Emily McKay: The Lair

“No,” she yelled back. Her fingers were at the buttons of her shirt, refastening the few that were left. “We can’t leave without him because we still need the cure. If Roberto is right and Sebastian has the cure, then we need that for Lily. We can’t leave him here.”

She was right; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it, too.

I nodded. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Get him ready to extract by then.”

I jogged off in the direction of the clinic. I was nearly there when a low thrum filled the air. I looked up to see a helicopter swoop in. It stopped above the clinic, hovering in the air above the squat building. My pulse kicked up.

Of course Roberto would have a helicopter. There were only two men on El Corazon who would have the authority to call it in. One of them was out in the square, trying to slice Sebastian into shreds. The other was about to kidnap my girlfriend.

I raced to the front door. I wasn’t sure how well staffed this place was or what I would encounter on the other side. As long as they were human, I could talk my way past them. It was the Ticks howling in the distance that I was most worried about. I didn’t give myself much time to think it through. Right about now, I was really missing my weapons.

With the electricity off, the pair of glass sliding doors didn’t open automatically, but one of them swung open when I pushed it. The entrance was empty, but I could hear sounds coming from the left. The building must have had a backup generator—I guess most hospitals do—because dim yellow emergency lights lit the hall about every ten feet. This was the opposite wing of the building from where we’d been held when we first arrived. The clinic was obviously bigger than this tiny community needed. Apparently when Roberto had built it, he’d been planning ahead. I ran down one corridor and then the next, glancing into every room, but I saw nothing. No patients. No staff.

Then I turned a corner and heard it. The faint, lulling beeps of a life support machine. I slowed to a jog. As I got closer, I realized it wasn’t just one machine but several, and the noises were coming from a room beyond a pair of doors just ahead.

I slipped to the side of the doors, pressing my back against the wall so I could listen. Someone was in the room. I heard the carts rolling around. Things banging. It didn’t sound like a Tick rampaging through the room, more like a human in a hurry. I peered through the window in the door and saw Price along with a woman in scrubs. Shit. And here I was. No weapon.

Still in a fight two against one, I could probably take them. Price was close to fifty. I couldn’t tell about the woman, but if Roberto was right about me—if Sebastian was right—then maybe all I had to do was ask her to step aside.

I didn’t want this power. I never had. No one should be able to bend others to his will. If you had asked me an hour earlier, I would have sworn that even if I had the power of an abductura , I wouldn’t use it. And here I was, ready to abandon my morals instantly. If it meant saving Lily.

I pushed through the doors in to the room. It wasn’t just a single hospital room but a whole ward, like an ICU. A dozen beds were lined up on either side of the room, each with the little privacy curtain pushed back against the wall. Four of the beds had patients tucked under the white blankets. Each had an IV bag hanging from the post above their bed. Each lay as still as a corpse.

Lily lay on the bed closest to the door on the far end of the room. Her skin looked unnaturally pale. She was as still and lifeless as the other three.

Price and the doctor stood over her. They had been talking in low voices when I came in, but both of them fell silent and turned toward me.

Thank God there wasn’t a guard somewhere that I hadn’t seen through the window. Faintly, in the distance, I could hear the whump-whump-whump of the helicopter still hovering above the building.

The doctor looked from Price to me and back again.

“Why did you let me think you had the cure?”

“I didn’t.”

“You said—”

“No. You said she needed medical attention. I got that for her. We don’t have a cure, but we have a treatment protocol that involves inducing comas. It slows the progress of the disease. Not indefinitely, but for a while at least.”

I glanced at the other patients. The one at the far end of the room was a guy with what looked like a short, military-style haircut grown out a couple of months. Had he been one of the guards? Whatever he had been in life, he wasn’t quite human anymore. His jaw was too big, his brow ridge too pronounced, making his eyes look sunken. Even under the blanket, the proportion of his limbs looked all wrong. I didn’t ask how long he’d been like this or how quickly he was progressing. I didn’t want to know.

I barely looked at the guy on the bed next to his, but the third patient caught my eye because it was a kid. And because there was a dog asleep under the kid’s bed. The chow mix slowly stretched and sat up. Chuy. Which meant the kid was Marcos. Ely’s little brother. They looked enough alike—despite the four year age difference—that they could have been twins. I might have doubted myself if Chuy hadn’t been there. And it made so much sense. Ely wasn’t a bad guy. He was just a guy who would do anything for his family. I could understand that. Knowing his brother was in here being held by Roberto, being held in stasis—it made me hate Ely less for betraying us. That was a good thing. I had enough people to hate right now.

I looked at Lily last. I couldn’t help but imagine her a few weeks or months down the road, looking like that guy at the end. How much time did she have? I didn’t know; I just had to pray it was enough.

I looked back up at Price. I expected to feel that burst of hatred. Instead, I felt nothing but exhaustion.

“I’m sorry.” He actually looked like he meant what he was saying. Not that I believed him. Not that it even mattered one way or the other. “I didn’t know you even thought we had the cure.”

I turned to the doctor. “How long can she live in stasis?”

“Dodson has been like that for two months, but we’ll lose him completely at some point. There was a guard before him who turned completely at eleven weeks. The sedative must be incompatible with something in the Tick biology. He woke up and we had to—”

I nodded my understanding. So, under three months. Probably less because it had taken more than twenty-four hours to get her here and into the coma.

I had come in here determined to save her. To get her out of the clinic and drive straight to the Genexome Corporation headquarters. To rip the place to shreds until I found the cure.

But how could I know if that was the right thing for me to do?

I looked at Price again. “You’ve got the helicopter? Where are you going?”

“Wherever we can find that’s safe. Probably one of the Farms.”

“You’re taking the doctor?” I looked at her. She nodded. “And you can keep her alive until I can find the cure and bring it to you?”

Pity flashed across her face. “I can try.”

Price stepped forward. “Once she wakes up, she’ll stay with me. I won’t let her leave with you.”

Now, it was my turn to feel pity. Price obviously cared about his daughters in his own twisted way, but he didn’t know them. If he really thought that he could keep Lily out of this fight, then he didn’t know her at all.

God knows I’d certainly tried and it hadn’t worked. Not at all. When you loved someone, it wasn’t always about keeping them safe. It was about caring enough to let them make their own decisions. It wasn’t about control or protection. It was about respect. I’d learned that the hard way.