Undaunted, Page 2

  A line guard in a jeep took us across the bridge to the base, where Dr. Solis was waiting. Despite his smile, the doctor looked tired and drawn and even thinner than before. He and my dad hugged, and then Dr. Solis marveled over my dad’s leg and that he was on his feet again. The last time he’d seen us, my dad had been laid out on a gurney, and it was unclear whether he’d live, much less walk again.

  Dr. Solis then turned to me. Deep grooves darkened the skin beneath his eyes. “Delaney,” he said with a fleeting smile. “I knew you’d be back.” His gaze had a dreamy cast. Apparently he still needed a hit from a Lull inhaler to wind down at the end of the day.

  “What progress have you made on the vaccine?” my dad asked. “Have the guards collected any new strains?”

  I tried to focus on what they were saying, but distant yelling had hijacked my attention. The noise was nothing like barked-out drill sergeant commands. No, this was angry yelling, and I spotted the source with a single glance across the drill yard where a red-faced guard was busy dressing down a little girl. Here I was, east of the wall less than ten minutes, and already, I was feeling feral. Not literally, of course. But then, I didn’t need a virus to dump animal DNA into my system in order to go wild.

  Neither my dad nor Dr. Solis nor the guards loading our gear into another jeep paid any attention to the hollering guard. Not that we could actually hear exactly what the guy was saying over the whirr of the departing hovercopter, but the patrol base was lit up brighter than a stadium. Even at night, anyone with working eyeballs could interpret the guy’s flapping mouth and jabbing gestures. When he thrust a pair of boots at the kid hard enough to knock her back a step, I was done being a bystander. I tossed my duffel and backpack into the jeep and stalked across the gravel.

  The girl was young — ten at most — with snarled black hair. Going by her dirty adult-sized fatigues, she was probably one of the orphans who lived on base. A kid whose parents had died or gone feral and, having nowhere else to go, had shown up at the gate. She was one of the lucky ones. The guards didn’t have to take in refugees — the government contracted the line patrol to secure the quarantine line, not run a day care. Still, that didn’t give this guard the right to bully her.

  “Do you even know what the word polished means?” he yelled, his back to me. “Or are you a grupped-up freak like your mother?”

  As she glared up at him, I stumbled in surprise. It was Jia — the girl who’d saved my dad’s life last fall. He’d come upon her mother circling Jia like she was prey. Her own child. My dad had thrown himself between them and gotten off a killing shot, but not before the woman slashed up his leg. He would’ve bled to death if Jia hadn’t loaded him into a wagon and hauled him across the bridge to the base.

  My eyes swept over all the guards in the vicinity again. I didn’t see Everson, but I wished he was here. He’d taken care of Jia that night, when she was so terrified. But even then she hadn’t been helpless, and she was far from helpless now.

  “I asked you a question, stray,” the guard snapped.

  “If I was grupped, Guardsman Bhatt,” the girl hissed, “I’d polish your boots with extra spit.”

  “What was that?” His hand shot out, and he grabbed a fistful of her hair.

  I broke into a sprint. “Let her go!”

  Jia thrashed in his grip, kicking and contorting like a mongoose. And Guardsman Bhatt’s response? To tighten his hold and yank her up onto her tiptoes, which, of course, sent Jia into screeching, clawing insanity. He may as well have grabbed a stray cat by the tail. He actually looked surprised when Jia sank her teeth into his forearm, and then shocked when she didn’t stop at a warning snap, and finally he bellowed as she broke skin …

  I winced at the spit-plus-wound combo. Like every kid in the West, I’d grown up obeying the golden rule: No biting. As in never! An infected bite couldn’t be taken back or undone because Ferae had no cure. Not then. Not now.

  Bhatt shook her off. He looked from his bloody forearm to Jia, and his fingers curled. I got there just as he pulled back his fist. Snatching the riot baton off his belt, I slipped between them.

  He dropped his fist, looking guilty, and then got an eyeful of me. His confusion lasted a split second before turning into scorn. “Which Disney princess are you?”

  “The Beast.”

  “Funny. Give it back,” he ordered, and made a grab for the baton.

