Sins of Our Ancestors Boxed Set

by Bridget E. Baker

  “Yes Brayden, we want to help,” I say. “No weapons, no threats. Just medicine. Will you allow it?”

  He lets us inject him and becomes our first patient. We follow him to Rafe's room, almost at the end of the long hallway.

  “Why inject him now?” I whisper. “Shouldn't we save the doses we have for the worst cases?”

  “We need to inject as many healthy-ish ones as we can on the front end,” Aunt Anne says. “Hopefully within a day we'll be able to use their blood to treat others. The weak ones will probably be useless for treating others.”

  I'm glad Aunt Anne's here to think about these things. I hated being Job’s backup. Now I’m not the B team, I’m a far distant C team.

  I'm even happier when we walk into Rafe's room. I would've punched him in the nose and never looked back on Monday night. Today I can barely handle the sight of him lying on a hospital bed, his face so pale it almost blends with the bed sheet, his arms limp at his sides, and sores on his cheek near his right temple and on his hand. I look away.

  “Rafe,” Sam says. “You're still alive.”

  Rafe shifts and tries to sit up. “You came back.” His words state a fact, but his eyes shine with hope.

  “We did,” Sam says. “And we think we have a cure.”

  Aunt Anne crosses the room purposefully and injects Rafe with one of her prepared syringes. “This should help. Quickly, I hope.”

  “How much do you have?” Rafe mumbles.

  “We have ninety-eight more doses right now,” I say, “with more to come.”

  “Ninety eight?” The corners of his mouth droop and his hands shake. “That's all?”

  “We're preparing as much as we can, as quickly as it's safe,” Aunt Anne says. “We'll treat the healthiest patients first in order to culture more of the cure. Then we'll triage everyone and prioritize the sickest patients.”

  He nods. “It is a cure, then?”

  Aunt Anne says, “As soon as we locate the proper equipment, we'll confirm that Tercera's gone from my system, replaced by my brother's hacker virus. We do believe it is, yes.”

  Rafe collapses back against the bed, his eyes closed, but a smile on his lips.

  Aunt Anne turns to me. “We have a lot to do. First and foremost, we need to find someplace that has a scanning electron microscope. If I can see how quickly the hacker virus takes over Tercera at the volume I'm injecting, it will tell me what doses to plan. Then we can prepare the doses, test the children for their blood type and isolate which doses to give to each child.”

  I lay my hand on Aunt Anne's arm. “These kids are going into total organ failure right now. We don't have time to refine this. We need to take our cues from the patients, not the microscope. And if someone gets a few ccs of the wrong blood type, what’s the worst that happens? Because if we have to blood type the kids before we can treat them.” I shake my head.

  Aunt Anne's nostrils flare. “I hate that we have so little time, but you're right. I've grown so used to research that I'm running this like an experiment, and it more closely resembles a trauma code. A few ccs of blood that’s the wrong type might not be good, and it varies widely by person and blood compatibility, but it shouldn’t do more than make them ill. When you compare it to death. . .”

  She spins on her heel and marches into the hall. “You there.” She points at Brayden. “Bring me nineteen of your friends who aren't accelerated. Immediately.”

  “How much blood can we take from Sam, maximum?” I ask. “It's ten percent of blood volume, right?”

  Aunt Anne shakes her head. “Sam, are you okay with being weak and maybe even sleeping for a while?”

  He glances at me and I nod. “But I'm not alright with him being at risk of dying himself.”

  Aunt Anne says, “What's your weight and height? Two-twenty, and six-four, right?”

  Sam says, “Two-thirty, close enough.”

  Aunt Anne closes her eyes, her lips moving silently. “That's around six and a half liters, total volume, right Job? Check my math.”

  Job's lips move, and his fingers tap his thumbs on both hands. He nods. “Yeah, six point seven five, I think.”

  “That means ten percent is a little more than half a liter,” I say.

  “He'll survive higher, like twenty or thirty percent at least,” Aunt Anne says.

  “No, he lost half his blood volume two weeks ago. We can’t risk that, not again.”

