Into the Yellow Zone Read online

  “Clay!” shouted Kalla, her head barely breaking above the water. The girl let go of the raft with one hand but Malcolm grabbed her and held on tight.

  “No!” he shouted at her. Kalla was about to swim after her intended mate, Isabella realized in shock.

  Together, they kicked as hard as they could, forcing the raft across the rushing water.

  By the time they reached the far shore, the crumbled highway bridge was a long way upstream. There was no sign of Clay, either in the water or on the land. The river snaked through the landscape, winding both north and south, but generally northeast. Whatever city had been there in the past was just a memory. Just as downstream, there were no houses here, only devastation.

  Kalla struggled out of the water calling Clay’s name as she half walked, half stumbled onto the riverbank, like the first fish crawling onto land billions of years ago. She started down the slippery riverbank, leaving the rest of the group behind.

  Together, Isabella and Malcolm hauled the raft onto the shore, then gathered the children, the cat and their gear, and rushed to catch up with Kalla. The girl had picked her way along the river in search of Clay, calling his name and looking for any sign of him. “Clay!” There was no response.

  They stopped and stood silent for a moment, listening to the wind rustling leaves in the trees. Isabella could not hear anything else.

  As a group, they started searching the riverbank again when suddenly Andra shouted, “I smell something!” and ran down the rocky shoreline in her lanky-legged pace that was tough for the rest of them to match. Andra’s legs were disproportionately long for her body and she had a sense of smell unequaled by normal people.

  Jumping over wet rocks and climbing over a mossy boulder almost as tall as she was, Andra ran toward the smell only she could sense. Her cat was so close to her that he almost tripped her a few times. Malcolm sprinted to catch up to her, and Isabella followed along slower with Shia. The little girl’s one shorter leg affected her speed, especially on uneven ground.

  When they rounded a bend in the river, they saw the boy sitting on the rocks, cut and scratched, blood seeping from his head and left arm. His grunt of pain was loud enough to be heard over the sound of the rushing river as they neared.

  “Clay!” shouted Kalla. She raced past little Andra and ate up the ground between them. He was battered, but alive and breathing. She hugged him and held on tight, as if the river would wash him away again if she let go. Clay returned the hug, his webbed fingers splayed across the wet t-shirt that clung to Kalla’s back. His shoes were missing and his pants were torn. His toes were as duck-webbed as his fingers.

  “I deemed you were dead,” sniffled Kalla, mashing her face into Clay’s chest. He held her tightly and did not say a word.

  Isabella and Malcolm stood back and let the young couple embrace. Malcolm held each of their daughters’ hands to keep them from interrupting the reunion.

  Taking her eyes off Clay and Kalla, Isabella surveyed their surroundings. A massive highway bridge stood before them. The river had brought them back almost to the interstate, the road they had chosen not to travel.

  Satisfied that Clay had no life threatening injuries, Malcolm and Kalla found a spot of grass away from the river and lay down in the bright morning sun next to Clay to dry and rest after their manic journey across the swollen river.

  Isabella sat guard duty, the two little girls at either side, keeping a wary eye out for danger. They were nearing the Yellow Zone – the edge was still a few miles away, but near enough to cause concern. Eaters may not be the only thing to fear in this neighborhood. She clutched Clay’s bow to her chest, unsure if she could use it if the need arose, but positive she would protect the others if she needed to. They had kept her safe all this time and one of them had nearly drowned doing it. It was time she repaid them.

  Chapter Four

  Luke

  Luke expected an interrogation but instead got a nice chat with tea and biscuits. Quite a change from the way they had treated him at the military base. Not quite the barbarians he had expected, the Telemark community of mutants proved civilized, and Oberon was an impressive leader, but his host’s skin gave Luke the creeps. Oberon’s dark, leathery skin gave him an almost reptilian appearance. He had long dark braids and brown eyes flecked with a rainbow of colors dancing inside the iris. It was almost unreal how they changed color when you looked at them from different angles.

