Contain (10 page)

“
This isn't over,” I warn
Jonah. Then, to the rest of the group: “You want to follow him to
your deaths outside the bunker, well, maybe I won't be able to stop
you, not if my father loses the vote. But I can guarantee you one
thing. We still know very little about the Flense. You go out there
now, you will die. All of you.”

I start pulling Bix away, but he can't
just leave without having the last word. “I guess now we know who
our real friends are!”

“You've got to tell your dad.”

Bix is right, of course. Now that
Jonah knows about the missing food stores, word will quickly get
around to the rest of the group, and it'd be better if my father
heard it first from me. But how exactly do I tell him? The food is
my responsibility. It's not hard to imagine his
disappointment.

At the same time, Jonah's plans to
leave the bunker is the more pressing matter. By opening those
doors, by taking away—

Bren

—
half our group, he'll put
us all at risk. There's barely enough people now with enough skills
to keep things running. We can't let him have the—

“
Access code!”

I stop and swivel around to face Bix,
and he charges into me before catching himself. He backs up a step
and frowns.

“
Excuse me?”

“
Besides my father, I'm the
only one who knows the code to that room. Whoever stole the food
would have needed it to get in. How'd they get the
code?”

“
Seriously? Dude, I've seen
you punch it in enough times that I could probably get in if I
needed to. I wouldn't be surprised if Bren knows it.”

My initial reaction to this is denial.
As her boyfriend, my instinct is to protect her. And myself. I
don't want to believe she'd do something like that to me. But what
if he's right?

“
You ever bring her down
there?”

I sigh and nod. “Yeah.
Sometimes.”

“
You dog!” He slaps me on
the arm.

“
It's not like that. Bren
helps me out is all. She keeps me company. And, okay, maybe we've
made out on occasion.”

“
Gah!
Stop it! I'll never be able to eat dinner again without
picturing you two making mashed potatoes all over the—”

“
Bix! Be
serious.”

“
La la
la!
” he says, loud enough to drown me out.
He cups his hands over his ears. “I don't want the gory details!
Okay, maybe I do.”

Bix!”

“
No, no, you’re right.
It’ll just give me nightmares thinking about a bunch of little
Brennians running around in this place.”

“
Brennians?”

“
Yeah, you know: Bren and
Finnian. Like famous celebrity couples.” He waves his hands about
as he tries to come up with an example. Then he snaps his fingers.
“Like
Brangelina!
”

“
Who?”

“
Kimye
?” He rolls his eyes and groans. “You're killing me here,
Finn.”

“
It would be a justifiable
homicide.”

“
Oh, did the Finn-meister
just make a joke?”

“
No, I was totally
serious.”

“
I'm just saying, Finn,
Bren's got to know the code. Kind of strange that she's suddenly
hanging out with
Jerkasaurus
rex
.”

“
She
wouldn't . . . .”

My thoughts darken further
as I contemplate the possibilities. I can feel my blood beginning
to boil.
Would she?

I thought she loved me. Maybe she was
just using me. Or maybe Jonah was using her. But if that was the
case, why wouldn't he just swipe food from the working larder? A
cupful of rice here and there over time could really add up. A
package of dehydrated fruit. Surely no one would notice that. In
fact, it seems more likely than sneaking into the big
storage.

Not unless he wanted the
blame to fall squarely on me.

“
Ground control to Major
Tom?” Bix says, snapping his fingers in my face.
“Hello?”

I bat his hand away. I don't want to
think about any of that right now. Right now I need to tell my
father about Jonah. I need to protect us from any ideas he might
have of splitting our group apart. It's become imperative that Dad
not lose that vote.

He's not in his cot when we return. I
glance at the clock on the wall and am startled by how late it is.
He's already risen and begun his daily duties, just like the rest
of the bunker.

Bix notices the time, too, and excuses
himself. “Dad'll be wondering about me. See you at
lunch?”

I nod distractedly. I have my other
assigned chores to do as well, but I need to find my
father.

I run into Kari Mueller, and she tells
me she saw him with Doc Cavanaugh heading down to the med bay, but
when I get down there and peek into Eddie's room, I don't see
them.

Hannah shows up a moment later. When
she sees me, she stops and starts to turn around, but then changes
her mind.

“
I can explain,” she starts
to say. But I scowl at her and tell her I don't want to know. It's
none of my business what she does with her time, or who she hangs
out with. If she wants to spend it with Jonah, so be it. I'm not
her father.

No, her father's lying in a bed just
on the other side of this door. He's barely clinging to life
because I didn't stop him from going inside that room. He'll never
be the same now, even if he does manage to survive the
infections.

I hurry up the hallway to Doc
Cavanaugh's office. Or lab. That's what she calls it, even though
she has very little equipment to speak of inside. She and a few
others have done their best to scrape together bits and pieces from
around the bunker. They've managed to make a stethoscope. And using
parts from one of the security cameras, she's been able to make a
fairly decent ophthalmoscope.

