Outbreak (3 page)

“No!” Harper breathes.

I glance down. There’s a chain threaded through the door handles and a heavy-duty padlock holding it in place. 

She wheels around and tries another door, which swings open easily. 

“Come on!” she whispers.

I follow her inside. The room is cramped and chilly and reeks of plastic and mildew. I only have a second to survey our surroundings before the door slides closed and thrusts us into total darkness.

Most of the available floor space is occupied by tall metal shelves filled with rubber bins and stacks of gray uniforms. Plastic crates, defunct workout equipment, and overflowing bins of ration packets are scattered haphazardly between the rows.

This must be the supply room.

I take one step forward and trip over something tall and wide, barely saving myself from a face-plant into a metal shelf.

“Shh!” Harper hisses.

I roll my eyes.

Then I hear a door creak open and the nearby rumble of a dolly. Muffled voices float through the wall from the other side, and there’s a loud scraping sound as somebody shifts something heavy.

“They’re in the weapons room,” Harper breathes.

“I kind of wish we were in there and they were in here,” I mutter. We wouldn’t have to worry about being caught if we were trapped in a room full of assault rifles.

But before I can voice the joke to Harper, a door to my right swings open, and a triangle of light spills onto the floor. 

My stomach drops. The weapons room and the supply room are connected, and someone is coming in here.

The Operations worker flips a switch, and the lights flicker on one by one. There’s just a single shelving unit between me and him, and I’m barely concealed by a tub of water bags.

I try to make my labored breathing as quiet as possible, but it still seems loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear. The worker moves down the row of supplies, and a head of messy brown hair appears.

The worker is preoccupied with a shelf of ammunition. He’s reading the labels on the crates carefully, and I can tell this guy’s never loaded a gun in his life.

Finally, he seems to find what he’s looking for and turns to grab his dolly. I see his ear and then the flesh of his cheek right before a black blur leaps forward and clobbers him on the back of the head.

The guy was still turning when he was struck, and I see the light leave his dark brown eyes. He collapses onto the ground like a sack of potatoes, and I gape openmouthed at the spot where he was just standing.

Harper is hovering behind him, holding a small corroded barbell plate between her hands. She looks horrified.

“Oh my god,” she mutters. “Did I kill him?”

“Probably!”

I bend down to check the guy’s pulse. It takes me a minute to find it, and I let out a breath of relief when I feel the steady rhythm of blood beneath my finger.

“He’s alive.”

“I just panicked!” she whispers, glancing over her shoulder at the door to the weapons room. “I think the other guy left.”

“Shit!”
Harper just knocked a guy unconscious!

“What do we do?” she splutters.

“I don’t know! Leave?”

I can’t believe she just knocked somebody out and expects
me
to come up with a plan.

“I had to,” she says, as though she’s reading my mind. “If he saw you, he would have blown our whole cover. Constance would have dragged us in . . . tortured us . . .”

I nod, but my brain is still screaming
What the fuck?

Just when I think things can’t get any more ridiculous, Harper bends down and tugs on the guy’s limp arm.

“Can you help me?”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting him up,” she says, as though this is obvious. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“The hell we can’t! It’s not like he’s dead.”

“Do you really want Constance questioning why one of their workers is missing? And what’s going to happen when they find him?”

“I don’t think he saw me.”

“We’re wasting time!” she groans. “Just help me!”

I’m still staring at her like she’s crazy — because she is — but I toss my bag in the corner and bend down to get a grip on Mr. Nosey. 

The guy weighs a ton. He keeps slipping off my shoulder, and when I yank his arm more securely around my neck, it feels too weak and flimsy to support his weight.

Together, Harper and I drag him out of the supply room and down the dark tunnel. I’m already sweating bullets, and my hand hurts from holding the guy’s wrist in a death grip. If I loosen my hold on him for even a second, he’s going to slip right out of my arms like a bag of Jell-O. 

