KILLER T

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘You paying someone to stalk me now?’ JJ shouted from inside.

  Then he gave a deep groan and Harry winced at the thought of what Fawn had just kneed.

  ‘Show me up in front of the whole city!’ Fawn screamed.

  ‘Who are you to talk?’ JJ shouted back. ‘I know you’ve been sniffing around my dad.’

  Holy shit! Harry thought.

  ‘Your father showed me some kindness while you were strutting the TMU campus like a horny bull,’ Fawn shouted. ‘But I’ve never cheated on you.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re a saint,’ JJ taunted, grabbing Fawn and pushing her out through the cabana’s flaps. ‘If you don’t like it, divorce me. But you signed a pre-nup, so you won’t get one damned cent.’

  ‘Won’t I?’ Fawn teased, wagging a finger. ‘You think I’ll go down without a fight?’

  JJ was six-five, but Fawn’s four-inch heels made her a match as they stared off.

  ‘You were born trailer trash and you’ll die trailer trash,’ JJ taunted.

  Fawn swung, drawing blood as she scraped purple nails across JJ’s cheek. ‘You’ll see what I’m capable of,’ Fawn threatened. ‘You wait and see.’

  ‘All you do is make my life miserable,’ JJ shouted.

  Fawn tried to claw again, but JJ saw it coming. He snatched his wife’s wrist and bent back her fingers.

  ‘You like that?’ JJ shouted, making Fawn whimper. ‘Show me up some more – I’ll break ’em.’

  JJ released his wife’s hand and shoved her hard. Fawn’s heels weren’t designed for wet tiles and she skidded on her front foot, grabbing the bar to save herself. She almost did the splits, but carried enough momentum to spin and crack her head against the wall-mounted TV.

  JJ’s crew erupted in cheers and applause as the screen cracked and Fawn slumped to the floor.

  ‘Quit filming,’ one of JJ’s pals demanded, stepping in to block Harry’s shot. ‘Gimme that camera.’

  Harry had spent so much of his life as a skinny dude that his instinct was to back off. But though the guy had a couple of inches on Harry, he was flabby, while Harry was all muscle.

  ‘Or what?’ Harry said, shooting the guy daggers. ‘Touch my phone and I’ll rip your head off.’

  ‘Press assholes,’ the guy spat. ‘I know who you are, big shot.’

  Harry was worried JJ’s pals would turn on him, but they were more concerned about getting JJ away from his semi-conscious wife in case the cops showed.

  As JJ and his crew grabbed their stuff and rushed the elevator, a giant bouncer hefted Fawn over his shoulder. He was tailed by a much smaller guy, who spoke into a radio, asking someone to make sure a casino limo was on standby to take her to hospital.

  Harry wasn’t the only person who’d filmed the incident, though he’d had the closest view. He considered uploading straight to Vegas Local, but the two Queensbridge girls were under eighteen, which meant he had to blur them in post-production, or risk getting sued by their undoubtedly wealthy parents.

  Harry decided it was safest to edit the video when he had a clear head, even if it meant someone else got the story online first. The TV breaking had tripped a fuse, wiping out the lights in Harry’s cabana and the nearest set of loudspeakers.

  He grabbed a can of Blue Moon from his bar and enjoyed the gloom as he settled back on his lounger. JJ’s crew had bounced and the partying teens didn’t want to be close by if the cops showed, so Harry found himself alone on his double lounger, detached from dancing, splashing and the laser show coming out of the DJ booth. He thought about going home and catching some sleep, but he lacked energy, and figured the decent thing was to give Matt and Hermione a clear hour at the apartment.

  But no cops showed. A guy in a suit barked orders as pool attendants swarmed JJ’s cabana, gathering towels and drinks, mopping tiles, covering up the bar and placing fresh cushions and rolled towels on each lounger. As the clean-up crew left, an electrician came along with a TV balanced on his shoulder.

  He whistled cheerfully as he placed the screen face down on the bar. Then he opened a little tool bag and started unscrewing the broken set. Feeling wasted and watching the party from a distance had made Harry grumpy, but he was captivated by the happy little man in his beige shorts and Red Spot-branded polo.

  ‘Can I ask you something, sir?’ Harry said politely, sitting up.

