Fever (9 page)

            “What
do
you know?” I ask.

            Sebastian looks at me. It occurs to me that most of his memories of me will still be of a frightened girl he was trying to help. Even so, I think I’ve proved myself enough by now to deserve an answer.

            Sebastian seems to think so too. “We think that somewhere in the region of two thirds of the world’s population is gone.”

            “Gone? You mean dead?”

            Sebastian nods. “Urban areas seem to have been hit hardest. Mexico City, Kolkata, Beijing… there doesn’t seem to be much left of them after the fire storms. And even where people survived those… there are reports of disease. It could just be the breakdown in sanitation systems now that there isn’t anyone to maintain them, but…”

            “It isn’t,” I say. I can remember sitting in my office, watching the archived accounts of the apocalypse. Watching people die. The fire was terrible, but the plagues were wo cagu  Serse. I can remember forcing myself to watch because I wanted to tell myself what was at stake. What we had to change.

            Yet it’s happening. Everything we tried to do to change things, and it’s still happening. There’s something so helpless about that. Like what we do counts for nothing. Yet I can’t believe that. Not unless I’m willing to abandon my world to its destruction. Not unless I’m willing to stand by while billions of people die from the plague phases of the apocalypse.

            “Where’s Johnny?” I ask.

            “The kid?”

            There isn’t enough time for me to explain, and in any case, explaining would also mean explaining my mission in front of a room full of strangers. Yet right now, in this instant, Johnny seems like the only person who can help. Okay, so he couldn’t cure the Fever, but the advances he made in medical science even on top of what we gained over a thousand years of progress mean that he should be able to deal with
this
. If anyone can, at least.

            “Where is he?” I ask again. “Did we get him back? Is he okay?”

            Sebastian shakes his head solemnly.

            “He’s not… dead?” I don’t know what we’ll do if Johnny is dead. I can remember snatches of things, ideas about how our medicine works in the future, but I don’t know the detail. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have enough to recreate any of it.

            “He’s not dead,” Sebastian says, “but he
is
hurt. He was on his way to Location Ten, but the helicopter he was on didn’t make it. They had to detour when the solar storm came. They headed this way, thankfully, and we were able to get him inside, but they took some pretty serious hits on the way. I guess as a kid, Johnny wasn’t able to take that as well as some of the others.”

            How badly is he hurt? I don’t ask it aloud, because there are too many details about Johnny that I don’t want to go into here, with strangers nearby. It’s not that I don’t trust them, particularly if Jack trusts them, but I’ve been wrong before.

            “He’s here then?” I ask.

            Sebastian nods.

            “Then I need to see him,” I say.

            “He’s pretty beaten up right now,” Sebastian says, but I know it can’t be that bad. If
anyone
knows how to keep themselves in one piece, it’s Johnny, after all. “He keeps insisting that we should let him treat himself, rather than leaving it to t cavi buhe experts.”

            “Then you should probably have listened to him,” I say. “Now, quickly, we need to see him if we’re going to have a chance of doing something about all this.”

            Sebastian looks to Jack and then nods. “Okay, he’s down in the cave with the others. We’ll go see them now if you want.”

            “I do,” I say, starting to follow him. I just hope that I’m right, and Johnny can do everything I remember. Maybe
this
time we can save more of the world.

TWELVE

S
ebastian leads us to another elevator. The doors close in front of us silently, and again, there’s the sensation of movement. It occurs to me that this Location has more power left than most of the towns I’ve seen. By now, I’m starting to lose track of where we are in the rock that we saw from outside. When the doors swing open, it’s cold. Cold enough that I’m grateful for the warm coats that are on a rack by the elevator doors.

            The reason for that cold is obvious from the moment I set foot in there. Somehow, impossibly, the interior of the space we’re in is coated in ice. It shines as light from above cascades down on it, reflecting and refracting, spinning different colors with every new facet of itself. There are planes and crags of it around the walls, with parts of it worked smooth, while others are ragged and shifting.

            “How is there ice in a desert?” I ask.

            “This ice is old,” Sebastian explains. He moves around the walls, almost touching it, but not quite. He does go to a computer station, tapping in a few things. “We’re not sure how it would have formed, perhaps it’s a hangover from the last ice age, but once it did, the lower temperature in this cavern would have helped sustain it. Now, it’s so thick and so old that it would take decades to melt, even if we weren’t careful with the temperature. It was like working with rock, when we dug this out.”

            “It’s beautiful,” I say. It is. It’s almost like being surroun favi baceded by diamonds. Better, because diamonds are just cold and dead, while the water that’s at the heart of the ice is what life needs.

            “Beautiful, but also useful,” Sebastian explains, while I follow along with Jack and Dr. Florence bringing up the rear. “Ordinarily, we use it to keep the temperatures in here low enough to use supercomputers in our work, but recently, it proved to be a very effective defense against the fire storm.”

            “But that…” I try to think. “I know you were putting in heat shielding after Jack and I warned you about what might be coming, but for a place like this, you would have already have to have known.”

            Sebastian shakes his head. “We just made use of the resources that were already available to us. Trust me, we were lucky to be able to do this much. The only people who were able to prepare for the apocalypse were those who had a hand in creating it. Weren’t they, Dr. Florence? Or did you think I wouldn’t look up who my son was bringing in?”

            He looks over at the scientist, and it’s obvious that Sebastian has at least some idea of who the man is. Dr. Florence puts up his hands like he thinks Sebastian might pull out a gun and shoot him. The scientist seems to be so scared of everything right now. But then, he’s had a lot to be scared of. And if it turns out that he knew, he will have again.

