AJ searched his face while waves of relief coursed through her, and she found herself just as at ease near him as the first time they met on the farm. She gave in to her desire to throw her arms around him, hugging tighter when his arms locked around her, too.
“They haven’t hurt you?”
“No, but I felt like they had plans soon. Thank you for coming for me.”
“The phrase you’re looking for is ‘You’re my hero.’ Have you eaten anything?” he asked in an urgent whisper, leaning back to look at her pupils. “They drugged your food.”
“Just an orange. I’m not eating anything they cooked.”
“Smart of you to know they’d drug you.”
“I didn’t,” she replied. “It just tasted like shit.”
He chuckled, then held up a finger and glanced down as he listened to the interrogation playing in his earpiece. AJ could just see the tiny object relaying a feed into his ear canal. Navy was buying time, but they needed to move soon.
“How do you want to do this?” he asked Navy.
In his ear, Navy replied, “Quickly. I’m blowing your cover though. Keep her safe, and I’ll meet you in the central communications office.”
Army looked back to her as if assessing her readiness. “We’re escaping. There could be some shooting, some fighting. Whatever happens, I need you to keep moving in the direction I say when I say it. Okay?”
AJ nodded. “Aye-aye, Cap’n.”
Glancing to the door, then back to her, Army said, “You run a fishing boat?” She nodded. “I bet you have good upper body strength.”
Washington, DC, TEAR Headquarters
General Kessler’s fury manifested in the ticking muscle at his jawline. The whole room vibrated with the sense of his barely leashed anger.
When Rory raised her eyebrows in challenge, he glanced around the room. With a mere tip of his head, the officers in the room departed, leaving only Byron, Jason Rajni, Rory, and the general. After they were gone, he leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers.
“Let’s cut through the bullshit. What’s your position?”
“My position?” she asked innocently.
“Yes. You’re here to negotiate, let’s start.”
“Good. I want the assured safety of Nathaniel Vercoeur, Avis James, and Army Harrison, and the release of any patients you’re holding for antibody research.”
He grunted a chuckle. “In exchange for what?”
“The cure to the world’s deadliest diseases.”
He glanced to Rajni and asked, “Have you checked anything about her claims?”
When Rajni began to answer, Rory spoke over him. “Can your holo-projector accept external wrist-phone inputs?” She was already turning over her wrist to summon a video, then switched on the projector via tabletop controls. Within seconds, the recording of her blood cells sending out bacteriophages became a living thing on the table before them, and Rory narrated it for Rajni and Kessler as it replayed.
“Now, if you don’t believe this video is real, you can have a sample of my blood to test. And I’ll tell you how to structure the experiment. If you show me where you’re holding my friends.”
Betraying nothing, Kessler looked to Rajni. “Please step outside with me.”
The doctor followed him into the hallway, and Kessler gave him an expectant look.
Rajni nodded. “It’s implausible, but it isn’t impossible. It’s a logical next step in the coevolution of bacteria, humans, and bacteriophages. It’s so simple, yet it hasn’t been discovered in years of our research.” He shook his head slowly in wonder. “I think she’s actually done what she says and solved this.”
Kessler pushed his lower jaw out thoughtfully. “Then let’s show her what she wants. But on my terms. If you intervene, I’ll make sure your remaining heirs die, too.”
Even Rajni wasn’t able to conceal the shudder that passed through him.
Outside Woodstock, Virginia
The guards outside patient James’ door were both alerted by their buzzing wrist phones and listened to the shared message. They each looked to the other, realized they’d been had, and dove for the doorway. When they stumbled in, the girl was gone. Seated on the bed was the soldier they had allowed entrance, leaning over his knees with his hands folded.
“Boys, now you and I both know this could look a lot better for you if you leave with a couple bruises. Myself, I’m a pacifist,” he shrugged as the door clicked behind them, “but . . . c’mon.” He stood slowly as if reluctant to, and they rushed him.
