Plague Island

by Justin D'Ath

  But what was the use of being a superhero if you couldn’t save your best friend?

  Birdy’s fever had returned. He could feel the heat through her wet clothes. Her face glistened with sweat. By the time they reached the top of the hill, she was asleep again.

  Or unconscious.

  Stage three.

  Colt looked for somewhere to set her down. He needed to free his hands so he could use the phone. But there was no flat ground. The hilltop gaped open before him like a huge, black mouth. It looked like the crater of an ancient volcano.

  Colt stood on its lip, cradling Birdy’s small, limp body in his arms, and peered into the hole. Something was down there.

  He took a deep breath. Was it possible to control his powers? Widening his eyes, he stared into the crater and willed the darkness away.

  Nothing happened at first.

  Then, slowly, his eyes started to glow. They grew steadily brighter as he concentrated, pushing back the shadows and illuminating a small pool of water at the bottom of the crater below him. A ring of ferns, bushes and tropical vines overhung its banks. Colt sniffed the air like some long-forgotten Lost World animal following a scent.

  The water smelled fresh. His super-sensitive nose detected something else, too: rats. Silver eyes stared up at him from every crack, fissure and cranny in the crater’s steep, rocky walls. So this was where they lived.

  ‘Buzz off!’ Colt said. He spoke louder than he’d intended, and every last one of the rats ducked out of sight.

  There was nowhere safe to put Birdy. Colt held her in his lap and sat on the edge of the crater – facing inwards in case the rats tried anything. He pulled out the mobile phone.

  His mother answered his call on the second ring. ‘Colt! . . . really you?’

  The signal wasn’t good – her voice was fading in and out.

  ‘Yes, Mum, it’s me, Colt. We’re on a little island called Plague Island.’

  ‘. . . already know where you . . . boat on its . . .’ said his mother’s distant, wavering voice.

  So Ali had kept his promise. Or they’d used PhoneTrack to trace the SIM chip in James’s phone. Either way, help was coming.

  ‘When will the boat get here?’ Colt asked.

  ‘It should . . . sometime in the . . . haven’t heard much . . . Katt won’t let . . .’

  Colt’s heart skipped a beat at her mention of his arch enemy, Officer Katt. What had she got to do with any of this, anyway?

  ‘Mum, I didn’t hear that last bit. What was that about Officer Katt?’

  There was a period of silence, then he heard his mother’s voice again, very faintly, saying something about the circus and being locked in.

  ‘Mum?’ he interrupted. ‘Could you say that again? Who’s locked in?’

  He didn’t hear her answer, because Birdy suddenly jerked in his arms and he nearly dropped the phone. When he got it back to his ear, he’d forgotten all about Officer Katt.

  ‘Mum!’ he cried. ‘Please listen! Birdy’s been bitten by a ghost rat. She’s unconscious – she’s almost reached stage four. I don’t know what to do! Mum? Mum!’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Mum, are you there?’

  Silence. The connection was gone.

  Colt hit Redial. No Signal. He tried several more times, but the same message kept appearing.

  Finally another message flashed on the screen: Battery Low.

  Colt’s eyes swam with tears. The situation was hopeless. He switched the phone off. It no longer mattered whether he talked to his mother or not. A boat was on its way to the island, but it wouldn’t arrive till the next day at the earliest, and only one person would be alive when it got there.

  Birdy had rat flu. She was beyond help now. The fever was burning her up and she was starting to jerk and twitch.

  It was the beginning of stage four.

  Blinking away his tears, Colt rose shakily to his feet. He set off down the hill with Birdy in his arms. He would take her back to the lagoon and cool her in the water.

  He mightn’t be able to save her, but he could try to delay stage five for just a little bit longer.

  Colt carried Birdy into the lagoon and sat down in the shallows. It was soft sand underneath him, but something hard was there, too. He shuffled sideways to find a more comfortable spot. The hard thing moved with him. It must be in my pocket, Colt thought. He adjusted his grip on Birdy to free up one hand, then slid whatever-it-was out. James’s phone. Oops! How many times had it been underwater today? (Well, today and yesterday.) Colt tossed it ashore. James might want it back. Even if water had got into it, they’d be able to save the data on the SIM chip. Colt’s body went rigid. Something didn’t make sense.