  “It’s me,” Sam says. “I’m fine.”

  “We already drew a quarter unit for testing and those initial doses.” Aunt Anne taps her lip with her finger. “We can draw another liter probably, without doing any permanent damage, maybe a liter and a half.”

  Job frowns. “That's enough for what? Eight hundred doses.”

  She nods. “Twelve hundred if we draw a liter and a half. It's what we can do right now.”

  “Draw more,” Sam says.

  “No.” I take his arm, visions of him lying in a pool of expanding blood flooding my brain. “Stop being heroic and be smart. This is triple the typical maximum draw. It's enough.”

  Brayden arrives with more Marked kids and I count. Twenty-four.

  “She said nineteen,” I say.

  He shrugs. “I asked for some volunteers and this is who came.”

  Aunt Anne nods. “You did great, son. Job can you please administer the doses to them immediately and keep them all here? Brayden, how many Marked patients do we have?”

  He looks down at his boot. “We aren't sure, honestly, but we think close to eighty-thousand were accelerated.” His voice drops to a whisper. “A few thousand have already died.”

  My aunt's face remains impassive, but her shoulders droop and her hands shake. No matter what we do, we can't save that many. Not even close.

  John Roth will have a lot to atone for if there's an afterlife.

  “Brayden, I need your friends to come with me so we can test you near Job’s lab. We're dosing all of you first so that you can help us grow a cure for everyone else. The accelerated kids won't be able to donate, not while their organs are recovering. Only those of you who answered Rafe's call and weren’t accelerated have a hope of saving them now.” Aunt Anne turns to me. “We'll need to give every other dose of the initial rounds to the unaccelerated volunteers. The bigger the volunteers are the better, because the blood volume will be higher, which means greater blood draw capacity later.” She turns back toward the Marked kids who answered the first call. “Go and call as many of the friends who came with you as you can, but don't tell them why. We can't risk a panic. Can you do that?”

  When Brayden nods, she turns toward Job. “Please take your father and Rhonda and find me supplies. We have syringes by the truckload, but we need more bandages and rubbing alcohol. We really need to find a functioning electron microscope too, so I can determine when their blood can be used to treat others.” Aunt Anne wrings her hands. “It’s like I’m doing this blind. If only I could test my progress. I'm twelve hours ahead of them, so we could get a read on the twelve hour mark immediately.”

  Over the next two hours, Aunt Anne sets up camp in the Life Share Blood Center and teaches me to prepare doses. We draw a liter and a half from Sam, and I convert them all into doses of the hacker virus. Brayden brings round after round of volunteers, and I inject them one at a time. We instruct them to report back in twelve hours. We dose the first hundred and fifty quickly, but then twenty minutes pass before we see Brayden again.

  “What's taking so long?” I ask.

  He frowns. “I found all the volunteers that are close, but now I'm having to walk further and further away to find them.”

  “I'll get you some keys to one of our cars and you can use it to bring people faster.”

  “I don't know how to drive,” he says.

  I roll my eyes heavenward. “Alright, then wait here until my cousins come back. I'll have one of them ferry you around.”

  In the meantime, I run more numbers.

  “Aunt Anne, che
ck me on these figures,” I say. “If these kids are roughly half Sam's size, we can draw approximately half as much blood, so half to three quarters a liter each.”

  Anne nods. “That might be a little aggressive, but we can shift that down a bit. Go on.”

  “If we use the same ratio as we did with Sam's blood, and we won't know until we check the blood whether that's viable, we would have enough for sixty-thousand doses from the hundred and fifty we've already dosed. Hopefully within twelve hours.”

  Aunt Anne looks over my numbers and sighs. “It's rough, but you're not far off. We're close. Perhaps we should start dosing the roughest looking of those who are accelerated with the rest of Sam's donation. That will start to give us an idea of what sort of recovery to expect.”

  The door slams open. Job pants and leans over, resting his hands on his knees.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He holds up one hand. “I'm fine, just excited. I found a microscope, and the room that housed it was interior. It wasn't exposed to anything other than dust and even that's minimal. I think it still works!”

