Mad World (Book 2): Sanctuary Read online

  Mad World:

  SANCTUARY

  BY SAMAIRE PROVOST

  Mad World: EPIDEMIC

  Mad World: SANCTUARY

  Mad World: DESPERATION (Coming Fall 2012)

  Mad World:

  SANCTUARY

  Samaire Provost

  Copyright © 2012 Samaire Provost

  All rights reserved.

  For Stephen, for all his help and support, and for crying at the end.

  All myths have a basis in fact

  Prologue

  It had been a crazy five and a half years since Luke was born. His mother, Holly, had become good friends with us for the week we had known her, and when he was born she had charged me with his care. Holly died less than half an hour after Luke was born into my hands. She had been pregnant nearly nine months when she was unwittingly infected with the strangely virulent strain of the Yersinia Pestis bacterium that had escaped from a laboratory at Stanford University, where researchers had been studying the Black Plague that had killed half of the population of Europe in 1348-1350. We hadn’t known she was infected; she had shown no sign of it. In fact, she had been cleared by doctors at JFK Memorial in Indio, California, the day before Luke was born. She had seemed fine, just a little carsick.

  The illness seemed to throw her into labor weeks before she was due. Then Luke was born in the back of our van on the side of the road. Holly had turned during Luke’s birth, but he had seemed fine. Within minutes of his birth, Holly had undergone a wild transformation into something you could only call a zombie, and we had all fled the van, leaving her tied up inside. But Holly escaped her bindings, and had gotten all the way out of the van before a police cruiser pulled up to help us. The policeman had been confronted by the crazed zombie that had been Holly only minutes after giving birth to Luke, and when she had charged him, he had shot her. Several times in the midsection, which had little to no effect, and then several times in the head, which did have an effect. Holly had died in the dirt by the side of the road.

  The police had taken us to be questioned and then to the hospital to be checked out. Their concern – and ours – was mostly for Luke, who they could see was a newborn. Jacob had been thinking clearly and had, thankfully, told the authorities that Holly had been pregnant with and had given birth to, his son. Luke hadn’t really been his son, we didn’t even know the name or whereabouts of Luke’s father, but telling them Luke was his allowed him, and us, to keep the baby. Holly had charged us with protecting her baby, and we took that charge seriously. Especially in such a crazy world.

  The world was getting crazier by the moment. The plague that had started at Stanford had quickly spread across the entire state of California.

  All because those scientists at Stanford, in their curiosity, had decided to reawaken this bacteria in their lab at Palo Alto. They had extracted bone marrow fragments containing intact DNA from the corpses found in mass graves dug more than six centuries ago and brought them back to their lab. There, they had successfully reawakened the bacteria and had tried – unsuccessfully – to contain it.

  One day, the first scientist became infected; the next day, he had turned. Less than a day after that, he had infected dozens on the University campus, and by the end of that second day, the infection had spread beyond to the surrounding cities. Within a week people were infected from north of San Francisco to south of Los Angeles and beyond. Evacuations from the Central Valley to the south only helped spread the disease, authorities realized too late. We had arrived less than a day after the residents of Fresno had evacuated to Los Angeles, and less than a day before L.A. fell to the infection. Luckily we’d gotten out an hour before the U.S. Military quarantined the entire state of California.

  That quarantine, however, turned out to be nearly impossible to maintain, what with California encompassing more than 150,000 square miles and was home to 37 million people. They simply didn’t have the resources. And with the panic spreading, people were ignoring the quarantine and trying any way they could to get out.

  Before they set up the quarantine, the authorities had first tried to evacuate the hundreds of square miles around Stanford, extending to the San Joaquin Valley and Fresno.

  That’s where we had come from. We had been on a school theatre club trip to New York with our teacher, Coach Turner when the outbreak had occurred. Or I should say when the nimrods at Stanford who had been tried to revive the original Black Plague from 1350 had allowed it to infect some of their own scientists, and thenceforth escape the confines of the University Lab. When this happened they had pretty much sealed the fate of the world. We had heard about the emergency and following panic in Palo Alto, where Stanford is located, while we were in New York City. We had immediately tried to make it back home with Coach in a rented van. We’d gotten all the way back to Fresno before we’d been faced with the plague infection firsthand and had seen what it could do to a human being.

  There was a reason the Black Plague had killed so many back in the 14th century, even though it was a time when hardly anyone traveled more than a few miles from their birthplace. There was a reason the survivors had hastily dug mass graves and buried the corpses in huge piles. When researchers had exhumed the burial grounds, they had found some signs that people might have been buried alive. Some corpses had been beheaded, or even dismembered. Some seem to have tried to claw their way out. Either way, it should have given those researchers pause.

  The particular strain of Yersinia Pestis that had infected most of Europe in the 14th century made people turn grey, then black – and then die. And then come alive again and attacked anyone they could. Eyes went opaque, skin went grey, fingernails went black, and they all turned into zombies, every last one of them. Scientists researching the problem in the years since the Palo Alto leak had found out these details. The infection did something to the brain and body. The person who had been infected changed. Who they were, their brain, their mind, their personality, was gone. They died. Then the disease reanimated the bodies. If anything, the zombies looking at you and growling could be understood to be personifications of the plague. They WERE the Black Plague.

