I shake my head. “It was an accident, a misunderstanding. And I’m fine.”
Mayor Fairchild shakes his head. “He told me when I saw him again that it was the worst mistake he ever made, not going to quarantine, his greatest regret. He told me you were the miracle that redeemed him from it. He told me that about you, right before he snuck out and left with you.”
Tears stream silently down my face, and Sam’s arms wrap around me from behind.
“Wesley loved you, and I’m not surprised he did as you say. He was a hero, and I’m free to be proud of him again. Unreservedly proud. He wouldn’t want me to blame you or be angry with you, and I don’t want to lessen his decision.” He nods stiffly. “I need some time to be as gracious as I should, but I’m going to try not to be angry at you. Now go save as many of those kids as you can.” He whispers this last part. “And tell those kids about my son and his sacrifice when you do it.”
“I will,” I promise.
We leave the Jeep behind so that Uncle Dan’s friend can load it up with the supplies we need. Rubbing alcohol, syringes, fluids, and bandages. Rhonda explains where he should go to retrieve the Land Rover, too.
Pardon in hand, we all jog past the old Tennessee State Senate building and the Musician's Hall of Fame, its front doors now wide open, all the artifacts long since looted. By the time we cross the James Robertson Parkway, my hands are shaking. I’m sick of wearing this ball gown, especially now that it makes it even harder for my short legs to keep up with everyone else’s long ones.
“We should've insisted on taking the car,” I mutter.
When we finally walk up the steps to the white brick holding facility, I bite my lip. I can't wait to see my aunt again. Since I last saw her she's been Marked, and I found out she lied not only about my dad's involvement with Tercera, but also about who I really am. How different could my experience in Galveston have been if I'd known who I was before I crossed that bridge?
How different would my life have been if I’d known she wasn't really my aunt all along? Would I have felt more left out and unloved? Or would I have known each and every day that even though we weren't biologically linked, she had chosen me? Would I have grown up happier, knowing my dad gave up everything to keep me, instead of being stuck having to raise me alone after my mom died? Would the truth have broken me or given me wings?
I'll never know, which in the end is why I have to forgive her.
When we walk through the door, a short guard with thinning black hair sits behind a desk playing solitaire. Sam isn’t the most patient guy to begin with, but today we’re all impatient.
“I'm Samuel Roth. Your name is?”
The guard's eyes bulge, and he stammers. “St-St-Stuart.”
“Nice to meet you Stuart.” Sam leans on the desk and his jacket falls open, displaying the gun resting on his hip. The balding man shoves his chair back. I knew Sam was a legend at the games, but I didn't realize people were scared of him here.
Sam slams the pardon down on the desk and grunts. “This pardon for my girlfriend's aunt, Anne Orien, is pretty clear and quite simple. We’re here to collect her.”
Stuart’s eyes widen and he points at the elevator bay. We all start for it when Stuart clears his voice. “I meant to say that, ah, the, well.”
“Spit it out, Stu,” Uncle Dan says.
We’re all a little crabby, too, it seems.
“The elevators are broken.”
Sam rolls his eyes, which may be the first time I’ve seen him do that, and pivots on his heel. I follow him to the stairwell and when we turn toward it, Sam reaches for my hand again. Grouchy, threatening Sam is gone in a blink. My heart rate slows, and my shaking abates.
It doesn't take long to locate my aunt on the second floor in one of the locked quarantine rooms.
“Anne.” Uncle Dan rushes to the window and presses his hand to the glass.
She places her hand on the opposite side and I sigh. I was lucky people as good as them raised me instead of David Solomon. I learned love instead of torture. I followed their example to a healthy, strong guy who supports me in making hard decisions. I shudder to think how I would have turned out if I’d followed Josephine and David’s example instead.
The guard monitoring the halls of the second floor unlocks the door for us after one glance at the pardon. Sam and I linger in the hallway to let Dan and her kids greet Aunt Anne first. Uncle Dan swings her around and kisses her full on the mouth while the guard looks on, horrified.
“He’s immune,” I say.
The guard practically chokes.