  19

  Sam's asleep, so I jot down a quick note telling him where we've gone. I tell Brayden to hold off on finding new recruits for the time being, and I take a sample of his blood to test. Once we have everything ready, Aunt Anne and I race out to the car. She checks the back to make sure she has her negative stains and specimen containers, and then we drive toward Job's find.

  He pulls up in front of a dark stone office building more than five miles away from the blood center.

  “How'd you find this?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I found the address on a brochure advertising to pay for subjects for a research study. We got lucky, I hope.”

  “What are we going to do about power?” I ask.

  “I sent Rhonda to find a portable generator,” he says. “Rafe has some and I told her where he kept them.”

  We race upstairs to the fourth floor and sure enough, there it is. My aunt sighs.

  By the time Rhonda arrives, we've cleaned up the microscope and prepared the samples. We boot it up after the generator goes online, and the console lights up. I whoop with joy, and so does Job. Aunt Anne smiles calmly. She places the samples of her blood, and the sample from Brayden's blood, inside the specimen chamber. The three minutes it takes to process the scan creep by, feeling more like an hour. My eyelids drift closed. I haven't slept well in days, and it’s catching up to me in a big way.

  The noise of my aunt's hands moving on the tracking ball jolts me awake and I focus on the screen, blinking my eyes to clear them. I don't see any tentacles poking out of the cell. Fluff balls float all around it, though.

  For the first time in my life, I hear Aunt Anne whoop for joy.

  It's probably best she doesn't repeat that, but Job and I drown her out with our cheers. We check Brayden's blood next, at the three-hour mark.

  The sample includes fourteen cells, and only four of them still have Tercera tentacles remaining. The sample shows dozens of hacker viruses floating around, and on two cells they're already actively attacking one of the tentacle viruses.

  “Fourteen hours out and no sign of Tercera, three hours out and it's on the run.” Aunt Anne's eyes well up. “My brother found the cure. Now let's go treat as many kids as we can and hope their organs can recover from whatever damage was already sustained.”

  The time between our discovery and sunset passes too quickly. Job doses the patients closest to us with the rest of Sam's samples and the samples I make from Aunt Anne's blood. We segregate those treated with my aunt’s blood for signs of an allergic reaction. Rhonda and Uncle Dan bring in a steady stream of syringes. My wrists ache, my back throbs and my head pounds, but I keep going.

  Poor Aunt Anne rests after her blood donation for all of half an hour, sipping water quickly, before she climbs off of the cot and begins to check on each patient one at a time, assessing organ damage and watching them for reactions to her donation.

  We push on into the night, notifying the infected and identifying and locating as many as we can. When the alarm sounds at ten a.m. signaling the twelve hour mark from first injection team, a cheer goes up in the blood lab. Brayden reports to have his blood drawn, and we test it on the microscope as quickly as possible. It looks just as good as my aunt's did. Aunt Anne and I work as quickly as we can to convert his blood into new doses. I slap my face every twenty or thirty minutes to keep awake, and try and avoid making any mistakes. Even so, a few of the doses are doubled, wasting precious resources.

  Just after one a.m. Sam puts his arms around me and pulls me back. “You need to take a break.”

  I shake my head. “I can't.” My voice drops to a whisper. “Job told me they've found five hundred more dead since we arrived. I literally kill people if I sleep.”

  “I heard that. He also told me it was to be expected. Eighty-five thousand kids in varying stages of the viral progression were accelerated. Some of them weren't going to make it no matter what you did from day two on.” He kisses my forehead. “You can and should sleep, at least a few hours. This process needs to be handled right and quickly, and to do that you need a two hour nap. Your aunt does too.”

  I open my mouth to protest, but Sam scoops me up and carries me over to a cot. “Ten years ago, I threatened to force feed you. This time I'm threatening to sit on you until you pass out if you won't go to sleep of your own volition.”

  I nod and close my eyes. “Two hours, Sam. Not a minute more.”

  His hand strokes my hair once, and I don't recall anything else until his hands gently shake my shoulders to wake me up.

