No Safety in Numbers by Dayna Lorentz

Between them, an old woman stumbled on shaking legs. She began to cough loud, hacking coughs. She slipped from the guards’ grasp and fell to the floor, still coughing.
    Her ears were blue. Somehow, all Shay could focus on were the ears. They looked like something off a Halloween mask. The guards hefted the woman back to her feetand dragged her behind the curtain. Shay listened to the coughing as it drifted back through the space beyond the Wall of Curtain.
    “That lady seems pretty sick,” Preeti said.
    She did. And not normal sick. Shay hadn’t allowed herself to think too much about why the hell members of the medical team were in hazmat suits. In the parking garage, she’d heard the senator say something about anthrax. Had the bomb exposed them to anthrax?
    No. That was paranoid thinking. She felt fine. If there was anthrax somewhere, she would not feel fine. But what if old blue-ears was contagious? She had to get Nani out of this place.
    Shay held open the main curtain door for Preeti.
    “There’s just more curtain,” Preeti said. “How are we going to find Nani?”
    Shay peeked behind the nearest curtain. “Trial and error.”
    A machine started beeping madly somewhere near the back of the vast curtain complex. Several hazmat people swept aside a neighboring curtain, pushed past Shay and Preeti, and rushed to the source. They hadn’t even noticed the two infiltrators. This was Shay’s chance.
    Each curtain-room contained two cots, most only one person. On the fourth try, Shay found Nani lying down, looking up at the sliver of sky visible over the top of the curtain wall through the windowed front of the PaperClips. If Nani was awake, whatever diabetes crisis she’d suffered had to be over. Shay grabbed Preeti by the arm and dragged her swiftly into the room.
    “Nani?” Shaila asked, kneeling beside the cot.
    Nani covered her face with her sari and coughed. “Sweet girl,” Nani said, pushing herself up.
    “I’m getting you out of here,” Shay said.
    Nani nodded. “This is not a good place.”
    The beeping became a steady, high-pitched drone, then ceased. The tops of two hazmat suits drifted past the curtain that led to the main hall; Shay heard the scratchy voices of the medical people inside say “flatlined.”
    That old lady died?
    Nani slipped her feet over the side of the cot. She coughed again. But her ears were brown—the right color. She did not have whatever that other old lady had. She was not going to die.
    More hazmat suits were visible outside of their curtain-room. Shay would not be able to sneak Nani out the way she and Preeti had come in.
    Shay began peeking behind the other three curtain-walls. The two side walls bordered other curtained rooms, but the back curtain hung a few inches from the windowed exterior wall, and that narrow span of floor ran from where Shay stood all the way to the front of the store.
    Shay swept aside the back curtain. “Nani, come hide behind here,” she whispered.
    Nani looked at Shay, confused. “Dear one, you think they won’t notice us hiding?”
    Shay smiled wickedly. “Not if we sneak to the front of this place and out the door, they won’t.”
    Preeti bounced up. “Yes,” she said, grabbing Nani’s arm. “Come on, Nani.”
    Shay stood in front of Nani, and Preeti took up therear. With their backs pressed against the windows, they walked on tiptoes with stomachs sucked in along the wall of the PaperClips. They passed beyond their room’s curtain to that of the one next to it. The person in that room—a woman, judging by the voice—was talking to someone.
    “I just have a cold,” she said. “The guy in the suit brought me here without even asking why I was coughing.”
    “That was protocol.” Another woman’s voice. Shay recognized it—it was the senator she’d seen on the first night in the parking garage. The senator continued, “We’re testing everyone, but I’ve asked the staff to bring anyone who seems sick here for more