Uncle Dan catches her up, telling her how Dad injected me with antibodies. He explains that now they've all been inoculated, so she can touch them without fear.
“Where's Ruby? Didn't I see her?” Aunt Anne's voice drifts toward me.
“I'm here,” I say. “I thought I’d give you a minute with your family first.”
Aunt Anne's been Marked, joined the Marked community, investigated suppressant failures, attempted to notify Port Gibson, suffered through a trial, and then been stuffed into a cell to await her own death with no real hope for a reprieve. In spite of all that, she looks exactly the same as the last time I saw her. Her clothes are neat and tidy, a light brown pants suit, and her hair is pulled back, not a strand out of place.
Her heels clack on the tile floor when she walks toward me and pulls me against her chest.
“Nonsense. Ruby, you are my family. I should've told you the truth before, but I didn't want you to ever think—”
“It's okay,” I say. “I’m pretty sure I understand.”
As we explain the rest of what happened, she wastes no time reaching the right conclusions. “You don't want to try and cure me with your blood, even if it's not too late, because we need my blood to test Sam's on.”
I nod. “If I'm wrong, Sam's blood won't help. If I'm right. . .”
Aunt Anne calls out to the guard who unlocked her door. “Randall, I'm going to need access to some of the testing equipment. You guys have it all in storage on the third floor, don't you?”
“Yes ma'am, we do,” he says. “I can take you upstairs, or we can bring it down.”
Aunt Anne works out the details with Randall, who treats her more like a friend than a detainee. Sam and I follow her upstairs, Uncle Dan, Job and Rhonda close on our heels.
“Missed me, I take it?” Aunt Anne laughs. “Why don't you three see if you can gather up all my things so we can leave as soon as possible? I promise not to disappear in a poof this time, okay?”
Uncle Dan frowns, but they head back downstairs.
Once we reach the largest room on the third floor, Aunt Anne croons. “What a beauty. Look at this! The doc who owned this practice didn't scrimp. You're lucky the Nashville quarantine rooms were set up in a Pathology lab. Otherwise we'd need to go hunt one of these down.”
“See this?” She waves at a desk looking thing with a huge box beginning on the floor and extending nearly to the ceiling on the left. The largest part has a sequence of white boxes and cylinders over the main mechanism with an interconnecting series of containers. It's the column for electron beam generation, the specimen chamber, and the vacuum pump of a scanning electron microscope. I know because I've used one before as part of an experiment in Science.
“Does it still work?”
She nods. “I used it last year after I came here for a presentation. It hasn't been perfectly maintained, but it's been rehabbed well enough.”
Aunt Anne sets me to cleaning off the electronic console and display monitors.
“I need a few options for a negative stain.” She glances at Sam. “Viruses are small, and Ruby says Don described this one as quite small. I'll need a special stain to see it. Which is probably why we never saw it, if it existed during your clinical trials.”
Sam nods.
Once we're ready, Aunt Anne draws her own blood, and then hands me the other syringe.
“You want me to draw his blo
od?” I ask.
She says, “Sam would probably prefer that I never draw his blood again.”
The corner of Sam's mouth turns up. “She's not wrong.”
I draw it, marveling at his big, easy to find veins. We mix up several samples to test various stains.
My aunt puts the first two samples under the microscope, and turns it on. Once the image finally comes up, she uses the tracking ball to shift it until one of the samples comes into view. She magnifies and shifts, magnifies and shifts. She shakes her head over both. When she replaces them with two other options, I close my eyes and say a little prayer. If there's something to see, please God let us find it so we can figure out how best to replicate it fast enough to save these poor kids. A few minutes later, the image appears, and Aunt Anne magnifies and shifts, magnifies and shifts. Then she exhales loudly, and her hand waves me over.
I squint at the monitor, not sure what I'm seeing.
“These viruses are dead now, killed by the electron blasts, but look here Ruby.” Aunt Anne points at several tiny puffy spots, frozen in time. “I think that's Sam's virus.”
My heart speeds. “You think there is one, then?”
