Contaminated

By Megan Hart

Two years ago, a trendy diet drink called SlimPro left my world in ruins. The Contamination turned people like my mom and dad into violent, shambling creatures. Now, the rehabilitated ones are being sent home with shock collars connected to their brains to control their aggressive impulses.

Or kill them.

My little sister Opal and I are surviving, but every day feels like a battle. And now, things are getting worse. The Sanitarium is taking people away to experiment on them, trying to find a cure. But what if the doctors running the experiments aren't trying to save us? What if the real threat isn't the "Connies," the government, or the doctors?

What if it's me?

For fans of The Last of Us, The Girl with All the Gifts, and The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Contaminated is a heart-wrenching tale of love and determination, where the power of human connection can mean the difference between life and death.

With reviews like "Alarmingly realistic and absolutely unputdownable" from USA Today best-selling author Jennifer L. Armentrout and "Confession: This book had me crying in public" from award-winning author Jeri Smith-Ready, readers won't want to miss this riveting and relentless adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094468860

Megan Hart

Megan Hart is the award-winning and multi-published author of more than forty novels, novellas and short stories. Her work has been published in almost every genre, including contemporary women’s fiction, romance, horror and science fiction. Megan lives in southwestern Ohio, which is too far away from the ocean. You can contact Megan through her website at www.MeganHart.com.

Book preview

1

They keep them in cages. The unclaimed. Long rows of narrow, filthy cages lined up along corridors lit by bare, hanging bulbs. The corridors stink like disinfectant. The stench rakes at the inside of my nose, but it’s better than the reek wafting up beneath the odor of cleanser. That smell is raw and meaty and moist, something sick. Like dirty wounds.

These are the only new girls that came in since the last time you were here. Jean, the kennel administrator, pauses in the doorway to another long corridor. Something I don’t want to see scuttles into the shadows. They’re all up to date on their shots. Ready to go home. Do you have the picture?

It’s worn and creased from being in my pocket. Warm from my body. I don’t look like that anymore. I was only ten then, and now I’m almost eighteen. But that’s okay. We all look different now.

Aww, she was pretty. Jean’s eyes say what her mouth keeps a secret.

She won’t be pretty anymore. Not after so much time. I’ve been searching both of the town’s kennels as often as I can for months. Every other day, if I can manage it. Even when I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it one more time. Even when I can’t decide if I hope someone brought her in, or if I wish she’ll be lost forever.

What was her name, again, hon?

"Her name is Malinda. I make sure to emphasize that. It still is Malinda."

Jean steps back at the force of my reply, like maybe I should be in a cage. I stare down the long, long rows. I can’t smell them anymore, which is a disgusting blessing because it means I’ve been here long enough to get used to it. I don’t want to get used to anything in this place.

I mean . . . it’s not like they can tell us their names. Unless they have identification or something . . . but of course, if they do, they don’t end up here. So we give them names, she says, too brightly, like she’s talking to a toddler. It’s my face. People tell me I look younger than my age. And we do our best for them until their people come for them.

"If their people come for them," I say. We start down the corridor, staying in the center to keep our ankles from being nipped or scratched.

Jean’s voice is reverent. And if they don’t, we do our best for them. Until it’s time.

A pain burns deep in my gut every time I think about how I might already be too late. She’s been missing for a long time, well past the cutoff date for shelter here. Nobody talks about what happens to the unclaimed, but everyone knows. The kennels do their best to hold them for as long as they can, but there’s not enough room, not with more unclaimed coming in all the time.

We walk the corridor again, looking in every cage. By the time we reach the end, I’m already counting the minutes until I can get out of here. I’m relieved. I’m disappointed. I’m anxious and tired and stressed; I have to get home to make sure Opal has her dinner, and I have some meaningless homework to finish.

Jean stops, finally, at the end of the row. This girl came in almost a month ago, but she’s been in quarantine for the past few weeks. Had a few nasty infections in her gums and one leg. The doc said it looked like she’d gotten hung up on some barbed wire somewhere along the way. But he fixed her up.

