Inhuman

by Kat Falls

  Backing off, Orlando swiped his arm across his mouth. “Crap, I kissed you!”

  Yeah, suddenly they all seemed of a wild nature. So I didn’t resist when the jumpsuit ushered me toward the door. I would much rather be poked and prodded in a quarantine center than ripped into bloody chunks by my classmates.

  Anna took up my free hand, which surprised me. For all she knew, I could be contagious. “What are you doing?”

  “Coming with you,” she announced, her expression defiant.

  The jumpsuit stopped short. “You’re not. She’s wanted for questioning and you’re staying here.” He faced the room. “You are all under house quarantine. No one comes or goes, except medical personnel.”

  Anna’s grip on my hand tightened. I stared at our entwined fingers and swallowed against the rising ache in my throat.

  Orlando shoved through the crowd. “How long are you going to keep us here?”

  “Until you’ve all been tested and the results are in,” the jumpsuit said in a flat tone. “Only a clear negative gets you out of here.”

  Swearing under his breath, Orlando snatched a bottle of vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet and took a gulp, but didn’t swallow. Instead, he threw back his head and gargled the alcohol.

  “Let go of her,” the jumpsuit told Anna. “Now.”

  Reluctantly she released my hand.

  Maybe Anna couldn’t come with me, but she’d tried to. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and cry and thank her for being such a loyal friend. Actually, she’d gone beyond friendship — I should know.

  Orlando angled closer, glaring at me. He gave the vodka in his mouth a last loud swish and then spat it on the floor, within an inch of my foot.

  When we exited the elevator into the marble and glass lobby, the jumpsuit clamped a gloved hand onto my arm, as if I was going to try to make a break for it. The doorman practically dove out of the way as the biohaz agents propelled me through the glass door and onto the sidewalk. So many glowering faces. My stomach coiled in on itself. As soon as I was within five feet of them, the gawkers skittered back. Then they lifted their dials and my humiliation was complete. My vision blurred as I ducked my head.

  A jumpsuit opened the back door of the van and thrust me forward. My knees locked. I couldn’t climb inside the van. I didn’t know these men.

  “Move it,” the jumpsuit growled.

  I gritted my teeth and did as I was told. Clearly stranger-danger rules didn’t apply to government agents.

  Much of the van was crammed with high-tech equipment, all clicking and humming. I squeezed onto a metal bench. The agent clambered in, pulled the door closed, and settled on the bench across from me. Through the Plexiglas partition, I saw the other jumpsuit drop into the driver’s seat.

  “Give me your dial,” the man ordered through his mask.

  I wanted to use it to call our live-in housekeeper, Howard, and let him know what was happening, but I slipped the chain from around my neck and handed over my dial. The careless way the jumpsuit clicked through my screens made my face burn. Or maybe I was coming down with a fever….

  The first symptom of Ferae was a high fever — really high, as in usually lethal. I clenched my hand to keep from pressing my palm across my forehead to check my temperature. I didn’t want the jumpsuit to think I was worried about my health. Because I wasn’t. I did not have Ferae. I couldn’t.

  Dogs barked on my dial as the jumpsuit watched one of my shelter clips. “You’re a real budding filmmaker, huh, Delaney?” he said after a moment.

  Yes, ever since I learned that the fastest way to get people to care about neglected animals was to show them the animals. But what did that matter to this guy? “It’s Lane.”

  He glanced up. “What?”

  “I go by Lane.” Only my dad called me by my full name, Delaney Park. It was where he met my mother — in Delaney Park, Indiana. People his age, they owned sentimental, which was why so many of them had named their kids after beloved places — places they knew they would never see again.

  The jumpsuit set my dial aside. “Okay, Lane. What do you say we get down to business?” He dragged a metal box from under the bench and opened it on the floor between us. “Put out your arm.”

  I braced myself against the vehicle’s sway. “Why?”

  “So we can test your blood back at the lab. Don’t you want to know if you’ve been infected?”

  “How could I have gotten infected?”

  “Spec sheet didn’t say.” He tossed a folded paper into my lap. It was a list of attributes and addresses — a summation of me. The addresses belonged to my friends, the animal shelter where I volunteered, two of my favorite coffee shops, and there were several more that I didn’t recognize, which was just as well because I was already thoroughly creeped out. The description of me was the final insult: brown eyes, brown hair, average build. Why not just say average everything? Instead of smashing the paper into a ball and throwing it at him like I wanted, I handed it back without a word.

  “Put out your arm,” he repeated.

  When I hesitated, he snagged me by the wrist and pulled my arm straight. He took a hypodermic needle from the box on the floor, and suddenly I was seized with the urge to bite his hand and free myself.

  But I didn’t.

  I smothered the impulse; I’d never do something so disgusting. So feral. I relaxed my arm and looked away as he inserted the needle.

  I figured that I should probably be thankful I wasn’t marched into the quarantine center through the front door. Instead, when I was nudged out of the back of the van, I landed in what looked like an empty warehouse except for the stacked cots along the walls. I breathed against the pinch of Anna’s vest and tightened my ponytail.

