The Farm (12 page)

I snatched the dart out of his open palm, dropped it onto the sidewalk, and crushed it beneath my shoe before he had a chance to stop me.

He just looked at me, flabbergasted. “What the hell, Lil? What if I need that later? Collabs are only issued two at a time.”

I smiled. “That’s how I know I can trust you not to shoot me in the back again.”

He gave a beleaguered sigh and gestured for me to start walking.

I felt better with him weaponless and with the shiv in my hand. I still couldn’t beat him in a physical fight—not without trying to kill him—but at least things were a little more equal now. Still, I kept a couple of feet between us, but he didn’t try to grab me again. He led me to a drab building squatting on the edge of campus, just past the water tower. It wasn’t far from where we’d been, but the walk felt interminable. With every step, my logical mind took back a little more real estate in my brain.

At this moment, the only thing I could do was hear him out. The first door he tried when we reached the building didn’t open, but he walked around the side, tried another, and jimmied it somehow, and it swung open. I didn’t see exactly what he did to the knob, which was frustrating, because that might have come in handy later.

It turned out to be some sort of maintenance building. A hallway led to an enormous open room filled with massive equipment chugging away in the background, all pipes and steam and meters and whatnot. It must have been the air-conditioning building for the whole campus. By the door we entered, there was a deserted break room.

Carter reached around and flicked on the overhead fluorescents, which flickered dully to life to reveal a sink and cabinetry along the outside wall, some storage lockers, a time punch, and a long, scarred table surrounded by cracking vinyl chairs. Against the far wall stood a pair of vending machines. The light on the Coke machine was still on, as it dutifully chilled the drinks inside, patiently waiting for some long-dead maintenance guy to come plug in his buck for an ice-cold can of soda.

After all these months on the Farm, I’d assumed that every corner of the place had been picked clean of anything valuable. A swarm of locusts had nothing on us Greens. If there was something we could eat or trade or use, I thought we’d found it. But apparently, much as we had Dr. Estleman’s stash of birth control pills, we’d overlooked the maintenance buildings.

Entranced, I crossed the room to stand before the machines, for a moment all the angst and fear of the past twenty-four hours receding into the background of my mind.

Some emotion that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in months—nostalgia maybe—clutched at my heart as I stared through the glass at the neat rows of sodas and snacks. I pressed my hand to the glass, feeling like I was looking through a portal to another world, one sweetened by candy-coated chocolate and high-fructose corn syrup.

We had junk food aplenty on the Farm, but it was the same thing every day. I’d eaten so many damn corn chips they didn’t even taste right anymore.

I heard Carter moving to my right and I jerked away from the machine. Carter slid out one drawer after another, digging around for something. After a few minutes of searching, he triumphantly held up a clear plastic cup with change rattling around in the bottom. Walking toward me, he poured the money out into his palm, picking over it.

“Two dollars and thirty-eight cents. Enough for a Coke and a snack.” He stopped beside me, considering the machines. “If I remember right, you’re a Dr Pepper girl.”

How had he remembered that? Before today, it had been nearly two years since I’d seen him. Even then we’d never eaten together. I’d sat in my quiet corner of geeky kids, while he’d been at the table of popular kids on the other side of the cafeteria.

For a second, I just stared at him, baffled. “Yes. A Dr Pepper would be great.”

He fed about half the change into the tiny slot. A coil within the machine rotated, pushing the plastic bottle off its little ledge. Carter reached his hand through the slot and pulled out the soda, then handed it to me. Then he stepped over to the candy machine. “What else do you want?”

I raised the bottle of Dr Pepper in silent toast. “This is enough. You should get yourself something.”

Nodding, he picked out Rolos from the candy machine.

A moment later, he pulled out one of the blue vinyl chairs for each of us, angling them so they faced each other just slightly, and he dropped down into the one nearest the door. I stood there, stone still, just watching him as he stretched his long legs out in front of him.

