I knew how he meant that, but it was statements like this that made it hard for me to feel like he truly accepted me.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the serum? Why do I again have to stand there, looking stupid, while I get bitch-slapped with something that fundamentally important? And if you say now that it was to lend me plausible deniability, I’m going to tear down this fence and come after you.”
Nate laughed. “I think there’s a hatchet right over there.”
“Seriously?”
He shrugged. “If you already know the answer, why ask? You know me well enough by now that you must realize that getting confirmation is not a relief to you.” He paused, letting me utter a few choice words before he went on. “But that’s not the whole answer. Guess I didn’t tell you because if you didn’t know, I could still deny that it was reality. It never bothered me before I met you.”
“But now it does?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t it bother you if you were me?” I didn’t know what to reply to that—and how much to read into it—but he went on before I found my answer. “I also wanted to give you a real choice—whether to stay with us, or remain here, at the lab. The moment I realized who was running that lab, I had no illusions about getting away with what I know you deem lies and betrayal. Sure, I could have spilled the beans right there, but you would never have been able to fake the kind of utmost horror that was gripping you the moment you saw those results.”
“Are you seriously making fun of me now?” I said, not hiding my anger.
As usual, Nate was unperturbed by it. “Come on, I deserve to have a certain measure of gallows humor there. It’s not every day someone realizes that you’re an actual monster. Not just because of all the terrible things you did in your life, but of what you will still do, at the very end of it. Because of what you are.”
What he deserved was me not denying that, so I didn’t. “You never told me how all that happened,” I prompted instead.
He sighed, then turned around so that he was leaning into the fence, letting it support his weight as he looked up into the starry night. There were always stars out now, except for when the clouds hid them. No more city lights to drown them out.
“No more lies, eh? Might as well dish. There’s really not much to it. I was young. I was stupid. I wanted to become the best at what I did—the ultimate killing machine. Would have taken me a couple more years to make it into tryouts for one of the special ops teams, and then there was the question if I could get through that. Someone noticed me, approached me, offered me a shortcut. I took it. End of story.”
“Just like that?” I asked, not bothering with tuning down my scorn. He shrugged.
“Pretty much. There was a stack of papers they made me sign, but I didn’t really read them. They explained a few things, but full disclosure wasn’t a part of it. I still remember how giddy I was. Couldn’t happen fast enough.” He laughed, a not exactly happy sound. “I don’t even know how many made it, and how many didn’t. Someone later mentioned a one in two or three ratio. I didn’t know anyone there, so I didn’t notice. The program came with benefits, too, making me even more blind to the danger. Got my promotion as soon as they realized that the serum hadn’t fried my brain. Fast track for any special skills I wanted to acquire—demolitions, sniper school. But above all else, no more sitting around base, hours of doing nothing while someone else died for us out there. You don’t keep your super special weapons in a depot to rot and their edge to dull. People died around me. Turned. Sometimes doing damage control was more of an effort than killing the targets in the first place, but it was a very effective… system.”
His pause was very noticeable there.
“I didn’t really think much about it. It was a fact of life for me now. In war, people die of a hell of a lot of things. I nearly bit it several times. Always wondered why no one had blown my head off as a precaution whenever I woke up in the hospital again. And one day, Raleigh was sitting at my bed when I returned to the realm of the living, so to say.” Nate smiled briefly, clearly a fond memory, even if it came with a wry twist to his lips. “He was livid. Somehow he’d gotten his hands on my blood results, and when I finally explained what was wrong—or right, as I saw it—he couldn’t shut up about it. Ended up storming off to confront the people responsible. How that ended, you know yourself. I think he struck a deal with them—he’d help them fine-tune the serum further, if they would let him work on a cure for it, too. Only that we’ll never know what would have come of that, thanks to that bitch.”
Nate fell silent, but before I could speak up, he went on.
“You know, of late I’m wondering if she wasn’t on to something. Never thought I’d say that, but I think in the end, she did him and me both a favor.”
“You don’t really mean that,” I scoffed.
“Maybe not entirely,” he admitted. “Am I still feeling a strange sense of satisfaction that she killed herself? You bet. But my brother sold his soul to save someone who didn’t want saving. It was only a matter of time until they would have twisted him around and around until he forgot what remained of his morals. He killed innocent people to find, what? A cure I wouldn’t have accepted at that time. In the meantime he helped propagate what led to more misery. More sons and daughters killed, bystanders slaughtered. And then some asshole came along and unleashed it on the world. The end.”
I mulled that over for a second. “You think what they’re trying to do now is equally senseless?”
His silence was telling, but when he spoke up, he sounded more diplomatic.
“I honestly don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. What matters is what you think, and what you’ll do now. No, don’t interrupt me before I got this out, okay? Sure, I’ll be pissed off if you stay here. I’ll feel betrayed, and I can’t promise you that I’ll be very graceful about it, but then you said so yourself, nothing I say or do will sway you.”
I grumbled something under my breath, cursing Burns. Eternal gossip mongers, the lot of them.
