Outcast

by Lindsey Fairleigh

  “You can’t go back there, Garth,” I said, needing him to grasp the severity of the situation. Of his situation, courtesy of me and my drama. “You can’t go home, and you can’t go to the station.” I turned to face him, reaching for his hand. His darker skin was raw and red, where the pale skin on the back of my hand was already mostly healed. His fate was now tied to mine, and his life was so much more fragile. “You have to disappear until I get this all sorted out.”

  His thick fingers slipped between mine. “I can help you.” His offer was sweet, but there was a wild look in his eyes. It was starting to sink in, and he was grasping for something to hold onto while the rest of his world fell apart.

  I flashed him a weak smile and shook my head. He’d taken an oath the day he earned his badge—serve and protect. Helping me from this point on would mean breaking that oath in every way possible. “You should go to Bainbridge. You’ll be safe with Heru and Lex.”

  Garth stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the gateway. “I want to help you.”

  I looked past him, meeting Dorman’s curious stare. For some reason, what happened between Garth and me next mattered to him. My choice mattered to him. Would I use Garth, or would I protect him? Maybe it would show Dorman what kind of a person I really was. Maybe it would be the thing that determined where his allegiance truly lay, regardless of what happened with the cure.

  I held Dorman’s stare for a moment longer, decision made. I wouldn’t use Garth; I would keep him safe. Always. Even if it meant hurting him another way.

  I looked at Garth, my stare unflinching. “You can’t help me. You’ll only get in my way.”

  His expression hardened, and he pressed his full lips together.

  “I’ll draw a gateway to Bainbridge,” I said, voice flat.

  Garth shook his head. “I’ll drive. There’s something I have to do along the way, anyway.”

  “But you will go there, right?”

  He nodded once.

  I clenched my jaw. “Fine.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Alright, so . . .” Dorman forced out a rough, nervous laugh. “Now that that’s decided . . .”

  17

  I walked Garth the quarter mile to his car, as much to make sure he got there safely as to show him where I’d parked it. It was half past eight, and the street running alongside I-5 was quiet. And Garth was quiet. And I was quiet. We were just a couple bundles of quiet, the two of us, surrounded by more, tense quiet.

  “Listen, Garth,” I started as we jaywalked across the empty street. “I know you’re capable of—”

  “I get it, Kat.” Garth looked up the street, away from me, then glanced my way. “I mean, look at you—you were covered in burns from the gas, head to toe, and now you’re good as new, while I . . .” He trailed off, clearing his throat with a cough. Tear gas is a real bitch on the ol’ esophagus and lungs. “I can’t even begin to understand what it must be like to be one of you . . . to heal the way you do . . . to know you’ll live for centuries while the rest of the world, well . . .” He laughed bitterly, gravel on concrete. “I’m like glass compared to your steel. You’re worried about me. I’m flattered, actually.”

  I eyed him as we walked and he talked, hands in my pockets, tongue tangled in knots.

  He didn’t say anything those final few steps to the car, but when we reached it, he took hold of my upper arms and backed me against the driver’s side. “I might be fragile compared to you, and I might come with a definite expiration date,” he said, leaning into me, our bodies touching from knees to chest. “But I’m not weak, Kat, and I’m not backing down from whatever this is that’s developing between us.”

  I raised my chin, my eyes locked with his. “Which would be what, exactly?”

  His dimples appeared as he smiled, just a little. “I don’t know yet, but I sure as hell plan to find out.” He angled his head downward and leaned in, claiming my lips for a few blissful seconds.

  I probably shouldn’t have let him kiss me, considering that, unlike Garth, I had no intention of indulging in our reckless relationship any further. I could already feel my heart hardening, closing him out. Which is maybe why I savored that last kiss so much.

  Palm to his sternum, I pushed him back a few inches and slipped out from between him and his car. I dug his phone out of my coat pocket and handed it to him. “Use the West Seattle Ferry Terminal,” I said, licking my lips. I could still taste him there, vanilla and coffee. I started across the street. “My people will be expecting you, so if you don’t show up at their gates on Bainbridge in a couple hours, I’ll come after you myself.”

