The hysteria was catching: Ellie giggled. “You’re welcome.”
Everyone laughed, except the doctor, who watched them suspiciously, as if wondering whether she’d be better off taking her chances with the mob and the fire – and except Cass, who looked blank. They settled in, Jule all too comfortably, pulling a cache of candy bars out from behind one of the steel cabinets and passing them around; Daniel didn’t want to think about why she was so at home out here. He didn’t like the idea of her spending days alone here, gnawing on Snickers and waiting out the final bell.
“We actually did it,” she said, tossing him a bag of M&M’s. “I thought you were insane, but we did it.”
“Ellie did it.” Daniel was slightly ashamed of himself. It wasn’t that she was a girl, it was that she was this girl, this pale wraith who flinched from her own shadow.
Though she didn’t look so pale now. She was still laughing.
Jule shrugged. “So she fixed the problem that she created in the first place. Are we supposed to say thanks?”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s fair,” Ellie said. “It’s true.”
“It’s done,” West said. “So what do we do now?” Daniel wondered whether it was mad-dog Baz who’d given him those black eyes and the bruises peeking out from his shirt collar. Hard to imagine West letting it happen. Baz was a thug, but West was big. And – though West kept his eyes fixed on Jason, as if daring the guy to try something – he hadn’t moved from Cass’s side. His arm circled her shoulders, which looked all the narrower settled comfortably into his bulk. Daniel busied himself with the M&M’s, and then with the view from the trailer door, peering through a gap to get a glimpse of the burning school. The flames hadn’t crept past the gym yet, but they would. School was out for good. No senior year, no yearbook, no prom – no big loss.
It occurred to him that West and Cass had, at one point, seemed poised for the homecoming court, and he wondered whether they would just pick up where they’d left off. In the movies, that was always how it happened, the hero and heroine falling into each other’s arms moments after they’d narrowly escaped mortal danger. Daniel should know, he’d imagined it himself enough times; it just hadn’t occurred to him that he’d be in the background, snarky sidekick, comic relief.
“Cass?” West said, sounding less than besotted. “Cass, what are you doing?”
Daniel turned around.
Cass had somehow acquired a gun. And she was pointing it at the doctor.
“No more excuses,” she said. “No more lies. Tell me what you did to me.”
What did you have to do to accept that you were going to die? Daniel wondered. What inner switch did you have to flip that would allow you to walk calmly to a pile of lumber and kindling where you would be set on fire? Was it a question of turning off your ability to feel anything, or feeling so much you went insane?
Technically, she wasn’t so sane to start out with, he reminded himself.
But she had never seemed quite this empty.
Cass held the gun with two hands. Neither shook. “It’s now or never. Talk.”
12
THE GOOD GUYS LOSE
There was a lot of shouting. A lot of voices coming from what seemed to be very far away telling Cass things that didn’t matter much, not compared with the things that the doctor had to say. But the doctor was silent. Even with a gun in her face.
There had come a point during the trial where Cass saw how the rest of her life was going to play out. She would fight back, and probably get in a few punches and maybe tear out a patch of hair, but she wouldn’t win. She would die. Waiting for it to happen, she’d had ample opportunity to think about what she would miss. Not her parents, her home, her future – she’d already had a year to mourn them and move on. The basics, things that you figured death-row inmates craved in their final moments, the smell of a cloudless sky, the sweetness of buttered corn or a fresh-picked strawberry, the taste of a kiss, the sigh of a body breathing beneath you – these were things she thought she could do without.
But dying without ever remembering? Dying without knowing why? She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. And now, as if the God she’d given up trying to believe in had dropped a gift into her lap, she wouldn’t have to.
“Shut up,” she told the noise.
“Talk now,” she told the doctor. “Tell me why I did it.”
“Not with him here,” the doctor said, pointing at Jason. “The rest of them are fine, but not him. He’s dangerous.”
“I’m dangerous,” Cass said.
“You don’t understand —”
“No, I don’t. So you tell me. Tell me why.”
She felt better with the gun in her hand. There was comfort in knowing that she could pull the trigger. If she had to.
“There is no why,” the doctor said. “No reason you killed Owen Tuck, because you didn’t, not really.”
Cass never let the gun waver. Focusing on that was the only thing that kept her upright.
“It was the drug,” the doctor said. “The R8-G.”
“I don’t take drugs.”
“You were given a dose of R8-G in your flu shot that afternoon. Five of you were, by random selection: Henry Gathers. Reverend James Willet. Gloria Birch. Paul Caster. Cassandra Porter.”
