"You were shooting a puppy?" Emily yelled. "I should dismantle you, you little monsters!"
Billy cradled the dog in his arms like a baby with one arm and pointed his fingertips at the biggest boy. His hand glowed white, armed with an awaiting light blast ready to fire.
"I . . . really, really want to give you a taste of your own medicine," Billy said. "I am so close to doing something I'm going to regret. Get the hell out of here."
The boys tried to scoop up the remains of their pellet guns as they ran away.
"Go!" Billy yelled in his deepest, harshest tone. "Get out! Go home! Get out!"
The boys took off as a pack, running like their lives depended on it.
"Your eyes are glowing again," Emily said.
"Crap."
We've talked about this, Billy. When you let your powers build up they manifest outwardly,
Dude said.
"Good," Billy said.
"You talking to the alien?"
"I'm talking to the alien."
Billy looked at the puppy in his hand. His fur matted and filthy, he smelled awful. The dog rested his head against Billy's chest. "What's your name, little guy?"
Small brown eyes stared back up at him.
Dude, we have to keep him, Billy thought.
We do not have time for sentimental —
"We're keeping him," Billy said.
"Good," Emily said. "I was hoping you'd say that."
Chapter 6:
The dying boy
Caleb Roth had been dying since the day he was born.
He arrived in this life early, small, weak, frail. This set the tone for the rest of his life, a boy whose immune system never wanted to stand up for him in a battle against any virus. Listless, thin, with papery hair and watery eyes, Caleb looked ill even in those rare times when he wasn't fighting off some sickness or another. Doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him.
"He's just sickly," someone said to his mother when he was half-sedated in a hospital bed as a child.
Just sickly. Just sick . . . Just weak.
He overheard another doctor say to a nurse that in ancient times, someone like Caleb would never have survived childhood. It was Darwinism. The healthy survive, the sickly are weeded out. The doctor gave the impression that he believed some people should just lose their battle against Darwinian forces and exit the gene pool.
Being sick was awful, but watching the toll on his parents was worse. He saw them spend vacation money on hospital visits, and understood more of their retirement savings trickled out the door with every new emergency room expedition.
Caleb felt guilty. Children were supposed to be there for their parents, and he knew he would be a sickly burden the rest of their lives. He just simply could not get well.
Which was why Caleb listened when a stranger entered his hospital room one night.
Now, as Caleb made his way across the country, he thought about that man often. The promises made, to make him well, to make him strong. The lies. There had been so many lies.
But one thing the man did say was true: they did make him strong.
Caleb entered the mall with a sneer, staring down the pack of girls who took a noticeable step away from him as he passed by. He found a certain amount of pleasure when one of them start coughing behind him. He walked through throngs of shoppers, most paid him no mind, but those who did look actively avoided him. His body radiated heat like an infected cut. Hunger and exhaustion brought him back into a populated place.
He sat down in the food court, alone, observing. He saw the sickness spreading, watched eyes turn to bruised sockets, heard coughing. One mother ran for the bathroom, leaving her child unattended with a plate of fast food in front of him.
Caleb sometimes wondered why he didn't feel bad when he made children sick. He supposed it was revenge, of a sort. If he had to spend his childhood in a hospital bed, so should everyone else. No playgrounds for you, kid. No soccer fields, no basketball courts.
The mall grew quiet. Many patrons had scurried off, feeling the shame of nausea washing through them, but others just slumped down where they sat, too sick to move. Caleb picked through their abandoned plates of food, a bite of a burger here, a stolen donut there. He discovered he could eat limitless quantities of food these days. And, it was almost like he had to, due to the perpetual gnawing hunger that ate at him every day.
He stopped in front of Ishmael's Donuts and took an orphaned iced latte from the counter. The barista behind the register had slumped down, wheezing and sweating.
Caleb stared at the giant stupid face of the blue-haired girl on the wall. He couldn't seem to get away from them.
