Generation M (2 page)

How she wished that Abby and Jordan were here now. She’d never forget about her sister and brother.

Never!

Doctor Perkins stepped to the fifth-floor window of the Gregor Mendel conference room in Colony East’s Trump Tower. His angular face and round glasses stamped a ghostly reflection in the glass as he squinted against the early morning sunshine.

Hurricane David, now a thousand miles to the north, had brought with it the lethal bacteria, and the solution he desired was finally at hand. The surviving population outside the colonies would be eliminated by the epidemic in two-months’ time. A Pacific-based hurricane would similarly introduce the bacteria from the equatorial region and address the issue in the western half of the country.

The children called the epidemic the “Pig,” for the ravenous appetite the infection produced. He preferred the scientific nomenclature for the bacterial mutation, “AHA-B.”

The problem had vexed him since the inception of the colonies. As the survivors outside the colonies grew older and stronger, they would become impatient with Generation M receiving all the adult resources; they would want to destroy his life’s work. It was only a matter of time before he and his colleagues could no longer repel the onslaught. Allowing the epidemic to spread would nip the issue in the bud.

Hurricane David had also wrought great physical damage. From his conference room perch, Perkins could see a sample of the devastation. Debris littered Fifth Avenue, and projectiles had smashed many of the windows in the surrounding buildings. He peered right. All that remained of the Bergdorf Goodman Building on the corner of Fifth and 58th was a large pyramid of bricks, steel girders, and office furniture. He looked left and saw a pond spreading out from the metro stop. As he had read in the damage report, the subway system was completely flooded.

His two-way radio crackled with the voice of Lieutenant Mathews.

“Report,” he replied.

“Green light at the airport, sir.”

Perkins sighed in relief. Clearing the runway had been critical. Now they could receive a shipment of antibiotic pills from the plant in Alpharetta. “Have you informed Atlanta?”

“That’s a negative, sir. Communications are still down, but we’re working on it. Estimated time for the fix is zero-eight-hundred hours.”

“Make it faster,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Perkins could hear the young lieutenant’s desire to climb the ranks.

“Good,” he said. “Keep me informed.”

He returned to his desk and flipped through a stack of damage reports. Countless skyscrapers were structurally unsound, and the storm surge had swept away every pier along the East River and the Hudson.

The energy report troubled him. The storm had destroyed nineteen of the twenty windmill stations that provided electricity to the colony. Even with diesel generators providing some electricity, the colony was operating at a mere ten percent of its capacity. They had only a five-day supply of fuel on hand to maintain even this subsistence level.

Security was equally troublesome. They could not electrify the northern perimeter fence, and they’d have to limit Zodiak patrols on the rivers, leaving them vulnerable to incursions.

When Perkins considered the totality of the problems, the conclusion was obvious. He wrote “Evacuate” on his notepad, and then underlined it twice.

Just then, Doctor Droznin, hobbling on crutches, entered his office.

Perkins marveled at how quickly the Russian epidemiologist had bounced back after being shot in the knee. She plunked her stout, short frame into a chair and set a graph on his desk.

“New data on the spectral analysis,” she said. “We based our initial projections on the bacterial density at the equator. For some reason, it’s far greater here.”

Doctor Droznin was consumed by research data, and he figured it was best to let her proceed before briefing her on his decision to evacuate Colony East.

He knew the chart too well: a projection of the overall mortality rate outside the colonies. They understood the nature of the illness. The AHA-B bacteria attacked the hypothalamus, the gland that controls appetite. Following a three-day incubation period, a victim experienced ravenous hunger, followed by a high fever. The number of victims would increase rapidly over the first few days of exposure, and then level out. Death occurred in one to four weeks.

The spike in the death rate at Week Four was a consequence of the AHA-B symptoms. They predicted that food riots would break out, pitting the sick against the healthy, and by Week Eight, the population of survivors outside the colonies would be statistically nonexistent.

Perkins massaged his temples. “I see this in my dreams.”

“Look at the X axis,” Droznin said.

