“As far as we can tell, it’s a special holding area. It went up a few days after the survival station opened.”
“Why is it covered like that?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe so people in the other enclosures can’t see inside.”
“Maybe my friends are in there,” she said.
“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he said. “It’s more likely they were put in one of the other two. If any of them were sick, they would have been in the one to the left, the rest in the other.”
“They’re immune so they wouldn’t have been put in the sick one,” she said.
He silently cursed Nyla for putting him in the position of dealing with this. “Most of those who have survived are simply lucky, not immune.”
“I realize that. But we’re all immune. We had the flu.”
His eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
“We were all sick, you know, during the outbreak last spring. I’m pretty sure it made us all immune.”
“How many friends are we talking about?” he asked.
“Well, there were nine of us, but me and three of the others headed north to look for my boyfriend.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“He had the flu, too.”
“And you know for a fact he’s still alive?”
Water glistened in her eyes. “He was. He’d left messages for me on my phone. But…” She fell silent, remembering what the woman on the road had told her.
“These five other friends of yours,” Gabriel said after a moment. “They’re the ones who went to the survival station on New Year’s Eve.”
“Yes.”
He stared out at the stadium, then whispered, “Is that what it’s for?”
“What are you talking about?”
He looked at her as if he hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud. “The special enclosure. I was just…well…see, none of the other survivor stations have reported a similar space. But that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Los Angeles is the closest station to the spring outbreak. If those who had survived the spring outbreak are actually immune, this would be the station they would come to. So once Project Eden realized it, I would think they’d want to separate them from the other survivors.”
“Who is Project Eden?”
“That’s the people running the stations.”
“So you’re saying you think my friends could be in there.”
He hesitated, and then nodded. “I think it’s a possibility.”
She lowered the binoculars, but kept her eyes on the stadium. “We have to get them out.”
“I might be wrong. There’s a good chance they aren’t there. Besides, there are only eight of us here. That means those guys with the rifles outnumber us more than two to one.”
“Not eight. Nine. You’re forgetting about me.”
22
The doctors didn’t come back until this morning. Woke us up again just like yesterday. They read more names. Sixteen. This time no one else volunteered to join them.
I don’t feel like writing anything more.
23
Neither Sanjay nor Kusum had ever been so far outside Mumbai. In fact, until the outbreak, neither had ever ventured more than a few miles from the city. That had changed when they moved to their new home at the former boarding school. As for Darshana, she had been to Goa several times to visit family, but nowhere else.
The thing that felt the strangest was being so far from the ocean. It had always been there, a constant in their lives even if they didn’t see it every day. Now it was growing farther and farther behind them, the distance feeling somehow suffocating.
They took the expressway, most of the time surrounded by kilometers and kilometers of untended fields, some barren and waiting to be planted, some fully grown and waiting for a harvest that would never come. There were few cars on the road, so for the majority of the trip, they were able to maintain a steady pace.
The tense moments came as they skirted around larger cities like Akota and Ahmedabad and Udaipur. At least Mumbai was a city they had known. These others were masses of unfamiliar buildings and homes where millions had once lived. Ahmedabad was the worst. The wind was blowing in such a way that even with their windows rolled up, they could smell the death.
It was almost a blessing when night fell and all they could see was the road in front of them. But that brought its own sense of eeriness. A land of over a billion people being so dark and unpopulated seemed impossible, as if someone had built giant blinders along the sides of the road to keep the normal life beyond out of view.
A sign ahead announced Jaipur was only fifty-four kilometers away. Forty minutes and they would be there.
“Would you like me to drive now?” Sanjay asked Darshana. He had taken the first shift that morning, driving for nearly six hours before turning over the duty to Kusum. Five hours after that, Darshana had assumed the driver’s seat.
“I’m okay,” she said. “But thank you.”
Sanjay glanced into the back to check on his wife. She was lying across the backseat, but her eyes were open.
“We are almost there,” he said.
“Finally.” She stretched her arms and sat up. “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
He held out his hand and she put hers in it.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Do I look like I slept well?”
“You always look beautiful to me.”
She frowned, but squeezed his hand.
“What is that?” Darshana said.
As Sanjay turned around, Darshana flipped off the headlights and took her foot off the accelerator.
The white glow of bright lights rose like a halo beyond a rise in the road ahead.
“Is that the city?” Kusum asked, peeking between the seats.
“No,” Sanjay. “I do not think so.”
The glow seemed to be coming from just beyond the crest, far too close to be from Jaipur. It was also too concentrated to be coming from something more than a single building, and unless the highway curved drastically on the other side of the hill, it appeared to be right in the middle of the road.
About a hundred and fifty meters from the top of the rise, Darshana let the car come to a stop without her touching the brakes. She moved the transmission into PARK and killed the engine.
“Shall we take a look?” she asked.
When they opened their doors, the interior dome light came on. All three reached up quickly to turn it off, but it was Kusum who got there first. They had to allow their eyes to readjust to the darkness before climbing out.
There was a thin, shoulder-high barrier running along either side of the expressway, and down the middle a shorter metal railing dividing the two directions. They moved along the side barrier until they reached a break and were able to hop down off the expressway onto the local road that paralleled it.
They crossed the blacktop to a row of dark shops and stands, and used them to conceal their presence as they continued up the rise.
Nearing the top, the glow grew considerably brighter, making Sanjay sure its source wasn’t much farther beyond the crest. He noticed something else, too — the light seemed to be accompanied by two distinct noises, a low hum and even lower rumble.
Ten meters from the apex, he tapped the two women’s shoulders and motioned for them to follow him around behind the roadside restaurant they were about to pass. From there they were able to get over the crest unobserved, and then found a gap between the next two buildings wide enough for them to take it back to the other side. At the end of this alley, they peeked across the road at the expressway.