UnBound

  “Good morning, Jobe,” says a man in a lab coat, smiling, but not offering his hand to shake. His name tag reads DR. FRIENDL. Jobe imagines penciling in a Y to make his name Dr. Friendly.

  Jobe is seated on an examining table covered with sterile white paper that crinkles when he sits. It’s like going to the doctor, if the doctor was planning to extract your internal organs and give them out like lollipops to the kiddies.

  “This won’t hurt,” says Dr. Friendly, wrapping a rubber strip around Jobe’s bicep and extracting a blood sample. He sticks the vial in his pocket, says “Wait here,” and is gone for an annoyingly long time.

  Jobe looks around nervously. A window shows the camp’s exercise yard, where teens are playing softball, lifting weights, doing forced calisthenics. Upbeat music blasts from pole-mounted speakers, audible even through the double-paned window. Jobe wonders how he’ll ever measure up, because he doesn’t feel well enough for exercise.

  Finally, Dr. Friendly returns with a burly orderly and a nurse carrying a tray of medical instruments. Most notably two syringes—one small and one unpleasantly large. “Standard biopsy,” he says. “Just to confirm the results of the blood work.” He prepares the first needle. “Anesthetic,” he says. “This will only sting a little.”

  It stings more than a little—but that’s not what troubles Jobe. What troubles him is that Dr. Friendly doesn’t say anything when he approaches with the larger needle. Perhaps because this one will hurt. A lot.

  The orderly holds him firmly to keep him from flinching. “It’ll be quick,” he says.

  The needle goes in. Jobe grimaces, refusing to scream, although the pain is excruciating. He wonders how much more it would have hurt without the anesthetic.

  At least the orderly was telling the truth. The needle is extracted. The pain begins to subside. They let him go. “You’re a trouper,” says the orderly. The doctor excuses himself and departs, carrying a sample jar labeled MARIN, J. His team follows him out, leaving Jobe alone.

  When Dr. Friendly returns, twenty minutes later, he’s smiling, but it seems forced.

  “I’m afraid you can’t be unwound,” he says with genuine regret. “A certain number of applicants simply don’t qualify. Please don’t consider this a reflection on your worth.”

  “Why?” Jobe asks. “What did you find?”

  Dr. Friendly offers an apologetic grin. “It’s not my place to say. Someone will be along to collect you shortly.”

  The door closes, and Jobe is left alone again in the examining room. He stares out the window, watching the others prepare for a procedure he won’t receive—because he’s not even worth the trouble of dismantling.

  2 • Heath

  “We’ve got another one, Heath.”

  Heath Calderon sighs. He’s sitting in an office in the Centralia fire station—what used to be the fire station—with a sweeping view of the town below. But now Centralia’s a ghost town. It was abandoned when a fire erupted in the coal-bearing caves under the city, spewing toxic gas from dozens of boreholes. It was deemed unsafe to live here. The entire town was condemned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, uprooting whole families, leaving a landscape blighted with rubble and ruin.

  The perfect place for AWOLs to hide, because no one gives a crap what happens here.

  “Who’s the new guy?” Heath asks.

  His assistant—an overachiever named Sebastian—checks a hand-scribbled notebook. “Jobe something, age fourteen. He’s sick. Bad. They kicked him off the unwind list because his parts weren’t worth harvesting. We found him at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.”

  “How’d you get him past the guard?”

  “There wasn’t one. Why would they guard the worthless?”

  Heath nods. “Good job, Sebastian. I think we can use him.”

  Sebastian beams. That boy takes pride in his work, Heath thinks. Even if the work involves tracking down unwinds near the end of their natural lives and bringing them here to this backwoods hideaway. Heath has a plan for how to use them, something he hesitates to talk about, except with his most trusted allies. Not even Anissa knows his plan.

  The cost of leadership, he thinks sourly. He likes Anissa a lot and wishes he could share what he’s doing with her. She’s the smartest AWOL he knows. Pretty, too. But Heath’s plan is secret, on a strictly need-to-know basis. Anissa—like everyone else—will find out soon enough . . .

