“Of course everything is fine,” Rohana said when she finally answered. There was no visual. Since returning to India, Rohana had retreated from the ubiquity of electronic society. She did not carry a phone but left it in one room of the house, as if it were an artifact from a previous century, a rotary black box hardwired into the wall.
“Rohana, is anyone sick around you?”
“You worry too much, Little Oh.”
Olivia cringed. Rohana had always called her that, though Olivia had been fourteen when her father married her—only three years after Olivia’s real mother died. Fourteen was too old for baby names, and forget about thirty. She couldn’t argue with the accuracy of “little,” though. Olivia had been five foot two until she got her growth spurt in high school and shot up to . . . five foot four. Also, Rohana had no children of her own and must have been blindsided by the self-obsessed melodrama of Olivia’s adolescence. Olivia knew she could be difficult—then and now—but she felt helpless to do anything about it. Of course, defining her stubbornness as “helplessness” probably reinforced it. Olivia loathed self-analysis.
But she tried to keep these mitigating factors in mind, tried to be fair. Still, she hated the whole “Little Oh” thing.
“Not too much,” Olivia said about the worrying. “But I do worry. Promise you’ll stay inside as much as possible until this is over.”
“I will promise no such thing.”
“I just want you to be all right.” Olivia closed her eyes. She hadn’t known she was going to say that. She never said things like that to Rohana.
“I will be fine.” Her stepmother sounded pleased. “Why don’t you come and visit me?”
“There’s an international travel ban, remember? I just told you.”
“But there wasn’t one last month, when your cousin Aanu married.”
Olivia was glad there was no visual. She knew the guilt must be written all over her face. “I was in Syria.”
“Not so far. And now you are in America, which is.”
“I know.” Olivia rubbed her eyes. “I don’t plan very well.”
“Little Oh, you don’t plan at all.”
Not true, Olivia thought, I always plan the exit strategy. But maybe not anymore. “Did I tell you I met someone? He’s why I’m back in America.”
“You know perfectly well you didn’t tell me.”
“I should have. I’m sorry.”
“What is this person’s name?”
“Brian. Brian Anker.” She glanced up and saw Brian listening in the doorway. “He’s a really nice guy.”
Brian smiled.
“I’m so glad to hear it,” Rohana said.
“Of course, he’s not perfect,” Olivia said, and Brian rolled his eyes.
“No one is, Little Oh.”
* * *
They monitored the reports all day and deep into the night. Olivia checked The Beat’s news feed. The story was there, posted minutes before the president’s address. By now it was like one person waving her arms for attention in a crowd of people waving their arms. Every news source in the world was going crazy, and variola wasn’t the catchword; smallpox was. Maybe the president would have given her speech this morning regardless, or maybe it would have been delayed another week—but it seemed clear that The Beat, and a few other news sources, had leveraged the government into the announcement. Olivia wasn’t positive that was a good thing.
“Why not?” Brian said. “They have no right to keep vital information from the public.”
They lay in Brian’s bed, their muted phones projecting international news tickers, bright yellow-and-red ribbons of words unraveling in the air. It was almost midnight, the apartment dark except for the ribbons and a lamp on the bedside table. An empty bottle of Riesling and two glasses stood next to the lamp.
“What got me,” Olivia said, “was the lack of information, vital or otherwise. I don’t think they know how to deal with the contagion. If it’s weaponized variola and there’s no effective vaccine, what happens then?”
“People have to know.”
“But does knowing help them?”
“More information is always better, that’s what you always say.”
“Yeah. But if President Crawford had announced a vaccination protocol, something tangible to deal with variola, that would have been better. Bri, without a vaccine there’s going to be panic. You’re not the only one Googling images of smallpox.”
“I hate this.” Brian picked up his phone and tapped off the news ticker. Then he reached for Olivia’s phone, fumbled it, and the phone fell on the rug next to the bed. Brian had drunk more wine than Olivia.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I just want a break from the blitz. It’s nerve-racking. How do you stay sane right in the thick of it all day?”
Olivia didn’t understand the question. “It’s reality. I want to know what’s happening.”
“Can’t we turn reality off for now?”
“All right.”
She leaned over the edge of the bed and picked up her phone, the ticker still scrolling in the holo projection. Hanging off the bed, she started reading about a riot in Paris. Brian’s fingers touched her hip, an invitation to vacate the blitz. She tapped off the feed and rolled over to face him.
“Reality is officially off-moded,” she said.
Brian stretched past her and clicked off the lamp, too.
* * *
The crump of an explosion jolted her out of her drifting edge-of-sleep thoughts. For an instant she was back in Aleppo, back in the war. A flicker of red firelight came through the window and played on the ceiling over the bed. Olivia remembered the disturbing dream she’d had in the Baron Hotel. She sat up and started reaching for her clothes.
Brian rolled over. “What’s happening?”
“I’m going to see.”
Sirens skirled up. There was a fire station less than a mile away. Aggressive get-out-of-the-way honking came on, like the charge of a Spielberg tyrannosaurus.