Anticipation swirls inside me as I move closer, trying to see into the cage’s shadows. Something moves back there. This shadow shifts on the nest of tattered blankets, and then it moves toward the bars of the cage. Jean had sounded hopeful, as though the picture I showed her could possibly compare to the emaciated mess in the cage.

I look for a long time anyway, needing to be sure, before I shake my head. That’s not her.

Hey, pretty girl. Jean tosses her a small scrap of some kind of biscuit. Here, Peaches.

That’s what you call her? Peaches?

Jean gives me a sideways look. It’s a pretty name.

But . . . it’s a dog’s name.

My voice breaks. I clutch my elbows, pressing my crossed arms to my belly, and my heart breaks worse than my voice ever could. The woman Jean called Peaches holds the biscuit in both hands, shoving it into her mouth so the crumbs spray out and slobber drips down her chin onto the dank, dirty floor.

It’s not a name for a person, I whisper.

Is she the one you’re looking for?

No. I don’t want to cry. We’d both be embarrassed.

I’m sorry, hon.

I know she is. Jean’s a nice lady who does her best for the unclaimed, given what she has to work with. Dirty cages and beds of rags. Dog biscuits to feed them. I know she’s sorry about this, but she can’t do anything about it. Before I can burst into tears, I’m heading toward the door. I need to get out of here. Fast.

Hands reach through the bars. The unclaimed moan. They babble. They can’t really talk, most of them, maybe a word here and there. Nothing that makes sense. Their fingernails, ragged and dirty, scratch at the cement with a sound worse than dragging them across chalkboards. They clutch and grasp at me, and I know it’s my own agitation that’s riling them up. The ones in here have all been neutralized. They’re not dangerous. They might grab and clutch and groan, but even if they get ahold of me, they’re not going to rip open my flesh with their teeth and eat my organs.

They’re not zombies.

And then at the end, right before I duck through the doorway, one of them catches me. I’ve dodged too far out of the way of a pale, curling hand on one side, and the woman in the cage across from it snags my shoelace. I stumble and grab the bars to keep myself from hitting the concrete. The metal rings out with a flat, hollow sound. She shudders and turns her face toward mine, her mouth slack and her eyes dull.

They give them clothes, although most of them would gladly go naked and not even know it. This one wears a flowered blouse, many buttons missing and not replaced. The flowers are daisies, yellow and white, with green stems. It’s an ugly shirt made more disgusting by the dirt and stains on it, and it shows off how thin her arms are.

I can see the collar from here. It’s black, about two inches wide, and circles her neck without any visible end. Two of the three tiny bulbs at her throat are dark. The other shines faintly, steadily green, like the point of light on a battery charger.

Her fingertips have tangled in my laces. Either she’s not trying to get them out, or she can’t. She tugs. My foot moves. I look down at her, the world swimming as my eyes burn with tears. I’d walked past this cage before, two days ago. I’d passed it twice in the last fifteen minutes. I’d looked at this woman and not known her.

But I do now.

My fingers slip on the metal bars as my knees fold. The cold, damp concrete bites my knees through my jeans. I gently take her hand from my shoelaces, and her fingers grip mine so tight they leave white marks on my skin. I hold her hand, and I try very, very hard not to be afraid.

Is this the one, hon? Jean asks from behind me. Did you find her?

Yes, I say, without looking at her. Yes. This is my mother.

2

The first wave of the Contaminated was slaughtered by overzealous soldiers, police officers, firefighters. Also by neighbors and by strangers. People had seen too many horror movies, read too many survival guides. When the first cases started getting reported, people made jokes about zombies. A few days later, when the massive numbers of Contaminated started losing their minds, those same people were already armed and ready to shoot, no questions asked.

