In the End (Starbounders) (18 page)

“Doc didn’t send you?” I ask. “He said he was going to get you a long time ago.”

“No, why would he?” He looks curiously at Brenna.

I scramble up, overcome with gratitude for this stroke of luck despite Doc’s efforts to thwart us.

“Brenna was bitten by a Florae and didn’t change,” I say hurriedly.

Ken freezes for a second, his mouth open. Recovering, he rushes over to examine Brenna. “Are you certain?” He feels her head, looks in her eyes, and unwraps and studies her wound. He has the same wild look on his face that Doc had. Their single-minded obsession has ruled them, and now that the end is in sight, it’s as though a fever has taken over. “I have to see what’s going on in her blood.”

“Doc’s already on it,” Jacks tells him.

“He took Brenna’s blood,” I add.

Ken looks up from Brenna for the first time since receiving the news that she was bitten and didn’t change. “But I just saw Doc in the exercise yard. He had a line of people he was giving shots to. I wondered what he was up to so late at night, but I just assumed it was the newest vaccine.”

“Giving shots?” I say. “He’s not even looking at Brenna’s blood?”

Jacks leaps to his feet. “Where’s that clipboard Doc had me get?” He’s frantically searching the exam room. “The one with the names of the people who’ve already had the shot?”

“I don’t know. Doc must have taken it,” I say.

“What are you doing?” Ken asks as Jacks tears the room apart.

“That list,” Jacks says, giving up and staring at Ken, eyes wide. “Doc took it. He’s lining those people up, he’s injecting—”

“You’re not making sense,” Ken says. “Why would he be vaccinating people who’ve already received the vaccine?”

“He said he was going to do some ‘life tests,’” I say. “What does that mean?”

Ken looks at us, his excitement replaced in a flash by fear. “Life tests?
Life test
is the term we use for experimenting on human subjects.” He gives his head a shake. “No. He must just be inoculating them. Then he’ll test this subject’s blood.”

In Doc’s mind, the vaccine is effective. Removing Brenna’s fingers stopped the spread of infection while the vaccine suppressed it in her blood. I think of all I know about the infection, and for some reason the Black Pox springs to mind. People can survive the infection and still spread the disease. Doc was already unhinged. Jacks said he thought he was drugged up. Could the possibility of a vaccine and the news of what really happened to Layla push him over the edge?

I remember Doc’s look, his feral glee at the thought of having found a vaccine. I shake my head just as Ken did, trying to rattle that mad image out of it. No. Not even Doc is crazy enough to risk injecting Florae-infected blood into the veins of people he only
thinks
have been successfully vaccinated. If he’s wrong—

Then the blood in my own veins turns cold, remembering Pete’s panicked whisper to Tank about the fate of another of Doc’s thugs.

Made him into a damned Florae
.

I can barely say the words. “Doc
is
testing Brenna’s blood,” I say. “He’s testing it on those people in the Yard.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

“Show me where he is,” I order Ken. “Now.”

“Amy, calm down!” Jacks yells.

“Don’t you understand what’s going on?” I scream. “We’ve got to stop this before it’s too late!”

Ken nods but eyes Brenna. “She shouldn’t be left alone.”

I turn to Jacks. “Can you stay with her?”

“If you’re going out there, I want to go with—”

“No,” I say. “I can fight a Florae if I need to. Brenna can’t. You need to protect her.”

“I need to protect
you
,” he says, grabbing my wrist. “You’re the one I—”

He stops himself, hesitates, and then leans in. My heart leaps to my throat as I think he’s going to kiss me again.

But then he just whispers, “Just . . . get back here alive.”

He’s so close, a strange, tingling sensation pours through me, all the way to the ends of my toes.

“I will,” I tell him. “I promise.”

I follow Ken into the corridor and around a corner. There’s a surprising lack of guards around, but when we head out into the Yard, I see why.

Doc has tasked the guards with rounding up people and keeping them in line. He’s set up lights, utilizing the power from the wall. The standing lamps look out of place and cast an eerie glow across the yard. We watch as Doc administers a shot on a woman, then pushes her to a guard to move her along. As Ken and I approach, one man refuses the injection. Doc nods to a guard, who brings down the butt of his rifle in the man’s face. Doc injects him, and the patient is dragged to the side.

Ken and I run past the guards. One tries to stop us, but Doc waves us through. “Ah, Ken,” he says, “you’ve come to participate in my case study? I can use the help.” Doc’s eyes have gone glassy, a sickening grin plastered to his face.

Ken eyes the syringe in Doc’s hand. “What the hell are you doing?”

