by David Kazzie
“What now?” she asked.
He rubbed his chin.
“Seems like I have three choices. One, I let you go. You don’t know where we are. You live your life. I feel like I might owe that to your grandfather.”
He studied her carefully, like he was trying to decide between two entrees on a dinner menu.
“But you’re a bright girl. You might someday find your way back here. After all, you’re going to have the time to look. I don’t want to spend my life looking over my shoulder.
“Two, I let you stay here. The others would accept you. But I sense you’re a crusader. That you’ll undo everything here out of some misguided sense of justice or duty.”
“What’s the third option?”
“I kill you.”
Her skin turned to ice.
“Put yourself in my shoes,” he said. “I’ve made it. I succeeded. The game is over. The people here are going to outlive everyone out there.”
He made a dismissive motion with his hand, as though she and all the other survivors were nothing more than roaches scurrying about.
“Give me the vaccine, and you’ll never see me again.”
“I personally vetted the Penumbra employees I brought here before the plague. They were chosen for their intellect, for their psychological mettle, for their physical health. And they’ve done beautifully.”
“Don’t you see the flaw in your own thinking?”
“What flaw?”
“Complex systems are unpredictable. They want to collapse, they trend toward failure. Why is this any different? By extending everyone’s lifespan, you’ve simply increased the chance of that happening.”
His face darkened for a split second then brightened just as quickly.
“You are indeed Jack’s granddaughter. But you’re wrong, Ms. Fisher. No theory is infallible. And if chaos theory is not infallible, that means it can be proven wrong. And that is exactly what I intend to do.”
“You can’t design your way around human nature. We are who we are. These people, their little psychological quirks will pop on you sooner or later. You’re a fool. Just like Miles Chadwick was.”
He reared back and smacked her across the face, the pop of flesh echoing in the empty room. Blood rushed to her cheek and it felt warm, but she made no move to cradle it with her hand.
“See?”
Another smack, harder this time, so hard it toppled the chair over. Her shoulder hit the concrete floor first and a bolt of pain shot through it. As her shoulder throbbed, Gruber knelt next to her, grabbed her ear, pulled her head off the ground.
“Thank you, Rachel. You’ve made my decision very easy.”
37
The night crawled by, Priya’s deadline looming ever larger in her head. Exhaustion enveloped her, but she couldn’t sleep, a combination of the cold and the fear. She didn’t know what the air temperature was, but she didn’t need to know. The misty puffs she expelled with each breath told her all she needed to know. It wasn’t cold enough for her to freeze to death, although she was starting to wish it were.
Tell him about Will, a tiny voice cried out.
Will was all the insurance either of them would ever need. Gruber’s guarantee of his safety would be more than enough to buy her silence. In her mind, the next decade, things that had yet to pass played out. Over and over, she saw Will playing with kids his own age, Will growing up.
But she hadn’t been able to say the words.
She sat there on the cold floor, her elbows propped on her knees, her head in her hands. The words hadn’t come out when she had the chance. Because she would know. She would know Will’s future would have come at a terrible price. She was his mother. Her job was to do what was best for him. That was it. The problem was that it wasn’t as easy as it looked on the surface.
Doing what was best didn’t mean only finding food and a safe place to lay his head. It was more than that. If she gave him up to Gruber, the truth would eat at her like lye, dissolving her insides. In some way, she would be endorsing what he had done, what Chadwick had done to those women. Fruit of the poisonous tree.
And if that meant no happy ending for her, for her sweet Will, then that’s how it would be. She would die on her feet. She would die with her soul intact. She didn’t want to die, no more than anyone, but thanks to this la-dee-dah vaccine running through her veins, it sounded like she’d have to be able to feed herself for a good while to come. And who knew when the skies would clear, when the crops would grow again.
In the end, she would know she had done her job as a mother.
As she sat there, acceptance of her fate curing like concrete, the door screeched open. When she looked up, she was surprised to see Jody standing in the doorway. She wore jeans and a heavy gray fleece.
“What did you do?” she whispered. Her words, even muted, echoed across the empty chamber.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m on kitchen duty,” she said. “I’m supposed to ask you what you want. For your last meal. It’s for tonight. What did you do?”
“I guess I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s a lot you don’t understand.”
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “Please tell me.”
Rachel climbed to her feet.
“The lab. Do you know where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Can you take me there?”
Her shoulders sagged.
“I’m not sure I should.”
A long silence as Rachel considered an alternative. She couldn’t afford to wait for Jody to make peace with her decision.
“It was him, right? Gruber?” she asked suddenly. “The outbreak?”
“Yes. He was behind it.”
Her jaw clenched, her lips tightening.
“Deep down, I’ve always known,” she said. “I think most people do. No one wants to be the one to say it. There’s always been a shadow over this place. It seemed too perfect, too clean. You know that feeling when you know something and you don’t want to admit it?”
“I do.”
“I would push it away, tell myself I was just imagining it.”
Her eyes were shiny with tears now.
“Why do you stay?”
“We have nowhere to go,” she said. “He’s telling the truth about that, right?”
