Recoil (7 page)

“What the heck’s he doing?” Mr. Johnson was now dropping shovels
full of dirt into the hole. He was working quickly; it would soon be filled up.
“It looks like a grave, like he’s burying hidden treasure,” I joked.

“He is, in a way,” said Robin. He put down his pencil and looked
out the window, sighing deeply.

“What do you mean?”

“That was Maisy.”

Maisy was the Johnson’s dog, a friendly golden retriever with a
gray muzzle, a loud bark and a perpetually wagging tail. She was one of the
very few pets left in our neighborhood.

Because of the danger of contagion, most people who wanted pets
had switched to animals that couldn’t get outside, couldn’t get infected and
couldn’t bite — tropical fish, seahorses, or reptiles like pet lizards which
were resistant to the virus. Or, of course, robots.
Robocats
came complete with shed-free, easy-clean fur and purring function.
RoboDogs
barked and did tricks like sitting and
back-flipping. Chatty Parrots repeated whatever you said. Mom was always a
little freaked out by the neighbors’ real live dog, and the fact that it was
allowed out into their yard several times a day to run around and do its
business really worried her.

“But, but, how did it die?” I asked, confused and beginning to
get concerned. “And why are they burying it in the yard?”

“She was really old. And I guess they’re burying her there
because they want to keep her close in some way,” said Robin, rubbing at the
dent the pencil had left in his finger.

“Mom needs to see this.”

“
Jinxy
, no, don’t —”

“Mom!” I called out loudly. “Come quick!”

Chapter 8

Overkill

“Jinx!” Robin thumped his notebook down hard on the seat
cushions. “What did you call her for? Now she’s going make a fat fuss. Their
poor old dog died, and they’re burying her. It’s not a federal offense!”

“Sorry to correct you, but I think it may well be,” I said, my
eyes still fixed on Mr. Johnson next door. He was patting down the earth on top
of the grave. “It’s definitely illegal. That dog could have died from the
plague — it could have infected them. Heck, it could have infected us!”

“You are
so
your mother’s daughter!” Robin’s look was scathing.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

Mom came running in, looking totally freaked out. She freaked out
easily.

I pointed out the window, ignoring the stink-eye Robin was giving
me, and explained what was happening.

“I can’t believe some people! When they know full well what could
happen.” Mom immediately snatched up Robin’s phone and called the hotline to
report the death. “Which is what they should have done themselves,” she said
when she’d supplied the authorities with all the details and hung up. She said
it a little defensively because Robin was glaring at both of us.

“You two are completely overreacting,” he said. “And you’re
causing real problems for the Johnsons.”

“That animal might well be infected. It needs to be disposed of
properly, Robin James, and you know it. Otherwise it could be a risk to all of
us,” said Mom.

“How? She’s dead! Is she going to turn into a vampire dog or a
werewolf?”

“When its corpse decays, the virus could get into the
groundwater.”

“Mom, we don’t get our water from a well in the back yard!”

“The contagion could still be spread —”

“A contagion it probably never even had,” Robin interrupted.

“—
if
something digs it up.”

“Like what?” Robin challenged.

“Like another dog — they do that, you know — or some foraging
critter. A raccoon or a coyote” — her voice rose because Robin was pulling a
contemptuous face and mouthing the phrase ‘foraging critter’ as if it was the
most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard — “or even a
rat!
The point is,
the laws are there for good reason, and this is against the law. And that,” she
said when Robin looked set to argue, “is the end of the discussion. The Fun Bus
will be here soon, get dressed please.”

“I am dressed,” said Robin.

“I meant, put on your suit and gloves and respirator, both of
you.” Mom stalked out, looking annoyed.

Robin snorted and rolled his eyes at me in disgust.

“She’s right, you know,” I said.

“She’s not. Nothing about this” — he swept a hand to indicate the
sealed window, the neighbor’s yard beyond, the protective gear lying waiting on
his bed — “is
right
.”