“The vaccine. It’s effective. I’m injecting all these people with that bitten girl’s blood. A meaningless test, but protocol is protocol. The
i
’s need dotting, the
t
’s crossing. I know she’s immune. And if she’s immune, even though she’s a carrier, everyone else given the vaccine is also immune. I mean, I couldn’t go out and get a live Florae, could I? Much too dangerous. Believe me, I know.”

“How does that make any sense?” Ken asks desperately. “The girl didn’t change, but that doesn’t mean the vaccine was effective. There could be any number of other factors in play. But one thing we
do
know is that she’s a carrier.”

“Oh yes, she is, certainly,” Doc tells us happily. He takes a bottle out of his pocket, pops the top, and pours some pills into his mouth. He pauses and swallows with a shake of his head. He turns back to us. “I ran her blood. The same bacteria we find in the Floraes is in her, fully developed, and yet she remains unchanged.”

I cringe as he gives another man a shot. “If the vaccine is ineffective,” I say, “doesn’t that mean that all these people are now infected?”

The man who was knocked out with the rifle begins to shake where he lies, unconscious. I pull out my gun and take a step back from him. “Ken . . . ?”

“It’s started,” Ken whispers, unbelieving.

I look around the Yard. How many has Doc infected? Some people change in minutes, others hours. How can it be contained? Another man drops to his knees, his hands to his ears. He screams, his skin turning from sunburned-brown to dark-yellow to yellow-green. When his hands fall away from his head, one ear tumbles to the ground, bouncing off the hard concrete. The other ear hangs loosely, attached by a thin piece of flesh. I stare, horrified. I’ve never seen anyone actually change before.

Ken comes to his senses before I do. “We can’t contain this, not now. Our only hope is to leave.”

“Leave? Where?” There’s nowhere left to run.

“I’ll contact New Hope, tell them about Brenna. They’ll send a hover-copter for us.” He grabs my hand. “Come with me. Kay would want you safe.”

“And Jacks,” I say, and he nods. We’ll get out and take Brenna to New Hope.

Ken pulls me back toward the wall, but the panic has begun. Someone runs into us, knocking me onto my stomach. When I roll over, Ken has disappeared, and a man stands over me, salivating. He hasn’t changed completely yet, but he’s close—his ears and nose are gone, his skin a pale pea-green. His eyes are tinged with yellow, but they aren’t yet milky and useless. They burn with a fire I’ve seen before in Floraes who haven’t yet lost all their sight. Hunger.

He is no longer a man. He is a monster. He’s one of Them.

Chapter Twenty-nine

He lunges greedily for me, and I don’t allow myself to hesitate. I can’t consider the fact that this creature was a man just seconds ago. I grab my gun, take aim, and shoot. His head snaps back from the impact and he falls over. Another Florae rushes to his side and begins to feed on him.

I scramble to my feet, pull up my hood, and prepare myself for a fight—knife in one hand, gun in the other. In the increasing frenzy, the lights that Doc had set up are knocked over and extinguished. I wish I had my Guardian glasses, but I left my pack with Jacks in the examination room. In the bottom of my belly I feel a familiar quivering.

Fear.

I’ll be fine,
I tell myself sternly. I lived for years in the shadows. I’m not afraid of the dark. It will make it easier to avoid the Floraes and get back inside.

Suddenly the Yard is filled with a burst of brightness. The spotlights in the guard towers have been turned inward. I silently curse the light. The guards are at least trying to destroy the Floraes, though. The sound of gunshots fills the air, making it hard to hear anything, to remain alert.

I sidestep a man on his knees, holding his ears, his face contorted in pain. Auditory sensitivity, one of the first signs he’s been infected. I level my gun, but I can’t bring myself to shoot him. He’s still a person. A man rushes toward me on my right, and I prepare for his assault, taking the fighter’s stance Kay taught me, but the man is only trying to escape. He dashes past me and starts banging on the door behind me to get inside the walls. I throw my back against the wall a few yards away from him, every muscle tingling, ready to fight any Florae that attacks.

One moment the man is pounding on the door, screaming in panicked desperation, and the next another volley of gunfire assaults my ears and the man drops to the ground. I sprint down the wall away from the door—the guards are taking down every threat to their quarantine. I can only hope Ken made it inside before the guards decided to shoot anyone trying to escape past the wall.

I need to reach my cellblock and figure out what to do from there. Jacks and Brenna should be safe inside.

