We will abolish The Sixteen Strains, or we will die trying. And good and goodness will prevail.
Symptoms include but are not limited to:
Chills
Rigor (more commonly known as shaking)
Bad cough
Bloodshot eyes
Elevated temperature
High blood pressure
Low blood pressure
High fever
Fatigue
Nausea
Vomiting
Nasal congestion
Difficulty swallowing
Abdominal pain
Photophobia (that’s sensitivity to light to us regular folks)
Lockjaw
Eye twitches
Muscle spasms
Rashes
Bleeding eyes
Dizziness
Fainting
Stupor
Delirium
And in extreme cases (that’s those with Strain 12):
Hallucinations
I find a few papers about the solar flares mixed in with the Strains info. More crap everyone knows about. I don’t know what John was looking for, but if he left the room like this, he must have found it and run off with some brainwave he needed to follow. I don’t like it, John running off.
I put the paper in a neater stack and hunt below the cushions of the sofa, behind every piece of furniture we have, and under everything in the room for any more papers, but I think I’ve found them all. As far as Thalia’s concerned, I threw everything out, but I fold the stack of thirty-or-so papers in half and then half again and squash them all in my back pocket.
Something feels off. Why would John just up and leave all this around? It looks like he’s spent weeks researching. Paper’s not exactly easy to get hold of, and it isn’t cheap. Not to mention the hours he must have spent at the library, copying everything from every book he could find. Library hours don’t come cheap either; it costs forty credits per hour—more than enough to feed our entire house for a fortnightly allocation. It was important to him, that’s pretty obvious, but why it was important I have no idea. But John can be like that, obsessive when he gets an idea in his head.
“Oi. Brat. Get in here.”
I assume Thalia means me so I saunter into the kitchen. I look expectantly at her, but she doesn’t notice. She’s shuffling on the balls of her feet, avoiding my eyes.
“Look, I’m sorry okay?” she forces out. “I know I shouldn’t have stolen the food but … it’s been ages since we’ve had more than half a portion each. I just … I didn’t think. I just took it. I’m sorry.”
For a while I just stare at her, stunned. Thalia has never apologised to me for anything in the whole time I’ve lived here. She slapped me in the face a few years ago for something I didn’t do, and what she said after she realised I was innocent was, well I hope you learned a valuable lesson.
“Don’t worry about it. I was being selfish, keeping all that food from everyone,” I eventually get out. I can’t tell her. Not yet. When John gets back, when Tia and Wes—Thalia’s husband—are home. When we’re all together, that’s when I’ll tell them about the letter, the danger, the way past the fence.
Thalia’s remorse doesn’t last. “So, you gonna give us the rest of it, then?”
No, I’m keeping it for when we break out into the diseased lands.
“Don’t push your luck,” I say instead.
She reverts back to smirk mode. “Moved it, then?”
“Yeah.” I stare at the chipped row of cupboard. “Thalia, has John been around today?”
She turns away from me and goes back to the stew. I guess her quota of patience for me has run out. “No, why?”
“I just haven’t seen him in a few days. Wondered where he’d gone.”
“He’ll be at work until nine.” Her tone turns teasing. “Why, do you miss him?”
I give her the finger.
“I’ll tell him you care, Pumpkin.”
For a second I just scowl at the back of her head. Then I risk being murdered, dart forward, and yank on her pony tail. I bolt out the kitchen and down the hall, her screeching following, filling up our cramped house.
I prop the half-unhinged bedroom door into place and drop onto my mattress. Three and half hours until Tia is due to back. I might as well catch up on sleep.
As soon as my head hits the pillow, I’m gone.
***
Miya
16:05. 18.09.2040. Forgotten London, Ealing Zone.
There’s a young girl twirling on a flat-topped bollard. Her grey dress billows around her. In this moment she reminds me exactly of a butterfly I tried to de-wing when I was a kid, when they weren’t extinct. She also reminds me of a life I had before this one. The setting sun makes a crown of her dirty black hair, and I flash back to hugging a ghost of a girl to my chest, promising to always protect her, and then leaving.
As I watch the girl, she looks less like a butterfly to me and more like a ghostly angel, with the dress as her wings, and the sun as her halo. A tight knot of pain forms behind my ribcage. Yosiah looks at me from the corner of his eye, knowing me well enough to see I’m unsettled. I pretend not to feel his eyes on me, his furrow-browed concern.
“Miya—”
“We should try the allocation centre near the edge of the zone,” I cut him off. If he voices his worry about me, I’ll have to tell him I’m fine. I’ll have to lie. After everything we’ve been through together, lying to Yosiah is my least favourite thing.
“We got food from there three nights ago,” he disagrees. “It’s too risky.”
“Then we’ll—”
In slow motion, I see the troop of Officials begin to cross the road and I hear the echo of their boots as if I’m hearing through water. I see the girl, too small, too young, too like that ghost of mine, twirling aimlessly. Not walking to work or school, not trudging home or to one of the few bars in this zone—just twirling, innocent but aimless. Officials hate loitering. I’m gripped by an irrational fear that they’ll kill this kid. Officials kill people all the time but not for something like this—rather for arguing, spitting insults at military, skipping work, theft, public brawls, shit that causes an actual disturbance. But logic has abandoned me and fear squeezes my heart in its fist.
