Infected

by Sophie Littlefield

  Sheila rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Carina, calm down. I am getting a little tired of your whole teenage angst thing. In these brief few days, you’ve made me wish I’d never agreed to be your guardian.”

  “Not as much as Walter, I bet.”

  A look passed through Sheila’s eyes that surprised Carina: hurt. Deep, genuine hurt. But she didn’t let her smile slip. “No, I suppose not. Here’s what’s funny, though. You’ve been running around all night looking for the antidote, I take it? Is that right?”

  “More or less,” Carina said begrudgingly.

  “Well, what on earth do you think was in that dart gun you took off the guard in the BART station?”

  Carina’s mouth dropped open. “What are you talking about?”

  “The darts that my men were trying to shoot you with. What did you think they were doing?”

  “Uh … trying to knock me out, obviously, so they could bring me back to you.”

  “Half right. The plan was to bring you in safely while the virus was eradicated from your system. I did want you back here, but only so I could keep you safe. Which, obviously, you can’t even begin to handle on your own.”

  “If it really wasn’t you who infected me—or at least ordered it done—how would you even know it had happened?”

  “I received an anonymous tip,” Sheila said. “Or more precisely, a threat. The morning of the funeral. I’ve had people trying to trace it around the clock.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Carina snapped. “I shot a guy with whatever was in that gun. He … he …” The image of his face, swollen and grotesque, came back to her.

  Sheila rolled her eyes. “The antidote is an incredibly powerful drug, and it’s a shock to the system if a person isn’t infected. Don’t worry, he’ll recover fully.”

  Other than the two ruined arms, Carina thought. Her confusion was growing; the earth seemed to be shifting under her. Was it possible that Sheila was telling the truth?

  “Look, Carina, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” Sheila said. “I admit there were a lot of things I didn’t handle well. Believe me—I’d change things if I could. But please, just take a look at this. I’m going to move slow here.…”

  She backed up to the car while Baxter watched impassively.

  Sheila opened the door and there, inside, was Tanner, looking a lot better than he had a few minutes ago. Meacham was sitting next to him, taping a bandage over the wound in his back. Tanner looked up at Carina, an apology in his eyes.

  “Show her,” Sheila said, and Meacham held up a black dart gun identical to the one Carina had left on the floor of the van after shooting the Albanian with it. Horrified, Carina remembered the foam that had spewed from his mouth when she shot him—but Tanner showed no signs of an adverse reaction. “Your boyfriend’s well on his way to recovery now,” Sheila added, as if reading her mind. “Give that antidote another hour and he’ll be feeling a lot more like himself.”

  “How do I know you didn’t poison him?” she demanded.

  “Oh, please. Look at him. You’re going to have to trust me here, Carina. I’m trying to help you. Yes, it’s true that someone inside the organization is working with the Albanians. Your mother was the first one to figure out that there was a leak, and I’ll admit, when she disappeared I got scared. When Walter started talking about the antidote a few months ago I begged him to stay quiet, but he wanted to get the Army Criminal Investigation Command involved. I …” To Carina’s astonishment, Sheila’s voice broke. “I was afraid something terrible would happen. And I was right. I kept telling Walter to keep things quiet, to stop stirring things up. We fought about it. The whole time I just … I’ve never been good at … Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  Her face was a twisted mask of anguish and fury, and Carina slowly realized that she had had Sheila all wrong.

  Sheila wanted something desperately, enough to compromise her job. But it wasn’t money.

  It was Walter.

  Sheila had been in love with Walter, but she’d never been able to express it, and he’d mistaken her attempts to dissuade him from his work for evasiveness. He’d suspected her of being the leak, the one who’d reached out to the foreign buyers, when all along she’d been trying to keep him safe.

  “Then who is it?” Carina demanded. “Who’s really working with the Albanians?”

  “Look, let’s get you the antidote and then we’ll talk,” Sheila said.

  “Not until you tell me.”

