Consume bunker 12 4, p.14
Consume (Bunker 12, #4), page 14
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“You let Finn walk all over you. You’re terrified of the possibility of life without him that you’d rather live in denial than face reality.”
“And what reality is that?”
“That Finn’s never going to be the same. He can’t walk. He can’t speak. He barely recognizes us, and he probably doesn’t remember much. Do you actually believe he’ll just wake up one day, get out of bed, and start joking around with you like old times?”
“There’s no such thing as old times,” Bix muttered. “Not anymore. There’s only now. Anyway, why should I even listen to you? A week ago, you were ready to write him off.”
“I wasn’t the only one.”
“Don’t you even try to suggest I was!”
“You had your doubts.”
“No, I didn’t!” He kicked the chair into the wall. “It should’ve been you!”
Jonah pulled back, his eyes wide with dismay. “Why the hell did you follow me out here then? If that’s how you feel.”
Bix glared at him for a moment, then stomped over to the door and reached for the knob.
“Come on, Bix. At least wait till the rain stops.”
“They’re going to wonder where we are and come looking. We should head back.”
“At least wait until— Damn it, shut the door!”
Rain gusted in. The storm was blowing hard, raising a racket. Water rushed off the roof in waves, forming a curtain that curved inward, as if trying to reach them. It instantly soaked the thin carpet and made a squishy sound when Jonah joined Bix beneath the overhang. He expected Bix to turn around and go back inside. Instead, he stepped onto the porch and headed for the steps.
“You coming or not?”
Jonah glanced out to where he knew the truck was, but he couldn’t see it. Maybe he was wrong about the rain. It didn’t seem to be letting up at all. “Fine. But let’s go around the back way. It’s out of the direct wind.”
They jogged down the walkway and turned right at the corner. The slope from the original mine rose up before them, funneling runoff directly across their path. The water was ankle deep and rising, but at least it wasn’t windy. Jonah had been right about that.
“Remind me not to come looking for you next time,” Bix shouted as they hurried along.
Jonah wanted to tell him to slow down, as the running made his hand throb. They cut across an open area, making for the building with the entrance for the bunker. The distance between them grew. “And here I thought we were having a moment back there!” he shouted.
“Sorry to disappoint you!”
There was a splash, and Bix disappeared. Jonah skidded to a stop. The ground had turned into a lake, its muddy surface boiling from the deluge. “Bix?” He took a step forward, and a head emerged through the choppy surface. “Bix!” The head slowly rolled to one side. The body appeared next, a few feet away, and rolled in the opposite direction.
“BIX!”
Bix exploded through the surface a moment later, sputtering and shouting for help. He didn’t seem to know about the corpse floating behind him.
“Grab my hand!” Jonah yelled. He edged carefully forward, testing the ground with his toes. Beneath the chop, the edge of the grave he and Eddie had dug for Seth Abramson days before was no longer visible.
The rotting body floated nearer and bumped into Bix. With a howl of terror, he pushed it away and scrambled out under his own power. “You son of a bitch!” he screamed at Jonah. “You brought me this way on purpose! That’s not funny! You’re fucking insane!”
Jonah yanked Bix away from the hole, urging him to be quiet.
“I am not going to shut up! You shut up! You goddamn fucking crazy son—”
“Listen to me, damn it! We’re in danger!”
“Goddamn crazy— What?”
Jonah yanked Bix around, then released him. He bent down, pulled Seth closer by one shoulder, and rolled him onto his back. Then he fished for the head. Most of the dead man’s face was gone, the flesh torn off. As was half of one arm. The remaining muscle was bleached white.
“This hole was dug up,” he said. “Something dug Mister Abramson up and started to eat it, and I don’t think it was an animal.”
The blood drained from Bix’s face. He spun on his heels and took off for the bunker entrance, abandoning Jonah with the corpse.
