The Darwin Effect (18 page)

Rolle walked over to the built-in desk and chair. He checked around, but there wasn’t really any place it could be hidden. He checked under her bed, and then looked through the sheets and covers on her bed. He walked over to the closet and looked inside “I don’t see it anywhere.”

Cromartie couldn’t understand how Sanders could’ve misplaced her knife when she had been the one so adamant about all of them carrying a weapon at all times.

But he decided not to press her on it right now. Maybe she was confused. Maybe she had hit her head when Ward slammed into her. Maybe he did take her knife when he attacked her like she had suggested. They could worry about that later. Right now they had more important matters to think about—like finding Ward.

“I need to go look for Ward,” Cromartie told them.

Rolle stared at Cromartie. “Maybe you should wait. Let me go with you.”

He shook his head no. “Someone needs to stay here with Sanders. I don’t want Ward coming back for her.”

“You could stay with her,” Rolle said. “I could go look for Ward.”

Cromartie shook his head, already dismissing that idea. He was several inches taller than Rolle and outweighed him by at least twenty pounds of muscle that he’d built up over the years on construction jobs. Ward was a survivalist, a fighter, a killer—Rolle would be no match for him.

“Sanders needs medical attention,” Cromartie told Rolle. “She needs your skills.”

Rolle seemed to consider the logic of it, and finally he nodded his head in agreement.

“Besides,” Cromartie said. “I’m the one who fought against detaining Ward in the first place. I’m the one who kept defending him. I’m the reason Abraham got killed. It should be me who goes after Ward. It should be me who puts an end to this.”

Sanders just stared at him, and then she nodded slightly.

Cromartie nodded back at her. He wished Sanders wasn’t hurt. He wished she was going with him to hunt Ward down. He wished she had his back, but she was injured too badly right now.

He was on his own.

C
romartie left Sanders’ room and he closed the door behind him.

Sanders and Rolle watched him leave. Sanders stared at the door for a moment and then Rolle turned his attention to her.

“Let me take your shoe off,” he told her.

Sanders nodded.

Rolle crouched down on the floor in front of Sanders. He gently removed her sneaker-like shoe that had come with her clothing in the room. He tossed the shoe over by the wall, out of the way of her injured foot. He grabbed the plastic first aid kit from the corner of the bed and rummaged around in it until he found a rolled-up elastic cloth bandage packaged in clear plastic. He ripped the plastic off and began to wrap the cloth around her foot and ankle.

Sanders winced as soon as he touched her ankle.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. Keep going.”

Rolle wrapped part of the cloth bandage around her ankle, and then he stopped for a moment like a thought had just occurred to him. He touched her toes gently.

“Can you wiggle your toes?” he asked.

She wiggled them.

“Hmm,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know. The sprain just doesn’t seem that bad.”

Sanders just stared at him.

“I mean,” Rolled continued quickly, “I know you’re in some pain, but it just doesn’t look like that bad of an injury.”

“Well, I’m sorry you don’t believe me,” Sanders said through clenched teeth. “But I’m telling you it hurts.”

“Can you stand up on it now? Do you think you can put all of your weight on it yet?”

Sanders sighed and struggled up to her feet as Rolle held on to her right arm for support. She tried to put all of her weight on her left foot and nearly crumpled to the floor, groaning in pain.

Rolle held on to her, keeping her from falling. “Okay, point proven. Let’s get you back down on the bed.”

After he helped her back down to the end of the bed, Rolle grabbed the rolled bandage and wrapped more of the cloth around her ankle as tightly as she could bear.

She hissed a little at the pain, leaning back on her elbows, watching Rolle.

He looked up at her. “Is it okay? It needs to be kind of tight. I know it will hurt for a moment, but eventually the compression will help it.”

Sanders nodded at him to keep going.

Rolle went about the process slowly. He tried to be as careful as possible as he wrapped the rest of the cloth bandage around her ankle.

After he was done, he stood back up and took the first aid kit with him over to the desk where he’d left his knife next to the lamp.

Sanders watched Rolle for a moment; his back was still to her. She glanced at the knife beside the first aid kit.

