“It’s about Dad.”
“Dad?” That’s the last thing I was expecting.
“After you told me about the bank attack and how he died, I went looking. I wanted to see for myself.”
“Oh, Robin, why?” I’d wanted to spare him that. “And where? How?”
“All of that footage is still available, if you know where to look. There are sites, on the dark web, where you can see anything — photos of murder scenes and dead bodies, videos of autopsies and executions and … well, there’s some seriously sick stuff cached out there, including footage of those early plague attacks and deaths.”
“You saw? Dad?”
Robin swallows hard. “Yeah, I saw.”
We sit for a long, quiet moment, both of us reliving those awful last hours of Dad’s life.
“But what I wanted to tell you — something good in all that horror — was that there were interviews with the survivors, those bank staff who were safe behind the security window, remember?”
I do. “I remember the one — a young woman with a birthmark here.” I trace a strawberry shape on my forehead. “She had a poster. An ad for the bank, I think.”
“Yeah, those were for Dad,” Robin says.
“They were? Why would Dad have wanted a giant bank advertisement?”
“Dunno. She said in the interview I saw that he’d asked her for some advertising materials — promotional pamphlets and posters and stuff like that. That’s why she left the bank floor and went to the back, to get it for him. It saved her life.”
He looks pleased to tell me this good news. To let me know that although Dad may have died, a life was saved because of him. But I’m not pleased, because the words “advertising materials” have jogged a memory. My scalp tightens. My stomach clenches. Somewhere the tally of deaths against my name increases by one.
“They were for me,” I say, and my voice is flat, toneless, dead.
“Huh?”
“We had that assignment for English — to analyze examples of advertising, remember? You did pop-up ads on websites, I think. And I was going to do financial services. I asked Dad to collect some examples for me from the bank … They were for me,” I tell Robin, who’s staring at me, openmouthed. “He was there, in that bank on that day when the terrorists struck, because of me.”
Chapter 14
Workout
I rush out of the room before Robin can say anything more. I want to get away, to be alone, but the treetops are not an option, because what I really don’t want to do right now, is to think.
Upstairs, in the room I share with Sofia and Evyan, I change into my sweats and running shoes. My plan is to exercise all thought and emotion out of myself, to run until I feel nothing but exhaustion, until I remember nothing except how to take my next breath.
On my way back downstairs, I cross paths with Quinn, Sofia and Neil. They’re laden with computers, monitors, keyboards, external drives and a rat’s nest of differently colored cables. Clearly, Robin’s bedroom is going to be transformed into the new tech central. Neil, whose face is shining with excitement, doesn’t spare me a glance as he passes, but Quinn takes one look at my face and knows something is badly wrong.
“Jinxy, what’s the matter?” he asks.
“Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Really, what is there to say?
I can see Quinn would like to push the issue, but he’s tethered by a fat braid of red and black cables to a machine Sofia is carrying, so he has to follow her. I disappear to the south side of the house, where there is a solarium — complete with glass walls and roof. In amongst the virtual forest of potted plants are exercise mats, weights, a cross-trainer, and a treadmill with a virtual reality setup.
I’m surprised, when I fit the VR goggles and headphones on and power up the system, to see the PlayState logo in the corner of the screen. I didn’t know they made these kind of things as well. The program urges me to choose “one of twenty different immersive environments to enhance your running experience”. I’m tempted by Sahara Sands and Brazilian Rainforest, but settle for the more mundane Cityscapes option. The belt under my feet starts moving, and I’m running along a busy city street. And to me, it’s just as exotic as any jungle or desert.
These scenes are at once utterly strange and completely familiar. They’re strange because we’ve always lived in the suburbs, never in the center of a city. And for the last four years, we’ve lived mostly inside our own house. But they’re also familiar because I’ve watched thousands of shows and movies on T.V. with urban settings from before the plague. Now, skirting the sidewalk tables and chairs of a Parisian-style coffee shop where hipsters sit with small espressos and large croissants, I realize I’ve come to view those televised locations as something like fantasy settings — Hogwarts, maybe, or the hobbit village in Lord of the Rings. But this is real, or at least, it’s a highly realistic version of what life was like until just a few years ago.
