Outbreak

by Tarah Benner

  He grins at me through the blast of water, and I feel myself go a little red as I stare at the tiny droplets clinging to his blond eyelashes and ruddy lips.

  Then the water stops, and he turns to open the door on the other side. There’s a stack of fluffy towels that smell like bleach and a bunch of scrubs in odd sizes waiting on the shelf. I hurriedly dry off my hair, and we turn away from each other to change.

  I don’t know what that was, but a new excitement is thrumming through my veins that has nothing to do with the medical miracle I’m about to witness.

  Maybe I don’t have to hate Caleb after all.

  eleven

  Sawyer

  I’ve watched dozens of surgeries from the gallery above this operating theater, but I’ve never had the urge to fall right through the glass and shout in the patient’s ear, Come on! You can do it!

  I’ve always been a detached observer, as though it was a staged production where the nurses, doctors, and even the patient knew exactly what was about to happen.

  This is nothing like that.

  The doctors put Lenny in suspended animation — a procedure I’ve read about but never actually seen. She’s lying on the operating table under layers of scratchy blue paper with her arms at her sides. The surgical lighting makes her look even more like a corpse: Her hair is a bright, unnatural orange, and her skin is practically translucent.

  She looks dead because she is, technically. When her heart stopped, the doctors pumped all the blood from her body and replaced it with a saline solution. Chilling her body should delay brain death and buy the doctors a few hours to fix the damage to her organs and repopulate her body with blood.

  “That’s incredible,” breathes Caleb.

  The look on his face captures the way I’m feeling exactly. His nose is barely an inch from the glass, and I can see Lenny’s body reflected in his wide eyes.

  “She still might not make it.”

  He glances over at me. “She definitely wouldn’t have made it if it weren’t for you. Her heart stopped right when she got here. A few more minutes, and . . .”

  I swallow, trying not to focus on the “what ifs.”

  Caleb turns back to watch the operation, and his face falls into a scowl. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “That it’s all true. I thought ExCon was making everything up about the hostile survivors in the cleared zone, but someone had to shoot her.”

  “Oh.” I hurriedly school my expression. “Yeah . . . you’re right.”

  I cringe. I’m horrible at lying.

  Harper told me that Recon was fending off Death Storm survivors near the compound, but most interns aren’t privy to that type of information. The doctors and nurses who work with Recon patients inevitably discover bits and pieces of what’s going on out on the Fringe, but they’re trained not to ask questions that aren’t directly related to the patient’s health.

  Because Health and Rehab is understaffed and Caleb and I have security clearance, we’ve been called upon to work a few Fringe retrievals. He’s had a taste of what Recon workers go through, but this must be his first time seeing patients after a deployment went badly wrong.

  “The board’s been lying to us all this time,” he continues. “I’m honestly surprised they’ve been able to keep it quiet for so long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just . . . how have people not wondered why so many Recon workers just disappear?”

  “Well . . . you never did before now.”

  I realize too late that my comment may have sounded like an accusation, so I clear my throat and add, “I never did, either.”

  “I know.” Caleb shakes his head, looking angry with himself. “It isn’t right. Nobody even cares. It’s like they’re invisible. You can bet if a bunch of tier-one workers started disappearing, people would ask questions. Hell, it would be all over the news feeds.”

  “I think you might be overestimating how much the other sections care about us.”

  “Shit. You might be right. Everyone’s just in their own little bubble around here.”

  A heavy silence falls between us, and I feel the heat of shame creep over me. It’s so strange to be standing here having a real conversation with Caleb MacAvoy. I’ve spent so much time and energy hating him for trying to take what’s mine that I never bothered to get to know him. It’s almost as bad as no one caring what happens to Recon workers.

  “She’s our age, you know,” he murmurs, staring down at Lenny. “I saw her chart. God. It’s unbelievable what they expect their first years to do.”

  I open my mouth to agree, but my throat feels too tight. Beside the operating table sits a stainless steel tray with a dozen tiny bullet fragments that they pulled from Lenny’s lifeless body. Suddenly my own problems seem embarrassingly shallow.

  What have I been doing? For the past few months, my entire existence has centered around getting ahead in Health and Rehab. I’ve barely seen Harper other than when she was injured or being detained here in psychiatric holding, and I haven’t so much as grabbed dinner with any of the other interns. It’s as though I’ve put my entire life on hold and refused to think about all the big important things going on in the compound.

  “They’re reviving her,” Caleb breathes.

  His voice is a welcome relief from my own guilty thoughts.

  I lean forward slightly, and I actually feel my nose hit the glass.

  Lenny’s blood flows through the curled tubes hanging off the operating table, making a graceful loop that looks like a signature. We watch in awe as it courses back into her veins, shooting through the tubes as though it’s in a hurry to return home.

  Within minutes, a faint pinkish hue begins to color her skin as her cold corpse transforms into a warm, almost-living body. They wait.

  Then the surgeon bends over her, says something to the nurse, and attempts to restart her heart.

  We hold our breath as the seconds tick by.

  Then the unthinkable happens: Lenny comes back from the dead.

