Washington, DC, TEAR Headquarters
Commander Jacobs’ secure phone rang, and he answered quickly.
“General Kessler. Did you get my email?”
“Who sent you that photo?” Kessler barked.
“Our analysts watching the Stevigson Farm, sir.”
“When was it taken?”
Commander Jacobs scrambled back to his email to open and reread the data.
“Ah . . . three days ago.”
“I need boots on the ground in Woods Hole now, Commander. Send in a tactical team and take the girl, by force if necessary. Just don’t harm her,” he emphasized. “I want your top retrieval team in there. I don’t care about anyone else.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, how do you know this man? The one with the tattoos on his face?”
Kessler was silent for a moment, then answered grimly, “We trained him. I thought we’d killed him.”
CHAPTER 12
* * *
Windham, Maine
“Navy! No!” she screamed when he spun backward and fell to his side, the bird advancing on him. He was holding his left side with one hand, blood staining his shirt. Still he held out the weapon in his right, the gunshots deafening her as he fired again and again until the bird stopped moving and fell backward. Rory ran to him, diving to her knees.
“Oh, my God! Are you okay?” she asked as he collapsed onto his back. The wound was on the edge of his waist, but she couldn’t tell exactly where or how severe.
“Yeah, I think.” He hissed out a breath of pain and sucked in another through clenched teeth. “I think it grazed me.” He let her carefully pull away the shirt and find the ragged but shallow wound oozing blood, and then she abruptly pulled her own shirt over her head and folded it up. She wore a tank underneath, and he watched her gently lay her shirt over his wound. He grunted in pain when she slowly applied pressure; then he relaxed as she ran to the Jeep and back with a suitable binding that could hold the makeshift bandage on.
Her blue eyes met his, a little panicked, but calm beneath. They both nodded in understanding. They had to get moving.
“You stay here, I’ll check the Jeep for damage. We need a hospital or a clinic or something.”
Navy pointed to the bird. “Cover its face. I just want to be sure it’s not still relaying anything.”
Rory looked over to it and then glanced behind her at the bridge exit. He couldn’t see her as she sprinted away, but when she returned it was with a stone the size of a volleyball. She walked past him to the bird, then viciously slammed the rock on its damaged head. Then she did it again. On the third time, he managed a laugh.
“Rory. It’s done.”
With a huff she straightened, then kicked it for good measure.
Rory first checked where the bird had fired into the Jeep and saw some minor damage to the inside wheelbase. Starting it again, she gingerly drove forward, testing its control. It was still running, though her instincts were that it wouldn’t get them far past Maine. Hopping out again, she took the time to examine every wheel just in case. As she was about to head back to help Navy to the vehicle, a bit of debris on one wheel caught her eye.
Buried in the outer edge of the tire was a little nail. No, as she looked closer, it was a plug with a tiny wire hanging out. The end of the wire was slightly more bulbous. An antenna?
Running back to Navy, she helped him up as she explained the plug.
“So the correct answer was both. Can you pull it out?” He grunted again as she got him into the passenger side, his legs still on the ground as she squatted at the tire in question. He had to smile when, as he grabbed for his knife to suggest she pry it out, Rory reached behind her back and popped out a folding knife of her own. The transmitter was no larger than a grain of rice and hadn’t even pierced into the tire.
“The river?” she suggested. Navy was considering their options when they heard a car ahead.
“Can you drag the bird behind the Jeep?” he asked urgently. She ran over, grabbed its feet, and tugged it over to the wall of the bridge nearest the vehicle. For all its ferocity, it was surprisingly light. She reckoned that was why Navy was still alive.
Rory looked at him and cocked an eyebrow at the frightening appearance he would give to a stranger. “Get in the car, shut the door. I got this.”
His dark eyebrows dove. “What are you going to do?”
“I got this. Be quiet and look sullen.”
“Rory. You don’t have the skills for deception.”
