Infected (18 page)

They waited as the sirens came closer and closer, wincing as several vehicles passed overhead, the noise deafening and the vibration terrifying. The cars careened into the lot across the street, and then there was shouting, demands for them to show themselves, orders to drop all weapons. Little did the cops know they were talking to one dead man, and another one who—Carina prayed—was unconscious.

“How are you feeling?” she asked Tanner, trying not to show her concern. She could barely make out his features in the light that seeped into the pipe’s opening. They couldn’t stay here. The longer they remained, the more people would arrive who would notice a pair of teenagers—both filthy, one covered with blood—at the edge of the crime scene. If
they went now, they might be all right; the cops’ attention was riveted by the body they must have discovered by now.

“I’m …” Tanner flexed his hands, then prodded his leg experimentally, wincing slightly. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to run a marathon, but I’m all right. The bleeding stopped a long time ago. I haven’t cramped up either, not since the first few minutes. Do you think—I mean, maybe the virus does other things too? Something to cut down on the bleeding?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it’s clear the bullet didn’t hit any major arteries, or you’d be dead. I’m pretty concerned about all the filth that’s gotten into the wound, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. Do you think you can make a run for it?”

“I’ll die trying,” Tanner said grimly, a turn of phrase Carina wished he hadn’t used.

Carina maneuvered her body around toward the tunnel opening.

And found herself staring into the face of the bald assassin.

“Stupid bitch,” the man wheezed in heavily accented English as he attempted to propel himself by brute force farther into the pipe.

There was something very, very wrong with him. His facial features were distorted and swollen, with great blotches of red marring his cheeks. His mouth was a grotesque leer, his tiny eyes practically disappearing into the folds of his skin. His breathing came in tortured rasps. Even his hands were swollen like cartoon mittens.

And yet, one of those hands was managing to hang on to a wicked-looking curved knife. He was clearly suffering some sort of reaction to the dart. He could easily have been disoriented, perhaps in pain.

If that was the case, however, he’d recovered enough to
follow them here. He must have eluded the police by reaching the ditch on the far side of the road before they arrived, and crawling toward the pipe out of sight. As if to counter any doubts Carina had about his abilities, the man took a swipe at her. If he’d been a few inches farther into the pipe, he might have cut her throat.

He struggled on his hands and knees to come farther inside, blocking most of the light, jabbing with the knife. But he was so large, and his coordination was so compromised by whatever was wrong with him, that he was having trouble.

Still, there was no escape route and no way, even with her heightened abilities, that Carina was going to be able to fend off a man who weighed more than twice what she did, especially since most of it was muscle and she was trapped in a space only a few feet wide. A few more seconds and he would crawl close enough to reach her with the knife; all it would take was one well-placed cut and she’d be dead. Then he could kill Tanner at his leisure.

That image—the man dragging her bleeding corpse out of the pipe to get to Tanner, wounded and trapped, infuriated Carina. She braced herself as well as she could, ignoring the pain in her knees from being pressed against rocks at the bottom of the pipe, and raised her hands, ready to try to fend off his jabs. Behind her, Tanner was grunting with the effort of clearing the debris blocking their exit, but with no tools and his wounded hands, he was making little progress.

The man inched forward, his breath sounding more like the whine of a motor than a human, drool hanging in strings
from his rubbery, enormous lips. He swung with the knife again, and this time the tip sliced Carina’s forearm, leaving a thin trail of glistening red. It was little more than a scratch, but his next attempt could certainly connect much deeper.

“No,” Carina hissed, gritting her teeth.
You will not kill me. You do not get to hurt us. You will not win
.

She grabbed for his left arm, the one wielding the knife, and managed to catch his wrist on the backswing as he prepared to lunge. He tried to shake her off, but Carina focused all of her strength—which she’d won the hard way, with thousands of hours at the gym and track practice, as well as with the artificial boost she received from the virus—into holding on. He clamped his other hand over hers, attempting to pry it away, but Carina grabbed that one as well. She was holding both of his wrists while he twisted and pulled, trying to wrench free. She held tighter, focusing on her breathing, her pulse, forcing herself to assume a calm she didn’t feel. To save herself and Tanner, she had to be better than she’d ever been before.

Not for the first time since being infected, Carina had the sense of time slowing down, of being able to experience every fraction of a second as though it was moments long, aware of every sensory detail that would ordinarily rush past in a blur.

And in the space of time it took for her to breathe in and out once, her daily appreciations flashed through her mind. Three things for which she was grateful, even now.

“Seeing my mom again. Tanner. And
this
,” she whispered, watching confusion pass through the man’s cruel little eyes.

She bent his wrists back.

At first it felt like trying to bend back a bar of steel, like she would never be able to repel the force and weight. She could hold him off, but not forever; there was still a limit to the duration of the bursts of strength she was capable of. Muscle contractions were still governed by the laws of biology. The chemical and mitochondrial realities were such that she would eventually need to rest.

But she had at least a few more seconds. She could feel her face flushing, her veins standing out as she pushed harder. The man emitted a sound like a kicked dog—and then that sound turned into a shriek as she felt something give. A tremor traveled through each of his arms, ligaments snapped … and then there were two audible cracks. Carina pitched forward, her forehead bumping against the man’s drool-covered, screaming face.

With her hands, she had broken both of his arms.

