Escape The Dark (Book 2): Fearful World

by Fawkes, K. M.

  “Relax, Richard,” Marsden McTerrell said. He looked the youngest of the three men—Adam would have put him in his mid-forties. His hair was still mostly dark, whereas his brother Charles’ hair was steely grey and Richard was bald. “He’s not going to bite you.”

  “We don’t know what he’s going to do.

  “Hi, Adam,” Marsden said, extending a hand to shake. “Marsden McTerrell. I’m a doctor.”

  “You are?” This was a stroke of good luck. They hadn’t had a doctor on the boat, just a first aid kit and a rudimentary knowledge of how to use it.

  “He’s not a doctor,” Richard said. “He lost his license to practice.”

  “He’s the closest damn thing we’ve got,” Charles said. “And we need to check the guy out. I might remind you that you agreed to this last night.”

  “Well now I’m having second thoughts,” Richard said. “What if he’s got the virus and Marsden misses it? Or what if we all become infected during this exam?”

  “You can wait outside if you want to,” Marsden said.

  Richard’s grip on his gun tightened. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Suit yourself, then.” Marsden turned to Adam. “I’m just going to do a quick exam, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  It was the strangest physical he’d ever had. Richard held the gun on him the entire time, and Adam was sure his heart was doing twice its normal rate. It was impossible to relax when death was looking you in the face like that. Marsden checked his blood pressure and pronounced it normal, then popped a thermometer in his mouth and felt his neck carefully for swollen glands.

  A moment later, he removed the thermometer. “No fever,” he said. “And that’s one of the first symptoms of the nanovirus. I don’t think he has it.”

  “We can’t know that,” Richard said.

  “No, we can’t,” Charles agreed, obviously exasperated. “But we’ve put this poor young man to every test we can think of. If he got sick now, it would be like no case of the virus any of us have seen so far. At a certain point, we have to just trust.”

  “No, we don’t,” Richard said. “Trusting strangers is what gets you killed. And we’ve already got enough strangers in this house.”

  It was the second time Richard had said something like that. Adam opened his mouth to ask what he meant, saw the way Charles and Marsden were glaring at him, and thought better of it.

  “He’s young and strong,” Marsden said. “In my professional opinion, he’s in good health.”

  “You’re the CFO of a drug company,” Richard scoffed. “What professional opinion are you offering here?”

  “In my professional opinion as the holder of a medical degree,” Marsden went on calmly, “Adam is a prime candidate to help us overcome the obstacles we face here. We need young people.”

  “We have young people. My sons—”

  “Your sons don’t pull their weight,” Charles said.

  “How dare you! My boys—”

  “Besides, this young man is older than they are, by a good ten years, I’d say. He’s bound to be more levelheaded.”

  “Have you considered that he might be carrying the bots?” Richard asked. “We don’t know for sure that everyone who got the injection got sick. Maybe he’s an asymptomatic carrier.”

  “You’re really reaching, Richard,” Charles said.

  “It’s something we have to consider,” Richard insisted. “If he’s a carrier, he can infect the rest of us. I’m not about to let my family die because you went all bleeding heart over the new boy. Or is it because your daughter has a schoolgirl crush on him?”

  “Leave Olivia out of this,” Charles said. “I’ve warned you not to talk about my children.”

  “And I’ve warned you not to talk about my sons!”

  Adam looked from one man to the other in stunned fascination. With so much animosity between them, how was it that they had come to be living together?

  He thought back to his time on Cody’s yacht, to the early days when Cody’s hard-partying friends had been at sea with them before they’d returned to the mainland. Times like these, he supposed, drove unlikely groups together.

  “Adam,” Marsden said, “you said you hadn’t had the nanotech injection, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Of course he would say that,” Richard said.

  “Well, there’s an easy way to find out whether he’s lying,” Marsden said. “The nanobots are injected at the back of the neck. If he received the injection, he’ll have a mark there.” He moved behind Adam and swept two fingers beneath his hair, lifting to examine the skin there. “Nothing.”

  “Let me see.” Richard said.

  “Do you mind putting the gun down, though?” Adam asked. He was antsy enough seeing a weapon pointed at his head for a prolonged period of time. Having that weapon at his back would be too much to take.

  “Give me the gun,” Charles suggested.

  Richard scowled, but he did as he’d been asked and moved to examine Adam’s neck.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Charles said to Adam. His grip on the gun, Adam noticed, was a lot more relaxed than Richard’s had been, and he didn’t seem inclined to start shooting. “You just really can’t be too careful these days.”

  “No, you can’t,” Adam agreed, thinking back on the deaths of his shipmates. None of them had been his fault exactly, but he knew he’d played his part. And he’d done it in the name of his own survival. Was that any different from what the Birkins and the McTerrells were doing now?

  “See?” Marsden said. “No scar.”

  “And you’re sure that’s where the injection would have been?” Richard said. “You didn’t actually administer any, did you? Lost your license before that technology became available?”

  “That’s right,” Marsden said coolly. Adam wondered what Marsden had done to lose his ability to practice medicine, but this didn’t seem like a very diplomatic time to ask about it.