  The first beep on the monitor is so faint it could have been my imagination, but then her heart rate picks up and resumes its slow but steady rhythm.

  I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, and Caleb’s triumphant laughter shatters the tension. My laugh comes out choked with emotion.

  I turn to him, and he throws his arms around my shoulders. The atmosphere of celebration inside the tiny gallery overwhelms the awkwardness, and we laugh and murmur our relief until the moment passes.

  When I pull away, Caleb is still grinning, and I have a fast, fleeting thought that he’s actually really good-looking. That’s enough to make the easy smile slip from my face.

  “Thanks for watching with me,” I say, feeling uncomfortable. “And for . . . you know.”

  “Sure.”

  Am I imagining how strange his voice sounds?

  “I better go tell Harper the good news. I have to examine her anyway.”

  Voicing my plan surprises even me. In the aftermath of the retrieval and my own emotional turmoil, Harper’s exam had completely slipped my mind. I shake my head and leave the gallery, angry with myself for losing focus.

  Luckily, the ward is busy today, so no one will notice that Harper has been waiting in the exam room for an awfully long time. I take a deep breath to collect myself and rap loudly on her door.

  “Come in.” Harper’s voice sounds oddly nasally, and I get a pang of guilt when I realize how worried she must be.

  I push the door open and rush inside.

  As soon as I see her, my heart breaks in two. Harper looks tiny and childlike, shivering on the table in her thin hospital gown. She’s got a mountain of damp tissues piled up beside her, and her eyes are red and bloodshot.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, putting an arm around her.

  “H-how’s Lenny?” she gasps, her glassy eyes filling with tears again.

  “She’s fine. I’m sorry.
I should have been in sooner. I was watching her operation. Her heart stopped, but it looks like they were able to fix the damage from the bullet and restart it. They had to put her body in hibernation mode to do it, but she should wake up in a few hours.”

  “Oh my god,” Harper whispers, her head dipping down in relief. “I can’t believe it was her. I saw it happen, and I still can’t believe it. She wasn’t supposed to be sent out yet.”

  “Jayden’s speeding up deployment?”

  “I don’t know what she’s doing. Lenny wasn’t ready. None of us were.”

  I know I shouldn’t ask, but I’m in so much trouble as it is, and my conversation with Caleb just magnified my curiosity. “Harper . . . what the hell is going on out there?”

  There’s a long pause, and when Harper looks up at me, her expression is haunted.

  “Oh my god, Sawyer. It’s so much worse than we thought.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “There are so many of them. They’re congregating just a few miles away, and now they have the technology to pick us off one by one.”

  “Hang on. How do you know that?”

  Harper’s eyes widen, and she glances furtively at the closed door. “Eli and I found their new base. We . . . we pretended to be drifters, and they let us inside.”

  The heaviness of that statement falls over me with a crushing force. “What?”

  “There’s more.”

  I don’t know how there could possibly be more, but judging by the frantic look in Harper’s eyes, it’s something huge.

  She opens her mouth to speak, but she’s interrupted by the beep of my interface. It shakes me out of my trance, and I glance at the message flashing in front of my eyes.

  “Shit.”

  It’s from Watson, reminding me of our meeting in a few minutes.

  Dread settles over me, and I immediately remember that I’m supposed to be examining Harper and taking a blood sample.

  “I have to draw some blood,” I say, grimacing when I realize that the sample is going to be late. I am really off my game today.

  She holds out her arm, and my hands are a little shaky as I tie the tourniquet around her bicep. I’ve done this a million times, but I’m still on edge from the Fringe retrieval.

  Harper makes a fist, and I stick the needle in her vein. It’s not my best work, but the pain barely registers on her face as I fill two vacutainers with blood.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Okay, I guess. I’m just tired.”

  “I’d be surprised if you weren’t.”

  I finish drawing her blood and hold a piece of gauze to the needle prick to stop the bleeding.

  “I’ll get these to the lab. They’re going to want to keep you under observation for a couple of days to monitor your white count and look for signs of radiation poisoning.”

  “How’s Eli?” she asks. “He wasn’t wearing his mask when we went with the drifters, and —”

  “He took off his mask?”

  I can’t imagine how Eli could be so stupid. Going out onto the Fringe is dangerous enough, but doing it without a mask is suicide.

  Harper shakes her head impatiently, and I can tell she’s getting ready to launch into whatever she was about to tell me. “He —”

  My interface beeps again — more frantically this time. It’s from the lab, wanting to know where Harper’s blood samples are.

  I sigh. “I’m sorry. I have to run this over for analysis. But I’ll be back. And I’ll check Eli’s dosimeter to see how much radiation he was exposed to.”

  Harper purses her lips together, trying not to cry. I feel bad for adding to her worries, but Harper is my best friend. I can’t lie to her.

  If Eli went without his mask, there’s a strong possibility he’s going to have serious radiation poisoning.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I whisper, squeezing the arm I didn’t draw blood from. “Eli’s strong.”

  Harper nods without meeting my gaze, slowly gathering her composure and regaining some of that inner toughness I wish I could summon.

