by RJ Crayton
He closed his eyes. Did he? “Some water would be good,” he said, opening his eyes long enough to see her hurry away to get his drink. He closed his eyes again, just wanting to rest.
“Lijah,” he heard her say, and lifted his gaze in time to see Elaan handing him a glass of water. He took it, gulped it down, and set the cup aside. The cool water was refreshing.
He closed his eyes again, still just wanting to rest. He knew Elaan was interested in talking, in finding out what had happened to him. But he wasn’t ready to talk. He wanted to be someplace nice and forget the world he’d just come from. He felt a hand on his own and opened his eyes to see Elaan staring with wide eyes and a creased brow. “Lijah, you’re scaring me. What happened to you out there?”
Lijah breathed out, steeling himself against the memories. What had happened out there? He didn’t want to talk about it. “Is she here?”
Elaan frowned, as if disappointed he hadn’t answered her question. “Yeah, she’s here. She’s been living here with an immune engineering student.”
Lijah raised an eyebrow. “An engineering student?” he asked. “A guy?”
Elaan nodded. “His name is Amadu,” she said. “He’s originally from Ghana, and he’s pretty nice.”
He scoffed. His mother took the cake. The world was disintegrating, and she decided to go cougar with a college student. He rubbed his temples. “So Mom’s been mourning herself by having a Netflix and Chill moment, sans the Netflix?”
Elaan rolled her eyes. “No, it’s not like that,” she said. “I see why you thought it. I thought the same thing you did when I got here. But it’s not true. For one, Mom says she’s in love with Dad and she’s never been unfaithful.”
Like that was supposed to mean something. God, he hated that she still believed every word their mother said.
“Second,” Elaan said louder, “Even if that were a lie, she’s not lying about Amadu. I’ve seen them together. There’s nothing going on there. Plus, he’s not interested in women.”
Lijah raised a brow. His heart double thumped in his chest. Gay. She picked up a young gay refugee to live with. A college student, someone around his age, a guy, a gay guy. He wondered briefly if she was drawn to this guy because she yearned for the son she’d left behind. He shook his head. He didn’t want to be sucked into anything involving her, or her need to make up for her wrongs.
“Elijah?” he heard his mother cry out, stunned. He turned to see her running toward him. She looked different; her hair was shorter, and she was thinner, but she seemed more toned, less soft than he remembered. In a few seconds, she was kneeling before him, examining his face, touching the scar on his forehead. “Son,” she whispered, her expression full of concern. “What happened to you?”
He couldn’t get away from that question. No matter how much he deflected. No matter how much he tried to ignore it, they kept coming back to that. And wasn’t that why he’d decided to come in the first place? To tell them what had happened, what he’d learned of the outside world, of what had happened a month ago. He supposed he’d have to tell them. There seemed to be no getting around it.
Chapter 32
Lijah suggested his mother and sister sit down. “It’s a long story,” he said.
“Do you want something to eat or drink, first?” Shonda asked. “You look hungry.”
He’d already had something to drink, and he wasn’t ready to talk. So, it was probably best to eat. He was, in fact, hungry. He’d eaten some berries and even had gotten lucky enough a couple of days ago to stumble across an apple tree. It was sustenance, but apples were certainly not what people dreamed about eating. Not for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “I am hungry,” he said. “What do you have?”
Shonda offered leftover fish from yesterday, some lentils, even a cup of coffee.
“How about all three,” he said.
His mother smiled at him. “Just give me two minutes to heat it up.” She headed toward the kitchen and began taking out the leftovers.
Elaan was sitting in her chair, tapping her feet. Impatient as ever. Yearning for the truth, still. He missed her. As annoying as she was, you could always tell where you stood with her. Right now, she didn’t want to wait for him to eat, but she knew she should, so she let out all her anxiousness through foot tapping. Only, it was going to drive him mad to watch her so wound up. He decided to ask her the question he’d been curious about since he’d arrived.
