Yesterday (24 page)

All U.N.A. students were required to lodge fi fty volunteer hours at a government-approved activity before graduation and my brother even had an administration offi cer at the camp ready to cover for him and Kinnari (and even me, if I wanted to go with them). Meanwhile they’d catch the Zeph (the nickname for the U.N.A.’s train system) to Chicago, arriving within fi ve hours.

I was surprised that Kinnari was willing to lie to her parents and run off to Chicago behind their backs and said as much to Latham. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It’s this major grounded experience— she’s
dying
to go. She doesn’t like lying to them, but she knows they’d never say yes. Garren said he would’ve come too, except he had plans he couldn’t shake.”

I was glad Garren couldn’t make it. The temptation to go to the concert would’ve been unbearable otherwise and I’d had a crazy screaming match with my mother earlier that day and wasn’t allowed to leave the house, except to go to school, for the next week. The last-minute Hendris concert was in only three days’ time.

Latham looked downcast when I explained why I couldn’t go. “
Shit.
You really should be there. Maybe we can come up with something. If you suck up to Mom for the next couple days maybe she’ll forget about putting you under house arrest.”

“She might forget if we were talking about
you
but if I sucked up to her it’d only make her suspicious,” I said.

Besides, the more alibis we tossed around the more likely they’d blow up in someone’s face and take the entire trip to Chicago down with them.

“Shit,” Latham repeated, shoving his fi sts into his pocket.

“This sucks.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I told him. “Go. Have a good time. Tell me everything when you get back.” Gushi was being blocked from the event, which was billing itself as one hundred percent grounded but the odds were that someone would eventually fi nd a way to share the experience.

Latham nodded but I could tell that if I didn’t do something he was going to keep moping about me not being able to go with them. I had a fl ash of inspiration and convinced him we should do the next best thing— dive into the gushi experience of the 1969 Woodstock concert, which featured performances by both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I was no expert on old music but knew of the concert because of my Hendris fandom.

Latham loved the idea and we stared inward, our Bio-nets shutting down input from our real senses as our minds jumped into as realistic an experience of that mud-soaked, drug-fueled hippy festival as you’d ever want to live through.

It was epic in parts and exhausting (and even boring) in others and though it felt like it had gone on for days the experience was all over in about two hours. For days after that Latham and I peppered our conversations with each other with hippy lingo and made references to doing acid and magic mushrooms.

I didn’t foresee anything unusual about the Hendris concert beforehand. The morning Latham left he was hyper like a little boy and I was jealous that I was being left behind. He hugged me goodbye and said, in the stoned-out tone we’d perfected over the past few days, “Don’t let the man keep you down, man.”

“Fuck the establishment,” I said back. Then I raised my fi ngers in a peace symbol salute.

That was the last time I saw Latham as himself.

Later that night I was curled up in bed, trying to sleep, when my mind fl ew to him and Kinnari across the country.

They were in the middle of a crowded, throbbing mass of people. Kinnari was dancing, my brother’s arms wrapped around her waist, and the music was so loud that they wouldn’t have been able to hear themselves think. Beads of sweat gathered on my upper lip as I felt fear spread through the crowd.

Behind Kinnari and Latham someone shouted, “Help me!”

Latham held Kinnari tighter and tried to tug her towards the stage, away from the disturbance. “Don’t touch me!” a terrifi ed male voice protested.

Chaos rampaged through the concert grounds. People began to run and in their fear trampled others who had fallen. Everywhere there were people staggering, bleeding and raw. Then I saw a boy who couldn’t be more than fourteen foaming at the mouth and tearing at the arms of an equally young girl, scratching the fl esh off them. His eyes rolled back in his head and the girl was crying, trying to twist her body away from him. But he was relentless, like an animal with prey. I watched him sink his teeth into her waist, watched her fall to her knees before being swallowed up by the terror of the crowd.

