Infected

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Hush,” Madelyn said, squeezing her hand. “I know. I know. Leaving you was the hardest thing I ever did, but I was afraid that if I didn’t back off they would hurt you. So I decided to make it seem that I was gone forever. Oh, Carina, I would have hated myself for putting you in danger, and I swore to myself I wouldn’t allow you to be involved in any way, even if that meant I never saw you. The risks were too great. I wished I’d never said anything, even though I knew what could happen if the virus got out.”

  “But you told Walter …”

  “As soon as I told him what I suspected, he figured out the rest. He was always smarter than me.” A small, sad smile played at her lips. “There. I said it. How he would have loved to hear that.”

  “But you were the only one who went to the management?”

  “Yes. We thought, because we knew there was a risk, that they would fire the person who questioned what was going on. We were sure they would suspect a leak, and the lab can’t take that kind of a hit on its reputation. So we believed that this way, even if I was fired, Walter would still be able to keep working on the antidote. And if we couldn’t stop the virus from getting out into the world, we could at least make it safer for people.” While she spoke, she had been gathering her purse and keys. “Now let’s get moving.”

  “You can tell us the rest on the way,” Carina said.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s best. Carina, I’m so sorry for all the time I spent away from you,” Madelyn said, her voice hitching. She sat down and took Carina’s hand. “Oh, sweetheart, if only I could do it all over again …”

  The sound of glass breaking interrupted her, and Carina’s attention snapped to the kitchen window, where one of the panes had shattered. Tanner was already on his feet, launching himself at Carina as she turned back to her mother. It all was happening in slow motion because there, against the pale knit fabric of her mother’s shirt, was a tiny, neat hole that was blossoming into a red-petaled flower. As Tanner’s hands grasped Carina’s shoulders and pushed her toward the floor, she saw her mother slowly slip down in her chair, a look of surprise in her eyes.

  When they hit the floor, Carina was still holding her mother’s hand. Blood poured from the hole in her chest, and her pulse was weakening under her warm skin. Someone screamed, a long, keening sound of grief, and it was only when Tanner clamped his hand over Carina’s mouth that she realized it was her.

  “Car, no, stop, you have to stop,” he hissed in her ear as he tried to drag her away. “Please, listen, we have to get out of here.”

  Carina fought him, pushing and scratching. His back hit the bank of cabinets and he let out an oof and Carina knew she’d pushed him too hard but she had to get to her mother, had to try to save her. She pressed her hand to her mother’s cheek, feeling her eyelids flutter. Her mother’s lips trembled, and then she whispered her name.

  “Carina … baby, I love you. Go. Go.…”

  Tanner scrambled across the kitchen and hit the light switch, casting them into darkness, and her mother pushed her away weakly.

  Carina had lost her mother once before, but this time it was for real. Tanner dragged her to her feet and toward the doorway just as a second crash sent more glass splintering from the back door.

  “This way!” Tanner yelled, pulling her back toward the front of the house. But Carina saw something—no, that wasn’t entirely right, especially since it was dark outside the windows and the drapes were drawn all the way. But she sensed something, perhaps a change in the air currents, or a sound too small to be picked up by human ears.

  But not by superhuman ears. Because wasn’t that what she and Tanner now possessed? The ability to sense things others couldn’t sense? And why shouldn’t that include danger?

  There wasn’t time to scream, wasn’t time to explain. She pulled Tanner to the side, away from the path to the door and toward the stairs, and he seemed to understand because he corrected his course and hit the bottom step running.

  The front door was battered by something enormous and loud, but there wasn’t time to look. Carina and Tanner raced up the stairs, into a dim hall that stank of mildew. Carina chose a direction at random and prayed she’d picked right. Heading for the door at the end of the hall, she hit it head-on, with Tanner at her side. She’d have a hell of a bruise on her shoulder if she survived this night, but the door splintered. Tanner kicked the broken board twice, and a section of the wood clattered to the floor.

  They had run through the door.

  There was something deeply unsettling about that, Carina thought as they ran the obstacle course of the bedroom, around a bed covered with an ancient chenille spread, ducking past an armoire with sagging doors, toward the window that faced the side of the house. You shouldn’t be able to run through a solid piece of wood, but they had broken a hole in it. Her shoulder tingled, but it didn’t hurt, exactly, or if it did, she was sensing pain in a whole new way.

  Tanner reached the window first and yanked at the brass handle on the sash. It creaked but didn’t budge. Carina grasped the other handle and pulled, the fittings popping and flying into the air as the window shot up. She thought for sure the glass would break, but it only shuddered as she heard shouting and the crash of things being shoved or thrown aside on the floor below them.

  “Go,” Tanner hissed, and Carina didn’t have to be told twice. She let herself out the window onto the sloping roof just as Tanner added, “Oh shit.”

  She knew she shouldn’t stop, even for a split second, but she couldn’t help it. She turned and looked past Tanner, who was scrambling through the opening as fast as he could, and found herself staring at a man lurching through the door of the room.

  A beard. None of the security team at the lab had beards, she thought just as the man pulled the trigger on the ugly black handgun he’d leveled at Tanner and the report echoed around the room.