  Charles lowered the weapon. “He’s passed every test,” he said. “He doesn’t appear to be infected. I think we should let him stay, as long as he can contribute.”

  “This is a mistake,” Richard said.

  “What’s the alternative?” Charles asked. “We’re not going to kill this man, Richard. He’s done nothing to us. He poses no threat.”

  “We let him go, then.”

  “You said yourself that you didn’t like the idea of a stranger on the island,” Charles said. “If he stays here with us, he’ll help us, and we’ll know where he is and what he’s doing at all times. If we send him away, we’ll always wonder if he’s alive or dead, if he’s still here or he’s left, if he’s planning to leave us alone or to attack us in our sleep.”

  Richard was beaten, and Adam could see that he knew it. He snatched the gun away from Charles and stalked out of the room, clearly unwilling to spend another moment in their company.

  “Thank you,” Adam said to the McTerrells. “I’ll be happy to do what I can to contribute.”

  “We’d better get you out of this room, then,” Marsden said. “You need to get the lay of the land if you’re going to be staying with us. Ella can show you around the place.”

  “Ella?”

  “I think she’ll be in the kitchen at this time of the morning. Making breakfast, no doubt. You’re in for a treat. Ella’s a great cook.”

  Adam felt a jolt at the mention of breakfast. His shipmate and good friend Sara had been an excellent cook and had made the months at sea a little more bearable by preparing breakfast for everyone most mornings.

  “How are you fixed for food?” he asked in an attempt to take his mind off of what had happened to Sara.

  “Pretty well, all things considered,” Marsden said. He led Adam out the door and into the corridor beyond, Charles following. “We’ve got plenty of dry and canned food. We ate the perishable stuff when we first got here, because we knew it would go bad quickly. But we’ve learned to fend for
ourselves a bit. Hunting, fishing, even growing a few things.”

  “So this was an actual functional country club?”

  “Oh yeah. There was some great food here for the first few weeks. And we’ve still got some crab legs and other things on ice—or at least we did until the freezer cut out a few days ago.”

  The EMP. In the turmoil of the last few days, Adam had almost forgotten about the blasts he and his shipmates had witnessed, followed by the total loss of power both on their boat and on the mainland.

  Adam was about to tell the McTerrells what he’d seen—that power seemed to have gone out all over, and that a series of explosions and an electromagnetic pulse were likely responsible—but Marsden pushed open a swinging door and he found himself in an enormous commercial kitchen.

  A short, slight, dark-haired girl whirled about the room with the speed of a hummingbird. As Adam watched, she pulled a box down from above the stove with one hand while at the same time stirring at something in a saucepan with the other.

  “Ella!” Charles said.

  The girl dropped her spoon and spun to face them. “Oh!”

  Charles laughed. “She startles easily,” he said. “Adam, this is Ella. Ella, Adam.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Adam said, wondering what relation she was to the men he’d met. He had expected to be introduced to one of the McTerrells’ wives, but Ella seemed much too young, younger even than he was. Maybe she was one of their daughters? Charles had mentioned having children, and he was sure he’d only met one of them so far.

  “Ella, will you please show Adam around the property?” Charles asked. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while. Make sure he knows where everything is.”

  The girl nodded. “But the grits—”

  “We’ll take care of them,” Marsden said. “Don’t worry about it.” He took her place at the stove.

  The girl looked for a moment as though she was worried about it, and Adam thought she might protest. But she didn’t. She merely watched Marsden for a moment, then glanced at Adam and gestured with her head toward the door.

  He nodded and followed her.

  She wasn’t a talker, he soon learned. She led the way down the corridor without speaking, her eyes fixed firmly on the floor ahead of them.

  “So, grits for breakfast?” he asked, trying to break the ice.

  She nodded and said nothing.

  “I haven’t had grits in months,” he said. “Plenty of oatmeal, but no grits. It’ll make a nice change.”

  No answer. Not only that, her silence was beginning to make Adam feel awkward. He stopped trying to make conversation as Ella led him all the way to the north corner of the house.

  “This is where the Birkins stay,” she said quietly.

  “All the way over here?” It seemed so far removed from everything he’d seen of the building so far. “What about the McTerrells?”

  “They’re at the opposite corner of the property.” She did not elaborate, but he noticed the pronoun. They. Was Ella not a Birkin or a McTerrell? Was there another family living here?

  Before he could ask the question, a corridor door opened and Richard Birkin emerged. “Ella, what are you doing here?”

  She didn’t meet his eyes. “Mr. McTerrell asked me to give Adam a tour of the property,” she said.

  “There was no need to bring him here,” Richard said, eyeing Adam suspiciously. “This is my family’s private quarters.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you take him out and show him the grounds,” Richard suggested. “I’m sure that will be of more interest to our new friend than a bunch of rooms at the back of the club.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Which part of the building do you live in, Ella?” Adam asked, hating to see her look so cowed.

  “She has a room off the kitchen,” Richard said. “It used to be a pantry, but this building has more pantries than it does food now. It seemed like the most sensible place for a housekeeper.”