He wondered how many people he would have to make sick before they'd finally notice him. He wanted to see how indestructible they really were.
Chapter 7:
Eye in the sky
Jane was watching the news report in the Tower's control room when Billy and Emily arrived, engrossed in the visuals onscreen, bodies wheeled out of a shopping mall, dozens of ambulances, healthcare workers in hazmat suits running around like a scene out of a horror movie.
"Is this that Dustin Hoffman movie?" Emily asked. She pulled her orange and red hat off dramatically and tossed it onto a nearby desk, her blue hair stood up and out in a cloud of static electricity.
"Three hundred people just got sick at a shopping mall," Jane said.
"I keep telling you guys, don't eat at the food court," Billy said. "You don't know what they put in that stuff."
"There's already been six deaths," Jane said.
"Oh," Billy said, the humor fading from his tone. "That's not good."
Jane tapped a button on the console in front of her.
"Kate, could you come up to the control room for a minute? I need you," Jane said.
"Kate's here?" Billy and Emily said simultaneously.
"You two really need to stop spending so much time around each other," Jane said. "Is that a dog?"
She hadn't noticed the bundle Billy had cradled in his arms when they walked in, but now it was looking at her, a scrawny, brown-gray matted mess of a dog with one floppy ear.
"Yes," Billy answered.
"Where did you get a dog?"
"But Kate is here? In the Tower?" Emily said.
"She's here," Jane said. "Are you keeping that dog?"
"I'm keeping it," Billy said. "Why is Kate here?"
"I'm here because our criminal justice system sucks," Kate said. She'd swapped out her filthy uniform for sweats, a hoodie, and a tee shirt. She still looked like a train wreck. "Is that a dog?"
"We've been over this," Billy said.
"Of course you found a dog," Kate said. "Why'd you call me up here?"
Jane addressed Neal, the artificial intelligence who ran the Tower for them, including its computer system.
"Neal, can you call up that research I was looking at a few minutes ago? Put it on the big monitor."
"Yes, Designation: Solar. Just a moment," the program said.
"What's the puppy's name?" Jane said.
"Name?" Kate said. "He's keeping the dog?"
"I'm keeping the dog!" Billy said.
"Then he needs a name," Jane said.
The screen lit up with a map of the east coast of the United States. Jane watched several points of light appear on the map. "I'm guessing you already know what you're going to name him."
"He's Watson," Billy said proudly.
Emily laughed. Loud.
"Why are you laughing?" Billy said.
"Point one: we didn't discuss this and I think I get to weigh in on this since I was there when we rescued him. Point two: If he's Watson, does that mean you think you're Sherlock Holmes?"
"Of course I'm Sherlock Holmes. In this case," Billy said.
"You're the dumbest Indestructible," Emily said.
Kate roared. Everyone turned to look at her, and the dancer was laughing so hard she was wiping tears from her eyes.
"There's a first time for everything," Jane said.
"Please," Kate said, still laughing. "Elaborate. I want to hear the Emily math on this."
"Okay," Emily said. "Me, I'm a genius, yo. It is known."
"It's known," Jane said, joining in with Kate's laughter.
"Titus is the only one of us who can really understand anything Neal does. So while Titus isn't a genius, he's clearly got some smarts going on upstairs," Emily said.
"Does this mean Titus is smarter than Kate?" Billy said. "In your scoring, that is."
"Hard to say. Kate's got the whole mouse trap-setting detective thing going on. So Kate's really clever. Clever is smart with a different paint job."
"Wait a minute," Jane said.
"Jane is marginally smarter than you, Billy," Emily said. "That makes you the dumbest Indestructible."
"What the hell does marginally smarter even mean?" Jane said.
The dog barked. Billy scratched him behind the ear.
"It's okay, boy. You and me against the world."
Kate regained her composure, though she still wiped stray tears from her eyes.
"Okay, Irene Adler," Kate said to Jane. "You called me up here for a reason?"
