Inhuman (5 page)

I hurried on, humming to distract myself, but then heard the sound echoing off the tunnel walls. I fell silent. The last thing I wanted was to attract something’s attention. I picked up my pace and didn’t stop again until I stepped into a cavernous room like the one I’d just left. A checkpoint chamber. My flashlight beam swept the dusty air. Across the room, a sloping rock pile blocked off the passageway. I hurried toward it, only to trip halfway. The flashlight flew from my grip as I landed on something stiff and dry. Crawling over it, I snatched up the flashlight and looked to see what I’d fallen over. My chest compressed, forcing the air from my lungs and a scream from my throat. Dozens of dried-up corpses lay scattered across the floor. Worse, some were in pieces. Shriveled limbs were flung every which way like hunks of beef jerky.

I scrambled back so far that my shoulders banged into the wall. I stayed huddled there, heart pounding, until I was certain that if I got to my feet, I wouldn’t bolt back the way I’d come. Mummified corpses couldn’t hurt me. They had to have been lying here since the exodus ended seventeen years ago. These were people who’d been denied entry into the West — probably because they’d been infected.

I shoved my flashlight under one arm and pulled out my hand sanitizer. According to my tenth grade biology teacher, you couldn’t catch Ferae from dirt or grime, which this chamber was crusted with, or a corpse, even if the person had died from Ferae. Just the same, I squeezed sanitizing gel into my shaking hands. Ferae was like rabies, passed on by the bite of an infected mammal … humans included. That’s why people said we could never reclaim the East — because there would always be animals that carried the disease, and we had no vaccine for Ferae and no cure.

That didn’t matter though, because I wasn’t going to get infected with Ferae. I flicked the flashlight forward and made a wide semicircle past the corpses, while facts about the early days of the plague crowded my mind. How the infected became aggressively psychotic — like rabies times ten — and would go in search of people to bite: doctors who were trying to help them, friends, even family. The military had been forced to firebomb a lot of the eastern cities to stop infected people and animals from spreading the virus.

The rubble was stacked up to the ceiling. After a moment of scanning my flashlight across the sloping mess, I spotted a gap at the top where fresh air drifted in. My nerves jumped: What if an infected person had wiggled through that hole and had been inside the tunnel with me all along? I whirled, my flashlight beam whipping around the chamber. Nothing. But now my heart was beating triple-time and sweat slicked my palms — not so good for rock climbing. But then, neither were high-heeled ankle boots.

To even have a shot at making it to the top, I’d need to use both hands. I set my dial on glow — enough to see by — and left it recording. Why not document my first glimpse of the East? After one last scan of the chamber, I turned off the flashlight and stuffed it into the messenger bag. I reached for a large chunk of broken cement for leverage, only to recoil from the slimy feel of it. Water had trickled in through the hole along with the air. The whole rock spill was a slippery mess. Heart still on overdrive, I started up the treacherous mound, backsliding every few feet. While I climbed, I kept my eyes pinned to the gap in the rubble above, just in case something crawled in.

Finally I reached the hole, a long burrow with a lighter shade of dark at the end. It was so narrow, I couldn’t believe that my father had managed to get through it. But he had. And so would I. I took off the bag, pushed it into the space ahead of me, and with a deep breath I wiggled in.

A glimmer of moonlight beckoned me forward as I crawled across the jagged rocks that lined the burrow. No, wrong word. This felt less like a bunny warren and more like I’d been buried alive. My hands and forearms were bruised, scraped, and cut by the time I reached the end, grateful to peer out and breathe the warm night air. I could hear the sound of rushing water and even see Arsenal Island, smack in the middle of the Mississippi River, the last stop before the Feral Zone.

The island glowed as though it generated its own sunshine via giant floodlights. In contrast, the bridge leading to the island was just a looming shadow over the water. The only illuminated area on my side of the river was the blacktopped landing pad next to the bridge’s entry gate. A spotlight swept across the jeeps and hovercopters parked to one side, and onto the rocky hill that led down to the river. When the spotlight arced back to zip along the base of the wall, I ducked into the hole again like a skittish rabbit.

Once the spotlight passed, I crept out onto the top of a bulldozed mountain of debris made up of earth, bricks, and chunks of cement mixed with broken glass, pipes, and roof shingles. A tetanus infection just waiting to happen. I perched on the rubble of what used to be the east side of Davenport. At the bottom, the bricks and cement chunks spilled onto a muddy patrol road, which meant that line guards could drive by in one of their open-topped jeeps at any moment.

I waited for the spotlight to move onto the hill again and picked my way down the wreckage, stepping as lightly as I could. Even so, rocks spilled down behind me. When I finally stepped onto the unpaved road, I found a length of pipe and jammed it into the foot of the rubble pile as a marker. Okay, orienteering, not a complete waste of time.

I paused to look back at the wall, so massive that it blocked out most of the night sky. A small thrill wound through me at seeing the Titan from this side — in person no less, not via toy hovercopter. Was it really just hours ago that I’d stood on Orlando’s roof hoping for a glimpse of the East? It felt like days ago, and yet I was still squeezed into Anna’s vest.

Her
white
vest, which in the moonlight may as well have been phosphorescent.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into wearing this,” I muttered and undid my ponytail so that my hair fell down my back in dark waves. My hair was thick and long but it didn’t hide the vest completely. “And I know you said don’t get it dirty, but … sorry.” I scooped up a handful of mud. Ew. How many germs were cupped in my palm? I couldn’t think about it. I smeared the mud over the exposed parts of the vest — grimacing the whole time — and then wiped my hands on my jeans and rubbed them down with more hand sanitizer.

Now what? I knew where I was supposed to go — Arsenal Island — but I didn’t dare just start walking. I slung off my messenger bag, unzipped it, and went through its contents more carefully than I had under Spurling’s watchful eye. The flashlight, the bandages, the iodine, the matches, the map, the machete — I didn’t even want to consider what I might need that for — and finally, a silver badge embossed with the words
Line Patrol
. I stuffed it all back into the bag except for the badge. What had Dad used this for? A single badge wouldn’t get him past a sentry. I flipped the badge over but there was nothing written on the back, just stiff black plastic.

Something glimmered in my peripheral view. I glanced across the road. A greenish glow had appeared on the ground at the base of a tree. I grabbed the messenger bag and jogged closer. The tree was leafless, dead. The crater next to it suggested an explosion. I reached out to touch the trunk, and my fingertips came back dusted with soot.

The skeleton tree, black as night.

This burnt hunk of wood was exactly how I’d pictured the skeleton tree in my dad’s stories. Maybe this blackened tree marked the start of a path as well. I’d just have to keep away from the harpy eggs….

All right, now I was getting loopy. Though it did make sense that my dad’s stories would come to mind now. When I was little, I always asked him to tell them when I was scared of the dark, or sad — two emotions I was definitely feeling right now.

In the time that I’d been standing there, the greenish light on the ground had grown brighter. I crouched. A fist-sized rock was nestled among the tree roots and glowing like a firefly. I reached for it, but then some glimmer of a memory made me snatch back my hand.

Of course this glow-in-the-dark rock wasn’t an exploding harpy egg from my dad’s stories. But what if it was something just as lethal? Like maybe a land mine? The rocky hill between here and the riverbank was probably covered with them. I backed onto the road. How weird that I may have just avoided death because of a coincidence: that real-life land mines and imaginary harpy eggs both cast a green glow.

My knees locked as realization dropped on me like a cartoon anvil. It was not a coincidence. The exploding eggs in my father’s stories were land mines. The burnt tree before me was the skeleton tree, black as night.

As the spotlight arced my way once more, I hurried back to the rubble pile and hunkered by a piece of a marble column. My mind spun. Why had my dad woven details from his life as a fetch into bedtime stories? Was Director Spurling right? Was he training me to be a fetch without telling me?

Not a chance. He’d never willingly let me do something this dangerous.

Whatever his motive, I wasn’t taking another step until I thought this through. Maybe there was a reason that his stories always began the same way.
In a very tall tower, next to a very tall mountain, there lived a little girl who longed to have an adventure. One day when she was walking along the base of the mountain, she discovered a cavern that was so long and deep, it took her through the mountain to the other side.

When she stepped out of the cavern, she saw a river that was wide and wild. She also saw that across the river there was a magical forest just waiting to be explored. As she was about to make her way down to the riverbank, she heard a cry for help. Turning back, she saw that a sheep had gotten caught in an immense bramble bush at the foot of the mountain. Because the little girl had a kind heart, she helped the sheep free itself from the thorny brambles. This turned out to be a good thing, because the grateful sheep revealed that there was a secret way to get down to the riverbank. The sheep sat down on a boulder and, while using its own wool to knit a sweater, it told the little girl that she must look for the skeleton tree, black as night, which marked the start of the path. If she strayed from that path, she might step on a harpy egg. They looked just like rocks, the sheep warned, except for their faint green glow. If you so much as nudged a harpy egg, it would burst into flames.

The little girl followed the sheep’s instructions to the letter and made it safely down to the riverbank, only to discover that an army of silver robots guarded the only bridge across the river.

Up to this point in the story, the only detail my dad ever changed was the type of animal caught in the bramble bush. The animal’s warning about the path to the riverbank was always the same — look for the skeleton tree and watch out for the harpy eggs. But once the girl made it down to the riverbank safely, her methods for getting past the killer robots varied. Sometimes she’d seek out the wizard who lived with the robots and spent his days devising magic potions….

Wait. A wizard surrounded by silver guys. Silver, as in light gray uniforms, maybe?

Okay, Dad, got it.
Dr. Solis and the line guards. Wow, that wasn’t even subtle.

I got to my feet. I didn’t need to take the story any further because I didn’t need to know all the ways that the little girl made it across the bridge and into the magical forest. I wasn’t going anywhere near the magical forest, aka the Feral Zone, even if that was where the little girl met the boy who lived all alone in a castle. He was wild and uncivilized and would say the rudest things imaginable, which, of course, delighted me when I was younger. Out of all of my dad’s characters, the wild boy was my favorite. But tonight, there would be no wild boy, no bridge crossing, and no magic forest for me. All I had to do was talk to the wizard. Dr. Solis, who was surrounded by killer robots. With Uzis. No problem.

I studied the rocky hill that lay between the road and the riverbank. I didn’t see any other green glowing spots on the slope below, but they were there for sure. If I couldn’t see the land mines, how was I supposed to avoid them? Too bad there were no talking animals around to give me advice. I crept closer and suddenly the land mine by the blackened tree lit up again. Had I activated it by moving?

No. The land mines wouldn’t glow in warning when you got close or quarantine breakers like me would just avoid them, making the mines pointless. However, the guards who set the mines would want to know where not to step….

I held out the patrol badge as far as I could without leaving the road. Not only did the glow by the tree intensify, but also, farther down the embankment, other rocks began to glow.

Thanks, Dad.

I zigzagged my way down the steep hill, steering clear of demolition wreckage, trees, and glowing harpy eggs. I headed for the landing pad next to the gated bridge. Of course, I still didn’t know how I was going to get across the bridge or find Dr. Solis once I was in the patrol camp. For some reason I’d pictured a patrol camp as a few rows of tents — an image that had nothing to do with reality. How did the word
camp
apply to what looked like a medieval town, complete with limestone buildings and a clock tower? But that was most definitely the line patrol camp. The rows of barracks on the south end of the island was one giveaway, the high chain link fence topped with razor wire another. And then there were the spotlights and watchtowers.

How was I supposed to snoop around such a brightly lit and highly guarded island?

Pounding footsteps sent me darting behind a tree. When I dared to peer out, I saw a man throw open the gate, leap off the end of the bridge, and bound down the gravel slope to the riverbank. He took cover in the shadows as three more people burst through the gate and ran onto the landing strip. They paused under a floodlight to scan the area. With their crew cuts and military fatigues — gray on gray camouflage to match the wall — they had to be line guards. Also known as killer robots. After a moment of whispering, they fanned out.