The Lost & Damned 2

by Keira Michelle Telford

  “At least the virus is still passed only through direct contact with an infected animal.” Alex tries to find the bright side of this mess. “Infection must occur through the transfer of bodily fluids, and you’d think that’d be relatively easy for the average person to avoid.”

  “Sure, until the virus mutates again and starts passing from one human to another like the fucking flu. That’s when the city walls stop being a protective asset and turn Amaranthe into a living tomb.”

  Feigning optimism, Alex tries to muster some buoyancy into his voice. “There’s still a chance yet. If we can find the source of Silver’s infection, we may be able to plug the leak.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Lost & the Dead

  Alone with the wall chart, Maydevine works on finding a common link between Silver’s documented cases of CV2 infection while Alex wanders into Silver’s bedroom, letting his eyes pour over the remnants of her Fringe life.

  There’s a small pile of clothes—one of Alex’s old shirts amongst them—a couple pairs of Hunter Division boots that he’d procured for her, and … not much else.

  On top of a dresser, he finds a discarded hunting knife with a broken blade. The broken shard is covered with dry blood. Beside it, there’s a needle and thread, the needle stained red. In the drawer of a bedside table, he finds a gun and some ammo, some of which he’d given her. On the bed, the pillow still bears the imprint of her head.

  Perching himself on the edge of the bed, he pulls his old shirt out of the heap of clothing on the floor. He’d left her wearing it one night at Kink Central and hadn’t seen it since. It still smells of her—of them.

  Her shampoo.

  His cologne.

  Sex.

  Shaken from a daydream by Maydevine’s booming voice, Alex responds to the call of his name and gets up to leave. Upon standing, he notices something poking out from underneath the bed and reaches down to investigate.

  A shiny, new laptop.

  “That’s unusual.” He takes the laptop with him and rejoins Maydevine in the living room. “Did you figure something out?”

  Maydevine looks grave. “I just got a call from Western Point.”

  Alex’s body surges with a pang of worry. “Silver?”

  Not sure how to sugar coat it—and not really knowing how that would help—Maydevine just spits it out. “She flat-lined fifteen minutes ago.”

  Silence.

  Alex’s heart ruptures and he collapses into a chair, the broken springs of it poking into his behind.

  “They managed to restart her heart, but she’s completely unresponsive,” Maydevine continues. “They have her on a ventilator, just until we can get back into the District.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then they have to let her go.” Maydevine’s voice cracks. “I’m so sorry, son.”

  Thunk.

  The laptop slips from Alex’s lap onto the floor, drawing Maydevine’s attention to it. “What’s that?”

  Alex tries to smother his emotions, but he can’t hide the enormity of his devastation. His voice comes out barely louder than a whisper, his eyes filling with tears. “It’s probably nothing.”

  Maydevine scoops it up. “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “Nothing important, I meant. It’s probably stolen.”

  Maydevine boots up the laptop. “Yeah, it’s stolen all right.”

  He turns the screen to face Alex.

  An Omega personnel login page.

  “Why would she want that?” Alex frowns.

  “Let’s find out. After we get you back to Western Point. If you’re not feeling up to it, I can get some of my other men to work on it.”

  Alex shakes his head, summoning strength. “That’s something else you and I seem to have in common.”

  “Son?”

  “I can’t sit back and do nothing; I’d rather work. I have to work.”

  “She’d call you a pussy if you didn’t.” Maydevine tries to entice a smile.

  It works.

  Briefly.

  Sniffing back sadness, Alex wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “I think we were fighting.”

  “Come again?”

  “The night Silver was attacked, she was mad at me.”

  “Don’t go down this road.”

  Too late.

  Alex is already there, and he’s been there for a while.

  “If I hadn’t walked out on her the last time we saw each other, she would’ve been with me the night she was attacked, and not out on the street by herself.”

  Maydevine watches Alex make fists so tight his fingernails dig into his palms.

  “Act, don’t react,” Maydevine reminds him. “Anger won’t solve this.”

  “It’s my fault she’s dead.”

  “It’s somebody’s fault all right.” Maydevine holds up the laptop. “Silver was investigating the CV2 outbreak. Whatever happened to her, I’m guessing we’ll be able to trace it straight back to this.”

  He’s right.

  Silver would’ve devoted herself to hunting down the source of the viral outbreak, no matter what. She’d have been infected, no matter what.

  She’d have died, no matter what.

  *************************

  The car drive to Western Point passes in silence. At the hospital, Maydevine dutifully pushes aside his own needs to give Alex some privacy in Silver’s quarantine room.

  Confined by the hazmat suit, Alex feels a million miles away from her. Holding on to the last warmth of her hand, he watches the technician turn off her breathing apparatus, and the heart beat monitor steadily begins to slow.

  Two beeps become one …

  Become nothing …

  Asystole.

  After thirty seconds of Silver being asystolic—the legal requirement for a pronunciation of death—the technician turns off the monitor and leaves Alex alone with her corpse.

