“I won’t hurt you, Rose,” Maeve said, the words coming out as a growl, as if she had to fight to utter every syllable. “If you’re afraid I won’t be able to help myself, I understand. You should go without me. Go ahead, and I’ll follow if I can.”
Rose seemed to consider it. Priya said nothing, but it couldn’t have been lost on her that Maeve had surfaced long enough to promise never to hurt Rose, but she’d made no such guarantees about the rest of them.
“I’m not going home without you,” Rose said at last. “I can’t.”
“It’s settled, then.” Walker looked at Rose. “Keep watching the entrance. Listen for trouble. One hour, and we’ll go.”
She nodded, took one more look at her sister, and stumbled off into the dark. Walker turned the penlight to help light the way for Rose, careful to make sure none of its glow made it out to the cave opening.
Something shifted in the dark, the air inside the cave suddenly heavy, the way it felt just before the sky burst open with rain. His skull hurt and he winced, listened to Priya whisper something about her own pain.
Walker heard Maeve breathing right behind him. Her breath cold on his neck.
In his mind’s eye, he could see those pale hands, hideous with plague spots, reaching for his throat. When he turned, the penlight followed, and he found himself inches from her, face-to-face. She exhaled at the same moment he inhaled, taking her sickness into his own lungs. It couldn’t be passed that way, he knew that, but still he felt panic race through him, and he thought of Charlie. I don’t need you, Charlie had said. But Walker needed his son, needed to live, to make it right.
The gun shook in his hand. He cursed himself for being too confident, for having survived horrors he’d thought were worse than this, not understanding that the worst horror would be the one he couldn’t come home from.
The barrel of the gun hovered inches from Maeve’s forehead, just above the bridge of her nose. He swallowed hard, forced himself to take another breath despite the terror and revulsion.
Her hands were still bound behind her back. Maeve made no effort to turn and touch him or to free herself. Against the wall, Priya called her name, pleaded with her not to kill them. But now Walker saw the anguish in Maeve’s eyes and knew she continued to fight the infection inside her, continued to fight the monstrous hunger there.
“If you have to kill me, or if someone else does it,” Maeve said, “make sure they burn the body. Leave nothing but ash.”
Priya said her name, tried to get her attention, to plead with her to listen.
“I will,” Walker said.
Maeve turned from them both and walked deeper into the cave, hands still bound behind her back. When Walker heard her begin to choke and cough and cry, he turned the light away to give her what little privacy he dared.
She cried softly for several minutes before she fell quiet again.
A little while later, the whispery laughter returned.
Walker waited and held tightly to the gun.
22
Rue sat in the passenger seat of Kat Isenberg’s old Prius, staring out the window in frustration. She plucked the little comm piece from her ear, tapped it, saw the little light turn green, and slipped it back into place. She’d been trying to reach Walker for the past forty minutes, called a dozen times, but all she could summon up with that phone was a harsh buzzing that sounded only vaguely like a cell phone ring. No answer. No sense at all that Walker knew she was trying to reach him or whether he might still be alive.
Tucked between her legs, in the space between her crotch and the car seat, her own phone vibrated, just once. With the quarantine, cell service had been blocked, but something had gotten through—maybe some kind of emergency notification? It felt like a jolt of reality, a shout-out from her ordinary life—the one that contained her work, her colleagues, her family, and a dating app that she’d been ignoring for weeks. A hole seemed to open beneath her, as if she could sink down through her seat and find herself back in that ordinary life, in a world of familiar things and the beauty of the mundane.
She tugged her cell out from under her thigh and saw a missed call from Ted Sinclair. Ted, whom she’d left at home to sleep and drink and grieve. Her friend, whom she’d abandoned, but only so she could do whatever possible to save him from further grief. The phone shouldn’t have worked at all, but she knew half the population of Jericho Falls would still be making attempts to call or text, and folks from outside would be trying to call in. Ted had tried to reach her, and the connection had been made for the millisecond it took to get her phone to ring once before the jamming signal had interrupted.
