Flash Point

by Nancy Kress

  She said, “We’ll take the middle door.”

  “Great!”

  Another few minutes and the door had closed behind her and Rafe, and Amy heard a key turn in the lock. They were in.

  More ten-foot-high walls, these about four feet apart, like a long hallway of unsanded, unpainted walls. The lumber was so new that it still smelled of fresh sawdust. Openings led to other branches of the maze. The ground underneath was dirt, interspersed with weeds and the occasional rock.

  Rafe said, “I love what they’ve done with the place.”

  “Do you want to go left or—”

  “Just a minute, I want to check something first.” He slipped the lanyard over his head and held it up to his eye. From his pocket he pulled a small folding knife, carefully pried the back off the microphone, and examined the innards. “OK,” he said finally, “I think it is just a mic. Not also a camera. They can hear us but not see us, at least not through these. Although I imagine microcams will film us at strategic points along the maze. Hi, Myra!” He waved.

  Amy said, “I have an idea. We should mark each turn we take so we don’t end up just going in circles. You can use your knife to cut notches in the wood.”

  “Good. We’ll do it.”

  They marked the first turn they took, branching to the left. Rafe said, “We should also keep the sun in mind as a marker, as well as remember that it’s moving through the sky. I have a feeling we’re going to be here all day. We’re facing the sun now. If we keep trying to turn our back to it, we’ll be at least heading back in the direction of Maze Base, which is where the second door is too.”

  But the available maze passages didn’t let them turn their backs to the sun. They plodded on for an hour, marking turns, until Amy felt completely confused. The sun grew hot and she took off her jacket and slung it over her shoulder. They never heard the other two teams; the maze must be enormous. Weeds poked through the sides and tops of Amy’s sandals, scratching her feet. The unending vista of rough wooden boards grew monotonous, and then faintly claustrophobic. The blue sky overhead helped, but it carried no clouds to shield them from the sun.

  Another turn, and they came upon a metal ice chest. “OK,” Amy said. “This will be a magic carpet to fly us out of here.”

  “Too low-tech,” Rafe said. “It’ll be jet packs, prototypes from Pylon’s super-secret research plant in the Arctic, and fueled by teeny-tiny nuclear reactors.”

  “No, it’ll be the opening to a tunnel that goes down to the center of the Earth. All we have to do is squeeze through that little opening.”

  “Not the center of the Earth—it leads to a fabulous underground palace, complete with fountains of chocolate and dancing girls.”

  “You can have the dancing girls, I’ll take the chocolate. Open it already.”

  The ice chest held bottled water, sandwiches, apples, and cookies. Amy took off her lanyard and dropped it into the ice chest. “Come on, let’s have lunch without listeners.”

  “You didn’t read the paper you just signed, Amy. We’re supposed to keep it on.”

  “Oh. OK. Then we won’t talk.” She reached out and took off Rafe’s lanyard, put it soundlessly in the ice chest, removed all the food, and closed the lid.

  Rafe laughed. They sat with their backs to a wall, drank deeply from the water, and ate the food. Amy was surprised at how comfortable she felt with Rafe, given everything that had been said between them. He was acting like a friend, not a rejected lover. At the same time, that very fact piqued her a little. Had he changed his mind about her already? She remembered her impulse at the hospital to kiss him. What if she tried to do that now? Would he push her away?

  Did she want him to?

  Instead she said, “Tell me more about Keegan’s syndrome.”

  He wiped his mouth on his sleeve; the ice chest had omitted napkins. “I said most of it back there. The virus releases a neurotoxin in the brain that really messes it up. The CDC is worried. What they know for sure is that it’s one of the fastest-mutating viruses they’ve seen, more so than influenza, and that’s fast. So far it’s been confined to mountainous areas. I’m surprised it’s here.”

  “Do you think it really is? Or that TLN is messing with our heads again and there isn’t any Keegan’s on the island?”

  “I thought of that. Could be.”

  “Did you always want to be a doctor?”

  He smiled. “Well, when I was four I wanted to be a hooker. I heard the word and I thought it meant a fisherman, putting bait on hooks.”