“Remember Dolores?” I nodded. He was referring to his friend, the young computer whiz who had helped him plan the entire operation that had led to us meeting each other. Who had, unlike me, decided to go with the other half our group had split up in, joining the people that Stone and Lowe were backing, too. “I’m not holding it against her that she decided she didn’t want to stick with us. She knew all too well what would likely happen to each and every one of us, and I think she was scared to watch it happen. And maybe she was right. A woman of her skills might do a lot more good with other tools than weapons.”
“Like I could in a lab,” I finished for him.
Nate looked down, not quite nodding. “As I said, that’s for you to decide. I’m biased, I won’t deny that. Ever since they got my brother killed, I can’t justify anymore what they did to us. I keep asking myself, if things had been different and Thecla and I had met before she did what she did, maybe we could have teamed up. She was clearly sabotaging the project, for whatever reason. That’s what I ended up doing, too, only way too late. I have no idea what information she had, and what made her do what she did. You think that Jenkins guy poisoned you to keep you out of the hot lab and save you? I’m not so sure anymore. It could have been her just as well, to ensure that she remained the only one in charge of the project. I don’t think that she had anything against my brother, personally. I’d like to believe that killing him broke her. It’s probably not important anymore what made her set out on her crusade; we’ll likely never know. Do with that assessment as you wish. You know where I stand, and where I come from.”
The rationality of his admission scared me. Not the fact that he seemed to have forgiven Thecla for killing his brother—the closer we grew, the more I got to see that he was less of a psychopath than I’d initially thought. He simply acted like one when it fit into his agenda. No—that he’d known all this, yet he still did his best not to influence me.
“Anything else you’d like to c
onfess to?” I asked. “I remember telling you that if you continue to hide things from me that are important, I’ll quit. That was before Bates and the cannibals, and, well, this.”
He hesitated for maybe five seconds, laughing softly under his breath.
“Not sure what else I can tell you. It’s all out there now. As a kid, I went through a phase of dissecting animals—two cats, three dogs, and a guinea pig. Not because I liked watching them die, I just wanted to know what made them work. Maybe I should have studied medicine. Or not. What else? I lost my virginity when I was fifteen to Angela Walsh. She was seventeen, I thought I was such a stud, and it lasted all of two seconds, I think. I can curse fluently in sixteen languages. I’d rather kill someone with my bare hands than a weapon, and I have yet to feel sorry for any of the things you keep flinging at my head. Happy now? I think that’s about it. You know me better than anything I could say now to sway your opinion of me. Ball’s in your court now.”
I held his gaze, not sure what to say. “Two seconds, eh? Glad I met you more than a decade and a half later, because that’s just embarrassing.”
He snorted, reaching through the fence to run a finger along my forearm while his eyes remained on my face.
“Don’t let me influence you. This is a decision you can’t go back on. You know that. I would say I’d try: to make this work long-distance, but you know just as well as I do that if you stay tomorrow, it won’t be the same anymore. You know my side of the story. Now you have to write yours.”
I waited for him to say more—three words more, really, but I knew that they wouldn’t come. Sighing, I pushed myself further away, feeling his finger slip away from my skin.
“I hate the woman I’ve become,” I whispered, barely loud enough to hear my own words. I didn’t even know why I said that, but my heart gave a painful twang at my admission.
Nate’s silence felt like a mute accusation, until he asked the last thing I’d expected—but probably should have.
“Why?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” I railed, exhaling forcefully. “I’m not saying I was a saint, but the things I did. And why. There’s no going back on that. I know that, and I’ll carry that with me for the rest of my life.”
“And you think that staying here, hiding in your underground lab, will change anything about that?” Nate asked, derision heavy in his tone.
“It might keep me from getting worse,” I protested.
His laugh made me want to punch him in the face, and I hated how he smirked at me as he flattened himself against his side of the fence. “Bree, wake up. These are the people that murdered countless homeless people just to test the progression of their experiments. They condemned thousands of us to turn into creatures right out of everyone’s worst nightmare upon death—and don’t think that there haven’t been enough car crash victims out there that led to tremendous cover-up operations. Do you really think they won’t lead you down into a rabbit hole of self-loathing and moral dilemmas? Maybe you won’t be the one who does the actual testing, but as project leader every single decision will be yours. Don’t tell me that you’ve forgotten about all that.”
He was right, of course. And I had done my very best to ignore these facts—which I doubted I would manage to continue to do now. But that didn’t change that here, it was all a possibility, while out there…
“It’s not just what I did,” I admitted. “It’s how I felt while doing it.”
I could tell that he was trying to stop gloating, but he didn’t quite manage.
“You’re conflicted because you liked it? You enjoyed being the sword that exacts vengeance? You got off on bringing justice to those that really had it coming?” he jeered.
“I killed at least six people, and I still don’t feel a fucking thread of remorse!” I cried, hard-pressed to keep my voice from alerting the entire village. “And if I didn’t have to pause to finish off Bates, I would have shot those remaining fuckers without hesitation! And I liked it! There, are you happy now that you made me admit that? I fucking liked it!”
