Immunity Index Page 23

  Prisoners had poured out of the barn, with the quarantine section now moved to a plastic picnic table near the farmhouse. The farmhouse-headquarters had been left unlocked and a team was exploring. Everyone was on their phone, staring at the displays or talking or listening.

  Koobmeej was reveling in the escape. “Irene! Thank you. And thank the mammoth.” He gave her a hug, apparently forgetting that she was one of the quarantined prisoners.

  “Um, thanks, but why didn’t the centaurs attack Nimkii?”

  He glanced at him across the highway. “Yeah, that was telling. Does he look like an ordinary threat? No. There aren’t a lot of pachyderms running around in central Wisconsin. A robot system wouldn’t have been trained for that. A human would know, and humans are supposed to be running the centaurs at least most of the time, and they’re not right now. Why not?”

  He grinned, still elated by fresh air or by his own self-apparent genius. She should have felt annoyed, but she wasn’t. She wanted his self-confidence. She used to be a confident, decisive person. When had she changed?

  He answered his own question. “My guess is a personnel shortage, and again, why? Cold? Or defections? We know some of them wanted to defect. I mean, maybe they didn’t like what they were doing. Or they know that if we win, they’ll be in trouble unless they go turncoat. I don’t think it matters what they decided, as long as they abandoned their posts.”

  “Maybe they’re just cowards,” a woman standing next to him said, never taking her eyes off the display from the phone on her wrist. “We really ought to take aim at the predators up higher on the food chain. I mean, look at this. Turns out there’s two kinds of cold. The one that kills people was aimed at us. It’s genocide.”

  Koobmeej leaned in. “Let me see.”

  Irene checked her own phone again. Nothing from Mamá, but she had a message from Cal that she wasn’t going to answer—and she could find more news than ever from everywhere, and some of it might be true. She wanted to believe it. An assault was under way on the prison in Madison—maybe the one Mamá was in. She held her breath and hoped. The university campus had been freed. But hospitals were overwhelmed and pharmacies were empty and, supposedly, the killer cold had been a conspiracy by the mutineers themselves to infect themselves and gain sympathy, or maybe it was a conspiracy and spread by Prez supporters, and one cure involved breathing argon gas. Bilge was sloshing around, and it might taste like good clean water to people who were desperately thirsty.

  Traffic on the road, once a trickle, became a river. Cars were coming carrying personnel to check on the prisoners, and families to take them home or to medical care. Where was Irene’s home? Her stuff was at Prairie Orchid Farm, and maybe Ruby was there, too.

  Her phone chirped. Cal again. Urgent. Really? Did he really think he needed to talk to a useless, untrustworthy clone? She had better things to do. A medical team had arrived and was setting up equipment and a tent. She should get herself checked.

  Cal called again. Still urgent. Well, he’d been arrested at the same time as Mamá. Maybe he knew something. She answered, audio only. This better be important.

  He didn’t waste time on a greeting. “Your mama’s very sick. You need to talk to her.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the Madison prison. The one they’re trying to free.”

  The one in the news? “How is she?”

  “There isn’t anything here, no food, hardly any water, and she’s lying on the ground and has a bad fever and doesn’t understand what’s happening. She wants to talk to you. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I was in prison, too.” A nicer one, with beds and showers and singing and dancing, and an attempted mass murder, while Mamá was lying on the floor. Maybe dying. More mass murder, if the rumors about the cold were right. A slamming noise echoed behind Cal and made the hair on her arms stand up.

  “Talk to her.” Off mic, he said, “Celia, here’s Irene.”

  “Irene,” she said, “¿dónde estás?” Where are you?

  “In Wausau,” she answered in Spanish.

  “Come here, girl, come and be with me.” Her voice cracked, hoarse.

  “I wish I could. Is Cal taking care of you?”

