No Good Doctor

by Nicole Snow

  But there’ll be a moment where it will fly out everywhere as those vials pop like balloons. We don’t want to be anywhere near it when that happens.

  I drop Leo against the wall next to the door and try the door access panel. It’s locked, completely fried, the lights dead. The door won’t budge.

  Snarling, I slam my fist at the metal.

  Fine. Only one way out.

  Pulling the sleeve of my lab coat over my hand, I smash my fist down on the access panel.

  It comes apart in a shower of sparks, circuits ripping away, and whatever was holding the latch together releases with a soft popping sound. The door groans open just an inch.

  That’s all I need, and I dig my fingers in, set my shoulders to it, and heave-ho.

  Forcing it one inch at a time, the door grinds open. Wider.

  Straining like mad, gritting my teeth, I throw all my strength against the steel, a snarl rising in the back of my throat. I can hear shouts for help rising throughout the facility – and more smoke billows down the hallway, collecting against the high white ceiling, turning it into a pillowing sky of black.

  The other electronics must’ve caught on fire. The others are trapped, no thanks to me, dammit.

  I don’t know how I’ll ever get everyone out. How I’m even going to get Leo out.

  But I have to try.

  With one last hard heave that makes my entire body hurt as my muscles shout in protest, I shove the door open wide enough to squeeze through, then reach back for Leo. One grunt and strain and tug at a time, I manage to wedge him into the hallway, gasping for breath – then regretting it when I inhale smoke and break out coughing. Shit.

  Shit.

  It’s hotter than a furnace in here. So hot, sweat crawls down my spine and heat soars up my neck, wet stinging drops clouding my vision.

  I can’t slow down. I can’t stop. I won’t stop.

  Hooking my hands under Leo’s arms, I drag him toward the door leading to the emergency exit, and the rising stairwell shaft that’ll take us out of the facility.

  And then I leave him there.

  Just for a moment.

  There’s something I have to do.

  I race back to the lab door, set my shoulder against it, and force it shut again, trying to make sure it seals as much as possible to contain the SP-73 when the vials explode.

  Then I race down the hallway again, shielding my hands with my lab coat sleeves and smashing as many access panels as possible. Again and again, my fists crash down in terrible explosions of pain, but I don’t care. I’m past the torture.

  Even when the bits of metal and jagged circuitry rip through the fabric of my sleeves and tear my hands open, I keep going. I bleed to stop this shit.

  I have to give these people a fighting chance.

  I don’t want anyone to die. Not on either side of the lines we’ve drawn.

  But as I hit the end of the hallway, a massive thudding boom rises up from below me, shaking the floor like an earthquake and flinging me to the ground.

  The generators. Something must have sparked the goddamned generators, set off their fuel and – oh.

  Oh, fuck.

  The lower floors, the storage areas, the residential units, everything buried down in the earth under the upper lab levels, not to mention the top-secret quarantine areas...it’s like I’m standing on the roof of hell.

  That’s a haiku I remember from college. Issho, I think.

  In this world, we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers.

  I don’t remember the Japanese, the proper syllables in the right language, but I remember the English translation. I remember thinking of it the first time I saw spring come to Heart’s Edge, all these flowers blooming across the land, and meanwhile below ground, Galentron made the apocalypse.

  I’m not sure why that comes to me so suddenly, staring blankly at the tile with my cheek pressed to the cold surface, my head ringing, something warm and wet that isn’t sweat trickling down my brow.

  Blood and shock. Or maybe concussion.

  But make no mistake: this is hell, and Heart’s Edge – with its pretty flowers everywhere – is its roof, and right now that roof is caving in.

  I hear screams.

  Rising up through the floor, tinny and quiet and distant, but there. The burning souls of the damned, deep in the pit.

  It’s too late to save them now.

  I just hope I at least managed to help the people on this floor.

  I hope I keep fighting and resist the urge to die, fall down and meet my maker while the facility burns around me. We probably just have minutes before some government containment crew arrives to make sure 'nothing' ever happened here.

  Burning alive would be my punishment for engineering this. For going along complacently for too long with SP-73, turning a blind eye to what they intended until there was no damn ignoring it any longer.

  But I can’t ignore it any longer. A groan from the end of the hallway that’s turned into an obstacle course of beams, fire, dangling cables, hellish black smoke, tells me I can’t.

  Because whatever drove Leo to this point, that’s partly my fault, too.

  I can’t just leave him to his fate.

  Even though my body protests, screams with every movement, even though I’m weak and battered and broken, I drag myself up and force my way through the debris toward Leo.

  The ceiling beams have collapsed on him. He’s trapped – trapped and burning, and it’s a mercy that he’s barely conscious.

  No time to think. I throw myself at the burning beams, grappling them with my bare hands, ignoring how those flames lick my skin, searing my fingerprints off. I can hardly see him past the fire engulfing him, his entire body, burning away his protective suit and eating into the tactical gear underneath.

  Come on, Leo. We have to go!

  Around us the flames rise higher and higher. I can’t breathe in this smoke, every inhale scours my lungs, but I won’t abandon him.

  Either we get out together, or I die here with my friend.

