“Listen,” he whispered.
I’d heard it too. A child’s voice saying, “Please help us.” The guard didn’t stir in his sentry station, even though he had to have heard the child as well. Everson slipped behind the guard booth. I followed and saw a little girl in a filthy T-shirt clinging to the chain link on the bridge side. Clearly the gate itself wasn’t electrified. A man in a blood-soaked shirt and torn pants lay in a wagon beside her, his limbs draped over the edges. At Everson’s approach, the girl looked up with eyes a nice, normal shade of brown. If she wasn’t infected, where had she come from?
“Please help him.” The girl pushed a snarl of black hair behind her ear. She had to be ten at most.
Everson peered through the fence at the unconscious man. “Was he mauled?”
Mauled. The word wound up my spine and clung there.
“My mom turned. She went — She was about to …” Shuddering, the girl looked down at the man in the wagon.
His face was tipped away from us, which was probably a good thing since the sight of his chest and right leg made me light-headed. I couldn’t tell stripped shirt from stripped flesh. Only the faint wheeze of his breathing revealed that he was alive.
“Get away from the gate, you stupid grunts!” shouted an angry voice. I turned to see a ruddy-faced guard step from the booth. His gaze skipped over me and onto Everson. “You,” he spat. “What a surprise.”
Ignoring him, Everson crouched so that he was at eye level with the little girl. “What’s your name?” he asked in a voice so low and gentle that I couldn’t help but stare. Where was this guy when I was back on the hill? Or standing in my underwear between the barracks? Moments that wouldn’t have been nearly so nerve-wracking if he’d used that tone with me.
“Jia,” the girl said, still clinging to the chain link.
“Did your mother bite him, Jia?” Everson nodded to the unconscious man with blood pooling by his outstretched leg. The girl gave a pained shrug. “Where is your mom now?” Rising, Everson looked past her into the darkness beyond.
Jia took up the man’s hand. “He shot her….” She said it so softly I wasn’t sure that I’d heard her right. “To save me.”
The ruddy-faced guard stalked toward us. “I told you, no one here is going to help you,” he snapped at her. “So, take off. And take him with you.” He pointed his gun at the mauled man.
“I’ll test them.” Everson turned on the guard. “If they’re clean, you’re going to open the gate.”
The two glared at each other. Then, surprisingly, the guard retreated. “Sure, let them in. What do I care?” he snarled before slamming back into the booth. “Let them all in, big man.”
Guess I wasn’t the only one who thought Everson was bossy.
“I need to get some things so I can test your blood,” Everson told Jia. “And his.”
“But he needs help now,” she cried.
“I can’t touch him yet. But I’ll be back with a couple of medics who’ve had a lot more training than me. If he’s not infected, they’ll help him. I promise.”
As we hurried toward a large building, there was so much I wanted to know — like did uninfected people live in the Feral Zone? But I was too worried about the little girl to think straight. “If Jia’s mother is dead, where will she go? Who’s going to take care of her?”
“If she tests clean, I’ll take her to the orphan camp,” Everson said. “It’s on the other end of the island.”
Orphan camp. That didn’t sound too awful. It had to be better than living with a mother who attacked people. “How could Jia’s mother have mauled that man?” I asked from behind him.
“Later.”
But as another series of screeches erupted from beyond the fence, I caught up with Everson. “What is happening to these people?”
He sighed, relenting, but didn’t slow his pace. “You know Ferae is a bootloader virus, right?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means Ferae carries foreign DNA. Animal DNA, to be exact. So do other viruses — swine flu, avian. The difference is that Ferae dumps its load into the infected person’s system. It’s called viral transduction. And when that happens, the person is epically grupped.”
“Because he’ll mutate … but how?” The screech from across the river trailed off. A chill skittered through me and I stopped short. “They become animals.”
“Not all the way.” Everson faced me, his expression grim. “They’re still part human….”
6
The moment I set foot in the dimly lit infirmary, memories of my mother threatened to shut me down. The building had clearly not been designed to be an infirmary — doors with frosted windows lined the hall, making it seem more like an old office building — and yet the antiseptic smell gave away its current function. The smell also brought back the desperation I’d felt the day they’d checked my mother into the hospital, knowing it was for the last time — that she’d never come home again.
Everson led the way through the echoing corridor, and I kept my face ducked until we stepped into a dark office. When he flipped on the light, I glanced at him and was caught by surprise. He was younger than I’d thought — only a year or so older than me. And despite the cropped hair, military fatigues, and the fact that he stood a head taller than me, he wasn’t nearly as intimidating as before. Probably because he wasn’t trying to be.
I tore my gaze from him and wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. The office was a mess. Crumpled food wrappers and blue inhalers littered the floor. All the cupboards were flung open and a mini refrigerator sat precariously on a stack of storage bins. Had biohaz agents come here and tossed Dr. Solis’s office because of his association with my father?
“He’s probably in the lab,” Everson said as he pulled a couple of latex gloves from a box. Since he didn’t seem the least bit alarmed, I figured the doctor must leave his office like this all the time.
“What kind of doctor is Dr. Solis?”
“A virologist,” Everson said, pocketing the gloves. “A long time ago he worked for the CDC.”
“What’s the CDC?” I scooped a midnight-blue inhaler off the floor.
“The Centers for Disease Control. It was a government agency that got cut before the plague.”
“What did they do?”
“Prevent plagues …” He loaded on the irony.
I snorted. Every history lesson about the early part of this century seemed to end with a ba-dum-bum-ching. I shook the inhaler by my ear but there was no slosh. At one point it had contained a sleeping spray called Lull, which I was somewhat familiar with. It had been prescribed to my father back when he’d had hernia surgery. After just one night, he’d thrown the inhaler away because the Lull had knocked him out cold for twelve hours straight.
Everson’s dark brows drew together when he saw what I was holding. “The doctor has trouble sleeping.”
He must — since the trash can contained enough inhalers to conk out a herd of stampeding elephants.
Everson strode to the desk and picked up an inhaler lying there. “He’s been on call since dawn, so he’ll be dying to sleep.” He met my gaze as he pocketed the Lull. “If he takes a hit before you two talk, you may as well ask the wall about your dad. I’ll tell him you’re here, then I’m going to try to convince a couple of medics to come back to the gate with me.” He headed for the door, snagging a white box off a shelf on his way. At the door, he paused. “Don’t touch anything.”