Sky on Fire

Will Niko and Dean manage to rescue Josie?

Find out in May 2014…

JOSIE

I KEEP TO MYSELF.

The Josie who took care of everyone – that girl’s dead.

She was killed in an Aspen grove off the highway somewhere between Monument and Denver.

She was killed along with a deranged soldier.

I killed her when I killed the solider.

I am a girl with a rage inside that threatens to boil over every minute of the day.

All of us here are O types who were exposed. Some of us have been tipped into madness by the compounds.

It depends on how long you were exposed.

I was out there for more than two days.

I work on self-control every moment of the waking day. I have to be on guard against my own blood.

I see others allow it to take over. Fights erupt. Tempers flare over an unfriendly glance, a stubbed toe, a bad dream.

If someone gets really out of control, the guards lock them in the study rooms at Hawthorn.

If someone really, really loses it, sometimes the guards take them and they don’t come back.

It makes it worse that we’re just a little stronger than we were before. Tougher. The cycle of healing, a bit speeded up. Not so much you notice, but old ladies not using their canes. Pierced ear holes are closing up. More energy in the cells, is what the inmates say.

They call it the O advantage.

It’s our only one.

The Type O Containment camp at Old Mizzou is a prison, not a shelter. The blisterers (Type A), the paranoid freaks (Type AB) and the people who’ve been made sterile (Type B), are at refugee camps where there’s more freedom. More food. Clean clothes. TV.

But all of the people here at Mizzou have Type O blood and were exposed to the compounds. So the authorities decided we are all murderers (probably true – certainly is for me) and penned us in together. Even the little kids.

‘Yes, Mario,’ I say when he starts to grumble about how wrong it all is. ‘It’s unjust. Goes against our rights.’

But every time my fingers itch to bash some idiot’s nose in, I suspect they were right to do it.

I remember my Gram talking about fevers. I remember her sitting on the edge of my bed, putting a clammy washcloth on my forehead.

‘Gram,’ I cried. ‘My head hurts.’

I didn’t say it aloud, but I was begging for Tylenol and she knew it.

‘I could give you something, my baby girl, but then your fever would die, and fever’s what makes you strong.’

I would cry, the tears themselves seemed boiling hot.

‘A fever comes in and burns up your baby fat. It burns up the waste in your tissue. It moves you along in your development. Fevers are very good, darlin’. They make you invincible.’

Did I feel stronger afterwards? I did. I felt clean. I felt tough.

Gram made me feel like I was good through and through and I would never do wrong.

I’m glad Gram is long dead. I wouldn’t want her to know me now. Because the O rage comes on like a fever but it burns up your soul. It makes your body strong and lulls your mind to sleep with bloodlust and you can recover from that. But after you kill, your soul buckles. It won’t lie flat; like a warped frying pan, it sits on the burner and rattles, uneven.

You can never breathe the same way again because every breath is one you stole from corpses rotting in the ground, unburied, where you left them to bleed out.

As I understand it, the National Government brought us here, but the State of Missouri is running the camp. The locals don’t want us released, but don’t care to pay for us to be properly cared for either. And the National Government has been slow to provide for us.

The result: not enough guards, not enough food, not enough space, not enough medical care. And they won’t let us out.

There were petitions circulating, when we first arrived. People trying to get the stable Os separated from the criminal ones. But the guards made life hard for the signature-gatherers.

Now we’re all just waiting it out.

Every week a rumour drifts through the camp that we’re to be released.

The hope is dangerous to me. It makes me care.