Immunity Index Read online

  One promise kept. “Get ready to get help.”

  Avril thought about trust as she walked downstairs and tested the front doors. They opened, and she walked outside as a centaur approached. The sidewalks all around were empty. No one wanted to get near a building with a centaur guarding it. Her shoulder still hurt from the last time—and her dignity still stung, for that matter, dragged around like a piece of luggage. The robot trotted up on its mechanical legs and towered over her.

  She could see some smaller residence halls nearby. “What’s happening over there at Bradley?” One of the doors of the old brick building faced Dejope. She stood and waited one, two, three minutes. Traffic sounded from far away, probably off campus, and low clouds were rolling in from the west.

  The door at Bradley opened. Someone peered out, saw the centaur, and ducked back in. It was the only centaur around. If she could get it to leave, the residents could walk out freely.

  “Let’s go. And I’ll walk on my own,” she told the centaur, trying to stare down whatever sensors were aimed at her. To see if someone was listening, she added, “Show the way.”

  It stood still. No one was listening. She waited and seethed with anger as the memory of Drew’s death surged back. Finally, a van pulled up. The centaur took a few steps toward it, but Avril decided to push her luck.

  Although the rear door of the van opened, she went to sit in the front so she could see where they were going, but waited to close the door until the centaur had climbed in the back. It would know where she was, she knew, and if she made a wrong move, it could shoot her through the rear wall of the cab. She’d pushed her luck far enough. She was on her way to somewhere, and it would be bad.

  She called her dad. The line was busy, so she left a message telling him everything that had happened, describing more extortion and kidnapping to charge Bowley with. “Just so you know. Keep doing what you’re doing. Tell Mom I love her.” Say goodbye for me, really, but no one needs to hear that now.

  In the short time she’d been in Madison, she had never seen the city so quiet. And never in her life had she been in a vehicle that raced so fast on city streets, heading due west to get out of town. Her shoulder ached against the seat belt when it took sharp turns, and ached even worse when it suddenly stopped dead in front of one of those boxy old buildings that had probably once been a big store.

  “You know what that is,” a voice on her phone said, that gloating voice again.

  Doesn’t that sadist asshole have anything better to do? Well, I won’t give him a show.

  The building had no sign or markings, and it needed serious upkeep. Its fake stone exterior was crumbling, and weeds poked up through the pavement around it. They’d recently been flattened by traffic at the front door. This was a busy place.

  “Let me guess,” she answered with all the scorn she could muster. “A federal facility. Political prisoners that the city and county won’t accept.”

  “Good guess. Don’t expect amenities.”

  Death without amenities. “Of course not.” She’d heard about those sites. “Lowest bidder, and they still skimmed off funds. You’re criminals in all kinds of ways.”

  “You know what? You’re not a mutineer, you’re a mutant.” The taunting voice tried to be infuriating.

  She stayed calm, still invigorated by the strength of fear. “Yeah, but I didn’t choose to be a mutant. You chose to be a sadist asshole criminal.” She tried to hang up, although she couldn’t tell if it had worked. Then she had a great idea. She peeled a sticker off her jacket and stuck a scrap of it over the camera lens on her phone. You won’t get to watch. I hope you’re disappointed.

  The front passenger door of the van opened. The door to the building opened. Could she make a run for freedom? She could try—and fail, so instead she stepped out and walked calmly and with dignity into the building. Could she turn this into a mere setback for herself and not the end? She’d try, and if she did, if she got free and survived, she’d go looking for the sadist asshole.

  * * *

  Berenike had sneezed a couple of times. Was it that minor cold that had been going around for a few days, or the delta cold that was killing people, or had the cleaning fluid gotten to her? There was one way to find out: wait to see if she got sick, and it might happen soon enough. Don’t waste any opportunities. Mutiny now, not later.

  She studied the statistics of overall AutoKar use. The lunchtime rush had been a relative trickle. Most people, presumably, had already made it safely home, if they were safe anywhere. She saw no evidence of major poaching or hacking. Cars would still need to be cleaned, but not nearly as quickly. Despite that, she would have had surplus cars after allocations to essential workers, like utilities and health care, but now they were being used to transport individuals to medical care. Demand still exceeded supply.

  But she had good news. Due to backlash from the federal government, the City of Milwaukee had finally declared itself independent, in open rebellion, along with some suburbs, although the county had stayed loyal. That mattered tremendously to her morale, although not to anything she was doing. Mutineer rebel commando—hell, yeah.

  Out in the wider world, the Prez still hadn’t made an appearance, but his staff and supporters seemed more concerned with putting down the mutiny than with solving its causes. The mutiny medical providers, which seemed to be most of them, were organizing diagnostic tests. And the news said that Mexico had closed its border and would shoot on sight any American trying to cross it.

  She got a call on her personal phone. Her pseudo-grandfather, Christopher Swoboda. Maybe he needed help, not that she owed him even the time of day. She answered because she’d suddenly had an idea about lawyers and extortion.

  “Honey,” he said, “come home here. You’re not safe. It’s just a job.”

