Poveglia (After the Cure Book 4), Page 2

  Sevita shrugged. “I don’t know Rick, I might be pretty ticked off that anyone brought me back at all. And then to be treated as inferior just because I got sick—”

  “They didn’t ‘just get sick,’” sneered Rick, “They ate people. They were murderers. It’s not my fault they are what they are. You can’t just ignore murder. It’s bad enough they aren’t locked away where they couldn’t hurt anyone else. Why should they expect equality with the innocent?”

  “And all of the Immunes are innocent, is that it?” asked Sevita, rolling her eyes.

  “We only did what we had to, to defend ourselves.”

  “Really? What about the guy that had the Infected chained up? The one that group of Cured left to find?” Sevita had been half-inclined to persuade Christine to join the exodus of Cured. She was tired of watching them get cheated and stepped on or ignored. But she still thought the people of the City could change, if someone tried to stand up for the Cured. And since nobody else seemed to be rolling up their sleeves…

  Rick ignored her and turned toward the lobby’s interior. “Tonya!” he yelled again, “Where is she?”

  Sevita smiled to herself. “She left Rick, with the others, don’t you remember? You have an Immune assistant now.”

  “Oh yeah. Well, why isn’t she coming? I want her to run to the power plant and find out what’s going on,” he growled.

  “Probably because his name isn’t Tonya, it’s Brad.” Sevita shook her head. “Never mind, I’ll go. I can’t do much here without power and I wanted to get some more exterior shots of the prison for the trial documentary anyway.”

  Rick grumbled and stomped off, looking for his new assistant. Sevita was used to doing things herself. She almost preferred it that way. She did miss her cameraman, though. He felt he’d given the City long enough to change and left with the others. She hoped he’d found a better home with them. One where people didn’t cringe when they first saw the scars running along his face.

  She packed a small hand camera in her bike bag. She’d lied to Rick, she was going to the prison, but she was going to find a way inside if it killed her. She wanted some shots of Pazzo’s old cell. She wondered if anyone had been in there since Nella had torn it apart looking for three little glass vials of bacteria. Sevita shuddered. What a scare that had been.

  The end of civilization ought to have meant the end of things like biological weapons. The problems of everyday survival were enough. But Sevita knew there were other dangers out there.

  Nella had radioed her from a small sailboat a few days before. The capitol city was a nuclear wasteland. Sevita wondered whether it was the same all over the world. It hurt to know for sure that the capitol was gone, evaporated, along with almost everyone else on the great, wide planet. As long as nobody had traveled there, it was easy to pretend that the world went on without her little corner of it, that someday, someone was going to come along and bring them back out of the dark ages.

  She hadn’t had the heart to broadcast the news to the City yet. She hadn’t even told Christine, who’d been napping when Nella called. She assumed the Military Governor must have known. Maybe his staff. No one else, though. Why tell them? What did it matter? They’d been on their own for almost a decade, why rob them of whatever distant fantasy they had?

  It used to be, Before, that every story was one that needed to be told. Withholding information, no matter how scandalous or damaging was practically a cardinal sin back then. But the capitol being gone was just one of dozens that Sevita had decided not to report in the past several years. It was almost more her job these days, to know what news the fragile City could handle and what was best left unknown.

  She looked around her as she pedaled. Once the television station’s block fell behind her, life returned to the City. The Farm was buzzing with insects and birds as the crops unfurled in a bright mist of green. The laundry steamed and inside she could hear someone telling a dirty joke to somebody else. A mail cart rumbled down the uneven road beside her and she waved to the mailman as he twitched the horse’s reins. The library roof was being re-shingled and the smell of yeast was heavy near Margie’s as they baked bread to cover for the brewery’s illicit activities. The group of Cured that had left had made a dent, but the world was repairing itself anyway.

