Authors: Louise Voss
The men looked at one another, and then over at the car. But it was dark, and the windows tinted. ‘You ain’t wearing a mask,’ said the leathery one.
Heather tried to shrug, although it was hard, immobilised as she was by the enormous forearm.
‘Your call,’ she said, resisting the temptation to add ‘loser’. ‘I’m immune. Are you?’
‘We’ll risk it. We need wheels,’ said the ringleader. ‘Give us the fuckin’ keys, lady.’
‘Let go of me and I’ll get them.’
The men all laughed.
‘You ain’t going nowhere. You one mean lookin’ bitch,’ said her captor, his voice so low in her ear that she felt the inside of her head vibrate. He leaned to one side, not letting up the pressure on her throat, and slid a meaty hand down her hip into the side pocket of her combats where her favourite hunting knife was kept. She tried to squirm away but he was far too strong. He removed the knife and tossed it to the leather-faced one. Then his hand delved into her front pocket for the car keys – but not before he’d snaked his fingers across to give a hard squeeze between her legs.
Heather sank her teeth into his massive forearm and bit it with all her strength. He bellowed with pain, and released the pressure on her for just a moment. She twisted out of his grasp – but turned right into the full force of a punch from one of the other men, rendering her immediately unconscious. She landed face-first, her broken nose grinding into the cracked asphalt.
Rosie and Lucy, their hands still taped behind their backs, lay silently in a bush next to where the SUV had been parked, not twenty feet from where Heather was out cold. Rosie watched the huge man kick Heather’s prone form, and gave a very small mental cheer. When the seven men piled into the SUV, Rosie hoped they would drive over Heather on their way out, crunching her bones like roadkill. But it seemed they had finished with her.
‘Ain’t no one in here. She was bullshittin’ us, man,’ she heard one of them say as they reversed at speed and then skidded on to the highway.
Everything seemed eerily silent once the gang had left, aside from the faint never-ending chorus of sirens in the distance.
‘Luce, honey? Sorry I had to push you out. Are you OK?’
The moment she saw the men emerge from the bushes, Rosie had begun writhing around in the back seat until her fingers grasped the metal of the door handle behind her. She’d hung on, praying that the men would stop looking at the car, that an opportunity would come for them to slip out without being heard. When a cry of pain rang out as Heather bit her assailant, Rosie had shoulder-barged her daughter out of the vehicle and into the shadows.
Lucy didn’t reply, but leaned her body into her mother’s. Rosie would have given a month’s salary to be able to put her arms round her, but she couldn’t. Hell, a year’s salary. She felt sick and shaky, but at least they were free.
‘Come on, hon, we’ve gotta get out of here before she wakes up,’ she whispered, staggering to her feet. ‘Upsy daisy,’ she said, trying and failing to smile. ‘Sweetheart, let’s go.
Oh hell
, I wish our hands weren’t tied.’
Lucy grunted and rolled over on to her side, and then on to her front, her face pressing into the prickly earth around the bushes. Using her forehead as leverage, she managed to push herself to her knees, and then, wobbling dangerously, to a standing position. In the moonlight Rosie thought her daughter’s skin was the colour of milk. ‘Good girl, that’s great, well done, honey. Come on.’
Lucy stopped and looked across at Heather’s prone figure. Then she spoke the first words she had said since Heather had attacked her in the house:
‘Where are we going?’
Rosie looked up at the smoking sky, at the fires burning in the near distance, trying to think straight while sirens shrieked and wails of grief and suffering came from a building nearby.
‘We’re going to find … a hospital … Or a police station. Somewhere …’
She jumped as something exploded in the distance. A gunshot. A scream. Her head hurt.
‘Maybe just somewhere we can rest a while. Somewhere safe.’
Kate sat on the uncomfortable chair in the corner of her room, staring at Preeti’s back as she tended to the still-unconscious Junko. If I had a knife, she thought, I could jump up and stick it between her shoulder blades before she had a chance to react. She’d never have thought
herself capable of killing someone in cold blood, but then she’d never have dreamt of throwing liquid nitrogen in someone’s face, yet she’d done it without a moment’s hesitation.
It struck her that this doctor was the weak link among the Sisters. She had a slightly nervous air, and her medical background suggested that she possessed morals or ethics that might make her susceptible to reason. Kate decided it was worth a shot.
