Until We End (19 page)

He hit the lights on his way out, leaving me in darkness.

I curled into a ball on the hard cot, holding the fresh bruise on my arm, and wondered where Brooks was now. One day down. Was he still hiding in the woods, waiting for me? If he was so sure this mission was pointless, he might have been lying when he said he'd wait for me.

But if he lied, I was glad. The feeling of having someone waiting for me, missing me, was a good one. It made me feel protected and loved.

I closed my eyes, hoping I'd dream of him.

Four beeps woke me. I shot straight up, heart pounding. Mitchell, followed by two soldiers, strode to my cot in three quick steps, slamming the door behind them. I clutched the edge of the thin mattress and put my back to the wall. Something was definitely wrong — it took me a moment to pinpoint — then it came to me. None of them were wearing bio-suits.

I kept my spine straight and brought my knees under me. “What is it?” Was that my voice? When did I get so brave?

Mitchell's eyes gleamed with anticipation. “Your blood test results came back, Sarah.”

“Good news, I hope?”

He smiled, crow's feet crinkling. “Interesting news.”

Every survival alarm in me blared, the muscles in my legs tensing, but there was nowhere to run. “What does that mean?”

“Your test results have shown an impossibility. When I introduced the virus to your blood, your antibodies fought it off.” He shook his head. “Like it was nothing.”

I pressed my back harder against the wall, the cold penetrating the fabric of my hospital gown. “I don't understand.”

“It was like you've been vaccinated.”

Impossible. “But no vaccine exists.”

“Exactly.”

Then why was he smiling at me like that? “So — okay — I don't get it. What are you saying?”

“I'm saying I'll need to run diagnostics. We'll have you transported to the medical facility on Sharp Naval Base and administer bone marrow tests, microbiological cultures, and a full physical. It'll take some time, but Sarah!” He dropped to his knees beside my cot, his eyes shining with an almost religious fanaticism. I shifted my weight away from him, toward edge of the bed.

“Think of the good you could do,” he said. “The key to finding a cure might be in your blood.”

“You're crazy,” I whispered, scrambling away from him and stumbling to my feet, back still pressed against the wall. The soldiers closed in. Mitchell rose slowly to his feet, frowning.

“Sarah, this is an incredible opportunity.” He held out his hands. “We've never seen anything like you before. We need to know more. Do you understand?”

“Yes. No.” I held my hands out, like that would stop them. “I can't go with you. My brother— he might be here, at the shelter. That's why I came. I have to find him.”

“You didn't mention a brother in your interview.”

“You didn't ask.”

But Mitchell did just say he'd never seen anything like me before. Maybe that meant they hadn't tested Coby, or that our blood was different somehow. Maybe he was still safe.

One of the soldiers jerked forward a step, and I bent my knees, ready to do whatever I could to keep them from taking me away from here — from Coby. Mitchell held up a hand to stop them and took a step closer, forcing me back onto the cot.

“What's your brother's name?”

I froze, focusing in on his face. With no plastic to distort it, I could see that though his brown eyes and hair were plain, the roundness of his jaw and the laugh lines around his eyes gave him a sincerely kind appearance. Like he was someone I'd want to trust.

Before I could blink he lunged forward, grabbed me by the shoulder with one hand, and forced my head back with the other. I felt this awful bruising jab in my neck and my eyes widened when I saw what he held in his hand: a syringe. I reached up to touch the patch of skin he'd stabbed and felt a drop of moisture.

My vision began to blur and my tongue felt thick and swollen.

The world went black.

When I came to, the first thing I felt was a cold concrete floor beneath me. My neck throbbed as I remembered the shocking pain of the needle and Mitchell's expression when he stabbed me. But before that, he'd said something impossible… something about my blood being the key to curing the virus.

Crazy. God, I'd been so close to finding Coby. To rescuing him. And all of it was blown to shit because of some stupid blood test fluke! I mean, what were they expecting to find? Some sort of magic cure-all potion in my blood? Some sort of crossword puzzle key? Everyone knew the virus had no cure. I wasn't anything special.