When his eyes fell to the horizontal scale that showed the timeframe of the lethal epidemic’s rise, he sat up with a jolt. “Two weeks!”

Perkins’s head was spinning. The revelation added to the emergency they faced.

He tented his fingers and informed her of his decision to evacuate Colony East. “I’ll schedule a meeting with Admiral Samuels and the company leaders as soon as possible. Lieutenant Mathews will work out the logistics for transferring the cadets. Atlanta can accommodate four companies.”

“What about Colony West?” she asked.

“I’m working on another plan for them, which I’ll share at an appropriate time.” Perkins glanced at his day calendar. “We have a meeting scheduled with Doctor Hoffer and Doctor Ramanathan today at twelve thirty to review the profile of a prospective Generation M member, ID 944. She’s marginal, at best. I’ll order her to be expelled, and then we can use the time to discuss the evacuation instead.”

“Lisette Leigh is the candidate,” Droznin said. “She participated in the early drug trials. She’s part of my ongoing study on the effects of the antibiotic.”

“That’s right. Her older sister was ID 1002, the cadet who shot you.”

Perkins feared where this conversation was heading. Droznin would argue to keep 944 for research purposes alone.

“Lisette Leigh is five years old, the youngest subject to receive the antibiotic,” Droznin said.

Speaking in the patient tone he reserved for the youngest members of Generation M, Perkins leaned forward. “Svetlana, have you seen her profile? Her test scores are abysmal. When we evacuate, we’ll be introducing two hundred new members of Generation M to Atlanta Colony. They won’t know where to put all of us.”

She insisted they conduct the evaluation.

He felt strongly that 944 would contribute absolutely nothing to the society of the future. Now was the time to weed out those who drained vital resources.

“Let’s postpone our decision until later,” he said, and then tried to change the subject. “How is your leg feeling?”

Abby doubled over in pain, bringing her knees to her chest and hugging them as waves of cramps rolled through her stomach. She had the Pig.

Dawn light came through the window and cast shadows in the upstairs room where she had spent the night after escaping from Colony East.

The second-floor room had probably been someone’s bedroom before the night of the purple moon. The hurricane had damaged the structure. One corner of the ceiling had collapsed, and water was dripping onto the heap of white chunks on the floor below. Through the window, she could see the dark buildings of Colony East across the East River.

Food might ease the cramps a little, but the small bag of cooked rice Abby had brought from the colony was the only food she had with her. She had to make it last.

She balled her fists and crossed her arms. The bag of rice was so close, and the desire to eat so powerful. How could she resist?

Her mind was playing tricks on her. The AHA-B bacteria attacked the gland that controlled appetite, and in turn, that gland sent a signal to the brain, convincing the body it was starving to death. How could she gain control of her actions when her mind was battling itself?

As the cramps intensified, Abby cried out repeatedly, bringing her hands to her mouth. When that failed to muffle her grunts and groans, she buried her face in her backpack and bit down on the strap, hoping the rough fabric pressing against her tongue would somehow mimic a mouthful of food.

As more light entered the room, she could make out the lumpy swell of tarps, blankets, and jackets that served as communal covers for the twenty other girls in the room with her.

The tribe of five and six-year-old girls had led her to this house after she had washed ashore from the East River. They had saved her life.

Abby’s head pressed against some part of the girl next to her, and another girl’s hand was draped over her shoulder. Everyone was snuggled close to stay warm.

Closing her eyes, Abby returned to the fantasy that had comforted her throughout the long night. She pictured herself walking down a dirt road with tall pine trees on both sides. Traces of purple dust bled into the bed of golden needles at the edges of the road. She could smell the lake in a fresh wind through the trees before she came to it. The opposite shore was two miles away, and the body of water extended to her right and left beyond her view.

The image of the cabin was clear in Abby’s mind. Mandy, a girl who had saved Abby and Jordan’s lives two years earlier, had described the cabin on the lake in Maine to Abby and given her directions. Mandy’s grandparents had lived there.

