Eat the Ones You Love (The Thirteen Book 2) (32 page)

“Fuck you, she’s saving you,” said Trix.

“Please, I just want to stay.”

“You can’t,” said Trix, sorrow in her voice.

“Why?” said Jenny.

“Because your heart is beating.”

Jenny gasped for air and tried to sit up, but there was something on her chest.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” said a familiar voice. He grunted and the weight was pulled away from her. Jenny tried to get up, but fell back again. Her mouth felt as if filled with ash. She spat out black dust. There was a searing pain in her shoulder, under her ribs on her right side and she looked down. All of her skin there had been burned away, leaving charred muscle. On her upper arm, even the muscle had been burned down to the blackened bone. Jenny gasped and felt the pain then. It was better than sadness. She made herself feel it, moved her shoulder around to grasp the intensity of it.

“Stop it,” said Faron. “I need you to focus.”

“Why?” said Jenny. “Where’s Trix?”

“The Asian girl?” said Faron. “Fuck if I know. Are you listening?”

Jenny was up looking over the bodies. Nearly all of them were guards, but Jenny recognized some of their own. Faron’s girl with the flaming hair had half her head blown off. Jenny looked up at what used to be skylights but had now been darkened by vines and slime and mold.
 

“She’s gone,” said Jenny.

“I see that now,” said Faron.

Jenny turned to see him looking at a face staring straight up at the darkened skylight. Trix’s fine features recognizable instantly, her hair spiked as it always was. Her eyes had been clear when she died. Jenny walked over and crouched down. She touched the perfect bullet hole in her friend’s forehead and her finger came away black and wet. Jenny sat down hard. She felt her heart hammering as she took a deep breath.

“You were right, Trix,” she said. “My heart is beating.”

Trix didn’t move. She didn’t snort derisively or glare or call Jenny a cheerleader. She didn’t do anything.
 

“She’s dead.”

“She was always dead,” said Faron.

“Fuck off,” said Jenny. She pulled Trix toward her and cradled her head. She remembered cradling Declan’s head just like this.
 

“Can you make me dead again?” said Jenny softly.

“What?”

“Can you make me a rotter? Can you make me walking around dead?”

“It’s not going to help, Jen,” said Faron. “You have to let her go.”

“Please make me dead,” said Jenny. “I can do this if I’m dead. I can save them all if I can’t feel anything.”

“You’d still feel it,” said Faron.
 

“Not like this,” said Jenny. “Not like this.” She touched Trix’s cold cheek, her cold lips. “My brother loved her, you know. I loved her too, but he really loved her. She was…”

Faron put a warm hand on her back, where she wasn’t burned. She closed her eyes and felt the physical pain as her body repaired itself.
 

“I loved him,” said Faron. “Abel.”

Jenny turned to look at him. “You did?”

“Does that shock you?” Faron was uncharacteristically morose. So serious that Jenny finally saw him. Not the crazy eyes or the Joker grin. But the real Faron. The Faron betrayed by his own sister. The Faron who had risked everything to steal a cure. Maybe it was only because he liked to eat bad people, but Jenny looked into his eyes now, as he talked about Abel, and she saw that he also did it just because he could. Because no one else would.

“I didn’t know,” said Jenny. “He said he used to have someone.”

“I went away for a long time,” said Faron. “I wasn’t myself. I worked for the Group. It lost me the love of my life. But I never stopped loving him.”

“We never can, can we?” said Jenny.

“No,” he said.
 

“He died because of me,” said Jenny.

“No,” said Faron. “He died for you. There’s a difference.”

“What’s happening right now, Faron?” said Jenny. “Why aren’t they coming?”

“Because they’re all dead,” said Faron.
 

“Oh.”

Faron carefully slid Trix’s body off Jenny’s lap and pulled her to her feet. Jenny stared at Trix’s face as they walked away. And if Jenny concentrated on her shoulder, she could just barely keep from crying.

“Where’s my sister?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I died for a minute.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

“The kids went to chase down the stragglers. Mercer is here somewhere. I can feel it.”

“Do you dream?”

“When I die? Yeah.”

“Do you think they’re true? Is it real?”

