Immunity Index Read online

  “How did it happen?” she said.

  Irene knew what she meant. “Will shot himself. In the living room.”

  “You should have stopped him.”

  “I was feeding Nimkii.”

  “You should have stopped him!”

  That’s a job for a mother, not a tool that talks. Irene remained still and silent. Nothing she could say would do any good.

  Ruby shook. Sobs? Rage? The helmet hid her face.

  Irene thought of something neutral to say. “I’ll go back home now.” She waited for permission to get up. If Ruby denied the truck she’d walk away and just keep on walking.

  Ruby motioned with her gun toward the barn. “Get up and get in there.”

  Irene had to pretend she didn’t know what Ruby meant. “In the barn?”

  “You belong in there.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.”

  “But what about Nimkii?”

  “I’ll shoot him when I go home.”

  Nimkii! “Oh, no, don’t do that. We can find him a new home.”

  “Move.” She motioned with the gun again.

  Irene felt tears rise. And anything she did would be futile. She got up and walked toward the barn. Maybe Nimkii would break out again. Maybe the mutiny would break the prison free any minute now. Maybe she had the delta cold and would die. Or maybe Ruby would. Each step brought another thought, every one of them sour.

  The door on the barn opened automatically.

  “Keep going,” Ruby said. “And through the next door. I’ll be watching, and I’ll be glad to kill you.”

  Irene knew she would. She stepped into a little corridor like a double entrance to a business. The door behind her closed, and she heard noise from inside the barn, voices, a lot of voices. The door ahead opened—into a wide space dimly lit by translucent panels in the ceiling. It held dozens, maybe a hundred people, and many of them were dancing and singing along to music from someone’s phone. The air smelled stale.

  They turned to look at her, and a grinning young man started walking toward her, clapping to the rhythm and wearing a purple T-shirt that said CANCER SURVIVOR. He sang, “I’m going to shine my light both far and near.” He stopped. “Welcome to Berry Farm Prison!”

  “I guess I found the party.”

  “You didn’t bring any food, did you?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was joking. The wide space held tables, chairs, and bunk beds.

  “I know,” he said, “cozy, isn’t it? I’m Koobmeej. I’m not really a cancer survivor. I got this shirt from a neighbor. He was handing them out. Purple, you know. Have you heard about the mutiny? That’s our color.”

  “Um, I’m Irene Ruiz.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t be here long. The cavalry is coming.”

  “You know there are still guards outside. And those robots.”

  He sighed, but his grin didn’t fade. “Not for long. You know this song? Feel free to sing along. We’ll be out soon.”

  “What about the cold?”

  “We all have the sniffles. Some cold!”

  I didn’t find a prison, I found a lunatic asylum. “I might be carrying the delta cold. The killer cold.”

  “We’ve heard about that. There’s the isolation ward.” He pointed to a table in a corner with a chalk line on the concrete floor to create a wide buffer zone. Three people sat inside, carrying on an animated conversation.

  On a whim, she looked at her phone. No reception. They had no idea what was going on, did they? But she knew what she ought to do. “I should go over there.” She didn’t want to seem rude. “Thanks for the warm welcome.”

  The people at the card table, two men and someone of uncertain gender, invited her to sit down. “We’re playing two truths and a lie,” a man said. He looked tired and wan, obviously ill. He coughed into his elbow. “No score. Honor system. Not much of that, either.”

  Irene sat down to be nice—and because she wasn’t sure about what else she should do. Is insanity contagious? “I have some medicine for the cold.”

  He brightened. “You do? We could all use that. I’m Roger, by the way. You’re an angel.”

  They passed around the drops and gave her back a near-empty bottle.

  “Your turn, angel,” he said. “Why do you look so glum? Can you tell us two truths and a lie about that?”

  She had a lot of truths to choose from. When she told them who her mother was and what had happened to her, they immediately stopped the game to talk about her books and art—Mamá had fans all over—and assure Irene that down in Madison, the prisons would be liberated soon, too.

  But they had no idea how that was going to happen. This is all just an act to make themselves feel better. And their optimism wasn’t very contagious. They might be liberated, or they might be trapped in there forever and slowly starve to death, since they had no food, only water.

  Another glum truth: Irene’s life lately had been one long series of big and small mistakes, although not all of them her own fault, and they had led her to disaster and likely early death.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Berenike let the truck pull into place in the industrial park. A load sat on a pallet in a driveway, and no one seemed to be around. The codes matched the list from the city: face masks, gloves, and protective gowns. She and Neal loaded the lightweight boxes into the truck. The job was disappointingly easy.

  At the next warehouse, a bit farther west, nothing waited outside for them. Neal, helmet on, pushed the buzzer at the entrance as she waited in the truck, windows down, listening. No response. He took out his phone. “Hello,” he said, “this is the Milwaukee Health Department. We’re here to pick up emergency supplies.”

  A man came around the corner of the building—a big elderly white man in a tight rent-a-cop uniform, wearing the kind of mask on his flushed face that would protect him from everything including toxic gas. He pointed a finger at Neal. “You’re trespassing!”

