I exchanged another look with Dave. “You could tell him we just got away,” I said softly. “You’ll have his zombie, right? Why not just let us go?”
“We’ve been your friends,” Dave encouraged.
There was a brief moment of guilt that flashed in The Kid’s eyes, but then he shook his head. “But he’s my dad. I have to do what he wants. Just get in.”
“Fuck,” Dave grunted as he climbed into the back of the SUV.
I clambered in after him, but before I could get settled, Robbie said, “Now sit back to back. I’m going to tie you up.”
“What?” I started, but Dave grabbed my hand and gave me a look. The Kid would have to put the gun down to tie one of his fancy knots, which just might give us a chance for escape.
Except… he didn’t. He pulled a handgun from one of those many magical pockets of his and leveled it in my face as he set the shotgun down at his feet. Keeping it steady, he somehow managed to get ropes wrapped around both our wrists and a knot tied.
All with one fucking hand.
“Damn, kid, you really are good at that,” I said with begrudging respect.
He smiled as he started to put the back door down. “Well, there’s not exactly a lot of TV to watch anymore. I have lots of time to practice.”
Then he was gone, the door shut and the two of us trapped behind the cargo gate. I rested my head back against Dave’s shoulder.
“So now what?”
“I don’t know,” Dave sighed. “I’m thinking. Aren’t you supposed to be the brains of this operation?”
I laughed despite our situation. “Well, let’s see, I believed a mad scientist and a crazy kid over you. I’m going to say that my brain power isn’t so great anymore. I may already be a zombie.”
Dave’s fingers found mine and he squeezed gently. “Just stay calm. We’ll figure a way out of this.”
I wasn’t so sure as The Kid got into the SUV and put it in gear just like he did it every day.
“Are you really eleven?” I called forward in the vehicle as he squealed the tires out of the parking lot and steered us back toward the highway.
“Yeah,” he called back. “That part was true. Why?”
“Well, you’re fucking driving the car like you’re in the 500,” I said as Dave and I rocked helplessly as he took yet another corner on all but two wheels. I think he might have been getting even for all the times our driving threw him around in the back of the van.
“You should have seen me following you on the motorcycle earlier today,” The Kid said with the smugness of a child who has the coolest new toy before anyone else. He smiled at me in the rearview mirror, but his eyes barely appeared in the glass because he was so short.
I blinked a couple of times at the idea of such a thing. “You know how to drive a motorcycle. At fucking eleven years old?”
He rolled his eyes. “I learned how to drive when I was eight, running around in the desert while my dad worked in the lab.”
Behind me, Dave shifted. I could feel his rage, his betrayal, bubbling through his body. It made his back hot against mine.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
He craned his neck back a little in a jerking motion. I could only see a tiny portion of his face from the corner of my eye as I strained toward him, but he looked as pissed as he felt.
“Well, I guess we’ll find out in a minute,” he said. “We’re pulling up to the warehouse.”
I craned my neck. Sure enough we were. And who was waiting for us? Barnes. He waved as The Kid slid into place in front of the old building and put the SUV in park.
Robbie got out and closed the door behind him. We couldn’t hear them, but I watched in surprise as The Kid approached Kevin. The doctor opened his arms and embraced the little boy briefly, ruffling his hair as they parted. They spoke for a moment, with The Kid motioning occasionally toward us and the car.
Kevin’s smile eventually fell and he walked up to the back of the SUV. Slowly, the hatch back glided open, sending a stream of bright sunshine in to blind us since we couldn’t lift our hands to shade our eyes. Barnes stepped in front of us, though, and then he blocked the sun, becoming only an ominous shadow standing before us.
“Hello, Sarah, David,” he finally said as he leaned down so I could see his face. It was remarkably smug. “I do hope you’ll forgive my boy for bringing you to me this way. But this has become our only option, I’m afraid.”
“Fuck you,” Dave spat.
Kevin smiled slightly, though the slur made his eyes lose a bit of their pleasure. Apparently he still didn’t like the language, which made me want to sing any song I could think of from South Park if only to piss him off. “Robbie’s Dad is a Bitch” seemed like an appropriate alteration of one.
“Let’s all go inside, shall we?” he said with a gesture toward the warehouse… like he was inviting us in for fucking tea or something.
He pulled out a shotgun of his own (aw, matching father/son psychos, how cute) and motioned us out of the car with the barrel. Since we were tied, exiting the SUV took some maneuvering, but we finally managed to slowly move out of the back of the vehicle together. Back to back, we walked toward the warehouse.
Dave was in the lead, facing forward. He never dragged me, in fact we were almost in perfect tandem. Those facts made me feel more guilty than ever about not believing him… about taking the side of the son of a bitch who walked behind us, that smug smile still trained on me as he cradled the shotgun in his arms. How had I ever thought he was even remotely cute?
The Kid was in front, leading the way. I could hear the soft crunch of his boots on the gravel up ahead of us and could only imagine that poor Dave was just keeping it together having to follow the little brat.
We should have just let the damn zombies eat him back when we first found him. But hindsight is twenty-twenty, right?