That first wave lasted about two weeks, followed by a few more weeks of chaos. Then the second wave hit. By that time, disease control experts had done enough autopsies to figure out that brain damage was causing people to randomly and suddenly go homicidal, and the second wave of Connies was neutralized by simple lobotomies, many done in the field by untrained staff. They shoved ice picks through the eye sockets and into the brains. It stopped the Connies from raging, but it killed a lot of them, too. Left some blinded and many others with permanent mental damage. It’s hard to be careful with an ice pick, especially with subjects that are screaming, writhing, and biting. Hospitals were overrun with poorly lobotomized patients.

By the time the third wave swept the world a month or so later, the Center for Disease Control had pinpointed the source of the Contamination. Not a virus. Prion disease. Mutated, twisted proteins literally ate holes in people’s brains, like Mad Cow Disease, but worse. Much worse.

They also figured out the source. Protein water produced by a single company. SlimPro.

The official name for it is Martin’s Syndrome, after the doctor who finally figured out the cause. Martin’s causes loss of impulse control and increased aggression. It mimics the effects of stroke as well as several kinds of recreational drug use. Prions can’t be spread through social contact, but they also can’t be destroyed by heat, disinfectants, or radiation.

They pulled the product off the market, but it was too late. Anyone who drank SlimPro has the potential to get the disease, even now, almost two years later, even if they only took a single sip. There’s no cure and no reversal. Only control of the symptoms….until the victims die.

Once they figured out why people were losing their minds in groups, they stopped killing or lobotomizing them. They collected them, took them into labs, and attached them to machines. They cut them open, injected them, whatever they felt was necessary to figure out what was wrong. They experimented to find out how they functioned and why they didn’t react to pain, even though their experiments showed they do feel it. They perfected electric-pulse shock collars that subdued them rather than further scrambling their brains.

Fewer than two years later, the Return Initiative is sending whoever survived the labs back to their families. At least, they’re supposed to. The process is complicated and slow and inefficient. So many people who were collected during the mass riots had no identification with them, they were incapable of communicating, didn’t even know their own names or how to reach their families. People who do want to find their loved ones can’t find them. Others aren’t even trying to, preferring to believe their family members are dead rather than being forced to take responsibility for them.

Thousands of Contaminated are being put into interim shelters that everyone calls kennels, but not enough are being claimed. Where else can they go but back to the medical facilities that have already kept them for months? And what happens to them there, after that, when it’s clear nobody wants them . . . well, that’s something else nobody talks about. We’ve all heard the rumors about that big old VA hospital just outside of town. Who goes in.

Who doesn’t come back out.

Before I can take my mom home, we have to submit our DNA samples to prove we’re related. I don’t want to think about why anyone would claim a Connie who doesn’t belong to them—it’s hard enough to take on the responsibility for a loved one, but a stranger? I shudder, wishing I were still too young to know the reasons why anyone would do something like that, but also glad they lowered the age of adulthood to sixteen after the third wave. I’m considered old enough to be her guardian. For my sister Opal, too. A swipe with a sponge inside both our cheeks, and it’s done.

The tests usually come back pretty fast. Jean smiles. Happy. Maybe to be rid of one of her charges, maybe she’s really glad for me, I don’t know. By next week you should be clear to take her home. I bet that makes you feel great, doesn’t it?

She’ll be okay until then, right? The words drop hard, like stones. She won’t be taken away before then? You have the paperwork all settled?

If she gets taken away from the kennel, at least I’d know she was dead, not missing. I shake away that thought. She’s not dead, and she’s not missing anymore. She’s still Contaminated, though. She always will be.

But she’ll also always be my mom.

She’ll be fine. I know what you’ve heard about some of those other shelters, but . . . I care about my girls. Nothing’s going to happen to her while I’m here. I won’t let them take her back before you can get her, I promise.

My eyes burn at Jean’s kindness. I want to let her hug and rock me, shush-shushing while I press my face into the front of her shirt. She smells like laundry detergent, and I’d like to clean my nostrils of the sickly stink that’s settled in so deep I fear I’ll never get rid of it. I can’t afford to cry. Once I start…another shudder ripples through me, and I force the fakest of smiles.

Mom, there’s a new arrival at the back door.

