Eat the Ones You Love (The Thirteen Book 2) (31 page)

“Parts of what?” said Jenny.

“Come on, Hawkins,” said Faron. “Surely you’ve figured it out by now.”

“You’re saying you have the cure,” said Jenny slowly.
 

“I’m saying,” said Faron, “that they had the cure since the beginning. Mercer just refused to use it.”

“What did he just say?” said Trix, pushing her way into the room.

“He has the cure,” said Jenny.
 

“After that,” said Trix, her voice hard.

“They’ve always had it,” said Faron. “Anna refused to release the virus until she knew they had a cure.”

“How do you know all this?” said Jenny.

Faron stepped across the room and looked at a monitor. “Research,” he said. He pressed a button several times, then gestured for Jenny to watch. Jenny looked at the screen and saw Sarah gutting her mother. Jenny stepped back.

“It really was beautiful, what you three accomplished,” said Faron. Jenny looked past him and saw her father pleading to the camera, hands clasped in prayer.

“Where else are the cameras?” said Jenny.

“The bunker. A few other places.”

“How did you get the…what? Antidote?”

“There were thousands of vials,” he said. “And there was a formula. Rayanne can put it together when we run out. It was actually easy. The hardest part was to pretend to be normal. As you know, people like us tend to go off the deep end every once in a while.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” said Jenny.

“I became a trusted advisor to Mercer. He once told me I was his only friend. Just like your friend Zeke is now.”

“Zeke?” said Jenny.
 

“Oh yeah. Poor bastard. That infection hasn’t been kind to him.”

“Is he okay?”

“No, he’s not okay,” said Faron. “He's a fucking goner.”

“So you stole Mercer’s shit,” said Jenny. “And then you hid it.”

“I took down an armored car full of the cure. Mercer was moving it, he told me all about it. He thought Warnken had found out where it was and he was transferring it from a military base in Galveston to somewhere he deemed safe. Somewhere in Arkansas, he said. We waited outside Galveston and took it. Then we transferred it into some vans, and took off cross-country,” said Faron. “This was before we met. I started handing it out from town to town. Like candy. I just told them it was medicine. No one turns down medicine when they find it. Whether they’re sick or not. The formula itself I split up and hid in different parts of the country. It’s safe with friends.”

“Omaha?” asked Jenny.

“Yeah, I made a stop there. They never should have taken those fucking kids.”

“But the formula, they must have stored in more than one place,” said Jenny. “They wouldn’t be that stupid.”

Faron smiled. “You don’t know Mercer. Secrecy is his thing. He’s fucking crazy. Crazier than me. He believes in one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Himself. He wants to live forever. And he’ll do anything to achieve that.”

“Zeke’s up there,” said Jenny.
 

“Yeah,” said Faron. “He’s in and out of consciousness most of the time. Mercer wakes him up every once in a while for some grand prediction. If he's as smart as I think he is, he’ll have that fat old motherfucker wrapped around his finger.”

“He’s smart, but he's sick,” said Jenny.

“We should leave him,” said Trix, picking her teeth with her fingernail. “We’ve got what we came for.”

“You killed your parents,” said Faron. “They did deserve to die. But these people? They’re worse. If we don’t take them out, they’re just going to keep expanding until they’re running the show. Then they’ll be too big to kill.”

Trix wasn't buying it.
 

“Look, I get it, they're the next big fish up the food chain, but we should get out while we can.”

“You mean while we’re still alive?” said Jenny. “Too fucking late.”

“They have my son,” said Sarah, suddenly appearing in the doorway.
 

Trix was quiet then. Jenny nodded to Sarah.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” Trix said. “You're right. ”

“You’re free to go, Trix,” said Jenny.

“No,” said Trix. “We have something to fight for. Even if it’s just one kid and one nearly dead Prophet.”

“Glad we’re all on the same page,” said Jenny.

“Also?” said Faron. “If we kill them all, we get to take their helicopter.”

“So what’s the plan?” said Jenny.

“The plan is that there is no plan,” said Faron, grinning like a skull. “Chaos of the highest order. Blood and guts and fire.”

“Sounds like the old days,” said Jenny.

“Don’t you miss the anarchy?” said Faron.

“I miss a lot of things,” said Jenny.