There had been some hope early on,
given that we were lucky to be assigned someone with medical
training, that we'd be able to combine her knowledge and others'
skills to learn about the Flense. But it's a lot harder when you
have no blood machines, no analytical devices. No centrifuges or
microscopes. And no access to material that has been exposed to the
Flense.

Which is certainly a good thing, given
how easily it's transmitted. But after three years, it also means
we know essentially nothing new about the disease or how to stop
it.

The door is closed, but I can hear
voices on the other side of it. I can't make all the words out, but
I do hear 'blood' and 'synthetic.' The conversation abruptly stops
when I knock. After a brief pause, Doctor Cavanaugh says to come
in. I open the door.

“
Finn? There you are,” Dad
says, when he sees me. “You were up early this morning.”

“
Are you busy?”

“
I was just talking to Gia
about Eddie.”

“
H  how is he?” I ask,
directing my question to the doctor.

“
Healing.” She shakes her
head, as if she can't believe it herself. “Still in a coma, but
he'll live. Last night he finally stopped needing assistance to
breathe.” She and my dad exchange meaningful glances.

“
It's why I've been gone so
much,” he hurriedly explains. “The doctor and I have been splitting
time pumping air into his lungs.”

“
You and Doc Cavanaugh?” I
say. “I would've helped if you'd asked.”

“
We thought it would be
best to keep this . . . between just the two of
us.”

And that glance confirms what I've
been suspecting these past few days. They're keeping something from
the rest of us.

“
I heard you talking,” I
say. “I heard what you said about his blood.”

It's a bluff, and I don't know if it's
even close. I cross my arms and wait to see if one of them will
bite.

“
We're not sure,” the
doctor finally says.

“
Gia?” Dad says,
warningly.

“
It's me, Dad. You said it
the other day: I'm not a kid anymore.”

He sighs, then gets up and shuts the
door. “I want you to keep this to yourself for now, Finn. We don't
want to . . . send the wrong message.”

“
What message?”

“
False hopes?” the doctor
suggests.

Dad shakes his head. He passes his
fingers through his hair and seems torn. “Panic.”

I lift my eyes in alarm. The best way
to cause a panic is to suggest that there might be a reason for
one. “Is it the Flense? Is Eddie infected? Is that
what's—”

“
No!” Doc Cavanaugh quickly
says. “No no no.” She jumps up from her stool and comes around the
bench toward me. “It's not the Flense, Finn. That much we do know.
If it was, we'd all have been infected
and . . . . Anyway, it's not. It can't
be.”

“
Then what is
it?”

She gestures at the table behind her.
“Eddie's recovery has been highly unusual, since the very start. By
all rights, he shouldn't be alive, and yet he is, and not just
alive but growing stronger every day.”

“
But that's good,
right?”

“
The rate of healing is
highly unexpected. It's . . .
unprecedented.”

“
You mean unnatural?
How?”

“
That's what we've been
trying to figure out. We know it's at the tissue level, but without
any instrumentation, I've been working blind. So I asked Kari to
help me out with the optics, and with Eddie's earlier help with the
electronics, I was finally able to convert the ophthalmoscope into
a crude microscope.”

“
Kari doesn't know what
we're about to show you,” Dad interjects. “Nobody else does.” His
implication is clear: This is a secret, a big one.

I nod.

“
We found something in
Eddie's blood this morning.”

“
A virus?”

She shakes her head. “It's much too
large for a virus. It's the size of cells. The problem is, the
resolution of the optics and detector still aren't good enough to
see much detail, and the image contrast is terrible.”

“
I'll ask Seth to have
another go at the programming, Gia,” Dad offers. “See if he can
improve the image processing. He says with these security cams, the
resolution is very bad. But even just feeding it into a larger
screen might help.”

Doc Cavanaugh nods. “This
thing — well,
things
, actually — in Eddie's
blood, they appear to be helping him heal.”

I frown at her. My knowledge of
anatomy from sophomore biology is pretty basic, but from what I
recall from Missus Abramson's lessons, I know that white blood
cells are responsible for fighting off infections. I ask her if
that's what she means.

She shakes her head. “Not white blood
cells. Not cells at all.”

“
Then what?”

There's another long pause. Finally,
she says, “That's what we've been discussing. We just don't know. I
personally have never seen anything like them before. They're
clearly not natural.”

She gestures toward the contraption,
inviting me to come around the desk and take a look.

I step over beside her. There's no
eyepiece to look into. Instead, the image is reproduced onto a
small LCD screen that had once been part of Kari's digital camera.
In the field of view, I can see several blurry disc-shaped objects,
which I take to be red blood cells.

“
This is Eddie's blood?” I
ask.

She nods and points to a syringe on
the desk. “I drew it this morning.”

“
What are those spiky black
blobs? They look like sea urchins.”

“
That's what we don't
know.”

I shrug. “So?”

Doc Cavanaugh removes the glass slide
and wipes it clean. Then she takes the syringe and squirts a little
fresh blood onto it and places it into a microwave. After running
two or three seconds, it starts to bubble.