Healing/Redemption13 min read
The Day I Welded the Gate: A Second Chance in the Outbreak
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I didn’t expect the last thing I did before the world tipped over would become my saving grace.
“I welded the gate,” I told them before they knew what to call me in the new days.
“You what?” Mrs. Hilda Black shouted from below, her voice bouncing off the concrete like a jury banging gavel.
“I welded the gate!” I said again, as calm as a woman announcing market hours.
“You son of a—who welded the gate?” someone else swore. The words in the courtyard were full of heat and anger and the little fear that comes before a real panic begins.
I stood at my window, hands still smelling of oil. I watched everyone gather like people always do — around the edge of a wound.
The sun burned white. I could feel it through the glass as if it tried to tell me something. Like it had been trying all along.
Three days ago I had lay under a hot sky and let two monsters take me apart.
“Lois?” I heard someone call my name, or thought I did, lost somewhere between being eaten and waking.
I remember pain like a heavy bell, the rude teeth, the way my breath left me with a thin rattle. I remember a pair of hands, quicker than the hunger, breaking a skull with a blunt stick. He hit the last head, then reached for me. For a second, through the mouthful of pain and blood, I thought: “My rescuer is going to eat me.”
Instead he dragged me. He tied me up with care. He left me in a room that did not smell of rot.
I woke up in my bed. The curtains were bathing the room in polite sunlight. There was no stench. My phone read July 20, 2022.
I swallowed the last piece of breakfast like it could fix the world.
“I’m dead,” I whispered.
“No,” I said again, because I wasn’t ready to let go. “I’m back.”
I had been back a week before anything else happened. The knowledge of what came later stuck like a shadow to every choice I made. I am Lois Dodson. No parents. Grandma raised me until the sickness took her. When the city redeveloped, I ended up with a small payout: an old house’s demolition compensation and ten thousand in cash. The rest I stretched into something wider — a plan.
“You can’t be serious,” the rental agent said when I asked for a villa. “You want the three-hundred-some square-meter place with the yard? It’s listed for tens of thousands.”
“I want it,” I said. “Show me.”
When I walked into the villa with the agent’s keys jingling in my hands, my chest tightened. Underground storage, big yard, enough wall height to keep most curious neighbors out. I signed for it and paid thirty thousand as if the building would never leave my life.
“What’s your plan?” the agent asked.
“Survive,” I said.
The countdown began. I took loans. I clicked every app that would lend me money. I filled carts. I bought generators, fridges, freezers — ten of everything that had a motor or a plug. I bought seeds, water, rice, beans, cooking oil by the barrel. I ordered twenty chickens, thirty pigs from the slaughterhouse. I ordered security cameras, radios, batons.
Every purchase felt like a vote against the sky.
“Are you buying a drugstore?” the pharmacy clerk asked when I handed over a list that read like I imagined the world would need in a siege.
“You think I’m joking?” I asked back, laughing in a way that was too loud and brittle.
“You buy a hundred boxes of antibiotics and I ask if you’re opening a pharmacy,” the clerk said, and smiled that tiny, confused smile that people have when someone else’s fear answers their curiosity.
I hid things in the basement: rice, beans, canned goods, medicine. I set aside a little room for a water pump. I ran pipes with men who didn’t leave until the sun set. I raised the yard wall to three meters and put bars on the windows. I thought about fences and locks and the kinds of people who would call themselves neighbors one day and thieves the next.
“Lois,” Asher said when we finally met properly. “You put the password on your vault: 11520?”
“Yes. Don’t tell anyone,” I said.
He smiled with one side of his mouth, like a man who kept things simple because simplicity made him strong. He was built to be a protector. When I first saw him beating the heads off of those things at our gate, the sight hooked into something in me. He moved like the videos, sure and brutal. He was a guard. He was Asher Hahn.
“You should move in,” I told him before I had any real right to ask.
“I’ll work for my meal,” he said. “And a place to sleep. Don’t worry.”
“How much?” I asked.
“One honest person’s wages,” he answered.
I gave him a room on the second floor and a small table in the garage for his tools. He made the rounds. He cleaned the yard. He beat back the first wave alone more than once while I watched from a second-floor window.
“You don’t have to throw your life away for me,” I said once.
“I don’t feel like I’m throwing it away,” he said. “You fed me when I needed food. That counts for something.”
“You’re the man who broke the jailer’s head the day the gate was welded,” Mrs. Hilda Black told me later in the courtyard, with the kind of tone that sorted people into dangerous and ordinary.
