Jane looked toward Angus as they drew closer, and when their eyes met she nodded. Relief flooded him, but it was short lived because a second later the guards stopped at the cell across from his, and the second the door was open, Jane was shoved inside.
Star stood outside the cell once the door was sealed shut and stared at the woman who had worked at his side for more that two decades. His expression was thoughtful and slightly deranged, and when he turned away only a minute later, he was smiling.
Angus slammed his palm against the glass, hoping to get the prick’s attention, but all he got was a glare from the guards as they followed Star through the door. When it had shut behind them, Angus turned back to Jane.
She was crying, but she nodded again so he’d know it was done. It didn’t help, though. Not yet. He would be tense and nervous until they came to remove the body. Helen and the guard knew they had around five hours after the injection, but they couldn’t remove the body until they were told to or it would draw unwanted suspicion. Only Jane, who was supposed to give them the signal, was locked away.
The next few hours were the slowest of Angus’s life, and that was saying a lot. He stood at the window, alternating between watching the door and staring at Jane. Like him, she never left the window of her cell; only it seemed to Angus that she rarely took her eyes off him. After an hour she had calmed down and wiped away her tears, but the more time that passed, the more anxious she became. She shifted frequently and chewed on her nails. More and more often she looked away from Angus so she could glance toward their daughter’s cell.
Had the plan gone the way they’d wanted it to, Jane would have been the one in charge of removing the body. She would have been the one to call the guard. Now, though, she was stuck in the cell across from Angus and just as powerless as he’d been for the past eleven years. He found less comfort in the knowledge than he should have.
Finally, the door opened and the people they’d been waiting for entered. The guard never glanced their way as he headed down the hall, pushing the gurney in front of him, but Helen’s steps faltered when she passed Jane. It was impossible to know what the other woman was thinking, but Angus had a strong suspicion that Helen thought Jane was getting what she deserved. Maybe she was right, but it was also possible that she wasn’t. Angus found that he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Helen hurried after the guard without even trying to say anything to the doctor she’d once worked for.
Only a few minutes later the two reappeared, and this time the gurney was not empty. The sight of the black body bag did something odd to Angus. Twisted his insides into knots while making his heart leap at the same time. He knew that his daughter was alive and that this was a good thing, but seeing her motionless form encased in the black plastic wasn’t easy. It brought back memories of holding her as an infant, of making her laugh, of seeing her toddle across his cell. It made him remember how she had fit perfectly into his arms as she slept, her little face pressed against his neck. It made him want to kill someone.
But after they had disappeared an odd sense of calm settled over him. She would be safe now, he was sure of it, and even though he would never leave the walls of this building alive, he was satisfied. Not happy, no that would have been too much to ask of someone who was going to miss out on the rest of his child’s life, but he could at least live out the rest of his own life in peace.
Angus met Jane’s gaze and once again found tears making their way down her cheeks, but he didn’t have anything left inside to comfort her with right now. He cared for her, but he hadn’t been able to forgive her completely yet. He was trying. One transgression at a time, slowly working his way through each one, but there were a lot of things to forgive and it was going to take time. Luckily, he had years in front of him to do it.
He turned away from her and headed to his bed where he curled up into a ball once again. Now that the emotional turmoil had faded, the effects of the virus they’d injected him with had become more prevalent. This one had been a whopper, and he could still feel the burn of it in his veins.
Movement in the hall caught his eye when he woke and he was on his feet in seconds, suddenly afraid they had dragged his daughter back to the CDC after discovering that she wasn’t actually dead. There were guards and scientists outside his room, and in the middle of it all stood Star, his back to Angus as he stared into the cell that held Jane.
Jane.
Until now, Angus hadn’t stopped to consider what would happen to her. She’d betrayed Star and there was no way the sadistic bastard would let it go unpunished. What excuse had she given? What lie had she told? It must have been a good one to make him believe that she had killed her own child, but Angus didn’t know what it had been. That was something they had never discussed, mainly because he hadn’t wanted to face the possibility that Jane might fail.
Now though, watching the commotion in the hall, he realized that Jane was in very deep trouble. Even worse, Angus would have a front row seat to her demise.
He slammed his hand against the window and yelled, “Hey! Asshole!”
Star didn’t turn, but that was to be expected. The rooms, after all, were soundproof.
That didn’t stop Angus from hitting the glass. Over and over again he slammed his hand against the window, hoping to get someone’s attention. What he would say or do when he did, he had no clue, he just knew that he had to try and stop whatever was about to happen.
It didn’t work, though. The guards and doctors who were in the cell finished what they were doing and left the room, barely noticing that Angus was slamming his hand against the window. The door was shut and the crowd that had gathered in the hall dispersed slowly until only Star was left. His back was still to Angus and his arms were crossed as he stared into Jane’s cell, but every inch of him looked totally at ease. That was something Angus couldn’t wrap his brain around, how a person could be so at home with their own cruelty. No one would have ever described Angus James as being a kind person before the virus hit, but even he hadn’t reveled in the brutality he’d inflicted on others. In fact, most of the time it had made him hate himself that much more.