Down the elevator we rode and let me tell you, that was an awkward ride. I’m sure you know what I mean. Haven’t you ever gotten on an elevator with just a couple of people, maybe even one of whom you know a little, but no one has anything to say? And it feels like it takes forever to get to your floor?
Yeah, it was just like that except with guns and bound hands. Oh and no elevator music, thank God.
Still, we somehow made it into the lab and as the doors downstairs opened, Dave shook his head.
“What the fuck with all this captive shit, Barnes? If you’re going to kill us, why not just get the fuck to it?”
I jerked to look at him over my shoulder. Was he nuts? I mean, I hadn’t fought for so many months just to get shot with my hands tied behind my back like some kind of mob moll in a bad Godfather rip-off. At least I wanted the chance to fight.
“I don’t like waste, David,” Barnes said as he stepped closer to us. “I like to use and re-use. This will be over for you soon enough. At least, I think it will be.”
“What do you mean, you think it will be?” I asked, hating how my voice shook.
He looked at me and there was a tightness, a sadness around his mouth. “We may know a great deal about how the zombie body functions, but very little about the mind. For all I know, those poor souls are utterly aware of everything going on around them, their minds intact and unable to stop themselves as they dive into their victims and roam the earth in rotting hell.”
I squeezed my eyes shut at the nightmare Barnes painted. My stomach turned and I barely kept my food from earlier in the day down. I really wished I hadn’t eaten his crappy croissant.
“Now, move,” Barnes said, the softness in his voice gone as he pressed the side of his gun against Dave’s chest and shoved him.
Dave snapped forward with a rather feral snarl, dragging me behind him as he rolled up on Barnes.
“Hey!”
All of us stopped and turned because it was The Kid who had spoken. He held his gun level to Dave’s face and he said, “Let’s just go to the room and we’ll talk this all out there. Okay?”
Dave
was tense as a board as he shook his head in disgust, but he followed The Kid, forcing me to back along behind him, my eyes once again on Barnes.
“Is he your real kid or is this one of those ‘New World-New Family’ deals you see so often in the camps?” I asked with an even glare for Barnes. I still couldn’t believe they were related, no matter what Robbie said.
He stared back at me evenly. “Oh, he’s very much of my own flesh,” he said with a smile. “Don’t you see it in our eyes?”
I shook my head. “I guess I never looked closely enough.”
He nodded. “Well, that was your mistake, I suppose. One of many I’m sure you’re reviewing in your head right now and kicking yourself for them.”
I didn’t get to respond because we moved into a room. This wasn’t a place I had seen during my tour of the facility the previous day. But then, as Barnes had said, that had been my mistake, too. I had been willing to believe that what he showed me in those first dozen or so rooms was true and had never guessed that it was all a manipulation. He’d made the gamble that I’d give up when so many rooms he showed me were anything but sinister.
Stupid me, his bet had paid out at least double. But then, I’d never done so well in Vegas anyway.
The room was big, with bright lights above that made the sterile white walls all the more painfully stark. I blinked as I looked around. There was a big window on one side of the room that looked into a lab. On the other walls were large doors, but they didn’t look like they opened on hinges, but rather slid up and down.
Barnes backed up to the door and lifted his shotgun to his shoulder. “Now, Robert, please do untie Sarah and David. And don’t try anything, you two, because I will shoot you without hesitation.”
I bit my lip, glaring at the doctor as The Kid unlooped the ropes around our wrists. Once we were able to break apart, Dave and I turned to face each other, each rubbing our raw wrists and looking at the other. There was no need to say much, we’d been together long enough to read something of the other’s mind and mood.
Neither of those were filled with very positive thoughts. As the door we’d entered slammed shut behind Barnes and The Kid, I reached out to take Dave’s hand. I shook my head.
“Sorry. This is my fault.”
His brow wrinkled and he stared down at me. “Not likely. The only one at fault here is that prick and his brat. They were the ones who preyed on your desire to find some kind of hope in the future.”
I dipped my chin as heat flooded my cheeks. “Yeah, well, so much for that, huh? I mean, I should have stuck with your way and only trusted what I could see around me. See where hope got me? Us?”
“Hey.” He lifted my chin with his finger. “I like that you have hope. When you believe there’s a future out there… it kind of makes me think that maybe there could be. There can only be one cynical jerk in this partnership and it’s me.”
“Very sweet,” came a voice from the speakers that were mounted around the room.
We both looked at the big window that faced into the adjoining room. Barnes was now sitting at a desk behind the glass, holding a microphone as he stared in at us.
“Where’s The Kid?” I asked.
“Still worrying over him even though he’s entirely capable of taking care of himself?” Barnes asked, and I thought I detected a hint of surprise in his tone. “He went out to collect the specimen you caught for me, Sarah. And by the way, thank you for that.”
“Thanks for almost getting me killed with your freak machines, asshole,” I snapped as I took a long step toward the glass.
Dave caught my arm and held me steady so that I couldn’t waste my energy going for the window.
Barnes shook his head. “I didn’t actually intend for my… what did you call them?” He seemed to ponder for a moment. “Oh yes, I remember now, bionics. I like that name. But I didn’t intend for my bionics to attack you in the school. I had hoped to drag our partnership out for a while longer before you learned the truth. Perhaps even to find a way to convince you to come around to my way of thinking.”
