Nina.
“So
, what? Now you’re going to kill me? You didn’t manage it the first time, so what makes you think you can this time?” I bite out, anger burning through my words. Probably not a good time to let my inner bitch out of her cave, but fuck it and fuck her if she thinks I’m going down without a fight—or at least without a couple of shitty remarks.
“Because there
’s no one here to save you this time.” Rachel looks at the gun and then at Michael. I glance at him, seeing his gaze fixed solely on Rachel.
He h
olds up his hands. “I want no part in this.” He backs up a couple of steps.
Rachel looks unsure of what she wants to do, and I play on that. “You don
’t have to do this, Rachel,” I say. God, I sound so cliché I want to vomit on my own words.
She shakes her head, and even from this distance I can see her eyes are glassy
with unshed tears. “I know, but I can’t have you telling everyone about me. They’ll all hate me.” She chokes on her words and clears her throat. “I’m not a bad person. None of us were, we just wanted to find a cure, to stop this thing.” She gestures around us.
“Of course not,
” I say as calmly as possible, even as my temper is begging me to go take a running jump at her face. “It’s just one of those things that happens: one day you’re thinking up a cure, the next you’re sentencing innocent people to death.” I shrug with a bitter snarl.
“It is!” s
he snaps back loudly.
“
Bet it would have felt pretty damn good if you would have been able to cure everyone, huh?” I glare. “Wiped your dirty conscience clean.”
Rachel
’s gaze seems far away. “Yeah,” she mumbles. “We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I mean, there seemed to be no cure at all. But then someone came up with a great plan, and it really was a great idea and it seemed doable, it just meant....” She looks to her feet. “It just meant infecting an embryo.”
“A what?”
My eyes bug out, I know they do. I can feel them wanting to pop right out of my head. “A fucking baby!”
Rachel shakes her head quickly. “No, just an embryo. Not a real baby.” She looks up at me. “The cure didn
’t work on babies. We tried.”
I gasp, loudly enough for her to flush red in shame. “You infected children?
Babies! You mean you killed children? Turned them into deaders?” I sob, a weird, strangled sound coming from the back of my throat, which I have no control over.
“I know that sounds bad, but if we could have found a cure, or at least found out why people turn into these
things, it would be worth it. Every death would be worth it to end it.” She speaks quickly, the words spilling out of her mouth. “But when that didn’t work, we thought maybe if we grow a baby already infected with the virus, that maybe, maybe that baby could hold the cure in its DNA.”
A hand flies to my mouth
to hold in my gasp of hatred and repulsion for this woman and her horrible team of wacko scientists. “You grew a zombie baby?” My heart thuds in my chest, reminding me of my mortality and of the ease with which she could kill me any second now. But I can’t stop the words from leaving my mouth. I can’t stop the anger and hatred for her; they pour from me in waves of disgust. “How could you do that? Why would you think that that would work?”
She looks at Michael. “Why did you have to tell her? I really liked Nina.”
Oh shit, she’s talking about me in past tense already. I am fucked. This is fucked and Mikey is going to go ape shit when I don’t return home.
Tears spring to my eyes—not sad tears, angry tears. I don’t want to die, not like this. What about Emily? I love that girl. I wouldn’t get to see her grow up—and then I remember she’s pretty much grown up anyway, because childhood is pretty nonexistent in this piece of shit world. And then I want to cry even more, because it’s my piece of shit life and Rachel is going to ruin it.
“She knew something was wrong. I
t’s not my fault, Rachel.” Michael looks exhausted. Did he know all along? I bet he was sick of hiding the truth, but how did he know?
“I
’m a little lost, and I think if I’m going to die that I should get the full story, last rites and all that bullshit,” I say. I’ve seen that in every damn Bond movie—the hero buying time by getting the villain to tell them their evil plan. It seemed stupid in the movies, but I’ll do anything right now to put off the whole
impending death
thing.
“That
’s fair.” Rachel leans against the doorframe. “What do you want to know?”
“You told me they were testing on people—t
hat you escaped because of that,” I say carefully, trying to lean against the CDs so she won’t notice as I grab my knife.
“Oh
, that part was true, it was just the part where I told you I got picked up that I lied about. I was already living behind the walls. My city was one of the very first built, long before the stupid apocalypse thing, actually. It was a testing facility for the army. Modern warfare ain’t got nothing on the shit that was happening back then.” She rubs her face, her gun hanging limply in her hand. “I never meant for any of this to happen—honestly, I didn’t. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I wanted to help, but we needed to test the stupid cure on someone—how else could we see if it worked?” She stands and looks at me, waiting for me to reply.
I shrug, not wanting to actually say what
’s on my mind because that shit would send Rachel over the edge. My thoughts right now are not of the comforting variety, they’re more of the ‘wait till I get my hands on you and wring your scrawny fucking neck you mental case’ variety.
“But then the first test subject reanimated, and the second, and the third
, and then the volunteers dried up. No one wanted to help the cause, so we had to
make
people!” she says and looks from Michael to me. I glance at him, seeing his worried but somewhat bored expression—like he’s heard this story a thousand times, and the only thing he gives a shit about is making it out of this with his pride intact. “It was for the good of mankind.”
“Of course,
” I reply dryly. “I’m sure that’s how those poor people saw it when you kidnapped and murdered them.” I lift an eyebrow, my fingers wrapping around the handle of my knife.
Rachel shakes her head.
“Don’t say it like that, like I’m some evil villain.”
I laugh sharply. “You
are
an evil fucking villain, asshole!”
“
I am not,” she whines back.