Both fell flat on their faces, tripped by the line that AJ now held behind them and was cinching down over their ankles. Army helped by snapping ties onto their wrists.
“She’s really strong,” he explained to them when they rolled over with a moan, and he pointed to the ceiling above the door where a few pipes turned. “She was up there. Cool, eh?” He snatched their badges and handed one to AJ.
“And now for the hard part.”
Washington, DC, TEAR Headquarters
Rory glanced at her father when Kessler returned and offered to take her, and only her, to see proof that Army, Navy, and AJ were safe and unharmed.
“We’ll be giving you access to highly classified information. I can only break so many laws today, Rory,” Kessler said. “Just you.”
Hasn’t slowed you down in the past, she wanted to say, but she knew it was unwise. Instead she gave her father a knowing look, hoping he remembered their earlier talk. Then she stood and followed Kessler and Rajni down the hallway.
An officer outside the door immediately fell in step behind them. Rory’s hackles rose with instant alarm. There was almost certainly no way that she would remember her exits from here, and they kept going deeper into the building.
Finally they stopped before a solid metal door and used a biometric scanner to pass into a darkened room where Rory’s eyes took a moment to adjust. The officer who had followed behind her stayed outside. Monitors papered the walls, and three analysts sat at computer stations before the monitors. They looked up, saw her, and each reached out to tap their buddy’s shoulder without looking away from her. She recognized that they were the eyes behind the drones that had been tracking her. She wondered which one had fired a missile at Navy.
“Bring up Patient James at the hospital.” Kessler hardly spared the analysts a glance; he just watched the monitor wall.
The hospital? Rory repeated mentally. You asshole, as if you’re trying to make them well again. A lead analyst gave a gesture to one who turned and typed, then the lead explained what they would be seeing.
“The communications at the hospital are in-room monitors. It’s a live feed. I’m not sure if we have audio on . . . What the hell?”
Everyone froze as they watched the screen, where a pair of guards had just entered a small room that was furnished with only a bed, table and chair, and toilet. The view was from a camera fixed in a room corner opposite the bed and the door, so it was able to perfectly capture the man sitting on the bed. It also revealed what the guards didn’t see but the analyst quickly had: the form of a body clinging to pipes in the ceiling, legs spread slightly and arms bent.
AJ. AJ was poised above the guards, and at the moment they moved on Army, she dropped in a single lithe movement, grabbed something from the floor, and yanked it up. The guards smashed forward onto their faces as Army and AJ quickly tied their feet and bound their wrists, then used their stolen security passes to leave the room together.
Rory looked to Kessler, then to Rajni. Rajni met her eyes and then snapped back to the screen, but she caught the barest hint of a delighted smirk beneath his beard.
Kessler looked to the analysts. “Well, what the hell are you doing? Bring up the whole compound!” he thundered, and the ferocity of it startled Rory.
On the screen, several rooms now appeared. Few had any movement, but she walked closer to the screen to try to understand what she was seeing. Three different monitors observed a
large room, full of patients in beds spaced only a few feet from each other. Each bed had an IV pump set up near its head, the patients tubed through their noses and veins. People in scrubs circulated, checking on a few of the prone bodies. Not a single patient moved. Not a single patient’s eyes were open.
The farm. She thought of these people, of their families, of years spent locked out, drugged, stolen from their own lives. From life itself. She was nauseated by the realization of what they had been through, and what they had missed.
“I want audio connection to them now to advise of the escapees.”
“Yes, sir. I can get a line set up in a minute.”
On another screen, movement caught her eye. Army and AJ were racing down the hallways, connecting from one monitor to the next. They encountered a couple of guards, but Army made short work of each. Then she saw him.
“Navy.” It was another room, another monitor far to the side. He was handcuffed to a chair, his hands locked at his sides. In response to a snap from Kessler, the image became the central monitor’s display as four guards began to hit him repeatedly, then one drew a gun and aimed it at his heart.
“Don’t kill him! Don’t let them kill him!” she screamed. “He’s got my blood. He’s got the cure, too!”
