RISE UP NO MORE

by otter (otter@fadedpress.com)

Jeremiah Dooley didn't think he was sick so much as infested. He clenched his teeth against the twisting in his guts, paid no mind to the tears that streamed from the corners of his eyes, and tried to remember how to breathe.

Everything in his brain went fuzzy and black for awhile, a falling-asleep that he wasn't sure would come hand in hand with a waking-up. For a moment he thought that he was back in his bed in Harristown, and then he thought maybe he was floating in that wide, warm river next to Chapel Hill, where he'd washed the Alliance blood off his boots before jumping in for a swim. His guts twisted and rolled again, pulled him back to where he was, but he didn't stay for long. He remembered riding fences as a boy, stopping to mend a broken stretch of barbed wire and finding that little calf huddled up under a bush. He'd thought it was dead, and then he'd seen it moving, and then he'd realized that the rippling under its hide was something beneath the skin, some unnamable horror eating the carcass from the inside out.

When he woke up again he was screaming, and he couldn't seem to stop. Somebody leaned over the bed and said, "That's enough, Private Dooley," and then they injected something into his neck that gave the agony soft edges; the stabbing pain became a gentle, loving rub, like his mother's barn cats twisting between his legs.

Jeremiah Dooley stayed in the barn with the cats, while the Alliance doctors loaded him onto a gurney. When they rolled him in among a crowded mass of the ill and injured in the shuttle, he was in the loft, easing aside a bale of sweet-smelling hay to uncover a mewling clutch of kittens whose black and white coats were still tinted by the fresh pink of their skin. When his body was arranged on a filthy infirmary cot, and somebody stole the boots off his feet, Jeremiah had his nose buried in the sun-warmed fur at the back of a cat's neck, and the deep-throated thrum of its purr was lulling him to sleep.

While Jer