I woke up on Monday morning to find a notice from Briarwood on my phone. They were shutting down for the duration, whatever that meant. I thought about sending out a note to the team list telling everyone to run intervals or something that afternoon. I’d even managed to dictate the first few words before I stopped and looked down the screen in my hand. This wasn’t a snow day. Micah was right. Shit had gotten freaking real, and worrying about cross-country practice suddenly seemed incredibly stupid. I seemed incredibly stupid. We didn’t need to start gearing up for Sectionals, because there wasn’t going to be any Sectionals. I deleted the message, and pocketed my phone.
“Hey,” Micah said.
I looked up. He was standing at the top of the basement stairs.
“Hey,” I said. “No school today, huh?”
He grinned.
“Doesn’t look like it. How do you want to celebrate?”
I sighed.
“First thing, I think we’d better go see what’s left of my house.”
“Wow,” Micah said. “You weren’t shitting me, huh?”
I pulled myself out of his crap-ass electric scooter and slammed the door.
“Nope,” I said. “I was not.”
The house wasn’t entirely burned to the ground. There was a lot of marble and stone in that place, and a lot of tempered steel to support the weight. It was definitely gutted, though. The walls around the windows and doors were blackened, and the roof had collapsed in a couple of places. I held up my phone, snapped a picture, and sent it to my mom. Micah was walking slowly across the yard. The grass and landscaping were torn to shit, tire ruts running back and forth across everything.
“Yeah,” he said. “Something definitely went down here last night, but I’m still not one hundred percent sure it wasn’t just a really crazy party. You might have . . .”
He’d stopped beside one of Mom’s landscaping projects.
“Oh, shit.”
I came up beside him.
There was a body there, half hidden by a cluster of three-foot hostas, sprawled on his back in the churned-up turf.
I’d been right the night before. He was a pimple-faced, dirt-lipped kid. Broken ribs jutted out of his chest where the cab’s tires had rolled over him. Micah turned to look at me.
“You’re telling me that cab did this?”
I nodded.
“There’s probably a couple more in the back.”
We walked slowly around the house. One body was laid out by the reflecting pool. The other was half sitting against the deck. It looked like he’d been pinned there and crushed. Micah closed his eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and then opened them again.
“Is this all there were?”
I shook my head.
“Somebody was still shooting at me when I bolted.”
“And he just left his friends lying in the yard?”
I shrugged.
“Might have been worried about NatSec coming to clean up the mess.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s legit. I saw a thing this morning about drones breaking up a riot in Baltimore with live fire.”
We kept walking. There was a detached garage on the far side of the house. I pulled out my phone and poked the door icon. Nothing happened, of course. I shaded my eyes with my hands, and peered in the side window.
Velociraptor was still in there, safe and sound. Bless, bless, bless.
I was back at Micah’s eating sandwiches on his deck when my mom finally pinged me back.
MBarnes12: Jordan! What the hell did you do to my house??
Jordasaurus: It’s a long and tragic tale, Mom. When are you coming home?
MBarnes12: Coming home? Ha! I don’t have a home! You burned my home!
Jordasaurus: I’m not going into it now, Mom, but trust me—when I do, you’re going to feel like a giant asshole for giving me shit right now. When are you coming home?
MBarnes12: . . .
Jordasaurus: Mom?
MBarnes12: I don’t know, Jordan. There aren’t any flights right now. The rest of the world has pretty much put the States under quarantine. I’ve spoken to your father, and he’s in the same boat. You’re going to have to manage on your own for a while. Do you have a place to stay?
Jordasaurus: Yeah, Mom. I’m fine. I’m staying with Micah.
MBarnes12: Great. Tell him I said thank you.
Jordasaurus: I will.
MBarnes12: Okay. And Jordan?
Jordasaurus: Yeah?
MBarnes12: Please . . . be careful?
“So,” Micah said around a mouthful of ham and cheese. “What does Mommy have to say?”
“Well, she’s not too happy about the house.”
He laughed.
“Yeah, I bet. She coming home?”
I shook my head.
“Looks like I’m an orphan until the world turns right side up again.”
He opened his mouth to say something else, but a crash and shouting inside the house brought us both to our feet. It sounded like Micah’s dad yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. I followed Micah in from the deck to the kitchen. His dad was standing by the breakfast table, fists clenched at his side. I could hear the sound of his mother’s feet pounding up the stairs. His dad turned to look at us. I took an involuntary step back. He was even bigger than Micah, and his face was murderous. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath in and let it out, then pulled a chair out from the table and slowly sat.
“Dad?” Micah said. “What the shit?”
His father dropped his head into his hands.
“Your mother’s sick,” he said.
“So what . . .” I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “Oh. Oh, shit.”
“Yeah,” his father said. “Oh, shit.”
