Eclipsed Read online

  Eclipsed

  Kathryn Hoff

  Copyright © 2020 by Kathryn Hoff

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover Design by JD&J Design © 2020 by Kathryn Hoff

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Eclipsed / Kathryn Hoff.—1st ed.

  KathrynHoffBooks.com

  Dedicated to all the girls who don’t yet know

  how much they love science.

  This is a work of fiction. The author in no way

  condones the use of primates or

  other animals as research subjects.

  CHAPTER 1

  That kid

  Zeke said I shouldn’t eat or drink in the primate house because it made the animals antsy, and I didn’t want to anyway because—honestly?—the place stank. So when I left the study center at three o’clock, I took my orange juice to the bench by the flamingo yard to enjoy a little fresh air before my afternoon shift cleaning cages.

  It was the day after Thanksgiving, cool and crisp. The leaves had fallen, making a crunchy mess on the asphalt pathways.

  The nice fall weather had brought a lot of visitors to the zoo. All the museums and movie theatres had closed down years ago—around the same time they’d shut the schools—but parks and other outdoor places were still supposed to be safe as long as you didn’t get too close to somebody who was infected. So, when kids got stir-crazy from being shut up at home too long, parents brought them to the zoo, even if it meant wearing surgical masks and holding onto their kids’ grubby hands to keep them away from strangers.

  The flamingos honked and strutted and fluffed their pink feathers, twisting their long, skinny necks into figure eights and tucking their heads under their wings. I sipped my juice wondering how they did it and why they thought balancing on one leg was more restful than standing on two like other birds.

  That was when I noticed the kid. He was a scrawny boy, probably about my age—just turned sixteen. Even before I saw his orphan bracelet, I knew he was from a teen home by the way he hunched his shoulders and glanced around like a spooked gazelle. The clothes clinched it: too-big jeans, worn and torn from somebody else’s wearing, a pair of run-down sneaks, a far-from-fresh surgical mask, a faded sweatshirt from a college that didn’t exist anymore.

  Strange that he was on his own. Teen-home kids got in free and wandered the zoo in packs, looking for trouble or something to lift. Taking the orphan discount, we’d say.

  The kid had scoped me, too, or at least my orphan bracelet. He ignored the flamingos and headed for me, circling around the snack stand—where Mr. Lee watched him like a hawk—and shying away from the moms and kids.

  Four paces away, he stopped. “Hey, girl. You work here?”

  Witless. The big blue letters on my sweatshirt said Mid-Atlantic Zoo Staff, so yeah, I worked there. I had a bet with Paula that I could go a whole month without calling anyone or anything stupid, but that kind of question made it tough.

  I pointed to my badge, Jackie K., Intern, and turned the back of my wrist so he could see the E-3 tattoo. The old orphan-to-orphan intro.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You looking for the john?” Which was the usual question people asked.

  He turned his wrist so I could see it. It was clean, no tat. That meant he hadn’t had Eclipse yet, not even once.

  Unless—

  I looked closer. The kid was pale and sweating, even though the air was cool.

  “I need…” He stopped. “You’ll have to call…”

  That’s when he started to cough, doubling over in great hacking spasms.

  I dropped my juice and backed away, fast, dragging my mask up over my nose. “Stay away from me!”

  His eyes were scared. Hopeless.

  Someone shouted, “He’s coughing! Call Eclipse Control!”

  Parents hustled their kids toward the exit. A woman cried, “Lord have mercy!” and—staying well away—started to pray out loud.

  “You better sit down,” I said. “They’ll come soon.” I backed up a little more to give the kid a clear path to the bench. Three meters—that was supposed to be a safe distance from somebody infected.

  He collapsed onto the bench, bent over and hacking and wheezing for breath.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped.

  I remembered how it felt, scared to death, struggling to breathe, and knowing nobody wanted to go near you. “What’s your name? You with somebody?”

  “Jamie.” Between coughs, it came out kind of strangled. “Nobody. Please…don’t go.”

  I wanted to go. All around, people were rushing away. Mr. Lee had already closed up his snack stand and was wheeling it to another location, somewhere far from the sight of a sick kid.

  I didn’t want to be anywhere near Jamie either—but he was all alone.

  So I stayed, mask covering my nose and mouth, more than three meters away but close enough so the kid could see me.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “People are coming to help.”

  Well, people were coming. That part was true.

  Two zoo cops rushed up. The older one bellowed to Jamie, “Stay where you are. Eclipse Control is on the way.” His sidekick, a newbie who was probably fresh out of a teen home herself, sent a panicky message into her radio.

  In the flamingo yard, the birds shook their feathers and honked.

  The older cop pointed to me. “You! Did the victim touch you? Cough on you?”

  I shook my head.

  “All right. Go on, then. Get out of here.”

  Jamie turned away, his back heaving from the coughing. Or maybe sobs.

  “I’ll stay,” I said. “His name’s Jamie.” As if it mattered.

  Paula rushed up, her radio and zoo staff shirt marking her as somebody with authority. “Jackie? You all right?” She put an arm around my shoulder. “He didn’t get near you, did he?”