  “Promises, promises . . .”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder. Didn’t say anything. Just looked at him.

  Garth nodded, and a second later, he opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. The engine rumbled to life before I’d reached the sidewalk, and I felt a little of the tension tightening my shoulders ease as he roared away. He was out of this, for now.

  I rubbed my hands together and broke into a jog. It was time for the real work to begin.

  “Do you have a plan yet?” Dom asked me as I neared the eastern gate.

  “Parts of one,” I told him, slowing to a walk. “And yes, it still involves Nik.”

  I passed through the gate, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. Planting my hands on my hips, I stopped and looked around. The first hundred feet or so within the eastern gate was a smaller version of the northern gate’s bazar, only focused solely on ready-to-eat food. It had been bustling with people when Garth and I were on our way out, barely ten minutes ago. Now it was all but abandoned. “Where is everyone?”

  “Was Dorman planning any kind of an assembly or a gathering?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know,” I said as I targeted the nearest person, an elderly Chinese guy manning a fried noodle bar. He was one of the few people still hanging around. “Hey,” I said to him as I approached. “Where’d everyone go?” I pointed to the rest of the thoroughfare with my chin.

  The man squinted, deepening the creases fanning out in the skin around his eyes. “There was shouting in the square,” he said, and I assumed he was referring to the central portion of the Tent District, where Dorman’s office and the hospital were. “Very loud shouting and other sounds, and everyone ran to it.” Noodle Guy was quiet for a moment, then nodded to himself. “But they will come back. Everyone has to eat.”

  I was already running toward the square by the time he finished talking. The crowd was on its way back, hushed murmurs exchanged between people clinging together at the elbows or comforting each other with arms around shoulders and waists. Red-rimmed eyes and the pale skin of shock marked most of them.

  “I have a very bad feeling about this,” Dom said.

  “Gee,” I muttered, “you think?” The closer I drew to the square, the thicker the milling and meandering crowd became, and with me moving against the tide, I had to do my fair share of shoving and offer up a string of excuse-mes and move-its just to make headway.

  There were too many people to see what was going on in the square, and I wasn’t tall enough to see over them, so I did what any logical person would do—I climbed one of the old, rusted shipping containers someone was using as a house. They stacked them up here in threes and fours and fives, the Tent District’s version of apartments. Once I could see over the crowd, it was easy enough to find the eye of the storm.

  Maybe forty feet from the entrance to the hospital-hangar, Dorman knelt on the ground, a small, frail body cradled on his lap and a solid ten feet between him and the crowd encircling him. His head was bowed over the child, his ever-present baseball cap removed. Even from so far away, I could see the blood spattering his clothing and tell that his shoulders were shaking.

  There were other people on the ground near him, some moving, some not. There was so much blood sprayed around on the people and asphalt within that open space that it looked like someone had pou
red out buckets full of dark red paint.

  “What the hell happened?” I said, more talking to myself than to Dom.

  He answered anyway. “It must’ve been one of the kids. If another child entered the final phase of the disease and turned rabid unexpectedly . . .”

  Slowly, I shook my head. “But they’re sedated. How could any of their bodies override the drugs?”

  “I shall confer with Neffe. I’ll return shortly.”

  I nodded and jumped down from the side of the shipping container. My hands smelled like rust and iron and paint, and I wrinkled my nose even as I returned to shoving my way through the crowd. I needed to get to Dorman to find out exactly what happened. If the sedative wasn’t enough, we’d have to come up with another plan. There were dozens of kids on the verge of entering the final phase, even more adults not long after that. If just one small child could do this much damage—infect who knew how many more people—what would happen if two went wild simultaneously? Or more?