  . . . because he’s about to strike back at the Juvenile Authority—in a way they’ll never see coming.

  3 • Anissa

  “You won’t have to lose the leg, after all,” Anissa says, examining Brent Lynch’s below-the-knee wound with a practiced eye. “The swelling’s gone down, so has the fever, and the skin tone looks a lot better. The antibiotics are doing their job.”

  “Thanks, Anissa,” says Brent, flipping his long hair out of his eyes. He’s been confined to bed rest in this Centralia farmhouse for three days now, in a not-too-drafty bedroom, on a mattress that’s mildewy but does the job. Anissa made sure he had clean sheets, fresh water, and the right black market medication—because he needed them after being infected with a tainted tranq dart.

  Stupid to contaminate the organs they want to harvest, Anissa thinks, adding that to the catalog of things she hates about the Juvies.

  She smiles, rebandaging the wound. “You may not ever be a track star, Brent, but you should be able to make the choice between ‘walk’ and ‘don’t walk.’ ” Then she adds, with a note of strong caution, “If you don’t try to do too much too soon. Give your body time to heal. You’re no good to anyone otherwise.”

  Brent nods, swiping at his hair. “Understood. I’m just glad you were here to help me. Were you, like, a med student, before . . . ?”

  “Picked it up from my dad,” she says.

  “Was he a doctor?”

  “No.” Anissa smiles at the memory. “He was a firefighter.”

  4 • Jobe

  Jobe sleeps with a little more peace than before, now that he’s been rescued by this group of AWOLs. He’s glad for the haven Centralia provides but not sure how to repay them, if he ever can. Each passing day saps his strength a little further, like a junker car with the gas gauge heading toward E. He knows he’s dying, knows he’s got only weeks to live, if he’s lucky—something he’d rather not think about. He can’t fathom why he’s been shanghaied from Wilkes-Barre General Hospital to this remote, befouled wasteland.

  They expect nothing from him. Just like at the hospital, he’s given regular meals—whatever the others have managed to steal or barter from outlying neighborhoods—and otherwise left alone. His room is small and barren, with cracked plaster and a boarded-up window, but the vibe here is different from at the hospital. There, his care was obligatory. He was unwanted—but here he’s clearly valued, for reasons he can’t guess . . .

  . . . until Heath Calderon, the leader of the group, pays him a visit.

  He’s charismatic, and Jobe could tell from the moment they met that Heath was in charge. It’s how he holds himself. There’s confidence in his body language even before he speaks.

  “How you feeling?” Heath asks.

  “Like the sun at sundown,” Jobe mutters.

  Heath pulls a chair around to face him. “I know you’re not well. Hell, I know you’re dying.” He shakes his head. “Your parents may not have known that—or didn’t want to know it. Some people have a willful blindness about things they can’t deal with. It was easier to sign the unwind order than to deal with a nasty, incurable disease.”

  “My dad said I was weak,” Jobe says.

  “He’s wrong. Your issue is a medical problem. In fact, you’re in a special class—what the Juvies call unclean. We’ve been looking for people like you.”

  “Why?”

  Heath smiles. “How would you like to be a part of something really important?”

  5 • Anissa

  Anissa Pruitt feels oddly at home in this dried-up town. She helped Heath choos
e Centralia as the location of their camp since it was long-forgotten and seldom visited. The place reeks of despair, but it’s their best hope of survival—a haven that seems to reflect their angry struggle. She keeps thinking of the mine fire still raging under their feet, the pulsing heart of Centralia, a fire that can’t be extinguished and will probably burn for a hundred years.

  My dad would hate that, she thinks for the thousandth time.

  She’s meeting Heath at the graveyard, a place others would find gloomy, but which, like most of Centralia, is starkly appealing to Anissa—a reminder that she’s still among the living. Every bronze plaque, each weathered headstone tells a tale that’s forever lost. She wonders whether Centralia’s ghosts can feel the heat of the earth below, warming up their resting places, like a sneak preview of the netherworld they’d rather avoid.