Faron didn’t answer for a long time as they picked their way across the lobby. Finally he answered in a small voice.

“I hope so. They forgive me in my dreams.”

FORTY-ONE

As they walked through a hallway ringing the outside of the Pentagon, a movement caught Jenny's eye and she saw Declan put a finger to his lips and hurry down the corridor just ahead of them. Jenny quickened her pace and followed him. Faron looked at her questioningly, but kept up. Declan went down one hall and up another, the coils of the building wrapping around like a nest of snakes. He stopped at a door and smiled before vanishing. Jenny arrived at the door and turned the knob, letting it swing open.
 

She stepped into a large executive office. With the top story window view, it must have been a high-ranking official. The plush carpet now full of mold and insects was once beautiful, the wood desk piled with various containers full of cigarette butts was abused mahogany. And the window was recently wiped clean.
 

The air smelled of stale cigarettes and Jenny found an abandoned pack lying on the desk. She offered one to Faron.
 

“No way. Clean living.”

“That’s what Abel used to say,” said Jenny, lighting the cigarette from a pack of matches and inhaling deeply.

“Why are we here?” said Faron. “We need to find your sister.”

“Declan told me to come here,” said Jenny.

“In your dream?”

“No, just now,” she said. “There must be a reason.”

“Because you’re crazy,” he said. He shrugged when she glared at him. “We all are. It’s not an insult.”

Jenny pocketed the last smoke, still in the pack, and walked around the sizable office. She caught a glimpse of movement outside the window and walked over to it.

“Oh,” she said, taking a drag of her cigarette and blowing it out of her nose. “I see.”

“What?”

“You know those rotters that were following me?” She nodded outside.

Faron looked out the window and his eyes widened. “I mean, I knew they were following you, but I didn't realize...”

“How many are there?” she said.

“Hundreds. Thousands.”

Rotters filled the South Parking Lot, and stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see, clogging 395, stretching back into the Pentagon Center. Surrounding the Pentagon, they waited patiently for instructions.
 

“Maybe I'm their hero,” she said.

“We’re nobody's heroes,” said Faron.

“No,” she said. “But we’re going to win.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly true,” he said.

“We need to let them in,” said Jenny. “Someone let the rotters in before, when we were downstairs. Was that you?”

“Yeah, but they were already inside,” he said. “They were here in a containment unit. A bunch of them, just locked in a room.”

“How are we going to let all those rotters in?” said Jenny. “The doors are all chained, boarded up.”

“The only way out is through the roof,” said Faron. “The helicopter.”

“Well, there goes that plan,” said Jenny.

“If we can't bring the rotters in, we could always send the Living out,” suggested Faron.

“I like it, ” said Jenny, stubbing out her cigarette in a puddle of blood under a guard. Her friends reappeared and she started following them.
 

“You can’t save us all,” said Zeke, before disappearing in front of another set of doors.

“Save them all,” said Trix.

“Kill them all,” said Declan.

“Are you ready?” said Faron. “This is it.”

“How many guards?”

“Only a few here.”
 

“Let’s go,” said Jenny.

They burst through the doors together. Jenny shot the first guard and Faron shot the second. They waited but there weren't any others. They stood there, scanning the room. A memorial still stood on display. A line of marble letters reading
America’s Heroes
shone on one wall. On the ledge below it was someone’s rotting head.

“Jenny?” came a high, sad voice.

“Sarah? Where are you?”

“You have to stop, Jenny. Please.”

“What? Sarah, where are you?” Jenny walked toward the voice. Across the floor with Faron at her side, guns raised.

“Jenny, he has him. You have to stop or he'll kill him.”

Jenny froze.

“Who? Mercer?”

“He has Rafael, Jenny.”

Jenny looked at Faron. She motioned for him to stay.
 

“Okay, Sarah, I’m putting my weapon down.” Jenny set the gun down on the floor so it made a clatter, nodding at Faron. He understood and picked it up.

Jenny walked toward Sarah’s voice. Behind a door in the back of the room a light blazed. Jenny walked slowly, her heart pounding. She cursed inwardly. It had taken her days, weeks to become Undead before. This time she’d made the transition in less than an hour. She’d been hoping for more time to recover. She stopped at the doorway and peered in, but could only see a small portion of the room.
 