Still groggy, Brian picked up his phone and began swiping for the news he wanted to escape a little while ago. “Holy shit, Shadowland is burning.” Shadowland was a bar only a block away. “They think it’s a gas explosion.”
“Where are you getting that?”
“West Seattle Blog.” The WSB was constantly updated, it seemed, by people who never slept.
Standing at the window, Olivia pulled on her pants and buttoned the waistband. A shawl of flame whipped high above the roof of the building next door. “You can see it from here,” Olivia said. “I’m going to run over, have a look.”
Brian turned on the lamp. “Wait for me.”
“The operative word was ‘run.’”
“I just have to find my pants.”
Olivia was already halfway to the door. “Be right back.”
“Hey—”
“What?”
“You don’t think this is something other than a fire, do you?”
“Like panic in the streets? No. It’s too soon for that.” She thought of the riot she’d just read about in Paris and wasn’t so sure she believed her own words.
“Liv, be careful. If you could just wait two minutes.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Outside, the smell of gas hung in the air. She walked toward the fire, passing a nondescript white van parked across from Brian’s building. Behind the cab, the van had no windows. Though it was the middle of the night, people streamed toward Shadowland, eager for spectacle. Olivia arrived on the corner of Oregon and California. Fire hoses, gripped in wrestling holds by heavily clad men, crossed streams before billows of flame and surging smoke. Glass fragments glittered in the street. A barstool hung snagged in the branches of a tree, blown there by the explosion. Thank God the bar had been closed, she thought. The faces of bystanders glowed in reflected heat, witnesses to either a local emergency or the emergence of the Disaster in their midst.
Most of the first re
sponders were too busy to answer Olivia’s questions. She approached a Seattle police officer doing traffic control. At 3 A.M., there wasn’t much traffic for her to redirect.
“I’m a reporter,” Olivia said. “Do you know what happened?”
“Yes,” the officer said. “The building caught on fire. I need you to not stand in the street, please.”
Olivia retreated to the sidewalk. She asked a few civilians if they knew what had happened. No one did. Some of them looked scared. A young guy with a full beard who smelled like he’d been bathing in a tub full of beer, said, “Everything’s going crazy.”
“It’s trending that way,” Olivia said.
“Hey, you here with anyone? You want to hang out?”
Olivia left him and walked back to the apartment. The sidewalk was empty. By now everyone was on California, watching the show. A man stepped out from behind the van parked across from Brian’s building. He wore a gray hoodie with a Nike swoosh over the left breast. He walked toward her with his head down and hands in the pockets of his hoodie. Olivia started to walk faster. She slipped her hand into her pocket and found her key, prepared to gouge somebody’s eye if necessary. Behind her, shoes scuffed the pavement. She started to turn—
And a hand clamped over her mouth and an arm circled her waist, pulling her in tight, trapping her arms. The man in the hoodie dashed toward her. She glimpsed his face. He was a boy, no older than twenty. Olivia screamed against the hand. She drove her heel into the shin of the man holding her. He yelped but didn’t let go. Then the boy was on her, grabbing her legs. They carried her to the open loading doors of the van.
A third man crouched inside. When Olivia saw the hypodermic needle, she fought her attackers with increased frenzy. She bit the finger of the hand covering her mouth, tasted blood, but he didn’t let go, and she couldn’t breathe. A stinging needle-jab penetrated her shoulder. She bucked and fought and tried to scream. They held her down on the metal floor of the van. The doors slammed shut and the engine started.
Olivia’s strength and presence of mind began to desert her. She realized, vaguely, that the hand was no longer covering her mouth, but when she tried to make a sound, all that came out was a pathetic little squeak, the sound of a drowsy puppy.
Oblivion swallowed her.
Seven
The metal floor bumped and swayed. Olivia opened her eyes. Everything was blurry. She lay on her back, something soft tucked under her head. She worked her lips, craving water. Her head itched. She reached up to scratch it and discovered her wrists were zip-tied together with disposable flex cuffs. She remembered the struggle, the hand clamped over her mouth, the taste of blood. The needle.
Fear swept away the cobwebs.
She tried to get up. Flex cuffs around her ankles hobbled her, and she fell, landing hard on her shoulder. A wave of nausea rolled through her, probably, she thought, a residual effect of the drug. She groaned.
A man said, “Hey, be careful.”
Another man, farther away, shouted over the engine and road noise, “What’s going on back there?”
“Nothing’s going on,” the first man said. “She woke up.”
“Do you need help?”
“No.”
“Don’t let her hurt herself.”
“I know what my job is,” the first man said. He sounded young and aggrieved.
Olivia looked up. A blurry figure leaned over her. She squirmed away. “Don’t touch me.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man said.
“That’s comforting.” Olivia squinted, trying to bring him into focus.
“Just lie still.” He came closer, not touching her but lowering his voice. “If you make trouble, we will drug you again. I’m serious.”
