Eat the Ones You Love (The Thirteen Book 2) (18 page)

“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t hurt her. She doesn’t know.”

Jenny froze at the voice. She stepped toward him, feeling how wide her eyes were but having no way of stopping it. She felt her lip quiver as she looked at him. Older now, but still the same. Balding, but still handsome in a bookish way. His gauntness was the only thing that altered his appearance. But Jenny would know him anywhere.
 

“Dad,” she said, the weight of the word like an anvil on her lips. Dad. Such a small, silly word. But not to her. “You’re alive.” Her voice was a whisper and her knees had turned to gelatin. She didn’t feel joy to see him. She wasn’t even really surprised. Faron had said he would kill her father, but she’d thought he was full of shit. She had hoped her father was dead because the alternative was too much to bear. That he had left them. He’d left Jenny and Casey with their mother and grandfather. Or worse, that he knew what was going to happen to them.
 

“Well it’s a happy fucking family reunion, isn’t it?” said Trix. “Should I kill him?”

Jenny looked at her father, felt his fear at the sight of her.
 

“He left us,” said Casey, suddenly there, suddenly looking at her father, their father, with disdain. Casey, who was dead, a hallucination. But Jenny nodded. He’d left them. All alone. Just left them.

“It’s all because of him,” said Casey. “Everything.”

“Jenny,” he said, smiling through his terror. “Dove, you’ve come back for us.”

“You have no idea, old man,” said Trix.
 

“Let him go,” said Jenny, her voice hollow.

“Seriously?” said Trix, disappointed.

“What are you doing?” said Casey.

“For now,” said Jenny. She walked over to her mother. She had a large book spread out in front of her and was muttering something under her breath. Now that Jenny was looking at her face, now that she was real, close enough to touch, Jenny could hardly breathe. Her mother’s heart was slow and steady. Her book was upside-down.

“Mom,” Jenny said. The woman didn’t move. She seemed to be in a trance. Jenny waved a hand in front of her face. The woman, once so powerful to Jenny, once so brilliant, didn’t move. Just sat there, muttering.

“She used to seem so big, didn’t she?” said Casey. “So tall and strong and gigantic in the world.”

Jenny nodded.

“Are you going to kill her?” said Casey. He grinned and Jenny looked away from him. When she looked back he was gone.

“What the fuck is wrong with her?” said Jenny. “What did you do to her?”

Her father, free from Trix, sat up and straightened his shirt. He looked apprehensively at her friends. Robin was like a coiled spring. Jenny saw her eyes darting from Grant Hawkins to Anna Hawkins and back again. Father to mother to father. Her father stood up and took a step toward Jenny. With effort, Declan grabbed his arm, straightening to his full height. It hurt him to do so, Jenny saw. But he was still trying to protect her. Jenny saw his hand tighten around her father’s bare arm, under his short sleeve. Weakened or not, Declan could kill him easily. And the look of fear on her father’s face showed that he knew that.
 

“Deck, let him go,” she said. Declan held on for an uncomfortable moment more than he had to, looking coldly at the smaller man who he could easily crush. There was hate in his eyes. He knew what Jenny had deduced. Her father could have saved her, but decided not to.

Jenny's father took a tentative step toward her, as though afraid of what she would do. He raised his hands in surrender.
 

“I didn’t do this to her,” he said. “It’s early-onset Alzheimer's. She’s been like this for years. She gets worse every month.”

“No,” said Jenny, shaking her head. “That can’t be true. I need her. I need her evil fucking brain right now.”

“You think your mother’s evil?” he said, clearly surprised.

Jenny looked at her companions. Trix laughed.

“Who the fuck do you think she is?” said Trix. “Ain’t no Mother Teresa there, asshole.”

“Why are you here?” said Jenny.

“Taking care of her, of course,” he said. “Dove, it is so good to finally see you after all these years.”

The room went dead silent.

Jenny looked at her mother.

“Where've you been, Dad?” She wanted him to explain that he had been taken. Held hostage, trapped, anything. Any little lie to calm her torrent of emotions, to convince her that he was not a man who had abandoned his children to medical experiments. Even if she knew in her heart what the truth was, she needed to hear him tell the lie.
 

