Immunity Index Page 16

“Stay home.” She hung up.

  She turned on the intercom to talk to the two employees upstairs: “There’s a public health emergency, but you know that. You can go home if you want. But if you want to stay, I’d appreciate that.”

  “Is it still double pay?” Old Man Tito asked.

  “Yep. Says so right here on my screen.”

  “Then let’s get cleaning.”

  What they needed was more cleaning equipment and robots, and that wasn’t going to happen.

  Delivery services also wanted cars. Unless they were for medical supplies, she put them at the back of the line, which meant afternoon at the earliest.

  She returned to her desk. Upstairs, Donella and Old Man Tito chatted as they worked. The intercom was still on.

  “It’s Sino cold,” Donella said.

  “No one’s saying that.”

  “No one wants to start a panic.”

  “Too late.”

  A few minutes later, Berenike checked again and found no new news. It felt like a long time had passed. Old Man Tito had been working for ten hours. Berenike had put out a request for workers. She got two replies, two more than she expected.

  The next call was identified as the Milwaukee Office of Emergency Management.

  “I have to explain something difficult,” the woman said. “We’re going to commandeer your company’s services.”

  “How bad are things?”

  “I need to stress the importance of this.”

  “My father died of that cold last night. It was … I just want to know.”

  “I’m so sorry—”

  “I’m saying I understand. You can have us. I’m just wondering how much trouble we’re in. Our customers are in a panic.” Berenike gripped the countertop, bracing for the answer.

  “We honestly don’t know. This is growing exponentially. I don’t want to—”

  “I’ll help. The company says not to, but I will.” Helping would be the biggest fuck you she’d ever been able to give it in her whole life.

  “Thank you for that.”

  Berenike thought a moment. “How about this: Right now, we’re cleaning every car after each use and spraying it down with disinfectant. We need to keep doing that. Customers need to get home, but I’m already prioritizing requests from the city Health Department. Just tell me what else you need. And hey, let me give you my personal number in case the company gets weird and tries to stop this.”

  “I called the corporate office, and they said no, they couldn’t help. So I thought I’d try to contact individual offices. I have to warn you. I don’t know what will happen to you if you go against corporate.”

  “I don’t care if they fire me.”

  After a pause, the woman said, “Thank you. We need delivery trucks.”

  “Just say how big, when, and where.”

  What she wanted could be filled relatively easily and almost fast enough, and fulfilling that request left Berenike a little disappointed. She’d hoped the city was mounting a bigger effort.

  Meanwhile, she was willing to buck corporate, but the others? She went upstairs.

  “I’m in,” Tito said, but he was going home as soon as there was a replacement. He looked exhausted.

  “I’m not,” Donella said. “I’ll call the cops. You can’t let them do that.”

  “The cops work for the city.”

  “I’ll have your job when this is over.”

  “You might. But I think I can save people.”

  Donella walked away, dropping her equipment as she did. Berenike followed her, picking it up.

  “Fuck her,” Tito said. “I’ll work my fingers to the bone just to fuck the fucking company.”

  She called the employees about to come in and told them the news. They both wanted to report for work anyway.

  “Everybody needs cars,” one of them said.

  Berenike couldn’t thank them enough. People like them kept the Earth in orbit.

  The regional AutoKar office called a few minutes later. Donella must have complained. Berenike knew the regional manager, inefficient and bothersome.

  “I hear you’re letting your office be commandeered.”

  “Yes.” There wasn’t much more to say. Well, there was, fuck you, but she didn’t say it and felt proud of her self-control.

  “They want not just your office, they want the whole regional fleet. Do you want to do that? Run the fleet for the government?”

  “Um. Sure?” This had to be a trick question.

  “Good. I can’t. I’ll get fired. I’ll switch over access. You know how to do this. You’ll have access to car usage, client databases, and personnel to call people in. That’s all. You don’t get to touch money.”

  “So like this suboffice, just bigger.”

  “Have you heard how bad things are?”

