Plagued: Book 1 (15 page)

Sergeant McNeil stared back at her with his dead eyes.

“Rickey is avenged. I wasn't in time to stop him, but I got the bastard. For you. For Rickey.”

She shook her head. “This is a lie. A trick.

“Not a lie. A terrible truth. Your sergeant and some of the officers are playing a deep game, Sky.”

He tried again to touch her. Sky jerked her arm away.

“You. You're the one who shot Rickey and then killed the sergeant. My sergeant. The one who taught me how to shoot and track and fight for my life since I was
twelve.
” She was breathing very fast, her heart pounding.

He dropped the tarp back over the body and straightened up slowly as though his body ached.

“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

He
rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.
“I'm not sure if you really want to know.”

She jumped to her feet and slapped him across the face. “
Wrong answer
.”

A bright red mark spread across the fine white skin of his cheek. He stood very straight. “If you would let me finish. I'm not sure if you want to know because what I tell you will change your life. Maybe forever. I brought you here to urge you to be careful and show you I avenged Rickey. I wanted you to know that at least.”

“No.” She chopped her hand through the air like she could cut through his words. “There's more to it than that. You
want
to tell me
more that's why you dragged me all the way out here.”

His eyes flashed to hers and Sky drew back at the depth of emotion reflected there.

“When I do, you'll hate me.”

Chapter 19

Blood Lust

“I don't want you to hate me, Skylar.”

She had a good poker face, she knew it. Not even blinking, she kept her stare steady. This was not the time to confess the very last thing she wanted to do was hate him.

Throwing the top of the tarp back over the body, Hugo leaned down and began to pull at the bottom edge. “I need to bury him, come outside with me. I'm already halfway done with the grave. I was just waiting to show you.”

He dragged the tarp out the back door and into the yard. He kept going all the way to a bunch of creosote bushes by the hill. Their sharp, oily odor made Sky sneeze.

A large shovel and a hole already about four feet deep showed Hugo had indeed been busy. Picking  up the shovel, he jumped in.

The irony of the moment was not lost on Sky. Since that impromptu lunch in the cafeteria, she had been dreamily thinking about spending a lot of time with the Honorable Hugo St. James. Going to the movies, laughing over coffee, doing homework together. All those things some of her friends and the other students did. Boyfriends, girlfriends. Kisses. Especially kisses.

Funny, watching him dig a grave to bury her Squad Leader – whom he also shot – was never on the list of activities

He paused to look at her. “You seem very calm, if you don't mind me saying. I would think...”

“Oh shut up, Hugo.
'If you don't mind me saying,'
” she mimicked his precise way of speaking. “What the
hell.
No, I'm not calm. I'm freaking out inside in an exhausted still-in-shock sort of way. But I'm not some little girly girl.”

“No, you are certainly not that. You're a plague child, just like the rest of us.” He took up the shovel again, digging hard and fast, throwing the dirt out in a wide arc. “We all have to take on roles we are unprepared for in this new world. The old must become young again and the young, old before their time.”

“You are very good with words, Hugo,” she sneered. “So smart. So clever. Running your hands through that thick black hair and smiling with your eyes as you chatter. Then, you put on a stealth suit, run around some kind of secret blood warehouse, and shoot people dead.
And
you break up with me after those kisses. Those kisses
meant
something to me. I thought your feelings were as real as mine. Honest. Everything though...just lies. Lies and more lies.” She kicked at the mound of dirt again.

Setting the shovel aside, he pulled himself out of the hole and rolled the tarp with the sergeant inside. It fell with an audible thump that sent chills up and down Sky's spine.

She'd been training with the segregant for years. He'd taught her how to keep herself alive in the field. Now he was dead and Sky was wondering if, in the near future, it would be her tossed into an unmarked grave with a bullet in the brain. 

Hugo jogged over to the house and back carrying a big bulky white bag that drooped over his shoulder. He split it with a jagged hunting knife, emptying a thick white powder in the hole. Lime, Sky guessed. There wouldn't be any smell that way. She'd learned about handling dead bodies in both biology and history. Lime would dry up the corpse; hide it from tracker dogs as well.

“'I didn't know who you were in the forest,” Hugo said as a fine mist of powder drifted up out of the grave. “I really didn't.”

