Recoil

by Joanne Macgregor

  RECOIL

  Joanne Macgregor

  Other Young Adult books by this author

  Scarred (2015, KDP)

  Fault Lines (2016, Protea)

  Rock Steady (2013, Protea)

  Turtle Walk (2011, Protea)

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  First published in 2016 by KDP

  Copyright 2016 Joanne Macgregor

  The right of Joanne Macgregor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  ISBN: 978-0-620-70289-8

  ISBN: 978-0-620-70290-4 (ebook)

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form of by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the author.

  www.joannemacgregor.com

  “If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.”

  Seneca (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

  “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable

  on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

  It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so

  than not to be exercised at all.”

  Thomas Jefferson

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The Kill Shot

  Why is it that even when you get what you thought you wanted, it never works out the way you thought it would?

  That Sunday, two days before the black van came for me, all I wanted was to kill Jakhil. Because pancakes for breakfast are good, Sunday morning reruns of Supernatural are good, finding the perfect jeans in my size and on sale at Hunter.com is really good, but finally killing Jakhil?

  That would be better than good. It would be awesome.

  So I waited, as still and quiet as death, for the perfect moment to take the shot. He was out there somewhere, the enemy who had invaded our world, and he had to be stopped.

  I had been stalking my prey for hours, and preparing for years — honing my skill with drill after drill, target after target, shot after shot. My eyes burned with fatigue, my throat was parched and my stomach empty. Sweat trickled down behind my goggles, but I kept myself motionless and focused.

  I’d tracked him over the course of days, and I was not about to get myself shot by giving away my position. Three times before, I’d had the chance to take him down, and each time I’d blown it with some stupid mistake. The first time, he’d pinpointed my position and sent a round into my thigh. The next time, I’d taken the shot and missed. And in our last encounter, he’d melted away into the background before I could line up a good angle. Today I was determined to get it right.

  So no matter how loudly my hollow stomach growled, I was not going to reach for the pack of candy lying beside me. Tempting morsels of sweetness — creamy, melting milk chocolate and sticky, salty peanut-butter. No, I was not even going to think about that.

  I was also not going to hand over the take-down to the other sniper that I knew was camped out somewhere to my right, near the platform. We might be on the same side in this war, but Jakhil was mine. A whup-whup-whup noise signaled the approach of a chopper. Was it from his army, or mine?

  My enemy was hiding somewhere in the deserted railway yard ahead of me — about 700 meters away, I estimated. I had long since stopped thinking of distance in feet or yards. Modern snipers used meters. I studied the scene through the high magnification of my scope, trying to identify the spots I would have chosen to hide. Maybe there — at eleven o’clock, in the dark shadows behind the open sliding door of a freight car. Or perhaps to my right, at two o’clock, behind the crumbling walls of the deserted station’s ticket booth, or in the shade cast by any of the sidelined passenger cars, standing empty and abandoned on the unused sidings. I scanned systematically, side to side and near to far, for the usual giveaways: shine, movement, contrast to background, or the distinctive head-and-shoulders outline of a target.

  I forced myself not to look up at the chopper. It was a distraction I couldn’t afford. Silently, I cursed the downdraft it pushed across my field of action. The wind whipped dust and old bits of paper and debris up into the air, obscuring my vision, and it would have unpredictable effects on my shot.

  A movement down on the railway siding caught my eye. One of Jakhil’s small robotic reptiles scurried mechanically across the rails. Through the rifle’s scope I could see the unblinking green lights of the repbot’s twin “eyes”. Was it merely reconnoitering the field of action, transmitting back the same information about conditions that I was trying to ascertain manually? Or had he sent it as a decoy, to tempt me into taking a shot? Either way, I should ignore it.

  Just as I made the decision, the robot exploded into fragments of steel and wire and microchips as the loud shot of a rifle cracked the air, followed a split second later by another report and a grunt from nearby. Damn. I hadn’t wanted Striker22 to get the shot, but I hadn’t wanted him to be shot either. He’d fallen for the lure and Jakhil had spotted him in an instant. Now it was just the two of us left in this battle to the death.

  I refocused my scope on the scene, searching the spot where, in my peripheral vision, I had caught sight of a muzzle flash. There. In the deep shadow of the freight car I had noted earlier, there was a contrasting patch of light and dark and the faintest glint of shine about one foot off the ground — right about where a rifle would be if the target was lying on his belly aiming out. At me.

  Moving slower than the second-hand on my father’s old wristwatch, I adjusted my rifle. I had studied my enemy and knew he was right-handed, so I aimed fractionally to the right of the glint, where his head and chest would be. I did the mental math — running through the calculations to account for the distance, bullet spin and drop, the fast cold air of this high altitude, and the wind kicked up by the circling chopper. Then I doped my scope, adjusting the windage dial to compensate for the air currents, and the elevation dial to offset the effect of gravity on the bullet over this distance, so that my aim would be true. Settling the rifle between my shoulder and cheek, I closed my left eye, squinted my right, and fine-tuned my aim. I pulled my attention away from everything but him and me, pushed away worries about my fellow soldier, and tuned out the noise of the helicopter. All of me was here. All there was, was now.

