“Fuck it,” Ted snarled. “And fuck you.”
He hurried onward, heedless of the gunfire. Walker knew he was right. The only way to answer his questions was to live through this, but right now, all Ted Sinclair cared about was protecting Rose and Priya, and Walker understood that. If Charlie were here, he would have made the same choice.
Charlie. Walker thought Charlie might have told him to go back and take shelter in a safe room with Alena and Dr. Jones. But Walker had never made his choices based on safety. His grandfather had been a malicious bastard, his father had been a coward, but both men had given him the same gift, one thing they both had in common and had passed to Walker. A single quote from a century before, which Walker had used in his high school yearbook. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
Walker hadn’t been built for safe harbor.
He followed Ted Sinclair, running through strobing red lights, running toward gunfire.
They reached the elevator hub. Gunfire echoed down the corridor to the left. Double doors down that end smashed open. Two guards and a quartet of DHS agents backed through the doors, firing at invaders Walker couldn’t see.
Ted punched the call button, which glowed orange. Lockdown or not, the elevator still worked.
Walker took his arm and pressed him into the narrow well of the elevator door, seconds ticking by, waiting for the doors to slide open. Gunshots echoed down the corridor, punctuating the clamor of the alarm. Walker reached for his gun, and his fingers grasped nothing but air—the guards had taken it from him when they’d arrived.
He worried the elevator wasn’t coming, that the button had lit up but lockdown meant the lift wouldn’t really be working.
He stared at the backs of the DHS agents and security guards as they kept backpedaling.
A DHS agent stumbled, tripped over his own feet. For a heartbeat, Walker thought him an idiot, but then he saw the man turn onto his hands and knees, gasping and grabbing for his throat. Purple blotches blistered his neck. Dark spittle flew from his mouth.
A security guard and another DHS agent grabbed for one another as they fell, sprawling on the floor. By then, the first had died, black blood pooling around him, and the other three had begun to cough and gasp and stumble.
Over their heads, Walker saw a single figure striding along the corridor toward him, cast in shadows and flashes of crimson light. Beyond her, scattered in the hall back the way she’d come, were more corpses.
“Ted,” Walker said, grabbing the back of his neck. “Run.”
Ted stared at her. “Rose. Oh, God … my Rosie.”
“That’s not Rose.”
“But you … you said Maeve was dead.”
Walker shoved him hard, got him moving back the way they’d come, had to catch Ted to keep him from falling when his bad knee went out.
“She was,” Walker said. “I swear to God, she was.”
There’d been a bright red Exit sign twenty feet back. The door showed a pictograph of a person walking up some stairs, along with the words AUTHORIZED USE ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND. He almost laughed as he kicked the release bar and the door swung inward.
Walker pulled and shoved and half-carried Ted, who cried out in pain as they ran and stumbled down the stairs. The man had cracked ribs and had torn something in his knee. Whatever numbing his drinking had provided had worn off now, scoured away by pain, but Walker couldn’t let him stop or even slow down. With every flight of stairs, every landing, he waited for the coughing to start. If Maeve saw the stairwell door open, she would start down after them. Would the concrete and steel protect them, slow the spread of the contagion that had begun to blossom out from her? He prayed it would. Prayed, unsure who or what might be out there to listen.
They reached sublevel two. Walker blinked in surprise when he saw the sign, then barreled through the door, hauling Ted behind him. Somehow the alarm sounded even louder here. The red lights flashed. He spun in a circle, trying to figure out which direction the quarantine chamber might be. They weren’t in the hexagon at the core of the building but in a side corridor. Down the hall, he saw the open space of the common area around the hexagon, the main elevator bank, and he hauled Ted in that direction.
“We have to find Rose and Priya,” Ted said.
“That’s what we’re doing. But we need a safe room or we’ll be dead. Priya, too. One of the labs, if we can get through.”
“Not without them!”
Walker turned to snap at him. “I know!”
