“It’s fine,” she said, nudging Lila lightly with her elbow. “It happened and I survived and now I’m here. That’s all in the past. Plus, it made me a stronger person. It helped me survive.”
Lila nodded as she continued her work with the carrots, and after a few seconds the smile was back on her face.
“What about you and Axl?” she asked. “I know you have Megan right now, but eventually you’ll want to have a baby. Right?”
Vivian shrugged like the question was no big deal, but inside she felt that familiar pang of worry. “Eventually. But right now I think we’re pretty content.”
In truth, she did want a baby with Axl, very much, and ever since Lila had confessed that she was pregnant, Vivian had found herself thinking about it more and more. But things were still so uncertain. Just that morning she’d helped deliver a little boy who’d died in less than an hour. He’d come out all pink and screaming just like he was supposed to, but things had gone south in minutes. It had been obvious by his labored breathing that every breath was a struggle for him. It was horrible to watch, and even though his death had ripped the parents in two, it was a relief when he’d finally slipped away and was at peace instead of in pain.
That was why Vivian was holding back, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell her friend that. Lila was already pregnant, and even though she knew babies were still dying, she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. To her it was still something that happened to other people, not to her, and Vivian didn’t want Lila to associate that reality with the baby she was carrying. There would be plenty of time for her to worry.
They ate dinner, spread out around the living room and crowded around the table. The conversation was loud, which made up for the less than stellar meal, and the slightly celebratory atmosphere brought to mind another meal not too long ago. Back when they’d still been in Colorado and a large group of them had crowded around a small table in Brady’s kitchen, laughing and enjoying a morning that should have been full of heartache but had instead turned out to be filled with joy.
It felt like yesterday when she thought about it now, remembering the day before that one when she, Axl, and Angus had gone out to look for supplies. They’d run into trouble and in the middle of trying to get away, Angus had been bitten. It should have been the end for him and they had thought it was, but as hours went by and nothing happened, another reality began to emerge. That was the day they’d realized that Angus James was immune to zombie bites.
Still, she had gone to bed that night uncertain about what the future held, unsure if the morning would bring death or hope. But she’d awakened to a new beginning of sorts, and when she’d walked into Brady’s house the next day she was greeted by the sound of laughter and had found everyone in the kitchen, gathered around a table that was much too small for the group.
Most of those people were gone now, or back in Colorado still, and despite the boisterous atmosphere in the small apartment Vivian now shared with Axl and Megan, she suddenly felt her friends’ absence more deeply than she ever had before. Darla and Winston and Angus were dead, all taken in different ways, but all their deaths had been just as heartbreaking. Brady, Sophia, little Ava, Max, and Anne had all stayed behind in Colorado when the rest of them had headed for Atlanta. They’d all had their reasons, heartbreak or the inability to say goodbye to the past, but she missed them all. Probably always would. Hopefully they were working to create a new life for themselves in Colorado.
After dinner Axl broke out the bottle of wine he’d splurged on when they’d found out Jim had in fact arrived in Atlanta. Once the glasses were filled, everyone settled in the living room while Vivian took Megan to bed. She’d fallen asleep on Al’s arm and was so out that she barely moved when her mother set her in her crib.
Vivian stood for just a moment, staring down at her adopted daughter while thinking about Lila and Al and the life they were going to bring into this world. She and Axl had talked about it so much that it felt like they’d gone around in circles, and until now her resolve to wait until things were more secure had felt like the right decision. Something about the hope of having Jim back had changed that feeling, though. Maybe it had to do with how Megan had come to exist and how crazy it felt knowing that she had been a product of something so horrible, yet was loved so much now.
Even though she had escaped relatively unscarred, her days in the Monte Carlo weren’t something she liked to think about. The idea of men collecting women and using them as currency still made her shudder, and the reality of what she’d witnessed there was as vivid now as it had been back then. Hadley, however, hadn’t been so lucky, and it was because of what had happened in that casino that they’d had doubts about who Megan’s father was. Jon or the man who had taken advantage of Hadley in that hotel.
Vivian thought about those days of uncertainty as she shut her daughter’s door, keeping it cracked just enough that they would be able to hear her if she woke. There was no doubt in her mind anymore, and she only wished that Jon and Ginny—Hadley—had been able to learn the truth before they’d died.
“You got somethin’ on your mind,” Axl was saying when Vivian walked back into the living room.
His eyes were on Jim, who had been friendly and happy during the evening but also a little reserved. Vivian knew she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed, but no one had brought it up. Until now that is. Axl always did know how to bide his time.
“We do.” When Jim glanced toward Amira, he almost looked nervous. “Amira heard something when she was in the CDC.”
“Heard?” Axl asked, sounding doubtful.
“Read lips,” Amira clarified, not seeming to take offense at Axl’s insinuation that she couldn’t hear a thing. “When I was first taken to quarantine there were two guards talking. They didn’t know I could understand what they were saying.”
Vivian perched herself on the arm of Axl’s chair and he sat forward, resting his hand on her lower back. His fingers moved slowly, almost absentmindedly, while he waited to find out what Amira had overheard, and even though Vivian’s insides were a mess of nerves, nothing in Axl’s countenance gave away that he was the least bit uneasy.
