G-157 (29 page)

A handsome young blond smiled back at him from the right of the ID number.

Gamma 285837-8.

Culver, Troy Allen.

Age: 17

Aire’s
own boyfriend was stalking her.

The surveillance system was still booting all working cameras as Jackson logged the boy’s number into the chip tracking system he’d designed.

Grid G, R
ow Seven, Block 8, Map Mark 328

“Impossible,” he whispered, and ran it again.

Grid G, Row S
even
,
Block 8
,
Map Mark
328

The boy was in
Aire
’s bedroom. Jackson shook his head. The boy was fast, but there was no way he could have run two miles from town to
her
bedroom in under three minutes. Unless…

Jackson pulled up the activity from Troy’s chip over the last week.

No movement.

The second monitor beeped, signaling that the security system had fully
uploaded. He quickly found Air
e on the basketball courts. It took a little longer for him to find Troy. He spotted the movement a half a block away. Troy ha
d leaned down to squat behind someone’s
back porch.

His chip remained stable in Air
e’s room.

“I’ll be God damned.” Somehow, Gamma 285837-8 had removed his chip a week
ago, put it in Air
e’s dresser, and the security
team
had never picked up on it.

“Un-fucking-believable,” he said, shaking his head.

A light flashing in quadrant six caught his eye. He looked at the little brick house on the screen. A figure moved across the living room window, creating a hunched shadow in the curtains as the old woman stared out. Jackson’s skin grew cold as he watched the figure pace across the window, her footsteps becoming faster and faster.

A red blinking light appeared on the screen with her stats and picture ID.

“Shit,” he whispered.

The chip system was designed to alert security team when a unit’s level became too stress elevated. Jackson himself had created the chip reactor system to alert the security team of the malfunctioned units when the surveillance team who used
to watch the monitors would need to be cut due to the country’s budget crisis. Since the start of the experiment there were occasional malfunctions. Some units couldn’t handle the constant neurochemical stimulation from the chip and would exhibit
psychotic episode
s of violence or erratic movements. The security team would then enter the population, and remove the unit for disposal for the safety of the others. Major Jenkins, or Mayor Jenkins, as the population knew him, then informed the population that the individual had been recruited by the army for his or her “
moxy
” or “special talents”. The population easily accepted this explanation  due to their lifelong conditioning, and became proud of the family members they had lost.

Now the very system
h
e had created was working against him.

The
quiet
bonk-bon
k
-bonk
of the alarm could be heard through his office walls. The security team was already suited up and taking action in John’s Town, and the alert system in the military van was directing them to secure the old woman.
Aire
would be in the team’s direct line of sight on the path to quadrant four.

“Move,
Air
e,” Jackson urged. “They’ll pick you off right then and there if you don’t move.”

The girl continued to weep on the bleachers.

***

Thursday May 6, 2010

2:50 a.m.

Population: 196

Aire was unaware of the time as she wept. It felt good to cry over everything at once, to get it out of her system and be done with it. She cried until the tears slowed and the sobs eased until she sat quiet in the night.

Her body calm, emotions numb, Aire wiped her eyes and glanced at her watch. She stood up and brushed the dirt off her jeans, her thin legs carrying her quickly down the bleachers and across the park.

The meeting rock was still a bit of a walk away. Her footsteps quickened as she trumped across the grass. She passed the soccer field, to the motocross track. The events of that day so long ago blazed in her mind. She remembered her fear at seeing that the jump was too short, her terror as Gary came crashing down on Troy. She remembered running across the track to him, how she had to force her stomach to be calm at the sight of all the blood. That’s when all the madness began. After Gary had caused the crash, the strange happening
s
began to surface just days later.

She hated him then, and she hated herself as heat throbbed in her cheeks. If he wouldn’t have been so stupid, had just taken a second to estimate the jump none of this would have happened. That was her theory, anyway. She didn’t know what it was, but somehow Gary had picked up some kind of infection during the crash, something that plagued the mind and drove it to insanity, and he had spread it to the others. It was the only reasonable explanation for everything. He was the source of it all, so maybe if she could convince him to leave with her to go to one of the hospitals in Parker, they could do some tests and find out what was wrong with him. Then they could both return to John’s Town with a cure.

Her quick stride turned to an angry march, her storming steps elevating the rage as
she reached the edge of the pond
. Why didn’t he do something about his illness earlier? Why hadn’t he gotten help when he knew there was something wrong with him rather than stay around and spread whatever the sickness was to the others?

She wanted to scream, to kick something, to punch Gary until he begged for mercy. Her fingers grabbed hold of huge tussles of her own hair, and she pulled down hard on it as she
paced by the
massive gray boulder she’d gone fishing at with Troy by the water’s edge.

