Nate returned and we got dressed. If I moved a little gingerly while pulling on my pants, it was pure coincidence. I couldn’t help it; I had to step up to the mirror by the showers and turn around so I could see first one, then the other black mark, the skin around it slightly swollen and red. I knew that in a few days it would look just like the one in the middle. I didn’t really know how to feel about it. It signified something that wasn’t true for me, but at the same time so much more than six lines ever could.
“Are you okay?” Nate murmured as he stepped up to me, his breath warm on the side of my neck. I caught his gaze in the mirror, taking a moment to think about his prompt. Was I okay? No. Out there, starving but not feeling hungry, feeling exhausted without moving that much because it wasn’t overexertion that leached the very strength from my muscles, it had been easy to ignore what was going on inside of me. Or easier. I’d done enough wallowing as it was, feeling sorry for myself. But now I had to face the fact that I wasn’t an island. What little Dom had divulged had been a lot more than I’d wanted to hear, and I was sure that it was just the start of it. If I really was infected, I needed to know. I needed to hear all this. I needed to face the music and deal with the consequences. But I really didn’t want to.
But even less I wanted to let Nate down, and force him to carry that load for me. There had to be enough on his mind as it was. We had lost two people, and if we were lucky no one else in the weeks since. The country was in unrest, and keeping everyone safe at the Silo and over at Dispatch was a good solution for now, but not in the long run. The last thing Nate needed was to have to worry whether the occasional suicidal thought of mine would lead me to do something stupid—or, even worse, brand me as undependable. So I put on a brave face and smiled, even if it was a somewhat lopsided one.
“I have your name on my ass for fucking forever,” I replied. “I don’t think that makes me anything even close to ‘okay.’”
He laughed, wrapping his arms around me for a moment to pick me up and squeeze me against him.
“I think that makes you very okay,” he observed, rubbing his—freshly shaved—cheek against mine.
“You would say that,” I snarked, digging my fingers into his arms until he let go. Turning toward the elevator, I couldn’t help but slap his ass, making sure to hit the tender side. “Come on, let’s go. I have a certain feeling that people are waiting for us.”
He nodded and joined me without a comment, but I didn’t miss the look of worry crossing his face.
Chapter 11
As soon as we stepped out of the elevator and into the Silo proper, I knew that our quiet time together was over. For one, Commander Wilkes and his other aide, Meeks, were waiting for us, with Sunny and Dom hovering behind them. For another, it took Andrej all of five seconds to envelope me in a bone-brushing hug that made me squeeze right back. The Ice Queen patiently waited her turn, but all her usual reservations aside, she also embraced me, if let go after a polite three seconds. They were the only ones of our people who’d reached the Silo yet, but Pia informed us that the others would likely get here before nightfall. Wilkes shook our hands, but I was sure that it wasn’t my imagination that he let go of mine rather quickly. He looked tense, a definite difference to our welcome here last time, but then things had changed since then.
“I apologize for complicating things like this for you,” he explained after all pleasantries had been exchanged. “I hope you understand.”
The way he said that didn’t exactly leave much room for protestations, but I had no intention to offer any. My nod he took for what it was—acceptance rather than agreement—and he was all too happy when Sunny barged in, perfectly vibrating with excitement.
“I’m sure you will want to see the results?” he said, way too enthusiastic for his own good. I hadn’t forgotten about his… fumble earlier, and I was still hoping that something—anything, really, zombie attacks included—would need our attention first, but that sadly wasn’t the case.
“What you have so far, please,” I lied. “I presume you’ll take a few more days to get it all done?”
