After (21 page)

“She? What if it's a boy? You think they won't do to him what they've done to Jake and the others? Or my little girl—what if the men don't wait until she's old enough?

What if they don't feel like lining up single file and waiting year after year after year for their turn with her to come?”

“Eva. I'll keep your children safe, just as I've kept you safe.”

“And what? You're not mortal? God, Avery, what if something happens to you?

Has that even occurred to you?”

“So. You came up with this...paternal triumvirate to watch over your child.”

“Yes.”

“And John. He went along with it. Helped you to fuck Riggs. The way he helped you get to me.”

“Yes.”

“I misjudged him,” he says after a still quiet. “It was careless of me, given what I know him to be capable of.”

Smith lets out a defeated sigh. “Damn it, Eva. I thought you understood. I've thought all this through very carefully, with a view, in particular, to ensuring your relative safety. I know it's not ideal, but—God, Eva—under the circumstances, can you really say your...marriage to John is too cruel a fate? You really have no idea the damage you've done, playing these games of yours.”

Eva keeps her eyes fixed on Smith's, and when she speaks again her voice is steel. “Try to grasp, Smith, that you are not the only person left on our decimated world who's capable of thinking about things beyond their own immediate happiness or pain.”

Smith is rigid and silent.

“As for games, that's your forte, not mine. Believe me,” her voice pitches upward and her mouth twists, ”the steps I've taken, I've forced myself to go through, even when just the idea of it—never mind actually doing it—made me sick.”

Smith's composed expression slips, and for a moment he looks sad, which is rare, but also hurt, which as far as Eva has seen, could be a first. Smith turns his back on Eva and stares out the window. Dark, pregnant clouds are rolling in from the east.

“You're a clever girl, Eva,” he says without turning to face her. “You made strategic choices.”

“Yes.”

“Riggs. Me.”

When he turns to face Eva, Smith's expression is as it always is. Except shattered, somehow. His eyes are fixed on her as if he were training a laser sight at the center of her forehead. Like a weapon. Something he will use to obliterate her.

Unhurried but determined, like a big cat stalking but not yet chasing its prey, Smith circles the end of the bed, closing the distance between them step by step until his body is almost touching hers.

“Eva,” he says when he's cuffed her arms in his rigid grasp, in a voice low and soft but threatening, like a growl, “you're trembling. What do you think—that I'm going to hit you?”

“No, Avery.” She keeps her face composed, but her voice is always first to betray her.

“Slit your throat, maybe?”

This actually makes her half smile. “No.”

Maybe the smile pisses him off. Smith shoves Eva back against the wall and pins her there.

“No,” he echoes, letting his mask slip away for a moment, letting Eva see some strong feeling distort his face.

Tears are reddening and glossing his eyes and he is trembling, almost shaking as his claws dig deeper into the thin flesh of Eva's arms.

“No,” he says again, “I suppose what you fear is that I've come here to fuck you.

To kiss you and touch you, as you've let me do before. And now that you've had enough sperm donations, and my seed isn't needed, any longer, to help your plan along, the thought of being touched by me makes you sick. Makes you shake this way and look at me with that expression of...revulsion.”

As if they are mirror images of one another, their first tears slip down their cheeks in near perfect sync.

“What I'm afraid of, Avery, is that I'm about to find out that I was very wrong about you.”

His claws abandon her arms, leaving behind pale yellow imprints as he grabs two fistfuls of her hair and crushes her between his body and the wall behind her. Pressing his wet cheek to hers he hisses, “You're afraid I'm about to rape you?”

She says nothing. Fat tears keep streaking down her cheeks.

“No, Eva. I'm not going to knock you down, hold you down. Wrench your knees open...” Smith is shaking, crying, forcing his words out, syllable by syllable through clenched teeth. “Just touching you this much,” he tears his fingers from her hair,

“sickens me, now that I know.”

“Now that you know what?” she asks, her sudden calm almost spooky beside Smith's agony of emotion.

“Now that I know you...you feel nothing for me. That you never felt anything for me. Except maybe hate. Contempt.”

“You seem awfully sure of this theory of yours. This theory you haven't tested.”