And plenty of other people had managed to survive as long as I had.
They
didn't have any anomalies. They were normal. I was normal. And after that all got sorted out, I'd get out of here and back to finding Coby. Back to Brooks.

I tried to sit up, but my head spun so hard I fell back on my face, cheekbone slapping against the concrete floor and making my jaw throb. Whatever drug Mitchell pumped into me packed a punch.

I flipped onto my back and cracked my eyelids. Concrete floor, low ceiling. Concrete walls, except for one. That one was made of steel bars. On the wall behind me, a barred window let in sunlight. I crawled on my hands and knees toward it, using the wall to pull myself up.

The sun was high in the sky — afternoon. I'd been out for hours. How long had it been since I'd left Brooks? Would he know I wasn't coming back? He said he would come in after me. Was that nurse scrubbing him down, even now?

I heard footsteps and turned to face the wall made of steel bars. Two soldiers and Mitchell walked down the hallway toward my cell. Still no suits.

“You can't do this to me,” I shouted. “I do not give my consent to be tested on! Hear me? Don't you doctors need informed consent? Don't you take some kind of oath before you get your license?”

They'd reached my cell. “Sarah, I'm not a medical doctor,” Mitchell said. “I am a scientist.”

The cell door opened with a clang
.
I backed up so fast that I tripped over my feet, the world still spinning from Mitchell's drugs, but the two soldiers were there in a second to catch me by the arms. They led me away.

I tried to memorize everything about where I was. The turns:
left, left, right, left.
Down a long, narrow hallway with a sanitized hospital smell. Up a flight of stairs. Then the soldiers opened a door to a patient's room that looked like it could've been in any doctor's office. The two soldiers dragged me in and sat me on a metal table in the center of the room.

Mitchell followed us in and shut the door behind him.

“Sarah, I'm afraid this first test will hurt a bit,” he said. “I'll have to take a sample of your bone marrow. You'll be given some local anesthetic, but I won't be able to knock you out during the harvest.”

Harvest.
Harvest?!

“Why can't you knock me out?” I asked, heart accelerating. “You didn't have any problem doing it earlier.”

“Can't mix the cocktails. You still have the last knock-out in your system.”

He told me to lie on my stomach and pull my shirt up around my ribs, and then swabbed my hip with a damp cloth that made the skin there tingle. His pen clickedas he filled out his clipboard.

“Sarah, what's your last name?”

“You already asked me that.”

Mitchell smiled at me. “Those were different forms. I don't have them handy for a cross-reference, so I'm afraid we'll have to run the gamut again.”

Cross-reference? More like cross-examination. He must not have believed the answers I'd given him last night. And why not? I'd been such a hot mess. I could have said the sky was blue and it would've sounded sketchy.

I'd get every question right. I had to. “My last name's Flurry.”

It began again. All the same questions, on and on. I wouldn't wipe my sweaty palms against the table, though. I wouldn't look away.

His eyes met mine over the clipboard when he came to his last question. “And your brother?”

“Go to hell, Mitchell.”

He pressed his lips into a thin line and put his clipboard on the counter. I swallowed my relief. I'd been expecting worse.

But when he turned back around and I saw what he was holding, I nearly fainted. Calling it a needle would be a joke. The thing was long enough to be a butcher knife, and almost as thick as the tip of my pinky.

“You can't be serious,” I said.

“Bone marrow will give me a much more in-depth look at your immune system,” Mitchell said.

The needle came closer.

I stared at it, horrified, and tried to move —
anywhere
— every instinct in me shrieking at me to run, to get off the table, even though I had nowhere to go. The two soldiers rushed forward and pinned to the table by the shoulders.

“No.
No.
” I pushed against the soldiers' hands, but their grip was solid, unmovable, flattening my face and throat against the metal table until my windpipe felt as thin as a hair's breadth. My heart bruised my ribs with the force of its beating.
“
You can't do this to me.”

Mitchell paused for a moment. Glanced at my face. Something moved in his eyes then — a sliver of doubt. But he looked away, and when he spoke next, his voice was rough.

