The End of Ordinary

by Edward Ashton

  The first stage of the Goo Flu feels an awful lot like the first stage of the regular flu, only much, much harder and much, much faster. By the time I got up to our bedroom I was shivering all over, and the muscles in my back and shoulders were starting to ache in that obnoxious way that they only do when I’ve got a heavy-duty fever coming on. I dropped my clothes onto the bed, flopped down beside them, and squirmed into my underwear and tee shirt. I tried closing my eyes then, but the room started spinning as soon as I did. My stomach twisted, and my eyes opened wide. I sat up, staggered to my feet, and just made it into the bathroom before everything left in my stomach came back up in a rush of acid and bile. I crouched in front of the toilet until the spasms eased, then pulled my shorts down, climbed onto the seat, and emptied out the rest of my digestive tract in one long, disgusting pour.

  By the time that was over, my teeth were chattering, and a throbbing pain had settled in just behind my eyes. As I washed my hands and splashed water over my face, the pain radiated to the back of my head, and snaked down along my spine to meet up with the ache in my shoulders. I opened the cabinet over the sink, pulled out a bottle of painkillers, and dry-swallowed three of them. I looked up at my reflection. My eyes were sunken deep back into their sockets, and the bruise where Kara had hit me seemed to be spreading across the rest of my face.

  If I’d had the least bit of sense, I’d have pinged for EMS. If I had, of course, there’s a fair chance I’d have wound up in a burn pit a few days later, when things really started going crazy and the UnAltered were trying to convince everyone that we were on the verge of the Slutty Zombie Apocalypse. Lucky for me, one of the first things the Goo Flu takes away from you is common sense. I locked my bedroom door, climbed into bed, and closed my eyes.

  Here are the things that you dream about when you’re down with the Goo Flu:

  Sex.

  That’s it. That is literally all you experience while your body is trying to decide whether to die or not. You’re lying there in your bed, dehydrated, starving, probably wallowing in your own filth, and all your brain is thinking about is doing the nasty. I thrashed around in that bed for the better part of three days, waking long enough to stagger into the bathroom and choke down a few swallows of water every few hours, then staggering back to my incredibly perverted dreams.

  I still remember the exact moment the fever broke. I opened my eyes to bright sunshine pouring in through the windows and rivers of sweat pouring out of me, soaking the sheets and matting my hair and dripping into my eyes. I licked my lips. They were cracked and salty, but . . . nothing hurt. The aching muscles were gone, the headache was gone, and I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time since that monster hit me with the injector on the shuttle. It sounds strange even to me, but I honestly remember that as one of the happiest moments of my life.

  I sat up. The room spun around once or twice, then settled into place. I rubbed my eyes clear, took a deep breath in, and let it out.

  I looked at my palms.

  I looked at my arms.

  I pulled off my sodden shirt and underwear.

  Underneath the grime and the blood and the slowly drying sweat, from head to toe, I was dusted with gold.

  26. In which Hannah misses out on the SZA.

  “Hey,” I said, and tapped on the glass that separated me from the front seat. “Are there any drive-thrus between here and the dungeon? I could use a burger.”

  The CorpSec in the passenger seat turned around to glare at me.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s almost dinnertime. Also, I’m a runner. We have very high metabolisms.”

  He shook his head.

  “No. There is no freaking way . . .”

  “Lighten up, Tim,” said the driver. “This is a P.C., not a takedown. If she wants a burger, we’ll get her a burger.”

  Tim turned to look at the driver.

  “Come on, Marty. She’s playing you.”

  Marty laughed.

  “You know what, Timmy? If this turns out to be part of her escape plan, I’ll owe you a Coke.”

  We’d been headed back toward the highway, but Marty looked over his shoulder, threw a hard U-turn, and went back the way we’d come. Tim gave me an ugly scowl, then turned to stare out the windshield.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What’s a P.C.?”

  “Protective custody,” said Marty. “It means that we’re holding on to you for your own good.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s good, I guess. Mind telling me who, exactly, you’re protecting me from?”

  He shrugged.

  “Not for me to say.”

  North Syracuse was pretty much already post-apocalyptic back then, and it took a bit of driving around to find a fast-food place that wasn’t boarded up or burned down. Eventually, though, we pulled into the parking lot of a Beef Bazaar, drove around behind the building and into the drive-thru lane. Marty took out his phone and looked back at me.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’re here. What do you need?”

  “Single,” I said. “No onions, no mayo. Fries. Vanilla milkshake.”

  He tapped his screen.

  “Anything else?”

  “Get me a shake too,” said Tim. “And some nuggets.”

  Marty turned to look at him.

  “Nuggets? You know what’s in those things?”

  “Sure,” Tim said. “Beef, right? It’s the freaking Beef Bazaar.”

  Marty laughed, and tapped his screen again.

  “Your funeral, Timmy.”

  We pulled up to the window and waited. After a minute or two, a red-eyed teenage boy handed Marty a bag and two cups. Tim took his shake, then rooted around in the bag and pulled out his box of nuggets. Marty pushed a button, and the glass between us slid down into the seat back.

