Love Bug

Love Bug

Asha’s mother had always told her that love was a strength, even though it made you vulnerable. She had been a romantic. In Asha’s opinion - and really it had turned out to be more fact than opinion - her mother had been pitifully bound to her vulnerabilities. It had made her an easy target.

When her mother had died, Asha’s greatest grief had been rooted in the feeling that she and her mother had not shared the intimate understanding of one another that she felt their biological relationship entitled them to. Asha herself hadn’t the patience for the aberrant floundering that takes place when you love someone. Her mother had been addicted to it. And that addiction had killed her.

Asha had met Sam through Resistance Research. They had been wary of each other at first, but that apprehension soon melted away into an easy reliance on one another. The camaraderie between those who had lost loved ones to the Bug was steadfast. For Sammy, it had been her brother and sister-in-law. That was the thing about this Bug - when you lost one person, you often lost two. In a morbid way, Asha had been lucky in that sense. She’d had no love for her mother’s boyfriend, and so had only felt the loss of one family member when her mother had succumbed.

Sammy’s case was different. She had loved her brother’s wife, too. And if you really feel for someone, you don’t just stop loving them because they were a Host. After Asha realized Sam’s grief extended beyond her brother, she kept a consistent nervous eye out for her friend. The ones that loved the hardest and the most easily were also the most vulnerable.

They had been a sturdy team for a while, just the two of them. They’d been able to protect each other’s defensive walls, keeping a safe distance from those around them. They had only needed each other, and it was the greatest sense of security that either of them had felt since Zero Day. Platonic love wasn’t subject to the infection. And for a while, they thought that just the two of them would be enough.

Then came the Front Line movement, a subdivision of Resistance Research that suggested a more physical approach to taking on Hosts. They proposed identifying, restraining and confirming Host identities proactively, rather than just observing and recording data and hoping a solution would present itself in time. In the beginning, neither girl had wanted anything to do with it. To them, and to many others in Research, it had seemed not only dangerous, but pointless. How can force fight an infection? How can you fight anything that can’t be seen, for that matter?

What they hadn’t anticipated was Jones. He and some others had used research from the coalition to devise a system for identifying Hosts. When he published the dissertation and it became available to Resistance members, the coalition became fractured by rifts and dissension on an unprecedented scale. Some thought Jones’ identification process was worth implementing coalition-wide, broadening the scope of the Front Line movement to include everyone in the Resistance. Others felt that, at most, the implementation should be localized to Asha’s branch, while other branches continued prioritizing investigative resistance methods. Still more believed that implementing an identification process that included containment and restraint measures for suspects was both immoral and unconstitutional - arguing that this line of action was comparable to the practice of predictive policing in the days before Zero Day.

The infighting itself was dangerous for many reasons, but especially because it exposed the members’ personal vulnerabilities to attack. Having a resistance movement with no sense of unity is bad enough, but it was the deepened relationships that formed within the factions themselves that proved to be lethal. It wasn’t until the first round of deaths occurred that anybody bothered to point out that the Jones method would have rooted out each one of the perpetrators before they had the opportunity to infect anyone.

The idea of Jones’ method was essentially to identify individuals who a) had entered a community without connections to anyone on the inside that preceded Zero Day, and b) who had established themselves quickly once accepted into said community. This profile matched every Host in the Resistance responsible for a death during the Division. Whether or not the profile also encompassed innocents had yet to be discovered..

What finally got Asha and Sam on board was the things that happened on the day they met Tedeschi Fields. Tex, as his cohort called him. They’d heard his name before. He was with Jones, they knew. Basically Jones’ right-hand-man. Jones was the brains of the operation, the primary author of the dissertation that started everything off. But Tex was the one who started putting it into effect. Asha knew that, a few months prior, he had presented the Board with a list of potential Hosts identified using Jones’ methodology. Somehow the list had been leaked, and included a lot of higher-ups in Resistance Research, including some of the Board members themselves. That’s when things really started flying off the rails. Suddenly, the same folks who had been working side-by-side for months with the objective of learning about and ultimately eradicating the Bug began pointing fingers at each other. Accusing each other of trying to seduce one another, of all things. And then there were those who stood firmly on the side of condemning Jones’ research and his Front Line “brutes,” as they were often called, though they had yet to find occasion to actually take up arms against anyone. That would come later.