  That’s how it happened with Coach Turner. And with our friends Conner and Emily. Then it had happened to Holly, too. She had been pregnant with Luke at the time.

  Luke had been born just inside the Arizona border. The policeman who helped us hadn’t known the Army was enacting a quarantine of the state we’d just left. We had told the hospital we’d come from L.A. and the policeman reported on what had happened with Holly. By the time authorities had examined her corpse, which showed obvious signs of having just given birth, we had already left the hospital and they had no way to find us. Besides, I don’t think they realized Holly’s baby was with us. There might have been some confusion, maybe they thought Child Services had taken him. Either way, we left that hospital with Luke and we fled.

  There was a sense of urgency in our flight. We knew what had just happened, although we didn’t realize at the time just how special Luke was. I’d just been relieved that he seemed to have been born in the nick of time, before Holly’s infection could spread to him, and before the zombie Holly became had a chance to injure him.

  For a week, none of us had any idea Luke was special. We spent that time moving from one motel in Phoenix to another in Tucson, each time registering under a false name and paying in cash. We dumped our van and bought another one cheap, since the first had been a rental Coach Turner picked up in New York City. That one had been rented out by Coach Turner. This new one was purchased by Jacob, who was 18 and legal, from a guy who was unloading it on Craigslist.

  We felt a need to stay under the radar. After all, they had quarantined
California less than a day after we had gotten out with a zombie in our car. Holly. The police had been slow in putting two and two together, but we knew that eventually they would probably turn their attention to us, and so we fled.

  A week after Luke was born, he was eating well, putting on weight, and losing that reddish skin tone all newborns seemed to be born with. His skin was fading into a normal light pinkish-white color. Holly had been very fair-skinned, and I guess Luke’s father had been, too. Luke had light brown hair and hazel eyes. But one day we noticed that his face, with its smile and chubby cheeks and little button nose … was grey. Just close to his hairline, his neck, part of his torso and down his arms a bit. Not completely. It was like he was frozen halfway between being a normal, alive baby into an infected zombie. He was a hybrid. Half human, half zombie.

  He acted completely normal. In fact, the kid never seemed to even get sick. Not so much as a cold, not so much as a sniffle. None of the ear infections so common among toddlers, no teething pain even. He was adorable, a sweet, healthy baby. Who just happened to be half zombie.

  His eyes never changed into the milky opaqueness of the zombie’s, and he never went insane, growling or trying to attack us. He acted completely normal. Yeah. Normal. Except he wasn’t.

  The quarantine of California couldn’t contain the infection. Phoenix had seen the first outbreaks, because most of the evacuees from infected areas had been taken there. Soon, the entire West Coast had been affected and the President had ordered a quarantine of that whole area. They had tried to keep everything a secret, tried to keep information about the plague from reaching the people, but it hadn’t worked – not with Twitter and social media spreading the panic faster than the contagion itself. News of the epidemic created a flood of people heading east. The military set up roadblocks and perimeters to contain most of the people in the southwest and West Coast, and they had been mostly successful, for a while at least.

  We had gotten out of Arizona as fast as we could, heading toward New Mexico and then Texas. We had looked for our families in Phoenix, but had found no sign of them. We got mixed information from authorities over the phone as to where the buses from L.A. had deposited the evacuees, and even with searching bulletin boards for information, we got nowhere. Then we needed to leave.

  Mike, the nurse who had been with us since Bakersfield, had decided to stay in Texas; he had family there. Before he left us, he gave us some money and some advice: don’t trust the authorities and keep a low profile. We thanked him, and there were tearful hugs all around; then he was gone.

  We left Mike in Texas and moved on to Arkansas, then to Tennessee. We made friends who helped us hide. We never stayed in one place too long. I will admit that, after a couple of years, we kind of relaxed a bit. Stayed in each place maybe longer than we should have. Four to six months at the most.

  The plague slowly spread, despite the authorities’ containment efforts. Three years after the initial panic, zombie outbreaks were occurring nearly everywhere. Every state had them. People had taken to arming themselves with shotguns mostly, when they could. Rifles and handguns too. Firearms flew off the shelves as people lost faith in the Army’s ability to protect them and took matters into their own hands. They armed themselves with anything that could take a zombie’s head off. That was the only thing that really stopped them. You had to chop their heads off, or at least shoot them in the head enough to take most of the brain out. Turns out that was still the nerve center. Jacob’s shotgun, which he had taken from his father’s house, was joined by an array of firearms we picked up along the way. I had a sawed-off I had made myself, plus a .33 I kept as backup. Jacob had his shotgun plus a .45 that could blow your brains out the back of your head. DeAndre had a rifle and a newer shotgun, all shiny and pretty. He loved polishing that thing. And even Caitlyn had a large-caliber rifle. Only Risa was without a gun. But she was almost constantly by our side, and she had taken to wearing a small machete on her hip in a holster Jacob had made for her. She looked like a pint-sized Mad Max.