The cabin sat thirty yards away from the water, with a chimney and a wide window that faced the lake. As Abby imagined herself stepping past the stack of firewood, Toucan burst through the door and raced to greet her, a blur of legs and curly red hair. Abby bent her knees and opened her arms wide, bracing herself for the impact.

She snatched Touk in mid-air, and while hugging her tightly, she carried her inside, where Jordan, Toby, and Jonzy were laughing and joking with each other. Jordan and Toby both had shaggy heads of hair and were lean and muscular from the day-to-day efforts to survive. Jonzy, who had spent the last two years at Colony East, wore thick glasses and looked like he had just stepped out of an exclusive prep school.

A stew of some sort was cooking on the wood stove. Inhaling the aroma, she put Touk down and went over to the pot, trying to guess the ingredients. She lifted the lid.

Abby shrieked from a painful cramp, which interrupted her fantasy. Nobody in the room stirred from the outburst. She figured the other girls, like many survivors, were used to cries in the night.

She sat up and her eyes blurred from the scent of Pink Sugar perfume mingling with the stink of dirty clothes and mildew. Grimacing, she tested her limbs and checked her fingers and toes. Nothing was broken or sprained from tumbling in the raging East River; there were only scrapes and bruises. Her wristwatch had also survived. It was 5:30.

She reached into her backpack and wrapped her fingers around the two-way radio. The rush of relief gave way to apprehension as she brought it to her ear. Were the batteries still good? She turned on the radio, heard the satisfying static in answer, turned it off, and returned it to the pack.

The walkie-talkie was the only way to communicate with Jonzy, who remained inside Colony East.

Abby stood and trembled in the chilly air. The communal blanket and collective body heat of the slumbering girls had kept her toasty throughout the night, but now her damp blue jeans pressed cold and clammy against her skin.

She slung her pack over her shoulder and made her way to the door, stepping next to heads and in between legs.

Reaching the doorway, she was about to look back at the tribe of sleeping girls, but instead continued into the hallway and down the steps. She could do nothing for them. Many would get the Pig, if they didn’t have it already. She had to put the girls out of her mind. Move on.

In the kitchen, she fixed her eyes on a bounty of potatoes, dried fish, some other type of dried meat, and bottles of water on the counter. She slipped three potatoes into her pack, aware that she was stealing, yet unable to resist the pull of the food. She unscrewed a bottle cap and took a long drink of water.

On the front porch, she groaned as a fresh wave of cramps twisted her gut. No matter how hungry she was, she could not steal from the girls who had saved her life. She returned the potatoes to the counter, considering it a small victory for her willpower.

Then, unable to control her hand, she picked up a potato, brought it to her lips, and wolfed it down, completely raw.

Outside, she walked down the porch steps and stopped, feeling guilty about what she had done, yet relieved that the tiny chunks of potato sitting in her stomach were finally settling her cramps.

Under different circumstances, she would have said it was a beautiful morning. The sky was pale blue and the temperature was mild. The slight hint of a breeze carried a tang of saltiness. Beyond the broken skeletons of two bridges, Colony East rose in the distance, and The East River, thick with floating debris, moved along swiftly. She marveled at the towering hull of the freighter beached on the bank, knowing it had saved her life. Were it not for the freighter diverting a channel of water, the rapids would have swept her farther down river.

She had to make it to the Ribbentrop Fish Market today, where she planned to meet Toby. The fish market was across from the gate where she had caught her very first glimpse of Colony East in a section of Brooklyn she guessed was at least several miles away.

“Where are you going?”

Abby turned. A girl stood on the porch. She wore an oversized man’s shirt and a pair of rubber boots that rose to her knees. She had ratty hair, smudged cheeks, and a bright smile. Her eyes sparkled in the sunlight.

Abby looked down. “I’m going to meet a friend.”

“Are you coming back?” the girl asked.

“Sure,” Abby said. It was a lie.

“What’s your name?”

Abby paused, thinking that if she told her, this girl might tell her what her name was. Abby didn’t want to know her name. She didn’t want to know her age. She didn’t want to know anything about her. Survival demanded a cold heart.