Anne Ursu - The Shadow Thieves

Zee did not want. He wanted to stay.

Summer was over for Zee in July, replaced by the strange season of mourning. Zee quit the football club-he walked to training on Monday to tell them, cutting through the university fields by unconscious habit and not even noticing that he was looking away-and spent his days helping his parents pack up Grandmother Winter's house. There was no way he could play anymore, and he'd be leaving in a couple weeks anyway. But a few of his friends from the club came to the funeral, dressed in suits that had been hastily shipped from their homes all over the West Country. Zee thought that it was pretty great of them to come. More would have been there, his friend Ben told him, but some of the guys on the team were sick.

"I've been feeling weird myself," said Zee. "Dizzy"

"Naw", said Ben, "this is something more. They've got it bad. Flat on their backs. Totally useless to the club now. Gits. Plus we've lost our best forward!" Ben nudged Zee.

"The best if you don't count the other four," Zee said.

"Well, yeah," grinned Ben. "That's what I meant."

Zee thanked them all profusely for coming and promised to come by training before he left. He got invitations from three boys to stay with them next summer so he could play with the club again. He told them he'd think about it, but he didn't mean it. As much as he liked the club, summer in Exeter would not be summer in Exeter without Grandmother Winter.

"Hey," Ben said, "some of us are going to the Grecians game tomorrow. I don't know if you can, but…"

Zee inhaled sharply. He had entirely forgotten about Samantha Golton. He couldn't watch the match, not now. But he had no way of contacting Samantha to let her know; he had no idea where she was staying.

"Can't," he said. "But listen, will you…" He trailed off. He couldn't just send Ben to give her a message. That would be… ill mannered. His gran had taught him better than that. He would have to meet Sam himself, tell her himself. He'd meet her, send her off to watch the match, then go straight home. "You say hi to everyone for me."

"Sure, mate. Come by next week, or we'll come get you."

The next day Zee took a bus to St. James Park an hour before match time and stood right in front of the gate. And waited.

And waited.

People flooded in around him, but none of those people was Samantha Golton. Or Ben, for that matter, or anyone else he knew

Then, fifteen minutes before match time, he saw one of Samantha's friends a few yards away. He waved and she came toward him.

"Zachary! Hi, I'm Sarah. Sarah Rocklin."

"Pleased to meet you." Zee shook her hand formally, like a well-bred grandson would. "Sam's not here yet?"

Zee shook his head.

"Have you heard anything from her?"

Zee blinked. "Uh, no?"

"Hmmm. She wasn't at practice yesterday, and neither was Padma. Sick, I guess."

"Oh!"

"There's something going around the dorms. I live in Exeter, so I'm not staying there, but training was pretty thin yesterday."

"Yeah, I guess ours was too."

"You guess?"

So Zee told Samantha's friend about his grandmother and the end of his summer and how he really was just there to tell them he couldn't come to the game-he was there because he couldn't be there, if that made any sense-and he had to be home to help his parents, and he was so sorry. He gave Sarah the speech he was going to give Samantha, which of course meant he would have nothing to say to Samantha at all, despite all his careful, considered preparation. Which meant that when Samantha did arrive, he would be left either repeating himself precisely and looking like a nitwit, or just stuttering aimlessly and looking like a nitwit.

But Samantha did not arrive, and neither did Padma. Zee and Sarah waited, and waited, talking of nothing until there was nothing left to talk about. They both began to shift and look at their watches and look off into the distance and shift some more. A half an hour after game time Sarah and Zee looked at each other and shrugged.

"I guess they're not coming," Sarah said uncertainly.

"They couldn't be inside?" Zee asked.

Sarah shook her head. "I've got the tickets."

"Should we call?"

"Sam doesn't have a mobile, and the dorm phone's useless."

"I hope everything's all right," Zee said.

But Zee could not help but feel that things were distinctly not all right. There was something sitting in his stomach, something apart from the hollowness left by his grandmother's death.

Zee couldn't have explained it to you. It didn't make any sense – there was nothing unusual about people getting sick, after all. But suddenly Zee was overcome with a sense of unease- somewhere, somehow, he sensed that something was very, very wrong.

"Um…" Sarah bit her lip. "I think I'll just go over to the dorms and check on them? Maybe they just forgot."

Zee looked at his watch. He was supposed to be back by now, but he knew he couldn't just leave Sarah to go off by herself. And whatever was wrong, he simply had to know.

"I'll come with you," he said.

When Zee and Sarah went to the dorms, they found Samantha, Padma, and most of the other girls in their beds, looking as if some specter had visited them and taken their souls. Sarah immediately called her mother, and soon the girls had been taken off to the hospital. Zee spent the next week calling Sarah for updates, but she never called him back, and soon he learned she had gotten sick too.

The mysterious illness swept through the young people of Exeter. One by one they took to their beds and simply could not get out again. The whole town began to panic. People could talk about nothing else. What on Earth was taking their children?

For it was only the children who were sick; as of yet there wasn't a single case of an adult with the symptoms. Some doctor on the local news one night called it the Pied Piper flu as a result, and the name stuck.

Zee watched as everyone he knew fell ill. He talked to their parents and read the newspaper and listened to various proclamations from doctors, and nothing would quell his unease. His parents weren't helping- they kept threatening to send Zee home on a train, and he had to fight to stay. It wasn't the Piper Flu. Whatever needed to be done for Grandmother Winter, he would do it. Then he could leave.

So his parents quizzed him every day on his health. But Zee was fine. Whatever had ailed him was passing-day by day he felt less dizzy, less tired. Perhaps he had gotten the thing and it had affected him differently. Perhaps his immune system had fought it off. Perhaps he had never had it at all.

It seemed he was the only one.

His club called off the rest of their season for lack of a team, and the football camps were shut down. By the end of that week everyone Zee knew in Exeter, including Samantha, had been fetched by worried parents and taken home.

The only good news was that none of the kids seemed to be getting any worse-everyone stayed exactly the same. From the little Zee could gather, no one could find anything physically wrong with any of them. No one could explain their complete collapse. And no one could make them better. All anyone knew was that the Piper Flu was entirely confined to Exeter, and it didn't seem to be contagious – there weren't any new cases developing around the afflicted kids who had been taken elsewhere.

The Millers themselves left Exeter two weeks after Grandmother Winter died. They had sold her house and closed her accounts and sold off her furniture-except for the big green easy chair, which Mrs. Miller was having shipped home. The Millers may have hurried things a little at the end, but they didn't tell Zee that. They needed to get out of there. Whatever plague or poison or fungus or flu had felled Exeter's children would not get their boy.