  The next few minutes are a blur as I push and bend and hurl as much as I can away from him. Fighting the blackness pulling at my brain.

  There’s almost nothing left of the man I once knew by the time I heave the last beam off him with a massive push that feels like it breaks something inside me, some crucial part of me ripping. Snarling, I tear my bloody lab coat off and throw it over him, using it to smother the flames, but underneath it’s only black char and burning.

  And his eyes.

  They’re open, barely.

  He’s alive, breaths rasping past his lips.

  God. It isn’t much in all this horror, but I’ll take it. As long as he survives, he can heal. His body, if nothing else.

  I keep the lab coat wrapped around him to shield his body, then kick the door to the stairwell open and drag him out. I can see a few other shadowy figures through the smoke, struggling from the rooms they’d been locked in, and I raise my voice, trying to shout. My throat’s almost burned hoarse by the smoke.

  “This way!” I roar. “This way, the emergency exit!”

  I hear the voices growing closer. Good.

  But I can’t focus on them for long. My entire world narrows to the man at my feet.

  It’s just me, Leo, the stairs, and a ticking clock as I calculate how long it’ll take the fuel-driven, raging flames from below to blast this place to smithereens. Especially when one of the labs has a small nuclear core driving some of the more sensitive, high-powered equipment.

  If containment breaches on that, fuck. Forget the virus. It could level the entire valley.

  My legs are numb, trying to buckle. I ignore them, force them to function anyway, force myself up one step at a time with Leo limping behind me. I just barely keep him up so his head doesn’t bang on the steps as I haul him up by his arm.

  If the lab was hell, this is purgatory, an endless, frantic climb toward the thin square of light above.

  That
light should be white, blue, gold – the color of electric lights, the color of the sky.

  It’s orange.

  And I realize why after what feels like hours and must’ve been urgent, frightened minutes as other escapees dart past without even stopping to help. I go stumbling out into the open, falling from the smaller hole cut into the earth next to the massive shaft that leads down into the facility. The night sky arches over me, full of stars, untouched and untainted by the darkness inside me, the darkness burned into my flesh.

  And the Paradise Hotel above the lab, where many of the higher-ups stay, is on fire.

  I’m too exhausted to care. Collapsing next to Leo’s smoking, groaning body, I hit the ground and suck harsh breaths of fresh, clean air, struggling to pull myself together.

  We have to get away from here, before the inevitable explosion. We need distance. But I can’t fucking move.

  I’m too broken, too weary, and I hate that we’ve come so far only to end here, watching the hotel go up in flames, splintering in on itself in huge whumps of sparks.

  One more minute.

  One more damn minute, and I’ll drag us to safety.

  I can’t move anymore. My reserves are spent. I don’t have any choice.

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, muster my last scrap of willpower, then start dragging to my feet, opening my eyes.

  Only to freeze at the sound of chambers loading, safeties flicking off.

  What now? I go still, forcing myself to look. I want to laugh.

  We’re surrounded.

  Tactical teams in black gear, all of them grim-faced behind their bio warfare masks and pointing heavy-duty weapons at me.

  At Leo, as if he can do anything.

  I realize there are others, too. Everyone who escaped has been surrounded, herded together, frightened, sobbing people streaked in ash and holding their hands behind their heads, bodies bowed, meek, begging to live.

  Fuck Galentron. I won’t beg.

  But I won’t fight, either.

  My hands fold together behind my head, watching them, feeling like I’m dead already as I wait.

  “Take ’em!” the man in the lead barks, distinguishable from the others only by the pins on his collar. “Clean up this mess and let’s get to the bottom of this.”

  It turned out getting to the bottom of this meant blaming Leo.

  No matter what I told them when they interrogated me, Leo was their scapegoat. Their excuse. Their reason for a nightmare he never caused – not completely.

  They let me go. I quit, same as most of the others who escaped.

  Leo wasn’t given the option. He was captured, thrown in jail, sealed away for life until he forced his way out.

  And Heart’s Edge had its new monster.

  Someone to blame for the fire. The mayor’s murder. The cover-up that followed.

  We made this mess together, but he paid the price.

  Only now, years later, whatever deal with the devil let me walk free is catching up with me.

  Now, it’s finally time for my debts to come due.

  17

  A Dog In Heat (Ember)

  Consider me speechless. What do I even say after something like that?

  I’ve always known Gray held entire worlds inside him. Bright galaxies. Dark, secret universes I never imagined I’d get to explore. I thought I’d just see them distantly the way we see constellations in the sky, struggling to understand them from those little sparks and faint outlines that tell us nothing of their burning truth.

  I never believed his vastness would open up to me this way.

  Sitting in the truck next to him, I’d watched the bright blue sky, following clouds streaking across in playful little skitters. The ruins of the hotel look so small in this sunlight.

  It’s unassuming and old and tired. Just a broken memory belonging to someone else, charred into nothing along with its secrets. And I’d listened while he reconstructed what the hotel once was alongside the secret lab underneath it and the old mine.

  God. What once took place down in that black hole in the earth...what almost happened to this town, if it wasn’t for him. I still can’t comprehend it.

