Forever Between (Between Life and Death Book 2) (11 page)

“I’ll be better in a few minutes. I just need to let this start working,” she says quietly, softly. Her speech doesn’t sound right to me. It’s nothing I can put my finger on, but she sounds a little less clear, her words enunciated less crisply. Liquid-sounding is the only real description I can come up with.

I bend down to squat next to where she lies on a mat of opened up cardboard boxes and a sleeping bag. This time of day everyone is outside that can be, either working in our gardens where the winter crops are starting to come in or watching the kids play. But for the last two days, Emily has been here in the darkest, coldest corner of the home warehouse, lying down and in pain.

She eases back down, her eyes closed and pain etching her features in stark lines. I touch her forehead with the back of my hand to see if she has a fever, but if anything, it feels too cool to me. Her eyelids squeeze shut more tightly at my touch, as if even that hurts her head.

“Emily, what’s wrong? Please tell me. Is this because of all the stuff you went through before?” I ask, wondering if the places where her skull was sawed into are what might be bothering her. She seemed fine when I first got here, but she did get headaches now and again. In the last few months, she’s grown pale—almost greenish underneath her sallow skin—and her headaches are growing worse. She’s fine most days, but even when she’s fine, there’s something off about her. She’s less energetic, but that’s not quite the right way to explain it either. Once in a while, when I see her walking, she looks like an old person, cautious and slow.

For a moment she says nothing, then she opens up one eye a little in the dim light and examines me, clearly considering if she should tell me something or not.

“Please,” I urge, and reach for her hand.

Her open eye fills with shiny tears, but her gaze remains steady on mine. “Sit down,” she says quietly.

I do and lean in close, blocking even more of the light that is coming in from the door on the far side of the warehouse. It takes her another minute to work up to whatever it is she’s going to say, but eventually, she disengages her hand from mine and levers herself up into a sitting position.

“I’m pretty sure my cancer is back,” she says. Her voice is flat and very matter-of-fact, like she’s telling me we can harvest spinach tomorrow, or that we need to arrange a day to collect firewood.

My mouth drops open and I stare at her. “What? How do you know? You can’t know.”

Her pale, cool hand lifts my chin up so that my mouth shuts and she smiles at me. It’s a sad smile and now that I’m looking at it differently, I notice that it’s crooked, one side of her face not as responsive as the other.

“Oh, no,” I whisper.

She nods and grips my hands in hers. Her smile goes wry, which looks more normal to me somehow, and she says, “Things haven’t exactly worked out like I had hoped. But…”

“But, what?” I prompt. Whatever she’s holding inside I want to know. She’s my lifeline. These other people still feel like strangers, or visitors. I mean, not exactly that, because I’ve known them all for a varying number of months now, but it’s not the same thing. Emily has never led me astray and we understand each other. She saved me, saved Jon.

“I’ve got a lot to tell you and I think this is probably the right time to do it,” Emily begins. “Make yourself useful and get me some hot tea. I’ll meet you up in our room.”

She says it gruffly, in that way she does when she’s messing with me. It’s her way of saying she cares. When she tries to get up, she wobbles terribly, like she’s going to take a header onto the concrete floor.

“Whoa!” I say, and brace her waist before she can fall. “Let me get you up to bed.”

She squeezes her eyes shut again and holds onto my arm, but then she pushes it away as she steadies. “No, I’m okay. I just get dizzy when I stand. I’m good now.” She detaches herself and leaves me standing there. I’m ready to grab her, but she seems fine again, if somewhat slow, as she crosses the space to the stairs.

She doesn’t turn around as she starts up, but she calls out, “That tea isn’t going to make itself, you know.”

*****

Emily sips the tea and gives a tiny, happy moan when she lowers the cup. “You used sugar,” she says, half-chastising me for using sugar and half-pleased that I did.

“I did. And you can’t put it back in the bin now, so you might as well enjoy it,” I say and sit down across from her on her pallet of cushions and blankets.

She eyes me, takes a deep breath, and says, “My head is a little better, so I’d better talk while the talking is good.”

