by Michael Ford
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1: Nineteen days later
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
KOBI’S DAD WAS DYING before his eyes.
He wasn’t about to drop dead in the next few minutes or hours or even days. With the right drugs, the correct dosing, the perfect balance of nutrition and exercise, there was no saying exactly how long he would make it. But slowly, inescapably, the poison in his blood was killing him.
Neither of them ever mentioned it, of course. Talking about it wouldn’t change a thing. Kobi couldn’t help noticing the signs, though. His dad’s spindly wrists and bony fingers unfastening the tape that sealed the school’s front door. The thinning hair Kobi could see when his dad bent to unfasten the bottom bolts. The slight yellow tinge to the whites of his eyes as he turned back to face Kobi.
“Remember to double up on the tape, okay?”
“I want to come with you,” said Kobi, though he knew exactly what the answer would be.
His dad chuckled. “Not this time, kiddo. When you’re—”
“Older, sure,” Kobi interrupted. “How old will I actually have to be? Like, thirty?”
“Older than you are now. You’re still just a kid.” Kobi straightened until he was a fraction taller than his father. “Okay, a big kid.” His dad ruffled Kobi’s mess of dark hair, then placed both his hands on Kobi’s shoulders. “Maybe next time, all right? Just sit tight, follow the protocols, and wait for me. I’ll be back in ten days. Two weeks max, if things take longer at the lab.”
“But . . .”
A flash of impatience crossed his dad’s face. “Son, please. It’s hard enough leaving you without the guilt trip.”
“But I can help,” said Kobi. “You know what I’m capable of. I’m strong, Dad, and you’re . . .” He didn’t really know how to put it.
His dad smiled, revealing slightly pale gums. “Thanks for reminding me. That’s why I need to get to the lab. Look, I know you don’t like being here alone, but it’s just too dangerous going all the way across the water. I’m not going to risk your safety. End of discussion. Right?”
Kobi gave in and shrugged.
“Good,” said his dad. “Now you’ve got plenty of food. Don’t forget to check the windows and doors, three times a day.”
“I know, Dad,” said Kobi with a roll of his eyes.
“And take your vitamins.”
“I read in one of the science journals that nutritional supplements are a con by pharmaceutical companies.”
His dad smiled but then said firmly, “Kobi, I’m serious. You can’t be complacent. Morning and night. You need to keep your body healthy. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“And reset all the traps at every external door.”
Kobi forced himself to smile. “Just go, will you?”
His father nodded, released Kobi’s shoulders, and pulled up the small flap in the cardboard that covered the front-door window, placing his eye to the hole. “Okay, all clear. I’ll see you soon, Son. Oh, and one last thing—no wild parties while I’m gone.”
He opened the door quietly, just enough to slip through, then closed it behind him.
“Can’t promise that,” muttered Kobi.
He quickly fastened tape across the seal, smoothing the edges down with care. Then he sprayed the anti-Waste aerosol liberally around the door. Finally, he peered through the hole himself. His dad was already making his way down the front steps, toward the trees. In a matter of seconds, the jungle had swallowed him. Kobi kept staring for a little while, scanning the trees for any sign of movement. Anything suspicious at all. The green stared back, giving nothing away.
Kobi closed the viewing hole and slammed an open hand into the wall. I should have insisted. Pushed him harder. He’s too weak to go out on his own.
He walked down the hall slowly, dread sitting like a rock in his gut.
Ten days. Two weeks max. He just had to wait.
Fourteen days stretched ahead like an ocean of time.
1
Nineteen days later
THERE WAS A WINDUP crank for setting the bear traps, but Kobi didn’t need it. He forced open the metal teeth with his bare hands until the mechanism clicked, then slid the trap carefully into place beside the fire door to classroom 9C. He was sweating. Following all the security protocols—moving from room to room—took a good hour on his own. But it felt good to be doing something—anything—to keep the gnawing anxiety at bay. Next he methodically checked each window seal. Maintaining an impervious barrier against Waste-carrying spores and pollen was a constant battle, and without the precaution of reinforcing the seals with duct tape, it wouldn’t be long before the school was overrun. At every possible contamination point, he sprayed the pesticide his dad had formulated.
As he worked, he tried and failed to ignore the scrawled writing on the white board. It was one of their last lessons—calculus.
“What’s the point, Dad? Math won’t get rid of the Waste.”
His dad had stopped writing and taken off his glasses.
“The Waste won’t be here forever. And when it’s gone, the world will need to be rebuilt.”
“By who?” Kobi asked. “We’ve never seen anyone else.”
His dad had turned back to the white board. “Just concentrate, smart ass.”
Kobi finished with the windows, then took the eraser and angrily scrubbed away the lines of equations. He stalked out of the classroom.
The last rooms he needed to check were the science labs. Of all the rooms in the school, these were the ones that reminded Kobi most of his dad. He’d spent most of his time in there, carrying out his Waste experiments. A fridge hummed in the half-light, connected to solar generators on the school’s roof. Through its glass door, Kobi saw the vials of Waste cleansers in their stand. His dad had taken four with him. The cleanser couldn’t repair damage to Waste-contaminated cells, but it cleared Waste from his system, temporarily at least. His dad described it like a war. He could beat the enemy back from their land, but each time the land was ravaged further.
