by RJ Crayton
Elaan’s jaw dropped. That was wrong. It wasn’t those people’s fault they were carriers any more than it was her fault she was immune. She wouldn’t want to die for being a carrier. But, that couldn’t be why they killed him. They wouldn’t kill him for a genetic defect. “Did he refuse to stay in quarantine?” she asked. “Is that why?”
“No, he was broken up about all the death he had caused. He was a minister. He prayed every day for forgiveness and swore he’d live the rest of his life in a cave if that would keep others from getting sick. But, the government decided that carriers were too dangerous.”
Her father’s gaze was sympathetic, but he still motioned her to turn around. “Pack, please.” She nodded and turned back to the drawers. “A little more than a week later, Lijah and Josh went into the quarantine facility to watch for signs of infection. But, the day after that, Kingston withdrew them both from quarantine and put them in our lab, where the primates had been.”
“Josh told me that,” Elaan said. Her father stared at her. “He said Kingston had planned to test the cure on them if they’d gotten sick. But they didn’t.”
“They didn’t get sick, but Kingston convinced them he had a way for them to be safe from the virus,” her father said. Elaan’s eyes widened in curiosity. “Kingston had the Alpha team’s prospective cure, but he also had the vaccine we’d been working on. Alpha team’s data was sketchy at best, but he thought our vaccine would work. The test results were good enough that we were close to starting human trials. Kingston decided to vaccinate both Lijah and Josh to give them a shot at surviving this awful disease. He was especially worried that they’d be turned back out if they survived quarantine. His initial test of them showed no sign of the disease, so he thought if he could give them the vaccine, it would take effect by the time they were to be released from quarantine. Both Josh and Lijah agreed. Kingston knew both their mothers had died quickly of the disease, so it was possible they’d have similar genetic responses. Kingston convinced them our vaccine was ready, and a low risk option, given the circumstances. And I wasn’t there to talk to Lijah, to help him make an informed decision.”
Elaan felt a surge of confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said. “If they have a valid vaccine, why aren’t they using it? Why aren’t they giving it to people?”
“Because it’s not a valid vaccine, Elaan,” he said. “We thought it worked. We thought it was right. We even announced we’d be using it, but it had side effects we didn’t expect.”
Elaan felt dread creeping through her. “What kind of side effects?”
“When we tested the vaccine, we exposed the vaccinated primates to sick monkeys and checked their survival rates. The vaccinated animals survived without ill effects. They were healthy after being exposed to the virus. After we concluded they’d survived and the vaccine was effective, we moved the vaccinated chimps into cages with healthy ones. Three weeks later, we realized the healthy monkeys were sick. The vaccine had kept the chimps from getting sick, but it seems that when the vaccinated chimps were exposed to the virus, they turned into carriers.”
Elaan’s eyes widened, and she dropped the clothes in her hand and turned to her dad. “The vaccine makes people carriers?”
“Only after they are exposed to the virus,” he said.
“And Josh and Lijah both got the vaccine?”
“Yes,” he said.
That didn’t make any sense. “But Josh is immune,” she said. “He didn’t need a vaccine.”
Her father closed his eyes, rubbed his temples. “Just finish packing, and I’ll explain.” Elaan picked up the sweater she’d dropped and tossed it in the box. Her father spoke again. “Josh isn’t immune. That was a lie. A lie Kingston told after we learned the side effect. The boys had already taken the vaccine by then.”
“Is that why you were livid when you found out what Dr. Wells had done?” she asked. He looked at her curiously, as if wondering how she knew. “Josh said you were mad that his dad moved them.”
Her father nodded. “I knew the vaccine hadn’t gotten final approval and I didn’t think it was necessary to try it yet,” he said. “Though, it was partly my fault Kingston did it. I should have agreed to fight for the kids in scientist housing immediately. I was preoccupied with your mother, with the decision to kill the carriers. I put him off, told him I’d think about it. He didn’t want his son sent out into the world to face this disease alone.”
