Eden Rising (11 page)

“Is that champagne?” Craig asked.

Martina smiled, and poured four even cupfuls.

“Come on!” She forced a cup into each of their hands.

“I don’t know,” Riley said.

“You just need to take a sip,” Martina said. She looked at her watch. “Okay, here we go. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…”

“What are you doing?” Noreen asked as Martina counted.

“Five, four, three, two, one.” Martina raised her glass. “Happy New Year.”

Noreen was the first to laugh, then Riley followed, and finally Craig joined in.

“Happy New Year,” they said.

They all drank.

“Hey, this is pretty good,” Noreen said. “Can I have some more?”

“Sure,” Martina said. “It’s New Year’s.”

Another round of the wine was shared.

“I thought you were going to tell us we needed to run,” Noreen said.

“Why would we need to do that?” Craig asked.

“I don’t know. Could be anything.”

Martina knew exactly what her friend was thinking. “Don’t say it.”

“Don’t say what?” Riley asked.

“I swear, Noreen, if you say it…”

“I didn’t,” Noreen said.

“Didn’t say what?” Riley pressed.

“Didn’t say zom—”

“Noreen!” Martina said. “What did I just tell you?”

“Zombies?” Craig asked.

Noreen shrugged. “Maybe.”

Riley rolled her eyes. “Oh, great. Now I have that in my head.”

Martina looked at her. “Your fault. You kept asking.”

They laughed and joked about it for a while and had some more champagne.

When the conversation lost some of its steam, Craig said, “I’m not really sure we should actually be celebrating New Year’s. I mean, what’s there to celebrate?”

“The most important thing of all,” Martina said. “We’re alive.”

The others contemplated her response.

After several seconds, Craig raised his cup. “To being alive.”

The others raised theirs.

“To being alive.”

January 1
^st

Year 1

World Population

1,000,207,113

10

MUMBAI, INDIA

6:11 AM IST

S
ANJAY PEERED OUT
the third-floor window at the alley. It was still empty.

Where was she?

It shouldn’t have taken Kusum more than four hours at most to make the round trip, but five had already passed. He cursed himself for about the thousandth time. He should have been the one to go, not because he thought she was incapable, but at least he would know what was going on. Instead, he could only sit there as his anxiety spiraled out of control. But the decision had apparently not been his to make.

“You went for the close-up look of the survival station,” Kusum had said. “That means it is my turn.”

“Why do we need to take turns?”

She looked at him, clearly thinking it was a stupid question.

“Maybe we should both go,” he suggested, hoping for at least a partial victory.

“Someone needs to stay here and keep an eye on what is going on,” she said. “
You
are familiar with both the buildings and the people—”

“Not all the people,” he interjected.

“Many of them. You will stay. I will go.”

He was beginning to see the pitfalls of falling in love with a woman who was smarter and potentially more competent than he was. “If you take too long, I will come look for you,” he said.

“You will not,” she said. “If I do not return by sundown, you will go to the camp, but you will not come looking for me. Do you understand?”

“Sundown? Impossible. I cannot wait that long.”

“Sanjay,” she said, her voice mellowing in the way it did when she tried to point out the obvious. “There are many people counting on us now. If something happens to both of us, they will have no chance.”

“I will not let anything happen to you.”

“I know. And I love you for that. But do not come looking for me.”

What else could he do but agree? Of course, that didn’t mean he had to stick by the bargain. He looked down the alley again. Nothing.

Dammit.
Where are they?

Kusum had gone to the furniture factory to fetch the three others who had come with her and Sanjay into the city. Given the situation at the Pishon Chem compound, it seemed a good idea because their help might be needed.

Patience
, the voice of Kusum said in his head.

He moved across the room to the window on the other side. His hideout was an apartment in a building two blocks from the compound. Though the Pishon Chem facility was visible from the window where Sanjay was perched, he could see only the very tops of the Pishon Chem buildings and a small portion of the fence that surrounded the property.

