Blackout (15 page)

THIRTY

AUBREY WOKE UP IN A
large room. She was lying in something like a hospital bed, with metal handholds on the sides, but the rest of the place looked oddly . . . homey. The sixteen beds all had clean, brand-new quilts, and each was next to a dresser with a lamp. She was the only teenager in there. At her feet, dropping a syringe into a red plastic box, was a man dressed in a lab coat.

“Aubrey Parsons?” he asked.

She ached all over, and her sight wasn’t quite right. Something heavy was wrapped around her ankle.

“Aubrey?” he asked again.

She wanted to disappear, but for some reason her head felt cloudy, like she couldn’t remember how to do it.

“Who are you?” she finally asked.

“Dr. Eastman. I have to say, you put on quite a show.”

“Where am I?”

For the first time, she noticed that her wrists were bound to the sides of the hospital bed with heavy Velcro straps. Even if she could disappear, she’d be stuck here. An IV was in her left arm, connected to a bag of yellowish liquid. Electrodes dotted her fingers, arms, chest, and head.

The door was metal, and thick, with a small, square window indented and bolted into the steel.

“You’re not far from where you were apprehended. I’d ask how you managed to get past the testing center, but I think that’s fairly obvious.”

Her eyes began to focus on the far wall. Despite the soft lighting and comfortable furniture, the walls were bare white cinder block. And there were cameras—as she craned her neck to look around the room she saw at least six.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re being watched. Does that bother you?”

She’d failed. She was captured, being interrogated, and she hadn’t been able to do anything to help Jack. Dr. Eastman glanced down at his clipboard.

“Why did you run?”

“I didn’t know what was going to happen to me,” she said, her voice hoarse.

He nodded. “You realize that it doesn’t look good for you.”

“What doesn’t look good?”

“You ran from the army when they entered your town—”

“They shot my homecoming date,” she snapped.

He ignored her. “And when you were detained, you faked your test results. Then once you were in the quarantine area—spreading the virus in a clean zone, mind you—you escaped and tried to infiltrate an army facility.”

She stared at the ceiling. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to happen. She was supposed to sneak in and sneak out. She was supposed to find Jack.

She was supposed to be back in Mount Pleasant enjoying high school, in a world that wasn’t collapsing around her.

She was supposed to be with Jack.

“Did you do tests on me?” she asked, fighting to hold back tears.

“Yes,” he answered. “Extensively.”

She let out a long slow breath. She didn’t like Dr. Eastman.

“Do I have a brain tumor?”

He laughed—he actually laughed. She wanted to slap him.

“No,” he said. “You don’t have a brain tumor. You have the Erebus virus. Interestingly, there’s quite a pocket of infected people in your area. Well, that’s not interesting—there’re infected people everywhere—but your town seems to have produced some of the more potent presentations of the virus.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you can do incredible things,” he said, with genuine wonder in his voice. “It means that you just escaped a quarantine zone that was designed specifically to look for people like you, and then you snuck into a highly confidential military research facility. You evaded capture for hours. You made highly trained soldiers look like fools.”

She snorted. “Someone propped open the door with a rock.”

“I’m told,” he said, “that corporal is now a private.”

Aubrey didn’t care about that. She’d done all the things that he’d said, and yet she’d been caught. She hadn’t found Jack, let alone freed him.

“What was Nate Butler?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Nate Butler. What was he?”

He flipped through the papers on his clipboard while she continued to stare at the cement ceiling.

“Nate Butler was killed trying to escape.”

“He was my date.”

“Were you aware—”

“No,” she snapped. “I wasn’t aware of any of this. I wasn’t aware of a virus or that there were any others or that the army was allowed to tie teenage girls down just because they’re sick. Have I been arrested?”

Dr. Eastman sighed, but she refused to look at him.

“Aubrey,” he said. “You don’t get it. You’re a medical miracle.”

She tried to disappear again, but something seemed to be stopping her. Not that it would do any good. “I’m a medical miracle that you don’t trust. I’m a medical miracle that you’re going to lock up.”

“Not necessarily.”

“What was Nate?”

“We don’t know,” he said. “It’s next to impossible to identify a patient’s symptoms postmortem. He was killed at the scene, and all we have are witness reports.”

“Then how do you know he was so ‘potent’?” She finally glanced over at him, convinced that her anger would elicit some response. But he was completely calm.

“Aside from the fact that he killed three soldiers and injured a fourth?”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She’d seen Nate do it, of course—she’d seen him tackle those men—but it had never sunk in what he’d really done.