FORTY

Two elevators, no stairs, no other route up from the underground lab. Just the elevators, standing side-by-side and gleaming like the pearly gates.
 

“How many do you think?” said Jenny, loading up the kids, armed to the teeth. “Soldiers, I mean. How many are up there?”

“No idea. Maybe twenty, maybe a hundred,” said Faron.

“That’s not helpful,” Jenny said, gritting her teeth against a painful wave of hunger. Her stomach was clenching up. She needed to keep busy. She needed to let the red come as soon as possible. But if she was in the red, would she hurt Zeke? As far as she knew he was still Living.
 

“Fuck,” she said. A figure was stalking around behind the new set of The Thirteen. Someone tall who smiled at her like he knew something. Declan. “Go away,” she said, closing her eyes.
 

“Kill them all,” he whispered in her ear. Jenny opened her eyes. She smiled.

“Everything okay?” said Faron.

“Oh yeah,” said Jenny. “Everything is perfect.”

“Is this going to work?” said one of the women who had come with Faron. One of The Thirteen. It looked like she had flames erupting from her head. Jenny remembered her from her adventure in the wheelchair.
 

“Two elevators, two waves,” said Jenny. “But after the first wave, they’re going to lock down the lifts. That’s when we get them with the second wave. That would be us, hiding on top of the elevators.” They made their way through the trap doors at the top until everyone was in place. She gave two stomps on the top of the elevator, the signal for the kids to take them up.
 

“Kill them all,” whispered a voice in her ear.

“Kill them all,” said Jenny.

Jenny crouched as the elevator stopped, muscles coiled. She realized she was excited.

“Kill them all,” Declan said again.

Jenny raised her hand to signal for the others to wait. One of The Thirteen was on the other elevator doing exactly the same thing.
 

The elevator bell chimed and Jenny heard the soft whoosh of the doors opening. She heard the bell on the other elevator and a fainter whoosh. The children's enraged screams sent chills up Jenny’s spine. Born into an inhospitable wasteland of despair and then taken away from whatever stability they thought they had, they’d been tortured, cut, and transmogrified into zombified killing machines. The researchers had done all their work for them today, Jenny thought, shooting them all up with rotter plague all at once.

“Zeke,” Jenny whispered, smiling.

“What?” Faron said.

“He made the perfect storm,” said Jenny.

“Damn right I did,” said Zeke, suddenly at her elbow.

“You’re not real,” said Jenny. “You’re in there.”

“Get me out,” said Zeke. “You know you can.”

The guns were going off now, the deafening echoes in the elevator shaft sending plaster caked in cobwebs down on their heads. The Armageddon lasted a full five minutes. Jenny was motionless as the firing stopped. She heard combat boots as the elevator shook just a little.

“
There is no love of life without despair of life
,” she said.

“Ah, Camus,” said Faron.

“Despair, motherfuckers,” she said.

Casey grinned at her.

“NOW!” she screamed, leaping down, shooting before she even hit the ground. Shooting and hitting soft bodies, stepping on the temporary corpses of the children. They were going to wake up and when they did, they would defend her own dead body until she became alive again. She screamed as she ran out of the elevator, Declan and Casey and Zeke screaming with her, alongside her, giving her strength. She felt the vibrations of the others around her, their guns going off, their screams as they burst through her hallucinations. And then she saw the reality of what was in front of her.
 

Dead men in black lay on the ground and more came to take their place. Scared eyes and terrified expressions. But they kept coming with wave after wave of guns. The more who lay bleeding on the ground, the more who came down the hall. And then the children stirred again and rejoined Jenny, screaming all the louder, the shouts of hate from such innocent voices unnerving, even to Jenny. She wanted to cover her ears so she didn’t have to hear them. The soldiers hesitated. Jenny saw then that they weren’t the infinite waves of a huge army. They were several dozen in a small hallway with big guns. The children kept shooting and when the men went down Jenny rushed forward, climbing up onto the mountain of the dead, nothing brighter than what she was seeing at that moment, nothing clearer than everything around her. She grabbed the first man she found and she took a bite, ripping a chunk off of his neck. And smiling through the blood and meat, she pulled out the grenade, one of three that Faron had given her.

The shooting stopped as Jenny held up the grenade and the soldiers started to back away.

