“Lead on.”
* * *
A knock on the glass door. Rue jerked upright in her chair, knocking over Dr. Isenberg’s nearly empty coffee cup. A little brown dribble spilled onto an array of paperwork before she’d snatched up the cup. She muttered a quiet profanity as she glanced over at the door to see Ben Walker on the other side of the glass. Rue burst into a smile of relief and victory, but Walker didn’t reciprocate.
“Oh no.” Rue stood and hurried to the door. “Please, God…”
As she opened the door, Kat Isenberg came up from the back of the lab, summoned from her work by Walker’s knocking.
“Dr. Crooker,” Walker said, clasping her hand and then reaching out to shake with Isenberg. “Kat, I won’t ask how you are. I can only thank you.”
“I’m glad to see you, Walker,” Isenberg said.
Rue searched his eyes. “I tried you so many times on the stupid earbud.”
Walker blinked as if he’d forgotten about it. He dug the plastic nub from his ear and tossed it into the trash can by Isenberg’s desk. “I was in the gorge, then in a cave since sunset, until a little while ago. Once I found Maeve—”
“You did find her? Oh, God, from the look on your face, I thought the worst. Kat and I have made some progress,” she said, all in a rush. “They were already working on ways to modulate the symptoms, manipulating the bacterium. It’s pretty harrowing, honestly, when I think about what they were trying to accomplish, but once Kat and I started looking at that research specifically with an eye toward diminishing the severity of the symptoms instead of—”
“Rue,” Walker said.
“The point is, we think we can slow it down. Right now, it wouldn’t help the newly infected much. It might buy them a couple of hours of pretty agonizing life, but it wouldn’t save them. But we’re looking at Dr. Hecht’s samples from after he infected himself, testing on them, trying to see what we can do for Maeve—”
“Rue, stop,” Walker said, holding up a hand, eyes squeezed shut. He opened them, glanced at Dr. Isenberg, then turned again to Rue. “You’re not working to help Maeve anymore. You’re working to help Rose. Maeve is—”
“No,” Rue said, shaking her head.
“She’s gone. But Rose is still here, and you can help her.”
Rue heard a quiet little cry of anguish, like the air leaving a balloon. It took a moment before she realized the sound had come from her.
“Poor Ted,” she said. “Oh, Maeve. She was the sweetest little girl, so smart. When she went through her teen years, the hostility broke Ted’s heart. Then when she went to college and it was like she saw him with new eyes and she was so kind to him, it was like the greatest gift. He was so…”
Rue hung her head. Kat Isenberg reached out and held her hand, squeezed her fingers. Rue couldn’t wrap her mind around it—Maeve and Logan and Ellen, all gone, and now Rose sick with the same thing, infected by Red Hands. Tainted by something Dr. Isenberg thought might actually be evil. Real, malevolent evil.
“Is Ted…?”
“He’s with Rose and Priya,” Walker said. “Priya’s been shot, but she’s going to be all right. The bullet didn’t hit anything vital, and she’s tough as nails.”
“Always has been,” Rue said. “Rose fell for her senior year in high school. Priya lets her parents turn a blind eye to the two of them, but she holds her head up, never apologizes for who she is. She’s tough. But I guess she’ll need to be.”
Rue gave Kat’s hand a grateful squeeze, then pulled away and went to sit back down at her desk. “Come on. Let’s get back to work. The Sinclairs are like my family. This right here is the only way I know how to help Ted and Rose, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Okay. I’ll be back in a while, see if I can help at all,” Walker said. He reached for the door, but paused to look at Isenberg. “There’s a hunger in them, y’know. The one who carries the contagion—Hecht, then Maeve, and now Rose. The longer they go without infecting someone, without killing someone, the worse the sickness hits them. But there’s a hunger, too, driving them to want to pass that infection along. If you can treat Rose’s symptoms, keep her from succumbing to the sickness, will that limit the hunger?”
“I wish we could tell you,” Isenberg replied. “Theoretically, the answer’s yes, but…”
“But?” Walker asked.
Rue stared at the computer screen, not looking up at them. “But it depends how much of the malignance in Rose is rooted in the bacteria, and how much is just … evil.”