“So,” Lijah said. “Where’s Josh? Did he leave after he brought you here?” Lijah hoped he had. He didn’t want to see Josh and Elaan together.
Elaan shook her head. “No, he and Amadu went into town.”
Lijah raised an eyebrow. Out with the gay guy. Was Josh a gay magnet? Did he enjoy standing there looking handsome and having gay guys lust over him, even though he wasn’t? No, that was stupid. A stupid thought he’d like to erase. Only, he was still somewhat too obsessed over a guy he couldn’t have. It was a bad place to be.
“Do you want me to show you around while Mom gets your lunch?”
Lijah shrugged. He was curious about the house. She stood, and he followed her, taking a mild interest in where he would stay. Anything here was better than where he’d been. He’d tried not to cringe when Elaan told him he’d be sharing a room with Josh. He’d deal with that later. Maybe he could convince his mother to let him switch with Amadu. When they’d finished the tour, his mother had a warm plate with fish, lentils, and a hot mug of coffee on the kitchen table.
He sat down and began to eat. His mother and sister joined him at the table even though they’d already eaten. He scarfed down the food quickly, and when he’d finished, they were both staring as if they didn’t know him.
He burped. “Excuse me,” he said, then took a sip of coffee. He would’ve liked some sugar, but the warm drink in and of itself was nice. It felt like liquid gold flowing through his body.
“So,” his mother said. There was that word again. She was giving him an opening for him to talk, but he didn’t want to talk. He took his spoon and tried to scoop up what remained of the sauce.
“What happened to you, Lijah?” Elaan asked, her desire for answers the one thing that was consistent about her. “How did you get away from Boxcar Willie?”
That was an easier question to answer, sort of. He told the story of escaping from Willie, finding the cabin in the woods, and deciding he wanted to stay there.
Shonda’s reaction was stony and cold, her face unchanging while he talked. She liked to be neutral sometimes. He used to like it, used to think it was good that she could appear unfazed by anything you said. But now he wondered if it was just the sign of a cold heart.
“So, why did you leave?” Elaan asked. “If you wanted to stay, if you just wanted to be reclusive, avoid the disease?”
Lijah shrugged, then picked up a single lentil left on his plate and popped it in his mouth. It was good. Good, good food. “There were a lot of reasons. Staying meant I wouldn’t know if you made it,” he said to Elaan. “Josh had promised me he would get you here, but what if he hadn’t? What if you hadn’t gotten to Mom? I made sure you got off that train, got away from Willie, tried to make sure you were safe. Staying in the cabin meant I wouldn’t know if that were true or not.”
Elaan’s face took on a bit of color, and she reached out and patted Lijah’s hands. “I should have said thank you earlier, Lijah.” She looked him right in the eye. “Thank you so much for what you did with Willie, for protecting me.”
He waved her off. “I was glad to do it,” he said. “You’re my baby sister.”
He caught a glimpse of Shonda. She was smiling, as if it warmed her heart that her children were embarking on a love fest. Sometimes he wondered if he judged her too harshly, if she were just what she said she was, a woman who loved her children but sometimes made mistakes.
“You left to come here?” Shonda asked.
“Yeah, after four days at the cabin, I decided I needed to know. I’d done a pretty good
job of eating off the land. I’d picked berries, and even caught a couple of rabbits in traps. They weren’t used to trappers, so it was easy enough. Though, killing and cleaning a rabbit with an old knife isn’t the easiest or exacting method. I had more waste than I should have. But I also hadn’t dug too deeply into the food I’d brought with me. Elaan had given me the Illinois map, so I just had to figure out where I was and get started.”
“Where were you?” Elaan asked.
“Greenville, Illinois,” he said. “Not so far from St. Louis, and way further south than I wanted to be. According to the map, it was more than two hundred miles from Dahinda.”
“You walked two hundred miles,” his mother said, peering down at his worn and tattered sneakers.