  “I’m doing essential work.” For once it was true.

  “I’m so worried about you. It scares me worse than dying myself.” He sounded like Momma at her worst. “You should be here, with me.”

  “I’ll be fine. I happen to know that one of my sisters’ father is a federal prosecuting attorney.”

  He was silent, then said, “I’m sure he wouldn’t—”

  “Extortion is a crime,” she said.

  He was silent again. He’d sounded well enough. That was all she owed him, the same concern for his health that she’d have for a stranger.

  “I’m working for Emergency Government now. I gotta go.” She ended the call, and she’d feel fine if she never heard from him again.

  Wholesale food distribution, pharmacy staff, emergency workers, and funeral transport all needed cars, or they would soon.

  The city called, this time a person in the Health Department she didn’t know. “We’ve had losses in the department and we need someone who could handle transportation. Can you? Now? It’s okay if you have other priorities, but we’re very short on resources and we think you have the skills—”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I should describe the job.” It involved making deliveries and having contact with the public, perhaps even large groups, so it would entail the risk of infection and possible violence—

  “That’s fine. I’ll do anything.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. I’ll be glad to take any kind of risk.”

  “You need to know that we’ve all been exposed to the delta cold here at City Hall. I don’t know how it suddenly got everywhere, but people have been exposed all over the city and the country, as far as we can tell, which is just not what epidemiological models would predict.” She sounded outraged, as if she suspected something. “Anyway, it’s definitely here in this building. You’ll be at risk of infection.”

  “I’ve been exposed, too. I’m not worried.” But yes, this whole outbreak seemed suspicious for a lot of reasons.

  “Um, okay. I’ll note that. Report to the Health Department at City Hall as early as you can.”

  Within minutes, she’d be a commando in
the streets. Good.

  But who would do her job at AutoKar? It was essential, after all. After a moment’s thought, she called upstairs to the Christian lady, Summer Ngan. “I need to do some work for the city. Would you like to manage the southeastern Wisconsin fleet? I know you’ve had some management training.”

  “Me? Let me pray on that.” Two seconds later: “Wow, God was quick this time. Yes.”

  “Okay. Not too much is happening right now. Can you come down here? I can get you ready.”

  Before she left, Berenike changed into street clothes but kept the wide purple belt and bright hair clips. She commandeered a delivery truck from the fleet. She’d need it for her new job—a better job, an exciting job. Anything would be. She had been trapped for much too long at AutoKar. Only an unthinkable disaster was enough to let her escape, but to what? All the news she had been able to find said that bigger shit would hit bigger fans as the day went on—more panic, more chaos, more death, more weird disease patterns, and more coordinated federal efforts to put down the mutiny. She could die, and not just of the cold. But, fuck it, she’d die with her boots on.

  * * *

  Vita and I were about to review some data together, sitting in my little office, and I studied her as much as she studied the results.

  “I’m surprised you made this analysis so quickly,” she said.

  “I found a shortcut, and what I learned makes me very hopeful.” I brought up some simple bar charts. The answer we yearned to find was, in the end, simple. “You can see the progression over time.” I paused to blow my nose, although it seemed like a waste of the precious vaccine viruses to trap them in a tissue.

  “Yes, that’s a very fast response by the immune system,” she said, and pointed to another, more complex set of colored charts. “And it seems to recognize the other virus, too, the Sino cold.” She persisted in calling it Sino, not delta. That told me something.

  “What we ought to consider is where this attenuated virus came from,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said tonelessly. She was lying, because if she truly didn’t know, she’d be anxious to find out, and I’d have heard that appetite in her voice. “It’s a good thing to see that it’s working. How will it interact?” She asked that question again, the same one she’d asked the day before, and now her voice was anxious. But why was she lying? Had she been trapped into this work like me?

  “How is it interacting in China?” I said, a hint of fire in my words.

  She looked up at me a bit too quickly, a bit too startled, unable to find the means to answer a question she didn’t expect.

  “I asked the Node 1 team for some data, and they knew how to get it. The mutiny is contagious and has been spreading fast into many low-level positions, the ones who do the actual work. It seems that potential hosts were primed by years of injustice, and mutineers were willing to provide information to us that should have been secret.”

  She frowned, perhaps doubting that something so basic as injustice had fueled the mutiny or perhaps that I could have made a conclusion about the source of the virus from evidence that sat in plain sight for those who knew what to look for.

  “This attenuated vaccine virus in fact came from China. According to what has been reported by our intelligence services, China’s vaccine virus is working well. They did extraordinarily clever work when they created it. For all its modifications, its external appearance was made to look almost unchanged, no more different than one zebra to another, just slightly different stripes. To a lion—or to an immune system—they all look like lunch.”

  She frowned, annoyed, then slipped a neutral expression over her face. “That was very clever on your part. I didn’t think of that as a way to find out, to check what was happening in China.”

  Her remark told me both that she knew it came from China and that she had been entrenched in the government bureaucracy long enough to be assimilated into a silo. She was no sudden recruit, then. She still might have been unwillingly recruited.