“What, like some kind of experiment?” Daniel said.
“Exactly like.”
The gun, Cass thought. Focus on the gun. The ground dropped out beneath her feet, the room spun around her, the words kept coming, making less and less sense, explaining everything and nothing at once; her ears buzzed and her eyes watered, but the gun was real. As long as the gun was steady, as long as her finger rested on the trigger, she was still in control.
“So you inject a bunch of people with some kind of experimental drug, it backfires, they murder some other people, and you just… sit back and watch?” Jule said.
“It didn’t backfire,” the doctor said. “R8-G did exactly what it was designed to do.”
“Give me the gun,” West said, suddenly beside Cass.
“No.”
“Give me the gun.” Cass risked a glance at him. Every muscle in his face was clenched. He was nearly vibrating with tension.
“R8-G turns people into killing machines,” the doctor said, her voice rising in pitch and speed. It was like she thought if the words came quickly enough, no one would have a chance to take in their meaning. “They’ll kill every living creature in sight, and when that’s done, kill themselves.”
West lunged at the doctor, bearing down on her with all his 243 pounds of muscle and ramming her into the back wall. From somewhere beneath his weight came a muffled but panicked squeak. Daniel and Jule were on him in seconds, tugging at his tree-trunk biceps, his thick waist, his immovable bulk, uselessly. It was like watching children try to shove an elephant. Ellie stood by with her arms hugged to her chest, her lips moving in what could have been a silent prayer. The junior, Jason, was hunched into a corner and seemed to be trying his best to disappear.
“West, stop,” Cass said quietly.
“Only if you’re going to shoot her.” His hands pinned her to the cement wall. “Or you can shoot me. Because otherwise I wring her damn neck.”
“That place you had me in. What was it?” Cass felt like she was moving underwater, trapped in one of those dreams where the world sped up and left her behind.
“Research base,” the doctor gasped out. “Government.”
“You mean military,” Jule said. “Holy crap, Scott was right?”
Cass tried to wrap her mind around it. She wasn’t a criminal or a mental patient. She was a subject. An experiment. There was no hidden reason – no why. There was just bad luck. Bad timing. Bad people. In AP psych, she’d learned about an experiment in which a rat, after being pumped with antidepressants for two weeks, had the drug yanked from its system. In the subsequent withdrawal, it went crazy and attacked any other creature unfortunate enough to share its cage. You
couldn’t blame the rat. Right?
She’d thought knowing would change everything.
But Owen Tuck was still dead.
In the silence that fell over the room, they could all hear it. West, his hands still at the doctor’s throat, was crying.
“Jeremiah,” Cass said.
“Don’t call me that.” It was more anger – more emotion, period – than she’d ever heard from him.
“Let her go, West.”
“No.”
She knelt to the ground and carefully laid the gun on the cement. Her fingers cramped and, for a moment, held their half curl around the weapon. Daniel stooped beside her and took her hands into his own, kneading the circulation back into them. She wondered if he felt better about himself, now that he had permission to feel sorry for her.
If it were a movie, he would take her into his arms and kiss her. Now that he had played savior and she had been redeemed, romance could bloom and the credits could roll. Events neatly tied up, lines of good and evil clearly drawn, hero and heroine on the right side of the border. Their shoulders pressed together, and for a moment, Cass toyed with the idea of kissing him, just to see what would happen. If she could magically convert her life from horror story to romantic comedy.
This time, at least, she managed to suppress the unseemly urge to laugh.
“She killed Nick. She killed them all.” West’s breath had gone ragged. “For the hell of it. For fun.”
“For a weapon,” Jule said. “That’s it, isn’t it? The weapon to end all weapons? R8-G. Rage, right? Cute.” Her voice strained with the effort to sound flip, but couldn’t quite make it.
“Do you know what you did?” West shouted. “Do you understand?”
“I’m sorry —”
“I don’t care,” West hissed, and something in it was more frightening than his roar.
Ellie chose that moment to rouse herself. “‘Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering,’” she said quietly, “‘that the Lord brought on me in the day of his fierce anger?’”
“What?” Jule said. “Does anyone know what the hell she’s talking about?”
It was West who answered. “It’s the Bible,” he said, with a harsh laugh. “Lamentations of Jeremiah.”
“‘I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath,’” Ellie continued. “‘He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light.’”
West joined her in a whisper. “‘Indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long.’”
“It’s all right,” Ellie told him, in that maddeningly soft voice. “I understand.”
“I doubt that,” murmured Cass, who thought she actually did.
