Evolution

by Teri Terry

  I tug at the bar that blocks the road to see if it is one we can move out of the way manually, but it won’t budge.

  We bend down to go underneath it.

  The place has an abandoned feeling. Grass that is probably usually kept at a precision length is overgrown; weeds are taking over flower beds. There are a few empty vehicles behind the building by the entrance—they might have some gas we can siphon, but we’re hoping for bigger stores than that. A road leads to a hangar and airfields beyond. Some other buildings are in a clump the other way.

  “I wonder if jet fuel would do the trick?” Freja says. “They must have supplies for the airfield.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not sure what that’d do to Angus’s generator!”

  “Let’s look through the place and make sure no one is here.”

  We knock on the door of the building by the fence first. I call out hello again, try the handle. Locked. I’m looking for a rock to break in when Freja nudges me and points. There’s a small open window. “I should be able to get through that,” she says.

  I give her a lift up, and she squeezes through, opens the door a moment later. She flicks a switch. No power.

  We go in, check offices, a boardroom, a small kitchen, bathrooms. All appear dusty and deserted.

  We step out the door and start down the road to the clump of buildings opposite the airfield.

  Then there’s a vague pressure in my mind.

  A prickling feeling on the back of my neck.

  I push back and feel whatever it is retreat—but not before I sense a feeling of puzzlement before it is completely withdrawn.

  “Freja? I think someone just tried to jump into my head. I pushed them out.”

  She stops walking for a moment, closes her eyes. Opens them again a moment later. “I can’t sense anyone. I’m guessing it is a survivor who has worked out I’m a survivor too and you aren’t, and so tried to find out who we are through you. They wouldn’t know you can detect and block them. I’ll see if anyone answers a hail.”

  She’s quiet again for a moment.

  “I still can’t sense anyone, and whoever it is won’t answer.”

  “Why do you think they are hiding from us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re scared? Survivors get hunted. They’re being cautious.”

  “Or maybe they want to check us out before they attack.”

  “I can’t believe that. Let’s see if we can find them.”

  We start to walk toward one building, but then I stop. “No. This isn’t where they are,” I say.

  She looks at me oddly. “Okay then, Einstein, how do you know that?”

  “There was a weird sort of sense of relief I could feel when we started walking toward it.”

  “Shall we try the next one, then?” We continue on to the next building, a larger one. “Don’t look up. There are more cameras on this one,” she says.

  There’s a sudden increase of pressure on my mind, and I flinch and push the stranger out. “Someone tried again,” I say. “Harder this time. I think we should check this building—I get the feeling they don’t want us to go there.”

  “It’s weird that you are catching a sense of what they think. Maybe whoever it is doesn’t quite know what they are doing—either they’re new at being a survivor, or they haven’t been around many people to have had much practice. You could let them into your mind, introduce yourself?” She looks annoyed that her attempts to contact whoever it is are coming up with nothing.

  “Not likely. What if they’re not friendly?”

  She looks contrite. “Sorry, you’re right. If you let them in, you have no defense.”

  Her words float around in my mind as we’re walking up the path to the door. No defense?

  Shay and Freja are the only ones I’ve ever let into my mind by choice, and that was with trust. Does that mean that if I let somebody into my mind, they can control me or do whatever damage they want? Like the time Shay sent me to sleep: I couldn’t stop that from happening.

  I knock on the door, call out, “Hello?”

  We wait a moment, then try the handle. It’s not locked, and I’m surprised.

  “Maybe whoever it is wants us to go through this door, but I was sure they didn’t want us to come this way,” I say. “Let’s have a look around outside instead?”

  We walk around the building. Something moves to the side, and I turn quickly—oh. “Look,” I say to Freja.

  A black cat with a white nose and socks stares at us intently from under a tree.

  “Could that be all it was all along? A cat?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head, then walks up to the cat slowly, bending down, hand outstretched. It looks at her, then runs away.

  “It couldn’t have just been that cat,” she says. “For a start that was a well-fed cat with a shiny coat, so either it is a hell of a mouser, or someone is looking after it. And I’ve never heard of anyone being reached out to by a cat. Reaching to a cat is one thing, but the other way would be something else entirely.” She frowns. “Yet I can’t seem to reach that cat, which is odd: perhaps someone is blocking me.”

  “What next?”

  We look around us. The overgrown lawn behind the building slopes down; there’s a low concrete structure below us.

  “What’s that?” Freja says, pointing to it.

  “Looks like an outbuilding or something?”

  We walk down to it and around, and on the other side of the concrete, there are stairs. They go down, cut deep into the earth. The concrete juts out from the ground around the stairs.

  “It could be some sort of bunker, maybe?” I say.

  We hesitate at the top of the stairs, then start down them. The air temperature drops with every step, and a shiver goes up my back.

  There is a serious door at the bottom.

  “I’m guessing we’ll never be able to break into this one,” Freja says.

  Just as we’re wondering what to do next, the door opens.

  CHAPTER 9

  FREJA

  A GIRL PEERS OUT AT US—maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. She has dark hair and eyes, and the bright aura of a survivor.

