“What is this about, anyway?” I asked Red while pretending that Hamilton wasn’t in the room. I could do that for five more minutes, no biggie. Red ignored me, but I could see a muscle in his cheek jump. “You know, contrary to what some people believe, I’m not stupid. I can put two and two together. Eventually, I’ll figure it all out, and then the big reveal won’t really be much of a surprise anymore.” Still no reaction, but that didn’t keep me from prattling on. “We ran into a security guard in the greenhouse outside.” Now he did look over, but his lips remained sealed. I beamed a bright smile at him. “Judging from the fact that he was missing half his head but was still moving, I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t a normal shambler. Oh, and he had some freaky jumping action going on.” Still nothing. “A guard, at a site that has garbled papers referring to the serum project. Come on, give me something to work with here. Or all you get from me once you decipher those files is a nod that yes, I can read that, but I won’t tell you what it really says.”
As expected, that got his attention, but also that of the idiot in charge. “You will talk,” Hamilton said with the kind of conviction that was begging for a punch in the face.
“I might be lying,” I offered rather than the claim that I wouldn’t, which would have just given him an opening to explain exactly how he would facilitate his part of the deal. “You have no way of checking if what I tell you is true, unless one of your grunts has unexpected previous life experience. Which I know they don’t, or else you wouldn’t be stuck with me.”
Gita let out a triumphant whoop, she and Cole high-fiving each other, which put a halt on my attempt to weasel more information—or any, really—out of those recalcitrant assholes. “We’re in!” she proclaimed, a little out of breath with excitement. “What files do you need decrypted?”
“Well, isn’t that the question,” I grumbled while Red walked over to them so he could look at the screen. He seemed to have more of a clue than the printouts let on, seeing as it took them all of a minute to find something to be printed—only that the ink in the printer had dried up, nobody had brought a replacement, and there were no other cartridges to be found.
“Copy all that to your laptop and on some external drives for backup,” Red ordered, still scanning the screen.
“You know, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on so many possibilities with that idiotic strategy of yours,” I remarked, waiting for Red to bite. He didn’t. “I mean, I get it. The bitch had to be put in her place first. But sawing your own arm off just to spite me won’t really do you much good.” When I still got no reaction, I turned to Hamilton. “Or did you get a gag order? Blink twice, or stare at the left upper corner if you can’t confirm it verbally.” Bucky’s gaze kept boring into mine, not even a single eyelash quivering. “Need me to elaborate? You didn’t know that she’s a hacker.” Well, neither did I, but I didn’t need to admit that. “And back when you were all, let’s kill ‘em all if you don’t cooperate, you didn’t know that Tanner’s one of you. No need to deny that, I saw Richards’s reaction when he noticed that he had the three marks across his neck. Trying to execute them would have ended with several casualties for your people. We’re in this together, whether you like it, or I like it, or whoever the fuck came up with this plan likes it. Let’s pool resources. Exactly what do you have to lose?”
Sadly—but not surprisingly—my vote for rational thinking went ignored. All Hamilton had for me was one of those sleazy smiles. “Then I wouldn’t get to see you squirm all the time with indignation and frustration, and trust me, that’s the biggest satisfaction I’ll ever get from anything.”
I was tempted to snark at him that he really must be needing to get laid, but I was not going there. So I let my silence—relaxed, and as far from indignant and frustrated as I could make it, which likely wasn’t working—be my answer.
“Lewis, take a look at this,” Red said once Cole was done feeding no less than four flash drives to his laptop. I didn’t miss that Gita let something disappear up the sleeve of her jacket, her attention seemingly wandering to the view of the garden but I didn’t buy the disinterested act. I absolutely felt like refusing, or at the very least stomping over there like a petulant child, but that would have negated my demonstrated willingness to cooperate, so I was stuck with doing so willingly.
Gita and Cole moved to the side as Red indicated me to park my ass in the desk chair previously pushed to the side. “We have about another thirty minutes until we need to move on,” he explained. “See if you can make any sense of anything on here.”
I glared at the stupid dainty computer mouse but decided that making a fuss that would cause me to backtrack would be even worse than going straight for the kill and trying to swallow my dignity. Using my teeth, I pulled my gloves off, dropping them next to the keyboard. Yup, using the mouse with a three-fingered hand was about as awful as I’d expected; it worked, scrolling and all, until I forgot that I was missing the fingers that stabilized it, and the first time I made a stronger motion to the side, it went flying off the desk, landing on the papers littering the floor. Someone snickered but I didn’t catch who. By the time I was about to heave myself out of the chair—which was painful enough thanks to where the zombie in the greenhouse had pummeled my side—Gita had already picked it up and was putting it back on the mouse pad. Swallowing thickly, I told myself to get a grip and resumed. Random scrolling didn’t lead to much so I went for searching the text. Yet when I tried to open the search window with the usual keyboard shortcut, I missed three times—not because I would have needed my left index finger for that which wasn’t available anymore, but because I had absolutely no sensation in the fingertip of the middle finger next to it. Well, that was promising. Pretending like nothing had happened, I used the mouse to navigate the menu to accomplish the job, but at the back of my mind my paranoia screamed. Forcing myself to concentrate on the text helped only so much.