  “Tell me about the military, Luke,” said Oberon, sitting across from him at the kitchen table. He was tall… his head reached a full foot higher than Luke’s, who was not a short boy himself. “Why’d they let you go?”

  Luke fidgeted in his seat, looking at Oberon’s odd eyes to keep from focusing on his creepy skin.

  “They didn’t. I escaped.” He drummed his fingertips on the table, tapping out a rhythm that beat in time with his heart … just a little too fast. He thought of the expression on Violet’s face when he told her the military had picked him up. “Why does this worry you and your wife so much? I would think you’d be more concerned about the immediate problem of the disease Isabella’s group might have exposed your people to. The military said it was dangerous. Look, I know you don’t know me, but trust me when I say I’m not a thief. Still, I stole enough of that drug to take care of most of this community, and I’ll happily share it with you. Why aren’t you worried about it? I don’t understand.”

  Luke’s heart rate skipped a beat each time he asked another question. Maybe he should just shut up and wait for the odd man to speak, but he had to know. He could not just leave all the questions to Oberon. He could not allow this to become an interrogation.

  “The wasting disease… TB, as you call it… is sporadic. Sometimes you catch it, sometimes you don’t. We’ve had people come in here with full-blown cases of it and not spread it to anyone. Even if Isabella or anyone from the Calloway tribe was carrying it, they might never pass it along. We don’t know exactly how it’s transmitted. We’re not stupid – we understand it travels through the air, from one person to another, but we don’t know why only some people are affected. I understand you want to help your sister…”

  “Cousin-sister,” corrected Luke. There was a big difference. They only shared a father.

  “Fine. Call her whatever you want, but Isabella didn’t have it.” Oberon grabbed another biscuit with his large hands and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. He might have actually chewed it a little, but Luke was not sure. The big man seemed to swallow it whole.

  Luke took another biscuit from the tray and placed it on his plate. He thought about eating it, but was afraid Oberon would see his hands shake, and did not want to betray his nervousness to the big man. He tried to sound confident as he spoke. “You can’t always tell. I had it – I mean, I tested positive – and I didn’t have any symptoms either. I had no idea I was carrying the disease inside me! They told me to take the pills every day for the next month to make sure it doesn’t turn into the full-blown disease. Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. That’s only for about a week once you start the pills and they kept me in quarantine during that time. I don’t know… maybe you and your people have some immunity to it, but Isabella doesn’t. I have to get out there and find her… just in case. If you don’t want me to leave you medicine, that’s fine. I’ll take it all with me. Just tell me where she went.”

  “After you tell me more about the military.”

  “Tell me why you’re so worried,” replied Luke. They were at a critical impasse and he wasn’t sure which of them would yield first. Luke stared into Oberon’s eyes, not nearly as confident as he sounded, waiting for the leader to reply.

  “That’s fair,” said Oberon finally. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms on his chest.

  Luke relaxed, suddenly feeling that they had reached some level of trust. He picked up the biscuit and bit into it.

  Oberon began, “The military conducts raids a couple of times a year. They come in with tank
s, capture whoever they can and leave the rest of us alone. It’s never the very old or the very young. It’s always the hale and hearty adults, so we’re wondering if they are experimenting on us again.”

  Luke knew that to mutants, “very old” meant people in their early twenties.

  “Again? You mean the military has done that before?” Luke had to know. He pressed on. He could only imagine the kind of experiments they would do on people they did not consider worthy of saving from a disease that had a simple cure. He could still remember the look of disgust and distain on Picatinny’s Colonel Ericcsen when he had asked him why they did not give the INH2 pills to the mutants, considering they had such an ample supply. “Well?” Luke pushed Oberon for an answer.

  “Sure. They have for decades. Since they don’t let most mutants go after they’ve been used as lab rats, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing, but we know they are doing something. It stopped for a long time but in the last year or so, it’s started all over again. So of course we’re worried.” Oberon leaned back over the table and wrapped his long fingers around his dainty teacup, and then looked up at Luke. “If you found out anything, anything at all, you must tell me. Did you see any mutants at Picatinny? Anything that might look like experiments of any kind?”