Keeping my back to the wall, I circle the exercise yard, which has deteriorated into utter chaos. Only a few of the bitten have turned into full Floraes; most are in varying degrees of change and writhe on the ground in pain. One man I pass stares at his green arms, unbelieving. Another holds his nose in place as he pulls clumps of hair from his head.

I hurry along the wall, my progress interrupted by others infected who have not yet begun to change, pleading for help. I ignore them, though each appeal cuts through me like a knife, leaving a sharp pain in my chest. It is too late for them, though. They’re doomed.

I reach the chain-link fence that separates the Arena from the Yard. Half of it has been torn down. A determined Florae now feasts within the crumpled fence, surrounded by bodies.

I continue on past the damaged area of the fence before the creature can focus on me, but another Florae has homed in on the smell of his blood. It might have passed me in the dark, but a spotlight sweeping the yard highlights me for a fraction of a second, just long enough for this new Florae to focus its weak eyes on me. It speeds toward me, and I manage to shoot it in the neck—only enough to slow it down. It plows into me, driving me against the half-erect fence. Weakened by its wound, though, it merely pinches at my synth-suit as it tries to bite my shoulder. I work my knife into the hole my bullet opened in its neck until the blade finds the spinal column, and then I pull it out for one final thrust. The knife severs its spine with a sickening snap, and the creature falls to the ground, twitching.

Freed, I move past Cellblock A, pushing through a crowd of people fighting to get inside. Cellblock B is no better. There’s a man at the door with a rifle. I survey the twenty or so people between us, unable to tell if they’re infected or not. I don’t see any bites or gashes, but I understand the man not wanting to take any chances.

“Get lost or get shot,” he tells a man pressing close to him.

“My cell is in there!” the man shouts. “My wife is waiting for me.”

“Too bad,” the armed man says, knocking the man back with the butt of the rifle, then sweeping its barrel back and forth before the crowd. He’s trying to contain the infection to the Yard. Understandable, but I have to get inside. That’s where Jacks would look for me. I step up, putting away my weapons and pulling down my hood so he can see my face.

“I just want to go to my cell and lock myself in,” I say, looking at him over the end of the rifle barrel now trained on me. “I haven’t been bitten, and if I had, I wouldn’t do much damage from inside my cell.”

The people around me murmur their agreement and, pushing in around me, move me to within inches of the rifle barrel’s cold black eye.

Lowering my voice, I say, “You’re not going to be able to hold all these people for much longer, not if they decide to rush you.” I can see the fear in the man’s eyes, but he holds his ground. “It’s admirable, what you’re trying to do,” I tell him, “but don’t you think you’d be better off going to your own cell and locking yourself in?”

He considers this, nodding just perceptibly, then takes a step back into the cellblock. “All right. Y’all got thirty seconds to get to your cells and lock the doors. If I catch anyone out, I’ll shoot. I ain’t getting bit by no damned Florae.”

I rush past him and sprint away from the others, up the stairs to my cell. Jacks isn’t there, and there’s no note from him.

Buzzing with adrenaline, I can’t just sit and wait. Besides, the Floraes are outside and I can do something to stop them. I doubt anyone in the Yard will survive, but maybe I can help the guards prevent the infection from taking out everyone in the cellblocks, too.

I decide to go up to the roof and scout out the situation, take out a few Floraes from there. I’ll also be able to spot any hover-copter arriving. I scribble a note to Jacks, telling him to meet me on the roof, and then I lock up. I’m about to run for the staircase when a sob escapes from the next cell over.

I go to the open door and peer in. What I see hits me like a punch to the stomach.

“Pam?”

Chapter Thirty

Pam looks up at me from where she sits on the floor, eyes red and puffy. In her lap is a man, bloodied, breathing in short gasps. His shoulder has a chunk of flesh missing, the gouge dripping a dark puddle onto the floor of the cell.

“Mike, he . . . he was bitten,” Pam says. “He came to find me. . . .” She stares at me, unseeing. She holds a bunched-up shirt to Mike’s shoulder to stanch the flow of blood. Her hands are covered in green-black goo.

He’s already begun to change.

I draw my gun and Pam’s eyes focus in on the weapon.

“No! You leave him alone!” she screams.

“Pam.” I have to calm her, explain to her what she doesn’t want to admit to herself. “He’s changing. Soon he won’t be Mike anymore. He’ll just be a Florae. He won’t know you.”

“I don’t care,” she says quietly. She wipes her tears with the back of her hand, smudging dark blood across her face.

I watch Mike. His hair has almost completely fallen out, his skin tinged a pale green.

“He’ll kill you,” I say.

“I. Don’t. Care,” she says to me in little more than a whisper.

