inDIVISIBLE (7 page)

I puked again, the pain in my right hand so bad I thought I might black out. The room swayed but I placed my left hand on the counter and held myself upright.

She set the bottle on the counter, either not noticing or not caring about the blood splatter beyond. I braced myself aga
inst the countertop—my left hand trembling as my right hand felt the tearing pain of the cutting board beginning to fall, taking the knife and a chunk of flesh with it.

“I can’t keep it down,” I gagged.

She looked into my face, and must have seen the sweat rolling down my cheeks.

“I can’t leave until you do.”

I puked again and cried out when the knife slipped deeper, the small stretch of skin holding it to my hand tearing, sending waves of searing pain to the tips of each finger.

She backed half a step and said,
“I think you should come with me.”

I shook my head, my eyes down, focused on the counter.
Breathe.

She tossed a second medical mask onto the counter and said,
“Put this on and I’ll take you to the doctor.”

“I can’t
.” I was passing this sickness off too well. I had to make her leave so I could finish removing my sensor, so I could run to T and ask him for help.

“I’ll take it, I promise. I just have to quit throwing up first.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and caught sight of the blood on the counter. The cutting board fell to the ground, skin ripping, and I screamed.

I pressed my hand
hard against my sleep shorts, trying to slow the bleeding without giving myself away. A warm droplet ran down my thigh, over my knee and hesitated mid-shin.

“You’re bleeding.”

I nodded. “Cut myself trying to make something to eat,” I choked.

She
opened the bottle and pushed it toward me while putting distance between herself and the blood. Whatever I had, she obviously didn’t want to contract.

“Take it.”

My stomach hurled again and she stepped backward.

“
I can’t leave until you drink it all.” She lifted her PCA, activated the video mode. As she lowered the PCA to capture the image of the blood, I grabbed the bottle.

She slung the camera back up
to record me chugging before she stopped the camera and bolted for the stairs.

Her feet rang out with each step up the metal steps until the door clicked open
and then slammed shut.

I
stuck my good fingers down my throat to expel the meds. She’d have to report what she saw. I just hoped it would take her long enough to allow me time to escape.

I rinsed my mouth before falling t
o my knees, digging a dishtowel from the drawer beside me. I wrapped it tightly around the wound before grabbing another to wipe up the blood I’d left behind. I couldn’t be here when my mother returned and that would be hard enough on her. I couldn’t leave blood behind too.

Once cleaned, I dropped the rag through a bin entitled biohazard and
stripped my clothes off to add to it. I rinsed the bottle and tossed it in the recycling compartment.

My stomach still churned and my hand screamed in pain. The only medication I could find was my mother’s headache medicine and I gulped down two
tablets before hurrying to my room. Ten minutes later, I had dressed in a pair of loose shorts and t-shirt—easiest with one hand—packed a change of clothes into my backpack and gathered all the food I could carry without attracting too much attention.

I
headed up the stairs after one last look into my mother’s room, reminding myself that if I stayed she’d be in danger of death herself, and I had no choice but to leave before they connected her to the same ideals that had destroyed my father.

But what if T was wrong about the kill list?

I reached for the doorknob and found it locked from the outside. My heart thunked. I had no sensor now to activate the system. I stepped back, the blood already seeping through the rag around my hand. If I didn’t get out soon I’d leave a puddle.

I caught my bottom lip between my teeth, eyes watering with pain.
I hadn’t sliced open my hand for nothing.
Perhaps I could use the emergency escape … I slipped my fingers over the keypad beside the door. Using it would alert the Alliance, but I’d be gone before they could check on me—if I hurried.

I thought back to the woods and my conversations with my father. The numbers for the override
popped into my mind as clearly as if he spoke to me now and I punched them in slowly, making sure I didn’t mess up and lock the doors permanently.

The indicator light didn’t change and I waited, sweat trickling from the hair at my temples.
I couldn’t have forgotten the numbers. It was impossible—unless the Alliance had changed them.

I swallowed and lifted my hand to enter them a second time with the light changed and the door clicked. I pushed through the door and into the sunlight, rushing through my yard to the foothills a few hundred feet away. All I had to do was make it past the tree line.

CHAPTER 8

Cotton drifting from the trees made my itching worse though none of it actually seemed to hit me. A few cotton flakes fell here and there—enough that I took to scratching my arms, my stomach and somewhere in the middle of my back with my left fingernail that barely reached. I rubbed my eyes and stopped, noticing the approved hiking path directly in front of me. Did I walk it or start into the trees alone?

I adjusted the strap over my shoulder and itched where it had rubbed. I knew my dizziness came from blood loss, but
couldn’t figure out what caused the itching. It had started as a patch on my stomach just after I left my home. Now it reached from the crown of my head to my toenails—looking like little red dots that illustrated the affected areas.

I stopped and groaned, using my short nails to gouge my thighs and lower back. I’d go off trail, I decided. I stepped over logs, around rocks and trees. With the pain that radiated from my hand, I couldn’t figure out how I felt anything else at all and yet the itching continued.

I took a calming breath and searched the hillside for anything familiar I’d seen when I’d come this way with T. I scratched my nose, swallowed and plowed ahead, sticks crunching under foot.