  Deliberately relaxing my shoulders, I breathed in through my nose for a count of four, held the breath for four beats, breathed out through my mouth for four, and held for four. One more time. In … two … three … four … Hold … two … three … four … Slowly out … two … three … four … Hold … two … three …

  In the pause between breaths, in the space between heartbeats, I squeezed the trigger.

  I watched the faint vapor trail of the spinning round as it travelled through the air and disappeared into the shadows of the freight car.

  A second later, all hell broke loose.

  Bells, alarms, flashing lights and the message box spelling out in bold, red, 3D letters: YOU WIN!

  What?

  I yanked off the virtual reality goggles, stared at the message on the screen, which was a little fuzzy now without the special lenses.

  YOU WIN!

  I screamed and punched the air, snatched up the realistic-looking sniper rifle — my game console’s wireless controller — and crowed, “I win! I win! I win!” into it as if it was a microphone, all the while victory-dancing a small circle between my bed a
nd desk.

  My mother came rushing through the door, her face pinched tight and as white as her floury hands.

  “Are you alright? You screamed!”

  “I won! I won The Game!”

  “Jinxy Emma James! You nearly scared the life out of me. I thought for sure you must have seen a —”

  “Mom, you don’t get it. I killed Jakhil. Me, little old Jinxy-me!”

  “You and that blessed game!” She wiped her hands on her apron. “If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen, having a stiff bourbon for shock. And counting my new gray hairs — for which I hold you responsible, young lady.”

  “I win, I win, I win!” I resumed my war dance. I needed music, applause, fireworks.

  Robin ambled into my room, running a hand through his rumpled hair and looking, as always, as sleepy as if he had just woken up from a ten-hour nap.

  “How is it possible that we’re related?” he said.

  He yawned, clearly unimpressed at my uncontrolled display of glee. We’re twins, and although we both have blond hair and blue eyes, we’re about as un-identical in our natures as it’s possible to get.

  “I won!” I yelled at him. “I killed Jakhil!”

  “You won The Game?” He wasn’t yawning now, no sir. He was staring at me in shock. And, if I do say so myself, awe. Robin might not be a sniper — he played the Game as a programmer when he played it at all — but he, unlike my mother, at least got what this meant.

  “I did! I’m the first sniper to take the leader down in eighteen months! That’s one and a half years, brother! Woohoo!” I sparred with the air, hugged Robin, and then started my war-dance again.

  “You know what this means, Jinxy? You’re going to PlayState!”

  As he said the words, my screen flashed a new message to the accompaniment of a repetitive bleep.

  Congratulations! Jinx E. James, you have killed Jakhil, won The Game, and qualified for the ultimate prize of a real-life simulated sniper mission at PlayState’s Southern Sector Headquarters, along with three of your highest-ranking competitors. Please be ready for collection on April 3 at 09:15. Full details and a liability waiver have been forwarded to your registered guardian, Marion James (mother), but you are directly advised that the wearing of Personal Protective Equipment is mandatory.

  I screamed again.

  Chapter 2

  Threes

  Four years ago, when I was twelve, three things happened that changed everything.

  The plague began.

  My dad died from a heart attack. He went to work one day and just never came home.

  And then my mom sort of sank inside herself for a long while.

  They say bad things happen in threes.

  Three: the number of (confirmed) ways in which Mononegavirales Zoonotic Viral Hemorrhagic Fever (aka rat fever) spreads: contact with bodily fluids, contact with airborne and surface contagion, and bites. The pathogen was a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent, a superbug combination of Ebola, Bolivian Hemorrhagic Fever (black typhus) and rabies, that had been engineered by our enemies to decimate our population. In the early days when the terrorist attacks were first launched and before the borders were sealed, infected agents entered the country as human suicide bombs, infecting as many people as they could. They even took civilian hostages in supermarkets and subway trains and once, horribly, kids in a school, injecting their victims with plague serum before turning them loose to become human virus bombs themselves. These days, the terrs mostly use rats.

  Three: the average number of days after infection that it takes the virus to incubate. Once infection begins, with a relentless headache and high fever, it soon penetrates the brain’s blood-barrier, sending the victims into an increasingly demented and uncontrolled state until they die from multi-organ failure and hemorrhage.

  Three: the number of mega-sectors the US was divided into for better control and security: the Northeast, the Mid-and-West, and the South, where I live.

  Three: the number of remote, ultra-high security prisons resurrected from their mothballed status: Guantanamo Bay, Alcatraz and Florence ADX. No facility was too remote or too severe for the terrorists who had infected our population and continued to try to do so.

  Three hundred thousand and rising: the estimated number of plague-infected giant rats believed to be running around our sector, biting wildlife and pets. And, of course, people.

  Three: the number of rat poisons against which the mutant rats already appeared to have developed an immunity.

  The total number of people who have died from the plague in the US alone? 12.5 million.

  I guess not all bad things come in threes, after all.

  Chapter 3

  Rabid

  I was already waiting at the front window, Robin at my side and Mom checking the fit of my respirator, when at precisely 09:15, the transport pulled up in our driveway. It was a huge black Hummer with tinted windows and PlayState’s distinctive yellow-and-red logo emblazoned on the side.

