Outbreak

by Tarah Benner

  “Let’s get out of here,” says Celdon.

  I nod and shuffle out of the closet behind him. Our footsteps echo loudly in the pristine white tunnel, and a feeling of hopelessness swamps me when I realize how powerless the compound was in the end.

  Just as Death Storm wiped out nearly everyone on the outside, a tiny organism brought down thousands of people in a matter of weeks. The best treatment money can buy was no match for nature. She swept through with a vengeance, killing every human nearby.

  We bypass the megalift and take the stairs up to Systems. The freedom to move on our own two feet feels reassuring, plus neither of us wants to get stuck on the lift if it malfunctions.

  Celdon leads us down the nicest residential tunnel and heads straight for the corner compartment. The door opens easily, and he shoots me a guilty look.

  “I went ahead and overrode all the door codes in the compound,” he mutters. “Just so we can access what we need.”

  Any other time, I might chastise him for flaunting his skills, but I can’t unstick my throat. We’re about to enter a dead family’s compartment — the place where they lived and ate and slept.

  I bet they never thought that when they left for the medical ward, they wouldn’t be coming back.

  As soon as I step inside, I’m blinded by daylight streaming in through the tall windows. The stark white walls magnify its intensity, and it takes several seconds for my eyes to adjust.

  This place makes Celdon’s studio look like a closet; you could fit ten compartments the size of his inside the expansive living area. Sunshine bounces off the polished floor, and all the furniture is sleek, modern, and extremely uncomfortable looking.

  The windows stretch all the way up to the vaulted ceiling, which tapers down in sharp lines to a loft with a sitting area and several upstairs bedrooms.

  On the second level, I can see a tiny staircase winding up toward the ceiling, and I get a pang of envy when I realize that the compartment has its own private entrance to the observation deck.

  “Whose compartment was this?” I ask.

  “The president’s.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  I throw him an admonishing look, but I guess it doesn’t matter whose compartment we choose. Everyone is dead.

  “We should get some sleep,” he says.

  Judging by the sun’s position on the horizon, it’s just past noon, but I’ve been awake for more than thirty hours.

  Suddenly that furniture doesn’t look so uncomfortable. And if everything in the main living area is this nice, I can only imagine how great the beds must feel.

  “You think one of us should stay up to keep watch?” I ask.

  Celdon snorts. “Watch over what? There’s nobody here but us.”

  That thought should put me at ease, but it just makes me sad. “Right.”

  We make the odyssey up the narrow staircase, and as soon as I catch sight of the massive bed in the first room, sleep starts calling me.

  I should brush my teeth, but I realize belatedly that we left our rucksacks in the medical ward. Without turning on a light or even glancing around the room, I collapse onto the fluffy comforter and fall asleep.

  * * *

  I awake in total darkness and instantly panic.

  I’m not in my compartment. The bed is much too large and comfortable, and there’s a huge window to my left with a breathtaking view of the starry night sky — a stark contrast to my streaky window overlooking the Underground platform.

  It takes several seconds for my fuzzy brain to catch up to reality.

  I’m in 119, sleeping in a dead stranger’s bed.

  I reach out for the lamp on the nightstand. When I touch it, a warm glow illuminates the room, and I realize I didn’t wander into a guest room as I’d thought. There’s a soft-looking sweater draped over a high-backed chair and a cluster of beauty products crowding the bureau.

  Whoever lived in this room could have been my age — maybe the president’s daughter or a favorite niece. And now she’s gone.

  I sit up quickly and slide off the bed. Careful not to make a sound, I open the door and tiptoe down the stairs to the living area. A shadow moves in front of the massive window, and I let out a little yelp of surprise.

  The figure turns. It’s only Celdon.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I take several breaths to calm my racing heart. “What are you doing up?” I ask.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” His voice sounds very far away, but when he turns to me, it’s the same old Celdon. “Dead guy’s compartment and all.”

  “They’re all dead guys’ compartments,” I mutter.

  “True. But that doesn’t make it any less creepy.”

  I can’t argue with that.

  Flipping on my interface, I’m startled to see that it’s almost twenty-three hundred.

  “Do you know what time it is?” I ask, feeling a little frantic.

  “Yeah.”

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long! The supply train will be here soon.”

  “I was going to wake you up, but I thought you could use all the sleep you could get.”

  “Well . . . we should get moving.”

  Celdon clears his throat. “Yeah, we should.”

  The silence that stretches between us is heavy with unspoken fears. Neither of us wants to acknowledge that the supply train might not come. We don’t have time to dwell on that possibility.

  Taking one more look around the luxurious open floor plan, I promise myself that I won’t have to spend another night in a dead man’s compartment. And I’m certainly not going to be stuck here for the rest of my life.

  two

  Celdon

  I’ve always tried to avoid silence. Silence feels like death — and there’s plenty of death here to go around.

  I never quite realized what a long descent it is from Systems to the lower levels. It seems a million times longer in the dark with the strap of my bag cutting into my shoulder and nothing to distract me other than the sound of Harper’s breathing.

