The Forgotten

by Saruuh Kelsey

  “No. I’m not. I’m dying. I caught one of the Strains down near the vaults. An Official injected me with it and now I’m infectious.”

  The Protectors around him take several steps back, dragging me and Bran with them.

  “Leave now,” he orders. “Go back to the base.”

  “We can’t leave you,” the technologist says, “but back home we can heal you.”

  “Too far gone,” he replies calmly, his voice barely loud enough to carry across the small distance. “I’m almost certain it was Strain Twelve.”

  “Please,” she begs. “We can’t leave you here. You should die in your home, surrounded by your people. Not here in the military’s utopia.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not an—”

  He drops to the floor before he can finish his sentence and the technologist starts towards him with a cry. A Protector holds her back.

  Grey Hair shouts, “Stay back! You have no way of knowing how badly he is infected. He would not want for you to die.”

  “But if he has Strain Twelve …,” one of The Guardians breathes.

  “He will become delusional and turn into someone you do not know. It would be best for you to go now. Take The Saviour and his friend to safety.”

  The Saviour? Does he mean Branwell?

  Or me?

  No, he can’t mean me—I’m the one who ruins people’s lives instead of saving them—he must mean Bran. But what is he the saviour of?

  The Guardian on the floor howls in pain, and something happens that I’ve never seen before. Blisters ripple into existence on his face and the parts of his body that are visible. My stomach rolls with the need to throw up. The blisters cover his face and then they start to pop. His skin bursts. The blisters leave behind craters of red, burned skin on his deathly pale face.

  The protectors pull us as far away from the head Guardian as possible.

  “Is that Strain Twelve?” someone asks. “Is that what it does?”

  “No,” a Protector replies. “That is definitely not Strain Twelve. Or any of the other Sixteen Strains.”

  The head Guardian screams and a shudder bolts down my spine. I can’t watch but I can’t look away either. His skin pops and peels away, and the skin under that pops and peels away until nothing is left of him but ash and clothes.

  I still can’t look away.

  “Leave,” one of the Protectors says in a voice as hard as steel and cold as rain.

  The Guardians don’t need telling twice. Branwell is laid across the back seats and the rest of us file silently into the car, ignoring the fact that we have more than enough empty seats to accommodate Bran’s laying form. A feeling of complete horror sits with us; it’s a person reclining in the leather seats, smothering us with misery and disbelief.

  All I can think is this: what has happened must be because of the new Strain my father warned us about, and my sister is out there somewhere, unprotected and at risk of catching it.

  When I close my eyes I see the head Guardian as he shrivels and burns away, but instead of it being his face, his body, his skin that decays, it’s Horatia’s.

  I think I must have passed out on the way back to the base because when I wake up, God knows how long later, Hele is sat beside my bed.

  “You should never have gone.” Her voice is as sharp as I’ve heard it. Her large eyes are filled with the kindling beginnings of fury. “You could have died, Honour. We could have lost you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble.

  She shakes her head angrily, but after a few minutes her voice has dissolved into something gentle and understanding. “I forgive you.”

  She lays the back of her hand against my forehead and purses her lips. “You’re cold.”

  “I don’t feel cold.”

  She puts a glass of water in my hand and looks at me expectantly so I drink it all. “You’re in shock,” she murmurs, pulling the covers around my shoulders after I set the glass down. Hele isn’t much older than I am, but she’s acting like a mother would and it makes me feel safe.

  She fusses over the covers, over me, until I tell her to pack it in.

  “Go to sleep,” she says and her voice leaves no room for refusal. “You’ll feel better once you’ve slept.”

  So I do, and Hele stays with me, whispering poetry like a lullaby until I fall asleep.

  ***

  Honour

  01:16. 07.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.

  Dalmar wakes me, digging his fingers into my shoulders. It takes me a while to see that he looks scared, though he’s trying to hide it.

  “The Guardians want you and the others who went to Underground London Zone to get tested for the Strains in the hospital.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  I slither out of bed. “I don’t feel sick or anything.”

  “You wouldn’t. The Guardians expect it to lay dormant inside you. You’ve been exposed to one of the diseases before. Timofei thinks that because you caught a weak Strain when you were a child—not that you remember it—it acted as a sort of immunisation to prevent further infection.”

  I shake my head and try to drag a sensical thought through the haze of sleep. “But … if I’m immunised, why can’t other people be? Can’t The Guardians come up with their own immunisations?”

  “Honour, it’s been possible to give vaccines against The Sixteen Strains for years now. People in States are given them, and so are some of the higher members of the military.”

  “I know that. Everyone knows that.” I drop my head into my hands, pushing my fingers against my eyelids to wake up. “But I don’t get it. Why aren’t The Guardians stealing the vaccines and giving them to everyone like they do with all their other stuff?”

  “Because they can’t.” Dalmar sighs. “They don’t work as well as States would have their people believe. It’s complicated. They give them to citizens of States but some people die from them. The Guardians don’t want to take that risk; they don’t want to endanger their own people.”

  “But they could save them.”

  “Honour, you know next to nothing,” he says in a dead voice. “Get up and get yourself tested. You don’t want to know about this kind of thing.”

