No one spoke as we followed Jada and Jim, but I wasn’t sure what our silence was a result of. The long night in which none of us had gotten any rest, the shock of finding out that Angus was alive and that Dad was being kept in the CDC, or the uncertainty of what was to come. For me it was a combination of all those things, as well as the sinking feeling in my gut that told me we weren’t done being surprised by what was happening in New Atlanta.
The scent of cooking meat hung heavy in the air. As we progressed further into the depths of the house, the smell was joined by the sizzling sound of something being fried. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten in a while, but I wasn’t sure if I would be able to choke anything down even if it was offered to me.
“Jada?” a female voice called.
“We’re here,” she responded.
She looked back over her shoulder at us, her expression filled with uncertainty. It was as if she saw us as soft, which I guess we were compared to her and the other people in this town, and she wasn’t quite sure what we could bring to this mission. If, in fact, this was a mission, which I still wasn’t sure of. She shook her head before turning away, and seconds later we were crossing the threshold of the kitchen.
The sizzling grew louder, and I was now able to see a short, plump woman standing in front of a gas cooktop where several cast iron skillets had been set up. In them bacon sizzled, and next to it a plate was already piled high with the salty meat. My stomach growled again, but my eyes were already moving around the room, studying my surroundings so I could take in everything as fast as possible like I suspected this was a trap.
It could have been. Not set up by Jackson, but by these people who had plans to use Angus for their own agenda. After what we’d just learned about the CDC, I wasn’t in a very trusting mood, and I was suddenly grateful that I had a gun buried deep inside my bag. I slipped my hand in and the feel of the cold steel against my skin was comforting, especially when a man stepped out of the doorway to my left and I was overcome by the sudden feeling of being surrounded.
“You’re back,” the man said.
His footsteps thundered through the room in a way that I hadn’t expected, and based on the reactions of those around me, neither had anyone else. Jim was in my way, blocking my view of the man, but when I stepped a little to the right I was able to see that both of his legs were prosthetics from what appeared to be the thigh down.
“Afghanistan,” the man said as if answering the silent questions each of us were entertaining. “Lost ‘em when I was twenty, so I barely notice it anymore. Or at least I wouldn’t if the gears didn’t get so banged up.”
“Sit down,” Jada snapped, but the words were laced with affection.
The man, who was probably in his late fifties, took a seat at the table in the center of the room, making a face that was more annoyance than pain while Jada grabbed a can off a shelf. She knelt in front of him and applied some kind of oil to a couple gears at the ankles and knees of each prosthetic, nodding when they rotated without squeaking.
“Thank you, love,” the man said, and Jada smiled.
I watched them, trying to get a sense of who they were to each other. They looked nothing alike because the man was clearly at least part Hispanic and Jada’s hair was white blonde, too light to have any of the same blood running through her veins as this man. Earlier I’d gotten the sense that she was with Jim, but even that didn’t seem to fit in my head because he had to be at least twenty years older than she was.
I was still in the middle of trying to figure the puzzle out when the woman at the stove turned to face us and smiled, showing off gaping holes where her teeth used to be and a face that was covered in scars. The right side wasn’t bad, the marred skin had healed and left only a handful of deep lines in her cheek, and everything was where it was supposed to be, but the left side of her face wasn’t even recognizable as human. Her eye was gone, scarred over by deep lines and so sunken that it was clear the eye was no longer in its socket, and her ear was missing completely. The worst part though, was the gaping hole next to her mouth that gave us a perfect view of her teeth and gums.
Her good eye sparkled, the blue of her iris standing out against the pink skin of her face, and her expression was nothing but welcoming when she looked us over. When she turned to look at the man, it was clear that they were in fact a couple.
Jada turned to face us after she’d set the can of oil back on the shelf. “This is Bonnie and Max.”
The two nodded and I waited for Jada to introduce us, but she didn’t.
“Help me,” Bonnie said, motioning to the counter.
Jada did as requested; carrying the plate of bacon to the table while Bonnie went back to cooking. The sizzling seemed loud compared to the silence of those gathered here. There were more than a dozen people crowded into the room and yet not one of us said a word. Jim leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, staring at the back of Jada’s head while at the table Max seemed to be adjusting one of his legs. Glitter was leaning on her father like they had spent their entire lives together as the rest of us shuffled around, waiting for something, anything, to happen, and Jada brought plate after plate to the table. Not only was there bacon, but there were scrambled eggs as well, fluffy and yellow and piled high on a platter. Two stacks of toast sat next to that, and at its side was a plate of butter, a luxury I’d rarely had in my life and one that made my mouth water and my stomach growl even louder than ever.
It wasn’t until Jada had brought the last plate of food over that she turned to face us. “We’ll talk while we eat.”
“Or perhaps after,” Bonnie said. She stood behind Jada, wiping her hands on her shirt and shaking her head, and once again I felt as if I was about to receive bad news.
Clearly I wasn’t alone in that thought, because no one moved. Jada frowned, but before she could say anything Mom stepped forward.
“We appreciate the food, but I think we’d all like to know what’s going on. You can start with who you are and why we’re here.”
