Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  About this Book

  As the world around them collapses under the weight of a slow, creeping virus that erodes memory, fifteen-year-old Dany and her five-year-old sister are on the edge of their own personal apocalypse – fearing separation at the hands of child services. When a dangerous new strain of the virus emerges, Dany careens headlong into crisis, determined to save her sister. Together with her best friend and reluctant history teacher, they must flee the city. Along the way, Dany faces a series of devastating choices: Can she make the dangerous attempt to break her aunt out of the prison-hospice? And just how much is Dany willing to sacrifice to ensure her sister and her friends survive?

  Girl Minus X is a meditation on the gift that is memory and its hidden costs, pitting a fear of forgetting against a desire to erase the past.

  Praise for Girl Minus X

  “Girl Minus X is what happens when great writing meets a mesmeric, page-turning plot. The best speculative fiction captures what we dimly imagine but intimately feel; and this book wins in its gripping tale of intense social crises, complicated family members, dismal pressures from school and a young woman awakening to her own uncanny power. Anne Stone will captivate both teens and adults alike.”

  – David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant and Brother

  “What if you could let go of your trauma? Now, what if that process was forced on you by a virus that robbed you of all memories? Girl Minus X explores the bonds between humans surviving mid-apocalypse. Nobody writes like Anne Stone. Get prepared for the unthinkable.”

  – Emily Pohl-Weary, author of Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl and Ghost Sick

  Also by Anne Stone

  jacks: a gothic gospel

  Hush

  Delible

  For Wayde & Senna (my loves).

  Contents

  Cover

  About This Book

  Also by Anne Stone

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  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

  Part Two

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part One

  | Chapter 0 = X + 1

  Dany can just make out the ruined rails of the roller coaster, its black bones rising into the sky. She knows better than to be here. Knows to leave well enough alone. Knows the smart thing to do is turn her back and say goodbye. She knows all of this, but it’s not so easy letting go of those you love. So Dany takes one step and then another, huffing her way up the hill, as her kid sister falls behind.

  When they crest the hill, she sees the whole of the prison. The old racetrack is girded by fences, each topped with razor wire. Where once were horses, she sees infected. Where once were grooms, she sees prisoners in orange jumpsuits. And watching over all of them, inside and out, military guards.

  Below them, scattered across the face of the hill, a dozen little groups. The families of the women they’ve locked up inside. Some cluster around foam coolers, some sit on what scant grass can be found and some, she can tell, have given up on the visit. Laid out on old blankets, their faces are tuned to the clouds. Some, like her, have one eye on the prison-hospice. Dany is scanning the compound when the kid’s tiny hand slips into hers. Tugs once, twice.

  “Give me a sec,” she tells Mac. Dany wants to see Aunt Norah, but there’s no sign of their aunt. Not yet. But there, just inside the fence, Dany spots a chicken coop. Beside the coop, a half dozen birds are stacked in tiny cages. Stunned and ragged, the birds shift on bony feet. In one of the cages, a bird lays dead. Its legs jut out, stiff as Popsicle sticks.

  There’s an old and stunted apple tree at the bottom of the hill. But it’s not nearly tall enough, and besides, it’s too far from the fence. But there, beyond the apple tree, she sees an enormous maple with leaves the size of dishrags. The maple is close to the fence, and a few of its branches arch up and over the barbed wire. Her eyes follow the largest branch, trace a path over the razor wire, make the ten-foot drop to the chicken coop’s roof.

  Again with the tugging, but Dany is looking at the racecourse – an oval track dotted with a hundred of the infected. More virals than she’s ever seen together in one place.

  Stick thin legs. Sallow skin. A strange human herd.

  Only herd isn’t the right word. Together like this, the infected don’t move like any group of animals Dany’s ever seen. They don’t move like a crowd of people, either. Each viral’s path is erratic. When she traces pathways over the track, she sees dark particles in a stirred glass. Atoms in Brownian motion. And then a picture of the virals lives in her mental album, too, for always, added to all of everything she’s ever seen in the world.

  At the centre of the field, a few virals stand with faces tipped to the sun, stumbling in slow circles. She takes in each of their faces, but none is familiar, or else all of them are, with that strange, waxen skin. On each yellow jacket a little metal clasp flashes when the viral hits six o’clock. Round and round they go, slowly spinning tops.

  The virus, she knows, has left its mark on the brains of the infected. At this stage, the grey matter is riddled with tiny holes. The hypothalamus has shrivelled up like an old pea. And the cortex and medial temporal lobe are pitted with deep, unforgiving lesions. The virus causes all kinds of psychiatric symptoms. But that’s not what gets to Dany. What gets to her is this: Once the disease has gone this far, the infected forget. They forget just about everything. They forget to even care. They forget friends and loved ones. They forget how to act. How to be. They forget who to be. Looking out over the prison-hospice, Dany knows that the virals sh
e sees are literally dying. But at this stage, people say, death hardly makes a difference.

  And maybe one day none of this will matter. To anyone.

  Maybe one day, if the virus infects enough people, they’ll just run out of fence. If that day comes, the whole world will be a hospice. Maybe then, places like this will be reserved for the uninfected, the few who can’t help but remember – themselves, the past, all the rest of what once was. Maybe one day it’ll be Dany inside the fence.

  The kid gives Dany’s hand another yank. Only this time, the kid tugs so hard she nearly takes Dany’s hand off at the root.

  “Hey,” Dany says. But looking down, she sees her sister’s brown eyes, huge with need. Hungry. That’s what the kid is. That’s what they both are. Pretty much all the time, these days. “Lunch?” Dany asks with a yawn.

  For a bright penny of a second, Dany thinks she’s actually done it, that the kid is going to answer. For a moment, Mac’s big brown eyes fix on Dany. Like a goldfish, that little mouth opens. But with a final yank, the kid lets go and stomps off towards the apple tree.

  They picnic under the apple tree, in spite of the mud, in spite of the smell. This close to the fence, the smell of shit and bleach is overpowering. By the time Dany has taken her first bite, her kid sister, sandwich in pocket, has abandoned their muddy blanket.

  The kid monkeys her way halfway up the trunk and clings to it, looking down at Dany. Blinking expectantly. Slowly, Dany rises and makes her way to the trunk, giving the kid a leg up. Mac settles herself in a nook, pulls her glass-eyed doll out of her backpack. The kid takes tiny bites of her sandwich, offers it to the doll, the two small figures framed by a clutch of scrawny buds. She looks sort of peaceful up there, in that gnarled old knot of a tree. Nesting there, among the apple buds, the kid almost looks safe. But then, kids fall out of trees all the time. Break arms. Dislocate elbows. An unlucky kid might even crack a skull.

  The letter the prison sent Dany said this would be a picnic.

  But there are no birds or dragonflies. No pond for her sister to skip stones into. Just a balding hill, with more bare spots than grass. And spread out across the rounded side of the hill, a dozen tiny groups – families, friends, the people who belong to the women locked up with the infected inside. All around the hill, swirling and settling on each of their skins, the sounds and smells of dying virals.

  Only it isn’t virals dying inside of the hospice, not really. It’s people. Isn’t it?

  Maybe not legally, not anymore, but Dany knows it.

  They’re people still.

  On the highway, eighteen-wheelers kick up clouds of dust and ash-laden smoke drifts out of the prison-hospice. Soon, every last bit of her is covered in a film of grit. The stench of the place licks at Dany’s clothes and seeps into her bread sandwich. Still, she’s hungry, and she isn’t going to let a little soot get in the way.

  As she eats, Dany watches the yard.

  On the other side of the fence, pair by pair, a group of prisoners gather up. It’s not possible to pick her aunt out of the bunch. Not at this distance. Not when all of their faces are grey with sweat and ash.

  As she waits, Dany digs into her backpack, pulls out a pair of books.

  The first is a primer on security systems and cryptography. The other, a coil-bound photocopy of a prison guard manual, courtesy of Antoine. Between each page she reads, Dany scans the compound. Finally, it’s her aunt’s name in the guard’s mouth. Finally, her aunt Norah is standing on the other side of the fence and there’s a spot for Dany and the kid, down by the red rope, just opening up.

  “Hey, Mac,” Dany shouts and, without waiting, makes her way down.

  There, on the other side of that red rope, past the scrabble of bare dirt that is the no-go zone, past the chain-link fence, stands Aunt Norah and another prisoner, the two chained at the wrist. Dany takes in her aunt’s orange jumpsuit. The suit is covered in filth, and the ankles and cuffs are practically black. On her chained wrist, the fabric is threadbare and worn. Slowly, the chain is wearing holes into the suit. Into their lives. Into everything.

  The rope might only put a few extra feet between Dany and her aunt, but that little whisper of distance changes everything. The red rope puts an end to quiet talk. Outlaws affection. Next to the highway, like this, Dany will have to yell just to be heard.

  But what Dany has come to say can’t be shouted.

  Some words can’t be said that loud. Some words can barely be said out loud at all. Dany studies the vacant-eyed guards, there, at either end of the red rope like a pair of stupid bookends. But one look and she knows. The guards they’ve posted out here might be bored out of their skulls, but they’re taking it in. They’re listening, hard.

  When Dany finally looks at Norah’s face, her aunt is looking past Dany, searching the hillside. “Where’s Mac,” Norah asks, but her voice is barely audible over the traffic. “Where is she?” she calls. Louder this time.