  “The data also tell us about the interaction between the viruses,” I said, “that is, the viruses circulating together in China. The vaccine is working there.” I brought up another chart and let her study its good news. “Here, however, I think the outcome could be different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ah, now things would get tricky.

  At that moment, although the door to my cell stood open, someone knocked: a soldier in full combat gear.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Peng, I’ve been assigned to guard you.” The voice and face, despite the obvious youth, allowed for no disagreement from me. “I hope I won’t disturb your work.”

  The soldier took up an alert stance that would keep me in a line of sight. I decided to ignore the guard politely and not ask questions, such as whom I might be protected against or, conversely, who was being protected from me.

  “First,” I told Vita, “I have epidemiological data for the United States, and it explains a lot.” I switched to a simple map that marked known cases of the attenuated virus shown in yellow, and those places were also known to have political leanings in favor of the Prez. “You will notice that this data has been compiled from several days ago. The virus was released here first.”

  The release had been extensive, although perhaps not everywhere, as I had overheard her say what seemed like ages ago. But everywhere was a nebulous term. I brought up a second map whose interpretation would permit no equivocation.

  It showed the deadly virus in magenta, clusters of dots that centered on places where, as everyone knew, the Prez faced opposition. I overlaid it with a map of occurrence of the vaccine virus. “This data started coming in just hours ago. It was a deliberate attack against the opposition, knowing that immunity would have already been developed in areas that supported the Prez.” Although I tried, I couldn’t say those words without my teeth clenched in the rage I had spent hours containing.

  She looked at the map with a hint of disappointment but no outrage at all. “Yes, I suppose that’s why there’s a mutiny.” Her halo instantly lost all remaining luster to me. She was either lying or stupid.

  “Or rather,” I said, “it’s a weapon against a mutiny.”

  She didn’t look at me. “I suppose.” She didn’t seem to want to say those words. She was lying, then. I’d have preferred her to be stupid.

  “And this virus, designed to kill the political opposition, isn’t going to work as well as hoped in the long run.”

  Now her head swiveled. So did the guard’s.

  “I’ll be glad to explain.” I said. “To everyone.”

  * * *

  Berenike walked out of the AutoKar office—goodbye, forever!—and into the truck waiting at the bay. She felt the thrill of terrified exuberance, maybe the way a soldier felt waiting for battle to begin.

  “I’ll pray for you!” Summer called.

  Berenike waved her thanks and hid her doubts. If some god somewhere had a plan, it was opaque to her. She climbed into the truck and told it to go to City Hall. The latest news—the limited news available—was either useless official bluster or real and bad. A forest fire was burning in California, hard to tell how big. In a couple of places, armed resistance had sprung up to fight local independence movements, hard to tell how bloody. Airports were shut down to passenger traffic. The U.S. Postal Service had closed—for the first time ever—as had most private businesses. Hospitals were mobbed and creating emergency rooms and wards in parking lots.

  Berenike’s eight-block trip through downtown Milwaukee passed through barren streets that looked like a scene from a bad apocalyptic movie, or like an epidemic that had happened a little before she was born. She’d seen the photos.

  She told her truck to park next to City Hall in a spot marked for official vehicles. Most of the spots were empty, and besides, she was now official. She walked into the elaborate gray stone and red brick building and looked around. Was this a suicide mission? If so, she’d die for a good cause, n
ot from stupid melodramatic personal negligence. Like Momma. Fuck. Remember what she did to protect you. She had plenty of fucks left for better targets.

  City Hall rose in the shape of a narrow triangle with a massive brick clock tower at the southern, pointed end. Inside, it opened into a seven-story atrium like many modern buildings, but this building had been standing for about a century and a half. She’d visited it once as a teen on some sort of enrichment field trip. The patterned tile floor, wrought-iron railings, and carved wood had seemed formal and solid. She felt no trust for the government because she couldn’t trust anything, but at least it seemed like the City of Milwaukee wasn’t going anywhere, not with all those tons of fancy brickwork anchoring it in place.

  The building bustled inside, unlike the empty streets—at least two dozen people in the lobby alone—and their voices echoed in a comforting human clamor. They stood farther apart than usual—they knew what to do. They wore surgical masks, and boxes of them stood by the door. She took a mask and put it on because if she was a carrier, she should protect other people. She found a marble stairway and climbed to the third floor and found a door labeled HEALTH DEPARTMENT. By the time she arrived she’d decided the mask might be necessary but this particular kind was a serious nuisance to wear, already damp from her breath.

  No one waited behind the counter.

  “Hello?” she called.

  A woman came out of an office. “Oh, you’re Bern…”

  “Berenike,” she answered, pronouncing all four syllables. No one ever got it right. “Berenike Woulfe. I’m here as a driver. I brought a truck, twelve hundred cubic feet and seats for two passengers. I know how to drive manually and I can adjust automatic controls. I just left work at AutoKar. The passenger and cargo spaces have been sterilized.”

  Just left AutoKar. Oh, those words felt good. Maybe she’d never go back one way or another, maybe Summer’s god would grant her that little blessing. That would be enough. She tried not to get her hopes up.