  More eye rolling. “Carina, honey, if you and I are going to live together, you are going to have to work on this trust thing. I just fixed up your boyfriend. I spent my Friday evening racing around town trying to find you. Don’t you think you could cut me a little slack? The short answer is that we don’t know. I’ve been in touch with Major Wynnside and I’m meeting with him next week. There’s going to be a covert investigation, to try to flush out the guilty parties without tipping them off that we’re looking. There’s more to it, but—”

  “Not a whole lot more, really,” Baxter said.

  Sheila looked at him in surprise. Carina did too.

  “What are you talking about?” Sheila demanded.

  “I said there’s not much more to it. Someone on the inside got tired of working for peanuts, figured there was a lot of money to be made here, and did a little simple cold-calling, trying to drum up business.”

  He reached inside his coat, and when his hand came out it was holding a gun, pointed at Sheila.

  “You never asked me what I did before I came to Calaveras,” he said mildly.

  “What are you …” Sheila looked aghast. Behind her, Tanner got out of the car, his expression wary, and started circling around toward Carina. Meacham clambered out after him and stood looking from one person to the next, clearly confused.

  “If you’d ever bothered to ask, I would have told you that I was a business major in college. I was going to take over the family business. Little chain of banks in Wisconsin. My grandfather started it.” He laughed bitterly. “Of course, you may have heard that the banking industry ran into a little trouble back a few years ago. Whoops. Dad narrowly missed going to jail, and we lost the banks. I had to take the first job I could get.”

  “But that’s not—”

  “And then once I’d been on the job awhile, I figured out that I could make easier money selling classified research than low-interest checking accounts. Besides, you can’t think I like working for you,” he demanded, anger edging his words. “You’re a real pain in the ass, Sheila.”

  “I’ll have your job for this,” Sheila said angrily. “You’re never going to—”

  He shot her.

  A neat little hole appeared in the center of her forehead and she stumbled backward, her eyes wide, staring in surprise. Before Carina could scream, Baxter pivoted slightly and shot Meacham, who fell in a heap like a bag of rags.

  Then he turned the gun on Tanner.

  “No, no, don’t!” Carina screamed, pushing herself in front of Tanner.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Baxter asked, caressing her face with the barrel of the gun. The metal was cold on her skin and she flinched. “I have everything I need right here, with you.”

  Carina swallowed. “I won’t give you anything if you hurt him.”

  “Really?” Baxter raised his eyebrow. “Very noble, but how are you going to feel when you start twitching and pulling out your own hair?”

  “It was you,” Carina said, a chill going through her. “You infected me. Where did you do it? The salon?”

  Baxter chuckled. “No, though that would have been a nice idea, but my boss wasn’t one to give me a lot of information about her personal calendar. Though she felt comfortable yanking me around any hour of the day. Treated me like her personal slave, most of the time. But no, I had to figure out that little detail without her help. It wasn’t all that hard.… Sheila was kidding herself if she thought that so-called security system of hers was worth a
damn.”

  “You broke into her apartment?”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing.” Baxter showed his perfect white teeth in an all-American grin. “I just paid a visit over my lunch hour, left you a little something on your toothbrush. Very nice bathroom, by the way. Some of the girls I date ought to learn from your example, clean and neat. Most of them leave their crap everywhere, makeup, hair on the floor.… Can’t stand that.”

  Carina wasn’t listening. She was remembering—getting ready for her date with Tanner. Putting on makeup. Picking out an outfit.

  Brushing her teeth.

  It had been after seven o’clock. Not six o’clock, as she’d assumed, which meant that she still had a little time. She wasn’t dead just yet. The relief that flooded through her lasted only a second, though.

  “Why didn’t you just take me then?” she demanded furiously. “If you figured out how to get in, you could have kidnapped me when I got back from the salon.”

  “Yeah, but I needed a little more time to make sure no one ended up blaming me. My plan was brilliant, I have to say. The morning of your uncle’s funeral, after he was safely in the ground, Sheila received an anonymous text saying that you’d been infected. I couldn’t be sure which of you Walter would have trusted. I needed you both. You were my insurance, because I knew Sheila would do anything to save you.”

  “But if she thought I was infected, why wouldn’t she just give me the antidote?”