  It’s kind of amazing to think we have an entire compound to ourselves, but I’ve never wanted to leave a place as much as I do now.

  We splash through yet another puddle of standing water on the middle landing, and Harper quickens her pace. She reaches the next level first and throws her weight against the metal door, bathing the stairwell in the harsh glow of the emergency lights emanating from the Recon tunnel.

  Seeing her standing there ankle-deep in cloudy water with her jacket rolled up to the elbows, I realize how much stronger she is than me. Bid Day didn’t destroy her. If anything, her time in Recon has made her tougher and more determined.

  The telltale rumble of the approaching train echoes down the tunnel, and relief shoots through my body like a hit of surge. We won’t be stuck here forever.

  “Come on!” calls Harper, throwing the door open wider.

  I take the last few stairs two at a time and join her out in the tunnel.

  The Recon level in 119 is even dingier than it is back home. The cinderblock walls are a drab institutional gray, the dirty tile is broken in several places, and the metal compartment doors we pass have obscene messages carved into the chipped paint.

  The screech of brakes is so loud that it hurts my ears, and my heart speeds up at the prospect of escaping this hellhole.

  As we near the “T” in the tunnel that leads to the Underground, I hear the train doors roll open and the slap of workers’ boots on the platform.

  Harper’s breathing has picked up, and her knuckles are white against the wall as she waits for the workers to vacate the premises.

  Somebody barks orders that are indistinguishable over the rumble of activity. Dollies roll down the train, and the workers bang around some more, unloading the empty crates. Harper peeks around the corner and then whips around so fast that we nearly bang heads.

  “Hey! What the —”
r />   “Move! Move! Move!” she hisses.

  “Why?”

  “They’re coming down here!”

  I freeze. Something isn’t right. The Operations workers are supposed to be heading up to Health and Rehab — not slumming down in Recon. But I force my legs to move and follow Harper down the dark tunnel at a run.

  When we reach a row of compartments, she stops and tries the first door. It doesn’t budge.

  She jiggles the handle again and turns to me with a wild look in her eyes. “I thought you unlocked all the doors remotely!”

  My brain is struggling to connect the dots, but I finally realize what the problem is. “The remote unlock command must have timed out.”

  She growls in frustration and tries another. I open my mouth to tell her it’s futile, but then she turns and sprints down the tunnel away from the Underground.

  I follow at a brisk limp. My legs feel heavy and sore after traipsing through the compound yesterday, and I’m definitely not as fit as she is.

  We wind through the maze of compartments until we reach a set of double doors. A tarnished placard over the entrance reads “training center.”

  “No!” Harper breathes.

  I glance down. There’s a chain threaded through the door handles and a heavy-duty padlock holding it in place.

  She wheels around and tries another door, which swings open easily.

  “Come on!” she whispers.

  I follow her inside. The room is cramped and chilly and reeks of plastic and mildew. I only have a second to survey our surroundings before the door slides closed and thrusts us into total darkness.

  Most of the available floor space is occupied by tall metal shelves filled with rubber bins and stacks of gray uniforms. Plastic crates, defunct workout equipment, and overflowing bins of ration packets are scattered haphazardly between the rows.

  This must be the supply room.

  I take one step forward and trip over something tall and wide, barely saving myself from a face-plant into a metal shelf.

  “Shh!” Harper hisses.

  I roll my eyes.

  Then I hear a door creak open and the nearby rumble of a dolly. Muffled voices float through the wall from the other side, and there’s a loud scraping sound as somebody shifts something heavy.

  “They’re in the weapons room,” Harper breathes.

  “I kind of wish we were in there and they were in here,” I mutter. We wouldn’t have to worry about being caught if we were trapped in a room full of assault rifles.

  But before I can voice the joke to Harper, a door to my right swings open, and a triangle of light spills onto the floor.

  My stomach drops. The weapons room and the supply room are connected, and someone is coming in here.

  The Operations worker flips a switch, and the lights flicker on one by one. There’s just a single shelving unit between me and him, and I’m barely concealed by a tub of water bags.

  I try to make my labored breathing as quiet as possible, but it still seems loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. The worker moves down the row of supplies, and a head of messy brown hair appears.

  The worker is preoccupied with a shelf of ammunition. He’s reading the labels on the crates carefully, and I can tell this guy’s never loaded a gun in his life.

  Finally, he seems to find what he’s looking for and turns to grab his dolly. I see his ear and then the flesh of his cheek right before a black blur leaps forward and clobbers him on the back of the head.

  The guy was still turning when he was struck, and I see the light leave his dark brown eyes. He collapses onto the ground like a sack of potatoes, and I gape openmouthed at the spot where he was just standing.

  Harper is hovering behind him, holding a small corroded barbell plate between her hands. She looks horrified.

  “Oh my god,” she mutters. “Did I kill him?”

  “Probably!”

  I bend down to check the guy’s pulse. It takes me a minute to find it, and I let out a breath of relief when I feel the steady rhythm of blood beneath my finger.

  “He’s alive.”

  “I just panicked!” she whispers, glancing over her shoulder at the door to the weapons room. “I think the other guy left.”

