The Dead Series (Book 2): Dead Is All You Get (19 page)

It’s not like I hated Fabian, but I didn’t want to give him another reason to get close to us. Maybe I was being too protective of my family, but I needed to be. It’s how we’d survived all this time. Why in hell did I have to flunk Spanish in high school? When Holly and I returned to our trailer, the aroma of Mexican food filled the air. I hadn’t eaten, and my stomach growled obscenely.

“Hello?” Holly said as we entered.

Fabian and Griffin sat at the small dining room table finishing servings of enchiladas, rice and refried beans and drinking sodas.

“That smells so good,” Holly said.

“Hey, guys,” Fabian said, getting up from the table. “Griffin said she was getting tired of the cafeteria food, so I thought I’d cook for her.”

“Are those chicken enchiladas?”

“Yeah. My mom’s recipe. I made them in the cafeteria kitchen. Want some? There’s plenty.”

He pointed at a foil pan sitting on the small kitchen counter. There were at least a half-dozen more enchiladas, along with plastic bowls of rice and beans.

“Don’t have to ask me twice,” Holly said, loading up a plate. “Dave, come on.”

“Not really hungry.” I walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed a soda.

Though the conversation was light and superficial, I sat there brooding. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I thought about what Holly had said about being jealous of Fabian. I think in my mind I’d determined that the three of us were a family, and I didn’t like outsiders horning in. Or something like that. In any case, I knew we needed him to help us.

“How’s the target practice going?” I said to Griffin.

I already knew Erzen had arranged for Fabian and Griffin to train together, and I didn’t like it. But it was the only way we could legitimately get Griffin back on the team. Griffin got up from the table, ran to her bed and brought me one of her targets. Though there were a couple of misses, nearly all of the shots were clearly centered in the head.

“Wow,” I said. “Most of these are kill shots.”

“I think she’s better than me,” Fabian said.

When we were finished, Fabian got up to clear everything away.

“Leave it,” I said. “We need to talk to you.”

“Am I in trouble?”

I found myself smiling. “Fabian, I know what you think, but I don’t dislike you.” I glanced at Griffin, who seemed nervous. “We need to talk about something very serious. Griffin, can you take Greta for a walk?”

“Dave, really? You’re making me go?” she said. I heard the anger in her voice.

“It’s Black Dragon business,” I said.

“I don’t care. Fabian’s my friend. We don’t have secrets.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Griffin is family, Dave,” Holly said. “And an intern.”

“Should I start taking hormones so I can get on this girl train?”

“You can stay,” Holly said to Griffin.

We explained the situation to Fabian, emphasizing that neither he nor Griffin could tell anyone. I wondered what kind of a person Fabian was—whether he valued his job over friendship. When he spoke, that worry evaporated, making me like him in spite of myself.

“What do you need me to do?” he said.

We needed an excuse to take Fabian and Griffin out of the command center, so we gave Pederman a partial truth. We said that one of the patients at the isolation facility only spoke Spanish, and we were trying to help out Doctor Fallow. When he asked about Griffin, we emphasized that this was a non-combat run and that she was perfectly safe with us. I knew he smelled something, but he decided to let us go.

“On one condition,” Pederman said. “Erzen goes with you.”

Standing outside the isolation facility, we prepared Erzen, Griffin and Fabian for what they would see.

“They’re all sick,” I said. “But remember, they’re people.”

“And they’re being treated,” Warnick said. “What they have is contagious, but as long as you aren’t bitten, you’re safe. So be alert.”

Fabian nodded. “Got it.”

Erzen looked at Warnick and me. “Any chance they can be cured?”

“That’s
the
question, isn’t it?” I said. “Let’s go.”

Once inside, the Vollmer twins led us to an examination room. We stood at the window for a moment. Ariel lay on a stainless steel table, her wrists and ankles bound with thick leather straps. She still wore the hospital gown. An IV ran into one arm, and light from the monitors shone on her frightened face.

“What’s that on her wrist?” Holly said.

“Heart rate monitor,” Nancy said. “Connects wirelessly to that screen over there.”

Isaac stood over Ariel as we entered, checking her pupils with a medical penlight. “Decided to bring the family?” he said.

I smiled. “Well, you know.”

After the introductions, we focused on the patient.

“We’ve given her a mild sedative, but she’s conscious,” Isaac said, turning to Fabian. “Are you our translator?”

“Yes, sir. Fabian.”

“Okay, Fabian. Now, Warnick will tell you what to ask her. It’s imperative that you translate exactly what she tells us. Is that clear? We’ll be taking notes.” Isaac turned to one of the scientists, who stepped forward with a pad and pen.

Fabian approached the patient.
“Señorita, me llamo Fabian Lopez,”
he said to her.
“Quiero hacerle algunas preguntas. ¿Me entiendes?”

“Si.”

“Gracias,
” he said to her. Then to Warnick, “She’ll answer your questions.”

The interview took less than ten minutes. Fabian dutifully reported her responses to Warnick’s questions, and her story unfolded.

Ariel had been hiding out in an apartment building not far from the market. Everyone else had fled. One night, a van had pulled into the parking lot. Three men—one in street clothes and two policemen—had forced their way into the building and searched it, apartment by apartment. She’d tried to escape but the men had found her, tied her up and thrown her into the van. She described a strange hospital in the middle of the forest where they’d taken her, forced her inside, and put her in a clear cell. They left her for the night—she didn’t sleep.

