by Megan Crewe
“Sorry,” Justin said to my surprise, his voice hollow. “That was dumb. Last night too.” He leaned his head against the bars. “‘Pick your battles,’ my dad used to say. I know I probably couldn’t take that guy even if I had both my hands. I just really, really want to.”
“Me too,” I said. “But if we get out of here, I don’t think it’s going to be by fighting. I don’t want you ending up more injured, okay?” We needed him able to walk, able to run, if Drew could pull off whatever he was working out.
“Yeah,” Justin said. He twisted his own cuffs, looking miserable. If it had driven him around the bend having to sit in the trailer those three days, I couldn’t imagine how crazy this imprisonment was making him. But then he added, quietly, “I won’t go at them again. Not unless it’s really going to help us.”
Anika was staring off toward the doorway where Leo had vanished. “What do you think they’re going to do to him?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever it is, the best thing we can do is say nothing.”
Her gaze flickered back and forth between me and the guards standing beyond the doorway. Her voice dipped to a murmur. “That guy yesterday. You knew him.”
So she’d noticed that last exchange between Drew and me. My shoulders tensed. I’d never mentioned my brother’s involvement with the Wardens to her; the last time we’d spoken to him, she hadn’t joined up with us yet. Now it was dangerous information.
“You said you had—” she started, and I cut her off. I didn’t know how carefully the guards were listening.
“Please don’t say anything about that, either.”
Anika lowered her eyes. “Okay,” she said. And then, “I hate this.”
It didn’t feel like much time passed before they came back, without Leo, and dragged Justin out. Anika sat silently against the wall, but the color had drained from her face.
“They’re trying to freak us out,” I said. “They could just be sticking them in some other room and leaving them there, for all we know.”
But it was working. I was freaked out. Maybe they weren’t hurting Leo and Justin, but probably they were. How far would Michael take it, at the start?
Not too far, I pleaded inwardly. Let them be okay.
When Chay and Connor came for the third time and marched Anika out without a word, a new thought made my heart seem to sink down to the soles of my feet.
What if Nathan was involved in this? Had he talked Michael into going along with his brand of torture after all? I’d have thought he’d be in here smirking at us as we were led to our doom, but maybe he was enjoying keeping us in suspense.
I had to be prepared for anything. Brace myself for the worse I could imagine.
I waited for a long time alone in my cell. Much longer than it had taken Chay and Connor to come back before. After a while, I forced myself to sit down and focused on just breathing. None of the others could give away where the vaccine was hidden, because none of the others had any idea. And if they’d given away that, surely someone would have come for me.
So Michael was still trying to convince them to talk. Not exactly reassuring.
When Chay finally appeared in the doorway once more, I was almost relieved, for about a split second before fear choked me. He recuffed my hands behind me, and he and Connor ushered me out of the jail room.
In the hall, we turned left instead of right. I tried to glance behind me, toward the direction they’d taken the others in, but Connor swatted my head.
“Just walk,” Chay growled.
They brought me up to a side door that led into a paved yard beside the main building. One of the police cars was waiting by the curb. Michael leaned against the hood, his eyes hidden behind bulky sunglasses. The panes reflected the pasty blue sky.
He straightened up as Chay prodded me over. The holster that held his revolver shifted against his hip.
“Uncuff her,” he said. “I’ll take the handcuffs and the key.”
If Chay thought there was anything unusual about his boss’s request, he didn’t show it. With a click, the pressure around my wrists fell away. Michael opened the front passenger door of the car. I stared at him.
“Get in,” he said tersely.
Was he taking me back to the house where Chay had caught us? Maybe one of the others had let it slip that the vaccine had to be there. I hesitated, but at the tightening of his mouth I ducked into the car. The inside smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.
“I’ll radio when I need you again,” Michael told Chay. He walked around the front of the car and got in beside me. I didn’t know where to look, so I studied my hands. The cuffs had rubbed my skin raw in patches around my left wrist, the one that had been restrained overnight. But the marks didn’t look half as bad as the ones Nathan had left on Justin.
“Where are my friends?” I asked.
“Where I want them to be,” Michael said. “Put your seat belt on.”
When I had, he leaned past me to grab a bandanna from the glove compartment. “Turn your head,” he said.
I stiffened. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to cover your eyes. Unless you’d rather ride in the trunk?”
I turned toward the window. He pulled the bandanna over my face and tied it behind my head. A sliver of light peeked around the edges, but otherwise I was blind.
“You uncuff me and then you blindfold me?” I said, not really expecting an answer.
“I don’t need you cuffed,” he said as he moved away. “When you’ve spent twenty-one years as a cop handling real criminals, you don’t feel too scared of one teenage girl. If you make the slightest move out of line, I will shoot you somewhere it’ll hurt very much. I figure you’d prefer to avoid that, and you’ll be more comfortable without the cuffs. I’m trying to be reasonable. But I can’t let you see where we’re going.” He paused. “Do you think I should put the cuffs back on?”