She nods. “Look right there.” She points.
Sam peers over my shoulder, which makes me smile.
“This is where Tercera has invaded my cells.” There's a big blob with what appear to be short noodles clustered around it. Her cell, invaded by Tercera. The squid-like shapes surround her cell, their largish heads attaching to the cell wall, and long tentacles spreading away, hijacking it. “Tercera resembles Ebola sort of, but look here.” She points at the edge, where the tiny puffy spots converge on the end of the tentacles. “I think your virus is eating Tercera, just like Don said it would.”
Once we've found a successful stain, we wait and scan more images, giving Sam's virus more time to work. At two hours out from the combination of Aunt Anne's blood with Sam's, the Tercera virus has been entirely replaced by the hacker virus. “It outnumbers Tercera four to one once it's consumed the larger virus. What an efficient little bug.”
“Can we start creating more while we travel to Baton Rouge?” I ask. “We're running out of time.”
Aunt Anne shakes her head. “It's harder than that. Viruses can't be grown in a nutrient broth like bacteria can. They require living cells. I need to run more tests to determine exactly how large a dose of virus we'll need to give each patient.”
“Can we run those numbers while we drive?” Sam asks. “Because those kids are out of hope. I worry what they might do, or even once we reach them, how much time we have.”
I call Job up from below, and he helps his mom and I for about three more hours. Aunt Anne runs tests and does calculations, and Job and I direct Sam, Rhonda and Uncle Dan on which things to load up in the cars. Aunt Anne injects herself with five ccs of Sam's blood before we leave.
“Are you worried about blood types?” I ask.
Anne shrugs. “Sam’s O positive, so I’ll be fine. It’s not really a universal donor, not like you Ruby with your O neg, but it’s awfully close.”
“You’re A, right?” I ask.
Aunt Anne nods. “I am, so O positive is fine for me. And if my numbers are right, I should be entirely cured and ready to donate hacker virus riddled blood to the cause myself by the time we arrive.”
“I'm happy to be injected as well,” I say. “Then we'll have more people ready to donate.”
Sam shakes his head. “I've had quite enough of you getting your blood drawn, thanks.”
I roll my eyes.
“Don had concerns about mixing the hacker virus with your super shot of antibodies. I'd rather test that under a microscope before we try it on you.”
“Ruby gave me her blood already, for what it's worth,” Sam says. “And I felt fine.”
Anne shrugs. “Still, better safe than sorry. I'd expect any issues to show in the reverse. Have any of you not been given antibodies?”
Uncle Dan shakes his head.
“Very well.” Aunt Anne sighs. “I hope there's a microscope there I can use in Baton Rouge.”
Job smiles. “I'm sure we can find one. It's a big town. I have a pretty decent microscope at my lab, but it's not an electron microscope. Once we get there I'll talk to my team, whoever’s still functioning, and we'll find what you're looking for. You're bringing the sodium silicotungstate, right? I doubt we'll find a lot of negative stains there. Not readily in any case.”
Aunt Anne smiles and pats his cheek. “I was born at night, but not last night. I've got it packed to take. I'm also bringing some of the neutral phosphotungstic acid, just in case. I didn't have time to check it, but it does quite well with viruses that dissociate at low pH, even if the contrast isn't quite as good.”
We leave for Baton Rouge at sunset, routing away from New Orleans, because there's no way I want to bump into my dear cousin Sawyer. Not yet anyway.
Luckily the roads are fairly well maintained, and we make good time even though we're driving at night. We stop briefly in Birmingham to deliver a message for the leadership there from Interim Chancellor Quinn, who appears eager to drop the 'Interim' from his title. I don't really care who leads the Unmarked, as long as I don't have to get involved. And anyway, this Quinn guy can't be worse than John Roth.
We don't take the time to check the cars or their gauges, but we should have. I'm asleep while we're driving past Meridian, Mississippi, but a few miles past the town, Sam's swearing wakes me up.
“What's wrong?” I rub my eyes.
Job bangs his fist on the dash. “Stupid car died. Electronics went out.”
