Infected (14 page)
Authors: Sophie Littlefield
Of course,
none
of what they’d just done ought to have been possible. Their strength, speed, agility, all of it was artificial. Biochemical.
And all of it would cause her insides to deteriorate in just a few short hours.
She ran faster.
Two blocks from the BART station, City Hall rose up into the inky sky. The wide, grassy park in front of it was host to a few other people, despite the hour: homeless men and women huddling on benches and sleeping on sidewalks, a few drunks staggering along with their bottles gripped tightly.
Tanner and Carina had stopped to take a drink of water at a bench under a row of flags that flapped in the breeze.
“We ought to be freezing,” Carina said. She touched her arms and her skin was chilly¸ but inside, her heart was pushing blood through her system so efficiently that she felt warm. The tics were worsening; she could feel the twitching all over her body, like little electric currents were being applied to her skin. Exertion quelled them temporarily,
but as soon as she stopped running, they started up again.
And they would only get worse.
“I’m hungry again,” Tanner replied. He dug in the pack and pulled out a couple of energy bars and a bottle of water. They ate and drank in silence, wolfing down the tasteless food, which barely took the edge off Carina’s hunger.
“At least we know one thing,” she said, after taking a deep drink from the water bottle. “You were right about the tracker on your phone. I can’t believe they didn’t get us at the apartment.”
“No.” Tanner shook his head. “It would have taken them a while. The bottleneck would have been in finding my number. I mean, I still can’t believe they were able to move that fast. You know how hard it is to get access to those records? They would have had to have access to the cell phone provider’s internal database, and there are so many levels of encryption on it that they would have had to get in a different way.”
“You mean—someone from inside was helping them?”
“Or someone powerful enough to get people out of bed requisitioned the records.”
“But who could do that? I mean … are you thinking it’s government?”
“I’m not thinking anything,” Tanner said, holding up his hands in protest. “Other than it’s someone with a scary amount of power.”
“Or someone with influence. Or money.”
“It keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Makes your
head spin. Here.” He reached into the backpack and handed her the note from the locker.
“Again?” Carina sighed. “I feel like this is getting a little stupid. I mean, I wish Walter had just talked to me instead of leading us all over town.”
“He was trying to protect you. The less you knew … I mean, if everything hadn’t gotten so screwed up, you might have always believed they were working on some harmless nutrition project, and you could have gone on to live the perfect high school senior year.”
“Yeah,” Carina mumbled.
She opened the envelope and took out the note. At least this time there was no key, no cryptic next step. Smoothing the paper on her lap, she began to read using the streetlight above them.
My dear Carrie,
If you are reading this, then I must assume I am dead or as good as dead, and that things are dire. No plan is foolproof, and as I made these preparations, I had to consider what would happen if you were not able to bring the major in to help you. This is a terrible turn of events, but in recent months I’ve learned that things can always get worse. So now we must both focus on helping you survive.
And that means that I have to share a secret that I have kept faithfully
during this last year. Your mother is alive, Carrie. I know this is shocking news and you must be very angry at me for keeping it from you, but please bear with me. Right now you MUST focus on your own safety.
Carina let out an involuntary gasp. “My mother—”
But Tanner took the paper from her. He read the rest aloud.
Over a year ago, soon after we’d finally created an antidote, your mother came to me and said she suspected someone was leaking data, that they were selling our work to someone outside the lab. She had already shared her concerns with Calaveras management, not wanting to involve me if she was wrong. When they dismissed her inquiry, she threatened to take her concerns to the FBI, and suddenly she began receiving threats on her life. Always anonymous, always untraceable, but she was convinced they were coming from someone on the inside at the lab. I thought she was being paranoid, exaggerating or maybe even imagining these threats. I had personally vetted everyone on our team, every technician, every research assistant,
even our administrative staff, the custodians. I never once thought to suspect Sheila.
But then Madelyn disappeared, and her suicide note was found. Several people called to say they’d seen her on the bridge that night—people will say anything, I guess, especially if a suggestion has been planted in their minds by the media. But a few days after her memorial, she called me. Nearly gave me a heart attack. I was desperate to find her, I begged her to come back, if only for you, but she said that she had to keep pretending she was dead—that if ‘they’ knew she was alive they’d go after me. She believed the only way to keep
you
safe was to pretend she was dead, because they could use you to get to her. She gave me a phone number to use only for emergencies, and she said that if I told anyone she was alive, she would disappear forever and I’d never hear from her again. I still didn’t believe her. I thought maybe she was having some sort of breakdown, but I didn’t know what to do.
And now it turns out that she was right all along. Sheila was peddling our work to the highest bidder, and she is every bit as ruthless as your mother believed. I no longer know who is
innocent and who is working with her, but I don’t trust anyone.
It was very hard to keep your mother’s existence secret, but I did as she asked. I am so sorry, Carrie, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve talked to her a few times in the past year, always when she calls me. She is safe, and I know she will do everything she can to keep you safe too.
I love you, Carrie.
—Uncle Walter
Carina realized she had stopped breathing. Tanner handed the letter back to her. She folded it carefully and slipped it back into the envelope, her hands trembling.