“Hitchhiked a little ways,” Lijah said. “That’s where I found out what happened.”
“What do you mean, you found out what happened?” Shonda said.
Lijah looked at Elaan. “You know how the food supplies stopped a month before we left, how they blamed it on contamination?”
Elaan nodded.
“I’m not sure what happened, but sometime, a couple of months ago, the military got infected as carriers. They started spreading the disease unknowingly.”
Elaan shook her head. “How do you know this?”
“I don’t know anything for sure. Just what the one guy who picked me up told me. He was traveling north and gave me a fifty-mile ride. I told him I’d been in hiding, away from the disease, but now I was trying to see if any family was left. He told me to watch out for soldiers, that everywhere they went, sickness and death followed. He doesn’t know what happened or why. He said there were rumors the government is trying to kill people, or that the government mistakenly turned its soldiers into carriers. Regardless, people fear soldiers. Frankly, they fear anyone associated with the government or establishment.”
Lijah slid his spoon across the empty plate, hoping to catch a smidgen more food. He was still hungry. His mother and Elaan were silent, digesting the information. It had taken him a while to comprehend it, too. He wondered if his father and Kingston were responsible. Had their vaccine been used on the soldiers? Had they thought it had been fixed? He searched his plate for a smidge of anything left, but he’d done too good a job. There was only a thin layer of sauce.
“Did you actually see any soldiers?” his mother asked.
He looked up from his plate and shook his head. “No,” he said. “But I can tell you that people are scared of something. Beside that guy who gave me a ride, most people stayed away from me. They stayed away from everyone. They’re not coming together, like you’d expect people to come together in a crisis. That means they’re staying away from people they don’t know. This lack of people we’re seeing, it’s fueled not just by the death, but by a general mistrust. I think Scott was right. The infected soldiers caused a massive uptick in death and fear.”
“Who’s Scott?” Elaan said.
“Guy who gave me a ride.”
“And you trust him?” Shonda asked.
Lijah nodded. “I see no reason not to,” he said. “What he said made sense. If there was a sudden uptick in illness, then it would explain concerns over contamination at the SPU. It would explain why supplies stopped, why everything changed so quickly.”
He watched as his mother and sister mulled over his words. It was a hard thing to reconcile, but he was sure it was true. He’d thought about it so much, as he’d walked through barren streets and towns, seen so few people, so few things open. The places that were open seemed to be the few ones that had maintained power. He wasn’t sure exactly what caused certain places to have power and some not to. Though, he’d seen a few wind farms on the way. Perhaps those power plants had been easier to maintain than some of the other types, such as coal-fired plants, which seem like they’d require more active pursuits to generate power.
“This means we should go,” Shonda said.
Lijah looked at his mother and sister. “Go where?” Lijah asked.
“We’ve been worried,” his mother said. “Worried that whatever happened a month ago that was causing the trouble was bad news for your father. Bad news for the people in the compound. I’m beginning to think they cut off the food supplies and have just left them there to rot. I want to talk to him, so we were going to try to head east toward the university. Amadu is familiar with it, and if anyone has access to electronics and internet, it would be that place. It’s our best bet to try to contact them. And our best bet to try to show them what I figured out.”
Lijah stared at her. “And what did you figure out?”
“I’ve gone over the data your father sent, and looked at all the experiments, all the reactions, all the data, and I think I know where they went wrong. I think I know how to turn off the carrier gene in the vaccine. So that people who get it won’t be turned into carriers with exposure.”
Lijah’s insides tingled. He closed his eyes, opened them again, wondering if what she was saying could really be true. Could she really crack the vaccine code, even though stronger minds had been working on it for months? “Mom, how can you say that? You haven’t even been working on the project.”
She nodded. “I know, but your father sent me all the data. He had been sending it to me before we lost our internet, and I’d been looking at it, but it’s been almost two months since then. And what I have is just a theory, but one I think will work.”