  I roll over and bat at him. “Go away. Too tired.”

  “You made me promise,” Sam's voice says. “Two hours. It's been almost three, because you wouldn't even open your eyes at two.”

  When I force my eyelids up, my eyeballs feel like they've been scrubbed with steel wool. I smash my face with the heels of my hands until my eyes start processing light again, and shove up into a seated position. My neck screams, my back shouts and I want to take some acetaminophen and lay back down. Until I think about Liberty and Rose, who we still hadn't located when I went to sleep. They can't be dead already. They can't, and I need to keep working so we can save all the Libbys and Roses out there.

  “I'm up, I'm up, I promise.”

  Aunt Anne's already drawing blood from one of the Marked kids, a small, dark-skinned little girl, who can't possibly weigh eighty pounds.

  “Don't take too much,” I say.

  Anne snorts. “Thanks for the helpful advice, Rip Van Winkle. I looked up the right amount. I'm too tired to estimate properly.”

  She and I prepare more doses while Job, Rhonda and Uncle Dan administer them. I almost drop the syringe I'm filling when the shouting outside begins.

  I stumble out the front door, Sam at my heels.

  The last thing I expect to see in the hours before dawn is Adam's handsome face. “Ruby!” He runs toward me and pulls me into a big hug.

  “Adam, what are you doing here?”

  Four huge, military looking trucks are stopped so that their headlights blind us. The dull roar of their engines running in the street behind him would’ve alerted us to their presence before the shouting if only we'd been awake enough to notice it. When I pull away from Adam and squint in their direction, I make out men with guns drawn peering out from the windows of every truck.

  “We left as soon as I got the message from Frank and Paul.” Adam sounds annoyed.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, but I figured you’d send aid, not come yourself.”

  He shakes his head. “I’d have been here before you if the idiots had sent the jets ahead with a message. As it was, the jets arrived and told us they weren’t needed. No one told me you were headed here instead of back to us or that you needed supplies until Frank returned.”

  I hug Adam again, happier than I expected to see him alive. I hardly know him, but I trust him already. A
nd now he’s come through for me twice. “You really saved me back there in Nashville.”

  “Your guards arrived explaining what you went to Nebraska to find.” He shakes his head reprovingly. “They also said you sent them all out of concern for my safety. That’s sweet, but if I really were in danger, I’d have wanted you to keep as many of them with you as possible.”

  I shrug. “I’ve got Sam.”

  Sam reaches down and takes my hand in his.

  “You didn’t need to worry. Everything’s safe and well in Galveston, but I figured if you were coming back to Baton Rouge, you might have located the one in a million cure you hoped for. I’ll admit.” Adam ducks his head sheepishly. “I wanted to see for myself.”

  “We did find the cure, and not a minute too soon.” Even through my bone deep exhaustion, a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.

  “If that’s true, why do you look so awful?” He wrinkles his nose. “And not to be rude, but you stink pretty bad.”

  I snort. “Minutes matter right now. In fact, I shouldn't have stopped even to talk to you. To say we're understaffed would be the understatement of the week.”

  “Good thing I’m here with reinforcements, then.” He waves at the trucks, and the men drop their guns and climb out. Frank and Paul are some of the first men who reach us, and I grin at them both. They salute me, and thankfully this time they don't bow. They're learning.

  Once the men are out, they begin unloading the backs of the trucks. Food, IV fluids, IV kits and bags, boxes and boxes of medicine, and case upon case upon case of liquids. Water, juice, and soda.

  “I brought a half dozen nurses, and two physicians as well. I thought you might need some people with medical training.”

  “Adam, if you weren't my brother and I didn't love Sam so much, I'd kiss you right now.”

  “I'll settle for one more solid hug,” he says. “We have a few hundred of those to catch up on. I've only had a sister for a few weeks, but I missed you a lot when you left. More than I thought I would.”

  I wrap my arms around him as tightly as I can, but when my eyes begin to drift closed, I straighten up and pull away. “Well, we better get them started.”