  The man turned and smiled. ‘Depends what it is, I guess.’

  ‘Have you got a one-one-seven?’

  The psychiatrists who developed and studied Zombie mods as a way of combatting mental illness catalogued hundreds of genetic modifications that might affect brain chemistry and alter a person’s mental state. Most z-mods were still known by these catalogue numbers.

  ‘How’d you work that out?’ he asked.

  Harry smiled. ‘Guys with sixty-eights and one-seven-nines are more jittery,’ Harry said. ‘But one-one-sevens are chilled.’

  The electrician strained as he lifted the broken TV from its wall mount.

  ‘May I ask why you had it done?’

  ‘Wife dumped me,’ the electrician explained. ‘Lived with my daughter for a while, but there wasn’t a lot of space in her apartment. Wound up drinking more and staying out later every night. I’d wake up stinking of booze and aching like the world was ending. I thought about killing myself. Got as far as buying a handgun, then I met a guy in a bar selling mod kits for eight hundred bucks. Took me out back to show me how to do the needles and the rest is history …’

  Harry was fascinated. ‘So now you’re happy all the time?’

  ‘Not happy exactly,’ the electrician answered. ‘You feel sad but it don’t matter.’

  ‘Isn’t it flat, though?’ Harry said. ‘Like, does anything matter, if you’re happy no matter what?’

  There was a pause as the electrician lifted the new TV on to the bracket and reached behind the bar to plug cables.

  ‘You reach a certain age and you realise life doesn’t amount to much,’ the electrician said. ‘I’m no philosopher. I don’t know if being like this makes my life less meaningful. But I wake in the morning and don’t dread the day in front of me.’

  ‘So you’d recommend it?’ Harry asked. ‘Because I don’t have much to complain about, but most of the time I feel empty.’

  The electrician stepped out of JJ’s cabana. Harry watched as he twisted a key in an access panel at the base of a metal post with a circle of Bose speakers at the top.

  ‘Well,’ the electrician said as he flipped a fuse switch, making the cabana lights and water mist come back on. ‘Maybe you should live a little longer before you start messing with your brain. What are you, a college freshman?’

  ‘High school senior.’

  ‘Just a kid,’ the electrician said, grabbing the remote for the TV he’d installed and flipping channels to make sure they were all tuned. ‘You have a good night. Go easy on the free liquor. That’s one thing I know won’t solve your problems.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that advice,’ Harry joked.

  ‘Enjoy your night, son,’ the electrician said. His permanent smile niggled Harry as he strode peacefully away.

  43 KILLER-T

  Charlie had moved out of Obama Independent Living when her supervised release period ended. She now lived with Iranian-American foster parents Navid and Jan Rahimi and their two tween sons.

  Charlie’s room was an extension built over the garage, with its own shower room and kitchenette. Since she’d never given her foster parents cause to think she was anything other than a model student, Charlie came and went as she pleased.

  It was the closest she’d come to normal family life. She ate with the family most evenings, helped with grocery shopping, drove the boys to Ju Jitsu and occasionally got drafted as the ten- and twelve-year-olds’ tutor.

  When Ken Kleinberg retired with health problems, Charlie got assigned to an energetic young welfare officer, who bugged Fawn until she agreed to let Charlie visit her younger brother. It was officially
restricted to once a week, but Charlie made friends with the nurses and they let her visit Ed on Tuesdays, Thursdays before school and first thing on Saturday. Fawn didn’t visit, so was none the wiser.

  The fifteen-mile ride from the Rahimis’ modest home to the irritatingly named Care4Kids was mostly freeway, taking twenty minutes in light traffic. Charlie usually let the car drive and tried to kick-start her day with perky tunes and a travel mug of black coffee.

  She’d lain awake most of the night, worrying about Juno, Mango and the LHV situation, and the 7 a.m. radio headlines didn’t help her mood.

  ‘President West has urged people to stay calm and prepare for a possible quarantine order after it was confirmed that LHV has been diagnosed in three patients in the San Francisco area. Two have been confirmed as a pilot and co-pilot who flew a private jet from London hours before transatlantic flights were halted. The four passengers on the flight, which include the tennis player Lee Rosenwein and his wife, have been placed in quarantine, but authorities in Winnipeg are still trying to track down two cleaning staff who boarded the plane during a refuelling stop.