  “That’s exactly what she’d do. Only, she wouldn’t have brought it to the memorial service. She’d have to go back to her house or the lab for it. And who do you think she would have brought along on such a critical mission?”

  Carina’s head spun at his words. The whole time, she’d thought Sheila was trying to use her, that she didn’t care about her. That Sheila would allow her to die, if necessary.

  But she—and Walter—had been wrong about her.

  “That’s right,” Baxter said, nodding smugly. “Her crack security team. Me and that dumbass Meacham. You know how long I’ve put up with that clown? Oh well, looks like I’ll be working solo now.” He chuckled.

  “So you were going to wait until we were all in the car after the service—”

  “And then we wouldn’t have gone back to her place at all. I had a nice little setup out near Red Rock Canyon State Park. Little cabin up there, been in Meacham’s family forever. The guy couldn’t stop talking about it; he used to invite me up there to camp. Ha. I would have put him down first, tossed him in the lake. He could have spent an eternity on his family land.

  “And then you and I and Sheila would have waited in the cabin. I took precautions—there’s supplies up there to last a week. Not that I figured it would take more than a few hours for you and Sheila to break down, once she remembered what your future held. You and she’d be begging to do the trade.”

  “Except for one thing—we didn’t have it.”

  “I know that now.” More chuckling. “I swear, it’s like I’ve got a little guardian angel sitting on my shoulder. If you and your boyfriend hadn’t bolted, you never would have ended up at your uncle’s hidey-hole, or on his little treasure hunt.”

  “When you shot her at the BART station—” Tanner said angrily.

  “Totally harmless. Mild sedative, I substituted it myself. I needed her unharmed, of course. You, I didn’t give a shit about, a waste of bullets. I just didn’t factor in the virus, which attacks the compounds in the sedative. Yeah, don’t look so surprised. I minored in biology.”

  “And then you tracked us using the phone?” Tanner demanded.

  “Yeah, Boy Scout. That’s what you get for playing out of your league. It was just bad luck that once you got on the train again, I picked the wrong station. Meacham and I had gone to Embarcadero, figuring you’d be heading back to the East Bay. And instead you went to Civic Center, where Sheila had sent the B team. You can bet that if I’d been there, things would have played out differently.”

  “And this whole time, Meacham never knew what you were up to?”

  “Yeah. Poor dumbass. I think he lost the thread somewhere back at the memorial service, but he was a good soldier. Did what he was told. Listen, this is fun and all, but I’d like to get going, and I imagine you’re in a bit of a hurry too. I’m assuming you’ve got everything I need now, right?”

  “No,” Tanner and Carina said at once.

  “There wasn’t anything in the locker,” Tanner said.

  “We still don’t know where he stored his backups,” Carina added. She knew neither of them was a credible liar, and Baxter merely raised an eyebrow.

  “You’ll forgive me for not taking your word for it. Go ahead and assume the position.”

  He pointed to the hood of the car, and Carina and Tanner put their hands on the warm metal while he patted them down. Carina squeezed her eyes shut at his touch, trying to quell the nausea that passed through her. When he started on Tanner, she watched from the corner of her eye, breathing a sigh of relief when he stopped short of Tanner’s socks and shoes. Next he went through the backpack, checking every pocket, raising his eyebrow at the rubber-banded money.

  “I guess Walter set you up pretty well. Still, this doesn’t mean anything. I’m guessing you’ve got the data addresses memorized. Lucky for you, I’m still willing to trade. We’ll go up to the cabin just like I planned. Let you think for a few hours, let you get a little twitchier.…” He glanced at his watch. “Yeah, give it an hour or two and you should be pretty cooperative. You tell me what I need to know, I give you the antidote.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out a syringe, and held it up to show her before putting it back. “I used the spare on your boyfriend here, so he can confirm it’s the good stuff. Anyway, then I call up my guys, make the trade, and it’s happily ever after for everyone. I’ll be on a beach next week with eight million in offshore accounts, and you two can go to prom together.”

  “It’s hardly happily ever after for the Albanians’ future victims,” Tanner said angrily. “You’re going to arm them with a weapon no one can control.”

