Contagion

by Contagion (retail) (epub)

  A worker bends and twists the hatch open. He mutters under his breath about how this shouldn’t be done during beam. The other worker’s eyes are wide. They drop through the hatch to a ladder and climb down, down, down.

  I float past them.

  Where the ladder ends below, there is another curved tunnel—a much bigger one. This one has a huge structure inside it that follows the tunnel, like a giant metal earthworm that burrows in the earth—round, with equipment attached around it at intervals all along its length.

  I’m drawn to it, and I drape myself on top of the massive worm, listening. Is there a musical hum inside? This has something to do with me; what or how, I don’t know.

  The two men emerge from the hatch and start checking some equipment under the worm. I leave them behind and fly along the top of it, on and on and on, as fast as I can go, past endless numbers of hatches like the one we came through. In a few places there are big rooms with even more weird-looking science junk and people inside. Around and around I go, again and again. I’m nearly past one of those rooms when a voice floats up.

  It’s a woman’s voice, with a particular biting tone. One I know. I home in on her voice and stop.

  It’s Dr. 6—the one who pushed my chair when they took me to be cured. I’ve never seen her before, not really—only in a suit—and it seems weird to see someone in the flesh after they’ve always been mostly hidden.

  She’s walking toward a door now, a few other people behind her, and as drawn as I am to the worm, somehow I have to follow her.

  Once through the door they stop. They put on biohazard suits, and the brief glimpse I had of them as real people vanishes behind visors and plastic.

  They go through doors and more doors: security doors with that same sort of eye device the scientist used earlier. As I follow, a twisted, sinking feeling grows inside me. I wish I’d stayed in the tunnel, flying around and listening for the hum deep inside the worm.

  There’s something about where they are going that I don’t like. Still they walk. I could stay behind but might get trapped in this narrow corridor.

  My dread grows.

  CHAPTER 12

  SHAY

  KILLIN, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 21 hours

  MY MIND ECHOES with the detailed memory I finally found and relived. Calista, the woods, the car, the man—there was something about him. He was not a nice guy. I shiver.

  I grope around in the dark until my fingers touch the cold shape of my phone. I hit the button and blink at the bright screen: it’s 3:00 a.m.

  The quiet gets to me. I get up and walk slowly and carefully. Any little noise I make sounds like a megaphone in the stillness.

  I start to head down to make a hot drink, but then remember Kai asleep on the sofa downstairs.

  Alone in the dark.

  What if he wakes up and his eyes find me as I slip past to the kitchen? What if his sorrow is too deep to bear alone? What if, now, in the quiet and the dark, he finally wants to talk? To me. And what if…

  Get a grip, Shay. I sigh.

  I retreat back up the stairs for a glass of water instead. When I turn the bathroom faucet on, I flinch when the pipes rattle and bang.

  Instead of the whole glass, a sip will have to do. I am so not flushing the toilet.

  CHAPTER 13

  CALLIE

  SHETLAND INSTITUTE, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 20 hours

  ONE LAST DOOR. The corridor ends. I have to follow Dr. 6 and the others through it or stay out here, trapped between two sets of doors. It is about to swing shut when I decide in a panic against being alone and throw myself through the gap.

  When I see where we are, I try to scrabble backward, but it’s too late. The door is shut.

  I close my eyes, but it’s no good. I can see it with my memory when my eyes are shut, and that is even worse. I open them and look around a room that I’ve only ever seen from the other side.

  It’s big and square, and all around three of the walls are windows. Thick windows, looking into small spaces. More like little cells than rooms.

  Inside each cell is a scared face. They belong to people of all ages, from children to teens to old people. Each one is strapped tight to a stretcher.

  On this side, doctors and nurses bustle about. There are monitors, equipment.

  “Sedative section one,” Dr. 6 says. Along one side of the room, the scared faces still, relax, then slacken. Their eyes close, but now I’m screaming, Stop this! Let them go!

  They didn’t use sedatives when I was in one of those little rooms. I screamed and screamed, way before anything even happened. They didn’t know I couldn’t be in small spaces like that.

  There are weird hands that go through the wall under the windows. Each of the section one cells now has a nurse or doctor controlling the hands.

  When I was in there, even though I was strapped down tight, they still had trouble injecting me. I was so scared.

  The needle not like any other needle.

  The pain not like any other pain. Until the pain of the cure, I’d have sworn it was the worst pain there could be in the world.

  Maybe they’ve started using sedatives now because they don’t like listening to the screaming?

  I roll myself into a little ball away from the windows, away from the needles, away from the pain.

  But the memory won’t let me go.

  CHAPTER 14

  SHAY

  KILLIN, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 19 hours

  A SMALL ROOM. A girl with dark hair. She’s crying; she’s alone.

  She looks up, blue eyes shiny with tears. She stares and her lip curls back.

  “You could have helped me, but you didn’t. You couldn’t be bothered.”

  “No, no, that’s not true. I—”

  “It is true, and you know it is. I’m dead, and it’s your fault.”