  It took me maybe five minutes to fight my way through the crowd, and I stepped on more than a few toes in the process. The Nejerets at least knew to get out of my way, and the humans proved themselves quick learners. By the time I reached the clearing, Dorman was on his feet, the child limp on the ground at his toes. The little boy’s eyes were open. Glazed over. Unseeing.

  I swallowed roughly as I stepped into the clearing. “What the hell happened?”

  Dorman turned to me, the color drained from his face and his lips parted. He had a dazed look in his eyes that spoke undoubtedly of shock. “I didn’t have a choice.” He was looking at me, but it was clear that he wasn’t seeing me. “Jonny—he was out of control. He attacked every person who came near him . . . anyone he could get his hands on. It took everyone to catch him. I—I—I had to—to—”

  “Hey,” I said, approaching Dorman with my hands upraised, palms out, like I was dealing with a wounded animal. With an unpredictable creature. “Hey there, Dorman, you’re alright. It’s all going to be alright.” I placed a hand on his shoulder and leaned in closer, weaving my head slowly this way and that until I managed to catch his faraway gaze.

  His eyes focused, and he shook his head. “I killed him.”

  I nodded, squeezing his shoulder through his raincoat. “I know. You did what had to be done.” I shot a quick glance around at all of the terrified and worried faces.

  Those closest to the clearing were Nejerets, immune to the infection. They’d linked arms, forming a living barrier. From the looks of it, all of the people within the circle were human and had blood on them—Jonny’s blood or their own, I wasn’t sure. But I suspected they were being held here by force. By that living barrier. Because they were believed to be infected now, too.

  “Let’s take care of the living,” I told Dorman. “We can deal with the dead later.”

  It took a few seconds, but Dorman finally blinked, then nodded. He’d just opened his mouth to address his people when someone screamed. It sounded like it came from the hospital.

  Both of our heads snapped toward the sound, and a second later, I lunged into a dead sprint. If another of the sick kids entered the rabid stage and somehow broke free of the sedative’s hold while literally every able-bodied person was out in the square, then there’d be nobody in the hospital to protect those who were too sick or injured to protect themselves. It would be a bloodbath. A full-on massacre.

  The ring of Nejerets parted as I hurtled toward them, as did the first few people standing behind them, but once I was well into the throng, I had to resort to less civil methods for ensuring my forward momentum continued. “Move!” I shouted, elbowing a man in the chest. I stiff-armed the woman behind him in the shoulder, and the people beyond them started to get the point. Pretty soon, the masses parted like I was Moses.

  Another scream, pained this time. Bloodcurdling.

  I leaned forward and ran like hell. Once I was through the hospital’s doors, I didn’t have to go much further. The sight that greeted me was so startling, so wrong, that I stopped dead in my tracks and stared for a fraction of a second. Long enough for my jaw to drop. For my stomach to turn.

  A little girl, maybe six or seven, straddled the patient in the cot in the middle row, three beds in. It was a teenage boy with a cast on his right leg. A cast that seemed to have made it impossible for him to escape from the wraithlike child tearing into his neck and chest with her bloodstained fingernails. She was making an unearthly noise, a snarl mixed with a whine and a growl that no human vocal chords should ever have been capable of producing. A few patients huddled in the corners, and those who were more mobile stumbled toward the exit, panic blazing in their eyes. Several littered the floor and beds around the little girl’s current victim, spattered and smeared with blood. Apparently they’d tried to help. They’d failed.

  I heard footsteps pounding the pavement behind me, knocking me out of my momentary horrified stupor. I leapt over the first cot, then hurtled the next, body slamming into the little girl. She flew back several feet, landing askew on the next cot over. Luckily, it was empty. The one beyond it, not so much, and that patient, though untouched by the rabid child, didn’t look like she’d be up and moving on her own any time soon. It was too late for the boy, he was bleeding out as I stood there, but if I could stop the little girl from hurting anyone else—from infecting anyone else, as sure of a death as tearing out their throats with those clawlike fingers—it wouldn’t be a complete fail in my book.