  It’s insane. It’s wild. It’s intense. It totally defies belief, and I don’t even know how to process it. I shouldn’t even believe something so crazy, but he spoke with a tone and a truth I couldn’t forget in ten lifetimes.

  This is Gray.

  He’s not crazy.

  He doesn’t lie.

  He might keep secrets, he might go Dr. Broodypants, he might try to protect people with half-truths sometimes but...he doesn’t lie.

  Which means all of this is real. His history, the darkness in this town, the terrible things that may be yet to come if Fuchsia being back here is any indication.

  “Gray, I...”

  I shake my head. I’m still lost for words. I want to tell him it’s okay. I want to tell him I don’t judge him for any of this. That I understand how the pain haunts him and how terrible it must’ve been to carry it with him constantly. How much it must’ve broken him every day, knowing there was nothing he could do to bring any of this to light, or to help his tortured friend.

  He stares blankly across the landscape, his hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. That’s how he’s been this whole time, his handsome face emptied of all expression. Trying, but not trying to shut himself off from these memories; from the darkness. He tried to pretend he still could.

  But I heard the bitterness of his words.

  I saw the way the hurt shone in his eyes. The way his shoulders tensed, straining to hold up the weight of this brutal past threatening to break him.

  He feels this as intensely as he did the very first day it happened. I know it.

  And now that he’s shared it with me, I won’t leave him alone with it.

  His fingers tighten on the steering wheel and then relax again. Without looking at me, he murmurs, “It’s all right. If you hate me – if you want to leave, I’ll take you back. Bring you home.”

  “No,” I blurt out. It’s the first certain thing I can manage, still struggling to process all of this. “I don’t hate you, Gray. I don’t hate you. I don’t blame you for keeping it in, I...”

  Words fail me again, so I do the only thing I know how.

  I unbuckle my seat belt and fling myself against him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders and pulling him to me.

  I’m not asking him to comfort me.

  I’m asking him to come to me, because someone desperately needs to comfort him. If only he’ll let me.

  He goes stiffer for just a minute. I expect him to pull away. To fight me back and continue to let the acid hurt inside him eat his soul.

  But he doesn’t move.

  Instead, he goes slowly lax against me, and my heart both breaks and sings as he buries his face against my throat and wraps his arms around my waist. He’s so massive, so strong, I feel like I’m being swallowed up inside him, and yet it’s everywhere I want to be. It makes sense now, why I’ve stuck with this and didn’t run, even when the insanity over the past forty-eight hours made me question spending another minute in Heart’s Edge.

  I’m here for Gray Caldwell. Giving him the solace for the secrets I’ve yearned for since the first time I saw him and realized something.

  He’s just as big a beast as the animals under our care. And like them, maybe he needs a gentle touch to heal.

  I curl myself around him until we’re tangled together. He holds me tighter, bringing my whole world into him, and I stroke my fingers through his hair, weaving the dark strands and soothing in long, slow caresses.

  Then very quietly, even though it feels too loud in the silence of the enclosed cabin, I do more.

  I sing.

  It makes my cheeks heat, makes me feel silly at first, but I just want to ease him the way music has always eased me. I sing about paper moons over a cardboard sea. I sing about bubbles with a rainbow in it. I sing about canvas skies o
ver muslin trees.

  I sing about how bad I wish he’d believe in me.

  The quiet song – so familiar, bringing up so many memories, late nights with Dad as our fireplace flickers and my mother hums along and everything is quiet in our chaotic family for once – soothes something raw inside me.

  God, do I hope it soothes him too.

  Especially when slowly, his heavy weight relaxes against me. Slowly that death grip around him begins to ease, until he’s just holding me.

  Really, truly holding me in his strength and his heat; holding me against him like he’ll die before he ever lets me go. The low growl rumbling in his throat fades, and he’s simply silent against me, his breaths curling against my throat, making me aware of every place where our bodies press together.

  When the song ends, though, after the last note finally slips past my lips, Gray sighs, shifting against me.

  “Don’t stop, Ember,” he growls. “Don’t fucking stop. You’ve got a beautiful voice. It helps make everything go away, if only for a little while.”

  I think that’s when my heart splits in two, even though I’m beaming like the sun.

  Smiling faintly, murmuring into his hair, I try not to tear up. Just hearing him say those words is so close to a kiss that my lips tingle, burn. “That’s the end of the song,” I whisper. “I could start over.”

  “Is starting over even possible?” he asks softly – and I know he doesn’t mean the song.

  He means everything else. What happened with the lab, with Nine, with Fuchsia...he means him.

  I linger for a few long moments, still stroking my fingers through his hair, daring to follow them down to curl my hand against the back of his neck. His skin is so warm, so weathered, the texture fascinating my skin.

  “I think,” I say, “if you want to and you try really hard, anything’s possible. I know that sounds cheap but–”

  “I don’t know if I can,” he says, his voice full of thunder. “Goddamn, I don’t know.”

  I feel his words rumble through me, his lips ghosting against the air over my throat, and my body tingles, my breaths uneven.

  “Not as long as Fuchsia’s still out there. Not as long as Nine’s still a fugitive. The old story hasn’t finished, it doesn’t have an ending. How could I ever start a new chapter?”