She looks in the fridge and then appears really worried. “He hasn’t eaten. Check his room.”
“What, really?”
“I’m not going to do it. What if he’s got a girl in there?” Kai raises a skeptical eyebrow. “It’s not impossible. Just do it.”
“Fine.” Kai gets up and goes up the stairs. He knocks loudly on a door and calls out, “Hey, Martin, are you still in bed?”
There’s no answer.
He knocks again.
I hear the door open.
There are footsteps above us. Mum is rinsing teacups.
“Mum? You better get up here. Now.” There is a note in Kai’s voice that makes her put the cups down and rush up the stairs.
I fly ahead of her and get there first.
The room is a mess of books on every surface, like it was when I looked yesterday. And inside it, in bed, is Martin. Eyes open and bloody. Dried blood on his face trailing down like tears.
It has got him; that’s how they look when they die.
Kai is standing next to the bed when Mum rushes in.
“I think he’s…Is he…?”
Mum kneels by his side, feels for a pulse. She looks up at Kai, eyes wide with shock. “Dead. Yes. For some hours, I should think. Get me the phone.”
Kai turns to grab it from the hall, but before he can pick it up, it starts ringing.
CHAPTER 17
SHAY
“BUT WHY CAN’T I GO TO IONA’S?”
“You heard what they said on the radio. People are advised to stay at home until the area is given the all clear. What’s the point of closing school if you all get together and swap germs anyhow? If you’re bored, you can help me do some things around the house.”
I groan, but the hours are ticking slowly past. Mum is afraid of heights, and in this house of high ceilings, everything involving a ladder is mine. Soon I’m lugging it around and cleaning cobwebs from corners. When I’m finished with that, she finds a bucket and sponge for me to clean the windows.
I hate the smell of window cleaner. I swipe viciously at the glass, not worrying too much about being neat.
I’ve nearly done the front of the house when I see a car through the window I’m cleaning. A police car?
“Mum! Have you broken any laws lately?” I call, and she comes out of the kitchen. She looks through the window and frowns. “What are they doing here?”
The front car doors open; two policemen get out. Then the back door opens, and out steps Mum’s friend Shelley, in her nurse’s uniform. What is she doing with them?
“Should I make tea?” I ask.
“Finish that window,” she says. Groaning some more, I continue.
Shelley sees me in the window and waves, calls out a hello. She walks to the door, the two policemen coming along behind her.
Mum opens the door. “Good afternoon,” she says.
One of the policemen has a clipboard. “We’re doing door-to-door checks of all houses in the area, ma’am.”
“I see.”
“And Nurse Allardyce is checking residents’ temperatures.”
“Oh, is she?”
“Sorry, it must be done,” Shelley says, and looks unhappy—she knows Mum’s views on conventional medicine. They’ve argued about all matter of things, from vaccines to antibiotics. “It’s just a thermometer, Moyra. I promise.”
Mum sighs. “Okay, fine.”
One policeman asks the full names of all those in residence.
“I already told you!” Shelley says, clearly exasperated. The other one says he has to check the house to make sure no one else is here.
Shelley has some weird thing that she puts in Mum’s ear. “98.7,” she says loudly, and a policeman writes it down.
“Sharona?” he says.
I roll my eyes, get off the ladder, and proffer my ear. “99.9,” Shelley says, and checks it again. “99.8. Probably you’re a little warm from running up and down ladders. We’ll come back and check you again tomorrow morning. In the meantime, stay at home. If you have any signs of headache or internal pain, call this number.” She hands me a paper.
As soon as they’re gone, Mum chucks it in the recycle bin.
Mum asks me to wash her car next. I start to protest that you don’t need a ladder for that, but one look at her face and I go. When I finally come back in, her face has a set look, one I know. Trouble is on the way.
“What is it?”
“The army. I’ve been phoning a friend up the top road. There is an army jeep at the end of our lane, blocking it so we can’t get out. It’s not right, Shay. Marching into our house without a warrant, demanding to know who lives here, and checking to see if we lied. This is a free country.”
I shrug. “No big deal having a temperature check, is it? They’re just making sure we haven’t got this flu.” That’s what I say, but why are they blocking our lane? Unease grows inside. What if my temperature is higher tomorrow? What happens then?
“I’ve a good mind to see them off with a shotgun.”
“If you had one.”
She grins. “If I had one.” There are few thoughts more incongruous than Mum with a shotgun: she’s campaigned for increased gun control, against hunting, against war.
That evening we watch TV for a while. It’s early, but I’m dead tired after all the chores, and looking for an excuse to head up. A text from Iona pings, asking me to call. I take the excuse to go to my room, and shut the door. Being off school sounds great, but when you’re under house arrest, it’s kind of boring.
I flop on my bed and hit Iona’s speed dial. It rings once, then she picks up. “You won’t believe what I’ve found out,” she says, her voice fast and eager.
“Hello to you too. What is it this time?”
“Log on to JIT,” she says. “You talking about Kai’s sister got me thinking. There’s been a lot of traffic about missing people lately, mostly not the sort that hits the news: like the homeless and runaways.”
