Excerpt: A Plague of Blood or Blue Roses

Chapter Six: Blue Roses

Ryan could see the pockets under Cate's eyes with more clarity in the morning light, but he didn't intrude. He made them both breakfast, but she didn't eat anything. She said she wasn't hungry, but the glassy look in her eyes and the paleness of her skin made him suspicious. When she ran off to the bathroom a few minutes later, he sighed and scraped her uneaten eggs down the garbage disposal.

"At least you know it's not the plague," he yelled down the hall.

He threw the dishes in the washer and scooped up a warm piece of toast and his suit coat on his way back to the bathroom. He stuck his head in the doorway and drew back in alarm as she tossed a towel at him from her position on the floor. Her head was over the toilet, her limp hair obscuring her face.

"Your not funny, you know," she said.

"Sure I am. You okay?"

"Yeah, my stomach's just a little upset. I'm going to call off work and lay down for a little bit, see if that helps any."

"You sure?"

"Get out of here already. Don't you have some place you need to be this morning?"

"As a matter of fact," he said, leaning over to plant a kiss on the top of her head, "I do. I'll be gone for a couple of hours and then I'll swing by to check on you."

"You don't have to do that, you know."

"I'm going to because I want to."

She shrugged her shoulders and opened her mouth to say something else, but her face turned a sick shade of pale green and Ryan left her to her own devices. He took the tube to the nearest government testing facility, located near the world-famous Cleveland Clinic. He noticed the city was covered in smog this morning as he stepped outside. He walked along the sidewalk, past the snaking line of people waiting to be tested. Even after weeks of testing, the lines were still long. A small voice inside his head wondered with wry amusement if the plague was a way for the world to create some more breathing space for itself. There were too many people clogging up the planet, as this recent epidemic was beginning to show. Census takers from around the nation were probably overcome with joy at the prospects of getting the first accurate count of U.S. citizens since the founding of the country. If they weren't already dead.

He stood at the end of the queue and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Thanks to the Cleveland Tube System and his travel schedule, he hadn't seen real weather in months. It turned out it was pretty nasty; as cold and drizzly as you could expect next to a lake in the fall. He was beginning to think the darkness he had chalked up to smog was mostly from the overcast skies above him. Thick, ponderous black clouds inched across the horizon, headed his way. The wind whipped his suit coat around him and stabbed his chest with icy needles. He pictures his fleece-lined leathre bomber jacket, hanging from its accustomed place in the front room closet, and cursed himself for leaving it behind.

The line crept forward. His fingers and toes went numb long before he could see the doors leading into the lobby. He almost left the line once; that insistent thought of his warm coat and bright apartment nearly undid him. But a quick look at the hundreds of people still shifting around behind him changed his mind in a hurry. He didn't relish standing out here in the frigid air another moment, but he knew that if he left the line now he wasn't going to go through all this hassle again. And then the government would really nail him.

The warmer air inside the building was a painful relief as his extremities began to thaw out. A sullen-faced teenager asked Ryan for his ping number and tapped a few keys on a small PDA sitting in front of him (or maybe it was a her; Ryan couldn't have said with any certainty) and uploaded a questionnaire to Ryan's wrist-comm.. It pulled all of his personal identification information from his wrist-comm and asked him questions in quiet, confidential tones about his family’s medical history and a list of any known conditions or medications he may have. Ryan ran through the program as fast as he could and found an empty space by the wall to stand and wait for his turn.

When they pinged him into the next room, he found himself staring at the Disease Predictor from a few feet away. The chair was much more ominous up close than it had seemed from the visitor’s gallery at Congress. The chrome winked sharp light in his eyes, beckoning him on to his death. He repressed a shudder and turned away from the ghastly thing to find two low-level bureaucrats sitting at a table burdened with massive electronic devices. Ryan nodded at them but they never looked up from their screens. He looked around the room, which was empty except for the two men and their table and the small, raised platform that held the machine itself. The walls and floor were nondescript tan color that reeked of neutrality.

A harried-looking woman flew in through the doors behind her, her brown hair pulling free of its ponytail as it bounced behind her. Her lab coat was askew and her glasses had slid down to the tip of her nose.

“So sorry,” she said in a breathless voice, “had a bit of a mix-up in the other room. Couldn’t be helped, couldn’t be helped I am afraid. But we should be back on track now and if you will just step up onto the platform, Mr., um, sir, that would be fine. Hop on in, then, nothing to be afraid of. Put your arms on the armrests there, that’s a dear, and we will go ahead and snap those belts into place—no fear, they’ll pop right off after the test is finished—and then we will swing this around here for your feet and you should be all set to go. Jasper!”