Was the VR footage filmed on a real street somewhere where there is no plague, like Sydney or Cape Town? Or was it filmed on a set created in a warehouse like the one for gaming simulations at PlayState? That bicycle messenger, weaving between the yellow lines of honking cabs, and that loving couple cooing over a baby in a stroller, are they real people or actors? Or perhaps just lifelike computer-generated images?
I run past an Asian grocer who waves a friendly greeting at me and then returns to stacking exotic fruits and vegetables in great balanced pyramids of purple, ochre and cerise, as if food can be left out in the open, displayed like edible art, with no worries of contamination or attracting rats.
In real life, the streets of our city are mostly empty. Whatever can be, is done virtually or remotely. But when I cross a street in this cityscape, the flow of vehicles is so dense that the traffic light’s stern red hand must hold them in check.
I run into a park, pushing myself harder and faster now. I can feel that I’ve lost condition — there was no way to exercise at Tallulah’s. While Robin, Neil, Sofia and Quinn work to make sense of what they’ve found, I’m going to work to get properly fit again. And if it leaves me too tired afterwards to do anything but sleep, so much the better.
The green spaces of this virtual park still belong to people — college kids playing a game of touch football, a dog-walker being dragged along by three eager beagles, a potbellied father grilling hot dogs for a party of hungry kids, a stooped grandmother sitting on a bench beside a pond, throwing breadcrumbs to a raucous flock of ducks.
Is it possible to miss something you’ve never had? To be fiercely homesick for somewhere you’ve never lived?
I want this back, even though I’ve never had it before. I miss it, even though it’s never been mine. In a different world, I would have chosen to have lived someplace like this. I could have planned, after high school, to go to college in New York or Boston or London; to meet people face to face, and go to museums with them — to be in the same room as a Van Gogh or a Michelangelo, inspecting the thick smears of paint and the soft curves in the hard marble up close, rather than merely viewing them on a small screen.
I feel a pang of grief for what I’ve lost, what we’ve all lost and are still missing out on — neighborhoods pulsing with life and energy and noise, communities of people who know and trust each other, the freedom and beauty of open spaces. Our lives now are shrunken, narrow little things, sterile and inadequate imitations of what once was and what might have been.
I’m sweating and breathing heavily when the simulation ends at the entrance to a busy street market, but I’m not so tired that I can’t still think of my father and Robin and all the rest of it. I grab a pair of ten-pound dumbbells and find Bruce and Cameron in the living room with Evyan. Cameron is reading a book. Bruce is cleaning my rifle while nagging Evyan to teach him how to pick locks.
“Come on, E, what else have you got to do? The brainiacs obviously don’t think you’ve got the smarts to help them.”
“D
id I miss the part where they asked for your help?” she snaps back.
“Hey, I know I’m more brawn than brain. Here, look at this.” Bruce clenches the muscles in his chest, making them bulge against the fabric of his tight T-shirt. “Impressive, right? Right?” He smiles down at his pecs as first the left and then the right one jumps. When Evyan doesn’t respond, he makes them jiggle faster.
She ignores him and continues to file her nails.
“What? If you don’t like that, I can make them move together — check it out!”
“Hey, Bruce?” I interrupt his display. “I could use a little of that. Not of your chest, —” I hasten to add when he gives me a look of delighted hope. “But your strength. I mean, I want to work out — abdominals and upper body strength — and I wondered if you and Cameron would help, maybe train with me?”
“Sure, Blue, any time!” Bruce leaps up enthusiastically.
Cameron nods and tosses the book aside.
In the backyard, under the curious gaze of the goats and the geese, the boys put me through my paces — crunches and sit-ups for my abdominals, planks for my core and back, plus pushups, bicep curls and shoulder presses to work my feeble arms.