  For the first time, Luke’s fear was replaced with empathy. Oberon’s eyes pleaded, begged for an answer. Luke knew what he had to tell the man, but he did not know how.

  He knew this man was desperate for information; anything that could tell him why his people had been hunted. But he was scared to death of the huge reptilian man! He dreaded Oberon’s reaction to the military’s horrifying plan that had sent him out into the polluted world chasing his sib. He swallowed hard, the teacup shaking in his hands.

  “I didn’t see any experimentation going on, but I did learn something else and it’s the reason I need to go find Isabella. Besides the chance that she might have TB, as if that isn’t bad enough.” Luke hesitated.

  “And?” prompted Oberon, drumming his scaly fingers on the pine table.

  Luke looked down at his lap to avoid making eye contact. “Your suspicions are right about them rounding up mutants, but it’s not for experimentation at all.”

  Luke bit his lip and then stared Oberon directly in the face before delivering the bad news. “They are using mutants to clean the cities… to clean where the radiation and chemical poisons are the worst. I overheard my grandfather on the short-wave radio but I wasn’t sure it was true or that I’d heard right. It was enough to send me running from my shelter to go find Isabella, though. Then at Picatinny, I found out it was true, but they wouldn’t give me details.”

  Oberon’s reaction was calm, and he spoke slowly, as if still trying to form his thought as he spoke the words to Luke. “Clean up the Yellow Zone. Why? I don’t understand. That makes no sense.”

  It appeared that once Oberon voiced the question, he decided that Luke’s warning was so ridiculous that he could simply dismiss it. Luke thought the community leader would actually begin laughing at him. The man’s eyes glittered with delight, his variegated irises visibly changing color. Luke’s story was completely implausible, absurd, and in Oberon’s eyes, ridiculously illogical.

  Luke continued on, a stony and serious expression spreading across his face. “The Colonel said it is the only way to clean up the Earth and make it safe for shelter folk. From what I heard my grandfather saying, it’s forced servitude. They aren’t exactly giving your people any options. I guess they figure you’re already living in it, so you might as well die of radiation poisoning too.” Luke’s words were so sincere and so convincing that Oberon’s facial expression changed slowly from amusement to completely serious as he spoke. He was not laughing anymore. Please don’t kill the messenger! pleaded Luke silently.

  “Just because we live out here doesn’t mean we want to go into the hot spots.” Oberon’s voice rose as he spoke, each word growing in volume from the one before it. “We stay far away from the shelter folk. And there is so much land anyway! Why clean the cities? It’s a waste of time. There are thousands of miles of places you people can live, just sitting empty!” He slammed his fist on the table, shaking the teacups, and then jumped out of his chair.

  Oberon’s ranting brought Violet running into the kitchen, trailed by two skinny young boys, who looked about six or seven years old.

  Violet put her hands on her husband’s shoulders and forced him back into his chair. “Oberon, you leave that poor boy alone! He isn’t our enemy. He brought us medicine and news. Now calm yourself and sit back down.” There was rage in Oberon’s eyes and fear in Luke’s.

  The shaking in Luke’s hands had begun again so he folded them in his lap to hide his dread.

  Violet handed each child a small wicker basket from the counter, and shooed them out of the room. “Boys, go on an’ pick some cherries for me.”

  Luke waited for the children to leave before speaking another word. Oberon seemed calmer now that his wife was in the room, so he took another chance. “There’s more if you want to hear it.” Oberon and Violet both nodded. Luke realized that she had been listening outside the kitchen and had heard his whole story.

  Luke took a deep breath then exhaled slowly through the gap in his front teeth. “They aren’t stopping the raids anytime soon. If anything, they’ll be increasing them. They want all your people to die. Using your people to clean the hot spots saves them the trouble of having to exterminate mutants directly.”