  “Azra! I told you not to open the door!” a boy says, peering around her shoulder. A few years younger than she is, and he’s a survivor too.

  “No one wearing a hat like that could possibly be dangerous,” she answers, an upturned eyebrow at the flowery monstrosity on my head. I take it off.

  “Hi. I’m Freja, and this is Kai.”

  “What do you want?” the boy demands.

  The girl gives him an impatient look. “I’m Azra, and this rude boy is Wilf.”

  Hi, Azra; hi, Wilf, I say silently while Kai says hello out loud.

  “You blocked me. How’d you do that?” Wilf says to Kai.

  “Easy-peasy, once you know how.”

  Wilf’s eyes are wide.

  “Now that we’re all nicely introduced, what exactly do you want?” Azra asks.

  “Well, we actually came here looking for fuel. We weren’t sure if the cameras meant someone was watching the place still—so I wore this,” I say, and waggle the hat. “To stay incognito.”

  “It’s just us,” Wilf says. “I worked out how to use the cameras! I was watching you the whole time.”

  Now Azra glares at him: is it because he said they were on their own? And I reassure her. It’s okay, as you said—we’re not dangerous.

  “You two are here by yourselves?” Kai asks, concern in his voice.

  “So what? We’re fine,” Azra says. I’d be even finer completely alone, she adds in an aside to me with another impatient look at Wilf. And I’m pleased she’s talking to me like this now. “You might as well come in,” she says out loud, then turns and goes back through the door.

  “Come on! I’ll s
how you. It’s really cool,” Wilf says, and we follow him in, down more stairs with dim lights on the walls—they have power? Well obviously, they must, to operate the cameras. At the bottom of the stairs, we go through another heavy door.

  And it is cool: it looks like a control room, like something out of a spy movie.

  “What is this place?” Kai asks.

  “A bunker! You know, so in the event of war or nuclear fallout or something, the command from the base could hide away in here and direct stuff from underground.”

  “Did the air force just abandon it?”

  “Most of them cleared out of the base when the epidemic got close,” Azra says. “Some of them came here instead, but they died in this bunker—they must have been sick before they got in and locked the doors.”

  “Azra thinks they are ghosts,” Wilf says.

  “I do not!” she says sharply. “Anyway, one of them must have realized they were dying and tried to leave—we found a body up above. He left it unlocked. The others died down here.”

  There is a flash through her mind of the two of them moving the bodies. They couldn’t get them up all the stairs, but there’s some sort of back emergency exit. They put them out there and locked it. The doors all seal, but no wonder she thinks there are ghosts.

  I do not.

  Survivors hear the dead: we can’t help it.

  And there is a shock of pain and fear and something else inside her.

  You mean…I’m not…going crazy?

  No. Definitely not.

  She’s so prickly on the outside, but she’s just hiding, covering up—being the older one who decides things so Wilf doesn’t have to. Like I used to with my little sister. An involuntary wave of sympathy flows from me to her, and this time she doesn’t push it away. And at the same time, I’m hiding a little part of me inside, where she won’t see it—one that is shaken deep down. It’s this feeling—talking to another survivor, using our minds. I’ve missed it so much. I’d felt like I was pining for some sort of deeper connection with Kai, but was it actually this I’ve been missing all along?

  “How did the two of you end up in here on your own?” Kai says.

  “The usual,” Azra says. “Everyone died or left. We both got sick but didn’t die. I ran away from the authorities—while there were still any here to run away from. Eventually I found Wilf and Merlin hiding on the base. Wilf’s dad was in the air force.”

  “Merlin?”

  “The cat,” Azra says, and gestures to where he’s been watching us from a high shelf, green eyes blinking. He meowed when she said his name but doesn’t look inclined to get any closer.

  “So then you moved in here?”

  “It seemed logical. We’re hidden. If we lock the doors, nobody can get in. There are endless supplies.” She shrugs like it was no big deal, but it was. The traces I caught of what they found here…I shake my head.

  You’re a smart girl. Brave.

  Don’t forget gorgeous and amazing. She says it sarcastically, but I can tell she’s pleased, that it’s been a long time since anyone has said anything nice to her—too long. Not sure how she’d react, I stop myself from hugging her.

  Wilf grabs Kai’s arm and wants to give him a tour. Azra and I trail behind, still having a silent conversation all our own as we go. There are rooms to sleep in and supplies, like Azra said, of long-life food and water that stretch on and on in a storeroom full of high shelves. Not quite endless, but they’d last a good long while if they were meant to keep the air force command going through a war or nuclear attack.

  There is power—some special system built into the place—but they don’t know what runs it. There is no power in the surrounding towns and villages.

  They’re not sure, but there may be supplies of gasoline on the base; Wilf says they used to fill up here, that he thinks he knows where it was kept.

  And there are also actual working computers. They have internet.

  CHAPTER 10

  KAI

  FIRST THINGS FIRST. We explain to Azra and Wilf what we need to do—find a way to contact my mum in Newcastle.