I think of all the people still out in the Yard, fighting their way back to the cellblock, hoping to lock themselves into their cells and ride out the infection. Finally getting there, that close to safety, and finding Floraes waiting for them. “I can’t leave you, Pam,” I tell her. “Either he’ll kill you or turn you. I can’t endanger everyone in the block.”

Pam’s head drops as she digs through her clothing. She produces something from the pocket of her skirt and tosses it at me. It’s heavy and metallic—a large, opened padlock.

“Lock us in,” she commands.

I want to plead with her, but I know it’s pointless. She is determined to stay with her man until the end. “Where’s the key?” It kills me to ask, but I can’t take the risk that she’ll open the door after I’m gone.

Pam takes a key from her pocket and throws it to me. This time I don’t catch it, and it skitters across the concrete walkway and over the side, falling two floors down.

Once I snap the lock on them, there’ll be no turning back. My resolve breaks. “Pam, please,” I try one last time. “You don’t need to die.”

“If Mike dies, I don’t want to live.” She gazes at his face, stroking his head, pulling away the last wispy brown hair as she does so.

I place the padlock between the two bars of the door and the cell. “Last chance,” I tell her.

“Do it.” She doesn’t look up. I close the padlock with a click that echoes through the cellblock. I have sentenced her to death.

Mike reaches up as though to scratch his nose, then rubs it so hard it begins to come off his face. His mouth twists into a snarl, baring his teeth, sharp and yellowed.

“If you love him,” I say quietly, “you’ll let me end it.”

I don’t think she hears me, but just as I turn to leave she responds. “He’s still my Mike. I’ll be with him until he’s no longer the man I love. After that, I don’t care what happens.”

I force myself to walk down the hall, my limbs heavy. As I make my way to the roof, my body shakes with rage. I tell myself the screams I hear below aren’t Pam’s. And they might not be. So many people are dying right now, it’s impossible to tell who owns what cry of pain.

When I pull open the door to the roof, I see that dawn is breaking. With the light, the Floraes will become even more aggressive, even more lethal. As I look around, I inhale, startled to find a figure cowering by the door. It’s the Warden, clutching a rifle to his chest and muttering to himself.

“Warden?” I say. But he ignores me, too overcome by fear.

I step around him and head to the ledge, searching the chaos below for signs of Jacks, Brenna, or Ken. No hover-copters have come yet; the only things of note in the sky are a few clouds and the pink-orange color that marks a new day.

I turn my attention back to the Yard where so many have changed. Those still human are being slaughtered. I check my gun. My backpack lost to me, I only have the one clip with no more than thirty rounds remaining, and I shot at least three Floraes on the way to the cells. I wish I could do more. The Warden whimpers. I glance at him and consider the rifle he’s cradling. Depending on how many shots he’s taken, there could be as many as thirty more bullets, and a rifle would be more effective this high up.

I go to him and reach for the gun, but he twists away from me, clamping it to his chest.

“I need this,” he whimpers again. “For my own protection. My men are dead.”

“What men?” I ask to keep him talking while I calculate how to go about overpowering him. He’s not large, but he’s scared out of his mind, which could make him unpredictable. Especially with that rifle in his hands.

“My personal guards.”

I shake my head, unable to drum up any sympathy. He’s the one who let Hutsen-Prime experiment on his prisoners. He’s the one who continued to deal with New Hope after the Floraes appeared, selling out the people of Fort Black as lab rats. The only way he got to where he is now was by standing on the backs of the people he was meant to protect.

He’s not a threat,
I say to myself.
He’s a pest.
I reach for the rifle and quickly pluck it from his hands.

I’m about to head back to the ledge when Ken bursts through the door armed with a rifle of his own. Looking relieved to find me there, he reaches back through the doorway and guides Brenna through it. Her eyes are open but flat, uncomprehending. Ken eases her to the ground and looks at me.

“I’m glad we found you. Jacks said you’d probably go back to your cell. When you weren’t there, I thought you got trapped in the Yard.”

“Jacks.” I look to the doorway, expecting him to step through, but it remains empty. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. . . . We got separated. I contacted New Hope, a hover-copter is on the way.”

“We can’t just leave Jacks—”

A figure fills the doorway and I wheel toward it, rifle raised, hoping it’ll be Jacks, but fearing it will be a Florae.

Instead it’s Doc who stumbles toward me, his lab coat covered in brown-red stains. He’s followed by a huge bulk of a man, his left shoulder covered in blood.

I freeze in panicked shock. “You—you’re dead,” I say, disbelieving.

“Not just yet, cupcake,” Tank growls, lurching toward me.