All three of us were suited up and waiting in the living room
when the Fun Bus’s horn sounded its usual perky tune. We were all tense — Mom
because she hated any of us leaving the safety of the house, Robin because he
was still angry that Mom had reported the neighbors, and me because I didn’t
much feel like seeing Bruce again.

Mom, Robin and I each took our turns in the
decon
unit, then emerged, blinking in the sunshine, and headed down the front path
toward the long Fun Bus parked in front of our house. Displayed on the side of
the bus was the familiar official advertisement about the need to repatriate
illegal immigrants to their countries of origin. In the photograph, a family,
perhaps Mexican or Puerto Rican, welcomed a long-lost member into their open
arms, above the slogan, “Support Immigration Reform, because families belong
together.”

But my gaze, along with Mom and Robin’s, and every person’s on
the bus, was fixed on the three official vehicles parked in the street in front
of the Johnsons’ front yard.

Two techs in full hazmat suits carried a sealed level 4 biohazard
bin to a white van, labeled
Purification Centre Disposal Unit
.
I guessed Maisy’s body was inside the bin, about to be taken off for testing
and incineration. The second vehicle was a police car. Its blue lights flashed
silently, while Mr. and Mrs. Johnson and their rosy-cheeked daughter were
escorted by more full-suited techs to the third vehicle, a minivan marked
Q-Bay
Transport
.

“Such overkill,” muttered Robin, turning toward the bus.

“It’s for their own safety,” said Mom. “And ours.”

I agreed with her — it was too dangerous to take chances with
something like this. But I also felt bad for the Johnsons, who were not in for
a fun time.

They would be kept isolated in quarantine until their test
results were confirmed. The blood samples took twelve days to culture, which
was a joke because, if you
had
contracted rat fever, you would be knocking on
death’s door by then, anyway. Until then, they were potential plague-spreading
M&Ms — rat fever Mike and
Marys
. Mom had told us
that the name came from someone called Typhoid Mary, an Irish cook who
immigrated to the States in the early 1900’s. She was a carrier of typhoid
fever, and although she was never sick herself, she’d infected scores of people
in the New York area before she was identified by public health authorities and
taken away to spend the rest of her life in isolation on North Brother Island —
the early-twentieth-century equivalent of Q-Bay.

Mrs. Johnson glared at us and shook her head as she was led to
the waiting transport, but Mr. Johnson looked merely resigned, or perhaps
defeated. Rosy-cheeks gave Robin a long look then trailed after her father. As
the doors of the Q-Bay transport closed behind them, we climbed onto the Fun Bus
and handed our social security cards to the hostess. She scanned their barcodes
into the automated attendance register, misted each of us lightly with a spray
from her
decon
aerosol can, and directed us to the
hand-sanitizer dispenser. Someone waved from the back of the bus. Recognizing
the short blond hair and heavily muscled frame of Bruce, I steered Robin and my
mother to free seats near the front instead.

The picnic started off bad enough, with the same old bland,
tasteless, sterilized food quickly slipped in under lifted masks, many of the
same neighbors commenting how I’d grown, and the same exchange of rumors and
stories about the war on the pandemic, all in the massive city park almost
completely deserted except for our group. But then it got worse.

Mom walked off to go chat to neighbors she knew, probably to dish
the dirt on the Johnsons or maybe to compare hairstyles. She was out of the
running for the award for most extravagant look. One of the women had hair
patterned with diagonal stripes all the colors of the rainbow, and she’d
continued the look on her face, with furry rainbow lash extensions merging into
vertical stripes of multicolored eye-paint stretching up over her eyelids and
brows, and onto her forehead. She looked like an image from my science
tutorial:
dispersal
of the light spectrum through a triangular prism.

Robin, still fuming, plonked himself under the shade of a tree
and stuck his nose into a thick book, and I was left alone on our picnic
blanket, lying in the warm sun with a protective arm over my eyes. This might
have been pretty good, actually, but Bruce took it as an invitation to join me.

