Eve of Destruction (17 page)

“You're stupid for staying down here,” she yelled back. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

It was, in its own way, the kindest thing Kate could have said. She was clever enough to know a challenge between rivals might get Avery moving.

But it did not.

A few seconds later it was Marisa in the shaft, and then it was me. I took one last look back, wishing it wasn't true.

“Are you sure about this? You might not get another chance,” I pleaded.

She wouldn't answer—only nodded—and hearing Connor yelling down the tunnel made me realize I had to get him to shut up and fast. He was drawing attention to us, and half of our number weren't even above ground yet. Kate was moving like lightning, already to the top before Marisa was halfway. Three rungs on my own journey to the top I heard a noise I hadn't expected. It was the kind of noise that makes a heart stop, a noise with the power to bring misery.

In hindsight I should have thought it was possible. I should have planned for it.

Ben wasn't there to hold the pipe any longer. And even with my terrible hearing, I could hear it when the pipe hit the hard tile floor. It was a sharp, metallic sound, followed by the ringing echo of the blue door being slammed shut. Avery hadn't opened the blue door, she hadn't needed to. He'd finally done it on his own.

Rainsford was free.

We'd arrived at Fort Eden about one PM. An hour later we'd found Mrs. Goring, eaten some pancakes, and heard about the vials. We'd gone to the pond and made the mistake of marching down the ladder. We'd spent six hours underground.

That last hour would change everything in ways I would not have imagined possible. Much would happen in the final hour, and it began with our escape from the underground missile silo. I had long since given up the idea of getting out alive, so it came as a weird sort of shock when I arrived at the very top of the ladder and smelled the warm forest air outside.

“I thought we agreed you were going to run for the cars,” I said, seeing Connor lean his head down into the round space. He wobbled as if he might fall.

“Back off there, tiger,” said Alex, pulling Connor away from the abyss. “Let's get everyone out before we start falling in.”

“That Avery behind you?” Connor asked as my head cleared the opening and I hopped out onto the floor of the shed. I glanced down into the hole, unsure what to do.

“Yeah, it's her. And
him
.”

“What? That's—I thought he was, you know,
disposed
of,” said Ben.

Rainsford called up from the bottom, where he was just mounting the first few rungs. “No sense locking the door. I'm coming out either way.”

“No such luck,” I said, but I didn't have to. Everyone heard the gravity of Rainsford's words ricochet through the air. And even though the latch on the iron door had held him this long, I don't think any of us believed it would stop him now. He had that kind of power in his voice, the kind that could blow through walls and locked doors. Somehow, he'd get out. He'd find each and every one of us.

“You guys should go, seriously,” I said. “Start running for the car before Goring shows up with a gun.”

“We're not leaving without you.” It was a voice I knew but kind of didn't. I'd only ever heard it through an old monitor with sketchy audio. I had two things attached to the sides of my head that passed for ears, but my hearing was so crummy I still couldn't be sure.

“Amy?” I asked, and she came through the door of the small shed, concerned but smiling. She was far more beautiful in person than she had been on screen; downright breathtaking. Her eyes were sharper, her hair softer in the light forest breeze, her skin radiant. It was like going from a regular screen to HDTV and finding a bunch of treasures hidden in all that extra detail.

I was speechless, unable to find the words to express how thankful I was for what she'd done or how awkward it was for us to be standing in the same five feet of space.

“Should I shut this thing or what?” Alex asked, breaking the silence. He was standing behind me, balancing the heavy door on its hinges.

“No doubt about it,” Kate said. “At least until we figure out what the hell we're doing. We can always let them out later.”

I held a hand up, signaling Alex to wait as Kate looked coldly at Amy like she didn't trust her. Marisa was also staring at Amy, seeing how pretty she was, sizing her up, trying to figure out if this new girl was going to be a threat or not.

“Avery, can you hear me?” I yelled.

“She can hear you fine,” Rainsford answered for her.

“Go back down,” I replied, feeling emboldened at my position in relation to his. “We're thinking.”

I had this other, unexpected feeling as the door started to slam shut and Rainsford's protests were cut off in midsentence: I was trying to impress someone, to act like I had things under control. It was Amy I wanted to impress, and I felt a pang of guilt at the thought of it.

What's wrong with me?
I thought.

I'll tell you what's wrong, bro. There's a heavenly creature standing three feet from your face and you're playing hard to get. What are you waiting for?

