Over the long days since his infection, I noted the mindless screams lessened in their intensity. He ceased slamming his fists and head against the walls and glass until they were bloody. His features, though coarser than they’d been before, and gray-tinged, were no longer frightening. Bruising faded. Split lips and cheekbones healed.

The clumsy jerking motions he made as he moved around the space where we’d trapped him eased into something less inhuman. Still unsteady on his feet, he used his hands to push off the walls or press against the ceiling to keep the wavering from sending him to his knees.

Physically, he was improving. I recognized him now beneath the dirty clothes and scruffy beard. But his eyes still betrayed his savage soul. They gleamed red. The darkening of his blue irises had been the first sign the disease had struck my lover.

I’d defied the law, refusing to report him or quarantine myself, and instead, had locked him in the garage studio he’d built when he’d been an aspiring musician, but which now served as his prison cell.

I’d watched the news as the disease continued to spread. The virus which caused an unending hunger for red meat, turned average citizens into mindless murderers. At first, the sick had been quarantined in hospitals, and then prisons. Now they were loaded onto train boxcars and sent to internment camps, or so the government said, until a cure could be found.

But rumors had started almost immediately that everyone who boarded those trains was destined to be “put down”—a humane solution, which protected the rest of the population. But still, the disease ran rampant.

Businesses operated, but only because people needed basic commodities and the money to buy them. But there were curfews and a military presence on every street corner.

Hiding Danny had proven tricky. The need to purchase large quantities of fresh meat meant I spent a good part of the daylight traveling to grocers in other counties so that my buying habits weren’t noted. I couldn’t risk having my home raided and losing Danny.

I’d do anything to protect him from extermination. No one knew whether the illness was reversible, but I was willing to wait and hoped the signs of improvement that I noted every day in my journal, weren’t just my wishful thinking.

Today, his gaze followed me through the thick Plexiglas without blinking. The raw, intense hunger was tinged with something else. Regret perhaps? Was he remembering us?

As I did every day, I unlocked the door to the studio and carried in a fresh set of comfortable clothing, a towel and washcloth, soap, and a tall pitcher of warm water.

Unlike days past, he didn’t rush toward me only to be jerked back when he reached the end of his chain.

I slid everything as close as I dared, and then backed away from the door, all the while holding his smoldering gaze. “Please bathe, Danny. I’ll bring you food in a little while.” I reached the door and turned the knob behind me. “I love you.”

My life was reduced to this. Foraging for food. Cleaning the perimeter of the dirty enclosure where I kept him. He’d helped prepare his own prison, installing a toilet where the old mudroom sink had hung on the wall before he’d converted the space. Welding chain to a manacle, and testing the length to ensure my safety when I entered. He’d removed his equipment and instruments. Placed a sturdy metal cot in the corner.

The morning he’d woken, feeling as though he had the worst hangover ever and rushing to the fridge for the hamburger I’d thawed the night before, he’d recognized the signs.

I’d awoken with him standing in the doorway, his eyes haunted.

“What’s wrong?” I’d asked.

He’d given me a tight smile, but then I’d noted the deep gray shadows beneath his eyes, the slick of perspiration on his forehead. The red irises. “Danny?” I asked, sitting up on my elbows as my stomach tightened in rejection.

No, it can’t be happening. Not to us. We’d done everything right. We’d stayed clear of quarantined areas. Used our own vehicles rather than public transportation to get back and forth to work. Never drank after another. Didn’t eat out in restaurants where we couldn’t watch the cutlery and plates being sterilized. Didn’t kiss.

The disease was passed in saliva.

“How?” I’d asked, my throat thickening with tears.

He shook his head. “I don’t know, baby. But I have to go. I’ll walk to the center. Turn myself in. I won’t tell them where I live, but you’ll need to sanitize when I’m gone.”

“You aren’t going there.”

His smile had stretched, although his eyes watered with unshed tears. “I don’t have any choice. I’m already scared to death I may have infected you.”

I shook my head, the back of my throat burning. “You know what they say about those places. I won’t ever see you again.”

He spread his hands and gripped the doorframe. His head bowed. “I love you, Terry.” Then he backed away from the door.

“No! We’ll find another way. Wait this out. They’ll find a treatment.”

But he walked away, down the hallway toward the front door.

I’d scrambled from the bed and followed. Before he reached the door, I encircled his waist with my arms and held him back. “Don’t do this. Stay with me. We’ll find a way to keep me safe. You still have a little time.”

While he’d finished the raw hamburger and I’d drank a pot of hot coffee, we’d conspired. By the end of the day, I’d hit the hardware store two counties over, and he’d cleared his beloved studio.

That hug at the doorway was the last time I’d touched him.

I locked the door and walked around to the glass. The pile was where I’d left it, and my gaze shot to Danny. He hadn’t torn the clothing to shreds as he had every day since the illness had taken his mind.

Instead as I watched, my eyes filling, he hobbled toward the clothing and soap. He shucked the grimy, blood-encrusted sweatpants he’d worn since he’d slipped the manacle around his own wrist. He bent and picked up the washcloth and clumsily soaked it in the water, rubbed it on the soap and began to wash.

The fact he could think through the process of cleaning himself made me sob.

The sound must have penetrated the glass because his dark gaze found mine. His features were still cast in a dull, emotionless mask, but his red eyes told another story. He was there. A glimmer of my lover was fighting to come back.

I smiled at him, dashing away my tears and walked toward the glass to press my splayed fingers there. “I’ll wait,” I said. “I’m still here. I won’t give up.”