Rue tried calling back and got nothing—not a buzz or a ring—just the Call Failed notification that had plagued phones all over Jericho Falls since the communication blackout had begun.
She set her cell on the dashboard, but she made no further attempt to call Walker. What would be the point? Either he couldn’t answer right now or he wouldn’t. Rue had started along her own path, and what happened next did not rely on Ben Walker. She had managed to get a guy named Joel on the phone at the SRC and told him she had a way inside Garland Mountain, that she hoped to help find a way to cure Maeve or at least control her contagion. Rue neglected to mention that it could take years.
“You ready to go?” Dr. Isenberg asked.
They had pulled onto the shoulder of the road, half a mile or so from the turnoff that led to Garland Mountain Labs.
Rue watched her in the dashboard light, this beautiful, brilliant, and deeply troubled woman.
“You sure you’re up to this?”
Isenberg smirked. “Not at all. But I worked on Red Hands from the beginning, and a lot of people have died. People I’d see in shops and cafés in Jericho Falls, people who were kind to me and my coworkers and who had no idea what we were doing might kill them. I’m going to carry that for the rest of my life. So you can call this next part just more of me being selfish, I guess. If you and I can help Maeve—either cure her or at least keep her own government from killing her—then I’ll do whatever I need to—”
A car whipped past them, so close it nearly scraped the paint off the Prius. Isenberg squeezed the steering wheel and swore to a messiah her faith didn’t believe in.
“Fucking asshole!” she added, almost a punctuation.
Rue’s heart raced, but before she could join in the righteous flinging of profanity, she spotted the back of the passing car in the glow of Isenberg’s headlights. The offender drove a silver Chevy Malibu with WR7 as the first three digits of the license plate.
Ted. And there was only one place he could be headed.
“Drive,” Rue said. “That was Ted Sinclair. We have to stop him.”
Jaw set, hands tight on the wheel, Isenberg tore away from the roadside as fast as the old Prius could carry them. Every pothole made Rue think they were driving an enormous tin can, but the car moved faster than she would have reckoned. It helped that, as fast as Ted had been driving, he didn’t realize anyone was following. Isenberg took a curve with reckless abandon, but she kept the car from skidding off the road. Far ahead, the Malibu’s taillights flared bright red as Ted slowed to turn down the narrow path that led up to Garland Mountain Labs.
“Shit, go!” Rue snapped.
Isenberg floored it. They were on a straightaway, and it took only seconds for them to catch up to the place where Ted had hit the brakes. The Prius juddered and squeaked as if it might quit on them, but Isenberg managed the turn doing about thirty miles per hour. Rue saw Ted’s taillights ahead, realized they’d closed half the distance, that they would be able to catch up to him, and for a heartbeat she felt relief. He’d be at least a little drunk and out of control, and there would be no telling what he might do when he reached the gate. But they could catch him, calm him down, explain the plan to him. You should have gone to his house, explained it to him already, she thought, but too late.
Too late in so many ways.
The Prius skidde
d to the right, the road muddy from the storm. Isenberg spun the steering wheel, but she overcompensated for the skid. The headlights found only trees ahead of them. Rue braced herself, had a moment to wonder if she had an airbag on the passenger side. Isenberg kept her cool, tapped the brakes, straightened out so that the car aimed directly for the trees as if that had been her intention all along. The tires gripped the road again. Isenberg steered back onto the road. The left side of the car thumped through ruts and took out some underbrush. They scraped an oak tree, shattering the driver’s-side mirror.
But they were back on the road.
“Holy shit,” Isenberg said, her breath ragged. “Holy shit.”
Rue blinked, still braced for impact, stunned that they hadn’t wrapped around a tree. She exhaled, shaking, and then saw the taillights far ahead of them. Isenberg accelerated again, but they had lost their momentum.
“We’ll never catch him,” Rue said.
