by Kathryn Hoff
“You have baby food, don’t you? Use that. Do it now and give me the numbers when you’re done.”
I held up two jars. “What do you say, Rico? Chunky applesauce or sweet potato?”
I chose sweet potato. It was vile but we choked it down.
After, I drank two glasses of water to wash the taste out of my mouth. Rico did the measurements, all very scientific, and reported them to Quinn.
It was strange to be in the red zone without hazmat suits, but it was certainly more comfortable. Molly and the babies must have been relieved to see people’s faces.
I fed Molly some biscuits to take my mind off the last time I was in a red zone. Fever. Coughing and pain and tubes in my arms.
“You were right,” I said. “We’re the first to get the phages, just like you predicted.”
Rico grunted. “You know what that makes us? Early human trials. When Quinn gets a Nobel Prize, we’ll be part of the research he gets it for. Of course, we’ll probably be dead. I’ll never get a chance to…”
“To do what?” I put Deedee on my lap and fed her from the stash of baby food and spooned more into Gabe’s gaping maw as he stood in the crib.
Rico cradled his injured hand. “Quinn promised that when the project is done and his phage is eradicating Eclipse, he’ll recommend me for a scholarship so I can go to college. Maybe even become a doctor. Now I’m not likely to live long enough to hold him to it.”
He yawned and chose the bed farthest from Molly.
I laid down, too, tired but afraid to go to sleep. Would I wake up burning with fever, unable to gasp enough air to breathe? Was this all my life would ever be? They could write “She cleaned up crap” on my tombstone. Except nobody would bother with a tombstone for me. They’d shuffle our bodies out in the medical waste bins for incineration. Nobody would care, except maybe Paula. But after all, there were always plenty more orphans if she wanted company.
In what seemed like no time at all, Deedee was awake and crying. That started Gabe off, and Molly too.
I changed the kids’ diapers and collected stool from the tray under Molly’s cage. Rico used it to whip up our disgusting “breakfast” and set aside samples for Quinn.
I put Gabe into his own crib, right next to Deedee’s so they could see each other and touch through the bars without Gabe being too rough on her. A couple of toys and they were set for a while.
I took some time to get re-acquainted with Molly, to feed her and refresh her training. I made her work for her biscuits—climbing the bars to touch her nose to the target held as high as I could reach or crawling under the sleeping shelf when I held the target to some hard-to-get-to corner of the cage. “Get those muscles working, Molly.” Maybe it was all for nothing. Maybe once Eclipse was cured, they’d have no need for a stinky old chimp, no matter how much we owed her.
Rico grumbled that I was nuts, talking to a chimp. Finally, I gave Molly a toy of her own, a puzzle feeder she had to twist and shake to get to the biscuits inside. It took her maybe a minute.
Westerly called to check in on us. “Paula is awake and eager to return to work, but I’ve insisted she rest at least one day. The containment team will arrive in two hours. You must move anything you think you may need from the prep room to the red zone. Leave anything you do not require in the prep room.”
I asked, “Will they take Bert’s body away? I think he’s starting to turn.”
“Indeed.”
“We need some food and clean clothes and baby food and some fruit for Molly.”
“It will be taken care of. We’ll push a box into the prep room. Once you have removed whatever you need, you must return to the red zone and remain there. Until the dressing and decontamination areas have been cleaned, no one else will be able to enter the red zone. That will take at least a day. Do you understand? You must manage on your own until then. Let me know when you’re ready.”
Somebody used a long pole to push a box into the prep room. I had to shift Bert’s legs to pull it in. Rico unpacked it in the red zone. “Baby food,” he said. “Bottles of milk for the kids.”
“What about for us?”
“Yogurt, power bars, bananas, rice pudding, and lots of high-electrolyte drinks.” Rico frowned at the box in disgust. “Great. Diarrhea diet. I guess we know what to expect.”
He used the yogurt to mix us up another batch of poop-and-phage pudding.
