Chapter 12
“You’ve lost weight.” Evie stares at the simple light green long-sleeve shirt and pants that I’ve belted to within an inch of my life. “A lot of it.”
I shrug. “Chic, right?”
She wrinkles her nose.
“Okay, so not that chic.”
“It’ll do for now. We’ll get you some better fitting stuff from the Quartermaster later.”
Our room is a simple cube with a few lockers and storage cubbies along one wall, two sets of bunk beds, and a small desk at the back.
Small, but the bed wasn’t too uncomfortable, or perhaps I was just worn out from everything that happened yesterday.
I’m definitely sore, and I don’t think it’s from the helicopter trip.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll hit the mess, then the lab.” She opens the door into a hallway with numerous identical little pods. Wyatt leans against the wall just outside.
“Morning.” He gives us a little wave. “Sleep okay?”
“Um, mostly.” I slept but woke several times and worried about Valen. The pulsing hum between us is there. I can feel it without closing my eyes now. Whatever link there is between us, it’s still alive. That means he’s still alive. I hold onto that, as tenuous as it is.
“Cool.” He walks along with us as the base seems to be waking up. There are a lot more people passing by today, some of them gawking at me, some with their heads down and papers in hand, some of them armed. The scent of food wafts through the air, my stomach growling loudly enough for me to blush.
“How many people are here?” My eyes widen as we enter the mess hall. What had been empty yesterday is now filled to the brim with people talking, eating, or standing in line along the cafeteria’s back wall that’s lined with food windows into the kitchen.
“Thousands.” Evie hands me a tray as we get in line.
“It’s like a little beehive that opened when DC fell.
It’s wild to think this whole place was just sitting here totally empty until boom, the world ended and it suddenly inherited all these stray humans.
The part we’re in is the secure zone with the military.
Though this is like level 4 secure or something?
We’re not allowed in levels 1-3, so don’t bother trying to go through any of those doors.
The guards will stop you, and they aren’t nice.
Anyway, there are more levels with civilians, and people they’ve rescued from the surrounding areas.
We don’t get to go there, either. Not sure why.
Probably something to do with more quarantine protocols but for regular illnesses, not plague. ”
“Are there more places like this? Like, around the country maybe?”
“Maybe.” Wyatt slides his tray along the counter, a worker serving him eggs and what I’m guessing is sausage. “I mean, I hope there are. Like we said, they don’t tell us anything.”
It smells wonderful. When’s the last time I’ve had food laid out like this?
“The eggs are some sort of powdered stuff, but they aren’t too bad. We don’t know about the meat—”
“And we don’t ask,” Evie interjects.
“Hash browns are always solid. Biscuits are hit and miss.”
My mouth waters. I don’t care what it’s made of, I want a biscuit. I want it all. It’s an embarrassment of riches, all of it steaming in pans while the cafeteria workers dole it out.
The sound of people is overwhelming. Talking, laughing—so many of them alive and existing despite the bleakness of everything around us. I find myself wanting to cover my ears, to ease into all this chaos. Despite its beauty, it’s also frightening. Unexpectedly so.
“It’s kind of a trip, yeah?” Wyatt tucks a water bottle under his upper arm and grabs his tray.
“Yeah. It’s loud.” I follow him to a table kind of far to the side of the room.
Plenty of people are watching us, some of them whispering as we pass.
Wyatt sits and hands his water to Evie who opens it for him.
“Eat. You need to put on more weight.” Evie points her fork at my plate.
“Rude.” Wyatt forks some of his eggs.
I open the small biscuit, the middle a bit thick and dense, but I don’t care. With my wooden knife, I slather some strawberry jam all over it. The first bite is heaven. Sweet and buttery, an absolute revelation.
“They haven’t been feeding her.” Evie frowns and surreptitiously scoops some of her sausage onto my plate.
“They have. One of the vampires cooked for me all the time. She was wonderful,” I say around the biscuit in my mouth. “Then David—um, Druin, I mean—he wasn’t much of a cook, but he did try.”
“Vampires cooking for you.” Wyatt shakes his head. “Wild. But that Melody you talked about, she seems like she was solid. Would’ve liked to meet her.”
I eat far more than I should, so much that my stomach is hurting by the time I’m done, and I have to put my fork down to prevent myself from making it worse.
“I could get you seconds,” Evie offers.
“No way.” I pat my full stomach. “I can’t stand another bite.”