It wound up falling to Micah to take care of his mom for the next few days. His father couldn’t be in the same room with her. The first day was bad—puking and diarrhea and a brutal, blood-red rash, with a fever that the analgesics we gave her couldn’t touch. The second day she was pretty much unconscious. We tried to get her to drink a little water every hour or two, but other than that we pretty much left her alone. By the third day, she was starting to look better.
By the fourth day, she was yellow.
Micah’s dad was gone by then, staying in a hotel somewhere because he just couldn’t bear the thought that his poopsie had banged some random Goo Flu zombie while she was supposed to be picking up groceries. Micah tried to tell him that it wasn’t her fault, that it was pheromones and whatnot that made her do it, but his dad was having none of it.
It took all of three days before Micah’s mom tried to molest me.
I woke up in the coal-black dark of Micah’s basement, disoriented, knowing something was wrong but not able to figure out what it was. I’d been having a really freaky sex dream, and for a minute I thought I was still in it, because someone was touching me.
Someone was touching me, I mean.
I jerked upright on the futon and scrambled backward.
“Shhhh,” a voice whispered. “It’s okay, Jordan. It’s just me.”
“Shit,” I said. “Micah’s mom?”
She laughed.
“My name is Moira, Jordan.”
“Micah!” I yelled. “Get down here, Micah!”
She tried to shush me, but I pushed her hand away and kept yelling. I felt the futon shift as she stood. I heard two or three quick steps before the door at the top of the steps opened and the lights came on.
“Jordan?” Micah said. “What the hell, brother? You having night terrors or something?”
That’s when he saw his mom. She looked up at him, then back at me, then burst into tears.
Micah put a lock on the basement door the next morning.
We settled into a routine over the next week or so, Micah and I. Most mornings, we hung around the basement with the lock thrown while his mom made breakfast and watched the world fall apart in slow motion on the living-room wallscreen. Sometime around noon she’d go up to her bedroom, and we’d come up to the main floor to eat. Afternoons we’d go for runs around the neighborhood.
That ended the Saturday after my house burned, when NatSec declared a twenty-four-hour curfew until the crisis was resolved.
“I don’t get it,” Micah said when that message popped up on our phones. “How, exactly, is this supposed to resolve?”
“Well,” I said. “According to Mr. Longstreth, it’ll be resolved when everyone on the planet is yellow.”
He turned to glare at me.
“Please tell me you’re not thinking about banging my mom.”
I punched him. He shoved me back onto the futon, and pinned me down with one forearm. I tried to throw him off, but it was like wrestling with a hairless bear. He waited for me to quit struggling.
“No,” I said finally. “I am not interested in banging your mom.”
“Good,” he said. He kissed me on the forehead, laughed, and pulled me to my feet. “If anyone turns you yellow, it goddamned well better be me.”
Two days later, we were in the kitchen making eggs when the wallscreen popped up video from the front-entry cam of two men dragging what looked like a giant sack of potatoes up onto the front porch. They didn’t bother to ring for entrance, just left it there in a heap and walked away. By the time Micah got to the door, they were already gone. The sack was black and a bit over six feet long, with a yellow biohazard symbol at the top and bottom, and a silver zipper running down the front. Micah stood staring down at it for a long while, nudged it once with his foot, then turned and walked back into the house. When he was gone, I knelt beside the bag and tugged the zipper down, just far enough to be sure.
He looked pretty much the same as he had when he’d left the week before. The only differences were the yellow skin, and the neat, almost bloodless bullet hole in his forehead.
We buried him in the backyard, like a dog. We didn’t know what else to do.
The days ran together after that. Micah’s mom stayed in her bedroom and cried pretty much all the time. Micah brought her food a couple of times a day. At first he threw away what she didn’t eat, but after a few days we realized that the cupboard was going to run bare eventually if NatSec didn’t lift the curfew, and we started eating her leftovers.
“Think this’ll give us the flu?” I asked the first time he offered me her half-eaten pasta.
He shrugged.
“We’re all gonna be yellow eventually, brother. I think I’d just as soon catch it from spaghetti, if it comes to that.”
A few days later, we were back in the basement waiting for Micah’s mom to clear the kitchen when my phone pinged.
<UNK01>: Jordan! How goes it, friendo?
Jordasaurus: Marta?
<UNK01>: If you thought this was Marta, would that make you more or less likely to do what I’m about to tell you to do?
Jordasaurus: . . .
<UNK01>: Right. That was kind of a giveaway, huh?
Jordasaurus: Kind of, yeah.
<UNK01>: Okay, you got me. This is not, if we’re being completely honest here, your good pal Marta. This is, in actual fact, your other good pal, Inchy.
Jordasaurus: Yeah, I don’t know any Inchies. Bye.
<UNK01>: Wait! Wait! This is important!
Jordasaurus: . . .