  “I’ll be back.”

  * * *

  I always dread making a handoff at the lab. The technicians in the Progressive Research Unit have an inflated sense of self-importance, and the one called Marge gives me a condescending sneer as I roll the vials of blood across the steel table.

  “You’re late,” she snaps.

  “I know. I’m sorry, Marge. There was an emergency with one of the other Recon patients.”

  “I need this within the hour after exposure, and this sample is late.”

  I nod quickly. I’d agree to anything to avoid a full-blown lecture. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  She gives me a stern look but doesn’t say anything else.

  For some reason, the lab techs are very particular about the samples collected from Recon operatives just returning from the Fringe. It seems strange, considering how little they care about every other aspect of their treatment. I know they need properly timed samples to watch for a sudden drop in white blood cells, but once radiation poisoning is confirmed, the techs aren’t as quick to process patients’ lab work.

  I only have a few minutes before my meeting with Watson, so I head straight to the supply decontamination room in the hope that they haven’t cleared Eli’s dosimeter yet.

  An enormous radioactive symbol fills the center of the dented metal door. I stop to don a hazmat suit and then punch in the door code and wait for the tired beep. The SDR is just a glorified storage area, but you need security clearance to access it.

  The walls are a dull grayish white, and the concrete floor dips near the middle for drainage. Shelves line the back wall, and a long stainless steel table gleams under the bluish light running down the center of the ceiling.

  I’m relieved to have the place to myself. It’s unusual for anyone who doesn’t work the decontamination unit to be in here, and it could lead to some awkward questions. Most physicians just wait for the decontamination workers to post the dosimeter readings to the patient’s file, but then again, most physicians aren’t friends with any Recon operatives.

  Eli’s rucksack and uniform are stuffed in a rubber tub at the end of the table, as though someone just dumped it there and ran off to erase the trail of radioactive particles I left behind.

  His dosimeter is still clipped to his holster, and I press the button on the top to beam the readings straight to my interface. I turn to go as soon as I hear the low beep, but then I remember Eli clutching his rucksack to his chest like his first-born child.

  I’ve only spent a limited amount of time with him, but Eli doesn’t strike me as the type of person to lose it after a deployment. He’s too experienced for that.

  There’s something important in his rucksack, and I’d bet it’s related to whatever Harper was trying to tell me.

  I pause for several seconds, listening intently for the sound of footsteps coming down the tunnel. Hearing nothing, I reach over and grab his rucksack and open the flap hanging over the drawstring.

  There’s nothing unusual inside — just a dozen or so ration packets, a half-empty water pouch, a first aid kit, and extra ammunition. I lay it all out on the table and stare at the items as though they might tell me something.

  What was it that Eli wanted to protect?

  He could have just been scared and flustered, clinging to something solid to reassure himself that he was alive. But it doesn’t fit.

  Frustrated, I tip one more stray ration packet onto the table and hear a tiny metallic clink.

  Holding the bag up to the light, I see a little zip pocket sewn into the lining. I stick my hand inside and retrieve two items: a silver charm necklace with a bright blue stone and an old photograph.

  My heart beats a little faster. I’ve never held a physical photograph before. People had them before Death Storm, but I never saw a need for one. This picture is crinkled around the edges and slightly discolored, but those things just make it se
em more real.

  It’s a picture of a woman in her late thirties, a man who looks a few years older, and two young boys — probably the couple’s children.

  I’m not sure why Eli would have this photograph in his possession. He knows better than anyone that it’s illegal to bring pre–Death Storm relics in from the Fringe. It’s also kind of bizarre that he would want a random picture from someone else’s life.

  Still, it could be important, so I carefully fold the photo along the deep crease in the middle and go to stick it in my pocket. But something on the back catches my eye. It’s a line of faded cursive handwriting scrawled along the edge in blue ink: Camping at Fishlake; Owen age 12, Eli age 10.

  That’s when I stop breathing.

  I unfold the photo again and stare at the two little boys. The younger one is squinting in the sunlight, but his features are clearly visible. He’s got brown, almost black, hair and big blue eyes. He’s small and lanky, but it’s definitely a ten-year-old version of Eli.

  Now that I know it’s him, I can’t believe I didn’t see the resemblance before. That must mean the older boy is his brother.

  He could be Eli’s twin, only he’s taller and has a little more meat on his bones. There’s also something in the eyes that sets them apart: His brother has the look of a born troublemaker.

  That’s when I realize that the photo and necklace are probably all Eli has left of his family. That would explain why he was guarding them with his life, but not why he brought them along for his deployment. They’d be much safer in his compartment — unless he brought them back from the Fringe today.

  That can only mean one thing. It seems so unlikely, but the evidence is undeniable.

  Somehow, somewhere, a member of Eli’s family is still alive.

  twelve

  Eli

  Growing up in the Institute, there were times I used to think Miles was telepathic. He always seemed to have a sixth sense for when I was getting the shit beat out of me, and he’d turn up just in time to help. When we’d turn back to back to fight our way out of a corner, we moved around each other as though we shared one brain.