Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (32 page)

CHAPTER 18

H
ARRISON HAD LIVED IN FEAR OVER
the belief that he would lead the Infected to us, placing us in mortal danger. But in the end it wasn’t him who led them. It was me. He hadn’t drawn the map on where to find us. I had. Me and my untainted blood.

It never occurred to me that I might be the one to jeopardize others or that I would turn. So when an inky black closed in to fill my sight and my body began to feel different, as if something else were taking control of it, I grabbed for Harrison’s arm. My hand slipped and Harrison caught it.

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him that I was sorry, that I made a mistake, a grave mistake, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“Shhh,” Harrison whispered, squeezing my hand tighter.

The stairwell was morbidly quiet now.

“I know,” he said. “I know, my love. It’s all right.”

I swallowed reflexively, trying to keep him in focus. He was going blurry.

The burning sting from my shoulder was spreading. My arms felt like scorching hot lead, too heavy to lift. They lay at my sides, one of them pressed against Harrison’s thigh, but even that feeling, the pressure of him next to me, was beginning to subside. The pain made its way to my chest, making it a struggle to inhale. The small amount of air filling my lungs grew toxic, stinging, as if the oxygen in the stairwell had been replaced with hot lava, searing as it poured down my throat. My hips and legs began to feel as if they were melting. And they could have been because I no longer had the strength or control to raise my head and see for myself.

Please
, my mind yelled out.
God, please no… please no…

From above, I watched Harrison’s head drop back as if he was praying to the heavens, but it fell forward and he bent down to me. And then I heard his voice in my ear, tender and firm.

“Kennedy, listen to me. You won’t stay this way, my love. You’re going to be all right. I’m going to take you back.”

What? No
, I screamed from inside.
No, I’ll put you at risk!

But these words never came. The virus was taking control. I couldn’t move or speak. I was locked inside my body with no power over it, peering out through the window of a broiling oven.

“You are not alone in this. I’m with you. I’m going to stay with you. Right here. Right beside you.”

No, no, no, no…Let me go. Let me go…

“I’m going to fight for you. So you need to do the same. Fight, sweetheart, you need to
fight
.”

I’ll put you in danger. Let me go, Harrison! LET ME GO!

“And I’ll never give up, because I love you, Kennedy. I love you.”

Those were Harrison’s last words to me before the infection took its final hold, seizing me in a grasp so powerful it wrenched my body into an arch.

Before my eyes closed, I saw Harrison’s stunningly handsome face, pulled together in determination, and that was the deepest cut of all…because I was gone now, completely and forever.

CHAPTER 19

T
HE CURIOUS FACT ABOUT THE
T
1
L
2
virus wasn’t that it took over the human body in less than sixty seconds or that it removed every physical sensation a human felt—so that injuries, cold, heat, exhaustion, fear—nothing at all, permeated or deflected the need to consume human flesh. What was strange about the virus was that while all that was happening, the infected person was acutely aware of it.

My breath, hollow in the back of my throat, sounded foreign to me. The scalding heat was gone, the air flowed unobstructed and without pain. The impairments to my limbs had been erased like a hand wiping a board clean.

In that brief moment, I didn’t try to control anything I felt. Breathing and awareness over your body’s condition was involuntary, a necessary part of being.

“She’s awake,” I heard Mei say, although it wasn’t her voice. It was too defined, too perfect in my ears. I picked up on a slight accent now. I noticed the air that coursed over her lips and teeth as she spoke and the tremor at the end when she finished the last word.

“Someone better hold-” That was Beverly’s voice, the sharpness of it more cutting now.

Then came my next inhale and with it the scent that drove me mad.

I had leaned into that natural earthy fragrance for months, wanting it to become a palpable entity and to wrap its arms around me and never let me go.

But that scent, Harrison’s scent, sparked in me an uncontrollable hunger, a craving unlike any I’d ever experienced before, as if I had gone weeks without food and would do anything at all to devour it.

On that inhale, I acted purely from instinct, from the base of my skull that drove innate animal reflexes.

I knew it was coming and tried to stop it, mindfully and desperately using every ounce of willpower I had.

No, no, no, no, no! NO!

But my muscles contracted, my eyes sprang open, and I lunged. My body became a tightly wound spring, snapping forward with more power and fluidity than I had ever felt. My direction must have seemed arbitrary to anyone watching, I knew it always had when I witnessed the Infected attack, but it wasn’t. I was drawn to Harrison.

Run! RUN!

He did move, but not away, closer to me. His hands latched onto my arms and twisted me around so that his chest was against my back. It was swift and exact, despite the potency I now felt running through me. And with one strong arm wrapped around my torso, pinning my arms to my sides, he had captured me.

“Man…,” Doc muttered uncertainly from behind me. I could tell that he had distanced himself from me. Mei had probably done the same. “I know how you feel about her, but-”

“She’s coming with me,” Harrison said unfalteringly, his breath floating by my cheek.

It incited me and again I flew into a rage, thrashing at my restraints.

I fought against myself, this body that was no longer mine to control, summoning everything I had to end its movement but it continued its rant.

“Where, exactly?” Beverly asked piercingly.

Either as a way to sidestep the question or out of legitimate need, Harrison said, “We need to go. That jam won’t hold long.”

Right, we were in a stairwell. Harrison had obstructed the door somehow.

Leave me here. Leave me here!

“Harrison,” Doc said.

