Plagued: Book 1 (4 page)

Negatives were encouraged to have children early, married or not. Women – any woman, not just Negatives – were entitled to generous subsidies and childcare. The childcare was to keep them in the work force. Industry and business could only be automated to a certain degree. The world needed people. Lots of people. But at the same time, it couldn't spare workers. Even Eloise spent six hours a day, three days a week, at the power plant in Mountain View, working on the power grid allotment boards. The self-employed, those who had finished their service or were too old for the draft, were required to contribute eighteen hours a week to general welfare businesses like power, water, sanitation, and infrastructure. Other workers only had to volunteer two, four-hour shifts a week.

The show was interrupted by a live segment on the upcoming Coronation. The world was excited. England was going to crown a new monarch. A prince had been found from the Tudor line. Well, they'd made him a prince. Many Tudor descendants carried the Rh negative strain. Or so the news said. England had been without a monarch for nearly three years. Now, that would change. It was just the sort of feel good story the media could fasten on. Every person with a television knew about young Prince Philip, soon to be King Philip. Only nineteen. Never going to set the world on fire with his keen understanding, but who cared? He was handsome and personable and
single
.

The Coronation was set for November first. Celebrations were planned all over America. England, after all, was one of their closest allies. Palo Alto was hosting a public Fan Fest on the first with big screens set up downtown, entertainment, food, and fireworks in the evening.

Even Sky had a t-shirt emblazoned with the Barbary Lion statues from the National Gallery, the British flag, and Philip's name. Eloise bought it for her at the Farmer's Market. Both of them listened raptly to the update. Chattering about who would eventually become his queen.

Once it finished, Eloise asked, “Did you talk to your mom today?”

“No. Time zone drama. We texted though. She says it is never
not
hot in New Persia and she is tired of sweating.”

“What about Kara?”

Sky glanced up. “No, again. Captain America and I have not talked for awhile, which is fine by me.”

She expected a rebuke from her aunt. Kara was her only sibling and sisters are supposed to love each other.

Instead, her aunt sighed. “She
is
an egotistical pain in the butt. It's not just me, right?”

“Totally!” Sky agreed.

Captain Kara Christensen was much too busy with her ambitions to be bothered engaging in casual chats with her little sister. At twenty, she was one of the youngest Captains in the regiment and the girl planned on making major before she was thirty. She certainly looked the part. Tall, blond, with striking good looks, long legs, and perfect proportions. It wasn't that Sky didn't love her, she did. Only Kara loved herself a lot more. When Mom – her personal cheering squad – wasn't around, Kara had little interest in coming home. Apparently Sky's ego-massaging skills were inadequate.

Maybe if they'd had similar interests it would have been different. Sky thought of herself as an introverted-extrovert or an extroverted-introvert depending on the day. She needed just a couple of close friends, video games, music, movies, and at least one TV series to fixate on and she was a happy girl.

Kara was exhaustingly social. Zeroing in on how each person could serve her needs. Connections, not companions. At least that was Sky's take on it.

Kara didn't need Sky and she didn't need Kara, and Sky was okay with that.

In fact, all she really wanted to think about right now was the very delicious Hugo St. James.

Chapter 4

Blood check

“
Rebuild. Repopulate. Renew! For you, and you and you..
.”

The public service billboard at the school bus stop sang cheerfully as the students triggered the motion activated sensor and the disinfectant fan blew everyone out the doors. The jingle followed Skylar along the sidewalk to the school entrance.

“Rebuild. Repopulate. Renew,” resonated deeply for most Negatives. Especially re-populate. Birthrates had plummeted for other blood types. So many people didn't want to bring babies into the world since fifty percent wouldn't reach their fifth birthday and another twenty-five percent after that could be gone by high school. Not very inspiring odds. She had forty people in her eleventh-grade class. The biggest class in nearly ten years, the teachers said. They were proud of those numbers. There were only eighteen in the senior class, one year ahead of her. Half of them Negatives.

Palo Alto had been lucky. Not only for Negatives. The transfusion technology keeping Positives alive was pioneered at University Hospital nearby and perfected in labs around Silicon Valley. Early successes from control groups kept many survivors clustered in the area. Though that wasn't the only reason people migrated there.

Silicon Valley had remained relatively calm and civilized -- beyond the flash of violence during the PharmCon riots – throughout the plagues. The area had a highly educated, ambitious demographic that had no desire to see chaos take over. Technology was not so labor intensive, so manpower was diverted towards farms in the vast San Fernando and San Joaquin valleys during the worst of the die-offs. The military maintained a calm and democratic presence for much of this part of the state. For the few years that federal control was only sporadic, they worked with town councils constructing centralized warehousing of non-perishables from the superstores and separate warehouses for cold storage to conserve power. Corporations were in no position to protest this sudden shift from capitalism to socialism since no one knew if civilization would even survive.