  Excruciating seconds tick by, and he can’t take it anymore. He wants to feel her skin against his. He wants to touch her lips, one last time.

  Violating the hospital’s strict quarantine rules, he pulls off his protective head gear and presses his lips against her forehead. Unless the virus has mutated, he rationalizes to himself, the room must surely be safe. If not, worst case scenario, he’d be nothing more than the next Sentinel District CV2 victim.

  Squeezing Silver’s hand tight, he leans in to her and rests his head against the bed, tears welling in his eyes.

  Silence.

  Silence shattered.

  Silver leaps up in the bed, gasping for air. Alex jumps backwards and falls over his chair. Silver looks around the room, confused. Choking to breathe and suddenly panicking, she pulls out the endotracheal tube in her throat and coughs and sputters her way back to normal lung function.

  She pulls wires away from her arms and checks herself for injury. Her wounded stomach and side send pain shooting through her nerves, and she falls back down against the bed, crying out.

  Alex, his nerves thoroughly rattled, picks himself up and tentatively makes a move toward her. “Silver?”

  She says nothing, her breathing erratic and shallow.

  “Silver?” He steps closer. “Please, don’t be a zombie.”

  Her head snaps round to face him. “Excuse me?”

  Alex stumbles back, making a cross symbol with his fingers like he’s warding off a vampire.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” She frowns at him.

  Her eyes are back to their usual, striking gray, but Alex doesn’t trust that.

  “Who are you? If you have a sudden craving for human flesh, I’m not your guy. That’s gonna be a total deal breaker.”

  Silver sits up in the bed, her head spinning. “What the hell happened to me?”

  Painfully slowly, Alex makes his way closer to her and she can see the fear in his eyes.

  “Alex? What’s going on?”

  Interrupted by an immediate influx of hospital staff, all in hazmat gear, Alex is p
ushed away and stuck in the neck with a needle. He promptly collapses on the floor. Silver, now lucid and full of fight, resists their efforts to examine her, forcing them to strap her down amidst her torturous shrieks and screams.

  *************************

  Alex wakes up in his own hospital bed, and finds Maydevine at his bedside, giving him a patented, fatherly glare.

  “Do you have any idea how long it took me to persuade the chief of emergency medicine that you didn’t need to be quarantined?”

  Rising to a sitting position, Alex tries to ignore the pounding in his head. He feels hung-over, though he hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in days.

  Maydevine tosses a file into his lap. “You’ll want to look that over.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “Silver’s medical file.”

  Recollection sparks inside Alex’s head. “Where is she?”

  About to leap out of the bed, his muscles tense for action, but Maydevine holds him back.

  “She’s in another room. Sleeping.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “They gave her a sedative.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “And kicking. She already gave one of the nurses a black eye.”

  “How the hell … ?”

  “I don’t know.” Maydevine shakes his head. “But they have her under armed guard. She’s the first person to survive the CV2 infection, and she could be the key to a medical breakthrough.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Not here.” Maydevine quashes Alex’s objection before he has a chance to make it. “The hospital’s launched a formal complaint about your behavior.”

  “Huh?”

  “Pulling off your head gear like that. It put you—and everyone else in the hospital—in danger. They wanted you taken off the job, so I had no choice but to temporarily suspend you while you were enjoying your little nap.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Silence.

  Alex twiddles his thumbs. “So my suspension’s over now, right?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Whether or not you’re mentally competent.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Since you’ve been suspended, you’ll have to attend a compulsory psych evaluation, then you can have your badge back. In the mean time, we have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “About what?”

  “Jennifer McAllister.”

  “I thought we already … you know, with the bag … and the dumping.”

  “Not that one. The one in the room down the hall.”

  “Oh.” A hesitation. “What about her?”

  “Sooner or later, someone’s going to figure out who she really is, and we need to be prepared for that.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need you to buy me some time.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  House Arrest

  Alex hears a knock at the front door while he’s on his hands and knees in the bathtub, scrubbing at water marks with a scourer. He fails to make his pink rubber gloves look manly. At the knock, he clambers out of the tub, discards the gloves and the scourer in the trash, and bolts for the front door.

  Silver’s been escorted to his apartment under armed guard. She’s in hospital scrubs, since she has no clothes of her own, and she looks weaker than he’s ever seen her before. Nevertheless, she refused the wheelchair.

  Alex’s delight to see her is marred only slightly by the jangle of her handcuffs.

  “Why are you cuffed?” He turns to one of the guards. “Why is she cuffed?”

  The guard takes off his shades, revealing a fresh black eye. “This woman is violent. It was for our own protection.” He doesn’t look amused.

  Alex turns back to Silver. “Violent? Really? What did they do? Speak to you?”

  Though he feigns irritation, Silver catches the hint of a smile behind his words. Truthfully, it reminds him of the night they first officially met. Like an obstinate child, she blows a raspberry at him and holds her wrists up for the guard to uncuff her. He obliges, albeit with some trepidation.