  I danced back. “So you can hit her with it?”

  “No, I … You’re crazy,” he sputtered. “I don’t hit kids.”

  “Right. You were going to pet her with your fist.” I pointed the baton at his face. “I don’t care if the patrol took her in. You don’t get to grab her or yell at her or ever make her feel like she’s not a person!”

  “Lane!” a voice shouted from behind me. My dad. I pivoted and winced at the sight of him loping for me, cane in hand, face pale and glistening with sweat.

  “Dad, stop!” I dropped the baton. “Your leg!” Moving that fast had to be sending stabbing pain through his right thigh. The doctors might have stitched up the mauled muscles and flesh, but his leg was far from healed.

  He slowed to a hitched jog and then his eyes narrowed. “Don’t even think about it!”

  I jerked around to see the baton gripped in Guardsman Bhatt’s meaty fist.

  The urge to flee electrified my limbs, but I raised my chin and silently dared the fuming guard to hit me with it. It would be worth taking the blow just to see him get dragged off to patrol jail. There had to be a cell somewhere on this island — maybe even a torture room, considering the line patrol was a private paramilitary security force.

  Bhatt’s fingers tightened on the baton, but before he could make up his mind, my dad shoved between us.

  “Get away from her,” he snarled. “Now.”

  Bhatt must have heard the threat in my dad’s tone, which made leaving seem like the better option. Guess even a jerk knew that military training didn’t stack up against an angry father.

  “Try to act human,” I shouted at his back, then saw that my dad had paused to lean heavily on his cane. “Oh! How bad does it hurt?”

  “How bad does what hurt?” he quipped, though strands of his dark hair clung to his sweat-beaded forehead. He was obviously in pain but as usual refused to show it. He nodded at the retreating guard. “What was that about?”

  I shrugged, despite my racing heart. “He thought it was okay to bully a kid. I disagreed.”

  My dad’s glasses gleamed under the stadium lights as he studied me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” I wiped my damp palms down my new canvas pants — tough material for what would be my new, tougher life. Something Jia would know a lot about. I glanced around, but there was no sign of the little girl. She must have escaped the second she got the chance. Smart kid. Unfortunately, as awful as the line guards were, she was still better off living on base. At least here she got three meals a day and didn’t have to worry about being attacked by feral animals … or feral people.

  “McEvoy!” Captain Hyrax stood like an aging rodeo star at the edge of the drill yard, chest puffed out, thumbs hooked on his belt. “You want an escort to Moline? You go now or you go alone.”

  “Be right there, Captain,” my dad returned, and then glanced back at me. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  No. But that wasn’t going to stop me. “As I’ll ever be.”

  My dad’s smile deepened the crinkles by his eyes. He slung an arm over my shoulders, and we headed back to the waiting jeeps. Now that we were facing west, we had an unobstructed view of the Titan wall. Was building a seven-hundred-foot-tall barricade punishment enough for unleashing a viral pandemic on the nation?

  Not in my book.

  Before the plague, Titan had operated Imaginariums, which were enormous labyrinths, fifty stories tall and hundreds of acres wide. My dad, like the rest of America, had loved the Titan theme parks. He said he’d wasted many a weekend getting lost in them. You
started at the ground level and tried to make your way to the roof by completing challenges to win clues for the maze on each floor. People came back over and over, picking up where they’d left off. Only a handful ever made it to the glass-enclosed paradise on the roof. Not only did the challenges get harder, but also there were wondrous things to see and experience on every floor, according to my dad. Apparently, each Imaginarium contained thrill rides, circus spectacles, haunted houses, water parks, and genetically modified animals — all under one roof.

  It was no surprise that the Titan Corporation had had the construction resources to build the wall that marked the quarantine line — and the security force to guard it. But reparation should mean repairing the damage the Titan scientists had caused, not just slapping on a humongous Band-Aid to hide the injury. A covered wound left unchecked didn’t heal — it festered.

  Dr. Solis was waiting for us in the backseat of the jeep.

  “How are things in Moline?” my dad asked Dr. Solis as we joined him there.

