The Bloom Series Box Set: Bloom & Fade (53 page)

“
And you helped them right
along, didn’t you?” said Colton. The disgust and accusation in his
voice was crystal clear. “You went ahead and showed them where they
went wrong, was that it?”

“
It wasn’t like that at
all,” said Adsen. His hands were shaking at his sides. “I just
wanted the pain to stop. It was the only way.”

“
Was that before or after
you killed the first boy? The first Nova they brought to the
lab?”

“
I didn’t kill anyone,”
whispered Adsen. He turned away and heavy tears rolled down his
cheeks. “I never killed anyone. You tell yourself things—things
about the type of person you hope you really are. I always told
myself I was a man who would die before he let anything bad happen
to other people.” His jaw quivered as he fought back a sob. “I was
wrong. I would have done anything to stop the pain. So I helped
them. Yes, I helped them progress to what I thought was the final
stage. But then I stopped before the end. I realized the virus was
not quite complete and I refused to go forward. That has to count
for something, doesn’t it?” He looked at Colton hopefully, then his
expression dropped. “No. No, I suppose not.”

Colton’s throat was dry as a desert.
He looked away from Adsen and wanted to be anywhere else in the
world but in that room.

“
But now I will atone,”
said Adsen. “I will go forward with my work, this time so others
can be saved. You will stop me before I finish, won’t you, Colton?
You will save all of us.”

Colton looked at him. Adsen stared
into his eyes with a mix of hope and madness, and Colton’s rage was
replaced with pity. He saw a broken man who had been forced to make
terrible decisions—the same kind Colton may have made if their
roles were reversed.

“
Just stop me before the
end,” said Adsen. “I’ll let you know when the time
comes.”

Colton sat on the stool and leaned
back against one of the water tanks. Adsen soon forgot he was there
and puttered about the room, humming to himself and working
quickly. Colton closed his eyes and thought of Haven. He tried to
feel her presence in the world—tried to call out and tell her
everything was going to be alright in the end.

Perhaps if he had truly believed it
himself, it would have worked.

26

H
aven picked her way through the storage room, stepping around
discarded plastic containers and piles of equipment covered in
sheets of green canvas. The truck driver had taken them to some
lesser-used section of the huge complex, a place where unused junk
was discarded and forgotten. She wasn’t having any luck finding a
door that led to the adjacent rooms.

“
Pssst!” whispered Bastian
loudly. “Over here, all of ye!”

He pointed to a door set into the back
wall, hidden behind a stack of heavy wooden crates. A foggy light
sticking out from the wall dimly illuminated the
doorframe.

Bastian pointed to it triumphantly as
Marius and Roku gathered around.

“
Who wants to go first?”
he asked. “Draw straws?”

Haven pushed past him and twisted the
doorknob. It turned easily in her hand and she opened the door an
inch so she could peek into the next room. There were no guards in
sight, but there was a man a few yards away in a long, white lab
coat standing with a clipboard, leaning back and looking up at the
ceiling. He pointed up repeatedly, as if he were counting items on
the ceiling high above. The man in the lab coat shook his head in
disapproval and made a note on his clipboard, then walked out of
sight.

Haven inched the door open and stepped
into the shadows against the wall of the next room.

The space was enormous. Packaging
machines lined both sides of a long corridor that ran for several
hundred yards through the middle of the room. Thick pipes descended
from the ceiling far above and connected with the machines. Haven
couldn’t see the wall on the other side of the massive warehouse
through the maze of pipes and machinery.

She realized this room was the heart
of the complex. When she had stood on the dune outside, looking
down at the massive building, this giant room took up the majority
of the compound, right at its center. Other rooms like the storage
unit her ragtag group had stumbled into were smaller satellite
rooms, connected to the main warehouse around its edges.

Roku, Bastian, and Marius shuffled
into the room behind her and the door closed. Marius reached back
and tried the handle—locked. They crept along the wall and found
shelter behind a large piece of machinery. Haven squeezed into the
space between the machine and the wall and kept going until she had
a clear view of the room between a gap in the machine parts. The
others followed her in. Marius had to suck in his gut and scoot in
sideways in order to fit.

The machine was warm. Large tubes ran
through it and up to the ceiling, where they joined a dozen other
pipelines that burrowed into the wall and out of sight. Liquid
sloshed from somewhere within the machine, as if a giant spoon were
pushing water in a giant bowl back and forth.

The floor of the entire room was a
maze of machinery. Huge tubs of empty syringes sat next to bottling
machines, but instead of pumping soda into empty glass containers,
the machines pumped Fade into metal syringe canisters.

Another machine spat out small flying
drones—little metal spheres with an orange light strip and a hole
in the side, just the right size for a syringe filled with Fade. In
the background of all that, Haven saw racks and racks of filled
syringes, their needles glinting brightly in the strong light from
the halogen lamps on the ceiling high above.

Around all of those machines flowed
the tubes. They plunged into the room from the ceiling and ran
straight down to the floor, as if they were supports for the
building itself. The tubes fed into the machines that filled the
syringes—a mass-murder delivery system, direct from the
manufacturer. Wherever those tubes ended after they left the room,
Haven bet she would find the holding tanks that contained the main
supply of Fade.

Haven ducked when she heard
approaching footsteps, expecting to see the man in the white lab
coat—but it wasn’t him. It was a woman wearing the same kind of
coat, with the same kind of clipboard. Marius looked at her and
frowned.

“
Not her,” he
said.

Bastian was just opening
his mouth in protest when the first man returned to talk to the
woman. Bastian relaxed and pointed. “How about
him
?”