“—getting crazy in here.” Someone’s raised voice behind me puts me on alert, and I whirl.
A woman is standing at the end of the next table, her eyes on me. Tall, close cropped black hair, dark skin, with a vicious scar along her cheek and snaking down her jaw.
“You’re her.” Her voice is deep, almost booming despite the fact she isn’t yelling.
The mess hall goes quiet.
“Georgia Clark. The president’s sister. That’s you.”
My hands go sweaty. It doesn’t matter how far I am from Juno or how angry, her legacy still follows me. Her shadow always blotting out the light.
“Yes.” I stand, nothing but a wooden fork clutched in my palm.
Evie’s already up at my side, the woman practically bouncing on her feet as if she’s looking for a fight.
“What’s it to you?” Wyatt pushes back from the table and comes to my other side.
The woman takes a step closer, her muscled arms on display at the edge of her cuffed sleeves.
I have the fork in a death grip.
“Is it true?”
“What?” I kick my chin up. She might have every advantage, but I’ve lost any illusions of fighting fair. I’ll do whatever it takes to defend myself.
She sizes me up, her gaze roving down to my toes and then back to my face. “You killed Theo?”
The room was silent before. Now it’s a tomb. No one breathing. No one blinking.
My pulse hammers, heat rising up my neck.
“Did you?” she asks again, a sharp edge to the question.
I swallow thickly, already regretting eating so much. “Yes.” I say it forcefully, with far more confidence than I actually feel.
Gasps and whispers.
“All right then.” She grins, her scar twisting with the movement. “Welcome. Fucking glad to have you.”
The mess hall erupts, people yelling, some of them approaching me and clapping. The entire room is twice as loud as before, people whooping and high-fiving.
My grip on the fork eases, and I let out a breath of relief.
The woman reaches out to shake my hand.
I take it, her grip firm but not crushing.
“I’m, um, I’m Wyatt.” He’s looking up at her with total amazement. “Ms. Briggs. I mean, um, I mean ma’am.”
She glances at him, her eyes bright. “Wyatt.”
Then Evie is pulling me away, hustling me through the crowd that claps and thanks me as we beeline out of the mess hall.
“She said my name,” Wyatt practically squeals at my elbow. “Liz Briggs said my name!”
The others follow us, some of them yelling my name and plenty of other things like “give ‘em hell.”
Wyatt speeds up and leads the way, turning through a maze of hallways and corridors until he passes through a set of double doors. Once they seal behind us, the noise fades. It’s just the three of us.
“What the fuck?” I bend over, hands on my knees. “Shit.”
“I thought it was gonna go sideways, no lie. Glad it didn’t. That’s a whole lot of woman. I would’ve hated having to show her my combat skills.” Wyatt chuckles and walks over to a messy desk near the door. He puts the needle on a record, the sound starting up with a slight crackle. Nina Simone.
“I could’ve taken her.” Evie shadow boxes a little.
“Major Liz Briggs?” Wyatt squawks. “No way in hell. That woman is a tank. A Marine. She fought two Tantuns with nothing but a pair of silver blades and a whip and lived to tell the tale. She’s a fucking legend.”
“You seem to know a lot about her.” Evie raises a brow. “In fact, you seemed starstruck even though it really looked like she was about to kick my ass.”
He shrugs. “I mean, look, I would’ve defended you. Given her the old razzle dazzle. But let’s be honest here: she’s a hot alpha who’s taller than me and could get me in a chokehold I’d never tap out of.”
I laugh, the mental image too much for me. Wyatt always managed to break the tension, no matter what situation we were in. It warms me to know he still has that quality despite everything that’s happened.
“You’ve got no shot. You know that, right?” Evie peeks out the door at the stragglers who followed us here.
“What?” Wyatt works on doing a one-handed man bun.
“She’s got to be into women.”
“You don’t know that.” Wyatt looks offended. “Besides, I’m majorly in touch with my feminine side. It’s all a spectrum, Evie. Don’t go shattering my hopes and dreams.”
“You’re right.” She closes the door. “My bad. Never say never.”
“Damn right.” Wyatt gives her a hard nod.
Once the throng outside has dispersed, I look around the lab.
It’s basic. Something similar to the setup I was using when I was still working at UT.
But it has a few more bells and whistles including a small containment lab.
Two large refrigeration units along the back wall look promising for materials. “Not too bad.”
“We call it home.” Evie puts her hands together and gives a slight nod to something against the wall to my right.
