by Anna Abner
“See, he’s fine.” Pollard massaged his jaw. “You can relax.” He urged me back through the roof vent and lowered me to the floor. Then he hopped down beside me, still cupping his chin.
“Did I hurt you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Just bit my tongue.”
I took in his bare chest. He’d donated his shirt to Ben’s recovery because I’d asked him to. He’d looked after me, even when I fought him, and he’d helped me through the panic attack. I leaned up on tiptoe and kissed him.
“Thank you.”
Pollard sucked in a ragged breath, and then yanked me flush against his chest. His arms circled me as he pressed his warm, soft mouth against my lips for a much different kind of kiss.
He held me gently, but his entire body, from his calves to his shoulder blades, went rigid.
Drawing away, I flushed and averted my gaze.
“You’re welcome.” He cleared his throat, and then pulled on a new shirt from his pack.
I slumped into the passenger seat as Pollard took the wheel from Hunny and drove the RV right through someone’s front yard.
“You were really upset,” he observed. “Are you sure it was only about Ben?”
I didn’t know how he’d guessed, but I was ready to confess a part of the pain around my heart. The pain that was always there, like a plaster seal of grief and anger and regret.
I hadn’t said the words in…
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said the words. Maybe I never had. I hadn’t said them to Dad. He knew as well as I did what had happened. I hadn’t told my friends. They read about it in the papers, and then Dad moved us away from my friends and teachers and neighbors.
“Uh.” I swallowed past a dry, dry throat. “My mom was shot and killed two years ago.” Pollard reached across the space separating us and grasped my hand, not caring about the zombie gore. He slid his fingers through mine, and Ben’s blood squished against my palm.
“I’m sorry,” he said with quiet sincerity.
I nodded, not sure what else to say.
“Guys,” Hunny called from the kitchenette. “I think you just ran over a couch.” Shaking her head at our lack of focus, she squirmed onto the extra soft captain’s seat beside me and laid her head on my shoulder. So, I was forgiven.
Smirking, Pollard poked Hunny in the ribs, making her jump in glee.
I collected my paper map and scanned the happy looking green and blue blotches covered in zigzagging black lines.
“How much farther?” Pollard asked, gesturing to the map.
I squinted out the windshield to read the next street sign, and then estimated the distance. “About another mile. Stay on this street, and then turn right on Vitriol.” Things were starting to look familiar. “Yeah. We’re close.”
Chapter Seventeen
“There it is!” I couldn’t believe it. My dad’s lab. Part of me had doubted I’d ever really see it again.
I hopped out before the tires had even stopped rolling and ran for the front doors. Someone or something had shattered the heavy glass. The speaker box on the wall beside a card reader where my dad had once slid his security badge hung from several black wires, smashed to pieces. With the doors swinging in the wind there wouldn’t be survivors inside.
My heart dropped.
I stepped inside the foyer, searching for the faintest movement. Nothing. I’d had a crazy hope my father might be there, since it was the last place I knew he’d been before everything got really bad.
Dad wasn’t there. The inside of the lab was a wasteland, just like the rest of the world. Gritty white dust puffed beneath my feet with every step across the empty reception area.
“You know where this cure is, right?” Pollard asked, leading Hunny out of the RV and keeping one hand on the butt of his holstered firearm.
I looked away, knowing seeing his weapon would mess with my emotions, and I needed a clear head. I had to find the elixir.
“Yeah.” But that was ninety percent bluff. I’d never actually seen it. It might be there. Or it may have been shipped to a different lab at the last second. Or it might not exist at all, but be part of a fairy tale my dad had told me to keep my spirits up. Or an employee had taken it with them when they abandoned the building to the Reds.
But I knew where it should be.
I jogged across the marble-tiled foyer, kicking up more gray dust as I passed a wide reception desk and headed for the offices, storage rooms, and labs. Through a shatterproof glass slit in a security door I saw a long white hallway lined with identical doors.
The lab had great security. All its doors, even the interior ones, had been electronically sealed and had required a key card and a pass code to unlock. But after the power went out and any backup generators or reserve power was depleted, all the doors hung open.
I wondered for the bazillionth time what had happened to my dad. The last text my dad ever sent had been from this location on the day the lights went out. What happened after that? What prevented him from coming home? Was he wandering the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina, a mindless flesh-craving monster? Or had one killed him?
“Reds will come running,” I warned. “Stay close. I know where they keep the important stuff.” I ran straight ahead and made a sharp left at the intersecting hallways, but then stopped dead in my tracks.
A pack of Reds, five in all, were bent over a fresh kill, up to their elbows in blood. I didn’t look too closely at the victim as I pulled my sword from my belt because on bring-your-daughter-to-work days I’d met a lot of Dad’s co-workers. I didn’t want to see any of them gutted.
Pollard rounded the corner, panting, “Maya, don’t—” and then he spotted the pack. Hunny slammed into my back and squealed.
Pollard palmed his weapon as five pairs of red eyes found us, the body on the floor all but forgotten. Briefly, his eyes met mine, and I recognized the same panic swamping me.
“Run,” he said. “I’ll cover you two.”
