“Of course.” She led me across the room to the twin doors. “I knew you were the right girl for the job, Delaney,” she said, and pressed her fob to the pad on the wall.
The door on the right rolled open and I found myself staring into a gaping darkness. Feeling close to heart failure, I stepped into the tunnel.
“One last thing,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard that the Ferae virus isn’t as lethal as it was nineteen years ago.”
I nodded, though I wasn’t planning on testing it out.
“Then you’ve probably also heard that instead of dying, when people get infected now, they mutate.”
A cold feeling crept along my neck. “Those are just stories.”
“No, actually, they’re not. So be careful.”
Every muscle in my body went rigid. “What? Are you saying there are mutants over there?”
“On the far side of the river, yes. Stick to the island and you should be fine. Good luck, Delaney.” Spurling pressed the lock pad again and the door slid shut behind me.
3
The instant the enormous door closed, darkness engulfed me, sending me into a frenzy to get the flashlight out of the messenger bag. I switched it on but didn’t feel any calmer.
Mutate how? I wanted to scream through the steel. The rumors I’d heard were never clear on that point. The only consistent part was that criminals who were banished to the Feral Zone ended up deformed somehow. But who believed stories that were whispered at slumber parties?
I couldn’t catch my breath, and it wasn’t because of the stupid too-tight vest this time. I leaned back against the cold metal door and aimed the flashlight down the tunnel. The beam pushed the shadows back only a few feet and the air tasted of mold and decay.
Enough. I had to get moving. If I didn’t find my dad, if he didn’t complete the fetch, Spurling wouldn’t destroy the evidence against him. I forced myself to start walking, though seeing nothing but darkness ahead was plucking at my last nerve. With each step I took, I felt like I wasn’t traveling forward but back through time, and when I reached the end of the tunnel, I’d emerge into the most horrific event in American history. I aimed the flashlight’s beam at walls covered in graffiti — names, prayers, and notes from people who had been sent back into the Feral Zone. I lifted my dial. There was no phone signal, of course — not under tons of concrete. Still, I tapped the screen and let the dial hang from my neck, where it would record whatever I passed.
My footsteps echoed off the concrete floor and ceiling, which would alert anyone or anything up ahead that I was coming. Shaking off that unhelpful thought, I moved on and came to an open suitcase with clothing spilling out. In the beam of the flashlight, I saw more suitcases and bags scattered ahead, along with random possessions: a bottle of Scotch, the Bible, a child’s tin robot. And then more ominous items: a handgun and gas mask that stopped me in my tracks. Talk about a reality overload.
What was I doing here? No matter what Spurling wanted to tell herself, I hadn’t been trained as an apprentice fetch. I wasn’t prepared to venture into the Feral Zone. Or anywhere, really. My dad had hired Howard to be my bodyguard as much as our housekeeper.
The weight of the wall pressed down on me. The tons of ugly concrete had been so hastily piled, who knew if it was structurally sound? Everything about the plague had been hasty. The speed with which the virus overtook the eastern seaboard. How quickly the rest of the world cut us off. The hurried mass exodus to the West. And the erection of first a fence and then the wall, courtesy of the Titan Corporation. Titan had been required to build the wall in reparation for creating the Ferae virus. A just punishment. Or so I’d thought until now as I stood beneath the result.
I hurried on, humming to distract myself, but then heard the sound echoing off the tunnel walls. I fell silent. The last thing I wanted was to attract something’s attention. I picked up my pace and didn’t stop again until I stepped into a cavernous room like the one I’d just left. A checkpoint chamber. My flashlight beam swept the dusty air. Across the room, a sloping rock pile blocked off the passageway. I hurried toward it, only to trip halfway. The flashlight flew from my grip as I landed on something stiff and dry. Crawling over it, I snatched up the flashlight and looked to see what I’d fallen over. My chest compressed, forcing the air from my lungs and a scream from my throat. Dozens of dried-up corpses lay scattered across the floor. Worse, some were in pieces. Shriveled limbs were flung every which way like hunks of beef jerky.
I scrambled back so far that my shoulders banged into the wall. I stayed huddled there, heart pounding, until I was certain that if I got to my feet, I wouldn’t bolt back the way I’d come. Mummified corpses couldn’t hurt me. They had to have been lying here since the exodus ended seventeen years ago. These were people who’d been denied entry into the West — probably because they’d been infected.
I shoved my flashlight under one arm and pulled out my hand sanitizer. According to my tenth grade biology teacher, you couldn’t catch Ferae from dirt or grime, which this chamber was crusted with, or a corpse, even if the person had died from Ferae. Just the same, I squeezed sanitizing gel into my shaking hands. Ferae was like rabies, passed on by the bite of an infected mammal … humans included. That’s why people said we could never reclaim the East — because there would always be animals that carried the disease, and we had no vaccine for Ferae and no cure.
That didn’t matter though, because I wasn’t going to get infected with Ferae. I flicked the flashlight forward and made a wide semicircle past the corpses, while facts about the early days of the plague crowded my mind. How the infected became aggressively psychotic — like rabies times ten — and would go in search of people to bite: doctors who were trying to help them, friends, even family. The military had been forced to firebomb a lot of the eastern cities to stop infected people and animals from spreading the virus.
The rubble was stacked up to the ceiling. After a moment of scanning my flashlight across the sloping mess, I spotted a gap at the top where fresh air drifted in. My nerves jumped: What if an infected person had wiggled through that hole and had been inside the tunnel with me all along? I whirled, my flashlight beam whipping around the chamber. Nothing. But now my heart was beating triple-time and sweat slicked my palms — not so good for rock climbing. But then, neither were high-heeled ankle boots.
To even have a shot at making it to the top, I’d need to use both hands. I set my dial on glow — enough to see by — and left it recording. Why not document my first glimpse of the East? After one last scan of the chamber, I turned off the flashlight and stuffed it into the messenger bag. I reached for a large chunk of broken cement for leverage, only to recoil from the slimy feel of it. Water had trickled in through the hole along with the air. The whole rock spill was a slippery mess. Heart still on overdrive, I started up the treacherous mound, backsliding every few feet. While I climbed, I kept my eyes pinned to the gap in the rubble above, just in case something crawled in.
Finally I reached the hole, a long burrow with a lighter shade of dark at the end. It was so narrow, I couldn’t believe that my father had managed to get through it. But he had. And so would I. I took off the bag, pushed it into the space ahead of me, and with a deep breath I wiggled in.
A glimmer of moonlight beckoned me forward as I crawled across the jagged rocks that lined the burrow. No, wrong word. This felt less like a bunny warren and more like I’d been buried alive. My hands and forearms were bruised, scraped, and cut by the time I reached the end, grateful to peer out and breathe the warm night air. I could hear the sound of rushing water and even see Arsenal Island, smack in the middle of the Mississippi River, the last stop before the Feral Zone.