  “Uh,” Tanner said as he dropped lightly to the roof. Carina gasped.

  “Are you hit?”

  “No. Go.”

  She skittered down the incline; there wasn’t time to be careful, and if she slid she wouldn’t have time to correct her course before she hit the concrete below, and she’d break a bone, or worse. But when she got to the gutter, thankful for the traction from the rubber soles of her shoes, she grabbed its metal edge in one hand and swung out into the air.

  For a second she held on by one hand, trying to calculate how to hit the softer dirt rather than the sidewalk; then Tanner let go and landed in a graceful crouch and she realized it didn’t matter.

  She hoped it didn’t matter, anyway, and in the small amount of time it took for her to free-fall the dozen or so feet, she was able to complete the perplexing thought that she was becoming entirely too comfortable with her superpowers.

  Though what did it matter? She’d just lost both her mother—again—and her best chance at getting the antidote before her time ran out.

  Her feet hit the concrete and the shock traveled through her body as though in a stop-motion sequence, Carina making tiny adjustments to her balance and stance to compensate. When she straightened up again she was fine.

  Tanner was rubbing his thigh, yelling at her to follow him. Only, when his hand came away from his shorts, she saw that it was covered with blood.

  “Oh my God, you’ve been shot!”

  “Barely, Car, it’s nothing. Come on!”

  But they’d hesitated a second too long. A shout from above drew their attention to the roof they’d just escaped from; there, framed in the window, was the bearded man. He took a shot but it went wild, and as he crawled onto the roof and prepared to fire again, a second man burst through the window.

  He was enormous, completely bald, his teeth glinting in the moonlight. And he didn’t look like he planned on stopping as he crab-walked down the roof. His progress was awkward because of the gun he was holding, a big two-handed-grip model like you saw in news reports about gangs, the kind of automatic weapon that could cut down several victims at a time.r />
  Carina didn’t need any more encouragement. She ran, Tanner close behind, as the big man reached the edge of the roof and the other man began firing again.

  The street led down the hill to a valley laid out like a glittering grid. At three in the morning, South San Francisco, a working-class area of the city, was fast asleep, indifferent to the drama going on above. Carina watched for porch lights turning on, people investigating the sound of shooting, but no one stirred. Shops, closed for the night, were interspersed with block after block of densely packed, shabby little houses like the one her mother had been staying in. Any hope they had of escaping through the backyards uphill was dashed by the presence of a huge sound wall behind the homes.

  “This way!” Carina shouted as she turned left, then ran down a cracked-asphalt driveway and into the backyard of a house across the street. She hoped they would encounter fences or other obstacles that would hinder their pursuers but that she and Tanner could vault. But most of the houses were separated by nothing more than trash-littered alleys and low picket fences that wouldn’t stop a child, much less two heavily armed men. Worse, Tanner’s wound had slowed him down; he ran with a crooked gait, favoring his left leg. The backpack had slid off one of his shoulders, half pinning his arm. He might not even be able to clear a fence, depending on how badly he was injured.

  “Go! Don’t wait for me!” he said, trying to push her away.

  “No!”

  She took his hand and pulled him along. She’d left her mother only because there was no way to get her out of the house without dooming themselves. She would not leave Tanner. Carina could hear the men shouting at each other and realized they were speaking something that sounded almost like Russian. Albanian.

  Carina’s blood ran cold. So it was true. No matter what else Sheila had lied about, she hadn’t lied about the rogue mafia, the deadly Albanians; now she and Tanner were being pursued by men who wanted them dead. If they just waited another day, Carina and Tanner would oblige them by dying from the virus.

  But she didn’t plan on giving them the satisfaction.

  Carina veered around a corner, past a little bungalow festooned with clotheslines, and into a street that led to the bottom of the hill. A car passed, and Carina considered trying to flag it down, but in the second before she threw herself into the street to get the driver’s attention, she realized that men willing to shoot at two unarmed teenagers probably wouldn’t hesitate to add an adult bystander to the list of casualties. And there was no way she could explain the danger fast enough to convince someone to be their getaway driver. They could all end up being killed.

  The car traveled up the hill, its taillights disappearing when it went over the crest. Carina was left trying to choose between several poor possibilities. Straight ahead, the road passed over a small, mostly dried-up creek before entering a commercial area, the next block anchored by an auto body shop and a shuttered corner grocery. To the right and left were side streets much like the ones they’d already passed: shabby little houses, cars parked along the curbs, trash cans at the street. The residents of the neighborhood slept on, oblivious to the drama unfolding just blocks away.

  Tanner was loping toward the auto body shop, grimacing from the pain every time the foot on his injured leg struck pavement. “Over here!” he shouted. “We might be able to find cover.”

  Carina followed him past the locked entrance and a rusting vending machine, and into the parking lot separating the shop from the building next to it, a strip mall that smelled of garbage and fried food. She focused on Tanner, anxiously watching the blooming bloodstain on his shorts.