  “Enjoying the scenery?” asks Heath, coming to join her.

  “I usually do. You’re late.”

  “I had business,” he says cryptically.

  She shrugs. Their walks together have become a daily ritual, even though he’s often late and won’t explain why. It’s not romantic, not exactly, but she likes his company, even if he doesn’t talk much and hardly ever reveals anything. Heath has secrets, a trait that’s both frustrating and oddly attractive.

  They set off down Locust Avenue, the main street of Centralia, where most of the AWOLs have made their home. Weeds sprout from cracks in the asphalt, engulfing old, rusted-out cars. The houses have fallen into disrepair, many uninhabitable, some stripped to the bare foundation. The air smells of sulphur—like rotten eggs—because of gas from the burning mine. Not many would find this beautiful, but Anissa does. It was a family trait, after all, to find hope in the heart of disaster and plunge into it head-on.

  “You’re thinking about your father again, aren’t you?”

  Anissa smiles. From the beginning Heath could always read her. “This all reminds me of him, Heath.”

  “Because he was a firefighter?”

  “Because he was a good one. He never gave up on anything, no matter how terrible it seemed. He’d walk right into a burning building, like he was strolling through the park. He said a fire wasn’t made that he couldn’t beat.”

  “Even this one?”

  She grins. “Dad once said he’d like to go to the mouth of the Centralia mine, take a deep breath, and just blow it out, like a birthday candle. He was like the Paul Bunyan of firefighters; you’d almost believe he could.”

  “But in the end, the fire beat him.”

  Anissa looks away. She appreciates Heath’s frankness, most of the time, but doesn’t like to be reminded of the day her father died. It was years ago, almost a decade, but the memory still troubles her.

  Martin Pruitt died on the job, battling a four-alarm blaze in a seedy Harrisburg warehouse. He went in wearing a heatsuit, a computer-controlled outfit designed to make any fire survivable. The suit could keep its wearer cool and comfortable, even if the outside temperature rose past broiling. But its greatest benefit—inspired by unwind technology—was that it could amputate injured limbs, if necessary.

  He was trapped in a burning basement, and his heatsuit recommended severing his limbs, one at a time, to conserve lifesaving oxygen. It would buy him precious minutes, time enough to be rescued—and as a firefighter, he’d be in a prime position to receive replacement body parts. But he refused, knowing the parts might come from a troubled teen who’d been forcibly taken and unwound.

  “My dad could have survived,” Anissa says bitterly. “But he didn’t want unwound limbs. He wanted to save lives, not use others to save his own.”

  There’s an awkward pause. A raven perches on the wall of a burned-out building, craning its neck at them. Anissa wonders what’s going through Heath’s mind, until he surprises her with an expression of honest sympathy.

  “You must have loved him very much, Anissa.”

  She nods. “He loved me, too. I’m sure he never imagined I’d end up with foster parents who’d sign an unwind order.”

  “Selfish idiots,” said Heath. “That’s the problem with unwinding—it’s not about problem kids, it’s about problem adults.” He spits on the ground. “Your father was better than that.”

  “And it cost him.”

  Heath looks at her with keen calculation, as if deciding how much he trusts her. He seems to be weighing the pros and cons on some imaginary scale. Finally he lowers his voice, though there’s no one remotely close enough to overhear, and says, “We may be able to change all that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  6 • Heath

  Heath knows it’s dangerous to let Anissa in on his plan, but he can’t keep it from her anymore. He needs her to know. He takes Anissa into the fire station, upstairs to the barracks, which Heath has converted into a fully functioning medical research lab. It’s easily the most modern part of this reclaimed town, with a portable generator, a centrifuge, an autoclave for sterilizing, and a high-powered microscope to examine samples—all lifted from a medical-supply firm in Lancaster during a midnight raid by Sebastian and some volunteers. The lab is littered with slides and beakers and pipettes, under a mountain of scribbled-in notebooks.

  “This is where it happens,” Heath says, perching on a lab stool.

  “Where what happens?”