  “Shit!” Harper just knocked a guy unconscious!

  “What do we do?” she splutters.

  “I don’t know! Leave?”

  I can’t believe she just knocked somebody out and expects me to come up with a plan.

  “I had to,” she says, as though she’s reading my mind. “If he saw you, he would have blown our whole cover. Constance would have dragged us in . . . tortured us . . .”

  I nod, but my brain is still screaming What the fuck?

  Just when I think things can’t get any more ridiculous, Harper bends down and tugs on the guy’s limp arm.

  “Can you help me?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting him up,” she says, as though this is obvious. “We can’t just leave him here.”

  “The hell we can’t! It’s not like he’s dead.”

  “Do you really want Constance questioning why one of their workers is missing? And what’s going to happen when they find him?”

  “I don’t think he saw me.”

  “We’re wasting time!” she groans. “Just help me!”

  I’m still staring at her like she’s crazy — because she is — but I toss my bag in the corner and bend down to get a grip on Mr. Nosey.

  The guy weighs a ton. He keeps slipping off my shoulder, and when I yank his arm more securely around my neck, it feels too weak and flimsy to support his weight.

  Together, Harper and I drag him out of the supply room and down the dark tunnel. I’m already sweating bullets, and my hand hurts from holding the guy’s wrist in a death grip. If I loosen my hold on him for even a second, he’s going to slip right out of my arms like a bag of Jell-O.

  Miraculously, we don’t encounter another living soul as we make our way back to the Underground platform, but I’m starting to panic again. It’s hard enough to sneak onto the train without being seen, and now we have an extra 170 pounds of dead weight slowing us down.

  Harper carefully transfers her half of the unconscious guy to me, and his mass seems to triple. My knees shake under the weight, and she checks to see if the coast is clear.

  “Now!” she breathes, bending down to take some of the weight back.

  I feel no immediate relief, so she must just be holding his hand or something. But we start moving, and somehow my legs manage to propel us forward.

  I don’t look around. I don’t watch where I’m going. I’m pretty sure I black out somewhere between the Recon tunnel and the train, but when I become aware of my surroundings again, I’m lifting up my foot to step onto the car and depositing the Operations worker behind a stack of crates.

  I breathe a loud sigh of relief and try to straighten my crushed spine. My shoulders and back are still screaming, but Harper looks energized and alert. She definitely wasn’t carrying her fair share.

  “Come on,” she says, moving toward the end of the car.

  “Huh?”

  “You want to ride back to the compound with him? What if he wakes up?”

  Point taken. He’s going to have one hell of a headache — possibly brain damage — from Harper’s psychotic assault.

  The voices are back on the platform again, and I follow her frantically to the next car. The workers haven’t loaded any cargo in here yet, so we keep moving until we find one with a few stacks of crates to hide behind.

  The workers’ voices are drawing nearer. There’s a loud clang as somebody rolls a dolly onto the car, and the dust bunnies near my feet shift as the worker deposits some more crates in front of mine.

  My heart is pumping so hard that I can’t hear anything except the blood throbbing in my ears, and when somebody slams our car door shut, I nearly cry in relief.

  “We made it,” Harper whispers.


  I lean back against the side of the car and wait for my cardiac episode to end. “Yeah.”

  We don’t speak again until the last car door slams and the train lurches beneath us. I feel the wheels grinding along the track as it slowly picks up speed, and I wait with bated breath for someone to burst in at the last minute and throw us off the train.

  No one does.

  As the empty platform flashes by and we’re swallowed by the dark tunnel, I expect to feel a sweet rush of relief that we’re leaving 119 behind.

  But with an unconscious Operations worker lying two doors down, Constance gunning for Harper’s death, and a compound full of rotting corpses, all I can think is that our problems have just begun.

  three

  Eli

  It’s strange to think that I’ve seen more of my brother in the past twenty-four hours than in the past thirteen years combined.

  I can’t stop watching Constance’s surveillance footage of the Fringe. It’s the only concrete evidence that a member of my family is still alive — that I didn’t imagine Owen.

  His cameo doesn’t even last thirty seconds, but there’s no doubt it’s him. The crooked L-shaped scar on his left bicep is a dead giveaway — a souvenir from the time he clipped a tree on his dirt bike.

  The rest of his features are hidden in shadow, but I can just make out the suspicious arch of his brow and the hard set of a jaw that reminds me of Dad.

  He and I could be twins, but we’re very different people. We got separated the night our parents were murdered, when I was eleven and Owen was thirteen.

  Three years later, I was brought into the compound, while Owen was left out on the Fringe to be raised by drifters.

  All those years of hard living have taken a toll on him. Now that he’s an adult, he’s tormented by suspicion and determined to bring down the compounds.

  I glance at the time blinking in the corner of the wall screen. It’s oh-seven hundred, which means I’ve been here all night. Nobody uses the Recon surveillance room after hours, so I knew I’d be safe.

  It’s nothing compared to Constance’s setup — just a glorified closet crowded with monitors. The walls are covered in faded maps of nearby towns, and a leaderboard in the corner of every screen details the date an area was last cleared of drifters.