  “Cool,” said Robin, nodding his approval.

  “Very,” I said, still amazed that this was actually happening to me.

  “Are you sure you won’t wear your full-face respirator?” my mother asked for the umpteenth time. There were shadows under her eyes — she’d probably kept herself awake half the night worrying about all the things that could go wrong on my adventure today.

  “Mo-om, we’ve talked about this. I’m going to play a game at PlayState’s headquarters, I’m not going to a hospital or Q-bay. Besides, this thing is bad enough,” I said, adjusting my half face-piece respirator over my nose and mouth. My series 7000E was ugly, even though I’d tried jazzing it up with stickers on the sides. I hated wearing the thing — it was stuffy and it muffled my voice. I made some Darth Vader breathing noises, trying to get a smile out of my mom, whose anxiety level today was hovering somewhere between extreme nervous agitation and completely frantic.

  “May the force be with you, my child,” Robin said.

  “I still think you should consider safety glasses and booties,” my mother said.

  “Not going to happen.” I pulled on my latex gloves and waved my protected hands at her. “See? Double thick. I’ll be safe.”

  “She’ll be fine,” said Robin, slinging an arm around Mom’s shoulders, perhaps to hold her back from tackling me by the ankles and trapping me inside the house.

  I grabbed my backpack and the liability waiver forms my mother had reluctantly signed, and headed for the door, eager to be gone. Eager to be somewhere other than inside these four walls.

  “Be careful!” Mom said as I turned the anti-microbial copper handle of the door to the decontamination unit and stepped inside.

  “Be awesome!” Robin called.

  I waved, closed the seal behind me, and waited until the airlock on the front door of the decon unit released. After suiting up in Personal Protection Equipment (mask, gloves, and one of the disposable PPE suits Mom insisted on), going out of the house was easy. Once you stepped outside the decon unit, its door sealed again and it automatically went hot-box, flooding the cubicle with sterilizing ozone and ultra-violet light. Coming back inside was always more of a mission. When I returned to the house this evening, I’d have to do a mini-strip inside the cramped cubicle. I’d shove my PPE suit and gloves into the disposal bin for later destruction in the household incinerator in the basement, place my shoes and respirator on the high mesh shelf directly below the lights, and I’d have to hold my breath and stand still, protective goggles over my eyes, for sixty seconds while I was sprayed with decon mist and then given a low intensity UV bath for fifteen seconds. When the door popped open, Mom would be waiting inside the house with hand sanitizer and disinfectant throat spray, while behind me the decon unit would seal and go hot again to sterilize my shoes and respirator.

  Now, outside the house, I stood for a few moments allowing my eyes to adjust to the dazzling light, loving the feel of the early spring sunshine warming me through my PPE suit and the u
nfamiliar feel of the breeze on the skin of my forehead. Somewhere nearby, birds were singing. It was always a shock to the senses to be outside. On any other day, I would have slowed my walk and enjoyed the rare experience, but that day I was too excited. I hurried over to the Hummer. The side door of the vehicle slid open as I approached, and closed behind me as soon as I had swung myself inside.

  There were already two people inside. The boy had dark-blond hair cut very short, and he was big, with broad shoulders, a wide chest and large hands. He looked maybe two years older than my sixteen, and the girl looked like she might be nineteen or even twenty. She was slim with short, spiky black hair and warm, deep-brown eyes. They were emphasized with purple eyeliner, and she had a tattoo that looked like a Chinese character at the outer corner of her left eye. Her latex gloves were in a trendy zebra-striped pattern; the double-thick gloves Mom insisted that we wore because they were more resistant to tearing and perforation didn’t come in anything but sickly beige or surgical green.

  Both of them were wearing only E97 respirators — the basic, form-fitted, particle-excluding gauze mask. I knew this would happen. My respirator was complete overkill, but Mom was so paranoid, she’d never have allowed me out wearing anything less.

  “Hi,” the girl said, “I’m Leya.”

  “Bruce,” said the boy.

  “Hi. I’m Jinx,” I said, and bumped elbows with each of them in greeting.

  “Welcome on board, Jinx,” said the driver, who was also wearing an E97. “You excited?”

  “Crazy excited!” I said. Then I felt a blush rising — maybe it wasn’t cool to be so enthusiastic. “Are we going to be playing together?” I asked, waving a finger between the three of us in the back.

  “That’s right, today is just for snipers,” the driver said, as he backed down our driveway.

  There were different roles you could play in The Game. Most kids played as soldiers in the war against the Alien Axis Army. I’d only ever been interested in playing as a specialist soldier, a sniper, but you could also play as a spy — intercepting the calls, texts and mails of Jakhil’s invaders; as a code-breaker; or as an intel agent — analyzing the data at a high level, looking for patterns and predicting skirmishes, attacks and the enemy’s next move. You could even play Ops Management — planning and distributing troops, equipment, and food; building army bases; and overseeing all the operations that kept the war game going. It was rumored that if you were good at code-breaking or programming, you could apply for training at The Advanced Specialized Training Academy, and get a great job working for the government afterwards. We snipers just played for fun though. And bragging rights.