  Four

  A tan military van was parked diagonally across the curb. A uniformed man stood in front of the plant doors, a weapon jutting from his hip, his arms crossed. One of the doors was shattered, the glass blinking light over the pavement. Even in the days of ruined buildings and abandoned parking lots, the scene blared that something was wrong. Sevita stopped her bike to pull the camera out. The guard held up one hand to stop her from entering.

  “Was it an accident?” she asked bluntly. “Where’s the ambulance?”

  The guard shrugged. “Don’t have any details, ma’am. I’ve just been ordered to keep all non-authorized personnel out.”

  Sevita frowned. “Is the power out to the whole City or just a section?”

  “It was out at the Barrier and it’s out here, but that’s all I know.”

  “Any estimate on when it will be back on?”

  The soldier just shook his head. She shrugged and turned her bike around to head to the prison. Another van came careening across the lot and skidded to a stop in front of the building. A large soldier emerged from the power plant. Sevita thought she vaguely recognized the long scar that rippled over his jaw and neck, but she didn’t have time to place him. Seven armed soldiers piled out of the vehicle. The scarred soldier waved frantically to them. His face dripped with sweat, though the morning was cool and a breeze blew constantly through the parking lot. The van’s driver stood by its door.

  “You’re sure Dan?” he called.

  The large soldier glanced at the door guard, who was beginning to look nervous, then at Sevita. He looked back at the driver. “I’m sure,” he yelled.

  Sevita felt a slow claw of ice creep through her gut as she watched the small knot of soldiers tear open plastic bags that held thick vinyl suits. They stepped into their suits, pulling the blazing yellow plastic closed and zipping out the world from toe to chin. She choked on her breath and realized she was close to hyperventilating. She looked down at her bike, trying to calm herself. The door guard whispered, “Oh shit.”

  Sevita looked up to see he was shaking. She looked back at the group in biohazard suits. They’d become faceless wasps. Black filtration masks and screaming yellow plastic completely blotting out their humanity. Now they were invulnerable weapons, ready to sting someone, anyone, to death.

  Anyone else would have thought about running. The guard did. But Dan, the scarred soldier, saw him tense up.

  “Remember your duty,” Dan growled.

  The guard nodded and straightened. Sevita didn’t think about running. She didn’t want to. Instead, she wanted a suit. She wanted a wasp shell. She wanted to sting whoever was behind the soldiers’ panic.

  “You’d better go, ma’am,” said Dan as the biosuits tramped toward them. “I’ll tell them you just arrived, you haven’t been inside.”

  The plant’s door creaked open and two soldiers half dragged a stumbling man out into the parking lot. Sevita stared at him in shocked recognition. His face was puffy and dark with rage and blood was blackening and drying in the beard stubble around his mouth. He roared and jerked his head toward one of the men holding him, trying to snap his teeth closed on the soldier’s skin. One of the yellow suited soldiers met the group at the back of the truck, injecting a sedative into the man’s arm. He clacked his teeth together again, and Sevita could hear the crunch as he ground them together. And she knew why the quarantine team was there.

  “It’s Ned Glist!” she cried. Some of the others looked around at her. “Don’t you understand?” she asked, “He’s a goldsmith. Robert Pazzo hired this man to make these fancy pens for him before the trial.”

  The head soldier turned his black, reflective mask toward her si
lently, waiting.

  “Dr. Rider never found the vials. She never found the bacteria,” said Sevita, “We thought Glist had them. We even interviewed him. He said he didn’t know anything about it, just that he was to deliver those pens on certain dates. And we believed him. God help us, we believed him. So when Dr. Rider failed to find the vials, we assumed Pazzo had used them all to infect himself.”

  One of the soldiers swore. They bundled the struggling man into the truck.

  She had sent Christine. Christine and Frank Courtlen had interviewed Glist, not Sevita. It should have been her. She’d been too scared that he would recognize her and lie. Instead, he’d lied to Chris. Or been tricked himself. Had he already been infected then? Was Chris already sick? Was the baby?

