Quarantine (3 page)

I
t was a twenty-minute drive, zigzagging and squeezing through the gridlock of wrecked vehicles, winding around downed buildings and avoiding craters big enough to swallow the vehicle whole.

They remembered Caleb. How he'd passed through one day, a nonchalant air about him. He'd stayed for a meal and exchanged information, then he'd left.

“I felt sorry for him,” Bob said. “Caleb, he seemed like a good guy.”

“Why's that?” I asked.

“Just the way Tom treated him—you'll meet Tom soon enough.”

“Treated him? Like how?”

“Just a difference of opinion, I guess,” Bob said. “He's not one to be challenged like that, and with Caleb getting people all excited by hopes of some way out of the city . . .”

This Tom guy sounded like a jerk. “Well, you can tell that guy that Caleb didn't get to see his way out of this city.”

Bob looked to Daniel, as if unsure who would ask the delicate question—if they needed to know at all. Maybe it was safer not to get too familiar?

“You talk like he's gone,” Bob said.

“Did I?” I asked, a little worried. “Really?”

“Seems that way,” Daniel said, his voice soothing away doubt and reluctance. “What happened?”

I explained about the explosion that had turned Caleb into a Chaser. First, I told them about the unexploded missiles. I'd seen one on my first day, and Caleb had reported one in an abandoned property. Then Starkey—whoever he was; would I ever truly know?—the only adult in his group who'd bothered to talk to me seriously, had warned me of the missile in the back of the military truck.
“When it explodes,”
he'd said,
“it will release the biological agent, you understand?”
The agent that turned people into Chasers. I'd run as he'd instructed me, but Caleb was still dragging bodies to safety when the explosion happened.
KLAPBOOM
! For a moment, Caleb was lost to me in the smoke and fireball and when I saw him again, it had happened. There was Caleb: at the body of a dead soldier. Drinking him.

They hadn't interrupted, but Bob couldn't hold back his questions. “This guy—Starkey—he was part of the US military?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Their trucks had USAMRIID stenciled on them. That's a scientist outfit, I think.” I remembered the words Felicity had used, drawing on knowledge gained from her brother. “They specialize in virology and combating biological warfare.”

Daniel nodded. “Stands for US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.”

“So what were they doing with the missile in the back of the truck?” asked Bob.

“I'd thought that they could have been taking it for tests,” I said.

“Could have been covering up evidence,” Bob added. “Biological warfare, you know.” Then he said, “Why—?” his question hung in the air, rhetorical. “Why all that, then have an aircraft of our own come in and hit them?”

I shrugged. “What I do know is that that's how you become one of the chasing kind of infected, like those we encountered back there:
proximity
to the explosion.”

These guys were hungry for information, and hung on my every word. Sharing news can bring you closer to the person doing the listening. I could see their empathy grow and, with it, mine did too. I wished I had more to tell, more to share, but this was enough for now. Besides, I felt tired being in this hot cab of the truck, and then . . .

Chelsea Piers.

 

Chelsea Piers was a long, bleak, industrial facade of corrugated iron running along the Hudson River side of Eleventh Avenue. We pulled up to the southernmost end, at some kind of sports center at the corner of West 18th—golf, mainly, by the look of the advertising outside. I could see that the pier had a massive ten-story-high net along the three sides to stop golf balls from flying into the Hudson—the scale of this place made it feel safe. I liked that it looked deserted: there was nothing from the outside that signaled there was a group of over forty survivors living inside.

“Bob,” Daniel said, and it was all he needed to say: Bob jumped out of the cab. Cold, hard wind stabbed into the cabin in those couple of seconds the passenger door was open. I watched him run over to a big roller door and bang on it three times. I felt Daniel's eyes in the rearview mirror, and I looked out my window. On the other side of the street was a big building of curved, white frosted glass, almost invisible in this weather; it looked safe and solid, the kind of place one could easily retreat to.

“Jesse, are you okay?” Daniel asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You'll be fine. But I think it's best if you don't tell the others about what happened to Caleb just yet. It'll . . . spook them.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. It seemed reasonable enough, since that news carried a weighty fear:
Be wary of being out in the streets, for, if your luck's run out, you just might become a Chaser, one of the damned . . .

Bob waved us through the open roller door. Daniel drove forward, pulling the monster vehicle inside the base of the complex. We got out as the big steel door slammed shut behind us.

Inside the receiving bay, by the glow of the headlights and some handheld flashlights, I could make out a group of people headed towards us: about a dozen women and men who quickly made short work of lugging in the gear. Everyone greeted me in passing.

Practically everyone wore evidence of survival: some had their arms in casts, another couple limped past on crutches. No one's face was unblemished by a bruise or scar. I imagined how misplaced Caleb must have looked, sailing in on his gleaming motorbike, looking young and fit, maybe even confident. Of course, I knew what was on the inside, but had they seen that?

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“Hi.”

Despite all that had gone on in this city, inside these words was a little piece of normality, of people making the best of being survivors. As I watched them shuttling about, stowing the gear we'd brought, it pricked the hairs on the back of my neck in a good way. Just like sharing information with Bob and Daniel, this sight—of survivors so happy to see me and to see a fresh batch of supplies—made me wish I had
more
to give. There was a girl about my age, maybe a bit older; I almost tripped because I was looking at her while trying to lug in a bin of food with Bob handling the other side.

“Hey, watch it, little buddy,” Bob said.

“Sorry.”

He grinned, catching me looking back at her.

“What?”

“Nothin'.” He was still all smiles and I felt my face flush red. “Yep, there's still girls around.”

I was embarrassed. “I know.”

“She's nice.”

“Shut up.”

He laughed. “Ah, to be a teenager again. Better you than me.”