They reached the hexagon. He skidded to a halt and spun around, the klaxons blaring into his brain. Two guards stood by the elevator, guns drawn. He was about to run to them, warn them that Maeve would be coming, and then the red lights flashed brightly and he saw the lab beyond them. A pair of women stood beyond the glass, looking out.
Rue Crooker and Kat Isenberg.
“Come on!” Walker ordered.
Ted ripped himself from Walker’s grasp. “Not without Rose.”
Walker reeled on him. “Where do you think Maeve is going? Rose is infected now. That happened because Maeve died, Ted. She died. I saw her corpse. Shot to death, bled out. Red Hands didn’t kill Rose because it needed her as a host. Something’s happened that we can’t possibly understand, but Maeve didn’t come here by accident. She’s looking for something, and the only thing that makes any sense is that she’s looking for Rose. For them to be together.”
Ted took a step away from him. Stumbled, nearly fell.
A figure appeared down the hall, beyond the lab where Rue and Kat waited. A shadow between red flashes. Walker felt his heart sink, waited for the sickness to carve him up, but then the red light strobed again and he saw it wasn’t Maeve at all.
Priya ran toward them. “Ted! Oh, thank God. Please, you’ve gotta come. Rose is fighting it, but she needs you. Please!”
Ted raced to her, barely a trace of his limp now, and the two of them vanished around the corner.
The elevator doors opened, and the two guards stepped on. They’d watched the whole thing unfold, guns at the ready, but hadn’t opened fire. One of them looked deathly pale, but not sick. Not yet. Neither of them wore a hazmat suit.
Walker ran toward the lab, where Rue and Kat were gesturing madly for him to hurry.
He thought of Ted and Rose. Of Ted and Maeve. Of Ted and Logan.
He ran faster.
* * *
Stop fighting, Rose thought. They’re right there. All you have to do is reach for them. If you need them, you know they will not deny you. That’s what love is, Rose. That is what love is.
“No,” she rasped, lips flecked with bitter black spittle. She licked it away, swallowed it down, fought the urge to throw it back up. “You’re not … me. That’s not…”
“Rosie. Love?” her father said, so gently. He uttered a little sob and wrapped his arms around himself, and she knew he did it because the glass kept him from reaching for her, holding her and comforting her the way a parent should. The way a true parent would want to.
“That’s not love!” Rose cried.
She began to cough, turned away from her dad and Priya. Huddled her face in the corner of her isolation room.
“Fight it, Rose,” Priya said quietly.
She understood, more than Rose’s father did. Priya had been on the other side of the glass when the hunger had really begun to claw into Rose. She’d cried as Rose had described to her the voice in her head, the insidious things it said to her, the suggestions it made. The way she wanted to touch Priya, how she wanted to rationalize it.
The hunger had stabbed her in the chest seconds after the alarms began to sound. It had been nestled inside her, somewhat under control, and Rose had believed she had time, that she could hold it off. Then the alarms blared and the red lights flashed and the hunger pounced, as if it had been waiting for the moment she would be off-balance.
And it whispered to her.
He loves you. He’ll do anything for y
ou.
Rose had told Priya to find her dad. Much as she loved Priya, and as broken as her father so often seemed, she needed him now the way she had when she’d been a young girl, waking in the dark after a bad dream, afraid of every shadow. Afraid of getting out of her bed and afraid of staying in. Her mother was dead. Rose needed her father to tell her everything would be all right in the end, that they could help her. That they could rip this hunger and its whispers from inside her. She needed her dad to lie to her.
To hold her.
No. Not hold her. Anything but that.
Rose turned to him. Her throat felt ablaze with pain, torn up on the inside. Trickles of fluid ran down her face, but they weren’t tears. Plague lesions had formed and were leaking.
“You have to go,” she told them, looking from her dad to Priya. “You shouldn’t have come in here with me.”
“We can’t,” her father said, face etched with sorrow, his heart breaking over and over and over again. “I told you. We’re safer in here than out there. As long as you can control it, we’re safer. Maeve is out there.”