The day Asha and Sam met Tex was the day that Sarah Lexington was found deceased in her cot. Her quadrant had woken up, curtains had been pulled aside, and there she was, looking just as peaceful as if she had drifted off to sleep with complete certainty that she would wake up in the morning. Only she hadn’t.

A Board meeting had been called immediately. Sarah had not been the first in the Resistance to die, but she was the first who had been seeing someone on the Board itself. Rumor had it that they had started talking about marriage.

Her boyfriend never showed up to the meeting, but when the rest of the Board members arrived, there was a scrap of paper folded neatly on the desk in front of his seat. On it were written five words:

Resistance is still my family.

When Tex showed up to the meeting that morning, none of the Board members could quite meet his eye. The member responsible for Sarah’s death had been on the list Tex had presented to the Board months before. The list they had all chosen to ignore. Asha didn’t know what Tex said to them behind closed doors that day, but she did know that when she and Sam ran into him on their way back to their quarters that morning, it had been his presence in that room that had sent them in that direction. As soon as the meeting was over, the Board had sounded the alarm, ordering everyone back to their quarters for “inspection”. It seemed that they had finally decided to take Tex’s list seriously.

Asha and Sam had been discussing the turn of events with animation as they made their way back to their quarters.

“Just because they were right one time, you think we should automatically start policing everyone? Deciding whether or not they might be guilty based on circumstantial evidence?” Sam was saying.

“First of all, I never said that. I’m just saying that the Jones method is actually pretty smart when you think about it. Also, everyone who’s turned out to be a Host so far has been on Fields’ list. I’m just saying that they’ve gotten a lot of stuff right.”

“So what, you want to join up with them now?”

Asha opened her mouth to reply, but was cut off by a voice drifting from a few yards down the hallway.

“I know smart when I see it, and it seems like your friend does too,” a deep voice echoed towards them. Both girls' heads snapped up, and that’s when they saw him for the first time. Tex Fields. He was smirking at Asha as he approached them, though he had been addressing Sam.

“Sam Turner, nice to meet you.” Sam extended a hand towards him.

“Good, you’re not on my list,” Tex replied, taking her hand firmly in his. “Tedeschi-”

“Fields,” Sam finished for him. “We know who you are.”

“Yeah, I guess you do.” Tex’s eyes returned to Asha. “And you are?”

“Not on your list either. Asha.”

“Asha….?”

“Just Asha is fine.”

“Well ok then. So you like the Jones Method, huh. And your friend here doesn’t.”

“I never said that,” Sam and Asha said together.

Tedeschi laughed, looking back and forth between them pensively. After a moment he said, “You wanna meet him?”

Against all odds, against everything Asha had decided about letting people in, the four of them took to each other immediately. Asha couldn’t help her curiosity about Jones’ way of doing things from pulling her in. Joining Resistance Research had awoken an investigative hunger in her, any and every new piece of information, especially regarding taking an offensive position against the Bug, piqued her interest.

It didn’t help that Jones and Tex offset Asha and Sam perfectly. Where Asha and Sam were passionate and driven by instinct, the guys were calm, levelheaded, and deeply contemplative. It made for near-perfect balance when they went into action as a unit, and for wonderful conversation besides.

Despite the initial awe the two girls both felt upon first meeting Jones, who had become a multi-bramch celebrity figure (for better or for worse) after publishing his dissertation, it was Tex who really drew Asha in.

For Jones, there was clearly some sense of identity in his research and methodology that made him almost inseparable, conceptually, from the Method and the controversy surrounding it. Tex’s position was a bit more complicated. He had known Jones from before Zero Day, when the first death by infection had been recorded, and believed unflinchingly in both Jones’ character and his work. But that didn’t mean that Tex was blind to the method’s weak spots. Where Jones defended the Front Line with vigor, Tex took a more nuanced view, allowing for the possibility of fault in the list he had devised, and also acknowledging the ethical implications that enacting a predictive method of Host identification would have had in the days before Zero Day.