Lijah popped his head in. “You guys ready?”
Elaan couldn’t help staring at her brother. He stood there looking as healthy as any nineteen-year-old should. He had taken a vaccine that made him worse than he’d been to begin with. She looked from Lijah to her father. “So Lijah isn’t a carrier now,” she said. “But he will be if he gets exposed to the virus?”
Her father swallowed. “Yes.”
Lijah grimaced. “So now you know,” he said. “Our dear mother dies and I worry that I’m destined for the same fate, so I take a vaccine that makes it so I go around infecting millions of people.”
Lijah’s mouth was an angry sneer and there was derision in his voice. It seemed so unlike him. Then she had a thought. She turned to her father. “But Dad, even if it turns people into carriers, that would be OK, right? If everyone is vaccinated, then the fact that lots of people are carriers shouldn’t matter. No one would get sick because everyone would’ve been vaccinated.”
Her father opened his mouth to respond, but Lijah jumped in, his tone scornful. “Did dear old dad forget to tell you the best part? Did he forget to tell you the most important thing, the reason why they won’t give out the vaccine?”
Elaan gaped at her brother, unsure where Lijah was headed, but knowing it wasn’t good. She almost didn’t want to respond to his question, but she shook her head no. Her father apparently hadn’t told her everything.
“You’re right. If everyone got turned into an immune carrier, it’s probably not a big deal. Presuming you could get a high enough vaccination rate, having millions of immune carriers would be better than the millions of deaths we’re facing now. People would survive and the virus would become like half a million other bacteria or viruses that float in people’s systems without causing harm. But being a carrier isn’t the only side effect. The other side effect, the one that affects ninety percent of the vaccine recipients, is that it makes you sterile. You’re the very last generation of your line. Ever.”
Elaan stood there, stunned. He couldn’t be serious. But everything about him — his face, his posture, the anger deep within his eyes — said he was. He was absolutely serious.
“Come on,” Lijah said. “We need to get up to the lab.”
Chapter 12
Elaan tossed a couple more things in the box, while her father returned to his own room, grabbed a small satchel, and locked his door. A moment later, they left the apartment. Lijah led the way, with her father in the middle and Elaan bringing up the rear. She had more questions, so many more questions, but she couldn’t ask them out in the hallway where passersby might overhear.
They passed Dave, a guy who also worked in the lab, walking somewhere with his wife. Her father and Lijah managed friendly hellos while Elaan could only muster a nod. She wondered if she looked scared. Or confused. She felt both.
Elaan’s mind still reeled. Lijah and Josh had been given a vaccine that would turn them into carriers if they were exposed to the virus again. Carriers who were sterile. Josh wasn’t really immune like she was. It had been a lie. A lie to keep Josh away from the uptop, a lie to get him into the safe housing.
Before she knew it, they were entering the lab. Lijah and her dad went in first, and Elaan arrived just in time to see Kingston yank a backpack from Josh’s hand and stuff it behind a lab table.
Kingston, tall with brown hair, an angular face, bushy brows and narrow black glasses, glared and said, “Why are you here? What’s in the boxes?”
“We’re here for the same reason you called Josh here,” Lijah said,
challenge in his voice. “Did you even consider warning us, Kingston?”
Josh took a step away from his father. He looked at Lijah, then back at his father and shook his head in disgust. “You said they’d just found out about me,” Josh said to his father. “You said they didn’t know about him.”
“Well, he lied,” Lijah said unapologetically. “They know about me, and they want Elaan, too. So, we all need to go.”
Josh turned toward Elaan, squinting in confusion. “Why do they want her?” he asked. “She hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s the only one of us who was telling the truth, right? She’s immune, right?”
Everyone had lied so much about everything that Josh’s question seemed appropriate. Lijah responded to Josh with a nod, and Elaan felt a sudden relief. At least that was one thing they hadn’t lied about.