“I wasn’t referring specifically to Nate, though,” Dr. Eastman continued. “I believe you are friends with a boy named Jack Cooper?”

“He’s Negative,” she said quickly.

“Wrong again. He thought he was Negative, but he was carrying the virus. While his symptoms are perhaps not as showy as yours, he’s really quite amazing.”

“Where is he?” she asked, her voice softer.

“He’s in a room that looks identical to this one. He’s just fine.”

“What are his . . . symptoms?”

“You can ask him yourself, soon enough, if all goes well.”

“What does that mean?”

Dr. Eastman changed the subject. “Tell me about your relationship with Nicole Samuelson.”

“What do you mean? We were friends.”

“I understand you had an arrangement with her?”

Aubrey’s stomach sank. Nicole had ratted her out. If Aubrey hadn’t been caught down here, they would have come to get her at the tent.

“I was her spy,” Aubrey said.

“Just around the school?”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

“It’s for your own good.”

“Yes, it was just around the school. Parties, too. Just normal stuff.”

“And what did you get in return?”

This was so stupid. “Nicole was popular,” Aubrey said. “She invited me to things. She helped me get friends.”

Dr. Eastman leaned forward. “Let me tell you something. And I can tell you this because either you’ll one day end up with a confidential clearance or you won’t leave this building until none of this matters. Yes, Nicole helped you get friends, and she did an amazing job of it.”

“I know she did.”

“Nicole has the virus,” he said. “It gives her kidney problems.”

“What?” That couldn’t be true. “She must not have known.”

“Oh, she knew,” the doctor said. “In fact, according to her statements, she’s known she’s had the virus longer than any patient we’ve examined. Nicole has the unique ability to control the pheromones of the people around her. When Nicole made you popular, what she was doing was, very literally, making people attracted to you. When she shunned a student, when she kicked them out of the popular clique, she literally—chemically—made people feel disgusted by them.”

It couldn’t be true. Nicole wasn’t a freak, not like Aubrey. Nicole was so . . . perfect. Even with her sickness.

But it had to be true. Boys were paying attention to Aubrey back at school. They were fighting over her. That had never happened before this year. Aubrey had once joked to Nicole that it was like a switch had been flipped and—bam—she was suddenly pretty and popular and desirable.

And that’s exactly what had happened. A switch had been flipped. Nicole had flipped it.

Which meant that it was all a lie. Aubrey
wasn’t
pretty or popular or desirable. She was just regular old Aubrey. Plain, trailer-trash Aubrey.

Dr. Eastman was watching her, studying her.

“Tell me about what you can do,” he finally said.

There was no point in hiding it now. Nicole had obviously explained part of it, and Aubrey had no chance of escaping anyway. So she laid it all out.

Dr. Eastman listened carefully. He took the occasional note, but mostly he just watched her.

“Can I ask you a question?” Aubrey said after she’d explained everything she knew.

“Sure,” he said. “I don’t know if I can answer it.”

“How did you find me? The soldiers in the hall couldn’t see me—only the person on the radio.”

He smiled, and leaned back in his chair. “You were right about one thing when you described your invisibility. It’s not a physical power: you don’t bend light or turn transparent. Your brain tells my brain that you’re not here. In a way, it’s a form of mind control.”

“That’s what I assumed. But I still don’t see how you found me.”

“Because your brain only projects that message to people nearby. We’ll need to do tests to see how far it projects, and what kind of barriers it can go through, but suffice it to say: the team watching security monitors was too far away, and to them it looked like you were right there. Same thing with the helicopters outside—they kept thinking they saw you, but as soon as they’d get close your brain would erase you from them.”

It took a minute to sink in. That wasn’t something she and Nicole had ever tested.

“You’re a lucky girl,” Dr. Eastman said. “We were getting a sniper into position to take you down before you entered the building. You got out of his line of sight before he could take the shot.”

“I could have been dead.”

“Many times over,” he said, his voice lighter than the subject should require. “But think of it this way: you should have been shot a hundred times during the last fifteen hours. Any normal person would have been. They wouldn’t have even escaped the quarantine zone, let alone gotten all the way down in this building and then evaded capture for hours.”

He smiled a cold, curious grin. “Aubrey Parsons, you are remarkable.”

She didn’t know what to say. If she was remarkable she would have achieved something. “So,” he said, “the big question—the final question—is this: Why did you do it?”

Aubrey paused, not because she thought lying would do her any good, but because she didn’t want to get anyone else involved in her problems.

“This is very important,” Dr. Eastman urged.

“I promised Jack I’d get him out,” she finally said. “I didn’t know he was Positive.”

“Why was it important to get him out?”