  I shook my head and blinked to keep my eyes from misting up. “I kept my distance. He just needed to sit on the bench.”

  Paula had been fostering me for a year. She was an E-4, tall, dark-skinned, big-busted, and stronger than she looked. I appreciated that she’d trusted me enough to put her arm around me before she’d asked whether I’d been exposed.

  Short siren beeps sent visitors scurrying as a white Eclipse Control Agency ambulance rolled up the sidewalk, crunching all the dry, brown leaves into dust beneath its wheels. The flamingos squawked and flapped in alarm.

  At the sight of the ECA ambulance, I started to shake.

  Paula squeezed my shoulder. “Honey, maybe you should go help Zeke.”

  Paula only called me honey when things were bad.

  “I’ll stay. He’s all alone.”

  Jamie’s back was still to us. I called, “Hang in there, Jamie. You’ll be all right.”

  That last part was a lie.

  The ambulance backed up to the bench. From the rear doors came medics in hazmat suits—white coveralls, thick gloves, and helmets that covered their whole heads like spacesuits. Their air purifiers made heavy breathing noises and muffled their voices.

  “Stay calm,” they squawked. “We’re here to help.” They sounded like robots from an old horror movie.

  Seeing them made me want to puke.

  I didn’t want to watch while they put Jamie in the isolation gurney, so I stared at the sign next to the bench, the one that had a big map of the zoo. You are here. This way to the lions. That way to the bears.

  This way
out.

  The white suits manhandled Jamie onto the gurney, the kind with a lid that closes down like a coffin. The cops covered their noses and drew away as the white suits sprayed the bench with disinfectant.

  I called, “Good luck, Jamie!”

  Then they shut the lid on the kid and took him away.

  The epidemic started in Africa somewhere, but the world didn’t take notice until it began to kill people on other continents. There was a solar eclipse around the time it hit Europe. That was enough to make the wackos point to signs of doom from the heavens, and the name stuck.

  When the first wave of Eclipse hit the US East Coast, I was eight and I still had a home and a family. That wave wasn’t so bad—mostly it took people who were already old or sick. My parents shook their heads and said it was a shame and told me and my brother to wash our hands and stay away from anyone with a cough. By winter it all calmed down.

  The next spring, the Eclipse bacteria mutated into a new strain. With wave two the infection rate shot up like a volcano spewing lava. The hospitals were full. People died in droves—even strong, healthy adults and kids, and people who’d survived being sick before.

  People started wearing surgical masks every time they left home. A lot of people stopped leaving home, period, hoarding canned food and barricading their doors to keep the sickness away. Then the schools closed, and we had to do online study units at home instead. My mom wouldn’t let me or my big brother Johnny go to the playground or the shopping mall or anywhere, even with surgical masks. Eclipse Control was on the news feeds all the time with videos of health workers in white suits taking whole families to quarantine centers, like aliens abducting half a neighborhood at a time.

  My family made it through wave two, but wave three came the next spring. That was a bad one. They started tattooing people who survived, so health workers would know at a glance which strains a sick person had already had, to help them figure out which strains made you immune and which strains left you vulnerable to another wave of Eclipse.

  When my mom started coughing, the white suits came to our apartment. In robot voices, they ordered us to go with them.

  I fought them, beating on the white hazmat suits with my ten-year-old little-girl fists, but they dragged me away like a naughty puppy. I thought they were taking us away to die.

  I wasn’t wrong.

  The white suits took my mother away in an isolation gurney and shoved the rest of us into an Eclipse Control van. Everything I knew was left behind—home, clothes, toys, books, everything.

  At the Eclipse hospital, they rushed my mom straight into the red zone, behind locked doors. They took me and my dad and Johnny to the quarantine center, where they scrubbed us down with disinfectant and gave us flimsy hospital clothes. Quarantine was full of families who had somebody sick with Eclipse and who’d left everything behind. And full of white suits, who brought us food and took our temperature and made sure we didn’t try to leave.

  My dad and Johnny began coughing the second day we were there, and the white suits took them away, leaving me alone.

  Then I started to cough. The white suits strapped me to a gurney and pushed me through the locked doors into the red zone, past beds of dying people.

  I spent days and days in the red zone with only the white suits for company. Days and days and days of coughing and fever and hurting and tubes in my arms and not being able to breathe. I kept asking about my mom and my dad and my brother, and the robot voices told me everything was fine.

  They lied.

  It was only when I was getting better that they told me my family was all gone and I was an orphan and I was never going home. Instead, they gave me the E-3 tattoo and an orphan ID bracelet and sent me to an orphan home. When I got there, an old-lady proctor told me I was one of the lucky ones.

  Lucky.

  And that was the most totally, completely stupid thing anyone could say, ever. Moronic, imbecilic, thoughtless, heedless, witless, asinine, obtuse, unintelligent, irrelevant, foolish, unwise, idiotic, and just plain stupid.

  CHAPTER 2

  A tall, dark stranger

  Paula kept her arm around me as she walked me to the primate house. Inside, a couple of kids made monkey noises at the gibbons and pointed at Jayjay Chimp, who just looked away because chimps think it’s rude to stare.

