by Jodi McIsaac
“Of course,” he said. “What are old friends for?”
“Sleepover!” Maisie cried, jumping up from her seat on the floor and bouncing onto the sofa where Wes sat. He drew back in surprise as Maisie did a happy dance beside him.
“Maisie, time to get ready for bed,” Kenneth said. She stuck out her bottom lip but then bounced off the sofa and headed up the stairs. “I’ll be right back,” he told us.
I watched him follow the still-giggling girl out of the room, an ache growing in my chest.
“You gonna have kids?” Wes asked, apparently reading my expression.
“What? Oh, I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“How come? Too much work?”
“No, I’m just . . . getting old,” I said, hoping he would drop it.
“Never too old for a miracle,” he said, and I forced my mouth into a smile. Miracles were for other, more naive people. I pulled my phone out of my purse as a distraction and saw a text from Latasha.
Hey, I miss you. And our gaming nights! Let’s meet online in that game we played last week.
I frowned at the tiny screen. Did she really think I was in the mood to game right now? Unless . . .
Sounds fun, I wrote back. How about now?
I dashed back out into the hallway so I could get my laptop from my bag and nearly ran into Kenneth as he was coming down the stairs.
“Sorry,” I said, stepping back. “Is she asleep?”
“She’s going to read in bed for a while. It’s a bit early for bedtime, but I wanted us to be able to chat without her listening. What’s going on? Where did you go after you left the hospital?” His hand rested on my arm, just above the elbow. I felt an insane desire to step into him, to wrap my arms around his waist and hold him like an anchor in an angry sea.
I took a step back.
“We tried to leave Clarkeston, get down to Boston. Obviously, it didn’t work.” I filled him in on the call from Dr. Hansen and the roadblock. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I actually didn’t know what I was going to do until we left . . . and I didn’t want you to worry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, though he looked slightly dejected. “I’m glad you felt safe coming to me.”
“Honestly, I think I might be going a little crazy myself,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Am I totally overreacting? Give me your professional opinion,” I added with a smile, hoping to lighten the mood.
His face was serious. “I don’t think you’re going crazy. Gaspereau has everyone on edge.”
“Something’s not adding up,” I said. “Hansen seems totally focused on Wes. He said his brain is ‘unique.’”
Kenneth’s eyes narrowed. “What does he mean by that? He didn’t say anything else?”
I shook my head.
The buzzer on the oven sounded. Kenneth went into the kitchen, and I found Wes watching TV in the living room. On the screen, a line of riot police advanced toward a crowd outside a grocery store.
“Where is that?” I asked.
“It’s here,” Kenneth said, coming back into the room. “The whole town has gone insane.” Seeing the expression on my face, he hurried to add, “Not with Gaspereau, though I’d wager quite a few of the people out there are infected . . . or soon will be. People lose their minds in a crisis.”
“Jesus . . .” I said softly as I watched the chaos unfolding. “I had no idea it had gotten this bad.”
“You’ve been rather busy the past couple of days,” Kenneth said wryly. “But people are terrified; they’re not acting rationally. News about the quarantine seems to have made it worse.” He walked over to the television and turned it off. “Come have some dinner. Let’s pretend everything is normal for a little while.”
We sat down at a round table in the corner of the kitchen, but instead of eating I opened my laptop. “Can I get your Wi-Fi password?”
“Sure. It’s ‘fluffybunnies.’”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Maisie picked it,” he said with a wry smile.
“What are you doing?” Wes asked, watching my computer screen warily.
Kenneth glanced over my shoulder. “You’re playing video games? Is this your idea of normal?”
“It’s Latasha,” I said. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I asked her to help me find out where they were holding Wes. I forgot to text her after we got him. But I got a weird message from her saying she’d meet me online. Maybe she found something.”
“Is this your friend who works for the NSA?” Wes asked.
“Mm-hm,” I said. “So she can be a little sneaky.” That was an understatement.
I waited for the game to load and took a bite of lasagna, hoping it would quell the nausea in my stomach.
Despite his misgivings about computers, Wes watched the screen with interest as I moved my avatar through the world. Kenneth’s eyes were trained on the game, too. Latasha wasn’t online. I texted her, I’m here. No answer, so I headed to the next town in the game universe, where I knew there was a mailbox. Maybe she’d left a message. There had to be some reason she’d wanted me to log on, and I doubted it was just to have some down time.
Kenneth and Wes ate their lasagna while mine cooled on a plate beside me. After a few minutes, Kenneth gave up interest in the game and began washing dishes, but Wes’s eyes stayed fixated on the screen.
“Remember when we used to play games as kids?” I asked.
“Yeah. What was it called? That one we played all the time?”
“Phantasy Star II. It was awesome. You always figured out the maps and secrets before me, so that made it easier.” I smiled at the memory. Most of my good memories of when things were normal, of when we were just your average brother and sister, had been eclipsed by everything that had come after.
“Yeah, well, I had help from Mom. She was better than I was!”
“She was not.”
“She was! We used to play while you were at Scouts.”
“I have a hard time believing that.”