  “A housekeeper?”

  “My family’s favorite housekeeper, in fact,” Richard confirmed. “We brought her along to the island when we left our home, in hopes that she’d keep cleaning up after us. Good help is so hard to find.”

  Adam thought of Cody, who had brought along his employees who worked when he’d retreated from the mainland. But Cody had also invited all his friends onto the safety of his yacht. For all his flaws, Adam couldn’t imagine Cody leaving anyone behind. But unless Richard was making some kind of joke that Adam didn’t get, Ella had been brought to the island not to keep her safe but so that she could go on making breakfasts for the Birkin family.

  What kind of people had he come to stay with?

  It didn’t matter, he told himself firmly. They had a warm place to stay. They had food. They were looking out for each other. He would be able to survive here. That was what mattered. That was the only thing that mattered.

  Chapter 3

  “This is the golf course,” Ella said, waving her hand around at the vast green area.

  “Wow,” Adam said. “This really is a country club.”

  “Well, it was.” Ella had become a bit more chatty, he noticed, now that they were out of the house. “Now it’s more of a safe house.”

  “And is it just the Birkins and the McTerrells living here?”

  “And you and me,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “I was surprised too,” Ella said. “When the Birkins brought me here, I expected to find more people. I thought a lot of club members would have had the same idea. But the place was empty.”

  “That was lucky,” Adam said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It would be nice to have more people around sometimes. The Birkins aren’t exactly great company.”

  “What about the McTerrells?”

  “They’re not much better. But I guess it would have been the same with any of the rich families who used to come to this club.” She was silent for a moment. “Sometimes I think they must have all gotten the nanobots when they came out. All the Birkins’ friends thought they were strange for not doing it.”

  “How long have you been here?” Adam asked.

  “We came at the beginning of March,” she said. “When the outbreak was still in its early stages. Richard said things were only going to get worse and that we should find a refuge while we still could.”

  “He was right about that,” Adam said. “And you decided to come with them?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Actually,” she said, “I was planning to quit my job that day.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “It…wasn’t a good fit,” she said vaguely. “But then they offered to bring me with them to the island, and I thought…well, I’d seen the way things were going. People were getting sick pretty fast. The virus was spreading. And here was this rich family offering to take me to an island far away from other people. It seemed like the best chance of survival.”

  Adam nodded. “I’d be willing to bet that most people still alive have had to make a choice like that at some point,” he said.

  He was thinking of his own decision to leave home, to leave his dying family behind for the relative safety of Cody’s yacht. It had helped that Adam’s stepfather had urged him to go, but it had still been difficult to know that he was sailing away to safety and leaving loved ones behind. In Ella’s case, it seemed, the sacrifice had been her pride. She had been forced to remain a servant to people she didn’t like or respect.

  Adam didn’t think much of the Birkins so far either, but that was because he’d spent much of the last twenty-four hours with their gun pointed at his head. He could only assume that same treatment hadn’t been shown to Ella. So what was her problem with the family?

  “Tell me more about the Birkins,” he said, not wanting to ask the question outright.

  She shrugged. “They are what they appear to be,” she said. “Very wealthy. A little too w
ealthy for their own good, if you ask me.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Not much. Mr. Birkin invests their money. I don’t know much about it. Their wealth is inherited. His ancestors were oil tycoons or something like that.”

  “Wow.”

  “This country club was built to cater to fantastically rich people. I’d never been here before we moved out in March, but I’ve seen pictures of dinners held here.”

  “I guess it makes sense that the members were first in line to get nanotech injections,” Adam said.

  “I think the Birkins actually expected to have the place to themselves,” Ella said. “I don’t know if they thought they were the only ones clever enough to have thought of coming here, or if they just assumed that every other rich family would have gotten the nanotech. And they did have it to themselves for the first night. But in the morning, the McTerrells showed up.”

  “It must have been a relief to see some friends had survived,” Adam said.

  Ella laughed. “You’d think so, but no. The two families never got along. The McTerrells are ‘new money.’ Apparently, earning your own money is just about the tackiest thing you can do. I don’t know.”

  “Marsden McTerrell is a doctor, right? That doesn’t seem like something to look down your nose at.”

  “Well, he was a doctor. He lost his license after some kind of scandal. I don’t know what happened. Mr. Birkin makes reference to it all the time, but he never talks about details in front of me. Now both McTerrell men own and operate a pharmaceutical company.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “They do animal testing, for one thing. The Birkins don’t like that. But the Birkins also hunted for sport before all this started, so I don’t think it has anything to do with animal welfare. They’re just conscious of the fact that animal testing is out of vogue these days. It’s an excuse to think of themselves as better than the McTerrells, that’s all. Meanwhile, the McTerrells think they’re better than the Birkins because they work for their money.”

  “Wow. How are they all managing to live together?”

  “They almost didn’t. The Birkins wouldn’t let the McTerrells into the club at first. The Birkins were here first, and they were armed. But Marsden McTerrell had his medical training to offer, and even though the Birkins like to run him down for losing his license, having an educated doctor around is something that comes in handy.”