Asha and Tex spoke of these things often while working on identification research together. Since the Board had adopted Jones’ predictive method in the days following Sarah’s death, Jones, Tex and sometimes even Sam went on roundups to isolate potential Hosts from the public, but while Asha supported their efforts, she still felt most at home in a lab behind a screen. Tex would often join her there where they would talk, going over the day's events, their lives before Zero Day, and especially the nuances of the work they were doing. It was during one of these chats that everything changed for Asha.

“You know, if you’d made more friends than Sam when you joined Research, you would have matched the profile closely enough to be on the List,” Tex joked at her.

Something flashed in Asha’s eyes, then was gone.

“How do you know I wasn’t going after Sam?” She said defiantly.

Tex shrugged, “Sam only has relationship history with men. There’s not enough evidence to put you on the List based on that kind of speculation.”

“You looked into everyone’s relationship history?” Asha asked with surprise.

“Well, yeah. We didn’t just throw the List together at random. We were thorough.” Tex’s eyes darkened. “The Board should have listened to us.”

“Yeah. They probably should have. We all should have.” Asha said.

They were quiet for a minute. Then Tex said, “We didn’t find much on you though.” He quirked an eyebrow at her tauntingly. “Not a lovergirl?” He looked at her menacingly. “Or should I be worried?”

He lowered his eyebrows at her enticingly as he taunted her, and Asha’s stomach flipped before she regained her composure and turned away. “Relationships just don’t interest me,” She said, shutting her eyes hard against the emotion that swelled up inside her.

Asha told herself that no matter how she felt about Tex, it didn’t matter so long as he never picked up on it. She knew by now that no one - especially not the ones you care about - could be trusted enough for that. People succumb to love far too easily.

A few weeks later, the four of them sat at the table, sharing the dinner Jones had cooked for them. Since they had moved quarters to a corner of the building where their rooms were adjacent to one another, they had taken to having the evening meal together as an opportunity to debrief the days’ events, and to bask in each others’ companionship (though none of them would admit to this).

“The Resistance has actually observed significant evidence that Hosts sometimes grieve for their lost partners after infecting them,” Jones was saying, waving his arms theatrically over the table where they all sat.

“So what are you saying?” Sam chimed in. “That Hosts love their victims?”

“Would it be so impossible? If we can love them, especially since we’ve discovered how lethal it can be to love someone, would it be so hard to imagine that they form connections with their victims out of necessity?”

Tex looked at him curiously. “What do you mean? Do you think that they can’t survive without infecting someone?”

“Maybe not. Or maybe they can survive physically, but not emotionally. Would you be able to make it through life if you knew you could never love another person that way? That they would die if you did?”

“Maybe it’s both,” Asha said quietly. The others all turned to look at her. “Maybe they can’t survive. And maybe they can’t help whether or not someone loves them, either. You can’t choose who you love. You can’t tell yourself not to love someone. And you certainly can’t tell them not to love you.”

She glanced upwards and caught Tex’s eyes across the table, which softened with understanding as he looked at her. He smiled at her sadly, and her heart sank into her stomach. She knew that, finally, despite all of her efforts to keep him in the dark, he understood her. And in that look that they shared, he had taken a final step over the threshold that stood between him and her heart.

Asha woke up in the luminous grey of pre-dawn the next day, feeling better physically than she had since before her mother had passed. That was how she knew something wasn’t right. She sat up apprehensively, and a note fell off of her chest into her lap.

It’s ok. I know you didn’t mean it. How could anyone help falling in love with you?

- T

Asha clutched the note to her chest as she rose from her cot and made her way across the hallway to where Tedeschi slept. Just like Sarah, he looked incredibly serene, his body relaxed against the cot as if in a dreamless sleep. Unlike Sarah, however, Tex was lying on his back, his arms folded neatly over his chest. He had known, in the end, that he had made himself her victim, And he’d had the sense and dignity to go out his own way. His composure was incredible to Asha, even in death.

She scribbled out a note from the pad on his table, the same paper on which he had written the note she had woken up to, and left it on the stand next to the cot where he lay.

I’m sorry. I loved him too.

- Asha

She knew Sam and Jones would find it when they came looking for Tex and Asha in a couple of hours.

Asha left the compound in the quiet of the early morning and never looked back.