  Oberon sat back in his chair with a sigh. All the anger had left his body as if it had been a balloon and someone had poked a hole in it.

  Violet sat down in the chair next to her husband and looked at him. Whatever she was thinking about, it was apparent Oberon thought the same thing. It was as if they were sharing a memory.

  “What?” asked Luke, his gaze moving from one to the other and back again.

  Oberon looked at Violet and she nodded.

  “About six months ago, a strange fifteen-year-old boy came into Telemark in the middle of the night. He was vomiting and complained of a headache,” began Violet. “We brought him to our healer with a high fever. She tried the usual cures for those but he continued to get worse. By the next day he was dizzy and disoriented every time he stood up to go out to the toilet, which was frequently because he had terrible diarrhea. He continued to throw up and within two days, his hair started to fall out and he was bleeding from his mouth and had blood in his urine and stool. The poor boy was quite literally coming apart at the seams. He had sores on his arms and legs where he had been injured, but they wouldn’t heal. He got so weak that he could no longer eat.” Violet stopped speaking and Luke saw the tears in her eyes. She couldn’t go on.

  Oberon picked up the story. “Our healer, Heals-With-Hands, is very skilled. She treats everyone in Telemark and has remarkable success. But no matter how hard she searched for a cure to the boy’s disintegration, she couldn’t do anything for him. She finally took his pain away at the end of his life and he died peacefully in bed. But Heals-With-Hands became so ill herself that she slept for a week.”

  When Oberon remained silent, Luke asked, “Your doctor, she caught whatever he had? Did she get better? Did anyone else get sick?”

  Oberon shook his head. “Heals-With-Hands came to us from a small tribe of Native American survivors who joined us a generation ago. She was born in Telemark, and learned her skills from her mother. Heals-With-Hands has many skills, but her psychic ability to physically take the pain of others into her body when she lays her hands on the patient is what she uses most often. It takes a huge toll on her. And it almost killed her that time. She’s fine now and no one else got sick. We never knew what illness he had, but we’re thankful that no one caught it.”

  Oberon stood up from the table and walked behind his seated wife. He put his hands on her shoulders and began to massage the knotted muscles he found there.

  Violet’s eyes filled with water. “We buried him in our ce
metery. The same place we buried your sister’s two-year-old boy, Davin.” She shook her head slowly, side to side and mumbled to the floor, “So much death in the world.”

  Oberon’s voice was slow and solemn. “I know what happened to that boy now.”

  “Yes,” replied Luke. “So do I. Radiation sickness... high dose of it too, to kill him within a week. No wonder no one else caught it. He didn’t have a contagious disease.”

  Oberon nodded. “And now I know where he got it. He came out of a hot spot with it. He got this far before falling apart. He must have escaped from a cleanup crew.”

  * * *

  Isabella

  After an hour of rest, Isabella’s group was ready to move on again. They walked along the riverbank to a small street that the map indicated would take them south. That would get them back to the secondary highway they had originally followed east. Though the river had carried them nearly a mile downstream, they made it back to the road marked on the map as ‘46’ without further incident and Isabella could not have been happier.

  Clay took the map from Isabella and examined it. She had begun teaching reading to the young adults back in Telemark but now focused on map reading skills and vocabulary. As they walked over the weed-covered highway, Clay and Kalla practiced their skills by writing with a stick in the dirt.

  “This is ‘east’ right?” asked Clay, his webbed fingers indicating the thick orange line on the map.

  “That’s right.”

  Clay then scraped the letters “E A S T” in the sand on the edge of the road. His webbed toes made weird marks in the sand. They would have to find him another pair of shoes soon; the road would rip his feet to shreds.

  Isabella’s pride in the two youngster’s skills had grown exponentially since they started studying, first in her classroom and now during their travels. When Oberon showed her the small library of books in Telemark, Isabella had been overjoyed. When she found out that no one in the town could read, she had immediately turned that library into a classroom. Both kids were exceptional at survival and could teach her volumes about the world, but they turned to her for guidance on academic matters.