Iggy lowered himself back onto the floor. There was no use wasting the energy to stand if he was expected to tell stories. Holding his chin up with a knee, he closed his eyes. "What kind of story do you want?"
A loud yawn rumbled out of Robert as he stretched his arms up toward the ceiling. "Anything! You're already putting me to sleep."
Iggy breathed out of his nose. "I'll tell you how I ended up here?"
"Oh goody," Robert replied smugly. "Another fruitful story of hope and inspiration. I wonder how it can possibly end." His arms loosely folded over his protruding belly as he leaned forward and peered into the cell, easily finding Iggy's eyes. "Surely you have thousands of stories that you could tell me. You're probably even older than I am. Fifty? Sixty? They don't make viruses like yours any more. Am I right? So, throw a number at me, already."
Iggy rested his palm across his forehead and pressed hard as if he were checking himself for a fever. "Tomorrow is my eighteenth birthday. At least... I think it is…"
Robert stared at him. The man he saw in the cell looked quite older than a teenager, but the truth was, Robert had nearly nothing to reference. He had a daughter who would have just turned eighteen if she hadn't been murdered as an infant. He imagined her youthful soft skin tanned from the sun and her soft baby brown hair long and flowing in the wind. Tall like her deceased mother with mysterious dark brown eyes. Beautiful and innocent. Although his imagination was all that he had, he still said, "you don't look eighteen."
Iggy shrugged his shoulders. "I'm infected. Why would I look my age?"
"It doesn't matter." Robert waved the images of what his own daughter could have looked like away like smoke. "Alright, tell me how you got here."
"It's all a blur," Iggy admitted to himself. "Really, blurry." He cradled his temples with his palms and pushed. "My brother infected me a few weeks ago." He buried his face in his dirty hands. "He was trying to save me."
Robert's face tightened rigidly. "Save ya? From what?"
Iggy rubbed his eyes. "I was bitten."
"You said that happened when you were a small child. You really are a liar." Robert sat back and kicked his book back open.
"No…" Iggy continued. "It wasn't the same thing. I went outside during the day. I never did that before. There was a woman in the garden. I woke up with her-" Iggy cringed "-She was on top of me. Biting my face." Robert looked up from the pages, again. "I wish that I died. Or was kept blind and uninfected. Anything would be better than what I've been through, here."
"You got that right." Robert stood up and paced back and forth. "It doesn't matter, though. Even if you were uninfected, they would've brought you in anyways. They don't discriminate between the infected and uninfected anymore. At least, not like they used to."
Iggy sought clarification, "if I was uninfected, what would they have done to me?"
Robert stopped abruptly in his tracks. "You don't want to know. Trust me."
"But, I do. If it's somehow worse, then maybe… maybe my situation won't seem so terrible."
Robert remained silent, granting him nothing more than a glance. He wasn't there to soothe him in any way, so he changed the subject. "Are they still doing the walls and the communities?"
Flabbergasted, Iggy leaned forward onto his hands. "You know about the village?!"
Robert bit his inner lip hard, not with passion, but with pain.