“Hey, Blue, how
ya
doing?” he said and
plonked down next to me on the blanket.

I didn’t feel comfortable lying down next to him, but when I
stood up and said I was going for a walk to see the flowering dogwoods, he
invited himself along. I had no idea how to tell him he wasn’t welcome without
being horribly rude, so I said nothing. He walked beside me, complimenting my
hair and eyes and even my false lashes, and every time we came to a tree stump
or boulder, he offered to help me over. The park was eerily empty. There were
no ducks on the ponds, no dogs being taken for a walk, no children playing in
the open areas. Dogwoods glimmered in the sun like ghost trees, their stark,
dark wood stabbing through the masses of white blossoms.

The only interesting moment of the whole social came at the end,
when Bruce and I were making our way back to the bus.

“That was a great shot you had in the game, when you hit
Sarge
. Lucky.”

“I guess.”

“I’m looking forward to taking you on again.”

“How?” I said, looking at him directly for the first time. “Do we
get to play another game?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Your mom didn’t get a letter about you?”

“Not that I know of. Though she did say something about good news
that she’s planning to tell me tonight. A surprise of some kind. What do you
know?”

“I won’t say anything except that it’s super-cool. You’re going
to be maxed out by the news. When my folks told me — dude! I was blown away.”

“What? What is it?” I demanded, but Bruce would only tempt me
with hints about what he knew, and taunt me with what I didn’t, all the way
back to the bus.

The minute I was in the seat next to my mother, I turned to her
and said firmly, “Mom, you tell me that good news, right here, right now.”

“What news?” said Robin, turning around from the row in front to
face
us.
His mood had improved now that the social was
coming to a close.

Mom smiled at both of us. “I was going to save it for later, when
we have our brownies.”

“Mother, now!”

“Tell us,” Robin chimed in.

“No one else is supposed to know,” she whispered. “I’m not even
sure I can bring myself to let you go.”

Robin and I pulled our heads in close to hear her. “The good
news,
Jinxy
, is…” She reached into her pocket, pulled
out a printed email and scanned it until she found the part she was looking
for, then she read it out to us very softly, “Is that based on your performance
in The Game and the simulation prize, you have been selected as a recruit for
the Advanced Skills Training Program at the Advanced Specialized Training
Academy, ASTA. On the first of May, if you so desire, you will begin your
training to become a member of their first ever elite sniper squad.”

“I’m going to be a sniper?” I whispered back, stunned. “What —”

“Hold on, let me finish,” said Mom, trying to find her place on
the letter. “Ah, here it is: ‘to be deployed in the elimination of dangerous
rodents’.”

Robin cackled with laughter.

“You’re not going to be a sniper,
Jinxy
,
you’re going to be a ratter!”

Chapter 9

Pirate

I sat in the black Hummer, facing its new occupant, intensely
aware of many things all at once. His long, lean frame and dark-mahogany hair —
worn a little too long, so that the end bits curled against his neck. The
silver ring threaded through one of the dark brows above eyes the color of
slate, eyes which crinkled at the corners. The heat warming my cheeks. And an
irrepressible urge to smile back building inside me.

He was wearing the lightest of protection — thin gloves and a
basic surgical-style gauze mask which I knew from Mom’s lectures on the subject
would stop only particles and droplets coming at you from the front, and did
little for airborne viruses. I could — almost — see the edges of his mouth
smiling beyond the mask’s loose-fitting sides. Risky stuff.

This morning, I had been determined not to be the only person
wearing way more protection than anyone else, so I’d smuggled an E97 mask in my
pocket to swap out before I got into the transport. I’d already said my
goodbyes to Robin and my mother separately.

“Robin, please keep an eye on Mom. I know she’ll worry about me,
but don’t let her get too anxious or, you know, go … dark. Again. Come out of
your cave occasionally and spend some time with her, okay? Promise me.”