Silence settled over them as everyone waited for Amira to speak. On the other side of the room, Al and Lila had stopped laughing, and Joshua stood as straight as a board almost as if he knew what was coming. Parvarti, too, looked alert and ready, and the longer the silence stretched out, the more tense even Axl became until his fingers finally stopped moving up and down Vivian’s spine.
He sat forward. “What?”
“They were talking about someone,” Amira said. “They called him a cabbage.”
“Cabbage,” Lila repeated, but there was no confusion in her voice and it wasn’t a question.
Amira nodded. “They called him a cabbage first, then a vegetable.”
Joshua took a step closer, positioning himself so she would be able to see his lips. “A vegetable?”
“Yes.” Amira nodded firmly as if the gesture would convince everyone of what she’d overheard.
“Don’t mean a thing,” Axl said. “They told us they was keepin’ Angus in a coma.” When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed and his next words came out slightly choked. “We already knew that.”
Amira glanced toward Jim like she thought she might need backup, and then once again focused on Axl. Her brown eyes held his for what seemed like hours, almost as if she was willing him to take her next words seriously. “Except the one guard said the man wasn’t a vegetable anymore. He said the guy was awake.”
Vivian let out a deep breath, unable to wrap her brain around what Amira had just said.
“That’s insane,” Al said.
It did seem insane. They couldn’t be keeping Angus in the CDC. Could they? Why would anyone do that? Who could be that evil?
Vivian looked toward Lila, whose gaze was already focused on her. The other woman’s hazel eyes were full of questions that had no answers. They’d agreed not
to mention that insane rumor to Axl, but that was before this bomb. Before this they’d had no proof that the rumor had anything to do with Angus at all, and even though they still didn’t know for sure, it seemed pretty suspicious. Somehow she had known this was coming even before Amira had started talking, and it seemed to Vivian that it was confirmation of the rumor Lila had heard. Or at least confirmation that they needed to check into things a little more.
Lila raised her shoulders in a questioning shrug, and before she could talk herself out of it, Vivian nodded. As much as she wanted to protect Axl from any more pain, she couldn’t ignore this. If Angus was alive and being held against his will they needed to know.
“Maybe not,” she said after a second. All eyes were on her. “Lila heard something the other day, but we brushed it off. It seemed nuts.”
Axl’s hand dropped from her back as he turned his gaze on Lila. “What? What’d you hear?”
“Just a rumor,” she whispered, and then repeated what she’d told Vivian, saying the words slowly like she was afraid the shock might be too much for Axl.
Vivian listened in silence, trying to gauge his reaction, but he didn’t give anything away. He’d be angry with her, that much she knew, but would he believe the rumor?
“That it?” Axl asked when Lila was done, his tone as calm and collected as usual.
“That’s all.”
Silence spread across the room as they all thought it through.
Vivian’s own mind wasn’t even close to being made up and she was sure she wasn’t alone. It was suspicious and raised a lot of questions, but it was by no means damning. The rumor was just a stupid rumor. You couldn’t believe half the things you heard on the streets these days. In fact, just yesterday she’d heard two women talking about how the virus hadn’t really been responsible for the zombies at all because they were a plague from God. As if that made any sense.
Just like that little tidbit of insanity, this could’ve been just another rumor started by a wacko who had gone nuts after months of wandering the country, and it was even possible that the man Amira had heard the guards talking about could be someone else who was immune. Vivian had known Angus James personally and, despite the whispers in the settlement, she didn’t believe for a second that he’d been chosen by God to save the human race. His immunity had been a surprise, but to her it was just proof that there had to be other people out there who could also survive a bite. The CDC had located at least one other person before Angus arrived, and even though she’d died before they could get her here, logic told Vivian that someone else might have popped up since then. It even made sense, seeing how their last few efforts had ended so badly, that they’d decided to keep the person’s existence quiet until they knew for sure he or she was going to live. After all, people had been pretty let down after Angus died on his way into the settlement.
“It ain’t him,” Axl said after a few minutes of silent reflection. “It don’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Parvarti snapped, showing more life and spunk than Vivian had seen out of her in a long time. “They needed him and we delivered him right to their door. Why wouldn’t they keep him locked up? Why would they risk him getting killed?”
Lila chimed in, then Al, then Joshua, everyone having a different opinion about whether or not the CDC was capable of holding a man against his will.
Since Vivian was on the fence she stayed quiet and let them discuss it, all the while thinking about what they could do to gather more information. Certain areas of the CDC were open to the public. A clinic was set up in the building so citizens had medical treatment when they needed it, and most of the time the lobby felt more like a town hall than a medical research facility. But as a midwife trainee she’d been in more of the CDC than the general population, and she knew that deeper in the building there were a lot of locked doors. Areas that would never be open to someone like her. No, a person would have to be a doctor to gain access to the secrets that existed behind those doors.
“You need to take that apprenticeship,” she said suddenly, looking up at Joshua.
Everyone stopped talking mid-sentence and turned her way.
“I’m sorry?” Joshua said.