“You should have left me alone,” said Jenny, almost laughing. She jumped into the crowd of soldiers as she pulled the pin.

“I’m trying to help you,” said Zeke. “But it’s getting harder and harder to come back.”

Jenny felt herself floating out in the red. It was so deep that she could barely hear his voice. There were other voices in the red, too. All the voices converging to a low roar so she couldn’t hear Zeke at all anymore. The red wasn’t letting her float anymore. It was sucking her in. She felt slimy hands grabbing at her arms and legs and pulling her under. She opened her eyes and found she couldn’t breathe.

“You don’t need to breathe if you’re dead,” said Declan, his face looming in front of her. She tried to answer that she
was
dead, but there was blood in her mouth and nose and in her eyes. She was drowning. Drowning in blood.
 

Another face loomed.

“We’re going to save the world,” said her mother.

“Yes,” said her father. “Have you saved the world yet, Dove? It was the only thing expected of you.”

Jenny shook her head and tried to scream, but now it felt like her mouth was filled with sand. A hand grasped her arm then, a hand that wasn’t slimy or trying to hurt her and she felt herself being lifted up, out of the red. Out of the blood. And then she was standing atop a pile of bodies. Zeke looked down at her.

“You can’t save me,” he said, his quiet voice even quieter now. As though his illness had robbed him of all strength even in this make-believe dead-world.
 

“This is my death-dream,” said Jenny.

“And I’m the Prophet,” said Zeke. “I’m telling you, you can’t save me.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Jenny. “You told me once that you saw yourself coming out of all this alive. You saw a vision of yourself.”

“I lied,” said Zeke. “I’ve never been able to see my own fate.”

“No,” said Jenny. “I can save you. I can do this.”

“It won’t bring him back,” said Zeke.

Jenny looked down at the sea of blood, just on the edge of the mountain of bodies. The blood rushed up and brushed their toes in tiny waves, like the ocean. Jenny watched as the red turned to scarlet, which turned to black and back to red again.

“I’m so tired,” said Jenny. “I don’t sleep. I haven’t slept a full night since that day.”

“The day in the train car,” said Zeke.

“He tried to tell me not to go, but I wouldn’t listen,” said Jenny. “He told me to run, but I thought I was strong.”

“You were. You are.”

“Not strong enough.”

“No one’s strong enough,” said Zeke.
 

“I thought I would find the cure,” said Jenny. “I thought I would save the world.”

“It’s okay to be disappointed,” said Zeke.

“But I’m not,” said Jenny. “I’m relieved. Because if it was me, I’m afraid that I’d do what Mercer did.”

“Lock it away?”

“Burn it,” said Jenny. “There is no humanity anymore. The Humans are all killing each other anyway. Let the mountain lions sort them out.”

“You wouldn’t give up on us, though,” said Zeke. “You died to try to get to me. And I’m basically gone.”

“I can’t die,” said Jenny.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Zeke. “I’m satisfied.”

“Why can’t I let them go?” said Jenny. “Why do I keep trying? Even when I’m at my most monstrous, I just keep trying.”

“Because it’s who you are,” said Zeke.
 

Jenny looked at her hands, covered in blood.

“Jenny,” said a voice, and it wasn’t Zeke. She looked up.

“No,” she said. “You can’t be here.”

Trix smiled. “I just wanted to say goodbye. I never loved a cheerleader like I love you. I wanted you to know.”

“Trix, no. Don’t do this. You can’t.”

“Come on, bitch. You’re tougher than that. I know you are.” But the smile faltered and a ruby red tear fell from Trix’s eye down her cheek.

“Dead girls don’t cry,” said Jenny.

“We’re not girls, Jenny.”

“Then what are we?”

“I’m not anything. Not anymore. And you don’t get to blame yourself. We were in it because we wanted to be. Not for you, not for anyone but ourselves.”

“You can’t leave me,” Jenny said, suddenly desperate. “You can’t leave me, Trix.”

“Yes, I can,” she said sadly. “And you have to wake up.”

“I don’t want to. I want to stay here.” Jenny’s voice was becoming fainter, without substance. “I want to sleep.”

“No sleep for the wicked,” said Trix. “Besides, you don’t get to choose. Save the boy and save Zeke.”

“Don’t save me,” said Zeke, suddenly appearing on her other side.