“Sure.” He gave me a tight hug.

“And please do the waste incineration for her.” The chore of
lugging the contents of the bio-disposal bins to the basement and feeding them
into the incinerator had always been mine. “You know how it freaks her out when
she has to touch that stuff.”

“Don’t worry about us,
Jinxy
. Go and
have fun with your rats.” He was grinning.

“I totally intend to have fun,” I said, ignoring his tease.
“That’s why I need to know you’ll take care of Mom.”

Downstairs, my mother made final adjustments to my respirator,
zipped my PPE suit right up to my throat, and tucked a bottle of hand sanitizer
and a pack of antiseptic wipes into my pocket. Her eyes were anxious even as
she smiled down at me — the child who was Daddy’s little girl but who for
months had made Mom grilled cheese sandwiches or tuna salad for dinner, brought
her water to take her meds, nagged Robin to get to school on time, and later,
to log on for his cyber-tutorials. To her, I was still a little kid who liked
Captain Crunch and watching old reruns of
The Simpsons
. And yet,
apparently, I could shoot, and I was leaving home to learn how to shoot real
live plague rats.

“To think my daughter is going to have such an important role in
the war against the plague. I’m so proud of you!”

The words, “Your father would be so proud of you,” hovered
between us, but they remained unspoken. My mother never spoke about Dad, and if
Robin or I mentioned him, her eyes would cloud over and fill with tears. When
the two of us wanted to talk about Dad and the days before the plague, we did
so in private.

“Don’t be too soft on Robin, Mom. If you let him, he’ll dream all
day and read all night. Make sure he does his schoolwork and finishes the
semester, and encourage him to do more programming units on The Game — he’s
really good and could turn it into a career, unlike poetry. And he needs hugs
every day, even when he pretends he’s too old for them.”

“I know what I’m doing! I’ve been a mother for sixteen years,
Jinx, I’m hardly likely to stop now.”

You did before.

“Of course,” I reassured her. “And don’t worry about me. I’ll be
perfectly safe.”

“I’ll always worry. It’s part of my job description as a mother.
I suppose you’d better go now, they’re waiting for you.”

“Love you,” I called to them.

“More!” they shouted back.

As soon as I was in the
decon
unit with
my back turned to Mom and Robin, I swapped my half-face respirator for the
lighter, form-fitted mask. When the
decon
unit door
clicked open, I hurried off to the transport, not turning to wave. I didn’t
want my mother to see that I was hardly out the door and already I was breaking
her rules.

It looked like the same twelve-seater Hummer, though its sides
were a plain, glossy black with no
PlayState
logo. I
was surprised to see that the official standing beside the open door, holding a
clipboard and pen, was Fiona, one of the instructors from the simulation.

“Hi! How come you’re here? Do you also work at the Academy?” I
asked, confused.

“Stow your bag,” she said, pointing to the trailer behind the
vehicle.

As I hoisted my luggage into the trailer, I noticed that many of
the other bags bore airline tags. This transport must already have collected
new recruits from the airport. The recruits starting their training with me today
probably came from all over the Southern Sector.

Fiona closed and locked the lid, then held out the clipboard and
pen to me.

“As you were informed in the documentation sent to you, you need
to sign a non-disclosure confidentiality agreement about today’s proceedings.
Also, before you get inside, please note that there’s to be no talking on the
transport to the Academy.”

It struck me as a little extreme, but there must be a good reason
for it, so I made no objection as I signed the form and then climbed inside.

Bruce had seated himself up front. I noticed that he had shaved
some sort of geometric pattern into the strip of buzz-cut hair above his ears.
He gestured to the seats opposite him, which were impossible to avoid since all
the rest, except for the spot right next to him, were taken. It was awkward,
being in one of the two seats that faced everyone else, including Bruce. Why
did I keep finding myself in this hot spot?