When Jane reappeared at the window, her face was streaked with tears and her hair was a mess. Her white lab coat was gone and the shirt she’d been wearing underneath it was torn, and a trickle of blood ran down her arm from where they had injected her.
Angus’s legs gave out and he dropped to the floor as deep inside his chest, his heart ripped in two.
He cried. He cried harder than he ever had, flipping through his life as he sat on the floor, thinking about everyone he had lost. His father who he had never really known, his mother who he had hated more than he’d loved, and everyone he’d known before the virus. None of them had really felt like much of a loss, but the deaths had still chipped away at him a little at a time. Then there had been Emily, Vivian’s girl who’d somehow managed to burrow her way into his heart when he wasn’t looking, Winston who he’d come to think of as a brother, Darla who had been the first woman he’d allowed himself to love, and Jon and Hadley who were like family.
Everyone else on the list could be traced back to his arrival in Atlanta, and as he flipped through their names, he realized that he blamed her for all of it. He blamed Jane. She’d stolen so much from him, but she’d also given him something, something that he never should have been able to have, not here in this prison. She’d given him a child and made the last ten years worth living. She’d taught him to love someone more than he loved himself, and in that moment, sitting on the floor of his cell, Angus forgave her. He forgave her for everything she’d done and for everything she’d put him through, because it had all been worth it if it meant he got to be a father.
Over the last three years she’d told him over and over again that she loved him, but he had never been able to say it back. Had never really been able to embrace it because he’d been hurt and angry, and even though he had every right to be, he knew he would always
regret missing this opportunity if he didn’t take it now.
He stood, pulling himself off the ground on shaky legs. Jane was still standing in the same place, her face streaked with tears and her shoulders shaking. Angus pressed his hand against the glass in front of him and she mimicked the gesture.
Her lips moved, the words shaky through the sobs but clear as day. I love you.
“I love you,” he replied, clenching the hand that wasn’t pressed against the glass into a fist. “I love you! I love you! I love you!”
He repeated it so many times that his throat was raw and the words were literally ripping their way out of him, but it felt good and right, and it freed him in a way that nothing else could have.
Jane’s bed was just visible from his window, and over the next few days he watched as she suffered a slow and horrifying death. He had no doubt from the way she writhed that she’d been injected with the most recent strain of the virus, and all he could think about was how painful it had been as it burned its way through his veins. Only for him the majority of the pain had stopped after two hours, his immunity to the virus proving to be too powerful even for the mutated version. Jane, though, suffered for days, curled up on the bed, her mouth open in screams he couldn’t hear but could feel vibrating through his body.
It dragged on and no matter how much it hurt, Angus found it impossible to walk away. He barely slept, refused the food they brought him, and stood until his legs felt like cooked spaghetti noodles.
On the third day, it stopped. It happened so suddenly that he thought he might be seeing things. Jane’s mouth closed and her body relaxed. She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling like she didn’t know where she was, and then she sat up. When she turned to face him, he expected to see the blank, milky stare he’d come to associate with the dead, but her expression was calm.
She stood and crossed the room to the window. Her hair was matted and clinging to her scalp, and her shirt was so drenched in sweat that it was practically transparent. She wobbled like her legs barely worked, but she made it to the window without falling and leaned her face against the glass, her eyes on him.
She didn’t say anything, but he could tell from her expression that the end was right around the corner and she knew it. Like her, he leaned his face against the glass, so exhausted he could hardly stand, but unable to tear himself away when the end was so close.
Less than an hour later she collapsed and disappeared from sight. Angus, who was barely keeping it together, screamed her name and banged against the glass. His eyes burned but no tears came, and he knew his body was too dehydrated from his three day vigil to muster up any tears, so instead he howled, allowing the agony to pour out of him in a stream of animalistic sounds.
By the time she reappeared he had worn himself out. Her hand came first, gripping the window’s ledge and using it as leverage so she could pull herself to her feet. The top of her head came into view, her blonde hair more disheveled than he had ever seen it, and then her face. The milky eyes were shockingly alert and focused on him, almost as if she blamed him for her state and wanted nothing more than to rip him apart. He supposed that was true. If she had never had sex with him, she would still be alive.
When she slammed against the glass and opened her mouth in a silent growl, he had to turn away. It was too much, seeing her reduced to this after everything they had been through.
Angus slipped into bed and pulled the sheet up over his head. His stomach was empty and his mouth so dry it felt like the Mojave Desert, but at the moment he needed sleep more than anything else. Not just because he was exhausted, but because he needed to escape the horrifying nightmare his life had become.
Meg
The warmth of the sun’s rays drew a smile out of Meg when she stepped out of the building. Summer would be arriving soon, and then her parents would take Margot and her to the pool so they could swim. The government had only opened it last year, and even though it got crowded at times, having something to cool them off in the summer had been a relief.
