Carrier
Authors: Vanessa Garden
Carrier
Vanessa Garden
Vanessa Garden
For fans of
The Walking Dead
and
The Hunger Games
comes a YA novel about freedom, choice and family â and the terrifying disease that makes them mutually exclusive.
From the day she was born, Lena has viewed the world through the jagged window of a razor-wired fence. The hundred-acre property she shares with her mother in the Australian outback may keep her safe from the Y-Carrier disease, but it is no longer enough to hold Lena's interest, and her mother's increasingly tight grip on her free will is stifling.
Just as her curiosity blooms and her courage rises, she meets a boy through the fence
â
the first boy she has ever laid eyes on. His name is Patrick and he comes with a dangerous yet irresistible invitation of adventure beyond the fence, an invitation to which Lena cannot say no.
But Lena's newfound freedom is short-lived and she soon discovers that the Y-Carrier disease is not the only enemy she faces on the outside. Her new enemies want something Lena has, and they are willing to do anything to get it...
As a writer and also a bookseller, Vanessa loves nothing more than immersing herself in the exciting world of books. When she is not dreaming up stories or gushing about her favourite reads to customers, she likes to spend time with the people she loves most â her husband and three kids.
Many thanks to my family and friends for being so wonderfully supportive â I love you all very much. A huge thank you to Kate and the entire team at Harlequin Australia, and an extra special thank you to the lovely (and very funny) Belinda Holmes for her editorial guidance and all round wonderfulness.
For R, G, L and M.
Bestselling Titles by Escape Publishingâ¦
I packed essentials only. Well, what I guessed to be essentials. Since I'd never left the confines of Desert Downs in all my sixteen and a half years, I could only estimate what I'd need beyond the razor-wired fence.
Dad's thick, dusty old waterproof jacket went into the hessian backpack first, followed by my slingshot and of course my Jeffery C picture â I hadn't slept a night without him since I was eleven. My knife went straight into the back pocket of my cargos for easy reach. It wasn't as sharp as Mum's â which I'd used earlier today to skin the rabbits she'd caught â but my blade was longer and flicked out faster, and so was the better weapon against any Carriers I might come across on my outing.
Wearing my dead cousin Alice's worn, holey sneakers, I moved soundlessly down the hallway, taking extra care as I passed Mum's bedroom door.
Once in the kitchen, I breathed again and began to pack other stuff; a piece of flint rock for fire from the third drawer, and some dried wild figs from the bottom shelf in the pantry â careful to take only a small portion and leave most for Mum. I didn't need any more than a handful because my plan was to stay away for just a night or two. Of course, there was always a chance I'd never return.
A fig rolled under the table and I dropped to my knees to retrieve it, my fingers trembling as I reached for the shrivelled fruit and dusted the hair and dirt that had stuck to it.
For most of the day I'd avoided thinking about the inevitable. That I might encounter a Carrier, that he might infect me with his disease, that I might become one of the many female carcasses rotting all over the country.
Absently, I gnawed on the chewy, sugary fig, my thoughts on Dad's old doctor's journals and the endless articles and data on the Y-Carrier disease he'd collected in them.
I swallowed down the fruit and got up, mentally shaking the journals from my mind. Picturing women writhing with agonising pain as their internal organs literally baked with uncontrollable fevers was not helpful on my first trip to the outside world.
Plus I was wasting time. It was getting late.
I zipped my backpack shut and threw it over my shoulder.
My stomach growled, reminding me that it was past dinnertime and also highlighting Mum's absence from the dinner table for the first time in years. I remembered the rabbits I'd left roasting on sticks over hot coals. They'd be cool enough to eat by now. Hopefully my girls, Charlotte and Emma â my pet dingos â hadn't eaten them.
Closing the door carefully behind me, I stepped onto the back veranda and listened for the squeak of Mum's bedroom door, the pounding footsteps, and her loud, angry voice demanding what the hell I was doing going outside after curfew.
But none of that came.
From a distance, somewhere east, an owl hooted. Goose bumps dotted my arms. Autumn nights got cold as soon as the sun disappeared, which was about ten minutes ago â the sky got dark pretty fast too.
Shrugging off the unease of Mum's non-response, I took hesitant steps down from the veranda and began crossing the yard towards the back of our shed where I always cooked our food, kicking up rust-coloured dust as I went. I patted the metal bulge of the knife in my back pocket for reassurance as I glanced around.
Night-time shadows had transformed our golden, one hundred acre property into a black nether of unseeable dangers, where everything around me transformed into something sinister. The trees seemed to watch me; the shed and Dad's old car now places for dark and evil things to hide. A weird feeling came over me, like a thousand dead fingers brushing the back of my neck and shoulders, quickening my steps.