  “Good afternoon, sir. We’re here for an authorized pickup,” he said casually. “Emergency. There’s one going on, you know.”

  “You can’t just come here and take what you want.”

  “That’s between the owner and the city. We’re here to pick up what was agreed on.”

  “That order has no legal standing.”

  Neal looked at his phone. “The security company will open the doors for us.”

  “What if I’m the owner? I won’t let you go in.” He had a gun on his belt and put his hand on it.

  Neal sighed, unruffled. “You can let us take the shipment, or I can arrest you. Do you really want to be locked up with a lot of coughing people?”

  “You can’t arrest me. It’s insurrection and unlawful. If you read the Constitution—”

  “Right here, sir, right now, the city has requisitioned certain material and will pay for it. You can allow us to remove it or you can pay the legal penalty. The choice is yours.”

  “You’re breaking the law.”

  “I’m not here to argue. I’m here to escort the pickup and delivery of certain medications that can save lives.”

  The two men stared at each other. Berenike watched, ready to drop to the floor at the first twitch of a gun. Then she remembered her customer service training and experience. She knew what this moment called for.

  She beeped the horn and leaned out of the window. “Hey, people are dying. Let’s get moving! I don’t know who you are, but we’ve got the paperwork, so let’s get the stuff!” She pushed a button on the dashboard to open the back of the truck.

  The guard stared at her, and judging from the movement of his mask, his jaw dropped. Good. She got out, holding her phone display toward him. “Right here, that’s the order. Take a look, but I know you’ve seen this already. We’re waiting. Fifteen cartons of antivirals, more if you have it. We’re authorized to inspect the warehouse.” She looked him right in the eyes, unblinking. “We can get backup.” That was a bluff
. Was this worth risking her life over? Maybe, maybe not, but it felt triumphant to be yelling at him, even if her heart was hammering. The next move was his. She waited, holding her breath.

  “I’m not having any part of this.” Red-faced with rage, he began to walk away, then turned and shouted, “It’s not legal! You can’t just take what you want!”

  Neal gave her an admiring glance as the old man disappeared around a corner.

  “I worked in customer service,” she said—worked! past tense! “I dealt with assholes all the time. Sometimes it takes a bigger asshole, and I’ve been trained in all kinds of assholery. I think I have a talent for it. We should get this stuff out before he changes his mind.”

  The side door to the warehouse clicked open, no doubt, she knew, the work of some bored underpaid contract worker somewhere at the security company’s office who needed a paycheck and didn’t give a shit otherwise. Berenike could sympathize. Neal strode inside, telling all the lights to turn on. How fast could they do their job before the asshole changed his mind? He had a gun, after all.

  The warehouse was well organized and they found the antivirals easily. She scanned some boxes that identified themselves as a different antiviral. She called King, who said it was even better and to take that, too. They loaded it up as fast as they could. Neal sent instructions to lock the warehouse door, and they were off. She set the truck to maximum speed and autopilot. She didn’t trust herself to drive. Her heart was still beating too fast.

  Behind them, three shots banged. They both instinctively ducked, but the truck seemed unharmed.

  “I’ll call that in,” he said. “Another red dot.”

  She let the truck drive itself most of the way and took over manually for the last half block to the first drop-off site, a community center. A crowd stood in front, everyone standing far apart.

  “Pull in at the back,” he said. “We don’t want them to rush us.”

  She knew the neighborhood, close to her home, poor and African-American for more than a century, and over time little had changed except that the population had declined as homes were lost to landlords who had let properties self-destruct during a succession of economic and bank crises. She’d attended a local history presentation at that very center. The people who remained were tough as concrete, “the tightest neighborhood in the city.” She hoped so. The city’s plan counted on it. They’d take care of one another. Probably. Everyone was scared and hurting, and people in pain reacted unpredictably.

  She pulled up to the back door, and she and Neal jumped out. She stacked a hand truck with boxes and pushed them in, and Neal carried an armload. A woman wearing a face mask and gloves was waiting and began thanking them effusively. Berenike knew her.

  “Just doing our job,” Neal said, setting down his boxes on the nearest flat surface.

  “Hey, Berenike!” the woman said. “Good to see you.”

  “I have a new job,” she answered. It felt fulfilling to say that.

  “Good for you! Can I get you anything? Coffee, water, sandwich, wash your hands?”

  “Water and soap, that would be good,” she said. “Then we have more deliveries and better hurry.” Neal nodded.

  Back in the truck, Berenike said, “I’m liking this job.”

  “Just try not to run anyone over,” he said. “I’d have to write you a warning ticket.”

  Two more drop-offs remained on that loop, although she had to alter the route for red dots. A column of black smoke was rising up from where one of them was. Neal studied his phone.

  “A fire,” he said. “Firefighters are on it. They’re tough to scare.”

  “I hear there’s a big fire in California, but that’s all I can find out.”

  “Yep. Two big fires out there. It’s bad. The problem is that first responders are getting sick, too. California is so fucked. Us, too.”

  “Thanks for the happy thoughts.”