“We need a cross bar for pull-ups,” Bruce says, evaluating the railing on the balcony outside Neil’s bedroom for its potential to serve as exercise equipment.
“There,” Cameron says, pointing to a horizontal log ladder which connects two trees.
“Perfect!”
I groan. Pull-ups and monkey-bar swings were the two exercises which always defeated me in boot camp training back at ASTA. I jump up a couple of times under the ladder, but I can’t reach the bars.
“Can you lift me up?” I ask Bruce.
“Blue, any time you want me to wrap my hands around you, just say the word.”
“Bruce!” Hands on hips, I glower at him. “You and me — it’s not going to happen, you know that. Heck, I don’t even think you really want it. So do me a favor and cut it out already, okay? Okay?”
He grins sheepishly, shrugs and nods.
“Cool. Now can my buddy, Bruce, give me a hand?”
He pinches his lips together — no doubt some comment about hands and giving me was on the tip of his tongue — then comes behind me, places his hands on my hips and effortlessly lifts me up to the cross bars.
“Ready?” he asks as I struggle to get a tight grip on the rough wood.
“As I’ll ever be,” I mutter.
When he lets go of supporting my weight, I fall straight down, which causes the boys no end of amusement. I hear the echo of Sarge’s voice in my head, “They’re called pull-ups, princess, not fall-downs.” An image of him — of his face in that last second before I fired, of his forehead in the split-second afterwards — flashes across my mind.
Bruce gives me another boost, and this time I hang on tighter, managing two chin-ups before dropping to the ground. Even the goats seem to be laughing at my efforts.
“Monkey bars,” I gasp.
“Hehe, this should be good,” Bruce says, lifting me up again.
Three bars. That’s all I manage — three bars, including the one I start out on — before I drop back down. But I’m spent, my arm muscles are shaking, and I just can’t do more. Worse, the exercise appears to have done more to summon the memories of Sarge than to banish them from my mind. Right now he’s reminding me, “Pain is … what is pain, my little piglet? Pain is good!”
“Tomorrow morning?” I ask Bruce and Cameron from where I lie, flat on my back in the dirt, glaring up at the monkey-bar bridge.
My new goal is to be able to cross that whole ladder in one go, and I won’t quit until I can do it.
As I get to my feet, dusting the butt of my sweats, I glance over at the house. Quinn is standing there, watching us. I smile and give him a wave. It’s a small wave, but it’s all my exhausted arm is capable of. He returns the greeting, but not the smile.
“Your leprechaun doesn’t look happy to see you hanging out with us, Blue,” Bruce says.
I’d like to elbow him in the ribs, but I don’t have the energy.
“You need to take a teaspoon of cement and harden the hell up, princess,” says Sarge.
Chapter 15
Outbreak
October 10
I spend most of the next day working out — alternating running on the treadmill and P.T. sessions with Bruce and Cameron — and taking my turn at kitchen duty. Beth has drawn up a roster of chores, from which only Neil and Robin are excused because they’re so busy decoding. And because of Robin’s arm, I guess.
That night all of us except Robin and Sofia gather in the big living area to eat our supper. The food here is a lot better than in the rebel camp, partly because of the fresh fruit and vegetables growing out back, but also because Neil is not only paranoid about being spied on and invaded by the government, he’s also obsessed about being cut off from the supply chain of living essentials. He has a massive pantry stocked to the ceiling with canned fruit and pickles, sacks of rice and beans, every kind of canned and freeze-dried vegetarian food, packages of organic baking mixes, and long-life milk. Beth, who isn’t a vegetarian, does order in frozen meat and fish, but only in small quantities.
“I didn’t suddenly want to increase my orders, in case the deviation from our established pattern flags a warning somewhere,” she explained the first day here, when her weekly grocery order arrived via driverless vehicle delivery. “Neil says they monitor everything.”
Tonight’s meal, which Quinn and I made under Beth’s supervision, is vegetarian chili topped with grated cheese and slices of creamy avocado. I polish off two bowls full — all the exercise has left me with a huge appetite — and then sit around watching television news with the others.