  Baxter shrugged, faking a yawn. “Me, or someone else. News flash, kid: the world’s an unstable place. There’s a global marketplace for terror, and you can either get your piece or let it run you over. If it isn’t me, someone else will sell it.”

  “Not if the Army Criminal Investigation Command shuts down the lab,” Carina spat. “Did you threaten my mom because she got too close?”

  “Oh, that. That was ridiculously easy.” Baxter laughed. “I was in it for the long haul. I was willing to wait until they figured out the little problem of how to attach the antidote. The virus without the antidote wasn’t worth a fraction of what I’m going to get for it now. But then your mom started nosing around, trying to get the whole project shut down. Well, I couldn’t have that, now, could I?”

  The knot of grief that Carina had buried deep inside threatened to burst free. She knew that if she allowed rage to overtake her now, she couldn’t do what needed to be done. So she pushed it back down. “How did you stop her?” she asked quietly, tasting bile.

  He shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe it himself. “One phone call. I used a voice mod—told her if she didn’t get the hell out of Dodge I was going after you. Said if I ever saw her face again I’d take you out. Hell, I never thought it would be so easy to scare her off. That’s the problem with women,” he added offhandedly. “Too sentimental. Your mom, Sheila, both of them let their feelings for you get in the way of what matters.”

  “It’s not just women,” Tanner said, his voice like steel. “You don’t get to decide who matters. We’re going to beat you, Baxter. I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but we’re going to walk away from this and you’re not.”

  Baxter laughed. “Yeah, really? ’Cause if I’m not mistaken, I’m the guy with the gun here and you’re just the little punk caught with his pants down.”

  Still chuckling, he moved around to the back of the car and
popped the trunk.

  “There’s someone I’d like you to meet, Carina,” he added. “Just in case you’re considering using your superhero powers on poor little old mortal me.”

  A man rose from the trunk, unfolding his limbs and flexing his hands, working the kinks out of his neck and shoulders. He leapt lightly to the ground, a young, fit man dressed in camouflage clothes and boots. Carina recognized the flushed skin, the bright eyes, the manic quality of his expression.

  He’d been infected.

  “Meet Joe,” Baxter said. “Not your average gun for hire. All you need to know is that anything you can do, he can do better. So mind your manners.”

  “Joe”—Carina was pretty sure that wasn’t his real name—rode in the backseat with Carina and Tanner on either side, like a parent separating two quarrelsome toddlers. Baxter drove. In what seemed like moments, they were on the Bay Bridge, heading out of San Francisco into the East Bay under the early-morning sunrise.

  It had been eleven hours since she and Tanner had taken the BART train under this very same body of water on their way to Uncle Walter’s secret hideaway. Three hours since Tanner had killed a man. A little more than an hour since they’d nearly been blown up by a drone.

  It was now only a little over two hours until she started to die.

  She wondered what it would feel like. Right now, she could sense her pulse racing far faster than normal. Her face was sheened with perspiration, and if it hadn’t been for the water bottles from the trunk that Baxter had tossed to them earlier, she was sure she would have started to experience dehydration. In addition to processing calories at an astonishing rate, she sensed that her body was burning through water, and she drank two bottles in a row.

  She was famished again, but her hunger took a backseat to other sensations, none of them pleasant. Some of the larger muscles in her arms and legs had begun twitching uncontrollably. Not often—just enough to make her notice—but she had a feeling that the pace would only increase. She was starting to have trouble focusing on a single thought at a time. Her senses were in overdrive: the colors in the view out the window—the cerulean sky, the white sails dotting the navy of the water, the red car in the next lane—hurt her eyes. She was assaulted by dozens of odors with each inhalation: not just the cologne, deodorant, sweat, and soap smells of the other passengers, but chemical smells of carpet shampoo and window cleaner and leather conditioner; coffee and stale food that must have been consumed in the car; and a dozen different notes in the air circulating from the outside. In addition to the sound of the engine and the passing traffic, she could hear the breathing of each individual; she even heard her own heartbeat.