  His mother had called him! How did she know he had James’s phone? And how did she know the number?

  Colt puzzled over it for few moments. Slowly the puzzle-pieces came together. James must have gone to the police after he landed the Cessna and reported what had happened. Or – and this was more likely – he’d radioed them from the Cessna. The police would have passed on what James told them to Colt’s mother. They must have given her James’s phone number.

  It all made perfectly good sense.

  But then Colt remembered something even more puzzling. When he and James were in the Cessna, Colt had dialled his mother’s number and her name, Kristin, had appeared on the screen of James’s phone.

  What was going on there? Was his mother’s number in James’s address book?

  Did they know each other?

  Before he realised what he was doing, Colt was back on his feet, wading towards the beach. He laid Birdy gently on the soft, dry sand, then picked up James’s phone. Hoping there was still enough charge left in its battery, he turned it on, clicked on the address book and scrolled down till he came to K. And there it was – his mother’s name and number.

  (Her old number, Colt thought, because Ranga would almost certainly have destroyed her SIM chip by now – probably right after Colt phoned him.)

  Battery Low began flashing again on the foggy blue screen. Colt quickly returned to the menu and clicked on the call history. James had made several calls to his mother over the past few weeks and sent one e-Vox message. Colt opened it.

  Astounding development! Tested

  enzyme-C on grs. It seems to block

  resistance to rf. Call me. J

  The e-Vox was dated two weeks earlier. Colt wondered what it meant. He knew vaguely what an enzyme was, but grs and rf meant nothing to him. Work talk, he supposed. James must be a vet like his mother. That would explain why they knew each other.

  Something hit his ankle. It was Birdy. She’d kicked him!

  ‘Birdy?’ He crouched next to her. ‘Are you awake?’

  She wasn’t awake. Her eyes were closed. But her legs were threshing in the sand like someone pretending to run while lying down. And that wasn’t the worst bit. Birdy’s head was twisting violently from side to side and there were bubbles coming from her mouth. She was having a full-on convulsion. Stage four!

  Colt dropped the phone, scooped her up and ran with her back into the water. He had to cool her down, had to stop the convulsions before she moved to stage five (heart failure and death). But he could barely restrain her threshing movements. It was scary how strong she’d become. Every last scrap of energy in Birdy’s small body was fighting to stay alive – twisting and kicking and punching, as if Colt was the enemy, not the deadly rat flu inside her.

  Then something connected in Colt’s brain. Rf stood for rat flu.

  James had been e-Voxing his mother about rat flu! Grs stood for ghost rats.

  Colt managed to restrain Birdy’s flaying arms and lowered her into the water. Her legs went on madly kicking and splashing, but there was nothing he could do about it. Getting her cool was the most important thing.

  It was amazing how the human brain worked. Even while Colt was struggling with Birdy, his mind was working on another problem.

  What
if . . . what if the C in enzyme-C stood for Colt?!

  Now everything began to fall into place: James, the rats he kept, even why he was so interested in Colt.

  About two weeks ago, Colt’s mother had come to him with a strange request. She’d wanted to take a sample of his blood to send to a former colleague of hers, who was a brilliant scientist. Colt had had blood tests a few months earlier and the doctors had found a strange enzyme that they’d never seen before. Kristin hoped the scientist could discover what it was.

  James must have been that scientist. The e-Vox made that clear. He’d extracted the enzyme from Colt’s blood sample and tested it on some ghost rats. It seemed like a pretty weird thing to do, but Colt knew that scientists had used rats in laboratory experiments back in the Animal Days. That’s how rat flu got started – an experiment with a laboratory rat went wrong. It had happened in the very same laboratory where Colt’s mother used to work. Had James worked there too? It didn’t matter. What mattered right now was the result of James’s latest experiment, his astounding development. Enzyme-C blocked the resistance to rat flu in ghost rats.