  “Everyone just relax,” buzzed the voice from behind the mask, “Dan just called us on a routine chemical spill. If you’ll just move away, ma’am—”

  Sevita shook her head, still staring at the poisonous yellow. “There’s only a handful of things that would make you react this way. It’s not chemical or he’d already have a face mask,” she said, pointing to Dan. “Which means it’s biological. There’s only one thing that a non-medically trained person would be able to recognize so quickly and be so sure about. If it’s what I think it is,” she said, staring at Dan, “then it’s already too late. For you, for me, for whatever is left of this ruin of a world. And you know it.”

  Dan mopped his face with a small handkerchief and said nothing. The door guard looked at Sevita with wide eyes as he was led gently but firmly back to the van. One of the wasp men took his place.

  “Give me a suit,” said Sevita.

  “Ms. Das,” one of the others said in his hollow, plastic voice, “would you please come with me?” She felt her arm gripped tightly.

  “No way,” she said, wrenching her arm back, “if I’m going to get sick, I’m at least going to tell the City how the jerk helped Pazzo pull it off. We all deserve that much.”

  The soldier hesitated.

  “That is what we’re talking about, isn’t it? One of the vials made it out. He put it in the pens somehow.” said Sevita. The wasp man’s mask turned toward one of the others.

  “It’s a six-week incubation period, you know that,” cried Sevita, “We’re either all Immune or we’re dead. Keep your fucking fancy suits. They aren’t going to stop what’s already inside you anyway. I’ll go in without it.”

  “We aren’t sure what it is,” said Dan. “There’s no reason to risk exposing yourself—”

  “I’m already exposed. We’re all already exposed. Don’t you remember how this worked last time? I’m going in there. The City needs to know—”

  “If you go in there, you’re going to be in quarantine until this gets sorted out. I’ve half a mind to confine you with them anyway, I don’t know when you arrived,” said the head of the quarantine team.

  “She got here the same time you did,” protested Dan. “Take her home, she doesn’t belong here.”

  One of the quarantine team moved to grab her, but Sevita darted past him and grabbed Dan’s handkerchief. She wiped it over her face as the others watched in shock.

  “There,” she said, handing it back, “Now I’m just as exposed as he is. You have to let me in.”

  The head soldier shrugged. “It’s her funeral. Let her come,” he said. Sevita followed them into the dark and silent power plant.

  The offices were empty and the panels of lights gaped like eyes rolled up into a skull. Sevita was openly filming, expecting every moment to be ordered to stop shooting or have it confiscated. But none of the soldiers said a word. It made her wonder if they even had orders at all. The thought made her nauseated with terror.

  “Where are the plant personnel?” asked one of the soldiers.

  Dan pointed down a long staircase. “Turbine room. The— the incident started there. It made it to the front door, but the other workers stopped it there. We figured since they were all exposed, we ought to keep them together. The plant manager requested they be held in the turbine room so that they could work on restoring power.”

  The head soldier cleared his throat and tried to speak softly, but his voice still echoed through his mask. “Any deserters?”

  Sevita watched Dan’s scars curve and stretch as he frowned. “No. Never.” He stomped down the first flight of stairs.

  “Good, that’s good.” The faceless soldier hurried after him. “It’s just— your squad— I mean, you can understand why I’d ask.”

  Dan turned and Sevita switched the camera light on, illuminating the shadowy stairwell. Dan was shaking his head.

  “No, I really can’t. My men aren’t cowards. We were the ones who maintained quarantine in the court incident after every other unit bailed. We’re usually the first squad in and the last out on all Infection related disturbances in or around the City. We aren’t deserters.”

  “But you’re Cured, which means you have more to be afraid of than the rest of us—”

  “No,” said Dan coming back up a stair toward them, “It means we know what we have to lose if this ever got loose. It means we walked into this situation knowing what we really promised when we took our oaths.” He reached up to another soldier and pulled his biosuit’s zipper closed the last inch. “It means we aren’t careless,” he said, and turned to walk down the rest of the stairs.

