Holstering my gun, I punch the baton out of the man’s hand, then grab him by the neck and throw him over the railing. He hits the ground with an ugly sound. I hoist Anthony out of the tangle of the other dead man, setting him straight and pushing him up to the exit. Then I shoot the two men who are still following behind, taking a bullet through a fine layer of skin on my arm. Once they’re dead, I help Ben over the bodies, then lift Josi back over my shoulder and emerge out of the nightmarish stairwell.
The room I’ve been aiming for is in sight at the end of the hallway. It’s a hospital-style nurse’s station, but what’s great about it is that it works as a panic room. It can be locked off from the outside, with no access at all. Within this sealed-off area is an even smaller patient room with glass walls, and this can also be sealed in case a contamination were to arise. It was also probably designed like that because they have a bunch of psychotic, violent patients to deal with in this place. The security guards don’t have a high enough clearance to open the panic room, but I do.
Anthony starts running toward the room.
“Wait, Doc—get behind me!” I call. Anthony ignores me, probably too freaked out to have even heard me. There’s a hallway that leads off to the right just before the entrance to the room, and I’d be willing to bet my life that there are security guards waiting for us to rush into their line of sight.
“Anthony!” I boom, and the idiot finally jerks to a stop.
“What? This is it!”
Ben and I catch up to him and I push him against the wall, giving him a rough pat on the cheek. “You need to listen to me, or you’ll get yourself killed. Watch.” I wave a hand past the opening of the corridor. Within half a second, four guns fire. I jerk my hand back in time, but my heart’s racing with dread.
“Fuck,” I whisper. Those bullets missed by the breadth of a hair, and not many people have that kind of speed or aim.
“Security beat us.”
“No,” I mutter. “Those guns belong to Bloods.”
“How do you know?”
“I can hear the difference.”
“Oh Christ,” Anthony wails, starting to panic. “We’re dead. We take one step and we’re dead.”
“Calm down,” Ben tells him wheezily. “No use yammering on like a bitch.”
This shuts Anthony up immediately. I think I may love Ben Collingsworth.
I get the tear grenade off my belt, my mind working overtime to come up with a plan.
“His print won’t work on the door, will it?” Ben clarifies, jutting his thumb toward Anthony.
“No, it’ll have to be mine. I’ll get across, open the door, then I’ll distract the agents so you can carry Josi across.”
“They’ll just shoot you as soon as they see you!” Anthony hisses.
“I’ll be fine.”
I crack each of my knuckles, using the familiar movement to calm my heart to a more manageable level. My breathing slows and I can feel the adrenalin coursing through my limbs, making me stronger and faster. It’s a good thing—I’ll have to be very fast to survive this.
Unbelievably, Josephine takes this moment to start waking up. She sucks in a ragged breath and moans loudly, causing my heart to jerk in shock.
“Shit,” I breathe. “Keep her still and quiet.”
“How?” Anthony demands.
What is wrong with these two? Do I have to spell every tiny thing out? “Hold her firmly and cover her mouth if she starts to make too much noise,” I say clearly. This is distasteful to the doc, but I don’t have time for his stupidity.
I take a few steps back and get ready. If I can get across higher than they’re expecting, I’ll have a few extra moments while they readjust their trajectory. One last breath, and then I go for it. Launching myself into a sprint as fast I can, I wait until I’m one pace before the hallway and leap into a dive. I press myself as high into the air as I can and tuck my body into a tight ball. I can feel bullets whizzing through the air, but they’re too low. The force of my jump sends me forward quickly, and as soon as I’m past the hall I pull myself down into a roll. A bullet has grazed my back, but it’s shallow.
I unlock the door and then turn back to see that security guards are approaching from the stairwell we used. Anthony’s firing at them repeatedly, and one of the bullets actually hits a guard in the head. This is not a good thing. Anthony sees what he’s done and freezes in horror. All the color leaves his face and the gun drops from his limp hand. Ben’s trying his best to shoot a few rounds, but his aim is even worse, since he looks like he has about a thousand cataracts on his eyes.
I throw my tear grenade into the Bloods and then scream for Anthony and Ben to run. Anthony manages to haul a woozy Josi to her feet, and together he and Ben support her across the opening. Shots are fired, but thankfully the smoke is so thick that none of them connect.
I have the door open and ready for them to bolt through, and at last the four of us are locked inside a somewhat secure room. I don’t know how long it will take for the Bloods to break in, and I don’t know how long it will take for Ben to finish his antidote.
I also have no idea how long it will be until Josi changes. But the reality hits as the raging guns go quiet and everything within this room falls still.
We’re locked inside a room with a ticking time bomb.
She is worse than everything we just escaped.
Chapter Nineteen
September 16th, 2065
Anthony
In my head is another head. This second head keeps exploding. Over and over again, a mess of blood and brain and skull. I can’t stop seeing it, I can’t block it out, I can’t take back the jerk of my finger that made this happen.
In the eerie silence of the sterilized lab room I know that I will never stop seeing the man’s head exploding. Not until the day I die.