I nod, toying with a thread coming loose from her top quilt. She brought back an absolutely enormous pile of these torn and worn blankets one day. She looked like one of those cartoons of people carrying ridiculous loads, or paintings of peasants carrying bundles of kindling taller than themselves on their backs. They all came from the vet hospital. This one still has dog hair threaded into the seams. I try to compare that grinning, strong girl to the increasingly frail one I see in front of me, and they just don’t marry up. I believe her now, about her cancer. And it’s devastating.

She pulls out a small black square of plastic from under her pillow and hands it to me. It’s heavy. It’s a hard drive. “What’s this for?”

“It’s part of what I want to tell you, but let me get it out my own way. Okay?” she asks, almost like she’s asking for me to forgive her for something I don’t yet know about.

“O-kay,” I answer, drawing out the word.

She takes a deep breath, presses her fingertips to one temple, then touches the hard drive. “I think that might have the cure—or one cure or a method to make a cure—on it. But I’m not sure. It could be nothing.”

At my gasp, my mouth halfway to launching an entirely unstoppable stream of questions at her, she holds up her hand for patience and I snap my jaws closed again. It takes effort to keep it closed and let her talk.

“I’m not sure, but my mom was working on it like a mad woman before she died. I know I told you she was working on computer stuff, but that’s not entirely true. She worked on what’s called Lean Medical Coding. It’s what they do for networking nanites for medical purposes. I don’t know much about it—I hate computer stuff—but she worked for the same people who made my nanites. And they made the nanites out there now, in the deaders and in-betweeners. With me so far?”

Again, I nod. My questions are gone, lost in confusion, but so far I get the drift. I clench the hard drive in my hands. “Go on,” I breathe.

“They did some kind of update. It was meant to help with persistence for people who carried permanent nanite loads for whatever condition, and to help First Responders nanites work better. It linked up the factory nanites and all sorts of stuff. But, clearly, that didn’t work out so well,” she says, her mouth twisted and bitter.

“Your mom did this?” I ask. I know it sounds like blame, and there’s no question there is a hint of accusation in my tone. Emily winces a little at it.

“No, she helped with the coding. She was not the asshat who decided veggie-heads everywhere should get the update. She wasn’t the one who sent the updates on regular airwaves, and she wasn’t one of the people out there that loaded themselves with every nanite they could get their hands on. There’s enough blame for everyone here.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I mean it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, and waves it all away. Her gaze falls to the drive again. “Anyway, my mom worked on something here almost every day while we hid away. I know she meant to go back, try to fix things, but it was too far to go with just the two of us. We waited for the military to come, but we waited too long. And she felt that she was missing something in her coding.”

She stops to sip more tea. I can see the memories of all of this in the flickering of expressions on her face. Her mom. I only knew she died, nothing more. This is something else altogether.

“Then, one day when I had a headache—but just a normal one, because I got dehydrated—she just sort of froze, and said, “Of course!” Then she ran off to her computer and didn’t talk for two days. When I finally got her to speak to me she said, “What’s the best control for a predator? Another predator!” I think that was the answer to it.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I ask. “What, create worse things than in-betweeners or deaders or something?”

“I don’t know. My mom got sick soon after that, but she was still working on the program. Before she…passed…she told me to get this to the lab where they made my nanites or where I got treated, but not to take risks. She said I couldn’t lose the drive, no matter what.”

“Why didn’t you take it?” I ask. How much of all this death could have been avoided? How many people had died since she got this hard drive?

“How?” she asks, holding up her hands. “By myself? I wouldn’t have made it and who would have taken it then? Where would it have wound up? Inside a deader’s stomach? It’s quieter out there now, but then?”

She’s right about that. The deaders are slowing down and the in-betweeners are getting few and far between, but they were thicker on the ground before. And if she’d been gotten, the lure of all this exotic metal would have guaranteed a deader or in-betweener would chew on it or do their best to swallow it whole.

“And once you got here, we had Jon. Do we bring him as well?”

I shrink from that idea. She sees it in my face, and nods, “Exactly.”

“And now?” I ask.