Ryan blinked and found the petite woman with the crazy hair had bulldozed him into the correct position and the test was about to begin. The door to the machine had shut, giving him the semblance of privacy as the machine scanned his DNA and explored his future. He could hear the nameless woman outside the box, haranguing someone named Jasper. Probably one of the two men sitting at that table when he’d come in.

He wasn’t sure what happened first; did he taste the hum or smell the colors? Did he hear the textures and taste the sights? They were all there, his senses overlapping in strange ways that should have been unpleasant, but weren’t. A tingling sensation of pressure rose up from the tips of his toes to the crown of his skull. There was a curious feeling of a great weight pressing down on him as his body grew lighter and tried to flow upward. The air was charged with electricity, making his hair stand up all over his body. There were voices swirling in the air around him and visuals on the walls before him, everything moving too fast for him to make any sense out of it. A small metal hood lowered itself over his head, swathing him in complete blackness. There was a prickling burn that grew in intensity on his right cheek and made his eyes tear up from the pain, which only grew larger and larger until he screamed from the hurt and fear.

And then it was the over. The hood lifted up and the arm and leg bands popped open, just like the woman had said they would.

A soft feminine voice announced, “You will die from the plague. Please proceed to the table outside to register your name and arrange your transportation to the new Lunar Colony. We hope you enjoy the moon.”

The door popped open. Ryan pushed himself out of the chair and staggered through the opening, his eyes drifting to the two men at the table. They weren’t there. He looked around the room with blurry vision, but there was no one else in the room with him. He went over to the table and stared at the electronic equipment sitting there, just as it had been when he’d first come in. But no one was operating them. Maybe the mix-up in the other room had happened again. Maybe there had been a problem with another machine. Maybe little green martians had taken over Cleveland, for fuck’s sake. It didn’t matter where they were, did it?

Except he couldn’t think of anything else, his mind racing in circles to avoid the one thought he knew he needed to face. He wanted to do something, not think. He needed to enter his name in the registry and the two men could take it from there. They would tell him where to go and what to do now that his life had been turned upside down. They would make all of his decisions for him, and he wouldn’t have to think about what any of this meant. But there was no one else in the room. He shuffled around the table and sat down in one of the vacant chairs. The computer screen in front of him was an old model, with no 3D capabilities and required the use of an old-fashioned mouse. He clicked on the program page and the words: “Registry of Plague Victims: Operation Blue Rose.”

His heart kicked into overdrive as the magnitude of recent events hit him all at once. That machine said he was going to die of the plague. He was going to be shipped off to the Lunar Colony. The rumors had been true! He wondered how many others had been true as well. If there was ever a time for him to give up and let the government run his life, this definitely wasn’t it. He looked around the room, but he was still alone. Far back in the corner opposite from where he had come in, he could see a door with a small sliver of light shining underneath. An exit.

He was half way across the room when the commotion started in the lobby. He heard a woman yelling, her voice getting louder as she got closer to the room. Ryan wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he would have bet money that the voice belonged to the woman with the fly-away hair who had strapped him down. He ran to the door, pulling it open even as he heard the door behind him crash into the wall.

“Stop him!” the woman said. “God damn it, Jasper, if he gets away it’ll be your ass, not mine.”

Ryan sprinted outside into the grey light of an autumn afternoon. He stumbled once in the lot surrounding the building, his legs moving too fast for his feet to keep up. He heard the calls and grunts of his pursuers, but he never looked back. He saw a tube opening up for a young couple a few feet to his left, and without breaking stride he turned and leapt into the capsule as the doors were sliding close. He watched them click shut in the face of a very angry and exhausted young man, and then he was whisked away to safety.

He nodded to the couple sitting across from him, who were staring at him.

“Sorry,” he said, between gulps of air, “I am kind of in a hurry.”

“Hey,” the girl said, “you are the Raven.”

Ryan nodded to conserve air.

“That’s awesome,” her boyfriend said. “That’s a wicked tat you have got there, man.”

The kid, and he was really little more than an overgrown boy, was pointing at the burning spot on Ryan’s cheek. He had forgotten about that. He turned his face to catch his reflection on the capsule’s gleaming surface. His eyes widened, his fingers reached to touch it and pulled away.

It was a tattoo. A small circle on his forehead, made up of blue roses.