I burst out a grunt of disgust and turned my back on the glass.
“Sarah, if you did decide to join me, we could be a remarkable team,” his voice continued behind me. “You are like a warrior woman from some extinct tribe. Think of what we could do with my brains and your brawn and, may I add, beauty. What do you say? Join me?”
I spun around to face him. “I would rather gnaw my own arms off.”
His brow arched through the glass and then he shook his head. “Well, it may come to that eventually, I’m afraid.”
“Aside from wanting to fuck my wife,” Dave snapped as his hand came to rest at the small of my back protectively, “what the hell are you thinking, Barnes? Were you involved in the zombie research? What the hell are you doing creating bionics?”
Barnes settled back into his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him.
“I wish I had been involved in the initial research. I’d heard about it, though it was deeply classified. But there are always whispers in the scientific community. But the research was in Seattle and I wasn’t able to get a transfer. They kept me here, working on other war elements. Like making soldiers stronger. Faster. More obedient.”
I blinked. “Making them bionic?”
“In a way.” Barnes shook his head. “What I told you about the plague hitting the city and us being in lockdown was true. When the alarms went off, though, I insisted that Robbie be brought down to the safety of the lab.”
“And what about his mother?” I asked softly.
“Let the bitch rot,” he snapped, his anger brightening his face in a rare display of his emotions. “She was sleeping with some army major anyway. A real man, she called him. I enjoyed watching her try to claw her way into the facility.”
“Wait, you watched her?” Dave asked in horror.
“Of course. I let her see that the boy was taken down to the labs. She begged the cameras, she pleaded with me… but I let the infected swarm over her. She was so torn apart, she didn’t even re-animate.”
I backed away from the window a step and stared. “Sadistic bastard.”
He shrugged. “Vengeance is commonplace in a world such as this. Are you saying that since the plague broke out you’ve never just killed someone because you didn’t like them? I mean, there’s no way you wouldn’t get away with it.”
“There’s been enough killing to last me a lifetime,” I said with a deep breath. “I don’t need to do it to frivolously satisfy my pride or my sense of moral outrage because someone took a parking place from me once.”
“Interesting that you compare stealing a parking place to stealing a wife,” Barnes said softly. “Either way, once she was dispensed with, the remaining survivors had to deal with the reality of our situation. And when one of the military men became ill, we realized that the infection had been brought down into the lab.”
I stared for a moment at Barnes and then let my gaze move to David.
“The infection came down here and you survived?” he asked in disbelief. “In this tight environment?”
“Well, we caught the man very quickly and confined him. In truth, his condition became very useful, for I was able to study him. I took core samples of his tissue, his brain, and using those I was able to begin work on various elements of the infection. One by one, I tested my theories first on the infected soldier, but then I needed to expand my research. So I picked others in our group of survivors.”
I covered my mouth. “So these people were trapped down here with you and you used them as guinea pigs.”
“No,” he said evenly through the speakers. “I used guinea pigs as guinea pigs. I used humans as test subjects. There were a few who caught on to my schemes, but they were easily isolated and taken care of. By the time the power generators went out above and unlocked the elevator, all that were left were just Robbie and me.”
“Then why did you need us?” I asked with a shake of my hea
d. “Why call us here and ask us to catch you zombies if you were capable of creating and testing on them on your own?”
He shrugged. “I have created them and tested on fresh and actively turning specimens, yes. But what I told you when we first met was also true. I needed more zombies of differing kinds and rot levels.”
“Why not get them yourself?” I pressed. “You’re clearly more than capable.”
He sniffed like the idea was beneath him. “I wasn’t about to go out myself and try to capture them. So you truly were doing me a service by helping me run my tests and increase my… what did you call it, David? My Undead Army.”
I winced because let’s face it, this was my fault. Dave never would have gone along with Barnes’s request if not for me and my insistence that we try to save the world.
“How many were there down here to start with?” Dave asked. “Alive before the outbreak.”
“Ten,” Barnes admitted without hesitation.
“So you killed eight people?” Dave breathed.
“Well, seven,” Barnes said, unapologetic and even bored. “The first one was infected before we were locked down.”
I paced to the corner of the room. “And Robbie saw all this? He knows you murdered his mother, that you slaughtered these people?”
“He’s eleven, Sarah, I know better than to expose him to such things. That’s how people become serial killers.” Barnes shook his head. “No, I protected him from all of that, kept him safe from what was happening around us. And the fact that only the two of us survived the lockdown actually brought us closer together. He needs me and loves me just as a good son should. A fact I think you saw demonstrated today.”
Dave swiped a hand over his face. “And what if we tell him what you did?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. “Why would he believe you over me, his father?” Barnes asked.
“He’s a smart kid—” I began.
He turned his attention on me immediately. “Oh no, Sarah. Robbie tested in the top one percent on all the standard I.Q. tests. He’s a genius, not smart. But he’s a boy. And I doubt you’ll sway him to turn on the one remaining parent he possesses.”
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