Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (33 page)

Harrison ignored him.

“Lou’s right, Harrison. She’s too great a danger,” Caroline called out before shifting her direction to the rest of our unit. “I can’t believe you allowed him to do this.”

“Allowed him?” Doc retorted. “We don’t
allow
him to do anything. He just does it.”

Caroline sighed. “Harrison, you can’t do this.” Her tone was firmer.

Again, he ignored them.

“I know how this must feel-” Caroline began but Harrison cut her off.

He twisted his head to glare at her over his shoulder and roared, “YOU KNOW
NOTHING
ABOUT HOW THIS FEELS!”

The fierceness he showed stunned them to silence, and inside my tainted cell I saw the love he held for me. He was burning with it.

Caroline’s eyebrows knitted together as Lou took another step back. Doc, Mei, and Beverly watched with intense interest to see who would win this disagreement. A lot was riding on it, so I understood. To contain an Infected inside the walls of our…their, now
their
safe compound was parallel to harboring an enraged man-eating lion.

Harrison stepped behind me and wrapped his arms around my chest. As he did this, I noticed the onlookers watching from the windows and emerging from around the sides of the buildings. Lou saw them, too.

“Harrison,” Lou said stiffly, and I could decipher instantly what he was thinking in his rapidly inflating posture and stern expression: It was time a man stepped in to correct this problem.

But Harrison’s name was as far as Lou got.

Harrison released me and marched across the muddy earth until his chest hit Lou’s and their noses were an inch apart. Lou’s body reflexively bounced back but he held his stance. They didn’t struggle or scream or pound their fists into each other’s bodies. Instead, they each quietly stood their ground, allowing their eyes to communicate their will.

This lasted several long seconds but even as my body thrashed I caught sight of Lou weakening beneath Harrison’s fierce stare.

When Harrison had finished conveying his silent message, he returned to me, scooped me up and carried me to the lab the same way he’d carried me to the Humvee, with my back against his chest, my arms fixed to my sides. Doc, Mei, and Beverly followed, but they were the only ones. Those left behind remained rigidly silent until we’d disappeared inside and they could launch into a conversation over the perils of my presence, one that I was sure Harrison heard if I could also.

Harrison held me in place while Doc tied me up, my jaws snapping at him throughout the duration of it. Again, I felt overwhelming guilt at this but thankfully Doc was an athlete and had the dexterity to maneuver around me. Still, the look of dread was firmly planted on Doc’s face so I was glad when Harrison checked the knots and they left us alone in the room.

Harrison watched me steadily for several minutes from just beyond my reach, his arms crossed, his legs spread wide. I had the feeling he was evaluating me.

“You’re in there, aren’t you?” he whispered.

My body lashed out.

He ignored me.

“Knowing you, you wanted me to leave you in the stairwell. You probably agree with Caroline and Lou, too.” He laughed through his nose. “Not a chance, Kennedy. Not a chance… You see, there’s something I never told you.” He squatted so that his knees almost touched my calves. He was close enough that my body was spurred into turmoil. But he didn’t back away. Instead, he leveled his intense stare at me as he always did when addressing something of grave importance, and as my head thrashed back and forth, my conscious mind focused on what he was about to tell me.

“From the first time I ate raw meat, I knew full well what I was doing. I knew it was wrong. Wrong by my father’s standard. Wrong by society’s standards. And I knew the consequences of my behavior. I understood what would happen if I got caught. And when I
did
get caught, and my father dragged me into the barn and mounted me to the wall and began cutting and beating that craving out of me, I still knew
even then
that I wouldn’t stop.”

In my chaotic state, as I grabbed for him and hissed at him, my mind was chillingly quiet. All I could comprehend was that this man, the one I loved, the one with more compassion and integrity than anyone I’d ever met had been beaten by his own father for doing exactly what I was doing now. But Harrison wasn’t beating it out of me. He was protecting me.

“That’s what you’re experiencing now, isn’t it, Kennedy?”

He nodded, a single confident gesture that told me that he knew he was correct.

“Hang on, sweetheart. We’ll get you back.”

And that’s what they tried to do. From that night on, Eve and her small team of three spent every waking hour in the lab.

As they worked, I watched them, grew to know them, to understand their idiosyncrasies and habits. Sidharth, the Indian man, liked tea before each meal and would heat it with a Bunson burner, always in the same colorful mug. He was patient and precise in his actions. Natasha, a slight blonde woman who avoided my eyes as if I might suck the soul from her, worked efficiently, usually staying one step ahead of Eve and performing the next action before it was requested. She was so quiet in her movements that if I had not been infected I wouldn’t have noticed her crossing the room. Johan was a shy, gawky Norwegian at first but once he warmed up, his sense of humor came through in the form of bad zombie jokes. Every day he had a new one…”Why did the girl go out with the zombie? Because he liked her for her brains,” and “Why couldn’t the zombie cross the highway? Because he was dead tired.” They were tasteless but it broke the monotony. Eve’s peculiarity rested in the fact that she had none. She was as plain as anyone I had ever met, never showing a smile or a frown, never raising her voice over a level tempo, never moving erratically. Every action she made was executed with planned calculation.

I was flattered when Doc, Mei, and even Beverly checked in, dressed in their usual camouflage and carrying their standard weapons. They stayed just long enough to drop off a piece of medical equipment or for an update on the vaccine’s development. But they left quickly after my first snap at them, and I understood. It was more than just slightly awkward to see their friend crave them as a meal.

Harrison stayed directly beside me the entire time, giving blood when asked, assisting under his aunt’s instructions, keeping an eye on me. At night, when Eve and her team would leave to rest, he stayed behind, whispering to me.