  She coughed. “It’s not Cal, it’s Zac. Cal hates me. He hates you. He thinks we sold out the mutiny, and that’s why the robots came.” Zac was an old boyfriend. He looked nothing like Cal except maybe for his size. “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Mamá. I’m on my way. I’ll go now and get a car and come to be with you.” That would make her happy. Maybe it wasn’t a lie, either. “You should rest. Let Zac help you. I’ll be there soon. Give the phone back to him.”

  Tears were dripping down Irene’s face.

  After a moment, Cal said, “What did you say?”

  “I said I’m coming. Maybe it will make her feel better. Give her strength.”

  “I hope so. It’s bad here.”

  “Why are you helping her?”

  Mamá was coughing in the background. “Can we get some water here?” Cal called. “For her. Yeah. Thanks.… Look, I owe her. I was worried.” He coughed, too. “I didn’t think … I didn’t think, that’s all. And after we were arrested, I got a real talking-to about who I ought to trust. Look, I’ll do what I can. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mamá was in a hellhole. She’d get a car and go.

  But no one could leave until cleared by the medical crew. She could just slip away, couldn’t she? Maybe. She tried to call a car as she paced across the lawn. One service didn’t answer, the other said there was a wait, at least two hours because disinfecting took time.

  She could walk to Madison in forty-seven hours, according to her phone, if she didn’t stop to sleep or eat.

  She was about to call Mamá again, but Cal called back first, this time using Mamá’s phone. Mamá was worse, much worse, too bad to leave on her own with everyone else even if the prison was liberated, which was under way, but Avril was there, he said, that other clone. She could help.

  * * *

  Avril huddled by the door to her sector with her team, everyone watching the attack on their phone displays. Some sort of armed force, all mutineers, had surrounded the building, and someone who identified themself only as a citizen reporter breathlessly narrated a video feed from a highway embankment overlooking the site.

  She suddenly remembered a poem—an odd and unwelcome memory—that said that the world would end not with a bang but a whimper. This attack might end with a bang, maybe a big one.

  “There’s another one,” the reporter chortled, their camera held above a car being used as a shield. Bushes obscured much of what was happening at the entrance, but it did show a grenade flashing bright in the twilight at the feet of a centaur guard. “They never thought their own weapons would be used against them!” A column of smoke rose up. “Got ’em!”

  Avril whispered to Enos, “How many are there? Robots?”

  “We don’t know.”

  More smoke was rising. “Wait,” the reporter said. “Let me get a better angle, although it’s not safe. I’m risking it all to bring you this.” The view shifted enough to show—“Oh my god. The building’s on fire.”

  Fire? In the reporter’s now-shaky feed, smoke rose from the front and rear of the building.

  “That wasn’t one of our contingencies,” Enos said, as if fire were a personal insult.

  Avril’s crew leader, Morgana, announced, “I’ve got the code for the lock.” She hurried to the door to the sector and held the phone on her wrist against it. Nothing happened. “Fuck, I thought I did.”

  Avril sniffed. There might be smoke in the air, at least some sort of sharp plasticlike odor.

  “Lemme try again,” Morgana muttered.

  “Wait,” the reporter said, “I’m hearing police communications. Security robots are retreating behind the fires. The heat hides their thermal signatures.”

  Morgana put her p
hone to the door again. Nothing happened. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  Avril’s thighs ached from crouching, and her shoulder still hurt, too, and her muscles wanted to move.

  “I hear sirens,” the reporter said. “Fire trucks? But how can they get close if the robots will shoot at them?” Flames popped out of the building as if the facade were hollow inside. “These are cheap buildings, I bet. They’ll burn easy.”

  Morgana shouted, “I’ve got it. You’re free. Let’s go!”

  Avril knew the plan. Find the exits, appraise the situation, and work with the rescue teams outside to bring out the ill mutineers first. But the exits were on fire, and robot guards were shooting. Things weren’t going to go as planned. She ran down the corridor anyway toward the back exit, just as she’d been assigned, to clear the way for people carrying ill prisoners.

  “Irene!”

  She turned. Cal had called her from inside one of the pens. He was in need of a shave and a shower—and stooped and wary, not the confident man she’d met five days ago.

