“The V mob is here,” Ricker said.
“They’re out trying to protect the cure,” I said. “We have to help, but we have to get you safe first.”
I hooked my arm under Gabbi’s and pulled her up. I helped her limp toward the open steel door.
“What if there’s a V?” Ricker said.
“Then we’ll kill it,” Gabbi said.
Ricker hurried to get ahead of us. He pulled up the door, then froze. He turned around—all the blood drained from his face.
“I…” He brushed a hand across his eyes. “Is this real?”
I pushed him aside because I knew whatever it was it couldn’t be a V. He would have been attacked already. A blue food barrel stood just inside the door. Two people huddled next to it.
“Maibe?” Alden’s voice.
My head began to spin.
One of the people stood up. It was Alden’s voice, I knew it was his voice. I thought it must be Alden who stood up even though it was hard to tell in the shadows. He walked to me with outstretched hands, but something was wrong with his arms. There was something terrible about his face. It looked like a muzzle was strapped over his mouth and someone had duct taped oven mitts over his hands.
“Mary?” Gabbi said, stepping forward. “Ricker, are you seeing this? Is it really her?”
“I see her.”
My eyes caught on Ricker’s arm and the puckered skin that formed the name Mary in scrawling childish letters. I looked again. This wasn’t Alden. The hair and eyes were too dark.
The person moaned under the muzzle.
“Don’t touch her,” a male voice said—Alden said.
“What have you done to her?” Gabbi took an unsteady step into the room. “I will end you for hurting her. I will—”
“Gabbi, she’s V,” Ricker said. “She’s V and he probably helped save her life. Didn’t you?”
I couldn’t stop myself any longer. “Alden, is that you or is it a ghost? Someone please tell me.” I trembled, waiting, trying to tell my brain to work, please work, please be right.
“It’s Alden,” Ricker said quietly.
I knelt on the ground and reached out a hand. “Alden.” I touched his cheek, but then remembered. He hated it when Feebs touched him. He hated it when I had touched him before.
He did not flinch away.
I looked closer. Scabbed over scratches marred one cheek. Even in the dim light, he had the same fading marks as Jane.
“You’ve been infected and cured?”
He barked a laugh. “I guess you can call it that.”
Chapter 27
“Why is Mary like this?” Gabbi said, horror thick in her voice.
“It was the only way to be sure everyone could be kept safe,” Alden said.
Mary had hugged Gabbi and then pushed her away. She now slumped against the wall and held her head between her legs. No amount of coaxing from Gabbi brought her up.
“Why isn’t she able to—”
“She goes in and out of being V,” Alden said.
“That’s not supposed to be possible,” I said. All the years we’d dealt with the virus and it had been black and white. V, Faint, Feeb. All of one or the other, or a mix of both.
Except I realized that hadn’t stayed true.
“I don’t know what they did to her,” Alden said. “Or if they tried to cure her or not. She’s the only V here who can partially come out of it.”
Ricker kept staring at Mary as if he thought she might vanish into a ghost at any second. “I knew you had seen her, Gabbi. I didn’t think you were lying. I knew, but I just never really believed. I never thought. But, Gabbi—”
“I know,” Gabbi whispered, her eyes not leaving Mary either. “I know.”
“We have to escape,” Alden said. “I tried once but they caught me. We have to get out of here while we can.”
Gabbi’s attention shifted to Alden. “We can’t just leave the cure behind.” Her eyes narrowed. She still didn’t trust him. She never really had. He would always be Sergeant Bennings’ son.
“Your father is here,” I said.
He didn’t respond.
“Alden,” I said. “Where’s the cure?”
“There is no cure. There never was.” He turned his head away from us and stared hard at the blue bucket.
“Don’t lie to us.” A flush crept up Gabbi’s cheeks.
“We’re not stupid,” Ricker said. “We can see the Feeb marks fading on you. Why would you try to keep it from us?”
Alden’s face paled. His hands shook as he used the barrel to stand up. “There is a cure, but it’s not worth the cost. It’s not worth it.”
“You would say that,” Ricker said. “You already got it so what does it matter if the rest of us don’t, right?”
“Ricker!” I said.
Ricker turned to me. “You can’t believe this. You can’t just take him at his word. This is too important.”
I waited for Gabbi to say something. She always did, but this time she didn’t. She looked at me, waiting for me to decide. Could we trust Alden? Deep down, I knew we could. I knew he was telling the truth as he knew it, but what if he was wrong? I thought about the Vs attacking the compound and how long it would take Dr. Stoven and Dr. Ferrad to notice we were missing. Ano and Jimmy and everyone back home were sick, dying. The cure was here. The cure was within our reach. It was worth the risk—
“Show it to us.”
We crept along the outside of the building. The sounds of fighting came from the far end of the compound. It was only a matter of time before someone tracked us down. Dr. Ferrad had kept Mary captured for who knows how long and Alden was Sergeant Bennings’ son—too valuable a tool in their war. Even now I felt eyes on us, though I couldn’t tell whose eyes—uninfected, V, Feeb.
We needed to hurry.
“What is the cure?” Ricker whispered. “How does it work?”