Miraculously, we don’t encounter another living soul as we make our way back to the Underground platform, but I’m starting to panic again. It’s hard enough to sneak onto the train without being seen, and now we have an extra 170 pounds of dead weight slowing us down.

Harper carefully transfers her half of the unconscious guy to me, and his mass seems to triple. My knees shake under the weight, and she checks to see if the coast is clear.

“Now!” she breathes, bending down to take some of the weight back.

I feel no immediate relief, so she must just be holding his hand or something. But we start moving, and somehow my legs manage to propel us forward.

I don’t look around. I don’t watch where I’m going. I’m pretty sure I black out somewhere between the Recon tunnel and the train, but when I become aware of my surroundings again, I’m lifting up my foot to step onto the car and depositing the Operations worker behind a stack of crates.

I breathe a loud sigh of relief and try to straighten my crushed spine. My shoulders and back are still screaming, but Harper looks energized and alert. She definitely wasn’t carrying her fair share.

“Come on,” she says, moving toward the end of the car.

“Huh?”

“You want to ride back to the compound with him? What if he wakes up?”

Point taken. He’s going to have one hell of a headache — possibly brain damage — from Harper’s psychotic assault.

The voices are back on the platform again, and I follow her frantically to the next car. The workers haven’t loaded any cargo in here yet, so we keep moving until we find one with a few stacks of crates to hide behind.

The workers’ voices are drawing nearer. There’s a loud
clang
as somebody rolls a dolly onto the car, and the dust bunnies near my feet shift as the worker deposits some more crates in front of mine.

My heart is pumping so hard that I can’t hear anything except the blood throbbing in my ears, and when somebody slams our car door shut, I nearly cry in relief.

“We made it,” Harper whispers.

I lean back against the side of the car and wait for my cardiac episode to end. “Yeah.”

We don’t speak again until the last car door slams and the train lurches beneath us. I feel the wheels grinding along the track as it slowly picks up speed, and I wait with bated breath for someone to burst in at the last minute and throw us off the train.

No one does.

As the empty platform flashes by and we’re swallowed by the dark tunnel, I expect to feel a sweet rush of relief that we’re leaving 119 behind.

But with an unconscious Operations worker lying two doors down, Constance gunning for Harper’s death, and a compound full of rotting corpses, all I can think is that our problems have just begun.

three

Eli

It’s strange to think that I’ve seen more of my brother in the past twenty-four hours than in the past thirteen years combined.

I can’t stop watching Constance’s surveillance footage of the Fringe. It’s the only concrete evidence that a member of my family is still alive — that I didn’t imagine Owen.

His cameo doesn’t even last thirty seconds, but there’s no doubt it’s him. The crooked L-shaped scar on his left bicep is a dead giveaway — a souvenir from the time he clipped a tree on his dirt bike. 

The rest of his features are hidden in shadow, but I can just make out the suspicious arch of his brow and the hard set of a jaw that reminds me of Dad.

He and I could be twins, but we’re very different people. We got separated the night our parents were murdered, when I was eleven and Owen was thirteen.

Three years later, I was brought into the compound, while Owen was left out on the Fringe to be raised by drifters.

All those years of hard living have taken a toll on him. Now that he’s an adult, he’s tormented by suspicion and determined to bring down the compounds.

I glance at the time blinking in the corner of the wall screen. It’s oh-seven hundred, which means I’ve been here all night. Nobody uses the Recon surveillance room after hours, so I knew I’d be safe. 

It’s nothing compared to Constance’s setup — just a glorified closet crowded with monitors. The walls are covered in faded maps of nearby towns, and a leaderboard in the corner of every screen details the date an area was last cleared of drifters. 

On screen, I watch Owen stalk out of the frame. Then I smack the keyboard again and rewind the footage.

As far as I know, this is the only video Constance has of Owen, and it seems strange to me that he would get caught on camera after living like a ghost all these years.

The drifters are planning something — something huge — and Owen’s appearance makes it seem as though he’s taunting the compound. He’s had the same smug expression since we were kids:
come and get me, motherfuckers.