“He’s my food man now,” I said, flat, and she puffed out a disbelieving sound.
“You bought everything?” she asked.
“Everything we’d need to last a long, long time.”
“You’re a selfish little—”
“Save the sermon for someone who cares,” I said, and shut the window.
I had learned that the truth had teeth. If you let it out without purpose it bit the wrong people.
Two days before the sky went wrong, Asher knocked on my door with a bruise on his cheek and a look he tried to keep small.
“Is it true?” I asked.
“Is what true?” he asked.
“About your father being the one the papers call ‘the root cause’?” I said.
He did not answer. He never talked about his family unless the world owed him a favor. The truth, when it came, crawled out like a thing that had been crawling long enough to forget the sun.
“My father was a scientist. Emil Diaz,” he said finally. “He worked on viruses. They say the accident was at his lab. They say—”
“They say he turned,” I said, finishing the sentence for him. “They say he became the first of them.”
“That’s what they say,” he said. His face set.
I had been alive to those first days in the other life. I had seen a broadcast claiming rescue. I had given away the last bread and waited in a store for the salvation that never arrived. I had looked at a man on the ground and decided to give him what would have saved me and died because of it.
“I remember,” I told Asher. “I remember the broadcast, the drone with the loudspeaker saying rescue was coming. I let a man live. Then nothing came.”
He looked at me like he’d never been read so plainly. “You gave it away?”
“One bread. One choice,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about that since I woke up.”
He did what strong men do when their feelings are too big for words. He fixed things. He walked the yard at night and cleaned up the broken things in me with work. He was not silent so much as unverbose.
“It’ll be okay,” he said one night, when fireworks split the sky and threw red light through the trees.
“Why fireworks?” I asked.
“People were trying to run,” he said. “They thought noise might lure them away.”
“From what?”
He looked at me like he had the answer but wasn’t sure I’d handle the truth. “From what they were.”
We left the villa three days after the noises started. We left because the yard filled with people who were desperate in a way that had little in common with charity. We left because one kid, a girl, was gone from her room when I kicked the door open.
“Where did she go?” I asked the empty room, hearing my own voice smaller than I wanted.
“Maybe she left,” said Asher, and then he did something he did not do often: he promised more than he could have.
“We search,” he said. “We find her.”
We drove out, following tracks and clots of broken things. The city had been unstitched. Cars lay like sleeping animals. The road was littered with things someone once loved.
At a base we found it — not what I expected. The heavy doors were open like someone had forgotten to close the world up.
“Watch,” Asher said, and his baton felt like an extension of his arm.
Inside, a man had been caught with his throat split and his head rolled away. A note said, simply, “I’m upstairs.”
“He’s waiting,” whispered Asher.
We climbed and there she was, sitting like the eye in the center of a storm: Jenny Smirnov, twelve years old, hair wild, eyes with a blue you could not mistake.
“Lois?” she said, and the sound was both like someone calling home and like a knife.
“You again,” I said. “You were gone.”
“I was experimented on,” she said. “They poked me. They told me I was sick. But the taste—” She smiled then, as if tasting the sun.
“When someone dies I—” she went on, “—I become something else and it is beautiful.”
She moved like a child and like a thing older than bones. The way she spoke made my skin heat with a fear that was personal.
“Did you—” Asher said.
She showed us the hands. She had killed and then she had done worse. She had the recklessness of grief and the curiosity of a child turned to hunger.
“I wanted them to notice,” she said softly. “I wanted them to see me.”
“You killed him,” Asher said. “You killed Jasper Newton.”
Jasper’s name was a punch in the dark. The scientist had been the man running the base; he had been the one told to extract, to test, to see what the strange child could bear.
Jenny’s eyes flashed. “He tasted like regret,” she said.
I did what someone who knows the smell of death does: I put a hand on Asher’s arm, not to stop him, only to steady myself.
We fought the thing Jenny had become. I will not lie about the brutality. She moved with a strength not small for a girl. I pulled out the little knife I always kept hidden and pressed it home. When I pushed, it was not revenge. It was protection.
After, we wrapped her and took her down. We buried her together, in a space up on the roof with sun and wind.
“It’s wrong,” Asher said eventually. “You did what you had to do.”
“It’s right,” I said. “We killed something that was hurting everyone.”
