Inhuman (2 page)

I wound my way through the crowd and onto the balcony to see what was happening on the wall. Nothing much. The guards were back in position. They must have found the broken toy and decided it wasn’t worth investigating further. At least, I hoped that’s what they’d decided.

For once I was grateful for the bars that enclosed high-rise balconies. Usually they made me feel like a caged bird, but tonight that cage was helping to keep me from the guards’ view. Our parents liked to call the bars
trellises
and said that they’d been installed to support climbing vines. Who were they kidding? We knew the cages were yet another safety measure. Were kids really falling off balconies right and left before the plague? Doubtful. But there was no reasoning with a nation of trauma survivors.

“Sorry about your camera.” Orlando joined me by the finely wrought bars.

“That’s okay. It was an old one. I figured it —”

He angled in for a kiss, his mouth on mine before I could think to sidestep him. Now, with the bars at my back and him leaning into me, it was too late. No matter how gently I pushed him off or squirmed away, it would end up awkward and awful. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings; I just didn’t want him exhaling on my cheek or — suddenly his kiss turned wet as he tried to push his tongue into my mouth.

I wrenched my face aside, ducked under his arm, and stepped free.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, sounding more confused than hurt.

I dragged a hand across my lips before facing him. “Sorry,” I said, trying for a light tone. “Reality overload.”

Orlando’s brows drew together, creasing his pale skin. “But all week you —” A siren cut off his words. We stared wide-eyed at each other for a second and then whirled to peer through the balcony cage.

Anna skidded out of the apartment. “Are the line guards coming for us?”

“No way,” Orlando said, though his voice quavered.

The siren screamed closer and then cut off abruptly. The flashing lights lit up the street below. They were not atop a fire truck or police car but a gray van, which meant only one thing….

Orlando slumped against the bars in relief. “It’s a biohaz wagon.”

Six biohazard agents in white jumpsuits burst out of the van and pushed through the building’s gate. Biohaz agents spent their time rounding up serious threats to public health, like contaminated meat and quarantine breakers. They wouldn’t waste their time on a toy hovercopter. The line guards might; the jumpsuits, not a chance.

After a sidelong glance at me, Orlando clearly decided not to pick up the conversation where we’d left off. “Call me if they haul someone out,” he said as he headed back into the apartment. “Their faces crack me up. They never see it coming.”

Anna threw her hands up. “Well, there goes my night.” At my blank look, she added,
“
My
parents
.”

Right. Like the rest of the exodus generation, Anna’s parents were massively overprotective. My dad was paranoid too, but he traveled a lot for work, so he couldn’t keep me under constant surveillance. Instead, he signed me up for survival skills classes. As if knowing how to make a basket out of bark would keep me alive if there was another outbreak.

“The jumpsuits are probably after a fetch,” I said, feeling a twitch of excitement. Almost no one fetched stuff anymore, even though plenty of people would pay top dollar to have a beloved item retrieved from the East. But these days you had to be desperate or demented to risk sneaking across the quarantine line. “Biohaz agents hunt down felons. Nobody you would have come in contact with.”

“Are you using logic?” Anna demanded.

“Oh, right.” I smiled. “Silly me.”

She glared at the people gathering on the sidewalk. Many had taken out their dials to report the big event to friends or record the poor quarantine breaker’s walk of shame.

“I may as well leave now,” she grouched. “This is going to hit the Web before the jumpsuits even get the guy in the van.”

And once his face got plastered across the news outlets, anyone who’d ever crossed his path would storm into an ER and demand a blood test. “I’ll go too,” I told her. “I need to get home and feed the gang.”

She gave me a faint smile. “Your pets can go an hour without you. Stay. One of us should get to live a little.”

A voice from inside the living room shouted, “Turn down the music! Someone’s banging on the door.”

They sure were. So loudly we could hear it out on the balcony. The music shut off abruptly.

“Hey, who said —” Orlando’s shout was obliterated by the bang of the door opening, followed by a girl’s scream.

“Don’t move!” ordered a male voice.

Anna and I exchanged an alarmed look and rushed into the living room.

“I said, nobody move!” Agents in paper-thin jumpsuits and disposable face masks fanned out across the room. Only their eyes were visible. Not that we needed to see more to know that they meant business.

When Anna slipped an arm through mine, I shot her a sympathetic look. Knowing her parents, they weren’t going to let her out of their apartment for the next year after this.

“It was just a toy hovercopter,” Orlando said weakly. “We didn’t —”

A jumpsuit stopped in front of him. “Is this your home?”

Orlando’s nod was barely perceptible.

“We’re here to collect Delaney Park McEvoy,” the jumpsuit said. “Point her out.”

My vision blurred into a single white smear at the end of a long tunnel. Delaney Park McEvoy — me. They’d come for
me
. But why? I’d never been anywhere. Biohaz squads rounded up line crossers and criminals, not a homebody who spent her Saturday nights editing shorts about the local animal shelter.

Anna’s hold on my arm tightened like a blood pressure cuff. “That can’t be right.”

The squeeze should have jerked me into the moment but somehow I’d floated up to the ceiling. At least, that’s how it felt — like I had an overhead view of everyone’s reaction, could see them all backing away from me.

The jumpsuit pivoted to Anna. “Are you Delaney McEvoy?”

“No. Annapolis Brown.”

“But you know her.”

The threat of having to be identified snapped me back into my body. “Me.” It came out as a croak. Swallowing, I tried again. “I’m Delaney.” The jumpsuit slid his focus on to me, assessing. Was I going to be a problem? “Get your things.” He ordered me forward with a curl of his gloved hand.

“Wait!” Anna cried. “You can’t just haul her off without a reason.”