* * *
The only thing Rose wanted was a blanket. As cool as the mountain air had been out there in the dark, even in July, it felt even colder in the little room where they had her locked up. A clean room, they called it. Not in the sense of being neat and tidy, though it was both of those things, but in the sense of being sterile. Of course, sterile also meant mind-numbingly boring.
“Try not to think of it as a jail cell,” said the Homeland Security agent who had opened the door for her when they’d put her in the room.
As jail cells went, Rose had to admit it leaned toward fancy. The whole room was off-white and looked to be made of plastic. The bathroom seemed to be one piece, as if it had been carved out of that white plastic and then slotted into place. The toilet and sink had biohazard symbols on them, as did the bathroom door, which made Rose feel a bit like a superhero. Or a weapon.
They’d given her a soft, cozy sweatshirt with Garland Mountain Labs on it, like it came from a souvenir store, or like these scientists and security guards had their own softball team. The pants, though, were thin cotton hospital scrubs, hence her desire for a blanket.
She had a bed. Between that and the bathroom, she thought she might be in this quarantine room for a while, but she wondered how they were going to handle feeding her. Certainly they wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble if they were going to let her starve to death.
Stop, she thought. Don’t think about food.
Rose sat on the edge of a chair, looking at her reflection in the blank screen of the TV attached to the wall. Don’t think about it.
She was hungry. Not thinking about being hungry didn’t make the hunger go away. What she wondered, though, was whether she felt hungry for food … or for something else. Her throat had begun to hurt. A tickle of a cough irritated the back of her throat. In her dark reflection, she could see dark splotches on her neck and heavy circles under her eyes like she’d let some goth punk girlfriend do her makeup.
So … hungry, she thought.
And froze, staring at her own eyes in that reflection, because the voice in her head just now hadn’t sounded like her, had it?
Rose hugged herself, bent over, perched on the edge of the chair. This was quarantine. She was supposed to be alone here, but Rose knew she would never truly be alone again. She opened her mouth to scream, but a little bell rang in her room, and she whipped around to see a green light blinking on the wall.
There were four doors in her clean room—one a closet, one the bathroom, one the door through which the men in hazmat suits had brought her, and a fourth, which had been locked when she’d tried the latch. Now that green light blinked just inches from the latch on the fourth door. Rose stood, went to the door, turned the latch … and it opened.
“Oh, Rosie,” her father said.
Rose stared at him, then at Priya, who’d been given a sweatshirt that matched Rose’s own. A spot of blood showed through the fabric, where she’d been shot, but Priya did not look quite as pale as before.
A hard plastic chair was the only piece of furniture on Rose’s side of the glass, and she sat quickly, mostly to avoid falling down. She hugged herself, staring at the two of them. First at Priya, then at her dad.
She thought of Maeve.
“Daddy,” she said, suddenly a little girl again. “I’m so sorry.”
Her father’s eyes were a bit glassy, like he’d been drinking, but he stood straight enough that she knew his thoughts w
ere clear. Their side of the visiting room was no bigger than Rose’s—except there were two chairs over there—but neither Ted nor Priya bothered to sit down. Ted put both hands on the glass that separated them. He moved slowly, and she could tell his cracked ribs still pained him, but he barely seemed to notice as he looked in at her.
“You were brave,” he told her. “You found your sister. I should’ve been there. I should’ve…”
He glanced away, as if he couldn’t meet her gaze.
Rose knew nothing she could say would make him feel better. His injuries would have held him back. He’d never have found Maeve. Rose and Priya had gone off on their own without consulting him because none of them had been thinking clearly, logic fogged by trauma and grief. Now here they were.
“Babe,” Priya said.
Her left arm had been put in a sling, but Priya reached to touch the glass with her right hand, fingers splayed. Rose covered it with her own hand, an inch of glass between them, protecting Priya from the disease eating away at Rose.
Rose put her forehead against the glass, and Priya did the same.
“They think they can help you,” Priya said quietly. “They’re working on it.”