  “Yes, I have, really bad.”

  “Exactly. I’m glad you’re willing to do this.”

  Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy after all. “I’ll do my best. Stay safe.”

  She called Old Man Tito to celebrate. “Hey, I just got a battlefield promotion. I’m now regional manager for as long as the company lets me, or until we all keel over from the epidemic. We’re still commandeered. I’m the regional commando now.”

  “Good for you, girl! What does the government want from us?”

  “Transportation, I suppose. We’re a transportation company. We get people and goods from place to place—fast, safe, and efficient—with outstanding customer service.” That was the corporate mission statement.

  “Then that’s what they’ll get.”

  Berenike hoped so. No one deserved to cough up blood until they died. But she’d been exposed to the killer cold. She might be sick right now. Well, she’d die with her boots on. But she still felt suspiciously well. It struck suddenly, right?

  Someone was banging on the door. Berenike wasn’t about to open it without checking who it was and what they wanted. She wondered if the window glass was bulletproof. Probably not.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Irene knelt and put a hand on Will’s shoulder as he lay collapsed on the ground, sobbing. He’d never seemed strong emotionally, and now … Well, Irene might react the same if her mother died. Or maybe not. She’d been able to carry on after she learned that Mamá had been arrested. Peng had always told her that he’d built her to be strong.

  Nimkii growled and raised his trunk, sniffing for danger. He knew something was wrong. She had to calm Will down, or at least get him into the house before Nimkii began to act out.

  “Let’s get you inside.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Should we call your mother? Your pastor?” They attended an electronic church, but she was pretty sure it had staff that could talk to people.

  He sat up and rocked back and forth. “Mom. I gotta tell Mom.”

  “Yes, you should.” She offered him an arm to help him stand up, but he ignored her, lurched to his feet, and stumbled to the house. She followed him. She needed to find those eye drops. She searched the first floor as discreetly as she could while he fumbled with his phone, still ignoring her. No eye drops in sight. She climbed the stairs, trying to act as if she were going to her room under the eaves and instead planning to inspect the second-floor hallway. If she had to, she’d go into the bedroom where Alan was.

  A glint of a tiny white bottle with an orange label caught her eye. There it was lying next to a baseboard—as if he’d left the bedroom and thrown it against a wall. She read the instructions. One drop was supposed to go into each eye. She looked up at the ceiling, pulled down her lower lid, and didn’t blink for sixty seconds. The drop stung and felt cold. After a minute, she sniffed, and the taste reached the back of her mouth: cucumberlike, of all things. She repeated it with the other eye, then took the bottle with her to leave in the kitchen where it could be easily found. There was enough inside for Ruby and Will.

  Would they have shared with me? Maybe not. They didn’t like Nim
kii or her. But she’d encourage them to use the drops when she could. She wasn’t going to be like them.

  She walked downstairs. Will was beating his fists on the wall so hard he was going to hurt himself.

  “Will,” she said softly, “what did your mother say? Did you talk to her?”

  “You go get her.” A gob of mucus dripped from his nose. “I’m not going to leave Dad alone. You go.”

  She could see the prison up close! Although, she thought bitterly, if he had left, she would have been there and Alan wouldn’t have been alone—but she didn’t count.

  “Where is she?” Irene said. “I don’t know where she works.”

  He turned and hit the sofa so hard that it tipped over, then he kicked it. She backed away. “The car has it. Berry Farm. Go get her!”

  “I’ll go right now.” She was glad to have an excuse to leave.

  She glanced at Nimkii as she ran out the back door to the truck. He was pacing around his pen, and eventually he would pass the broken part of the fence. Stay calm, pedazo. Please. I’ll be back soon—if everything went well. After that …

  “Berry Farm,” she told the truck’s controls, and during the short trip, she rehearsed ways to act innocent and brainless when she arrived. She expected a hostile reception. The truck turned in to the Berry Farm driveway and parked itself in a gravel-covered area close to the road. She prepared to step out and find someone to naively ask about Ruby, but a burly man ran toward her. He wore a heavy black jacket despite the warm morning, and he pointed a rifle at her.