“No, you just decided to sit down next to me in the ER waiting room and have a chat.”

“I was curious. I'd seen you at school. Knew you were only sixteen.”

“Curious to see how I hadn't died in the goblin attack? Were you one of the people who put those scarecrows up?”

He shook his head. “No, of course not. We were tracking them. They weren't goblins, by the way. There is no secret organized blood gang calling themselves Hemogoblins. Plenty of enterprising amoral entrepreneurs in the blood trade, certainly. They were Power Company people pretending to be goblins. To keep you military types busy.”

“Why would the electric company be draining blood and nailing people to trees?”

“First of all, the term 'hemogoblin' was thought up by a New York ad executive working for Homeland Security. Quite catchy, don't you think?”

She snorted. “That's just stupid internet buzz.”

“Actually, it's not. Better the devil you know. Easier for damage control. Your government has used Hemogoblins as one of several propaganda campaigns to rally the American people. Someone to hate and fear. The bodies you find are criminals and those the government has found to be inconvenient. Hemogoblins are often paired with the Victims Army, showing supposed evidence the two groups work together. Effectively deflecting any lingering sympathies for the supposed just causes of the Victims Army terrorist movement ”

“The Victims Army members
are
terrorists.”

“I don't dispute it. For all their calls for justice and recompense, they've never presented a viable alternative to the system we already have in place. Imperfect as it is.”

“I don't believe you about the Hemogoblins. They kill people.”

“People who are in the way, as I
said,
” he made an impatient noise. “Hemogoblins are not the point. I was talking about the Power Company. Not the real power company supplying water, gas, and electricity, you must understand. Under cover of that agency is another entity entirely. Power Company is a euphemism for the combined NSA and Homeland Security's covert operations group. An excellent cover since there are offices and huge power generators all over the country perfect for hiding all sorts of people and operations.”

He started to refill the hole.

“Your mother is employed by them and has been since leaving her work in the labs. She is not in the Persian Confederacy, as you believe. She hasn't been for two months. She was in Washington D.C. last week, talking with the President.”

Sky snorted. “My mother does not know the President. That's crazy.”

“Yes, she does. She has known every President since the bird flu turned into an epidemic.”
He was sweating and wiped his face on his sleeve. “
Now, however, she is actually quite nearby. In San Francisco. From there, my sources do not know where she is bound.”

“Your sources? Listen to you. You're a year older than I am. Seventeen-year-olds don't have sources.”

“I'm eighteen. And eighteen-year-olds like me, do. You've been on active service since you were  barely able to lift a gun. I, too, have been busy. I work for the Home Office. They are the government branch in charge of covert affairs for my country.”

“Why would my mother say I had to keep away from you?”

“I believe that is personal rather than pivotal. Micro to the Macro of current events. Your mother and my father had an affair. Quite a passionate one over the course of two years.”

She stared at him open-mouthed. “You are
not
going to tell me we are brother and sister and that's why we can't be together.”

He looked at her like she was crazy. “What an appalling thought. Why would you even think that?'

“You said they had an affair.”

“They did. They were young, intelligent,
educated
people, however, and used protection.”

The grave filled, he stamped on the dirt with both feet, walking over it back and forth. “Your mother and my father were working for your government.”

“Wait, what?”

“Your mother is quite a brilliant mathematician, though you may not know. Geology,
really?
” he made a face.

“Just when were your father and my mother working together?”

“Let's go back to the house. The walls have scrambling equipment built in. No eavesdropping from the eyes in the sky.”

Inside, he motioned for her to sit down. Instead, she leaned against the kitchen counter opposite the sink. Her nerves were jumping and the last thing she wanted to do was sit. She glanced at the skid marks the tarp had left on the faded linoleum and quickly looked away. She needed to be a soldier right now. Not Sky. Not someone who let their knees tremble inside their jeans or had to keep clearing her throat because of the bile rising up and threatening to choke her. She put on her poker face and waited for Hugo to speak. Explain the unexplainable.

Hugo took his time rinsing his hands and arms off under the faucet in the kitchen before drying them on a dishtowel. “This is going to be a very bad day for you, Sky. You don't know the realities of this world our parents have created. And when I say 'our parents' I'm not generalizing. I mean our actual parents.”

