I looked again at the man lying so still in the bed, thought again of the rabid in the street.
“Look, I can just about imagine myself helping to tranquilize these people so that they can be brought in and treated, and that their families can …” I gestured helplessly down the hallway where the family had gone. “But back at the compound, you mentioned terrorists.”
“We need to bring them in, Blue. To arrest them, to question them about their operations and methods and plans, so we can take this war to them instead of sitting back like a bunch of dumb sheep waiting to be slaughtered.”
“And we need to subject them to the full force of the law. These monsters need to be tried and punished for their heinous crimes,” Roth added. She was hot on the law, all right.
“I can’t argue with that, but I also can’t see myself doing it. That’s a job for a real soldier. What if something goes wrong? They’re armed, aren’t they? And there would be real shooting involved, with live rounds.”
“We don’t want firefights out there among our citizens, Blue. And we don’t want to use live ammo — we need the tangos alive and talking. As soon as they come around from the tranq, we can start to interview and debrief them, learn their methods. We start using real soldiers for these missions, we’ll have us some dead bodies, and we’ll learn nothing.”
Still I hesitated.
“I’m just not sure I have the heart for this. I’m not … It’s not …”
I struggled to express my deep reluctance. I now realized that I had painted myself into a corner when I’d assured Sarge months back that I was capable of shooting live targets. When I’d made my choice to stay at the Academy, it had been for the wrong reasons. It hadn’t been because I liked killing — far from it. And it hadn’t been because I believed myself the right person for this work. No, if I was honest with myself, I had been motivated mainly by fear — fear of going back home and getting stuck in my mother’s smothering net of worry, with all its unending sameness. I hadn’t so much chosen to stay and snipe as I had chosen not to go home.
“It’s not my fight,” I finally said.
Roth and Sarge exchanged a glance, then Roth said, “There’s something else you need to see. Follow me.”
Roberta Roth set off briskly down the hospital hallway, with Sarge and I following, and led us to an office occupied by two white-coated doctors.
“Will you excuse us?” she said, and they left the room without a word.
Sarge closed the door behind them and took up position in front of it, as if guarding the entrance, and told me to sit in the chair at the desk. Roth sat down in the chair beside me, took a laptop out of her briefcase and fired it up. She hit a few keys then spun it around so that the grainy black-and-white image on the screen was facing me. Two more keystrokes, and the window was maximized to full-screen size, and the video began playing. I glanced quickly at Roth. Her mouth was pinched tight, her eyes looked back at me with something like pity.
It took me a few moments to realize what I was watching was footage from a security camera — from a couple of them by the looks of it, as the angle on the scene kept switching — monitoring the floor and counters of what looked like a busy bank. Behind the service counter, tellers were counting cash and keying entries into computers. The camera view changed to the security door that led from the banking floor to the area behind reserved for employees. A smiling young woman with a strawberry-shaped birthmark on her forehead looked up into the camera as she buzzed for entrance. The door clicked open and she passed through to the employees-only side.
I leaned forward to read the numbers in the bottom corner of the footage. Some of them rolled over continuously. I guessed those were the seconds of the time-stamp. Eight digits interspersed with slashes stayed constant — a date stamp. The footage was from a date in June four years ago. My heart gave a sudden, unpleasant kick against my chest wall and beat more quickly.
Something. Something bad. Something about this, about to happen.
Behind the counter, the young woman with the birthmark was now standing between two of the tellers. She was holding a stack of papers and a poster-sized bank advertisement, and laughing at something one of her colleagues had just said.
As the footage changed to the camera covering the main entrance, a group of five figures burst through the doors, training weapons on customers and tellers. The camera view shifted to the row of tellers behind the counter. All their heads snapped up. Their eyes were wide with shock. Stark terror constricted the face of the one closest to the camera, as a thick sheet of reinforced security glass slammed down between the tellers and their customers.
The view shifted again. One of the figures, a man who must be the leader of the intruders, fired shots into the air above his head. His mouth moved in a soundless stream of shouted commands. The video had no soundtrack, but in the noise and pressure building inside my head, I could imagine the reports of the weapon, the screams of the customers, the threats and orders as the civilians were corralled into a group in the center of the floor.
Without warning, the footage changed. Now it was full-color, sharp-focus, close-up and with sound.
“Now this is footage the terrorists took themselves, of their actions that day and in the days that followed. We’ve edited it so that we can show you what’s relevant to you,” said Roth quietly.
“We have brought this war into your temples of greed and into the lives of your men, women and children, as you have so often brought your unjustified military imperialism into our lands,” the man on the screen shouted. He wore a scarf around his head, and above his bearded chin, his eyes glinted.
My heart was racing. I couldn’t look. Something was about to happen — my thumping heart told me so. But I couldn’t look away.
“An eye for an eye! A tooth for a tooth! A life for a life! Bring the first.”
There was the briefest flash of a terrified child being handed to the man, and then the picture jumped with an edit and I was looking at a struggling man with wide, panicked eyes and arms bound behind his back.