“Come now, Dove, you don’t need to start like that.”

“Where. Have. You. Been?” Jenny said, each word feeling like it was punching its way out of her body. She couldn’t breathe again. “You’re alive, so that’s something. Everyone said you were dead. Sully said—”

“You talked to Sully?” her father said, brightening.

Jenny stared at him for a long moment. “I killed Sully.”

“Now why would you go and do a thing like that?”

“Jesus Christ,” said Jenny. “Because he killed my friends. Because he kidnapped me and tortured me for several days. Because he wouldn’t stop. Just like her.”

“Oh,” he said weakly. “Oh my.”

“Cut the shit, bitch daddy,” said Trix. “We all know you’re not the fucking father of the decade.”

“Kill him,” said Robin.

“What?” said her father, looking at Jenny. “Are you here to kill us?”

“I wanted her,” said Jenny. “I needed her to be
her
. If you’ve got her on some kind of drug…”

“What drug? How would I possibly fake dementia?” he said.

“The same way you erased my sister,” said Jenny, her voice a whisper. “The same way you strapped me down and made me forget. How long was I there, Dad? A week? A month?”

He was silent. He looked down at Anna, still muttering. Jenny heard her say something like,
the cortex is in Sagittarius when the Medulla Oblongata is stable.
Gibberish.

“HOW LONG, DAD?” Jenny said, screaming the words.

Everyone was watching her father, and not in a kind way. Declan stepped forward.

“Jenny means a lot to everyone in this room,” he said. He smiled and looked like his old self. Dangerous. “I suggest you answer.”

He looked around the room, panicked, then sighed, as if realizing it was futile to look for a way out.

“Two years,” he said, pulling out a chair out and sitting next to Anna.

“What?” Jenny said.

He flipped the book around the right way and Anna slowly looked up, her lips still muttering. When she saw his face, she blinked and then smiled brightly.
 

“Grant,” she said. “You've come back.”

“Yes, Anna. I’ll always come for you.”

She leaned toward him conspiratorially. “The fly is in the Vaseline.”

“I know, sweetheart,” he said. “Read your book.”

He looked up at Jenny.
 

“Sometimes she’s lucid. Sometimes she remembers my name. She knows who she is and how to fix the world. But more and more often, she’s like this.”

“So, there's a chance she might remember?” said Jenny.

“Remember what, Dove?”

“Do not fucking call me that,” said Jenny. “She might remember how to be…Anna Hawkins.”

“What is it you came for, Jenny?” he sighed.
 

“First things first,” said Jenny. “I need her to fix him.” She nodded to Declan.

“He’s one of them?” he said. “One of Anna’s kids?”

“Oh, you do not get to give us a cutesy fucking name,” said Trix.

“Sorry,” he said.
 

“No,” said Jenny. “
I
made him this way. He was dying from a bite and
I
made him. I did this to him.”

“How?” he said, suddenly interested. He stood up and approached Declan, looking him over like he was a lab rat. Declan put a large hand on her father's forehead and pushed him back.
 

“Please, you must let me look at you,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”

“Jen, we need to talk,” said Declan.

“In a minute,” she said. “Why did you send me away for two years?”

“We didn’t send you away, Dove,” he said, looking around at her. “You were in the hospital. You were catatonic.”

“Because you took Sarah away.” Jenny’s voice was cold iron.
 

“Sarah?” he said, and Jenny thought he went weak, if only for a second.
 

“My sister,” Jenny said. “And don’t tell me she was imaginary. I know she’s here. I can hear her heart beating.”

“What did he do to you, Jenny?” said her father. “Your grandfather. Did he do it to you like he did to the others?”

“What others?” said Jenny. “Faron?”

He looked like he tasted something bitter.
 

“Faron is a psychopath.”

“Aren’t we all?” said Trix, smiling serenely.

“There were others,” he said. “Not Faron, who came later. But there were others. They were unsuccessful.”

“They died.”

“No, not all,” he said. “Sarah survived. She wasn’t right, though. She was a terrible influence on you. Caused your mother no end of worry.”
 

“She cut into Sarah's brain,” said Jenny.

“To help her,” he said. “And later to improve her.”

“I’m going to be sick,” said Robin. “Your own children.”