  ‘In other news, the death toll in the United Kingdom is said to be over twenty thousand, with the National Health Service on the brink of collapse. The British parliament held its first ever session under quarantine protocol yesterday, with Prime Minister Lawrence taking questions over a video-conferencing system. Leader of the opposition New Labour Group made an unexpected call to pay the $1.5-billion-dollar ransom, and then “hunt the culprits without mercy to the ends of the earth”.

  ‘Meanwhile, a team of virologists at Britain’s Defence Research Authority, DefRA, have announced that LHV appears not to be related to the Ebola virus, as had been previously thought. Although the symptoms of massive internal bleeding and rapid physical collapse are similar to Ebola, scientists now say the virus is either completely synthetic, or derived from an as-yet-unidentified animal virus adapted to infect humans.

  ‘The group’s initial finding is that the virus appears to work by taking control of so-called Killer-T cells that produce antibodies. This effectively turns the human immune system into a massive virus factory and leaves the body with no means of defence. Although global governments have poured over one hundred billion dollars into anti-viral research since the SNor outbreak, even the most optimistic scientists say trial vaccines will take months to develop from scratch …’

  Charlie felt grumpy as her car reached the Care4Kids lot. It seemed deeply unfair, having some bunch of nuts in a lab on the other side of the world, determining whether she got to fall in love, get a doctorate, have a family and grow old, or die coughing up blood in two weeks’ time.

  ‘Down in the dumps today, Charlie,’ Joyce the Jamaican nurse said as Charlie scrubbed her hands in reception.

  ‘It crossed the Atlantic,’ Charlie said.

  Joyce put her palms together. ‘May our Lord protect us,’ she said as Charlie donned blackout goggles. She stepped into a plastic cubicle, spreading fingers and raising her arms over her head as Joyce activated the dazzling bluish light of a UV sterilisation booth.

  Charlie’s phone and the contents of a small bag rolled through a more powerful steriliser before Joyce opened the electric gate to let Charlie inside. The first time Charlie had visited Care4Kids, she’d been reduced to tears by the yelling and droning, and a whiff of urine and disinfectant that lingered after you left.

  But Charlie barely noticed this now, instead admiring the patient work of mental-health nurses, who got punched and screamed at by their mostly teenage charges. Ed was one of the most able residents, and one of the few who attended a special education unit at a nearby middle school.

  ‘Guess who,’ Charlie said as she rapped on Ed’s door, which had his name along with a picture of his face superimposed on a Star Wars movie poster. He was easily upset and sensitive to other people’s emotions, so Charlie shook her arms and tried to relax as she stepped into his room.

  Ed was fifteen and close to six feet tall. Handsome, but borderline obese. He wore grubby white soccer socks into which he always tucked his tracksuit bottoms because he had a phobia about things crawling up his leg.

  Charlie caught a strong whiff of BO as Ed’s arms locked round her back. His first hug always predicted how the next hour would go. If it was stiff and rushed, it meant he was fretting about something, usually about a lesson at school or his constant nagging fear that he’d forgotten something. But today’s hug was lengthy and relaxed.

  ‘I love you so much, Charlie,’ Ed said, slurring slightly.

  ‘Aww,’ Charlie said, suddenly feeling better about the world. ‘You haven’t told me that for ages. I love you too, Ed.’

  ‘I got a new book from Amazon,’ Ed said. ‘It’s true stories about Arctic explorers. I read a hundred and three pages already.’

  Ed’s slurred speech and emotional outbursts meant people thought he was stupid. But while his damaged brain struggled with spatial tasks like tying laces or putting on a T-shirt the right way round, he was an average ninth-grader in most school subjects, and he loved to read. Especially biographies of astronauts and explorers, and books about wars.

  ‘So,’ Charlie said, speaking slowly because she knew the confusion could tilt Ed into panic. ‘Today is Saturday so we don’t have to go to school. How about I help you in the shower? Then we’ll get some breakfast. Then we can play a video game, or watch one of your shows together.’

  ‘I don’t need a shower,’ Ed said.