I pull out my laptop and log on to Jitterbug while she talks. Once logged in, I can see the unpublished blogs that she’s writing. She gets me to check her stuff, to make sure she hasn’t jumped to too many outrageous conclusions and to keep the slander down to a reasonable level—that and to correct her spelling.
There are a few new drafts since the last time I logged on. She’s started one on Multiverse, that weird truth commune she was talking about, but it looks like she’s abandoned it for something new.
I click on the one at the top, titled The Untold Missing.
“All right, go,” I say as my eyes scan what she has written.
“There has been a huge increase in internet traffic searching for missing people of a certain type. Running over three years now. Most are from particular areas of Scotland and northern England—it’s hard to know where the boundaries lie, exactly.”
She’s listed page after page—links, names, many with photographs.
“How much of an increase?”
“Big, really big.”
“Have you got any numbers on that?”
“Well, no, but—”
“And if that were true, wouldn’t the authorities have picked up on this?” I say, playing my role as official skeptic.
“Look, really look, Shay. Most of these people are on the fringes of society, the sort that no one would miss other than their few friends, who no one would believe. But the story is there.”
“Do you think Kai’s sister Calista could be part of this?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t fit the profile. Can you read it and tell me what you think?”
“Can I do it tomorrow? Mum’s had me doing chores all day; I’m exhausted.”
“Tomorrow, you promise?”
“Yes. Now let me go to sleep.”
Iona laughs. “She must really have worked you to the bone. You’ll be glad when school is back on.”
We say goodbye, and I am tired, but I can’t stop myself from scanning through her draft blog again. So many people—
literally hundreds of them—many, as Iona said, from particular areas of Scotland and northern England.
Where did they all go? What could have happened to them?
Should I tell Kai, or Dougal the policeman, in case it has anything to do with Calista? I bite my lip and think. It’s just conjecture that there is any sort of connection between all these missing people. Is it really a big increase on normal numbers, or is Iona seeing what she wants to see in her excitement at finding a story no one else has spotted?
Anyhow, as Iona said, even if there is something happening here that she has stumbled across, it can’t have anything to do with Calista: she doesn’t fit in this group at all.
I’ll stay quiet for now and see what else Iona comes up with.
I take out my phone and read Kai’s message again: better now he’s heard from me.
I smile, and text back: You call this a holiday? I wasn’t allowed out of the house except to wash the car. Hope you’re having more fun than me. S xx
There’s a dull ache behind my eyes; I take some pain medicine and head for bed.
CHAPTER 18
CALLIE
WHEN MUM GETS OFF THE PHONE, her face is white.
She swears in German.
“What is it?’” Kai asks.
“That was Craig—Dr. Lawson—who I spoke to last night. The one who is with Public Health England. He called to ask for my help. As I’d guessed, the so-called Aberdeen flu is no ordinary flu. Cases have been reported from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. And now in Newcastle.” Her eyes move to the room behind Kai, and his follow.
“Is that what…”
“Perhaps, perhaps not.” She shakes her head and sighs. “Poor Martin. What am I going to tell his parents?”
Kai’s eyes move from Martin’s body to Mum, and he steps closer to her and farther from him. “Does that mean that we’ll get it too?”
“I don’t think so. I think we’d have symptoms by now if we were infected. But I don’t have enough facts about how it is spread, or how he caught it. Assuming that is even what caused his death. It could be something unrelated.” But she doesn’t think so. It’s all over her face.
“Should we call that ambulance now?”
She shakes her head. “Craig is taking care of that.”
Very soon, sirens ring loud in our ears. I rush to the window to watch. There’s not just one ambulance coming to this house—there are two, and a truck also.
And they’re not the only sirens we can hear; there are more in the distance.
When Kai answers the door, his eyes open wide. He’s surprised to see men in plastic suits standing there.
I’m not surprised; I’m horrified. They look very like the suits everyone wore underground in Shetland. Everyone except subjects, like me. It’s like what happened underground is happening here, now. Will Mum and Kai get it too?
And it’s even worse: inside the suits you can see enough of them to work it out. They’re uniforms—army, I think, but army or police or whatever are all the same to me. They mean trouble.
Some of them bag up Martin and his bedding and so on from his room and take it all away. They ask Mum and Kai for a list of everywhere he has been in the last few days.
“Nowhere. He’s been nowhere,” Kai answers.
“It’s true,” Mum concurs. “He’s writing up his PhD. He hasn’t left the house. At least, not while either of us have been around to see him go. I can’t imagine how he’s come into contact with anything.”
“Ma’am, I have orders from Dr. Lawson to bring you with us. You’ll need to put on a biohazard suit.”
“What about my son?”
“He can stay here. Under house quarantine.”
“What is your name?”
“Bryson, ma’am.”
“Well, Bryson, I’m not going anywhere without my son.”
“But—”
“Unless you want to drag me kicking and screaming away from him, he is coming with us.”
She has a staring contest with Bryson, and he finally sighs. “Sure, why not?”