Keith, you don't know the first thing about having a girlfriend.

Whatever you say. Amy is hot though, you gotta admit.

The wisdom of little brothers is endlessly entertaining and dead wrong most of the time. But knowing these things didn't cause me to stop staring at Amy. Marisa sure did, though.

“Is there a plan, Will?” she said, but she didn't take her eyes off Amy. “Like shouldn't we be getting on with it? You know,
leaving
?”

Alex pushed the heavy metal handle into lock position and stood up, slapping his hands together like he'd just completed a very difficult and important task.

“It looks crowded in there,” Amy said from the door. Marisa had been looking at her, but Amy was pretty much settled on looking at me, which is probably why Marisa broke into the open space on the dock and nearly knocked Amy out of the way. By the time everyone was outside standing in front of the pond, I felt like I'd lost control of the situation. Connor was having one of his dizzy spells and sat down hard on the wooden dock. Marisa stared out at the water, arms folded across her chest, as far away from me as she could get without stepping into the pond. Amy was staring at me like I'd betrayed my promise to ditch the group and wander off into the woods with her. Ben was hobbling around like a crippled old man while Alex and Kate stared darts into my forehead that basically said,
Get it under control, Will. What are we doing here?

I zeroed in on Amy, feeling time compressing against our odds of escape.

“Where is she? Where's Goring?”

“You wouldn't believe it if I told you.”

“Try us,” Marisa said, but she didn't stop looking at the pond.

“Wait—this is important,” Amy said, and she was moving like a flash back toward the shed. “You're not going to believe it—just hold on.”

“Amy, what are you doing?” I asked her, and then I started to get a sixth sense that we should start running, just leave and never come back.

But Amy looked at me with those piercing eyes and asked me once more in a soft voice, “Just give me one second, okay? I promise, it's going to be fine.”

“What do you have there, Amy?” I asked.

“That's it, I'm leaving,” said Kate. “Marisa, give me the vial. We'll mix up our witches brew at home.”

“You got the vials? All of them?” Ben asked. He'd taken to sitting down, wincing in pain, which was only part of why I was feeling compelled to stay. Connor was just coming out of a severe dizzy spell and Marisa, finally turning in my direction, looked so worn out I didn't have much faith in her making it all the way back to the cars without needing a good long rest. At best I could hope for a few of us to escape, a few of us not to. It wasn't the kind of outcome I would willingly choose. I was, for better or worse, at that low self-preservation point where I believed it was all of us or none of us. It was starting to feel more and more like something was terribly wrong and we were all about to perish. Amy was only in the shed for a few seconds before she came back out. She had a smile on her face and her hands behind her back like she had the most amazing surprise hidden there. It was something she could hardly wait to share, and I got a morbid vision of Mrs. Goring's severed head held in Amy's hand. It was a vision I had to shake free from, a doomed vision even I had no interest in seeing come true.

But why? Why did I feel that way? What marvelous secret was Amy hiding that felt somehow all wrong instead of all right?

“I'm sort of sorry, but not really,” Amy said.

And that's when Rainsford came out of the shed, holding the metal pipe I'd used to hit him not once, but twice. Amy had pushed open the lock on the hatch, letting a beast loose into the world. That was her surprise.

“Amy, what have you done?” I asked. She was standing exactly halfway between the dock, where we had all gathered, and the shed.

No one else spoke. No one moved.

Amy turned in the direction of Rainsford, the two of them catching each other's eyes at the same moment in time. I could no longer see Amy's face, but I could see Rainsford's. I could see a long-forgotten memory appear in his mind and bloom as a full-blown revelation on his face.

“Eve?” he said.

“The one and only,” Amy said.

But it wasn't Amy. There had never been an Amy. It had only ever been Mrs. Goring all along. My mind, and that of everyone else who knew Fort Eden the way I did, understood what was happening in an instant. It was one of those wonderful tricks of the mind—the way it can calculate so much in the blink of an eye—the way everything falls together.

“How did you do it?” I asked, the first to speak, though I had a pretty good idea.

Rainsford took a step closer, like a man who hadn't seen his young lover in a very long time, trying to decide if it was really true.

“Seven hours instead of seven days,” Mrs. Goring said. “Same result, it's just a little more complicated. Nothing I couldn't handle.”