“Get down,” I cry out. Stupid, drawing attention to myself.
The girl stops dead, turns her eyes to the end of the road where the troop is marching past, paying us little attention while they walk towards whatever dark purpose calls them, and she goes white. I can’t switch off my panic. I jump out of the thin alleyway Yosiah and I lean at the mouth of and pull her down, leading her a couple buildings down into the wooden shed in the garden of a half-wrecked house that is home to me and Yosiah. He follows quickly, quietly. He has that calculating look on his face that I know so well.
“Did they see us?” I ask him, trying to pull a full breath into my lungs. I can’t see him now; the door blocks out all of the light. The only thing that’s real to me is the girl’s fluttering pulse under my hand and Yosiah’s even breaths.
His hand brushes my shoulder and the frantic sound that was clawing its way up my throat stops midway. I draw a long breath. “No,” he says, his voice low, “They were walking straight forward.”
“Did I do something wrong?” the girl asks. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“Be quiet,” I say sternly, but I gather her in my arms and hold her tightly to my chest. I don’t even know the girl, I tell myself, but my body won’t listen to the logic my mind keeps throwing at it.
We each hold our breath, listening for the Officials.
“Why’s there so many of them?” I ask once they’re just a distant sound.
“A house check maybe,” Yosiah offers.
“No.” I shake my head, and then realise how stupid that was. We’re in pitch blackness, and he can’t see a thing, let alone my movements. His hand still rests on my shoulder though, so maybe he felt it. “Routine
house checks call for ten, maybe fifteen Officials. That was…”
“Fifty five,” Yosiah finishes, “at a rough guess. Maybe sixty.”
“Where are they going?” the girl whispers. She sounds scared, helpless, but she lives in this town, on these streets. It could be a mask—pretending to be innocent is a sure way to be underestimated by everyone. A sure advantage for you. I should know; I’ve used it a few times.
“West.” There’s a hard edge to Siah’s voice. I grasp around and take hold of Yosiah’s wrist in the darkness. It’s as close to a hug as we get.
“I’m gonna go see where they go.”
“What if they catch you?” the girl says instantly.
“They haven’t caught me yet,” I lie.
I edge closer to the door and at the last minute I drop Yosiah’s wrist and let go of the kid.
“Stick to the shadows,” Yosiah instructs. “Keep your feet light. And—“
“Keep your mouth shut,” I parrot. “You say the same thing every time I go out on my own.”
“And I’ll keep saying it until you remember it.”
I roll my eyes and unlatch the top half of the door. It’s one of those old stable doors. I wonder if this was a stable at one time. It doesn’t seem big enough to fit the giant horses that the military sometimes ride, but I don’t know what life was like whenever this shack was built. It’s older than Forgotten London, that’s for sure.
I swing the door open to look out and see if anyone’s around but the door smacks into something hard in the street. I have just enough time to glimpse the Official—alone, not part of the large group, but just as deadly to us—and the man the door hit as he covers his bloody nose, before he grabs his gun and fires.
I duck back into the shed, my heart racing, energy and alertness flooding through me.
Yosiah reacts immediately, as always. He’s level headed as he grabs my arm and steers me back through the shed to a second exit we hammered out when we first set up here. The girl is shaking and close beside me. I take her hand and hold it tightly as Yosiah throws open the back door. We lock eyes, unspoken warning passing between us, and we run.
Outside is almost blindingly orange and on the horizon I can see patches of red and white. There’s an old phrase Yosiah says about skies like these. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Or is it shepherds? My thoughts are all fragmented and messed up—don’t get shot. Don’t stop running. What are we going to eat tonight? Where are we going to sleep? Don’t get shot, don’t let Yosiah get shot. Who is this girl and what are we still doing with her? She’s not Livy, she’s not Livy.
We sprint down a narrow street and pause at the end of it. The girl is finding it hard to keep up. Her little legs can only carry her so far, and pulling her along isn’t really helping. By the time her wrist falls out of my grip, she’s run in another direction and lost to us. That’s gratitude and Forgotten London for you. Or I guess I put her in more danger than she was originally, so she has every right to run off.
My feet hurting through thin soles, the pavement slapping into them, I run as fast as I can across a wide road and into a residential block beyond it, as close to Siah as I can get. It’s getting harder to breathe and my side is strained, but I keep pushing on, following my best friend. He starts to tire, his limp becoming more pronounced with the effort of running. I know his leg must be screaming with pain and anger builds—at myself, at the Officials, at the whole damn fucking world.
He takes us behind a block of houses and onto a dirty stretch of pathway between two rows of backyards. When we’re far enough away from the roads that no one will see us, we collapse onto the ground. He’s breathing hard, his leg stretched out awkwardly before him, his face red and twisted with pain. I want to grab his hand and hold tight but something holds me back.
We sit there for minutes, listening for footfalls, for voices or the crackle of headsets. My breathing eventually settles, leaving a stretched ache across my whole chest to go with the stitch in my side and my throbbing feet. But none of that can even remotely compare to how hurt Yosiah must be, not that you can tell by looking at him—he’s the suffer in silence behind a stony mask type.