I couldn’t run. They’d chase us like a pair of mice in a maze. I had no choice but to stand firm and fight.
My sword felt feather light in my hands as if it wouldn’t pierce a piece of paper, let alone a human body. I tightened both fists around the hilt, but my arms shook so badly the tip of the short sword wobbled and swayed.
The Reds rushed us.
I shoved Hunny behind me and stuck my weapon out in front like a fireplace poker.
Pollard fired once, missed, and fired again. The sound and smell of gunfire jerked me into the present. The second shot hit a female Red, and she collapsed. But that only pissed off the other four. Pollard fired twice more, downed another, and I waved my sword, ready to meet the remaining three with the point of my sword.
Someone ran past me, brushed me into the wall, and threw himself at the group.
“Ben,” I breathed.
He swept the legs out from under one Red, and then tore into the zombies with teeth and nails. He was protecting us, giving us a few precious moments to escape. And all I could do was waste it standing there staring.
“Maya, go!” Pollard grabbed Hunny by the collar and shoved me down the hall.
I dodged the snarling, writhing mass of zombies, and yanked open the door to my dad’s office. Pollard and Hunny crashed after me, and then I slammed it closed.
“Through here.” I pushed into the sanitation room between Dad’s office and the actual lab.
A few months earlier everyone who entered the main lab had to suit up. That’s what my dad had called it. Clean scrubs, booties, gloves, mask, and snood cap. The works. That day, though, was a different story.
I bypassed the sinks and racks of supplies and let myself into the main lab. On the left were centrifuges, computer systems, microscopes, and all kinds of high-tech scientific equipment. On the right wall stood tall cases, some refrigerated, some locked, some not.
The problem was they’d already been ransacked. Someone had smashed all the glass cabinets and destroye
d everything inside.
“Maya?”
Pollard stood over my shoulder. He saw what I saw, and he must have realized we’d come all that way for nothing.
“Are you serious?” Pollard lifted an electronic dispenser off the nearest counter and threw it against the wall. “It’s not here? We came all the way down here and Russell gave his life for nothing?” Another heavy piece of equipment hit the wall, and then another.
This wasn’t right. I hadn’t traveled into the city of the dead for nothing. It had to be there.
My gaze traveled the mess of glass, scattered hypodermic needles, and dried goo. Not all the remaining vials were broken.
There. A few had rolled under the lip of a cupboard. I hopped over broken glass and dove for what could be the answer to my prayers. I belly-flopped and cupped the vial, squinting at the label. It didn’t mean much.
“Aw, crap.” Pollard stopped throwing things. “Fire.” I heard him and Hunny rush the door. “Maya, come on, the whole place is going to blow.”
“Coming,” I called, not moving. Pollard got Hunny out, but I couldn’t leave until I made sense of the codes.
Strings of numbers and letters represented specific batches, dates, lab techs, whatever was important to log.
“212R,” I whispered as flames spread across the central counter. It had the name of the zombie infection on its label. “A cure exists. I knew it.”
Ben stumbled through the doorway, blood smeared across his face and staining the entire left side of his navy work shirt. At some point he’d lost the T-shirt bandage I’d made for him. He was breathing the hazy smoke through his mouth, and he looked more like a mindless, flesh-eating monster than ever before.
And he had me in his sights. He lunged for me, ripping the vial out of my hands, and then plucked a sterile hypodermic needle from the mess on the floor. He filled the needle from the vial before I fully understood his purpose.
“No, Ben.” I tried to grab the needle and vial away, but he fought me. “We don’t know the dosage. Ben. It could be a bad batch. It could be the red plague. It could kill you.”
He jabbed the hypodermic into his neck and pushed the plunger.
“Ben!”
“Mmrrr.” That funny growl of his.
I grabbed his collar in horror. “Ben?”
“Mmmaya.” His eyes rolled up in his head, and he slumped, his face thunking against the tile floor.
The fire leapt across the central counter and attacked the broken vials spread around Ben and me. We had to move or we’d be toast. Literally.
“Ben!” I tugged on his shirt, but he was dead weight, and I only moved him a few inches toward the last corner of the room not on fire. I took a breath and pulled harder. I got his feet out of the fire when the wall behind me exploded. I threw myself over Ben to protect him from flying bits of brick and plaster.
Pollard hopped out of the cab of the RV, screaming at me through the giant hole he’d carved in the side of the lab. “Get in! Are you trying to kill yourself?”
“I’m not leaving without him.”
Pollard swore. “This dude has been more trouble…” He slung Ben over his shoulder and then dumped him in the cramped interior of the vehicle. I knelt beside him, laying one hand to his chest. It was still wet with blood. His right forearm was chewed up from saving us from those Reds in the lab. But his heart was beating. The injection hadn’t killed him outright.
“Don’t touch him,” Pollard barked. “He could be contagious.” He grabbed my wrist and yanked.
“He took the antiserum,” I shouted, jerking my hand free. “And I don’t know whether he took too much. It could be poisoning him.”
Pollard’s face drained of color. “You found the cure?”
I shifted Ben’s weight, bringing his head into my lap where I could better watch for symptoms of an overdose. “One vial. He injected the whole thing.”