“More like months,” Sunny enthused, leading the way toward the command center rather than the labs. Nate, Pia, and Andrej fell into step behind us, with Dom a silent presence next to Nate, while Wilkes and Meeks brought up the rear. “We’re still busy doing chromatography to clear your blood of anything but the virus. It’s highly fascinating that we still haven’t managed to produce antibodies so we can do the reverse, but it’s only a matter of time—“
I tuned him right out, instead studying the way people reacted to us passing by. A lot of them ignored us, or only took passing interest to greet their Commander. But there were a lot of non-Silo personnel down here today, and almost all of them checked us out, trying to gauge who we were, and, more importantly, how far up the pecking order we ranked. That wasn’t new, but what was different was that now I didn’t drop out of their focus the second they saw that the sides of my neck were unmarked. And from my neck their gazes usually dropped to the weapons strapped to my thighs, the way I moved, or how I studied them in turn. I could only hope that most of them would miss the slight hitch in my gait every few steps when my left thigh gave a twinge. Staying still for how many hours I’d slept had made my muscles lock up somewhat, but already I felt the stiffness ease up a little. A few sprints and I would be as good as new.
What they didn’t look at me as was a half-zombie, ready to tear out their throats at a moment’s notice, and that was something I was insanely grateful for. Some did regard me as a juiced-up lunatic about ready to run amok, but that I could deal with. After that intermezzo with the traders and soldiers I wasn’t sure if that wasn’t warranted.
Sunny kept droning on until we reached the command center. Last time half the workstations there had been abandoned, but now they were manned to the last one. On several of the screens that we passed I could see air surveillance videos, making it obvious where the drones we’d seen were piloted from. The video wall was showing a huge map of the country, a lot of the main thoroughfares marked red. I remembered that last time they had been green—all the roads that had been reported as at least passable and clear of larger groups of zombies. The Silo and Dispatch were both marked as green, and several of the settlements were blue, making me guess that meant neutral. Our base back in Wyoming was one of them, I was somewhat happy to see. Aurora and Harristown were red, and neither came as much of a surprise. I would have loved to inquire about that, but Sunny went over to one of the smaller workstations at the back, shooing away the guy who’d been stealthily playing a computer game in the midst of all the productivity going on. A few clicks and he had that presentation pulled up that Dom had been hinting at. I figured it was a small mercy that it didn’t have a title page, and seemed to consist mostly of scanned images of the different assays they had run already.
“This is really quite fascinating,” Sunny said, not giving anyone a chance to contradict him. “We have been waiting for over a year to see the virus mutate, but definitely didn’t expect it to recombine. Dominic told you that theory already? Of course it will be another week until I can confirm this completely, but if you look at the first blots that we did—“
There were way too many lanes on that SDS-PAGE gel and western blot that Sunny was raving about, making me tense up before my mind was even able to sift through the details. None of the lanes were signed with anything but numbers, but I’d seen the results of way too many time progression experiments in my time not to make sense of this. Although, time progression was not the applicable term.
My throat closed up and my stomach dropped out from underneath me. It was impossible for me to tear my gaze away from the screen, and I didn’t hear a word of what Sunny kept going on about. When I finally managed to shake myself out of it, I reached over and pulled the stack of papers from his hands that he used to explain what exactly which blotch on the screen signified. I didn’t care about the diagrams and jotted notes,
but kept rifling through the pages until I found the sheet that held the sample order for those first assays that Sunny had shown me. It was all abbreviations, of course, because scientists were lazy fuckers through and through, but it wasn’t hard to decipher them and match them up to what I knew they had to be. Right there it was, black on white, that harmless-looking “P” and “E”—short for “placenta” and “embryo.”
Air left my lungs in one explosive burst and I felt the sheets slip through my suddenly slack fingers, tumbling all over the floor. My heart seized up inside my chest, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. My mind ground to a halt, trains of thought clashing against one another without affecting anything.
This couldn’t be happening. Of all the things that had gone down, not this.
But it had happened, because there was the data. And didn’t it make so much more sense that Nate would shush Sunny to shut him up before he could blab about inconveniences, rather than to spare me another deluge of grief? Because what was going on inside of me had never mattered to him as much as virtually anything else.