“Dr. Helton has been asking you to be an apprentice since we got here and I know you aren’t thrilled about the idea, but it will give you access to more of the CDC. Right?”
He nodded, but just like she’d predicted, he didn’t look thrilled by the idea. “What will that gain us?”
“Look, I don’t know if these rumors are true, but the only way to find out for sure is to snoop around a little. But we all know it would be impossible for the rest of us to poke around the CDC. It’s sealed tight. But you could get access if you were working with Dr. Helton.”
“She’s right,” Parv said, turning to face Joshua. She had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye because she was so short, but when she did, she fixed him with a serious gaze. “Right now we only have rumors, no facts. If you’re working in the CDC you’ll be able to gather some real information. Not just about whether or not Angus is there, but about what they’re doing.”
“They’re creating a vaccine,” Lila said, and then looked around. “Aren’t they?”
“That’s what they say, but who knows.” Parv shrugged.
Once again silence fell over them.
Vivian had never known Parvarti to be such a conspiracy theorist, and it had her wondering what the other woman had seen around the settlement to make her so suspicious. She was working as a guard, and steadily moving up in the ranks thanks to the fact that she was cool under pressure and not afraid to put herself in the line of fire, so maybe she’d seen something that she wasn’t sharing. Maybe Lila’s coworkers weren’t the only ones who liked to gossip.
“Why do you think that?” Vivian asked.
Parv turned to face her, her dark eyes serious. “The CDC has their own guards. Men who live there night and day.”
“Why?” Lila asked, the word coming out like a gasp.
“I don’t know,” Parv said, punctuating each syllable. “But don’t you think it’s possible this rumor could have something to do with it?”
No one spoke for a few minutes and the silence that fell over them was heavier than ever before.
It was broken when Joshua nodded, his eyes focused on the ground as he said, “I’ll do it.”
Axl barely spoke the rest of the night, but Vivian let him be. She knew they’d talk later, after everyone had left, and she wanted to give him a chance to think things through before then. He wasn’t someone who typically acted on emotions, but the few times he had, he’d said things they’d both regretted.
When Angus was bitten Axl had been sure that his brother was going to die, and he’d yelled at her. Blamed her for being impulsive and putting them all in danger. He hadn’t been totally wrong, but it wasn’t how he usually liked to deal with things and Vivian knew better than to prod him into talking before he was ready.
She didn’t bring it up until after everyone had gone home for the night and she’d slipped into bed next to him. He was staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed in a way that reminded her of a petulant child, and it almost made her smile even though she knew they were about to have words. Not a fight necessarily, more like dealing with things that were uncomfortable to talk about.
“You’re mad,” she said when he didn’t look at her.
“Nope.” His mouth scrunched up the way it got when he was thinking something through, and he still didn’t look away from the ceiling.
She waited for him to say more and when he didn’t, she decided to press him. “Then what?”
“Confused,” he said flatly.
He was a man of few words, but by now she was used to drawing them out. Used to getting him to talk to her about what he was thinking and feeling, even when he didn’t want to.
“About?”
“‘Bout whether or not my brother’s alive and why my wife would lie
to me.”
Wife. Hearing that word come out of his mouth wasn’t new and it wasn’t a surprise, but it still affected her in a way she couldn’t explain. Still made her insides heat up and tingle, made her want to pull him against her and wrap him in an embrace. They weren’t officially man and wife and odds were they never would be. She didn’t wear a ring and neither did he, but in their eyes they were married. It was something they hadn’t even talked about. It had just happened, each of them referring to the other that way as if it was the natural course of things, and Vivian supposed it was.
She let out a sigh, wishing that she could follow her instincts and kiss him instead of dealing with the elephant in the room, but she knew that leaving it for later wasn’t a good idea.
“I didn’t lie to you,” she said, turning onto her side so she was facing him. “Axl, look at me.” He did, his gray eyes studying hers. The look of betrayal in them hurt, and it also wasn’t fair. “I didn’t lie,” she repeated. “Lila told me about the rumor but it sounded nuts and I didn’t want to hurt you. Why would I think something so crazy could be true?”
“Shoulda told me.” He went back to staring at the ceiling.
“So you are mad.”
“Hurt.”
A pang of regret cut at her insides and she found herself wondering if she should have told him. Maybe she’d been wrong, but at the time all she’d been able to think about was how much it would hurt him to believe that Angus was being held against his will, and with nothing but a single rumor to go on, it didn’t seem worth the pain it would cause.
Vivian scooted closer and grabbed his chin, forcing him to turn his face so she could look him in the eye again. “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again. But it’s not like this isn’t a common thing with us, trying to protect each other. It’s what we do. Before we got here we were always worried about physical threats. Zombies, other people, stuff like that. Now that we’re safe we’ve switched to emotional threats. I know you intentionally avoid mentioning Hadley to me. I’ve seen you almost slip and then cover it up. It’s the same thing. You don’t say her name because you don’t want to hurt me, and I didn’t tell you about that rumor because I didn’t want to inflict any more pain on you.”
Twisted World Series Box Set | Books 1-3 & Novella Page 46