“Here, take these,” Rolle said as he turned around.

She snapped her eyes away from the knife and watched Rolle as he walked over to her with two small pills in his hand. The pills were white like just nearly everything else in these rooms.

“What are they?”

He shrugged. “Says painkillers on the container, but it’s probably some kind of aspirin or ibuprofen. Either one should help with the pain and inflammation.”

Sanders plucked the two small pills out of his palm.

“I’ll get you some water,” Rolle said and headed for the bathroom.

Sanders held the two pills in her hand and watched Rolle enter the bathroom. Her eyes darted back to the knife sitting on the desk top next to the plastic first aid kit. She moved over towards the corner of the bed, ready to spring across the room for the knife, but then Rolle came out of the bathroom with a plastic cup of water.

He stood next to Sanders at the corner of the bed, staring down at her. “You shouldn’t be moving around right now.”

She nodded and smiled at him. “Yeah. I … I just wanted to get a little more comfortable?”

“At the corner of the bed?”

She didn’t say anything. She tossed the two pills into her mouth and Rolle gave her the plastic cup of water. She chased the pills down with the water that had a faint chemical and iron taste to it.

“Thanks,” she said and handed the cup back to Rolle. “If you want to help Cromartie find Ward, I can wait here.”

Rolle shook his head, already dismissing that idea like it was a bad one.

“It’s okay if you want to go,” Sanders told him. “You could give me your knife so I could protect myself in case Ward comes back. You could get another knife for yourself from the kitchen.”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Where’s your knife?”

“I told you, I … I must’ve lost it. Or maybe Ward took it. But if you give me yours, you can go help Cromartie. I really think two of you should go after Ward. He could be very dangerous. I think we’ve already seen how dangerous he can be.”

Rolle seemed to be thinking her suggestion over for a moment. “I don’t want to leave you here by yourself. You’re in no shape to defend yourself right now.”

“I would feel better if you would just let me hold on to your knife,” Sanders said and smiled at him.

Rolle backed away from Sanders like he was suddenly suspicious of her. He moved towards the desk and reached out behind him for the knife sitting on the desktop without looking at it, keeping his eyes on Sanders the whole time. Then he grabbed it. “I think I’ll hold on to the knife for right now.”

A
s soon as Cromartie left Sanders’ room, he thought about checking the storage area just to be sure. But he hesitated a moment before going that way.

Sanders had told him that Ward had run away towards the front of the ship, towards the bridge.

If he could believe her,
his mind whispered. But he chose to believe Sanders’ story even though some of it wasn’t adding up in his mind. And he chose to believe Rolle’s story about being in the rec room. What other choice did he have? He didn’t want to waste time down in the storage area while Ward doubled back down here from the upper level.

Even though Sanders said Ward had run this way, Cromartie knew that Ward hadn’t run to the bridge because he’d been there earlier. From the commotion and running he’d heard in the hallway when he was on the bridge, he had to assume that Ward must’ve fled to the upper level.

But before searching the upper level, Cromartie decided to check the other rooms in the hall one by one. Just to eliminate all other possibilities, he told himself.

Or to stall?
his mind whispered.

He ignored the voice in his head and he searched the rooms. It only took a few moments to search their living quarters and his body was tense as he inspected each room, his skin felt like it was buzzing with overactive nerve endings. His senses seemed heightened, and he listened for any strange sounds. He gripped the knife in his hand so hard his fingers were starting to hurt. He was ready for a wild-eyed, blood-splattered Ward to jump out at him with a knife at any second.

But Ward wasn’t in the rooms.

Cromartie continued his search down the hall to the next section—the dining area, the kitchen, and the walk-in freezer. Ward wasn’t in these rooms and Cromartie’s eyes lingered on Butler for a moment when he was in the walk-in freezer, her body wrapped up in plastic and leaning against the metal shelves in a seated position.

Next, he checked the bridge just to be certain that Ward hadn’t doubled back from the upper level while he’d been in Sanders’ room. There were few places to hide on the bridge because every available space was crammed with computer equipment and machinery, but he checked every possible hiding place. He checked under all of the built-in countertops and around the swivel chairs. The bridge was murky but he didn’t bother turning on any other lights.