  “I’m not Irene.” He knew better, and she had better things to do than waste her time on him. She had an assignment.

  “Can you be Irene?” he said.

  “Can I be a clone? Sure. I’ve done it all my life. Is it a good thing now?” What was he going to do, apologize?

  “I was just being careful about things. You know.”

  Nope, she wasn’t getting an apology. Her team had reached the end of the corridor. She needed to catch up.

  He said, “Irene needs you to help her.”

  “The one with the mammoth?”

  “Her mother is here.”

  Celia! He’d been arrested with her, arguing. Avril would gladly help Irene, but not him. “What does she need?”

  He fidgeted. “Her mother is sick. Irene can’t get here, but you can be her and help her mother. You can pretend to be Irene. I have her on the phone. You can talk to her.”

  Pretend to be Irene? She’d watched that video twenty times at least. She didn’t look exactly like Irene: too pale, too thin, too young. But maybe she could pretend. “Let me talk to Irene.”

  “Come with me. You can use Celia’s phone.” He reached for her arm, the wrenched one.

  She stepped aside. “I’ll follow you.”

  Celia lay with a sweater draped over her chest on a carpeted area alongside a chain-link fence that served as a dividing wall. The rug was old and stained and dirty. The air smelled much more smoky, acrid—and smoke from plastic was toxic.

  Cal picked up a phone on the floor next to Celia and spoke into it. “Here’s Avril.” He held it out.

  The projection showed an almost-mirrorlike face. “Hello?” she said.

  “Are you there, Avril?” Irene asked. Behind her were voices, but distant, as if she were outdoors. Irene’s voice sounded like her own in a recording, higher and thinner compared with the way she heard her own voice in her ears. It was creepily familiar.

  Irene said, “I need you to pretend you’re me. I can’t get there to be with her.”

  Cal handed Avril an earpiece. She slipped it in and thought she heard Irene sobbing. Or maybe she heard the pulse from her own heart, beating fast. Celia had a bit of blood in the corner of her mouth, and her hair lay around her in snarls. She coughed compulsively, deep and wet and weak.

  Cal took the phone and held it to record the scene. Irene gasped when she saw her mother and how appalling she looked.

  If Avril’s mother got sick, would she be like this? Who would care for her? She took Celia’s hand. It felt too warm. Celia clasped Avril’s hand weakly.

  “We speak Spanish to each other,” Irene said in a tight voice. “Tell her, ‘Estoy aquí, Mamá.’”

  Avril rummaged through her two years of high school Spanish. I’m here, Mama. She pronounced it as best she could with pure, musical vowels.

  Celia took a shallow, rough gasp. “Irene,” she muttered with the Spanish pronunciation, ee-RAY-nay. “¿Estás bien?” Are you well?

  Avril repeated what Irene told her, surprised by how much she understood: “Yes, I am well and I am here. I am going to live, Mamá. I am well.”

  “Vas a vivir,” Mamá rasped. You are going to live.

  “I love you, Mamá, and I’m here.”

  Celia muttered something more and coughed a lot. Irene was silent. An alarm went off nearby. A fire alarm? Finally. Avril looked around. The air was gray with smoke. Somewhere far away, glass shattered. Everyone besides her and Cal and Celia had fled from the pen.

  Mamá suddenly sat up, her mouth spilling bloody foam. She moaned and writhed. Avril tried to hug her.

  “What’s going on?” Cal said. He was still holding the phone for Irene to watch. Avril knew what was happening. Death. And Irene didn’t need to see this—it was bad enough to watch a stranger die. Avril slapped the phone out of his hand.

  “Estás bien,” she murmured to Celia. You’re okay. “Estoy aquí.” I’m here. “Te amo, Mamá.” I love you, Mamá. That was all the Spanish she could remember, but what else was there to say? Irene was sobbing in her earpiece. Could she even hear what was happening over the blaring alarm? Mamá’s breaths became hoarse. And with one long rasp, they stopped.

  Avril kept holding her, and she began coughing, too. Would CPR have worked? With this poisoned air?