“It’s true.” He looked more closely at the screen. “What exactly are you doing?”
“I’m looking for the mailbox. Sometimes it moves around a bit.” I played for a few more minutes, fighting some mutated wolves along the way, and then spotted it: a treasure chest sitting under a tree in the middle of a field. I went over to it and typed in the Open command. A window popped up, asking me for the password.
“Password?” I muttered. “I’ve never had to use a password.”
Kenneth returned to the table and squinted at the screen. “It says you can click for a hint,” he said, pointing. I clicked, and a question popped up on the screen. Where do you want to live?
I frowned at the screen. Why was Latasha being so cagey? I checked my phone—still no response from her. “Where do I want to live?” I asked out loud.
“Well, we know it’s not here,” Kenneth said wryly.
I shot him a look and typed in Seattle.
Password incorrect.
“Um . . . New York City?” I said, typing it in. I had often dreamed of living in New York—the New York of the movies, anyway. I’d imagined myself sitting in some artsy loft apartment with brick walls, writing the Great American Novel on my laptop and drinking red wine out of long-stemmed glasses.
Password incorrect.
“Oh, come on! There are a hundred places I want to live!” I tried Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Montreal, Vancouver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Bangkok, and Tuscany, but none of them were correct.
And then it hit me.
“Ohhhhh,” I breathed. “Of course.”
“What?” Kenneth and Wes asked at the same time.
“It’s not serious,” I said, staring down at the keyboard. “It’s just something Latasha and I joked about once.” I typed in Albany.
“Albany, New York?” Kenneth asked.
“Australia,” I said.
“Why would you want to live there?”
I couldn’t think of a convincing
lie, so I told the truth. “It’s as far away from here as you can get.”
Neither Kenneth nor Wes said anything. I clicked “Enter.”
The treasure box opened, and a screen popped up with a short message from Latasha. It read This explains a lot. Be careful.
“What explains a lot?” Kenneth said from over my shoulder.
“There’s a file,” I said, pointing to a tiny paper-clip icon beside her message. I clicked on it, and a document opened up on my screen. No one spoke.
Across the first page was a gray watermark that read “CLASSIFIED.” The letterhead read “Department of Defense.”
“That looks like something we shouldn’t be seeing,” Kenneth said.
Wes’s breathing grew ragged.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“I need a smoke,” he said.
“Hang on,” Kenneth said. He got up and left the room, then came back a moment later. He handed Wes a nicotine patch. “That’s the best I can do right now. We can make a smoke run later.”
“You’re a doctor,” I pointed out. “Why do you have patches?”
“My ex decided to quit during our divorce. Not a good combination. I found some of her patches in my things after we moved.”
We turned our attention back to the document on the screen as Wes slapped the patch on his chest. “This is so fucked up,” he muttered. “I gotta get outta here.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” I said sharply.
He stood up.
“Hey. Where do you think you’re going?”
“I just need some space,” he said. “I get fidgety.”
My father had once told me that Wes needed massive amounts of sleep and hated crowds. Did Kenneth and I count as a crowd?
“You know, I’ve got some books upstairs in the library if you want to check them out,” Kenneth said.
“You have a library in here? That’s cool, man.”
“C’mon, I’ll show you.” Kenneth led Wes up the staircase.
I watched them go, then moved my computer to the living room. I sat cross-legged on the sofa and scrolled through the document.
I hardly noticed Kenneth coming back down the stairs.
“Maisie’s asleep and Wes is reading. He’s in the guest room with a stack of books.” He sat next to me. “So . . . what is it?”
A growing sense of dread spread through my stomach. For the simple crime of accessing this document, let alone sending it to someone outside of the NSA, Latasha could go to prison for treason. She had taken an enormous risk, which meant that she was very, very serious.
“It’s from the Department of Defense. According to this, there was a breach at a government facility outside Clarkeston that was working on a biological weapons project called Project Amherst, and the project has been shut down,” I said slowly. “That has to be the lab we visited. I thought they were finding a cure for something like Ebola! Not developing biological weapons! Why would they test something like that on U.S. soil, especially where there are people around? Are they crazy?”
“They used to do it all the time, back during the Cold War,” Kenneth said, a look of deep concentration on his face. “I remember reading an article about some of the experiments they did—light bulbs filled with pathogens placed on the rails of the New York City subway, for example. And they would burst balloons filled with who knows what over major cities to track how the pathogens spread.”
I drew back. “Are you serious?”
He nodded. “But it supposedly ended in the seventies. The U.S. and most other major countries signed a treaty to not use or test biological weapons anymore. Russia signed the treaty, too, but apparently there was still evidence of their program in the mid-nineties; some of the scientists working on it defected to the U.S.”
“So if Russia didn’t stop, chances are the U.S. didn’t stop either,” I said. “They just pretended they did.”
“I don’t know,” Kenneth said. “It would be a hell of a job to move something like that underground. And we don’t know for sure that’s what this report is even referring to. But Project Amherst . . . that’s too much of a coincidence to ignore.”
“Damn right it is.”
“Why would Latasha send this to you?”
