The Dead Won't Die
Page 26
Jacob coughed in response.
“What were you thinking?” Kelly said.
“Just wanted to get out of life alive,” he said. He found Stu hovering over a computer. “Did you get the power cell I found?”
“Yeah, I got it. It’s installed and charging up now. We should be at full power in less than twenty minutes.”
Jacob nodded to himself. “That’s good. Alright.” He put a hand on Kelly’s arm. She glanced at it, but didn’t make a move to push him away.
Instead, she kept her fingers on his forehead and even brushed the hair away from his sweat-stained face. “You are so stupid,” she said.
“Yeah, but you heard him, right? He called me your boyfriend.”
She laughed. “How about we take that one step at a time, okay?”
From behind Kelly, someone shrieked in frustration.
“Who was that?” Jacob asked.
“Chelsea,” Kelly said, her expression turning serious.
“What is wrong with you people?” Chelsea said, storming into the small circle of light around the medical couches. “Seriously. You’re making jokes. The whole reason I came here was to clear my father’s name. Now the notebooks are gone. I have nothing left to prove his innocence. Nothing. All of this. All of this was for nothing.”
She stood there looking at them, daring them to say something.
No one did. Kelly reached down and squeezed Jacob’s hand, but it wasn’t the action of a lover. He seemed to sense that without the words. He knew Kelly better than anyone, and he knew her heart was breaking for the girl.
Stu and Juliette had suffered, too. They’d lost their boss, and a beloved friend. And this girl, she was the last surviving member of the Walker family. To see her in such pain, in such rage, was, in a way, to relive the death of their friend and mentor.
Brooks, once again, was the cypher. Jacob gave Kelly’s hand another squeeze, then turned his head to look at the older man. Brooks had turned his head to find Chelsea out beyond the circle of light, but the pain was obviously flaring up again.
He called out to her, “Chelsea, I read your father’s research.”
Silence.
“Chelsea?” Brooks said.
The next instant, the girl was at his side, jabbing a finger in his face. “Don’t you dare even speak his name, you son of a bitch. You have no right, no right at all! I hope you fucking die on that couch, you bastard. I hope you suffer for the things you did.”
Brooks climbed painfully up on his elbows. The action forced him to wince and close his eyes. When he opened them, tears ran down his face from the pain.
Stu rushed to the man’s side. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Go easy, Dr. Brooks.”
“Step out of the way,” he said. “I’m fine. Chelsea, will you please come back here? Please, child.”
She came back to the side of the bed. From where he lay, Jacob could see her face, and he was pretty sure he’d never seen such naked hatred before. Not even during their time among the Slavers.
“I did try to put the blame for the wreck of the Darwin on your father, child, you’re right about that.”
Chelsea looked like she was about to claw his eyes out.
“Please,” he said. “Hear me out. I did do that, and for that error in judgment, I am deeply sorry. I did a disservice to your family based on my scientific prejudice and my personal greed. I was wrong, and I will make that right.”
“What are you saying?” Chelsea asked.
“Your aunt never got a chance to tell you about us, did she?”
“What about you?”
Brooks winced again at his pain, but pushed on. “Chelsea, after your father started talking up the Triune Movement, your aunt and I found ourselves constantly showing up at the same functions, the same conventions, giving talks at the same dinners, always saying the same things against your father. I can’t tell you how many nights we sat over dinner together, talking about the crazy things your father was saying, and all the while growing closer. Chelsea, I loved your aunt. And I think she loved me. We just couldn’t make the long distance thing work, what with her here and me in Temple. It was hard, and eventually, it just got too hard to work.”
Chelsea stared down at him with contempt still plain on her face. For a moment, Jacob thought she might actually spit on him.
“Please,” Brooks said, still fighting through his pain. “This is important. Do you remember when Jordan Anson asked me to get your father’s notebooks?”
The girl nodded.
“When I did, I noticed that she’d been copying them into her data bank. It was stored in her personal account, but I thought I knew what her password would be—and I was right.” He smiled at the memory of that, or perhaps of his memory of how the password came to be. He winced again, and then said, “I have all the notebooks on my tablet over there. Everything.”
Chelsea turned to the table behind her and picked up the tablet Jacob had seen him reading earlier.
“It’s all there,” Brooks said again. “Everything your father wrote. I’ve read it.”
“And you’re locking it away as evidence, right?”
“It is evidence,” Brooks said. “It’s evidence the world needs to see.”
“What?” Chelsea said.
“When we get back to Temple, I’m going to make sure the world knows what your father had to say. I still don’t buy it all, not all of it, but if Miriam thought enough of it to give it a fair shake . . . well, that’s good enough for me.”
“That’ll ruin your reputation,” Stu said.
“Probably get me kicked off the Council, too. Might even be enough for the board of directors at my company to vote me out. We’ll see.”
Chelsea said nothing to that. She hung her head and went forward to the seating area. She sat down with her back to Jacob and the others and started to cry. In the stillness of the darkened hold, he could hear her sobbing.
A moment later, all the lights came on. The air-conditioning started up, blowing waves of cool air over Jacob’s sweaty face.
“Looks like we’re back in business,” Stu said. “You feel well enough to come up front with me?”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “I think so. Kelly, can you help me?”
He sat up and dropped his feet over the edge of the med couch. He rested an arm on Kelly’s shoulder and slid off the edge.
“Jacob, I’m not sure about this. You should stay in bed.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Stu there said all my vitals showed normal.”
“Your blood pressure’s a little high, but other than that, yeah, you’re okay.”
“See?” Jacob said to Kelly. He flashed a smile at her. “I’m good.”
They went up front to the cockpit. Stu slid into the driver’s seat, and Juliette took the spot next to him. Jacob looked out the windshield at a scorched wasteland. Most of the fires in the buildings had gone out, leaving only blackened skeletons without roofs and windows.
“What do you think the damage is?” Jacob asked. “You think anybody was topside for this?”
“Doubtful,” Stu said. “The entire city had already gotten the order to head down below into the safe zones. If they were above ground, they were doing it contrary to orders.”
“What about the herd?” Already he could see figures coated in ash, slogging their way through the burned-out wreckage that had been the air base and most of northern El Paso. There weren’t many, but he could see more off to the east.
“I’d say you wiped out about half of one percent of the herd,” Stu said. “We’re gonna see a whole lot more before this is all over.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“I was thinking we head to Temple. See if the good doctor back there is true to his word.”
“I thought you said we didn’t have any food.”
“We don’t, but now that we’ve got the power cell fueling us, we can do this trip in less than a day.”
Jacob turned to Kelly. “Wha
t do you think? You game?”
She put her hand on top of his and stroked the back of his knuckles with her thumb. It was an old gesture he’d forgotten about, though the memory came back to him immediately. She looked right into his eyes. “Let’s do it.”
He smiled, then gave Stu a pat on the shoulder. “You heard the lady. Let’s do it.”
“You got it.”
Stu pushed the throttle level, and the vehicle lurched forward into a brave new world.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2015 Joe McKinney
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3399-7
First electronic edition: October 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3400-0
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3400-9