Contagion

by Contagion (retail) (epub)

  “Let me ask her something, then.” He turns, arms crossed. “What did I give her for her last birthday? I was late with my present; I gave it to her just before she went on that last trip with Mum, before she disappeared. No one saw it; she left it in her room when she and Mum went away. To keep it safe, she said.”

  “Callie? What was it?”

  I don’t remember!

  What?

  Stuff that happened to me has mucked up my memory.

  Try, Callie!

  I don’t know.

  “She says she doesn’t remember—her memory has been mucked up.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  He starts walking out the door. There is fury on his face, tears on mine.

  How can he not believe me?

  Because he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to think his sister has died.

  Wait! I think I know. Was it a silver dolphin? A necklace?

  “Callie says a silver dolphin! On a necklace.”

  He turns around, tears on his face now too that he doesn’t try to hide.

  “Calista?” Kai whispers, and she goes to him—she wraps her dark arms around him.

  “She’s here; she’s with you right now,” I say, and take his hands and put them around her even as it tears into me inside, knowing how much this truth is hurting him now. Will it help him heal in the long run? I hope so.

  I shield my thoughts from Callie. Are there more things I should tell Kai, so there are no more secrets between us? That Callie is my half sister. That she and I share a father—a man he despises.

  No—Kai doesn’t need to know this. My mother fled before I was born to keep me away from my father; she said there was a wrongness inside him. Kai’s opinion of him backs her up, and I trust both their judgments. He’s not really my father, not in any way that counts.

  Though there was something about him that day we met…

  In Edinburgh. We met in Edinburgh at the university. I’m careful to keep the shock from my face when the realization slams home: the Aberdeen flu is all over that part of Edinburgh.

  My father is almost certainly dead. He most likely died before I even knew who he was.

  Thinking this gives me a weird, uneasy feeling. Despite my conclusions about him, despite everything, the thought that he is probably gone sits strangely in my gut. I don’t know how I feel about it.

  And what about Kai? Maybe he wouldn’t look at all this in quite the same way. Maybe he’d want to know who my father is.

  But he’s had too much—way too much—to deal with today.

  I bury these truths down deep where Callie won’t spot them. I go to Kai and hold him.

  CHAPTER 29

  CALLIE

  THEY SLEEP THROUGH THE DAY while I keep watch, their arms around each other. There is mist in the morning that creeps from the loch to surround us, so that the land—the world—is no longer there. But the sun burns it away in the afternoon, and all is revealed. A thin bridge to the shore. A building and fence above, and a road. I watch it, but no one comes.

  I slip out now and then to see what the army is up to. No more uniforms have come to the area since the ones with the dogs last night; altogether, there are six of them and three dogs. They’re taking the dogs around the shore of the loch, barking and snuffling and running back and forth. They find the rowboat Shay and Kai left behind and the path they took up to the road. From then on they concentrate on the road and the places it leads. Shay’s trick seems to have worked.

  And the whole time I’m waiting and watching, I’m thinking.

  I should be happy that Kai knows I’m here, but I’m not. He was so upset. I didn’t think of that. I thought he’d be happy to know I am with him, but he wasn’t. And he wanted to know how I was taken away, but I couldn’t tell him. I don’t remember. And then I didn’t want to tell him anything else that happened to me, the stuff I do remember. It would just upset him more.

  Shay knew how he’d react, didn’t she? She tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen.

  But I know where I was. I know it was Dr. 1 who did this to me. And I know he got away. Just thinking about him makes me start to burn inside, so much so that I’m afraid I’ll burn down the crannog by accident, and I go sit on the shore instead.

  If I tell Kai and Shay about him, they’ll want what I want, won’t they? Especially if they think it is their idea.

  * * *

  The sun is low in the sky again when they finally stir.

  Kai sits up and droops, head in hands. “I feel like I’m hungover, and I haven’t had a drop,” he says. “My head—ouch.”

  “Can I try to make you feel better?” Shay asks shyly.

  He’s uneasy, but she pulls him to his feet, pushes him down to sit on the bench. She slips behind him and rubs his shoulders, neck, temples. He sighs, leans back into her, and her arms go around him. He twists his head around, and she leans down and he kisses her.

  Bleugh! I say.

  Shay pulls away from Kai and rolls her eyes.

  “What?” he says.

  “Callie said ‘Bleugh.’ I don’t think she’s into watching us kiss.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t get my head around this. That Calista is here.”

  Callie, not Calista.

  “She likes to be called Callie,” Shay says.

  “I know. Sorry, Callie. Her father called her that, so I didn’t.” A shadow crosses his face when he says her father, and something flits through Shay’s mind, but the thought is gone before I see what it is. “But if that is what she wants to be called, Callie it is.” He shrugs. “Anyhow, I need to know when she is watching. Seeing us kissing isn’t something my little sister should be around for.”

  Give me a three-second warning, and I’ll go away!

  Shay smiles.

  “What?”

  “She says she’ll go away if we warn her first.”

  He half smiles. “That requires advance planning.”

  “Speaking of planning, what do we do next?”

  “Okay, let’s analyze this situation.”