And the cleansers couldn’t prevent recontamination. Out in the city it was only a matter of time before his dad inhaled Waste spores, or drank water that wasn’t 100 percent purified, or Waste entered his system through small cuts or insect bites. Even in the best-case scenario, one dose might last six days. Twenty-four days’ worth. That meant his dad was five days from a death sentence. Soon, the enemy would overrun him.
But he told me to stay. What if he comes back and I’m gone?
In the woodwork room, which his dad had long ago commandeered for weapons and equipment, Kobi checked the doors and windows quickly. Dozens of half-finished contraptions were strewn around the place—experiments they’d been working on. A spare generator dual powered by solar energy and the wind turbine on the roof, a smoke-bomb launcher, a water purifier, the cobbled-together radio receiver that had never received anything.
Kobi didn’t want to look, but h
is eyes traveled to the corner occupied by the Snatcher, the single biggest thing in the room. It was about the size of a small car and looked like a giant metal spider, with its eight legs curled up beneath its carapace. This one had only a single wing, because the other had broken off in a collision with a tree about three hundred yards from the school. Kobi’s dad thought its navigations systems must have malfunctioned because normally Snatchers didn’t head this far out, and they certainly didn’t crash into things. The drones’ programming and microjets allowed them to cut intricate flight paths through the city terrain, moving silently and stealthily to capture their prey—any living thing that crossed their sensors.
Kobi approached the contraption, letting his gaze travel over the battered titanium shell and the solar panel array lining its remaining wing. Underneath its head, a number of wires spilled out. His dad had deactivated it straightaway to make sure it couldn’t send any signals back to its hub in the city. Its multitude of black “eyes” stared back at him. Apparently they detected across the visual spectrum, including infrared and ultraviolet. A perfect hunter. Kobi trailed his fingers over its cold shell. Along the side of its “head” were scrawled five letters: CLAWS. The name fit, given the segmented appendages curled up beneath its main body. Dad said the Snatchers’ mission was simple—to patrol the city, scoop up any Waste-infected fauna, and take it for disposal. Dogs, cats, deer—whatever they spotted from the air.
People too, if they weren’t careful.
Whoever built the Snatchers was long dead, but the drones were automated and solar charging. They’d fly until the hardware broke down.
Nineteen days. I haven’t got a choice, Dad. You said two weeks max.
Kobi turned away from the Snatcher, set the door trap, checked the seals, then opened the fridge and took two vials of cleanser.
I’m coming for you.
In the changing room, Kobi lit the candles they left around the windowless room, then reached into locker D22 and grabbed his Kevlar vest, scavenged from the local police department headquarters a few blocks away. He slipped it on and tightened the straps, followed by his backpack. He hooked the police Taser into the janitor’s old utility belt, then loaded his water flask, flashlight, and compass as well. He fastened the sheathed machete to his left hip. Last of all, he took out his preloaded crossbow—courtesy, like the bear traps, of Big Hank’s Hunting Supplies—and slung it over his shoulder. He was about to shut the locker when he remembered the scent masker. Bear musk.
“We’re lucky there are no girls left to impress.”
He smiled and shook his head at the memory of his dad’s words. Kobi used to hate it when he made jokes like that, but he would have given anything to hear his dad’s voice right now, echoing down the corridor with apologies and excuses for taking longer than expected.
Kobi sprayed the can back and forth over his clothes, then slipped it into his belt.
Candlelight flickered over the holographic photo tacked to the inside of the locker door. It showed the previous owner of D22. Maxwell Trenton looked like a nice kid. Maybe a year or two older than Kobi himself, he was scrawny, with braces across his teeth. Kinda goofy. He wore a Seahawks hat and was standing between two hulking linebackers in front of a huge crowd at the city’s GrowCycle Stadium. The football players looked like they could have broken Max in half like a twig, but they were smiling for the camera. Kobi guessed the signatures hovering across the bottom were theirs.
Maxwell was dead, of course. So were the linebackers in the photo, along with the rest of the 2029 Seahawks team, and all the unsuspecting spectators in the background. Plus the janitor, every cop in Seattle, and even Big Hank, if he was ever a real person in the first place.
But not my dad. No way.
People had always thought it would be nuclear war or climate change or a meteor strike that would destroy the world, not a food company. His dad had told Kobi the story so many times. By the late 2020s, climate change had begun to severely affect the world’s ability to produce enough food to feed the growing population. The answer was GAIA, a fertilizer GrowCycle developed to grow crops quicker. People thought it would be humankind’s savior, but something went wrong. The scientists pushed things too far. Some genetically engineered hormone spread through the environment, altering organisms’ DNA. Animals, humans, plants . . . they all began to change.
The rest was history. “Or the end of it,” as his dad had joked.
On the bench in the middle of the locker room, Kobi spread out his map, showing the familiar outline of the bay and the grid of streets.