Ten sets of eyes stared back at me — from faces that were black,
white and brown, male and female, with a variety of different styles and colors
of hair. One boy near the back had hair cut into a triangular scarlet afro. It
was hard to tell because of the masks, but I guessed they were all a couple of
years older than me. I’d made a good call on the face-mask because only one
person, a slim Asian boy with a ponytail, was wearing a half-face respirator.

“Do you know if
Leya
is also coming?” I
asked Bruce. I was keen to make a friend of her.

Fiona spun around from her seat up front and shushed me. “I told
you — no talking.”

I made a placatory gesture with my hands.

We didn’t collect
Leya
. I hoped this
was because she lived clear across town, and this transport was collecting
recruits only from our side of town, and not because she hadn’t made the cut.
We made one more stop en route to the Academy — outside a small house in a
low-income neighborhood closer to the center. It looked like a scene out of a
movie from before. There was an old-fashioned wooden swing-bench on the front
porch, a low picket fence with peeling white paint out front, a basketball hoop
mounted on the wall above the garage, and a blue-and-green toy pedal wagon
lying on its side in the short driveway fringed with crimson azaleas. Did
anyone actually swing on that seat or play in that yard?

Several people came out the front door at once — didn’t they have
a
decon
unit? —
a
tall
teenage boy carrying a big, black duffel bag in one hand and a cat in the
other, a shorter young man holding the leads of two dogs who were madly barking
and leaping about, a much younger girl in an orange dress, and a middle-aged
couple whom I assumed were their parents. The tall boy handed the cat to the
little girl and then hugged each of the family in turn, even kissing the girl
and the woman. I stared at them, shocked. None of them, except the boy now
striding toward the Hummer, was wearing a mask or gloves.

He signed the form Fiona handed him, but when she warned him of
the no-talking rule, he lifted his eyebrows in surprise.

“Really? Why’s that?”

Fiona eyed him for a moment before sniffing then replying,
“Because this transport includes recruits from across different … specialties.
And you don’t yet have security clearance to hear about them.”

“
Okaay
,” he said slowly.

Bruce craned his neck to see the new recruit, then his eyes
registered the empty seat next to me and he swung himself territorially across
into it, sitting right up against me and gesturing to the newcomer, when he
climbed inside, to take the seat opposite us.

Which was fine with me, because now, as the vehicle pulled off, I
got to study the smiling gray eyes, the wayward mahogany hair, and the dark
tone of his skin. I couldn’t decide if he was naturally olive-skinned or just
deeply tanned, but together with the silver ring piercing his left brow, it
made him look like a pirate. Black-and-white checkerboard sneakers stuck out
below fraying denims — alone amongst all of us, he wasn’t wearing a disposable
PPE suit. He was wearing faded Levis and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt printed
with the graphic of a stick figure who had a single, vertical line for an eye,
and something written below. As I leaned forward to read the message, the
Hummer bounced roughly over a pothole and I lurched forward almost into his
lap. He caught me around the arms, steadying me. Bruce grabbed a handful of the
back of my suit and snatched me back into my seat beside him.

“Would you like to sit next to me” — the pirate gestured to the
space beside him — “or perhaps in my lap?” His voice was deep with a slight
lilt to it, and one eye twitched as he spoke. Unless … Had he just winked at
me?

Fiona turned from her seat up front and scowled at me. No fair —
I hadn’t been the one talking.

“No talking,” she snapped.

“You’re kidding, right?” the new guy said. “We were only playing
around. I wasn’t talking about anything sensitive. Well,” he added with another
wink at me, “not
security-
sensitive.”

“I never kid,” Fiona said.

Looking at her fierce frown, I believed her.

“And this isn’t a game,” she added.

The pirate raised his eyebrows at me. Then he leaned forward and
stretched his shirt out from his chest so I could read the words printed there:
“
It’s
all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
”

Then I did smile. Actually, I laughed. And so did he.