She nodded.
“Few years back, there was an unauthorized pregnancy,” Jody said. “They took her outside, right in the square behind the chalet. Put a blindfold on her. Shot her in the head. We all had to watch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It never happened again.”
Another pause.
“We have to go now,” Rachel said. “I don’t have a lot of time to explain. But he showed me a metal valise. It had hundreds of doses of the vaccine inside. If we can get these out, back to where I came from, it will give people hope. Maybe we can figure out the food problem.”
She was talking crazy now, but she didn’t care. It was worth the risk. It was worth dying for.
“The seeds,” she said. “He mentioned hybrid seeds that grow in this climate.”
“Those are kept in a safe too.”
“Dammit.”
There had to be a way.
“Take me to the lab,” she said.
“Can’t. The guard is outside the door.”
Rachel held up a single finger and closed her eyes, taking a moment to get her bearings. She couldn’t do it all at once. It had to be like one of her coding sessions.
One thing at a time.
“I’ve got an idea,” Rachel said.
She moved to the back of the room, away from the door and began running in place as hard as she could. After a minute, her legs began to ache and a deep burn settled into her chest. Her legs pistoned quickly beneath her, a muscle car revving its engine. A necklace of sweat formed at the hollow of her neck as her body began to cool itself
. She pushed herself even harder, the sweat dripping off her now, even in the chill of the room.
When her muscles began to fail, she nodded toward Jody. She lay down on the cold hard floor and began twitching as violently as she could. Her legs flopped, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she left her mouth partly open, a bit of drool snaking to the floor underneath her. She was completely winded, her mouth hanging open, sucking in huge gobs of air. The altitude had taken its toll on her; if she kept this pace up, it wouldn’t be an act much longer.
“Help!” Jody called out, banging on the door. “Something’s wrong!”
The guard rushed into the room, his rifle up.
“She’s having a seizure,” Jody yelled, her voice breaking with worry.
“What the hell is wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” Jody said breathlessly. “She said she wasn’t feeling well, and then she collapsed.”
“She’s fakin’!” the man said. “She knows what’s coming.”
Rachel went still, her eyes closed as Jody pleaded with the guard.
“Look at her, she’s beet red,” Jody said.
“Check her forehead,” the guard said.
Rachel felt Jody’s warm hand against her forehead.
“Jesus, she’s burning up.”
“Let me see.”
The guard’s bigger, rougher hand replaced Jody’s and pulled back just as quickly.
“Shit. Is she breathing?”
“I think so,” Jody said, her voice appropriately spiced with panic. “Look, her chest is moving. What do you think’s wrong with her?”
“Fuck all if I know,” he said. “But I ain’t taking any chances.”
“You think it’s Medusa?”
“Jesus Christ, now I do!” he said, stepping back and wiping his hands on his shirt. “The hell with this, I’m getting out of here.”
“I’ll tell Gruber.”
The man grunted in frustration.
“Remember, we’re vaccinated.”
“Right,” the man said, his breath ragged. “OK, I’ll get her to the clinic. You get word to Gruber.”
Rachel went as limp as she could as the guard yoked her into his arms. Through half-lidded eyes, she could see how big the man was. He outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds and carrying her would not be much of an issue. Jody led the way, the guard trailing behind.
The pair hustled out the door and into a small anteroom that was bracketed with a stone staircase at its opposite end. Up the stairs. Rachel lay limp, feeling helpless now. A bottle bobbing along the surface of the ocean, its fate still in doubt. Maybe it would wash up on the shore, or perhaps it would be dashed along the rocks.
The stairs brought them to a short corridor that led outside. He was focused on getting her to the lab, which afforded her the chance to steal a few glances of their route. They were behind the main chalet, headed for the same building where Gruber had caught her earlier. It was still daylight, the weak sun at its peak. There were people out and about, getting on with their day, doing their jobs, living their lives. Maybe it could have been like that for them. Maybe not.
Then inside again; the warmth felt good against her chilling skin. Her body temperature was returning to normal, so that part of the ruse would be lost. Too bad. Nothing worried people more than a high fever. Shades of Medusa. He navigated a long corridor before making a sharp left at a T-intersection.
A noisy commotion erupted around her.
“What the hell is this?”
“She’s sick,” the guard barked. “She spiked a fever and then started having seizures.”
“Get her into Exam 2.”
Now she was on an examination table, the crinkle of sterile paper under her body as her weight settled onto it.
“Get the zip ties off her.”
The room exploded into a cacophony of panicked medical jargon. An oxygen mask was strapped to her face. The squeeze of a blood pressure cuff on her arm. Someone slid a pulse oximeter onto her fingertip. A sharp point into her arm as blood was drawn.
BP one-sixty over one-twenty.
O2 sat is normal.
Pulse is one-forty-five.
Check her for signs of trauma.
Need a Chem-7, full workup. I want those results ASAP.