  “Did you do a lot of fishing where you grew up?”

  “Fishing, hunting, trapping. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have eaten.”

  This was new information. At the café on Fenton Street, Rafe had evaded saying anything about his background. Now he crumpled up his sandwich wrappings, glanced once at Amy, then gazed at the opposite wall of bare boards as he talked. Its shadow slanted across his face, striping it in dark and light.

  “You can’t imagine how I grew up, Amy. It was in the West Virginia mountains, where Latinos aren’t exactly common. Or welcome. My father died when I was six. He was distilling meth in a lab that blew up—they do that, you know. Tricky stuff. My mother raised me and my brother alone. She fed us squirrel stew, fish from mountain streams, stuff from the neighbors. When she couldn’t make that work anymore, we left the mountains for DC and she worked as a maid in a hotel. Six months later she dropped dead while cleaning somebody else’s toilet, and I went into foster care.”

  There was no self-pity in his voice, and Amy didn’t touch him. She only said, “That must have been hard.”

  “Yes and no. At least it got me sent regularly to a decent school. In the mountains and then in the hovel my mother could afford in Anacostia—which is not a good neighborhood in DC—the schools mostly tried to keep kids from killing each other. They didn’t always succeed. I was small and smart and couldn’t fight well, so I got beat up a lot. But even though my foster parents were pricks, keeping kids for the money, they lived on the edge of a good school system filled with kids whose parents wanted them to succeed. I never fit in—too poor, too geeky, too unathletic—but my teachers loved me. You, too, I bet.”

  “Yeah. For all the good it did me.”

  “It will. We’re both going to earn these bonuses and then get ourselves to college. I’m going to be a doctor and you’re going to be a neurologist.”

  “Fine with me. What happened to your brother?”

  Rafe’s face shut down. “Dead of an overdose. You don’t want to know the details. Come on, we better get back to work.”

  They put on their lanyards and resumed walking. Amy wanted to take Rafe’s hand, but now his face looked so closed up that she didn’t dare. Probably he regretted saying so much. Why had he told her at all? Maybe she should reach for his hand . . .

  Then he said something that shattered that possibility. “I’m glad your sister’s here. I’ll bet Myra is, too. Waverly is photogenic, but Kaylie is the most beautiful girl I ever saw. And when I saw her last night talking to Tommy—you weren’t there—I realized that I’ve misjudged her. She’s really sweet underneath. She—what is it, Amy?”

  “Nothing,” Amy snapped. “Keep walking. We need to get out of this stupid maze.”

  Thirty-three

  TUESDAY

  TWO HOURS. THREE. The maze went around and around, or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just led straight on forever. More than once they rounded a bend to find carved into the wood their symbol that said they’d been there before. The sun rose high in the sky and beat down steadily. Amy felt sweat soak her hair, run between her breasts, break through her underarm deodorant. Her Fendi jacket, slung over her arm, felt like a hot compress. She and Rafe came across another ice chest of food and drink, a pair of lawn chairs, a plastic wading pool filled with fluffy stuffed penguins, and a cardboard box of tennis balls. Amy had no idea what they were supposed to do with any of it.

  “Nothing,” Rafe said, “except remar
k that the stuff is here, so that the cameras that are also probably here can pick us up. Well, we’re doing that. Have a tennis ball.” He threw one playfully at Amy, who made no effort to catch it.

  He said, “What’s eating you?”

  “Nothing. I’m just tired.”

  “Let’s rest a few minutes.”

  They sank to the ground, Rafe so near her that Amy could feel the heat from his thin body. It stirred her, and she castigated herself. Sure, now you decide you like him just because he’s switched his interest to Kaylie. You’re an idiot, Amy, and perverse as well. You always want what you can’t have and ignore what you can. Stupid!

  “Amy,” Rafe said, and at the choked sound in his voice she turned to him. His eyes were pleading. “I know I said this once before and shouldn’t say it again, but—”

  “EMERGENCY!” blared Amy’s and Rafe’s lanyards, so loudly that Amy jumped. “This is an emergency! We must evacuate the island. Repeat, this is an emergency and NOT part of your scenario! Find the blue dot on the side of your lanyard and press it three times. That activates the homing device. Just go in whatever direction keeps it beeping to return to your start. Please, people, come in now!”