‘Don’t you feel ashamed?’ she said in a low voice. ‘You were trained to heal people, to help them. And here you are, trying to bring about the biggest act of genocide since the Holocaust. You unleashed the pandemic the whole scientific community has been dreading for years. Do you know how many people will die?’
Without turning to look at her, Preeti said, ‘It is destiny. The will of the Goddess.’
‘Hah, you should hear yourself!’ She dropped her voice to a near whisper. ‘You’re brainwashed. Is that what’s happened here? You were weak for some reason – something bad happened to you, like your husband left you or somebody close to you died – and you were looking to belong to something, looking for leadership. And Angelica came along and made you feel special, important. Filled your head with all this crap about the Goddess and the plague.’
Preeti didn’t respond. She continued to examine Junko, lifting one eyelid then the other. The Japanese woman remained locked in her own world, not responding.
‘I’ve got news for you, Preeti.’ Keep using her name, Kate thought. Make it personal. ‘There is no such thing as the Goddess. It’s all make-believe. I don’t blame you for being taken in by it – God knows, we all need something to believe in – but this virus is very real, and you are betraying thousands of years of medical progress and the oaths you made when you became a doctor. Assuming you are a real doctor and not just some quack who bought her diploma online.’
Preeti’s shoulders tensed. She still didn’t look back but she replied with a shaky voice, ‘I am a real doctor. I studied in Paris and Boston.’
‘Then you should be ashamed of yourself. Surely you can see how wrong this is? Think of the millions of children who will die or be orphaned as a result of your actions. The suffering, the pain, the devastation? It’s not too late, though, Preeti. You can—’
The door opened and the soldier came in. Kate had labelled each of the women in order to tell them apart. The soldier was called Simone. There was also the driver, Brandi,
and of course the leader, Angelica. Apparently there was
another woman she hadn’t seen yet, for she’d heard the others mention a Sister Heather. So, five of them. If Junko woke up before Heather returned, that would be four against two. Not too bad. Even if Junko didn’t wake up – and it seemed unlikely that she would – Kate only needed to get past four so-called Sisters.
Or she could try befriending one of them, sowing seeds of doubt, appealing to the human being beneath the brainwashed robot. Preeti was the obvious target. Perhaps instead of trying to shame her she should try a different strategy. But not while the soldier was in the room.
Simone cut an imposing figure as she stood over them, watching Preeti examine her patient. The role of prison guard suited her.
‘Any progress?’
Preeti stood up. ‘No. She is stable but there are no signs of her regaining consciousness.’
‘She needs to be in a hospital,’ said Kate.
Simone popped a stick of chewing gum into her mouth and grinned. While the other Sisters were as po-faced as bank employees, Kate had learned that the soldier was quick to smile – and equally quick to lose her temper. ‘Hospital is the last place anyone would want to be right now.’
‘Why?’ Kate asked, knowing what the answer would be.
‘Because if you’re not infected when you walk in, you sure as hell will be when you walk out. In fact, last I heard all the hospitals in this part of California have shut their doors.’ She laughed. ‘Right now, being a medic is the most dangerous job in America. All those sick people, asking
you to cure them but killing you with the very breath they use to ask. Your Chinese friend here is in the best possible hands.’
‘She’s Japanese.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’
Preeti placed a hand on Simone’s shoulder, caressing it. ‘Dr Maddox was accusing me of being brainwashed,’ she said, turning to look at Kate.
Simone smirked. ‘Was she? Nobody’s washed my brain, Sister. I woke up, is all. I ain’t brainwashed – I’m enlightened.’
‘You’re sheep,’ Kate said, trying to keep her voice steady, refusing to let them see her fear. ‘Don’t you have family out there? I take it none of you have children, but surely some of you have nieces, nephews, siblings …? And parents – what about them? You don’t care about them dying? You think this will be some kind of paradise when they’re all dead? Think again. It’ll be a rat’s paradise, that’s all.’
‘Rats?’ Simone asked, seemingly shaken more by this than by the mention of her family.
Kate looked at her. ‘Well, there will be a lot more rats around after the virus.’
‘Huh?’
‘They’ll thrive in these conditions. All those bodies, all that food going to waste, nobody around to lay down poison or traps? The rat population will explode. They’re going to have the time of their lives. Didn’t any of you think of that?’