“Nice try, but I’m not that stupid.”
Rory looked desperately to the head analyst. “You. You shot him, didn’t you? With the drone?”
“I don’t shoot people. I just oversee drones. But yes, a drone shot him.”
Rory looked back at Kessler again and pleaded, “Believe me. After he was shot, he needed blood and I gave him a transfusion. He has the cure, too.”
“I don’t need him. I have you.” Picking up the phone line that an analyst handed him, Kessler spoke. “You’re holding Nathaniel Vercoeur, an AWOL Navy SEAL who goes by the name of Navy. He is extremely dangerous. If you want to control him before he cuts all your throats, tell him I have Aurora.” Holding a hand over the receiver, he looked to his small audience and grinned wickedly. “This should be entertaining.”
Her blood felt like ice in her veins. Kessler watched the screen calmly while her whole body wanted to scream out loud. The very reason she had thought to come here, the very leverage she hoped to have, didn’t faze Kessler in the least. He would turn her into a donor in his farm as easily as he would give orders to have Navy shot dead before her. He would die. He would die and so would Army and AJ, and she would cease to live, and then the whole Resistance’s only hope was to turn her discovery into a public cure before TEAR could. What had she done?
The monitor suddenly flickered, and audio came through. The guards were speaking to Navy.
“ . . . have Aurora in custody. At TEAR headquarters, with General Kessler.”
Navy slowly smiled. “That’s okay. I think you’re lying, but if you aren’t, I’m not worried. She’s got skills.”
Rory’s heart thumped to painful life in her chest, reassured and emboldened. A building alarm went off in the room on-screen, and in the split second that the guards flinched and looked to the ceiling in surprise, Navy suddenly lunged forward and spun, slashing the legs of the chair into the two guards ahead of him so hard that they slammed into the wall. She could barely track his movements as he knocked a third guard down, then sent a vicious kick into the fourth guard’s face before he could draw his weapon. Once all four were unconscious, he maneuvered himself so the chair was in front of him, found their key, and had himself free in seconds. Grabbing a guard’s badge, he left the room, and they all followed his movements as he converged on the same hallway as Army and AJ. They reunited with a tap of fists.
“No casualties?”
“None. AJ went fishing and caught a few, you?”
“None. Four unconscious back there. Few broken noses. They ran into a chair.”
Navy looked to AJ, who hooked her thumb toward Army and said with a lopsided grin, “I’m supposed to tell you he’s my hero.” Navy grinned.
“Comms are this way.” Army pointed to a passageway, and they followed him as Navy related what the guard had said.
“Kessler’s watching. He told them to tell me they have Rory.”
Army shook his head. “Lying.”
In the room, Kessler thundered, “Get me audio! Get that comms room online now!”
Rory looked to Rajni, but he seemed frozen in confusion and terror. She had to stay ahead of them, maintain the upper hand Army and Navy had fought to secure. Plan F, she thought.
The central four monitors became one solid large image, showing a room that looked like a smaller version of the one they were in, with two uniformed soldiers working at computer stations. Navy and Army had their weapons drawn when AJ pushed open the door, eliciting the reaction they had planned for: the soldiers raised their hands in wordless surrender and were rewarded with nothing more than the indignity of being handcuffed and sat in the corner. Army immediately got to work, familiarizing himself in seconds and establishing the connection to TEAR at the same time the analysts connected to them. In a side monitor, Rory could see the room as Navy and Army saw it: she and Kessler center stage, only feet apart.
She pulled a gun from the ankle of her boot and trained it on Kessler.
“Rory!” AJ exclaimed before Navy could even speak.
“You’re going down, you sick bastard,” Rory told him. “We’re freeing every one of those donors and giving the cure away.”
Kessler spared her a brief, disinterested glance, then looked back to Navy on the screen.
“Well hello, Nathaniel. You look a lot fucking uglier than the last time I saw you. Tell me, who do you think has the upper hand here?” he said with eerie calm. “You have my donors. But I have the donor.”