“No,” I said quickly. Even if I thought I could outmaneuver him, what would that accomplish? An accident in which I could be just as hurt as him? Getting myself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a wrecked car and nothing else?
“I am trying to be reasonable,” he said again, “so maybe you’ll do me the favor of being reasonable too.”
He started the engine, and the car rolled forward. I tried to relax into the seat, but the blackness before my eyes was unnerving. I flinched as we swayed around a curve I couldn’t have seen coming.
The rest of what Michael had said sank in as he drove. He’d been a police officer? One of the people who should have been protecting us?
My hands clenched in my lap. Obviously he’d given up that commitment the second things got bad. His comment about real criminals—what did he think he was now? What had his associates—Nathan, and Chay, and Marissa—been in their former lives? Probably not kindergarten teachers.
I couldn’t think of anything more unreasonable than what he’d ordered done in the last few months. Chasing down a group of teens, stalking them with the intent to kill. Looting all the hospitals and rounding up the surviving doctors, when it would have taken only one to maybe save Gav. Shooting Tobias, who still could have been cured, unarmed and alone in the woods. Chaining the rest of us in those cells.
Gav’s body wrapped in that pale blue sheet. The bruises on Leo’s cheek, Justin’s arm. What part of that was reasonable?
By the time the car eased to a stop and Michael jerked up the parking brake, I was seething under my terror.
“You can take off the blindfold,” Michael said. “We’re getting out now.”
I shoved the rough fabric away from my eyes. Michael had parked in a small lot outside a single-story building with walls of gray aluminum siding. There was nothing else around but patches of forest on either side.
Michael seemed to be waiting for me to move, so I stepped out onto the asphalt. He locked the doors after he’d followed and directed me toward the building.
“What are you going to d
o to me in there?” I asked, trying to sound defiant and not as panicked as I felt.
“I’m going to make you look at some things,” Michael said. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t know what to think of that. When he gestured again, I forced myself to start walking. At the building’s door, he pulled a key ring from his pocket. Inside, a flashlight sat on a small table at the far end of a hall. Michael picked it up, and unlocked the second door there. As it swung to the side, he flicked on the flashlight.
“I’ve outfitted this place with three generators,” he said. “Two for backup. And I’ve stockpiled enough fuel to keep them running for years. But I’m not wasting it on show-and-tell.”
I lingered in the front hall as he stepped farther inside. Part of me wanted to bolt. But bolt to where? He’d put a bullet in my leg before I made it two yards.
Cautiously, I approached the doorway. As my gaze followed the flashlight’s beam, my breath caught in my throat.
The room looked like Dad’s laboratory, expanded tenfold. Glassware and microscopes and dozens of machines I didn’t know the names for lined the counters. A shelving unit in the corner held rows of filtration masks and what looked like folded biohazard suits. Five industrial-sized fridges gleamed by the opposite wall.
“I started looking for a place to set this up as soon as I heard a vaccine prototype existed,” Michael said. “It’s been outfitted with the advice of my virologist and the two doctors with me who have experience with vaccine manufacturing. We just finished putting it in order two days ago. With this equipment, we’re capable of close to mass production. We have nine other doctors here to assist, and I can call down more from up north if necessary. The materials we need that have to be refrigerated, we’re holding at the training center until it’s time to use them.”
“Why are you showing me this?” I said, as if the sight hadn’t sent a shiver of excitement through me. I could picture scientists moving around this lab, processing vial after vial of the vaccine, until we had enough that the virus could never kill another person. It felt so real. So within reach.
“I want you to know that I’m not some goon who just hijacks anything that sounds valuable,” Michael said. “I want you to know that if the vaccine found its way to me, I’d have the means to make more—I might even have a better setup here than those cowards in the CDC do. It wouldn’t be in bad hands.”
I’d wondered if he’d planned to replicate the vaccine, but I’d never guessed he’d be this ambitious, that he could have pulled off an undertaking of this scale. And yet uneasiness was already trickling through my amazement.
“That depends on how you define ‘bad,’ doesn’t it?” I said. “What would you do with it, after you made more? What would people have to do for you to get it?”
He switched off the flashlight and nudged me back toward the hall. “People don’t value what they can get for free,” he said. “And they don’t respect the person handing it out, either.”
“So being respected is more important to you than saving lives,” I said. Now that the lab had vanished back into the darkness, the momentary excitement fell away in the wake of my anger.
“Keeping the vaccine out of my hands is more important to you than making sure someone is able to use it?” he retorted.
I swallowed. It could come to that, couldn’t it? Every day we resisted was another day’s chance the samples would be lost, or spoil.
“It’s not just up to me,” I said.
Michael studied me, expressionless, before saying, “I think it is.”
I made myself frown with what I hoped looked like confusion. “What are you talking about? We all—”
“You all hid part of the puzzle. I heard the story. And I’ve seen the four of you, and I’ve talked to your friends. You don’t spend as much time on the streets as I have without learning how to read people. And developing an ear for bullshit. There is no puzzle. You know where everything is. You could hand it over right now if you wanted to.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” I said, ignoring the skip of my heartbeat. “I guess you don’t read people as well as you think.”