The other kids from her class left, some with parents and some with friends, but Meg leaned against the wall and waited for Margot. There were only a few kids her age, so she knew them all, but she didn’t talk to anyone. The two girls from her class were weird—they always made a big deal about her Uncle Angus—and none of the boys interested her. Well, almost none. There was one boy who was really cute, but even though she caught him staring at her a lot, Meg wasn’t ready to admit that she liked boys just yet. It made her Daddy too happy when she said they were gross, and there was a part of her that didn’t want that to change. Even if she didn’t think this boy was gross at all.
Jackson Star glanced at her for the hundredth time that day when he walked by, and Meg felt her cheeks heat up. She and Jackson had never had a real conversation, but she had a feeling he wanted to one day. Maybe even soon.
The doors to the school burst open and a line of younger kids filed out. Margot was toward the middle, bouncing on the balls of her feet. When she saw her older sister she waved, swinging her arm over her head so hard that her blonde hair swished around.
“Meg!”
“I can see you.” Meg rolled her eyes.
Margot smiled like she thought her big sister held the answers to all the secrets of life. “It’s hot!”
“It’s warm.” Meg threw her bag over her shoulder and Margot did the same with hers. “Let’s go.”
They walked down the street side by side, Margot hopping along at her sister’s side and chattering like a bird. “Today we painted pictures.” She held her hands up and spread her fingers so Meg could see her palms. They were tinted pink like she’d covered them in red paint but hadn’t been able to get it all off. “I painted our family.”
“I hope you made me pretty,” Meg said.
“Nope. I made you ten feet tall with fangs.” Margot showed her teeth and let out a little hiss.
Meg smiled, but she was eleven years old, which to her meant she was also required to roll her eyes yet again. “Figures.”
“Well, I needed—” Margot stopped mid-sentence and started waving again. “Mommy!”
When Meg put her hand up to block the sun from her eyes, she saw their mom headed down the street. She waved and smiled, and Margot ran off to meet her, but Meg was eleven, not nine, which meant she was much too cool to run down the street to her mom. But, almost against her will, she found her feet moving faster when she saw Margot throw herself into their mother’s arms.
“I can’t wait to see it,” Mom was saying when Meg walked up. “I bet you did a great job.”
“My hands are pink!” Margot held her hands up again and their mom laughed.
“They sure are.”
“What are you doing here?” Meg asked when her mom pulled her in for a hug.
“I didn’t get to see my girls last night, so I wanted to come pick you up from school.”
“Was it a girl or a boy?” Margot asked, just like she always did.
Their mom leaned down like she was telling Margot a secret. “A girl.”
She laughed and clapped, and Meg found herself thinking that Margot looked just like their daddy when she smiled like that, only pretty like a girl. She had Mom’s brown eyes, and probably her hair too, but it was hard to say for sure since Daddy’s was the same blondish color.
Meg was the only one in their family with dark hair, and sometimes it made her mad that she didn’t look like her mom and dad the way Margot did. They weren’t her real parents, but that didn’t stop her from wishing she looked more like them. She knew because she’d asked them about it once, a couple years after Margot had been born. Before that it had never occurred to her that she didn’t look like her parents, but then her sister had come along and Meg had been bombarded with constant comments about how much her younger sister looked like her dad, or how her eyes were the exact same color as her mom’s. When Meg had stopped to think about it, she’d been shocked to realize that she looke
d nothing like either one of her parents. Even at the age of six she could tell that. So she’d asked, and her mom had explained that even though Meg was her daughter and always would be, she’d had another mother for the first few hours of her life.
Her two moms had met after the virus and they’d been best friends, but before that Meg’s birth mom had been a movie star. Hadley Lucas. Meg had rolled the name around on her tongue while her mom, her second mom, had loaded a DVD into the machine they rarely used, and then a movie had popped up and she’d seen her mom, her first mom, for the very first time.
Meg hadn’t been sure what to think about it that day, and things hadn’t gotten any clearer as time had gone by. She had a Mom and a Dad she loved, and the other people, the ones who had been responsible for creating her but had died before she’d had the chance to get to know them, didn’t seem real. Especially her dad, who she didn’t even have a picture of, but even seeing the smiling face of Hadley Lucas on the TV couldn’t make the woman seem real to Meg.
She walked down the street with her mom and sister, thinking about the two parents she’d never met and wondering how her life would be different if Hadley Lucas had survived—or if the virus had never killed most of the population. It didn’t occur to Meg that she wouldn’t exist if the zombie virus had never been released, mostly because her mom had never explained to her how her birth parents had met, but it didn’t matter either. Meg was happy with the life she had and she loved her parents, and thinking about a different world was more like a fairy tale than anything else.
Margot never stopped talking as they walked, holding their mom’s hand and skipping down the streets of New Atlanta like she was the happiest little girl in the world. Megan walked on her other side, smiling quietly as Margot grinned and looked back and forth between her mom and big sister.
Twisted World Series Box Set | Books 1-3 & Novella Page 66