"Take a look at the screen," Jane said.
There were four points marked on the map. Each point was time stamped, a few days apart from each other. Jane gestured to the first.
"A diner, a strip mall, a chain restaurant, and a shopping mall," Jane said. "Each one has had a massive outbreak of some sort of flu-like illness in the past three weeks."
"Swine flu?" Emily asked.
"No."
"Bird flu?" Emily said.
"Stop," Jane said. "It hasn't been diagnosed yet. But it spread incredibly fast, and each location has seen numerous fatalities. Worse still, nobody who has taken sick has got any better. They just seem to be wasting away from it."
"Has it spread?" Kate said.
"That's strange thing," Jane said. "It doesn't seem to spread from person to person once contracted. It just lingers."
"Small favor, there," Kate said.
"Notice anything about the pattern of the incidents, though?" Jane said.
"Yeah, of course," Kate said. They're moving in a straight line, or near enough. Heading up from Georgia to points north."
"Heading our way," Billy said.
"That's why I wanted you to see this," Jane said. "I wasn't sure if I was being paranoid."
"Not being paranoid in this business will get you killed," Kate said. "Still, I don't think we have enough data to say 'it's coming at us,' but it's definitely coming toward the City."
"Why isn't anyone talking about this on the news?" Billy asked.
"They are, but it's mostly localized," Jane said. "It looks like officials are spinning it as some kind of horrible food poisoning. Hard to tell if they're being deliberately obtuse or really think that's the case."
"It could be food poisoning," Billy said. "Or heck, it could be bird flu. I don't know how we can help with this unless we just deliver supplies or something."
"What did you say the symptoms were like?" Kate asked.
Jane called out to Neal again.
"Neal, has the analysis of the symptoms come back yet?"
"Yes, Designation: Solar," the robot responded. "Using current limited data, the symptoms closely mirror the pneumonic plague."
"Random," Emily said. "You don't hear that one too often."
"Pneumonic plague is real?" Billy said. "It sounds like a literary device gone wrong."
"Did you just make a reading joke, Billy Case?" Emily said.
"I did."
"You may have just jumped Jane on the Indestructibles Intelligence Scale," Emily said.
"Let me guess," Jane said. "You know all about pneumonic plague already."
"It's more virulent and less common than the bubonic plague," Emily said. "There's only been about seven outbreaks since the turn of the millennium, but it's killed like 2,000 people."
"Do you have the Internet plugged directly into your brain?" Billy asked.
"One literary joke does not make you a genius, Billy," Emily said. "You gotta earn this stuff. Anyway, it's pretty awful stuff. It was one of the causes of the Black Death or something."
"But here's the thing — it's not pneumonic plague, not according to any of the reports Neal has been able to access from the World Health Organization or CDC," said Jane. "The symptoms are similar, but it's not the same."
"We can hack into the CDC?" Billy said.
"We can do many things one might find morally questionable," Kate said. "Titus found out Neal could get access to almost anything that touches the Internet."
"How'd this land on your radar, anyway, Jane," Billy said. "We don't normally monitor outbreaks."
"Broadstreet told me about it."
"The reporter with the hots for you?" Emily said.
"I don't trust him," Billy said.
"He does not have the hots for me, and he's too old for me even if he does, and yes, that's who gave me the tip," Jane said. "So what we're looking at is a need for additional information."
"You're not suggesting what I think you're suggesting," Billy said.
"Neal," Jane said. "Did you prep those rebreathers I asked you about?"
"They are waiting for you in the hanger bay, Designation: Solar."
"No," Billy said. "No, we're not going to sickville. I have to give my dog a bath."
The puppy whined.
"Kate?" Jane said.
Kate seemed vaguely distracted a moment, lost in her own thoughts.
"I'm coming with. I'm in," Kate said. "We need to do this."
"What's the worst that could happen?" Emily said. "It's only the plague."