Working on an even/odd system of social security numbers, teams were organized for both harvesting and supply chain logistics all year round. An equitable system of rationing-- volunteering meant you earned points – kept real hunger rare in northern California, unlike so many other states.

Everyone knew the Bay Area was better off than LA. That city burned for years. Sky had seen films  in Tactical. Maybe they'd just bulldoze the vast empty suburbs, plow them under and turn the valley back to farm land. Like it was before. Other cities the government just burned with phosphorus bombs. The best way to deal with the rot. There was still a lot of popular resistance to bombing L.A. like that. Sky couldn't understand why.

Nowadays capitalism was firmly back in place, the smartest corporations had survived and adapted, and the blood lottery spread the chances of recovery more evenly around the country.

Sky loved her school. Loved
going
to school instead of sitting in front of a computer screen for online classes. Redwood High was laid out in a Spanish Mission style. Adobe colored with a traditional red-tiled roof and tall campanile bell tower.

Sky made her first of two daily stops at the secure lockers by the bus stop: One to drop off her weapons; one to pick them up. The heavily armed guard scanned the bar code on her neck that gave her and other Tactical trainees access to the gear lockers. Behind him, two more soldiers stood watch in bullet-proof compartments. The precautions were necessary in case of an attack by Victims Army terrorists looking to steal weapons.

She threw her heavy duffle bag inside, stepped back through the metal detector and was re-scanned out. Weapons were not allowed on school grounds, of course. Every piece of equipment emitted a digital signature that could be tracked down to the square foot. Sensors all around the school automatically scanned for weapons technology, metal or plastic. Not that anything had ever happened. Not since the plague, at least. The adults said a lot of the crazy seemed to have died out of America with most of the population. Even the Victims Army had never targeted a school.

The school rambled over a full acre and had stretched even those boundaries back in the day. Now, Redwood High needed only the two floors of the main building and a gym. Inside, the floor and lockers were an ugly industrial gray green. The walls, though, were a succession of murals painted by each class since the high school re-opened four years ago.

Having a real school was so much better. It felt normal. Everyone young and old wanted to feel normal again. However they interpreted that. For Sky, it was school and bells and noisy voices full of life like she'd seen in movies and on TV throughout her childhood.

“McShane!” She called, seeing the tall boy ahead. “Chase, hey! Wait.”

She ran to catch up with him as he walked into their homeroom class, tugging on the sleeve of his hoodie. “Hey, thanks for last night.”

He was a good looking boy with creamy brown skin. He kept his tightly curled hair short which brought out his broad cheekbones and signature big smile. His brows came together in a troubled frown. “What do you mean?”

“You know. You stepped in after I got smacked down by the goblins. Probably saved my life.”

“Not me.” He dropped his backpack next to a metal and wooden desk all the way in the back. “I was supposed to be behind Daphne but the Sarge sent me to check out a reading from the flybots. I wasn't even close.”

“No,” Sky protested. “I saw a boy. Bending over me after I went down. He said I was going to be okay. He took off my helmet. You were the only guy besides the sergeant in the field last night. Raj didn't come on patrol. So it
had
to be you.”

“Nope, not me.” He threw himself into the chair and pulled out his tablet PC for class. “You must have gotten hit pretty hard.”

Confused, Sky found her own seat. She'd been
sure
it was Chase. Who else could it have been?

The teacher came in, everyone's tablet flickered into life, and the school day began.

Rickey found her in the cafeteria at lunchtime, rolling up in his wheelchair and spinning several wheelies. The people around them clapped. Rickey could make his chair do just about anything.

“Hey, how are you? Is your head better?”

She rubbed the sore spot on her temple. “Mostly. Thanks to some prescription pain killers. That goblin knocked me flat on my butt. Thought he had me for sure.”

“Heard you kicked his ass. Shot him dead.”

She shook her head, the events of last night still jumbled and unclear. “Not me. I got the two who were running. Did you find the bodies?”

He nodded. “Sarge did. He and Chase bagged and tagged them. Goblins for sure.”

They moved into line and picked up a couple of trays to slide along the metal rack.

“Sky, are you angry I didn't come to the hospital with you after patrol?”

She play-punched him on the arm. “Don't be stupid. You had to lock down the data in the Comm Van. Besides, who
wants
to go to the hospital.
Gawd
, I'm so hungry.”

Lunch was her favorite time of the day because there were Rickey and the Mathews twins, some of her other squad members and food. Rickey was Negative, like her and sort of a genius. So
not
like her. Their families were friends from the plague days and they'd grown up playing together.

You couldn't describe Rickey as handsome. Brown hair, brown eyes, an average sort of nose and mouth. Everything in its proper place. His expressive features, though, and his brilliantly bright, funny character gave him a charm that far surpassed much better looking boys. Once he started talking, it was hard to look at anyone else.