She looked at the dashboard. Her cell phone had slid off at some point while they were fishtailing and hoping not to die, and she felt a pang at its absence. It would have done her no good, but she thought of that missed call from Ted. If he had been able to get through to her, this would all have gone so differently.
“Slow down,” she said quietly.
Isenberg kept chasing, though she knew she couldn’t catch him.
“Kat, stop the car!” Rue said.
The Prius bumped through potholes as Isenberg hit the brakes. The engine gave a little electric sigh as they came to a stop, and Isenberg shot her a confused look.
“What are we doing, Dr. Crooker?”
Rue didn’t like the way the woman had said her name, but now wasn’t the time to point out that her anger was misplaced.
“We can’t catch him. Pull over and we’ll sit here for five or ten minutes,” she said. “It does us no favors to arrive right behind a guy who is obviously about to make a scene.”
Isenberg pulled the car to the side of the road. Rue thought of a lot of ugly ways things could be going up ahead, from Ted ramming his Malibu through the front gates at Garland Mountain to the guards shooting him while he tried to jump the fence.
“How crazy is he right now?” Isenberg asked. “Scale of one to ten?”
As Rue spoke, she felt as if she were betraying her best friend, even though all she wanted was to help him.
“He’s a recovering addict and a currently functioning alcoholic.”
“Goddamn,” Isenberg said.
Rue nodded. “Yeah. My sentiments, too. I’m sure Ted’s been drinking. When Oscar Hecht drove into the parade crowd, Ted went up and over the hood. Hell, he went over the whole car. Cracked ribs and more. He’s in no shape to fight anyone and no shape to climb fences.”
“So you think he’s just going to go up and politely ask them not to kill his daughter?” Isenberg said.
Rue didn’t hold her tone against her. Isenberg had lost track of the fact that these people were like her family, that Ted might as well be her brother—hell, she loved him more than most people loved their brothers.
She turned in her seat. “Here’s how it’s going to go. Ted will go up and tilt at windmills. He’ll shout and scream and make a scene. But he doesn’t own a gun and he’d have no idea where to get one in the middle of all of this, so nobody is going to shoot him. They’ll either turn him away or they’ll let him into the public part of the complex and have some kind of PR hack sit with him and try to calm him down, reassure him, maybe even attempt to send him away. If they don’t let him in, that’s bad for us. We might not get in, either, because they’ll be extra prickly. But if they let him in—”
“If they let him, he’ll be their focus,” Isenberg said. She turned to focus on Rue. “Ted flew by before you could tell me what the guy at the SRC said. Maybe now’s the time to share?”
They had jumped right into a car chase, so Rue’s mind had been elsewhere.
“Right,” she said. “The short version is they don’t know much, but they know Walker caught up with Maeve. He’s also with her sister and others.”
Isenberg nodded in relief. “That’s good. That’s something.”
“Yeah. I just wish I could’ve told Ted that.” Rue sighed. “Anyway, there’s more. Apparently, there’s a tug-of-war going on over how to handle this. The SRC’s director is arguing the case in D.C. that it’s best to quiet things down and cover them up. Make it disappear without just murdering a bunch of people, which it seems your boss is totally fine with. The good news is that this Joel guy hinted the whole thing may be shut down in an hour or two, but there’s another wrinkle.”
“The bad news?”
Rue felt queasy, remembering the chill she’d gotten when Joel had shared the last of his thoughts with her. “The general overseeing Project: Red Hands—”
“General Wagner.”
Rue nodded. “That guy. There’s apparently some doubt in D.C. as to whether he’ll obey an order to stand down.”
Isenberg shifted the car into gear. “I’ve been in plenty of meetings with the general, and that wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
“So where does that leave us?” Rue asked.
“The same place you are every morning when you wake up,” Isenberg said, sadness in her eyes. “Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.”
Isenberg pulled back onto the road. She drove as if they were ordinary visitors on an ordinary day. Rue tensed as they approached the front gate but saw no sign of Ted or his Malibu. Isenberg pulled up to the guard booth and rolled her window down.