Time passed, although I can’t tell you how long. All I know is that Johan grew a beard and shaved it off during that time.

Still, Harrison remained by my side.

Even as my limbs and teeth lashed out at him, I cherished that he stayed with me, spoke to me, never failing in his belief that I was listening. When I found him observing or talking to me, my cell seemed just a few inches larger and a touch less lonely. Those were the moments that carried me through. When he retightened my straps, his fingers would linger against my skin, as if he wanted to do more than simply touch me. When he spoke my name, which was often, I knew it was to keep me alive inside.

Always, he kept pushing, positive and convincing.

When I’d met him, he had built a wall to keep others out, to push them away, to keep them safe. And I watched as this wall returned, only this time I was on the inside and he was holding it in place to keep
me
safe.

Only once did that wall come down and he showed me just how much seeing me this way ate him up inside.

He had been sitting on the floor directly in front of me, his back to the cabinets, the counter above him stacked with equipment. As usual, he had his arms around his knees and he was observing me. When he opened his mouth I thought it was to tell me another story about his family’s Texas ranch or how much progress Eve had made that day, but this time his tone was somber.

“Kennedy, there’s something…,” he said and swallowed. His eyes squeezed closed and reopened in an indication he was in pain. This made no sense, considering he didn’t feel such a thing. “I need to say something to you…” He drew in a breath and exhaled slowly. “But it’s hard.” He laughed at himself with derision. “Hard…as if what you’re going through isn’t…” His head dipped and lifted. Then he stood, drew a chair to place in front of me, and sat down.

His face, that beautiful face, constricted and, although I couldn’t show it, I hurt seeing it. If I had the ability, I’m not sure I would have allowed him to continue. But I was forced to sit there, listening, unable to do anything to quell his pain.

“I always believed that I would be the one to turn and that I would be a danger to you. Because of this, I did everything I could think of, everything in my power to keep this from happening, to keep you safe. I tried to convince you to keep your guard up…I trained the others to stop me if I ever turned, because I knew you wouldn’t…I left you when I realized that the Infected are drawn to me and my being with you put you at risk.” He stopped to sigh and stare at me. “You know all this. You know this…,” he said to himself. “But what you don’t know, my love, what I haven’t said to you…,” his voice dipped and grew hoarse as he finally uttered the words he’d been struggling to let loose. “What I haven’t told you is that I’m sorry I failed you. My entire purpose was to keep you from being hurt and you are…you are…” He went still then, absorbing the pain. “You are hurt…” His lips pinched closed and a dark shadow drifted into his eyes. “Because I wasn’t strong enough to stop it.”

He bolted up from his chair, toppling it back. It clanging loudly as the metal frame hit the tiled floor but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I wasn’t strong enough. Me… who can fight ten Infected at once, who can suppress a wall of them… couldn’t hold off the one who got to you…”

He exhaled harshly and launched into a frenzied pace across the room, his fists opening and closing as if they wanted to sense something in them.

“So I have to ask the question…If I can’t do the one thing that matters…what the hell am I good for? What the hell are these senses for, this body, these muscles? WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY GOOD FOR?”

He was growing enraged, which only agitated me.

He stopped mid-pace to stare at me as I thrashed against my bindings, not out of curiosity, not as if I were the caged animal everyone else saw me as. He did this to prove his own point to himself, that I was hurt, that I was the one sitting in the chair, poisoned with the virus that he felt had come from inside him.

His lip curled back in the way his rage comes out when he is defending me, and he spun toward the wall. His hand, which had again curled into a tight fist, slammed into it, spraying pieces of drywall and paint. When he pulled it back, his skin was darker, and as it fell to his side reddish liquid dripped from his knuckles to the floor. In its wake, a gaping hole was left where once there was just a solid wall.

He didn’t move for a very long time, enough to give my body the length it needed to calm down. His broad back didn’t shutter or shift. His head remained bowed. The next movement he made was to shake the blood from his hand and then he returned to me.

He fell to his knees and looked up at me. I expected to find sad eyes but there was no hint of that emotion. Instead, they were filled with the same steady tenacity I had loved in him from the start.

“I’m not giving up on you, Kennedy,” he whispered. “Not now, not ever. I’m here for as long as it takes. As long as it takes.”

What he didn’t know, because my body wouldn’t tell him, was that I was close to giving up on myself, wavering on the edge of that bottomless precipice of despondency. I stopped trying to control my actions, which I learned over time had always been in utter, dismal vain. My efforts to speak to him fell away and I had given up on self-talk so that only silence existed in my head. That was the true danger of the virus. It had taken my body, and gradually it was taking my mind.

Then the day came when Eve and her team were ready for a trial run with their newly manufactured cure.

It was just past noon on a bright, breezy day. I could hear kids playing tag out the windows behind me. They smelled like jellybeans, all different flavors.

Stillness came over the room and no one moved for several seconds. This was an anomaly that quickly drew my attention away from the kids. At that point, if you looked around, you could no longer see a classroom. It had been transformed into a lab, sealed air tight with a ventilator and tubes and biohazard suits.

Harrison was in a chair next to me. Being unconcerned about exposure, he forewent protection so I was given a clear view of his muscles as they involuntarily flexed when he caught on that something significant was happening.

Eve rotated to address him over her shoulder, her voice breathless with excitement. “I think we have it.”

Harrison stood. The other three in the room turned stiffly in unison, as if too much movement might disrupt the possibility of having reached a cure.

“Of course, we’ll need to test it,” Eve remarked, shifting her eyes between Harrison and me.

Lab protocols seemed to have been followed closely, so that made sense.

“Then we’ll need test subjects,” Harrison said in agreement.