<UNK01>: Please? It’s about our mutual pal, Hannah. She’s in a bit of a pickle, and I need you to help me get her out.
“This is a bad idea,” Micah said.
“Relax,” I said. “There are no traceable electronics in this car. No onboard GPS, no auto-drive, no built-in comm. It’s totally undetectable. Unless someone sees us with their actual eyeballs, we’ll be fine.”
“Great,” he said. “I’m pretty sure my dad didn’t have any traceable electronics in him either. How’d that work out for him?”
We turned off a deserted suburban street and onto a cul-de-sac, and pulled over to the curb in front of a hulking gray Victorian. Devon was waiting on the porch. Micah got out to let her into the back.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“No problem,” I said as Micah climbed back in. “I didn’t know you and Hannah were friends.”
She twisted around for a few seconds trying to find a comfortable position, then gave up and belted herself in.
“I got to know her a bit after that meet last month.”
“Wow,” Micah said. “And now you’re willing to break NatSec curfew for her?”
She shrugged.
“Inchy says it’s important.”
“So,” Devon said as we pulled onto the highway. “Have you heard from Marta? She could actually be super helpful here.”
I turned to look back at her.
“No,” I said, “I have not heard from Marta. I thought I’d talked to her a few times since the shit went down, but I’m pretty sure now that I was actually talking to your friend Inchy—which means that I haven’t actually heard a peep from her since our . . . um . . . visit. I’m a little worried, to be honest. Her dad seemed really, really pissed the last time we saw him.”
“Truth,” Micah said. “I was kind of surprised he didn’t sic the sentient corn on us when we left.”
“Anyway,” I said, “why do we need Marta? Are we bribing someone?”
“We need Marta,” Devon said, “because we’re rescuing Hannah from Marta’s dad.”
The road was empty, so I risked another look back.
“We’re what?”
“Well,” Devon said. “Inchy tells me Hannah got snagged by Bioteka CorpSec around the same time our friend Officer Mike was trying to run us in.”
“Yeah,” Micah said. “That’s pretty much what Tara told us. It doesn’t make sense though, does it? Officer Mike was torqued at us because he caught us red-handed, trying to crack a Bioteka system . . .”
“And also because Jordan knocked him on his ass and dry-humped him,” Devon said.
“Yeah,” Micah said. “That too. Anyway, Hannah didn’t do any of that stuff. She was definitely not a perpetrator of what we were doing, and technically speaking, she could have been considered a potential victim. I mean, it was her house we kind of invaded. Why would Bioteka go after her?”
Nobody had a good answer for that. We passed a shut-down rest stop in silence.
“By the way,” Devon said, “you did leave your phones at home, right?”
“Uh . . .”
I turned to look at Micah. The car swerved right. Devon shrieked, and I snapped back around in time to pull us back onto the road.
“Easy,” Micah said. “Yes, I left my phone at home, Jordan. I’m not an idiot.”
Just at that moment, a sharp, audible ping came from the vicinity of my right hip pocket.
“Okay,” Devon said. “So what was that?”
“Um,” I said. “That was my phone.”
There was a long, awkward silence then. Devon shook her head, and Micah covered his face with both hands.
“Well?” Devon said finally. “Somebody wants to talk to you. Might as well see who it is.”
That wasn’t nearly as easy as she made it sound, but after a couple minutes’ worth of writhing, I finally managed to wrestle my phone out and get a look at it. I read the message once, then again. Micah poked me.
“So?”
“It’s from NatSec,” I said. “They say we need to pull over.”
“Shit,” Devon said. “Who invited this guy?”
“Out the window,” Micah said. “Now.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“Your phone,” he said. “Out the window.”
I shook my head.
“My phone is not going out the window.”
“Micah’s right,” Devon said. “You’re gonna get us snagged. The phone’s gotta go.”
“No!” I said. “Do you know how much info I’ve got stored up in here?”
“Jordan . . .”
“No, Micah.”
He made a grab for my phone then. I yanked it away. We swerved halfway into the breakdown lane and back again.
“Come on, Jordan!”
“Guys?”
We ignored her. Micah grabbed my arm and started prying at my fingers.
“Guys?”
We kept ignoring her.
“Hey!”
She smacked the back of Micah’s head.
“What?” Micah said. “I’m trying to save us from NatSec. Do you mind?”
“Yeah,” Devon said. “I think you can stop now.”
She pointed out the windshield. Micah’s arm went limp.
And then it dropped into view, twenty yards ahead, just keeping pace with us—a jet-black quad copter, squat and ugly, about the size and shape of Micah’s scooter. I mean, except for the fact that Micah’s scooter didn’t have a twenty-mil cannon hanging off of it. As I watched, it rotated slowly around, until we were looking straight down the barrel.
My phone pinged.
“It’s NatSec again,” I said. “They say we really need to pull over.”