  Then Tanner stopped short and she almost crashed into him. Looking up, she understood why. The entire parking lot next to the auto parts store was fenced: the narrow space was encircled with chain-link twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. Even if they were to scale the fence—and Carina wasn’t sure Tanner could right now—they would never get past the razor wire: their enhanced abilities were no match for the deadly pointed barbs that would slice through their skin as easily as anyone else’s.

  Carina pushed Tanner behind a pair of Dumpsters as another bullet zinged past, followed by a rapid eruption of gunfire. Both men were shooting, and from the earsplitting echo of bullets on metal, the automatic rifle was cutting holes through the Dumpsters’ sides.

  Someone in the neighborhood would hear, wouldn’t they? Someone must be calling the cops even now, right? The police might not be able to help them get the antidote, but it wouldn’t matter if they didn’t survive the next few minutes.

  “Tanner,” Carina said desperately. He was bent over, his hands on his good knee, his face pale. “I’m going to run and try to distract them, okay? Stay here.”

  “Run where?”

  Carina had no idea. Beyond the lot, parked against the brick wall of the strip mall, was a rusting panel van that looked like it had been abandoned; the side was creased and dented from a collision, and one of the tires was flat. It wasn’t much of a haven, but it would keep her safe, if only for a few seconds, and more importantly, it might distract the gunmen from Tanner. Even if she managed to draw only one of them, she’d give him a few more seconds of safety.

  She bolted around the lot, a string of bullets following at her heels. At the van, she squeezed into the narrow space between it and the brick wall. Trying the door, she found it was locked, but the window was partly open. She reached in, the top of the glass cutting cruelly under her arm, grabbed the handle, and yanked.

  Carina jammed the door open as far as possible, squeezing inside the passenger seat and grunting as her ribs were compressed between the door and the body of the van. She pulled the door shut behind her and crawled into the back. The metal floor was cold and hard on her knees, and the interior smelled like cigarette smoke and burned coffee. She looked around frantically for a weapon of any kind, but all she found was an empty coffee cup that had rolled under one of the seats.

  Something was pressing against her hip—and suddenly Carina remembered the dart gun. How could she have forgotten it? She jammed her hand in her pocket and pulled out the gun. It was small and black, barely bigger than a water pistol. She could see the cartridge fitted into the barrel, which was open on the sides. A greenish liquid filled the tiny tube. The gun was simple in design; there was only the trigger, and a small slide that she figured was the safety. She snapped it forward just as something struck the side of the van and it rocked with the impact.

  Someone shot out the driver’s side window. Much more efficient, Carina had to admit as she cowered behind the backseat, than wedging himself through the passenger door as she had. She watched a hand, muscular and thick, grope for the door handle and yank it open.

  The huge bald man climbed into the driver’s seat. He was too big to squeeze easily past the steering wheel, which must have frustrated him, because he let loose what sounded a lot like cussing in another language, spraying the floor of the van with bullets as he forced himself between the two front seats.

  Carina knew she had only one chance. The minute he saw her, she was dead. She blinked, and an image of her mother—she’d aged so much, in that one year she had been away—flitted through her head. There were faint lines around her eyes, and there was a softness to the skin along her jaw. Her mother had suffered, and Carina, who had always wished for affection and warmth from her distant mom, realized the love had been there all along. Madelyn had simply never known how to show on the outside what she felt on the inside.

  And now she was dead. And the man in front of Carina was one of her killers.

  The fury inside Carina was suddenly unrestrainable. She rose to her knees, a guttural, furious cry escaping her lips, and with two hands aimed the pistol directly at the man’s round, oily face.

  She wasn’t much of a shot. The gun bucked in her hand, and the dart lodged in the man’s throat. He dropped his gun, pressing his hands to his neck, making a sound like air whooshing out of an inner tube. His lips moved
as though he was trying to talk, and his eyes went glassy. Foam bubbled from his lips. He began to sink to the floor, his knees going out from under him.

  Carina didn’t intend to stick around to see what happened next. She thought about trying to get his gun, but he had collapsed on top of it, his breath coming in shallow gasps. There was no way she could move a man of that size—and besides, who knew what he was capable of, even in his compromised state; he looked like he had enough power in a single hand to strangle her.

  Carina yanked up the lock and slid the side door open a few inches, staying behind it and wincing as she anticipated a hail of bullets.

  But there was nothing. Far in the distance, she could hear sirens. Across the parking lot were the Dumpsters, but no sign of the second gunman. Glass littered the ground next to the van, and she stepped down cautiously, her shoes crunching on the shards.

  Crouching low, she ran to the Dumpsters, praying that the gunman wasn’t waiting for her behind them. Because that would mean that Tanner … No. She wouldn’t consider that, not until she had to.

  She reached the Dumpsters and rounded the side, nearly colliding with Tanner, illuminated by a harsh streetlight. He was squatting, supporting himself against the wall with the backpack he had somehow held on to through the chase, an unreadable expression on his face. Placing a hand on his cheek, she felt his strong pulse, his warmth beneath her fingers. He was alive.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered hoarsely.

  He covered her hand with his own, holding it close against him, and nodded. “Car …”

  He swallowed hard and turned with effort. Carina followed his gaze.