Sensing trouble, the other agents closed in. “We have a reason,” the main jumpsuit replied in a voice devoid of feeling. “Potential exposure.”

I gasped. “To what?”

Why had I bothered to ask? Only one disease brought the jumpsuits out of their dungeon. Now I watched the man’s mask move as his lips shaped the answer that I didn’t really need.

“The Ferae Naturae virus.”

Ferae Naturae: “of a wild nature.” Supposedly it was a fitting name for the virus that had killed 40 percent of America’s population, though some people said that it also described how Ferae affected the uninfected. Their natures turned quite wild when confronted with the virus’s existence. Like now, I realized, seeing the growing anger in my classmates’ expressions. I had just ruined their senior year of high school. Even if my blood test came back clean, there would be no more in-person get-togethers where a laugh could spray microscopic dots of saliva into someone else’s eyes. The only contact they’d be allowed to have would be through their computer screens. We weren’t alive nineteen years ago when the epidemic decimated the eastern half of the country, but we’d all grown up with the gruesome photos and footage — images that had to be flooding their minds now.

Backing off, Orlando swiped his arm across his mouth. “Crap, I kissed you!”

Yeah, suddenly they all seemed of a wild nature. So I didn’t resist when the jumpsuit ushered me toward the door. I would much rather be poked and prodded in a quarantine center than ripped into bloody chunks by my classmates.

Anna took up my free hand, which surprised me. For all she knew, I could be contagious. “What are you doing?”

“Coming with you,” she announced, her expression defiant.

The jumpsuit stopped short. “You’re not. She’s wanted for questioning and you’re staying here.” He faced the room. “You are all under house quarantine. No one comes or goes, except medical personnel.”

Anna’s grip on my hand tightened. I stared at our entwined fingers and swallowed against the rising ache in my throat.

Orlando shoved through the crowd. “How long are you going to keep us here?”

“Until you’ve all been tested and the results are in,” the jumpsuit said in a flat tone. “Only a clear negative gets you out of here.”

Swearing under his breath, Orlando snatched a bottle of vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet and took a gulp, but didn’t swallow. Instead, he threw back his head and gargled the alcohol.

“Let go of her,” the jumpsuit told Anna. “Now.”

Reluctantly she released my hand.

Maybe Anna couldn’t come with me, but she’d tried to. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and cry and thank her for being such a loyal friend. Actually, she’d gone beyond friendship — I should know.

Orlando angled closer, glaring at me. He gave the vodka in his mouth a last loud swish and then spat it on the floor, within an inch of my foot.

When we exited the elevator into the marble and glass lobby, the jumpsuit clamped a gloved hand onto my arm, as if I was going to try to make a break for it. The doorman practically dove out of the way as the biohaz agents propelled me through the glass door and onto the sidewalk. So many glowering faces. My stomach coiled in on itself. As soon as I was within five feet of them, the gawkers skittered back. Then they lifted their dials and my humiliation was complete. My vision blurred as I ducked my head.

A jumpsuit opened the back door of the van and thrust me forward. My knees locked. I couldn’t climb inside the van. I didn’t know these men.

“Move it,” the jumpsuit growled.

I gritted my teeth and did as I was told. Clearly stranger-danger rules didn’t apply to government agents.

Much of the van was crammed with high-tech equipment, all clicking and humming. I squeezed onto a metal bench. The agent clambered in, pulled the door closed, and settled on the bench across from me. Through the Plexiglas partition, I saw the other jumpsuit drop into the driver’s seat.

“Give me your dial,” the man ordered through his mask.

I wanted to use it to call our live-in housekeeper, Howard, and let him know what was happening, but I slipped the chain from around my neck and handed over my dial. The careless way the jumpsuit clicked through my screens made my face burn. Or maybe I was coming down with a fever….

The first symptom of Ferae was a high fever — really high, as in usually lethal. I clenched my hand to keep from pressing my palm across my forehead to check my temperature. I didn’t want the jumpsuit to think I was worried about my health. Because I wasn’t. I did not have Ferae. I couldn’t.

Dogs barked on my dial as the jumpsuit watched one of my shelter clips. “You’re a real budding filmmaker, huh, Delaney?” he said after a moment.

Yes, ever since I learned that the fastest way to get people to care about neglected animals was to
show
them the animals. But what did that matter to this guy? “It’s Lane.”

He glanced up. “What?”

“I go by Lane.” Only my dad called me by my full name, Delaney Park. It was where he met my mother — in Delaney Park, Indiana. People his age, they owned sentimental, which was why so many of them had named their kids after beloved places — places they knew they would never see again.

The jumpsuit set my dial aside. “Okay,
Lane
. What do you say we get down to business?” He dragged a metal box from under the bench and opened it on the floor between us. “Put out your arm.”

I braced myself against the vehicle’s sway. “Why?”

“So we can test your blood back at the lab. Don’t you want to know if you’ve been infected?”

“How could I have gotten infected?”

“Spec sheet didn’t say.” He tossed a folded paper into my lap. It was a list of attributes and addresses — a summation of me. The addresses belonged to my friends, the animal shelter where I volunteered, two of my favorite coffee shops, and there were several more that I didn’t recognize, which was just as well because I was already thoroughly creeped out. The description of me was the final insult: brown eyes, brown hair, average build. Why not just say average everything? Instead of smashing the paper into a ball and throwing it at him like I wanted, I handed it back without a word.

“Put out your arm,” he repeated.

When I hesitated, he snagged me by the wrist and pulled my arm straight. He took a hypodermic needle from the box on the floor, and suddenly I was seized with the urge to bite his hand and free myself.

But I didn’t.

I smothered the impulse; I’d never do something so disgusting. So feral. I relaxed my arm and looked away as he inserted the needle.