Lijah stared at his mother, not really sure he believed her. “Have you tried out your theory?”
“I don’t have anything to conduct experiments with,” Shonda said. “That’s why we were going to try to get to Champaign. Amadu’s familiar with the campus, and if school has actually begun, he’s supposed to be enrolled. He’d have access to the labs and the equipment we’d need. Maybe I could get a message to your father.”
Lijah nodded. “When did you want to go?”
Shonda turned her head and looked out the rear window, toward the tree-lined rear. “Once the boys come back from town, we can talk about a plan, and hopefully leave in a couple of days. The sooner we leave, the better, I think.”
Elaan smiled. “Sounds like a plan to me.”
END BOOK TWO
Thank you for reading this book. If you enjoyed it, please tell a friend or leave a review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and much appreciated. The final book in the Virus series, Contained, will be published in early August. Turn the page for a sneak peek at RJ Crayton’s newest book, Scented, due out July 6, 2016.
Scented Preview
Prologue - Mother
(BRYAN)
The last words Bryan ever said to his mother were, “You stink.” That was eight years ago.
His mother had been leaving for a Friends of the Library meeting. Wrapped in her winter coat and holding her gloves in one hand, she’d said, “Let me give you a hug and a kiss, because I won’t be back until after you’re asleep.”
He walked toward her, fully prepared to meet her request, but as he got nearer, he slammed into a putrid odor. He stopped immediately for it was as if he'd been slapped with funk. It was the worst thing he’d ever smelled. Worse than the “science experiment” he’d done with Tommy Johnson where they’d added turpentine, mud, paint, pond scum and all the other gross things they could find. At the time he’d thought nothing could out-stink that concoction. Clearly he’d been wrong.
He stopped short of her outstretched arms, just beyond the tips of her fingers. She startled at his abrupt halt, but still smiled at him. Her dark brown hair was straightened, instead of curly, falling just beneath her shoulders, fanning out across the chocolate-colored coat.
“Don’t stop,” she said with a chuckle. “Come on.” She leaned toward him and he realized the smell was coming from her. It was as if it multiplied a thousand times in strength with each millimeter closer she came. Bryan stepped back two paces.
She knitted her eyebrows, truly confused
“Mom, you stink,” h
e said in the unapologetic tone only an eight-year-old could manage.
Hurt flashed across her face, then quickly morphed into a strained expression — though probably it was her attempt at neutral. The sound of the kitchen door opening broke the silence, and both Bryan and his mother turned to see Bryan’s father emerge. He’d been finishing dinner because he’d gotten home too late to eat with his family.
“What’s going on?” he asked, squinting distrustfully at Bryan, and then turning to his wife, trying to interpret her flustered face.
Bryan’s mother pulled her lapel up and sniffed, then lifted her arm and inhaled in the direction of her pit. She shook her head. “Bryan thinks I don’t smell well,” she said, turning an awkward phrase in a clear attempt not to repeat what Bryan had just said so bluntly: that she stank. “I think I’m fine,” she told her husband, though she still seemed to be surreptitiously inhaling the air around her, searching for this odor Bryan detected.
His father walked over to her, passing Bryan with a glare, and sniffed the air around his wife. He smiled. “You’re great, Marina.”
Marina returned her husband’s grin, then looked past him to Bryan. “Guess you’re outvoted, kiddo,” she laughed. “Come on, give me my hug and kiss now or I’m gonna be late.”
Bryan’s father moved aside so the boy could go, but Bryan found he couldn’t move. It didn’t matter what they said. She stank, and he wasn’t going near her or that smell. Bryan shook his head and stood firm. “You stink.”
The redness seemed to burst onto his father’s face like someone had turned on a switch. One moment, he was normal; the next he was filled with anger that had turned him the color of a beet. “That’s no way to talk to your mother,” he screamed.
Bryan took a step back. It had been to avoid his father’s rage, but taking a step away from his mother had also lessened the pungency of her newfound stench.
