Tony went pale. “You don’t know my brother. You’ve never seen him.”

“I saw you had him locked in a closet in the other room.” Tim looked around the table. No one was eating, none of them were whispering amongst themselves. Tim wasn’t sure if he’d broken a serious taboo by even talking about Tony’s brother. If he had he was probably already in trouble, so he pressed on. “What’s his name?”

It was Tony’s mom who answered. “Philip,” she said, and her voice was thick.

“I told you about the last place we had. The one that got kind of burnt. We had to leave in a hurry before it all came down on top of us. Phil was in charge back then—he was a tough guy, you know? Real tough. Used to beat the shit out of me when we were kids. After this shit went down he said he would take care of me, that he would keep me safe. He watched out for all of us. He made something for us, here. Something good. When we left the old place, he was the first one out. I don’t know if the droolers were curious and the fire drew ‘em, or if they were just hanging around outside, waiting for us. Either way the second Phil stepped out of the house they swarmed on him. None of us knew what was going on—we were hauling buckets, trying to put out the fire, or we were gathering stuff up, getting ready to go. I was near the back making sure Mom was okay when I heard gunshots up front. I ran up there to find Phil loading his desert eagle back up, calm as fuck, man. He looked right at me and told me to take care of mom, that he was putting me in charge. There was like five droolers lying on the sidewalk and they were all dead, but Phil, he had a chunk bit out of his arm. He was covered in blood.” Tony trembled in his seat with the emotion of the memory. “He was going to blow his own brains out. I guess he was kind of weak, though, with blood loss or some shit, because I grabbed for the gun and for the first time in my life I actually got something over him. By the time we were ready to go, he was sweating and shaking and he just did whatever I told him to. When we got here he crawled in that closet on his own. We put food under the door for him, every day, and I guess he eats it.”

Tony looked away from the table as if he were afraid someone might catch him crying. He said nothing for a long while.

Tim touched the boxes on the table. They were white cardboard, printed in black lettering, and each one contained a bottle filled with orange tablets. Tim rattled one of them and everyone heard the pills shaking inside the bottle.

“You’re full of shit,” Tony said, standing up and pounding his fists on the table. “There’s no cure. There is no fucking cure for the Russian Flu!”

“No,” Tim agreed. “But these will help. You can have one bottle now, and one when I come back from Seattle. I think that’s a fair price.”

“Tony, I never heard of anything like that, not from my cousin, not on tv,” Sasha announced.

“Are you a trained doctor?” Tim asked her. “Are any of you?”

“No,” Mikey said. “But I don’t think you are, either. Where’d you get those?”

“They were handing them out at a checkpoint—a military checkpoint—in California. People with the early symptoms, you know, bad headaches, paranoid thinking, excessive salivation, anything like that, they were supposed to take these and report to the nearest hospital. Of course people knew better. Once they showed up at the hospital they just got taken off to jail cells or worse. The pills are supposed to slow the disease down, though. Do we have a deal?”

“How—how do we give it to him?” Tony asked. “He’s not, I mean, he doesn’t talk anymore. If we open that closet he’ll attack the first one of us he sees. I can’t get him to take a pill.”

“Grind one up and put it in his food.” Tim read the back of the box. “Once every eight hours. You should see results right away.” He shoved a box hard so it slid across the table and stopped right in front of Tony’s plate. “You’re robbing me blind, honestly. Do you know how much that box is worth?”

Tony picked it up, read the information on the back. There wasn’t much there a layman could understand, just the instructions. There were no indications or warning labels. Just a very hard-to-pronounce name for the drug inside. Chlorpromazine 25mg.

“You swear this will help him?” Tony asked.

Tim sighed. “Listen, the brain damage is probably irreversible. We all know that this thing eats grey matter. I don’t think he’s ever going to be your big brother anymore, no. But it’ll make him human again. I promise.”

“Then you’ve got a fucking deal, pal.” Tony rubbed at one eye with a thick knuckle. “When do you want to leave for Seattle?”

“Tonight,” Tim said.

Buzzard kicked him under the table, but Tim didn’t even flinch.