It was messy, because life is messy. And then the work of the future began. Dr. Emil Diaz — Asher’s father — had equipments and records spread in corners of that same base. Papers lay like confessions. Someone had tried to pull lines of science into godhood and failed. They had tried to make a thing larger than a child: a king of the broken.
We found evidence of injections, notes with Jasper Newton’s handwriting, film files where he justified experiments with phrases like, “For the future of humankind.”
“He thought the end justified the methods,” I said, pointing to a screen.
“Do you think we should burn it?” Asher asked.
“No,” I said. “We should make them see.”
What followed was the punishment I did not imagine we would need. There were survivors in the base and many more who followed the path of our trucks and our rumors. The city was a slow clock of small communities, each deciding justice on its own. We had a one-room assembly; we had a roof lit with lamps; we had a microphone run from a generator. For once I used my things to make a scoop of sunlight in a dark place.
“Everyone,” I said into the mic, my voice slightly higher than I wanted. “We have to address what happened here.”
“You’re not a judge,” someone shouted. “You welded the gate, Lois!”
“I welded the gate,” I answered. “That doesn’t make me anything else.”
We pulled Jasper from his hidden room. He was not the monstrous figure the rumors painted. He was thinner, older in a way that made his shoulders look as if they bore too many secrets. His face had the white of someone who thought he was untouchable until he wasn’t. He tried to speak.
“Please—” he began.
“You killed children,” someone said.
“You called them subjects,” said another voice.
“If you say ‘it was for science’ one more time—” a man near the front spat.
“Jasper Newton,” I said, and the name was equal parts accusation and truth. “You injected a child. You took anyone you could lock down. You thought you could study and shake hands with angels. You never thought anyone would hold you to account.”
He tried to step back. The circle closed.
“You put needles into Jenny Smirnov,” Asher said quietly. “You watched her change.”
Jasper’s eyes went from pleading to anger to a thin, ugly fear. His mouth moved in patterns meant for bargaining, but there was no accountant to count his sins. We had turned our eyes into a ledger.
“You are under citizen arrest,” I said. “No hospital. No special prison. This is for all of us.”
He laughed a dry little laugh. “You don’t have the right.”
“Right?” a woman shouted. “We have the right to live.”
“What are you going to do?” Jasper asked, fighting to make his voice steady. “You’ll punish me for trying to save people.”
“Save people?” Hilda Black said. “You made monsters.”
The crowd changed. It shifted from curiosity to the physics of a mob. People who had been hoarding and hiding came forward and placed jars, photographs, objects on a long folding table. They brought papers, family names, small tokens of the people who had been taken. They wanted to be seen.
“What do you want us to do?” Jasper asked, suddenly small.
“Tell us what you did,” I said. “Tell us every name. Tell us every needle. Tell us who helped you.”
He tried to shrug. “You don’t understand what I was doing,” he said. “I sought a serum—”
“We all sought ways to live,” Asher said. “You decided to treat children as lab animals and called it fate.”
Jasper began to sweat. The crowd started clapping in a soft, slow rhythm that had nothing to do with celebration and everything to do with pressure. Voices rose, names were called. Photographs were held up. A man cried.
“Tell!” he begged. “Tell about the children you took.”
He stammered, then broke. The story poured out in the way ruined things do, jagged and sharp. He spoke of funding lines, of orders, of a base that had lost its ethics when the first patient screamed. He spoke of his notes, of what he hoped to learn. He blamed disease. He blamed panic. He blamed people who had survived too long to die the easy death of infection.
The crowd reacted with a human churn of emotion. Some cried openly. Some spat. Mrs. Hilda Black took a pair of pliers from someone and walked up.
“You will watch us bury your notes,” she said, and her voice was steady as a hammer.
“No,” Jasper whispered.
“You will watch us burn what you wrote,” I said. “You will see the faces of those you touched.”
They took his papers and held them over a skillet. The edge of the flame licked the words. He watched as diagrams curled in black and ash. He watched the records of injection sites reduce to nothing. His hands flapped in the air like birds who had nowhere left to fly.
“You will be recorded,” someone else said. “So the world will know you did not die with your secrets.”
They turned a small camera to him. He answered questions, and over and over, he could not make his speech hold. He changed from arrogance to pleading to a brittle, distant rage. He shrank before our eyes.
They did not hang him. They did not stone him. We took what he had given — names, files, excuses — and we used it to make sure there would be no recipe for the kind of cruelty he had practiced.