Dillon, Jean’s son, comes out of the back room. He’s a few years older than me and looks a lot like his mom. Nice smile. Friendly eyes. He’s been here almost every time I’ve come in, so we nod in recognition.

Hey, Velvet, he says, and I’m surprised he remembers my name.

We’ll call you when you can come for her, Jean says.

It feels wrong to leave by myself again, leaving Mom behind. When the door to the street closes behind me, I close my eyes and breathe in air so cold it sears the inside of my nose. This burning is good. Gets rid of all the junk in there. It burns away the tears I wouldn’t let myself cry and the sour taste on my tongue. Shivers wrack me, and I’m stupid for standing like this on the sidewalk when I don’t even have a hat or scarf, but I take another minute, anyway, to breathe.

I found her.

So now, what will I do with her?

3

My dad was a tall, skinny guy with freckles and red hair, but not the temper to go with it, even when Opal and I annoyed him the way kids do. He worked as a game programmer and was getting a little pot belly. My mom’s job in an insurance office meant she also spent too much time at her desk. Mom joined a gym close to where she worked, but Dad decided to try the popular new drink everyone was raving about. All the talk shows, all the Hollywood stars. All the magazines had ads for it, every TV show had commercials for it.

SlimPro water. High protein, low carbs. Kosher! Halal! Vegan! No animal products used!

The weight, according to the ads, would fly right off. Protein water was already popular, but sales of SlimPro went through the roof. It was supposed to be the best, the healthiest. Designer water, like shoes, or purses, or sunglasses. It was everywhere.

My dad bought cases of it. And, yeah, he lost weight. Dropped ten pounds in a couple of months, right from the start, while hardly exercising at all. My mom, who was spending hours on the treadmill and never having dessert, held off a little longer, but pretty soon she was on SlimPro, too. Why not? Everyone else was.

The company couldn’t keep up with the demand. Shelves were empty. People started hoarding it, or reselling it at a huge markup. The SlimPro manufacturers figured they’d better get some more, fast. The problem was, their suppliers couldn’t keep up, either. So they did whatever businesses do when they can’t get what they need to make the product that’s paying for their kids’ college educations and trips to the Bahamas. They found another supplier.

Kosher, halal, and vegan?

Not anymore.

A few of the factories kept using the original plant-based proteins, but most switched to animal sources. Ground-up bits of leftovers from slaughterhouses. Rumor has it they even contracted to pick up roadkill. Whatever they could get for the cheapest price possible. They mixed it all up in vats and poured it into bottles, and they rushed it onto shelves to meet the demand.

SlimPro sales soared even higher as warmer weather encouraged more people to drink water. Temperatures rose. Supplies dropped. They made more. Who knows what they did to it this time? Used more scraps? A different slaughterhouse, diseased animals? Whatever they did contaminated the water people were guzzling by the gallon.

They went insane…but not all at the same time.

My dad started losing his temper more often during that spring. He’d snap in ways he never had before. He’d forget he told us something, repeat it ten minutes later, and get furious when we told him he’d already said it. He’d say one word when he meant another. To him, we became idiots, brats, pains-in-the-asses. He seemed to hate us, and he was angry, so angry, all of the time.

A well-known movie star had a meltdown on the set, and the video went viral. Their spokesperson was an A-list movie actress lauded for her charitable work with children around the world. She was reading stories to children in a public-school kindergarten when the disease hit her. She bludgeoned four of them before the teacher tackled her to the ground, and then she bit off the teacher’s lips. A preacher in a small Southern church sprayed his congregants with gasoline from a high-powered squirt gun, then lit them on fire.

An Epidemic of Rage is what one headline called it, and experts speculated it was caused by the hottest spring on record for the past eighty years, along with what was shaping up to be an even hotter summer. Religious people blamed atheists, atheists blamed religion, and everyone else blamed politicians. Old people said it was young people who hadn’t been brought up right, and young people said it was because old people were too old. The real reason was that all that SlimPro water had eaten holes in people’s brains.