He was supposed to be closer, had been closer, in fact, until just an hour ago when he’d returned to this meeting point, expecting to find Kusum and the others waiting for him. Seeing they weren’t there, he didn’t even consider going back to his former position.

On the roof of one of the compound buildings, he spotted one man in a UN uniform patrolling the top. It was disturbing to him how hard they were trying to sell the United Nations angle. Most survivors would arrive at the facility in a state of shock. If the soldiers were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and only had the letters UN hand painted on the sides of their helmets, people would believe them.

The sound of something scraping the ground floated through the window on the other side of the room. Sanjay quietly ran over and looked outside. The alleyway was no longer devoid of movement. At the far end was a man approaching along one of the walls, his movement odd, off-balanced.

It was another few seconds before he moved into a shaft of light.

Not just any man. It was Prabal, one of the people Kusum had gone to fetch.

He was limping, his right leg swinging carefully forward with each step. And running down the side of his face, a wash of blood.

__________

W
HILE IT HAD
been
disturbing enough moving through the seemingly empty city with Sanjay, Kusum found it downright terrifying doing so on her own as she made her way back to the camp.

The quiet was the worst part. Here she was in Mumbai, one of the largest and busiest cities in the world, yet there wasn’t the sound of a motor, the cry of a child, the laugh of an adult. There was no music, either, something that been such an integrated part of the background noise that she noticed the lack of it now more than she’d ever noticed its presence.

Sticking to smaller streets and pathways, she was easily able to avoid the soldiers, seeing only a single group of three near the site of an old market. She hoped the same would be true when she and the others headed back to Sanjay.

The camp was set up in the courtyard of a small factory that had made and repaired furniture. Semi-organized piles of chair legs and tabletops and bed frames took up much of the courtyard space, but there was still plenty of room for Kusum’s and Sanjay’s friends to spread out. The best feature of the place was that it allowed them to hide from view if anyone passed by on one of the surrounding streets, while still having open air above them. If they needed shelter, there was plenty of that inside.

Kusum entered through a back door that led into a basement, where she took the stairs up into the main workshop. Along the interior wall was a large door that could be opened onto the courtyard, but whoever had left the business last had shut it and locked it in place—a hopeful act that he or she would return. She exited through the smaller door on the right and stepped into the outdoor space.

“Stop.” The voice was low, the tone commanding.

“It is only me,” Kusum said.

“Kusum?”

“Yes.”

Darshana stepped from the shadows behind a stack of wooden planks, in her hand an iron rod. After she could see it was indeed Kusum, she lowered her weapon.

“Sorry, I did not realize it was you,” she said.

“Never be sorry for this,” Kusum said. “I could have been anyone. I would have been surprised if you had not greeted me like this.”

Darshana tried to maintain a neutral expression, but Kusum thought she saw a flash of pride cross her friend’s face. Though they were about the same age, Darshana and the rest of their survival group considered Kusum and Sanjay to be their leaders, and looked up to them more than Kusum thought they should.

“The others?” Kusum asked.

“Sleeping.”

“We must get them up. I need you all to come with me.”

“This way.”

Darshana led Kusum around the piles of wood and metal to the open area where Prabal and Arjun were stretched out on thin blankets.

“Wake up,” Darshana said, shaking first Arjun’s shoulder then Prabal’s. “Come on. Wake up. We need to go.”

Prabal rolled onto his back with a groan. “What?” he asked, his eyes struggling to open.

“Kusum is here. She needs us to go with her.”

Arjun raised himself on an elbow. “Kusum?” He looked around as if he didn’t quite understand, and then his gaze fell on Kusum. “Oh. Oh, Kusum.” He sat all the way up. “I am sorry. I am…um…still…”

“It’s okay,” Kusum said. “Please get up and gather your things.”

Arjun immediately began rolling up his blanket.

“What’s going on?” Prabal asked, slowly sitting up.