She'd had seven new subjects, ones we'd never seen, and she'd done their cures before we arrived and while we were belowground. Each hour a new one, each hour turning into Amy or Eve or—whoever—the point was she turned young again, but only for a little while.

She'd known all along, every step of the way, all that was happening underground. She'd been Amy
and
Goring.

“You look even better than I remember,” Rainsford said, taking one more step closer, tentative but excited.

“There's twisted and then there's
twisted
,” said Kate. “This is insane.”

Rainsford and Mrs. Goring were both young again, and as the shadows of night began to fall on Fort Eden, every angle told the same story: an old feeling was new again. Rainsford was in love.

And this, above all other mistakes he could have made, was the one that
did
have the power to undo him. A shotgun, a metal pipe, a frozen pond, a floor of radioactive waste—all of those things paled in comparison to the power of a woman scorned. For young Eve Goring had let out more than just Rainsford, she'd also let out a ghostly-looking girl named Avery Varone. With night coming on, she really did look more like a ghost than a living, breathing girl as she crept silently closer to Rainsford.

“Davis?” she said, when she had come up directly behind him. For a moment he wouldn't turn, so captivated was he by the sight of young Eve Goring. It was a moment he would come to regret as his fatal mistake. It told Avery everything she needed to know about the man she thought she knew. She was the one with something important hidden behind her back, not Eve Goring.

As Rainsford finally did turn to look at Avery, it came to me. I knew what it was before I watched Rainsford hold out his arms to embrace Avery one last time. Alex was the one with the pouch filled with insulin shots, but I hadn't seen the pouch in quite some time, not since he swam across the water into the room of vials.

Avery Varone had taken some precautions of her own. She was going to be ready if Rainsford ever betrayed their love. I think it was me that saw the needle first, but it might have been Eve Goring. She was closer.

Avery accepted Rainsford's hug, putting her own arms around him, and when she did, the needle went into the meat of his shoulder and she squeezed out the seven parts of blood swirling around inside. My blood, from my fear, and the blood of everyone else: Alex, Connor, Ben, Kate, Marisa, and Avery. It was the perfect poison, the one thing that could end the unending.

Rainsford knew. As sure as he knew his own name, whatever it had been at the beginning, he knew: death had finally found him.

The horror of decay shivered across his body and hobbled him to his knees. He looked at each of us in our turn, the knowledge of doom spreading on his face.

“The final mystery comes to me now,” he said, and in the time that the words passed his lips, he aged twenty years.

Eve Goring—or Amy—posed a cruel question. “You never loved her, did you? I was the only one.”

But Rainsford had more pressing matters to attend to.

Death was on him. He had no time. Twenty more years passed in the span of Eve Goring's words. He was creeping up on sixty in a hurry.

“I loved no one,” he said, but I knew it was a lie. He had loved them both, but more than that, he had loved himself.

He was eighty, wrinkled and old as Mrs. Goring had been, his back curled in an arc that forced his face to the ground. The pipe fell out of his hand and rolled into the wild grass of the wood.

“Well, for whatever it's worth,” Amy said, and she did seem like an Amy to me, young and dominant, “I never loved you, either. I always thought you were a little on the dumb side.”

God, she was so beautiful! I could see how Rainsford would have fallen for her. Strong like Kate, cunning like the Goring we knew, yet soft like Marisa. A horrible, powerful beauty.

The very last went quickly, just as dusk turned to night in the forest and the air began to chill. There was just a little light left, enough to see a man go from eighty to one hundred and beyond. Things accelerated after that. All the death Rainsford had managed to avoid landed square on his face as he lifted his head and screamed in terror at the coming night of his soul. Small craters punched into his face, his eye sockets deepened until there were no eyes at all, and dust began to fall.

Death had found him at last. Turning him to particles before our very eyes. Even the bones blew apart with a harrowing
pop!
that seemed to fill his empty, wet clothes with air. Only the shirt and the pants and the shoes remained, all else was turned to dust in the shadow of Eden.

The man was gone, but Eve remained. An Eve of destruction, or so she must have thought.

“Were you ever going to cure us?” asked Marisa. She had moved without my really paying attention, without any of us knowing, to within a few feet of Mrs. Goring. Mrs. Goring turned to face Marisa. It was hard not to think of her as Amy when I looked at her, though I could see the same mocking spark in those eyes.