Two years ago, in June, a heat wave washed over the country. And finally, something broke. Normal people woke up and began their days, and somewhere along the way, something cracked open inside them, and they all just . . . lost it.

When the first wave hit our town, my parents were both at work. Opal and I were home alone. I was sleeping in to enjoy summer break. I heard the neighbors’ two dogs barking. They barked a lot, but not like this. Not for so long or so loud. I got up, went downstairs. Opal was at the table eating dry cereal and reading a book.

I still thought nothing of it until the dogs ran up onto our back deck. Snapping and biting, they paced in front of the sliding glass doors, tails tucked between their legs, begging to get in. Rottweilers, by the way. Nice dogs, but not timid.

What’s going on with Tooty and Frooty? Opal asked.

No clue.

Before I could open the door, our neighbor, Craig, stumbled onto the deck. He wore his bathing suit, which wasn’t that unusual since they’d put in a pool the year before, and it was hot outside. The lack of balance wasn’t that surprising, either, since if he was out by the pool, he usually had a couple of beers. What did make both of us cry out and back up was the way he staggered into the glass door.

Full on, his head smacked the glass so hard it broke into stars but didn’t shatter. Bright red blood streamed over his forehead and down his face. His mouth worked like he was shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything but the barking. The dogs circled his feet, dodging his kicks.

Craig never hit his dogs. They were as much his children as his real kids were. Maybe more, since the dogs usually obeyed him, and his kids mostly didn’t. His dogs were allowed to sleep on his bed with him. They rode in his truck with him. And now he was kicking at them, screaming so loud that the veins stood out on his bloody face.

What’s the matter with Craig? Opal grabbed my hand.

I don’t know!

We need to call Mom!

Craig faced us, his eyes red-rimmed and crusted. Blood lined the spaces between his teeth as he grinned. He walked into the glass again. And again. As hard as he could, each time, like nothing even hurt him. His nose squashed. The next time he grinned, I saw he’d lost a tooth.

He’s gonna get in, Velvet! Stop him!

I didn’t know how to stop him. I was still in my pajamas, my breath sour, my eyes crusty. I thought maybe I was dreaming until Opal’s fingernails cut into my hand.

Mom and Dad’s room, Opal, run!

We got to the top of the stairs as Craig finally broke through the glass. I locked the door to my parents’ room behind us. Craig screamed from the kitchen. No words, only loud, sharp bursts of noise. Opal clamped her hands over her ears.

I tried to shove the dresser in front of the door, but my parents’ TV was too big and heavy. It was really old, still had a VCR built into it, and was twice the size of the big flat screen downstairs. I shoved, I pushed, but the dresser didn’t move.

I didn’t think about pushing the TV off. It would’ve broken, and my parents would be angry. How did I know that it wasn’t only Craig who’d gone insane? How did I know that somewhere out there in the street, my dad was doing the same thing to someone else’s daughters while my mom was trying to get home to us, unable to, because the roads had all been blocked?

My mind raced through all the scenarios my parents had ever put us through. They trusted me to take care of Opal. They were counting on me, and so was she.

Fire? The fire ladder was at the end of the hall. I’d run through flames before I’d run out in front of Craig, pounding up the stairs. Tornado? We were supposed to hide in the basement. That wouldn’t work, either.

It felt like years before I got it, though it could only have been a few seconds. My dad had a golf club under the bed. Once I’d asked him what it was for, and he’d told me, It’s for when the serial killer comes in the middle of the night. Or the zombies. I’d never appreciated my dad’s sense of humor or his preparedness as much as I did right then.

Get the club, he’d said matter-of-factly over pizza and cards one night while my mom was out at the movies with some friends. We were going over all the emergency procedures we should ever use if my parents weren’t home. But don’t use it unless you have to. While whoever’s there is pounding on the door, you take Opal and run into the bathroom. Get into the cubbyhole. Pull it shut behind you; that will buy you some time. You’ll have to pull up the board on the floor, but I left it loose, just in case.

Oh, Dad. I was laughing, but Opal was all ears.

And then what, Daddy?