“It looks like a proposal for new trial runs,” I muttered a few minutes later. “Clearly written by someone who expected the reader to be up to date with the proceedings. There are a lot of references to previous discussions and alternative shit. It’s almost like they didn’t want anyone not in the know to be able to make any sense of this.”
Red ignored my sarcastic remark. “But it is about the serum project?”
“Presumably. You know, a smidgen of context—“
“Not going to happen,” Hamilton interjected, not that Red had appeared in the mood to volunteer anything. “Are you done? Because there’s no need to waste any more time if you’re just uselessly sitting on your ass.”
I clicked over to the folder view and checked a few more files, but it was about the same. One contained experiment conditions and ingredient lists, but it wasn’t like I could just read that and find some hidden clues in there. Just to annoy Bucky, I tried to spend as much time as I could looking preoccupied—which wasn’t hard, as no one was actually paying me any attention—but eventually had to give up. This wasn’t like Raleigh Miller’s data on that flash drive that Nate had been hogging all through the apocalypse, full of information, carefully vetted, set up to be read by someone else. This looked more like a backup data dump, only to be later checked on for one specific detail or another by someone who was very familiar with the overall concept.
As soon as I pushed away from the desk, Bucky ordered the others to pack up so we could get going. I narrowly avoided getting plowed over as the room exploded into activity. After grabbing my pack where I’d left it by the shelf, I pulled on my gloves and retrieved my weapons, without a further word slinking outside to join Nate and the others downstairs. Gita was still busy filling them in, adding a lot more details that, even with her explanations, still made no sense to me. I shook my head at Nate’s questioning look in my direction. Nothing new, except shit he already knew himself.
I fully expected that Red would keep us in the dark about where we were headed next, yet once we were all assembled at
the foot of the central staircase, he turned to us at large. “We’re heading south next, toward Ajou.” I remembered that this was the name of the town Gita had found spelled out all over Cabourg as the place for the resistance to meet. “Hill’s still getting a repeating message in several languages on one of the frequencies. We have no clue if we will find anyone alive there, but they need to have some kind of setup to power their radio station, so that likely means a secure shelter at the very least. Depending on what we find there, we will decide on how to proceed. We shouldn’t meet with much more opposition than before until we get there, but try to conserve your energy. The next leg of the journey after that won’t be quite such a walk in the park.”
The way his gaze lingered on me, I knew he was waiting for me to ask about details—or where, at all, we were ultimately headed—but I kept my trap shut. This was getting old—and if they didn’t want my input, why bother? Yet until we were back outside the wall, and even for the next two hours of marching, I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder repeatedly. Of course that could have been a fluke—one security guard, certainly a beefcake before he turned, getting the jump on me. I sure wasn’t in the best shape of my life, and Burns had taken care of the issue quickly enough. But it hadn’t been the first zombie I’d encountered after not dying on that operating table, or even the fiftieth. Something about this was very, very wrong, and if I’d learned anything in the past year, it was that consequences always came back to bite me.
Chapter 16
Something was indeed very, very wrong, but not with anything lurking in the shadows. I was barely lucid from exhaustion by the time we shacked up in a small farm house and adjacent barn, and expecting me to actually stand guard was an idiotic undertaking. For once, Nate didn’t shadow me as Red seemed to have him tied up with yet another important meeting I wasn’t a part of, and by the time he came to relieve me, I only nodded at him in passing as I dragged my sorry ass over to the house to force some chow into my body so I could curl up in my sleeping bag. I was dozing off as soon as I had zipped it up to my chin, trying to get comfortable—yet instead of actually falling asleep, my body froze. It wasn’t exactly like with the zombie attack—looking back, that had felt more like a stalling engine—and only took me one sluggish minute to work out what was going on: my body had reverted to falling into a coma rather than real sleep, like at the very beginning of this damn mission. Panic started clawing at my mind, powerful enough that my pulse should have skyrocketed—but it didn’t reach beyond my racing thoughts, and even those disappeared like dandelion seeds ripped from the flower’s stem in a storm, every few seconds. It felt as if I was locked inside a meat suit, with a heavy damper on my brain on top of not having control of my body. Fucking hell. Add to that more than just a dash of delirium—that I barely recognized as such—and I would have been tempted to go for my Beretta to put an end to this had I been able to move, or even blink.
Burns and Tanner were sitting closest to me, and when Burns remarked that I’d been really quick to fall asleep tonight, looking over his shoulder to me as he said it, my hopes went up that he’d realize what was going on with me. Yet I was barely able to blink, let alone move or croak out something, simple breathing a Herculean task. Tanner muttered something I didn’t get, making Burns laugh and glance back once more, as if to make sure I hadn’t caught it. Our gazes crossed and he winked, as if to make the fact that I had presumably caught Tanner’s derogatory reply our secret, but he was facing forward by the time I managed to close my eyes a second time. Damnit!