“What—” It hits me like a sucker punch.
Gretchen. Her photo, the one that had been on her CDC badge.
It’s in the center of a little shrine with a few pieces of fruit—oranges, her favorite, and some knickknacks that she would’ve loved: a fidget spinner, a pen with a fluffy neon topper, a small ceramic cat.
Next to that is Aang’s photo, an arch look on his face, his dark hair going every which way.
There’s a particularly filthy MM manga on his little table and an assortment of anime figures, some of them scratched and beaten up.
He would’ve prized them above everything else.
I close my eyes, willing the tears to retreat.
Evie takes my hand. “Don’t be sad. These are happy reminders, that’s all. A little way to keep them in our hearts. They’re here with us. They never left.”
Emotion clogs my throat as I look at them, at the familiar faces I’d forgotten for so long. Now I remember. I remember everything.
Wyatt finally gets his hair tied up into a messy bun. “We talked about making one for you. Glad we held off. Woulda been pretty awkward right about now.”
“When did you find out I was alive?” I tear my attention away from the memorials and inspect the lab equipment, most of it somewhat dated but useful, nonetheless. It should get the job done for our purposes.
“Umm.” Wyatt looks up. “We didn’t know anything for a long time.”
“Yeah, either way. We just didn’t know. We hoped and we prayed, but we never heard anything about you after DC.
It was like you’d disappeared. But then again, a lot of people never made it out.
The entire city was destroyed, the vampires turning our weapons against us.
They knew exactly where to strike, what to do.
” Evie doesn’t meet my eyes. “They had people on the inside, people really high up.”
Juno. She doesn’t say the name, but I hear it loud and clear.
“Anyway, about two days ago, maybe three, Gage came to us and said he’d located you, that you were alive, and that he was working to get you out.”
“Two days ago, huh.” I bristle at that. Gage had known where I was for months, yet he didn’t tell my friends.
“It was the first good news in a long, long time.” Evie flips a switch on the electron microscope, booting it up.
It gives off the scent of ozone, the deep whirr of it familiar and welcome.
“He’d been on us right after we arrived, asking us about your poison.
Grilling us for anything we could remember about your research in those last days. ”
“That we had no idea about.” Wyatt gives me a dirty look. “You made progress, huge progress, and didn’t say a word.”
“I know.”
“Why’d you hide it?” Wyatt asks. “Didn’t you trust us?”
“Of course I did, more than anyone. I was trying to keep you safe.”
“By keeping us in the dark? We could’ve helped you.” Evie’s tone carries a hint of reproach.
“I know.” I glance at Gretchen’s memorial.
“She did. Gretchen had the formula for the poison, and I was hoping she’d be able to leverage it in our favor as soon as you got to Atlanta.
I was… I guess I was stupidly optimistic about your chances.
I thought the military would be able to protect you, that you’d make it.
I thought sending it with her was the best way for it to get into the right hands, but I didn’t foresee … ”
“Right.” Evie nods, her fingers tangled together in her lap. “Gretchen. There’s no way you could have.”
“Everything was a clusterfuck. Everything.” Wyatt plops down on one of the lab stools, his standard issue green pants riding up almost to his knees.
“It’s okay if you’re mad.”
“Mad?” He smiles, the warmth of it reaching his eyes. “I’m happy as hell you’re here.”
“Same.” Evie drapes an arm across my shoulders.
It hits me almost as hard as the memorials. Having my friends back, knowing they’re here for me no matter what. Why does it all have to hurt?
“I guess we should get to work.” I clear the knot from my throat and roll up my sleeve. “Evie, get as many vials as you can without killing me.”
“I got you.” She heads for the metal cabinets along a side wall.
“Time to cook.” Wyatt drums his fingers on the table in time with the music.
“Wyatt, I can give you a list of what we need to create the poison—do we have an array of signalosomes? I need that and hemophiliac factors to start. We’ll also need a full workup of my blood again—I’m assuming the Saints couldn’t recover the data or samples from the convoy?”
“No. Only got a few things for the lab. Anything that was glass, gone. Electronics were smashed or looted by the time they got there.”
“So we’re back to square one. Okay, I think I should focus on the poison while you and Evie focus on the vaccine. We also need to consider economies of scale. Do we have someone we can talk to about that?”
Wyatt grins, the music on his record player swelling. “We’re back, baby.”
I return his smile, hope blooming again despite the barren soil of my heart. “We’re back.”