Alone in my bedroom, I shook myself free of the vision and stared at the ceiling, my teeth chattering.
Latham. Kinnari.
Would they make it to safety? When would the horror I’d seen come to pass? Was there time to stop it?

I disappeared instantly into gushi to search for news about the concert. At fi rst there was nothing but soon a jour-nalist in New York issued a report about an unspecifi ed disturbance at the Hendris concert in Chicago and said military forces were on the scene. I stayed awake all night waiting for another update, debating with myself about whether I should wake my parents.

Finally, the morning Dailies were broadcast and with them, the awful news that a new plague had been unleashed in Chicago last night and that the entire state was under quarantine. I thought it must have been another virus by the terrorists and I was jumping up from the kitchen table, on my way to tell my father my worries about Latham, when Latham himself stumbled into the kitchen, his skin damp and his eyes wild. I turned to run towards him and he threw out his hands in front of him and jumped back. “Don’t come near me, Freya,” he cried. “They …” His tongue was crash-ing over his words. “They were fucking crazy, like rabid animals. I’m not … I’m already not right. I shouldn’t have come back here.”

I cursed my vision for being too late. What was the point of having second sight if it couldn’t keep my brother safe?

“I saw it on the Dailies,” I told him. “How did you get away? Where’s Kinnari?”

“Back with her family now. You know me; I have friends in high places. We managed to get out okay. She’s in a little better shape than me but not much.” Latham smiled but it only made his face look manic and sick. He motioned for me to move away and then lurched forward. “I have to get to my room. Get some things and … get away from here. I’m …

just … so
tired.
”

Latham’s body jerked like he was about to fall and I stepped forward to help him.

“Stay back!” he snarled.

I stopped dead, letting him pass.

“Go to school,” Latham instructed in an eerily strangled voice. “You’ll make them more suspicious if you stick around.”

I slipped into a kind of partial denial then, I think. I went to school where I had to scale a rock wall in gym class and listen to Elennede bait one of our more sensitive teachers, my mind constantly fl itting back to Latham.
He’ll be fi ne,
I told myself over and over.
Not
like
the
people
in
Denver.
Whatever he’d been infected with couldn’t have been as bad, otherwise Latham wouldn’t have still been on his feet so many hours later.

Then midafternoon gushi was unblocked so that the school could receive another Dailies update. The school hardly ever unblocked gushi and everyone was immediately afraid. My fellow students listened raptly as we were informed that the origin of the new plague had been uncovered and was not the direct result of terrorist actions as was fi rst thought.

For years the DefRos have been using the biological weapon P-47 to help defend the U.N.A.’s border with Mexico.

The weapon was intended to temporarily blind and weaken those attempting illegal entry into the U.N.A. It acted as a paralyzing agent so that the illegals could be scooped up by trucks and then dumped back on their side of the border.

Now it appeared that two biological weapons, P-47 and Mossegrim (fi rst used by the terrorists in the late 2040s but tweaked by them many times since), had converged, through direct infection, to form a brand-new threat the Dailies referred to as Toxo. While Mossegrim, even in its newer strains, could usually be cured if it was treated within forty-eight hours thanks to the ingenuity of U.N.A. scientists and the strength of our Bio-net, there was currently no cure for Toxo. Experts theorized that a small group of people who had at one point in their lives been exposed to P-47 had also recently been infected with one of the newest strains of Mossegrim. Their infection had reached a critical stage during the Hendris concert where it was now known that many more people had been infected by Toxo via blood or saliva.

The Dailies continued to explain that initial Toxo symptoms resembled the common cold. Soon fever would set in and the infected would begin to emit an odor. In later stages they would act erratically and aggressively and fi nally they would become blind and rabid, attacking everyone they encountered. They would remain in this hostile, feral state for an as-yet- undetermined amount of time until, it was theorized, they would die of dehydration, having lost the instinct to nourish themselves. The update closed on a quote by Mark Twain: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear— not absence of fear.”