She lay perfectly still, wondering how long she could maintain the charade, how long she would have to keep up the charade, hoping the numerical value assigned to the former outweighed the latter. Eventually, the activity began to subside as the condition of the patient stabilized. Increasingly confident their most precious patient wasn’t going to die on them, their voices returned to normal.
“What do you think happened?” a woman asked.
“Hard to say,” said a second woman. “Maybe altitude sickness. Stress could have triggered an autoimmune response. We’ll have to see what the blood work says.”
The last two care providers exited the room, leaving her by herself. It gave her a chance to explore her environs for the first time. Nothing spectacular. A standard examination room. A long counter with a series of cabinets mounted underneath.
Don’t suppose the secret vaccine briefcase would be in here, huh?
As she waited in the room, she repeated the workout, driving her heart rate and body temperature upward. When the doorknob jiggled, she quickly lay down on the exam table. The door swung open, and Leon Gruber stood before her, his arm wrapped around Jody’s neck, a large knife to her throat. Her eyes were wide with horror, tears spilling down her cheeks. Dangling from his right hand, the one holding the knife, was the silver valise.
Then he slashed Jody’s throat open.
Rachel screamed, scurrying toward the back corner of the bed as Jody’s lifeless body crumpled to the ground. If Rachel hadn’t been sedated, she might have had that heart attack after all.
“Quite the performance,” Gruber said. “Very impressive.”
Rachel could not take her eyes off Jody’s body, which had been nearly separated from her head. A pool of blood was spreading across the floor, shading the floor in a deep crimson red. The glug of blood cascading onto the linoleum floor reminded her of an upturned cup of coffee.
“You came for this,” he said, lifting the briefcase.
A glint of silver flashed under the fluorescent light, pulling Rachel’s gaze from Jody’s body. After setting the briefcase down on the counter, he unhitched the latches and flipped open the lid. Then he plucked a vial out and held it out for her to see. Rolled it between his fingers. Tossed it in the air, making Rachel gasp, saving it from its gravity-defined fate at the last second.
“This is all the vaccine we have left,” he said. “This little bottle. This is enough for twelve people. You could give this to twelve women, kill the antibodies to the virus, and they would have beautiful, bouncing, healthy babies. Babies who would grow up.”
He tossed the vial into the middle of the room. It arced, end over end, before striking the floor and shattering into a thousand pieces. He repeated the act six more times with six more vials, the floor now slick with a thin mixture of Jody’s blood and vaccine solution.
Rachel looked for something to say, but the well was dry. What was there to say in the face of such evil, of such darkness? Maybe Eddie had been right. Maybe they should have made the deal with Priya. Maybe Priya would have found the answer where she and her father had failed. Maybe there was method in her madness; maybe the end justified the means. Instead, she was here, watching Leon Gruber extinguish humanity’s fire, perhaps forever. There would be no way to undo what he was doing, no way to turn back the clock to a place where they still had a future.
As she watched the clear liquid of the vaccine swirl together with Jody’s blood, an empty finality settled deep inside her. Not sadness, not regret. Not even a sense that she’d come so close to seeing it all the way through. A giant void. Perhaps it was better this way. Perhaps humanity was capable of nothing better than destroying itself.
A memory of San D
iego flickered, a rocky outcrop overlooking the beach she’d found in high school. It wasn’t far from their house, a ten-minute walk up Dunlap Avenue. Sometimes she would stop for tacos and eat while watching the waves gently caress the shoreline, the way a new mother might kiss her baby at night. Her view pulled out suddenly, like an overhead satellite view, retracting from the tiny you-are-here of the little rock and then she could see all of it, the entire country, the strange cartographic shape of the country, which had always reminded her of a terrifyingly obese turkey, the big belly of Texas scraping the ground, the proud plumage in the northeast. Then the sky-blue of the oceans, she wondered about the oceans; how had marine life done in the years since the plague? Had the changes in the climate wreaked their havoc on them?
An empty planet.
A faint boom reached her ears. At first, she thought she was hallucinating, a side effect of the sedative they’d given her. Then a second one; Gruber’s head tilted toward the door as he reacted to the sound as well. Something was happening.
“Get up,” he barked. “Now.”
He moved fluidly across the room, his heavy boots crunching the bits of glass underneath. His aged countenance concealed his vim and vigor, and he was on her, yanking her off the bed with the coiled strength of a man half his age.
“We’re moving,” he said. “Try anything and I snap your little neck. We clear?”
She nodded.
“Say it.”
“Clear.”
Gruber dragged her back outside, where they walked into a maelstrom of panic. The far end of the chalet was ablaze. Thick black smoke curled into the late afternoon sky, catching the wind like a child’s balloon and drifting east.
What the hell?
Small arms fire peppered the afternoon air.
A whistling sound, followed by another boom as the chalet took another hit.
Briefly, she entertained the fantasy that Jody had somehow spread the truth about Gruber to the others, that they were rising up against him, casting off the shackles of lies that he’d used to keep them here. But that fantasy died as quickly as it had been born. Wishful, naïve thinking. Jody had been right. These people knew the score. They wouldn’t bite the hand that fed them, no matter how dirty the hand.