Eat the Ones You Love (The Thirteen Book 2) (10 page)

“He said he’s going to kill my family,” said Jenny. She frowned. “I have a sister. I think.”

“Sister?” said Trix. “Why the fuck didn’t you say so?”

Jenny shrugged. “I didn’t know. Zeke said it…before they took him. And Faron said it, too. He said he was going to kill her. And my father. He said he was going to kill my father.”

“I thought he was dead,” said Trix.

“I thought he was, too,” said Jenny.
 

“Faron’s a fucking liar.”

“Yeah,” said Jenny.
 

 
“How do we find Zeke?” Trix said. “I bet the traitor knows.”
 

“Benji’s not a traitor,” said Jenny. She looked at the ceiling. “He knows where Faron went, he says. At least he thinks he knows. If they even told him the truth.”

“Why would they lie to him and no one else?” said Trix.

“I’m not sure Faron shared the entire plan with anyone.” Jenny looked at the crusted blood on the floor. “Benji says they're in D.C. This…I don’t know what to fucking call it. He calls it the Group.”

“Seriously? D.C.?” said Trix. “That’s just fucking hilarious.”

“They’ve got some…operation,” said Jenny. “From what Benji told me, they had a big medical military industrial project bullshit going on there. They were going to cure this thing.”

“How?” said Trix.

Jenny met her eyes. “With me. With us. All of us. He doesn’t know how.”

“They got Sully to spread the virus?”

“Yeah,” said Jenny. “Faron knew a lot about what happened with Sully.”

“So where do we go? D.C.?”

“No, let's stick to the original plan,” Jenny said. She closed her eyes. “We have to talk to Anna Hawkins.”

“The bitch-mother?”

“Yeah,” said Jenny. “But not to kill her. At least until she tells us what she knows.”

Trix nodded. “Okay then. Abel said New York City, right?”

“Yep.”

“Then we’re going to fucking New York City.”

“It’s a big city.”

“Not anymore.”

Jenny sighed. “The whole world got smaller. But it didn’t get any easier.”

“Cry me a fucking river,” said Trix. “Hey, cheerleader.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s Casey’s sister too, right?”

Jenny flinched at her brother’s name but nodded.

“Then we’re going to fucking save her, too. Her and Zeke. God help anyone who gets in our fucking way.” Trix nodded toward the door. “What are we going to do about him?”

“Benji?” said Jenny. “He comes with us.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s one of us,” said Jenny. “And he didn’t know.”

“He
says
he didn’t know,” said Trix. “He had a fucking machine gun, Jen.”

“Well, no one has one now,” said Jenny.

“Except the people who want to kill us.”

“We need help, Trix,” said Jenny, not looking away from her glare. “And he needs us. I can’t leave any more of us behind. I can’t leave him alone.”

“Yeah,” said Trix. “I know.” Trix reached out and touched Jenny’s arm briefly, before pulling her hand away like she'd been burned.

“I’m going to find your idiot boyfriend and tell him we’re going to town,” Trix said.

“Okay, Trix.”

She stopped at the door. Without looking at Jenny she said, “You really think you have a sister?”

“I don’t know,” said Jenny. “Maybe. My parents weren’t exactly the Brady Bunch.”

Trix snorted. “They turned you into a cyborg, cheerleader. Your parents were the fucking Manson Family.”

Jenny was relieved that there was no one outside the lab. She walked through, her boots crunching on glass. The floor wasn’t sticky with blood anymore, but she knew it was there, even in the dark. She peeked around the corner into the hall. She heard voices in the main living area. Trix was yelling; Declan snapped back at her. Jenny eased quietly down the hall. It wasn’t that she was being secretive, she just didn’t want anyone else there. It felt too private.

Casey said their mother disappeared one night. He woke up and she was gone. No tire tracks or anything. Just gone. Considering that a paramilitary squadron had just descended on them from a helicopter, Jenny was sure they didn’t let poor Anna Hawkins take much with her. She looked at the five doors in the hall. Casey’s room was the closest. Jenny was positive that her sweet mother would want to be as far from her children as possible.

“Personal space, darling,” Jenny remembered her mother saying to her. It was her favorite thing to say before the Collapse. And then her favorite saying was, “This is going to save the world.” The irony was not lost on Jenny that it became her own mantra for a while, too. She turned the doorknob quietly and slowly eased it open. She closed it behind her and pressed the lock. Bracing herself, she turned on the light.