  Amy had not known Jillian could sound so desperate.

  Rafe said, “Do you think this is part of the scenario?”

  “I don’t know. She said not. I don’t know.” She found the blue dot and pressed it three times. A strong blatt sounded. When Amy turned one direction, it softened and then ceased. In the first direction, it stayed loud. “We better follow it.”

  Amy and Rafe walked quickly, following the blatts. Amy kept expecting some of Mark Meyer’s weird holograms to jump out at them, but nothing did.

  In half an hour they were back at the start of the maze. Cai and Kaylie had already arrived. They both stared at the television blaring from the shelves.

  “Amy!” Kaylie cried. “The president’s been assassinated!”

  “—has set off a fresh round of riots in a nation already tense from economic collapse,” said the voice of a newscaster over images of rioters. “Burning and looting in several cities has not yet been brought under control. The former vice president, sworn in scant hours ago, has ordered out the National Guard. She—”

  One of the cities burning was theirs. Amy watched as an explosion took out the State House with its distinctive green dome—the State House.

  “—equipped far better than previous rioters, including some with what seems to be military hardware. Shoulder-mounted grenade launchers have—”

  Cai said to Rafe and Amy, “It’s all so well organized!”

  Rafe said, “Who was the assassin? What was his agenda?”

  “They don’t know yet. He blew himself up. Jillian says we’re aborting the scenario and going back to the mainland. She’s outside with the copter pilot. We’re just waiting for Violet and Tommy.”

  Kaylie said wonderingly, “The news guy said it’s a revolution.”

  The monstrous images began to repeat as the newscaster scrambled for new information he didn’t yet have. Amy clasped her hands together tight. Oh, Gran—you were so sure we’d dodged the flash point!

  Jillian ran back inside just as Tommy burst through the door from the maze, his lanyard still blatting. The ugly noise stopped at the same moment that Jillian said, “Where’s Violet!”

  “She’s gone!” Tommy screamed, almost hysterical. Tears ran down his broad face and his entire huge body trembled. “She got bit by a naked dog and then she acted all weird and then she got out of the maze and she’s gone!”

  Amy’s mind raced. A naked dog—that could be Tommy’s description of a coyote. The coyote could be one of Mark’s tech inventions, a hologram . . . except that Tommy had seen it actually bite Violet—hadn’t he?

  She seized his sleeve. “Tommy, tell us what happened. Everything. Don’t leave anything out!” When she saw that her agitation was only adding to his, she forced her voice to be soothing and calm. “It’s all right, you’re safe, we just need to know what happened to Violet. Tell me everything.”

  Tommy looked over Amy’s shoulder at the TV. “Somebody killed the president!”

  “I know, and we can talk about that later. Just tell me what happened to Violet, everything you can remember.”

  Her soothing was working, at least a little. Jillian snapped off the TV. Tommy clutched Amy’s hand. Cai moved to Tommy’s other side and put an arm around his shoulders. “Steady, big guy. You can do it.”

  Tommy’s face scrunched with effort. “Violet and me walked through the maze. She put marks on the wall with lipstick so we knew where we went. She had three lipsticks in her pocket, different colors.”

  Of course she did. Ah, Violet!

  “Then we went around a bend and this naked dog—”

  Cai said, “Naked dog?”

  Rafe said, “Coyotes undergo heavy shedding when warm weather comes.”

  “It jumped out at us and it bit Violet!”

  Rafe said, “How did the dog behave?”

  “All weird!” Tommy cried. “When it ran it fell down and it had spit all around its mouth! And it bit Violet!”

  Amy said, “You actually saw it bite Violet? Not just jump near her and maybe her body was between you and the dog so you didn’t see the actual bite?”

  “I saw it! I saw her blood! And she told me to help her tie a piece of her shirt on it and I did but it kept bleeding through the cloth.”

  A shudder ran through Amy. Impossible to not believe Tommy, or blood. Violet had been bitten by a coyote carrying the Keegan’s virus.