  “I do.”

  “No!” he screams. There’s anger in his glaring eyes, his clenched fists, and his bared teeth. “You don’t!”

  The hospital room is cold.

  Around me are metal tables presenting instruments and medical equipment of all kinds. On the bare stone walls hang charts and tables listing formulas and chemicals that are gibberish to me. Tinctures and solutions in glass vials, small pots of white powder, tubes of creams, and syringes of remedies litter the tables pushed against the back wall. A mountainous pile of towels sits beside cardboard boxes, and above them a rack of medical uniforms is suspended. In the middle of the room are two gurneys with sickly green padding. Bran sits on one of them looking drained and barely alive.

  “Is that what it does?” I ask Dalmar in a low voice. “The test?”

  “No. That was what he looked like when we dragged him out of bed.”

  “Not literally?”

  He narrows his eyes. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong but he’s livid under the surface. “What do you take us for?”

  I mutter, “Sorry.”

  “Okay,” Timofei sighs, breezing into the room. “The Guardians who went out with you have already been tested. It’s just you two.”

  “I’ll go first,” I say.

  Timofei nods, approaching the table of paraphernalia. I watch as he sucks a clear liquid from a vial into a syringe. “This will be injected into your arm and either nothing will happen or a small rash will appear if you have a Strain. Okay?”

  I nod okay and he injects the thing into my left forearm. I look at Branwell who has his eyes closed. “You okay, Bran?”

  “No,” he says feebly. “I do not have an affinity for needles. I’d rather I didn’t know when it wa
s going to happen if that’s at all possible.”

  Timofei looks pensively at Branwell. He prepares another needle and slides it into Bran’s arm, injecting the liquid. Bran doesn’t flinch. I’m not sure he even notices.

  Timofei pats him on the shoulder. “Done.”

  “Really?” Branwell asks, deflating quicker than a popped balloon. “That was all?”

  Timofei smiles kindly. “That was all. And now we wait. It’ll take around two minutes for the rashes to appear if they’re going to.”

  I stare at my arm. I’m convinced I am going to be infected—that I have The Sixteen Strains and the new Strain contaminating my veins. I don’t feel any of the symptoms, but a part of my mind keeps repeating two words over and over:

  I’m infected. I’m infected. I’m infected.

  So when a circular rash the size of a fingerprint forms on my forearm I’m not surprised at all.

  Timofei looks at me for a full minute, analysing. “You’ll have to be quarantined,” he states eventually.

  I ask, “Don’t you have any vaccines? Will they stop me being infectious?”

  “No. They don’t work that way. They don’t cure you—they provide defence and immunity against future infections. It’s something that needs to be administered before you catch it, not after.”

  “The Officials call the immunisation a cure.”

  Timofei snorts, but he seems more angry than amused. “The Officials say a lot of things, and I don’t trust a word they say.”

  It’s Dalmar that replies, not me. “That’s not true, though, is it?”

  Timofei fires a withering glance at Dal, dragging his hands through his lank hair. “There have been cases,” he informs reluctantly, “when we were able to save someone by administering the vaccine. Don’t ask me how it works—I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, and it shouldn’t work, but it has done in the past.”

  “So do it,” I say. “Will it stop me infecting anyone?”

  Begrudgingly, “Yes.”

  “Then you need to give me that vaccine.”

  Timofei shakes his head.

  Dalmar’s hands are fists, crossed over his chest. “He won’t give up. Honour’s the kind of person who will steal the vaccine and inject himself if you deny him it.”

  Am I? Am I that kind of person?

  “There are risks involved.” Timofei sighs, but he’s not trying to convince me out of it anymore. “A lot of risks—and bad ones at that.”

  It’s this or kill everyone I come into contact with. Tough choice. “Aren’t there risks with everything?”

  For a split second Timofei looks like he’s going to grin. “You’re right, Dalmar,” he says, then he disappears around the side of the door.

  “From what data we’re able to access, we’ve determined that ten percent of people given the vaccine don’t survive for longer than a month,” Dalmar tells me. “You need to know the odds of what you’re getting into. One in ten people die.”

  “But it’ll stop me infecting anyone.”

  “It could also kill you, Honour! Don’t you care about yourself?”

  I shrug. “I’m not sure anymore. It’s not that I don’t care, but after everything that’s happened it doesn’t seem that important. It’s like … John died and Thalia died and Wes died but nobody cares. Horatia left, but nothing changed in Forgotten London. People carry on.”

  I draw in a sharp breath. This feels like a rant.

  “But there’s this whole thing here—this rebellion or whatever it’s called. There’s States who are spreading the Strains around F.L. and pretending to care and comfort their families when they cart their dead away. There’s the Officials we’re supposed to trust, who are in on a plan to kill us all and skip off into the sunset. Now tell me how me dying actually matters when all of that’s going on.”

  Dalmar stares at me.

  “You don’t deserve a premature death,” Bran says and I start. I’d forgotten he was in the room. “The men outside these walls, who plan the horrible things you say—those are the men who should be exposed to death, not you.”

  “And the people in here? What about them? I could infect everyone. There are kids in here.”

