The Vault (A Farm Novel) (18 page)

CARTER

“We need to get the doctor. Fast.”

That drama teacher at Dawn’s high school really deserved, like, a medal or something, because when she said it, it convinced even me.

The clinic had been empty when we arrived. I guess the whole compound kept vampire hours, which meant even though it was early afternoon, it was essentially the middle of the night. Surely there was always someone on staff to monitor Workman, but Marek led us past the hall that led to Workman’s room, down a short hall, and into a room set up like an ICU, with ten hospital beds, curtains separating each one.

Darren “came to” as they laid him on one of the beds. He groaned and pretended it was a struggle just to bring his hand to his head. At least I hoped he was pretending. Jesus, I’d barely hit the guy. Right?

Dawn looked at Marek’s twin. “There is a doctor, right?”

The twin looked blankly at Marek, who answered. “Sure, but she’s off shift now. She won’t be here for another eight hours.”

Dawn made a sweeping gesture toward me. “At which point, he could be dead. You need to go wake her up now.”

Clearly, Dawn was trying to get rid of one of the guards, since it would be much easier to take them out one at a time. I approved of the idea, but hoped like hell that it didn’t depend on my convincing them I was near death, since I hadn’t attended the Elderton High School drama program and couldn’t act for shit. The best I could do was hope some of my nerves would push Marek over the edge.

“He looks fine,” Marek pointed out.

“Which is a classic symptom of this kind of head injury.” She crossed to where I stood and pushed my hair back at my temple. “Look at this.”

“He doesn’t even have a bump,” Marek observed, sounding suspicious.

“Exactly. All the swelling from his head injury is internal. He could be in serious trouble and you’re standing here debating it.”

Finally Marek nodded to the other guy. “Go wake Dr. Dudzinski.”

As soon as he was gone, Dawn lit into Marek again. “Okay, tell me where the supply of meds is.” When he looked like he was going to argue, she cut him off. “Look, my brother is in pain. I’m going to go find something to help him.”

“I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”

“Either you can worry about whether or not I’m going to try to escape—which would mean leaving my guy and my brother behind—or you could tell me where the meds are so I can get my ass back here before anyone realizes I’m gone.”

Jesus. Dawn was like a drill sergeant when she got going. It was hard not to follow her orders. Marek just pointed toward a door at the back of the room.

“Take a left through there and then another left. That’s the lab. The meds are kept in the fridge.”

“Thank you.”

She headed for the door, but stopped when Marek said, “But the fridge has a lock on it. You can’t get in there without a level-three passkey.”

But Dawn didn’t panic. She just asked Marek flatly, “Well? Do you have a level-three passkey?”

He fidgeted, glancing in my direction.

I tried to look beaten and pathetic. It wasn’t hard.

“Then get over here,” she ordered, taking his lack of answer as a yes.

Which it must have been, because he followed Dawn meekly through the back doorway.

The second it closed, Darren started to sit up. Shit.

If he sat up and started talking to me, then whoever might or might not be watching down in security would realize he wasn’t hurt as badly as he’d pretended.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said. Then for the sake of the cameras, I added, “I kicked your ass once today. Don’t make me do it again.”

Darren made a sound like a strangled laugh. “You kicked my ass? That’s not how I remember it.”

“Really? You want an instant replay?”

Before he could answer, the door opened again and Marek and Dawn came back in. She’d pulled on latex gloves and held a nasty-looking syringe, presumably full of painkillers for Darren.

Had she been able to lift the cure while she was at it? She definitely seemed to have a plan here. And I didn’t want to get in the way. At this point, all I could do was be ready.

She walked over to Darren, set the syringe on the table beside the bed, and looked down at her brother. She brushed his hair tenderly away from his face. “How are you feeling?”

He groaned dramatically.

“I’m going to give you a shot of Menderall. It’ll help with the pain and whatever swelling might be causing it.” Then she looked up at Marek. “I need you here. You have to hold down his shoulders in case it causes a seizure.”

Marek hesitated again.

“Get your ass over here. We don’t have time for this!”

Again, Marek hopped to it. I guess he was used to following orders. She showed him how to brace his hands on both of Darren’s shoulders.

“You have to really lean into it.”

He looked down at Darren and then puffed out his chest. “I think I can hold down one kid.”

“If he seizes, he’ll be much stronger than he looks now. Have you ever seen someone on meth? It’ll be like that.”

Marek blinked and then leaned into it.

And the second Marek’s neck was exposed, Dawn jabbed the syringe into it and shot him full of Menderall.