No. No, please.
The scarved man held him around his neck, pressed a filled syringe up against his throat. Pushed in the plunger.
No-no-no-no-no!
“We will not stop our war until you do!”
Cold sweat broke out on my upper lip. My hammering heart was the whole of my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I could only stare.
“Tell your leaders what you think of them now,” they shouted at him. “Talk to your people!”
Then the man did talk. He said, “Jinxy, Robin, Marion. I love you.”
Chapter 19
Fury
A moment to take it in, and then my whole body began to shake. I leaned over and retched into the bin Sarge held out to me. Roth passed me a clutch of tissues, and I wiped my mouth and blotted my sweaty face. They both stayed silent, watching me, waiting for my response. I had to clear my throat a few times before I could speak.
“That’s my father,” I said, though of course they already knew.
Roth pinched her lips together and nodded.
“That’s how he really died?”
“Yes, that is what happened.”
“From the plague?” I still couldn’t quite take it in. I felt like I had been catapulted into someone else’s life.
“I’m very sorry, Jinx. I know this is distressing, but we felt it was time you saw for yourself.” Roth gestured back to the screen and my gaze followed her hand. “As you see …”
And I did see.
I saw my father, filmed in bursts over the course of the next ten days, watched as he disintegrated in front of my eyes. I saw how the light of reason faded into a feverish mania, how the sheen that covered his face was overtaken by the rash of weeping blood spots and dark hematomas. I listened as his words of love and reassurance for me and my mother and brother fell into begging and pleading — “help” he kept saying, over and over again, “help me” — then tangles of
meaningless utterances, random snorts and grunts and, finally, wordless screams. I watched as his familiar movements — fingers run through his hair, a wide yawn and even, once, a gentle smile — were replaced by endless cross-legged rocking, relentless beating on the front doors of the bank, vomiting of black blood, convulsive seizures, and attacks on himself — pulling out gore-clotted hanks of hair, and scratching at his forearms until they streamed with virus-riddled blood.
Roth froze the picture on a close-up of him turning to look directly into the eye of the camera, his head twisted impossibly far around his neck, his snarling lips smeared with red slime and black flecks, his red eyes empty of any trace of the father I had known. And loved. I looked away, aware suddenly that my face was wet with tears. A shudder ran through me. I was on the verge of losing it completely.
“Suck it up, soldier,” said Sarge. “Snap to.”
I swallowed hard, dug my nails into the palms of my hands and focused on that pain instead of the one that threatened to swamp me.
“Your father was one of seven innocent victims who were infected that day, all of whom were murdered in the same way. One was just a child. And they filmed it, the terrorists. They filmed it in high definition and full color so that they could release it on the net and to the newsfeeds so as to terrorize our population,” said Roth.
“But I didn’t know. I never even … How is it possible I’ve never seen this?”
“At the time, the government got together with the news organizations and agreed that no one’s interests, apart from the terrorists, would be served by showing such graphic footage. We’d already learned in this country how deep a scar can be grooved onto the collective memory and psyche of the public by showing footage of terrorist attacks over and over again. Of course, there were some leaks in violation of the embargo, but we soon had a court order and were able to get the footage removed and the offending sites taken down. After a few successful prosecutions, people stopped disseminating it.”
“And you left them in there to die? You didn’t try sending in a SWAT team to rescue them?”
“We knew very little back then about this disease and how it spreads. We couldn’t risk sending in a team of assets who might themselves get infected. And we couldn’t blast an opening into that sealed building if that meant letting the contagion out. Besides, once the victims were infected, we knew they would die anyway. There was no cure. There still isn’t.”
“My mother, she told us he died of a heart attack.”
I remembered it clearly. When she fetched us from school that day, her eyes were red and puffy, but she wouldn’t say what was wrong until we got home. Then she made us both sit down and told us that Dad had had a heart attack and was very sick in the hospital, that he might not make it. She said we couldn’t visit him because kids weren’t allowed in the ICU. Then a few days later, she told us he’d passed away. We never got to say goodbye.
“She lied to us all these years?”
“Hell, Blue, would you tell someone you loved that this is how their father died?” Sarge dipped his head towards the screen.
I kept my eyes averted from that final sickening image.
“Yes,” I said, aware now of an anger building inside me, coursing into my trembling hands, gathering behind my eyes. “People deserve the truth. She should have told us the truth!”
“I’m sure she was merely trying to protect you and your brother from the pain of knowing how he really suffered and died. A lot of people choose not to tell the truth about how their relatives passed away because it’s such an appalling image to have stuck in your head. That’s part of the reason for the work done in this unit” — Roth tilted her head back in the direction of the quarantined room — “and the establishment of your specialized unit. But you’re old enough to know the truth now, Jinx. And old enough to make a decision about what you need to do, now that you know.”
“Now that I know.”
“Dammit, Blue, this is your fight. It doesn’t get more personal than this,” said Sarge. “But only you know if you’ve got the intestinal fortitude for the battle.”
