Colony East (25 page)

Thinking this breezy news would cheer up Lily, he sealed the letter in an envelope and delivered it to David Levine in the CDC liaison office.

Levine paled the moment he entered the office. Dawson thought it was strange the scientist’s hand shook as he took the envelope.

“Thank you,” Dawson said.

Levine lowered his eyes and turned away without a word.

The scientist was shy and awkward around people, but something seemed to be troubling him. It was not long before Dawson understood the source of Levine’s anxiety. In the air command pilot’s room, he picked up the latest weather fax and drew in a sharp breath. The first tropical storm of the season had formed off the coast of Africa. They had named her Athena, and she could be very bad news.

So much for a quiet hurricane season, he thought. The map showed the storm at position, 18.4 N 126.3 E with gusts maxing out at fifty miles per hour. The meteorologists projected Athena would track toward Cuba, and gave it a fifty percent chance of strengthening into a hurricane. What direction Athena took from that point on, or whether she grew or fizzled, was anyone’s guess.

He considered Levine’s concern as a very bad omen. The scientist likely knew the latest results of the antibiotic trials. An early season hurricane combined with a delay in producing the antibiotic would create a disaster of epic proportions.

Dawson struggled to keep his chin up and shoulders back as he left the pilot’s office.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Brooklyn

“Nineteen Livingston Place,” Abby kept repeating to herself, not wanting to forget the place where Toucan and Toby were staying. When she met the adults, she’d tell them that Toucan and Toby were at Nineteen Livingston Place, please pick them up.

Scuffing her feet from fatigue, she approached the area where Toby had said he’d seen the adults in hazmat suits. Abby counted five kids sprawled on the sidewalk in front of Ribbentrop Fish Market, all appearing as sick and listless as Touk. She figured they were suffering the advanced stages of the illness. Several of the victims had friends or family with them. Word must have spread that the adults had come to this spot, and now they were all hoping the adults would return and take them to Colony East. Abby eyed the sick kids with compassion, but also as competition.

Then she spotted a large metal gate a block away, so she walked over to it to get her first close-up glimpse of Colony East. Pressing her face against the bars, she gaped in amazement. On the other side of the river, a truck drove along a road. There were boats that motored back and forth, fifty yards off shore, and she could make out adults in them, though none appeared to be heading for shore.

Abby paused to think how far they had come. She considered it nothing short of a miracle that she, Toby and Touk had made it from Castine Island to the edge of Colony East. It was a miracle that Touk was still alive and that Toby had witnessed adults looking for kids with the Pig. She realized, though, that all those miracles would amount to nothing if this was as far as they got. Less than a mile away were doctors who might be able to save Toucan, but the final leg of the journey seemed much further than that. Abby felt as if she were standing at the edge of the ocean, with Colony East as far away as the horizon.

“There should be a lot of trash at high tide.” Abby spun around. The filthy boy who spoke had a friendly face, wore two pearl earrings, and from what she could tell, appeared to be close to her age.

“Trash?”

“You’re not from around here,” he said, sizing her up.

“I'm from Maine.”

“Cool,” he beamed. “Tonight the moon is full, so the tide will be extra high. The adults dump all sorts of good stuff in the river. Last week, I got a bunch of uniforms the kids over there wear. They just had a few rips.”

Abby hesitated, leery of saying too much to a stranger, especially on the mainland. Then she reconsidered. Toucan was dying and the time for playing it safe had passed. “I don’t want trash. I’m waiting for the adults. My sister has the Pig.”

In an all too familiar reaction, the boy took a step back. It was somewhat promising, though, that he hadn’t walked away.

He nodded. “The adults have come two days in a row, looking for kids who have the Pig. They’re coming back to get more kids tonight.”

Abby’s pulse raced. She wondered how he knew that, but she didn’t want to come across as a naive stranger who asked dumb questions. “Where’s the best place to wait?”

He crinkled his eyes. “The best place is the hardest place to get to.” He reached his arm through the bars of the gate and pointed. “Right there. You want to meet them when they get out of their boats. On this side, it’s a free-for-all. Everyone wants to touch them and talk to them. The mob'll push you out of the way.”

Abby’s heart sank as she peered up at the cinder block wall, three times taller than she was and topped with curly barbed wire. “You can climb over that wall, right?”

