Infected

by Sophie Littlefield

  There, unmoving and crumpled between the Dumpsters and the wall, his chest covered with a seeping stain, was the second gunman.

  Dead.

  She knew he was dead by the lack of focus in his eyes. The fact that Tanner was alive was further proof: the two Albanians had not been about to let Carina or Tanner survive if they could help it. But if she had been unsure he was dead, the long, jagged piece of metal jutting from the bearded man’s chest would have convinced her: it was embedded deep in his heart, and the area surrounding it was saturated with the blood that was dripping from his shirt into a growing pool on the ground.

  “Are you all right? Where’s the other guy?” Tanner asked.

  “I’m fine. He’s unconscious, I think. I shot him with the dart gun. Whatever was in there, it put him out. I guess if they increased the dose—”

  “—to accommodate for the virus, it probably was enough to take out a horse,” Tanner finished the thought. “Thank God you’re okay, Car.”

  But she wasn’t, not at all. Her vision was starting to flicker at the edges, as if her brain was short-circuiting as it processed information from the optic nerves. Her hands were trembling, and the smallest sounds pounded in her head like hammers. Her scalp itched, and it was only the memory of the man on the video pulling out his own hair that kept her from scratching at it.

  But she couldn’t let the symptoms of the infection interfere with what she had to do. “How did you …?”

  Tanner lifted his hand and slowly unclenched his fist. Inside was another piece of metal, shorter than the one that had killed the bearded man but just as jagged.

  “Where did you get it?”

  Tanner’s other hand slid down the side of the Dumpster, coming to rest on a metal band that had apparently once served to lock down the lid; a padlock dangled from the end. He pushed the metal and it clanged against the side of the Dumpster, the sound echoing hollowly in the space between the buildings.

  “You … broke it?”

  “Yes.” His voice was wooden.

  “You literally tore off that piece of metal?”

  Only then did Carina notice that some of the blood on Tanner’s hand was fresh. It wasn’t all from the wound in his leg. She could make out a few abrasions and cuts on his palm; ripping the metal had sliced through his flesh. She gasped and reached out to touch him. The piece of metal clanged to the ground as he finally let go of it.

  Taking his hand gently, she pushed back his fingers. “Ow,” he said. “That’s a little tender.”

  “How did that … thing get in him, is what I want to know. I mean, he had a gun, right? And even you aren’t as fast as a bullet …”

  “I, uh, threw it.”

  “You—”

  Suddenly she understood. Sometimes, when Tanner was bored, he practiced throwing knives in the backyard. Dull ones—old steak knives from his mom’s kitchen drawer—at a homemade paper target fixed to a tree with a pushpin. It drove his mother crazy, and every time she caught him doing it she gave him extra dish duty, which he did without complaint—but Tanner insisted that working on his throwing accuracy this way increased his distance with the discus.

  As if to illustrate her thought, Tanner picked up the piece of metal lying on the ground and got to his feet. He gingerly flexed the foot of his injured leg and set his weight on it, testing. Then he whipped the metal piece across the parking lot, straight at the van door that Carina had left open. The metal lodged in the upholstered seat, buried halfway, and the van rocked from the impact.

  “If I keep this up, I’ll go to the state championships for sure,” he said, attempting a smile.

  But Carina knew every one of Tanner’s smiles. There was the easygoing one he flashed whenever he ran into friends, the cocky one when he won a heat at a meet, the gentle one when he helped his two middle brothers with their homework, and her favorite, his unguarded, pure happy-to-see-her grin, the one he reserved just for her.

  This smile was like none of these. It was transparent, a ghost of a smile pasted over much deeper emotions. Horror. Guilt. Self-recrimination.

  Tanner had just killed a man. And it was tearing him apart.

  “Oh …,” Carina breathed, feeling like her lungs were being crushed. Tears pooled in her eyes, and she longed to take him in her arms, to comfort him the way he had comforted her when her uncle died. She wanted to take his pain away, the way he had for her.