  A new jumpsuit awaited us, her face mask firmly in place. A one-woman welcoming committee. Her spiky gray hair didn’t move as she strode forward, tablet in hand. I saw my school photo on its screen.

  “Delaney McEvoy?” The woman clearly knew she had the right girl, but she waited for my nod before continuing. “I’m Director Taryn Spurling. Head of Biohazard Defense.” She turned to the jumpsuit who’d brought me. “Did you get a sample?”

  He handed her the vial of my blood and my dial.

  “Is someone going to tell my father I’m here?” My voice came out higher than normal.

  Above her face mask, Director Spurling’s laser-blue gaze sharpened. “You know where he is?”

  “Visiting galleries in California. He’s an art dealer.”

  She stiffened. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Delaney. A lot better. You see, I’ve got all the evidence I need. I can issue the order anytime to have your father shot on sight.”

  Her words punched the air out of my lungs. “For what?”

  “You’re not going to help him by lying.”

  “But he is an art dealer,” I said helplessly.

  “Yes, of course.” She spoke through a clenched jaw. “That’s where the big money is. But my sources tell me that Ian McEvoy will retrieve anything if the price is right.”

  “Retrieve?” Understanding crawled out of the primordial mud of my mind, tiny and grasping. “You mean from the other side of the wall….”

  “Now that look almost works. You almost have me believing that you don’t know” — Spurling leaned in until her face mask grazed my ear — “that your father is a fetch.”

  I recoiled. “No. That’s not true.”

  Under that mask, the woman was smirking, I was sure of it. Well, Director Spurling was wrong. Dead wrong. My father was no fetch. He wore bifocals and was lactose intolerant. Him, scale the Titan wall and sneak into the Feral Zone? Not possible. But the word fetch had triggered my memory of the last fetch they’d arrested. He’d been executed by a firing squad in front of the Titan. As always, our online classes were cancelled so that we could do the patriotic thing and watch the event in real time. The worst moment wasn’t when the bullets flung the man against the wall, as awful as tha
t had been to see. It was earlier, when they’d forced a black hood over his head, making him face death in total darkness — alone. That seemed beyond cruel.

  “Put her in a containment room.” Director Spurling’s thin voice dragged me back into the moment.

  “You’re keeping me here?” I began to sweat, which plastered the vinyl vest to my skin.

  Spurling didn’t spare me a glance, just headed for the door, tossing off a last order as she passed the jumpsuit. “Call me if she’s still alive in the morning.”

  I paced the cold, white box of a room. I’d been stuck in there for just over an hour and already I was losing it. It was too much like a hospital room. Too much like where my mother had spent her last days. But Director Spurling could lock me up for months if she felt like it. The Biohazard Defense Department had the authority to do whatever was deemed necessary to keep the nation safe.

  What did it matter if they kept me in quarantine forever? I flopped onto the small, starchy bed. Even if I didn’t have Ferae — and I absolutely, positively didn’t — life as I knew it was over. A sneeze sent people running. A rumor of serious illness, even if it wasn’t contagious, turned a person into a pariah. I’d learned that when my mother’s cancer diagnosis set off a chain reaction of hysteria. Within days of her first chemo treatment, she was fired without notice. My father’s gallery business dried up. But hardest to understand was the way our friends cut off all contact once they heard the news. I wasn’t invited to a single birthday party or sleepover that year. Since our extended family had all died during the plague, in the end, as my mom grew sicker and sicker, it was just the three of us. Now we were a family of two, me and Dad.

  The image of the last fetch — hooded and flailing as the bullets hit — dropped into my mind. I buried my face in the pillow. The longer I stayed trapped in this room, the harder it was to convince myself that Director Spurling was full of crap. She had sounded certain in a way that usually came with proof. Plus, the more I considered our life, the more suspect it seemed. Dad’s monthly business trips. The never-ending supply of valuable art. We didn’t live extravagantly, but I had wondered if my dad’s gallery was doing better than he let on. We had so much original art — paintings by Rothko, O’Keeffe, Lucian Freud, and more — hanging on our apartment walls. It was especially sketchy considering he’d had to declare bankruptcy after my mother died. Her hospital bills had created a gaping crater of debt and yet, within eight years, Dad had not only paid it all off, but also built up savings. Definitely sketchy.

  “Your name is on everything in case something happens to me,” he’d said once while giving me keys to several deposit boxes, all at different banks. At the time, I’d figured that something meant a terminal illness or car accident — not execution.

  At least the biohaz agents hadn’t arrested him. It was obvious Spurling didn’t know where my father was and thought that I did. Probably because most parents didn’t leave their kids with the housekeeper for a week every month with no way of contacting them. And I’d put it down as another one of Dad’s quirks: He hated dials and refused to carry one. What if all along his real reason for not calling was that he’d been in a place where dials didn’t work?

  So, if my father wasn’t in California and the biohaz agents didn’t have him, where was he?

  Please, please don’t be in the Feral Zone.

  If he was on the other side of the wall, he couldn’t stay there forever … and not just because of the risk of infection. The only people living in the Feral Zone today were banished criminals. My art-loving father wouldn’t last a week.