EDDIE WAS THE LAST to join the group in the kitchen, appearing freshly showered and shaven with the towel still draped over his shoulders. Kaleagh stood at the stove, studiously avoiding eye contact with anyone. She felt indirectly responsible for what had happened, despite their insistence that she wasn’t to blame for any of it. Harrison had told her it was his fault for not making sure Seth’s grave was deep enough, but she refused to hear him.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, her voice quiet and hitching from the crying she’d done after hearing the news. She brought the pot over and set it gently down on the table, as if it were made of crystal and would shatter at the slightest bump. She lifted the lid, releasing a cloud of steam infused with the aroma of canned stew.
“Has he remembered anymore of our names?” Eddie asked, referring to Finn. “Said anything else since we got him back inside?”
They looked to Harper, who shook his head. “He fell right to sleep and still hasn’t woken up.”
“Did he . . . eat anything?” Kaleagh asked.
“Canned peaches. But he didn’t speak.”
“It’ll come,” Harrison said, “most likely in fits and starts, like his legs. I think the shower and food helped. So will the rest. At least he’s moved on from saying ‘more’ all the time. And he does seem a lot more aware of what’s going on around him than we realized, even if he can’t communicate with us just yet.”
“Bix?” Kaleagh said, pushing the pot toward him. “Eat. You, too, Jonah.”
Bix eyed the floating chunks of potato and meat in the stew, and his stomach did a hot, slow roll. He felt like he could take a thousand showers with scalding hot water and scrub his skin until it bled, but he’d never be able to remove every last trace of dead person clinging to him. He was destined to forever have essence of corpse leak from his pores.
He lurched out of his chair and ran out.
“How’s your hand?” Eddie asked. He’d meant the question for Harper before remembering Jonah’s injury.
They had happened to come on the scene with Bix and Jonah just as Bix took off. Thinking he was running from an infected Jonah, Eddie shouted out in alarm, prompting Jonah to whirl around. Harper fired the pistol, but the unexpected recoil threw him to the ground, reinjuring his broken wrist. Luckily, the shot had gone wide.
“Um, fine?” Jonah said, eye-checking Harper, who nodded in agreement. He turned back. “Sorry you had to deal with Mister Abramson by yourself, Eddie.”
Kaleagh slammed the metal lid for the pot down on the table. “I don’t know why we don’t just kill her,” she snapped. “Why are we keeping her alive? After what she did to— After what she—” Another sob escaped her throat.
No one said anything. There was nothing they could do that would lessen the emotional trauma on them all.
“You need to get rid of her,” Kaleagh continued after regaining some control of herself. “And her brother, too. I don’t care who does it. I don’t care how you do it. If you don’t, I will.”
“I understand how angry you are,” Harrison quietly told her. “But we mustn’t act rashly.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what I should or shouldn’t do!” she screamed. “That man murdered my husband! And then his sister—” She covered her mouth with her hand and turned back to the stove.
The next several minutes passed in uncomfortable silence. Finally, Eddie leaned over. “I agree with Kaleagh,” he quietly said. “We put ourselves at great risk by keeping her alive. And for what? You still haven’t explained how you think she could be useful to us.”
“I told you, Adrian is holding out. He knows something.”
“He’s a liar. He’s manipulating you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“If he knew where the twelfth bunker was, he’d have already gone there instead of letting Harper lead him on a wild goose chase.”
“He wanted Finn. And now he wants that cure, more than ever now that we’ve recovered his sister. He’ll do what we ask to get it. He needs our help.”
“There is no cure,” Kaleagh asserted.
“He obviously believes otherwise, and I’m inclined to believe it, too.”
“Why?”
Harrison’s face pinched. “I just need time. Adrian’s hinted at a few things. Now that we have his sister, he’ll be more willing to share.”
“We don’t need him. You want to go looking for Bunker Twelve, fine. We have perfectly good people back at Westerton that will help, people we can trust.”
“We thought that the last time, and you know what happened. Nobody is completely trustworthy.”
