“Well, yeah. I saw Penny on TV. She’s okay.”
“Who’s Penny?”
Wendy felt slighted. She looked down. “Never mind.”
“Oh yeah, Penelope. The half-breed.” Troy sighed and turned toward Wendy. “Look, the EPS is a shit-show right now. We won’t know anything for days, and then you can count on lies.” Troy paused to look Wendy up and down, then shook his head. “Just like what they fed us in the first place.”
“Fed you? What do you mean?”
“We were had…twice! About six weeks ago, me and Keith made a run to Biter’s Hill to buy some information about the curative research. We didn’t know who was selling, but we knew it was legit. The Chief Registrar there said they were class four. Do you know what that is?”
Wendy nodded. Doctor Kennedy was class four. She could carry a cell phone on Rock Island, she had access to anything, and no one logged when she came or went. Special access.
“We dropped the money in a Jeep and waited for morning. At dawn Keith found an envelope on the windshield of our rig. I don’t know how they knew it was us, or how they got the thing there without us knowing, but when you’re in a situation like that, the best move is to run like hell, so we bugged out and didn’t look back. A couple hours later, boom!”
Troy threw his hands in the air for emphasis.
“Fucking levelled the place. We used fake RFIDs so no one knew who we really were. Took the identities of a couple hunters who got themselves killed earlier this year. Paid a shit-load to St. Mary’s for those. Bought three more for today’s excursion, too, just in case, but they still knew we were coming.” Troy shook his head and put his boot down hard. He turned his back on the field and sighed heavily.
“Do you think St. Mary-of-the-Woods had anything to do with the EPS?”
Troy sneered, looking at her as though she was stupid. “Don’t you get it? We learned about Rock Island and the curative from the information we bought at the Hill. We asked to buy the cure. We didn’t get an answer. We doubled our price, still no answer. Rock Island went up in flames, and we were worried we were shit-out-of-luck, so we doubled down again, and still nothing. Then a few days after the Senator was rescued and the world found out about Larissa, we got some new information. They told us you were going to be arrested.”
Wendy straightened, taken aback.
“Yeah, that’s what I was trying to tell you earlier,” Troy said, wagging a finger at her shocked expression. “We were also told we didn’t need to buy the cure. We just had to take it. From Larissa…and you.”
“Well,” Wendy started, her mind still digesting what she’d heard. The only people at the EPS who knew she had the cure were Tom, Penelope, and Hank. “Who the hell told you that?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll bet it was the same people who blew up the EPS. They gave us the access codes to the security system, your schedule, and information about your access to the door. They gave us the information on Larissa’s condition and when the Senator was coming back. They knew our windows of opportunity. They must have just waited until we did our thing, then boom!”
Troy waved his hands in front of his face with his fingers splayed like fireworks.
“That’s why Keith is pissed. He gets it. He figured it out the same as I did. We were used.”
Thirty-One
Wendy didn’t like the idea of being used, and she couldn’t believe Tom or Hank were involved, either. Penelope simply didn’t have the communication skills or capacity to think through an elaborate or complicated scheme like that, and even if she could, as a half-breed she lacked the resources needed to pull it off in the first place. Tom, on the other hand, had plenty of motivation—the estranged son of the Senator. It made her question how well she thought she knew him.
The night Mason died, she spent an hour with Tom talking about his childhood, about how Larissa had been bitten under his care, and how his father treated him like a leper from then on. Tom didn’t seem bitter about it, though. Wendy thought she was a good judge of character, usually—she knew Doctor Kennedy was a bitch and couldn’t be trusted, after all—and Tom didn’t come off as the kind of person to do something like blowing up the EPS.
Which left Hank. Even though he was at all three locations when they went up, the idea that he was involved was stupid. Hank had practically been killed in the first two explosions, and she was with him when Rock Island went up, and he certainly hadn’t seen that coming. That wasn’t how a serial bomber worked. The kind of person who would take out all three facilities was the kind to hide behind a network of agents working on his behalf. Someone like the Senator.
A man like that ordered the death of someone else while sipping bourbon in his berth. That’s how she imagined it had happened—Mason’s death. The Senator telling his man Carl to go up to the engine room and kill Mason and Houston and make it look like they had gotten into a fight or something. But Mason was more than Carl could handle, and Mason got a shot of his own in, killing Carl even as Carl killed them both. All the while the Senator swirled ice cubes in a half empty glass and waited for the deed to be done. Yes, that was the kind of man the Senator was.
But then why entice Troy and his men to abduct his own daughter? He risked his life to go after Larissa in the first place, after all.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Wendy said.
Troy turned to look at her. “Of course it doesn’t. If it made sense, then there would be a path to follow, a clue, something to implicate whoever did it. This is the kind of shit the CIA pulls off. Makes everyone point guns at each other like a Mexican stand-off. Pin it on whoever shoots first.”
“No, I mean, what, exactly, did they say about this supposed cure?”
“That you could make it.”
“Me? They specifically named me?”
“Yes. They said you could do it using Larissa’s blood.”
“But I can’t. They lied. The cure doesn’t even work like that.”
“You know, you keep saying you can’t do it, then you make these blanket statements about how the cure really works. Do you know how to make the cure or not?”
Wendy sighed. “Kind of.” She leaned against the railing and looked out over the field, toward where the zombies would be if they followed Troy’s logic. “Remember back at the EPS, you asked me why I’d been keeping Larissa sedated. Part of it was for convenience. Waking her up meant managing her. We do her physical therapy with electro stimulation so her muscles don’t atrophy, but waking her…I could only take it for four hours at a time. She’s completely lost. It’s tiring, even with someone else there doing most of the cognitive exercises.”
“Someone else?”
“The Senator’s son, Gary. A clone of his dad in so many ways. He made it even more exhausting. He came in around noon every day. We woke Larissa so she would get accustomed to seeing his face, hearing his voice, that sort of thing. His job was to talk to her, so for hours he did just that, passing her objects like a square block or ball, or pointing at things that are green and saying the word over, and over, and over.
“I did my blood draws in the morning, before he arrived, and sent them to the lab across the channel for testing—always mismarked, of course. No one was allowed to know it was hers. I sent it with all the other blood packets. Protocol testing of all the quarantined subjects. I sent my own as well to validate the tests.
“Just like we suspected, the active proteins that cause the infection were gone in three days. Completely cured, according to the panels.”
“Okay,” Troy put in. “So what?”
“My friend Tom used his authority as Chief Registrar to hold Larissa in quarantine for fourteen days because I asked him to. The reason I’ve been holding Larissa back is because I think the cure doesn’t work. I mean, it works, but I don’t think it’s permanent. I was hoping to see measurable remission in the panels….”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to admit that she meant to use the information to blackmail her way out of her si
tuation. It was a dangerous game, one that could get her killed, but that outcome was already highly likely given what happened to Mason.
“The research I was doing at Rock Island was destroyed on purpose. It’s gone. I invented this cure two years ago, but up until recently, we couldn’t get the protein blockers to stave off reinfection due to the presence of sustaining hormones in the lymph system.”
“Pretend I didn’t get any of that,” Troy said.
“Right.” Wendy grinned. “The cure is a selective inhibitor. How much do you remember about your cellular biology classes?”
“Let’s just say I haven’t been keeping up on my continuing education.”
“Okay. So, there are lots of cell types, and each type has a broad range of receptors. Think of the cell like a cube and the receptors are sort of holes and hairs hanging off the surface. Drugs work by binding to these receptors. There are two kinds of bindings: electrical and—”
“Yeah, like an atom.”
“Right. And a positive cell surface attracts negatively charged hormones. Cells also have these complex proteins hanging off the surface, and each one is folded a certain way, with a pocket so that specific peptides will bind to it, which will tell the cell to do specific things.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s all coming back to me. Kind of like hormone creation.”
“Exactly. Anyway, the consumption pathogen does just that. It binds to every cell in your body in such a way that it causes all kinds of weird hormone generation and widespread changes in ionic pathways—like the pain thing. You need electrical transmission to pass pain through your nerves to your brain. They’re all blocked on infected subjects. You can hurt them, but they just don’t feel it. They’re just…numb.”
Troy furrowed his brows. “I’m still totally lost. You invented the cure two years ago. Why can’t you make it now?”
“Well, first of all, you need a half-breed host to fabricate the stable enzymes needed to culture the isolates.”
Troy waved his hand over his head and made a whoosh sound.
Wendy grinned. “You need someone who’s immune.
“Secondly, depending on the peptide used in fabricating the curative, the binders either block the Consumption Pathogen from attaching to host cells, which kills it off and leaves you with all the side effects of the infection, or it binds to the pathogen cells themselves, preventing the pathogen from reaching its target.
“When I was at Rock Island, that’s what I was working on—combining the two outcomes so it would permanently block reception and attack the pathogen. If you don’t do this, you aren’t ridding the body of the pathogen. Half-breeds block reception because they’re immune, but they keep producing the pathogen because they’re infected. Curative recipients don’t. So, over time, their symptoms diminish and appear to disappear completely. The only problem is, technically, they’re still infected. Cells die and new ones are constantly forming, and you didn’t actually rid the body of the pathogen, soooo….”
Troy nodded, comprehending the issue. “So, once you’re cured, you need to keep taking the drug forever, or you’ll wake up one day hungry for brains.”
“Unless you’re a half-breed, pretty much.” She didn’t want to tell him the rest, how she suspected Doctor Kennedy and Eloran executives might have been perfecting a drug that required constant boosters instead of an actual curative so they could create endless demand for their product. It was probably why Kennedy hid the fact that she experimented on more test subjects than she was legally allotted…people like Penelope.
Wendy sighed. The television image of Penelope standing on the toppled rail car, looking up in fascination at the drone flying overhead with its camera eye trained on her got Wendy to thinking about what Doctor Kennedy said—that Penelope couldn’t be cured. Not with whatever was in the vial Wendy had in her pocket. Penelope had been part of the immunization program, not the curative research. It meant she was one of the early bite victims that didn’t succumb to the pathogen. Like all the original forty test subjects, she had natural immunities. At least, she did once. Doctor Kennedy’s experiments may have stripped Penelope of even that.
“Well, I’ve had enough fun and information for one day, and it’s fucking freezing,” Troy said. “Let’s head back.”
Thirty-Two
Wendy smelled the cigarette smoke as they walked back toward the main buildings. She knew Keith was nearby, even though in the dark it could have been anyone. An orange glow outlined a silhouette walking along the path in front of them. At hearing their footfalls in the snow he stopped.
“Who’s that?” It was Keith.
“Me,” Troy replied.
“You believe this shit?” Keith breathed, the frustration apparent in his tone. “I mean, what the fuck? How are we supposed to prove we didn’t do nothing?”
Keith waited until they were side-by-side to turn around and walk with them.
“What about you, Doc? Did you have any grand plans of not being sent to jail for the rest of your life?”
Wendy waved a hand at the smoke, hurrying to get ahead of him so she wouldn’t have to breathe it in. She also didn’t want to point out that their abduction of her constituted a felony.
“We should get online,” Keith went on. “Check the internet. See what’s really up.”
They walked in silence for a minute.
“Did you tell her?” Keith broke the silence.
“About what?” Troy asked.
“Her. The files. The cure.”
“Yeah.”
Keith took a long drag from his cigarette before flicking the nearly spent butt to the snow. He exhaled. “What I want to know is how come they said you got the cure?”
“She invented it,” Troy thankfully answered for her.
“No shit? Then you can cure Egan and the rest.”
“The rest?” Wendy wondered aloud.
“Family.”
“You’ve got others in here that need curing?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Keith replied.
Wendy sighed with relief.
“That would be fucking stupid. Keeping Egan in here’s bad enough, except Momma won’t let anyone put him outside. The line in the sand. That’s what she calls him. No more waiting for ‘them’ to make things right again.
“Only thing is, you’re one of ‘them’, huh?”
Wendy stopped, turning to face Keith. “I’m not part of your conspiracy theories, if that’s what you mean. You abducted me, remember?”
“Don’t go getting all snooty tootie,” Keith grumbled. “We saved your life.”
“Oh, really?” Wendy put her hands on her hips. “And just who told you my life was in danger? The same lying bastards that told you I could cure everyone?”
“No, I mean we literally saved your life. If we left you at the EPS today, you’d have been blown to shit like everyone else.”
Wendy straightened. He had a point. She hated to admit it, but he had an actual, concrete point. Except, not everyone died. “Would they have blown the place up if you hadn’t come?”
“Yeah, see,” Keith argued, pointing a finger at her. “Now who’s talking conspiracies. You get it now, don’t you? They made you part of this. They made you guilty, too.”
“Guilty?” Wendy wasn’t following Keith’s logic.
Keith turned to Troy. “T, are you sure we got Doctor Wendy O’Farrell?” He shook his head and glowered at Wendy. “Sometimes you’re about as dumb as dirt.”
Wendy’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t see her in the dark.
“It’s simple: a disgruntled, ex-employee who protected a felon wanted for the destruction of Rock Island. That’s you. To get even, you team up with a group of radicals hiding in the quarantine zone—that’s us—abduct the Senator’s daughter, and blow up the EPS. Sound like a conspiracy, or the evening news?”
Wendy shook her head. “No, that’s….” Even coming from Keith it sounded plausible.
“That’s reality. That’s what th
ey’re doing to all of us. Reality TV! They want scapegoats. They made me and T into criminals,” Keith went on. “Now I don’t know about you two, but I’m getting the—”
“Shut up,” Troy said quickly.
“Shut up yourself,” Keith snapped.
“No, I mean shut the fuck up. Listen!” He pointed to the sky.
“Listen?!” Keith turned his ear to the sky and they all three stood as still as stone.
Wendy was amazed at how acute the different sounds around her were. A generator hummed somewhere in the trees off in the direction of the crane. The echo of nondescript voices carried from the darkness ahead, a large group by the sound of it, but too far off to make out anything being said. Mingled with the background noise was a very faint rumble that sounded utterly foreign in this vacant world: a plane. The distinct and distant groan of a jet airplane at incredibly high altitude. Everyone looked up.
“There,” Keith said, pointing at the sky. “See it?”
“Uh huh,” Troy replied, nodding.
Wendy squinted but saw only the dark night sky…except, there was something. A tiny star, hardly bright enough to twinkle, a shadow in a shadow, but it was moving toward them.
“Coincidence?”
“Nuh uh,” Troy replied.
“What’s going on?” Wendy whispered.
“AWACs?” Keith asked, ignoring her.
“Maybe,” Troy replied.
“HALO?”
“Maybe,” Troy said again, this time sounding a little more certain.
“A video game?” Wendy put in. “What’s going on?”
“Not sure,” Troy replied. “We don’t get visitors often.”
“Visitors?”
“Want me to sound the general alarm?” Keith asked softly.
“What, and have Chico barricade himself in his war room again?” Troy turned his attention on Keith instead of the sky. “Let’s get to Momma’s place and tell her what we’re hearing. Wake up Vance, or whoever’s in the mixer, and go tell Brady to man the lights and alarms.”
“Yeah,” Keith agreed, nodding as he rushed ahead of them on the path. “I’m gonna tell Boone to light up the eye, too.”
Plagued: The Battle Creek Zombie Rectification Experiment Page 13