Alden squinted at the gap between two buildings. He sized up the space, then glanced back at Ricker. His eyes burned with a sort of anger I swore I’d only seen in V eyes until now. “You won’t believe me until you see it yourself. Just promise me we’ll escape after.”
“I’m not going to promise that,” Ricker said, disgust in his voice.
Behind us something moved. I blinked, looked hard. Multiple somethings, like a crowd of people. There was no way to tell if they were uninfected, Feebs, or Vs. The only thing I did know was they were headed in our direction.
“We have to go. We have to go,” I said, panic making my voice too loud.
Light flared in Alden’s eyes. The scratches on his cheek flushed. He blinked, then dashed across the gap. Mary and the rest of us followed.
Mary’s movements were jerky, like she moved and then her brain panicked and tried to take it back, afraid she was about to hurt someone. The cycle repeated itself as we passed by a troupe of chimps. There was a pile of hay, more blue food buckets, two metal wheelbarrows tilted onto their sides. They reminded me too much of the one Corrina had used to carry Dylan when he had been in the fevers.
The group of chimps followed us along their fencing and shook the metal when we didn’t stop to notice them. Alden took us to this squat building set back at an angle from the grid-like row of sheds. As we approached the door, the chimps went silent.
The fighting noises softened behind us. Smoke filled the sky like thunderclouds. My ankle and wrist ached with each step. The chimps huddled together and watched as if they knew whatever lived in there wasn’t right.
The door opened without a squeak. In here, the electricity was still on. No red glow, no flashing lights, no siren to disturb the medical atmosphere of the air. Stacks of paper covered an unmanned reception desk. Ricker pushed on the only obvious door, but it would not move. A key card next to it glowed red.
“Security is rather tight, don’t you think?” Gabbi said.
“Never can be too careful.” Ricker rummaged through the drawers of the desk. He came back with a lett
er opener, pried off the card slider, and examined the wiring before jamming the point six inches deep into the device and twisting.
A whirring noise died away, then the red light turned green. With a click and rush of air the door opened.
“How did you…” Alden said.
“I’m smarter than you’ve ever given me credit for,” Ricker said.
“That’s not true,” Alden said.
I was about to explain it was because he and Gabbi had learned to pick all kinds of locks as runaways, but something held my tongue. The two of them looked at each other in such a way that I knew this was about much more than the lock.
Noises, almost a hint of a melody, drifted through the opened door. “Do you hear that music?”
I sighed with relief when they agreed. My symptoms had not betrayed me for awhile. I could only hope my luck would hold.
We entered a sort of laboratory mudroom, tiled with porcelain that glared in the golden light. White suits and full head gear hung on hooks. Hoses were attached to cylinders of oxygen.
The noises had turned into unmistakable, foreign songs, with a woman singing in a language that was almost familiar. Her melody was both haunting and romantic, the melodies of a string section, hand drums, even an accordion. It sounded like an old recording, like the music on tapes my uncle had made me listen to when he wanted to remember the old country. The music played on a loop through speakers set high in each corner. Over these last three years I had forgotten about music and how it could make you feel. This tore at my heart in a way I almost couldn’t stand.
“Oh, god,” Gabbi said somewhere off in the background, as if speaking through a wall. “This is the place. They showed up at the railroad station. They had this white tent and they dragged Mary into it. They just surrounded us and took us. They must have brought us here. I remember the chimps when we escaped. I thought it had been the fevers somehow, but I had never seen a real-life chimp before.”
“I remember the chimps, too,” Ricker said quietly. “Which means it wasn’t the fevers.”
“We didn’t know what it all meant,” Gabbi said. “Only that we needed to get away.”
“Mary was here,” Ricker said.
Gabbi looked at us with wide, haunted eyes. “Mary’s been here and we left her. Why didn’t we come back?” There was a keening note in her voice.
Mary reached out a hand and rested it on Gabbi’s shoulder.
“Mary, Mary. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Gabbi hugged Mary and buried her face in her shoulder.
The look in Mary’s eyes changed. I waited for everyone to see it, but it all was too powerful a spell—the music, the room, the glowing tiles.
“We thought she was dead.” Ricker’s eyes searched the walls as if they contained the answers to all the questions he should have asked a long time ago. “We got lost in the fields—in those fields that went nowhere for miles until suddenly we were back at the red boxcar and then things got really bad.” He turned to Mary a yearning look on his face. “We thought you were dead.”
Mary scrabbled at Gabbi’s back with the duct-taped oven mitts. She banged her muzzle-covered jaw over and over again on top of Gabbi’s head.
Gabbi cried out and backed away, holding her hands over her head.
Mary moved forward as if tied to her with a rope, swatting her arms around.
I rushed over and helped Ricker pull Mary off. We pushed her onto her back. I sat on her arm and part of her chest while he did the same to her other side. Her legs kicked wildly and slammed into the side of my head. My injured wrist flared with pain. It felt like my ankle wept blood again.
Gabbi sat across Mary’s legs so that she was pinned down by all fours.
“Alden, please do something,” I said. “Where’s the cure? Where’s a sedative? Find something.”