  Once free, she brushes past Alex into his penthouse apartment as if she owns the place. By the time he signs the papers for her release into his custody and catches up to her, she’s already in the kitchen, helping herself to some potato chips.

  “Hungry?” he figures.

  She’s ravenous.

  “Nice place.” She takes a seat at the table. “I don’t suppose you have any of my clothes here, do you? I guess the ones I was wearing the other night were kind of ruined.”

  Alex sits down beside her. “If by ‘ruined’ you mean that they were torn to shreds and soaked in your blood, then yes, they were ruined. And yes, I do. I went back to your ‘apartment’ and took everything that was yours.”

  “You were at my place?”

  “With Maydevine.”

  “Why?”

  “To try and figure out what happened to you.”

  “Any luck with that?”

  “None.”

  Silver goes back to the chips, Alex watching her carefully.

  “I was really hoping you’d be able to help us fill in some of the blanks.”

  Silver shakes her head. “I can’t. I don’t remember anything.”

  Alex swipes the bag of chips away from her, trying to get her full attention. “Nothing?”

  She fixes him with a glare. “Nothing.” She snatches back the chips. “Where are my clothes?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  Potato chips in hand, she deserts him there and goes in search of underwear. She finds her clothes in a garbage bag on the dresser and dumps the contents out over the bed. Eager to change into her own stuff, she’s already half undressed when Alex enters the room. He stops in the doorway, unsure if he should avert his eyes.

  He doesn’t.

  “Is there a reason why you’re being so bitchy? Or did you just wake up with a mega case of PMS?”

  He sounds irritated, but he knows from experience that her sharp attitude is little more than a well-rehearsed self-preservation tactic. Often to her detriment, she’ll hide her vulnerability behind bravado, apathy, disconnect, and anger.

  Today is no different.

  She’s frightened, and doesn’t want his pity.

  Pants on, shirt off, she gives up trying to get the sleeves of her favorite sweater untwisted, and tosses the infuriating thing back onto the bed sheets.

  She’s one step away from tears.

  Alex’s eyes are drawn to her bandages, wrapped tightly around her torso. Her skin is all shades of purple and blue where she’s been beaten, and her neck bears some odd markings of harm that Alex can’t quite identify.

  Reaching for her hand, he glances down at her arm. The scars of self-mutilation are almost completely faded now, though there’s a pin prick of blood in the crook of her elbow. It could be from the sedative at the hospital, he thinks. It could be from a hundred different things.

  He places a hand on her shoulder, slipping aside her bra strap to expose the full outline of yet another bruise. Touching her ever so gently, though it still makes her wince, he fits his hand into the shape of the bruise.

  It matches, almost perfectly.

  A man’s hand.

  “Are you okay?” he asks quietly.

  The first tear falls. “Why don’t I remember?”

  “I don’t know.” Alex shakes his head. “You’ve been through a lot.” He slides her bra strap back into place. “You nearly died.”

  “I did die.”

  “Yes, but you came back.”

  Moving her hair out of the way, he uses tender neck kisses as a subterfuge for getting a better look at the markings on her skin.

  Burn marks.

  Unaware of his investigation of her body, Silver leans into him. “But how?” she whispers.

  “I don’t know.” He pulls back and cups her face in
his hands, looking beyond her into the reflection of her back in the mirror.

  Squarely behind her shoulder blades, there’s the distinct outline of a shoeprint.

  Judging by the size of it, her subduer was male. She was crushed so hard by his boot that the imprints of the sole are still preserved in her skin.

  A temporary, purple photograph.

  With an Omega emblem in the center of it.

  Remembering her question, he looks back into her eyes. “You have some kind of immunity. The doctors have never seen anything like it. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but the way your lymphocytes responded to the invasion of the virus is going to pave the way for a vaccine.”

  He’s holding something back, she can tell.

  “Why is everyone calling me Jennifer McAllister?” She waves her wrist at him, her plastic hospital ID bracelet still fastened around it.

  She was bound to ask.

  Alex sits down on the edge of the bed, unable to look at her. “It was the only way we could get you back here, to get you to the hospital.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s …” Alex struggles to find an explanation, running a hand quickly through his hair.

  Silver catches it. “Okay, well, now I know it’s bad because you just did that thing you do with your hands and your hair. Seriously. Who is she?”

  “Maydevine took care of her. He borrowed that tag from her.”

  “Borrowed it? Like there’s a chance she’s going to get it back someday? Where is she?”

  Alex looks away from her, ashamed. “She’s dead.”

  “Dead? What kind of dead? Old age dead? Or dead like you guys killed her?”

  Alex jumps to his feet and to his own defense. “Hey! I didn’t kill her.”

  “So Maydevine did?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh, my god.” Silver looks horrified.

  “Look, Silver … Ella …”

  “Alex …”

  “Her death had nothing to do with your tag—trust me on that. It was just a coincidence that Maydevine exploited so we could save your life.”