“It'll be over soon.”

When the needle bit through my skin, I couldn't keep from crying out, even with my face and throat crushed against the table. My whole skeleton vibrated with pain, somehow sharp and blunt at the same time. The local anesthetic did nothing to dull it.

Pain worse than anything. Consuming, like fire over dry brush. Reaching into the deepest parts of me, all the dark corners where I hid my secrets, until every single cell sung with the burning.

“I'm in, Sarah. Just a few more minutes.”

Over soon. I clung to that like a lifeboat as the needle jackhammered into me, jolting my skeleton at its root, shuddering through my muscles. Over soon, soon, soon.

Then it started to suck. I could feel it pulling all the way from my toes up through my leg, like my blood was flowing in reverse. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, and spots exploded behind my lids. Blue spots, cream spots, blond spots, Coby-sized spots. Is this what they'll put him through?

I could barely remember how to breathe. Inhale. Exhale.

“I'm coming out now.”

He removed the needle but the pain didn't leave me. The hole in my skeleton throbbed.

I opened my eyes. Mitchell stood over me, looking a little guilty, but more than that: excited. He held a syringe filled with cloudy white fluid.

“
Bastard
,” I gasped.

“Give her some pain killers,” he said, turning to the soldiers. “Nothing stronger than five hundred milligrams.”

The soldiers pulled me up by the elbows, making me fall on the hip that Mitchell had stabbed. I screamed, pushing against them, and over my screams I heard shouting, maybe Mitchell telling them to lay off, but they didn't. They dragged me through the door by my arms, legs trailing behind. Mitchell stood in the doorway and watched them take me.

The more I kicked the more I hurt, but I didn't stop kicking, because I wanted to hurt them, too. I wanted them to pump me full of drugs again so I wouldn't have to wonder if Coby was destined for the same fate as mine. So I wouldn't have to feel this pain.

They threw me into my cell and tossed something after me. I looked for what it was after my eyes refocused. Two small white pills.

The clang of the cell door opening startled me awake. I didn't remember falling asleep and, for a wonderful moment, didn't remember where I was. Morning gave me a moment of mercy.

But gravity pulled heavy at my eyelids. When I managed to open them, my vision was too blurry to see much of anything. I heard his voice first.

“Cora,” Brother Charlie said. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

I tried to scuttle back, but the pain from my hip tangled my thoughts and paralyzed me.

The door to my cell banged shut and my vision began to clear. Brother Charlie stood across from me in a blue plaid shirt and khakis, his hair freshly gelled. Two soldiers stood outside the bars, gripping their rifles and watching us.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He walked a few steps deeper into my cell. “I'm your counselor.” Weak evening light streamed from my barred window, reflecting off Charlie's bleached teeth. “Cora, it seems you and Dr. Mitchell have had a miscommunication.”

He'd called me by name. They knew I lied to Mitchell, then. But — I never told Charlie my full name. So there was still no way for them to trace to me to Coby.

I had to play this off. Lying looked bad. Very bad. “What do you mean?”

He clasped his hands behind his back. “When we met the other day, you introduced yourself as Cora.”

“That's right,” I said.

“The name you gave Dr. Mitchell was Sarah Flurry.”

“Cora's my middle name. What I go by. Sarah is my first name. I don't think I ever gave you my full name, did I?” The lies flew off my tongue. I curled my toes and my fingers and waited for him to call me out on it, but he just cocked his head.

“No, I suppose you didn't.”

I shifted my weight. The adrenaline of being woken by Charlie had begun to fade, and my hip was aching so bad it made my hands shake, but I couldn't let myself dwell on it. “My full name's Sarah Cora Flurry.”

His eyes shone bright as marbles. “How lovely.”

“Thanks.” I swallowed hard. “So aren't you supposed to be counseling me?” I flicked my eyes to the two watching soldiers. They hadn't stopped staring at me since they walked in. I pulled on the hem of my hospital gown and dropped my gaze to my hands, which had curled into fists, ordering myself to relax.