  Dany nods back at the apple tree and, glancing down at her aunt’s mud-caked boots, she takes in that chain. The chain will be a problem. A three-foot-long problem, to be exact; one that binds Norah to the gap-toothed redhead beside her. Dany adds one three-foot-long metal chain to her mental list.

  The prisoner with the bottle-red hair, meanwhile, is making herself heard too. And beside Dany – so close that when the wind shifts, she can smell her – a musty old woman is cussing. Working herself up. Words hurtle through the air all around Dany. And beneath it all, like a river, she hears the muttering of the infected and the low groans of passing trucks.

  “Dany,” her aunt is saying. “Hey, honey, look at me. Focus.”

  Dany’s eyes find the red rope. The fence. The outline of her aunt behind it.

  “Where’s your papa?”

  Dany frowns.

  She doesn’t know why Norah cares about Antoine so much. After all, everything is Antoine’s fault. Pretty much everything that’s ever gone wrong for Dany can be traced back to Antoine, one way or another. If Norah hadn’t gotten involved with Antoine, her aunt would still be at home. Still cleaning houses. They’d be hungry, sure, they’d be having a hard time making one end meet the other, but they’d be together. Now, thanks to Antoine, Dany and her aunt are screwed. “I’m an orphan,” she says with a shrug.

  “Jesus,” her aunt says. “Can you let it go?” Norah shakes her head and takes a deep breath. When she tries again, she clasps the fence, as if she needs something to hold her up. “Look, where’s Antoine?” she asks.

  But Dany shrugs the question off.

  She has so much to tell her aunt. There’s so much to work out between them. She glances at the closest guard. Focuses on his heavy black boots. But she can feel it. A pair of cold blue eyes shift in their sockets, take her in. Dany draws in a quick breath, glances back at her aunt.

  “Talk to me,” her aunt is saying. “Where are you staying?”

  Dany shrugs again. “Home,” she says.

  “Antoine’s farm. You two are at the farm?”

  Dany shakes her head, no. Shrugs.

  And everything falls to pieces. Because there, in the yard, just behind her aunt, the world has gone topsy-turvy. A fight has broken out. Or worse. Dany nods her chin at the ruckus just behind Norah.

  Norah turns, and her whole body tenses up. Because there, in the prison yard behind her aunt, the group of waiting prisoners has parted – moving back in a loose circle – drawing an anxious ring around a pair of prisoners. At first, Dany thinks the woman has been hurt and that’s why she’s screaming. Screaming and tugging at her chain. But when Dany traces the chain to the other end, she sees the real problem.

  There, lying on the ground, a prisoner is face down in the muck. Her face half buried in the foul stuff. Her head is wildly thrashing. Above her, the other prisoner is yanking on the chain that binds them – trying to get away. She yanks
so hard that the prone woman’s arm pops right out of its socket.

  All around them, the world has gone quiet.

  And in that quiet, Dany hears the sound of bone, dislodged. Hears sinew, tearing. An echo of it there, in her head. For always. And ever.

  Norah takes one step back. And another. Presses her back against the fence, dividing her jumpsuit into small orange diamonds. But Aunt Norah has hit the hard limit of her world. There’s nowhere for her to go.

  Dany takes in the prisoner, face down in the yard, thrashing. She knows what an epileptic seizure looks like. But this is no ordinary seizure – no, this is something worse. Dany studies the prone prisoner, there, convulsing in the muck. Jasper, her biology mentor at the lab, would see it too. One look and he’d see it. This woman is sick. Something has shorted the circuits in her brain. Dany tries to get a look at the prisoner’s eyes, her pupils, but, with all that thrashing, it’s impossible. As she watches, she feels her little sister’s hand glide into hers. Feels tiny fingers gripping her own, falling slack, gripping again, as the kid’s huge eyes take all of it in.

  A shrill alarm splits the air and, for a long beat, Dany forgets all about her mentor.

  Forgets the woman, seizing up in the muck.

  Forgets her aunt, back pressed to the fence.

  Forgets everything, except that tiny hand in hers.

  For a long time, the air screams, and when the screaming stops, when all is quiet, Dany’s ears ring with an echo of the alarm.

  Before her, the rope trembles. The guards, on either end, have unclasped the hooks. As she watches, the red rope drops to the ground, lifeless, a skinned snake. Dany grips her sister’s tiny hand, grips it hard.

  The closest guard turns on Dany and the kid, taking the two of them in. His hand hovers over his baton before settling on his belt buckle. He leans in. “Go on,” he tells her. “Get out of here.”

  Dany grabs up her backpack and takes hold of her sister’s hand. But the kid’s feet are planted in the earth. “We’ve got to go,” Dany tells her. “Now.” But the kid just stands there, staring past the fence, at the outline of her aunt.