“I don't need to perform laboratory experiments. All I had to do was review the evidence.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as that insane plan you hatched out behind my back. A plan in which I see I play the same role as Riggs.”

“Avery...” she says, warmth flooding her voice, her gaze.

“Don't call me that, anymore. Even my name sounds like a lie on your lips.”

Smith tears himself from her and leaves, straightening and slowing himself before opening the door, which he closes and locks with quiet calm.

* * * *

“What do you think?” she asks John when she's told him about Smith's visit.

“I think he's hurt.”

“Are you hurt?” she asks. “Have I hurt you?”

“No, Eva. You've never hurt me.” He gives her a weak smile, and kisses her forehead. “But you trusted me. You brought me on board. But you played Smith.”

“More than he played me?”

“No.”

“Besides. That's not really the difference. Is it?”

“Between me and Smith? No.”

“What do you think he'll do now?” she asks.

“Honestly, I don't know.”

They are quiet together for a long time.

“John?”

“Yeah.”

“What did Smith mean? What he knew you were capable of?”

Her question hits him, shrinks him.

“I don't know.” John tips back against the wall, hugging himself, and with obvious effort, meets her eyes. “He probably means Amy and Juliette,” he says, his voice frail and hollow. Eva steps near, but doesn't touch him because when she tries, he retreats further against the wall, further into himself, shrinking. His mouth opens, but for a long time no words come out.

“Amy was a med student,” John finally says, his body trembling, barely vibrating, like it is resisting the pull of the past, anchoring him there in Eva's room. “She was doing her residency at Grady. When the virus broke out, it didn't take them—the medical community—long to figure out what it was. A chimera. A bio weapon. A man-made virus with properties of smallpox and ebola.”

“Yeah,” Eva says. The news had been everywhere for twenty-four days.

“There'd been some work done, going back decades, working up vaccines against weapons like that. There wasn't nearly enough to inoculate the general population, but at Amy's hospital they worked up batches of the vaccine as quickly as they could. And I guess it's the usual thing, staff and their families got that chance that most people didn't get. Amy, Juliette, me, we all got the vaccine.”

John is silent again for a long time, his red eyes filling with tears, his vibrating body beginning to shake.

“For a while, seventeen days, we thought we were okay. I mean, the world was coming apart all around us. But we'd boarded up the house; we had food. We didn't seem to be getting sick. We promised each other the virus would run its course, and we'd find the other survivors—even if it was just half the neighborhood—and we'd bury the dead and put out the fires and put the world back together again. But then—“

John's voice cracks. He starts again.

“But then Amy got sick. All the early symptoms. And then Juliette. The disease went slower, with them, probably because of the vaccine. But by then we knew what would happen. Weeks of it on the news, and no one who'd gotten sick had survived. It was always the same. Pain, then...horror. Then death.

“We'd promised each other, Amy and me, that if we got sick, we'd end it before it got bad. Before the bleeding and the madness. Amy'd made up three injections. But we'd talked about it like it would be all of us. The three of us together. Dying that way, it hadn't sounded so bad.

“Juliette got sick after Amy, but the disease worked faster on her. It was just three days, and we could see the bruises all over. And she was crying more than usual. We knew we couldn't wait. That it was just going to get worse for her. And Amy—“

John's words come out torn and wet.

“She didn't want to...to stay, after Juliette. So we huddled together, the three of us in our bed. Juliette in Amy's arms, Amy in mine. Amy was going to give Juliette the injection, and then herself. But in the end, she couldn't. Couldn't kill her little girl.

“So I did it. Injected Juliette. And after she was gone, gave Amy her injection.”

* * * *

Deep in the dark of the storming night, Eva and John sleep, curled up in the warmth of each other's bodies.

By the time the ruckus of the soldiers entering wakes Eva and John, the men are on them. Flashlight beams cut through the night, blinding the couple. Men seize them, drag them naked from their bed.

“John,” Eva says just below a shout, “Right now. Let go. You have to let go of me.”