Olivia tried to control her fear. Once, in Damascus, Islamic separatists had taken her captive. For a while, kidnapping journalists had been everyone’s favorite hobby. They’d held her for three days in a windowless room that contained a filthy gray mattress and a porcelain bowl. The bowl served as a bedpan. Once a day, a woman with a scarf covering her face brought her food and water, took the bowl away, and returned it empty. Like this blurry man here with her now, her kidnappers had been young. But unlike the blurry man and his cohorts, the separatists had seemed strangely uncommitted. One day, no one came for the pot. The ammonia smell of piss competed with the fried bulgur patties they fed her. She tried the door and found it unlocked, the house empty. She had been lucky. But she had also kept a cool head, which is what she needed to do now.
“There’s something wrong with my eyes,” she said.
“It’s the drug. I think it’ll clear up.”
Think it will clear up.
“Who are you?” Olivia said.
“The Elders will tell you that.”
“Who are the Elders?”
“Stop talking now.”
Olivia didn’t push. She dreaded the needle. Maybe these guys were organized, but she didn’t trust them to know what they were doing with the drug. What if her vision never cleared up? What if they injected her again and it stopped her heart?
Stay cool.
The man withdrew and sat on a bench along the wall, like you’d find in a police van—though this seemed to be some sort of commercial vehicle. No side windows, just the metal walls. There was a big gray toolbox behind the driver’s seat, and a pair of jumper cables under the bench, the red-handled clamps sticking out. That was it. Nothing to indicate who these guys were or what they wanted with her. Olivia groped around and found the soft thing, which felt like a rolled-up sweatshirt. She lay back, resting her head on it. After a while, her vision began to clear.
“Can I have water?” she asked.
The young man grumbled. He hunkered beside her again and offered her a bottle of water. White gauze and tape were wrapped around the man’s middle and ring fingers. His face came into focus. It was the guy she had confronted at the crosswalk down from Hotwire, the one she had thought looked like the man who followed her in Aleppo. She took the bottle, pulled the nipple up with her teeth, and sucked warm water.
“Are you the one I bit?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What’s your name?”
“You don’t need to know my name.”
“Look,” Olivia said, “you don’t have to tell me your real name, just tell me what I should call you.”
The driver turned around. “Just tell her your name. It doesn’t matter, and you’re scaring her.”
The bench guy glared at Olivia. “I’m Emilio.”
“Where are we going?”
Emilio took his bottle back and slapped the nipple down with the flat of his hand.
“I just want to know where we’re going,” Olivia said.
“You’ll know when we get there.”
Emilio went back to his bench. Olivia closed her eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to relax. What was Brian doing right now? For that matter, when was “right now”? Olivia had no idea how long she had been unconscious. At the thought of Brian, of the safety and intimacy of his West Seattle apartment, of his bed, her throat tightened with emotion she didn’t want, and she couldn’t easily swallow. She had started to think of Brian as “home.” The salesman was through the door and he had his sample case open, selling her a life she wasn’t yet ready to live. It didn’t matter anyway. If Brian was “home,” he might be a home she would never see again. It had happened before. One day you kissed your mother goodbye in the cancer ward and life as you knew it was over. One day you walked into the living room and your dad was slumped over the arm of his chair. This time it would be Olivia who left forever.
She craned her head around. Daylight came through the van’s dirty windshield. From her low angle, all she could see was a washed-out blue sky. Something about the light made her think of open country. She couldn’t see the face of the driver or of the guy riding in the passenger seat. The passenger was wearing a gray hoodie, though. He must be the guy who came at
her on the sidewalk. Nike. And that meant the driver was probably the one who had injected her.
They rode in silence. Then, after what felt like an hour, the van pulled off the road and parked. Olivia had been drifting in and out. Now she sat up, tense.
“What’s happening?”
Emilio shook his head. “Shhh.”
The engine switched off. The driver came into the back. He stooped over Olivia. Maybe forty years old and stocky, he had the air of someone in charge. She remembered him crouching in the back of the van with his hypo.
“We’re gonna be here a few minutes,” he said.
“I need the bathroom.”
“Later,” he said. “Do you want a cheeseburger?”
She stared at him.
“A cheeseburger,” he repeated.
“No.” Olivia was starving, but she was damned if she would take anything from these assholes. A tiny, pointless act of defiance.
“Suit yourself.” The man started to turn away.
“Wait,” Olivia said, changing her mind. What was the point in not eating? “I’ll take one. But no cheese or onions. Or mustard.”
No one said anything, then the driver laughed. “Is there anything else you’d like?”
“No, I’m good.”
The man returned to the cab and reached for something under the seat. He tossed it back to Emilio. A roll of duct tape. Before Olivia could react, Emilio tore a piece off and slapped it over her mouth. Olivia shook her head, kicked out at him.
“You might as well calm down,” the driver said. “The tape comes off once we’re back on the road. I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s temporary. You try to rip the tape off, these boys will stop you. We don’t want to disrespect you any more than necessary.” He pointed two fingers at her with thumb cocked. “I’ll be right back. Brothers,” he said to the other men, “be vigilant. And respectful.”
“We will,” Nike replied.
The Chaos Function Page 6