Rickey wasn't paralyzed. His congenital spinal defect made it impossible for his lower body to support itself completely. Braces and crutches let him hobble along upright, but he preferred the chair for speed and mobility. He only wore the braces at home, to keep his muscles in condition. All that would change once he got his new mobile legs after graduation. A lightweight exoskeleton that would allow him to walk and run. For now, just because he was crippled didn't mean he was exempt from service. Nor would he want to be. He'd adapted and used his smarts to handle field communications, robot wrangling and tracking from the mobile operations van that shadowed them on patrol.

Once they got into high school, he had special advanced placement classes in science and math so lunch was their only time to hang out during the week until Tactical training. The cafeteria served good food. Not, she'd been told, how it used to be. Lunch ladies with hair nets and dead vegetables and mystery meat. Redwood High had a salad bar and a choice of two hot entrees. The cafetria was bright and airy with big old-fashioned leaded windows from the original building. Instead of plastic and metal furniture, the students ate at long wooden tables big enough to seat ten or twelve. The chairs were wood as well, all mismatched, so it looked more like a restaurant than institutional dining. The lights, too, were hanging Spanish-style chandeliers.

Behind the counter was a mural painted last year by art students from all the classes showing the old Spanish Missions along the northern Californian coast. Sky and the squad worked together on Mission San Juan Batista. Every day when she came in for lunch, she felt very proprietorial over their corner of the mural.

Sky loaded her plate with meat and vegetables. What with the rigorous physical training and lugging her gear around on patrol, she didn't have to worry much about calories.

“Hey, can you reach the pasta?” Rickey asked. “I
told
them to stop putting it at the back.”

Sky piled the plate with spaghetti and smothered it in meat sauce for him.

“Thanks. We just officially finished that online training session for the new hack on intercepting cell phone calls this morning. The thing was so simple, I figured it out last week after just one session. I am so badass.”

“Interesting stuff?”

“Cool. Very cool. Nasty bit of engineering. I love it!” He gave her a wicked grin. “With a bit of fiddling, I can hack into cell phone calls and texts. Don't you want to know what
they're
saying? I've collected all sorts of sound bytes on file from all kinds of people. Including them.”

'Them' meant Andrea Goodman, Thomas Raines, and the rest of the Negative Seniors. Even with such a small school, Redneck Juniors and Seniors didn't mix.

“
No,
” she sneered. “I don't
care
what they are talking about. Why would you?”

“Maybe we could get some insight on the aptitude tests. They'll take them after graduation, during winter break.”

Sky rolled her eyes. “Don't lie. Like you care about aptitude tests. You just want to hear your crush Thomas' voice on the line to Andrea and pretend he's telling you how sexy you are and how much he
wants
you right here, right now!”

“Shut up!” He bumped her with his chair wheels.

She bumped him back. “No,
you shut up
. And you
know
it's true, Rickey.”

“Shut up. And yes, it is.”

They both laughed. Rickey wanted the tall, tan, gorgeous Thomas to be secretly gay. Thomas, however, refused to stray from his girl-chasing ways and turn that perfectly chiseled jaw in Rickey's direction.

“You know you can get into a lot of trouble for hacking calls like that,” she felt honor-bound to point out.

He made a fake innocent face, giving her expert puppy-dog eyes. “Oh, but officer, I didn't know what was going on. The technology is
so
hard and I am so young.”

She laughed again.

“Out of my way mortal,” he declared swiveling his chair away from the counter.

She backed up so he could move and ran into someone with her tray.

“
Ow!
”

She looked up and saw Hugo St. James. He leaned over to rub his knee.

“Sorry, sorry. My bad,” she apologized.” Did I hurt you?”

He dropped his hand. “No, I'm fine. Nothing.”

“Really? Because you look like it hurts. Wasn't that the pants leg with the blood on it?”

Last night he'd told her he brushed up against something. She'd smelled the blood, though. No Positive brushes up against blood without freaking out. Blood Plague could be carried by bodily fluids. Maybe he'd hurt himself and just didn't want to say.

He made a face. “What a wimp I must seem. And my knee is fine. More importantly, how's your head?” He looked at her temple. “That's a nasty bump.”

“Let's just say me and my bottle of ibuprofen are like this.” She set her tray on the rack to hold up two fingers crossed on one hand. “Very close.”

“I hope it doesn't ache too terribly. May I say your hair looks very pretty down like that? I hadn't realized it was so long. You often wear it pulled back at school.”

She didn't know quite how to reply. He knew how she wore her hair. That delighted and terrified her at the same time. He was very cute and she, like most of the girls at Redwood High, had been admiring him since he arrived. Admiring from afar and standing there
talking
to him, were two very different emotional dynamics. Her mouth went dry.