He’d never refastened his jacket and it hung open over his pressed white shirt. The shirt was looking a little worse for the wear. It now bore wrinkles and smudges of dirt, mostly in the places I’d elbowed him. He let the tranq gun drop to the floor by the chair as he peeled off a layer of the wrapper on the Rolos and popped one in his mouth.

I set the shiv down on the table as I lowered myself to the chair. Then I twisted the cap off the Dr Pepper. Habit had me glancing at the inside of the lid. I laughed.

Carter’s eyes popped open and he straightened.

I tossed the cap onto the table between us. “I won a thousand bucks.” I held the bottle up, reading the label, listening to the fizzing of the carbon bubbles. “All the Dr Peppers I’ve drunk in my life and I never won jack. Today must be my lucky day.”

Somehow the words didn’t sound as bitter and ironic as I meant them to. Suddenly I was just tired. Or maybe it was the tranquilizer still pumping through my blood.

I took a sip. As the soda rolled over my tongue, I felt a rush of gratitude. Carter may have just beaten the crap out of me, he may have shot me in the back, but he’d bought me Dr Pepper. I know it was effed up, but somehow, it balanced out.

Carter smiled, that odd, twisted smile of his. “Maybe.” Then he set the Rolos down on the table and pushed them toward me. “You want the rest?”

I looked from him to the Rolos to my Dr Pepper. “That isn’t fair. I got the soda.”

We must have realized the absurdity of the conversation at the same moment because we both kind of laughed.

I reached for the candy, then asked, “You sure?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been on the outside more recently than you. I’ve probably had all kinds of stuff you haven’t.”

At some point, the Rolos had melted a little and the caramel had leaked out to sort of glue them to each other, but I managed to pry one free. “About that . . .” I asked, just before popping it into my mouth.

“Yeah, about that.” He gave a little shrug, then scrubbed his hand over his newly shaven jaw, like he was trying to figure out how to tell me something difficult. “You said you had questions.”

Hell yeah, I had questions. Thousands of them—some hugely important. But oddly, the one closest to the surface was: why had he remembered I like Dr Pepper? Why had he gotten so upset when he found out he’d gotten the date of our birthday wrong? Why did he keep acting like he cared for me? Not in a generic, I’m-clinging-to-the-remnants-of-my-past kind of way. But like he actually
cared
. About me.

The way he was acting was seriously messing with my head. Yeah, sure. The hot guy from school coming to rescue me, that was a nice fantasy. But it was
fantasy
. Not real. One hundred percent guaranteed to crush your soul. It was like the pencil thing all over again.

Carter was playing me. I had something he wanted and he was charming me to get it. Last time it was my test answers; this time it would be something else. I just hadn’t figured out what yet.

But I knew this: I wasn’t going to just sit back in my chair and swoon like I had last time. I was going to call him on it. “You know I can’t just trust you, right?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Okay, so a braver woman than I might have actually reminded him of the pencil incident, but I couldn’t do that without tipping my hand to the fact that I’d been all weak-kneed crushing on him before. I wasn’t that bold yet. So instead I said, “I can’t just blindly believe that you’re going to be able to get me and Mel out of here. If it was just me . . .” I shrugged. “Maybe. But if we’re going to go with you, you have to tell me everything.”

“What can I say to convince you that I’m on the up-and
-
up?”

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning and I’ll stop you when you’ve won me over.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lily

“What is out there?” I asked abruptly. I know I’d asked him to start at the beginning, but suddenly I couldn’t wait to hear the truth. And I didn’t even wait for him to answer. “We can see through the fences, but we never see any people. Never hear anything beyond the Farms other than the Ticks at night. Are there any people left out there? Any towns, cities? Anything?”

Carter’s gaze dropped away from mine. He frowned and rolled a Rolo across the table with his forefinger.

“Nothing?” I asked.

“Not in the big cities,” he said slowly. “I haven’t been everywhere. I don’t know for sure. There are Farms in every state I’ve been in. Lots of them. In the Farms, I’ve heard rumors—”

“Rumors about what?”

