Shadows Have Gone (33 page)

“What was the deal with you and Carl anyway? I have a memory of seeing a picture of him in your office. Is that accurate?”

“I did. I loved him.”

Justin laughed. “You? Love? You’re not capable of love.”

“You might be surprised. I did love Carl. I wanted him to be my heir, so to speak. But then he met Gloria. I considered having her killed, but that wouldn’t have removed the flaw in Carl that made him want to be with her.”

Justin’s blood chilled as Lewis so casually discussed killing an innocent woman just because she distracted one of his men. But innocence was very subjective to a man like Lewis.

Justin thought back to the bloodstains on his own hands. Did he know why those people had to be removed, what they had done to “deserve” having Justin sent to coldly and clinically end their lives? Justin had been trained not to ask questions, and he hadn’t, assuming every death was absolutely necessary for the security of his nation. And looking into Lewis’s eyes, he didn’t want to ask those questions now. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear the answers.

“I would have liked to see your daughter,” Lewis said. “Your genes and Carl’s . . . quite a combination. She could be a hell of a warrior.”

“I think she will be, but she’ll have a mind of her own and a conscience.”

“So you’ll fill her head with notions of a moral code that will always cause her grief when she has to break it in order to survive.” Lewis gave Justin a thumbs-up. “Genius.”

“She’ll have to make choices,” Justin said. He drew up his knees and rested the hand that held the grenade on one of them. “Just like the rest of us. Some of them are hard, but Carly’s shown me that we’re better for the struggle.”

“Pretty words,” Lewis said with a twist of his lips that might be called a smile, but it never reached his eyes. “A pointless burden when you’re going to end up doing the smart thing.”

“What was it like, growing up on Vulcan?” Justin asked.

Those lips quirked further. “Actually, I grew up in New York.”

Justin was genuinely surprised. “My second theory was they grew you in a petri dish.”

“No, you and I have similar backgrounds, though we reacted a little differently. They plucked me from the juvenile justice system. What? Why are you looking at me like that? Did you think I started the Unit? I was groomed by my predecessor, as I tried to groom my replacements over the years. Less successfully, obviously.”

“What happened to him—your predecessor?”

“Her. And she outlived her usefulness.” Lewis coughed— and kept on coughing until his face was burning red and his eyes bulged with the force of it. “She became a liability, as we all do, knowing too much, slowing our decision making, rethinking key concepts. She wasn’t surprised when the order came down, nor at who was chosen to carry it out.”

“The retirement program is shitty for those in your position.” Justin laughed, but it turned into coughing, too, and then the coughing turned into gagging. He scrambled over to a plastic trash can he saw along the wall. There wasn’t much in his stomach, but his stomach didn’t seem convinced of that fact and kept trying to empty itself. Justin collapsed on the floor beside the can, feeling weak and wrung out. He kept his grip on the grenade, but he felt his hand shaking.

Lewis watched him with dispassionate eyes shining from his sweat-slicked face. “Anyone who wants to retire, can. But those in my position are the ones who never want to retire.” Lewis took a bottle of water from the pack and rolled it across the floor to Justin. Justin braced it in the crook of his arm and opened it one handed.

“I’ve wanted to ask you about other countries. Were they able to vaccinate before the Crisis struck? I spoke with Carter—” He stopped as the coughing took him again, and then the few sips of water he had taken made a slow, painful journey back up.

“He made it, then?” Lewis leaned forward, and for a moment, his eyes glistened with eagerness. After all the information Lewis had withheld from him, Justin had the urge to sit back and say,
Oh, that’s classified
, but he couldn’t do that.

“Yeah, he made it. A least until June of that first year. He and his wife, but she was burned out by the Infection.”

Lewis sat back, digesting this information.

“From what Carter was telling me, there were other survivors in France. Were there other vaccine programs?”

Lewis remained silent except for the coughs he couldn’t hold back. They shook his frame, and he covered his mouth with the back of his hand as they exploded out of him.

“Did you send them the vaccine?”

Lewis fumbled with the bottle of water, splashing out half of it before he managed to take a sip. “That’s classified.”

That would be a no, then.

“So we weren’t the only ones who knew this was going to happen. Other countries had their own vaccination programs. They tried to save as many as they could, too.”

Lewis said nothing. He just stared at Justin with a level gaze before coughing overtook him again.

Justin’s mind whirled with questions, and he didn’t know which ones to ask first. Lewis stopped him before he could even voice the first of them.

“Justin, some of it I don’t even know. I knew better than to ask. I carried out my orders and did what I could within my parameters.”

“Your parameters suck.”

“It’s the vow I took. The vow you took, as well.”

A vow he had kept, actually. There had been very little he had revealed to Carly about his role in the Unit, but he couldn’t say that had been because of a desire to keep to his vow of secrecy. He’d been worried about her opinion of him. She always said it didn’t matter what he had done in the past, but she didn’t have an inkling of what he had been. And as far as Justin was concerned, he’d take most of that shit to his grave.

“Why didn’t they kill you? Why would they let you run around the wasteland, knowing you had all this information they didn’t want to get out?”

“Because they knew I wouldn’t talk.”

Justin nodded.

“Have you?” Lewis said this conversationally, but Lewis’s words were never light and casual.