  “Change. Real change.” He waves her onto another stool. “It’s not easy to pull off. The clappers want to do it by blowing up things. They’ve accomplished nothing. Brute force doesn’t work; we have to beat these people at their own game.”

  “How?”

  They’re interrupted by someone coming up the stairs—it’s Jobe. He’s fish pale and wheezing, out of breath from the climb. To Heath he seems like an old man crammed into a kid’s body.

  “This is Jobe,” says Heath. “He’s been helping us.”

  “Still am,” says Jobe wearily.

  “And we’re grateful. What you’re doing here helps more people than you can imagine.” Heath pulls a long syringe from a cabinet, and has Jobe get onto an examining table. He knows Anissa won’t want to see this, but she needs to, so she can understand. “Jobe, I need you to lie on your side, so I can take a fresh sample.”

  The scrawny kid gets into position while Heath eases the extra-long needle into his lower back. Jobe grimaces but makes no sound. Heath withdraws some fluid, then pulls out the needle, squirting the viscous sample into a petri dish, forming a yellowish puddle. Liquid gold, as far as he’s concerned.

  “Take a look,” he says, sliding the sample under a microscope, then moves aside to let Anissa squint into the eyepiece.

  “What am I seeing?”

  “It’s what you’re not seeing,” says Heath, glad for the chance to share his secrets. This may be a mistake, he knows, jeopardizing their mission for the sake of impressing a girl he’s grown fond of. But he’s sure he can win her over, once she understands the full scope of his design.

  “Jobe has cancer,” he says bluntly. “In his kidneys, lungs, spleen, and pancreas. It’s metastasized throughout his body. You should be seeing tumor markers, like fetoprotein and microglobulins, all over that sample. But you don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’ve developed a cellular camouflage, a blood-borne enzyme that mimics normal body chemistry. The standard method of detecting cancer won’t work. Which means Jobe and countless others can submit to unwinding—and be accepted by doctors with no idea they’re extracting deadly, cancerous organs.”

  Anissa recoils. “How does that help us?”

  “Anyone who receives one will be getting a death sentence. It’ll sink the program, don’t you see? No one will want an unwound organ if they can’t be guaranteed safe!”

  “But you’d be killing people.”

  Heath knows that’s true, but it doesn’t change his conviction.

  “We’re killing a few . . . to save many many more.”

>   7 • Anissa

  The sense of betrayal is as great as the moment she was told she was to be unwound. But this isn’t just a personal betrayal—it’s treason against everything that makes them better than the unwinders. Everything that makes them human.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she yells, but clearly, if his mind was lost, it happened long before she met him. This isn’t just a spur-of-the-moment plan. It was premeditated, calculated, perhaps for months. This has been simmering inside Heath, like the hellish fire in the mines beneath their feet.

  Only then does Anissa look to a series of shelves beside her. Dozens of petri dishes, growing God knows what. Heath has turned the lab into a seething cauldron of biological weapons.

  “We have bacterial infections, cancers, viruses—and we’ve hidden all the biological markers,” he tells her, proud of his accomplishment. “We’re going to release plague after plague on those who would receive unwound parts—and the world will finally see unwinding as the horror it is!”

  Her fury explodes. Before she can stop herself, she sweeps her hand over one of the shelves, knocking off the dishes, spilling their tainted specimens. They shatter on the floor—but not before one of them cuts her hand, right between two fingers—a deep, painful slice.

  Her blood drips onto Heath’s research notes, smearing the paper like a red Rorschach.

  “Anissa, wait!”

  He tries to stop her, but she evades his grasp and stalks out of the lab, glass crunching under her heels.

  • • •

  It was Anissa who chose the firehouse as the center of their operations. All the more horrifying now that she knows what Heath is using it for.

  It was once a symbol of survival for the town. Despite the evacuation, a few die-hard residents dug in and refused to leave, staying in their homes, resolute, as the town evaporated around them. Law enforcement ceased; roads went unrepaired. The Postal Service stopped delivering mail and—as a final insult—revoked their zip code.