“Just people guessing mostly. We know there are factories. Someone’s making the food Greens eat. Someone delivers it. Adults who are Collaborators. We’ve turned some of them, but only a very few. There must still be farms—real ones that grow food—down in the valley and out in California. But in the part of the country I’ve seen . .
 
.”

He shook his head.

I couldn’t imagine the Dallas metroplex empty. There had to be at least five million people in the area. How did that many people just disappear?

I didn’t ask about my mom. I’d known in my heart that she must be gone. My mother was a fighter. She would have fought to the death to protect us. To get us back. She would never have given up once she realized the Farms were not the sanctuaries everyone believed them to be. I wasn’t ready to talk about her yet—I didn’t know if I ever would be.

I leaned back in my chair. “Okay. Now you can start at the beginning.”

Carter looked at me for a long minute, screwing up the corners of his mouth, like he was testing out what he wanted to say. Finally he blew out a breath, met my gaze, and said, “Here’s the part you’re not going to want to believe.”

“Okay, hit me.”

“Vampires are real.” He said it straight-facedly, like this was supposed to be shocking news.

I arched an eyebrow. “Not the mutated genetic freaks that ate their way through the Southwest. But real honest-to-God vampires? Like, the mythical monsters who don’t like garlic and sparkle in the sun?”

I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t. His gaze was completely serious when he said, “They don’t sparkle.”

“O-okay.” I popped another Rolo in my mouth to give myself time to process. “Yes, we have all these Ticks now and some people call them vampires because they’re really strong and hard to kill and have a moral compass that points straight to
hmm, humans are yummy
. But you’re talking about something different, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Never once had his gaze wavered, which made me uncomfortable when I was the first to look away.

“Have you seen one of those vampires yourself?”

He must have heard the barely contained sarcasm in my voice, because this made him smile. “Yes. With my own eyes. I’ve seen the fangs. I’ve seen one eat. They aren’t like Ticks. They’re smarter. Maybe smarter than we are. And cunning. And completely amoral. By our standards, at least.”

I studied Carter, the tension in his shoulders. The stubborn set of his jaw, like he was daring me to call him on it. Like he was expecting me to argue with him about the existence of vampires.

The Ticks had a clear scientific origin—at least according to the CDC. Scientists at the Genexome Corporation had been tinkering around with epigenetics. They’d been using certain benign mircoorganisms to switch genes on and off, trying to cure a whole host of diseases and disorders, including autism. Because of the autism link, I’d actually been following their work even before the outbreak. They’d been able to affect brain development, tumor development, and birth defects. Their work was amazing. Until it had gotten out of hand and a supposedly harmless microbe was accidentally released as a pathogen that turned about one percent of the population into horrible monsters. Anyone who was exposed to the pathogen had a one-in-a-hundred chance of morphing into a Tick overnight.

After thinking about it for a minute, I asked, “So are the Ticks and the vampires related?” He frowned and I rushed on. “I don’t mean, like, by birth. But genetically. Do tweaks to the same epigenes create vampires and Ticks?”

Carter looked surprised. “You believe me?”

I waggled my hand in an
eh
gesture. “A year ago, I’d have thought you were bat-shit crazy. But now? Who’s to say what is and isn’t believable? You could tell me that the UN was run by opera-singing, alien werewolves and I couldn’t argue with you.”

Carter’s lips curved in what might have been a smile, but before he could respond, I sat forward and tapped the table with my forefinger.

“What I want to know is what any of this has to do with the Farm. With me and Mel. Does knowing any of this help get us out?”

He leaded forward, too. “This has everything to do with the Farm. They’re all part of a plan. To take over the world.”

“The vampires have a plan to take over the world?” I asked. I felt a bit dumb, gasping in surprise at every twist to the story and incredulously repeating all the important bits. But somehow Carter’s version of things made sense. I felt like Dorothy at the end of
The Wizard of Oz
when the green curtain is pulled back to reveal the truth.