No one could concentrate after the Dailies and our teachers tried to assure us that the scientists would win in the end, that they always had and there was no reason to think that this time would be any different. My left eye wouldn’t stop twitching and I couldn’t get enough oxygen. I had to dig my nails sharply into my sides to remind my lungs what they were supposed to be doing. The action reminded me of how the infected boy had relentlessly torn into the girl from the Hendris concert crowd.

Was she dead now or was she infected like Latham? How long did my brother have?

As soon as I got home I sprinted up to his room. My mother was standing in the hallway, watching him through the open door. I heard Latham howling before I reached her and froze in the hallway.

There were tears in my mother’s eyes. She said, “Don’t look at him, Freya.”

But I couldn’t help myself. I crept towards her and stared across the force fi eld keeping my brother penned inside his bedroom. Latham stared back at me, snarling. He gnashed his teeth and lunged for me, the force fi eld bouncing him backwards across the chair positioned in the middle of his room. His nose was crooked and bloody when he looked up again and he surged towards us a second time.

My mother clamped her fi ngers around my wrist and guided me along the hallway. “Was he in Chicago last night?”

she asked, sounding a million miles away.

I nodded and fought the urge to storm back towards his room. Where had my brother gone? The real Latham had to be in there somewhere, lurking beyond reach of the infection.

My father arrived home shortly. I was sent to my room for the night, a precautionary force fi eld activated there for my protection, but later I heard a scientist friend of my father’s in the hall. They must have contacted him to discuss Latham. My parents let him into my room before he left and he administered a scan that showed I was clear of infection. He sounded relieved and told me that my parents were clear too.

Next, my mother came to speak to me. She said they were waiting to see if a cure would be announced and, like my teachers, she assured me that there would likely be one soon.

I believed her, despite what had happened to Joanna, despite all the arguments we’d had over the years and despite the man I’d seen her kissing in the street. My mother loved Latham. She would do what was best for him. Protect him with everything she had.

I went to sleep believing that.

When I woke up I was still in lockdown and our domestic, Ro, had left breakfast for me. I had to watch the Dailies from my bedroom. U.N.A. president Caroline Ortega was holding a live press conference. She announced that the vir-ulent nature of Toxo made it a real threat to national security.

According to her, tens of thousands of people in Illinois had already been infected and there was not yet a cure in sight.

She stressed that although the search for a cure was well under way everyone was advised to stay indoors and avoid contact with other humans. SecRo patrols would instantly be tripled and the U.N.A. was temporarily under martial law.

Then the worst news came. The president declared that Toxo poised a unique threat and required a uniquely fi rm response. If we weren’t careful, Toxo plague could overcome the nation. To avoid this scenario all infected were to be immediately euthanized. This would prevent further spread of the virus. Anyone who’d been infected was urged to do their civic duty and turn themselves in. The SecRos would then escort them to a local SecRos holding facility where they would be painlessly euthanized. Those who did not turn themselves in would be considered at large and when apprehended by SecRos would be killed on the spot.

I threw my mouth open and started screaming frantically for my parents. I needed to know they wouldn’t let the SecRos take Latham, no matter what the president had said. My father was a powerful man with powerful allies.

He didn’t have to publicly fl out the rules, just keep Latham under lockdown until a cure was discovered.

It was hours before my father came to my door and told me that he was having Latham moved to a secure facility, not for termination but for everyone’s safety, including his own.

He said they had to keep Latham’s body nourished until the scientists could come up with a cure. I was on the verge of crossing over into hysteria, rocking back and forth as I paced in front of the doorway, and my dad kept saying, “Look at me, look at me, Freya. I’m not lying to you.”

I peered into his eyes and did what I could to quiet my mind and read Latham’s future. I saw the SecRos taking him and saw him, like my father had said, safe, sleeping in a strange bed with sheets as white as sunny-day clouds.

“Freya,” my dad said, “he’s going to be
all
right.
They’re going to do everything they can for him. The biologists are working around the clock. We just need to keep him alive in the meantime.”