“Yeah, I know a way,” he said, “but it’s hard and dangerous. That wire will slice you to bits if you don’t know what you’re doing. Coming all the way from Maine, you don’t want to bleed to death.”

Abby pleaded. “I need to get over there.”

“Forget it. You’ll get hurt.”

“Please,” she begged. “My sister is very sick. If she doesn’t get help soon…”

The boy hesitated. “Well, okay then. My friend has a ladder and rope. We climb up, throw a blanket over the barbed wire, then lower ourselves down on the other side.”

Something about the boy’s sudden change of heart alerted Abby. She wondered if he wanted something from her. “I can do that,” she said, pushing caution aside.

He narrowed his eyes. “No offense, but I don’t think you’re strong enough to hold the rope. Look at your arms. Where are the muscles?”

Abby straightened, aware that she had misread his intentions. He really was concerned about her safety. “Listen, I can do anything.”

The boy stared across the river, thinking. Abby held her breath. She made two fists, hoping he noticed the muscles in her forearms.

He finally let out a sigh. “What do you have to trade?”

She fished the gems from her pocket.

“That’s it? Those diamonds are fake.”

She felt the blood drain from her face. “Please.”

He pursed his lips and looked away. He nodded to himself, starting to speak, and then stopped himself. He made a clicking sound with his mouth. “All right,” he said finally and plucked the three rubies, leaving her with two diamonds.

Abby's eyes welled with tears. “Thank you.”

“If you get hurt, it’s not my fault,” he said and led her along the wall for fifty yards. “Wait here.” He disappeared into the crowd before she could ask him how long he would be. After four hours, with darkness falling, Abby balled her fists in anger, knowing the boy had tricked her.

Abby clenched her jaw and told herself she would find a way over that wall. She picked herself up and headed toward the gate, her mind whirling with ideas, fueled by the furious urgency of Toucan’s imminent death. Before the boy had known anything about her, he had mentioned trash. More than likely, he had thought the idea of picking trash from the river would bait her. Others must collect trash from the river, she thought. How did they get over the wall?

She stopped and listened for any noises coming from the other side of the wall. It was difficult to hear anything above the noises coming from this side. Kids played soccer, tag, they sang, laughed, ate, hung out around fires in barrels, rode bikes. It was as lively a gathering as any place she could remember before the night of the purple moon, a new type of society thriving. Unfortunately, all that was missing from this carnival of survivors were doctors who could help her sister.

Abby continued to the gate and peered out. Her pulse raced at the sight of the red and green running lights of boats that were closer to shore than earlier. After a minute, she realized the boats were only patrolling back and forth.

She headed north toward the Brooklyn Bridge, which, in the light of the full moon, looked like a broken skeleton. She hadn’t gone far when she heard voices. Up ahead, a flashlight flickered at the base of the wall. Moving closer, she saw a kid disappear into a hole in the ground. Abby picked up her pace, knowing that a tunnel must lead to the other side of the wall and beyond that, Colony East. To Abby, crawling through a hole certainly seemed smarter than trying to climb over razor sharp barbed wire ten feet in the air.

Abby sized up the hole and got on her hands and knees. She was about to worm into it, when all of a sudden, two girls marched up to her. One positioned her foot an inch from Abby’s hand. The other girl shone a light in her eyes. They both wore shorts and black leather boots, and the one with the flashlight had on a policeman’s hat. She waved the light and hissed, “Are you going to pay, or what?”

Then the one who had nearly stepped on her fingers widened her stance in a menacing way. “Pay or get out of here.”

Abby dug the two diamonds from her pocket and held them in her palm. Both girls laughed. “That’s all you got?” one sneered. “It’s high tide. You know how much trash you’ll get?”

“I don’t have anything else to trade,” Abby said, stopping before telling them that Touk was dying, sensing that sympathy would not buy her the privilege of crawling through the muddy hole. She also had another plan taking shape in her mind and it was best to conceal the real reason for wanting to get to the river’s edge.

The girl with the flashlight kicked some dirt at her. “Move on. Now!”

Abby thought fast. She had never negotiated before, but she had watched Toby enough times. “I’ll give you fifty percent of the trash I get. You choose what you want.”