He couldn’t have known
I’d
be watching this footage. Recon relies on heat mapping to gauge how many warm bodies are holed up in the towns surrounding the compound. I didn’t even know that Constance’s reach extended to the radiation-soaked desert — not that I’m surprised. There seems to be no limit to what they’re capable of.

All the public areas within the compound and dozens of compartments are under surveillance. They used my computer to spy on me and drained Harper’s bank account to keep her from leaving. They probably know where I am right now.

Owen moves out of sight, and I pause the recording again. I’m just about to rewind the footage when a blurry sign behind him catches my eye.

I zoom in on the image and squint at the writing. It’s one of those pre–Death Storm novelty signs that reads, “Hog Parking Only — Violators are Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’.” 

I
know
that sign. I’ve
seen
that sign.

I hastily pull up the file of my deployment history and pound in my password. I remember the most recent deployments, but the Green Valley mission is a little fuzzy. At least I
think
that was the town with the biker bar.

I didn’t leave any descriptive notes about the town itself — just the number of drifters I killed and their locations. Luckily, the person who visited after me was more thorough. He even took a few photos of the town’s major landmarks.

Sure enough, I see the biker bar in all its rough-neck glory: weathered wood siding, the rattlesnake emblem burned into the wood, and an outdated sign advertising Mud Wrestling Mondays.

Suddenly, the door to the surveillance room creaks. I hit “escape” to hide the files and spin around in my chair.

I’ve got an excuse on the tip of my tongue, but it’s only Miles. His towering tattooed frame fills the doorway in an intimidating way, but I’m relieved to see him.

“Finally!” he snaps. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“What?”

“It’s almost oh-eight hundred. You’re gonna be late for training.”

“It can’t be.” I rub my eyes and glance at the time again. Sure enough, I’ve pissed away another forty-five minutes, but it felt like five. “Shit.”

Miles is staring at me as though I’ve gone nuts. “Have you been here all night?”

“I . . . yeah.”

“Never knew you to pull an all-nighter for Jayden,” he says, a suspicious edge to his voice. “What the hell is going on?”

“Nothing, I just . . .”

I trail off so I don’t have to make up an excuse. I know I shouldn’t tell Miles about Owen — or that Harper ran away to 119 — but all those secrets are weighing on my mind. I’ve never really needed anyone, but right now, I desperately want to unload my troubles on Miles.

“What’s going on?” he prompts.

Miles may be more of a brawler than a strategist in the ring, but he’s one of the most intuitive people I’ve ever met.

I let out a tired breath and swivel around to pull up the footage of Owen. I rewind and hit “enter,” and the recording starts to play.

Owen’s appearance is over before Miles really has a chance to focus, and when he leaves the frame, Miles looks more confused than before. 

“What am I supposed to be looking at? Is this ours?”

“No. It’s surveillance footage from Constance.”

“Those assholes have surveillance cameras on the Fringe?”

“Yeah.”

He swears. “And they’ve just been sitting on this information the entire time? We could have
used
this.”

If Miles weren’t my only real friend, I’d be scared shitless. He’s terrifying on his best day, and right now, he looks furious.

“That’s not what I wanted to show you.” 

I hit rewind and play the footage again. He watches the recording over my shoulder, and I freeze the video and point at Owen. “Look like anyone you know?”

“How can you tell? I can’t even see his face.”

“That’s my brother.”

There’s a long pause.

“Huh?”

“My brother . . . Owen.”

For a moment, Miles stands frozen. He’s staring at the screen in deep concentration, and I realize I only mentioned Owen once — back when we were kids in the Institute.

“The brother who was killed the night your parents were murdered?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“He’s . . . He’s
alive
?”

I nod slowly. Hell, I can hardly believe it myself.

“Shit!”

“Yeah.”

“Wait . . . is he a drifter?”

“What else would you call someone who lives out on the Fringe?”