He was made into a living warning. We drew his face in the courtyard and wrote his deeds on posters. Children who survived pointed at him and spat. He was forced to watch every family who came through the camp show what the scientists had taken. He sat for hours in rows as townspeople read lists of those missing, and he had to stand when their names were called.
His reaction changed in tiny, visible stages. First he was defiant. “I was trying to save us,” he said.
Then he was terrified — of names they'd call, of the faces that came forward. He tried to bargain.
“I—” he stammered.
“That bargaining worked in a lab,” Asher said coldly. “It will not work here.”
By the end, he was hollowed in front of everyone. He begged. He said he would help make an antidote. He offered his data. We let him. But we made him sit under the lights, make his confessions, draw maps of every place he had taken someone.
People wrote on his chest with black ink. They put the names of victims over his heart and the places he had claimed he was saving people. They made him listen to stories of what those people had meant to their families.
Around him, the crowd reacted in waves. Some cried, some held up phones and recorded the scene, some spat, some whispered that true justice might be worse, some wanted blood. A small group went silent and then came forward to strip his keys and tools. Others applauded when he finally could not speak.
It is messy, a kind of justice not decided in courtrooms but in the raw light of those who had survived. It was public. It was as close to spectacle as grief and righteousness will allow.
At the end, he was given a choice: help fix what he had broken, or walk from the place where he was known. He agreed to help.
“Why help him?” Hilda asked me later, as smoke left the burned pages.
“Because the information can save people,” I said. “It is practical.”
“You’re soft,” Hilda accused.
“Or practical,” I said back. “You’re also the woman who took a hundred dollars to look the other way while I built a wall.”
She reddened. “That was a gift.”
“Then we’re even,” I said.
Asher stood nearby the whole time, his face unreadable. When the crowd found ways to perform justice, he stayed quiet and let it be their catharsis. After, he came and stood beside me.
“You did this well,” he said simply.
“I welded the gate,” I said.
He laughed. “Better than that.”
Once the day’s small tribunal ended, we used what Jasper left — the sketches and notes he claimed were incomplete — to build an antidote. Emil Diaz’s old journals, taken from an armory of files, gave us traction. With patient work, with nights of mixing and tasting and failing, and with people who would not leave, a formula began to form.
“Are you sure?” Asher asked one night when the lab smelled of burnt sugar and late hours.
“No,” I said. “But sometimes you do what you can.”
Jenny’s death — or what she had become — left a hole that never closes. It made us more careful and less trusting. It made us willing to look evil and call it by name. It made us weld gates.
The antidote worked on some. Not all. Some returned with memory of the night they had eaten. Some could not bear what they had done and chose to disappear. Some, when they opened their eyes and found their hands were their own, wept like people who had been given daylight after long years in a dark basement.
“There are things you can’t take back,” Asher said, the last night we celebrated a small victory.
“Then don’t let people make them again,” I answered.
We did what strangers do in strange times: we rebuilt a small community in the villa. We opened the gate on a schedule and kept it welded the rest of the time. People came who wanted to trade and left who could not stand the watch. I slept better than I had in years, with locks and wires and a man who would stand outside in the dark just to make sure nothing bothered me.
“Why do you do all this?” I asked him on a night when rain tapped like a secret on the roof.
“For you,” he said.
“You’re ancient poetry,” I teased.
“For you,” he corrected.
I looked at the small card he had given me much later — a bank card with numbers not mine but saved for me — and I laughed.
“You’re loaded,” I said.
He shrugged. “My father… he left some things. He and I split whatever compensation people gave for fixes. It’s not about money. It’s about choices.”
“You sound heroic,” I said.
“I’m practical,” he said. “And stubborn.”
We kept the password on the box. We kept the generator on. We kept the memory of the court on the roof. We kept the burned papers as a reminder: knowledge without humanity is a weapon.
“Promise me one thing,” Asher said one night, voice low.
“What?”
“Don’t give bread away like last time,” he said, grinning.
“I’m not that fool again,” I said.
He touched my forehead like someone counting stars.
“You’re not a fool,” he said. “You’re careful.”
We had saved things, burned others, punished a scientist in the light of many witnesses. We had killed a thing that had once been a child. We had learned the edge between mercy and survival is thin, and we are the ones who decide where to stand.
“Lois,” he said once, out of tiredness and hope.
“Yes?”
“Will you stay?” He kept it short; the rest arrived in his tired smile.
“I welded the gate,” I said, and then, maybe for the first time in a long while, I meant it not as a boast but as a home.
The End
— Thank you for reading —