“Improve her how?” said Jenny.

“To make her…more compliant,” he said. “So she’d stop running away. But when she started taking you with her, that was when we knew. She had to go. For good. You didn’t take it well.”

“You punished her for trying to escape from
her
?” Jenny said, pointing to Anna. “Do you know what she was doing to her? Cutting her. Putting bits of machinery inside of her. Experimenting on her.
WE WERE FUCKING CHILDREN.
”

“She can’t help it,” he said. “She’s far more brilliant than the rest of us.”

“She killed hundreds, maybe thousands of kids,” said Jenny. “Do you understand?”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Yes,” he said, frowning. “It was a necessary risk. We needed to fight the illness. No one knew what it was. We still don’t fully understand it, this virus, this disease. I’ve tried—“

“I don’t give a shit,” said Jenny. “I did once, but you know what, Dad? Fuck you. Fuck her. Fuck the cure. We were people. We were your children, other people’s children. Even if we died, we should have had a chance. We should have had those moments to end it in our own way.”

“That’s ridiculous. This is science.”

“Where were you, Dad? Why did you leave us?”

“I didn’t leave you,” he said. “I was working.”

Jenny laughed. “Working. Oh, you were working. My fucking mistake.”

“How does it feel?” he said, oblivious to her near-manic state.
 

“How does what feel?” she said. “To be abandoned by your father to a bunch of sociopaths?”

“No, no,” he said. “The equipment. The machinery. That’s a work of art inside you, Dove. How does it feel to be a walking work of art?”

Jenny’s hand went to her knife without thinking.
 

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Trix put a hand over her mouth. Jenny had never seen her horrified before. Declan was shaking his head like he couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

“It wasn’t easy to make, you know. I’m an engineer by trade and had always drifted towards the nanotech designs. Biomedical. That’s how I met your mother. But that spine was like a Van Gogh by the time I was finished. You’ll never die, Dove. You’ll always live on. Again and again and again. The nanotechnology is like God Himself came down and fixed you. Fixed humanity.”

“You made this,” Jenny said. “You knew. All this time and you knew.”

“Oh, I never had the stomach for surgery. So I stayed in D.C. and worked. Improving, improving. Until we had a flawless design. And then they told me about Anna and her…reduced capacity.”

“Where’s Sarah?” said Jenny. “What did you do to her?”

“Your mother does have her occasional lucid spells. And working makes her happy. Sarah created an opportunity for us.”

“Oh my God,” said Declan.

“You let that crazy bitch experiment on her?” Jenny said. Her voice was low and soft. Her vision was more clear than it had ever been. She tightened her hand on the knife as heat filled her stomach.

“Not on her,” he said, seeming to realize how angry Jenny was. He leaned away from her. “Well, not much anyway.”

“What then?” Jenny said. So calm. So soft. “What did you do, Grant?”

He jumped at the use of his first name. He met her eyes and for the first time he looked ashamed.
 

“They took it all away from us after a time,” he said. “The Group, I mean. They take everything away eventually.”

“The Group,” Jenny said, looking at Benji, who had been oddly silent all this time. Benji met her eyes.

“They used to be called the Mercer-Warnken Group,” said her father.

“The drug company?” said Robin.

“Yes, yes,” he said, nodding. “Started in pharmaceuticals, but they paid big money back in the day for research. All sorts of research.”

“That’s who you were working for?” said Jenny. “A drug company? And you did what for them?”

“State of the art nanotechnology,” he said. He reached over and took Anna’s hand. She didn’t notice. “We pushed the envelope. Things no one had ever seen before. Things no one had even imagined before. Things that would heal the world.”

“Until they didn’t,” said Jenny.

“Oh, they could have,” he said, his voice sad and empty. “They certainly could have. But, the Group decided to go another way.”

“They spread the plague,” said Jenny. “The one that caused the rotters. That ended the world.”

“It turns out, they didn’t want to heal the world,” he said. “There was more money in breaking it first, and then putting it back together the way they wanted it.”

“But I’m not immune to the rotters,” said Jenny.
 

“You are, in a way,” he said. “In time. But your design is slightly flawed. The newer design is the one with immunity.”

“Faron,” said Jenny.