Infected

by Sophie Littlefield

  “At least not where we can find it.” She sighed. “He must have never dreamed I would need it.”

  “Or maybe he just couldn’t bear to think about the possibility. Even Walter’s entitled to a little denial.”

  “Well … we don’t have many other options, right? If there’s nothing in the locker that can help us, we can try to go to the lab. I might be able to figure out how to get into Walter’s office, since it’s not in the secure part of the building.” As she said it, though, she realized how unlikely it was that such a plan would work: the lab wasn’t near a BART stop, and they didn’t have a car. Carina knew where Uncle Walter kept his spare keys, but that would mean a trip to the house, which Sheila was undoubtedly having watched. And besides, the lab used fingerprint recognition at most of the entrances, even the nonsecure office wing. “But if it gets close to thirty-six hours, we’re going to have to throw ourselves on Sheila’s mercy.”

  “No. It’s not going to get that far. After we check the locker, if there’s nothing there, we call that Major Wynnside guy. Maybe he can do something. Find Sheila, or someone else at the lab, force them to produce the antidote.…”

  “Yeah, sure,” Carina agreed readily, but she knew they were both thinking the same thing: that would take time. Even if the major had all the resources of the armed services at his disposal, finding Sheila and forcing her to give them what they wanted—especially since they were working from inside the system, unlike the rogue agents who’d killed Walter—would take too long to save them.

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath and ran her fingers through her newly shorn hair. “I guess it’s time to go.”

  It was only two BART stops to the Civic Center station. Carina and Tanner slouched in seats at opposite ends of the nearly empty car, trying to look bored. Carina’s legs had begun to jitter uncontrollably, and she tried to force them to be still by pressing down on them without drawing attention to herself. Tanner had the backpack containing the laptop, disposable phone, and money, and as much of the nonperishable food and water as he had been able to jam in the pack. Carina had the letter and keys in a pocket of her shorts. She scanned the other riders, unable to stop feeling like they were watching her. If a Calaveras Lab security team had suddenly burst through the doors between the cars, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

  It was almost one in the morning. Some of the passengers looked like they were returning from second-shift jobs, dozing or listening to music—Carina could hear it clearly even through their earbuds, the many small sounds in the car competing inside her head. Other passengers looked like they’d been partying, dressed up for an evening out, and she could detect half a dozen different perfumes.

  The Civic Center station was relatively empty, the booths shuttered, trash skittering along the stained concrete floor as the train rushed down the track. Carina and Tanner followed the signs to the long bank of lockers deep within the underground station. No one else was in the corridor.

  “I’ll go,” Carina said as they stared down the empty hall. Her heart was hammering in her chest. “You stay here. If anything happens … Tanner, you have to run, seriously.”

  “You’re out of your mind.” He smiled when he said it, but Carina had no doubt he was serious. “You’re my ticket to fame and fortune.”

  If they’d had more time, she might have argued. Instead, she approached the locker warily, looking for anything out of place. It was one of the smaller ones, near the top, and her hand shook as she slid in the key.

  It turned easily. Nothing happened: no explosion burst from the small space. Carina wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but as she reached inside, she felt great relief nonetheless.

  An envelope. Her name in Walter’s handwriting. It was becoming a treasure hunt, like the ones Emma’s mother had set up every year for Emma’s birthday when they were little. All around town, Mrs. Choi hid clues in places like the ice cream shop and the post office, concluding the search with cake and balloons in the park. How Carina had envied Emma, who never seemed to understand how lucky she was. On Carina’s birthday, her mother usually gave her a gift certificate, a practice she’d started before Carina was old enough to go shopping by herself.

  Carina shook her head to push away the memory. There was something else in the locker: a small device that looked a little like a car remote, with a display flashing a series of numbers. She handed it to Tanner, who examined it carefully. “I think this—”

  He was interrupted by the sound of footsteps echoing around the corner. Running.

  Tanner jammed the device in his pocket and grabbed her hand. “Run!”

  Carina glanced over her shoulder as she pivoted and took off. Black jackets. Short hair. The stone-faced expressions of the two muscular young men matched those of every Calaveras Lab security team member, even if she couldn’t identify these two. But she was sure they wouldn’t stop until they caught Carina and Tanner one way or another.

  They careened down the corridor, bland cinder-block walls flashing by. Carina was aware of her lungs filling with air, her muscles stretching and flexing, her heart pumping blood through her veins. But now, knowing that her body was playing host to a virus that heightened her senses and increased her strength, it was almost as though she were seeing herself from another dimension. She anticipated her feet hitting the floor with perfect precision. She felt the arc of her arms’ motion both in real time and, somehow, in slow motion, envisioning their perfect concordance. She willed herself to lengthen her strides, to cover more distance, and she could sense the thousands of tiny adjustments, brain to nerves and muscles, that made it happen. And beside her, Tanner was keeping pace, his own form flawless.