“Jesus Christ, really?” Jenny muttered.
 

The room had nothing. It was tidy. The bed was made. Nothing was on the nightstand or the bookshelf. It was perfectly dusted.
 

“Fuck,” Jenny said. She narrowed her eyes as she remembered the lab in Chicago, hidden away behind a shelf. She’d found some papers hidden away. Whoever cleared her mother out — if in fact she didn't run away — would not have known about Anna’s hidey-holes. This room was sanitized. There was nothing of her mother’s sparse personality. She expected it to smell of rosewater and sandalwood soap. She expected sketches of scientific formulas hanging on the walls, as her mother was wont to do. Anna had once taken a permanent marker to a big bay window in their old house when an idea struck her.

“There has to be something here,” Jenny whispered. “This can’t be all. This can’t be all you fucking left me, you selfish bitch.” She wasn’t going to cry. She was not going to let her mother hurt her one last time. Jenny would do the hurting. She would find her and…

Jenny wiped the wetness from her face. It was stupid to be sad about mothers and family and being unloved. It was fucking idiotic to let it get to her, she knew. Who the fuck cared if she was abused? Who cared if her mother didn't love her and her father left her? It was the end of the world. It didn't matter anymore. But it did. It mattered to her.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” Jenny said to the empty room. It smelled like bleach near the floor. “You knew what he was doing. Why didn’t you stop him? He was your fucking father, my grandfather. WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU STOP HIM?” She stopped crying then. Because she realized why. Once her mother had a theory, she never gave up. Jenny never understood the things her parents talked about. And when she got older, she purposely paid no attention. She made sure she failed her science class in Junior High. But her mother hadn’t even noticed. But the thing was, no one told Anna Hawkins what to do. No one told her that her theories wouldn’t work. Even if the house was burning down around her, Anna Hawkins would never stop working. She would wrestle the dry erase marker out of the fireman's hand before she would give up.

“It was you,” Jenny realized, and she heard herself laugh. “It was all you. It wasn’t that evil old prick of a grandfather who orchestrated all this. It was you. Anna Hawkins, the fucking plague doctor.” Jenny stood up, feeling stronger than she had in weeks. She was starving, but she felt strong. The anger fueled her, gave her strength.
 

“FUCK YOU!” she screamed. She kicked the shoddy nightstand and it flew apart and clattered on the floor. She picked up the thin mattress and threw it against the wall. She realized she was screaming. People were pounding on the door. Voices yelled in the hall. She punched the metal wall and left a dent, blood dripping. She barely felt it and she knew she’d be healed by the time she left the room. This just made her angrier. She pulled the empty bookcase to the ground and it also broke apart as it hit the cement. She flipped the shoddy bed frame and, grabbing a piece of the wooden nightstand as a club, started hitting it. Her throat was raw from screaming.

“WE. WERE. CHILDREN!” she screamed. “We were fucking children!
Children. Children. Children.
” She shrieked the word over and over again as if she could make her mother listen, as though screaming hard enough would make her care. She started losing her voice, but still she kept saying it, hitting the bits of wood left from the bed frame, not satisfied until everything that had belonged to Anna Hawkins was turned to sawdust.
 

Then something caught her eye. Dust along the floor near the wall where the bed had been. A wadded up sheet on the floor looked as though it had fallen off the bed. Jenny stood up, dropping the board in her hands. Her palms were riddled with splinters of wood and raw from her rampage. She didn’t care. She kicked the sheet away.

“Conniving bitch,” Jenny said, her voice hoarse. “What were you hiding?”

Voices were yelling on the other side of the door, banging, rattling the knob. She ignored them.
 

“Jesus Christ, calm down,” said Casey, suddenly standing over her.

Jenny looked up at him. He was staring at the patch of concrete that had been under the sheet. She saw that a chunk had been chiseled out of the floor.
 

“Well?” said Casey. “Aren’t you going to find out what the evil hag was hiding?”

“You’re not real, are you?” said Jenny.

“Who fucking cares?” said Casey. “What the hell is in there?”