  Footsteps clacked in the corridor outside my door. I sat up as the lock of my containment room clicked and the door opened. A woman with sharp features and spiky gray hair stepped in. Director Spurling, without a face mask, without a jumpsuit. It could mean only one thing. “You got my blood test back.” I scrambled off the bed. “I’m fine.”

  “Would I be standing here if you were infected?”

  A weight seemed to slip from my shoulders like a sodden coat. I hadn’t even realized how worried I’d been. Some tiny part of me must have thought there was a chance that I’d been exposed. Probably the same part that was beginning to believe that my dad might be a fetch.

  Spurling held out my dial. In her tightly cut black suit, computer tablet in hand, she was more than a little intimidating.

  “Are you letting me go?” I slipped the dial’s chain over my head.

  “It’s an option, but not one that will help your father.”

  “I don’t know where he is. Really.”

  “I’ve been thinking, Delaney, that perhaps this situation can be salvaged. Follow me.” Pivoting on her heel, Spurling strode away.

  What else could I do? I followed. Though I couldn’t help noticing that Director Spurling was moving suspiciously fast and that there were no other agents around. In fact, the halls were so empty they echoed. Every containment room we passed was empty too. Yes, it was late, but the whole scene felt wrong. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re problem solving.”

  “What does that mean?” I spotted a floating camera bot bobbing near the ceiling, but it didn’t rotate as we walked past, meaning it wasn’t recording us. Had Spurling turned off the security cameras? As director of biohaz she had the power to do anything she wanted. When she didn’t answer my question, I slowed and put on my ice face. “I’d rather problem solve with my father’s lawyer here.”

  Spurling turned so fast that I had to sidestep to keep from plowing into her. She thrust her computer tablet under my nose. “Don’t get smart with me, Delaney. I have a whole file on you. I know about the orienteering and the self-defense classes. You think I can’t guess why you take them?”

  “Because my dad makes me.” Other kids were forced to take piano lessons, but I had to suffer through night hikes in the park and memorize an attacker’s five most vulnerable areas — eyes, ears, throat, shin, groin. Considering that our live-in housekeeper was an ex-Marine and our apartment building was tricked out like Fort Knox — as most were, in case of another plague — I didn’t really need to know how to chop someone in the windpipe. Not that I was going to say this to Director Spurling, who looked like she’d chopped many a windpipe.

  “Of course he makes you,” she snapped. “You’re his apprentice.”

  My surprise came out as a laugh, which I turned into a cough.

  “He takes you out and times you running,” she went on. “Why would he do that unless he’s training you to be a fetch?”

  I eased back a step. She was a little too invested in her theory. “Actually, I asked him to. I’ve been trying to break my —”

  “Shut up.”

  I obeyed instantly since Spurling seemed on the verge of beating me to death with her computer tablet.

  “I have been working on this investigation for five years, Delaney. Five years of trying to coerce rich scumbags into giving up their art supplier. They’re like drug addicts, thinking only about their next fix. They’ll clam up and lawyer up long before they’ll tell you who their dealer is. But last year, I got a solid lead on your father. And finally, finally, I have the evidence against him and where is he? Poof, gone.” She glared as if I had personally hidden him away. “I don’t accept that. Not after all the effort I’ve put into getting Ian McEvoy right where I want him. Now walk.”

  Spurling pointed down the corridor, which ended at a massive steel door, made all the creepier by the bar across it, guaranteeing that it stayed shut. I focused on the bar in order to control the pricking sensation behind my eyes. If I dashed back the way we’d come, I could outrun this sadist in heels. But that wouldn’t help my dad.

  “If you’re trying to make yourself cry, don’t bother. I had my heart surgically removed when I took this job.” She headed for the door. “Come on. Your father is going to need every minute.”

  I glanced up. What did that mean?

  “I first got whiff of him,” Spurling said, now
sounding positively conversational, “at a dinner party.” She didn’t slow her pace, so I was forced to catch up. “There I noticed a landscape by Ferdinand Hodler on the wall.” She heaved aside the bolt. “It was an incredible moment. Not for the host, of course. He’d thought it was a safe-enough painting to hang in his dining room. Hodler is a fairly obscure Swiss artist. But I’m from Chicago.” She glanced at me as if to check that I was paying attention. “And I’d seen that particular blue mountainscape many times … in the Art Institute.”

  “How is that an incredible moment?”

  “Because it meant that some fetch had traveled all the way to Chicago and back — deep into the quarantine zone. No other fetch I’ve heard of will go that far, no matter how much a client offers.”

  Spurling pressed a key fob to a pad, which unlocked the door. As it slid open, a sigh of cold air prickled my skin. Lights flickered on to reveal metal stairs descending into darkness.

  Seeing my hesitation, she said, “We’re going under the wall,” and started down the stairs. “So, I did a little digging,” she said, continuing with her story without so much as a backward glance, “and found more valuable paintings here, in the West — paintings by Matisse, van Gogh, and Renoir — all from the Art Institute of Chicago and all on record as having been left behind.”

  As we rounded each bend in the stairwell, a new set of lights flickered on. The air smelled musty, and I felt like I was breathing in decades of old pain and fear. “What makes you think my father fetched them?”