He reared back like a rhino hit with a tranquilizer dart. His arm shot out and he knocked Dawn clear off her feet. She flew maybe five feet through the air right into a cart of medical supplies before crumpling to the ground. The needle was still sticking out of Marek’s neck and he ripped it out. A sharp splash of blood sputtered from the wound. He flung the syringe aside and clapped a hand over his neck, before ducking his head and charging at Dawn where she lay on the floor.

Darren and I both launched ourselves at him. I jumped right onto his back like a wrestler, wedging my forearm into his windpipe. Darren threw himself at Marek’s knees. The combined force of us brought the guy down. And then, a second after we all landed sprawled on the floor, Marek went limp.

I scrambled back, trying to untangle myself and Darren from Marek’s form, rolling Marek over in the process. His eyes were still open, his expression vacant. Darren and I both reached Dawn at the same time, just as she was struggling to sit up. Her hand was pressed to the side of her head and she’d gone pale.

“Jesus, are you okay?” I asked.

“Dawn? Say something!” Darren demanded.

Her eyelashes fluttered for a moment, like she couldn’t make herself keep her eyes open. Then she pushed herself to her feet, swaying slightly. “Yeah. I’m fine.” She looked around the room, her lips twisting a little when she saw Marek. “That guy was like a bull moose.”

“How long will the Menderall keep him out?” I asked.

“Come on,
Mend-
er-
all
? I made that up.”

“Then what’d you shoot him with?” Darren asked.

“Ketamine.” She swayed again a little, but fought through it. “I gave him enough to knock him out. We don’t have to worry about him. Not for a while anyway. It’s the old-school version of what’s in the tranq darts.”

“No, all we have to worry about is whether or not someone is watching the video feed.”

“And Dr. Dudzinski coming back.”

“Right. So we’ve got maybe ten minutes to get out of here.” I eyed Dawn. “You going to be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.” But she looked more unsure than she sounded.

“Okay,” I said, despite the aches in my side. I was a lot less worried about me than I was about Dawn. Marek had sent her flying. “Come on, get his passkey. We still have to go back and get the cure. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Before I even finished the thought, Darren had rifled through Marek’s pants and come up with the passkey. It was clipped to his pants by some kind of security wire.

“Hang on,” I said, digging through one of the cabinets until I found a pair of scissors. Which couldn’t cut through the wire. “What is this stuff?”

Darren ran his thumb along it. “Some kind of reinforced cording. And the clip seems embedded in his jeans. So it’s impossible to get off.” He looked up at me. “What do we do? Drag him with us?”

“How far are we from the lab?” I asked Dawn. Between the three of us, we now all had injuries. “I don’t want to be dragging around two-hundred-plus pounds of deadweight unless we’re out of options.”

Dawn just rolled her eyes. “Well, unless his pants are also made of reinforced steel, I’d just use the scissors to cut the clip off his jeans.”

Maybe two minutes later, Dawn slid the passkey through the lock on the fridge.

“Okay,” Darren said. “Let’s grab the cure and go.”

I would have agreed. Except I was right behind Dawn when she swung open the door on the fridge.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Dawn said.

“Why?” Darren asked.

Dawn stepped back to show him the contents. The fridge contained rack after rack of tiny glass vials. There were hundreds. Maybe thousands of them.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

“What?” Darren asked. “So we just take them all. We sort them out later. So what?”

“We can’t take them all,” I said.

“This is the compound’s entire supply of meds,” Dawn said. “Vaccines, insulin, painkillers. Whatever they need, it’s here. If we take it, people could die.”

And I hadn’t even thought of that. “Besides,” I added. “If we take everything we see, we won’t know until we sort it all out whether we actually got the cure. I’m not leaving until we know we have it.” Still, in my mind, a clock was ticking. If we were lucky, we had eight minutes left before security came through the door. They wouldn’t kill me, because I was too valuable. And maybe they wouldn’t kill Dawn and Darren right away. Maybe Sabrina would just torture them to keep me in line.

I couldn’t think about that. I couldn’t let my fear win out, because panicking wouldn’t get the job done.

“Okay,” I said, forcing myself to think through it. “We pull out all the trays and start looking through the vials. Hopefully it’ll be labeled with the words ‘Miracle Cure’ or something. Basically look for anything at all that’s not labeled with a name you recognize.”