Max sighed and waved to the table. “Let’s sit down, then.”
We did, moving into the kitchen where extra chairs had been squeezed around the table. There weren’t enough for all of us, but Jim, Jada, and Bonnie all stayed standing. Luke, too, didn’t sit, but he also didn’t keep his distance. As if he found himself trapped between the two groups and unsure of where exactly he belonged anymore. I couldn’t say that I didn’t agree with the feeling. He and I had been close growing up, spending most of our free time together as children, but things had changed over the last few years as I’d found him missing from my life more and more. Charlie and I had grown closer, which I never would have thought possible considering what a pain in the ass she’d been when we were little. I’d thought Luke had a girlfriend or something, but now that I saw him, looking like a zombie slayer instead of an apartment kid in New Atlanta, I had to wonder if there wasn’t more to it. Clearly he knew things about the city that we didn’t, but I wasn’t sure how.
“You’re here for safekeeping,” Max began once we’d all settled in. “That’s the best way I can put it.”
His gaze was pulled from Mom’s when Jim cleared his throat, and everyone turned his way. He was frowning and Jada was looking up at him, nodding. There was an expression on her face that made my gut clench and I found myself reaching for Mom without thinking. She startled when I closed my hand over hers, but didn’t look away from Jim, and I knew that she could feel it too. This was it. This was the moment I’d been dreading.
“We didn’t want to tell you this until after you were out of the city safely. This is going to be a shock. I’m sorry.” Jim looked down for a second, swallowing like he couldn’t get the words out, and then dragged his gaze away from the floor until he was looking Mom in the eye. “It’s Margot.”
Mom’s fingers dug into mine, and her back stiffened. “Margot?” she whispered.
Jim didn’t blink before saying, “She’s alive
. In the CDC.”
The words had no meaning because all I could picture was my little sister’s smiling face as the memory of her laugh filled my head, making it impossible to focus on anything else. Not even when Mom’s hand went slack in mine and her body dropped to the floor. The room swirled around me as everyone moved at once. Words and cries were thrown around and I blinked, but I couldn’t comprehend what was happening.
Margot wasn’t alive. She couldn’t be.
But Jim had said she was, and he seemed to know a lot more about what was going on than we did.
She was in the CDC.
But why? Margot wasn’t immune. She couldn’t have been.
Only, I knew she could. Angus was, and so was Dad, so it made sense that Margot could have inherited whatever it was in their blood that protected them from the zombie virus. The CDC would have known it too. It would have been easy for them to get a blood sample when Margot was born, and they had already proven that they wouldn’t tell us. But how had they gotten her? How had they saved her that day the zombies flooded the city? Had they staged the breach just so they could steal my little sister, who had only been nine years old at the time, and lock her away in the CDC just like they had with Angus? No. That was crazy. That was impossible.
Only it wasn’t and I knew it.
Chapter Four
Meg
Luke knelt in front of me. “Meg.”
“Did you know?” I whispered, thinking about the way he’d acted that night I saw him at the bar, as if he knew all the dark secrets the CDC was hiding from us. “Did you know about my dad? About Margot?”
He looked away. “I found out a few weeks ago.”
I sucked in a deep breath, holding the air in my lungs until I felt like they would burst. When I let it out, I found myself lashing out at Luke, my hand flying through the air and making contact with his cheek. The slap of flesh against flesh cut through the chatter in the room and everyone froze. All eyes were on me, my half-conscious mom forgotten as everyone in the room focused on the red handprint that had sprung up on my cousin’s cheek.
My face grew hot, not from embarrassment but from anger, and I was suddenly afraid that I would lash out at Luke again or at someone else even. At Jim, who had clearly known all along that my dad was alive, at Glitter who was in on this too. At Angus who had saved me more than once but had also kept secrets from me. At Al and Parv who’d known for years that Dad was immune.
I needed air.
I pushed away from the table and stood, leaving everyone behind. The rooms I’d passed through only a few minutes earlier flew by in a blur. When I pushed the front door open and burst outside, I was met with early morning light that nearly blinded me. I sucked in a deep breath, but the air was thick with humidity and muggy and not the least bit refreshing. If anything, it made my insides tighter. Made it harder to breathe. I leaned against the porch rail and took slow breaths in through my mouth, blowing them out through my nose, but I couldn’t calm down.
Margot was alive. I knew it had to be true, but accepting it was a different story altogether. I had been there, I’d witnessed what had happened that day and I could remember it all with perfect clarity. Now though, facing this truth and knowing what I did about Jackson and his father, I couldn’t help feeling like the vivid memories from that day were nothing but a lie that had been carefully planned out and spoon fed to me by someone who knew I’d swallow them without a second thought.
The last day I saw Margot had been the first day of my friendship with Jackson. I’d always known who he was of course, because not only was he the son of the Regulator of New Atlanta, but he was also charismatic. Even at the age of eleven I hadn’t been able to ignore the magnetic pull he’d had on me. We’d never spoken, but I remembered how he’d smiled at me that day as I stood outside the school. How it had made me feel hopeful and excited and had filled me with a buzz that seemed to energize my body.