Simone gaped at her with barely disguised horror. ‘Uh-uh. Angelica never said nothing about no motherfucking rats.’
‘Perhaps the Goddess forgot to mention it. Cockroaches too. Every kind of pest and vermin you can think of. It won’t only be you and your sisters who inherit the earth. Some Golden Age, huh?’
She folded her arms, enjoying Simone’s discomfort.
‘This is why you are so vulnerable to brainwashing. You’ve got no connection to the real world. You’re looking for family. Angelica is like a mother or big sister figure to you, telling you what to do, persuading you that you finally belong. But your families are still out there. And they are going to suffer and die. You will have murdered them.’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ said Preeti, tight-lipped, as she changed Junko’s dressing.
‘It’s meant to be,’ said Simone.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Kate. ‘It is decreed? The will of the Goddess?’
Simone appeared impervious to Kate’s withering sarcasm. ‘Yup.’
‘The Goddess is a story. Angelica made it up. She’s brainwash—’
Simone’s hand was around Kate’s throat before she even saw the woman move towards her, knocking the glasses from her face. Gasping for air, she tried to dislodge the woman’s grip as she pushed her against the wall. The woman brought her face within inches of Kate’s. Her breath was sweet, minty.
‘If you try to tell me I’ve been brainwashed, or mention those fucking rats one more fucking time …’
Unable to reply because of the hand that was crushing her throat, Kate could only stare helpless into the woman’s eyes. There was no anger, just irritation, as though Kate had wrecked her buzz. Her jaw continued to move up and down, working on the gum.
‘We’re not allowed to kill her,’ Preeti said from over Simone’s shoulder.
Tutting, Simone let go, and Kate gulped down a lungful of air as she retrieved her glasses from the floor and put them back on. She wouldn’t let these women break her. She pulled herself up to her full height, all five foot seven, and said, ‘It’s not too late to stop this, you know. Junko and I can find the vaccine if you let us go, if Junko gets proper medical care and wakes up, we can stop the virus, I know we can.’
The women just laughed at her over their shoulders as they left the room, their only response the clunk of the key turning in the lock behind them.
It was silent in the house when Kate awoke from a woozy, dreamless sleep. Immediately she registered that something had changed, but it took her a moment to work out what it was.
The silence. Normally, she could hear Junko breathing.
She got up and ran to Junko’s bed, taking hold of her wrist and feeling for a pulse. With growing panic, she put her ear to Junko’s chest, then crossed the room and flicked on the light. Junko lay motionless, her face waxy and her eyes closed.
‘Help!’ Kate banged on the door. ‘Quick!’ She shouted and banged as loudly as she could.
Within a minute or so Angelica pulled open the door. Simone and Brandi were behind her. All three were wearing white towelling dressing gowns and were flushed, as if they’d just got out of a hot tub.
‘She’s stopped breathing.’
‘Fetch Sister Preeti,’ Angelica barked at Brandi.
Kate tilted Junko’s head back, held her nose and opened her mouth. Remembering her first-aid training, she blew three slow breaths into Junko’s mouth. She stripped back the sheet, put the heel of her hands between Junko’s ribs and pressed down as hard as she could, five quick compressions. Tears splashed her hands and she realised she was crying.
‘Come on, Junko,’ she whispered. Angelica and Simone were staring at her from the doorway, Angelica impassive, Simone with her mouth open, looking fretful.
Kate repeated the breathing and compression again. Junko’s body didn’t react.
‘Please,’ Kate implored. ‘Don’t, Junko, please don’t. We need you.’
She moved to breathe into Junko’s mouth again, but Preeti appeared and grabbed her by the shoulder, pulling her away. Kate watched helplessly as Preeti tried the same resuscitation attempts that had already failed.
After a minute, Preeti looked up and shook her head.
‘I’m sorry, Dadi Angelica. We’re going to need another Sister.’
Kate launched herself at Angelica, aiming a punch at her cheekbone. Angelica blocked her easily, and Simone grabbed her arms from behind. Kate screamed in Angelica’s face, ‘You murdering bitch.’
‘Sedate her,’ Angelica said to Preeti, and the next thing Kate knew – the last thing she knew before darkness enveloped her – Preeti had grabbed her arm and a needle was sliding into her flesh.