  After a moment frozen in shock, she raised her arms. I should have expected weapons.

  He studied her through a visor, standing taut, his rifle aimed right at her. “Why are you here?” He wore a surgical face mask under the visor-screen. Did he expect contagion?

  “I’m here to see Ruby Hobbard. Her husband just died. I was sent by her family.”

  He kept the gun pointed at her. “Stay in your truck! Don’t move. Your name?”

  “Irene Ruiz. I work at the farm with the mammoth, Prairie Orchid Farm.”

  He looked at something on his visor. She tried to act surprised and scared—that was easy, since she was scared—and kept her hands up. This is a prison. No dairy farm shoots visitors. As much as she could without seeming nosy, she looked around. Every detail might be important to know if she could find someone to tell it to. The big, barnlike building had security cameras under the eaves, the kind that could look in any direction. It had two entrances that she could see, a double-width door that rolled horizontally on a track like a livestock barn, and a human-width door next to it. Around the area were parked cars, a pickup truck, and two big vans. Several people were walking toward the big building. They, too, wore visors and face masks. She couldn’t see more without obviously looking away from the guard, and she did not want to antagonize him.

  He relaxed a bit. Whatever he saw on his visor must have corroborated her story. “I’ll call her. Don’t move.”

  She glanced around a bit anyway as if she were reflexively looking for Ruby. A couple of centaur robots paced around the building. She looked at the vehicles more closely. Two seemed to be official cars of some sort, maybe one of them the car with the red lights she had seen racing to the farm during the night.

  Ruby came running out of the big, hulking building, and she, too, wore a visor and mask. She got in with barely a glance at the guard or Irene. “Home,” she told the car—not Irene—and it started up and began to move. The guard lowered his gun and walked away.

  After a moment, Irene said, “Will is very upset.”

  Ruby grunted.

  Irene took a deep breath to work up the courage to ask: “What kind of farm is that?” She hoped it would seem logical to ask, since a gun had been pointed at her.

  Ruby said without hesitation, “Experimental animals.”

  “Oh.” Irene nodded as if she believed it. The rest of the trip took place in silence.

  Even before the car came to a full halt at the house, Ruby dashed out. Irene watched her run in without bothering to close the door behind her. Irene closed it and went to Nimkii’s pen. He was touching the barbed wire she’d used to repair the fence with his trunk as if he were thinking.

  “Hey, Nimkii,” she called from the far side of the pen, “come over here. I’m back.”

  * * *

  Avril found her room empty. “Went to the clinic on the second floor,” a note said. Good. She found her phone and switched it off so the centaurs couldn’t follow her inside the building—unless her phone couldn’t really be turned off. It might be permanently on. By law, the software didn’t belong to her, so it could legally do anything at all.

  After the mutiny, we’ll change that.

  She left the room, ran to the stairway, and opened the door to it a crack, listening for centaurs. Instead she heard a torrent of footsteps. She peeked in. Students packed the stairs, running down them. She joined the human river cascading over the steps and out the nearest exit. The girl next to her wept with relief as she stepped outside.

  Avril kept running across a wide lawn and downhill toward the lake, aware that if they were all exposed to the delta cold or whatever it was, now they would spread the illness. Well, she wasn’t the one who had imprisoned them without access to help. Some disasters weren’t her fault.

  Near the lake, she stopped and turned her phone on.

  Mom had left a several messages over a period of hours. The most recent: “Are you okay? Call right away.”

  She called. Mom could be in trouble, too.

  “Avy, how are you?” She was calling from work at the property management office, walking down a hallway, and she looked as frightened as she sounded. And she was wearing a purple blouse.

  “I’m okay. What’s going on?”

  “There’s an epidemic.”

  “Here, too,” Avril said.

  “Everywhere. It might be that delta cold, Sino. No one seems to know. Are you safe?”