We moved quickly after that. Dawn had been right about the medications. There was tons of insulin, and vaccines for all the major diseases and several I hadn’t ever heard of. When I found a tray of vials labeled “EN371—VAC,” I set them aside. There were maybe twenty vials altogether. This was probably the same vaccine Roberto had at El Corazon. It wouldn’t cure Lily, but having it for the people at Base Camp and at the Farm in San Angelo would help. Except how the hell would I decide who to give it to?

“Darren, leave this to us. Go see if you can find a cooler. We’ll need something to transport these in. There’s got to be one somewhere in this lab.”

Dawn glanced over at the tray of vials I’d set aside. All she did was raise an eyebrow.

“It’s a vaccine. For the Tick virus. Only twenty samples, but—” I shrugged. “I don’t know how we’ll decide who gets the vaccine.”

“Forget giving it to anyone. If it works, we need to replicate it.”

“Can you do it?”

“Me, personally? No. But there’s got to be someone out there who can.”

It wasn’t a solution, but it was a step. Yeah, maybe being an
abductura
didn’t mean I had to do everything alone. Maybe it wasn’t my job to make every decision.

I went back to the fridge for another tray of vials. When I came back, I noticed Dawn frowning at one of the small glass tubes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Nothing I recognize.”

She handed me the sample. I had to squint to read the printing on the label.

It read simply: “NT QUAR 371X.”

There were three vials of it.

“Do you recognize it?” she asked.

“No.”

Darren had come back carrying a pair of Styrofoam coolers. “You found it? Cool!”

“No,” I pointed out. “We didn’t find it. We don’t know the working name of the cure. Maybe this is it. Maybe not.” I pointed to the tray, where all the vials were grouped by threes. I picked up another. “NT QUAR 371T.” “NT QUAR 371S.” “NT QUAR 371W.”

I carefully slid the vial I held back into its empty slot, even though I was so frustrated I wanted to sweep my arm over the table and knock all of them off.

This was impossible. Thousands of vials. Any of them could be it. Or maybe none of them were. And we were running out of time.

“We’re screwed,” I muttered.

“No,” Dawn said. “These are all variations of the same thing, right? You said Sabrina’s doctors were trying to re-create the cure and hadn’t yet. These are their attempts.” She ran a fingertip along the tops of the vials. “Look, here’s 371N. Here’s 371P. All the way down to
X
, the first one I found. All we have to do is find the one without a letter.”

Darren was back at the fridge pulling out more trays before she even finished talking. Almost immediately he held up a vial. “Got it.”

Dawn and I both rushed over. “We can’t know for sure—” I started to say, but before I could, Dawn took one of the tubes.

“Look! Look at the label. It’s from a different printer!”

“How can you tell?” Darren asked.

“No. She’s right.” All the lettered variations of 371 were labeled with plain white stickers, bare except for the black type. This label had a pale orange border. Although the font was similar, there was a tiny logo before the name NT QUAR 371. A logo that looked like a double helix flowing through a
G
. “This is Genexome’s logo. This is the sample from Genexome. This is it.”

And for the first time since Lily had been attacked in that gas station in Sweetwater, I felt hope.

CARTER

“This is easy,” Darren muttered with a grim finality.

Darren—the eternal optimist, the most cheerful guy I knew—did not sound pleased about this.

And yeah, he was way more optimistic than I was.

We had made it out of the lab without seeing any of Smart Com’s security staff. In the time it took us to pack up the cooler with ice, the cure, and the vaccine, Marek had just sat there, like a drooling happy baby. His twin hadn’t shown up with Dr. Dudzinski. No one from security had come running. Apparently, we hadn’t set off any alarms. Raised any flags. In fact, we’d strolled out of Building C without even the gardener giving us a curious glance.

Now, true, while Dawn and Darren had packed the cooler, I’d taken Marek’s uniform—thank God for heavy doses of ketamine. The pants were cuffed because they were too long and folded over at the waist since Darren and I had mutilated them to get the clip off. I’d even found a stock of tranq rifles. Once I pulled on his jacket, I almost looked like I was one of the guards. As long as no one looked too closely.

But that was the problem. Sabrina and all of her top people knew we were here. Even if she thought she’d won me over, she would be cautious. Even though it had been less than twenty minutes since we’d taken out Marek, someone should have found him by now.

“This whole damn compound should be looking for us,” I muttered, scanning the compound from my spot by the rear of the Hummer. “Someone should have seen us by now.”

“You’re complaining no one’s shooting at us?”

“Not complaining. Just wondering what angle she’s working.”

