Emmy Laybourne - Savage Drift

“We need you on the VACCINE, Cutlass, not this super-soldier bull crap!”

“Tell that to the Pentagon, because I’m under direct orders—”

“HEY!” I manage.

The doorknob turns.

A short Asian nurse with thinning hair hurries in. She’s wearing medical scrubs decorated with cartoon drawings on them, the Traindawgs.

“Sunshine!” she says with a smile. “You’re awake!”

Two doctors in white coats step in.

One of them is brown-haired. Late forties? He has rugged good looks—movie star kind of looks. Or maybe it’s that he reminds me of a movie star. But I can’t think which one.

The other is older. Must be the Russian. He’s tall and silver-haired with a paunch and a kind of grim dignity. He leans on a cane.

“Where am I?” I manage.

The handsome doctor comes and stands over me. He looks anxiously into my eyes.

“You are at USAMRIID,” the older doctor says. “We are a government medical research facility. I am Dr. Savic and this is Dr. Cutlass. You have been exposed to the warfare compounds. Do you remember that?”

I nod.

Then suddenly I remember—Mario dying and the drift and NIKO.

I try to talk, but my throat is too dry.

I make a strangled sound.

The nurse brings a plastic cup of water with a straw in it up to my face.

“Here you go, sweetheart. Drink up.”

Somehow, she has a thick Southern accent. Sounds like a Georgia peach. Looks Chinese.

The water fills my mouth. It’s sweet, clean water.

“Niko found me,” I manage. “You have to take me back.”

The doctors look at me for a minute, then back at each other. They begin to speak again, disregarding what I’ve said.

“There is a level of integration in her blood that is unparalleled,” handsome Dr. Cutlass says.

He has a minitab in his front pocket and he takes it out, pulling up something to show the other doctor.

“Your ethics are on a very slippery slope, James. You know I feel this way,” says the Russian.

Huh. They have completely written me off. They think I’m crazy.

“You are required to get a full release form on this girl,” the Russian says. “There are rumors of people being tested against their will and those rumors have reached the president.”

He says “rumors” like an accusation.

“Hey!” I say. They’re ignoring me. “Look, my friend Niko came for me. I shouldn’t be here! I should be back there! You have to take me back—he came all that way for me!”

Dr. Cutlass nods to the nurse.

She smiles at me kindly as she does something to my IV involving a syringe.

“It’s okay, hun,” she tells me. “You’re safe now.”

And a heavy warmth seeps up from the mattress, dragging me down into a deep, heavenly sleep.

“I’ll be here when you wake up, sugar,” the nurse says and she looks, for a moment, like an angel, with the ceiling lights her halo.

In the morning there was a knock at the front door.

“Jamie! Lizzie! Are you there?”

I guess I’d fallen asleep for a while, because the knocking woke me up.

I hurtled down the stairs and looked out the three glass panes at the top of the front door.

All I could tell through the swirly glass was that it was a black woman.

“Jamie, it’s me! Open up if you’re home!”

I opened the door and she jumped back when she saw my face.

“Don’t be scared,” I said. “We found Rinée and brought her home. That’s all.”

“Oh my God. Where are Jamie and Lizzie? Do you know where they are?”

“Why don’t you come in and I’ll tell you?” I told her.

“Tell me first, then we’ll come in.”

She held her hand up in a halt position toward the car. I saw a boy there, watching with his face pressed up to the glass.

“Is that—”

“Rinée’s brother, J.J.—Jamie Junior,” she answered. “I told him to wait. Didn’t know what I’d find. I got a call from his school yesterday. Whole bunch of kids were not picked up. I went and got him, but we had to spend the afternoon at the hospital with my husband. He was attacked—I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m Lea, Rinée and Junior’s aunt. Please, tell me what you know about my brother and his wife.”

“Lizzie… We don’t know where Jamie is, but Lizzie. Rinée’s mom. She was killed. I’m so sorry.”

Tears filled the woman’s eyes.

She nodded.

“Is… is Lizzie here in the house?”

“No,” I said. “The body is not here.”

I didn’t tell her where it was or how her sister-in-law died. I planned to, I did, but it could wait.

“All right,” she said. “I can do this.”

She turned and beckoned to the boy.

The first thing J.J. did after his aunt explained that neither of his parents were home, but that Rinée was safe was to shoot up the stairs in a flash and go straight to Rinée’s room.

I heard his voice speaking softly, waking her up and then her crying for a moment and him shushing her.

“She’s fine!” he called down.

Lea was watching me. I was pacing in the living room. I knew I should, I don’t know, offer to make coffee or something. But I was worried about Astrid.

“Listen,” I said. “My girlfriend’s sick. I’m not sure what to do. She won’t drink anything or eat and she’s pregnant and she’s been throwing up all night. Could you take a look at her—”

“Why didn’t you say so? Where is she?”

Astrid was still on the floor, where she’d been all night long. Only now she was lying on her side.

“Hmm,” Lea said, frowning.

“I think it’s a stomach virus. Or maybe some bad chicken—”

“Go get me a spoon and some fresh whatever this is,” she said, handing me the cup of Gatorade. “We gotta get this girl hydrated.”

By the time I got back, Lea was on the floor, sitting cross-legged with Astrid’s head and shoulders pulled into her lap.

“Find me a clock,” she said. “We’re going to sip one teaspoon of Gatorade every three minutes. Gonna do by the clock, baby doll. Gonna get you feeling better. You’ll see.”

Astrid whimpered.

“How many weeks’ pregnant is she?”

“Twenty-eight, we think,” I said.

“All right, okay, you’re gonna be fine, tootsie,” Lea said. Her voice had a calming effect. She was so confident and capable—you just naturally wanted to do whatever she said. “Hey,” she said, looking up at me. “Do me a favor and fix the kids some breakfast?”

“Yeah,” I told her.

In a different situation, in a different world, I might have told her that I was used to cooking for kids. That it had once been my job.

I fed the kids scrambled eggs and toast with jelly. Rinée and J.J. were cute together in a way that was heart wrenching.

J.J. was very quiet. He seemed around ten years old. I would have thought he’d have a lot of questions for me about where his parents were, but he didn’t ask me a thing. I remembered how, back at the Greenway, the little kids acted sort of like this after we got stuck there. You could call it denial, but that didn’t really fit. It wasn’t that their minds had perceived there’d been a series of deadly accidents and they were choosing to deny they’d happened. It was as if a veil had been thrown over their consciousness—preventing the horror from creeping in at all. Like layers of gauze protecting their minds from things they couldn’t handle knowing.