Rose lifted her head, now eye to eye with Priya, but she said nothing about the prospect of these scientists helping her. Priya hadn’t been infected, but after being with Maeve and seeing what had happened to her, what was inside her, they knew that the scientists at Garland Mountain Labs hadn’t developed this malignant contagion … they had unleashed it.
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, she thought.
Or, at least, Rose hoped the thought was her own.
“Fight it,” Priya said as if she could see the doubt and worry in Rose’s face. “I love you, Rose. I love you, and I need you.”
Rose could only give her a quiet nod. She would fight the influence of the thing whispering, even now, deep inside her. For Priya’s sake, yes, and for her dad’s sake. She was all he had left. But mostly, she would fight for Logan and Mom and for Maeve, all of whom the hunger had taken from her. Rose and the Red Death, she thought. Only one of us will live.
This time, she knew the thought was her own.
But the whispers were still there, slithering in her skull.
Rose looked at Priya and her dad. The way they stood, even the way they looked at her, she could see they thought this was over.
But it wasn’t over. Not at all.
27
If someone had asked her even two hours earlier, Cristina Vargas would have predicted an unmitigated disaster for Project: Red Hands. Already, Oscar Hecht’s decision to experiment on himself had led to a pile of corpses, including his own. Hecht had killed eight people with his BMW at the parade and another nine with his bare hands before Maeve Sinclair had bashed his skull in with a baseball bat. In addition to Hecht, Maeve had gone on to kill her mother and brother. The chaos in video clips made it difficult to say with certainty whether the other two people who’d died the morning of July 4 had been touched by Hecht or by Maeve, but either way, they were dead.
Then the slow-motion massacre had moved up onto Mount Champney. They didn’t have a head count yet, but between those shot to death and those infected with Red Hands, the dead numbered in the dozens. General Wagner had been much less concerned with how to spin the news than he’d been with capturing Maeve Sinclair, but everything had changed now. The general had been removed, and it would be up to Homeland Security to devise a story to explain the video that the whole world had seen of Oscar Hecht, as well as the quarantine, and the deaths in the mountains above Jericho Falls.
Vargas mustered a morbid grin. At least it wasn’t her job.
She stood on the rim of Moonglow River Gorge. The whole area had turned into a hive of postcrisis activity. Muddy Jeeps and three-wheelers lined the rim, some parked between trees. Homeland Security had accounted for nearly all the White Oak Security employees—living or dead—who had been working for General Wagner. Bodies were being loaded onto wagons and into the backs of Jeeps. Some asshole with a drone had been taken into custody, his drone destroyed. The state and local police had been informed that Maeve Sinclair had been found and they’d been asked to stand down.
One thing Vargas had to say for SRC Director Alena Boudreau—the old bitch worked fast. And she knew how to utilize her assets. Vargas had initially worried that her involvement with Red Hands would end her career, but so far it appeared that the general would suffer the consequences and that Vargas would be retained to continue her research. The bad news was that Maeve Sinclair had died.
But Rose Sinclair had been infected. That might not have been good news for Rose, but for Vargas, it was Christmas morning. They would have a living subject and two dead ones—Maeve and Oscar Hecht, not to mention the bodies of all those Maeve and Oscar had killed.
A gust of wind swirled across the rim of the gorge. Vargas shivered and looked up at the sky, breathing in the mountain air. It must have been going on 3:00 a.m. by now, she thought, and the last of the clouds had begun to clear off, exposing the stars and a crescent moon. It had been a long time since she had slept, but she felt energized. Exhilarated. Sleep could wait.
The distant buzz of an approaching helicopter arrived on the next gust of wind, just as a Garland Mountain lab monkey named Hurwitz trotted up to her.
“Dr. Vargas, they’re prepping to move the body. The chopper’s almost here,” Hurwitz said.
So earnest and dutiful. Alena Boudreau would be cleaning house now that she had taken over, but Hurwitz couldn’t be sure if Vargas would still have any power, so he was kissing her ass just in case. She nearly snapped at him—did he think she couldn’t hear the helicopter approaching? Instead, she thanked him with a beatific smile and turned to look down into the gorge. Even when Hurwitz took up position beside her, almost elbow to elbow, as if they were equals, Vargas did not slap him down. Like Hurwitz, Vargas couldn’t be sure what the new boss might do. She had to be careful, just in case this obsequious, snot-nosed lab monkey landed higher up the ladder than Vargas herself.