I looked down at my hands, as if expecting them to give me the answer. And they did — they had stopped shaking. I was still shocked, horrified, sickened. But mostly … mostly I was angry. Livid with my mother for never telling me the truth. Filled with fury at the men who had killed my father, that child, the bank teller. Enraged that human beings could do this to each other in the name of a cause, any cause. On fire with an icy flame of wrath at the cruelty of the disease, and the extremists who started it and still spread the suffering.
The plague was a darkly looming presence in the room — huge, powerful, evil. And real. Real to me in a way that it never had been before.
In spite of my fury, I finally understood my mother — how she’d crumbled and gone silent on Dad after his death. Finally I got her paranoia about the disease, her overprotectiveness of Robin and me. I even understood why she’d lied to us. It was unspeakable. But in refusing to speak about his death, she’d lost his life and her own, in a way. She’d stayed frozen in a lake of pain and silence and horror, Robin had got stuck in his window seat, lost in his stories, and I’d disappeared into a game. A game that wasn’t even a game.
There were so many losses, so much pain rippling out and out from the center point of the plague. So many families out there were also trapped in grief and fear, living their constrained lives behind walls and latex and respirators. So many children might never get to play outside with the other kids in the neighborhood, or camp out in nature, or have pets. I thought of Robin’s skateboard, mounted like the head of a dead animal on his bedroom wall, of the empty swing on Quinn’s porch, and the deserted city parks, of the boy and the girl peering through the pane of glass at their dying father.
It had to end. And I had to help end it.
Part Four
Chapter 20
Committed to Target
The first person I shot was a young woman.
She was dark-skinned, maybe twenty or twenty-five — it was hard to judge ages once the rat fever took hold — and she was wearing the mismatched remnants of a former life: the top half of a cheerleader’s outfit, the knee-length pinstripe pencil skirt of an office suit, and a red velvet stiletto on one foot. Her other foot was bare and filthy. Through the powerful magnification of my eyepiece, I could see a torn nail bent back and bleeding on one stubbed toe. While all of her clothes, like her skin and her matted hair, were filthy, that one beautiful shoe looked as good as new as she stumbled and mumbled her way through the litter and puddles of the back alley.
I finished assembling my rifle and weighed it in my hands. It felt cold and heavier than the usual weapons we worked with. Was that due to the suppressor fitted to its end, or the modifications that had been made to it to fire the dissipating bullets? Or was it due to my dread at having to put a tranquilizer round that looked pretty much the same as a small but live round into an actual human being?
I’d been trained, along with Bruce who’d also been approved for these missions, on two particular weapons. The first, the one we’d use to take down the terrs, was a tranquilizer dart gun suitable only for short-range distances. The second was this tranquilizer bullet rifle to be used on M&Ms because it was accurate over much greater distances. They didn’t want us getting anywhere near the infected plague-carriers, especially as the “camouflage” we needed to wear for these jobs included nothing more than an E97 mask and latex gloves. No helmets, no protective ear- or eyewear, no flak-jackets and no full-face respirators.
“You need to blend in,” Sarge had said. “That’s the whole point of camouflage. You need to adapt your look so that you disappear into your environment.”
And while there weren’t many teens walking the inner-city streets in jeans and t-shirts, it wasn’t so extraordinarily rare that anyone gave me more serious scrutiny than a casual second glance. Though what they thought might be in the big gym bag I was carrying was
anyone’s guess. My hog’s-tooth necklace was tucked under my T-shirt, where no one would see it, and Quinn’s silver earring was in its usual place against my skin.
I was dropped off outside a four-story industrial building whose roof overlooked an alley where an M&M had been sighted. Until now, our ratting missions had all been in the suburbs and in the undeveloped, wooded land outside the city, but this built-up environment reminded me of the simulation arena at PlayState. It occurred to me now that they’d probably built it with the express intention of training us for sniping in urban areas.
The comms earpiece connecting me to Sarge, who was directing proceedings from the van down on the street, crackled.
“Ready to go there, Blue?”
“Just taking my final firing position, sir.”
It was an awkward position, poised behind a small loophole in the retaining wall at the edge of the roof, with my rifle angled steeply down at the target below. She was clutching her head and walking in small circles now, hobbling lopsidedly on that crippling crimson heel and her injured foot. I wished that Tae-Hyun was here, spotting for me — he was the best at these high-angle shots — but we’d been told that these take-downs would be solo missions.
As Sarge had said: “Maximum maneuverability, minimum attention, total success.”
What would Quinn think of today’s mission? He had obviously known from his work in Intelligence what the ultimate purpose of our unit was. He hadn’t freaked out solely because we were shooting animals, he had known we were being trained to “shoot” humans. I needed to get him on his own, explain why we were doing this, how it was better to bring in infected people for treatment and containment. I needed to explain why I believed I had to do this work. I needed to tell him about my father. But every time I passed him at the compound, he was surrounded by a group of people — Sofia looked like she was moving in for the kill — and he either gave me an unreadable look or ignored me altogether.
“Soldier, are you in FFP and committed to target?”
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