  An honest answer would make Mom feel worse, but she always wanted the truth. “No. We’re sick, I mean, not me but other people, dying, and campus security was holding us prisoner in our dorm, and we were cut off from communications. That’s why I didn’t call. I couldn’t. But we just escaped.”

  Her mother seemed to need a minute to take that all in, and oddly, she didn’t panic. “I see you’re wearing purple.”

  “There was a plan.”

  “I know. Your dad is in on it.”

  “Really?” She felt herself smile. “I thought he would be!”

  “And me, I’m in, whatever I can do. Avy…?”

  “Tell me everything you know, Mom. Please.”

  A centaur voice was shouting from the other side of Dejope Hall. Avril hurried away toward the lakeshore.

  “I don’t know much at all,” Mom said. “The city declared a state of emergency. I’m going home. Your dad is going to stay at work. They have a lot to do, a lot to disobey.” She smiled, then someone shouted her mother’s name. “Oh, god. I gotta go. Avy, I’ll let you know everything I can find out. You’ll do the same?”

  “The truth, even if it’s bad.” A centaur was coming around the building—there was no time to explain.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” Avril started running with no plan of where to go. The lake—yes, she could run to the lake, down into a marshy area, where she could hide. She crashed through the underbrush, and Drew was suddenly running beside her. She sank ankle-deep in mud and kept going. Drew ran ahead of her, but he turned and grabbed her hand to pull her toward the open water.

  She was thigh-deep when a noise hit her so hard she fell to her hands and knees: the centaur noise. Her head was underwater. She tried to get up and fell again, too dizzy to balance, not too dizzy to know she might drown. Keep your head up. But which way was up? She was going to vomit, and she had to keep holding her breath. Her head was about to explode. She felt the lake bottom under her hands and knees an
d crawled as fast as she could in the direction she hoped was toward the shore. The lake bottom eventually sloped up almost enough for her to raise her head.

  Drew was next to her. He pulled her arm up and supported her so that she could kneel. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. The whining centaur stood far beyond the shoreline trees. It wouldn’t see them there.

  She tried to stand, stumbled, then crawled again, next to him, toward the deafening noise. The water grew shallower until they reached its edge. She rose up, then fell again, this time with her head on mud. Safe. The sound cannon suddenly stopped.

  The centaur would go past. It had more important things to do. She lay stunned, panting. If she opened her eyes she would definitely vomit. Her ears rang so loud she heard almost nothing.

  This was only a setback. As soon as she could stand …

  Something grabbed her by the arm. Hard. Metal. She knew what it was before she opened her eyes to see gleaming steel. The centaur yanked her up. Drew was scrambling to his feet—and it kicked him in the head. Blood splattered, and he flew back into the water.

  * * *

  Berenike told the woman banging on the door to take a bicycle. “I’ll make it free.” Amazingly, the woman agreed.

  As Berenike set up the free ride, she saw that she could make all the bicycles in the region free. Done! Then she set up a notice to send to everyone requesting a car that the bikes were free. Corporate would choke at that. Good. Mutiny felt almost as exhilarating as she’d hoped.

  Could she do that to buses, too? Of course. She was an omnipotent god—but not omniscient, she realized, or she would have thought of that already. She could also open all the windows on every bus automatically. Fresh air would be healthful. Done and announced. Get home fast and free, folks!

  She sat down and took a moment to gloat. She had power, and she could use it for good.

  Enough gloating. She stood up to study the data. Usage resembled nothing on record. No one was stopping to eat or pick up meals. Wait times had leveled off at unacceptable levels, but the free alternative bikes and buses might help soon.

  Fleet size remained stable. Good. No poaching from surrounding areas, which there sometimes was, a kind of war within AutoKar for scarce resources. Only two cars had disappeared from her control, both in the northwestern area. Again, that was odd—until she checked and saw that some surrounding franchises had shut down. Irresponsible fuckheads. People need cars.