by Teri Terry
CHAPTER 15
KAI
I LEAN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR.
The horrible screaming; the smell of the smoke still caught in my throat—like a barbecue but sweeter, and worse, and wrong, as if someone were making a pyre inside the building.
There are voices shouting below. A fire alarm starts screeching out a high-pitched warning.
My stomach is heaving, and I struggle to control it, to leave that part of what I saw behind and focus on the rest of it. The men down there now—whatever happened to one of them—are trouble. Are they army or police? They weren’t in uniform, but they all had an army haircut and wore similar plain, dark clothes.
Why are they here? A cold feeling in the pit of my stomach replaces the nausea. I called Mum, what—half an hour ago? And here they are. Did they trace the call and come looking for me? Even though I’d thought it was possible, I’m still shocked to find out it may be true. And that they got here so fast.
I peer carefully over the side of the balcony. It’s dark, but I can just make out two men down below to my right watching the back door; one has something rectangular in his hand—a radio, a phone? Despite what is happening inside, they’ve kept their position.
When the ones downstairs remember why they’re here, they’re sure to come and check this door too. I move one of the chairs on the balcony carefully, quietly, and wedge it under the door handle. That won’t slow them down for long.
What now?
There’s another balcony below this one. If I climb down to it on the left side, the balcony should block the view of the two men below, and they shouldn’t be able to hear me with the fire alarm still wailing away.
If I don’t fall. If there aren’t more of them down there, watching the other side from the shadows…
The door rattles behind me—someone is trying to open it.
I tuck the tablet into the back of my jeans, ease myself up onto the railing, swing my feet over, and climb down the side. Something—a pebble?—is dislodged and clatters down the side between alarm wails, and I’m sure they’ll hear it.
I’m hanging there, about to swing my feet onto the balcony below, when I hear the chair crash and give way above me. At almost the same moment, the back door opens below. There are voices and the sounds of people spilling outside.
I swing and drop to the balcony under this one just as sirens sound loudly in the night air. I duck down against the building. There are more sirens in the distance now, police and ambulance.
The two who were watching the door below are still there, but they’ve moved away from the door. They’re hanging back, looking at everyone who is coming out because of the fire alarm.
There are footsteps on the balcony above now; if they peer over, they’ll see me. If I jump down, the two down there will see me. I try the door to the inside from the balcony; it’s locked.
The sirens are closer now; then there are flashing lights as police cars and ambulances pull in.
Above me the footsteps retreat to the door; it opens and closes. The two down below disappear up the lane.
They’re not police, then, are they? Not if they’re avoiding the emergency workers.
This balcony is only one flight up from the ground. I swing myself over the edge and drop.
I hit the ground, hard, the shock running up my feet and legs, and I crouch on the ground a moment.
“Are you all right?” A hand helps me up. It’s a policewoman.
“Fine, yeah. Just wanted to get out of there.” I shudder, remembering the screams and the smell from that man—from his flesh, burning—and this time don’t fight it. I’m sick on the ground.
“Whoa, that’s gross,” someone says—one of the guys from the hostel who’s standing around out back.
“Is it true?” another one asks. “Did somebody actually just burst into flames for no reason? Did you see?”
Without any other reason to explain barfing on the pavement, I nod yes.
“They’re taking statements from witnesses out front,” the policewoman says.
“Give me a sec. I think I’m going to be sick again.” She walks away in a hurry.
“Are you all right?” A girl passes me some tissues out of her handbag, and I wipe my face.
“Thanks. I’m fine.”
“He really just suddenly burned up,” she says. “So freaky.”
“You saw it too? Who were those guys anyhow?”
She shrugs. “They were asking who’d been using the phone. Did you see anyone? We saw you were there when we came through.”
I look at her again—was she the girl who’d walked through with a boy just after I’d used the phone? I didn’t think they’d seen me move.
“No, no one used the phone when I was there.”
“Or maybe it was you, John, and you’re the one they’re after.” She smiles. Is it to show she’s not serious? How does she know my name? She must have asked about the new guy at the reception desk, and that much curiosity makes me nervous. “Anyhow, you’re safe now; they all left quickly as soon as they heard the sirens. Weird, huh? I thought they were police.”
“No idea what that’s about,” I say, but I’ve never been a good liar.
The policewoman who helped me up before gestures for me to come over.
“Gotta go.”
I walk to where they are taking statements. I can feel that girl’s eyes on my back: what are the chances of her not repeating what she just said to me?
Not much. Maybe not to authority, but if she talks, it could travel easily enough.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I wait until the policewoman is speaking to someone else and has turned away, then slip to the other edge of the milling crowd and walk quickly up the road.
Once I’m out of sight, I go faster and turn a few corners quickly in case anybody tries to follow.
What now?
Before I was interrupted by all that weirdness—could that man really just have spontaneously combusted?—I was watching that video I’d found, over and over again.