“No, not really.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about sweet little Carly’s opinion of you. She knifed my lieutenant in the gut. Tried to, that is. He would have been a dead man if I hadn’t made him wear a puncture-proof vest.”

Justin’s stomach heaved, but his muscles were too exhausted to make him retch any longer. He hovered over the trash can until the nausea passed and then sagged back against the wall. He was cold. So cold. He should have asked those soldiers to bring them blankets. He wiped his cheeks on the shoulders of his T-shirt, but it was already soaking. “So here we are, at the end of the road. Will you tell me now?”

“No.” Lewis was just as sweat-soaked. It ran down his face like tears.

“I understand loyalty and silence. But considering we’re both going to be dead in a few hours, I think you can make an exception.”

“There are no exceptions. No deathbed confessions. No moving last words. I’ll take it to my grave just as my superiors did.”

“You never were in contact with Washington, were you?”

Lewis was silent.

“You son of a bitch.”

“I had my orders when I left, and I know the machinery was still in place. I’ll follow my orders until I hear differently. There’s no reason to
     
assume—”

“Jesus. For all you know, Washington has gone back to being the fucking fetid swamp it was built on and the only thing moving is the rats and crows. You don’t know, because you didn’t get one of the coveted spots in the vault. They dismissed you like a lackey when the shit went down.”

“I have my orders.” Lewis shrugged. “Establish and keep order. I’ve done that. You have, too, in your own way.”

“Yeah, sometimes the center does hold.” Justin gulped some of the water and blew his nose. Christ he felt like shit. He pulled his shirt more tightly around his chest, though he knew it was futile. “My people are holding it. Not because of discipline, but because of conscience.”

Lewis shifted and wiped his own nose. “Whatever form of social control works, I suppose. But the flaws of running things based on emotion, opinion, and democracy becomes soon apparent.”

“I lived your way for ten years,” Justin said. “Five years of training for five years of service. So I’ve experienced both, and frankly, I prefer Carly’s way.”

“Had things been different, I should have considered recruiting her.” Lewis’s expression was as close to a genuine smile as Justin had ever seen it.

Justin shook his head. “You couldn’t break her will. She’s stronger than I am. Stronger than you, maybe.”

“Your daughter is going to rule the world.”

Justin considered. “Maybe. If she takes after her mother.” It was so damned cold, and he shivered. He used the shirt to mop his sweaty face, hoping that might help.

It struck him suddenly, and he laughed, laughed until he began hacking again, and then had to laugh at Lewis’s puzzled expression.

“What’s funny?”

“You, actually. I just realized something.”

“What’s that?” Lewis didn’t sound terribly interested, and Justin supposed he wouldn’t be. Dying had a way of making insignificance very stark.

“I just realized what a fraud you really are. All these years, Lewis. All these years, I had almost a superstitious awe of you. Lewis the Great and Terrible. I thought you were more man than machine, and now I see how you carefully cultivated that image. Even now, you’re holding onto it. But you’re really not as emotionless as you seem. Not without empathy or social desires. In the end, you couldn’t help it, either. Those kids out there? They’re not killers. None of them. I didn’t see a single one you could shape into Unit material, even if you had a hundred years to train them.”

“You take what you can get.”

“No, you don’t. Don’t tell me you haven’t come across a pack of murderous assholes that you could have recruited. They’re thick on the ground out here. Instead, you picked up these nice young folks. You’ve been taking care of them, Lewis. Feeding them. Protecting them. Giving them a home and a sense of purpose. Why?”

Lewis waved a hand.

“Because you do have a heart. Small and shriveled it may be, but in the end, you do. That’s why you sent them away. The monster I thought you were would have ordered them in here with us . . . just to be sure. Even if they weren’t showing any symptoms.”

“It would probably have been smarter,” Lewis said.

“Yeah.” Justin stared down at the grenade. It was possible some of them had been exposed. Very possible. But he didn’t have the will to kill them all just in case. Had he doomed the world with that weakness? What if one of them made their way to Colby and his family was exposed anyway?

Justin stared at the grenade clenched in his palm.

He had one consolation. It seemed to get bad fast. He and Lewis started showing symptoms almost immediately. The sick ones wouldn’t get far. He tried to stand to go check on Cassandra, but his legs were too weak.

Time was running out.

“The office building is on fire,” Carly whispered. “That’s where they took me to talk to Lewis.”

“Justin’s work?”

“Seems likely.”

Carly, Pearl, and Sam crouched near the gate and watched as the troops threw bags into the trucks with haphazard haste. Over by a second building, four men were using dollies to load another truck with boxes. With the way everyone was running back and forth, Carly expected to see smoke rising from the back of the building, or some sign of impending disaster.

“What the hell are they doing?” Pearl murmured. She watched them through her rifle scope.

“I don’t know. Moving out . . . looks like they’re taking everything with them, so they’re not planning on coming back, I think.”

“An invasion?” Pearl asked.

“Who ever heard of an invasion force bringing their pillows?” Carly watched as a young woman scurried toward the truck with an armload of bedding that she handed off to someone in the truck and ran back for more. “And that girl has books. Lots of books.”

Another woman ran out carrying boxes marked with large red crosses. Medical supplies of some sort.