“I thought that was the last question.”

“One more.”

She sighed. “Because we all thought you’d be dissecting the Positives in here. That’s why I faked my test result. You know—military testing, dissection, like in the movies. I thought he was a Negative, and I wanted to save him.”

Dr. Eastman nodded, and stood up.

“So?” she asked.

“Good answers,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

THIRTY-ONE

JACK FINISHED THE TEST, FILLING
in the last bubble on the scan sheet.

The room was filled with the chalky, rough sound of graphite on paper, of the repetitive and heightened heartbeats of the kids around him, of the deep, jagged breaths Matt kept taking, the tap of Nicole’s fingernails on her desk as she thought.

He closed his eyes, and he could see them all. Every scratching pencil was like a GPS marker. He knew the exact direction of each one, the exact distance. It was like he was looking down on the room like a sheet of graph paper, and he could plot every student on it.

At least he wasn’t throwing up anymore. For a while that was all he could do. Eating so much as a piece of bread was a nauseating assault. He tasted everything, every tiny bit of improperly mixed flour, all the mold spores that were lurking inside, not even visible yet. Even water was a disgusting slime of minerals and oils.

He could hear everything. He could taste everything. He could see everything.

He could control it better all the time; he could focus his concentration on something—staring at the cinder-block wall and counting the dimples in its texture, or looking at his fingerprints as if they were under a microscope—and that helped to block out the unwanted senses. At least now he could sit in a room with other people and not get a headache from the noise. He could have the lights on without feeling blinded.

They’d moved him to a nice dorm room, with a real bed and a dresser and a lamp. It reminded him of going to the department store: rows of bedroom sets of all different styles. This entire facility seemed to have been constructed in the last few weeks; he wondered if the army had raided an Ikea to build the dorms.

“Pencils down,” the man in the suit said. He didn’t appear to be military. Was he FBI? A doctor? They’d gone through three tests already today: one that checked basic school stuff, math and science and reading, one that was more about problem solving, and now this third one was an endless true-or-false personality test: “At times I feel like swearing,” “I think I would like the work of a librarian,” “I am sure I get a raw deal from life.” Five hundred sixty-seven statements like that. When Jack finished and laid his pencil on the desk, his brain felt like mud.

As the man walked up and down the rows of desks, he seemed nervous, like he hated being so close to the kids. Jack wanted to jump, just to make him flinch. But really, Jack was one of the people in the room who couldn’t hurt anyone. He could just watch and listen and smell and taste.

And touch—ugh. No blankets were soft enough for him. Everything felt like sandpaper.

With the sheaf of questionnaires in his arms, the man turned back to the group.

“You’ll be meeting with me in the next few days to discuss the results of these tests.” Then he turned and left.

“Can’t wait,” said Josi, just as the door closed.

“What a wuss,” another boy said. “He acted like we were going to light him on fire. Can anyone in here do that?”

Several people laughed. Everyone knew what their abilities were now, and they were slowly getting used to them.

“Jack,” Matt called out from across the room, as Jack climbed back onto his bed. “Did you notice anything? Any Sherlock Holmes action to explain what that was all about?”

Matt asked Jack that after almost every person came in the room, but Jack never knew what he was supposed to be looking for.

“Deodorant, cologne,” Jack answered. “He had dandruff and looked like he bit his fingernails. Maybe if I was smarter I could put all of that together into a brilliant psychological profile.”

“I saw something,” Josi said.

Josi had one of the few powers in the group that Jack envied. A sort of photographic memory, combined with instant comprehension. It sounded like the kind of thing that would come in handy during a math class back home.

Everyone perked up. Josi had become a sort of de facto leader.

“We’ve all been classified,” she said. “I saw it on his paperwork as he was going through our names.”

“What do you mean,
classified
?” someone asked.

“The army—or the government, or whoever—has categorized us all according to our usefulness,” Josi said.

“Usefulness for what?” Matt asked, sitting on top of his desk. He didn’t sound pleased.

“Military use. They have a rating system to show how beneficial we’d be if we were in the army.”

“What the hell?” a girl said. “I’m fifteen years old.”

Josi shrugged. “I’m just saying what I saw.”

Jack called out, “So what is it? What are we?”

“We all have something called a Lambda rating. I don’t know what Lambda means—that wasn’t on the chart. Jack, you’re a Lambda 4T, which means you’d be best suited for tactical intelligence, which I think means reconnaissance. I’m a Lambda 4O—that’s operational intelligence. I’m not sure what that means.”

“What about me?” Matt asked.

“You had an asterisk,” she said. “That means ‘currently uncategorized.’”