Josephine screams.
Josephine
There’s a fire my whole body is on fire it’s searing through my skin and my organs and it’s cracking all of my bones I can’t stand it not for one single moment more but I can’t escape it either it’s taken over everything and in my head there’s no place to escape to there’s only the memories all of them at once like a furious hurricane of death and violence and all the things I’ve spent my life blocking out—
Luke
The sound she makes is straight out of my hell. Somehow she’s awake even though her body should be dead, and she’s enduring a pain I can’t even imagine. A night terror while she’s conscious enough to understand it.
I run to her side, but she’s thrashing around on the operating table like she’s being tortured.
“You’re the doctor—do something!” I roar at Anthony. He looks at me, still dazed from having killed someone. I wait for him to respond, breath held. If he loses it again like he did at the car wreck, I don’t know if I’ll have the patience to talk him out of it. I may have to punch him in the face.
Slowly he nods. “There’s morphine in here somewhere—look for it while I place an IV in her arm.”
Thank god. “What does it look like?”
“There’s probably a supply cupboard or fridge. It’ll be in a little jar labeled clearly.”
Ben is already setting up his stuff at a work bench, so I run around like a lunatic looking for morphine. Once I’ve got it, Anthony injects it intravenously and then stands back. Watching Josi thrash around is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. At one point I try to hold her arms down, but she’s so strong that she launches me off my feet and onto a steel surgical tray.
It takes about twenty minutes for the morphine to kick in. Anthony’s given her an extremely high dose because according to Ben the temperature of her body will be burning it off much more quickly than normal. We’ll have to keep her on a steady flow of the stuff because if I never hear her make these sounds again it will be too soon.
Josi’s screams stop and she lies still, whimpering slightly. There are tears streaming down her face as I approach slowly
. “Sweetheart,” I whisper, reaching to touch her cheek very gently.
She swallows once and then opens her eyes. They’re clouded with pain, but she’s managing. “Luke,” she rasps with a shredded voice.
The relief of hearing her say my name is so much that I slump down onto the edge of the bed. “Oh Christ, girl.” There are tears in my eyes and I try to blink them away. I don’t think I let myself acknowledge how terrified I was until this moment. I really thought she was never going to wake up again, or if she did it would be as a monster. There’s air being injected straight into my lungs, like a shot of adrenalin.
“What happened?”
“You were in a car accident, but you’re okay.”
“It hurts.” This seems to slip out before she can stop it, before she can jam her teeth together, pulling that cloak of cold invincibility around her. She’s been wearing this cloak every day that I’ve known her. I’ve wished for the cloak to disappear so many times, but now I love it. It keeps her strong, strong like iron, strong enough to get through torture.
“I know, baby,” I murmur brokenly. “We’ve given you morphine and we’ll keep it coming. Just try to relax.” Try to relax? There’s a virus moving through her body, determined to steadily destroy her from the inside out, and I’m telling her to relax.
“Where are we?”
“In the asylum with Anthony and Ben.”
“Was anyone else in the car with me? Was anyone hurt?”
“No, sweetheart, everyone’s fine. You were alone.”
This seems to confuse her. “Why? Why would I drive anywhere? I don’t even know how.”
Oh fuck she doesn’t remember. We’ll have to go through the whole nightmare again. I feel sick, closing my eyes. The walls are closing in around me and I’m unsteady.
Josi makes a soft sighing sound and I see her nod wearily. “I remember.”
We look at each other and I don’t have a clue what to say.
“Stop touching me,” she murmurs. “It hurts.”
I swallow, moving my hands from where they rested over hers.
“Get off my bed and explain to me what’s going on,” Josi orders crisply.
I stand up, clearing my throat. “There are Bloods outside that door, and if they get in they’ll kill the four of us. Ben is currently finishing his antidote, hopefully in time to stop you from changing. So we’ve got nothing to do but wait.”
She thinks about this, not looking at me but over at Anthony. “And if by some miracle he does stop me from changing, what then? How do we escape the Bloods?”
I shake my head, feeling exhausted. “We’ll figure that part out if we reach it.”
Josi makes an impatient sound. “And you? Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be out there with the rest of your kind?”
I open my mouth but realize I’d rather die than speak a single word aloud right now. I could try to explain, but at this point it feels like sullying the last shreds of pride we both hold. She doesn’t deserve excuses or platitudes. I told myself that I would only speak the truth to Josephine from now on—the truth so she would never feel that I lied to her again.
So I turn and walk away, over to the other side of the room. I sit down next to Ben and inspect whatever the hell it is that he’s doing. I don’t look at Josephine, because if I do I might break down and bawl my eyes out, which would be mortifying. This is a mess I got myself into. I don’t deserve tears or apologies or explanations—I deserve guilt, oceans of it.
Anthony sits in my spot by her side, and she doesn’t tell him to stop touching her or go away or explain.
“You’re still here,” she says. It’s slightly alarming that every word spoken in this room can be heard like it’s hooked up to a microphone.
“Of course.”