Rory’s brows rose in challenge. “I have skills, Navy. Watch this.”
Reluctantly, he got into the Jeep and closed the door.
As the car crested the hill ahead, they saw it was a truck, older and dirty and probably belonging to a local farm. She waited till it could see her, then pretended to be having trouble getting cell reception on her wristlet phone. The truck, driven by a young man, slowed as he took her in with a growing smile. She smiled back and waved at him, then leaned into his passenger window when he stopped.
A few seconds of conversation later, with some pointing down the road and a burst of flirty laughter that made Navy turn in his seat then almost cry in pain at the movement, and Rory hopped into the Jeep’s driver seat to watch the truck disappear in their rearview mirror.
“He’s headed all the way to Boston. To see his girlfriend. With TEAR on his tail.”
Navy eyed her. “Does he know that?”
“Nope.” She pulled away from the bridge, heading north again. “It’s rolling under his passenger seat right now.”
Navy gave her an admiring glance. “Where did you learn those skills?”
“Those skills were fired in the dark crucible of middle school, Navy.”
A few miles down the road, they crested a hill into an area that Rory remembered visiting in her youth. It wasn’t a vivid memory, but it involved a red-bricked hospital overlooking a small town. It didn’t take long to find, and it was definitely not functioning.
“I guess my mother did research here . . .” she mused as she pulled up to the hospital’s front entrance. A beautiful building at one point, but now shuttered, it showed signs of neglect.
“Maybe this is best. No one’s here, so there’s no record we’re here. Let’s just get in, get what we need, and get out,” Navy suggested. “Surely there’s some leftover first aid kits or bandages inside.”
She looked over at him, wishing for more supplies—saline, antiseptic, probably a suture kit, too—then back at the building. He was right. There might be all those supplies inside, useless to anyone but them. Many hospitals had closed down after the die-off, resources exhausted, finances wiped, their community of customers beyond help. When antibiotics stopped working, even their most heroic efforts were in vain. And they’d walked away, what few employees remained to care. How many ways did we do this to ourselves? she heard her father saying in her head.
“Breaking and entering aren’t among my skills. Do we just smash a window?”
Navy shrugged. “I’ll knock first.”
Getting inside wasn’t as hard as she expected, after they found a back entrance with a digital keypad long disconnected from electricity. Once in, they were able to discern that they’d entered near the hospital’s receiving bay for shipments and storage. Navy followed his instincts to the offices in the space and found an emergency supplies cabinet.
“Blizzards require flashlights. Growing up, we had one in every cabinet.”
“Oh, so you weren’t lying about growing up in Maine?” Rory mused.
“Dammit, Rory. I took a bullet for you. Call your dad a liar.”
Rory shrugged. “Fair point. Sorry.” A breath passed. “I believe the bird was aiming for you, though, so . . .”
Navy paused in his search and turned to glare at her. She held up her hands.
“Just to be factual.”
He palmed his way through the cabinet and found two small flashlights, cheap but thankfully with batteries that were still t
aped at their ends to prevent energy loss. They set off through the maze of hallways and began a search of each area likely to have what they needed. “It’s like a frozen slice of history,” she whispered as their lights illuminated offices left with coffee cups still on the tables, and patient rooms cleaned, tidy, awaiting the next admission. The hospital had clearly been abandoned, probably without much warning by the look of it.
“The chapter of history where the healthcare system worked?”
She glanced over at Navy, who looked distinctly uncomfortable and angry. She wondered if this place surfaced memories of the treatment that had nearly killed him and marked him with the deep blue scars just below his skin.
“Well, some hospitals are still trying. Actually, I think the healthcare system was just one factor. Ruining antibiotics was a worldwide accomplishment.” Then she sighed. “But yes, it feels like a photo of a time that was more hopeful.” Navy looked at her and pointed his flashlight at a wall sign that gave directions before an intersection of halls: LABORATORY, ER.