He leaned against the sink, his stance mirroring Sky's, and took a deep breath.

“Your mother and my father know each other because they worked in a secure lab here in Silicon Valley during the worst of the bird flu epidemic. More about that later. I admit I was curious to meet you. My father, unlike you mother, has told me much about that time in his life. I liked you immediately. I didn't want to...” he looked down at the floor, kicking at his boots to shake off some of the lime dust. “Hearts have a will of their own. After your mother outed me, I backed off. Realizing it was not my place to destroy your fantasies no matter how I felt.”

“I sense a 'but' coming on.”

He gave a quiet laugh that had no humor in it. “But I feared they were going to try and take you out. You had stumbled onto a nasty ring of thieves which your government and mine are attempting to stop.”

“You knew it was me in the vault. When you shot that man in the suit.”

Hugo stepped away from the sink and Sky tensed in case he came closer. Instead, he paced back and forth across the small kitchen several times as though trying to decide whether to tell her or not.

“Shooting people in the back is not something I make a habit of, though I imagine that's hard for you to believe. I was shocked when I realized it was you in the vault. And I did, almost as soon as we started grappling with your weapon. I mean, what are the odds? Besides, he really was a slimy bastard. No morals whatsoever.”

Sky watched his face very carefully as he spoke. Saw the lines deepen around the side of his mouth as though he was in pain. He pulled out one of the wooden chairs at the small kitchen table and sat facing her, placing both palms carefully on his legs.

“You couldn't kill me?”

“I could not. You were jeopardizing my mission but...I just couldn't. Even though,” he stopped and his face tightened as he clenched and unclenched his jaw. “As
importan
t as that moment was on a personal level, it was and is just a small part of a large and terrifying saga. First of all, you need to know your mother, my father were there at the beginning of it all.”

“The bird flu?”

“No, the blood plague. Imagine the scenario. The time is several years after the flu mutated and became airborne. A true pandemic. Ten million people around the world died, then twenty, then thirty and still climbing every winter. The virus mutates again and again, resisting all their efforts to create a vaccine. It is a beast. A behemoth of biblical proportions. The best and the brightest minds are swooped up by the government under martial law and virtually imprisoned in secure, clean labs around the country.”

“Including my
mom?
”

“Mathematics plays an important part in medical research, though you might not think so. Emily Murphy is a brilliant mathematician. My father was here at the University. He really is a surgeon, but he is a much better geneticist. Together they were thrown into a shark tank of bright minds, linked to other teams equally shining around the United States working to find a vaccine that would stick. God, I'm gasping. I need something to drink.”

He got up from the chair, walked to the cupboard and pulled out two bottles of water. Sky opened the one he tossed her and gulped the lukewarm water. Hugo drained his, throwing the empty bottle in the sink and looked at Sky.

“There was a breakthrough in modifying hemoglobin proteins to act as carriers of the vaccine. The modified proteins of negative blood types bonded better than the positives, so research zeroed in on that. Particularly O-
negative.

“Why O-Negative?”

“Because that was your mother's blood type and it was my father's besotted
homage
to her. Apparently they'd fallen into each other's arms the very first week.” He waved one hand in the air impatiently. “Beside the point. Early results were so encouraging incorporating the Rh-factor that the government ordered them to keep going.”

Sky could never fully imagine the terror of those times. The pressure to succeed would have been enormous. Not only to save ordinary people. The United States needed a reliable supply of healthy individuals to keep the country running. To maintain order, police towns and cities. Keep the power on, the water and sewage systems, harvest crops and slaughter animals for meat and cold storage for perishables.

“The early successes of the program here in Silicon Valley were adapted by the other labs in a panicked rush to find a vaccine. They were able to modify the proteins even further so they would bond regardless of the blood type. Results were more than encouraging. Inoculation did not prevent bird flu but rendered it weak, virtually non-lethal when it was contracted by devouring the virus cells. It could mutate faster than the virus. In normal times, clinical trials would have lasted years before rolling out such a radical new treatment utilizing blood proteins bonded genetically to chemically altered enzymes. Once the flu deaths reached fifty million worldwide, the powers that be decided to go forward. Your President signed the Mandatory Inoculation Bill and the vaccine went into mass production in the United States.”