Her father spoke. “Elaan is immune. However, many of the immunes are immune to only the airborne version. She’s immune to both the airborne and the fluid-passed versions of the virus. They’d like to do more research on her. Many things have been floated around, the most simple of them being that they’d like to clone her to do more research.”
Elaan felt her stomach plummet. “What?” she asked, so startled by her father’s pronouncement that she dropped her box.
James turned to Elaan and picked up the box. “You’ve heard of Dolly the sheep, right?”
She nodded, thinking of the first successful clone in the world.
“Well, cloning has gotten much better since her. Generally, with cloning you’ve had to take the DNA, insert it into an egg, and carry it to term as a baby,” he said softly, staring at her. “Well, now you still have to carry it to term, but scientists have found they can speed up the growth process, to about double time the normal developmental rate. They think the child would grow twice as fast, too, but they don’t care. There are ethical rules against this, but right now, they want more data, more research on how people like you evade the effects of this virus, and they think having more subjects with your DNA will make it easier to study. They’ve pitched it as helping humanity, but I fear Mengele-like experimentation with no rules.”
Elaan swallowed. “Mengele? Like the Nazi?” she asked, thinking of an assignment her history teacher had given, and the examples her father had mentioned to illustrate Mengele’s derangement. The Nazi had tortured Jews, supposedly as part of scientific experimentation.
Her father nodded. Elaan’s chest tightened. The government wanted to do Mengele-like experiments on her or her clones. She took a step back, leaning on a lab table for support. She closed her eyes. What her father was suggesting sounded crazy. Experimenting on human beings was wrong. She wondered if this was some bizarre dream. That would make more sense than everything that had happened in the last half hour. She didn’t want any of it to be true. She wanted Josh to be immune and Lijah to have just been a lucky guy who hadn’t gotten sick, not someone who’d taken a vaccine that left him worse off than when he’d started. She wanted everything to go back to the way it was this morning when she woke up.
She opened her eyes and everyone was staring at her. Her father had taken a step toward her. “Laani,” he said. “Baby, are you alright? I know it’s a lot to take in.”
Understatement of the year. “How do you know they want to clone me?”
“They asked permission,” he said. “They told me their plan and asked my consent. They thought I’d give it, but I wouldn’t. I refused. I’ve been working with Kingston to try to figure out another vaccine or treatment based on your DNA. We’re close, I think, but,” he paused, lowered his eyes. “With my absences, things have been slower.”
As his face quivered with remorse, Elaan’s heart hardened. He knew they wanted her. He knew they wanted to do this awful thing to her, and do God knew what to her clones, and he still couldn’t get his act together to help Dr. Wells. Even to help her, not the rest of the world, just to help her. He couldn’t get it together enough to work with Dr. Wells so he could help his own daughter. A wave of grief hit her. He’d abandoned her through his lack of action. He hadn’t done the one thing parents are supposed to do: protect their children.
Her father was staring at her, like he wanted her to speak. But she had nothing to say. The words for how she felt right now would be cruel, and she didn’t want to be cruel, because now was a time for urgency.
“Why do they need your permission?” she asked. “Why is it that they need your permission to clone me? Don’t they have DNA samples from me already? You’ve taken a ton of samples.”
Her father sighed and looked at Dr. Wells. “Kingston’s utter lack of faith in modern man has saved you. They wanted to have your DNA sent to all the labs. He refused, and said the single lab approach worked best. He would send out some results patterns but not all the data. I suggested to him that we be more cooperative, that doing so would get them off our backs, but he refused. I didn’t have the energy to fight Kingston and work, so I let him make his choices. As a result, we’re the only lab that has your DNA on file. I pulled all your DNA info off any computers that connected to the network servers after they made the first request. We’ve been working off of flash drives, and only periodically connecting to the network, so they can’t access certain data. They actually need you if they want to try the cloning research.” Her father sighed. “Kingston has saved you from experimentation without your knowledge, but that does mean they have to come get you if they want you. And they want you now. Apparently very badly.”