“Jenny, please,” said Sarah. She had to be just inside the room, just around the corner. Jenny took a deep breath and stepped inside.

“Finally,” said a man spilling out of his chair, his thighs barely contained. The girth of him was shocking. She gaped at him. In a time when food was scarce and people were starving, it seemed obscene to be this large.
 

“You eat living people,” said Mercer, “and yet you stand there judging me. Perhaps the Prophet was wrong about you.”

Jenny looked beside him to see Sarah, looking stricken, Dr. Warnken behind her with one arm around her neck, the other pressing a pistol against her head. Warnken had a bandage on her neck where Jenny had attacked her.

Jenny frowned. “Where’s Rafi?”

Sarah shook her head. “I had to,” she said. “It was the only way.”

“The only way what?” Behind a white sheet in the corner, drawn like a hospital room curtain, someone groaned. Jenny heard an engine starting and the room vibrated. The engine revved louder and Jenny looked behind her through the doorway.

“Fuck!” she said, her heart beating so fast she thought it would explode. “What the fuck is happening? What the hell is going on?”

Faron was gone. He had left her gun on the floor. He’d drawn a smiley face in the grime on the floor beside it. Above her was the distinctive sound of a helicopter taking off.
 

“
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?
” she screamed at the old fat man. She moved toward him, but Warnken tightened her forearm around Sarah’s neck, pushing the gun further into her head, and Jenny stopped. She locked eyes with Sarah. “What did you do, Sarah?”

“She went with her instincts,” said the fat man. He stood with a groan, using the armrests to help push himself to his feet. He lumbered slowly across the room to the white sheet. He smiled back at her. “You’re not a mother, Jenny. You wouldn’t understand.”

Jenny looked at Sarah for an explanation.

“It was Rafi’s only chance,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You know you can't kill her with that gun,” Jenny snapped at Warnken.

“Do you really want to take that risk?” said Warnken. “Sarah was a beta version.”

“So? What the fuck do you want?” Jenny said. The fat man was drawing back the curtain, revealing a hospital bed, also draped in white. Jenny moved closer, her breath catching.

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

Jenny shook her head as though shaking off a cobweb.
 

“Is someone speaking to you right now?” said the fat man. “Good God. It’s true then. Everything he said was true.”

“You’re Mercer,” said Jenny.
 

“Yes,” he said, standing by the bed. Jenny couldn’t see from where she was. “Come,” he said, motioning her over. Jenny glanced at Warnken, but she still had a tight grip on Sarah, who was looking at the ground, ashamed. Jenny walked toward Mercer, narrowing her eyes. She knew who would be in the bed. Though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see.
 

“I’ve been trying to save him,” said Mercer, and Jenny was sure there was panic in his voice. “He knows what I should do. He knows how to do it. But the spirits only let him say a few words at a time.”

Jenny noted IV and blood bags hanging over the bed, a machine silently measuring vital signs and displaying them on a screen. She stopped.

“I don’t want to look,” she said.
 

“No, this is how it has to be,” said Mercer. “You have to look. I want you to look. Look at him. Behold the face of God.”

Jenny walked warily to the side of the bed. She purposefully didn’t look down, just kept staring at Mercer. His dark skin was a jaundiced yellow, as were his eyes.
 

“You’re dying,” she said.

“On the contrary. I’m going to live forever,” said Mercer. “The Prophet says so, and he is never wrong. He said you’d come. He said if I let the blond boy out, if I gave him what remained of the vials, that everything else would work itself out. Even your nephew, who was on that helicopter.” He raised his greasy lips in a benevolent smile. “Everyone wins.”

“You let Faron go free?” said Jenny.

“He’s gone now, don’t bother to chase him. That was the deal. He brings you here, and I let him take the children back home. All the children.”

“Wait. Faron traded me so he could return those kids to their parents?”

Mercer was growing impatient, the fervor fading in his eyes. “I assume so. And the medicine. I had more hidden away. Even he didn't find it. I traded everything for you.”