He stopped by the captain’s chair for a moment, eyeing the computer controls. His earlier thoughts when he’d been here suddenly returned to him.

He smiled.

He knew the answer to the puzzle, the reason they were all here, and he was going to share the answer with Sanders and Rolle as soon as he found Ward and either detained him or killed him.

He didn’t want to have to kill Ward but he was afraid he was going to have to do it—he couldn’t imagine Ward going down without a fight, so he needed to prepare himself to fight to the death. Maybe if he could just tell Ward the secret that he’d found, if Ward would just give him a chance to explain everything, then maybe he wouldn’t have to kill him.

After leaving the bridge, Cromartie walked back down the corridor until he came to the foot of the metal steps that led up to the third level. He hesitated for a moment, listening, making sure no strange noises were coming from Sanders’ room. He was positive that Ward couldn’t have doubled back, but he still felt jittery, like something was wrong, like he had overlooked something big.

He climbed the metal steps silently, the knife clenched in his hand. He hesitated at the top of the stairs, looking both ways. To his left was the cryo-room down the short, wide hall. And to his right were more storage areas and the part of the corridor that partitioned out. And beyond that partition, farther down the hall, was the airlock door.

The hum of the machinery was louder up here, the endless purring of the air handlers recirculating their air.

Cromartie decided to check the cryo-room first. He entered through the round archway and waited there for a moment. Like most places on this ship, there weren’t too many places to hide in here. He walked deeper into the gloomy room and checked each Plexiglas chamber that they’d woken up inside of just to be sure. The floors of the chambers were still shiny with the gel that had surrounded them in their suspended animation state, and it smelled faintly of chemicals.

After a quick check around the room to make sure Ward wasn’t crammed into one of the small niches, he left the cryo-room and glanced down at the metal steps that led back down to the second level.

There was only one last area to check, the corridor where the airlock was, and Ward had to be there.

Cromartie hesitated again near the top of the stairs, gripping his knife harder. He needed to be ready to do this. Ward was going to attack quickly and lethally. Cromartie wasn’t an expert on knife fighting—he hadn’t even been in a fistfight since high school. He couldn’t help wondering if Ward was an expert at knife fighting. Ward was a survivalist, and he had told them before that he was trained in the martial arts. Did that include knife fighting? He couldn’t help feeling that he didn’t stand a chance against Ward.

But he couldn’t back down now. They all needed to survive. Maybe if he could tell Ward that he’d found the answer to their survival, if he could reason with the man for a moment … but was Ward too far gone now to reason with?

Cromartie crept down the wide hallway, coming to the partition wall in the path. He stopped there by the wall that jutted out and he peeked around the corner.

He could see all the way to the airlock door, and Ward wasn’t standing near it. Ward wasn’t anywhere in the corridor … but there was blood.

So much blood.

Cromartie stepped out from behind the wall into the corridor and stared down at the gray metal floor. There was a large puddle of dark blood only a few feet away from him, and then a trail of blood, large droplets of it, that led all the way to the open storage closet door.

It was Ward … had to be.

Was he hurt?

Cromartie crept towards the open closet door and he saw Ward’s shoe sticking out of the nearly closed door. He hesitated in the middle of the corridor, his knife gripped in his hand. He watched Ward’s foot for a long moment, but the man’s foot wasn’t moving.

“Ward?”

No answer from Ward.

Was this some kind of trick? Maybe this wasn’t Ward’s blood at all on the floor. Maybe this was Abraham’s blood and he was setting a trap for him.

“Ward? It’s Cromartie. I’m here by myself.”

Still no answer.

“We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to hurt each other. I … I just want to talk to you about what happened to Abraham.”

Everything was still eerily silent up here except for the humming machinery behind the walls.

Cromartie approached the half-open door cautiously, his eyes darting around as he got closer to the door, his ears attuned to any sound, ready in case a barefooted Ward jumped out at him from somewhere else.