Rise, Tomorrow Girl | Chapter One
The night is silent the way late nights always are in my leafy Oakville neighbourhood of graceful houses and fastidiously manicured yards. It’s an unlikely place to be a fugitive. Not somewhere I ever would’ve imagined wanting to escape from. Everyone knew bad things were out there on the horizon, creeping closer every day, and the people of my generation realized it more keenly than most. But we didn’t know how little time we really had before tentacles of destruction wormed their way under the soft foundations of our lives—sports practice, protest demonstrations, well-intentioned parents—and changed our lives forever.
Honestly, I still didn’t know. Maybe your heart and mind never truly knew until it was almost too late. But almost meant there was still a chance.
The last time Cleo called me her nostrils and the skin at the side of her lips were broken and raw. She stared dazedly out from my phone screen as she lied to me in a voice as brittle as split fingernails. “Remember that time in sixth grade I had stomach flu and threw up on your new suede boots outside the school gym?” I nodded at her, forcing a weak laugh. “Okay, well, this feels maybe thirty percent worse than that,” she continued. “Not remotely like something fatal.” She rubbed her eyes from underneath her glasses and glanced anxiously over her shoulder. “My parents want me resting non-stop. They’ll snag my phone again the moment they realize I have it. So, just . . . don’t forget about me, okay? I’m still out here. I’m just living on mute.”
My eyes burn at the memory, then jump to the nearest streetlamp. Luckily, it’s too far down the road to call attention to my clumsy movements. What anyone would notice first is the collection of regal six feet tall nutcrackers standing guard over a neighbour’s snow-glazed front yard. Lamplight glints off the gold in the nutcrackers’ elegant soldier hats. No one ever told them the bad news; they’re still in formal dress and ready to party.
My eyes burn at the memory, then jump to the nearest streetlamp. Luckily, it’s too far down the road to call attention to my clumsy movements. What anyone would notice first is the collection of regal six feet tall nutcrackers standing guard over a neighbour’s snow-glazed front yard. Lamplight glints off the gold in the nutcrackers’ elegant soldier hats. No one ever told them the bad news; they’re still in formal dress and ready to party.
The continual reminder of glossy, happier days feels cruel. I blink and refocus on the doorknob as I ease the front door shut with the same gentleness you’d kiss a newborn baby. The act has a finality about it that cinches my chest.
But Cleo’s blue guitar pick necklace hangs around my neck, lending me courage. She would’ve been a superstar someday. Even my dad said so and he would know, he’s the guy the media used to call the next Bryan Adams because of their shared clean-cut Canadian rocker image and slew of mega-hits. How you can tell them apart is that my dad, Will Khoury, is the one who didn’t chart with a summer song about a popular sexual position. If you ask my father, he’ll tell you—with tears misting his eyes each time—that the highlight of his career was the night Gord Downie joined him on stage to sing Dad’s heartbreak-of-growing-up song “The Last Beginning Days” at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto.
That was before my father became a bona fide hit machine, before I was born, before he met my mother. Long before Cleo died and I promised her little sister, Janey, that we’d get through this nightmare together, keeping our memories of Cleo burning with such brightness that she’d never really be gone, only out of the room.
Forever out of the room.
My key jams in the door as I struggle to lock it behind me. Sweat beads multiply on my forehead and I stifle the cough that’s jogging up my esophagus, my clammy fingers gripping the key tighter. If Cleo were here she’d be halfway down the street already, not fiddling with a lock that never before in the twelve-year history of my family living here has given anyone a moment’s trouble.
“Leave it,” the Cleo in my mind’s eye commands, head tilting impatiently. “Just go already.”
She could be as bossy and imperious as medieval royalty when she knew she was right. I can see her with such perfect clarity—in her wool sweater dress, combat boots and blue tortoise framed glasses, guitar case slung across her back—that I jump in my skin. Cleo, are you there?
But of course she isn’t. Her funeral was over a week ago. Nobody beyond her immediate family was there because no one can attend funerals or any other kind of gathering anymore. A family grieves at home and dead bodies aren’t handled by funeral parlours. They’re disposed of by specially trained emergency teams operating under protocols established by the Public Health Agency of Canada and its provincial partners.
The facts of life are clinical and cold now. I’ll never be able to say goodbye to the person who was the closest thing to a sister I ever had. That night on the phone I should’ve gathered my courage and said something that neither of us was ready to hear yet. My last chance to say goodbye and it’s already slipped into the past tense.