We left our blood-stained shoes and jumpsuits in the prep room, showered in the decon room and changed into clean scrubs before entering the red zone for the last time.
Rico paused before going in. “Say goodbye to the world, Kennedy. Chances are, when we leave here it’ll be feet first.”
“At least they’ll get rid of the corpse,” I said.
Rico’s look would have made me cringe a few days ago. “Is that your idea of looking on the bright side? If it is, then do me a favor and shut the hell up.”
He was getting on my nerves. “I got through wave three,” I said. “You survived wave two. Westerly and Quinn and Paula will take care of us, as soon as they clean up. Being negative won’t help.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got reason to be negative. I’ve never had a chance to do anything or be somebody. I wanted to go to college. Now I’m probably gonna die, and the only company I’ve got is you.” He unwrapped the bandage on his hand.
It looked bad. The cut was red and puffy and had pockets of pus. I called Westerly, and she directed me how to clean the cut—which hurt Rico enough to make him squawk—and bandage it.
“Do me a favor, Kennedy. Don’t ever be a doctor. You suck at it.”
“That’s what you want, huh? To be a doctor?” I said it just to keep his mind off what I was doing.
“Yeah. My mom was one. If she’d lived, I’d be in college now. We had money, before. A nice house. But the damn ECA took everything when she and my dad…when they were gone. How’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get fostered? I mean, you’re not cute or smart or anything.”
“Thanks.”
“No, really.” His voice seethed with resentment. “I mean, I obeyed every rule and sucked up to the proctors and was way ahead on my lessons. I was charming as hell every time I got a chance to talk to a prospective fosterer. What did I get? Nothing. I had to beg a washed-up high school teacher just to get a job running errands. And you—you’re dumpy and snarky and average in everything, but you got fostered by a research biologist! What’s so special about you?”
“Nothing.” I shook my head. “Nothing’s special about me.” I had to sniff and blink to keep tears from falling.
Rico turned away.
I finished taping the bandage. I tried to make it neat and smooth, but it ended up patched together like a bird nest.
Nothing was special about me. I had no idea why Paula had chosen me, but she probably regretted it. She certainly seemed to have gotten along fine without me since we’d joined the ECA. She had Quinn and her work, while I got clean-up duty for babies and a chimp. If I got Eclipsed by strain seven, she would be better off. She and Quinn could get married and raise Deedee and Gabe or have babies of their own. They could have a real family without worrying about a dumpy, snarky, average-in-everything, stupid kid like me.
Feed the kids, feed Molly, clean Molly’s cage, change diapers, take stool samples.
I played with the kids to keep them from fussing. They didn’t like being apart but putting them in the same crib resulted in Deedee being bowled over and bruised by her big brother. Both were antsy at being confined to their cribs. I wouldn’t keep a puppy in such a small space for long, much less toddlers itching to walk.
Some bumps and machine noises announced the arrival of the special strain seven clean-up crew.
I waved at the white suits through the window. No one waved back. “At least the body’s gone.” I said.
Rico didn’t answer. He sat on the bed, all hunched over.
“Rico?”
“Hey
, Kennedy. I don’t feel so good.”
CHAPTER 30
Repent now
Rico’s lips were gray. His face glistened with sweat. He held his puffy hand out stiffly and winced with pain when it touched anything.
Westerly told me what pill to give him for pain, and how to clean and dress his hand again. He cried when I did it, but he stayed still for it.
After, I gave him a cold cloth to wipe his face. He whispered, “Thanks, Kennedy. Sorry about that crack. About you becoming a doctor.”
Then he started to cough.
I told him to go to bed and reported to Westerly.
“Plenty of fluids,” she advised. “Raise the head of the bed to ease his breathing.” More pills for pain and fever.
The diarrhea was kicking in too. I had lots of opportunity to collect samples, from myself, Rico, and then Gabe.
“That’s good,” Quinn said over the intercom. “That means the phage is being transmitted. You must collect all the samples you can.”
“Yeah, the fridge is full of them, just waiting for you. You know, I could use some help in here.”
