Ophelia Immune

By Beth Mattson

Ophelia is a young woman in a world where zombies roam the hillsides, humans are sold at auction, and surviving on the new frontiers of humanity is all but impossible. When her family abandons her, Ophelia must set out on a quest for a cure to the zombie virus in order to have any hope of ever finding peace, acceptance, friendship, or — maybe, just maybe — someone to safely kiss. Ophelia must redefine what it means to survive in a world turned on its undead head, with humanity in crisis and her own little sister trying to gnaw on her bones. She must triumph over the forces of evil, those that snap their jaws and those that aim to own other people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beth Mattson
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732381025

Beth Mattson

Beth Mattson is a writer, teacher, and mom in the driftless region of Wisconsin, a fan of zombies and poems about your mom.

Book preview

Ophelia Immune

a novel

by Beth Mattson

Copyright © 2018 by Beth Mattson

ISBN 978-1-7323810-0-1 (Print)

ISBN 978-1-7323810-1-8 (Kindle)

ISBN 978-1-7323810-2-5 (ePUB)

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

For Terence L. Duniho, the best penpal ever, for offering to run his hand down a cheese grater.

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

Table Of Contents

The Car

The House

The Funeral

The Picnic

The Leaving

The Clinic

The Swan

The Training

The Plan

The Cell

The Battle

The Celebration

The Killer

The Kite

The Flyers

The Safe House

The Friends

The Drunks

The Sobering

The Rally

The Cure

The Homing

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 locked 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. Sixr 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.

The Ranger loaned the waxy cowboy a pen for the Petition for Special Protection. When the cowboy had finished, he and the Ranger stood jovially, joking about the shape of the mud on the hood. It looked like a cow, a butchered cow. They loved it.

The Ranger banged the Zodiac's mud happily, slipped his hand once more over the sleek, shiny Smithson G4, and then he made the Move Over sign to the Brown family in front. The Brown father stuttered and thought enough to reach for the pad of Petition for Special Protection forms, because they clearly had more than three children, whom he swept his arm at broadly. They obviously needed Special Protection. He held up his fingers to show their ages. He opened his trunk to show that it was empty of supplies and that he needed to barter work for food. He begged and bowed on one knee, but the Ranger gripped the pad of papers more tightly, signed Move Over one more time, and strode away, fingering the keys to the last two sites that he had already given away.

The Smithson G4 and the ragged Zodiac eased around the other Brown family’s wagon so that they could back up and go find someplace else to park. We didn’t look up to wave at them and we didn’t catch anybody else’s eye either. It was sad, but they probably knew how to handle themselves and didn't need our pity. Or what if we spoke up and had to go with them? What if we invited them in and then the Ranger was mad at us and also one of them was Infected and bit us in the night?

We just shivered and pretended to be asleep at 3:00am when we heard them scream and their windows shattering – a chorus of voices in different ages and pitches, ringing in our ears for only a few minutes.

They should have known better. Why didn't they know better? If you can’t get a Campsite, you don’t sleep in your Car. You find a tree that the beasts can’t reach you in, and then they leave your Car alone, because you’re not in it. But we never missed getting a Campsite. Dad was obsessively early to the line until the ground froze.

When the ground froze, all of the zombies froze too, so you didn't need bars to protect you. And that was when Juliet arrived. Juliet, another baby to keep us busy. Hector and I were not destined to be alone. Mom was finally on a roll. Our Little Sister Juliet was born in icy weather – only the year after Hector. I was eleven. I was counting time now, and we were farther North, just outside of the big city of Turington. We couldn't afford the Clinic that we could see, with its big red cross painted on its frosty bricks, so Mom just used the front seat again.

We couldn’t open the windows to dry out the Car. If we did, the wet spots on the upholstery would freeze and chap our skin. So we stayed balmy and wrinkled, smelling of umbilical cord and tasting briny for days.

Hector and I sat in the back sipping from glass jars of melted snow that I had sweetened with honey. All of the adults older than sixteen hiked the hillsides putting pikes into zombie heads and pulling the frozen corpses through the snow into Burn Piles. Except for Mom, who sat in the front seat giving birth to Juliet. She wailed and the insides of the Car steamed and baked with the effort of the new baby.

I took care of Hector, like Immogen would have me. When he couldn’t laugh at my funny faces anymore, I slathered some crackers with jam. We didn’t get much jam, but the sugar would be good for him, I thought. It would help him fall asleep before Mom really started to push. Besides, he was going to have to get used to Mom’s milk being for somebody else.