The girls traded glances. Finger stomper gave a little snort. “Seventy percent.”

“Forty percent,” Abby shot back.

“Sixty-five,” flashlight girl countered.

Every cell in her brain and in her heart screamed for her to agree to that number. But she had seen the best in action. She trusted Toby. In a calm voice, almost apathetic, like she didn’t care what they would say, she said, “Thirty percent. That’s my final offer.”

The girls burst out laughing. Then they stepped away and conferred privately. They returned.

“Go on. We get to choose what we want. And don’t get shot.”

Abby quickly crawled through the hole before the girls could change their minds, and emerged on the other side. Along the bank, kids waded to their knees and fished snippets of trash from the river using long poles with hooks.

Colony East rose up before her like the Emerald City, it gave her cold chills. Gazing at the city, Abby remembered that Dorothy encountered a few obstacles before she got to see the Wizard of Oz. She resolved that nothing was going to stop her from getting to the adults.

She kicked off her shoes and stepped into the water. The silt squeezed between her toes as her feet sank in the mud. Compared to the icy water of Castine Island, the East River was a steamy bathtub. She sensed the trash collector kids stop and gape at her as she waded deeper. Imagining Touk on the edge of death and requiring urgent care, Abby slipped all the way in and took her first stroke toward Colony East.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Colony East

Dawson’s two-way radio crackled with the voice of Admiral Samuels. “Dawson, come in, over.”

Strange. The admiral ordinarily left the mundane task of communicating over the radio to Ensign Parker. It was even stranger the admiral would raise him this early in the morning. Reveille was not for another thirty minutes.

“Dawson, over.”

“Get to my office, on the double. O’Brien will cover for you.”

Dawson couldn’t read anything into Admiral Samuels’s gruff, irritated tone, because he always sounded that way.

Ten minutes later, as rosy clouds boiled on the horizon, Dawson stood before Trump Tower. Before facing the admiral, he recited the sailor’s refrain—Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight. Pink sky in morning, sailors take warning.

Ready for stormy seas, but hoping for the best, Dawson raced up to the fourth floor, discovering Ensign Parker had yet to arrive and the door to the admiral’s office open. He stepped inside and snapped off a crisp salute.

Seated behind his deck, Samuels waved a hand. “Have a seat, Mark.” Then he leaned forward. “Abigail Leigh.”

“Sir?”

“Do you know her? L-E-I-G-H.”

Dawson didn’t recognize the name. “Is she a cadet?”

“They picked her up on a windmill stanchion in the East River. She swam from the Brooklyn side and flagged down Ensign Mathews in a Zodiac. Do you know Mathews?”

“No, sir.”

“She’s a real go-getter. They call her ‘torpedo’. Just arrived from Colony West. She was a weapons specialist on the
Virginia.
Ms. Leigh informed the ensign that her sister has Ahab.”

“Ahab?”

“A-H-A-B. She called it the Pig. She said she knew we were looking for kids who were sick, who had siblings, and she gave an address where her brother and sister were staying.”

Dawson exhaled a sharp puff of air. The will of survivors amazed him. This girl breached the wall and made it halfway across the East River, all in a desperate attempt to save her sister.

“Normally,” the admiral continued, “Mathews would have taken the girl back to Brooklyn, but Abigail Leigh said she knew you.”

Dawson choked. “What?”

“So Mathews called me and asked what to do. I called Doctor Perkins, and he told me they were still looking for test subjects so I sent a team to pick up her brother and sister.”

“Abigail Leigh?” Dawson shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Sister is Lizette, brother is Toby.”

“Admiral, I have no idea. I…” All of a sudden, he felt his throat clamp shut. What if Abigail Leigh had come from Mystic? She might have been his neighbor. Kids of all ages had lived in their neighborhood. His wife had known all their names. They had joked they would never have trouble finding a babysitter for Sarah. How in the world had this girl found him? Easy, he thought. The CDC had broadcast that submarine crews had survived the epidemic, and Abigail Leigh might have known he was in the Navy serving on a submarine. She might have assumed they had assigned him to Colony East because it was close to Mystic. That assumption would have been dead wrong, but she had made it here nevertheless. This girl might have information about his daughter. It was his lucky day.