Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (43 page)

There was understanding in Nate’s eyes, but not of the sympathetic kind.

“And what’s so bad about this? You’re not going to start randomly killing people. I don’t even think you’d kill anyone here to get me out of dodge, as long as my life’s not on the line. Your moral compass is still intact. So why the theatrics?”

Frustration clogged my throat, my body screaming for me to launch myself at him and beat understanding right into his thick skull, but that would have made it all so much worse. And would have underlined what didn’t need underlining.

“How can you even ask me that?” I had to feign the horror in my voice, and his continuing smile told me plainly that I was so busted.

“Because life’s not a damn fairy tale where you just have to stick to what is morally right, and everything will end in sunshine and rainbows,” he reminded me. “You are not the first woman in history who had to realize that sometimes, violence is the answer. And sometimes, what others have told you about how you should behave is exactly what you need to do to survive. So what, you went a little over the top out there with the cannibals. They wouldn’t have walked away with a couple of bruises if you hadn’t taken charge, that much is obvious. It was either your decision, or mine, and thank fuck that you finally had the guts to wise up and stop pretending that you’re just a pebble in the water, getting thrown this way and that without control, always reacting instead of acting. Be grateful that for the first thirty years of your life, you lived in a society that could allow itself to coddle everyone. That life doesn’t exist anymore, even if all those upstanding citizens out there on the other side of this fence like to pretend it still does. You know better than that. You have what it takes to survive. And, just let me give you a hint, that’s not muscles, or charm, or what you learned in college. It is exactly that ruthlessness that makes a difference. You are a ruthless bitch. Deal with it. I won’t judge you for it, and neither will any of the others. Who might judge you for it are the people who think it’s their right to brand and exile their best bet at survival. Do you really give a shit about what they think of you?”

He made it sound so easy, like the decision that was tormenting me wasn’t even a hard one. Maybe for him, it wasn’t. But whatever he claimed, I wasn’t like him. Not yet. But I knew that, just as irrevocably as I’d change if I stayed here, I wouldn’t remain the woman I was now if I threw my lot in with him. Again.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” I whispered, hating how conflicted my own words left me. Nate continued to look at me before he gave the smallest of shrugs.

“Remember when you said you trust me? I trust you to do the right thing, because when the time comes, you will know.”

He didn’t turn away, but it was obvious that he’d said everything he wanted to say. I remained standing there a moment longer before I turned around and left, returning to the other side of the fence, asking myself what the hell I should do now.

Chapter 26

I ended up back in the lab—for all the good that did me. But where else should I have gone? Back into my room that suddenly was stifling like a prison cell? Or the cantina where the guys looked at me as if I was a traitor and the town folk still regarded me a stranger? With my life hanging in the balance, a familiar setting sounded the most soothing to me—so that’s where I went.

I couldn’t say how many hours I spent staring at the copy of the protein gel. There certainly wasn’t any knowledge nor answer to be gained from that. I only got up to grab more coffee, but after the second mug it just churned like acid in my stomach.
 

What the hell should I do?

Follow my brain that insisted that I could make a difference here, in the lab.

Or follow my heart that knew that my place was out there, with the people who knew me better than anyone else. Who accepted me, no questions asked.
 

How could anyone make a choice like that?

Around three in the morning I had kind of an epiphany—although, really, it was more of a need for confirmation. Stone’s office was left unlocked, so I sat down at his desk and rifled through his files until I found a blue folder—not the green one with all the saucy information, but one looking like the one that had doomed half of my group to certain outlawdom. There was an entire blue section in that drawer, and as I pulled file after file, they all contained the same—yet more electrophoresis gel images. It only then occurred to me that I’d never even asked how they’d treated the samples—but then, they knew what they were looking for, so they’d likely done some chromatographic assay to separate proteins that were close to the viral proteins. It didn’t matter. Only the results did.

As I scanned the pictures, the results were always the same. Some didn’t hold a single suspicious sample. Those that did more often than not had one more with that cloud, too—a spouse or girlfriend, likely. From what Nate had told me about how he’d gotten into the serum program, I figured that Pia was likely one of very few women who had ended up in there—and that was a story I was burning to know, but wouldn’t ask her about unless she volunteered—making it easy to figure that the samples that lit up the lanes with blue were from men mostly. None held as many as ours.

I idly wondered where these people were now. Likely out there, somewhere, living a life similar to how mine had been until this very week. There were easily a few hundred samples there, making it obvious that they couldn’t have come from this lab only. With so few people left, could we really afford to cut so many from what remained of society?

Then again, thinking about the guys, I realized that it was more like a willful exodus. It was still morbidly ironic. The virus had been a true equalizer, reducing all of us to one common denominator: human. Not skin color, ethnic background, religion, sexual preference and identity—we were all just human. And it had taken us all of mere months to create a class system that cut a harsher line through us that remained than most things that had ever existed.

But at least some of us—like me—had a choice. It still wasn't fair.

Curiosity finally got the better of me, and I picked up that green folder Stone had set aside for me. Leafing through it without looking at more than the occasional image, I wondered again if there was any sense to this project. Raleigh Miller had been one of the most brilliant scientists of our time, and his results had brought up nothing. How should I accomplish what he hadn’t?

Turning a page, my eyes fell on another protein gel, similar to the one that was haunting me right now. I knew the neat scrawl it was annotated with all too well, my interest piqued as I recognized Thecla’s handwriting. There was no text, but as I studied it, I realized that it must be a sample she took from Raleigh when she infected him—two, actually, one just after infection, and the other after he died, if I wasn’t mistaken about the labeling being time course numbers—a typical experiment setup. The first lane was clear—the virus and possible vaccine that he had had injected wouldn’t have had time to show up in his blood. The second lane was a mess, completely overloaded with everything. But what was interesting were the other lanes that looked like cleanup steps, until the very last one looked strikingly familiar. Pulling the image from our results out of my lab coat, I put it right there, making the resemblance even more obvious. It looked exactly like the two samples from Nate and me—virus and antibodies.

