Max Collins - After the Dark

“Yes, ma’am.”

But she was already out of the bedroom and into the large room with its dividers that cordoned-off sections. The kitchen, with all its postmodern stainless steel appliances, and the dining area, with an oak table large enough for six, were off to her right. The apartment was similar to the one Ames White and his NSA minions had trashed last year, with a comforting familiarity about it — like the living room with its monstrous leather sofa, three chairs, coffee table, and lawn-sized area rug, directly in front of her, and Logan’s office space to her left in the rear of the spacious quarters. A door at the far end of the room led to the tunnel that connected them to Terminal City, and the door to the right, the one that Dr. Sam Carr was presumably pounding on now, opened to the street.

After a quick check of the small monitor to one side of the entry — a video peephole of sorts — Max flung the door open to reveal Dr. Carr in a heavy blue parka, the hood pulled up to protect the man’s balding head from the wind. A gust whipped into the apartment, helping Carr inside. He and Max didn’t even bother to speak until the door was firmly bolted against the nasty weather.

“Where is he?” Carr asked, handing Max his Gladstone bag, then slipping off his coat and hanging it over the back of a dinner-table chair.

Perhaps five-ten, with a forehead that stopped at the apex of his skull, Carr had short dark hair that covered the back and sides of his oval-shaped head like a yarmulke with flaps. His dark eyes had the resigned sadness tinged with kindness of a man who’d spent a career listening to people’s problems; his nose was long and straight, his mouth sensitive, his chin cleft.

“Bedroom,” Max said.

“How’d it happen? You’ve been careful.”

She told him.

“Be surprised how many people die stupidly around Christmas.” Shaking his head, Carr took the Gladstone bag from her. “Frankly, I don’t know what I can do for him. We can try a transfusion from another transgenic, but—”

“Don’t you usually examine a patient first, then make your diagnosis and treatment?”

Carr’s eyes tensed. “What’s going on here, Max?”

“That’s what I’d like to know — go look him over.”

She was trying to keep the hope out of her voice, and Carr seemed to be reading that as despair, keeping his eyes on her even as he crossed to the bedroom, where he slipped inside.

Max flopped onto the couch, trying to force all feeling and emotion from herself. Let the doctor do his work — let him examine his patient, and science would determine whether Logan Cale had a future...

She didn’t dare embrace these hopeful feelings. It was going on half an hour since her hair blew into Logan’s face, and he seemed fine. But how could that be so? Renfro herself — Manticore’s final leader — had told Max there was no cure, and no antidote but for that small vial of antigen, which was long gone.

The detestable woman had proceeded to take a bullet for Max, saving the X5 for some unknown reason, then dying in her captive’s arms, saving Max from death... but leaving the young woman cursed with that designer virus...

In a way, hope had been the bane of Max’s existence, and — like a prisoner with a life sentence — she had tried to avoid that particular emotion; but, like a nagging summer cold, it just kept coming back. She knew that her probably naive wellspring of hope was how she differed from Zack, her brother and the leader of the twelve who escaped Manticore, or impulsive Seth who’d not made it out that first night, and from Brin, who was reindoctrinated by Renfro, even from self-centered Alec, who had shown signs of coming around some lately, but who was still, at his core, a cynic.

Among the X5s, only Jondy and Tinga seemed to carry hope inside them in the way Max did, and one of them — Jondy — had disappeared, while the other, Tinga, was dead. And yet Joshua, the first of the experiments, despite all he’d suffered, had never lost hope; locked up in the basement of Manticore — an unwanted stepchild following the disappearance of that benign father known only as Sandeman — Joshua had nothing but hope.

It was an argument for certain qualities, positive or negative, being born into a person — she’d always said Joshua had a good heart, and where hope in Max was a flicker compared to her inner fire of rage, in Joshua hope radiated, and all the cruelty leveled upon him could never snuff that flame.

Maybe Joshua had been right to hope in the face of despair — still, to Max, hope seemed to bring nothing but disappointment... which did not prevent her from hoping with all her heart that Sam Carr could do something to save Logan.

When the doctor had been in with Logan for over an hour, Max was starting to fear the worst. She longed to break down the closed door and find out what was going on, but she forced herself to stay in the living room, pretending to read an art book of Logan’s.

Finally, unable to take it anymore, she tossed the book on the sofa and got to her feet. Pacing now, she felt slightly better — any activity was better than none. She marched over to the door, listened intently, her rabbit’s ears picking up nothing but what sounded like mumbling, then she stalked to the other end of the room.

Stopping at the door that led to the tunnel, she had the sudden urge to simply bolt. Running away, leaving the pain behind, knowing she would never connect with another person as she had with Logan... wouldn’t that be better than staying here to suffer this loss?

But it was only a moment — only a fleeting thought. As much as the urge to flee might gnaw at her, the need to stay overrode it. She turned and trudged back toward the bedroom.

Max was only a few steps away when the door opened and Logan came out, Carr trailing him.

And Logan looked fine. In fact, he looked wonderful — he was wearing a wide smile and holding open his arms to her. Her eyes shot to Carr, who shrugged and smiled too, though the doctor’s smile was lopsided, digging a groove of uncertainty in one cheek.

“What are you two grinning about?” she asked, almost irritated. She did not step into Logan’s offered embrace.

Carr came forward, holding up a small black box that looked like a voltage meter. “Blood test showed no sign of the virus.”

Max’s eyes traveled from Carr to Logan and back to Carr; she pushed the hope down — it was leaping within her like an eager puppy, and she would not acknowledge it. “How in hell can that be?”

Logan finally realized that Max wasn’t going to fall into his arms, and dropped his hands to his sides; but his smile didn’t fade.

“That’s what took so long,” he said. “We’ve been doing some impromptu research on the laptop, trying to make sense of it.”

“And did you?”

The doctor said, “I know it’s a lot to take in — I won’t lie to you and say I’ve taken it all in, sufficiently, myself.” He motioned to the couch. “Let’s sit down and take this a step at a time... and I’ll do my best to explain the theory we’ve come up with.”

They moved into the living room area, Max still doubtful, and a little shellshocked, as she took a seat on the leather couch. Logan sat next to her, very close, and she fought the urge to scoot away from him — maintaining distance was a habit now.

Carr took a seat in one of the chairs facing them. “As I said, I did the blood test and there’s no sign of the virus.”

She looked from Carr to Logan, whose own grin had turned lopsided, too — he seemed almost embarrassed, for some reason.

“Do we need to take Logan to a facility,” she asked, “and check again?”

The doctor’s eyebrows lifted. “You mean, do we need a second opinion? We asked ourselves that, but this is a simple procedure. We didn’t need an opinion — we needed an explanation.”