Fucking politics, she thought.
Down in the gorge, retrieval teams were still zipping corpses into body bags. They wore hazmat suits, despite Vargas’s certainty that they couldn’t be infected by contact with Maeve Sinclair’s victims. Vargas and her deputy, Kat Isenberg, had examined Oscar Hecht’s body themselves and were fairly sure that even contact with Maeve’s corpse wouldn’t release contagion. Whatever activated the passage of the infection from host to victim, it went dormant when the host died. At least, it had gone dormant in Oscar.
But better safe than sorry.
The helicopter buzzed over the tops of the trees. Vargas and Hurwitz both squinted and covered their eyes as the spotlights beneath the chopper swept the rim of the gorge. Arrays of emergency lights had been set up down at the bottom of the gorge to help with the investigation and body retrieval. The helicopter’s spotlights added to those lights, and now the area around Maeve’s corpse lit up like high noon in the desert. Several techs in hazmat suits backed away from Maeve’s corpse, waving to the chopper. Two of them knelt by the body, and Vargas saw they had not finished preparing it for airlift. The techs had shifted the corpse onto a backboard to preserve its condition, and now they lifted it, then lowered it into the thick, yellow, plastic body bag specifically crafted for potentially infected human remains. Black biohazard symbols were printed all over the yellow plastic.
“It’s finally over,” Hurwitz said as if he’d been running the show all along.
Vargas glanced at him. “It’s just starting, actually. Unless you need a vacation.”
Hurwitz smiled thinly. “Are you…”
He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward, as if he meant to pitch himself over the edge. Vargas looked into the gorge, following Hurwitz’s gaze, and felt a chill envelop her. She took a step back from the rim.
The corpse of Maeve Sinclair stood up, yellow biohazard body bag pooled ar
ound its ankles. Hazmat-suited techs scrambled away from her, but the dead thing reached out and caught the back of one tech’s hood. Maeve yanked the tech toward her, ripped open the plastic hood, then shoved the tech away from her. Grasping at the rip in his hood, the tech staggered a dozen feet, fell to his knees, and sprawled face-first onto the rocks at the edge of the Moonglow River, twitched once, and went still.
Dead.
Maeve hadn’t touched him.
“Oh, fuck this,” Hurwitz said, backing quickly away from the rim. He turned and started running toward the nearest mud-spattered Jeep.
Vargas couldn’t run. She could barely think. None of this made sense. The whole point of Red Hands was that it passed through skin-on-skin contact. She moved closer to the rim, resisting the urge to flee. The thing that had been Maeve Sinclair turned south and began to stagger in that direction, first slowly and then with unsettling speed. Its jerky, flailing movements suggested that whatever had happened to Maeve, even if she were somehow still alive—or alive again—her brain had stopped worked properly.
“Shoot her,” Vargas said quietly. Then she unclipped the radio at her belt, thumbed the button. “This is Cristina Vargas. We have Subject Two secured at the lab. We do not need Subject One. Eliminate her.”
“Dr. Vargas,” a voice came back, fuzzed with static. “Director Boudreau specifically—”
“Fuck her! She’s not here!” Vargas barked, voice cracking in panic. Her stomach churned and her heart pounded, and it occurred to her that there had been emotions she had never understood before now. Terror. Real terror. Her hands clenched and her palms turned slick with sweat as she shook her head and leaned farther over the edge, watching as hazmat-suited techs climbed rocks to get out of Maeve’s path and others retreated north. One of them jumped in the river, swept south in the current.
They had seen what Vargas had seen. Maeve had never touched the tech she’d just killed.
Not just terror, Vargas thought. Revulsion. For all Oscar Hecht’s talk about whispers in his head, about the Red Death, she’d thought it all absurd. But she watched Maeve spider-crawl over massive stone slabs and reach the wall of the gorge, and she understood that the thing down there in the gorge must be evil. Vargas would have said, even two minutes ago, that evil existed only in myth.
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