Rose shook her head. Every muscle felt the urge to reach for him, to embrace him, to kiss Priya, to infect them and take their lives to feed the hunger and the disease in her. But she leaned against the wall and wrapped her arms around her knees.
Fuck you, she thought, and this inner voice belonged to her. You can’t have them.
The Red Death whispered to her in return, the voice slithering inside her skull. The sickness will rot you down to snot and marrow.
Rose didn’t care.
She looked at Priya and then at her father.
“That thing out there,” she said. “It’s not Maeve.”
* * *
Walker stared at Kat Isenberg, heart pounding, glad to be on the inside of the secure door of the lab. Each of the sublevel labs at Garland Mountain had been built with contamination protocols. The moment the alarms had gone off, each lab had sealed itself to keep any contagion from escaping and also to prevent any outside contaminant from getting in. They were safe in here, or so Walker told himself. Images of the guards and Homeland Security agents dropping dead in the upstairs corridor swam into his head, and he pushed them away. Nobody really knew what they were dealing with here. All they could do was press on.
“You’re sure about this?” Walker asked.
Kat threw up her hands. “Of course I’m not sure. Rue’s only been here half a day. Her instincts are fantastic, and we worked on this together, but I have no idea if it’s—”
“Just tell him!” Rue said, plugging her ears with her fingers. The alarms were drilling into all their brains by now.
Kat nodded. “Vargas and Hecht and I were working on a bacteriophage engineered to shock the infection into dormancy. It’s not a cure. The introduction of the phage won’t kill the bacteria, but it should slow it down. Might even put it into hibernation inside the cells.”
Walker could have kissed them both. “Inject me.”
Rue unplugged her ears. “We don’t know what it’ll—”
“It might keep me from being infected,” he said. “If it doesn’t, it’ll diminish the effects enough that it should buy you time to keep working.”
Walker didn’t need to see the glance the two scientists exchanged to know they agreed with his assessment. They were all scientists.
“Inject me,” he said again. “Then give me the biggest syringe you have. I’m going to find Maeve. Nothing else has stopped her, but if anything can—”
Something slammed against the glass door. Kat Isenberg gave a jump and cried out. Walker spun around, but he saw Rue’s expression even before he turned and he knew what he would see.
Maeve Sinclair’s corpse dragged a bloody palm across the glass, made a fist, and began to pound on the door. So many bullet wounds had torn up her body that the fabric of her clothes had become almost indistinguishable from her flesh. All ripped, all bloody. One half of her face had been obliterated. Shards of her skull jutted from brain matter like shark’s teeth.
The grin on what remained of her lips and the red gleam in her single eye were enough to tell him that it wasn’t Maeve looking through the glass at them.
Walker wished he had time to mourn her.
“Kat, tell me you have that injection ready.”
Rue told her to stop, to wait, but Kat grabbed Walker’s arm. They’d been working down here for hours and had studied a hundred possible solutions. He winced as she injected him with the only one any of them believed might make a difference.
Walker held out his hand.
The thing inside Maeve Sinclair watched as Kat put a second syringe in Walker’s palm.
It stopped slapping its bloody hands against the glass and its half smile widened as if it knew what came next. As if it dared Walker to try.
“Rue,” Walker said. “Open the goddamn door.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t do this.”
Kat Isenberg whispered some small kindness to Rue and then gently moved her out of the way, reaching for the controls that would override the contamination protocol and allow her to open the door. To let Walker out … or to let the monster in.
Another wet slap hit the glass.
Walker glanced over and saw it wasn’t Maeve’s hand but her ruined face. She slumped into the door and slid down, collapsing, leaving a smear of blood and mucus and black rot on the glass. For a second or two, she leaned against the door, and then the dead thing toppled backward and slid onto the floor.
The malevolent grin on that half face remained, but the red light winked out in that one dead eye, and the corpse lay still.
