April Henry - The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die

I press the button to end the call. I resist the urge to dial the number again just to hear my dad’s voice.

Will I ever hear it again?

When the phone rings, I jump. Ty and I look at each other and then lean over to check the caller ID. The display shows only “Cell Phone,” but the number listed is not the number I dialed. My heart is beating in my throat. What if it’s Kirk Nowell? With a shaking hand, I pick up the phone.

“Hello?” I make my voice lower and gruffer.

“Cady?” My mom sounds suspicious. “Is that you?”

Hearing her, I melt. “Mom!”

She’s still cautious. “What did Grandma give you for Christmas last year?” I can hear the tension in her voice.

I’m sure Mom already knows it’s me. So why is she asking? No one but me and my parents would know the real answer to her question. Grandma herself probably wouldn’t even remember. If I tell Mom the wrong answer, she’ll know I’m under duress.

“Queen-size pantyhose.” Mom’s mom is known for her crazy presents, usually purchased at garage sales. I take a deep breath. “Are Dad and Max okay?”

“Basically.” Before I can ask Mom what that means, she says quickly, “You need to know that someone is pretending to be your aunt. She’s calling herself Elizabeth Quinn, but her real name is Elizabeth Tanzir.”

“Mom, we already know about that. She’s tied up here at our house, along with Michael Brenner.”

“Wait! What? And who’s we?”

Ty leans in closer to hear. I pull the phone a half inch from my ear. “There’s this guy named Tyler I met in Bend. He’s helping me.”

“Okay,” she says slowly. “Maybe you should start over again from the beginning. Tell me everything that’s happened.”

I give her an even shorter version than the one I gave Elizabeth, only this one includes my not-so-fatal attack on Brenner, Officer Dillow, “Aunt Liz’s” double-cross, and Brenner’s broken elbow. I leave in the fugue state but skip over my missing fingernails, knowing they’ll just freak Mom out. And I end with, “And right now, they’re both tied up in your bedroom.”

“You’d better check on them frequently,” Mom says. “Especially Elizabeth. And don’t trust anything she says.”

“Don’t worry. She already taught me that.” I take a deep breath. “What did you mean when you said Max and Dad were basically all right? Is something wrong?”

Mom sighs and then falls silent. Finally she says, “Yesterday morning, your dad found the proof we needed. Z-Biotech has converted some old storage rooms in the basement. They’re raising thousands of infected field mice, but we only need a couple of dozen for legitimate research. They also have a desiccator to dry out the droppings, which basically turns them into a bioweapon. Your dad took photos of the mice and the desiccator, and then he took a sample of the desiccated droppings. He called me and told me we had to leave in a hurry. I grabbed up Max from day care and met your father in the back parking lot. But Kirk tried to stop us. Your dad ended up getting shot.” Over my gasp, she hurries to tell me the rest. “It went through his shoulder without hitting anything vital. But he’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Why didn’t you take him to the hospital? Or go to the police?”

“First, we wanted to make sure you were safe. We called your phone, but you didn’t pick up. We called the school, but they told us you weren’t in class. That’s when we knew things had gone wrong, and we left you that message to give you a way to contact us if you could. We bought a couple of disposable phones a few months ago in case we needed them. We didn’t realize until later that Kirk had left us messages on our old phones telling us he had you. And that he would kill you if we went to the authorities.”

“You talked to him?” I think of his voice, so calm as he punched me in the jaw. So reasonable even when he put the gun between my eyes.

“Just called in later to listen to the messages. He left us several and in one”—her voice breaks—“and in one… oh, Cady… it was just you screaming. He told us if we wanted to see you alive again, we had to meet you at the cabin. But by the time we heard the message, the deadline he had given us had already passed. I left your father with Max, and I took the gun and went to the cabin to try to rescue you. But instead, it was on fire. And when we heard on the radio that there were human remains…” Mom’s voice breaks.

“It was actually a chimp, I guess, one from the lab. The same one they tried to make me think was Max.” I take a deep breath. “So we can go to the police now, right? I think the main station is downtown. Let’s meet there.”

“Cady,” she says, and then stops. “That’s the other thing. We were in a hurry when we left. Your dad was in the back seat with Max, trying to stop the bleeding while I drove. I tossed him the first-aid kit from the glove compartment, and he was ripping open packages of bandages. He also had the sample in a vial in a bag, and we think Max must have been trying to help by opening things up. Maybe he thought it was some kind of medicine.” Her voice shakes. “Max has been exposed to the hantavirus.”

My heart stops beating. I know what she’s going to say next.

“We only realized it today when we found the vial uncapped in the back seat. That means we have just about a day to give Max the vaccine. Once he starts showing symptoms, there will be nothing anyone can do.”

I try to imagine Max pale and listless, coughing up blood between violet lips. But instead I just remember him in his tub, lining up his shampoo bottles shaped like Tigger and Eeyore and Pooh, offering them drinks of bathwater from a blue plastic cup.

And then I run through what Mom just said one more time. “What about you guys? If Max is exposed, doesn’t that mean you are, too?”

“When the animal tests went well, people at the lab volunteered to be part of the preliminary clinical human trials before we ramped up vaccine production. So your dad and I are okay, at least as far as being exposed goes. We’re already immune. But we have to get our hands on the vaccine for Max. We can’t go back there ourselves. I’m sure our security cards have already been deactivated and our pictures are posted at the front desk.”

“You mean you want me to go…” I let my words trail off.

“Yes. To Z-Biotech. You can use Elizabeth’s ID to get in.”

“Why can’t we just tell the police what happened and make them get it for us?”

“We can’t take that chance, Cady. The window is already closing. What if Kirk decides to destroy the vaccine?” I hear the despair in my mom’s voice, how thin the edge is between her and a breakdown. “If he knew that Max had been exposed, he would do it just to punish us.”

There must be a way that won’t involve going in the lion’s den. “Don’t you know how to make the vaccine yourself?”

“It takes months to grow. Even the batch that’s in production now won’t be done for another week. Max has to have it by tomorrow or it will be too late.”

I think of the guy Elizabeth told us about, the one who died on the way to his girlfriend’s funeral. Who drowned in his own blood. Then I take a deep breath.

“What can I do?”

At Home Depot, it takes what’s left of Ty’s money plus most of what we took from Elizabeth’s purse and Brenner’s wallet to buy a janitor’s cart, cleaning supplies, an industrial-size broom, two sets of dark blue coveralls, two painter’s caps, and a yellow sign that warns in English and Spanish about wet floors.