It’s itching at me; I want to go back online. With all the things I have to think about, the one thing stuck in my mind is that blonde girl…It’s all lies, she said.
I force myself to wait until I’m a fair distance away from the hostel before trying to find some Wi-Fi. Finally, I find a small pub down a side street and slip in the door. “Have you got Wi-Fi?” I ask the guy behind the bar.
“For customers.”
Stomach too sour to think of drink, I order a barely edible hamburger and log on.
But I can’t find her channel. I’m baffled and go through history, click on the link—it’s gone.
Has it been taken down?
I do another general search: survivors, Aberdeen flu, lies.
And one comes up, called “It’s still all lies.” Could this be it?
I click on it, and there she is.
“Hi, me again. I’m still a survivor. If what I’m saying isn’t true, why are my posts taken down as fast as I can put them up? Why would anyone bother unless they don’t want people to know the truth?
“Look, I’ll prove it. I’ll show you.
“Now watch.” She smiles and slips a scarf around her hair.
The camera—a phone camera, most likely—moves as she walks down a street.
People are walking around her in every direction, and I recognize where she is: Piccadilly Circus. It’s not as busy as that part of London would usually be—it’s usually swarming with tourists in the summer—and many people are wearing masks like you sometimes see in footage of places like Japan, the sort they wear when someone has a cold. Not that that sort of mask would stop the epidemic, but London is still clear, isn’t it?
She steps into a doorway, and the screen focuses on her face again.
> “Did you see where I am? And all those people I walked so close to?” she says, voice low. “I’m a survivor. If survivors were contagious, they could all be infected right now. They could be dead in a day.
“But they won’t be, and that is because it’s a pack of lies.
“Why is the government lying about this? I don’t know. Maybe they’ve got something to hide.”
I look again and again, but there are no more installments. And soon the one I’d just watched vanishes.
I’m afraid to let myself hope that she could be telling the truth.
Maybe Iona knows something about her? I have to tell her what happened tonight too.
I log on to JIT and start a new draft post, titled “Are you there?”
I hit refresh again and again. The guy at the bar is looking at the plate I pushed away ages ago; maybe I need to have something else to keep using their Wi-Fi undisturbed. I order a soft drink.
The screen updates, at last.
Iona: I am now. What’s up?
Kai: I called my mother and twenty minutes or so later had to slip away from a bunch of pseudo-police.
Iona: OMG. You’re all right?
Kai: Yes, but more down to luck—and someone else’s lack of it—than anything else.
Iona: I’ve got some news. There have been more rumors surfacing of a facility where survivors are being held. I don’t know if it is or isn’t true; it’s all reactionary—as in, let’s find it and burn it down.
Kai: Any idea where?
Iona: England, by the sounds of things. I’m working on narrowing it down.
Kai: There’s something else I want to ask you about. Have you heard or seen a vlog, initially called “It’s all lies”?
Iona: Do you mean that girl in London? There’s been panic over there, but consensus is she’s never had the flu—that she is attention-seeking or unstable, and it’s made up. And how would she have gotten out of the quarantine zone without being screened anyhow?
Kai: It has been done before. Shay and I sneaked out of the zone when we left Killin, after all. But there’s more. When I was talking to Mum, she said that survivors being carriers hasn’t really been proven. That the evidence is all anecdotal.
Iona: I’m sorry to say this, but you may be clutching at straws. What Shay said about where you’ve been and the flu following was pretty convincing, anecdotal or not.
Kai: I know.
I type the words, but I can’t stop thinking of that girl—the sincerity in her voice. It felt so real. Could she really be making it up? But she’d sound sincere if she’s unbalanced and believes what she is saying. I shake my head.
Iona: What now for you?
Kai: Good question.
Iona: Do you need somewhere to go while you work things out?
There’s a friend who lives not far from Glasgow—in Paisley. Hang on, I’ll see if he answers a message.
I wait, sip at my soft drink.
Iona: Yep, you can stay there. I trust him completely.
She gives me the details.
We say our goodbyes, and I shut down the tablet, yawning. What do I do for tonight? It’s too late to try to get to Iona’s friend—it’s too far to walk, and the trains will have stopped for the night.
Those men—police but not police, or whatever they were—would they have put the word out about me? Am I wanted in Glasgow? If they go back and talk to that girl—well, they’ll put it together fast enough. I definitely can’t go back there.
I walk up to the bar. “Is there a hotel or B&B around here?”
He looks me up and down. “You got cash?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a room over the bar. You want to see it?”
I nod and follow him up the stairs. It’s small and noisy from the bar below, but it looks clean.
“Cash up front,” he says, and doesn’t ask my name.
I bolt the door behind him. Despite the racket downstairs, I’m asleep in seconds.