“You can say that all you want,” he said, “but every day my people go out into this world and risk infection, and the doctors and nurses who examine them risk it too, and as long as they don’t have a vaccine to protect them, some of them will get sick. And die. That’s on you. Do you honestly believe the CDC is going to be a hero here, offering vaccinations to anyone who asks, with no price to pay? That the people there are so special it’s worth taking the chance of losing the vaccine completely? It doesn’t matter what their job titles are; they’re still human beings. And there aren’t any laws left except the ones we’re making for ourselves.”
His insinuations pricked at me, reminding me of Dr. Guzman’s hints about withholding the vaccine. Yes, maybe they’d have their own criteria for giving it away. But it wasn’t the same.
“They haven’t tried to murder us,” I said. “How many people have died, not because of the virus, but because of you?”
Finally, I provoked a reaction. A spark flashed in his eyes. “Believe me, I’ve saved enough lives too. I’ve done what I had to.”
“And what are you going to do to us if we don’t talk?” I demanded. “Let Nathan carve us up? That’s how it works, isn’t it? You get to sit behind your desk like you’re some kind of CEO, making other people do the awful parts so you can pretend it’s not on you—so you can pretend to your daughter that all you do is paperwork. You’re even worse than the rest of them.”
The words came out in a burst of rage, but the instant I finished speaking, a chill washed over me. I was practically asking him to go ahead and torture me himself.
Michael opened his mouth and then seemed to bite back whatever he’d been going to say. Something in his expression softened with what looked like sadness, or regret. His face stiffened again so quickly I almost couldn’t believe I’d seen it. But I had.
“I do what I have to do,” he said again.
Even if he didn’t like it, I realized. He was working with the kinds of people he’d spent most of his life putting behind bars. How could he like that? This was his preferred strategy, right here. Showing me the lab, trying to persuade me that it was in my best interests to go along with him. He hadn’t laid a hand on me.
Maybe I’d hit closer to home than I’d known. Maybe that desk and that shelf of books were his wall between him and the reality of what “his” people really did to get what he wanted.
“I can be reasonable,” Michael went on, gathering himself, “but I can be unreasonable too. I need that vaccine. You will tell me where it is. If you haven’t decided to cough up the information by tomorrow, I’ll have to switch to a more painful approach. And I know much more effective techniques than Nathan does.”
There was nothing but ice in his gaze now. I had no doubt he’d do it if he had to. Whatever it took.
Some distant part of me even understood. No one had to tell me how important the vaccine was. How many awful things had I done to protect it myself—and to protect my people? I wasn’t sure any of the decisions I’d made getting here could’ve been much better. But maybe that was how it seemed to Michael too, no matter how much more horrible his actions were.
“We’ll think about it,” I said.
He walked me back to the car and put the blindfold on me. As we drove away from the lab, I stewed in my thoughts.
When Anika had first told us about Michael, I’d gotten the idea he’d been a sadistic criminal mastermind all along, but obviously that wasn’t true. How did a random cop end up here? How far had he traveled between his old life and the one he was living now?
I guessed he’d have gotten to know people, working on the street. The kind of people who were used to getting out of dangerous situations. Who weren’t afraid to take desperate measures to stay alive. It would be useful, if you were trying to survive, to protect your daughter, to have those kind of people on
your side. He certainly knew how to keep them in line.
“I heard you came from out west,” I said. “BC.”
Michael hesitated so long I thought he wasn’t going to bother answering. Then he said, “Vancouver.”
“And there wasn’t enough for you there?”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, “but the friendly flu doesn’t care how many people you have on your side, how much food you stockpile, how many vehicles you can keep running. I can’t stop until I can stop it.”
Which was why he’d been stockpiling doctors and medical equipment too. Why he’d headed south to stake out the CDC, Drew had said, before he’d heard about our vaccine.
“And then?” I asked. “What would you do, if you got the vaccine, after everyone who could pay your price had taken it?”
“Keep sitting behind my desk, I’d imagine,” he said with an edge of sarcasm.
I tried to picture it: a world where Michael controlled the vaccine. Maybe there wouldn’t be much else he could do but keep on this way. He’d still need food and shelter—and protection. Nathan couldn’t be the only one hungry to take his place.
And so he’d keep shaping this world into one where strength through violence ruled and your only choices were to be the victim or the perpetrator. A world I suspected he didn’t even like.
The car rolled to a stop sooner than I expected. But when I raised the blindfold, we were back at the training center. As we drove past the gate, Samantha looked up from where she was crouched on the lawn by the fence. Nikolas stood beside her, and the cat she’d been chasing yesterday was prowling through the grass at the end of a leash. Samantha must have caught a glimpse of me through the car window, because she waved eagerly and pointed to the cat. I guessed the tuna trick had worked.
“It’s for her too, you know,” Michael said as he turned into the parking lot. “Not just people like Nathan and Chay. She could be exposed by accident any day. You could be condemning her along with the rest of us.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.