  No place was truly safe, zombies were appearing everywhere; there was no pattern. It was people, of course. People who were getting attacked and somehow surviving for a while, and then moving. To another place, another city, another state, driving wherever. But invariably, after either one hour or one day or more, they turned. And then you had a zombie in a place where none had yet been before. They would pop up in crowds of people, at gas stations, city streets, state parks, you name it. You could never know where you’d encounter them. So we stayed close, always venturing out with at least two adults together.

  We protected the kids. Risa grew up fast. Although she was only 13, she had street smarts. She had the maturity of someone three times her age and she had the instincts of someone who had been fighting and staying alive in a world infected with zombies for more than half her life. She was tough. She was a fighter. She made me proud.

  We passed her off as my little sister, and Luke as my baby. Jacob and I had never formally married, but we were together. We never stopped long enough to make it formal. But we didn’t need to. It was us, all the way. Jacob was Luke’s father in so many ways other than biologically. That little boy looked up to Jacob with something close to hero worship. Risa made a wonderful big sister for Luke. She loved helping with him, and dressing him up. In fact, for the first three years we let his hair grow out long, it better hid his strange coloring. He was this long, sandy-haired little toddler with big eyes and an infectious laugh. And we all doted on him and protected him.

  Caitlyn and DeAndre were a couple as well. They’d tied the knot with a quick ceremony in a friend’s apartment. He’d been a minister for the corner church, and we’d stayed with him and his wife for several months. Caitlyn and DeAndre had been happy to have the short, sweet words spoken and the marriage certificate issued, and they were careful to keep it safe in their belongings. They were never very far from each other, and one always seemed to have a hand touching the other, as if they never wanted to feel apart.

  We homeschooled Luke and Risa, and tried to give them as normal a childhood as we could while hiding Luke from the world. We did a good job too, using makeup and clothing to hide his coloration. He would ask why I used a light foundation or powder to cover up the sides of his face and wrists, and I’d tell him, “there are bad people out there. You have to be careful, squirt.” Then I’d ruffle his hair and we’d go play on the playground. Many times he’d get so dirty that it would work better than any makeup job I’d do. His hair grew longer, and I’d make sure it was brushed, but loose. He often looked like Aragorn out of a Lord of the Rings movie, except fairer. The tips of his hair touched his shoulders by the time he was 3, and the sun bleached them almost blond. We hid him well. No one suspected really. We had thought we were going to be okay. Until today.

  Chapter One

  “Jacob, I need to talk to you, man,” Tim said as he nervously finished his cigarette. Tim brushed back his light brown hair where it had fallen into his face. It reached his shoulders and was almost long enough for a ponytail. His fingers were stained with tobacco. He was our roommate and had actually saved our butts by giving us a place to hide out for the last five months. We had become good friends with just about everyone in the neighborhood since moving here from Georgia. Luke and Risa had been our ambassadors, making friends with everyone, first the kids, and then their parents. We had been out with some of our neighbors that day, a rare picnic that had ended with bad weather.

  We all hurried through the front door, out of the driving rain that had overtaken us during a day of hiking. At least we had gotten to eat our picnic before the clouds had decided to dump their water on us. I looked in Tim’s face and then turned to the kids.

  “Risa, take Luke upstairs and get him in the bath. You can use the cherry bubble bath,” I said as an incentive, and then watched Luke let out a “Whoop!” of happiness and run up the stairs, sounding like a small herd of baby buffalo. I called after them, “Hey, Risa,
go ahead and take a shower, Sweetie.” I turned to Jacob and Tim talking quietly in the kitchen.

  “Jake, man. You know I love having you here, and appreciate the help on the rent. But dude, these guys were asking around the neighborhood for you this morning, about an hour after you left. Freaked Paul and Jim out. They came and told me,” Tim was saying. Paul and Jim lived two doors down. They were a couple and attended the local university. They had big dreams, despite the epidemic that was slowly overwhelming our country.

  “What? What kind of guys?” Jacob asked. I was instantly on alert. DeAndre and Caitlyn both drew near as well, apparently sensing my anxiety. I leaned in further behind Jacob in the small kitchen, trying not to disturb the conversation but needing to hear what was said.

  “Man, some kind of Feds. Looked like undercover cops or something. They were questioning people in the apartment house at the end of the block, where Nick and Shady Al hang out,” said Tim. Nick and Shady Al were the local tough guys. They were our neighborhood’s version of a gang I suppose, except with just the two of them, it wasn’t much of a gang. Nick fancied himself a wannabe gangsta and had an affinity for the latest rap fashions.

  Nick was okay, only 19, but Shady Al was bad news. He dealt some, and we tried to avoid him.

  “Did they come down this way? Did Al tell them anything?” Jacob asked.

  “Nah, man. He was just glad they didn’t take him in. He’s got two on the books ya know,” Tim crushed out his cigarette in the sink and lit another one. His hand was shaking. “Man, I don’t know. They were asking about three guys with two girls, and with two kids. One younger. Man, they sounded like they were describing you guys.”