  “Sure.”

  “So, Mum says we should go to the army. She tells them you are in Killin. They then try to kill you, knock me out, tie me up, and use me as bait to try to kill you again. This is not normal army behavior.”

  “No.”

  “And I’m pretty sure Mum wasn’t expecting it either.”

  “I hope not. That’d be a bit of an extreme reaction to your son getting a girlfriend, wouldn’t it?”

  “Huh.”

  “Iona said not to tell the army I was a survivor, that survivors go missing.”

  “Mum said they disappear before they can be brought to her, so they’re not making it there. She wanted you to be taken to the research center in Newcastle. How about we go there on our own?”

  “But how do we know the same thing wouldn’t happen again with the army once we get there? And this time your mum might get in the way.”

  “What else can we do? What she wants—what everyone should want—is to find out what causes this illness before it spreads any further. She says she needs you for that.”

  I know where it came from.

  “What?” Shay focuses on me, and Kai looks between her and the space where I am.

  I know where the illness came from.

  Shay repeats what I said. They look at each other, and Shay turns to me. “Okay, tell us, then.”

  It came from where I was. The islands where the huge explosions and fires were.

  “Shetland?”

  Yes.

  “Explain.”

  So I do, with Shay repeating what I say to Kai. That we were in a research institute underground; that they made people ill on purpose and then watched as they sickened and died.

  But I didn’t die; I survived. Like Shay. That’s how I know what it is like to be as she is now.

  And then they cured me.

  When I tell them what that means—the sealed room, the fire—Kai is f
urious. Shay’s eyes fill with tears.

  And then the sickness spread in the medical staff. There were accidents—explosions underground that became explosions above ground too. It escaped.

  “In the news, they said the Shetland disaster started with an earthquake—that it damaged the oil reservoir, made it go up in flames,” Shay says. “Maybe the same earthquake destroyed the underground research institute as well.”

  “That could be,” Kai says.

  “I don’t get it,” Shay says, frowning. “Why would anybody deliberately make people sick in some sort of big experiment?”

  I heard a nurse say they were looking for a cure for cancer.

  Shay relays what I said.

  “But they can’t experiment on people, even to find a cure for cancer—not like that,” Kai says.

  “Not legally, no. That must be why it was hidden away. Callie, how many people were there who were made ill?”

  I don’t know. When I got there we were all in a big group, all ages, maybe thirty of us. I saw another group being infected after I was cured. Oh, wait: there were these numbered bags of ashes of people. There were over four hundred of them.

  “So many.” Shay is horrified. “When I told Iona about Callie, she said there’s been a surge in missing persons in northern England and Scotland the last few years. How long has this been going on?”

  I don’t know.

  “If this is all true, then the Aberdeen flu didn’t actually start in Aberdeen,” Kai says.

  It’s true! Sick people from the islands took it to Aberdeen.

  “Callie says it came with sick people from Shetland to Aberdeen.”

  “Mum has to know this. She said identifying the starting point and path of the illness was really important in working out how to stop it. We have to tell her.”

  “But none of this explains why they were trying to kill me. Was it just because I’m a survivor of this illness they created?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There is someone who may know. The doctor who was in charge.

  “Who was he?” Shay says, and Kai looks at her, raises an eyebrow.

  I don’t know his real name. They all called him Dr. 1. He had a house on the island; I went there looking for him after I got out. There was a desk full of his stuff. Maybe if we go there, we could figure out where to find him.

  Shay relays what I said. “If he was involved from the beginning, he may know how to stop it,” she adds.

  “Well, it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do,” Kai says.

  “Yeah. Hiding out in a crannog could get boring.”

  “Plus, I’m starving. The catering here is shit.”

  “Nonexistent, you mean. But you can’t tell your mum where we’re going.”

  “I have to!”

  “Think about it. She told the army to come and get me, and how did that turn out?”

  “She didn’t know what would happen. She couldn’t have.”

  “I believe you, Kai. But if she doesn’t believe us about what the army has done, she might tell them where we are going and think she’s doing the right thing. Even if she doesn’t, they might be listening in, or they could try to make her tell them what we’re up to. You can’t tell her.”

  Kai stares back at Shay and eventually nods. He sighs. “You’re right, but she’ll be so worried. And what if the army catches us before we get there, and nobody knows what we know?”

  Shay tilts her head to one side, thinking, then nods. “You’re right. We need to get word to Iona.”

  “You can’t call her either—doesn’t the same reasoning apply? She’s a known friend of yours. They could be watching her, or listening.”

  Shay shakes her head. “She has a blog under another name—no one knows it is hers. I can log in and put up stuff only she’ll see; it won’t be on the internet. We have to tell somebody what we know.”

  “What if they’re monitoring her internet usage too?”

  “She’s got it all teched up in a major way; some friend of hers who is a total computer geek set it up to be untraceable. She said it bounces around the world. They can’t trace it, I promise you.”

  “How do we leave Loch Tay without getting caught?” Kai says. “There are roadblocks, so we can’t go by road. There are dogs that can follow us if we go on foot.”