  The lights went out. A crash came from the back of the building.

  Cal shoved something into her hand. Celia’s phone. “Take this.” And then he ran off.

  Take the phone. Take care of everything. Alone and abandoned.

  “Irene?” she asked.

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m so sorry. I tried to take care of her.” Maybe that was another lie, like I’m well, I’m here, I’m going to live. She’d been exposed to the cold every single minute since it started. Everyone didn’t die, did they? If not of the cold, would she die in the fire?

  “I have to go,” she said, and ended the call. She laid Celia down gently, stood up, and found her way through the haze to the door out of the pen.

  She turned toward the rear entrance—she was pretty sure she knew the right way. The light from tiny windows high in the walls had disappeared behind thickening smoke that stung her throat. She needed to crawl below the smoke—she’d learned that somewhere, because the air closest to the ground would be the cleanest.

  She dropped to her hands and knees, and she felt cold, dirty concrete. She lowered her head. The air seemed clearer, but she tried to breathe as little as possible. Her eyes watered so much she shut them. The alarm kept blaring. She had to get out fast, and crawling was slow, too slow, and the smoke seemed to keep getting worse. Well, she always knew she might die. That didn’t mean she wanted to. She resisted the urge to get up and run, and held her breath.

  Noise came from ahead: voices shouting, some sort of banging, and she opened her eyes. Through the smoke there seemed to be a red light shining that might be an exit sign.

  A wide patch of light suddenly opened ahead, bright even through the smoke, and an amplified voice announced, “Clear the building.” I already knew I should do that.

  Her hands touched wet pavement, a puddle, and the light kept getting brighter. Someone ran to her and picked her up and carried her out—

  Past a smoking doorway lit by floodlights, out to a dark parking lot and into air, fresh air. She took a deep breath. Safe! She was being carried by a firefighter in heavy gear, who set her down. Another firefighter joined them.

  “We can take you to help.” A gloved hand gently took her arm, so gently that her shoulder didn’t hurt. “Can you walk?”

  She looked around. Behind her hoses were showering water on the building, but flames rose like monsters, and she was sure only that she needed to get away, get safe. She took another breath. She should let the firefighters lead her. They’d know where to go. She could trust them—she hoped.

  They took her to an area where people were waiting behind a yellow ribbon strung between light
posts. A man in an orange vest, wearing a face mask and gloves, hurried over.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She didn’t know how to answer. Being all right suddenly seemed like a complicated idea.

  “Can you breathe? Breathe for me,” he said. He held a circular sensor to the bare skin at her collarbone. It felt cold in a refreshing way.

  She took a deep breath. Air had never felt better. But she coughed.

  He looked at the readings on a box in his other hand. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Avril. Avril Stenmark.”

  “How old are you?”

  That seemed like a weird question, but she answered. “Eighteen.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Chicago.” Not exactly, but close enough.

  “You’re okay,” he said, “but barely. Smoke can cause problems later. If you have a cough or feel faint or confused, get help, okay? If you can, get checked again tomorrow morning for smoke inhalation. And if you develop a fever or cold symptoms, get help right away, too.”

  She nodded.

  “You can go over there for now. You’ll get water and care there.” He pointed at a tent where a lot of people stood.

  Water. She needed some water more than anything else. There was Enos, too, near the tent. He saw her and waved with both hands as she approached.

  “You made it out. We were worried.”

  “Yeah, I got out.” She’d left behind a beloved corpse. She ought to call Irene. No, she ought to call her own mother. No, her father.

  “There’s water over there,” Enos said, pointing.

  She knew that, didn’t she? If she felt confused, the man said … Yes, maybe she was confused. She started to walk—No, wait, I’m dizzy, take another deep breath—and when she could, she followed Enos, who was watching her and waiting. He led her to a table with paper cups of water. She drank: it was cold, and the first swallow stung her throat. The second swallow felt cleaner, better, and she drained the glass.

  “We’ll be here for a while,” he said. “Everything’s confused and busy.”

  * * *