  The doctor’s languid expression turned grim. “Not good,” he admitted. “The inhibitor stopped working. The protein that encased the infected cells dissolved. After being forced into dormancy for so long, the virus …” He looked like he was going to be sick. “It multiplied at an incredible rate. Everyone who took the inhibitor went feral within days of one another.”

  The night air thickened, making it hard to draw in a breath. Faces floated up in my mind. Sid, Moline’s gatekeeper, infected with boar; Ed, the walrus-man whose wife stayed by his side even though she didn’t have the disease; and all the other infected people who’d lived peacefully inside the compound. They’d been allowed to stay, so long as they remained sane.

  “All of them?” my dad asked, sounding hoarse.

  “Only those who took it,” Dr. Solis said apologetically. “Apparently many of them didn’t trust medicine that came from a Titan lab.”

  My dad just nodded, still looking shocked.

  I was past shock. The inhibitor was the main reason I’d encouraged my dad to take this job. Chairman Prejean had promised to send cases of the inhibitor to Moline every month instead of the small box my father had been taking there — enough for the whole compound, including Rafe. Without the inhibitor, the virus would eventually destroy much of Rafe’s brain. And now I had no way to stop it.

  “What happened when the place went feral?” my dad asked. “Was Hagen hurt?”

  I flinched, my control beginning to splinter. Besides being my dad’s significant other, Hagen was the mayor of the Moline compound and wouldn’t have taken cover during a crisis. She would’ve put herself in the vanguard.

  “No,” Dr. Solis said quickly. “And I heard she’s the reason the situation didn’t turn into a complete bloodbath. Though there were casualties.”

  I crossed my arms to hide my trembling hands and asked, “Is Rafe all right?”

  “I wish I could say.” Dr. Solis rubbed his forehead as if fighting off a headache. “No one has seen him in months.”

  A cold feeling crept over my skin. “How many months?”

  “Not since the two of you were in Moline.”

  No one had seen him since I’d left the zone? Was my worst fear true? Had I left him there in Chicago to die alone?

  My dad shifted uneasily beside me. “Have any of the hacks come across him in the zone?”

  Dr. Solis shook his head. “The guard asked on every visit. I knew you’d want to know.”

  “You mean Everson?” I asked. “He was the one taking the inhibitor to Moline, right?”

  Captain Hyrax dropped into the front passenger seat with a snort. “That’s the Titan prince you’re talking about. You really thought Chairman Prejean was going to let her precious son rub shoulders with grups?”

  Grup, as in “genetically corrupted,” wasn’t a medical condition; it was an insult.

  “Go,” Hyrax barked at the driver, then took off his beret and rubbed a palm over his bald head.

  The jeep pulled onto the paved road that crossed the southern tip of the island. Nothing had changed on base since my last visit, except the weather, which now held the soggy chill of early spring. I’d changed, however. And so had Everson and Rafe. They’d started our venture as different as could be. Guard vs. thief. Civilized vs. crude. Selfless vs. selfish … Yeah. Very different. Though not as much by the end. They’d rubbed off on each other — even started to like each other. And both had rubbed off on me.

  So where were they now? And more important, how were they?

  Why hadn’t anyone seen Rafe in six months? Whenever I thought about him, which was often, I pictured him alone and suffering, which was stupid. If anyone could survive among the beast-men, he could. More than survive, Rafe thrived on the wild side of the wall. But that had been before he’d gotten infected. Maybe he’d gone feral fast. He’d said that usually happened when a person got infected with reptile DNA, but ultimately, there was no telling how the virus would affect someone. And that fact ate at me. Wondering if he’d gone feral — worrying that he was so crazed he couldn’t take care of himself — was keeping me up at night as much as my nightmares. I wasn’t going to rest easy until I knew for sure that Rafe was okay. Well, as okay as an infected person could be.

  Our jeep stopped at the massive electric gate that blocked the only bridge across the Mississippi River. At Hyrax’s nod, the guard in the sentry booth pushed a button, and the gate creaked open. Last fall, the bridge had been shrouded in darkness, but now every rusty nail and rickety plank was visible.