  Colt didn’t really know what that meant. He wasn’t a scientist. But he did know that ghost rats didn’t get rat flu – they had a natural resistance to the virus that let them pass it on to other animals without catching it themselves. But according to James’s e-Vox, enzyme-C changed that. It sounded like the ghost rats he’d tested it on might have actually caught rat flu!

  Which means, Colt thought, there’s something in my blood that reverses the effects of rat flu in rats.

  Would it reverse rat flu in humans?

  Thirty seconds later they were back at the shelter. Colt laid Birdy gently on the ground. She was still in a coma, but she was no longer threshing and kicking. Perhaps it was the onset of stage five.

  There was no time to lose.

  Colt rummaged through his pockets and found the last of the mussels. He cracked it open with his teeth. But instead of eating the slimy contents, he shucked them onto the ground and broke the two wings of shell apart. Selecting one, he carefully wiped it clean on the front of his T-shirt.

  Then he ran it across one of his fingertips like a knife. Blood shone red in the pale light from his glowing eyes.

  Colt crouched over Birdy. Lifting one of her pale, sweaty hands, he positioned the shell’s sharp, blade-like edge against her skin. But he couldn’t do it – couldn’t cut Birdy. Anyway, he didn’t have to – already there was a small open wound in the webbing of her thumb where the ghost rat had bitten her.

  Please make this work!

  Colt pressed his bleeding finger against the rat bite on Birdy’s small hand.

  Nothing happened.

  I need my head read! he thought. This is nuts! Nobody has ever survived the bite of a ghost rat! Except me. And Mum stopped the virus before it reached stage one.

  Birdy had reached stage five.

  She was going to die.

  Colt was about to pull his finger away when he noticed a prickle of goosebumps on the back of Birdy’s hand. He held his breath.

  The goosebumps were spreading.

  Slowly they travelled over Birdy’s wrist, then went running up her arm like a long, bumpy rash.

  Within five minutes, Birdy was covered in them from head to toe.

  Within thirty minutes, her fever had gone.

  Two hours later, as dawn broke over the island, Birdy opened her eyes and saw Colt kneeling next to her. He held a half coconut shell, brimming with fresh water.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said.

  They lay side by side on the island’s outer beach, warming themselves in the early morning sunshine as they waited for the rescue boat to arrive.

  ‘Don’t you remember anything?’ Colt asked.

  Birdy picked at a piece of driftwood. ‘I dreamed you found a phone.’

  ‘I did. It belongs to James.’

  ‘The detective reporter,’ Birdy said, grinning.

  ‘The scientist,’ he corrected her.

  ‘What makes you think he’s a scientist?’ she asked.

  ‘Something Mum did a couple of weeks ago,’ Colt said. ‘Remember how I ended up in hospital the night she and I first came to see the circus?’

  ‘How could I forget? You collapsed in the middle of the circus ring and went into a coma.’

  ‘It wasn’t a coma,’ he said. ‘I was just asleep.’

  ‘For three days?’ Birdy’s eyebrows went up. ‘That’s a coma, Colt.’

  He shrugged. ‘Anyway, when I wouldn’t wake up, they did some tests and found something weird in my blood that nobody had ever seen before.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘That’s the point – nobody at the hospital knew. It was some kind of enzyme unknown to science. So two weeks ago Mum took another blood sample and sent it to this guy she used to work with back in the old days when she was a scientist.’

  ‘And this guy was James?’ Birdy said.

  ‘Mum wouldn’t tell me who he was,’ Colt said. ‘But it makes sense. I found an e-Vox message in his phone. To my mother.’

  Birdy rolled over and eyed him seriously – she didn’t look like someone who had been at death’s door only a few hours earlier. ‘What did it say?’

  He told her about the message, and about everything else that had happened while she’d been unconscious.

  As she listened, Birdy’s eyes grew wider and wider. ’So this thing in your blood made me better,’ she said softly.