“Could be the alternator, maybe.” I climb out of the warm spot I've made on the backseat bench, and circle around the car to aim my flashlight under the hood. “Yep, I think it is.”
I look around us. Nothing for miles.
“We need to find a compatible alternator.” I read the specifications and repeat them a few times in my mind. “We can't fit all the junk in the back, plus you, me, and Job in the jeep with Rhonda, Aunt Anne and Uncle Dan. We need all that stuff, right Job?”
He nods.
“Well,” I say. “I'm going to start hiking. An alternator we salvage shouldn't be ruined from ten years of disuse, necessarily. I'll look for one, or maybe we'll get lucky and see a parts store.”
I'm about a hundred and fifty yards from the Land Cruiser before Sam reaches me in the Jeep.
“Where's everyone else?” I climb into the passenger side.
He reaches for my hand. “Thanks for getting me out of my funk. It just seems like everything is going wrong.”
“We had good weather for the most part between here and Nebraska,” I say. “WPN showed up just in time, and you do have the hacker virus inside you.”
Sam sighs. “You’re right. Some things are working. The others are gonna try to sleep for a little bit until we find something. It didn't make sense to split up, and no reason to go hiking on foot, since we still have one functioning car.”
We don't find a parts store, but we do locate a Toyota truck with an alternator that works ten miles or so away. I'm feeling pretty good about my resourcefulness, right up until I try to help replace the alternator and it pinches the meaty part of my thumb.
“Ouch,” I complain.
“Okay that's it, you're done.” Sam takes the screwdriver from me and hands me the flashlight. “You hold this.”
Once he loosens the bolts and yanks on the alternator to remove it from the mounting bracket, his hand slams into the hinge. He exhales and I glance down. Blood covers his knuckles.
“What a waste,” I say.
He frowns. “So now I'm the walking blood bag, huh?”
“I hated it, too.”
Sam shrugs. “I don't mind, actually. If this works to save some of them, I won't mind at all.”
I know what he means.
We finally reach Baton Rouge right before noon on Friday. Almost four full days after the accelerant bombs e
xploded. Rafe doesn't meet us at the barricades. In fact, no one does. The once busy streets are empty: no work noise, no laughter, no shouts, and no peering faces.
I hate the silence.
We drive up to the main hospital where Wesley parked almost two weeks ago, and a wave of sorrow crashes over me. Please let us not be too late for all of them. By the time Sam and I open the car doors, Aunt Anne has already climbed out, bag in hand. She prepared more than a hundred doses on her way here, ready to begin immediately.
We walk toward the entrance, my heart beating a staccato rhythm. Where is everyone? Are they already dead? All of them? I think about baby Rose and Libby and bite back a sob.
When a short kid with blonde hair meets us at the door of the hospital, I almost clap with glee. “Oh, you're alive. Where is everyone else?”
The boy looks up at me from under the fullest eyelashes I've ever seen. “Rafe called for all of us, everyone who wasn't accelerated, to come here and take care of them that was.”
“And you all came?” Aunt Anne asks. “How wonderful.”
The boy shakes his head. “Not everyone, but some. We've been trying to feed them that would eat, and make sure they have water.”
“We need to see Rafe right away,” I say. “Can you take us to him?”
The boy nods.
“What's your name, son?” Aunt Anne asks.
“Brayden, ma'am.”
“Thank you Brayden. Before we go inside, I need to ask one more favor. I've got something here that will help you. Something we need to inject you with. Will you allow it?”
Brayden steps backward, his eyes darting from my aunt to me and back. “Who are you? Does that mean poke me with a needle? Why do you need to do that?”
Aunt Anne hesitates and glances my way. I'm sure she doesn't want to say it's a cure, lest it create some kind of frenzied panic.
“You know Rafe was working on a solution,” I say. “Well, we were part of his plan. We left to get something we needed and we're back. This medicine should make you stronger, and you can help take care of the rest of them more effectively.”
He looks at each one of us in turn. “You people ain't Marked, but you're standing here with no fear?”
Sins of Our Ancestors Boxed Set Page 72