Carter shook his head. “They’re not all in on the plan. Vampires don’t work like that. That’s one way they’re different from Ticks. Ticks are pack animals. They stick together. Vampires are the opposite. They’re fiercely territorial about their kine and—”

“Their what?” I asked.

“Their kine.” Carter said the word more slowly, toying with a bit of Rolo wrapper as he did. Like he didn’t want to look at me. “Their livestock.”

“Oh, livestock. The humans they feed on.” A sort of sick feeling roiled in my gut. I’d been donating blood to feed the Ticks for months now. I thought I was long past being creeped out. So why did that word—kine—send a shiver through my body?

Maybe because it wasn’t the sort of word Carter could have just come up with on the fly. It was an archaic word, but one he knew well enough to slip into conversation. And it lent a sense of truth to his story about vampires. Vampires who—according to him—were just as deadly as Ticks, just as fast, just as strong, but were also smart.
Smart.

The Ticks’ diminished brain size—their lack of mental capacity—represented the one advantage humanity might have over them. Someday, we might have a chance of winning against an enemy that was as dumb as stegosaurs, but if they got smart, we’d be screwed.

I took another gulp of Dr Pepper because I needed that sugar burn on the way down to keep me grounded.

“Do they have . . . like, ranches or something?” As soon as I asked it, I realized how stupid that sounded. I was on a Farm. I was a Green. That was as livestock as it got. “I mean in the Before. There couldn’t have been Farms before. Right?”

Carter gave a terse shake of his head. “No, there weren’t Farms. Vampires think of all the humans in their territory as their kine. As belonging to them. The way a medieval king would think of the deer in the forest as belonging to him. But if a vampire accidentally makes another one then—”

“Wait a second. What do you mean accidentally? Isn’t it, like, you get bitten by a vampire and if he doesn’t suck all your blood, voila, you’re a vampire?”

“Not exactly. The only people who turn have a very rare gene. They call it the regenerative gene. Less than one percent of the population has it. Only people with that gene become vampires. But if they’re bitten by a vampire and exposed to a vampire’s venom, they
always
become vampires. And once a vampire turns someone, he has to share his territory. Which means—”

“Less livestock,” I supplied, talking past that sick, squelchy feeling in my stomach.

“Exactly. And one vampire decided he’d had enough. He decided to build an army and take over the U.S. Roberto started by—”

“Did you say Roberto?”

Carter nodded. “Yes. Roberto De La Cruz. He’s the vampire who—”

“Roberto?” I said again.

Carter’s mouth flattened in annoyance. “Yes. Roberto.”

“So there’s an evil vampire trying to take over the world . .
 
.”

“Yes.”

“And his name is Bob?”

“Yes.” Carter huffed with impatience. “Roberto—”

“Bob.” Laughter bubbled up inside me. It was the juxtaposition that did it. The dehumanizing brutality of people as
kine
, up against the benign banality of the name
Bob
.

“Bob,” I said again. And then dissolved into giggles.

It was inappropriate. Completely. And it pissed Carter off. I could see that.

“This isn’t funny.” Carter frowned.

“I know,” I gasped. “I know it’s not. It’s just . .
 
.”

“Just what?” Carter asked when I was laughing too hard to talk.

“Bob is the least scary name. Ever.” I wiped tears from my eyes. “My grandfather’s name was Bobby. And there’s Bob Hope. Bob Dylan.” I could feel more laughter well up inside. “Bob Newhart. SpongeBob. That gelatinous guy from
Monsters vs. Aliens
.”

I lost the battle again; I dropped my head onto my folded arms to hide my lack of control.

“Why is this funny?” Carter bit out the words. His voice was terse and angry.

“It’s not.” I pushed myself up, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “That’s the thing. If you were making this up, you’d have come up with something else. Something that sounded scary. Like Vlad or Damien or Dante.” Suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore. “But his name is Bob.”

The harsh lines of Carter’s face softened. “It’s Roberto. But yeah, I probably would have gone with Damien or something.”