We dumped the food down in a hall full of supplies, where a couple of people inventoried and sorted the new stock. It was warm and dry in here, so different from the building back at the zoo where Rachel and Felicity would be hunkering down to weather this storm.

“Come on, I'll show you around,” Bob said.

Up a level, there were chairs and couches scattered throughout a reception area, people lounging and resting, talking and listening, reading and playing cards. Their enjoyment was infectious. A group of kids ran about, playing some kind of tag game. Carried on the breeze of an open door out onto an Astro Turfed pier-turned-golf-driving-range was the heady smell of a barbecue, which made my stomach groan and my mouth salivate.

Around a corner behind a screen were a couple of people lying on makeshift gurneys: closer, I could see that they were patched up with bandages but they didn't seem too badly off. Bob noticed a drop of blood fall from my gloved hand as I put it into my pocket. Even though I was among many wounded, I didn't want to signal the weaknesses that could overcome me at any minute. I was alone, after all, just one person who maybe would need to act with the strength of many to persuade them to part from their safety net. The safest way to get home was to head north—because the contagion was worse in the warmer climes—and be among as large a group as possible. We couldn't wait for more attacks and for the Chasers to become more ruthless.

“We've got a doctor here,” Bob said. “I think he should take a look at that hand.”

“Surgeon, actually,” a tall, tanned man said. He was fifty or so, taut leathery skin with an orange-ish tan, thick black hair brushed just so. “I'm Tom.”

“Jesse,” I said. I noticed that the pretty girl I'd seen in the receiving bay was watching me from across the room, talking to three younger kids. She was shorter than me, and had sandy-brown hair in a ponytail. Cheerleader kind of pretty.

Tom addressed me as he put on latex gloves and used scissors to cut my torn glove off.

“Sorry?” I asked, through gritted teeth as he poked and prodded.

“I asked you if you were planning on staying here.”

“I, ah—”

“He's sheltering with us until the storm passes,” said Daniel, falling in next to me. “Then he can decide what he wants to do.”

“Your hand will be fine. It needs a cleanup and dressing; I'll have someone attend to it.” He put a wad of gauze on my palm, then took off his gloves, and tossed them into a bin and moved on to the other patients.

“Don't mind him,” Daniel said. “He likes to seem important—first impressions and all that.”

I understood. “Yeah, that's cool.”

“Come on,” Daniel clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I'll introduce you to some friends.”

He gestured to Bob, who was back to filming his documentary or whatever. I followed Daniel, who seemed to be headed for that girl, and I tried to do my best not to make a fool of myself. I remembered getting tongue-tied when I'd met Felicity, but surely that was the effect of finally meeting her after days of longing for her company, right?

What was so special about this girl? She was pretty, sure, but I couldn't let myself be distracted by her. I had good reason to be here now, and I'd make sure they all soon knew that we had good reason to leave.

 

We approached the group of teens. One guy, thirteen maybe; a girl his age who was strikingly similar, and another who resembled the comic-book guy from
The Simpsons
.

“Paige, this is Jesse, our guest for the day,” Daniel said. “Paige's father is Tom, who you just met.”

It was her eyes that entranced me and it took me a few seconds of staring to figure out why: not just the perfectly shaped almonds, the long dark lashes: it was her irises. They were different colors, one brilliant blue, the other a dark green-brown.

“Oh, okay.”
Damn
. Why did she have to be related to
him
? “Hi.”

“Hey.” Paige looked at me as if I was a novelty, some kind of new toy.

“Paige, could you show Jesse around, get him sorted out for lunch?”

“Sure,” she said, a little too chirpy.

“Your father's getting someone to see to his hand.”

“I can do that,” she replied, all smiles.

Daniel clapped my shoulder again, and left for the terrace looking over the pier into the murky Hudson River. Bob stayed behind, filming me, Paige and the others nearby. He crouched a little and slowly panned around in a tracking close-up.

“Bob, you can stop that now,” Paige said. He did as he was told and went in search of something else to document.

Paige produced a medical kit and opened it on the table. “We'll get you cleaned up,” she said, her chair facing mine, taking my hand in hers.

“Okay,” I said.

Paige's hands were small, soft but cold. She was well-tanned compared to others here but a similar tone to me—it was summer back home in Australia. I flinched when she touched me, her fingers on my hands and wrists, ticklish, electric, real.

“Hurts?”

“A little,” I said. I felt my cheeks blush. I tried thinking of cricket. “Where are you from?”

“L.A.,” she replied. She washed my hands with a damp cloth, using sterilized water from a plastic medical squeeze bottle, cleaning out the grazes, reopening the deep cut on my palm. I couldn't stop looking at her face, her skin, her eyes. Every now and then she'd connect with an exposed nerve ending and I'd cringe.

“Might sting,” she said, spraying disinfectant on my hands.

“Ouch.” It hurt but I was glad—it took my mind away from her smile.

She stuck some bandages on the heels of my palms, which I'd grazed raw. She wrapped the hand that was still leaking blood in a tight padded bandage.

“Job done.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Feel okay?”

“It's great,” I said. My hands were painful, but they rested gently in her lap, held by her own, as she looked into my eyes. Her expression was full of doubt. Not her own, I realized, but a reflection of mine.

“What is it?”

“It's—nothing,” I said.

In leggings and a tight sweater, Paige's look and manner reminded me of a couple of the popular, untouchable chicks back at school, the ones who always seemed way out of my league; but here she was, here we were, talking. I decided not to look at her body anymore. As we got up and made our way through the room I tried to keep next to her, in stride, and said “Hi” to at least a dozen people she introduced me to.

“Hope my dad was nice to you.”

“Yeah,” I said.