Swearing under his breath, Pollard got behind the wheel and reversed the nose out of the smoke-filled lab. “Everyone hold on tight. We’re getting out of this hellhole and back to the truck stop.”
He spun the wheel, stomped on the gas pedal, and we lurched over a curb. “Is he dying?” Pollard asked, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.
“He said my name.” I still couldn’t fathom it.
Pollard’s brow creased. “Zombies don’t talk.”
“He injected himself with the cure, and he said my name.” I bent over Ben, listening to him breathe, trying to determine with my limited medical knowledge the severity of his condition.
“Are you sure it wasn’t a zombie moan? They do make noises.”
“He said my name.”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.” I brushed a lock of filthy hair from Ben’s brow.
A cure exists.
That’s what my father told me.
If that vial was the last of it and Ben had just injected it into his body, then the answer to fixing the world coursed through his veins.
“You said my name,” I whispered to Ben. “I know you did. Please wake up and say it again.
Antidote
Chapter One
“Maya!” Pollard made a hard right, the RV bounced over a median, and I held Ben even tighter. “He’s a zombie. Back off.”
“He injected the cure,” I argued. “He’s not a zombie anymore.”
“You don’t know that!”
“He said my name,” I stated, still rocked by the memory of my name on his lips. I’d never heard a red-eyed infected person speak. No one had.
I felt the pulse at his throat and was rewarded with a strong thrumming against the pads of my fingers. Like plucking a bass guitar. His forehead, gritty beneath my palm, radiated heat. The fever had come on fast.
“Do we have Tylenol?” I called out. I didn’t even possess a proper first-aid kit. And there were so many other things that could go wrong.
“Not that I know of,” Pollard answered.
I wasn’t even sure if a fever was normal in a person infected with 212R, the zombie virus. Maybe he’d had one all along.
“I can do this.”
I had never done this. Over winter break I’d volunteered at St. Joseph’s Hospital to make my dad, the chemist with two medical degrees, happy. I had alternated between stocking supplies my manager re-organized after I went home—which was awful—and trailing actual nurses as they did their work—which was awesome. One LPN used to narrate every single thing she did, from inserting IVs to checking blood pressures.
But none of it had prepared me for this.
“Where are we going?” I asked. If we found a hospital or a clinic I might be able to scrounge medical supplies.
“Away from this nightmare,” Pollard said.
Away from the flaming remains of my dad’s CDC lab. Away from anything he’d made or left behind. All that was left of his work coursed through Ben’s veins and nowhere else.
As gently as possible, I unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt and peeled the dark navy fabric away from his skin to inspect the gunshot wound. A dime-sized hole, surrounded by angry swollen flesh, stared back at me.
I replaced his shirt and something like rough paper in his breast pocket, the one over his heart, stalled my fingers.
I pulled out a wallet-sized school photo and immediately dropped it.
“Crap.” Fumbling, I picked it up off the RV’s dirty linoleum floor and stared into my own face.
Mine.
To be certain, I flipped it over and my narrow, jagged signature adorned the back. Last Christmas I’d mailed the photo inside a care package to my brother Mason. It had been addressed to the Dogwood Juvenile Detention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina.
But if I’d mailed it to Mason, how had it ended up in Ben’s shirt?
“Hang on to something,” Pollard called.
I stuffed the pic into my pocket. If Pollard or Hunny asked questions about it, I had no answers, yet.
“Oh, no,” I cried out. His legs spasmed and his head knocked against my belly and thighs. Hard. “Ben? Can you hear me?”
Fear twisted my insides into origami as I held him through full body convulsions. Finally, his muscles quieted. I checked and re-checked his pulse.
“What’s wrong?” Pollard shouted.
“The medicine made him sick.” Understatement. More likely, it had poisoned him and his internal organs were failing.
“You’re not going to die,” I whispered as his seizure faded to a few quivers in his hands. Not with my father’s only remaining elixir in his blood. “I’ll take care of you.” Whatever he needed. A bath. Decent clothes. Soft blankets and a pillow. How long had it been since he’d slept on a pillow? If he needed medicine, I’d find it.
I wanted to take care of him. Because with my father’s antiserum in his veins, he felt a whole lot like family.
And I didn’t have much family left. My gaze wandered across the interior of the RV from Hunny’s blonde ringlets to the back of Pollard’s head.
Pollard cursed loudly, clipping the rear end of a compact car and sending it spinning away. The RV swayed to the left and I knocked into the mini fridge.
“I noticed the neighborhoods are less crowded than the highways,” he said.
On our two-day trip into downtown Raleigh, we’d stuck to major thoroughfares and been slowed down at every turn. Nothing but streets bottlenecked with abandoned vehicles, packs of red zombies, and overzealous snipers. I glanced down at Ben’s dirty face. He’d be a major hindrance if we were forced to change vehicles, or worse, walk part of the way back to the truck stop.
“Get the map out,” Pollard said. “Please?”
He swerved around debris, and it felt like the RV went up on two wheels for a moment, sending my stomach into a tailspin.
“Hunny,” I called. “It’s in my backpack.” I was afraid to move. Afraid to jostle Ben, even a little bit, and maybe hurt him.