Marius nodded. “They have info kiosk
after all.”

“
Are you sure?” whispered
Haven.

“
He will talk. Marius
knows.”

The man in the white lab coat was
showing the woman exactly what he had seen on the ceiling that made
him shake his head in disappointment, and she joined him in his
disapproval. After a few more words, she hurried quickly away, and
the man watched her rear as she went, smiling faintly to
himself.

“
Hey,” said Haven from the
shadows, just loud enough for him to hear.

He looked around, confused, squinting
into the darkness behind the machine. Haven walked to the far edge
and stood against the wall. “Help me!” she said urgently. She did
her best to look terrified, shooting quick glances all around like
she didn’t know where she was.

The sly grin returned to the man’s
face and he walked toward her slowly, first checking to make sure
no one else was watching.

“
What are you doing back
there?” he asked.

As he came closer, Haven noticed
several deep scars on his face. She thought it may have been a car
crash or some kind of industrial accident. One of his ears was
lower than the other and the skin of one cheek was pulled back
toward it. For a moment Haven felt guilty about taking advantage of
him, because she saw the loneliness in his eyes when he spoke to
her. Then he reached out his hand and she remembered where he
worked and what he did for a living, and her sympathy drifted
away.

“
Please,” she said. “I
don’t know where I am.”

“
It’s alright,” said the
man in the lab coat. “I’ll take care of you.”

A shadow moved behind him and grabbed
his throat before he could cry out. His eyes bulged in their
sockets as Roku dragged him over to the wall with one hand and
slammed him against a machine. The man gurgled loudly and clawed at
Roku’s hand, to no effect.

“
Where’s Alistair?” asked
Haven, standing close enough to see the sweat begin to bead on the
man’s forehead. He opened his mouth and choked out a garbled word.
“I didn’t quite catch that,” she said.

Roku loosened his grip slightly and
the man spat out, “He’s not here. He left yesterday.” Roku’s eyes
searched the man’s face for a moment, then his fingers tightened
around his throat and squeezed. The man’s eyes turned black and the
color drained from his face.

“
Please,” he managed to
spit out. “Please…”

Roku released him and the man slumped
to the ground. He choked in a breath and started to scream, “HEL—”
but Marius kicked him in the ribcage, right over a lung. The man
grabbed his chest and dragged in a long breath as if he were
sucking air through a pillow.

“
Don’t do that,” said
Marius. “Is very bad idea.” He knelt down in front of the man and
slapped his face to bring him back to the present. The man blinked
at him stupidly. “Okay, then?” said Marius. “We ask you some
questions now. You answer and you walk out of here. Otherwise we
stuff you into the machines, see how you fit.
Understand?”

The man’s eyes cleared a little and he
nodded weakly.

“
Good. First, what’s your
name?”

The man took a deep breath. “Walter,”
he said at last.

“
No it’s not,” said
Marius. “Is Dead Meat. That is your name, isn’t it?”

The man looked at him, confused, then
nodded slowly. “Y—yes. I guess it is.”

“
You learn fast!” said
Marius. “This will be over in no time. Tell me, where is
Alistair?”

“
He’s not
here—”

Marius slapped the man’s face back and
forth. “Don’t lie to me, Dead Meat.”

“
I’m not lying,” he gasped
after Marius pulled his hand away.

“
Where did he
go?”

“
He doesn’t tell us those
things. We only know when he’ll be here at the facility. He just
came in yesterday for an inspection, wanted us to ramp up
production.”

“
Why?”

Dead Meat hesitated. Marius raised his
hand to slap him again but the words tumbled out quickly after
that. “Okay okay! He just finished testing the new variant and we
have to make some slight modifications to the delivery system
before we start rolling out the new drones.”

“
What new variant?” asked
Haven.

He looked at her, then down to the
floor. “Human.”

27

M
arius grabbed the collar of the lab coat and drew the man
closer to his face. “They make Fade for everyone?”

The man nodded, trying hard to keep
away from Marius’s snarling mouth. “Not just—not just for your kind
anymore,” said Dead Meat. “Now anyone can be infected, abilities or
not.”

“
Well, that’s just great,”
said Bastian. He threw his hands up in defeat and walked away,
shaking his head.

“
How long until he starts
using it?” asked Haven.

“
Distribution starts as
soon as we make our adjustments.”

“
How long will that
take?”

Dead Meat didn’t answer right away.
Marius shook him roughly by the collar.

“
Two days,” he said
finally. “Three at the most.”

Haven stood there, trying to wrap her
brain around the concept of a global virus that could wipe out all
of humanity. Dead Meat was just starting to relax when Marius got
in his face again.

“
Why you do
this?”

“
Wha…what do you
mean?”

“
Why you work here? Why
you make the virus that will kill everybody? Is it because of your
face, huh?” Dead Meat tried to turn away as Marius slapped the deep
scars on his cheeks. “They were mean to you, so now you get them
back, is that it? Marius wants to know how so many people could
work here and do such a thing.”

Marius relaxed but Dead Meat continued
to guard his face.

“
Most of them don’t even
know we’re making a virus,” he said. “They think we’re shipping
placebos for a major pharmaceutical contractor.”

Marius laughed loudly. “You lie to
them! Of course! You tell them it is safe to come to work, to have
a normal job. Do you know what you have done?”

Dead Meat shook his head and
cried.

“
Yes, I think you do.”
Marius sighed and grabbed Dead Meat’s chin so he could look right
into his eyes. “Where is the cure?”

The man seemed genuinely confused.
“What cure?”