She looked out across the water, squinted her eyes into the woods to see if Gary was coming. Nothing was in the distance. She turned to look across the track, past the park, where she saw
pair of yellow head
lights coming up the road from the north.

She dropped down and hid behind the boulder. She listened to the engine growl as it drove down the highway, watched as it turned onto Bourbon to enter the heart of John’s Town.

Crouching onto all fours, Aire crawled across the grass towards the city, careful to stay low in the shadows. The truck lights turned off and it began to slow, prowling the streets like a panther in the darkness. It found its prey and stopped in front of a small house with a rocking chair on the
whitewashed
front porch.
A col
dness crept through her bones when
she recognized
it as
Mrs. Amos’s house.

She watched three men in Army fatigues get out of the camouflage
truck
. The door opened to Mrs. Amos’s house, and the old woman
shot
forward, her wrinkled hands curling into claws raised above her head. A wretched, animal like wail erupted from her lungs as she lunged
at
the men.

One of them outstretched
his arm
as he walked up the stoop towards her, and Aire heard a small pop. Mrs. Amos collapsed on her front porch near the old rocking chair, twitching for a moment before going limp.

The shortest man in the group crouched next to the old woman and put his fingers to her neck. He shook his
head
. Another quiet pop echoed off buildings. This time the short man looked up to the other and nodded. The other two men reached down
,
and
began to grab at
Mrs. Amos
’s limbs
.

Her mouth in a wide O, Aire watched
with stunned eyes
as they carried the old woman’s body down the steps towards the truck.
Rage ignited within
when they threw
the old woman
into the back like
the trash crew chucking bags of garbage along the side of the road into the trash wagon
. Satisfied with their work, the men climbed into the truck, and
continued down
Bourbon.

She sat behind the rock and watched the truck create a cloud of dust as it drove through downtown and onto Buffalo Trail towards the residential houses. What could the military want with an arthritic old woman? Surely she couldn’t be of much use to them. It was another lie, she thought. Mrs. Amos hadn’t been recruited. No one had been recruited. They were dead. Every single person they had been told was recruited by the military had been murdered.

It was an extermination. The military knew about the virus and was ridding the town of the infected. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to come back to anyone she knew. If Gary didn’t come to Parker with her, she’d go there alone
, tonight
. Parker was three times the size of John’s Town. There had to be someone who could help them there.

The billboards could be a problem. They’d stopped Troy from leaving that night, but maybe since Gary was sick they wouldn’t affect him. Her plan was to cut through the woods, far away from the roads. The distance could cut
the effects from the billboards
(if there were any)
and they’d be safer in the cover of the tree line. Parker was just over twenty miles away. It would be faster to take a motorcycle, but the noise of the engine could warrant unwanted attention. It would take them a day, maybe a little more to reach Parker on foot. She hoped she hadn’t acted too late.

Aire glanced at her watch.
Where was Gary
, anyway
?

***

Thursday May 6, 2010

3:02 a.m.

Central Control, Security wing

Jackson breathed in a sigh of relief as he watched
Aire
head toward
s the pond
just before the security truck broke across the tree line. Relief was short lived. It tore at his heart to watch the old woman be tranquilized and thrown into the truck. Hundreds of people had died because he hadn’t been smart enough to crack the virus. It was too late for them.

He watched the girl for a few minutes more, just as he had nearly every day for the last thirteen years. She’d been in diapers then, just two years younger than Sandra. She’d grown on him, become his own in a way. He’d smiled at Jenkins reports on her
strong will
and stubborn ways. She was so much like Sandra.

Turning off the monitor, Jackson went back into his office. A virus code that cou
ld not be cracked had taken the
lives of hundreds of innocent people, but it had shown him a thing or two. If some kid in Manhattan could design something so intricate, so could he.

***

Thursday May 6, 2010

4:13 a.m.

Population: 194

She’d waited almost an hour for Gary to show, but he never came. He’d made it clear he had no intentions of helping her in any way. This would be a journey she’d have to do alone. For a moment she almost began the trek when her watch struck four, but thought better of it and went into the old woman’s house for supplies instead.

She’d drank almost a full pot of coffee and her hands shook
from the caffeine and fear of the impe
n
ding voyage
. Aire found an old child’s back pack in Mrs. Amos’s hall closet. The name Chris was scrawled across the top with a backwards R.
She loaded the pack with
a few cans of food and several water bottles.
After all,
Mrs. Amos
and Chris
had
no need for these things now. T
he
y were
dead. So many were dead.

Throwing the pack over her shoulder, Aire took one last look at the clock befo
re
closing the front door behind her.

The sun wasn’t set to rise for another hour, and t
he cover of darkness was still thick enough
that she could
venture through the woods without detection. The Coconino forest was said to be thicker the farther west it was travelled, and she hoped at least that much was true as she circled the lake and began her venture into the forest,  the lump in her stomach growing heavier with each step.