“Evening, Carlo,” she said to the guard, brandishing her ID for him to scan. “I’ve got a guest tonight. Dr. Crooker from Boston University.”
The guard scanned her ID and craned his neck to look inside the car. Rue leaned in so he could get a good view of her, flashing her B.U. identification to make his job a little easier, as if they had nothing to hide.
“Weird time for it, Dr. Isenberg,” the guard said.
“On the contrary,” Isenberg replied. “We’ve got a crisis on our hands. I can use all the help I can get.”
Rue wanted to ask about Ted, but she knew that was a terrible idea. If he’d made trouble, the question would draw the wrong attention, and if he’d turned off into the woods somewhere along the road and hadn’t come up to the gate at all, she’d be sending up a warning flare, so they’d be on the lookout for him.
The guard, Carlo, slid the door to the booth closed and made a call. He turned his back halfway toward them, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke, but in less than a minute he faced forward and slid the door open.
“Go on ahead, Dr. Isenberg. But as you’ve got a visitor, please park in the visitors’ lot, and stay with Dr. Crooker at all times.”
Isenberg clucked her tongue. “Even in the public areas?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s weird.”
The guard tapped a button inside the booth. With a loud buzz, the gates clicked and began to swing open.
“It’s a weird night,” he said.
Rue held her breath as Isenberg tapped the accelerator. They drove through, and the gates swung closed behind them. Isenberg turned into the visitors’ lot, which was vacant except for a familiar silver Chevy Malibu.
“That answers that,” Isenberg said as she pulled into a spot and killed the engine.
“It can’t be that easy,” Rue said.
“Maybe they decided having Ted around could help them if and when they bring his daughter off the mountain.”
Rue let that simmer for a moment. She hoped the explanation could be that simple. Was it possible her fear and paranoia about Garland Mountain’s hunt for Maeve had been unfounded? Ted had been drinking earlier, but she supposed it was possible he had sobered up by now.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Rue said.
Isenberg looked at her. “We’re not going to breathe a word about Ted Sinclair once we’re inside. I know you’re worried, but even if they roll
ed out the red carpet for him—and we both know that’s unlikely—you can’t let them connect you to him. Not if you want to see the research.”
Rue sank back in her seat. “Maybe this was a bad idea. You do this research for a living. It’s not likely I’ll see anything in it that you haven’t already.”
“It’s not just about that. I’m so immersed in the project that I can’t see the forest for the trees right now. Walker wouldn’t have asked you to get in touch with me if he didn’t think you could be valuable.”
Rue laughed softly. “It’s not as if he picked me from a pool of biologists available inside the quarantine area.”
“True,” Isenberg said. She put a hand on Rue’s shoulder, locking eyes with her. “He got lucky. People in Walker’s job are trained to seize opportunity in the field and to improvise. You were opportunity, and he’s improvising. Maybe you’re right and you won’t see anything that’s going to help Maeve or help get this thing under control, but I’ve got a lot to show you, and if all you can do is pass along what you learn to Walker, that might still help him.”
“And Maeve,” Rue said, nodding to herself. “And Ted.”
Isenberg popped open her door. “Exactly. So are you coming inside?”
Rue stared at Ted’s Malibu for a few seconds, wondering. Walker would save Maeve or he wouldn’t. Ted would be all right or he wouldn’t. People were dying, others were crawling all over a mountain looking to commit murder, and she’d been told the most outrageous story today, been asked to believe something absurd and terrifying. If only she hadn’t seen people choke and die with her own eyes, hadn’t seen people sicken with plague at the touch of a hand … then she would’ve been able to tell herself it was all a hoax.
But the Sinclairs were like family to her. They had each been kind to her in a world far too short on kindness. Ted loved her. If it had been her being hunted up on that mountain, he would have done the same foolish thing he’d done tonight.
Rue opened her door and stepped out, leaning back in to peer at Dr. Isenberg. “Even if I’m out of my league, curiosity alone is enough to lure me in.”
Red Hands: A Novel Page 23