  Jillian, very pale, said, “Where is Violet now?”

  “I don’t know! We tried to walk real fast but she fell down and I tried to call you on this”—he held up the lanyard—“but I couldn’t figure out how it works and Violet had her eyes closed and wouldn’t help me! So I tried to follow the lipstick marks back here but I got lost and then this thing started to make noise and said to follow the noise. Cai, you have to find Violet!”

  “We will,” Cai said, but at the uncertainty in his tone Rafe looked at him sharply.

  The helicopter pilot strode into the room. “Jillian, you have two minutes to get everybody aboard.”

  “One of our participants is still in the maze.”

  “Then get him out!”

  “There’s been a . . . an unforeseen incident that—”

  “Listen,” the pilot said, “my family is in that area of the city where there’s fighting. My wife is eight months pregnant and our baby is two years old. I’m flying this bird back to the mainland and getting myself home no matter who is or is not with me. Do I make myself clear? This job is not worth my family’s life. Now, anybody who’s going, get yourselves aboard now.”

  Jillian said, “Just let me call Myra to—”

  “Call whoever you want. I’m lifting the copter in two minutes flat. I’ll send someone back for you later if I can’t come myself.” He strode from the room.

  Jillian cried, “Get on the copter, everyone!”

  Amy said, “You can’t leave Violet here! If she’s bitten, she needs the antidote you have here!” She seized Jillian by the shoulders. “Or were you lying about the antidote?”

  “No! It’s there! But I’m not staying—if the city really is burning down, who knows when anybody will get back here!” Jillian wrenched herself free of Amy’s grasp, threw her a look somewhere between fear and dislike, and ran out the door.

  Amy said, “Kaylie, get on the copter. You, too, Tommy.” He would be no help here. “Rafe and Cai and I will look for Violet.”

  Kaylie said instantly, “I’m staying!”

  Cai said, “I’m going.”

  Amy looked at him. She saw what she’d always known was there: the weakness under the spectacular looks and sweet nature. Cai was kind, but he was passive. Otherwise he would not have let Kaylie dominate him so completely. And to think she had once preferred him to Rafe! Amy hadn’t even considered whether Rafe
would stay; she knew he would.

  But Kaylie was a surprise. Did she want to stay for the humanity of saving Violet, or for the drama? Either way, Amy wanted her little sister somewhere safe. She opened her mouth to say this but Kaylie cut her off.

  “Don’t start,” she said savagely. “I’m staying. This is my decision!”

  Cai, stiff-backed, walked from the room. A few moments later Amy heard the copter lift.

  “OK,” Rafe said, not entirely steadily. “Let’s go find her.”

  * * *

  They ransacked the cardboard boxes on the rough shelves, tearing open cartons and spilling the contents onto the floor. “Here are the syringes with antidote,” Rafe said. “Three of them, preloaded. Let’s hope they don’t need to stay cold, or that we find Violet soon.” Carefully he wrapped them in his denim jacket. “We can— Oh, shit!”

  “What?” Kaylie cried, spinning around and squinting at the door.

  “The tote bag with all our tablets and cells is gone. Jillian must have loaded it onto the chopper for the trip back before all this came down. Efficient Jillian.”

  “Well, don’t say ‘oh shit’ like that,” Kaylie said crossly. “I thought you saw an infected coyote!”

  Amy said, “Here’s some rope. We should take it with us.”

  “Why?” Kaylie demanded. “Oh—in case we have to tie up Violet. Here are spoons, forks, and oh! Some steak knives. Everybody take one.”

  Amy said, “A blanket, bottles of water—how are we going to carry all this stuff?”

  Rafe said, “Make backpacks out of these garbage bags.”

  “Stylish,” Amy said. “You’ll see them on the runway in Paris.” The joke fell flat. Amy’s fingers trembled as she checked the batteries in three heavy-duty flashlights. Surely they wouldn’t need those, surely they’d find Violet before nightfall. . . .

  “Ready?” Rafe said, looking determined. “Let’s go.”

  With garbage-bag packs on their shoulders, the three of them entered the maze.