I grit my teeth, trying to
contain some of the anger that’s building inside me. Anger won’t do me any good right now, but trying to keep a lid on what I want to say is a losing battle. “Yes, you are. You didn’t save anyone. There was no super-cure in the end, was there?”
Rachel shakes her head. “No. W
e hadn’t made a cure for the reanimation, we’d just made it an extremely painful death for the test subject, and they still reanimated.” Her different-colored eyes widen. “It was really gross, to tell you the truth. Their skin rejected their bodies, sliding off their bones, but the brain,” she points to her head as if I don’t know where a brain is, “the brain kept ticking no matter what we pumped those bodies with. It really is fascinating.”
I fi
nally had my knife in my hand. If I could dodge a bullet and get to her, I could slit her throat if need be. It was a big
if,
and if I did manage to do all of that, there was still the begging question on what Michael and Nova would do to me afterwards. Shit, Nova was still sleeping, completely oblivious. Would she question where I was? Would she give a shit? She and Rachel are really close; if I slit the bitch’s throat, Nova will more than likely slit mine. It’s a lose-lose situation whichever way I look at it.
I turn to look at
Michael, trying to stall for more time. “So what’s your deal in all this? Why keep quiet on it all?”
He gives me a shi
fty sideways look. “I love her. She’s my sister.”
“You mean,
like
a sister?”
He shakes his head. “No, she
’s actually my sister.”
“And Nova?” I ask warily.
“Yep, my other sister.” He smiles with pride at that fact. “We were all together when she was testing on those people. Nova had no idea what was really going on—still doesn’t. She can’t stomach that sort of thing. She thought they were trying to find a cure. And that was all I cared about for a while, but when I found out about the embryo experiment, I told Rachel enough was enough, but the team didn’t want to let it go—let her go—so we snuck out of there.”
T
he final pieces fall into place: their closeness, their bickering—they really do fight like brothers and sisters.
My head
is pounding, and I want nothing more than to have a long shot of something really fucking strong to sort it out. Maybe a quick nap, too, but there’s not much chance of that. I try to give a casual glance around me for an escape route, but Rachel is blocking the one and only. My odds aren’t looking very good.
“So what about the embryo? The baby?” I ask, still stalling for time.
“The last I saw of the woman they were going to infect, she and her man were running across country to escape just as much as we were,” Michael says, his eyes flashing to Rachel.
“Well you helped them escape, that
’s a good thing. You did a good thing. Maybe it isn’t all that bad after all.” I try for lighthearted happiness, but it comes out more desperate than anything else.
“She was already pregnant,
” Rachel says quietly.
My heart freezes in my chest. “You impregnated her?” I ask, just to make sure I
’m hearing things right.
Rachel nods, tears streaming down her face. “She
’ll be seven months now, I think.”
Vomit and bile curdle in my stomach. “She
’s pregnant with demon spawn? With fucking deader DNA?” I clutch a hand to my own stomach. “What will happen to her?”
“The cure will either work or it won
’t,” Rachel says coldly, wiping away her tears and snot. She lifts her gun back up and aims it at me.
“And if it doesn
’t work?” I ask, sort of knowing the answer anyway. It’s an inevitable answer, really. We all know what happens when deaders feed, when they get hungry. I shouldn’t ask; I should be more concerned with me, with my life that’s dangling loosely in front of me by some crazy madwoman. “What will happen to the baby? To the mother?”
“It will eat her.” S
he looks at her gun and then at me. “It will eat her from the inside out when it’s strong enough.” She laughs cruelly, her laugh ending in a small sob.
I have no idea why she is crying, but it makes me angry, makes me
want to hurt her and make her pay; I want her to die with my hands around her throat, my angry face the last thing she ever sees. Rachel begins to sob, her laughing dissolving further away into a wail.
“Rachel?” Michael says and takes a step
forward.
She stops crying, the tears still pouring silently down her cheeks
. “I really am sorry, Nina. I’ll tell Mikey and Emily that you went out fighting. I’ll give you a great death.” She smiles, a little spark shining in her eyes.
“Are you fucking serious? You think that will make up for it?” I yell, my hand gripping my knife so hard that the palm of my hand hurts.
“Well, no, obviously not. But it’s either you or me, and it will always be me. I’d rather you be dead than everyone hate me. But I am sorry. I mean that sincerely.” She bites her lip and holds the gun steady, pointing it square at my chest.
“Fuck you,
” I whisper, and duck down below the CDs as a shot rings out.
I scream as a bullet ricochets against the CDs and they smash, exploding into a thousand pieces that rain down on me. I hear Michael shouting and running, and I know that I’m alive, but my heart is about to burst out of my chest and I think I might have a heart attack at any point. The acrid smell of bullets and melted plastic surrounds me, and I stifle a cough as I shuffle backwards. I have no idea where I’m going, but I can’t stay here. I get to the end of the aisle and take a peek toward the door, and see not Rachel with a gun, but Nova.
I realize something isn’t right, that somehow I’ve yet again misjudged these people and this situation. Nova looks over to me, sadness engulfing her features. I stand slowly, cautiously, staying as much behind the racks as possible.
“Nova?” I say quietly.
Michael stands up, his face mimicking Nova’s sadness. But he doesn’t cry. Not Michael. He never cries.
I walk slowly toward the front of the shop. Rachel’s body lies prone on the floor, her brain splattered across the granite flooring. Her eyes stare at me accusingly, and I gulp down a cry. Of course this was the better outcome: her, not me. Like Mikey said, it can’t ever be me, but Rachel was my friend—or at least I thought she was. And now she’s dead. By her sister’s hand.