He did fall soundly asleep but I stayed awake to see Dad come back to The Car just in time to scrub himself with alcohol and a towel to pull Juliet up from somewhere down near the floorboards of Mom's passenger side. In the morning, we chucked the bags of afterbirth and ruined towels on top of the Burn Piles with the corpses. Dad thought we should bury them near a tree to help it grow, and that the tree could be named Juliet. Mom told him not to be such a gross Romantic and looked around to see if anyone heard him say something so Uncivilized. Nobody even looked up. Juliet wailed in the stiff chill. Immogen would have Loved her.

She was a sweet baby, who cried more than Hector did, but she made the Car smell better, like flowery drool instead of poopy fingernails. Hector stared at her a lot, chattering instead of talking. He taught her how to stick out her tongue before she could smile. Mom wasn’t so happy about that.

Bad enough we were living in our soiled Car until Dad could make the rest of the money that we needed to buy an abandoned house on The Cheap from The Government, worse yet that my little brother could barely walk or talk better than his year-younger sister who he kept giving bad habits to. Juliet sprouted, lean and coordinated from the beginning. She spoke before she turned one, her favorite phrases delighting us almost as much as her long, curled eyelashes did.

Honey, please. Hug me. Happy Birthday. Be careful. Hector, no.

I watched them grow, instead of staring out of the window by myself. I had two toddlers to watch out for. I threw them Birthday parties with extra beans spread across their sesame buns. We counted to ten and then twenty on our fingers and then toes. We played pat-a-cake until they could clap the most complicated versions with their eyes closed.

I had to make sure they developed despite our pinched quarters. Hector finally took to walking, two years after he should have, once we had the space to move around in the largest Campsite cage any of us had ever seen. Dad got a Long Term Job at a river with a dam that was falling apart. Most people were too scared to go near the water, because everybody knew that the zombies and the horrible, slimy, Infected fish were in it, but Dad said he could balance on the dam, bash in heads, and fix the girding beams all at once. We spent more seasons than we wanted to count patiently waiting for him to come home and be locked inside with us before dark. He always made it safely, whistling with something delicious thrown in the sack over his shoulder.

He came home with fresh venison haunches, snow hares, or duck eggs and when he shared with the Rangers, they gave us an expensive, deluxe Campsite that we could roam around in, free of worry. Mom and I wore our backs out, hunched over, working three and four-year old muscles, stretching Juliet and Hector until they could move all their joints like they should. We dusted their blankets so their noses didn't run constantly and braided their hair so that they didn't look like Ragamuffins, until Dad showed up one afternoon, well before dusk, with his burlap goodie bag fuller than usual.

The first item that he waved before us and passed around gingerly was a rolled up scroll of paper. Paper is expensive, but I didn't see why it was so exciting or why Mom was crying until Dad told me what it was. It wasn't a receipt or a scrap of nice kindling that he had found, it was a Deed to our new House. The dam was finished and we finally had Cash to spend on a Real House.

Our new House was an abandoned one outside of a small town even a little bit farther North, in Nasmyth. Hector galloped around like a maniac and Juliet skipped steadily back and forth between Mom and Dad, all of us chanting Nasmyth until the Ranger asked us to Simmer Down. Didn't want us scaring people, or provoking them to rob us.

Dad handed Mom two paper packages, one full of powdery beige flour, the other brimming with sugar, dark brown and sticky sweet. She beamed at him and let us each lick one finger full of the amber crystals before she hid them under the front seat. Dad gave Juliet and Hector each a wooden pull toy attached to a long twine – a painted green duck and a etched grey goose that flapped their feet as their wheels turned. I high-fived Hector and then Juliet and then Dad, agreeing that these were the best gifts ever. But there was more. Dad wasn't finished yet. There was something for me.

He reached into the bottomless sack and handed me my very own, brand new, bright blue hammer.

You're going to need this hammer, Ophelia – for building and for killing – there are going to be a lot more zombies to kill on The Farm in Nasmyth. There won't be a cage. Just wide open spaces and fresh air. You're going to have to learn. I'm going to count on you. You can help me make our home.

I loved it. I could build the Future and defend my Family with its sturdy handle and shiny steel head. I kissed it, which made Dad laugh, and then I propped it in the back window where it wouldn’t fall on anybody’s little head or fingers accidentally. I was fifteen and I thought I could handle a heavy hammer, especially such a beautiful one. But we were all still too small for our ages. Perhaps the fresh Northern wind sweeping through our own windows would help us sprout and straighten our teeth.

With a tank full of gas and our Deed in the glove compartment, we couldn’t sit still for the last of our Car ride North. We whisper chanted Nasmyth until we got too loud and Mom scolded us. She wondered if we’d stolen and eaten all of her sugar. I tickled the kids until they couldn't giggle anymore.

Nasmyth came before our new House. High, pitted speed bumps announced the edges of the incorporated part. It looked like every other small town we had passed