Anger came hot on the heels of denial dropping away, anger so hot and deep-seated that it made me see red. I felt my ragged fingernails bite into my palms as my hands curled into fists. I needed an outlet for that anger, and I knew that if I didn’t leave here, right fucking now, it would be someone’s face rather than an unlucky inanimate object.
Turning around slowly, I stared at Nate. At least he didn’t have the audacity to ignore me. And, oh, he knew that he’d screwed up. I could see it in the guilt on his face, the anguish in his eyes. But he stood tall and defiant as ever, not giving an inch when he should have been groveling in front of me.
I held his gaze until I couldn't stand to look at him anymore—and then I left.
Chapter 12
You know you’re in trouble when all of a sudden a corridor that is wide enough for five cars to drive through side by side is closing in on you.
That was exactly how I was feeling as I stormed out of the command center and flew blindly down the hallway. My only instinct was to get out, but with my mind all but scrambled I took the wrong turns, and rather than reach the hangar, I ended up stepping into the converted gym. There were a few people in there, training on the mats across the room, but I didn’t even really see them. My eyes fell on the punching bag suspended from the metal rafters overhead, and suddenly I had an outlet for all the anguish that was tearing me apart right now. Screaming, I exploded toward the bag, first hitting it with my fists, and when that did nothing, I pivoted on my bad leg and kicked the bag as hard as I could. Leather ripped, the bag slamming into the wall as it tore off its suspension hook, and it fell down in a heap on the floor, sand escaping through the tear at the top. I stared at it, panting, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
The silence in the room was deafening, making me turn around slowly and glare at the others on the mats. “What?” I ground out, but got no reply, just more incredulous stares.
The door to the gym fell shut with a bang, and when I glanced over, I saw that the Ice Queen was standing next to it. She ignored me, instead zeroing in on the others. “Out,” she barked, her commanding tone allowing no disobedience. One by one, the others filed out, a few curious glances directed at me but mostly straight forward at the door. The last guy that scrambled outside hastily closed the door again, essentially locking us in here together.
With one exception, Pia was the last person I wanted to be alone with right this moment.
I stared at her, my shoulders heaving, my teeth clamped together so tightly that they hurt. She held my gaze easily with that infuriating kind of calm that made me feel like a child throwing a tantrum. I fucking hated her guts right now.
“Are you here to clean up his mess?” I shouted across the room, ignoring how all the concrete around us made my voice echo. “You know what he did, right? Of course you do, because you always fucking know everything. It’s me he constantly shits on,” I accused.
The venom dripping from my voice didn’t affect her in the least, but then I hadn’t expected it to.
“That’s not why I’m here,” she said.
“Then why? To tell me to get my shit together and stop acting like a spoiled brat?” I tried to remember if she’d ever done that—I had certainly deserved it a time or two—but came up blank. There wasn’t much else my mind was revolving around than what had my pulse up at one-eighty.
As before, what I said didn’t even seem to get through to her. “Not particularly, no. You look like you need to vent some steam.” She paused as she looked away, but held my gaze easily when she caught it again. “I’m here to tell you a story.”
“I don’t fucking need to hear any stories!” I rasped, but she would have none of it.
“You do. So you understand.” Was that actual hesitation? Couldn’t be. She remained silent for maybe five seconds, and although her voice stayed calm, there was sudden tension in the lines of her body that, like this, I hadn’t noticed before. “Just hear me out. You don’t need to say anything, and after I leave, we will never speak of this again.” Pia waited until I gave a small nod before she went on. “I had two children. I lost them. If anyone here understands what you are going through, it is probably me.”
That I hadn’t seen coming. I also didn’t know how it made me feel. Stupid. Angry. Yet before I could do more than open my mouth, she silenced me with a jerk of her chin.
