Immunity Index, Sue Burke [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

Maybe she should leave. Whatever killed him might be contagious—but it wasn’t the delta cold. And besides, this was her father. She wasn’t going to abandon her father.

He’d been telling jokes until the end. I’m here with my microbe friends. She’d wait there with him and his friends. And think about all his jokes. Even a trip to a restaurant with him could be funny. She thought about the good times, like when Papa took her to an amusement park and he enjoyed the rides as much as she did. Or he bought her real ice cream with lots of real chocolate sauce. He came to her school musical performance, even though Berenike was just working backstage on the sound system, and he had plenty of specific praise for technical details about how good it sounded, especially since the sound crew had to overcome inadequate equipment.

Then she sat and listened to a silence that was full of words, of Papa and Momma fighting, of the summer when the neighbor lady realized that little Berenike was underfed and gave her a banana every afternoon, which was why she hated bananas now. Yet, for all that they did wrong, the neglect, the lies, they’d taken care of her and protected her.

The coroner’s team came, three hours after she’d called—were that many other people dying?—actually not the coroner, instead a private funeral service subcontracted by the county. They seemed businesslike, wearing white suits like a hazmat team. She had to sign some documents, and a woman gave her a flyer and a little lecture. “He may have had a cold, but the cause of death is likely food poisoning. There’s been an outbreak of that, and people are afraid it’s the Sino cold, but really he had a minor cold and then this on top of it.”

Berenike tried to think of the symptoms of food poisoning. Didn’t people usually throw up instead of foam at the mouth? “What about that cold? Was I exposed?”

“It’s really mild. Don’t worry about it.”

They told her to contact the funeral home. She could receive more information about adjusted funeral services if she had limited funds. Be sure to clean up with proper precautions against the bacteria and toxins from the food poisoning. They gave her a pair of gloves. They were sorry for her loss. The faces inside the clear plastic visors looked sorry. Or worried. Or angry. At her? What had she done?

After they were gone, after she’d sat for a little while longer, she found some bleach-based bathroom cleaner, put on the plastic gloves, and wiped up the blood on the table and stain on the chair. The fake wood faded from the bleach. She didn’t care.

The entire apartment would need to be cleaned. Cleaned out. The rent canceled. So much to do. But not tonight, and not tomorrow. Tomorrow! She poured out the cold coffee her father had been drinking, put the cup in the sink, and left.

She caught a late-night bus home. That funeral-home team had lied to her about something, she felt sure. Bacteria and toxins. Toxins. That was it! Papa had been poisoned. Rather than round him up and throw him in jail, they’d simply killed him. A clever cover-up, food poisoning. The Prez’s assholes killed Papa. For a moment, her tears dried up. She felt rage surge strong enough for her to tear up the bus seats and throw them out of the windows. But the bus had surveillance. She had to sit nice and quiet and normal. Mutiny—oh, she was going to be dangerous tomorrow.

She arrived, shaking with anger, stomped off the bus and up the sidewalk to a different twentieth-century brick-faced apartment box with even tinier units. The hallway smelled a little better, but the air seemed thick, resistant, hard to walk through. Someone was listening to happy dance music somewhere down the hall. Even when she closed her own door, she could still hear it. Two of her roommates were asleep in bed, and Deedee was sprawled on the old sofa in the corner drowsing as some video game waited for her next play on her phone.

Karen coughed.

Deedee opened her eyes. “She has that cold,” she whispered.

Not food poisoning, I hope. Karen might have crossed a line somehow and been targeted like her father. No, not Karen. Or maybe she just had that cold. Berenike had no way to know. The AI counselor had tried to teach her not to worry about things she couldn’t change, to think about something else instead. Yes, she could think about the mutiny.

She had a lot to do tomorrow—she had to change the world! She went to bed, hoping to fall asleep fast, and please, please, no dreams. But rather than sleep, she wept silently for what seemed like a long time and couldn’t find a way to stop crying, or maybe her dreams were all about crying.

By evening, we had returned to teamwork, and we had at our disposal a small treasure of Earth’s rarest substance: accurate data—patchy and incomplete, more like a rough nugget than a solid coin, much of it in narrative form, but honest gold. I held my breath.

The virus meant as a vaccine had been released by aerosols three days earlier at hundreds of locations throughout the United States, often at flag-distribution centers, as well as at major military installations. The Prez’s political team had spearheaded the entire operation from conception to execution. (This proved that they were all criminally reckless idiots—but we’d known that for quite some time.) (Also, how did those idiots create something that sublime?) As of twenty-four hours ago, stores nationwide had reported upticks in cold remedy sales, and hospital emergency rooms nationwide had reported fewer than one hundred cases of complications from colds and influenza above baseline numbers, and perhaps an additional three deaths above baseline.

“Satisfied?” Node 6 challenged me.

“The virus has been successfully released, and it’s not entirely harmless,” I said. I didn’t mention that the figures seemed optimistic,