I’m immune.
The fictonimbus virus, commonly known as Hydra, passes through two distinct stages before sending its victims into the sky. First, it injects triggers into a victim’s cells, throwing them into a fever, painting a mosaic of black-and-blue bruises across their skin. After a week they pass into the second stage, where it wraps every cell in their body with a layer of proteins, like the casing around a bomb. It’s that casing that gives off the scent that sparks the Wrath in anyone standing nearby, and it’s also the only thing that can stop the virus from entering your cells.
That’s how the immunity works. If you eat the flesh of a second-stage victim, the virus doesn’t realize it’s changed hosts. Within an hour of taking a dose, it’ll wrap all your cells up, forming the only barrier strong enough to keep the virus from burrowing into them. You have to be careful, though. An early dose, taken from someone in the first stage, will infect you with the virus too. A late dose, taken from a second-stager on the brink of detonation, could blow a hole right through you before you digest it. The dose I took tonight was late stage, but didn’t have the warning signs – speckles of blood from burst capillaries that hint at imminent detonation.
That’s lucky, because after the scent of infection hit me, I don’t know if I could have stopped myself.
The deer lower their heads to drink, their ears twitching as I scrub my face and hands with the lake’s icy water. Every time I blink, I see the dead man’s face behind my eyes, a constant reminder of what I’ve just done to stay alive. To be honest, I can live with the killing, and I can even live with the eating, even though before the plague I would have sworn that I’d rather die.
It’s funny, that saying – I’d rather die. It’s funny because nobody means it. The truth is that when you’re facing death, there’s no telling what you’ll do. When you’re killing people who are dying anyway, it almost makes it too easy.
Almost.
No, it’s not the killing that haunts me, or the immunity itching in my blood. It’s the fact that every time I do this, part of me likes it.
Whenever the Wrath hits you, it comes on like an instinct, as powerful as survival and as basic as hunger. And when you yield to that instinct, it’s like nothing you’ve known. Endorphins. Fireworks. Your body’s entire arsenal of neurochemicals, all hurled into your brain as a staggering reward. Your body tries to convince you that murdering someone is the best thing you’ve ever done.
It’s like a drug, and a dangerous one. The Wrath is so consuming that sometimes people lose themselves in it and never come back. We call them Lurkers. They travel in packs, hunting like wolves, locked in a constant state of hunger and bloodlust.
I wipe my hands on my jeans, gather my things and follow the gravel path up to the cabin. Night is falling fast, and I can barely see my way. My ocular tech makes a weak attempt to help me, multiplying the moonlight, turning my world into a pixelated mess. Before the outbreak, I begged my father to write me cosmetic apps like skinSmooth and lustre, but he always said it was a waste of his time. These days I wish I’d asked him for ultraview or echolocation, or even the clunky kind of night vision that leaves scars around your eyes.
I dump my bag on the cabin’s porch and wave my forearm over a sensor near the door, waiting for an LED to blink by the handle. You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking. You also wouldn’t see the electromagnets bolted inside the frame, not until it was too late. When panels are first budded, they grow networks of cables inside you, like a subway system to transport nanites throughout your body. The cables use metal sockets in your shoulders and knees, so I wired up two electromagnets inside the door to wrench the knee sockets out of anyone who might try to break in.
It’s not a perfect security system, but it’s better than nothing. Especially when all I have left is one bullet.
The door clicks open, and the cabin’s lights blink on, casting a jaundiced glow across the living room. My sleeping bag is crumpled on a mattress near the fireplace, where a pile of last night’s embers smoulders silently. The walls are bare, with the exception of a single photograph that Dax took of me and my father just before the outbreak. My father has his arm round my shoulders, and my hand is halfway to my face, pushing the windblown hair from my eyes.
We look so alike. I have his grey eyes, his long thin nose. Our chins are neat and tapered, like the bottom of a heart. In the photograph, my father’s mouth is curved in a rare smile – we’d just finished a piece of code we’d been working on for months. He never used words like ‘love’, but the day the photograph was taken, he told me he was proud of my work, which was close enough for me.
I pick up my dirty clothes from the living-room floor, shoving them into my rucksack to take to Agnes’s. My long-suffering genkit is hidden under a pair of jeans – an old laptop model with a needle wire to jack into panels. Genkits are coding tools, used to access and edit gentech software and tweak or install apps and run maintenance. They’re not technically computers, but mine will act like one if you ask it nicely, and it’s been my trusty sidekick for the last two years.
I flick it open, trying to decide whether to take it with me. Ninety-five per cent of the cracked screen blinks to life. A chat request pops up in the menu, and a woman’s face appears on the screen. Dr Anya Novak. Scarlet hair, rhodium fingernails and a trademark smile she blasts around the world three times a day. She’s the leader of the Skies, the loosely formed group of survivors that sprang up after Cartaxus used the outbreak to take over what was left of the world.
They only took over to help us, of course. Cartaxus is always trying to help. They tried to help my father into a chopper by shooting him twice. They tried to help us after the outbreak by dissolving the world’s governments, seizing the media and urging people into their massive underground bunkers.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. If I hadn’t known better, I would have lined up with most of the locals for a place at the closest bunker, Homestake. Food, shelter, airlocks. Protection from the virus. Most people couldn’t think of a single reason not to go.
But I could. My father’s words were fresh in my ears, and they still echo there two years later. Never let them take you. Sure enough, even though the bunkers were faradayed and guarded, rumours drifted out of deplorable conditions. People were living in dark, dirty cells. Cartaxus had taken control of their panels, wiping nonstandard apps and code. Security was brutal. Families were ripped apart.
The choice was clear: risk your life on the surface, or swap your rights for an airlocked cell.