“Let me talk first. I am not telling you this to make you feel bad. But you should know this.” Her mouth quivered, and I thought she tried to smile but didn’t manage it. “Kata I had early, when I was seventeen. She wasn’t planned, but she came at the right time. I never wanted to be a hairdresser but my mother made me learn the trade. Said it would be good for a woman to be independent. I was stupid, of course, and in love, so I had a child with a man who was barely more than a child himself. I thought I loved Mirko, but I loved my beautiful, intelligent little girl more. Three years later I had a boy, Luka. I was still living with my family because Mirko was all talk and never brought home money. He got himself killed when the war started. I grieved but he was never there, so the children didn’t miss him much.” She paused, and now she did manage a small, private smile, momentarily lost in memories. “I loved my children. And I loved being with them. The women in the village, they used to bring me their children when they had errands to run, or needed some time away from the craziness. I never minded. I always helped. I had my children, and their children, and I was happy not cutting hair.”
Her eyes focused on me again, a shadow passing behind them. “It was when the ethnic cleansing started. The war, it did things to people. Turned them against each other. The women and children, they bore the brunt of it. I tried to be there for them, but my brother…” She trailed off there before she resumed with a sigh. “He needed help. He had information, and it was vital. But he got wounded and couldn’t deliver it. He asked me to do it. He knew I could run, and I knew the hills outside the village, I would find the rebel camp. And I did, only that the army found it first.”
It was hard to reconcile what she told me with the woman I’d come to know rather well over the past year. But there was no doubt that she was telling the truth. I just didn’t know what to make of this—although I had a sinking feeling I could tell where it was going.
Shaking herself out of the memories, the Ice Queen went on. “They were slaughtering the last remaining men in the camp when I got close. I turned back when I realized what was going on, but what I saw through the trees made me stop in my tracks, cower there in horror. I thought I hid well but they must have seen me because when I went back home, they followed me.” She paused, grimacing. “I was slow, and they were fast. They got there ahead of me, but just in time for me to see them pull my brother out of the house and shoot him in front of my parents. Then they locked everyone inside and burned the house to the ground.” She didn’t elaborate, but it was obvious that this meant her entire
family. “I wanted to hurl myself after them into the flames, but one of my brother’s comrades had been hiding in the woods also. He held me back, clapped his hand over my mouth to stifle my screams, and told me that if I wanted to make their deaths count, I needed to survive.” Her eyes flitted away from mine, down to her hands. “If you look closely, Romanoff still bears the scars today from where I bit him.”
So that was where Andrej and she had met. It made a lot of sense now. She gave me a moment to ask something, but when I didn’t, she went on.
“I don’t remember much of what happened after that. We fled, or else we would have gotten slaughtered, too. There was nothing left there that held me, and he had no family, not even where he’d come from. He was a mercenary back then already, doing a favor for a friend. When that friend died, he stuck with my brother, and then with me. Years passed. I couldn’t forget. After cutting me down from the third tree I tried to hang myself on he decided I needed a distraction.” She said that with a humorless grin. “He still had contacts with people he had worked for, before coming to Kosovo. We met up with them, somewhere in the Middle East. They were all grand talks, with grand ideas. Andrej never believed them, but their contacts led us to a recruiter, for a program the US military was running. Very secretive, very low-profile.” I could fill in the blanks what program that had been all right.
“They wanted to reject me, because I wasn’t a trained fighter,” Pia explained. “But they didn’t have enough female volunteers, so in the end, they agreed to take me as well. I was their perfect candidate—no family, no purpose, no fear of death. They didn’t give me much chance of survival, but I proved them wrong. While the others still recovered, Andrej started to train me. It took some getting used to, learning to fight and manage the physical perks.” Her eyes dropped to the sand sack I’d eviscerated but didn’t comment on it. “Then they had a training mission for us. It went wrong, but I was one of those that survived. Then they sent us into a real fight. I… snapped.” Now there was real humor in her eyes, which was just plain creepy. “They wanted to put me down after that, like a dog. They said I wasn’t mentally fit for what they needed me to do. A young captain from the group that had pulled us out objected. He insisted that there was use for anyone who came out of such a fight alive. He had no illusions about my damage, but he didn’t care. You know that he can be very single-minded when he has a purpose that drives him.” Nate, of course—who else?
Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 Page 13