Free while the black stars burn by kucy a snyder Page B

over 300 degrees. You will know what to do.
    *
    I wake up crying, bile in my throat. My mother is going to kill herself for me. She is everything to the fate of the human race, and she is going to waste herself, just because I am her child. Her helpless, useless child.
    Soon, the morning alarm blares through the room, and the door slides open. The loudspeakers order me into the kitchen. It’s always like this; the whole thing is automated.
    In the kitchen, I find two young women and an order for French fare. The recipes are demanding, and I cannot concentrate on my work. I burn the bread and scorch the sauces, and at the end of the day I am sent to the tiny, cold concrete room where it is nearly impossible to sleep. I do not dream much, and that is a mercy.
    *
    I walk through my work a tear-stained zombie, half awake and half asleep. I feel as though I’ve been wrapped in an invisible shroud. Sound, light, touch, all my senses are muffled. My fingers are clumsy and numb. I spill more food on the floor than I get into the pots.
    Just as I set the last of the poorly-cooked fajitas and enchiladas on the conveyor belt, a searing pain shoots through my thigh. Suddenly, my blood races with adrenaline. Gunfire and screams ring inside my head. A stabbing pain rips into my chest, and I pass out.
    Later, I come to in my small cold cell. My heart is beating strongly, and I realize what I felt was my mother’s death.
    The human race is lost. I sit huddled with my head on my knees for a long time, unable to even cry. Finally, I drift off to a dreamless, black sleep.
    *
    The next morning, on the butcher block I find my mother and two young men with Marine Corps tattoos on their forearms. Stark against their pale skin are purpling, quarter-sized bullet holes. My mother has been shot through her right thigh and between her breasts. 
    My whole body is shaking, a tic in my eyelid making my vision twitch. But my mind is dead and cold. I can feel nothing, no rage, no grief, nothing. This is my waking nightmare, and everything I see and touch has taken on the distant, insubstantial sheen of dream.
    Only my work is left; everything else is gone. I pull the paper from my mother’s mouth. The Jagaren want an Ethiopian meal today. Dinner for sixty. This is twice the number I’ve ever had to serve before. Apparently, they’ve all come out to devour her.
    I will have to work fast, and my mother’s flesh will have to go a long way. I pick up my skinning knife and start to prepare the corpses. As I start to skin one Marine, I realize that his flesh looks strange. His fat is ever so slightly bluish, and his blood vessels are thickened. How can such a young, fit man have arteriosclerosis? I turn to my mother, and slice open her leg. She has the same blued fat, the same hardened vessels.
    I dig deeper and cut open her femoral artery with my knife. Inside the plaque that is almost blocking the vessel I see the shine of minute blue crystals. If the plaque showed up on a CAT scan or MRI, it would simply look like advanced cardiovascular disease.
    My mother’s thoughts echo in my memory: 300 degrees, don’t go above 300 degrees. You will know what to do.
    The realization hits me, and I curse myself for not catching on sooner, for letting my grief blind me to what my mother planned. Virus. The plaques contain crystallized clumps of virus, resistant to denaturing up to 300 degrees.
    I stare at their exposed flesh. They’re absolutely loaded with the virus. Suddenly, the cause of my mother’s fevers and surgeries is clear to me—she’s been letting the doctors turn her into a walking bioweapon.
    I cut out some of their arteries and leave them to soak in a cauldron of warm water; I will use this to make the batter for the thin pancakes used to scoop up the food. The pancakes cook at about 200 degrees and, with luck, the artery-water will render them virulent. I take several pounds of fat from my mother and the Marines and pulverize it in the food