But the scrub-down next door was still going on. Why was it taking so long? Strain seven’s extra precautions were going to be the death of us.
Molly screeched and complained. Deedee cried from boredom and wanted to be held all the time. Gabe fussed and refused to eat.
We ate another dose of crap pudding.
Rico was quiet. I gave him adult diapers—he was too weak to get to the john, and couldn’t manage anyway, with only one good hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as I cleaned up another mess.
“Don’t worry about it. At least you’re more cooperative than Gabe, and it makes it easier to take Quinn’s samples.” I handed him a drink.
“I need a priest.”
“Sorry, we’re fresh out.”
“Kennedy, you were Catholic. You must have been. Don’t you remember, about confessing to a priest?”
“I’ve heard about that, but I…”
“Just listen!” He paused to cough. “I have to confess, before I get too sick. You can do that for me, can’t you? Just listen?”
He did look bad, pale and sweating and coughing. “Sure, Rico.”
He crossed himself and mumbled, something something I have sinned.
He grabbed my hand with his good one. “You can’t tell anyone though, understand? That’s part of it. The person who hears the confession can’t tell, ever! Promise! Promise to keep it a secret.”
Great. Another secret I didn’t want. “All right. No telling, cross my heart.”
He closed his eyes. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I deserve to die like this.”
“Nobody deserves this, Rico. Not you or me or your parents or my parents or my brother or anybody else.”
He coughed again. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who let Bert in, while his friends made a disturbance at the gate.”
“You let him in? On purpose? Why? What did he want?”
“When I couldn’t give him that caveman paper, he said he wanted to look for it himself. I let him in the back gate while the End-Timer mob kept the guards busy in front. I swear, I thought the paper was all he wanted! But when I opened the gate, he said Quinn had done something terrible with the babies. Bert wanted me to help him take one to prove it—to take Gamma or Delta! I tried to yell for help, but he pepper-sprayed me and stole my badge. Don’t you see? Without me, he wouldn’t have gotten in, and I wouldn’t have broken the vial, and I wouldn’t be sick, and you and I wouldn’t be here, and he wouldn’t be dead.” He lay back exhausted.
Crap. Poor old Rico, always trying to be smart, and always doing something stupid. Quinn had done something terrible with the babies, but that didn’t justify Bert trying to kidnap Deedee. I guess Bert’s religious views came down on the side of truth regardless of the consequences.
I handed Rico his drink. “If I hadn’t taken the paper away, you could have given it to him and he would have had the proof he wanted without breaking in.” And everyone would know the secret about Gabe and Deedee.
“So it’s your fault too.” Rico smiled for a brief moment.
“I guess.” I didn’t feel any need to confess to anybody, though. “It sounds to me like all this is Bert’s fault, not yours or mine.”
Eyes closed, Rico shook his head. “Mendez.”
“What about Mendez?”
“That’s my fault too.”
“You’re delirious. That guard Perkins shot Mendez. You weren’t even there.”
“I talked too much. Months ago. Told some of the soldiers we were close to finding a cure. One of them trashed Westerly’s office looking for it. Perkins must have remembered about it, and when his baby got sick, he tried to get the cure from Mendez. If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have shot Mendez.”
“Fine. You’re guilty of talking too much and trying to help a friend.”
“Quinn suspected me, about leaking information about the phage. He would have fired me if he knew for sure.”
“Is that what Bert had on you? To make you take the paper?” This confession thing was making my head spin.
“Molly.” He coughed.
“Molly?”
Molly eeked at hearing her name.
“I’m the one who let her out.”
I froze. “You! But I thought Bert…why the hell did you do a stupid—I mean, a bonehead thing like that? She could have been killed!”
“To get you in trouble.”
“Well, it worked!” I was furious. “Why? What did I do to you?”