  She wanted … But no, that wasn’t entirely right. She longed for him, but this was different from the longing that took over her senses whenever they touched. This was a longing to be his strength, to be his support. To join herself with him so that together, they would be more than they were apart. Together, they would be enough—for any challenge, great or small. And it was hard to imagine any challenge greater than coming to terms with taking a life.

  What she was feeling was more than longing, though. It was love.

  Love. Carina tested the word in her mind as she gently caressed Tanner’s face. She loved him; she knew that now. But love was the emotion she had feared above all others, the most terrifying, because it had always been linked with loss. And now Tanner was covered with his own blood, wounded, in just as much danger as she was. His chances of survival were made even worse by the gunshot wound in his leg. Loving him was the last thing a sensible person would do.

  “Carina, please, run now, while you can,” he said, as if sensing her thoughts. “Leave me here.”

  “I’m staying. The cops will be here soon.” The sirens were coming closer, only blocks away now. “We’ll be safe with them.”

  Tanner took a breath, wiping his hand on his shorts. “No. We won’t. Think about it, Car: we’ve been involved in a homicide. Possibly two, since I didn’t see anyone come out of the van but you. By the time the cops process the scene, straighten out who did what, it’ll be tomorrow. I mean, it’s already tomorrow. We’ve got less than three hours left. And those hours are going to be spent at the police station. There’s no way they’ll believe us if we tell them what’s really going on.”

  “They have to,” Carina said. “At least enough to call Sheila—her boss—someone—”

  “And what, Sheila will rush over with the antidote? Even if she just conveniently happens to have it at home, there’s no way she’d incriminate herself in that way. And to requisition it from the lab, even if they rushed through the steps—come on, Car, it’s got top government security, there’s no way it’s happening in time.”

  With a sinking heart, Carina realized Tanner was right. If the cops found them, they were as good as dead. Frantically she scanned the empty lot, the street beyond, the nearby houses. The parking lots and streets were lit by unforgiving streetlamps, the cold yellow light barely casting shadows behind parked cars and fire hydrants. There was nowhere to hide, not with Tanner injured. She wasn’t even sure he could walk.

  And then her eyes lit on the drainage pipe that went under the road where it crossed the creek. The opening was about three feet across, large enough for an adult to crawl into. They had to get there—even if she had to carry Tanner, the way he had carried her earlier. She probably could, given all the other new capabilities she possessed. But before she tried, Carina had to do something she very much did not want to do: she crawled across the asphalt to the body of their would-be killer and looked for his gun. There—it had fallen near where he was sprawled. She had to move his leg slightly to get to it, and she did so with her foot, suppressing a wave of nausea. The weapon felt heavy in her hands.

  “I’d put this in my pocket but, well, I don’t want to shoot myself,” she said.

  Tanner was already standing up, and he started to take the backpack off his shoulders. Action brought some of the life back to his eyes. “I’ll carry it, I’ll—”

  “Here,” she said, pushing the pack back in place. She unzipped the outer compartment and dropped in the gun. “Okay. Now I need you to let me help you walk,” she said, slinging his arm over her shoulders.

&
nbsp; “I’ll slow you down, I can’t—”

  “We’re not going far.”

  She walked as fast as she could, Tanner keeping up better than she had dared hope. In fact, by the time they reached the ditch, he was almost walking on his own. Maybe it was shock that had immobilized him earlier—or maybe the virus helped heal him.

  “Hurry,” she urged, waiting for him to crawl into the pipe before she followed. He had to stay low, the backpack scraping the top of the pipe. Inside, there was an inch or so of standing water and a layer of slick mud. It smelled of rot and urine: someone else, probably homeless, had been here. For a moment she was afraid there were vagrants already inside, taking shelter for the night, because something blocking the other end kept any light from entering. But as they crawled deeper, feeling their way into the darkness, she found that it was trash wedged against a tangle of branches and dead foliage; at some point during the rainy season, the water had been high enough to sweep garbage into the pipe, and it hadn’t yet been cleared.