There was understanding in Nate’s eyes, but not of the sympathetic kind.
“And what’s so bad about this? You’re not going to start randomly killing people. I don’t even think you’d kill anyone here to get me out of dodge, as long as my life’s not on the line. Your moral compass is still intact. So why the theatrics?”
Frustration clogged my throat, my body screaming for me to launch myself at him and beat understanding right into his thick skull, but that would have made it all so much worse. And would have underlined what didn’t need underlining.
“How can you even ask me that?” I had to feign the horror in my voice, and his continuing smile told me plainly that I was so busted.
“Because life’s not a damn fairy tale where you just have to stick to what is morally right, and everything will end in sunshine and rainbows,” he reminded me. “You are not the first woman in history who had to realize that sometimes, violence is the answer. And sometimes, what others have told you about how you should behave is exactly what you need to do to survive. So what, you went a little over the top out there with the cannibals. They wouldn’t have walked away with a couple of bruises if you hadn’t taken charge, that much is obvious. It was either your decision, or mine, and thank fuck that you finally had the guts to wise up and stop pretending that you’re just a pebble in the water, getting thrown this way and that without control, always reacting instead of acting. Be grateful that for the first thirty years of your life, you lived in a society that could allow itself to coddle everyone. That life doesn’t exist anymore, even if all those upstanding citizens out there on the other side of this fence like to pretend it still does. You know better than that. You have what it takes to survive. And, just let me give you a hint, that’s not muscles, or charm, or what you learned in college. It is exactly that ruthlessness that makes a difference. You are a ruthless bitch. Deal with it. I won’t judge you for it, and neither will any of the others. Who might judge you for it are the people who think it’s their right to brand and exile their best bet at survival. Do you really give a shit about what they think of you?”
He made it sound so easy, like the decision that was tormenting me wasn’t even a hard one. Maybe for him, it wasn’t. But whatever he claimed, I wasn’t like him. Not yet. But I knew that, just as irrevocably as I’d change if I stayed here, I wouldn’t remain the woman I was now if I threw my lot in with him. Again.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” I whispered, hating how conflicted my own words left me. Nate continued to look at me before he gave the smallest of shrugs.
“Remember when you said you trust me? I trust you to do the right thing, because when the time comes, you will know.”
He didn’t turn away, but it was obvious that he’d said everything he wanted to say. I remained standing there a moment longer before I turned around and left, returning to the other side of the fence, asking myself what the hell I should do now.
Chapter 26
I ended up back in the lab—for all the good that did me. But where else should I have gone? Back into my room that suddenly was stifling like a prison cell? Or the cantina where the guys looked at me as if I was a traitor and the town folk still regarded me a stranger? With my life hanging in the balance, a familiar setting sounded the most soothing to me—so that’s where I went.
I couldn’t say how many hours I spent staring at the copy of the protein gel. There certainly wasn’t any knowledge nor answer to be gained from that. I only got up to grab more coffee, but after the second mug it just churned like acid in my stomach.
What the hell should I do?
Follow my brain that insisted that I could make a difference here, in the lab.
Or follow my heart that knew that my place was out there, with the people who knew me better than anyone else. Who accepted me, no questions asked.
How could anyone make a choice like that?
Around three in the mo
rning I had kind of an epiphany—although, really, it was more of a need for confirmation. Stone’s office was left unlocked, so I sat down at his desk and rifled through his files until I found a blue folder—not the green one with all the saucy information, but one looking like the one that had doomed half of my group to certain outlawdom. There was an entire blue section in that drawer, and as I pulled file after file, they all contained the same—yet more electrophoresis gel images. It only then occurred to me that I’d never even asked how they’d treated the samples—but then, they knew what they were looking for, so they’d likely done some chromatographic assay to separate proteins that were close to the viral proteins. It didn’t matter. Only the results did.
As I scanned the pictures, the results were always the same. Some didn’t hold a single suspicious sample. Those that did more often than not had one more with that cloud, too—a spouse or girlfriend, likely. From what Nate had told me about how he’d gotten into the serum program, I figured that Pia was likely one of very few women who had ended up in there—and that was a story I was burning to know, but wouldn’t ask her about unless she volunteered—making it easy to figure that the samples that lit up the lanes with blue were from men mostly. None held as many as ours.
I idly wondered where these people were now. Likely out there, somewhere, living a life similar to how mine had been until this very week. There were easily a few hundred samples there, making it obvious that they couldn’t have come from this lab only. With so few people left, could we really afford to cut so many from what remained of society?
Then again, thinking about the guys, I realized that it was more like a willful exodus. It was still morbidly ironic. The virus had been a true equalizer, reducing all of us to one common denominator: human. Not skin color, ethnic background, religion, sexual preference and identity—we were all just human. And it had taken us all of mere months to create a class system that cut a harsher line through us that remained than most things that had ever existed.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 91