  This is the point where, if this had been an action vid, I would have disabled Marty with a karate chop to the neck, stabbed Tim in the face with my straw, and made my escape. I mean, Tim was right. Why else would I have asked them to take me to a drive-thru at a time like this? Clearly this was some kind of ploy, right?

  The answer is that no, it was not a ploy. I was a runner, and I was hungry, and I wanted a burger. I took the bag and my milkshake from Marty, thanked him politely, and dug into my fries as the glass slid back into place.

  The Bioteka dungeon was housed in a squat concrete cube, just west of Syracuse and a half mile north of I-90. We pulled into the parking lot, through one automated gate, past a guardhouse, and straight into a massive concrete receiving bay. A steel door slid shut behind us.

  “End of the line,” Marty said. “Hop out, Hannah.”

  I opened the door, which apparently had never been locked, and climbed out. Tim and Marty stayed where they were. A woman waved to us from a little glass office at the far end of the bay. Marty rolled down his window.

  “Sam’ll take care of you,” he said. “Go introduce yourself. She’ll show you around.”

  “Wait,” I said. “That’s it? Shouldn’t you be fingerprinting me or something?”

  Marty rolled his eyes.

  “I told you, you’re a P.C.”

  He backed the car up, cut the wheel, and pulled a three-point turn. The door rolled back up. Tim and Marty drove away.

  “Can I ask a question?”

  Sam looked back over her shoulder. She was short and chunky and a good fifteen years into middle age. The CorpSec uniform made her look like someone’s maiden aunt on her way to a really unfortunate costume party.

  “Sure, honey. You can ask whatever you want.”

  “Why does Bioteka have a dungeon?”

  We turned a corner and came to a steel door with a tiny barred window at eye level. Sam pressed her palm to a reader on one side. A buzzer sounded, and the door swung smoothly open.

  “This isn’t a dungeon,” Sam said, and led me down another of what seemed to be an endless series of corridors. “It’s a biological containment facility.”

&
nbsp; “Okay,” I said. “Can I leave?”

  She laughed.

  “Oh, honey. No, that’s not gonna happen.”

  She sounded weirdly confident about that. I hadn’t seen another person since Tim and Marty had dropped me off. I was taller than her, at least forty years younger, and she didn’t appear to be armed. Also, I was 100 percent confident I could outrun her.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  I stopped walking. Sam stopped as well, and turned to face me.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t do what you’re thinking about doing,” Sam said. “It won’t end well for you.”

  I stared at her. She stared at me.

  “Look,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I know what you’re thinking, and I’m telling you, it’s a really bad idea. You’re here for your own safety, Hannah. Things are going to be happening outside soon, and your parents . . . well, they’re not going to be good company for a young girl like you for a while. Just come along, and let me show you to your room. It’s really very nice. You’ll have full access to the nets—incoming only, obviously—whatever you like to eat, and plenty of time to exercise or read or whatever you like to do. You’ll stay here until Corporate decides to cut you loose. Think of it as a vacation.”

  I tried to give her the brow-ridge glare, but she just folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head to one side. She suddenly looked much less dumpy for some reason.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “why do you have rooms for people in your biological containment facility? Shouldn’t this place be all clean rooms and test tubes and whatnot?”

  She shrugged.

  “We’ve got that stuff too.”

  “And the guest rooms are here because?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t ask questions unless you really want the answers, honey.”

  I let that sink in for a minute. Finally I said, “So, ah . . . you don’t have any sentient corn here, do you?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she shook her head again, slowly.

  “No,” she said. “We do not have any sentient corn.”

  I sighed.

  “Fine. I guess I can stay for a while.”

  As it turned out, what Sam had said was mostly true. The Bioteka dungeon was pretty much like a mid-list hotel in a lot of ways—the one obvious exception being that I didn’t have the option of checking out. I had a queen bed, and a couch, and a coffee table, and a wallscreen. I had a private bathroom with a shower stall and a soaking tub. I could use the wallscreen to order food, which popped through a hatch in the wall about twenty minutes after I placed my order. The menu was impressive, and they let me have as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. Anything I didn’t eat, I put back into the hatch. I never did find out if there were people on the other end, or if the whole thing was automated, but either way the whole system seemed to work pretty smoothly.

  Sam came to see me once or twice a day for the first week or so, just to make sure I hadn’t hanged myself, I guess. The door she came and went through opened to her palm. It was not interested in opening to mine. There was another door, though, on the opposite wall. That one would open for me. It led out to an enclosed courtyard, with a basketball court, some exercise gear, and a two-hundred-meter track.

  Sam brought me a set of orange jailbird togs on my first morning in the dungeon.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What do I do about laundry?”

  Sam laughed.

  “We don’t do laundry here, sweetie. Just dump your uniform in the hatch when it gets ripe, and I’ll bring you a new one.”

  “Great,” I said. “That’s helpful, I guess. What about my running gear?”

  She shrugged.

  “Like I said—we don’t do laundry.”

