Free Contaminated by Em Garner Page A

It’s not that suddenly there are so many of them, but that I didn’t notice them before.
    The worst is the little boy I pass on my way to work every day. The first time I see him, I think he’s hanging out in the backyard, maybe playing with the trucks I see stacked up around him. It’s cold outside, but he’s bundled up pretty warm. Hat, scarf, gloves, boots. It’s more than what I have,anyway. I wave when I pass by the yard, and he looks at me but doesn’t wave back.
    The next day, he’s there again. Same place. I’d think he hadn’t moved at all, but that’s silly, because he had to have gone inside overnight, right? But on the third day, as time is spinning slowly closer to the day when I can pick up my mom and bring her home, I stop and look over the fence at him.
    “Hi,” I say.
    He’s smaller than Opal. Maybe six, or small for an eight-year-old. His nose and cheeks are red. He’s still staring, but he doesn’t react when I speak.
    “Hi, what’s your name?” I don’t know why I’m asking. Why I care. I shouldn’t blame him for not answering; after all, I’m a stranger and any kid these days should know better than to talk to strangers. Even ones like me, who are hopefully not so creepy.
    He gets up then. His first step kicks a truck out of the way like he doesn’t even notice. I hear the scrape of chain on concrete. The kid’s moving faster now, heading for the fence at not quite a run.
    He doesn’t make it even halfway before he’s jerked off his feet. Flat onto his back. He sprawls, arms and legs out like he’s trying to make a snow angel, though so far, the winter’s been bitterly cold and snowless. The chain is stretched out behind him, attached to a ring set into the concrete.
    Horrified, I gasp and cover my mouth with my coldfingers. Before I can say anything, the back door opens and a woman comes out, with a baby on her hip. She’s barely dressed, wearing only a pair of sagging pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. Slippers. The baby starts to scream and, no wonder, brought out into the frigid air wearing only a diaper. I’d scream, too.
    “Oh, God, Tyler. Get up. Get up, get up, get up,” she chants, leaning over the boy on the ground. “Please, get up.”
    Her head whips around to stare at me. “What are you looking at? What did you do to him? Don’t you know any better?”
    “I’m sorry—”
    She ignores me. The little boy on the ground, Tyler, sits up slowly. He doesn’t look at his mom. He doesn’t look at me. He crawls on hands and knees back to the pile of frozen sand and his trucks, where he sits and stares at nothing.
    His mother has snot running out of her nose, and it looks frozen, too. “It’s the only place he’s quiet! It’s the only place he’ll stay quiet!”
    I hold up my hands and back away from the fence. I’m not judging her. She puts her hand over the baby’s face, kissing its head, and, watching me warily, ducks back into the house. I can see her through the glass even after she closes the door. She’s watching me, making sure I go away.
    So I do.

    “Okay, hon, I have to go over some paperwork withyou first. And you’ll have to watch a training video, okay?” Jean’s as nice as ever. She smiles at me, and I know I should be smiling back but I can only manage a grimace. “Don’t you worry about anything. It’s real easy to take care of her. The new collars are wonderful, just wonderful. Really.”
    “Really?” I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Fortunately, she doesn’t notice, or if she does, she’s too nice to show it.
    Jean pats my shoulder. “Really.” She takes me to a small room with a flickering TV, which plays a DVD showing me how to take care of my mom. The narrator’s careful to refer to the Connies as
patients
and I realize this movie was made for hospitals, not civilians, to use.
    At any rate, the movie shows me how my mom’s been fitted with a surgically implanted pair of electrodes, connected wirelessly to the collar