Chapter 40
FORTY
Male voices—doctors? Hospital? Had she finally collapsed? The thing about knowing you had something terminal was the waiting, God, it just wore across every nerve every damn day.
“Fever’s gonna spike and break. All we have to do is keep her below the brain-cook.”
She strained against delirium. Cold, she was so cold, and burning at the same time.
Slickness everywhere, she was covered in slime.
Phillip, closing the front door with a small click.
“Have a nice life, Holl.” Sitting at the kitchen table, right where he had while giving her the news, the warmth of him still in the chair and the numb realization that she was alone sinking in.
One of the men made a bitter sound, almost a laugh. “Yeah. Serve your country, they said, you’ve got all the right measurements. Dumbshit that I was, I went along.”
Paper moving. She strained to remember where she was, what was happening to her. “Christ. Is this for real?”
“You really want to ask me that?”
“It was rhetorical, soldier.” Reese. She found the name, clung to it. Tried to speak, produced only a weird shapeless sound.
“Listen to the vocab on you. Emotional noise went off the charts for every agent sooner or later. You held out longest, looks like.”
“Call me talented.” A familiar touch against her forehead. It was him, it was Reese, and the thought steadied her. If he was here, it would be all right. Or maybe not, because he couldn’t fix what was wrong with her.
At least she wasn’t alone.
“You gave them everything they wanted to hear in psych eval. Got a future in the theater.”
“Like you didn’t.”
“For a while, I thought being honest was the best policy.”
“Then?”
“Then I wised up on a job, and started thinking.”
“Yeah.” A heavy, metallic click. “Here.”
“So you trust me?”
“No reason for you to be this forthcoming if you’re eventually going to kill me. Unless they want me back in the fold, and I’m pretty sure they—”
“Oh, they might. You were their shining boy—amped mission fidelity, no emotional noise, they want to poke and prod and figure out what the hell. Also, if it’s jumped to her, they want her for testing.”
“You’re not helping your case, Cal.” Reese sounded thoughtful. The world was full of smeared color, pain gathering deep in her twisting, burning body. Confused movement, sudden pressure all through her. “Shh, baby. It’s okay. It’s gonna be all right.”
“You smell that?”
Crackling silence, punctuated only by the rasp of cold air against her wet skin. A terrible moment of clarity—something awful was about to happen. Surging up underneath her, a shark rising through black water.
“What’s it smell like to you?”
“Relax, Reese. My little friends don’t like her. She’s all yours.”
“But you can smell it—”
“Christ, will you settle down? She’s complementary, you know?
Bacon on your cheeseburger—any idiot can sniff and see your swarmies are going to love her.
Just like puzzle pieces. You could theoretically infect others, I guess, but their survival rate is going to be closer to two, three percent.
That’s what the models say. They’re scrambling to figure out if any of us have spread it to the general population.
But this, they’re calling it Gemini. A mutation of the original virus. ”
“Holy crap.” Reese sounded as though he’d been punched. Hard. “And they send us all over the world, right?”
“You’re quick on the uptake. Yeah. If there are even a few who survive, there’ll be problems.”
“I’ll just bet. What’s the spread rate?”
“Like I said, all theoretical. They don’t know.”
“They don’t... Jesus. Jesus Christ.”
“Add to that the doctor losing his mind. Heming. Thought he was going to be a hero and stop the contagion at ground zero.”
“So he botched erasing both of us.” That tone—as if he’d been socked a good one in the gut—was wrong. Reese shouldn’t sound like that. Everything was wrong.
I’m sick, she thought. Very sick, and it’s not the cancer. It’s something else. She strained to listen, to remember, but the shark beneath trembling semiconsciousness was losing patience with threatening.
It wanted to swallow her. Its tail sliced through cold water, and her sobbing breath quickened. She could hear her own heartbeat racing, pressure building in her temples and throat and lungs.
“Looks like. Aren’t we the lucky fellows. Um, Reese? She’s heating up.”
“I know.” A chill against her forehead—a washcloth? She was dimly aware of more movement, a rising scream, a cracked, hoarse voice.
Was it hers?
The shark decided to quit playing around and rose with eerie speed.
She could almost see it, fins jagged from the chaos of old battles, pale scars on its sandpaper sides, mouth open and triangular teeth in rows, its dead-glowing eyes fixed on the small struggling human above.
It streaked for her and she screamed, over and over, thrashing, struggling, and there was that voice again, the one she knew.
“Holly... Holly, shh... come on, baby, it’s all right, you’re all right... please, Holly, Holly!”
Jaws closed with a snap, teeth in her flesh, bones creaking, then, thankfully, the shark swallowed.
And she was gone.