The veins on his face seemed to pulse. He sprinted through another door. It opened into a type of shower that flipped on hot pink lights. He kept going through a second door before they both closed and took him from sight.
Minutes passed. Maybe seconds. It felt like an eternity. Too long.
“We need to get in there,” I said.
“Go. I can hold her,” Gabbi said.
“It takes three of us. What about her arm?”
“I’ve got it,” Gabbi said. “Ricker, get her legs.” Then she moved up, straddling Mary across the stomach, using her legs to pin Mary’s arms to her sides.
I released my hold on Mary and stood back. I didn’t know if I should stay or go. Except we had to help Mary. There had to be something. We couldn’t just stay there until the uninfected found us.
I headed after Alden.
“Maibe,” Ricker said.
I stopped and looked back.
“Be careful.”
The pink lights were hot and made my skin sweat and my eyes swim. The music disappeared. I swore I could hear shouts from outside. We didn’t have much time. Either the Vs would find their way in or the uninfected would win and check on the cure.
Alden stood in the middle of this narrow room. There were two rows of seats, like theatre seats, with cushions and arm rests. A sort of window started halfway up the wall that looked down, not to the outside, but to another room.
Alden peered through the glass. “I didn’t know this window was here. I thought they could only see me through the camera.”
I went to his side. Down below, a full floor below, was a hospital bed with straps. Empty. Everything was cement.
“Is that—”
“Come on.”
He grabbed my hand and electricity sparked between us. He didn’t seem to notice. He led me down a set of stairs and suddenly we were in the room we had just been watching. Metal rings were attached into the cement. A speaker was mounted in the corner near the ceiling. There was some sort of camera lens next to a vent.
“They hook you to a machine.” Alden drew my attention to a door across from the hospital bed. “It’s like a dialysis machine. Except, I don’t know, different somehow.”
Alden shook his head. Actually, it was more like he shivered.
“Dr. Ferrad and Dr. Stoven worked on it for months. They said it’s the only one like it in the world and that if the world hadn’t fallen apart that they’d win an award for it.” The way he talked about the doctors and this machine—his voice was full of disgust. “Uninfected blood replaces the infected blood, but it’s more complicated than that. It changes the blood somehow.”
I headed for the special door. “Then it’s the machine we need. We’ll take the machine and find something for Mary and—”
He reached out as if to stop me. “No, Maibe.”
“You just said—”
He pushed by and his clothes brushed mine. He’d never let himself get close like that before. Now it was like it didn’t matter anymore.
“Look.” He threw open the door.
Red tubing was coiled like a snake next to this huge sort of boxy machine. Knobs and dials and tubes connected everything together in this complicated system that made my head dizzy.
Alden was right. This looked like it did much more than just clean blood.
My heart sank.
The machine was as tall as me and a little wider. There was no way we could move it, not even if all of us helped.
Something red dripped from one end of the tubing. The light was faint here and I bent over to touch it.
“Stop!” Alden pulled on my shirt.
I resisted.
Something moaned.
I shot up and felt a crack on my skull. Stars burst across my vision and pain lit up the back of my head. I turned and saw Alden rubbing his chin.
And then I saw the bed.
It was just on the other side of the machine. There was someone on the bed and she was uninfected and she was gasping for breath. Tubing snaked into her arm and buried into her flesh as if it had been forgotten there. What dripped from the tubing was her blood.
Alden seemed to float over t
o the uninfected woman’s bedside. “I was in the fevers and I remembered when we sat together on that cliff.”
Her breathing became shallow even as I watched.
“You know the one. You got the clue I left you? I was going to get the memantine first, for your people, and then I was going here. But they captured me and forced me here themselves—even though I told them I would come willingly.”
The world shifted under my feet.
“I thought if things got bad,” Alden said. “You’d come looking for me. Over and over again I remembered sitting there on the ledge and the terrible way I acted.”
This woman was uninfected. She was dying because they had drained her of too much blood. “This doesn’t make any sense.” I went to her bedside. Maybe there was still time to save her. We had to try.
Her brown hair curled around her face. Her eyes were closed, her lips pale, her face like ash. She looked almost deflated.
“Where are the doctors? Why did they take so much? If this is how you get cured why would they take so much?” I wanted to rip out the tubing. It looked like this horrifying worm-like tumor growing out of her flesh. But if I took it out, what if she bled more? Why was no one here to take care of her? Had they abandoned her to die because everyone had gone to fight the Vs?
Alden stood there with his hands clasped behind his back. “When you need to be cured, they just hook you up.” With the roar in my ears it was like he spoke from miles away. “This was an uninfected that came in with another group not too long ago. It’s a life for a life. That’s the cure. It doesn’t take just a little bit of blood—it takes all of their blood.”
The uninfected woman drew a long rattling breath and went silent.
I waited for her to start a new breath. I counted the seconds, long seconds. When I got to thirty—I knew.
She was dead.
I bent over and threw up a stringy film of saliva onto the floor next to the bed. I wiped my mouth and tried to think about what to do. I didn’t realize how much I’d come to believe in the cure. I had never counted on it in the first place but then Jane had come along. Ano and Jimmy needed this.
Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4) Page 69