They help Kai and Mum get into biohazard suits and usher them into the other ambulance. Behind us, wide tape is being put across the door. Like police tape, but this is red, with funny symbols on it, and QUARANTINE in black letters. Neighbors are watching through windows, but their doors stay shut. As if that could save them, when all the precautions and suits and sealed doors underground couldn’t: once it gets out, it’s unstoppable.
“Where are we going?” Mum asks Bryson.
“To a temporary army operations base. We’re assisting setting up a group to analyze the spread of the disease. We’ll have to put both of you into quarantine for a day. If you make it through that without signs of illness, we’re hoping you’ll be able to help us.”
“I’m rather hoping for both of those things,” Mum says.
“Yeah.”
I’m scared. When we get to the base where they are putting Mum and Kai in quarantine, it is too much like being a prisoner underground on Shetland. I want to go with them, but I just can’t handle being locked up again. Their temperatures are checked, and they’re told if they don’t have any symptoms and they pass another temperature check in twenty-four hours, they can come out. Mum demands access to all they know so far on the situation.
What if they have it? Will they die? I didn’t die when I caught it. There was so much pain that I was sure I was going to, but then I got better. But if Mum and Kai die, will they be ghosts, like I am? Will we all be together, and will they be able to hear me and talk to me?
And what I want and don’t want are all twisted around in a confusing knot. I want them to know I am here; I want them to talk to me. But I don’t want them to scream in pain. I don’t want them to die.
I watch them for a while. Kai keeps looking at his phone like he wants to use it, then putting it back in his pocket. Mum is pacing, waiting for them to send a computer through with the data they have on the Aberdeen flu so far.
Watching them through the transparent wall just makes me think the worst. And now, not only can they not hear me, I can’t hear them either.
Instead I wander around the army base. It’s set in fields on hills above Newcastle; the city skyline is in the distance, green all around. Bryson said the base was temporary, and while it is tents, not buildings, and everything looks new, the grass freshly trampled, it is somehow serious and solid at the same time. There are high fences all around, barbed wire on top. The gate we came in seems to be the only way in or out, and it has guards in biohazard suits, guns in their hands. Other guards patrol the fence.
I don’t think they built this in a day. They were ready.
I wander around the base and listen, in the cafeteria, in meetings. Some sneak away and use their phones when they think no one is watching, and warn people to get away, to hide.
One thing is clear: things are bad, very bad. Everyone is scared.
It has escaped from Shetland, and nothing will ever be the same again.
CHAPTER 19
SHAY
I’M ASLEEP BUT NOT ASLEEP, both at the same time. My head hurts, and I can hear a voice calling out, “Mum, Mum.” Is it my voice? It must be, but it is distant, like it belongs to someone else.
The door opens. Light from the hall spills in, a blunt ax that splits my skull and makes me cry out.
Mum’s voice is soothing; her hand is on my forehead.
There is pain deep inside me, and I’m crying. I try not to, but I can’t stop.
Mum says something like “No one is taking you away, not while I’m here to stop them.”
She’s bustling around. She puts something cool on my head, has one of her concoctions for me to drink. I can’t lift my head and she helps me, holds the cup to my lips. It tastes all right. I must really be sick.
She helps me sit up. The movement reverberates in pain in my head, as if I’m the clapper in a bell, hitting the sides over and over, and I’m crying again.
“Be brave, love,” she says, and I try to stop, but my eyes are still leaking tears.
“Have I got it? That Aberdeen flu? Am I going to die?” I can only whisper the words.
“No way. You probably just ate something funny,” she says. “You’ll be all right.”
She’s easing me into clothes, and I make myself pick up my phone and put it in my pocket. I promised Kai, didn’t I?
We’re outside now, and the cool air on my skin is good. I breathe a little better.
“Where are we going?” I say.
“Away. I think we need a little vacation.” And she’s drawing me down the path to the loch. I’m leaning on her, trying to help, not to stumble, but I have no strength. My arms and legs feel wooden and disconnected, like they belong to somebody else.
We finally reach the shore, and she helps me onto the bench by the small pier where our boat is tied. The water is lapping softly, but it sounds like a tsunami in my pounding head.
“Wait here just a minute, Shay. Don’t move.”
I whisper a promise not to move. Not that I could if I wanted to.
She’s gone for more than a minute. I look up at the night sky. The pain hasn’t lessened, but I’m getting used to it. I can almost bear it without crying, so long as I don’t move. But the sky looks…wrong. The moon and stars are so bright I can barely stand to look at them, with colored halos all around.
Mum comes back. She carries loads of stuff. She helps me into the boat, tells me to lie down if I want to—puts something soft under my head when I do.
She’s rowing. I’m not sure if I’m awake or asleep. The cool air and the swaying on the water are soothing, but there is still pain inside me: my head, my chest.
Everywhere.
I can close my eyes and breathe. And try to compartmentalize the pain. Put it away in a drawer, and shut it. Don’t open it. It’s still there, I know it’s there, but I can pretend it isn’t.
Time passes. I might sleep, I don’t know. The boat bumps into something and jars my head. I cry out.
“Sorry, Shay. We’re there now. You’re going to have to help me a little.”
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