“Really? Does that include you?” Jonah asked.
“Don’t talk to my father that way,” Bix said, reappearing in the doorway. His forehead was covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and he looked pale.
“Look,” Harrison said. He got up and walked around the end of the table to where Kaleagh stood. “Adrian’s shackled. He’s not going anywhere. He can’t hurt us. And his sister’s tied up, too. She’s not going to get free. All I’m asking is that we don’t make any decisions about either of them we can’t undo. At the very least, let’s sleep on it, gain some distance from what happened this afternoon.”
“Well, you know which way I’m voting,” Jonah said. “I’m not changing my mind.” He stood up and went to the door, but Bix refused to let him exit. “You mind?”
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Rain’s stopped. Truck’s still broken. The offer still stands, Bix. If you’re up for it, I could use your help.”
He glanced back into the kitchen, defying the adults to stop him.
“It’s already getting late,” Harrison advised. “Why don’t we just start fresh in the morning?”
“You know something?” Eddie said, standing up. “I’ve got things to do, too.” He slid the towel off his shoulders and shoved it into Harrison’s hands.
“Like what?”
“Like packing up supplies.”
“Eddie, we shouldn’t—”
“I think it’d be best if Jonah and I leave for Westerton in the next few days. We’ll send someone back to fetch the rest of you and the supplies, but I think we’re done here.”
HARRISON SAT FOR A long time after they left, deep in thought. Finally, he turned to Harper. “We know that the Flense depends on the presence of nanites, since Bix and I are both immune.”
Harper nodded.
“But so are Eddie and Finn. Their accidents altered their nanites somehow, made them resistant. It’s like immunity. So, this infection, this virus, can only infect — what? — nanites that haven’t been activated in some way?”
Harper reflected on this for a moment. “If that’s true, then maybe the cure is to activate all of the nanites in our bodies. Is that what we have to do?”
“That’s not what I’m suggesting. I mean, who’d want to risk trying to kill himself to test that theory? We also don’t know if the effect is permanent. It might not be. Maybe the nanites deactivate after they’re finished, although Eddie’s still . . . .” He sighed, then shook his head. “No, the only way to be sure is to get rid of them entirely.”
“From the body?” Harper asked. “That seems impossible.”
“It’s only impossible until it isn’t.” He frowned, thinking hard. “I was just thinking about these devices Adrian had. They produce some kind of radio signal that can stop Wraiths dead in their tracks.”
“But they don’t discriminate. That signal knocks out anyone with nanites inside their bodies, not just Wraiths.”
“That’s not entirely true. It does differentiate, since the effect is stronger on Wraiths and on people like Finn and Eddie, whose nanites have been challenged to a higher degree. It barely affects people who haven’t suffered a lot of injury or illness. And they don’t affect me or Bix at all.”
“Well, it’s not a cure. The effect goes away as soon as you turn the machine off. A cure has to be permanent.”
Harrison nodded. “And the only way to do that is to destroy them. But these separate pieces of information are all part of the larger puzzle. We just can’t see the whole picture yet. We need more pieces.”
Throughout this exchange, Kaleagh had kept her silence — and her distance — but now she joined them at the table. “If you think it might help,” she said, “Seth kept records of everything he did. All his notes, studies, experiments. He was careful in that manner.”
“Notes? Why didn’t you say something before?” Harrison asked.
She shrugged. “He was so sure there was no cure, and I believed him. But I can’t . . . . I want to believe there is one. Especially now.”
Harrison saw the flash of alarm on Harper’s face. It was obvious she was worried about what the nanites were doing to Finn, what they could do in the future. And the effect that his changes were having on Bren. But would curing Finn give them the outcome they all wanted?
“You’ve seen these notes?” Harrison asked. “You know where they are?”
“Maybe, but it would have only been once. It was the day Abraham became bunker leader. I found Seth down on Level Eight. He had a bunch of loose papers in his arms, and what looked like a laboratory notebook. He also had a folder with David Gronbach’s name printed on the front.”