  “No!”

  “Kai will work it out. He will. And then he’ll hate you, like I do.”

  A cry is rising in my throat. I twist, and the pull of the sheets around me brings me back, to here, to now.

  Alone. In bed; in my bed.

  That wasn’t real; it was a nightmare.

  Is Calista really dead?

  Is it my fault?

  It can’t be true.

  Can it?

  CHAPTER 15

  CALLIE

  SHETLAND INSTITUTE, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 18 hours

  FINALLY A DOOR OPENS: a group of nurses comes in. Some of the nurses who were here say hello to them, goodbye to others, and go out through the door. I bolt after them.

  There are a dozen or so of them, chatting and laughing like they didn’t just cause severe pain; didn’t just cause dozens of deaths, slow and painful. Or maybe they’re just trying to forget.

  I hate them.

  They go on through many corridors and security doors until finally they stop at a door. Two go in, and the door shuts. Minutes later it opens again, and another two go in. This time I go with them.

  They pass through one of those car wash things like the scientist I followed earlier, then finally take off their suits. They look ordinary, not like mass murderers.

  When they get to the door at the end, it won’t open.

  “Please wait,” a voice says, echoing in the space.

  The nurses exchange a glance. “Wonder what it is this time?” one of them says.

  The other one frowns. “I know somebody in tech down below. He heard somebody collapsed in the control room. What if there’s been a real breach this time?”

  “I’m sure it was just something normal, like indigestion or appendicitis. You know how careful they are; it can’t get out.”

  Someone collapsed? Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe all their jumpsuits and precautions aren’t enough, and one of them caught whatever it is they’re injecting into people.

  I hope so.

  “No, it’s not just that,” the other answers. “They’ve quarantined t
he control room; that’s why he knows. No one can get in or out.”

  CHAPTER 16

  SHAY

  KILLIN, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 17 hours

  TOO MANY HOURS OF BEING AWAKE, being quiet, and not flushing the toilet have caught up with me. I just don’t care anymore what Kai hears.

  But I run the shower before I flush. Just in case.

  It’s only 7:00 a.m. when I tiptoe down the stairs to sneak past the sofa to the kitchen, but he isn’t there. Instead, Ramsay the bear is tucked underneath the blanket with his head on the pillow. Sweet.

  I peer into the kitchen: no sign of Kai.

  He hasn’t left, has he?

  No, why would he?

  I look out the window; his bike is still there. And then I spot Kai on the bench at the end of our garden. I slip on some shoes and step through the door.

  He’s facing away, not moving. His hair has golden streaks through it that catch the morning light. Is he lost in the view? Most people ooh and ahh if they haven’t seen it before. From here you can see over the trees to Loch Tay below us, a glistening blue that stretches miles in both directions. If you turn the other way, Ben Lawers and other peaks are stark above.

  I walk toward him; he turns at the sound. He smiles.

  “Hi,” I say. “Up early?”

  “Didn’t sleep very well.”

  “Sorry, was it the sofa?”

  “No, not at all.” He shrugs. “Just couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.”

  I sit next to him and look across the loch. On a sunny, still morning like today, the water is glass, the world above—trees, hills, mountains—reflected within it in perfect detail. If I could see well enough from this distance, I’m sure there’d be perfect replicas of the two of us in a watery world.

  Then Kai shakes his head. “I can see why people come here, but it just makes me think of what is missing.” He stands abruptly and turns away from the loch.

  CHAPTER 17

  CALLIE

  SHETLAND INSTITUTE, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 16 hours

  THE DOOR FINALLY OPENS, and the two nurses walk through to a square room, me close behind. A suited technician checks their temperatures and asks how they feel. They’re told they must sit and wait an hour and have their temperatures taken again.

  They sit and complain about being hungry and missing the start of some movie they want to watch.

  Finally their temperatures are taken again, and a door opens on the other side of the room.

  They go down a corridor to a cafeteria; dinner is underway. There are tables, large and small, and groups of people in twos or threes or many more, talking, laughing, eating, or finished and just hanging out. There are some grumpy, worried faces in a clump; a heated, whispered conversation that I can’t hear. Overall, it doesn’t seem much different from a small school cafeteria at lunchtime, except the food looks better and the chairs more comfortable.

  There is a loud clattering.

  A woman has tripped, her tray of food spilled on the floor.

  Someone goes to help her. The woman who fell looks familiar. Ah, yes, she was the woman with a white coat who spoke to the scientist in the room with all the monitors and asked him why he was late.

  If that was the control room…I thought the nurse said they were quarantined? She must have left before that happened.

  She looks a little pale.

  CHAPTER 18

  SHAY

  KILLIN, SCOTLAND

  Time Zero: 15 hours

  “HAVE YOU BEEN ON A MOTORCYCLE BEFORE?” Kai asks.

  “No. Well, only a moped.”

  Kai opens a storage box on the back of his bike and pulls out something red: a helmet.

  He holds it out. “See if that fits.”

