiful ruffled Blouses in shades of fuchsia, violet and teal. Immogen loved the fancy clothes, but you, Ophelia, would just haul her off by the hand and run through the racks of clothing to play hide and seek – hooting and hollering until you fell asleep against your big sister. You clenched the Microwave Popcorn in your fists on the floor of the break room, like you wouldn't ever get any more, and I guess you were right! Your cheeks were stuffed like a chipmunk, and Immogen was scared that you would choke on a kernel, so she stayed awake and watched you, snuggled into her side, snoring with your stuffy nose.” She wiped a tear from her eye before it could fall. “Ophelia, my Ophelia. You are twelve now. You are the Big Sister.”

  Twelve. Six years gone from Immogen. Four years of forward and backward and sideways to jobs and gas and Campsites. Six years of stunted growth and silent gazing. No New Years, no Birthdays. Just desperate navigation and waiting for the North to present itself possible. How much longer would it be? How long would my little brother last? How much longer would I last?

  “Ophelia, do you hear me? You are the Big Sister now. You have to look out for Hector, just like Immogen did for you.”

  She was right. I was twelve. It was time to be Big Sister. A hot tear escaped Mom’s cheek and dripped onto sleeping Hector, whom she set in my arms. She squeezed both of us close and pulled my hair too tight while she braided it. She wiped her tears on her sleeve, grabbed one of Immogen’s leftover barrettes, clamped my sister’s shiny plastic around the end of one of my pigtails and lectured me about importance of not being such a Tom Boy.

  Hector's arrival gave us a life to be more careful with. She made me note that hogging all the snacks was not Appropriate. Picking flea bites was not Civilized. Snoring was not Attractive. Brown was beautiful. Car camping was no excuse to look Unkempt. We couldn’t afford to look Ragged.

  Hector was dandled and hugged and dabbed with washcloths until he glowed. Our singing increased to several times a day. I grew older while I took care of him. The Car was more spacious with him in it.

  “There used to be,” I mimicked Mom's tone, “Stores and Parties and music on the radio. Dad packed up The Car with his tools every morning, instead of with us. He sang with the radio, instead of using it to find gas and barter jobs.”

  Dad snuck up behind us and scooped Hector into his arms, singing.

  “There's more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line.”

  Dad and I twirled Hector in circles between the walls of our cage. Mom folded the blankets she had just shaken out, trying not to smile at our Wildness.

  The slamming of car doors distracted us. Three cars pulled into the Campsite line that we had been in earlier, before we had paid and been gladly locked inside. The first Car in line was a station wagon, plenty full of Brown kids just like me, sitting on their hands and trying to behave like I had done so many times, but they had nothing else – no cartons of food or tools or crayons. They must be new to the road.

  The second Car in line was a real, working Smithson G4 with unscratched fins, intact taillights, and a very pale Driver. Nobody had seen a purring G4 in ages. It was shiny and in mint condition, which was funny, because it was kind of a pearly, minty color too. I said so to Hector, and chuckled over it. We whistled from afar, faces pressed against the mesh of our Campsite fence.


  Dad paced out of our cage with the other admirers, to touch the smooth finish and nod with the pale owner. Dad couldn’t resist looking at nicely greased gears and motors. I too marveled over the magical silver rims and the unbroken side mirrors, so much shinier than the iron bars that I gripped.

  And I glanced nervously at the unremarkable wood paneling of the station wagon in the front of the line. The station wagon family was just as dark as us, Brown and in an unremarkable car. A shabby vehicle with no extra money for bribes, because, like everybody sensible, they bought food instead of hub caps.

  There were only two sites left, a long line of cars starting to show up, and the Rangers got to choose to whom they would be given. If they didn’t feel guilty enough about giving the last two sites away to pale folks – for Asset or Emergency reasons, they would say – nobody would speak up and say that the decision was just because of their color. There was nothing that could be done about it. No proof. Nobody to report it to, nobody who could be contacted on the same day, while it still mattered.

  Dad finally glanced around at the line and got as worried for the Brown family as he should have been. My mechanical, Engineer father slipped quietly away from the call of the fresh oil in the Smithson motor and paced back into our Campsite, mostly looking at his feet. He didn't stop me, so I kept right on staring at our rightful neighbors, the Brown family at the front of the line.

  The third Car that pulled into line, behind the station wagon and the Smithson G4, was an old Zodiac, with a tattered canvas roof and a deflated tire. It wasn't sturdy enough to protect the owner at night, but there weren't any kids inside who needed Special Protection. It was just a single, peachy man. He stepped out wearing a rough leather hat, his mirrored sunglasses contrasting against his translucent skin.

  The grumpy Ranger finally roused himself from his desk at the entrance hut. He walked past the Brown family's ordinary station wagon, to the second man in line with the minty Smithson G4. He handed the pale owner a Petition for Special Protection and waddled to the door of the peachy man in cloth-topped Zodiac.