LAST IMMUNITY

Chapter Four: IDENT Drones

Tightening the pipe around his injured hand, Cole kept walking and the thought of Tann.

He'd been failing at not thinking about him since he left the warehouse because Tann had become a constant presence in his new life.

When the last of Tann had gone, his eyes turned flat white and the color of his skin were as pale as a Greys.

Cole tried to speak to him, he tried to bring back pieces of his memories but Tann violently attacked him, lunging at him to claw out his eyeballs.

After failing to see any form of sense or humanity in him, Cole did the only thing he could think of.

No, he didn’t kill him.

Instead, he used a length of heavy, metal chains to restrain Tann to the backup generator.

He told himself it was necessary to keep Tann safe until the authorities get things in order and develop a cure for the plague.

After all, situations like this were the reason why global institutions existed, the reason why people paid taxes, and followed rules.

The citizens trusted that even when everything collapses, someone with more resources and better information would arrive and fix it.

Abruptly, a faint mechanical hum flew high and steady and Cole stopped to scan above the rooftops.

He saw a small, matte-black drone, descending and leveling off at eye height, six feet in front of him.

The single lens at its center rotated once, orienting toward him as a thin ring of blue light pulsed.

It hovered, patient and completely indifferent to everything that had happened in the last four hours.

"Hello, can anyone hear me on this thing?" Cole said and the blue ring light pulsed, the lens readjusting. “People are dying, they’re scared and need help!”

The drone whirred back and forth and the blue light pulsed again.

"There is an infected man chained in a warehouse on Derell Street." Cole’s voice was steady but there was something underneath it, something that had been building since the railing suicide.

"My colleague was bitten and needs to be treated by someone who knows what they're doing. There are still survivors in this city.

I don't know how many but there are people alive and they need help and you are the first thing I have seen today that looks like it understands what on earth is happening."

The blue light slowed.

"So I need you to tell whoever is on the other end of this thing that there are people here. Can you do that?" He stepped closer. "Can you at least do that?"

The blue light blinked thrice and then turned red.

SCAN ID #00-4471 — CLASSIFICATION FAILURE

— PATHOGEN RESPONSE: NULL — ANOMALY FLAG: PRIORITY REVIEW

Cole looked at the drone. "Is that's it?" His voice dropped in disappointment. "That's all you've got?"

The drone began to ascend and Cole’s chest clenched in an odd feeling that wasn't purely rage or grief as he picked up a brick from a cracked curb and threw it hard at the drone.

The drone came apart in the air, its metal black case and lens spinning off and skipping across the asphalt before coming to rest against a car tire.

Unbeknownst to Cole, a signal went dark in the P.A.X system that had sent it, logging his last map coordinates as he went along his journey to find Dana.