  I tug it over my head and get the angle a little wrong. Kai catches it in his hands, straightens it. Tucks my hair around.

  “Comfortable?” he asks.

  “It’s fine.” I hesitate. “Was this hers? I mean—”

  “Was this Calista’s helmet? Yes. Red was her favorite color. Her hair was dark, like yours. Though hers was—”

  “Long and straight. Not this mess—I got the wrong copy of the curly hair gene.” Just in time I stop myself from telling him about the genetic studies that one day may sort out my hair without hours spent using straighteners—because who has time for that?

  “But it suits you.” He catches a curl around his finger where my hair spills out under the helmet. Then, like he realizes what he’s done, he yanks his hand away so fast that my hair springs back.

  He gets me to tuck my jeans into my heaviest boots, which he’d told me to wear, and shows me how to get on the bike. Where to hold on.

  And then we’re off.

  He’s going slower than I bet he usually does to start with, but the feel of speed, of the road underneath us, has my blood singing. All too soon we’ve done the distance that would take half an hour on my bicycle.

  He slows as we near the main street of Killin with its few shops, cafés, churches, and pubs—what passes for civilization here. The sky is clear blue; the early morning sun reflects and shimmers on the surface of the river as it tumbles over the Falls of Dochart. The mountains and trees above are lit up with a glittering halo. It’s a warm spring day, but snow still lines the peaks above.

  Okay, so this place is pretty beautiful on days like this. But sometimes I wish there were enough people around to feel anonymous. Here, everyone knows who is local, who is a tourist. And who is neither: me. Despite having a Scottish mother, I’ll always be marked as alien.

  We pass a few girls from my school, out early for a Saturday, and I can feel eyes following us as Kai pulls in to park by the side of the road. At least, for a change, the thing they’re noticing about me—the topic for dissection on the bus to school on Monday—is tall, blond, and handsome.

  “Was that all right?” Kai asks as I take off my helmet.

  “I loved it!” I can feel my eyes sparkling.

  “Another time I’ll take you on a proper ride where we can put on some speed.”

  My stomach does a weird flip. “I’d like that,” I manage to say.

  He turns to put the helmets in the storage box on the back of his bike. An odd look crosses his face, as if he wishes he hadn’t said it. He was just being polite, wasn’t he? He didn’t really mean it. I try not to mind that he didn’t—he’s got enough to deal with just now.

  “Now, where does this path start?” he asks.

  “Come on. I’ll show you,” I say, and we cross the road and walk over the bridge by the falls. As always I listen to the music of the water and don’t speak again until we’re across and starting down the lane below the pub. “Why was your sister here—where was she staying?”

  “She was with our mother, at our vacation house. It’s one of a group of them on the south side of the loch.” He gestures toward Loch Tay, not visible here through the trees. “Sorry, I guess I could have stayed there. I don’t like going there anymore.”

  “That’s understandable—don’t worry about it.” I know the place he means; there are a half dozen very, very expensive houses there, all barely used vacation homes. And while they may be reasonably close by boat, they’re a long way around the shores of the loch. “That’d be a long walk to here. There are no paths most of the way; much of it is by road. Unless she was on the water?”

  “She liked to go out on the loch when we were here, and often went alone even though she wasn’t supposed to. But our canoe was still at the house.”

  “Even assuming she walked that far, it’s unlikely she wouldn’t have been seen somewhere along the way. Everyone here knows everybody; who belongs, who doesn’t. She would have been noticed for sure.”

  “That’s what the detective said. So he thought she must have wandered off into the woods. Or been taken from the house.”

  “What about your mum—did she hear or see anything?” He’s silent a moment.
“I’m sorry if I’m asking too many questions,” I say, then stop walking and gesture to the rough lane. “Here’s where we join the bike route. Then farther along there is an unmarked branch that veers up; that’s the way we go.”

  We continue, and as we walk I glance sideways at Kai. His face is closed, carefully contained, like he is scared to let anything of himself out.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, finally breaking the silence. “It’s fine to ask questions. It’s just difficult to talk about. No, our mother didn’t hear anything. She got up late in the morning, and Calista was gone. Mum wasn’t alarmed—thought she’d gone for a walk, or on the loch. But time passed. She checked; the canoe was still there. She started to panic and called the police. They assumed Calista had merely gotten lost on a walk. Searches were arranged. They carried on for days. No sign of her was ever found.”

  “Do they think she just got lost, and…” My words trail away. I don’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “That seems to be the police’s main theory. That she was lost, or hurt. That her body will be found one day in the woods.” He flinches when he says body.

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “No. I was sure something else had happened to her. She wasn’t the kind of person to get lost; she was sensible for her age and had a good sense of direction. But there was nothing, no proof of anything else. Without it—well.” He shrugs. “I think the police had a theory they liked, so they gave up.”

  “But now you know I saw her.”

  “Yes. Now they must look at her case again.” He says it with cold determination.

  We walk on in silence. Kai had been so excited when I called; his hopes so dashed when he realized how long ago it was that I saw Calista.