The next morning I’m on the Wi-Fi again before I even search for coffee. I find her on yet another channel.
Her smile fills the screen, then she backs the camera away.
“Hi, it’s me again. People are asking questions about me online; some are saying I’m either lying or crazy and never had the flu.
“So. This is me.” She holds up an ID card: Freja Eriksen is printed on it. She’s a little younger and in a school uniform—it’s a school ID. She looks bored, like the smile isn’t in her eyes. She looks more alive on her channel in London.
“I boarded at Durham School in Durham. The entire place was wiped out by the Aberdeen flu, apart from a few who were immune, and then there was me: I’m a survivor. Find the immune from school and ask them; they know that I was sick.
“Ciao for now.”
I search for information on her school but don’t find anything about the flu—the school website was last updated weeks ago. But the school is definitely inside the quarantine zone.
I head out, walking, not sure what to do. I should go to Iona’s friend’s place, I guess, but Iona said the rumors point to England, didn’t she? Not west of Glasgow.
I can’t stop myself from stepping into every café with Wi-Fi as I go. I’m glued to the internet, to finding Freja’s posts before they get deleted.
Every hour or so another one appears. She’s mocking the authorities—they can’t keep up with her. They’ll get to her eventually to shut her up, won’t they?
Now she’s by St. Paul’s Cathedral in another disguise. She suddenly pockets her phone without turning it off; the view is of fabric and thin light moving through it, and police sirens sound nearby.
I almost hold my breath for the next installment, and check again and again. It’s a few hours before I finally find her, and relief rushes through me to see her standing on the Millennium Bridge. She got away. Then that is replaced by disbelief that she’d stand in the middle of a bridge and stream this live: what if they rush to both ends of the bridge? She’d be trapped.
Then her face focuses in, and she whispers: “After nearly getting picked up at St. Paul’s, I’m putting this up after I’ve left.”
I breathe easier again.
She even makes the TV news on my café wall. There’s panic spreading in London, but so far it still isn’t there. She’s wanted for questioning by the police, her image up on the screen, but there aren’t any reports of the flu from places she’s been.
This girl, this Freja, can’t be a survivor; she can’t—where are all the cases of flu if she is?
Could Shay have gotten things so wrong?
But what about how everyone got sick and died at the Shetland air force base after Shay went there? What other explanation could there possibly be for that?
It can’t be true; I can’t make it so just because I want it to be.
But doubt gnaws inside, finds places and pain, and—no, I can’t discount this. If there is any doubt at all about Shay being a carrier, I have to find out.
I have to know the truth.
What do I do now?
I can’t be John anymore; it’s too risky—they might link that name to the phone call to Mum. I can’t be Kai either. I want to find Shay, but I can’t even begin to guess where to look for her.
It goes over and over again in my head, and I can’t let it go: What if we’ve got it all wrong? What if Shay was never a carrier in the first place?
I can’t believe it. Everything she worked out made sense. But I can’t let it alone either.
Mum said the evidence was only anecdotal. Without knowing the cause of the illness, it couldn’t be anything else—they couldn’t prove how it was transmitted without knowing how it was caused in the first place.
What if this Freja is right and everyone else is wrong?
There’s
only one way to find out if she’s telling the truth: I’ve got to find her. I know enough about what being a survivor is from Shay. I’ll see for myself and judge whether Freja is or isn’t. Anyhow, Iona said the place survivors have been taken is probably in England. Freja is in London; at least if I go to look for her, I’ll be heading in the right direction.
And then it hits me: there is one way to know for sure. If Freja can see and hear Callie, she must be a survivor.
I have to find her.
In a quiet corner of a park, I sit on a bench and hope no one can hear me. But if anyone does, they’ll just think I’m a bit odd and talking to myself, won’t they?
“Callie, are you there?” I say, voice low. “We’re going to London to find Freja. When we get there, I can work out where she’s been last from her video messages, but then I need your help. I need you to find her and tell her where I am, so she can come to me.”
CHAPTER 16
CALLIE
I STARE BACK AT KAI.
What do I do?
If Freja is a survivor, will she be able to hear and see me like Shay could? Kai seems to assume she will, but I don’t know if he’s right—Shay is the only survivor I’ve ever known.
It’d be amazing to be heard again! I wouldn’t be so alone.
But I’d have to be careful, very careful. I’d have to hide that I’m the carrier down deep inside, where she’d never spot it.
CHAPTER 17
KAI
HOW DO I GET TO LONDON?
I can’t travel as Kai or John.
To be fair, I don’t know if the authorities are actively looking for me or if it is just whoever it was that searched the hostel. They ran when the police came, after all. But anyway, I can’t risk using either name. I’ve got cash—thanks again, Bobby—but it will only go so far.
Instead of heading for Iona’s friend, I get on a bus that goes in the direction of the M74. From there I’ll hitch all the way to London if I have to.