            “Please, I didn’t know. I swear. If I’d known what Hammond was doing, and how it would hurt so many people, I would never have gone along with it. I would have told someone. I would have tried to stop him.”

            Somehow, I doubt that Dr. Florence would have had the guts for that. Though he did say no to Hammond enough for his thugs to want to kill him. Maybe I’ve misjudged him. Maybe I just don’t know enough to judge him. After all, how much of him have I really seen in the past few hours?

            “I don’t think anyone knew,” Dr. Florence says. “Just his staff and maybe a few of his closest advisors.”

            Like his chief researcher? I don’t say that though. It would only make things more difficult. I don’t know what to make of Dr. Florence. I don’t know whether to trust him or not. Still, he might be useful when it comes to undoing some of what Wilson Hammond is trying to achieve. Even if it turns out that we can’t trust him, we might still be able to get some information from him on exactly what they were doing at that lab where we found him.

            “You must have guessed something,” Jack says to Sebastian. He seems almost as suspicious of his father as I am of Dr. Florence. But then, they’ve always had a strange relationship. One where they both clearly care about one another, but the needs of the mission come first. “You were preparing for years. These Locations didn’t come from nowhere, and the way they’re heat shielded…”

            “You know that we’ve been monitoring things for decades,” Sebastian says. He doesn’t sound too upset to be questioned like that. Maybe he’s expecting it. “Space, signals, anything we could find that would give us a better grasp on some of the stranger things around us. It doesn’t mean that we got things right. Remember that there was a time when we thought Celes here came from space.”

            Rather than the far future. Because frankly, which of those was more plausible? Well, neither of them, really.

            “We thought that because the signals we found coming from Celes seemed to have a celestial connection,” Sebastian goes on. I can almost hear the excitement of a scientist there. Sebastian’s father has shown that he’s interested in helping people first, but finding out new things is definitely a close second for him, even when it makes things more complicated for us.

            “So how did you go from that to a place like this?” I ask.

            “The possibility of a fire storm or an asteroid strike was always there. Science suggests that the asteroid strike that destroyed the dinosaurs was not going to be an isolated event, for example. There was always the possibility of more impacts. We wanted to be prepared, and with our monitoring, we started to pick up on the heating up of the Earth. Follow me, all of you.”

            Sebastian leads the way through the main cave, into a room that looks like it might be living quarters. It looks almost like a whole hotel or apartment complex underground. It’s a little warmer in here, though still much cooler than it would be out in the desert sun. There’s a large dining area, which we walk through to get to a kind of lobby area, where a television is currently displaying images that look like they’re taken from a satellite feed.

            “There are still satellites?” I ask. “I thought the apocalypse destroyed them. At least, we seemed to lose all communications.”

            “And we’ve been working to get them back,” Sebastian explains. “We actually launched our own satellite to do it. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t have the room for a rocket launch, so we had to work with balloons and then small scale rockets from altitude. It’s just one of the things we’ve done to ensure that this Location continues to remain secure in the coming days.”

            “It sounds like you have everything you need for your own little country,” I joke.

            Sebastian looks a little more serious.

            “You aren’t actually
thinking
of being a country?” I ask.

            He shakes his head. “No, but nor do we intend to be k iny">

            “It sounds like you have everything worked out,” Jack says.

            “Not everything, but we’re doing our best. Someone has to preserve things.”

            Dr. Florence chooses that moment to speak up. “It’s good that you are. With the level of destruction there has been, things could go backwards so quickly if no one works to preserve what humanity has learned. One generation not learning is all it would take for the world to regress to the Stone Age.”

            I think about the society we have in the future, where we’ve had to work so hard to preserve knowledge and advance it. Those thoughts bring me back to Johnny and Grayson. We’re down here for a reason, after all.

            “Where’s Johnny?” I ask. “And what about Grayson? Is he here?”

            I hear a laugh from the other side of the room. I turn, unable to keep the happiness out of my expression as I see Grayson there. He looks perfect, unruffled even by the apocalypse, his muscular good looks and short dark hair going together to create a perfect image of the high school jock. Except that Grayson is so much more than that. He used to be so much more than that to me, before Jack.

            Grayson actually catches me off guard, picking me up and twirling me in the air, before doing something even more unexpected. He kisses me. Right in front of Jack.

            “I’m so glad you survived,” Grayson says. “I thought you might be…”

            “I’m fine,” I say. “Things got a little complicated, but we made it okay.”

            “Was Johnny with you?” Jack asks, and there’s something stern, almost angry, in his voice. It’s easy to see why. Grayson is standing there with his arms around me, having just kissed me. A lot of guys would have punched him for doing something like that.

            Apparently though, Jack’s memories of the future run to remembering that there, at least, the three of us are all good friends. He moves forward to put an arm around Grayson’s shoulders.

            “You might have your arms around my girl, but it’s good to see you made it, buddy.”

            Grayson shakes his head. “Your girl? Buddy?”

            It occurs to me that Grayson hasn’t had all the details that Jack and I know about the future yet. He certainly hasn’t remembered them for himself. He might never remember them. After all, he didn’t come back because of his ability to resist the effects of the Fading machine on memories. He came back after me and Jack. Right now, he might know that we’re from the future thanks to seeing some of my memories playing out on the Faders’ screens, and he might know all about the apocalypse thanks to the same incident, but he doesn’t have the same details Jack and I have.

            “Never mind,” Jack says. “I’ll explain later.”

            “Right now,” I say, “the main thing is that we find Johnny. Is he here, Grayson?”

            Grayson looks a little nervous. That isn’t like him. “He’s here.”

            “We need to go to him then,” I say. “He’s going to be vital in helping us treat people when it comes to these plagues. Without him…”