“Okay, Sally Sunshine, you worry about Sabrina’s motives. We’ll worry about finding a ride.” Dawn kicked her foot toward Darren. “How’s that lock coming?”

“Almost,” he muttered just before the lock popped on one of the Smart Com Hummers. He swung the door open and sketched an elegant bow. “M’lady, your chariot awaits.”

Dawn smirked. “If the battery isn’t dead.”

“And if it has gas,” Darren added.

“And if we can hot-wire it.”

“And here you were worried this was going to be too easy.”

Dawn slid into the driver’s seat and got to work on the steering column. For two kids from what I gathered was a very conservative family, Dawn and Darren had mad skills when it came to car theft.

Of course, everyone I knew now had stolen an abandoned car at least once. The people who hadn’t learned those skills hadn’t survived long on the outside. There were tricks to stealing a car. Anything manufactured in the past decade was a lot harder to hot-wire. Anything that had been sitting too long, the battery would be dead. Hopefully, stealing one of the Hummers meant we wouldn’t have to worry about the battery—there were Hummers all over the campus, like Sabrina had given them out as Christmas bonuses—but all the Hummers were newer models and therefore harder to hot-wire.

While Dawn was still trying to pop the key assembly out of the steering column, Darren reached past her to snag the keys out of the cubby in the door. He held them up for her. “That was easy,” he said again.

The perfect escape vehicle? Gassed up and ready to go? It was like the Smart Com valet service had parked it there for us.

Dawn looked up at me. “You want to drive?”

“Yeah.” She scooted over and I slid into the driver’s seat. I scanned the parking lot. Cars were dotted around, but there were plenty of empty spaces. In the Before, Smart Com had employed thousands of people and its parking lot would have put Disneyland to shame. At the far end of the lot, there was the standard triple row of chain-link fences topped with razor wire. “Make sure your buckles are on.”

“Why?” Darren asked, sticking his head forward between my seat and Dawn’s.

She gave his head a light slap. “Why do you think, doofus?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

I ignored their bickering, but kept an eye out for any sign that the alarm had been raised. The fact that I didn’t see anything wasn’t particularly comforting. I circled back around to the front of the parking lot, giving myself as much room as possible between the car and the fence line.

“You buckled yet?”

“Yep,” Dawn said.

Darren grumbled under his breath and then I heard a click. And then I floored it.

The tires squealed against the pavement as the engine strained to keep up. Still, by the time we reached the fence, we were going over a hundred.

“Whoa!” Darren yelped from the backseat. “You’re not going to—”

The Hummer slammed into the fence. And then the next. And the next. The sound of crunching metal and the twang of snapping wires filled the air. One whole panel of fencing broke free and molded itself around the nose of the Hummer. The SUV bounced over the curb on the road just beyond the parking lot. We skidded to a stop in the middle of the deserted road.

In the rearview mirror, I could see Smart Com’s cluster of buildings. The lights flickered and went out. Then, a second later, surged back on. I didn’t really believe our escape had gone unnoticed, but now? There was no damn way they’d missed this.

“Holy crap!” Darren said from the backseat, his voice a mixture of elation and terror.

I slammed the Hummer into reverse and tried to back out of the fencing clinging to the nose. Looking over my shoulder, I drove backward, again with the pedal all the way to the floor. The roar of metal grating across the ground blocked out whatever obscenities Darren was yelling at me. I heard more wrenching metal and felt the wheel jerk in my hand as the fencing pulled free.

“You’re good. That’s it,” Dawn said.

I slowed and only then did I turn around. The crumpled fence lay in the middle of the road. I glanced back at Smart Com, where the lights were still flickering. A siren was going off somewhere. I squelched the sick feeling of guilt in my gut.

Sabrina might be a monster, but there were plenty of humans living here who weren’t. Yeah, I’d just gotten my people out, but I’d endangered a whole hell of a lot of other people to do it. Dusk was maybe five hours away. I just prayed they’d get the fences back in place by then. And that we wouldn’t be here to see it.

I put the Hummer back in gear and floored it again, swerving to miss the fence.

I took the first turn and just kept driving.

“Why are we alive?” Darren asked from the backseat.

Dawn twisted to glare at him. “What?”

“Those fences were electrified. Why didn’t they toast us?”

“Rubber tires,” Dawn snipped. “Didn’t you pay attention in science? No, wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”

“When we stop the car,” I said, “make sure you jump free of it when we get out. I don’t know how long the car will hold a charge, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“When are we going to stop?” Dawn asked.

“Not until we have to.”