“The original leader,” Harrison clarified for Harper.
“I thought nothing of it at the time,” Kaleagh continued, “since he’d died just the day before, and Seth was helping Abraham with the transition. He was always so organized that way, keeping notes.”
“Right,” Harrison said, remembering how they’d sent David’s body over the railing outside Level Six and into the spillway to the river below as a sort of burial ceremony.
“I could see how upset he was. We all were, of course. But this was a different kind of upset. He was . . . . He seemed angry about David dying, frustrated, which didn’t seem to fit with the circumstances. It was like he took it personally. When I asked him what was wrong, he said it was all a lie. Just like that: ‘A lie, nothing but false hope.’ I thought he meant the bunker, which was supposed to protect us, but he shook the folder with David’s name on it in the air and said, ‘How are the rest of us ever supposed to get out of here now?’ ”
The others remained silent, digesting what she’d just told them. Finally, Harper shook his head. “And you think he was talking about the cure?”
Kaleagh hesitated, then nodded. “In hindsight, yes.”
“But that was so soon after we arrived. When would he have had time to do any experiments?”
She shrugged.
“Well, in any case, he could have destroyed those notes a long time ago,” Harrison said.
“It’s been at least two years since he gave up,” she acknowledged. “But it wasn’t like him to thrown his papers away. I can’t be sure, but if he saved them, they’d still be in Bunker Eight.”
Harrison stood up. “Then that’s where I need to go.”
“But Eddie and Jonah are—”
“They can drop me and Bix off. It’s on the way.” He paused, then added, “You two will be safe here with Finn and Bren until we can come back for you.”
“If you come back,” Kaleagh murmured, as he hurried out of the kitchen to find Eddie. She caught Harper’s eyes and saw the same skepticism she was feeling in them, too.
WHEN THEY GATHERED for dinner two days later, the mood was considerably lighter than it had been in a long time. It was the first chance the entire group had to sit together for a meal since their arrival, and a lot of the tension from the events of the previous days had diminished.
Finn’s vocabulary had expanded considerably, too, and he now knew them all by name, although he still had no memory of the day of his accident. The physical healing proceeded at a phenomenal pace, but there were hiccups and stalls and setbacks. Sometimes he would suddenly stumble for no apparent reason, or experience localized temporary paralysis. He’d stare at the offending body part, not in anger, but concentration, as if willing it to reboot. Sometimes the simplest tasks he’d already shown proficiency in confounded him, or he’d forget what he was doing. Once, they found him quivering in bed and crying out, as if in agony, but when they roused him, he woke without pain or memory. The episodes were always frightening for the others to witness, but they didn’t seem to phase him for more than a few minutes.
The most troubling aspect of his recovery was his appetite, which put even Bix’s to shame. Nothing, it seemed, could satisfy his cravings.
They kept hoping to see signs of the old Finn, but he remained stubbornly absent. On the other hand, there had been no more manic episodes like the one that resulted in Harper’s broken wrist, which was healing as quickly as they expected, that is to say, a lot faster than normal.
Bix had helped Jonah get the pickup truck back to running, and he reminded Jonah of it every chance he got. With a little guidance, he had singlehandedly — a word he used often and with emphasis whenever the opportunity arose — cleaned out and reassembled the pickup truck’s entire air filtration system. The fix had worked, although the engine still coughed and hesitated, as if it wanted to stall. Jonah suspected a faulty control valve sending error messages to the computer.
“That’s the problem with these late model cars,” he complained. “Give me something from before 1980. No computers, all mechanical, and a lot more reliable.”
Eddie had also managed to get the prison bus in the maintenance depot running after Jonah de-gelled the diesel inside the fuel tank and lines. It took a considerable amount of effort and came at great risk, as they’d had to resort to burning whatever they could find to warm the maintenance bay up to the point where the paraffin decrystallized.