  As horrifying as it was to know that she had been injected with a deadly substance, and despite the fact that she was being pursued by armed gunmen, it was exhilarating to push her body to its limits. Down a flight of stairs, through another corridor, past signs indicating an exit up onto Hyde Street. There it was, the turnstile that led to freedom, and their pursuers had fallen behind; she couldn’t even hear their footsteps. Carina skidded to a stop, Tanner doing the same beside her. The turnstile was a spinning column of steel bars, eight feet tall—and it was chained and padlocked.

  USE GROVE ST. EXIT AFTER 9 P.M. M–F read a sign looped through the chain.

  Now she heard the footsteps, quickly gaining on them.

  Tanner grabbed the bars and pushed, making a guttural sound of frustration, and as Carina watched, he actually managed to bend two of the bars. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much force it would take to bend steel, but it wasn’t going to help since there was no way the thing was turning while the chain was on.

  “Tanner, stop!” she shouted, grabbing his arm. “We need to figure—”

  She stopped abruptly as the two men came into view, holding weapons, aiming as they ran. Darts again, presumably, though Carina was sure that by now they’d adjusted the dose to account for the virus, and whatever they shot her with would make her drop like a stone. And what about Tanner? There was no reason for them to be careful with him.

  “… heading south, blocked at exit,” she heard one of them bark into his wrist, and then an all-too-familiar voice screaming at them to hurry. Even through the static Carina could tell it was Sheila, and the hairs on her neck stood up. How could she ever have trusted her?

  “Hang on,” Tanner muttered, turning to the trash can pushed up against the wall. The top, made of metal, was a domed shell that covered the can and kept the plastic liner in place. Tanner ripped it off.

  The motion spun him, his own strength giving him momentum. A ping sounded, and Carina knew that one of their pursuers had fired and almost hit Tanner with a dart. Instinctively she ducked and pressed herself against the wall. A second dart whizzed past, inches from her shoulder. If it hadn’t been for her almost preternatural responsiveness, she would have been hit.

  Fear segued to anger. Carina was growing tired of being pursued and shot at by people who
didn’t even know her. As Tanner dipped one shoulder in the elegant, graceful motion that she knew was the windup to his discus throw, she turned and ran directly at the closer man.

  Tanner spun and released, the can lid leaving his hand at the same moment that the man took aim at her. Carina heard a growling scream that she realized was coming from her own throat as the man began to squeeze the trigger. She was able to see the twitch of his finger even though he was ten feet away, as though her vision were being sharpened and magnified inside her mind, and as she braced to be hit, her momentum too great to veer away, there was a loud crash and he was knocked sideways, the lid connecting with his torso.

  He grunted in pain and dropped the gun. It went off when it hit the floor, the dart striking the ceiling. Tanner had run at an angle, and as the other guard tried to take aim, Carina saw him bank off the wall, running halfway up the side until his body was parallel to the floor. Carina dove for the gun, absorbing the impact and letting it carry her along. She slid right past the first man, who was doubled over, moaning. The gun was small, short-barreled, and lightweight in her hand; she jammed it into the pocket of her shorts as she scrambled to her feet.

  Tanner landed, as light as a panther. The guard was clutching his face, staggering toward them. She could hear Sheila’s voice coming through the device on his wrist, demanding to know their status.

  “What did you do to him?” Carina asked as they ran back the way they’d come.

  “Kicked him in the mouth,” Tanner said. “Not much finesse, but it worked.”

  Carina was trying to figure out how his foot had connected with an object—a man’s face—that was five feet off the ground. He must have managed a kick as he came off the wall, a maneuver requiring such precision that Carina would have thought it impossible.

  Of course, none of what they’d just done ought to have been possible. Their strength, speed, agility, all of it was artificial. Biochemical.

  And all of it would cause her insides to deteriorate in just a few short hours.

  She ran faster.

  Two blocks from the BART station, City Hall rose up into the inky sky. The wide, grassy park in front of it was host to a few other people, despite the hour: homeless men and women huddling on benches and sleeping on sidewalks, a few drunks staggering along with their bottles gripped tightly.

  Tanner and Carina had stopped to take a drink of water at a bench under a row of flags that flapped in the breeze.

  “We ought to be freezing,” Carina said. She touched her arms and her skin was chilly¸ but inside, her heart was pushing blood through her system so efficiently that she felt warm. The tics were worsening; she could feel the twitching all over her body, like little electric currents were being applied to her skin. Exertion quelled them temporarily, but as soon as she stopped running, they started up again.

  And they would only get worse.

  “I’m hungry again,” Tanner replied. He dug in the pack and pulled out a couple of energy bars and a bottle of water. They ate and drank in silence, wolfing down the tasteless food, which barely took the edge off Carina’s hunger.

  “At least we know one thing,” she said, after taking a deep drink from the water bottle. “You were right about the tracker on your phone. I can’t believe they didn’t get us at the apartment.”

  “No.” Tanner shook his head. “It would have taken them a while. The bottleneck would have been in finding my number. I mean, I still can’t believe they were able to move that fast. You know how hard it is to get access to those records? They would have had to have access to the cell phone provider’s internal database, and there are so many levels of encryption on it that they would have had to get in a different way.”