  “Why did the patrol put lights on the bridge?” I asked Dr. Solis, speaking loudly so as to be heard over the rushing water below.

  He glanced up as if only now noticing the change. “Perhaps because the patrol expanded the base.”

  Squished together as we were, I felt my dad stiffen. “What do you mean?”

  Captain Hyrax glanced back, a smirk perched on his thick lips. “Chairman Prejean didn’t tell you? Welcome to Gateway Station.” He extended his hand toward the end of the bridge like a game-show host revealing a prize.

  When I’d sprinted across the bridge last time, I’d exited through a narrow opening in an ancient blockade, but now the corrugated steel was gone. We drove straight onto a fenced construction site that took up over half the meadow. And like the fence around Arsenal Island, this twenty-footer had “Danger! 10,000 Volts!” signs and ominous-looking electrical posts every twenty feet. Between those and the elevated sentry boxes, the area could have passed as a prison yard. But I knew better. That state-of-the-art barrier wasn’t here to keep people in but to keep them out.

  “The area is a work in progress,” Captain Hyrax said, gesturing to a single squat building surrounded by construction equipment. “We still need to double the fence and add trip wires and an enclosed checkpoint. Maybe change out the wooden guard towers for concrete and add a few observation bunkers. It’ll be a thing of beauty when we’re done. We’ve already trained more dogs in feral eradication — track and attack,” he crowed. “We plan to push those grups back, mile by mile, till they fall into the Atlantic. We’ll have this country back in one piece within a decade.”

  “Is that why there are more guards on base?” my dad asked, his voice taking on an edge. “So you can ‘track and attack’ sick people?”

  I hadn’t noticed the increase in guards, but then, I’d only come east one time, while my dad had spent years sneaking through the base to get to the Feral Zone.

  Hyrax’s dark gaze narrowed on my father. “Let’s see how much sympathy you have for those ‘sick people’ when you’re living with them.” Abruptly, Hyrax shushed my dad and touched the listening device in his ear. After a moment, he said, “Yes, without incident.” His gaze tracked back to a mega-sized white RV trailer parked by the bridge entrance. A shadow hovered behind its tinted window. “Yes,” he clipped. “They’re good to go … father and daughter.”

  Our jeep maneuvered between bulldozers and a backhoe while my
dad eyed the guards patrolling the perimeter.

  “The patrol is giving out food, medicine. In exchange, the manimals let us take a sample of their blood,” Dr. Solis explained, his tone oddly flat. “It’s a one-time deal.”

  “The point of Gateway Station isn’t to give the grups handouts.” Hyrax sent Dr. Solis a sharp look. “The point is to find carriers of the missing strains. And it’s working. We’ve collected two out of three of them. You should thank us, fetch. We made your job a whole lot easier.”

  We pulled up to another gate — only this one had a tent standing in for the usual sentry box.

  “This is where the doctor and I leave you.” With a jerk of his chin, Hyrax ordered Dr. Solis out. “Don’t worry,” he assured us with a fake smile, “we’ll know if you run into any trouble out there.” He pointed at a small camera mounted on the dashboard.

  A guard climbed over the back of the jeep, shoving muddy boots between me and my dad to settle on top of the seat.

  I looked up with surprise and then smiled. “Bear Lake.”

  “Bearly,” she replied, laying her assault rifle across her knees. With her hair shaved within an inch of her scalp and iron-spike posture, she was intimidating, but I was thrilled to have her along. Unlike the other line guards, Bearly had set foot inside Moline’s walls — the day she’d accompanied Everson to retrieve me from the compound. But then I’d hijacked their jeep and left her surrounded by manimals. If she was still mad at me or nervous about going back, she didn’t let on. She had her guard face screwed on tight.

  “They’ll drop you at the compound and leave,” Hyrax told my dad. “Then you can get started on your mission.”

  What was his problem? The chairman herself had offered my dad the job.

  “Get into position,” Hyrax barked at the guards patrolling inside the fence.

  I moved to the front seat so my dad could stretch out his bad leg.

  “I’m Frank,” the driver said as soon as I settled into the passenger seat.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Lane,” I said, though my eyes were on the gate as it rolled open.