  ‘I guess so.’

  Colt looked at his finger. Like all the cuts and scratches on his legs, the wound had healed itself. All that remained was a tiny white scar. It nearly matched the scar on his other hand, where a ghost rat had bitten him twelve years earlier – back in the days when rat flu was about to spread across the whole world, killing all the birds and animals. Back when his mother was a scientist like James.

  ‘I wonder . . .’ he said.

  ‘What do you wonder?’ asked Birdy.

  Colt shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  There were so many questions chasing each other around in his head. About James, about James and his mother, about James and him, about enzyme-C, about all that strange stuff his mother had said last night about Officer Katt and the circus being locked in. (How could anyone lock in a circus?) It was all too much to think about right now. Only one thing mattered, really – Birdy was alive.

  And she was smiling. Not at Colt, but up at the sky. She pointed.

  ‘Look!’

  Colt raised his eyes. Two small, red-and-gold shapes wheeled and circled high above the island. It was Goldie and Scarlet. Colt had never seen birds in the sky before. They looked good up there. Wild and free.

  Almost as if that’s where they belonged.

  ‘COOEE! COOEE! COOOOOOOOOEE!’

  Birdy was shouting and waving and jumping up and down on the beach.

  Colt waved, too. But he wasn’t jumping up and down and he didn’t bother shouting – the ship was too far away. It had dropped anchor about two kilometres from the island.

  He wondered why it hadn’t come closer.

  ‘Do you think they’ve seen us?’ asked Birdy.

  Colt zoomed his superhuman vision. ‘Looks like it. They’re launching one of those Zodiac inflatable boats.’

  ‘Yaaaay!’ Birdy turned a double cartwheel on the sand.

  ‘You should take it easy,’ he said.

  She performed another cartwheel, grinning at him all the way around. ‘You sound like my mum.’

  Colt shrugged. ‘I saved your life last night, so I’m kind of responsible for you now.’

  ‘You so are not!’

  He smiled and looked back out to sea. A man and a woman in strange white outfits with elasticised overshoes and fitted hoods were climbing down a rope ladder into the Zodiac. ‘That’s creepy.’

  ‘What’s creepy?’ asked Birdy, whose eyesight was only normal.

  ‘They’re wearing hazard suits.’


  ‘Well, this is called Plague Island.’

  ‘Only because there are lots of ghost rats here.’ Colt felt a twinge of unease. ‘Don’t tell anyone you got bitten.’

  Birdy frowned. ‘But didn’t you tell your mother last night?’

  ‘The phone stopped working – I don’t think she heard.’

  He hoped she hadn’t. He didn’t want people asking tricky questions. Why Birdy was still alive, for example.

  The Zodiac came bouncing across the glassy green waves. Its two passengers had put on orange lifejackets over their weird white outfits. Birdy waved and the woman waved back. The man made a shooing motion with one hand, warning her and Colt to stand clear as he steered the sleek inflatable lifeboat into the shallows.

  The woman jumped out as soon as its bow touched the beach. She was carrying a seriously big first-aid kit. ‘Hey guys!’ she said, fitting a surgical mask over her mouth and nose. ‘My name’s Hayley – I’m a doctor. Which one of you got bitten by a ghost rat?’

  Birdy looked at Colt. His mother must have heard him after all. Too bad.

  ‘Neither,’ they both said at the same time.

  They had to lie, otherwise Colt’s secret would be out.

  And since last night it was a double secret – not only was he Superclown, but there was something weird in his blood that had saved Birdy from what should have been certain death.

  Choose the sentence below that best describes you and remember the letter next to it. Then turn the page to find out which animal you are most like . . .

  I am sleek and dangerous.

  If I get angry, I charge!

  Swinging in trees is one of my favourite things to do.

  I eat scraps off the floor.

  You can often find me running around with the wind in my hair, being wild.

  Everything in my wardrobe is pink.

  I am loyal and friendly.

  I like to follow others and wear woolly clothes.

  Most people think I’m cute. I’m pretty shy.