CHAPTER 36
* * *
Outside Woodstock, Virginia
Navy’s gut had told him something might be wrong, the guards weren’t just repeating Kessler’s ploy, but when Army connected to the monitors at TEAR and he processed the video before him, he still couldn’t believe it. Then she pulled a gun on Kessler, and Navy’s world was inverted.
“Rory, what are you doing there?” he shouted, then turned his rage on Kessler. “What the hell is she doing there?”
Kessler smiled slowly. “Why, she came to me.”
“It’s under control, Navy. I couldn’t let them have you, have all of you. I’m the ultimate bargaining chip, right, Kessler?” Rory asked him. To the room of people behind her, she snapped, “Move and he dies.”
Kessler turned his grin into the barrel of her gun. “Well, aren’t you quite the little self-aware one? What a brave little test tube your mother raised.”
“Rory, my God, why did you do this?” Navy begged.
Rory continued talking to Kessler. “I won’t be a pawn anymore, in anyone’s game. I control the game now.” When he just laughed at her, she shivered slightly.
He sensed her weakness like a snake and struck before she could see his hand even move. Suddenly the gun was twisted sideways, snatched from her grasp, and Kessler spun her in a throttling dance that left her pinned under his left arm, the gun biting into her temple with his right.
AJ let out an involuntary shriek of terror.
“Well, that was easy.” Kessler’s belly laughed against her back, and she read the fear in Navy’s eyes on the screen before her. He looked exactly as she had felt minutes before when the gun was on him.
“Don’t hurt her, Kessler. She’s your only hope,” Navy tried to reason with the man. In response, Kessler wrapped his hand around her neck and closed it in a crushing grip. “Stop! You can get what you want without hurting her.”
“Oh, a small bullet to the brain stem will just keep her . . . obedient.” With a smirk, Kessler tightened his hand, and she wasn’t even able to create a sound to voice her pain. Tears slid down her cheeks as she tried to fight against him.
“No!” Navy screamed when he saw Rory swing an arm up toward Kessler’s neck. He knew instinctively that
the man wouldn’t hesitate to kill her. And he watched Kessler’s finger bend on a hair trigger.
But the trigger Kessler pulled clicked on an empty magazine, and her hand struck his throat right at the side, leaving a small orange tube hanging from the skin of his neck.
He was so stunned, she was able to spin away from him and back a couple of steps away as he fingered at the needle lodged in his neck.
“That’s a BB gun, and it’s empty,” she explained of the gun through a voice rasped over a bruised trachea. “But that needle in your carotid, well—that wasn’t empty. I handpicked the fastest-acting pathogen in my lab just for you: Pandalus borealis.”
Washington, DC, TEAR Headquarters
Rory smiled at Kessler as the injection began to take its toll, seeing the red rise to his skin.
“I thought you ought to feel what it’s like to die of an infection. I thought perhaps you, more than anyone, needed to experience your lungs filling up, your throat swelling closed. Does your tongue feel thick?”
“What did you do to me?” Kessler growled, but even the words to me were thickened from a mouth lisping with a swollen tongue.
“You probably feel hot all over. Is it hard to breathe yet?” Rory asked with a curious tip of her head.
Kessler’s hand went to his chest with a sudden wheeze, then to his throat as it began to tighten. He sank into a chair and gripped the arms of it as he tried to focus on getting in a breath.
“I can help you. I can cure you. But now I’ve got to hear you admit it. Admit that you had those people imprisoned in their own bodies so you could treat them like your own federal blood bank.”
Kessler’s eyes were bulging, his face turning dark red. He nodded. “And I’d do it again, goddamn you. For a fucking cure.” The words were thick but clear.
Rory leaned closer. “And the cure? Were you planning to just give it to everyone?”
He wheezed in again and stayed silent. She leaned even closer. Her voice dropped in volume. “When the infection really takes hold, you’ll start to feel like you’re on fire from the inside. Like dying in a burning building, but no one will think to offer you water.”
Resistant Page 17
