Free Shattered by Robin Wasserman Page A

don’t-screw-with-me scowls that couldn’t mask their boredom. Not to mention their bitterness at protecting a life they could never afford themselves. Small wonder that secops was as low on the desirability spectrum as wastewater management and human resources. At least the data-entry grunts got to stay hidden away in their glassy cubes—ignoring us, I’d always assumed, just as happily as we ignored them.
    There was one recent exception to the stay-put rule—the Brotherhood of Man had begun sending buses to area corp-towns, offering residents a field trip to the newly completed Temple of Man. I wondered how many of the hostile faces surrounding me had witnessed Auden’s little martyr show live and in person. How many looked at me and were afraid.
    Twenty minutes passed, and Jude’s mystery man didn’t show. Another twenty, and still nothing.
    I glanced up at Riley. He was resolutely ignoring the giggling girls—who were now taking turns boldly flashing their net-linked lingerie at
him.
    â€œIs he usually this late?” I VM’d.
    â€œNever,” came the answer. “Stay put. I’ll voice Jude.”
    Of course,
I thought in disgust.
Jude always knows what to do.
The all-knowing, all-powerful Jude had all the answers.
    Then the sun went out.
    Darkness, and then the world blazed red. I stood up as the alarm sang out, a single scream at the top of the octave. The crowds froze, faces tipped up toward the vidscreens, which all flashed the same useless message:
Alert. Biohazard. Alert.
    The red strobe flashed on, off, on. Glowing faces burst from the darkness, then dropped into shadow. The fountain bled pink, the rippling pool of water at its base a bottomless red.
    I was staring at the fountain when I realized the noise had stopped. Not the alarm, which was still singing, but the sounds beneath it, the rustling, mumbling, shrieking, crying chaos of the crowd. Gone.
    Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies.
    The inane rhyme whispered through my head as they began to drop. They fell silent and still, their eyes bulging and mouths convulsing, fishlike, open shut open. Soundless. The two men with their dirt-beards, the old woman. The giggle twins, their giggles silenced, their skirts askew. Down, hard and ugly, heads cracking against plastic stone, arms jutting at odd angles. Down went the little kid, fingers clawing at her pink shirt. And her mother, down without a fight, her back to the kid.
    Ashes, ashes.
    Someone told me once that the nursery rhyme was aboutthe Black Plague. That the ring of roses referred to the disease’s trademark red rash; the ashes to the burning bodies of the dead. But that was a lie: I looked it up. The words were nonsense; they meant nothing.
    The red light pulsed rhythmically. I tried not to count the faces, hundreds of faces. Some of them twitched, chests heaving, sucking in air and whatever poison hid inside of it, whatever
biohazard
had touched off a useless, too late
alert
alert alert
.
    Some of them—one of the men, the girl, three women with chunky ankles and identical rings on their stubby fingers—prostrate, frozen. Askew. Their eyes open, their chests still.
    Faces red, then pale, shadowy,
non
, then red again.
    â€œWe have to get out of here!” Riley’s voice in my ear. Riley’s shirt absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley’s hands on my shoulders. Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.
    â€œLia!”
Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.
    Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn’t make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.
    Running without looking down, just step over them like stones, just go, Riley said, don’t stop don’t look just go.
    Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium,