In the End

by Lunetta, Demitria

  Rice and I sprint down the hall. When we reach the only locked door in the corridor, Rice swipes his card and enters his code. The door beeps twice. “I can’t get it open,” Rice tells me, as he desperately tries again.

  “What’s the holdup?” Kay asks.

  “I don’t know. This door shouldn’t even be locked.”

  “We have to move on,” Kay says, already halfway down the hall. As soon as the words are out of her mouth, another Florae appears in front of us. Kay tries to draw down on it, but the Florae is too close and is on her before she can aim. It bowls into her and knocks her down as it rolls over her. I can’t fire on the Florae twisting next to Kay without risking taking her down too. Kay snaps to her feet with a knife in hand before the Florae’s next charge. She sidesteps it and stabs it hard through the neck, pushing the knife into the creature’s brain. It drops at her feet, a mess of green and black.

  Just then the door Rice struggled to unlock finally opens. Ken stands in the doorway, looks at the carnage in the hall, then back at us. “What the . . . You mean that evacuation order was real? You’d better get in here.”

  We push past him into his lab and he closes the door behind us, locking it. The lab looks like a scaled-down version of the main lab, with equipment I couldn’t even begin to understand. At the far end is another closed door.

  “How do you still have power?” Rice asks.

  “I rerouted it from the main lab using my laptop.” Ken taps his computer. “When Dr. Reynolds made his announcement, I thought it was a drill, and when the power went out, I figured no one else would need it. . . .”He stares at Kay and me in our synth-suits. His eyes flick from me to her.

  “Tell me one of you is Kay.”

  Kay pulls up her hood. “You know I’m always showing up to save your ass.”

  “I didn’t know my ass needed saving.” He motions around the well-lit lab. “As you can see I’m doing fine here.” Ken grins, and I’m amazed at how similar they look. Before, when I saw them together on the hover-copter, I was in so much shock, I didn’t have time to process their similarities. They’re even the same height.

  They may look alike, but I know there’s a huge difference in their priorities. I face Ken. “Where’s Brenna?” I ask. If she’s down here, she’s in danger too.

  “She’s safe,” he assures me.

  “And the camera?” Rice asks, motioning to where it hangs in the far corner of the ceiling. He looks at me. “Dr. Reynolds will know we’re in here now.”

  As the words leave Rice’s mouth, the power fails and the door pops open.

  Ken shakes his head. “No,” he says petulantly and too loudly. “I made sure I’d have power so I could finish my work.”

  “Dr. Reynolds turned off the power,” Kay tells him. “He released the Floraes to kill us.”

  Ken refuses to understand. “He wouldn’t do that. Not to me. My work is too important.” He folds his arms.

  “Where does that door go?” I ask, motioning to the far end of the room.

  “It’s . . . nothing.”

  Kay steps up into his face. “There are at least twenty Floraes running around, if not more by now,” she tells him. “Where the hell does that door lead?”

  “It’s . . . It’s my personal office. Oh, just go. It’s open. There’s a manual lock inside. There aren’t any cameras. I didn’t want anyone spying on my results.” As I head to the door, I feel a twinge of guilt over scrambling for cover when I should be rescuing Baby, but I know we have to regroup and formulate a plan.

  Rice gets the door open and goes inside, while Kay and I wait at the door for Ken. He opens a drawer and takes out a folder.

  “The Floraes aren’t interested in your data,” I tell him. “You’re wasting time.”

  “These are my notes.” Somewhere in the maze of the lab, someone screams. “I don’t know why Dr. Reynolds is doing this. . . .”

  “Ken, hurry!” I shout. I can hear Them snarling from the hall. Ken runs to us and shoves his notes at me.

  “Hold these. . . . I have to get the blood samples. They might destroy those if they smell the blood.”

  “No—” Kay tries to grab his arm to haul him in the room, but he shakes her off. He doesn’t even make it halfway across the room before a Florae flashes in from the hall and takes him down. Kay rushes to his side and I try to go and help her, when Rice yanks me into the back room and slams the door shut, leaving me with a horrible snapshot of the creature perched atop Ken, ripping into the side of his face and lapping up his blood.

  I push against Rice, who is latching three separate bolts. “I have to help Kay!” I scream at him, forcing him from the doorway. My hands shake as I undo the bolts while Rice pleads with me.

  I can still hear Ken’s screams, until he falls abruptly silent. Rice is at my back and whispers, “I was just trying to save you, Amy. I wanted you to be safe.”

  I pull open the door and am knocked aside by a figure in black. Kay. She enters the room and collapses on to the floor, her hood pulled aside. I join her on the floor. Dazed, I try to comfort her as she weeps into her hands. She looks up at me. “I couldn’t save him,” she whispers. She looks up at me and, for the first time, I see Kay’s pain. Rice is with us now and pulls Kay to a cot in the corner. He makes her sit down so she can collect herself.

  “Just . . .Let’s give her a moment,” he tells me.

  My hood is stifling, and I pull it up to get some air. I feel numb. It’s as if seeing all this death has turned my insides to ice.

  “Amy?” a voice behind me says, pulling me from my thoughts. I turn and find a familiar face staring back at me from a chair in the opposite corner.

  “Brenna?”

  She’s alive, and she looks healthy, her skin no longer a deathly paper white.

  “It’s about damned time you showed up,” she tells me with a grin.

  Maybe I’m not numb after all—when I see her, I’m so happy, I let out a tiny sob of joy.

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  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I rush to Brenna and hug her. She still looks more fragile than before, but she’s better. Her skin is cool to the touch, meaning she’s probably beaten her infection.

  Suddenly there is a fevered scratching at the door. My head snaps around.

  “They can’t get through,” Rice assures us.

  I glare at him, still angry that he prevented me from helping Kay when she needed me most. Even if Ken was already bitten, I could have been at Kay’s side.

  “Where’s Ken?” Brenna asks. “I can’t believe he let you guys in here. I haven’t seen anyone but him for days.”

  “He didn’t make it,” I say softly, glancing at Kay. Her face tightens, but she closes her eyes and takes a breath. I know she is fighting her pain, trying to push it down until later.

  “Oh, hey.” Brenna’s eyes widen. “You must be Ken’s sister?” Brenna asks. “Holy crap, you look just like him. Sorry about what happened. . . . I mean, despite the fact that he kidnapped me. He talked about you a lot. He wished he could have spoken with you more.”

  Rice nods. “He was a good guy. He was a brilliant researcher.”

  “Yeah, he was great,” Brenna says. “You know, except for the whole holding-me-against-my-will thing.”

  I push Brenna with my elbow and shush her, but Kay just stares at us. For a moment I think she’s going to break down again, but instead she lets out a small bark of a laugh. “Ken was . . . complicated,” she says, her voice strong and clear.

  “He was a genius,” Rice says quietly. “When I first met him four years ago, when this was still a university, he was one of the few people who was nice to me. Over time, though, he just got more and more secretive, more locked down into himself. Dr. Reynolds tends to bring that out in people.” He looks at me, “Amy, what do you have there?”

  I’m
still clutching Ken’s notes to my chest. “He wanted to save these. . . .”

  Kay stares at them then says to Rice, “Well, have a look. See what Ken thought was more important than his life.”

  I hand the notes over to Rice, who takes them back to Ken’s desk and starts reading.

  “I guess he did try to make me comfortable,” Brenna tells us, eyeing Kay. “He brought me books, which were way boring, but at least he tried. He talked to me about you too,” she tells Kay. “The stories were pretty exciting. He was proud of you.”

  “Maybe,” Kay tells us, her jaw tight, “you should all stop trying to comfort me about Ken for a moment and spend your energy trying to figure out how we’re going to get the hell out of here alive.”

  We listen to the Floraes scratch and snuffle at the door and watch Rice rifle through Ken’s notes.

  “This is pretty remarkable,” he says, bending low over them, oblivious. “He was getting somewhere.” He looks up at Brenna. “Did any of the other researchers visit you?” Rice asks from where he’s perched on the desk. Brenna shakes her head.

  Rice looks around at the room and the door with its triple locks. “He was keeping you all to himself. If he’d collaborated, if he’d set a team to work. . .” He shakes his head, flips back a few pages, then starts forward again with growing excitement. “There’s an antigen found in both Baby’s and Brenna’s blood. I think the antigen, in conjunction with the original vaccine, is what saved them both when they were bitten. It makes them carriers, but immune to the effects. That’s why they didn’t change. This antigen is rare; do you know how remarkable this is?”

  “I knew there was something different about the original batch of vaccine. . . .” I say. “But it wasn’t the formula—it was the patients!” That’s why they could never get it to work. The problem wasn’t in the replication. It was having the correct subjects.

  “I’m one in a million?” Brenna says with a smirk. “I always knew I was awesome.”

  “It’s actually more like one in ten thousand. . . . But this is just . . . amazing,” Rice continues. “That’s why we never caught it before. We could vaccinate thousands of people and try turning them all and not one could have the right antigen to combat the infection.”

  “So . . .,” Brenna says, holding up her bandaged hand. “Amy didn’t need to chop off my fingers?”

  “We don’t really know for sure,” Rice says, looking from her to me and back again.

  “Brenna, I was just trying to do anything to save you. Your fingers were shredded. I don’t think you would have ever been able to use them again, and I thought it might stop the infection from spreading.”

  Brenna stares at her left hand, the space where her middle and ring finger should be. “It’s okay, Amy. I don’t blame you. At least I’m alive . . . and I have my pointer finger,” she tells me. “I can pull a trigger.” She looks at me with a grin. “But I sure will miss the middle finger. Who knows . . .? Maybe it did help the infection spread more slowly . . . letting that anti-thingy kick in.”

  “It’s amazing that both Brenna and Baby carry this antigen. Maybe we would have even known right away if they had been in the same test group.”

  “There were multiple test groups,” I ask. “How many children did Dr. Reynolds test?” I ask, horrified.

  His head snaps up. “Amy, it was harmless. This was before the outbreak, and the bacterium itself was tested on soldiers who volunteered. We just needed to see if the vaccine had side effects. We weren’t going to infect the children.”

  “How many groups?” I ask again.

  He sighs. “We used group homes as a cover and tested on only the children we knew wouldn’t be adopted, older children, and in Baby’s case, children with relatives under Dr. Reynolds’s control. There were five initial groups we used to test the vaccine . . . Brenna’s in Texas, one in New York City, two in California, and one in Kansas . . . right outside of New Hope, when it was a university. That’s where Hannah started out.”

  “Then how did she make it to Chicago?” I ask. “She was alone when I found her.”

  “I don’t know, not exactly. When the infection broke out, we didn’t know if the university would be safe. We hadn’t set up the emitters yet. We didn’t have a plan. Dr. Reynolds had the children evacuated to a secure facility in Chicago, the one your mother stayed at before coming here. But there was some kind of accident. None of them made it there. . . . We didn’t know Baby survived until you showed up in New Hope with her. We didn’t know that we’d actually evacuate the Chicago facility to here after a few months. If we’d known then how quickly the infection would spread, we could have just brought the children here, but then it wasn’t safe.”

  “It’s not safe now,” I say, horrified. “And the other children?”

  “None made it, as far as we know. The ones who went to Fort Black, we didn’t reach them in time to evacuate before they were lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “Dead . . . or like Brenna, simply surviving under our radar. Baby and Brenna are the only ones we’ve found . . . and that’s because they didn’t turn when they were bitten.”

  “Could others have a natural immunity?” Kay asks quietly.

  “Who knows? Maybe . . . But I think it was the combination of the vaccine and the antigen that saved them. An antigen can be an outside agent, but in Brenna and Baby’s case, it’s produced by their body. Usually, naturally occurring antigens are ignored by the human immune system and don’t do any harm or good. But this particular antigen can bind with an antibody and attack the weakened form of Florae bacteria found in the vaccine, neutralizing it. This would allow the body to fight off the full infection of a Florae bite. This antigen is rare, but if it can be synthesized . . . I’m telling you, Ken may have found something here. I . . . have to get to a lab and analyze this.”

  “That might be a little hard right now,” I say. I don’t like the fevered look that’s come over him. It’s too familiar.

  Rice nods and takes a deep breath as though reeling himself in. “You’re right, of course. I just think Ken didn’t know what he had. He was too close to it. With a few modifications, this might actually work.”

  “A vaccine?” Kay whispers from the cot. “You think Ken actually did it? He discovered a vaccine?”

  “I can’t be sure until I run some tests, but yes.” His ear-to-ear grin seems almost to split his face, but then fades just as quickly. “I wish I could have talked to Ken about this. If he’d only consulted me.”

  Kay tilts her head, listening.

  “What?” I ask.

  “That was Marcus on a call all to the Guardians. They’ve been dispatched to deal with the Florae breach.”

  “Well, that’s good. Gareth would have gotten the call. . . . He can help us. . . .” I stop. “Marcus and his cronies are going to be prowling the labs too?”

  Kay nods. “And they’ve been told to eliminate you.”

  “Fan,” I say. Then laugh, despite myself. Even to my own ears the sound is hysterical, and Brenna looks at me with concern.

  “I’m fine,” I assure her. I look over at Kay, not knowing what to do. She stares back, a strange look in her eyes.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” she announces, standing. “Let’s go get Baby.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  We leave the lab with a new sense of purpose. I’m worried about Kay, but she seems to have buried her pain and is ready to help me retrieve Baby. We also have Brenna, who is eager to remind us that we’ll have her newly heightened hearing at our disposal.

  Miraculously, we encounter neither ravenous Floraes nor murderous Guardians between Ken’s office and Baby’s dorm, and I’m relieved to see that the door is still closed and locked. So she might be safe, but how do we get inside? Rice swipes a key card and punches in a code, then
presses his finger to the door. No surprise when it doesn’t open.

  “What now?” I ask testily, scanning the hall behind us for threats.

  Rice looks around, thinking. “There may have been researchers stuck inside this area when the alarms sounded. If they got caught in the lockdown, they wouldn’t have left a secure area.”

  He fiddles with the panel and presses a button. For a long moment, nothing. Then a tentative voice on the other side says, “Hello?”

  “This is Assistant Director Richard Kiernan. I’ve been locked out of the lab. Can you open the door?”

  After a long pause, the voice responds. “It’s against protocol.”

  “Yes, I realize this.” Rice sounds commanding. “But there is currently a Florae breach and I am trapped on the wrong side of this door. If you do not break protocol, you could be responsible for not only the death of the assistant director, but of the future of New Hope.”

  Brenna looks at Rice, eyebrows raised. “Wow,” she says.

  Rice shrugs sheepishly as the door opens and a scared researcher pops his head out, his eyes darting over us and down the hallway. “Have any of you been bitten?”

  “Yeah,” Brenna blurts out before I can say no, “but it was forever ago and I’m doing just fine.”

  The researcher moves to slam the door, but I jam my foot in it, and Kay and I push our way in past him. Brenna and Rice follow, securing the door behind them.

  “I’m going to get Baby,” I call back to Rice as I hurry away down the corridor. Maybe this time I can convince her not to scream. She just needs to be reminded of the dangers, to remember how she used to avoid Them every day.

  The door to Baby’s room is already open. I rush inside and find her sitting at her table across the room, coloring, completely oblivious. But she is not alone.