The regret’s so thick that I’m losing focus, my brain fogging up like the bathroom mirror after a long shower. There’s a chance I could be suffering from your regular old garden variety flu and that I’m running away for nothing. If that’s the case, I’ll be happy to be wrong. Sean and I will lie in bed eating chicken noodle soup and cookie dough ice cream for however long it takes for the danger to pass. If I don’t have the Century Virus, he probably doesn’t have it either.
We could recover either way. Just because this virus kills more young people than old, with teenagers being its favourite victims, doesn’t mean we’re done for. Only yesterday morning Mom and I saw a news story about a tenth grade Mississauga girl being released from Trillium hospital. Someone had tied a bunch of balloons to her wheelchair, as if she were six years old. The grins etched into her parents’ lips were so earnest and grateful that it made my stomach hurt.
“I don’t want you to worry,” Mom said suddenly, her right hand skimming my left arm as we both hovered around by the TV. “We have a plan for if you get sick. You’ll be okay. We’ll make sure of it.”
How could she promise that? Defiance and loss thudded under my ribs. Or, thinking back, maybe it was fever onset.
“What are you talking about?” I gasped. “What kind of plan?” The Zhangs couldn’t save Cleo. Other kids from my school who’d succumbed to the virus couldn’t have been saved either. Everyone was doing all the right things, to the extent that it was possible. Schools and colleges had closed temporarily. Sporting, entertainment events and public transit were suspended. Religious services happened solely online. Most people weren’t even going to work anymore. Those who did venture out in public went in face masks and latex gloves. The entire population of Canada—and every other industrialized country—was washing their hands raw and dousing themselves in layers of hand sanitizer.
SARS and COVID-19 were warning shots that couldn’t protect us. It took time, and cost millions of lives—driving people behind masks and distancing measures to elude it—but in the end scientists had tamed COVID-19. Together a range of therapeutic treatments and periodic vaccine shots tweaked for mutations succeeded in reducing severity and deaths from the virus, largely keeping it at bay. Afterwards, we’d gradually once again come to believe climate change and terrorism were the biggest dangers ahead. But we were wrong. The highly fatal and virulent Century Virus arrived on the scene less than a decade after COVID-19 had first appeared in China, just a few years late for the centennial anniversary of the Spanish flu. People referred to the Century Virus as a “once in a lifetime” event or “the big one” and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was funny or not that in 2028 even a virus had to have a snappy name, like it was competing with political scandals and cat videos for everyone’s attention.
When it came down to it, what we called the virus didn’t matter. All the other terrible facts about it remained the same, meaning there was only so much a person could do to avoid infection. My parents couldn’t guarantee I’d be okay. Nobody could say for sure.
Back in our living room my mom had turned away, her mouth sagging in uncertainty. My triumph at being right flat-lined into guilt. Never mind that it was ridiculous and impossible for my mom to vouch for my safety, why point out how helpless my parents were? They must have been painfully aware of it.
“I shouldn’t say,” Mom replied, focusing stubbornly on the TV. “Just trust me. You don’t have to worry.”
“Mom.” My voice curled into a fist. “How can you burst out with something like that and then just leave me hanging?”
Mom’s jaw dropped. Her dark hair needed retouching at the roots. It was the kind of thing nobody was bothering with during the pandemic and that I shouldn’t have noticed. But in that moment I was glad of the reminder that she was fifty-four. If she caught the virus, it likely wouldn’t hit her as hard. She’d feel exceptionally shitty for a while, and then bounce back.
“If I tell you, you can’t share what I say with anyone else,” Mom said quietly, her face pinched. “Not even Sean.” My mother had nothing against my boyfriend. If anything, my parents approved of his ambition, and were flattered that Sean sought their advice for his movies. Soundtrack music, edits, dialogue. That kind of thing. Sean had a way of making people feel important. Like no one else’s opinion could possibly matter as much as yours, whoever you were.
Offbeat horrors or quirky comedies were Sean’s genres of choice. But his biggest heroes, other black filmmakers, spanned across genres: Jordan Peele, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Spike Lee, Steve McQueen, Ava DuVernay. Sean had been writing and shooting short films for a year and a half before he’d graduated from high school. Before the Century Virus had paused normal life, Sean was studying film production at Ryerson and I was lucky to see him once a week. He spent half his nights sleeping on other Ryerson students’ floors and couches. In saving himself the commute back to Oakville he gained extra moviemaking hours.