  Azra shakes her head. “She may have been doing research in Newcastle a while ago, but I doubt she is still there. Pretty much all the government stuff shifted west and south when the zones started breaking down. They’d have been too far from power and supplies there.”

  “Not enough bunkers,” Wilf chimes in.

  I shake my head. “I didn’t think of that. How will we find her?”

  “The old-fashioned way?” Wilf says, and opens a search box. “What’s her name?”

  Freja and I exchange a glance: it can’t hurt to try. “Dr. Sonja Tanzer,” I say.

  I’m not expecting anything recent, so I’m surprised when a link to a research center set up to study the epidemic comes up. We click through another page.

  Assuming this is correct, she’s in Welshpool—in Wales. I curse under my breath, trying to work out how long it will take to get there, and how much gas we’ll need.

  “Can we contact her?” Freja says. “By email or something?”

  “I can’t do it directly,” I say. “The last time we spoke, some sort of SWAT team swooped down on me twenty minutes later.”

  “Cool!” Wilf says.

  “It really wasn’t cool at the time.” My stomach twists, remembering how one of them, whoever they were, went up in flames for no reason. Spontaneous combustion isn’t something you want to witness, but if it hadn’t been for the fire, it was unlikely I would have managed to get away.

  “How about we make up a profile to contact her, one that isn’t traceable to any of us?” Freja says.

  “I’ve got about a dozen identities online,” Azra says. “Wilf probably more. We can’t be ourselves online either.”

  We talk it through and after a while come up with a plan, which begins with me emailing Mum—but not directly to any personal email address. Instead, we’ll send a message through the Contact Us link on the center website.

  It seems odd with everything going on that a thing like this is still in place. They wouldn’t expect me to contact her that way. I hope. And I’ll email as if I’m Bryson—a man who was infected and must have died soon after I left Newcastle. He was there the last time I was with Mum; there are things only the three of us would know. She’ll work out that it’s me, won’t she? Again, I hope.

  I fiddle the words around back and forth, and finally come up with this:

  Dear Dr. Tanzer,

  I’m sure you’ll remember me: I’m Bryson, from the temporary base we set up in Newcastle during the initial outbreaks. I recall our day out in Newcastle very well; that girl we met left a mark on me, for sure. I’m being transferred to Cardiff and was hoping we could catch up on my way past?

  And then I give an email address Wilf set up for this purpose.

  “So this girl cut his arm and infected him, and he took off his biohazard suit because he knew that was it for him?” Freja says.

  “Yes. Just the three of us were there. I suppose Bryson could have told somebody about it? But I doubt anybody he could have told would have lived through the outbreak. And if anyone is monitoring these messages, hopefully they won’t know anything about Bryson or what happened to him. Everything was chaotic there then. Assuming anyone is even bothering to monitor Mum or trying to trace me anymore.”

  All we can do now is wait and see if she answers.

  Next we check the news. What has been happening in the world while we’ve been away from any contact?

  And it’s much like Angus and Maureen said. It looks like quarantine measures are finally holding, at least in some places; there are areas of the UK that are still free of the epidemic.

  But so very few of them. Most of Wales is all right. Ireland never really got hit—just stray cases and small outbreaks. There are odd pockets free
of it here and there in southern England, and some islands, down south and in Scotland also. I remember Shay’s friend Iona—the one who helped me find Shay when she was ill. Her family farm was cut off and the roads blocked. Are they still okay? I have no way of finding out.

  We watch a news bulletin from BBC Wales: the main source of news now. The sense of optimism seems to be getting stronger. Despite the devastation in most of the country, hope seems to be returning.

  Maybe the country can recover.

  “Out loud, please,” Freja says.

  “Where does that leave us?” Azra says. “Not you,” she says to me. She gestures at Freja and Wilf. “Us survivors. No one wants us.”

  Even though she is the one who asked them to speak out loud, now I can tell Freja is talking to them silently. Not that I’m not used to it whenever survivors are around.

  Like she notices my reaction, Freja shakes her head. “Sorry. I slipped back to talking like that without realizing. I was telling them that there are groups of survivors in places. There was Patrick and the others, a group we were with for a while—I could try to contact them again; maybe we could get them to meet up with you two? There were a few teenagers, the rest adults—they were fine when we left them. Last time we saw them, they were thinking of traveling north to join another group of survivors in Scotland.”

  As she says that, I wonder: is the group in Scotland part of Alex’s bunch—Multiverse? Is he at the center of these survivor groups—did he contact Patrick’s group about joining together?

  Maybe Patrick would know where Alex is.

  “Do you know how to get in touch with them?” I ask.

  “I think so. I didn’t use the dark net Patrick set up, so I don’t know how to contact them there, but I could try the website where I met JJ ages ago. It’s got secret forums. Maybe he still checks it. Do you want me to try?” Freja asks the question out loud, but I can tell it is really aimed at Azra and Wilf, not me.

  Azra shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She’s being casual about it, like she doesn’t care, but she must want to be with other people—and she should be. She can’t stay alone with Wilf in a bunker underground forever, no matter how long the supplies might last. But what if it is that Multiverse crowd?