  I can feel Bran’s gaze on me, strong enough to burn holes through my T-shirt. “It’s not your duty to protect them.”

  “Isn’t it? My name is Honour. Where would be the honour in not doing this? In not getting rid of the danger? The Guardians saved my life from the Officials. The odds aren’t that bad—at least it’s not one in two. I owe it to them.”

  “Very honourable,” Timofei drawls, returning. “Give me your left arm.”

  I hold it out without hesitation. My life has been a fifteen-year-long string of bad things and bad luck. I’m not taking the chance that quarantine will keep the Strains contained.

  “Wait,” I say. “What if I’ve already passed it on? How do you know I haven’t already infected anyone?”

  Dalmar and Timofei exchange the quickest of looks.

  “What?” I demand. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Only one person has been infected by the party that went aboveground,” Timofei says to the floor. “The rest of the base has been cleared. We have a team who can test the air for it. They’ve been working night and day to develop new technology to go with the information we’re receiving.”

  “That’s innovative of you,” Branwell says.

  I don’t hear him. I’m looking at Dalmar. I think I know why he’s so angry now. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t want to be right.

  “Dal,” I whisper. He looks at me and he’s heartbroken. I’m crying before I realise it and he’s gripping my arm, embracing me. “I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not gonna say it’s okay,” he breathes, “but I don’t blame you. You didn’t know you were a carrier.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat. I can’t stop saying it.

  “Honour, shut up. Once is enough.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Shut up. Will you … rethink this vaccine? Please? I’ve … Hele has had it already tonight. She had to. She was … she was infected and she was dying so she had no choice. But she might die from this. I can’t have that happen to you as well. I could lose everything.” He’s whispering now. “Please, Honour. Please.”

  “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. I’ve infected Hele. I won’t infect anyone else.”

  “I’ll lose everything,” he says so quietly I almost miss it. “You’re my only friend.”

  “I wouldn’t deserve you as a friend if I didn’t do this.”

  He laughs bitterly. “You don’t deserve friends. It doesn’t work that way. You have them or you don’t. Friends aren’t something you have because you deserve them. You have them because people like you and love you.”

  “You’re not making this easier.”

  “I don’t want to!”

  “Do it,” I order Timofei. “Enough people have died because of me.”

  “What about me?” Dalmar screams. “Have I not had enough? Enough loss? Enough pain?”

  Timofei’s voice is calm. “Dalmar, go find Hele. You’re acting out of fear. This isn’t you.”

  “How can you tell me what is and isn’t me?” Dalmar fists Timofei’s uniform, shoving him against the wall. He snarls, millimetres from Timofei, “How dare you?”

  Timofei sighs with exasperation. I watch in horror as he swipes a needle from a tray to his left and jabs it into Dalmar’s neck. Dalmar goes down fast, thumping onto the floor. I growl and launch myself at Timofei.

  “What the hell have you done?” I think I’m trying to punch him.

  “Honour, he’s fine!” Bran yells.

  It takes me forever to realise that Timofei isn’t fighting me back. He’s only restraining me so that I can’t hit him. Bran is knelt on the floor beside Dalmar and looking up at the two of us. “He’s
perfectly fine.”

  Timofei is visibly offended. “I wouldn’t hurt him. He’s my friend, too.”

  I slowly regain composure and, when my arms are released, I back myself into a corner. “Sorry,” I say to no one in particular. I barely notice when Timofei gives me the vaccine. I infected Hele and because of me, she almost died. She still might.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was a carrier?” I ask.

  “Alba thought it might make you unstable, and that it might lead to you demanding to be vaccinated. She couldn’t risk losing you as a symbol of our cause.” He smiles wryly. “She’s always right.”

  “So … what now? How long until I find out whether it’s worked or not.”

  “Oh, the immunisation works without fail. You only find out if it’s going to kill you once you’re dead. There’s no warning, no symptoms, no anything. So, good luck. You’re going to need it.”

  ***

  Yosiah

  11:02. 07.10.2040. Forgotten London, Edgware Zone.

  We’re in a grand ballroom that is further underground than the other rooms and corridors. It’s enormous.

  The walls are old and gilt, with angels and birds that I assume are doves carved into the stone. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of plastic chairs have been set out in rows, and at the front, even though I can’t see from here, are seven chairs facing the amassed crowd on a raised platform. When I walked in I could just about see Alba, Timofei, and five people I didn’t recognise sat in them.

  The entire population of The Guardians’ base is here.

  Something big is happening.

  I can’t see most of the room from where I’m sat, let alone the front, and I seriously doubt I will be able to hear them. I’m starting to wonder how this meeting is going to work. I get my answer five minutes later when the walls of the ballroom flicker to life with small glass screens that were previously transparent. They show Alba. When she speaks, her voice echoes through invisible speakers.

  “Thank you all for being here. I know you’re confused, and worried, so I’ll keep it brief. In the next fortnight we will be leaving this base for the free lands. We believe that Forgotten London will soon be in chaos and, according to our allies and sources, the town will cease to exist. Every citizen who lives here in the base will be led outside of the town, past the border, and into safe zones. The Guardians will focus on evacuating the town of its civilians and getting them to safe zones also.”