‘No headlights,’ I mutter. ‘They might be using infra-red. You sure it was a jeep?’
‘Brand new, they said. Has to be Cartaxus.’
The hair on the back of my neck rises. I’ve never seen a jeep out here before. Cartaxus always sends its troops out in camouflaged trucks, with whining drones for air support. I scan the forest again, straining my ocular tech until my vision starts to glitch.
‘I tried calling you,’ Agnes says. ‘A few times, the last couple of days.’
‘I’ve been in the lab,’ I mutter, scanning the roads. ‘Trying to make gunpowder.’
‘That sounds dangerous.’
A half-smile tugs at my lips, and my fingers twitch instinctively, running over the sensitive, newly regrown skin on my palms. ‘There were some minor explosions. Nothing my healing tech couldn’t handle.’
Agnes clicks her tongue. ‘Bobcat. When did you last eat?’
‘Um … yesterday?’
‘Do you have clean clothes?’
I glance down at my filthy sweater, my dirt-encrusted jeans. ‘Uhh …’
‘Get yourself over here right now, young lady. I don’t like the sound of this jeep, and you need to get out of that godforsaken lab for a night. Right now, you hear me?’
I bite back a laugh. ‘OK, Yaya. I’ll be there soon.’
‘Damn straight you will. And bring your dirty clothes with you.’
The connection clicks off in my ears with a hiss, leaving me grinning. Agnes isn’t really my yaya, though she certainly acts like it. We don’t share DNA, but we’ve shared food and tears, and ever since the outbreak, that’s all that really counts. Sometimes I think the only reason either of us is still alive is that we can’t bear the thought of leaving the other alone.
I stretch my arms over my head, scanning the forest one last time before dialling my ocular tech back down. The embedded panel in my forearm that powers my tech chews through a few hundred calories a day even on standby, and food isn’t exactly plentiful any more. My vision blurs as my eyes refocus, and it takes me a second to realize there’s a plume on the horizon that wasn’t there before.
‘Uh-oh.’
I freeze, counting the seconds until the crack hits my ears. The plume rises before spreading, mushrooming out across the sky. The flock of pigeons fragments into wild, panicked streams, racing away from the billowing cloud. The sound takes fifteen seconds to hit me, which tells me it’s three miles away. Too far to make out the details, but I can tell the cloud is a sickly shade of pink.
That’s the colour of a human body when its cells are ripped open, blown into mist and spat into the air.
A Hydra cloud.
My stomach lurches. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, this distant cloud just might kill me. One breath is all it takes. One lungful of swirling, airborne virus particles that will swarm through every cell in your body. You’ll get a fever; you’ll incubate; then two weeks later you’ll go off like a grenade, infecting everyone in a mile-wide radius.
There’s no cure, no treatment. There’s one way to get immunity, but it’s been twenty-six days since I last took a dose.
Agnes’s voice crackles in my ears. ‘That … near you?’
I close my eyes, using a mental command to switch my comm over to text mode. It’s slower – I have to focus harder, bringing up each word separately in my mind – but it doesn’t need a clear signal.
3 miles, I send. Blowing further east. Probably out of infection radius.
haul out quick, she replies.
I will. She doesn’t need to tell me twice.
I pause as I turn back to the trail, watching the cloud drift. It’s twice as big as the clouds I first saw in the outbreak, two years ago. The virus is evolving, and the blasts are getting stronger. If they keep growing, pretty soon there won’t be anywhere left to hide.
I push the thought away, jogging back down the mountain, trying to dodge the worst of the mud. There’s no need to panic about a cloud as far away as this, but without immunity, I can’t help but feel a little nervous.
I glance back as I descend into the trees, telling myself that it’s miles away, that I’ll be fine. I’ll go to Agnes’s place, and she’ll feed me lentils and her disgusting liquorice sweets like she always does. We’ll fire up her woodstove and play a game of cards. Simple. Easy. But just as the cabin comes into view, another crack tears through the air, and I jerk to a stop.
A second plume shoots up, pink and leaf strewn and terrifying. Close enough that I forget to count the seconds that pass until I hear it. The mist billows into the air like a living, heaving thing, unfurling through the forest, sending the pigeons scattering. The wind is dragging it away from me, but the wind can change in a heartbeat.
This cloud is far too close. I’m going to have to run.
Agnes’s name pops up in my vision as I race down the mountain.
another one
I KNOW, I reply, skidding to the bottom of the hill.
dont like this bobcat, she says. shdnt let ur immunity lapse.
There’s nothing I can say to that because I know she’s right; it was reckless to let myself run out of doses. There was a reason, but thinking about it now makes my cheeks burn with its sheer stupidity.
I bolt up the cabin’s stairs to the porch and grab my rucksack and knife, picking up the rifle before throwing it back down. Dead weight. I race out to my bike, an old BMX with a rusted frame that can handle dirt trails like nobody’s business. I sling my rucksack over my shoulder, slip my knife into my belt and haul the bike out from the bushes I keep it hidden in. One leg is over it, my grip tight on the handlebars, when an alert from my audio tech sends me flying into a crouch.
Rustling. Nearby. An unenhanced ear wouldn’t hear it, but my filters sharpen the sound into slow, heavy footsteps. Laboured and staggering. The way people move when they’re infected.
They’re just beyond me, in the trees, and they’re coming my way.
‘Oh shit,’ I breathe, my hands shaking.
near me, I send to Agnes, my mind spinning so fast that I can barely form the words.
HIDE NOW, she replies.
The command is so unlike her, so frantic and bizarre, that I don’t even pause to question it. I just drop my bike and run.
The cabin is too far, but there’s a willow near the lake, and I haul myself up through the branches, my newly healed palms scraping against the bark. I kick and claw my way to a high branch in a matter of seconds, flying up the tree on sheer adrenaline. As soon as I find my balance, a man crashes through the bushes, and I hold my nose at the exact moment he splashes into the lake.