The world seems much the same as the last time I looked. Our government has sent an envoy to Beijing to formally protest the recent nuclear testing in the South China Sea; drought is devastating Sudan; in the House of Congress, one of the Southern Sector’s senators has introduced a bill proposing to lower the voting age to sixteen years; and the Middle East is still as violent as it’s ever been.
My eyes are drooping as I snuggle up to Quinn on a giant beanbag, and I’m wondering if I dare go out for a run on the actual streets tomorrow morning when three sharp pips sound from the T.V.
It’s a public service announcement by Alex Hawke, President of the Southern Sector. Though his thick wavy hair, just greying at the temples, is as perfectly styled as ever, tonight his strong, square face isn’t smiling in its usual reassuring way.
“Since when do they have the power to interrupt programming?” Quinn asks.
“They’ve been doing it for a while now,” Beth explains. “This will be playing across all channels right now.”
“All channels?”
“Even the cartoons get interrupted, and all radio stations, too. And the channels will need to rebroadcast it at three-hourly intervals for the next twenty-four hours. Newspapers will have to print the transcript in all editions tomorrow.”
“So much for freedom of the press,” Quinn says.
Bruce shushes him. “Let’s hear what he has to say, man. It could be important.”
“— because war is coming,” Hawke is saying. “This evening, we have received reports of a heinous new attack in Orlando, Florida.”
“My father lives in Orlando,” Evyan says.
“Terrorists have released thousands of mutant rats, presumed to be infected with Mononegavirales Zoonotic Viral Hemorrhagic Fever, into the grounds of a onetime vacation and entertainment resort.”
As he speaks, new images appear on the screen — footage from the security cameras at Disney World? The heaving mass of disgusting giant rats floods through the deserted, cobbled avenues where once there were parades, climbing dead trees and green plastic shrubbery. They stream across empty fountains and drained canals, pour over bridges and course into fairytale castles. They scramble over figures of tiny children in
national costumes and scuttle into a hall with life-sized models of all the presidents, climbing into Lincoln’s lap and weaving through George Washington’s powdered white curls.
Mermaids, mice, princesses and pirates, carousels, spaceships and pumpkin carriages, all writhe with the twitching, scrabbling swarm of rodents. They mount a bronze statue of two chipmunks, and climb lampposts and rollercoaster rails as if seeking a view of the territory they’ve conquered.
I nearly gag when the footage switches to images of the vermin pouring through food courts, clambering over soda fountains, squeezing into old ice-cream trucks and pretzel carts.
The close-ups show that many of the rats have bulging tumors and oozing sores on their bodies. Their black eyes glitter with the threat of death and decay.
“Ah man, look at that! I need to be out there, eliminating the vermin,” Bruce says, banging a fist on the arm of his chair.
A dozen of the rodents claw their way to the top of a giant model of a roaring T-Rex and stand erect on two legs on the dinosaur’s head. It’s like a new epoch has dawned, and it belongs to the rats.
Evyan sneezes and asks, “But why release the rats there? It’s been closed for years, there’s no one for them to bite.”
“Symbolic,” Cameron says.
“Huh?”
“It’s a symbol of western capitalism. And of our vulnerability too, I guess, because it was supposed to be the happiest place on earth for children and families,” Quinn explains.
“Plus, the rats won’t stay contained for long,” I add.
Sure enough, there’s a shot of rats pushing through the bars of the ticket gates, squeezing under fences, and squashing through the grids of drain covers.
“The real question is why they’re allowing this footage to be shown,” Quinn says, frowning. “They usually suppress footage of attacks, or at least censor it.”
“While there have been no confirmed reports of infections linked to this attack as yet,” Hawke’s voice-over continues, “there is no doubt that the threat level to our citizenry has further increased, not only in Orlando but all across this great nation. According to our intelligence reports, more such cowardly attacks are imminent, and it is only prudent that we implement more stringent security measures without delay.”
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