He turned and this time I could see Doc. He stood several steps up. Mei was behind him. Eve and her group were down a step. Beverly was the closest, her metal sword pointed at me.

“She’s infected, man,” Doc said, his tone burdened with realism.

My body lifted slightly and I rose upward.

He’d taken a step.

“Harrison,” Mei said, firmly. Her palm came up as if that would stop him.

His muscles rumbled against me, and I sensed rage in him, the kind I was battling now.

He took another step.

“Harrison!” Mei snapped, her voice raw with fear.

“I’M NOT LEAVING HER!”

He swung me to the side, keeping me pinned despite my body’s single-minded attempt to take a bite from him.

Leave me! Please, God, leave me!

The desperation I felt in no way disrupted my actions. They couldn’t hear me, couldn’t know that I was still inside, trapped. My body and mind were separate and distinct entities now, each behaving in their own regard, each with opposing goals.

Beverly stepped aside, eyeing me warily. Doc held Mei back, pressing her back as we passed. The others pinned themselves to the wall, putting as much distance between us as possible.

Harrison wasn’t thinking straight. I was a danger now, far greater than he’d ever been himself. And yet he kept climbing, maintaining his sturdy grip on me.

The others fell back, just in case. I knew this because I heard their footsteps grow quieter and their smells grew more faint. Harrison was correct. They had distinct aromas. Beverly was closer. I could detect the chemicals that Harrison had referred to when explaining each of our scents. Doc was behind her, smelling of laundry. Mei was directly next to him. She reminded me of cinnamon with a hint of cloves. Eve and her team brought up the rear. She smelled faintly of formaldehyde. The Indian man and the others emitted varying levels of rubber, as if they had been wrapped in a biohazard suit for most of their adult life.

Strangely, none of those aromas would normally be appealing to eat but my body still hungered for them, too.

Harrison carried me up the stairs, my hissing and their footsteps becoming the only sounds to echo off the walls. On the second floor, he kicked open the door and strode inside, not bothering to look either way for incoming Infected. He didn’t need to. There were none in the vicinity. I knew this now too. The floor was quiet and smelled of ink and paper.

He carried me past cubicles, through a lobby, and down a flight of stairs.

The Infected that chased us were still clamoring at the emergency stairs on the east end, which gave us room to exit the building without being discovered.

I thrashed and growled the entire way to the Humvee. Harrison worked alone to strap me to the open trunk in the back. When he was done, I was latched in place with ropes and ties, leaving no room to wiggle out. He stood back at the door, one hand on edge as he prepared to close it, and paused.

“I’m sorry, my love,” he said tenderly and then the door closed and the noise inside became nothing but the sound of heartbeats and breathing.

In the few seconds it took for Harrison to step into the driver’s seat, I hoped, truly wished for Beverly to send that metal sword through my head.
That would end it
, I reasoned.
Everyone would be safe.

But Beverly wouldn’t do that for me. She respected Harrison too much to take me away from him. Instead, they chose to bide their time, waiting for him to calm down before addressing him with logic.

As I writhed in the back of the Humvee, their voices began and grew steadily more persistent.

“How will you contain her at the reformatory?” Mei asked.

“Who says she’s going to the reformatory?” Beverly argued. Before waiting for an answer she declared, “She’s not going to the reformatory.”

Her obstinacy sometimes replaced common sense. Even I knew that was where Harrison was taking me. Ignoring her, Doc persisted on behalf of Mei.

“Harrison, how will you contain her?” He sounded oddly intelligent, something I hadn’t picked up on before.

“She’ll be in quarantine, in the lab.” He was strained in saying it, confirming he didn’t like the idea himself. It was just the best he could do.

“And you’ll watch her day and night?” Mei asked.

“She’s not going to the reformatory,” Beverly huffed.

“Beverly,” Doc said in warning through clenched teeth. I could hear his tongue hitting the back of his teeth, which was odd.

“Yes,” she replied, thick with sarcasm.

He must have given her a glare because she didn’t reply.

Once this power struggle had resolved, Harrison announced, “I’ll watch her, every second of every hour.”

There was something in his voice that I couldn’t help but notice. Caution. He was telling them not to come near me, that he’ll be there if they did. And I understood why. He had trained them to kill the Infected. They had become alarmingly efficient at it. He had done this for our protection from himself but what had never crossed his mind was that they might use those skills on me.

That ended the conversation right there because they grasped his intent. He would keep me alive, no matter the cost.

What I observed, and no one else did, was that Eve and her team remained quiet. I figured it was out of respect for Harrison until I realized who they were. Scientists. And they needed a specimen to test the serum. That idea was alarming to me, but for a reason other than self-preservation. I wasn’t concerned about being made a guinea pig, probably because I felt no pain other than hunger in my infected state. What choked me like a suffocating blanket was the fact that Harrison might get himself hurt trying to protect me.

I thought of every possible way to escape but regardless of what I came up with my body wouldn’t respond. And it made me realize that every infected person we had come across had been in the same state, locked in a jail cell inside their own body.

We reached the reformatory and Harrison unstrapped me alone. The others stood a few feet back, just in case. Everyone had their eyes on me, so they never saw Caroline and Lou approaching from behind.

“Oh my God…,” Caroline breathed, which I heard over my growls because of my now acute hearing.

They came no farther than the front steps leading to the main building, their distance indicating their aversion toward me.

“You…,” Lou said, shaking his head and wagging a finger in the air. “You can’t keep her here.”