But West softened under her touch, and allowed Ellie to take first one arm and then the other off the doctor and back him away.
Daniel took the gun. He pulled Cass to her feet, and the five of them stood together, facing the woman who’d changed things for all of them.
“Drop a bomb of this crap on your enemy and they’d kill themselves off,” Jule said. “Nice and neat and no army required. Is that about right?”
The doctor didn’t answer. She rubbed her neck, where bruises in the shape of fingers had begun to bloom.
“And you’re still here,” Jule said. “Studying us. The lab rats are really that fascinating? Even when most of them are dead?”
“Some of us at the base were staffed to research, but most are there for… procurement.” The doctor cleared her throat. Her fingers played nervously together, steeples rising and falling, thumbs warring and surrendering and warring again. “Here’s where things get problematic.”
Jule snorted. “Right. Here.”
“R8-G isn’t a synthetic drug – it’s a refined solution of a substance found in nature.”
“What kind of substance?”
The doctor hesitated. “It’s not a substance, not exactly, the way you’d think of it. It’s got unusual qualities – unusual energy.”
“Like radiation?” Daniel said.
“Like. But not like. This… substance seems to be excreted from the human body at the time of death – especially violent deaths, and especially when they happen in great numbers. The law of conservation: all that anger, fear, and rage has to go somewhere.”
“And there just happens to be a big pool of it sitting under Oleander?” Jule asked.
“It seems to collect in certain pockets – some of us believe a pocket requires only a particularly brutal initiating incident, and then the substance tends to pool. It attracts more of itself, so to speak.”
“Like an evil lint ball,” Jule said.
“The Oleander pool is large and isolated. A perfect research site.”
“Except for the thousand people living on top of it.”
“We obviously took precautions,” the doctor snapped. “Until…”
“The storm,” Cass said. Remembering the explosion and the fire that had nearly killed her – and the massacre that had killed everyone else, all those bodies, piled on top of each other, bloody and whimpering and still clutching their spent machine guns. How much of this R8-G would it have taken to do that? And what else had it done? “Something went wrong.”
“About twelve things went wrong – but all you need to know is that we had a leak.”
“So why haven’t we all turned into a bunch of murdering zombies?” Jule said.
“It’s like radiation, remember?” the doctor said. Cass had never seen her like this, vulnerable, defensive, and almost, if you squinted, afraid. “Nuclear material, when refined and assembled in a very specific way, can set off a concentrated blast of energy – a bomb. But if you were to release the unrefined raw material in a less controlled fashion… if you were to have, for example, a containment breach at a nuclear power plant, the result wouldn’t have the destructive force of a bomb —”
“But people would still die,” Daniel said. He balled up his fists. “Slowly. They’d get sick first, and without knowing why. And then they’d die. A bomb in slow motion.”
“Except this crap wouldn’t kill them,” Jason said in a hoarse voice. “It would drive them nuts. Slowly. Until they couldn’t stop themselves. And then they’d kill. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what’s happening to me?”
She hesitated. Maybe trying to decide whether or not to lie. “The others are immune.”
“But not me.”
Everyone turned to look at him. Cass saw the fear in their eyes, and she saw Jason see it, too.
“It’s already started, right?” Jason said, trembling. “It’s happening right now?”
She nodded.
“So can you fix it?”
She shook her head.
“Then… then…” Jason backed away from her, from all of them, still staring at him, accusing him for what he hadn’t yet done. He backed himself all the way to the door, and pushed through it.
“Jason…,” West started.
“She can’t fix it,” Jason said. “She can’t stop it. You want me around? Knowing that?”
West didn’t say anything. No one did. And so none of them should have been surprised when he ran away. Cass certainly wasn’t. Cass understood. Finally, Cass understood.
Jule slammed her hand against the wall so hard the trailer wobbled.
Dr. Fiske sighed. “It’s in the air, it’s in the ground, it’s in the water. It’s been there since the storm, warping the entire town. Except for children, who for some reason don’t seem to feel any effect – and except for you.”
“Why?” Jule asked. “What are we, some kind of lucky mutants? Is this where you reveal our superpowers and our special destinies?”
“Cassandra’s body has already been saturated by the R8-G. It can’t do anything to her. The rest of you were each present at one of the killings; you each came into contact with a subject’s blood while the R8-G was active. You’ve been inoculated. As… have I.” She looked sick.
Co
ntact with infected blood, Cass thought, and thought of gunfire and smoke, and stepping through broken bodies while a storm raged overhead. Of course the doctor was also immune.
Jule started. “But you said there’s no cure.”