In the laboratory Rory found gauze and bandages, supplies for various tests, but no antiseptic or even saline to wash the wound. Exploring on toward the ER, they found a supply cart still stocked with sterile bandages, gauze, needles, antiseptic scrubs and iodine paint, as well as sutures.
“Jackpot,” she said. “Let’s find a room with an exterior window so I can see better.”
As they moved down the hall, a noise somewhere ahead of them froze their steps. Navy put a hand out to restrain her, just as a dark figure appeared at the end of the hallway. It looked male, wiry and leaning on a cane as it took them in.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my hospital?” the man rasped, in a voice deep and scratchy with age or infirmity.
“We’re only looking for some supplies. We’ll be gone soon,” Navy said evenly. The man kept walking slowly forward, into the weak reach of their torches, and with each step forward Rory became a little more horrified by what she saw.
He was dressed in scrubs and a white lab coat, but the coat was stained with rusty brown splotches. His face was oddly disfigured, one side swollen with what seemed to be infected skin lesions, the other sunken with malnutrition. Thinning, scraggly hair was patchy on his skull. Evidence of many small surgeries riddled what skin showed, as if he’d been self-lancing and draining pustules in a vain attempt to keep himself alive. His sallow skin and eyes were jaundiced, but the kind of intense orange that she knew to be associated with certain classes of antibiotics.
He stopped a few feet from them. The smell of him nearly made her turn her head: a mix of body odor, antiseptic wash, and the battlefield putrescence of gangrene. Between them, Navy covered her hand with his.
“You’re injured,” the man in the lab coat observed, a gravelly growl.
“We just want—” Navy began.
“You can’t have any medicines!” he suddenly screamed, and Rory jumped a little at the unhinged furor of his reaction. His teeth were stained green. “All the antibiotics here are mine!”
Navy squeezed her hand that he was holding, asking her to wait for him to answer, but she couldn’t.
“Antibiotics are useless. Why would we want antibiotics?” she whispered, mystified. Almost glowing orange, his eyes pinned to her face.
“Some work. Work for a little bit—enough to sustain!” he screeched, and lifted his cane to gesture at her, his lips pulled back in a sneer.
“So you’re just . . . you’re just creating more resistance? You’re probably a walking cesspool of resistant strains,” she said almost to herself. The orange eyes were likely from rifamycin antibiotics, the jaundice from overuse, too. The green teeth indicated tetracyclines, another antibiotic with colorful side effects.
She was staring so intently at his mouth, Rory didn’t realize he was advancing on her with his cane. He was already nearly touching her chest when Navy grabbed and yanked the cane from him. The man held on, stumbling toward Navy. Rory saw the man’s left arm draw from his lab coat pocket, fist clutching a shiny object.
“Navy, he’s holding something—” she started to shout, too late. The ruse evaporated, the man dropping the cane and lunging with shocking strength at Navy. He was wielding an unsheathed syringe that he plunged into Navy’s neck with a horrific scream.
The needle connected with the force of the man’s stab, but by the time he’d struck his target, he was already being knocked unconscious, the cane now in Navy’s hands whipped first under the man’s chin with enough force to snap his head backward, then jabbed into his windpipe. The blow sent him flying backward. His head connected with a corner of a granite countertop, and he slumped to the floor.
Rory looked in shock to Navy, who was watching the man for signs of revival. The needle still stuck out of his neck.
“Jesus. What did he inject? Do you feel anything?” She examined the instrument, afraid to touch it and cause pain.
“I feel a needle in my neck, Rory,” Navy said in fury. “Can you just take it out?”
She pulled it out, glad to see it was a small-gauge needle that would be unlikely to cause significant tissue damage. But who knew what had been in it? She turned to the man, her eyes narrowing on his lab coat. Crouching beside him, she hesitantly dug a hand into the pocket and pulled out two small containers: one generic centrifuge tube and a small medicine vial. Her light revealed its contents. She spun back to look at Navy.
