Demitria Lunetta - In the End

Brenna shakes her head.

Rice looks around at the room and the door with its triple locks. “He was keeping you all to himself. If he’d collaborated, if he’d set a team to work . . .” He shakes his head, flips back a few pages, then starts forward again with growing excitement. “There’s an antigen found in both Baby’s and Brenna’s blood. I think the antigen, in conjunction with the original vaccine, is what saved them both when they were bitten. It makes them carriers, but immune to the effects. That’s why they didn’t change. This antigen is rare; do you know how remarkable this is?”

“I knew there was something different about the original batch of vaccine. . . .” I say. “But it wasn’t the formula—it was the patients!” That’s why they could never get it to work. The problem wasn’t in the replication. It was having the correct subjects.

“I’m one in a million?” Brenna says with a smirk. “I always knew I was awesome.”

“It’s actually more like one in ten thousand. . . . But this is just . . . amazing,” Rice continues. “That’s why we never caught it before. We could vaccinate thousands of people and try turning them all and not one could have the right antigen to combat the infection.”

“So . . . ,” Brenna says, holding up her bandaged hand. “Amy didn’t need to chop off my fingers?”

“We don’t really know for sure,” Rice says, looking from her to me and back again.

“Brenna, I was just trying to do anything to save you. Your fingers were shredded. I don’t think you would have ever been able to use them again, and I thought it might stop the infection from spreading.”

Brenna stares at her left hand, the space where her middle and ring fingers should be. “It’s okay, Amy. I don’t blame you. At least I’m alive . . . and I have my pointer finger,” she tells me. “I can pull a trigger.” She looks at me with a grin. “But I sure will miss the middle finger. Who knows? Maybe it did help the infection spread more slowly . . . letting that anti-thingy kick in.”

“It’s amazing that both Brenna and Baby carry this antigen. Maybe we would have even known right away if they had been in the same test group.”

“There were multiple test groups?” I ask. “How many children did Dr. Reynolds test?”

His head snaps up. “Amy, it was harmless. This was before the outbreak, and the bacterium itself was tested on soldiers who volunteered. We just needed to see if the vaccine had side effects. We weren’t going to infect the children.”

“How many groups?” I ask again.

He sighs. “We used foster-care facilities as a cover and tested on only the children we knew wouldn’t be adopted, older children and, in Baby’s case, children with relatives under Dr. Reynolds’s control. There were five initial groups we used to test the vaccine . . . Brenna’s in Texas, one in New York City, two in California, and one in Kansas . . . right outside of New Hope, when it was a university. That’s where Hannah started out.”

“Then how did she make it to Chicago?” I ask. “She was alone when I found her.”

“I don’t know, not exactly. When the infection broke out, we didn’t know if the university would be safe. We hadn’t set up the emitters yet. We didn’t have a plan. Dr. Reynolds had the children evacuated to a secure facility in Chicago, the one your mother stayed at before coming here. But there was some kind of accident. None of them made it there. . . . We didn’t know Baby survived until you showed up in New Hope with her. We didn’t know that we’d actually evacuate the Chicago facility to here after a few months. If we’d known then how quickly the infection would spread, we could have just brought the children here, but then it wasn’t safe.”

“It’s not safe now,” I say, horrified. “And the other children?”

“None made it, as far as we know. The ones who went to Fort Black, we didn’t reach them in time to evacuate before they were lost.”

“Lost?”

“Dead . . . or like Brenna, simply surviving under our radar. Baby and Brenna are the only ones we’ve found . . . and that’s because they didn’t turn when they were bitten.”

“Could others have a natural immunity?” Kay asks quietly.

“Who knows? Maybe . . . But I think it was the combination of the vaccine and the antigen that saved them. An antigen can be an outside agent, but in Brenna and Baby’s case, it’s produced by their bodies. Usually, naturally occurring antigens are ignored by the human immune system and don’t do any harm or good. But this particular antigen can bind with an antibody and attack the weakened form of Florae bacteria found in the vaccine, neutralizing it. This would allow the body to fight off the full infection of a Florae bite. This antigen is rare, but if it can be synthesized . . . I’m telling you, Ken may have found something here. I . . . have to get to a lab and analyze this.”

“That might be a little hard right now,” I say. I don’t like the fevered look that’s come over him. It’s too familiar.

Rice nods and takes a deep breath as though reeling himself in. “You’re right, of course. I just think Ken didn’t know what he had. He was too close to it. With a few modifications, this might actually work.”

“A vaccine?” Kay whispers from the cot. “You think Ken actually did it? He discovered a vaccine?”

“I can’t be sure until I run some tests, but yes.” His ear-to-ear grin seems almost to split his face, but then fades just as quickly. “I wish I could have talked to Ken about this. If he’d only consulted me.”

Kay tilts her head, listening.

“What?” I ask.

“That was Marcus on a call to all the Guardians. They’ve been dispatched to deal with the Florae breach.”

“Well, that’s good. Gareth would have gotten the call. He can help us. . . .” I stop. “Marcus and his cronies are going to be prowling the labs too?”

Kay nods. “And they’ve been told to eliminate you.”

“Fan,” I say, then laugh, despite myself. Even to my own ears the sound is hysterical, and Brenna looks at me with concern.

“I’m fine,” I assure her. I look over at Kay, not knowing what to do. She stares back, a strange look in her eyes.

“Okay, I’m ready,” she announces, standing. “Let’s go get Baby.”

We leave the lab with a new sense of purpose. I’m worried about Kay, but she seems to have buried her pain and is ready to help me retrieve Baby. We also have Brenna, who is eager to remind us that we’ll have her newly heightened hearing at our disposal.

Miraculously, we encounter neither ravenous Floraes nor murderous Guardians between Ken’s office and Baby’s dorm, and I’m relieved to see that the door is still closed and locked. So she might be safe, but how do we get inside? Rice swipes a key card and punches in a code, then presses his finger to the door. No surprise when it doesn’t open.

“What now?” I ask testily, scanning the hall behind us for threats.

Rice looks around, thinking. “There may have been researchers stuck inside this area when the alarms sounded. If they got caught in the lockdown, they wouldn’t have left a secure area.”

He fiddles with the panel and presses a button. For a long moment, nothing. Then a tentative voice on the other side says, “Hello?”

“This is Assistant Director Richard Kiernan. I’ve been locked out of the lab. Can you open the door?”

After a long pause, the voice responds. “It’s against protocol.”

“Yes, I realize this.” Rice sounds commanding. “But there is currently a Florae breach and I am trapped on the wrong side of this door. If you do not break protocol, you could be responsible for not only the death of the assistant director, but of the future of New Hope.”