  “We could bike, off road? Could dogs follow us if we were on bicycles?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they could: they seemed to follow us okay when we were wading in water.”

  Shay nods. “Okay, let’s think about this. What if we drive out of range of where the dogs will be looking for us, but go off road before we hit the roadblocks? We could get another car once we’re out of the quarantine zone, or maybe bicycles would be better. We could stay off road, use the bike route to the coast, and worry about how to get to Shetland once we’re there.”

  “All right. So, first up we need to get our hands on a car to get us away from the dogs.”

  “Yes. We’ll have to scope out the best place to try that we can easily reach from the shores of Loch Tay. Callie can help us work out where is safest.”

  They continue to talk about what to do, and how, and when, but I leave. I tell them I’ll watch the road to see if the army is moving about again, but really I just want to get away from Shay so I can think without risking her listening in.

  Can we really find Dr. 1?

  I want to find him, wrap myself around him, and make him burn.

  I want to watch him die, screaming in pain like so many others have done—and then, just before he dies, he’ll be able to see me, hear me. And I’ll tell him who I am, what I’ve done to him, and why.

  I

  WANT

  REVENGE.

  PART 4

  THE FALL

  Once all possible solutions have been eliminated, the impossible becomes not only possible, but probable.

  —Xander, Multiverse Manifesto

  CHAPTER 1

  SHAY

  WE SLIP OUTSIDE AT DUSK. Kai climbs down the ladder and pulls the rope to haul our boat out from under the crannog. He steps into the boat, and it rocks wildly in the water. Once it settles I follow him down the ladder and get into the boat with not much more grace. No food for a day and a half and my hands and feet are wobbly and uncoordinated.

  “Ready?” Kai whispers.

  I nod, and he starts rowing—pulling us away from our hiding place and out into deeper water. His strokes are calm, sure, quiet. He hasn’t eaten for longer than me, and has coped with being bashed on the head and tied to a bench for a day, but still keeps going.

  I watch him as he rows. The stars are out tonight; the colors around them are bright to my eyes and reflect on the water, on Kai. His muscles flex in his arms as he pulls the oars through the water; his hair curls at his neck, and my fingers ache to reach out and touch him.

  “Stop it,” he whispers.

  “What?”

  “Looking at me like that. I’m trying to concentrate.”

  Callie reappears from checking on the soldiers. Three of them are still in the area. One is at your house with the dogs; they seem to be asleep. Two are on the move: one going between the roadblocks above the loch and the other below the loch. Kenmore is clear.

  “Callie says we’re good to go,” I say, and give Kai the thumbs-up. He turns the boat to the right, toward Kenmore.

  It’s a small village, about the farthest point from Killin on the loch. It wasn’t within the quarantine zone when we first arrived in Killin, but it is now. It hasn’t been cleared, and Callie told us earlier that there are bodies there, and sick people, and now that the army has pulled out—apart from those who seem to be here to find me—no one is helping them.

  Kai pauses in his rowing.

  “Do you want me to take a turn?” I ask.

  “No. I’m fine. I was just thinking: we should throw our phones in the loch. They’ll be traceable. We can’t use them.”

  “Oh. Okay.�
�� I sigh and take it out and run my fingers over the cover, then struggle to take it off. Mum gave it to me. It’s a polar bear design, like Ramsay, and I can’t let it go. Something catches inside at all the things I’m leaving behind for the unknown. But with Mum gone, does any of it really matter?

  The case goes in my pocket, and our phones slip into the cold waters of the loch.

  Soon we’re nearing the pier at Kenmore. I feel it before I see the village: the pain, the dead. I have to block it out. Callie says she’ll keep watch on us from above, and zooms up into the sky.

  Kai maneuvers the boat near the pier, and I step out, slip the rope around a post. He follows.

  It’s time to steal what we need.

  We walk down one street, then another, looking for likely houses to try. Some are empty, or only occupied by the dead; others have the sick and dying inside them. I keep my barriers up most of the way, just loose enough that I can still sense which is which, so we can avoid the latter.

  We try front doors, back doors, sometimes windows, and let ourselves in to one house after another, trying not to think what has happened to those who lived here. It’s hard, when what is left of them is often still there.

  We find and wolf down cereal bars and fruit, anything we can eat quickly, and stuff small backpacks with more food and bottles of water. We hunt for clothes that almost fit and change into them. There is a shelf of maps in one house, and I quickly memorize relevant ones and then leave them behind.

  I’ve always had this photographic memory, but since I was sick it seems to be even more precise. I can glance at a map and see it in my mind, and more: I can integrate it with other maps and information and manipulate it all. It’s like everything I ever knew is there, accessible, just when I want it; there is none of this having to hunt around in my memories to try to find what I need.

  I scavenge through handbags and drawers, then even the pockets of the dead, for smartphones—ones with a decent charge and no security code. I find five, and then I’ve had enough of this grim task. That will have to do. Kai leaves me where I found the last one while he goes to look for a car. I turn off all but one of the phones, then wrap them over and over in plastic in preparation for the river crossing. The one I left on I use to log in to Iona’s blog, JIT.