“I won’t say anything,” I agreed automatically, registering the extent of my mom’s apprehension seconds too late. “Not even to Sean,” I echoed with a sincerity I wasn’t positive I meant.
Sean and I had been telling each other almost everything for the past two years. Although I called Cleo my best friend, truthfully I had two. They’d both, at different times, seen me cry so hard that I couldn’t catch my breath and both shared secrets with me that would never pass my lips in anyone else’s presence.
If my mom had known Sean had snuck over to see me only the night before we would’ve had a very different conversation in the living room. One that would’ve consisted of her yelling bitterly, and then calling my dad into the room to shout at me too, while I wilted in the subtle glow of the TV, knowing that they were right and that it was beyond stupid to roll the dice with the Century Virus for a couple of hours alone with your boyfriend.
There’s no excuse, I know.
And now that I’m sick I know it in a way that I didn’t only yesterday when my mom was telling me not to say anything to Sean.
Two nights ago Sean and I both believed we were okay. Not a hint of illness in either of us. Not even a sniffle. Regardless, we were careful. We didn’t so much as kiss on the mouth. Sean hugged me and we both cried about Cleo all over again. I breathed into his sweatshirt and felt something deep within my body unknot. “This isn’t real,” I whispered. “It’s just a really long, warped nightmare. I’ll wake up and tell Cleo about it and she’ll make a face and complain, ‘I can’t believe you killed me off in your subconscious.’”
Being without Cleo was like losing a limb. How could I possibly stay away from Sean too? The social isolation was strangling me, emptiness searing a hole through the centre of my chest and sleeplessness ravaging my mind. Before Sean’s visit I’d begun to believe that nothing really mattered because we were all just shambling not so slowly towards our last days on the planet, finishing up the last of our yogurt tubs and pre-sliced cheese so we could climb into our beds and pull the sheets up over our heads until it all was over.
After Sean left my house two nights ago I was still heartbroken about Cleo, but I didn’t feel so hopeless and alone.
In the living room, Mom’s head dipped, her grey roots on full display. “Your dad has connections,” she said. My father knew tons of people in the entertainment industry but in a flash I understood she must have been referring to Dad’s best friend, Michael Comtois, whose brother was the Minister of Public Safety.
My heart raced. There was a secret bunker up in Sudbury where we could all hide out until a vaccine was developed. Or a talented Canadian microbiologist had created an experimental vaccine that would be administered to my family shortly. We were saved.
If only it could’ve been that neat and easy.
There was no secret bunker, or if there was my parents weren’t confided in about it, let alone invited. There was no vaccine either.
“You know the fatality rate for CV is running at fifty-eight percent in young people who are infected in the Middle East, where the virus first appeared,” Mom continued. “It’s looking the same here.”
The grim stats were unavoidable. TV newscasters repeated them on a loop, solemn CNN and CBC commentators projecting impressive imitations of calm while the internet skid off the rails into previously unchartered depths of craziness that led to the temporary suspension of most social networking sites. In the 1918/1919 pandemic up to ten percent of those infected died. So far the Century Virus was less lethal, unless you happened to be a teenager or in your twenties. There was no cure and anti-viral drugs only helped reduce symptoms and hasten recovery in a small minority of patients.
The hospitals were teeming with people stricken with CV. Pop-up clinics had begun to open in elementary and high schools that were all otherwise standing empty due to indefinitely cancelled classes. First you were walking around like a fully functioning member of the population. Next you came down with a fever, cough, sore throat, fatigue—symptoms that matched your typical winter flu. But the Century Virus wasn’t content with being typical. Instead, it was what medical experts described as a “potent inducer of pro-inflammatory proteins” that caused uncontrolled inflammatory response in the lungs, and acute respiratory distress.
It didn’t want you to breathe; it wanted you to die.
“Without a vaccine health officials believe the rate of infection could rise as high as fifty percent,” my mother continued, the patience in her tone pulling me back towards childhood.
“Some experts say it could burn itself out at any time,” I countered in an abrupt burst of hope that took me by surprise. “We’ve been through this before. It will pass. Scientists will come up with a vaccine or cure.”
“They’re trying,” Mom said hesitantly. “But it was different last time.”