He lets go. Lights flick on. Two masked soldiers aim their weapons at John and back him into a corner. He watches, taut, crouched, ready to spring as four more masked soldiers get Eva up against the wall. Eva and John look frantically around the room. Then at each other.

Smith is not there.

Pinned behind the muzzles of two riffles, John watches the soldiers bind Eva's wrists behind her back, watches them stuff black cloth into her mouth, then tie a gag between her teeth and pull a black hood over her head and drag her away.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Eva has stopped struggling against the plastic cuffs locking her wrists to the iron bars at the head of the narrow bed. For hours she has been sitting still, eyes open, breathing in a steady, even rhythm. It's getting light.

When there's the sound of a key scraping into a lock, though, she stiffens and her breathing quickens.

The door opens. A man Eva doesn't know enters. Tall. Muscular. Dark hair. Dark eyes.

The soldier closes the door behind him, and Eva's breathing goes frantic. Maybe without knowing it, she tugs uselessly against the plastic cuffs again.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he says in a quiet voice.

He has not come any closer to her since shutting the door.

“The Major sent me to check on you.”

Eva's rigid, trembling body stills, softens. Little by little, her panting slows and deepens.

“I can get you some water, if you're thirsty.” Eva is silent. The soldier goes behind the canvas drape to the right of the door, and there's a sound of water gushing from a tap. He emerges with a plastic cup. As he approaches, Eva locks eyes with him. She is shaking. “You must be thirsty,” he says, and extends the hand with the cup of water.

Eva leans forward and drains the cup the soldier puts to her lips.

“More?” he asks.

“No. Thank you.”

Her body and her voice are taut.

“If you need to,” the soldier pauses to choose his words, “use the can,” is the phrase he settles on, “I can let you up for a couple minutes.”

Eva looks toward the canvas drape.

“No. I'm good.”

“Sure? I won't be back for two hours.”

“I'm sure.”

“Later, I'll have some food for you.”

The soldier goes toward the door.

“Diego?” she breathes.

He turns. Smiles.

“That was dumb of me, not to introduce myself,” he says. “This is strange. Guess I'm nervous.” Then, an afterthought, “How'd you know my name?”

“This—Smith ordered it?”

“Yes.”

Tears run down Eva's face, but she doesn't seem to know she's crying.

In a quiet, nearly normal voice, she says, “John's told me about you. All of you.

You and Evan are the only ones Smith would let near me. Unless he wanted to...” she trails off.

Diego comes near, hesitates, then sits on the edge of the bed.

“Major Smith doesn't want you hurt.”

“What about John?”

“He's all right.”

“How do you know?” she asks, her walls crumbling.

“It was me and Evan on John, when we went in. Smith wouldn't have let anyone else near him.”

“The way they took me out. He'll think...he'll think...”

Eva is falling apart, tears pouring through her shattering dam.

“Eva,” Diego tries to get through the veil of tears washing her away. “Eva. He knows. John knows you're all right.”

“How?”

“Evan snuck him a note.”

Eva stares at Diego with red, tear-bleared eyes.

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure. He knows.”

“Smith. Did he say how long I'd be here?”

“No.”

“Can you try to see John?”

“Sure. I'll try to see him.”

“If you do, tell him I'm okay. I'm not hurt. And tell him it's you, checking on me.

That I'm not scared, now.”

* * * *

“What's happening to her?”

“The same thing that's happening to you. She's getting a little taste of anarchy. Of what she can expect if she won't cooperate to ensure I can maintain order, here.”

“That didn't look like anarchy, Smith. This is a goddamned police state. Your goons come in here and carry out your orders like fucking brown shirts.”

Smith smiles.

“Tell me she's okay.”

“That depends on you, John.”

“Tell me she's okay,” John's voice shoots up. He is shaking and ropey veins bulge from his neck.

Smith relents. “No one's hurt her.”

John's rigid body sags. A heavy silence hangs between the two men in that small room.

“I'm surprised you'd come in here alone,” John finally says, not like a threat. Like a statement of plain fact.

“Without Eva? Or without men?”

“One or the other.”

“I'm safe with you, John. With you locked in here, who would keep Eva safe if something happened to me?”