  There was a low hum as they entered the large turbine room, but not the deep rumble that normal activity usually produced. A few temporary floodlights sat unevenly around the massive metal blades of the turbine where several people were working. Another cluster of people surrounded a man who sat leaning against a nearby wall, his face ashen, his light work shirt now a damp, dark red as his coworkers tried to help him with the meager leftovers of an ancient first aid kit. The ring of people around him all wore some kind of mask. Paper masks from the soldiers’ medical kits, plastic welding masks, even strips of torn cloth. Anything to prevent breathing the same air as if they could undo the past weeks of working side by side. As if it wasn’t already far too late.

  One of the yellow suited men pointed to the injured man. “Is he the only one who’s had direct contact with the— the Infected?”

  “No,” said Dan, “But he was the only one bitten. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Glist were down here making an emergency weld. They argued about the work and Mr. Glist became agitated and attempted to shut down the turbine. Mr. Ryan tried to block the controls and Glist hurled his welding tank into the turbine blades and then attacked Ryan, biting him repeatedly and then running up the stairs toward the exit, where three other workers caught and detained him until we arrived. He smashed through the glass of the front doors and was stopped there by my second in command. The rest of the plant, of course, responded to the explosion when the turbine blades ignited the welding tank. Since the plant workers wanted to continue working and we needed to contain them and start the generator in order to treat both welders, we convened down here.”

  The wasp man nodded. He called two other men in biosuits over. They rolled an old ripped up stretcher between them and carefully picked up the injured man. After strapping him in, they pulled a thick bubble of plastic over the entire thing, leaving only the wheels free and turned on a small cannister of air, inflating it. The workers openly stared. When it became clear that only the soldiers in the yellow suits and the injured men would be leaving any time soon, a few of the workers started to protest loudly. The unprotected soldiers, Dan’s men, looked grim as the plant workers panicked, but they were maintaining order, for now. Sevita took advantage of the commotion and slid into an empty corner of the room, grabbing the radio from the soldiers’ crates of equipment as she passed. She tuned it to Christine’s old ambulance band, now their private channel, and hoped she had her set on. Sevita didn’t know if the radio would even work all the way down in the turbine room, but she had to try. She didn’t know what to say even if she reached Christine. Was it too late? Weren’t they all already Infected? What
good would worrying her do?

  Sevita watched the tense soldiers and the terrified plant workers. Faces were already tightened into snarls and hands collapsed into fists. What would happen when they all went feral? Would she still be trapped in the turbine room with them? She tapped the radio against her hand, trying to decide whether to call. What if Chris was Immune? She could make it if she could hide until help came. But she had to be warned.

  Before the rest of the City found out.

  Before the Plague’s sister ailment, terror, spread through the streets.

  Sevita clicked the transmit button. “Christine,” she whispered, “Christine, are you there? Come in.”

  After a few beats of dead static, Christine’s breathless voice came through like a sudden sunburst. “Sorry, ‘Vita, doing an admission, I’m all over the floor today.”

  Sevita’s heart plummeted. “An admission already?”

  “Yeah, teen girl wandered up to the gate today. She needed some critical care so they sent her here to do her process. Lots of folks coming in after the Governor’s speech a few months ago.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Sevita. Of course they couldn’t have reached the hospital yet, she thought, the quarantine team must have just left the building.

  “Dispatch considers admissions screening light duty. They forced me out of emergency care last week. Until the baby’s born, I’m up here. But I think I’m running more now than I was in Emergency.”

  Not for long, thought Sevita. “I need you to go down into the basement bunker,” she said, “And I need you to go now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just trust me. Go now. Don’t tell anyone, don’t take anyone, just go. I’ll call you again as soon as I can. Don’t open the door for anyone. Anyone. And don’t come out until I let you know it’s safe.”

  “But Sevita, I—”

  “Don’t waste time arguing! Please, Christine, for me. I’m trying to protect you. I love you.”