  “It’s my job as a first responder to think strategically, including all the ways that this job could go wrong.” He kept studying his police screen. “It’s a good thing we’re in an unmarked vehicle. Less chance of being attacked.”

  “By who?”

  “People who want our stuff—for themselves, or to keep it from people they don’t like. Some really bad shit is happening in some places. I recommend wearing helmets at all times.”

  * * *

  Avril walked into prison undefeated. Because she was undefeated, right? Her superpower. Just another setback. When the mutiny succeeded … It would, wouldn’t it? With or without her, if she died.

  She checked. Her phone had gone dead, no surprise. This prison was secret, or at least semisecret.

  The door ahead of her opened, and she walked through, aware that some robot with a gun mounted in the ceiling or somewhere else had her in its aim. The door closed behind her with a tiny, unmelodramatic click and left her facing yet another door. It opened, and she stepped into a dismal low cinder-block hallway with grates overhead. The air inside reeked of body odor. At the end of a sloping corridor, another metal door opened—into a corridor, and it was filled with noise, heat, and a worse stench. She hesitated.

  “Move forward,” a voice ordered, that same uncanny voice of a centaur. She did. Now is not the time to fight. On one side of the corridor was a chain-link fence wall up to the ceiling, with a series of pens on the other side walled off from each other with fencing, each holding dozens, maybe hundreds of people.

  The door to the nearest pen opened, and she obediently took a step in. The mutineers stood in groups or sat on the floor, and they turned and appraised her. She searched for familiar faces and saw none. Furniture would be an amenity. She saw no amenities at all. Adults and even a couple of children of all sexes were in the pen. No amenities and not much planning, either. Quite a few wore purple clothes.

  She’d heard once that every prisoner had the duty to escape, at least military prisoners, and this was a war, right? An elderly man approached with a snippet of lavender tape on his chest, and “Enos” had been written on it with a blue marker.

  “Welcome. My name is Enos. Lemme fix you up with a name tag and an assignment. We’re organized into crews here.”

  “Um, sure. I’m Avril.” Crews? What kind of assignment? She knew what she wanted to do. She dutifully wrote out her name tag and, because why not try, she asked, “Is there an escape crew?”

  He grinned. Well, she knew it was a stupid question.

  “We can’t figure out an escape,” he said, “but what we can do is figure out the rescue response. The minute we get a chance, when a rescue comes from the outside, we’ve gotta have a contingency plan. You want to join that, the rescue response crew? I’ll be glad to introduce you.”

  The woman in charge of that pen’s response crew, Morgana, had needed a shower at least three days earlier. Her body stank, her breath stank, and by the way she tried to keep her arms tight against her body to shield her armpits, she knew it. “Sorry I’m so rank. The second thing I want to do when I get out is shower and brush my teeth. The first thing is to get everyone to safety, whatever that means when the time comes. You’re new? What’s going on out there?”

  Avril told her what she could. In exchange, she learned that there was one chemical toilet per section, and one working spigot for water for the whole place, so a bucket brigade moved water from one sector to another, painstakingly pouring it through the chain-link fences. No food had been provided since breakfast the day before, which had been bags of cheap bread tossed in. The prisoners themselves had the job to divvy the loaves up.

  “I hope they saw that we could do that civilized,” Morgana said with a thumb jerked at observation cameras in the high ceiling. “We’re not like them. Fair, not greedy. In case there still are people out there watching us, I don’t know. Did you see any humans?”

  “Nope. And not guarding the dorms back on campus.”

  “Figures. We’ve been controlled by a morally repugnant elite and their flunkies, a
nd the flunkies are jumping ship.”

  A special priority at all times, Morgana said, were the people in the row alongside a wall, lying on jackets or scarves or whatever could be scrounged as bedding. All of them were ill. No medicine or treatment was available for them, no masks or gloves or anything else for the medical crew caring for them, and no protection for everyone else except several feet of space separating them from the prisoners who coughed into damp or bloodstained tissues or cloths. Lying still in a corner were a half dozen bodies.

  Avril stood and stared.

  “You okay?” Morgana said.

  “No. This is not okay.”

  “I know. This is uncivilized.”

  “This is a crime.”

  Enos joined them. “When we get outta here,” he said with clenched teeth, “heads are going to roll. I already got a list. A long one.”

  Revenge. Avril could understand the urge. And like him and everyone else, she was sure the mutiny would free them soon. The thought comforted her.

  An hour later, she was still trying to feel sure. Any minute now. Her crew debated scenarios: a shootout, a surrender by the guards, a wholesale victory against the federal government, or a collapse of society due to the cold.

  “If everything collapses,” Avril asked, “who’s going to come for us?”

  “My family will never give up on me.”

  Your family might all die. Avril didn’t say that.

  A few minutes later, the air was filled with chimes and beeps and snatches of music. Their phones were working again.

  “Blessed be!” Morgana said. “That’s the first step.”

  Avril called Hetta. “Is the dorm still free?”

  “Yes. They’re all getting real care, Shinta and the rest. Where are you?”

  “In prison. We need help. This place is horrible. People are dying.”

  “That one on the West Side? It’s under attack, I think. Let me check.”

  * * *