“Where are you, Dad?” he whispered, and his voice choked up in his throat. He reached automatically for one of his vitamins that he usually kept in his inside pocket. But he’d left the pills back in the gym. He hadn’t taken any since his dad had left. To Kobi, it felt like one small act of protest against his dad for leaving him there alone.
All around Bill Gates Memorial High, toward the map’s left edge, hundreds of hand-drawn circles littered West Seattle. Each was labeled in his father’s familiar hand: F (food), M (medical), W (weapons), H (hardware). All the food sites on this side of the bridge were crossed out. Exhausted of supplies. There were plenty more locations marked, but they were all on the other side of the bridge. There was even an L all the way on Mercer Island, though his dad said that that particular lab would always be impossible to access. Mercer Island was Waste ground zero; the most contaminated place in the world. Before the disaster, GrowCycle had dumped a load of Waste on a vast site sown with a range of botanical specimens as a PR stunt, intending a new park to spring up overnight. It didn’t quite work out that way.
The closest labs were a day away on foot, in the old university a few blocks off the I-5. If his dad had made it that far. Kobi had never even crossed the bridge, despite pleading more times than he could count. The excuse was always the same. “You’re not ready.”
Anything could have happened—that was the problem. There were other predators in the city besides Snatchers. They’d found bear droppings close to the school a couple of months ago, and Kobi didn’t even want to think how big a Waste-infected grizzly might be. The Waste affected all creatures differently. In the initial contamination period, 99 percent of fauna had died off. Those that didn’t, and managed to breed, spawned all manner of mutated offspring.
Or maybe something as mundane as an accident had kept his dad from returning home. Maybe he’d fallen and hit his head. Thing was, time out in the Waste affected his father badly, even with his cleansers. Just a few hours of prolonged exposure would leave him frail.
And he wasn’t in great shape even when he left. . . .
Kobi’s stomach cramped up, and he waited for the spasm to pass. His last meal had been the day before—a can of Barkz dog food. Not bad, if he kept his eyes closed. It was nutritious—40 percent protein, plenty of fat and fiber. All that mattered, when it came down to it. But the longer he waited, letting the hunger gnaw at his stomach, the weaker he’d get.
If he was going out, it had to be now.
Folding the map, he blew out the candle and left the locker room, grabbing his backpack on the way.
Bill Gates had once had a student body of about fifteen hundred. Their lives echoed silently around the corridors and classrooms, on the bulletin boards that announced sports news and the upcoming prom, in their assignments displayed on the walls, in the graffiti scrawled onto the bathroom stall doors. In the thirteen years the school had been his home, Kobi had come to know every inch. He and his dad had broken into hundreds of lockers, every classroom cupboard, and every teacher’s drawer in their attempts to scavenge things useful for survival. Mostly a waste of time. A pointless sifting through forgotten lives.
Kobi switched on his flashlight and walked down the main corridor, heels squeaking on the floor as he made his way to the doors in the gray half-light. When he reached them, he carefully peeled away the duct tape and slid back the top and bottom bolts. He put his eye to the viewin
g hole, to make sure there were no nasty surprises. Only when his hand was on the handle, about to push it open, did he hear the voice in his head.
“Whatever you do, never go out alone.”
“Like you did,” he whispered to the empty hall. “No choice, Dad.”
He opened the door onto a morning alive with the chatter and rustle of insect sounds and bird cries. The parking lot was a forest of Douglas firs, rising five hundred feet tall. Other trees, not quite as towering, grew among them, sycamores and maples. Sunlight filtered through the canopy above. A few bikes rested in the branches of a red oak, about 150 feet up, carried there by the force of nature as the tree had grown from seed to sapling to megaflora. Kobi’s father had used a book from the school library to teach him the names of all the plants in the city. Though some of the newer, deadlier ones weren’t listed in any books.
More cars lay abandoned among the trees, some like miniature metal greenhouses, busted-out windows sprouting shrubs. Across the road, the football field’s goalposts were twined with vines and the turf was invisible under dense knots of sprawling weeds. Kobi tried to imagine Maxwell Trenton and his friends squaring off against a rival team, but he just couldn’t.
He listened for a moment, eyes trailing across the vegetation for any sign of predators.
“Always be patient. Better slow than dead.”
Kobi turned toward the sky. Snatchers rarely came this far from the city center, but it paid to be cautious.
Satisfied that nothing lay in wait, Kobi stepped into the open, took more duct tape, and lined the door from the outside. He fastened the padlocks, then made his way down the cracked steps and along the path he and his father had cut toward the road. Despite being hewn back just a few weeks earlier, the grass had already grown back as tall as Kobi himself. He hacked at the stray tendrils with his machete, all the while glancing over his shoulders, covering the angles.
“Two pairs of eyes are always better than one.”
“So why didn’t you let me come with you, Dad?” he murmured.
Kobi moved through the grasses quickly, stepping carefully over a centipede the size of his arm. Then he made his way into the thicker forest, where the light was dim. He darted from tree to tree, pausing at each to check his surroundings.