“I need you all to come with me,” Kusum said. “We found something and we might need your help.”

“What did you find?”

Darshana shoved Prabal in the back. “You don’t need to ask what. If Kusum needs us to go with her, we go.”

“Of course, we go,” Prabal said. “I was just wondering what we were going to. It was only a question.”

“It is a stupid question,” Darshana said. “We will find out when we get there.”

As Prabal rose to his feet, he said, “It is
not
a stupid question. It is simply a question. Who are you to—”

“Please,” Kusum said. “There is no need for this. Nothing is a secret here. We are going to a place close to the so-called UN survival station.”

Prabal shot a see-it-wasn’t-stupid look at Darshana.

“So-called?” Arjun said. “So it is not what they are saying?”

Kusum shook her head. “It does not look like it. Many of the people there are the same ones who were in charge of distributing the disease throughout the city.”

“Are you serious?”

“It is even worse than that,” she said.

“How worse?” Prabal asked.

“Survivors are coming in and being locked in holding areas.”

“You have seen this?” Arjun asked.

“Yes. Not too long before I left, a group of four women arrived. Thirty minutes later they were led to one of the holding areas.”

“What is going to happen to them?” Prabal asked.

“No way to know for sure, but I cannot imagine it is good.” She let this sink in for a moment, then said, “We need to go. There may be nothing we can do, but if there is, we need to be in a position where we can help them.”

Darshana, clearly not needing to hear more, started repacking her bag. Within seconds, Arjun and Prabal were doing the same.

As they headed through the building, Kusum said, “Keep conversations to a minimum. There are soldiers patrolling the city. They will be dressed in UN uniforms, but I do not think they are really from the UN. We need to consider them dangerous.”

“Perhaps we should leave all of this alone and go back to the school,” Prabal suggested.

“If you want to return to the school, you can,” Kusum said. She looked at the others. “Any of you can. But Sanjay and I will not leave these people in danger if there is a chance we can stop it.”

“Do not worry,” Darshana said, shooting a look at Prabal. “We are all coming with you.”

“I was not saying I would not come,” Prabal said. “It was merely a suggestion.”

“Maybe you should keep your suggestion in your head,” Darshana said.

“If anyone else has something to suggest, say it now,” Kusum told them. “Once we go, you need to be quiet.”

When no one spoke up, she led them out of the factory onto the street. From there, she kept to the same route she’d used on her trip to the camp.

She could tell the silent city was having its effect on the others. The looks on their faces were often wide eyed and shocked, as if this couldn’t really be Mumbai but perhaps a replica or a movie set they had somehow wandered onto.

Their path took them through a dense residential section that had once been teaming with life, each place they passed no longer a home but a tomb.

“Please tell me we don’t have to walk through something like that again,” Prabal said, after they came out the other side.

Darshana twisted around and shushed him.

“No more like that,” Kusum whispered. “But we are getting close now, so we need to be extra careful.”

She led them down the street, keeping them tight to the buildings.

The roar of the motor seemed to come out of nowhere—one moment silence, the next a car engine revving to life only two blocks away. Kusum jammed to a stop, and pressed up against the shop they were passing. The others followed suit. Down the street, headlights popped on, pointing in their direction.

She glanced back the way they’d come. The businesses lining the street were smashed together, in a continuous wall with no breaks between them for at least a hundred meters. No way she and the others could make it down and around the end without being seen. Most of the entrances to the stores were flush with the wall, providing no place to hide.

Swinging her gaze back around, she focused on the cars parked at the curb only a few feet away.

“Down,” she said, pointing at the ground near the vehicles.

As they ducked behind the cars, she was sure it was too late. The car with the headlights was already heading in their direction. She could almost feel the light touch her skin.

“Listen,” she said quickly, and gave them an address. “That is the building we are supposed to meet Sanjay in. Third-floor apartment, number sixteen. Say it back to me.” They each did. “If we have to split up, go there.”