“Figures,” he said, annoyed. “Not much call for basketball in the army.” Matt had been diagnosed with a very mild form of telekinesis: without realizing it, he’d been guiding all his throws by gently nudging the path of the ball.

Jack laughed. “Think of how well you could throw a grenade.”

“And that’s probably it,” Matt said.

“Laura,” Josi said, “you were the only five—a Lambda 5D, which means Direct Weapon Use.”

“Nice,” one of the guys said. “Kickin’ ass and taking names.”

Laura only smiled.

Josi went through the rest of the list. There were a lot of twos—designated as “Civilian Use” —and a couple of ones—“No practical use.” Eddie, with the hot breath, got that one, and he was pissed. So did a girl who could change something’s color by touching it. She laughed it off and said she was glad—she saw a life ahead of her as an interior designer.

The threes were all logistics—a kid who could fix anything mechanical, another who was some kind of human calculator, and a handful more.

The fours were all intelligence. Nicole got lumped in there, same as Jack: Lambda 4T. Little Cesar Carbajal, the kid who could instantly count anything he could see, was also put in intelligence, which seemed to make Eddie even angrier.

The fives were the weapons. Josi said this was broken down into several categories, but the only one in the room was Laura.

It was a 3L, a sort of healer, who asked the question on everyone’s minds. “Does this mean we’re all going to be drafted?”

“We’re too young to be drafted,” Jack said. “Well, most of us are. Who here is eighteen or older?”

Laura and Josi were the only ones who raised their hands.

“See?” Jack said. “And girls don’t have to sign up for selective service. We’re not going to get drafted.”

“Maybe it’s in case we want to join up?” Laura said.

Eddie shook his head. “Who would want to join up after this?”

“I don’t blame them,” Laura said. “They said that the terrorists have this same virus, and they’re using it against our country—against America. I’m not just going to go back to school and the mall and pretend we’re not at war.”

“After what they did to you?” Eddie pressed.

“Don’t you think they were right to be nervous?” she said. “They didn’t know if we were terrorists. I wouldn’t trust me, if I were in their shoes. Why do you think they put these GPS trackers on our legs?” Laura pulled her leg up under her and tapped the ankle bracelet.

There was a pause, and then the 3L boy with the strange mechanical affinity pointed to his own bracelet. “They’re not GPS trackers.”

Everyone in the room looked at him. He was maybe sixteen, and extremely skinny and pale. “I’ve been messing with it. They’re not GPS. They’re bombs.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the room erupted in noise. Jack had to force himself to lower his hearing, block out the painful sound.

It was Laura who shouted everyone down. “Get a grip, people! Shut up and let the kid talk!”

He looked at her shyly but gratefully. “It’s a small explosive charge. Probably not enough to kill you, but it’d take off your foot. If you try to cut through the plastic, it will explode. And it can be detonated remotely.”

Eddie glared at Laura. “These are the people who you’re giving the benefit of the doubt?”

She stared back. “Yes. If you had a room of people who were potentially terrorists—who were human weapons that you couldn’t disarm—wouldn’t you take some kind of action to control them?”

Jack didn’t want to think about it. Instead he sat back and tried to block them out. He focused his attention elsewhere. Deodorant and cologne. He could still smell it, fainter, but present. He walked to the door and closed his eyes. The smell seemed to paint a picture in his mind, to leave a trail that filled spaces and marked objects.

The man had left their room and had gone left, his scent leaving a lingering picture of a narrow space—a hallway—before turning . . . was it to the right? Yes. To the right, down another hallway. There was a stronger scent there—a handprint on the wall, then another on a doorknob, and the man entered a large room where his scent spread to fill a much bigger space. Air vents were running through this room, but just churned his smell around, mixing it with the sage and dust of the outside air.

Jack could see it all—or smell it. It was like all his senses were blending together. He knew the shape of the halls by the way the remnants of cologne filled them. Jack knew, without a doubt, that he could walk directly to the man—with his eyes closed.

The man was still there. Jack listened. Water ran through pipes, electrical outlets hummed, as Jack retraced the path from him to the man. He could hear the air ducts in the man’s room—small, whirring, and metal, probably vents in the ceiling.

The man was flicking through the papers. He was marking them, the scratch of his pencil—no, a smoother sound; a pen—making notes every few seconds.

There was a sudden buzz and whir, which died down quickly, and soon the man began to type. Jack could hear each keystroke.

A hand touched Jack’s shoulder and he started. He spun to see the rest of the kids staring at him.

“What are you doing?” Josi asked.

“Listening,” Jack said. “He’s grading our tests.”