I nodded, swallowing back my emotions. Carter just looked at me, an intensity in his gaze that unnerved me. Suddenly I felt so damn vulnerable. I wasn’t one of those girls who looked pretty when I laughed. Or when I cried, for that matter. My face got all red and splotchy. Never mind that I hadn’t seen makeup in half a year.

And none of that mattered. Not really. “So,” I said after a minute. “Roberto. He did this.”

“Yes. He wanted to build an army that would destroy modern civilization. He wanted to take back what he thought should be his. The Aztecs once worshipped Roberto as the god Tezcatlipoca. They offered him daily blood sacrifices and thought he was all powerful. He wanted to be returned to his former glory.”

“So why not just bite a bunch of people? Why not make his own vampire army?”

“Because most people he bit wouldn’t turn into vampires. They would just die. Besides, he didn’t want a vampire army. He’d never be able to control them. No, he needed something else. Something like vampires, as strong, as fast, as difficult to kill, but something he could easily control.”

I gave a snort of derision. “Yeah, how’d that work out for him? I mean, the Ticks I’ve seen don’t seem like they’re under anyone’s control.”

Carter gave a shrug. “That’s where our intel gets dicey. We’re not sure if this is what he really intended to happen or if the Ticks have gotten out of hand. But. . .” Carter’s words trailed off and he shook his head.

“What?” I prodded.

“Well, we know some of what Roberto wanted because of things he told Sebastian, but I can’t imagine that this was his end goal. Either things in the Genexome Corporation went really wrong, or this is just a stage two in a multi-stage plan. Which means things could get worse.”

I let that vile thought roll around in my gut for a while before I pushed it away and went back to something Carter had said. “What about the Genexome Corporation? All those scientists? Do they work for Roberto?”

“It’s buried pretty deep, under about five dummy parent corporations, but yeah. He owns it.”

“Those scientist at Genexome, they must have started with vampire venom and—”

“Actually, we don’t know that for sure. And we have no way of knowing if they knew what they were working with. But, yeah, it’s a pretty good guess that Roberto supplied them with a sample of his venom and they used that as a starting point.”

I felt the Rolos trying to creep back up my esophagus. The idea that the Tick outbreak wasn’t accidental, that someone had done this on purpose was repugnant. I dropped my head back to my arms, resting my ear on my sleeve, feeling suddenly more exhausted than I could believe. I just sat there, staring at the cheerfully glowing Coke machine. Something that had no right to exist in this horrific new world. It occurred to me then that this might be the last time I ever drank a soda. Or ate candy. And if it was, then I resented the hell out of this Roberto guy. I really didn’t want to puke up the last Dr Pepper I ever drank.

Slowly, I realized that Carter still hadn’t answered the basic question: what did this have to do with anything? What did it have to do with the Farm or with me and Mel or escaping?

But as soon as the question drifted through my mind, the answer was there behind it. I remembered what Carter had said just now about things Roberto had told Sebastian. Suddenly it was as if the fog of the tranq rifle had lifted and I could see the truth that should have been so obvious from the second I opened my eyes in the admin building.

I pushed myself up. “He’s one of them, isn’t he? Sebastian’s a vampire.”

For a long moment, only the gentle hum of the Coke machine filled the room, but eventually Carter spoke, his voice as soft as someone trying to coax a spooked kitten out of hiding. “He is. But he’s different.”

“Different how? Like Edward Cullen different? Like Stefan Salvatore different?”

“No. Nothing that . . .” He searched around for a word. “That romanticized. He’s a vampire. He drinks blood. But he’s on our side.”

“Our side? We have a side?”

“I do and I’m hoping you’re on it, too.” He pulled his chair closer to mine. He propped his elbows on his knees. “That guy I mentioned before, the guy with the military background from school. That’s Sebastian. The school was sort of an . . . investment for him. He was there when the Ticks hit the school. After we lost the school, Sebastian expected us to scatter. But those of us who were left stayed together.”