When morning came, the experiments began. Several times a day, they removed Ariel from the cell and strapped her to a table. They injected her with something that made her sick. After that, she lost track of the time. Over the next few days, she faded in and out of consciousness. In the beginning, she remembered one of them asking her questions in Spanish—her name, where she lived, the names of her friends. At first she answered correctly each time. But as the days went on, she could no longer remember—not even her name.

When Warnick asked about the person who questioned her, she described a twitchy man who smelled bad.

I turned to the others. “Bob Creasy.”

“Ask her how she got back to the market,” Warnick said.

She said she vaguely remembered them driving her away from the hospital, then she’d found herself inside the market. She didn’t know how long she’d been locked inside. She’d passed out at some point. When she awoke she was surrounded by draggers, but they ignored her. She’d wanted to escape but was too weak.

We asked her about the young man we’d found in the freezer. She said he was a cart pusher named Luis. One day a dragger attacked and bit him. He got away and came straight to the grocery store. Ariel tried to look after him, but eventually he became violent. So she locked him in the freezer. That was the last thing she remembered clearly until the day we rescued her.

“If they were running a controlled experiment,” Isaac said, “why would they release her?”

Bud looked at his sister, then at Isaac. “That’s something Nancy and I were discussing earlier. They may have been modifying the virus to see how it performs in the wild.”

Nancy nodded. “It’s not like any protocol I’ve ever seen.”

After the interview, Isaac again examined the woman’s pupils. “Hey, look at this,” he said to the scientists. The three of them watched her face. We moved in closer to see what was happening.

Ariel’s eyes changed rapidly from brown to purple and back again. With each change, her facial expression changed impossibly from a young frightened woman to something cold and reptilian.

Bud glanced at the heart rate monitor. “It’s over one-eighty and rising!”

As Isaac leaned in to take a closer look, the woman’s head jerked up and she let go a hiss. I yanked Isaac away, and he fell on the floor. We heard an ominous stretching sound followed by a snap as one of the wrist straps broke. Erzen grabbed Griffin and Fabian and pulled them out of the room.

Ariel flailed around on the table. The second wrist strap gave. We jumped out of the way as she sat bolt upright and tore at her ankle straps. With a single effort, she burst both and leaped to her feet. She sized us up and decided to go for Holly.

A shot. A single bullet, leaving a hole the size of a quarter, sent blood and brain spraying out the back of her head. For a moment, Ariel’s eyes turned brown again, and that same frightened look appeared on her face.

“Dios,”
she said and collapsed on the floor.

I turned. Warnick still held his handgun pointed at nothing. The room was dead silent except for the sound of our breathing.

Warnick lowered his weapon. “We have to tell Pederman,” he said.

Ariel’s death stunned me.
Seeing her in that cell only hours earlier—alive and looking normal—had given me hope that there might be a way out of this. But once again, hope was an illusion. Ariel had turned like all the others. And now she was dead.

We tried reaching Pederman by radio, but he was unavailable. So we arranged to transport Ariel’s body to the hospital, where Isaac planned to perform the autopsy. Erzen drove Griffin and Fabian to the command center. Considering the circumstances, Griffin held up well. Fabian not so much. He was a sensitive kid who had no business on the front lines. In dangerous circumstances he might be a liability.

Holly, Warnick and I joined Isaac in the autopsy room as he extracted and weighed fluids and took brain and other tissue samples. He worked in silence, completely absorbed, only speaking to record an observation. It surprised me how a family physician who had worked for decades to bring countless babies into the world—including me—could so ruthlessly and efficiently cut into the morbid flesh of a disease-ridden cadaver and marvel at its dark secrets.

Once again, Holly was squeamish, but she kept it under control. I took her hand and, despite the surroundings, thought of the new life she carried inside her. She seemed grateful for the support and forced herself to watch the proceedings.

There’s something otherworldly about an autopsy. As you watch body parts being removed and examined—pieces that are inside
you
—you can’t help feel an overwhelming sense of loss. It’s as if it’s you who, piece by piece, is being reduced to nothingness. And there was no life or movement in these things, or in the body that had been violated, but there
could
have been at the whim of a lethal virus that nobody understood—least of all its creators. I’d seen draggers in various states of decay, missing limbs, organs—and even half their faces. And yet they walked, hell-bent on only one thing—to feed. What was it that kept this girl from getting up and walking out of the room?

“This patient died human,” Isaac said, laying down his bloody scalpel.

“What about the virus?” Warnick said.

Isaac shrugged. “I don’t know. So far everyone who is infected dies, then reanimates. But not her.”

“Now what?” I said.

“The Vollmer twins aren’t making the progress I’d hoped. Not their fault—it’s a very difficult problem, mainly due to the fact that the virus continues to mutate.” Isaac leaned back and rubbed his tired eyes. “I think it makes sense to contact Robbin-Sear to see if we can collaborate. They might be further along.”

“I don’t think the mayor is going to like that,” I said.

“He doesn’t have a choice. We need a vaccine.”

As we headed for the door, Holly swayed and almost fell. I caught her and eased her into a chair.

“Autopsy get to you?” I said.

“No. I think … I think it’s the baby.”

“She’s pregnant?” Isaac said to me.