Page 2 of Immune

The sliding metal of the locks being freed and the scrape of the wood that barricades the door sound like the cocking of a bullet in a gun’s chamber. The look Maine sends me over his shoulder like the unlatching of the safety. And the freshly shot bullet embeds itself into my chest when the door shuts after him, leaving only Mom and me in the townhouse that suddenly feels empty without my big brother. Without the only person left in this world who knows how to keep my scent under wraps, myheats quiet, and my designation from becoming the thing that gets us both killed. He’s the only one left who can keep me safe.

A shuddering breath escapes me, another tear falling, but I can’t wallow long, because Mom calls for me again. “Dakota, my mouth is dry. Can I get some water?”

Peering up at the ceiling as I force my lungs to take a steady breath, my tears to stop, and my heart to quit breaking, I shake my head and put on my brave face and big girl panties.

Rolling my shoulders back, I head to the kitchen at the back of the house and pour a glass of water for Mom from one of the water containers we filled when news broke of the disaster we now live in. A disaster that sent the world into chaos, where death litters the streets now, and monsters that were once human lurk around every corner. A disaster born from a cure that was meant to save Omegas, instead turning them into corpses, ghosts, bartering tools, or secrets. A disaster that forced us from our lavish home in the suburbs to a townhouse in a derelict street that hasn’t seen a living person in three months, that stole Dad from me, and is now slowly stealing Mom from me, too.

And my brother has just gone out there to find us more food and medication.

Stomach rolling, I trail through the house, up the stairs to Mom’s room, and enter without knocking. She’s right where we left her after her last episode, curled on her side in the bed that used to hold warmth and memories. Plenty of times, Maine and I ended up cuddled in here while the frail woman on the bed would tell us tales of faraway places, her voice soothing us to sleep. Now she’s simply a former shell of herself, worsening day by day due to the disorder that sent her on a rampage only an hour ago. Echo Mutation Disorder. EMD. Three little letters for something that is anything but little. From where I stand, I can see the mess left behind in the bathroom, broken shards of glasslittered over the floor after Mom smashed it. It took everything in Maine and me to calm her enough that she wasn’t making so much noise, drawing attention to the house.

Noise brought the dead. Scent brought the living. And I don’t even know which one of the two scares me the most anymore.

“Here, Mom,” I say quietly, offering her the glass. As expected, she doesn’t take it, so I place it on her bedside table and take a seat in the armchair beside the bed. Ignoring the spaced-out expression, I tell her, “Maine left to find food, so we’ll have to go easy on what’s left until he comes back.”

Mom simply nods, unseeing eyes staring over my shoulder.

“It’ll be dark in a couple of hours,” I note, not that it makes a difference. The windows have been blocked and boarded for the past three months, keeping the daylight out and the darkness in. It’s the safest way to live these days. When Mom makes no effort to reply, I sigh and stand. “Get some rest. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

What I didn’t know at the time was things would only get worse.

I could never have anticipated waking in the morning to find Mom’s dead body hanging from the shower rail in the bathroom she’d ruined. Certainly wouldn’t have guessed finding her white, cloudy eyes watching me closely as I stepped into the room, her jaws snapping at me like she wanted to take a bite out of my flesh, straining against the rope wound tightly around her throat. Or that the bond sickness had finally dragged her beyond grief, madness, and humanity, leaving behind something hungry wearing my mother’s face.

But even worse, I didn’t once expect to never see my brother again, especially after promising not to leave me alone ina world where humanity dwindled and died away and the dead rose to take out the rest of us.

He promised he’d be back in two days, three days max, promised I wouldn’t be alone. Six years later, I’m still waiting on him to fulfill that promise, surviving life more alone than I’ve ever been.

An Omega with no pack, no family, no blockers, and no one left to stop the world from finding out what I am.

ONE

DAKOTA

2032

The virus was never meant to send the world into ruins. It was supposed to save it. Life never seems to work that way, though.

Six years ago, everything I knew, all I had, was lost. All in the name of humanity’s survival. All in the name of my survival. Mine. Mom’s. Maine’s. Omegas were dying out long before the dead started walking. Heat cycles were failing, pregnancies were ending before they could even begin, bodies that were built and designed to carry the future were slowly forgetting how to do just that. NOVAC was meant to fix it. It was meant to make us stronger. Save us. Drag us back from the very real threat of extinction with science, good intentions, faith, dust, and fucking pixie dust.

Instead, it made us rarer than a Twinkie in the apocalypse and twice as dangerous to find.

That thought tickles the back of my mind as I sit in solitude, admiring the clean streaks of black that now coat my fingernails. Which seems like a totally ridiculous thing to do while the world rots beneath me. But there are only so many things left in the world that feel like mine anymore, and this is one of them. After all, my hair is perpetually hidden beneath my brother’s hat, my scent is buried beneath blockers, smoke, dirt, and old fabric. My clothes are a little too big, a little too heavy, and very ugly, chosen for the sole purpose of making me look like something I’m not.

But my nails? Oh, yeah, those suckers aremine.

Well, mine and Maine’s.

Every single time, without fail, Maine would paint my nails when I was stressed, back when stress only meant school, nightmares, bad heats, and Mom and Dad arguing in hushed voices behind closed doors. He would sit across from me with the bottle of polish precariously balanced on his knee, tongue poking out in concentration while he painted every nail with hilarious but careful precision, as though he was painting a masterpiece. He would tell me it gave my inner Omega something gentle to focus on. Something soft. Something safe. Something that was mine.

And, with a heaping dose of annoyance, I’ve been forced to admit that he was right.

Even now, with my hair hidden, my figure disguised, and my scent masked beneath a chemically produced pill that hides my Omega-ness, my nails still make me feel like me.

At least a little bit, and that’s all that matters.

With careful accuracy, I paint my thumbnail with black polish, holding my finished hand up to the wind while I wait for the stragglers below to disappear. From my vantage point in the tree, I can spy the hoard of Zeds below, dragging their hollow bodies through the street I’ve camped in for the past two nights.

With flesh hanging off bones, rotting corpses grunt and groan as they collectively advance on the house that is currently ablaze, the sound of the makeshift bomb I planted last night echoing far and wide enough to lure the Zeds from where I need to get to.