Elaan placed a hand on her topsy turvy stomach. Bile rose in her throat and she thought she might vomit. She tried to breathe through her nose. Her friend Priya used to say that could help center you. But she didn’t feel centered. She felt lost. Here she was in a world where Kingston Wells had done more to ensure her welfare than her own father. Everything about this situation seemed almost incomprehensible. She looked past her father, to Lijah. “What do we do?”
“We have to leave, but we need supplies,” Lijah said. He tipped his head toward Kingston. “I suspect he has some. I suspect he has a plan, too.”
Kingston took a step back, surveying all the faces squared on his, and then pressed his lips together tightly in defiance.
Only, there was another defiant Wells in the room. “Yes,” Josh said, eyeing his father with contempt. “He was telling me about an alternate exit, one we could use to escape undetected.”
“It’s safer for you three not to be together,” Kingston said, his voice strained. “The three of you together would be easier to find.”
“I’m not leaving Elaan,” Josh declared. Elaan stared at him, shocked. Lijah stared, too, but said nothing.
Kingston rolled his eyes. His eyes darted over to his son, then over to Elaan and Lijah. “You’ll do better without them, Joshua,” Kingston said. Josh folded his arms and Kingston focused in on Elaan. If looks could kill, Elaan would be pushing up daisies. Kingston’s face soften when he ripped his gaze from Elaan and turned to Josh. He sighed and muttered, “Fine. I have empty backpacks and some food and water. Let’s pack your stuff, and then I’ll explain to you how to get out of the complex.”
Lijah nodded. Elaan wanted to nod, but she still felt overwhelmed. She tried to take her box back from her father but he wouldn’t let go. She stared at him and he let go of the box. He set it down and took her hand. “You look shell-shocked,” he said. “Just sit for a minute. I’ll transfer your stuff to a backpack and get your supplies.”
Now he wanted to take care of her? Now. After he’d spent the last months falling apart. She had a good mind to tell him to go to Hell. Only, she was shell-shocked and she did want to sit for a second, so she sat on an aluminum stool facing the lab table. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and slipping her head into her hands.
A moment later, she felt a hand on her shoulder. “You alright, Elaan?” Josh asked.
Elaan lifted her head and turned to him. “Not really,” she admitted. “I’m still confused th
ough.”
“Confused?” he asked. “About what?”
She rubbed at her temples. Her head hurt. She tried to explain to Josh. “My dad had to explain in a hurry. He said you took the vaccine, one that would make you carriers if you were exposed to the virus,” she said. “But I don’t understand why your dad lied. Why did he lie about you being immune?”
Josh peeked behind her, presumably, over at his father, then back at her. “He didn’t want to lie, but he wanted me in the scientist housing. Initially, the housing was only supposed to be for scientists and others approved by the Scientist Housing Selection Committee. Even before my dad took us from quarantine to his lab, he wanted your dad’s support to fight for the families of scientists to get admitted automatically.”
Elaan turned and watched her father, who was in the opposite corner taking things from her box and neatly folding them and packing them in a backpack. “He said no?” she asked, turning back to Josh.
Josh shrugged. “He told my dad he didn’t know that it would be fair, that it would look right. He said he wanted to think about it. Once Lijah and I had been vaccinated, your dad was really angry about my dad doing it without telling him first. He told my dad he hadn’t decided if he would support him, yet. He’d said it didn’t matter, since we were vaccinated against the virus anyway.”
Elaan bit her lip and creased her brow. “This was before you knew that the vaccine was bad?”
Josh nodded. “Yes. We’d been in Dad’s lab for a little over a week before they learned about the vaccine turning people into carriers. It was around the same time that your father got the test back saying you were immune. Once that test came back, you were granted automatic admission into the scientist housing. My dad was apoplectic. Before, he’d just wanted me in the housing. Now he needed me in the housing, more than ever. He decided he was through trying to talk to your dad, trying to get your dad to back him. He lied. He told the Scientific Housing Selection Committee that I was immune, too. He sent in some doctored test results and they admitted me.”