  ‘You certainly do,’ Charlie said firmly. ‘You’ll never get a girlfriend with smelly armpits and dirty socks on your feet.’

  Ed picked up one of his feet and seemed proud of how black the sole was.

  ‘Come on, pilgrim,’ Charlie said firmly. ‘I’ll go and set the shower at the temperature you like. You take off those nasty clothes and drop them in the laundry hamper.’

  44 SPOILED BRATS

  Harry opened his eyes slowly. His brain throbbed and his vision blurred as he tried to raise his head. The sun was coming up and a sharp breeze rattled the rooftop palms.

  There was puke sprayed the other side of the double-lounger and a sparrow pecking at it. Harry didn’t think he’d been sick, but most of what happened after Matt left was a blur.

  ‘Time you got your ass home,’ a cleaner said irritably. She wore a chequered smock, thick rubber gloves and had faded tattoos down her arms.

  Harry felt like his brain would rupture as he sat up, rubbing his face and planting his feet down. The pool shoes on the floor weren’t his, but they’d do. He looked around for his tank top.

  ‘You seen a blue-grey tank?’ Harry asked, then started coughing.

  ‘Ya ain’t supposed to be here,’ the woman said sharply. ‘And we ain’t gonna start looking for your shit.’

  Harry tapped his back pocket, relieved to feel his phone, house key and money clip zipped inside his swim shorts. It was a $90 Lululemon tank that he looked good in, but his thirst and a need for the toilet overrode any desire to start searching.

  The deck swayed as Harry stood and steadied himself on a post. The scene across the pool reminded him of a news item he’d seen about kids who lived on landfill sites. There was tons of litter, sticky cocktail spills and lounger cushions floating in the pool.

  Harry stumbled round the pool towards the glass elevator, straddling half-eaten nachos, beer cans and dried blood.

  A guy in the pool wore rubber waders, using a giant boom to scoop litter off the surface. When Harry caught the cleaner’s eye, he got a look of pure hate. He realised he was the hungover spoiled brat, loathed by people on minimum wage who had to clean up after him.

  Harry drank from a water fountain outside the restrooms. A smell like a rotting carcass turned him off the gents.

  ‘Hello?’ he yelled, making sure there was no answer before cutting into a stall in the ladies. He kicked a dead lip gloss across the floor, then walked into a stall and lifted the seat.

  Harry was halfw
ay through a much-needed piss when he noticed a wasp on the wall, the stripes on its back a shimmering metallic purple. He hadn’t noticed with his blurred head and desperation to pee, but someone must have spilled something sugary in the next stall because the synthetic wasps were coming under the partition and a few fizzed up near the ceiling.

  ‘Christ,’ Harry gasped, spraying his shorts as he backed out frantically.

  The University of Chicago biology student who’d engineered purple wasps was serving fifty years in federal prison, but his genetically altered creatures had spread across North America. Besides their dark metallic stripes, purple wasps produced a much more potent venom than regular wasps. It could kill an untreated child in twenty minutes, or an adult in three agonising hours.

  Harry had peed over his feet, but the shock boosted his energy. He checked all over his body, making sure there were no wasps, then jogged to the elevator, only to find it shut down, with the car open and a woman inside polishing the glass.

  ‘Service elevator, at back,’ a cleaner said, aiming her pointing finger behind the main bar.

  ‘Gracias,’ Harry mumbled.

  The service elevator had scuffed plastic walls and a whiff of burnt rubber. Harry rode it down twenty-three floors, expecting to emerge inside the casino, or the taxi lobby where he’d been dropped off the night before.

  But he exited into a deserted underground loading area with a strong smell of trash. He pressed the button to try riding up, but a red light flashed, indicating that he needed to swipe an employee card in the control panel.

  Harry cursed, then walked around trying to find someone who could tell him the way out or swipe the elevator so he could get up to casino level. But the hot basement was dead and his only option was to follow a narrow vehicle ramp towards chinks of sunlight.

  The heat was oppressive and the stench churned Harry’s weakened stomach. After a couple of hundred yards he was out in warm morning air and able to draw a full breath. He glanced around and realised he’d reached street level, with a bunch of tacky Fremont Street casinos visible at the end of the access road. Fremont was pedestrianised, but Harry knew there were taxi ranks in the side streets.