* * *
Rose felt a different sort of ache. Not the hunger that gnawed her insides but a kind of lure, hooked into her chest, drawing her with such power that it could not be refused. The alarm continued to blare, but the noise had receded somehow, as if muffled by this new yearning. The red lights flashed on the faces of her father and her girlfriend, but she barely saw them now.
“What are you doing, Rose?” Priya asked, her voice little more than a whisper in the dark, the scratching of a mouse trapped in the wall.
Rose exhaled, weakness deflating her. She leaned against the glass wall, looked through it, and wondered where Priya had gone. Earlier, they had been able to gaze at one another through the glass.
“Hey! Rose! Snap out of it!” Priya shouted.
She clapped her hands loudly. Rose blinked and swiveled her head to look at Priya.
“Where are you going?” Priya asked.
Ted stood behind her, hands on Priya’s shoulders. “Rosie, just stay here. Please. You can’t go out there.”
In the strobing red glare, Rose saw her own hand wrapped around the doorknob. The same door her dad and Priya had used to join her in the isolation room. They’d come in here because they thought they would be safer with her than out there in the corridors with Maeve on the hunt.
Rose could feel Maeve out there now, and she understood what Priya and her father did not—sharing this room with her couldn’t keep them safe. Rose might be able to control the hunger, the Red Death that whispered into her brain, but Maeve had already lost that fight. The infection had gotten deep into Maeve, eaten into her marrow, and all that remained of her now was the Red Death. Rose could feel it out there in the halls of Garland Mountain—coming for her. The Red Death might feed on others along the way, might spread its contagion, infect everyone it came near, but the whispers inside Rose’s head knew the truth.
The rotting, living death had been torn in half, split between the Sinclair sisters, and it wanted to be reunited.
“I can’t stay here,” Rose managed to say before a ragged cough burst from her lips. She gasped to catch her breath. Bitter black fluid leaked from her eyes and nose. She looked over at her dad and Priya. Sounds had retreated again, their voices were muffled, but it was better that she could not hear their pleas.
“You’ll be safe without me,” she said,
looking sadly at her father. “I’m going out to give her what she wants.”
Priya started to reach for her, anguished, heart breaking. Ted wrapped his arms around Priya and pulled her away, held her back. He stared at Rose, crying, but he would not let Priya be infected.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Rose said.
She opened the door they had unlocked when they’d come looking for her. Rose wasn’t a prisoner any longer, and neither was the death inside her.
The door slammed behind her, and Rose went out to meet her sister.
* * *
Walker crouched by the glass door of Garland SL2-Alpha and stared at Maeve Sinclair’s ravaged corpse. He had watched her die twice tonight and wanted to be sure. The closer he looked, the more he focused, he understood how impossible it was for her to have gotten this far. Bullets had torn apart her chest. Broken bone jutted from her side. Her right knee looked shattered. But of course it was her face, her skull, the visible wreckage of her brain, that told the tale. Even in the pulsing red light, he could see the black lesions on her brain. Blisters leaked a thick fluid that looked more like paste than blood.
“Stay back from the door,” Rue said over Walker’s shoulder.
“She’s dead.”
“Walker,” Kat Isenberg replied, “she’s right. We don’t know that. Until someone shows up to confirm and start the cleanup, let’s not take any chances.”
He kept staring at Maeve. Her one good eye had filmed over, and now a viscous, milky caul had begun to form on the retina.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “The Blackcoats killed her in the gorge, but here she is. You both saw her. She had enough strength to get all the way down here, but then her body just gives out?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Rue said, “look at her.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
Rue came and stood beside him. She didn’t crouch down, though her view of the corpse would be obscured by the smear of blood and fluid that Maeve had left on the glass.
“She’s not moving,” Rue said. “She’s not going to move. Whatever drove her to get her here, the bacteria inside her, the Red Death, her body finally took enough damage that she couldn’t go any farther.”
Red Hands: A Novel Page 31