I wanted to call for T but knew it would be too dangerous. I stopped, the pain in my hand puls
ating in waves up my arm, throbbing with each step. I cradled it against my body and focused on that pain, trying to block out the other annoyances that threw me off course.

I spotted the trail through the trees and veered off to my right, further into the wilderness.
I’d made it about half a mile before my throat grew tight and my breathing turned to a wheeze.

I balanced myself against a tree trunk and waited for my breath to return and when it didn’t, my heart raced. “T,” I whispered.

I sat on a stone at the base of the tree and leaned my head back, opening my airway. I’d only ever had one allergic reaction before, but it had felt just like this—had made me itch, cut my air, made me pass out … I just couldn’t think of anything that I’d had that would cause this. Could it be shock from the knife wound?

I unwrapped the bloody towel and stared down at the gaping wound. The bleeding had stopped. I wiggled my fingers and it started again.

A twig snapped and I jerked my head up in time to find T, peering from behind a tree. He recognized me and rushed forward, bending over my hand and asking, “What have you done?”

I tried to smile. “Sensor’s gone.”

T wrapped the bloodstained towel around my hand, his face paling. “What did you use to cut it out?”

I focused on his face, prayed he wouldn’t be sick because the cramping in my stomach would just copy his reaction. “A butcher knife.”

“Sheesh,” he stood and turned away, both hands clasped behind his neck. When he turned, he had some of his color back. “There are easier ways than doing—doing—that.” He pointed to my hand and I wanted to laugh despite everything.

“It’s a long story,” I said instead.

T pulled me to my feet and we started further up the canyon before I said, “Something’s wrong, T. I don’t feel right.”

He checked my eyes, felt my forehead and noticed the hives that covered both arms and my legs beneath the streaks of blood I’d forgotten to wipe away.

“What did you take?” he asked.

The wind hummed through the trees, making the leaves dance and tinkle. “Just my mom’s pain meds. I’ve taken them before and they’ve never done this.”

His forehead wrinkled as he thought, the trees casting shadows around him, and over him in a rhythmic pattern that spattered him in light and dark.

I tried to relax
, but my body trembled, tensing in unceasing waves of stomach cramps and burning pain, with the itching coming in third but pushing for the forefront.

“How many?”

I shuddered from sudden chill. “Two.”

He rubbed his palms up and down my arms. “What else?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“What else?” he sounded like he was getting angry and I didn’t understand.

I thought back to the kitchen—the knife and the blood—the bottle of medicine. “Immune booster,” I choked out.

“Did you read the label?”

I shook my head, wanting nothing more than to sleep this all away.

“Did you read the label?” he asked again.

“No,” I wheezed. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I made myself throw it up right after I took it.”

“Some of it must have
gotten into your system anyway and with the way it’s progressing, we don’t have time to wait it out.”

“Some of what?” my eyes closed but I could still see the swaying of the branches above me in a cascade of red and black through my eyelids.

“Whatever they were using to kill you.”

“The immune booster
came from the doctor’s office.” Even as I spoke I remembered my own fears of taking the booster, irrational as they were.

His arms gradu
ally softened and he pulled me up off the stone and into his arms. “They usually work with things that could easily be mixed up anyway, like substituting one medication for one they know you’re allergic to. It keeps people from becoming suspicious.”

“
You’re just one conspiracy theory after another, aren’t you?”

T stepped away from me but held onto my arms.
“If you didn’t think anything was wrong with the booster, why did you throw it up, Brynn?”

I
looked away, saw the blood again, dripping down my leg as I stared at the bottle, felt the pain of the knife ripping through my flesh and then, I remembered the words of the doctor stating that they were containing everyone … this wasn’t a real sickness and they knew it. “Something was off,” I whispered.

T stroked my cheek and chills raced down the right side of my body. He must have seen the trembling because he pulled me tighter, w
rapped both arms around me.

“They just tried to kill you,
Brynn, just like they killed your father, your grandmother and Kamp.”

“They didn’t kill my grandmother
.”

“You talked about her in Greece, remembe
r? What was she when she died, sixty-five?”

“
Sixty-eight.”

“
That’s right. She had a few health problems. Was no longer working, thus a drain on the One United system.” Sarcasm tainted his words and shot through me like adrenaline. “Did you know that when my grandmother was born, life expectancy was eighty? That’s almost fifteen years longer than your grandmother lived.”

I pulled back
to look at him. “They didn’t kill her.”

“She was scheduled for surgery,” he said.

“I know.”

“She didn’t make it because she was too old.”

“My father said she still lived like she was a young woman, up until the day she died. She wasn’t old.”

“She wasn’t working—wasn’t paying taxes
—wasn’t contributing, just taking.”

“She had a pacemaker, okay? It worked great u
ntil one day there was this glitch, a little shock to her heart when there shouldn’t have been, and then before she could go in for surgery, there was another. It happened too fast. They couldn’t help her.”

T licked his lips and glanced to the sky as if to read the words he wanted to say. “They didn’t want to help her, Brynn. When people quit working the Alliance considers them a drain on society so they’re put on death lists and allowed to die when it’s convenient. Your grandmother’s pacemaker malfunctioning made her time of death convenient.”

              “You’re saying they
made it
malfunction?”