Why indeed? I shook my head. “I don’t know. I told her about the lab and asked her to look into it, but that’s because I wanted to find Wes. She must have found this instead. But it’s more proof that something screwy is going on. It says right here that there was a breach. Kenneth . . . I think they were developing Gaspereau as a biological weapon.”
I got up and paced the room. “Do you have a flash drive?” He nodded and retrieved one from his office.
“Why else would they shut the project down, if not because of a breach?” I said as I downloaded the document onto the flash drive.
“I don’t know, but does it matter? Let’s say all of this is true. What—if anything—are we supposed to do about it? It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make Gaspereau go away.”
“Maybe not. But it sure explains a hell of a lot. If the government created the pathogen that causes Gaspereau, then they’ll be desperate to find a cure before anyone can point a finger at them. Hence the quarantine and the National Guard. And if they think Wes can help them develop a cure . . .”
“Then they’ll stop at nothing to find him,” Kenneth finished for me.
“Maybe Hansen isn’t such a lone ranger after all.” I cast a nervous glance up the stairs. I stood. “We should go.”
“Go where? If they’re looking for Wes, there won’t be an easy way out.”
“I don’t know where!” I burst out. “I just need to get him out of here.”
Kenneth regarded me silently for a moment and then said, “Stay the night. We’re all exhausted, and we’re not going to make good decisions. Get some sleep, recharge, and we’ll figure out a plan in the morning before I have to go back in to work. Keep in mind that the safest place for you might be right here.”
“I don’t want to wait until morning. I want to get out of here now! I hate this place!”
“There are worse places to be stuck, you know.” He sounded wounded.
“I doubt that,” I muttered.
“Christ, Clare. Do you even know what you sound like? You’ve hated Clarkeston ever since I met you. Maybe it’s not the big city, but it’s your home. You belong here.”
“Screw you,” I shot back. “You think that because we had a one-night stand almost a decade ago, you have some special insight into my life? You don’t know anything about me.”
“I don’t think you know much about you either,” he said, his eyes flashing. “I don’t get it. What exactly are you running from, Clare? Parents who loved you? A brother who’s different? Life in a small town? Why are you always so desperate to get away?”
“Don’t be so self-righteous,” I spat. “The only reason you moved back to this hellhole is because your wife left you.”
He gave me a single furious look before stalking over to the tall windows lining the far wall. He rested his hands against the wide windowsill and leaned his forehead against the glass. The window fogged up from his breath.
Shame crowded out my anger. As I watched him against the window, I regretted more than my harsh words. What was I doing? Kenneth had only ever been good to me. And yet I was still pushing him away.
“Kenneth, I—”
“Stop.”
“What?”
“Just . . . stop. You’re right; that’s why I moved back. And you’re right—I don’t know you, not anymore. But I can’t help it. A part of me is glad you can’t leave. I want you to stay. I want you to want to stay.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was watching me. He didn’t move, just stood there. Waited.
I stared at the pattern in the carpet. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t push him away, not this time. Something wonderful was standing right in front of me, and for once in my life I wasn’t g
oing to let fear chase me from it.
“I don’t want to stay,” I said. “And maybe I don’t have a good excuse. I don’t know what it is about this place, other than I have a lot of bad memories and not very many good ones. Being here is toxic for me.” His face twisted with pain, so I rushed on. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you. I do.”
I’d taken the plunge; now I held my breath. His face softened, but his eyebrows lifted in skepticism. Still he said nothing, so I continued.
“In the hospital, after I said I was sorry, you asked me which part I regretted,” I said, moving closer. “The truth is . . . I regretted leaving you. Not giving us a chance. That’s it. I know things have changed and we’re different people now. But I’m willing to give us a chance.”
His eyes stayed trained on me, as though he had no idea whether I was going to hit him or kiss him.
I kissed him. At first, his lips didn’t move, but then his arms tightened around me and he crushed his lips against mine. His touch and his smell and his taste swirled around me.
His lips found my neck, right above the collarbone. I moaned and pressed myself into him, threading my fingers through his hair. His hands slid down my back and scooped me up, and my legs wrapped around his waist. In two strides, he had me pressed against the wall.
His hands were frantic, as though he wanted to touch all of me at once. I pulled him closer to me with my legs and felt him stiffen in response. His hand slid inside my shirt and cupped my breast. A whimper of pleasure floated from my lips.
“Wait,” I murmured, remembering. “What about Wes and Maisie?”
“Right. There’s a lock on the bedroom door.” He buried his face in my neck and said, “God, you feel so good.” He let me down, and we ran up the stairs to his bedroom.
“Hang on,” he said, as I moved to pull him down onto the bed. He left the room for a moment, and I quickly did a mental inventory. When was the last time I’d showered? Shaved?
He crept back into the room and closed the door. “They’re both asleep.” He came toward me, a shy smile spreading across his face. He lowered himself on top of me, taking his weight on his arms. For what seemed like a long while, I just drank him in—the flecks of light in his dark eyes, the faint scar on his chin, the way his shoulder muscles moved when he shifted position.