Part of me relished the fear and the fact that I was outside post-curfew, alone, because after living my whole life under the hawk-eyes of my mother, I was finally free â free to see the outside world with my own eyes, free to see if I could survive without Mum's and the razor-wired fence's constant protection. And it was all thanks to the stranger who'd trespassed on our property last night, the same stranger who was now resting beneath our largest salmon bark eucalypt alongside Dad and Alice.
Because if he hadn't have come, then Mum wouldn't have gone all weird and locked herself in the master bedroom with the only bottle of alcohol in our house after she'd shot him.
With my fingers now resting on the smooth, worn handle of my knife, I moved cautiously towards the rabbits. The night was still and the birds eerily quiet. Even our goat, Nanny, who normally bleated herself to sleep, was silent.
I froze halfway to the shed at the sound of rustling beyond the fence, my heart slamming against my ribcage. Slipping the knife out of my pocket, I flicked the blade and eased back a step. Perhaps the man hadn't come alone last night. Perhaps his friends wanted revenge.
Familiar yelps and yaps filled my ears as Charlotte and Emma emerged from the near darkness to leap over their special part of the fence where Mum had removed the razor wire at the top and bent the frame so that it was low enough for them to scale with ease, but high enough to deter trespassers.
I spluttered a sigh of relief and folded my blade before shoving it back in my pocket.
Like a moving blanket of orange-gold, they came bolting in my direction and I bent down onto one knee to greet them, arms outstretched.
They, along with Mum, were the reason why I got up and forced myself through each and every day of nothingness and isolation out here, and I was pretty certain they felt the same about me because every time I greeted them they nearly bowled me over, licking and nuzzling me with their wet noses.
âJeez, Charlotte, what have you been eating?' I wrinkled my nose at the stench and pushed the dingo's furry face away, breathing through my mouth so that I didn't have to smell her rotting-carcass breath.
Sometimes the girls liked to bury their catches and dig them up days later to mess around with. No matter how many times they did this there was no getting used to the stench of decaying flesh. And there was always the sickening possibility that they'd been toying with a human carcass.
I found the rabbits untouched, glistening above a bed of red coals. After easing the hot meat from their sticks, I wrapped each rabbit separately in two pieces of cheesecloth. I left one for Mum on the kitchen table and slid the other into my backpack. I would feast later tonight wherever I camped â if I could hold my empty stomach off before then.
Next I shut the girls in the shed with a couple of strips of dried roo meat and some of the fresh rabbit innards I'd left aside from earlier today â the last thing I needed was for their crazy yapping to drag Mum out of bed while I was gone.
Chewing on a dried ribbon of smoked meat I'd swiped from the shed, I gazed up at the stars beginning to bloom in the purplish black sky above. The last time I'd broken Mum's curfew and gazed up at the stars like this was when my cousin Alice had died.
I wondered if she was up there watching out for me, cheering me on and saying,
âGo see the world, Lena. Don't be afraid. None of its true; the disease is gone. Your mum is an overprotective psycho. Everyone is waiting for you out thereâ¦'
God I missed my cousin, my one and only friend; unless I counted Mum â which I didn't. Don't get me wrong, I loved Mum, but I wanted someone who would listen to my hopes and dreams instead of crushing them to pieces the minute I conceive them.
I was sick of hiding, sick of avoiding dangers and sick of Desert Downs. But most of all I was sick of Mum breathing down my neck and waving her shotgun around like a lunatic, telling me I would be dead like Alice if it wasn't for her.
Glancing up at the sky, I blew a kiss at the brightest star, imagining it to be Alice. Had she had the same hopes that I had right now, on the night she'd died? Had she too wanted to escape my mother's overbearing protectiveness? Had she wanted to make friends her own age? Had she wanted to press her lips against a boy's mouth and breathe a little piece of herself into his soul?
A sudden spark of brilliant electric blue appeared beside the half-moon, its brightness illuminating the sky.
My breathing hitched. Was it some kind of sign from Alice?
I blinked and looked again but it was gone.
A shiver crawled up my back. The idea of alien life had always creeped me out. When I was a kid, nightmares involving men with bone-white skin, large almond-shaped blue eyes and long blond hair had tormented me. Mum had always said it was because I used to flick through Dad's old sci-fi mag collection when I was a toddler and now those images were imprinted upon my brain. It did not help that Dad's magazines had countless articles stipulating that alien's chose to land their aircrafts on barren landscapes where there was lots of room and less civilisation â aka Desert Downs.
A gentle breeze passed through the trees, tickling my closely cropped hair and bringing with it the wild, earthy scent of bush flowers and of distant desert sands. I breathed in deep, the effect instantly calmingâ¦and glanced at the fence.
It was now or never.
I adjusted the straps of my backpack and rubbed at my arms where my skin continued to prickle, and with a slow, forced gait, moved away from the house until I was face to face with the fence.
This was
really
it. Most likely my one and only opportunity at freedom with Mum holed up in her room like she was.