She didn’t startle as Declan kicked the door open and burst into the room, looking around feverishly. He looked right through Casey. Jenny turned and pried the stone loose with her fingers and lifted it out.
 

“Is everything okay?” Trix said. “Are you just going psycho in here or what? Who are you talking to?”

“No one,” said Jenny, lifting her mother’s secret out of the hole: One file in a manila envelope labeled
Patient Zero.
Jenny flipped it open to see her own face staring angrily back, eyes narrowed, sneering like an original punk rock queen. Hair hung in ropes and her face was dirty. Jenny smiled. Casey nodded.

“What the fuck is happening, Jen?” said Declan, staring at her like she’d gone crazy. Jenny looked back at him, seeming to notice him for the first time. Benji stood behind Declan and Trix, his face stitched together like a clown from a horror movie. Jenny held up the picture with her face. Her identical face.

“So you found your file?” said Declan.

“That’s not me,” said Jenny. “It’s my twin sister.”

“Took you long enough,” said Casey.
 

THIRTEEN

They sat around the kitchen counter and watched Jenny read the file. The forms never mentioned a name, but Jenny’s smile turned to a look of disgust as she read everything they did to her. When she finished she closed the stained manila folder. She stared at the coffee ring where someone had casually rested their cup. She wanted to start punching things all over again. She looked at Declan, who could barely move without sloshing against his stitches. He’d wrapped a sheet around himself over the duct tape as a cushion.

“She was the first,” said Jenny, her voice raspy from her screaming earlier. “Before me. They…” She swallowed, trying to find the right words. She hugged the file to her chest. “I don’t understand all of it. They cut open her head, I know that. Poked around. It says they cured her of epilepsy. They took out part of her brain.” Jenny looked around the room. A sofa. A kitchen. Electricity. Her mother had done these things to them and then been able to live a normal life. For how long? A month? A year? Would any length of time be okay?

Jenny swallowed hard and clenched her fists.
 

“They put — whatever this is that they put in me — they put it in her head. They called it a prototype. Mine is around my spine. Or replacing my spine. That’s why Sully cut me open. He wanted to see how it worked.”

“Jenny,” Declan said, taking a step toward her. But Jenny put up her hand, stopping him.

“Let me talk,” she said. “I think it’s time you knew just what they did to us.” Jenny hugged the file closer and looked away from all the faces. “They cut her open again and again. They used anesthesia, so that might have been easier for her. But they didn’t have the technology quite right. In the file, they didn’t know why it wasn’t working, why she wasn’t healing correctly. They must have fixed that because I heal real fucking good.” Jenny looked at her knuckles where she’d struck the wall. Not even a scar. Her chest wasn’t hurting either, except for the the occasional stretching of her heart as it regenerated.
 

“So she wasn’t healing,” Jenny said. “She had scarring everywhere, from what I understand. Which admittedly isn’t a whole fucking lot. Anyone speak scientist here?”

Benji looked away and Jenny saw his teeth clench together. She understood. Rayanne would know. If she hadn’t been taken away with the others.

“Yeah, well,” Jenny said. “Fuck that bitch, Benji.” Benji didn’t look back to meet her eyes.
 

“What happened to her?” said Trix. There was no trace of sarcasm in her voice and Jenny looked at her quickly. She’d been quiet the whole time and Jenny realized she was listening raptly to Jenny’s synopsis of Patient Zero. She was clasping and unclasping her hands. She had known Casey better than Jenny. Maybe even loved him. The file on her sister—Casey's sister—concerned Trix too. It concerned all of them. Jenny felt her guard go down a little, feeling her chest fill up with emotion.

“The study was terminated when my…when Patient Zero left,” Jenny said. “That’s what they said,
left the premises.
”

“She escaped,” Declan said. “Like you.”

“The date is right around the time my grandfather became interested in me,” said Jenny. “That’s when they started doing the same thing to me. Except…” She trailed off, feeling suddenly out of breath. She could still feel the scalpel cutting into her back, into muscle and bone. She could still feel the screams rising up in her throat.

“Except they didn’t use drugs with you, right?” said Trix. “Not after the first little bit.”

“Sully said I died,” Jenny said, trying to stand up straight, trying to look strong. “I died more than once, according to him. He told me when he was cutting me, sticking his fat, ugly fingers into my body. When he had me on that table, he told me all sorts of things.”