  “You mean—someone from inside was helping them?”

  “Or someone powerful enough to get people out of bed requisitioned the records.”

  “But who could do that? I mean … are you thinking it’s government?”

  “I’m not thinking anything,” Tanner said, holding up his hands in protest. “Other than it’s someone with a scary amount of power.”

  “Or someone with influence. Or money.”

  “It keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Makes your head spin. Here.” He reached into the backpack and handed her the note from the locker.

  “Again?” Carina sighed. “I feel like this is getting a little stupid. I mean, I wish Walter had just talked to me instead of leading us all over town.”

  “He was trying to protect you. The less you knew … I mean, if everything hadn’t gotten so screwed up, you might have always believed they were working on some harmless nutrition project, and you could have gone on to live the perfect high school senior year.”

  “Yeah,” Carina mumbled.

  She opened the envelope and took out the note. At least this time there was no key, no cryptic next step. Smoothing the paper on her lap, she began to read using the streetlight above them.

  My dear Carrie,

  If you are reading this, then I must assume I am dead or as good as dead, and that things are dire. No plan is foolproof, and as I made these preparations, I had to consider what would happen if you were not able to bring the major in to help you. This is a terrible turn of events, but in recent months I’ve learned that things can always get worse. So now we must both focus on helping you survive.

  And that means that I have to share a secret that I have kept faithfully during this last year. Your mother is alive, Carrie. I know this is shocking news and you must be very angry at me for keeping it from you, but please bear with me. Right now you MUST focus on your own safety.

  Carina let out an involuntary gasp. “My mother—”

  But Tanner took the paper from her. He read the rest aloud.

  Over a year ago, soon after we’d finally created an antidote, your mother came to me and said she suspected someone was leaking data, that they were selling our work to someone outside the lab. She had already shared her concerns with Calaveras management, not wanting to involve me if she was wrong. When they dismissed her inquiry, she threatened to take her concerns to the FBI, and suddenly she began receiving threats on her life. Always anonymous, always untraceable, but she was convinced they were coming from someone on the inside at the lab. I thought she was being paranoid, exaggerating or maybe even imagining these threats. I had personally vetted everyone on our team, every technician, every research assistant, even our administrative staff, the custodians. I never once thought to suspect Sheila.

  But then Madelyn disappeared, and her suicide note was found. Several people called to say they’d seen her on the bridge that night—people will say anything, I guess, especially if a suggestion has been planted in their minds by the media. But a few days after her memorial, she called me. Nearly gave me a heart attack. I was desperate to find her, I begged her to come back, if only for you, but she said that she had to keep pretending she was dead—that if ‘they’ knew she was alive they’d go after me. She believed the only way to keep you safe was to pretend she was dead, because they could use you to get to her. She gave me a phone number to use only for emergencies, and she said that if I told anyone she was alive, she would disappear forever and I’d never hear from her again. I still didn’t believe her. I thought maybe she was having some sort of breakdown, but I didn’t know what to do.

  And now it turns out that she was right all along. Sheila was peddling our work to the highest bidder, and she is every bit as ruthless as your mother believed. I no longer know who is innocent and who is working with her, but I don’t trust anyone.

  It was very hard to keep your mother’s existence secret, but I did as she asked. I am so sorry, Carrie, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve talked to her a few times in the past year, always when she calls me. She is safe, and I know she will do everything she can to keep you safe too.

  I love you, Carrie.

  —Uncle Walter

  Carina realized she had stopped breathing. Tanner handed the letter back
to her. She folded it carefully and slipped it back into the envelope, her hands trembling.

  “My mother …,” she started, but her voice broke. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Car …” Tanner hugged her. “I mean, this is … amazing.”

  “Amazing?” A surge of anger took hold of Carina, the strength of it making her squeeze her fists and clench her teeth. She could feel the blood vessels in her neck pulsing, and she forced herself to take a deep breath, tremors racking her body. “Amazing that a mother could go an entire year without ever talking to her daughter? Knowing what she was going through, knowing—”

  Tanner held her tighter as a sob escaped her throat. “It’s okay, Car, it’s okay,” he murmured, her tears spilling onto his chest.

  “She had to know how much I missed her. How devastated I was.”

  “She was trying to protect you. Look, you have to call her now. She must have some of the antidote, and now she can help you. Don’t you see how she’s been waiting for this moment? She had to be praying it would never come, and also desperate to see you again.”

  Carina swallowed, trying to process what she had just learned. “I—I just can’t believe she let me think she was dead, all this time.” She twisted the ring on her finger, the points of the hexagonal stone sharp against her skin. Her mother—alive. How many times following her funeral had Carina cried herself to sleep, thinking about the last conversations they’d had, all the opportunities she’d missed to tell her she loved her? How often had she felt the ache of her absence like a burning hole in her heart that she could never reveal? And the whole time, her mother had never reached out to her to reassure her, to explain why she had disappeared, to tell her she missed her. Even to hear her voice.