  They waited as the sirens came closer and closer, wincing as several vehicles passed overhead, the noise deafening and the vibration terrifying. The cars careened into the lot across the street, and then there was shouting, demands for them to show themselves, orders to drop all weapons. Little did the cops know they were talking to one dead man, and another one who—Carina prayed—was unconscious.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked Tanner, trying not to show her concern. She could barely make out his features in the light that seeped into the pipe’s opening. They couldn’t stay here. The longer they remained, the more people would arrive who would notice a pair of teenagers—both filthy, one covered with blood—at the edge of the crime scene. If they went now, they might be all right; the cops’ attention was riveted by the body they must have discovered by now.

  “I’m …” Tanner flexed his hands, then prodded his leg experimentally, wincing slightly. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to run a marathon, but I’m all right. The bleeding stopped a long time ago. I haven’t cramped up either, not since the first few minutes. Do you think—I mean, maybe the virus does other things too? Something to cut down on the bleeding?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s clear the bullet didn’t hit any major arteries, or you’d be dead. I’m pretty concerned about all the filth that’s gotten into the wound, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. Do you think you can make a run for it?”

  “I’ll die trying,” Tanner said grimly, a turn of phrase Carina wished he hadn’t used.

  Carina maneuvered her body around toward the tunnel opening.

  And found herself staring into the face of the bald assassin.

  “Stupid bitch,” the man wheezed in heavily accented English as he attempted to propel himself by brute force farther into the pipe.

  There was something very, very wrong with him. His facial features were distorted and swollen, with great blotches of red marring his cheeks. His mouth was a grotesque leer, his tiny eyes practically disappearing into the folds of his skin. His breathing came in tortured rasps. Even his hands were swollen like cartoon mittens.

  And yet, one of those hands was managing to hang on to a wicked-looking curved knife. He was clearly suffering some sort of reaction to the dart. He could easily have been disoriented, perhaps in pain.

  If that was the case, however, he’d recovered enough to follow them here. He must have eluded the police by reaching the ditch on the far side of the road before they arrived, and crawling toward the pipe out of sight. As if to counter any doubts Carina had about his abilities, the man took a swipe at her. If he’d been a few inches farther into the pipe, he might have cut her throat.

  He struggled on his hands and knees to come farther inside, blocking most of the light, jabbing with the knife. But he was so large, and his coordination was so compromised by whatever was wrong with him, that he was having trouble.

  Still, there was no escape route and no way, even with her heightened abilities, that Carina was going to be able to fend off a man who weighed more than twice what she did, especially since most of it was muscle and she was trapped in a space only a few feet wide. A few more seconds and he would crawl close enough to reach her with the knife; all it would take was one well-placed cut and she’d be dead. Then he could kill Tanner at his leisure.

  That image—the man dragging her bleeding corpse out of the pipe to get to Tanner, wounded and trapped, infuriated Carina. She braced herself as well as she could, ignoring the pain in her knees from being pressed against rocks at the bottom of the pipe, and raised her hands, ready to try to fend off his jabs. Behind her, Tanner was grunting with the effort of clearing the debris blocking their exit, but with no tools and his wounded hands, he was making little progress.

  The man inched forward, his breath sounding more like the whine of a motor than a human, drool hanging in strings from his rubbery, enormous lips. He swung with the knife again, and this time the tip sliced Carina’s forearm, leaving a thin trail of glistening red. It was little more than a scratch, but his next attempt could certainly connect much deeper.

  “No,” Carina hissed, gritting her teeth. You will not kill me. You do not get to hurt us. You will not win.

  She grabbed for his left arm, the one wielding the knife, and managed to catch his wrist on the backswing as he prepared to lunge. He tried to shake her off, but Carina focused all of her strength—which she’d won the hard way, with thousands of hours at the gym and track practice, as well as with the artificial boost she received from the virus—into holding on. He clamped his other hand over hers, attempting to pry it away, but Carina grabbed that one as well. She was holding both of his wrists while he twisted and pulled, trying to wrench free. She held tighter, focusing on her breathing, her pulse, forcing herself to assume a calm she didn’t feel. To save herself and Tanner, she had to be better than she’d ever been before.