  Was I lazy, or stupid? Probably a little of both. Either way, it took me most of that first week to realize that I could rinse out my clothes in the tub. They were pretty much standing up on their own by then, and the smell when I pulled them on was enough to make my eyes water.

  As you can probably guess, I did a crap-ton of running during my time in the dungeon. Over the course of those weeks, I learned one incontrovertible fact: distance training on a short track sucks. That’s true of any short track, but this track in particular was more a square than an oval, and the four turns were sharp enough that I had to switch directions every mile or so to even out the wear on my ankles and knees. Factor in the dizziness and the tedium, and after a few days I was dreaming of a run in the woods the way a desert-island castaway dreams of a steak dinner.

  The thing is, though, I really didn’t have much else to do. There were only so many hours a day that I could spend binge-watching vids on the wallscreen. I ran twice every day—pace work in the morning, and speed work at night. In between, I did abs and stretching and calisthenics and anything else I could think of to pass the time. After a few days, my left IT band started twanging. I stretched more, and ran through it. By the beginning of Week Two, I was starting to see some definite advantages to incarceration, from a training perspective. Not having to worry about school or friends or family really helped with my focus. I hadn’t been soft before, exactly, but I was starting to see muscles pop out in my calves and thighs that I hadn’t known were there.

  I don’t mean to give the impression that I was totally cool with the fact that I’d basically been tossed down the memory hole. I tried asking Sam more than once if anyone had contacted my parents, if they had any idea whether I was alive or dead. She just shrugged and said that kind of stuff was above her pay grade, which I took as a no. I worried about what my disappearance was doing to my dad. I worried about what my mom was going to do to Bioteka when she found out what they’d done. Plotting to wipe out the human race was one thing, but messing with Kara Bergen’s daughter was taking things to a whole other level. I wasn’t angry, exactly, but I knew that I should have been.

  When I found out what had been going on outside while I was running laps and doing squat thrusts, of course, my feelings on the matter got a lot more complicated.

  Somewhere around the end of my first week in the dungeon, I found out that I wasn’t alone. It was breakfast time, give or take, and I was doing my morning thing—looping around the track, working up a sweat, singing to myself as I ran, just to make sure my voice still worked—when a door slid open on the opposite side of the courtyard from mine. I pulled up short. A doughy-looking kid with lank black hair and a patchy beard poked his head out, saw me, and pulled it back in. The door slid closed again.

  I jogged across the courtyard. His door stayed shut. I tried pressing my palm to the reader, but it just beeped and flashed red. So, I went old school and pounded on the door with the side of my fist.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Open up! I want to talk!”

  After three or four seconds of silence, a heavily muffled voice answered.

  “Are you infected?”

  That stopped me.

  “Uh,” I said finally. “Infected with what?”

  “What do you mean, with what? The Goo Flu, moron.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Seriously?” The door slid open. He was about my height and probably a hundred pounds heavier, but from the way he shrank back from me, you’d have thought I was a monster. “How long have you been in here?”

  I stepped into his room. He scuttled back until there was a couch between us.

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” I said. “About a week, I think. What about you?”

  “Huh,” he said. “Have you been getting any newsfeeds?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing but old vids.”

  “Me too. Before they picked me up, though . . .”

  I hopped over the back of the couch and put my feet up on his coffee table. He stayed out of reach, but I think he was starting to realize that I wasn’t a carrier.

  “About that,” I said. “What did th
ey get you for?”

  His eyebrows came together at the bridge of his nose.

  “Get me for? I’m a P.C. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what they told me. Sam said something about needing to keep me away from my parents, but I pretty much assumed that was crap. Also, I kind of helped my friends break into a Bioteka system right before they grabbed me. I figured the whole kidnapping thing actually had something to do with that.”

  He eased himself down onto the opposite end of the couch.

  “Well,” he said. “The what is easy. They’re protecting us from the Goo Flu—mostly they’re afraid we’d get it from our parents, I think. That’s the kind of thing that could really leave a mark, if you know what I mean. The why is that we’re family of Bioteka execs. My mom’s a VP in finance. You?”

  “Dad’s an engineer.”

  He nodded. I nodded. We sat through a long, awkward silence.

  “I’m Hannah, by the way.”

  “Nathan.”

  “Nice to meet you, Nathan.”

  He smiled.

  “You too. Sorry it had to be at the end of the world.”

  Nathan and I spent a lot of time together over the next couple of weeks. As it turned out, he’d been in the dungeon since the middle of Week One, give or take, and he didn’t know much more about what was going on outside than I did. They’d pulled him from his school a few days after they got me. By the time they brought him in, people were already talking about the Goo Flu, even though they really didn’t know what it was or who had set it loose. Nathan had heard that it was an STD, which was largely true, and also that it did weird things to your brain in addition to making you feel like crap. He did not know about the more . . . long term effects, obviously. We didn’t get the full story on those until everything had settled out.

  So anyway, I modified my routine a bit. I still did my running in the morning, followed by stretching and a half hour or so of abs. After that, though, I showered and went over to hang out with Nathan. We watched vids, played Deathstalker 7, and argued about whether we were ever getting out of the dungeon.