Back then I’d believed my parents could shield me from anything. The COVID-19 outbreak kept me from in-person school for over a year, my parents forced to get creative about safe visits with my friends, but the virus didn’t scare me. As a kid it never occurred to me that I would lose anyone or get seriously sick; my naivete rendered COVID-19 a nuisance and frustration without any urgency behind it. I’d spent the previous pandemic in a bubble of extended restless longing and boredom, homemade soup lunches, sleepy online classes and Animal Crossing mania.
“You could be right,” my mother amended. “I hope so. But if not, we’re prepared.” She curved her hand around my head, smoothing my hair down. “There’s a facility in Upstate New York that’s been practicing suspended animation. They’re not the only ones. There are others in various states, and Brazil, China, Russia and India.”
“You mean if I die you’re going to cryogenically freeze me?” My eyelashes blinked frantically, like they were operating independently from the rest of me, which had gone incredibly still. If my lungs were still filling with oxygen, I couldn’t feel it.
Mom mashed her lips together, her eyelashes under strict control. “The results haven’t proven very successful with that particular method. If you happen to come down with the virus—and there’s every chance that you won’t—they’d have to freeze you before death to give you the best odds. The closed border won’t be a problem. We’ve been promised travel documents that will allow you to be transported across. When a cure’s invented and the revival technology’s been perfected, you’d be woken up and treated. Facilities don't have the resources to perform the procedure on a large scale, even if there weren’t legal issues. But they’ve been doing it for select people.”
Cryogenically freezing a living person is a crime, even in countries that allow human cryonics. It’s regarded as murder.
My skin had begun to crawl while some vital essence of me was already draining away.
Mom’s mouth gaped open, fish-like. “We’d only consider it in the event that you were dangerously close to passing away,” she added, the bob of her head barely perceptible. “I don’t want to scare you. I just wanted you to know there are options if you get sick. It won’t mean the end.”
“But, for all you know they may never be able to revive me. You just said the technology isn’t even there yet.” I forced myself to breathe. “Why wouldn’t you at least wait until you knew I was dead?”
“Because.” Mom blanched. “If you have a subject that’s passed away, by the time the procedure is performed some neurons are already irreversibly dead. In mammal cryopreservation trials there’s been serious tissue and cell damage, particularly brain damage, after reanimation when the animals were deceased beforehand.”
Mammal trials? Reanimation? She’d researched this so thoroughly that she knew the lingo. A wave of dizziness washed over me, threatening my balance. I dug my heels into the carpet as I stared blearily at the woman who suddenly felt like a stranger to me.
“Living subjects fared much better,” she clarified. “These facilities have woken up primates and their minds and organs were intact and functional. Once scientific advances in nanotechnology allow for brain repair at the molecular level they’ll be able to revive humans too.” Mom rambled on about the importance of cryoprotectants and of carefully modulating temperatures during freezing. Inhibiting ice. Rapid cooling rather than freezing. Vitrification. Ethylene glycol. Things I didn’t understand and couldn’t follow because I was picturing Calvin destroying Ryan Reynolds from the inside in the Life movie and John Hurt’s gut-busting scene from Alien.
Once you were in stasis, anything could become of you. The very worst things you could imagine. Scientists could revive me only to discover brain damage had rendered me ragingly psychotic, a frothing-at-the mouth zombie. If there was a soul, what would become of mine if no one ever woke me up? In a better case scenario, I might be revived in a hundred years’ time, with my parents and all my extended family having passed away decades earlier. I would be alone in the world. Sean would never again press his forehead against mine, the two of us staring at each other with blurred vision.
“I dream about your eyes sometimes,” he’s told me more than once. “The way you look at me.” Not many people look at a person the way I looked at Sean or the way he looked at me. It felt like a special kind of magic. You had no doubt how someone felt about you when they looked at you that way. It was like a vivid, living promise.
“You’re talking crazy,” I told my mother. “None of that is actually possible.”
But she and my father—and facilities in Brazil, China, India, Russia, and New York State—think it is. These facilities have been diligently working on the endeavour, bending and breaking rules in the name of science.
It’s horrifying.
I’m not ready to die, but I’m not ready for the alternative either. I’m running hot and cold, my pulse racing and my throat sputtering into a dry cough as I abandon my key in the newly belligerent door and follow through on the biggest decision of my life, walking swiftly along my street to the spot just before the stop sign where Sean waits in his mom’s sedan with the engine running.