Push out the panel in the garage ceiling. You can jump down into the garage from there. Get out of the house. And then you run. If it’s dark, hide in the woods.

Will a serial killer still be able to find us, Daddy?

My dad had looked solemn, though there was a twinkle in his eyes to make all of this less scary. Not if you’re very quiet and it’s dark. And if it’s daytime, you run as fast as you can across the street to Garry and Hope’s house.

But, Dad, what if it’s a zombie?

Then, my dad had said, there will be more than one, and you need to be extra careful to figure out if they’re the slow kind or the fast kind.

You watch too many scary movies, Dad, I’d said.

His plan worked, by the way. It got me and Opal out of the house. In our pajamas, we ran across the street to Garry and Hope’s house. He greeted us at the door with a shotgun and urged us inside. On the news, reports of all kinds of crazy things were coming in.

If you girls haven’t taken Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you’d better think about it.

We’re Jewish, Opal had reminded him.

It’s funny what stands out in memories. Garry had looked like she’d told him she’d stepped in dog crap and wiped her feet on his living room sofa, and I’d laughed in his face. What difference did Jesus make then, or any other time? His wife Hope had shushed him and brought us cold drinks while Garry boarded up all the windows.

Craig didn’t follow us across the street. We watched the local news team filming a riot in downtown Lebanon. The street by my dad’s office. I caught a glimpse of red hair in the crowd, which was surging like some vicious, wild sea into a storefront, bodies crashing like waves into the glass windows. It might have been anyone, could have been anyone. But I knew it was him.

What we seem to have here, said the wild-eyed local police chief, is a genuine zombie outbreak!

He sounded more excited than worried. In the background, Connies staggered, their clothes ripped, their bodies bruised and bleeding because nothing seemed to faze them. They’d walk into a brick wall, fall down, and get back up again with bone showing through the cuts on their heads.

That was why everyone assumed they were the walking undead. That’s why the police gunned them down without warning, or ran them over with their cars. That’s why they tossed them by the dozens into the back of trucks and drove them to fields outside of town, where they dug giant ditches and poured the bodies in, covered them with concrete, and pushed dirt over them. Fearing airborne contagion, they didn’t burn them, but nobody seemed to think about what an undead-corpse virus might do to the environment, leaching into the dirt of a farmer’s field.

Eventually they’ll make memorials out of those ditches, the ones filled with concrete and bodies. For now, they built metal rail fences around them and planted flowers on top. Plaques without names on them. Nobody’s really sure who’s in there, and while there’s been a lot of noise about digging them up, nobody’s managed to get the authority to do it yet. It seems people don’t like the fact their loved ones were dumped in ditches, even if they did try to bite off their faces.

We never got official documentation that my dad was killed in the first wave.

We just never saw him again.

My mom came home and got us from the neighbors’ house after a few hours. She took us back to our house, told us it would all be all right while we watched the news and obeyed the shelter in place orders. She told us it would all be okay — and I think she believed that. At least for the next few weeks.

When the second wave hit, she was at the sink peeling a potato when she started twitching. The knife had clattered into the sink, like in slow-motion — that’s how I remember it. She’d gripped the edge of the sink with both hands, so tight, her knuckles turned white.

Get your sister and go upstairs, my mom had said in a gravelly voice, nothing like her normal one. Lock . . . lock . . . lock the door, Velvet. Go! Now!

I don’t know what happened after that, because I’d done what she said. Opal and I listened to the screaming and crashing. Things breaking. But Mom never came upstairs, and after the noises had stopped, we came down. She was gone.

A few days later, the Army took me and my sister away.

4

Waiting at the bus stop, I count the military trucks and police cars the way Opal and I used to count yellow cars for points. One, two, three, four, five. I’d be the winner, for sure. None of them slow as they pass me, but if I were doing anything more energetic than bouncing on my toes to keep warm, at least one of them would stop to look me over. Make sure I’m not a wild Connie, turned out on the street and ready to mess some shit up. Knowing this should make me feel safer, but