I had to wait through another bout of coughing before he answered. “You’re Bardo’s foster kid. I figured she would want you to be her lab assistant and then Quinn wouldn’t need me.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You’re Quinn’s boy. You’re the one he counts on.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, but I’d screwed up too many times. Smoked in the men’s room and forgot to douse the butt, knocked over some gels, dropped some slides. He said he’d fire me if I messed up again. Then on Christmas night, Bardo said you were going to help her in the lab. I figured Bardo had put the fix in for you to replace me.”
“You jerk! Suppose Molly had hurt somebody? Other than me, I mean. They might have killed her!”
“I didn’t think she’d get out of the primate lab, just that she’d mess things up in there and get you fired. Quinn would never let anything happen to Molly. He needs her for the phage.”
“Well, it was a lousy, brainless thing to do. And all that crap about helping find out who was responsible and acting like we were friends?”
“I’m sorry. Somehow, you managed to convince Westerly you didn’t do it. She even promoted you, letting you help out in the iso lab. So then I had to make you and everybody believe it was someone else who let the monkey out.”
“So you blamed Bert and steered me into that whole bullshit about spying on him. That sucks.”
“I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes, and a tear leaked out one corner.
Fuming, I went to soak the washcloth in cold water while I thought it through. So Bert wasn’t guilty of most of the sabotage. He thought messing with human genetics was unethical—but hell, so did I. He’d risked his job to keep Quinn from creating engineered babies. That wasn’t a terrible thing to do—maybe it was even heroic.
Acting on his beliefs, Bert substituted normal embryos for Alpha and Beta, but he failed to make the switch for Gamma and Delta. Then, around the time Gabe and Deedee were born, Bert’s own daughter and her unborn baby died from Eclipse. It must have seemed like divine punishment.
Bert was never the nicest man, but everything he’d done had been perfectly reasonable by his own values—until Quinn fired him for obeying his conscience. After that, with no family left, no job, and no home, Bert and Tilly had nothing to fall back on except the End-Timers, who seemed to think everybody dying from Eclipse was God’s will. Maybe that put Bert over the edg
e. Maybe he’d felt that proving Quinn had tampered with the babies was the right way to redeem himself, even if it meant blackmailing Rico, kidnapping a baby, and exposing himself and a lot of other people to strain seven.
And Tilly—she’d tried to warn me and Reyna, and we’d treated her like a loopy old lady. She hated everything the lab stood for, but she’d stayed for Bert’s sake while he tried to prevent Quinn from screwing with human DNA.
Poor Tilly. Poor Bert. Poor Rico.
Rico coughed. “Like I said, my fault. I might not make it. Like the priest used to say, make confession. Ask for forgiveness. I’m sorry, really sorry.”
I hated Rico for putting Molly in danger and for trying to get me fired. But he was just a kid, an orphan like me, hustling to make something of his life. And now, maybe dying.
I mopped his brow with the wet cloth. “All right. You’re a jerk, but I forgive you. Provided you never do anything again that might hurt Molly.”
He twitched a shadow of a smile. “Done. Molly’s safe from me.”
Someone else had started coughing too—Gabe. He fussed and felt hot to my touch. I called Westerly, but she said cold cloths and fluids were all he needed.
Deedee cried and raised her arms to be picked up, but I had to change Gabe and bathe him, try to get his fever down. Molly screeched and touched her nose to the bars, asking for a training session that would relieve her boredom and earn her more biscuits.
Rico coughed and asked for more pills for the pain in his hand.
Cold, wet cloths on Rico’s head. A bottle of fluids for Gabe.
While I rocked Gabe, I talked to Rico to keep his mind off his hand. I told him about the zoo, about Henry and Tika Orangutan and Larry and Lola Gibbon, and how they played while I cleaned their cages. I told him about punching Ronnie for bullying a little kid and calling me “monkey girl.” I told him about Mr. Lee at the snack stand, who was always afraid the kids from teen home were stealing from him, and all the ways they did. I told him about Jamie, the kid at the zoo who’d collapsed right in front of me, and then I lied and told Rico that Jamie had come through strain six just fine. I talked until I was out of things to talk about and Rico and Gabe were both asleep.