How much time had passed before all of that changed? Ten minutes at the most, probably less. One second I’d been sharing a look with a boy and the next I’d been running with my mom and sister, fleeing the dead that had somehow managed to penetrate the safety of our walls. Mom had disappeared, and then Margot, and I had been left alone. People had run by, too panicked and worried about their own asses to even notice me.
Jackson had popped up out of nowhere and saved me. He’d comforted me, stayed with me, helped me when it was all over, and I had trusted him. To me it had seemed like he’d been sent from God, like his sole purpose had been to save me, and that feeling had stayed with me for years. More than that, it had grown stronger until I had been certain that Jackson Star was the only person I could depend on.
But it had all been a hoax. Margot wasn’t dead, and it made the whole thing twice as devastating. After she’d disappeared, I’d given up while my parents had clung to hope. I’d been so certain that they were fools, but I had been the fool. I’d let Jackson trick me and manipulate me, had let the fact that he’d listened to me cry trick me into thinking he was something he wasn’t.
I shouldn’t have given up. I should have held onto Margot harder. Should never have let her go.
The door behind me opened and I stiffened. “What?” I snapped without turning to look at the person who had come out.
“You sure do remind me of your mama,” Angus said.
I turned to face my uncle. His gray eyes took me in, and they were so similar to my dad’s that I found myself wondering how I had never noticed it before. When he’d first approached me in the street and given me a note, at the bar when I’d been shocked by the appearance of Joshua’s zombie corpse in the ring, in the street when my uncle had saved me from being attacked. All those moments and I’d somehow missed the obvious similarity he and my dad shared. Of course it made sense, because I hadn’t been expecting that my supposedly long-dead uncle could ever pop up, but it probably wasn’t really an excuse. Not when I had known something strange was going on.
“I hope that’s a compliment,” I said, because I had no idea how else to respond.
He stared past me, out over the town that was just now waking up for the day. “It is. I didn’t like much of this world before all this went down, but after, when we was tryin’ to learn how to live, I found that I appreciated a hell of a lot more than I had before. She was one of them things I woulda liked either way, though. Hollywood was a tough little thing from day one. Probably why she was able to survive what happened in Vegas.”
“What happened in Vegas?” I asked, and then immediately found myself wondering if I really wanted to know. Right now, I wasn’t sure I could take in anything new.
Angus lifted his eyebrows. “Guess your folks never told you ‘bout all that.”
“Do I want to hear this?”
“There probably ain’t much ‘bout that time that anybody would wanna hear, but I’ll tell you if that’s what you need.”
“Why?” I asked.
“‘Cause I know that right now you’re feelin’ like you been left in the dark a little too much, and you need to know it ain’t ‘cause we didn’t think you couldn’t handle it. It was to keep you safe. You and your mama and everybody else in there. Them people in the CDC would slit your throat to keep you quiet. That’s who they are, and we didn’t want nobody else to die.”
“I guess that makes sense.” The words should have come out grudgingly, but the truth was, it did make sense and I knew it. That didn’t mean it didn’t sting to learn so many horrible things at once.
“Is my sister okay?”
“I ain’t seen her.” Angus frowned and it seemed to darken his irises until they looked like clouds just before a storm set in. “She’s immune though, so they ain’t tryin’ to kill her.”
“But she could die?”
He pulled his gaze from the houses at my back and focused on me. “They all did. All of ‘em but me.”
I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath. I’d wanted the truth, but it hurt like a bitch.
Dad, Margot, and Donaghy, all three of them were now in Jackson’s clutches and I wasn’t sure how we were going to get them back.
I opened my eyes and focused on my uncle. “Do you have a plan?”
“We do,” he said, but he didn’t sound thrilled about it.
Of course, at that moment I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know why he rolled his eyes the way he did or what the tight-lipped expression he wore meant. I honestly didn’t want to know anything else. Not what Angus had been through over the last twenty years, not what Donaghy or Margot or Dad were going through right now, and not what Jackson had in store for us. I just wanted to take some time, even if it was only an hour, to absorb the information I’d gotten before shoving anything new into my brain.
“I should check on Mom,” I said, turning toward the house.
My uncle followed me back inside without a word, almost like he knew I couldn’t handle any more information right now.
Mom was resting on the couch in the living room, her eyes closed and a cold compress on her head. I paused in the doorway and Angus stopped at my side, and together we stared at my mother in silence. She was still trembling and her face was pale, and even though I knew the shock of finding out her daughter was still alive and being held in the CDC had to be overwhelming, I couldn’t help being disappointed. This wasn’t who I wanted her to be. I wanted the mother who’d raised me back. I wanted her to pull herself together and get up, to show the fire and determination I knew she had inside her.
Her eyes opened and she gave me a weak, sad smile. “Come here,” she said, holding her hand out.
I did, crossing the room while Angus stayed where he was. I sat down next to her, positioning myself on the edge of the couch. Her hand grasped mine and she squeezed, and something flickered in her brown eyes that gave me hope.
“We’re going to get them back.”
Twisted World Series Box Set | Books 1-3 & Novella Page 74