“Navy, you need to find a place to lie down,” she told him urgently, and he stood even as his legs began to falter. Guiding him to a bed down the hallway, she managed to ease him onto it and he leaned back, looked at her with glazing eyes.
“What was that?”
“Propofol. It’s going to cause you to sleep.”
“Take my gun,” he said urgently. He could feel his brain relaxing, his senses dulling. She wouldn’t be protected if he couldn’t fight it. “Rory, look at me.”
Rory leaned in, her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Navy.”
“No, trust me, it’s not. You’re not safe. I can’t protect you,” he tried to say, but even the end of the sentence was hard to get out.
She rolled her eyes at him and then said with an optimist’s tone, “I’ve had plenty of your protection. At least you won’t be able to feel me stitching you up.”
“Rory.” His hand grasped hers and tightened on it. As he slipped into unconsciousness, she heard some honest thoughts that his conscious self probably wouldn’t have said. “I take a bullet and a needle for you, and you roll your eyes at me?”
She let out a breath as his head dropped back, and she searched her memory for every fact she’d ever read about first aid, about propofol, about sedatives.
Heart rate. Blood pressure. Add fluids. She looked around, wishing for electricity so that she could see everything, use everything. Not that I’d know how to work any equipment.
Equipment. Wristlet. She wore a wristlet phone, and though Army had turned off its communication ability, it still had embedded in it an accelerometer, a heart rate monitor, and blood pressure sensors. Slapping hers onto his limp, heavy wrist, she activated the hologram screen onto his forearm and pulled up the health monitors. His heart rate was low, but not dangerous. Fifty-five beats per minute, holding steady for a full minute. His blood pressure seemed stable, if low. Now to hydrate him.
If saline was anywhere, she expected, it would be in a storage room here or in the lab. She hated leaving Navy’s side, but she needed more supplies than she had. And, glancing at the man in the lab coat, she hated leaving him nearby that asshole. Grabbing the syringe and the bottle of propofol, she tipped it up and loaded the syringe again, then stabbed the bastard in the neck as hard as he’d done to Navy.
“And stay down, you sick bastard.” Standing, she paused in thought. The other vial . . . what had it been? She held it up to the light, saw the tan-green drop of fluid still at its pointed base, and her stomach turned in fear. Opening its lid released its scent, confirming
her suspicion.
He had injected Navy’s carotid with a syringe full of propofol. And his own pus.
———
The propofol wore off a couple of hours later, giving Rory time to clean Navy’s wound and place a few sutures that tied the jagged edges of his small wound closed. She learned in the process that she wasn’t very squeamish, but also that it was far easier to stitch up a person whose pain couldn’t register. She also learned that Navy’s body, strong and lean and attractively muscled, had experienced the same discolored side effect as his face. The last swath of dark blue skin dipped under the waistband of his pants. She didn’t look further.
An historical display discovered in her search for saline, food, and water had yielded the old-fashioned blood pressure cuff now circling Navy’s upper arm. She had also found a room with an external window that helped her see him as he began to wake.
“Hey,” she greeted when he was able to focus his dark amber-green eyes on her. “How do you feel?”
He first looked from her to the saline bag hanging from an IV.
“Salty. And hot. Did you turn on the electricity or something?”
Rory frowned. “No.” Reaching out from her perch beside him on the stretcher, she laid a hand across his forehead. He was warm. She’d checked his temperature only fifteen minutes before. Now, twisting his wrist into her lap again, she activated the wristlet phone’s display and read the metrics. Heart rate low. Temperature high. His blood pressure had dropped off.
“What’s going on, Rory? Are you okay?”
Her blue-green eyes rose to his, and he read the worry in them. “Yeah, I’m fine. Tell me what else you feel.”
He started to answer, then cringed and coughed abruptly for a few moments. He tried to sit up, shook his head, tried to stand, and then leaned back into the stretcher.
“Don’t lie to me, Navy.” It was a warning, but he could hear the fear.
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