  Not for the first time since being infected, Carina had the sense of time slowing down, of being able to experience every fraction of a second as though it was moments long, aware of every sensory detail that would ordinarily rush past in a blur.

  And in the space of time it took for her to breathe in and out once, her daily appreciations flashed through her mind. Three things for which she was grateful, even now.

  “Seeing my mom again. Tanner. And this,” she whispered, watching confusion pass through the man’s cruel little eyes.

  She bent his wrists back.

  At first it felt like trying to bend back a bar of steel, like she would never be able to repel the force and weight. She could hold him off, but not forever; there was still a limit to the duration of the bursts of strength she was capable of. Muscle contractions were still governed by the laws of biology. The chemical and mitochondrial realities were such that she would eventually need to rest.

  But she had at least a few more seconds. She could feel her face flushing, her veins standing out as she pushed harder. The man emitted a sound like a kicked dog—and then that sound turned into a shriek as she felt something give. A tremor traveled through each of his arms, ligaments snapped … and then there were two audible cracks. Carina pitched forward, her forehead bumping against the man’s drool-covered, screaming face.

  With her hands, she had broken both of his arms.

  She was still holding on to his wrists, frozen with shock, but they flopped uselessly, the bone fragments grinding. The knife had clattered to the bottom of the pipe. The man’s screams had turned into one long braying sound of agony, and only Carina’s fear that someone would hear him got her moving again. She let go of his wrists, her stomach twisting in revulsion at seeing them hanging down from his ruined arms. He tried to lift them to his face and succeeded only in clubbing himself with his forearm.

  Carina reached back and grabbed at the pile of debris that Tanner had been creating with the muck he’d managed to pull from the blockage. She seized a handful of mud and twigs and pebbles and jammed it into the man’s open mout
h, pushing the entire handful in before he had a chance to bite her. His screams ended with a choking gasp as he inhaled some of the stuff.

  “I’m through!” Tanner said. Weak light streamed through a hole in the debris. “I think there’s room—here—”

  Moving forward, he shinnied through the hole in the blockage. Carina followed close behind, trying to ignore the frantic choking and gasping of the injured man. Branches painfully scraped at her exposed skin, and her hips got stuck for a moment, but she was able to push past, and in seconds she and Tanner were out of the pipe.

  Carina glanced over at the parking lot and saw that several more police cars had arrived, a virtual swarm of vehicles. Their headlights lit up the scene. Only the gathering crowd of onlookers, people in workout gear and pajamas and bathrobes, all straining to see past the makeshift barrier that the police had erected, temporarily shielded them from view.

  They crouched as they ran, partially hidden by the lower elevation of the creek bed. After half a block, another road crossed the creek, and they ran up onto the street and across lawns, into an alley, using the cover of darkness. Tanner was limping, but Carina barely had to slow down for him to keep up. After another quarter mile, they finally slowed.

  Tanner took her hand, pulling her behind a tall, unkempt hedge where they were shielded from the views of even the closest neighbors.

  “I broke … I broke …” Carina’s teeth were chattering so hard she couldn’t get the words out. She had broken the man’s arms, snapped them like they were toothpicks. She had no idea if such an injury could be fixed, if he would ever heal. Whatever had been in the dart might have finished him off anyway—his breathing was so poor that he could easily be suffocating even now.

  She’d shot that dart. If he died, she had killed him.

  “You had no choice,” Tanner said, pulling her close to him. “If you hadn’t done something to stop him, he would have killed you.”

  “But why? I don’t understand. I mean, Sheila’s trying to pick me up alive so I can give her what she thinks I have. These guys—whether they believe I have Walter’s data or not—want me dead.”