She was still holding on to his wrists, frozen with shock, but they flopped uselessly, the bone fragments grinding. The knife had clattered to the bottom of the pipe. The man’s screams had turned into one long braying sound of agony, and only Carina’s fear that someone would hear him got her moving again. She let go of his wrists, her stomach twisting in revulsion at seeing them hanging down from his ruined arms. He tried to lift them to his face and succeeded only in clubbing himself with his forearm.

Carina reached back and grabbed at the pile of debris that Tanner had been creating with the muck he’d managed to pull from the blockage. She seized a handful of
mud and twigs and pebbles and jammed it into the man’s open mouth, pushing the entire handful in before he had a chance to bite her. His screams ended with a choking gasp as he inhaled some of the stuff.

“I’m through!” Tanner said. Weak light streamed through a hole in the debris. “I think there’s room—here—”

Moving forward, he shinnied through the hole in the blockage. Carina followed close behind, trying to ignore the frantic choking and gasping of the injured man. Branches painfully scraped at her exposed skin, and her hips got stuck for a moment, but she was able to push past, and in seconds she and Tanner were out of the pipe.

Carina glanced over at the parking lot and saw that several more police cars had arrived, a virtual swarm of vehicles. Their headlights lit up the scene. Only the gathering crowd of onlookers, people in workout gear and pajamas and bathrobes, all straining to see past the makeshift barrier that the police had erected, temporarily shielded them from view.

They crouched as they ran, partially hidden by the lower elevation of the creek bed. After half a block, another road crossed the creek, and they ran up onto the street and across lawns, into an alley, using the cover of darkness. Tanner was limping, but Carina barely had to slow down for him to keep up. After another quarter mile, they finally slowed.

Tanner took her hand, pulling her behind a tall, unkempt hedge where they were shielded from the views of even the closest neighbors.

“I broke … I broke …” Carina’s teeth were chattering so
hard she couldn’t get the words out. She had broken the man’s
arms
, snapped them like they were toothpicks. She had no idea if such an injury could be fixed, if he would ever heal. Whatever had been in the dart might have finished him off anyway—his breathing was so poor that he could easily be suffocating even now.

She’d shot that dart. If he died, she had killed him.

“You had no choice,” Tanner said, pulling her close to him. “If you hadn’t done something to stop him, he would have killed you.”

“But
why?
I don’t understand. I mean, Sheila’s trying to pick me up alive so I can give her what she thinks I have. These guys—whether they believe I have Walter’s data or not—want me
dead
.”

Tanner was silent for a moment, thinking. “Someone who doesn’t want you talking? Trying to protect the lab? There’s millions, probably billions, of dollars invested in this research, not to mention people’s reputations. If you talk, the whole thing’s going to be shut down, and investigated pretty heavily.”

“But what about their accents, Tanner? Sheila said that the Albanians want the virus for themselves. For their own army or mafia or whatever. If they think I have it, then they’d want me alive, not dead.”

“But what if they have another source for the data? Or
think
they do? If they believe Sheila already has Walter’s passwords? Then you become a complication, right? If they think you have the means to shut it down before they can get it?”

Carina realized Tanner was right. If she truly had a way to access Walter’s backup data, then she could destroy it just as easily as she could share it, either with the help of the Army Criminal Investigation Command or on her own. And if someone else was trying to reach the data, but hadn’t yet …

Because their source at the lab hadn’t turned it over …

Because she didn’t actually
have
it …

“Oh my God,” Carina breathed. “Sheila is selling the data to the Albanians. She promised it to them, but hasn’t given it to them yet. They think she’s stalling because of the money or something, but really it’s because she doesn’t actually have it—she thinks she needs me for that. She infects me to force me to trade the information for the antidote, because that way she has a surefire window of less than two days to get her hands on Uncle Walter’s data.”

“But meanwhile, they must have been following Sheila and you for days. And when we ran, at the funeral, they made a big assumption—a wrong one.”

“That I had access to the data—”

“—and you were going to expose her. They see you arguing with her. They see us take off, and her guys go after us. They think Sheila’s desperate to stop you before you turn her in.”

“Because they know that’s when the project gets shut down and they won’t have access to the virus. Okay, I get it. But Tanner—one thing I still don’t understand—how did they
find
us?”

“Well, we know how Sheila’s guys found Walter’s
place—my phone. They couldn’t take us there, so they followed us to BART. All the Albanians had to do was watch what the Calaveras security team did, knowing it would lead them to you.”

Carina shivered, thinking of the two sets of trained killers following them. For a moment she despaired, realizing what an amateur she was, thinking she could go up against professionals.

“Why didn’t they just take us back at Walter’s apartment? When we came out? We couldn’t have made it easier for them.…”

“I bet they tried. Car, the way Walter’s got it set up, there’s no way they could have gotten in …”

“But wouldn’t we have heard them?”

“No way. He’s got that door reinforced, and I’m sure it triggered some sort of alarm, but whatever it was, either Walter disabled it or we missed it somehow. Anyway, once they figured out what they were dealing with, they probably figured it was better to follow us and see where we went, rather than take us right away. After all, we’d already proved to them that we weren’t hard to keep tabs on.”

“So we managed to ditch the Calaveras guys, but not the Albanians. With Sheila’s guys out of the way, they didn’t have to be so careful—and we led them straight to my mom,” Carina said, disgusted. “I can’t believe we made it so easy! If we hadn’t managed to get out of there …”

“They’d have the password generator.”

“I can’t believe I got you into all of this,” Carina said, her voice breaking. “Do you realize how many times now I’ve almost gotten you killed?”

“Yeah, I’m keeping track. You owe me half a dozen Double-Doubles. At least.”