  The girl scrabbled around until she was crouched on the cot on feet and hands. Blood was smeared all over her nightgown and clumped in her dirty blonde hair. Her eyes were so bloodshot it looked as though all the blood vessels in her eyeballs had burst. Maybe they had. I didn’t know the nitty-gritty of the disease’s symptoms.

  The girl pulled back her lips, revealing a mishmash of adult and kid teeth, along with a couple gaps where her baby teeth were missing. She made that sound again, that bone-chilling, whiny snarl.

  A shiver crawled up my spine.

  And then she lunged at me.

  I was so shocked by how quickly she could move that my deflection of her attack was slower than it should’ve been. But she was a sick little girl and she couldn’t possibly be this strong and how could I bring myself to hurt—

  Her jagged fingernails caught on my cheek, gouging the side of my face in stops and starts. She grabbed a chunk of my hair in her impossibly strong grip and yanked my head to the side, exposing my neck. For the kill.

  Even a Nejeret will die from a ripped-out throat. And there was no way I was about to let some kid kill me.

  I wedged my boot between us, pressing the sole into her belly, and rolled onto my back at the same time as I kicked out. She might’ve had the adrenaline-fueled strength of a pro boxer, but she was still as light as a young child, and I launched her far. All forty-five pounds of her flew even farther than I’d intended, and her frail body slammed against the corrugated metal wall. The boom of her impact echoed throughout the room, a gong of pain and death.

  She sat limp for a moment, but impossibly, she lifted her head and managed to gather her feet under herself. She was preparing to spring at me again.

  “Stay down,” I said through gritted teeth as I stalked toward her, hoping some part of her brain was still lucid. “Please, just stay down.”

  She placed her hands in front of her on the floor and leaned forward.

  “Damn it,” I howled, reaching over my shoulder to draw my sword. It was easy enough to stop her once Mercy had joined the fight. As the At blade slid through her little body, it was one of the few times Mercy proved the rightness of her name. The girl had already been at death’s door. She been fated to die the second she contracted that fucking disease. At least, now, her suffering was at an end.

  The footsteps behind me stopped, and I pulled Mercy’s blade free as I turned my head to glance over my shoulder. “The sedative isn’t working,” I said to Dorman. “When they get close to the final phase, en
d it.”

  He nodded, his throat working but no sound coming out.

  I wiped my sword’s blade on my jeans until the At was invisible once more, then stood and re-sheathed it. I stared down at the little girl lying on the floor. Somehow her face was absent of bloodstains, though the rest of her seemed bathed in the stuff. She almost looked like she was asleep.

  “What was her name?” I asked softly.

  “Ab—” Dorman cleared his throat. “Abigail. Her name was Abigail.”

  “Any family?”

  “A mother, but she’s sick, too.”

  I raised my eyes to the ceiling so high above and blinked several times, then took a deep breath. “That’s a blessing, then.”

  “Yes,” Dorman said. “It is.”

  18

  Before I left the Tent District, seven kids had to be euthanized. Neffe sent word to me through Dom about her theory that the spike of epinephrine that floods the infected person’s system as they enter the final, rabid stage of the disease must be so intense that, in some cases, it’s able to override any sedatives. She said that increasing the already tripled dosage further might help keep them down—might—but such a high dosage was also just as likely to kill them.

  Apparently she and Aset and a team of other brilliant, scientifically minded Nejerets had been tirelessly working in their lab on Bainbridge since they first received the blood samples from Nik. They had some idea of how the disease worked—some sort of an attack on both the body and the soul—but not enough to slow it down, let alone stop it. It was unlike anything they’d ever seen, and considering they had millennia of experience in the field, that fact scared the shit out of me.

  Dom had known Neffe for centuries, and he’d worked closely with her for almost as long. He knew how to read her, and according to him, she wasn’t just flummoxed by this disease; she was afraid. Such a thing almost never happened, and that scared the shit out of me even more.