“You’ve risked your life to help me, Doc. How do you feel?”
“A bit … nervous, I suppose.”
Josi laughs softly. “I’ll bet. It’s all going to be fine, I promise. Just tell them Luke forced you.”
Great, thanks.
“I’m sure he’d love that.” Anthony smiles.
“I don’t give a shit what he’d love.”
I must make some kind of noise, because Ben looks up and gives me a mundane task to do to distract me from eavesdropping.
“He’s done a lot … to get us here,” the doc says, and my ears prick up in interest. I definitely never thought Anthony Harwood would be the one to stand up for me.
“Like what?”
The shrink lowers his voice, unaware that I can still hear him perfectly. “Well he … Josephine, he saved you from dying at the crash site, and then he got all three of us into this room, at great risk to himself. Without Luke we’d all be dead.”
“He’s a Blood, isn’t he?” she asks coldly. “He’s supposed to be good at breaking into places and sneaking around.”
I can feel her eyes boring into the back of my head and I feel like sinking into the floor. Breaking into places and sneaking around. Yep, that’s pretty much it.
“Not just that,” Anthony says, but I can’t stand being trapped in here with Josephine and her words, and this other man who also loves her. I stride from the room into the outer section. From here I can see them, but I can’t hear them unless I press an audio button—which, despite wanting to escape her voice, I can’t help but press. I find another button that turns the glass from clear to reflective. I love this button. It seems to support my complete self-loathing and desire to disappear. I can now see the three of them, but they can’t see me. I’ll always be a voyeur, it seems. Ben is looking at something through a microscope again—this is all he seems to do. His cheeks are still worryingly flushed, but he seems to be breathing okay. I have a clear view of the complete left side of Anthony, sitting with his shoulders hunched, speaking softly to Josephine. He can’t be too much older than thirty, but his temples are graying slightly, and he’s got a certain look of refinement about him. He’s definitely made of money, and well educated.
It occurs to me that Josephine has spent an entire year with this man. That’s as long as she and I were together, so I can’t claim to know her any better than he does. I can’t claim to care more about her.
I want to smash the glass window to pieces. How could this man know my Josephine? How could he love her more than I do? How could anyone?
He has not touched her like I have, kissed her like I have. He has not whispered to her in the dark or held her while she sleeps. He has never cooked for her, played with her, danced her around the top of a dining room table. He has never pushed her into a river or listened to her screaming nightmares. He has never made love to her and felt like the world could be exploding outside and he wouldn’t care.
But, in all probability, he has never lied to her either.
Josephine
The morphine feels squishy in my veins. Everything is an aching dullness. It’s so strange and disorienting that I almost want to go back to the agony. It seems absurd that the human brain can erase the memory of pain so we’re completely unprepared every single time it hits.
Morphine takes its name from the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. There’s a Morpheus in an old 2D movie, too. I can recite the script, just as I can recite the script of any movie I’ve seen. I am delirious with all the trash stuffed into my brain. It is never ending, and it’s confused all the important things. Like being unable to figure out that my boyfriend is a scumbag who doesn’t, in fact, love me one little bit.
His hands on my body hurt. I don’t know why he can’t feel it. Doesn’t he hurt too? Doesn’t some part of him, some distant part, accept that something huge has dropped out of our lives, leaving a gaping chasm? Can’t the part of him that has always been uncured see that there was an enormous love inside me? Can’t he try to imagine how it must feel inside my chest right now? Who can take such a thing, fake such a thing?
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, because these are the thoughts of the child I have never been. The child I never
had the luxury of being. The truth of the world is that people lie, and they pretend, and they hurt. I know this. It is all I have ever known. Luke Townsend was given a job and he did it. He had to watch me, so he did. He had to learn me, so he talked to me. God only knows what else he had to do.
My foolish, treacherous heart can’t help but wonder what’s going on inside him now, as he sits there across the room from me. I can’t help but imagine what he must think and feel, having undertaken a job of such magnitude, only to have it blow up in his face. I want to talk to him, ask him about it, about his thoughts and feelings, because this is what I did for a year and imagined doing for another one. He is so much a part of my life—my adult understanding of who I am—that at this moment I feel almost like I don’t exist anymore.
How utterly pathetic.
Since when, in this broken, shattered life I’ve survived, have I relied on anyone other than myself?
I made him stop touching me. It’s the only way. I’m a burning inferno of fury, and if he touches me I will destroy this whole room.
I don’t even realize that Anthony is sitting with me now—my eyes have followed Luke to where he sits with the scientist. Anthony tells me that Luke saved my life and we’d all be dead without him.
The thing is, this doesn’t surprise me. It doesn’t surprise me that he is capable of something wonderful and brave and skilled—these are the reasons I loved him. I loved him because he could always do the things that seemed impossible; big, courageous things. I know now the reason for those abilities. None of these words can take me back to when I didn’t know.
I wonder why my memory hasn’t sliced out this piece. It seems to pick pieces that could hurt me and dispose of them, so why not this?
Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) Page 26