“My mother …,” she started, but her voice broke. “I can’t believe this.”
“Car …” Tanner hugged her. “I mean, this is … amazing.”
“Amazing?” A surge of anger took hold of Carina, the strength of it making her squeeze her fists and clench her teeth. She could feel the blood vessels in her neck pulsing, and she forced herself to take a deep breath, tremors racking her body. “Amazing that a mother could go an entire year without ever talking to her daughter? Knowing what she was going through, knowing—”
Tanner held her tighter as a sob escaped her throat. “It’s okay, Car, it’s okay,” he murmured, her tears spilling onto his chest.
“She had to know how much I missed her. How devastated I was.”
“She was trying to
protect
you. Look, you have to call her now. She must have some of the antidote, and now she can help you. Don’t you see how she’s been waiting for this moment? She had to be praying it would never come, and also desperate to see you again.”
Carina swallowed, trying to process what she had just learned. “I—I just can’t believe she let me think she was dead, all this time.” She twisted the ring on her finger, the points of the hexagonal stone sharp against her skin. Her mother—
alive
. How many times following her funeral had Carina cried herself to sleep, thinking about the last conversations they’d had, all the opportunities she’d missed to tell her she loved her? How often had she felt the ache of her absence like a burning hole in her heart that she could never reveal? And the whole time, her mother had never reached out to her to reassure her, to explain why she had disappeared, to tell her she missed her. Even to hear her voice.
But there wasn’t time for that now. She took the phone and dialed the number scrawled at the bottom of the note.
It rang twice before it was answered, the voice on the other end so familiar it brought tears to Carina’s eyes.
“Mom. It’s me.”
It took a few minutes to hail a cab, but when Tanner pushed some bills at the driver, he put the pedal to the floor.
The address Madelyn had given her was in a working-class neighborhood fifteen minutes from the center of the city. Since it was the middle of the night, the cabbie said he could make it in ten.
Carina rested her head against Tanner’s chest, even though she didn’t feel the least bit tired. The jittery sensations that had been plaguing her nerves had increased, until it felt like an electric current had completed the circuit within her, sparking along her synapses. She had to remind herself to blink, but then at other times her eyelids would spasm, fluttering out of control. Even after sharing a bottle of water with Tanner, her mouth felt dry. She felt like walking—no, running—if only to channel some of the extra energy away from her muscles.
Instead, she nestled into Tanner’s arms and listened to his heartbeat. It was fast, too fast, but it was also soothing. She inhaled his scent, and it was amazingly clear, as though all the individual notes—laundry detergent, soap, fabric softener, sweat—were tangled into a knot that she could untie with her mind.
“Think about next year,” Tanner said, rubbing her back. “In six months you’ll be just another college freshman with a bad haircut.”
Carina knew he was trying to distract her, to take her mind off the reunion that lay ahead, but she couldn’t force herself to go along, because her mind was beginning to go haywire along with her body. Tanner’s infection was several hours behind hers; soon enough he would feel what she was feeling, thoughts starting to fray at the edges. It
was becoming difficult to concentrate—and impossible to lie. “But I won’t be with you,” she said miserably, her voice almost lost in the sound of the cabbie’s scratchy radio, the wind rushing through the open windows, the traffic noise.
Tanner’s hands went still on her back. They’d circled this discussion so many times. About Tanner’s acceptance to Berkeley, and all of the rejections Carina received before her acceptance to Cal State Long Beach.
Before Madelyn died, Carina had performed well in all of her classes. But afterward, her grades tanked and she never recovered. Looking back now, she had to admit that her mother’s death had created a deep chasm of grief, loss, and loneliness that nothing could fill. Schoolwork wasn’t hard for Carina—just pointless, at least when all she had to look forward to was an empty house and the take-out dinners her uncle would bring home long after everyone else had left the office.
All those nights, she’d ignored the textbooks stacked up on her desk and spent time on Facebook or watching shows on Netflix or working on problems in her cryptography books. She went out with her friends, and learned how to hide the emptiness, but she never forgot she was the only one with virtually no family. Being part of the track team had helped, though sometimes she used the workouts to make herself so tired that she could fall asleep without having to think.
When Tanner came along, everything changed. Carina began to believe in a future. She started to see the outline of
a family she could build for herself, one made up of friends, people who loved her, with Tanner at the center of it all.
But it wasn’t enough. The plummeting of her GPA meant she didn’t qualify for Berkeley, one of the toughest schools in the country to get into. She celebrated along with her friends when Emma was accepted at Michigan and Nikki got into Sonoma State. When her own acceptance letter came from Cal State Long Beach, she was grateful for the opportunity.
But Tanner wouldn’t be there.
They’d only talked about it twice, and both times Carina had cut the conversation short. Because there was only one way it could work out, and that was with them being separated. Sure, they could see each other on weekends sometimes, maybe holidays, depending on when their breaks were. But Carina had gotten used to seeing Tanner almost every day. She had needed to see him, almost like she needed oxygen, even before Walter’s death. Now he was all she had. And if they lived through the day, she wasn’t sure she could bear to be apart.