  Paula used her key to open the Staff Only door. “Go on, honey,” she said. “Cages to clean.”

  In the movies, when a girl cries, she’s still beautiful as a single dew-drop tear crawls artfully down her cheek. When I cry, I’m an ugly, wet mess with a drippy nose and swollen eyes and my mouth all bunched up.

  I didn’t want anyone to see me like that, so I put on a fresh surgical mask and rubber gloves and rubber boots and helped Zeke muck out the enclosures.

  Henry Orangutan and his mom, Tika, watched me from the shift cage, but I didn’t wave or play peekaboo the way I usually did. Lola and Larry Gibbon watched from across the way, knees up and their ridiculously long arms wrapped around themselves, because they were always interested in what the keepers did, but I didn’t do anything to amuse them. I just raked out the straw and crap, staring straight ahead, trying to stop crying. Then I washed down the enclosure with disinfectant until it didn’t smell like ape pee anymore—it smelled just like the disinfectant the white suits had sprayed on the bench where Jamie had sat.

  Riding the bus home with Paula that evening, I didn’t feel like talking. I just sat and looked out the window as we passed neighborhoods of boarded-up stores and apartment houses, where young, barely-trained cops patrolled for looters. The public service posters over the bus seats were full of the usual crap. Rub out Eclipse—Wash your hands. Coughing? Call Eclipse Control at the first sign of illness. Foster a child today—Full support available for hard-to-place children.

  At least Paula didn’t try to cheer me up with a load of phony bull about how everything would be fine. That’s what I liked about Paula, she never lied to me. She didn’t try to be my mother and she didn’t rag on me about my weight or my hair or wearing nice clothes or doing girl stuff. Which she wouldn’t, because she was no skinny fashion model and she kept her hair natural, and she never bothered with makeup or jewelry or fancy clothes. She said she liked animals better than people anyway. And the weird thing was that even though she mostly left me alone, since I’d been living with her I was eating better, and was stronger, and even did better on my schoolwork.

  Most important, she’d got me the internship at the zoo.

  Sure, lots of kids say they love animals, even though they’ve never done more than walk a dog or clean a litterbox. I was an animal professional—or at least trying to be. Every day I cleaned cages before most people had breakfast. The stink didn’t bother me because I knew the animals liked having a clean home and fresh straw to burrow under and different toys to play with.

  Paula said we could never really know how animals felt, but it was easy for me to tell when they were bored or frustrated or tired of people staring at them. After all, I’d spent enough time at teen home, bored and frustrated and tired of prospective foster parents looking me over and saying, Sorry, no, not her. Giving the animals a clean cage, training them so they wouldn’t be spooked by a routine veterinary procedure, and hiding a special treat in a box or paper bag for them to discover made me happy. Taking care of them was almost like having a family again. They never lied, and they needed me like nobody else on Earth needed me. For the first time in my life, I was doing something useful.

  By the time we got to our apartment building, I was starting to feel better. That is, until we got off the elevator and I saw a man waiting at our door. A tall, dark stranger wearing a badge that said Eclipse Control Agency.

  I stopped walking so fast that Paula bumped into me. I scanned the hallway for white-suited medics who might be lurking in ambush.

  The man pulled down his mask. He had a grin like a toothpaste ad, his dark face setting off beautiful white teeth. “Hello, Paula! Ho
w lovely to see you again.”

  Paula seemed to think it was lovely too. “Avery! This is a surprise.” She actually hugged him and let him in.

  He was tall, like basketball player tall. He had to duck going through the door. His wrist tat, hardly visible against his brown skin, said E-2.

  He looked around our apartment like he was thinking of moving in. “How very homey. Very cozy.”

  “Jackie, this is Dr. Quinn,” Paula said. “I used to work with him. Avery, this is my foster daughter, Jackie Kennedy.” She patted my shoulder like I was a dog that needed calming. Maybe I was standing a little stiff.

  The stranger grinned bigger. “Jackie Kennedy, huh? How nice to meet you.” The way he said it, it was clear he knew who the real Jacqueline Kennedy was, and how sophisticated and glamourous she was. And that I wasn’t like her at all.

  Who was this guy? In the year I’d been living with her, Paula hadn’t even gone on a date except to go out for a beer with Zeke and the other keepers.

  Maybe Dr. Quinn was good-looking in a tall, skinny kind of way, but he worked for the ECA. That alone was enough to make my skin crawl. I hoped like hell Paula didn’t like the guy as much as he seemed to like her.

  Paula hung up her jacket and slung his over a chair. “It’s nice to see you, Avery, but you should have called.”

  “I thought it best to talk to you in person. I’m hoping you’ll reconsider.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The stranger looked down at me and said, “Sweetheart, maybe you have something you need to do. Somewhere else.”

  Paula’s lips got tight, but she said, “Why don’t you go read in my room for a few minutes.”

  So I went to Paula’s bedroom and shut the door, but then I opened it a crack so I could listen. One thing I’d learned at teen home—it pays to know what’s going on.

  The man—Quinn—said, “We’re at a turning point, Paula. Come back. We need you.”

  “I’ve done my part for the ECA. Now I have a different job. I have a life.”