And, right fucking there, I had my answer.

The idea of a vaccine—letting the body create antibodies to stave off infection—may have been a good one, but the electrophoresis gel with our samples itself proved that it was impossible. I realized now what that last, unmarked lane must be—a sample of zombie tissue. The bands matched up well enough with the serum samples, but a few were markedly missing. I doubted that it was because the virus in its active form was expressing fewer proteins—on the contrary; we already knew that wasn’t the case with the whole deal with the perpetuating activator. No. SDS-polyamide gel electrophoresis had one glaring problem—some proteins just didn’t unfold properly because of the polarity of the amino acids that made them up, sometimes lumping them together rather than creating the nice, long, uncoiled denatured strands needed for this method of separation by size. The fact that none of the larger proteins were present in the zombie sample proved that the proteins were likely permanently coiled due to the activator binding, or some other similar modification.
 

And antibodies? Antibodies were nothing more than matches to surface parts of proteins. Proteins that were so heavily modified looked vastly different than those exact proteins that weren’t—and I was certain that if I had a means of checking, I’d find that all of my antibodies there would react to the non-modified proteins. I probably had it, in fact, because whatever method they’d used to end up with my antibodies had likely been developed years ago.

So, yes, in an actual twist of irony I was developing immunity toward Nate—but I was still as vulnerable to any zombie out there as if we’d never gotten down to exchanging bodily fluids.

I paused for a moment, waiting for that soul crushing to happen that should come with the realization that we were all doomed for good, but all I felt was a flutter of excitement deep down. If there was no cure to be found, why should I dedicate my life to a futile cause? With one option invalid, the remaining one was obviously the one to choose.

And even if there was a chance of a cure—now that my mind was swaying more heavily in one direction, I realized how little really held me back here. True, I’d loved my job while it lasted—past tense. That woman who gave up everything for the sake of science—a relationship, friends, hobbies, other hopes and dreams—that wasn’t me anymore.
 

Dr. Brianna Lewis had died on Day Zero, buried under the rubble that used to be the Green Fields Biotech building. And there was absolutely no sense to keep holding on to her.

I still held on to that folder—including that print of the electrophoresis gel with our samples—as I walked out, knowing for sure that this was a world I simply didn’t belong to anymore.

Chapter 27

The sky was only just turning light in the east as I left the lab and crossed the yard to the cantina, but already there were people out and about. I grabbed a bowl and filled it with oatmeal and fruit, intent on getting the most out of this last meal that wasn’t either canned or salted to death. Not bothering with sitting down, I ate it standing up by the door, then ducked back outside to get my pack from my room. There wasn’t much to pack, actually, but I made sure to push both my knife and gun holster into the outside pockets, draping the dark sweater I’d worn last night over it. Should things get worse than I expected, well, I came prepared. But with luck, we’d be out of here in an hour or two, without a weapon drawn or fired. Stone’s folder and the notes that Ethan and Megan had given me were safely stowed away at the very bottom. By the time I stepped outside again—this time leaving through the door and stairs rather than the window—people had started to gather around the town square. The atmosphere wasn’t exactly cheery, but not as glum as it should have been. People were sentenced to exile, if only in deeds rather than words—this shouldn’t have been a cause for celebration.

As I was slowly gravitating toward the left side of the gathering—leaving me at least one direction to run, should I need to—I watched as a group of guards escorted their six very special guests into the middle of the square. Nate looked about as relaxed as if he was taking an early morning stroll—right into a group of heavily armed hostiles out to get him. I would have probably screamed profanities at the top of my lungs. Pia seemed about a step away from that, and when she turned her head to the side, I saw the shadow of a bruise bloom around her left eye and cheekbone. “Go quietly” was not part of her vocabulary—but I really couldn’t fault her for that. The others were somewhere in between those two—except for Burns, who still had a hint of a grin on his face.

What was surprising was that a few more guards—just as heavily armed but not quite that aggressively posturing as the others—shooed the remainder of my group in front of them. Seeing that, I couldn’t help but glance around, waiting for someone to materialize right next to me to drag me forward by my arm any moment now. But no one came.

Stone and Lowe joined the festivities, while Amy remained with the town people, quietly talking to a middle-aged woman next to her, looking none too happy. At least someone here had shown up with the appropriate attitude.

I half expected Stone to drag this out and roll around in his superiority complex, but he kept the first part of the “ceremony” rather brief. Talking in a loud, carrying voice but never taking his attention away from the six his speech concerned, he went over the details he’d dropped the evening before—they would be welcome in any town, but only for a limited time. Food, shelter, and other necessities would be provided for them, and the council thanked them for their service, et cetera, et cetera. Nate glared at him without muttering a single word, and that didn’t change when the zip ties that held his hands behind his body were cut and he was forced down onto his knees, exposing his neck, the muzzle of an assault rifle held right next to his head. Every fiber of my being screamed with pent-up frustration as I watched the guy with the tattoo gun get his gear ready and then set to work. Nate didn’t wince or move a muscle, remaining still as a statue while three deep black, X-shaped marks were tattooed across his neck, and another one on the outside of the back of his right hand, under the knuckle of his pinkie finger. I wondered if anyone would laugh if I called him Xander Cage now. Probably not.