“And now we have the others. I could go with one of them, except I’m pretty sure I’m dying here.” She stops there and laughs a bitter laugh. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“I’ll go. I’ll take one of the others and go,” I offer immediately.

She puts her hand over mine again, and says, “I’m thinking it might be too late, don’t you? There’s no way there’s anyone still there who knows how to do whatever she’s got on that drive. It’s a pipe dream! A predator for a predator, my foot. What we need is some idea of where there’s anything like organization left, not just running off like a random-ass idiot.”

“Why are you so reluctant? Just tell me where it is!” I demand, and move the hard drive out of her reach before she can snatch it.

She doesn’t have the energy to chase me down for it and her hand falls back to her side. “It’s the military hospital, by the base. It’s the same place where my cancer was treated with nanites. You’ll never make it there. Just think how many deaders and in-betweeners there are. Think!”

“I’ll make a copy of the hard drive. We’ve got enough juice from the solar for a computer. We can find one. That way, if I don’t make it nothing will be lost.”

She shakes her head sadly, and says, “Nothing except you. And that won’t work. You don’t think I tried? It’s a proprietary drive with safeguards on it. I can’t even get the files to open and it won’t copy. That’s it. That’s the only one.”

“Then I’ll make it,” I say, confidently. Then my brain finally puts together a few things. Specifically, I marry up what she just said with what I remember her saying long ago as we sat around the fire and she first told me of her childhood bouts with cancer. Her nanites, her cancer, the hospital. “Wait a second! Can you get your nanites at that hospital? Or can I get them there? Is that the same place you were talking about?”

Emily leans back a little against the pillows and sighs, like this is exactly what she didn’t want to discuss. When she doesn’t answer, I shake my head impatiently at her and she says, “Fine. Yes. That’s the place.”

“You said if it ever came back, you would just go get some there from storage. You said those weren’t the kind of things people loot. Why aren’t we going?”

Her voice is impatient now, too. “For the same reasons I didn’t go with the hard drive.”

“I’m going. No if’s, ands, or buts. I’m going,” I say, standing and putting the hard drive behind my back.

She gives me an evaluating look and I expect another argument. Instead, she says, “Not yet. I don’t know these new people well enough. I don’t want you to leave them alone here with Jon.”

“You’re here. He’s not alone,” I respond, then realize what she’s saying. “How long?”

“Not long, I don’t think. I don’t know how much more pain I can take…”

“Don’t say that!”

“Not saying it won’t change anything about the outcome,” she says, and puts her hand to her temple again.

“I’ll stay for a while. For you,” I say.

Today - Doctor Blue

I’ve read the term “frog-marched” before, but never actually understood it. I always thought it was something that bent people over, or was somehow more frog-like. Now I know what it is because when we enter the hospital through the basement, our hands tied high on our backs by leashes two of the soldiers—or whatever they are—hold, the man who greets us says, “You didn’t have to frog-march them down like that.”

So, now I know. It sucks.

It’s dark inside the hospital, the only light coming from a tiny LED bulb held in the man’s hand and reflecting against tin foil he’s got backing it. It’s sort of like a very new-school lantern. The floor is dirty and drifts of dirt wedge up against the corridor walls where we stand. There’s a smell of leaking plumbing and wet plaster in the air. It’s not a very auspicious start and I’m suddenly very doubtful that these people have anything working in this building.

The two people holding our leashes, a man and a woman, let them go and I can’t suppress a groan as the pressure on my shoulders eases. The man in the blue camis shoots a disapproving look toward the guy who seems to be leading the trio that leashed us, but all that guy does is say, “Sir, I don’t know them. I’m not going to roll out the red carpet.”

I can see a name tape on the man in blue’s shirt. Reed. I know that name. “Are you Doctor Reed, as in, Emily Bracken’s, Doctor Reed?”

The man in blue gives a start, then smiles a genuine smile that puts all his teeth on display. “You know Emily? Where is she? Is she alright?”

I hardly know what to say, but it seems I don’t have to say anything. My expression must say it all, because the smile falters and he says, “Oh.”

“I’m here because of her,” I say, pulling at the rope around my wrists that the soldier is trying to untie.