“Shepherd’s Bush Zone,” he says, running a hand over his mouth. His long, dark hair is stuck to his face with sweat.
A couple of young kids chase each other down the path, playing tag or catch, or some other kind of game. I glare at them until they move away.
“What?” I’m too tired to think right now. I spent most of the day working the bar in a club at the far end of Ealing—ninety nine percent of the profits of which go straight to States, the only reason they let the pubs stay open—under the name of Stacey Miller, and now the run has taken everything I had left of my energy. I just want to sit here for as long as I can and then find somewhere to steal some food and a place we can sleep for the night.
“That’s where the Officials were going. I heard one of them say it.” He frowns for a moment. “They were all heading towards Shepherd’s Bush.”
“So?” I yawn, tipping my head back against the wall we’re sat against.
“That’s where Honour and his sister live.”
I sigh. “Again—so?”
“So he’s my friend. And he’s yours too. You like the guy, don’t deny it. He makes you laugh.”
“Yeah, whatever. You don’t know the Officials were going to their zone, though.”
He sighs, looking at me.
“But you’re not gonna let it pass,” I say knowingly.
“If something happens to them and I could have helped—“
“You’ll never forgive yourself. Yeah, I get it. You’re being paranoid and overreacting. But fine, be careful, alright?”
“Aren’t I always?” he jokes, laughing. His teeth are white against his sand-coloured skin and his chapped lips. They’re redder than usual; the result of him biting them in agitation.
“No.” My voice is hard. I almost lost him once, and it was bad enough for me to want to shadow him now as he goes to check on Honour, but now I’m being paranoid and overreacting. I don’t need to protect Siah, I don’t want to follow him every single place he goes like a lost kid. I’m perfectly fine without him and he’ll be fine without me. But as he brushes my arm, about to stand, I catch his wrist. “I mean it,” I say. “Be careful, Yosiah, or I’ll never forgive you.”
He squeezes my hand, his brown eyes solemn, a promise in their dark depths. “I’ll be careful if you will. Go to the library we saw the other week. Stay hidden until I get back.”
His concern makes me feel self-conscious, and then annoyed at feeling self-conscious. “I don’t need to you worry about me,” I snap.
“I’m not worried about you.” His smile is a flash of teeth. “I’m worried about me. I wouldn’t last two seconds in this town without my bodyguard.”
I snort, and all my disgruntled edges soften even as I recognise what he’s doing. He has a hundred different ways to disarm me—this is only one of them. “Go.” I point him down the road.
His grin softens, his eyes too. He squeezes my hand one last time and pushes to his feet.
***
Honour
16:02. 18.09.2040. Forgotten London, Shepherd’s Bush Zone.
I’m startled awake by someone hammering on the front door. Military Officials. I know it the minute I hear the sound. My thoughts go straight to Tia. She’s not due home from work for another hour but anything could have happened.
I throw myself up and rush to the door just in time to see Thalia open it.
The Official wears an overly fake look of remorse. Horatia’s dead, I know it. My world spins for a split second before the Official asks if there’s a Thalia Norton here. They notify next of kin; they’d be asking for me if something had happened to my sister.
My breath floods out of me in relief. Horatia is safe.
Thalia tells him that’s her and the Official in charge gives her a scrutinising look. I don’t know what he’s
searching her for but he mustn’t find it because in the next second disappointment chases through his eyes, maybe frustration too.
“I’m sorry to inform you that your brother, John Norton, is deceased as of today, fourteen-oh-nine. Cause of death, toxic poisoning.”
Thalia scratches the wall for balance and I think about reaching out to stabilise her but then the dread of the Official’s words hit me. “What?” I breathe, shaking my head.
John’s dead.
It takes a minute for that to sink in before my brain starts connecting the coincidences. Distant, keeping emotion away for as long as possible, because if I let it in I’m going to crumple.
Yesterday John found something in his research—that’s pretty obvious obvious in the array of abandoned papers in our living room. I know it was something about the Strains, or the solar flare disaster, but that’s all I know. Nobody saw him today; did he never come back from wherever he disappeared to yesterday afternoon? My eyes are burning, my throat tight; I fight it. An Official is at our door, Thalia is struggling to stay composed, and he’s watching all of it.
But this is too sudden, too … neat. John worked in the pharmaceutical department at the hospital so he really could have inhaled or ingested something toxic—but he’d done that job all his life. He’d never make that kind of mistake.
Would he?
What the hell was with the papers, the hours he must have invested in the library, the credits thrown away that we could have used on food? I want to punch my fist through the wall but I don’t know who I’m angry at. Him or them.
The Official tells us the other details of John’s death, an accident, a spilling of some noxious chemical. But they don’t know John. He was a perfectionist. He took pride is his work and was obsessive about details. There’s no chance he could have made a mistake. He checks the ingredients on the soap label twice to make sure it’s safe before we use it, for God’s sake. There’s no way he did what they say he did. No way. But does that mean they’re lying.
The Forgotten Page 3