More chatting, more soft laughter, until Burns suddenly went quiet. I managed to pry my eyes open, but it took me forever. He was looking my way, only now with a frown creasing his forehead. “You doing all right there, Lewis?” I tried to blink, but even that didn’t work anymore. My breaths evened out, turning shallow enough that the edge of my vision blurred, then went dark. It was hard to focus. It was hard to keep breathing. It…
“Bree?” Burns, now coming from much closer. A large hand enveloping my shoulder, shaking me softly, then not so softly. The motion got my head to snap to the side, my eyes flying wide open and remaining that way. Burns leaned over me, his gaze skipping over my face until it landed on my eyes. “Shit,” he muttered, tearing off the glove of his free hand so he could check my temperature on my forehead. As soon as his skin came in contact with mine, he shied back, then checked more thoroughly, his hand almost ice cold against my skin. “You’re burning up.”
Tanner’s head appeared next to mine. He looked as concerned as Burns sounded. “She’s running a fever?”
“Not just that, I think.” He leaned closer, snapping his fingers right next to my ear. I wasn’t sure what that should have accomplished but it seemed to make sense to him. “Girl, wake up,” he said, shaking me a little more. I tried to tell him to stop, but only got as far as opening my mouth. Nothing came out.
Letting go, Burns looked around, thinking for a second. “Gita, your watch shift is up next, right? Good. Go fetch Miller. Tell him to hurry. Make sure you’re easily heard when you explain, loudly, that you changed your mind and want to trade watch with him. Now, go.”
He then went back to trying to rouse me, but to no avail. I managed to keep myself from slipping further so I could at least retain my ability to think and handle what sensory input my useless body managed to receive, but that was about the extent of it. Nate dropped to one knee beside me a few minutes later, his eyes skipping from Burns to me. “She’s unresponsive?” he guessed even before he checked my temperature.
“I think she’s right in there, but she can’t move,” Burns explained.
“Shit,” Nate muttered, perfectly in agreement with me for once. After confirming that I was hot as a pizza oven, his eyes skipped over my entire body, as if he’d suddenly gotten X-ray vision and could see through the sleeping bag and my gear. He and Burns looked at each other without exchanging words. When Burns didn’t bring up anything, Nate exhaled slowly, coming to a decision. “Tanner, go fetch Parker and Richards. Don’t tell them what’s going on. For now, we’re keeping this on the down-low. The last thing we need is Hamilton getting nosy. If we can keep this quiet and between as few outside people as possible, the better. I know you can bullshit your way through this.”
Tanner cleared his throat. “Easy, seeing as I have no fucking clue what’s going on.” He paused, likely looking my way. I couldn’t tell, he was standing too far away. “I’ll be right back. Gimme five.”
Nate looked after him for a moment, then his gaze dropped to my face. “Don’t worry. We got this.”
Worry wasn’t exactly what was tightening around my heart like an iron fist. Worry was wondering whether I’d get hot tea in the morning, or whether a sudden incursion of shamblers would force us to break camp before anyone could get tea started. This? This was way beyond that. The fact that my body didn’t respond to the abject horror that I was feeling made it so much worse. The few times I’d fallen into this state on the destroyer hadn’t been that bad, more like an absence of top-level consciousness while some of my senses had still been working, with my mind tuned down to basic function. This now? This felt exactly like it had been on that operating table, only that my mind was sluggish rather than focused on all that pain. And more pain. And still more…
I realized that I was losing myself in chasing that memory, but it was hard to focus on anything else instead. Nate and Burns were talking in hushed tones, but it was all just noise to me. Trying to take stock of my body was definitely the wrong thing to do as it seemed like the fast-track to crazy town.
Silence fell as Tanner returned, Red and Parker in tow. Parker was muttering under his breath about needing sleep or else, but shut up as soon as he saw me lying there. “Ah, hell, no,” he muttered. “I’m not getting close enough to that so it can chew my face off.”
It was a token of how concerned all of them were that nobody laughed at his assessment. It took me a moment to realize that he thought they’d ca
lled him in to verify that I was dead.
“She’s just paralyzed,” Nate explained. “Lucid, at least to a point, but we can’t rouse her completely. I think she was about to fall asleep when her body shut down. And she’s running a high fever.”
Red hunkered down next to me but didn’t make a move to verify that last bit. “Since when?”
“No clue,” Nate admitted. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until they got me from my watch shift. She did hers without mentioning anything.”
Burns grunted. “She was sluggish this afternoon, when that undead fucker came for us in the greenhouse. I thought she was just clumsy because, you know. Probably wasn’t.”
Nate grimaced but nodded reluctantly. “She’s been quiet since we left that conservatory. That’s not her usual MO.”
Oh, the nice things people say about you when you can’t defend yourself.
Parker listened to it all, then took a knee opposite Red and reached for my forehead, then checked the lymph nodes at the side of my neck. My eyes and throat were next, twice as unnerving as usual as I couldn’t even squint against the glare of the flashlight. “Any new injuries? Not just superficial cuts. It would have to be something deep enough to reach a blood vessel for her to get an infection from it. Or some serious deep tissue bruising perhaps? Any broken bones?”
Nate’s eyes had been watching my face carefully while the medic assessed me, but at that they zoomed up to Parker’s. “Do I look like I’m psychic?”
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