The Vault (A Farm Novel) (14 page)

“You came to me.”

“Your men picked us up miles from here.”

“Potayto, potahto. In a hundred and fifty years as a vampire, how many times do you think an
abductura
has simply wandered into my territory?” She raised her hand, her fingers curved in a graceful zero shape. Then she stood and strolled over to the bank of windows on the far wall and looked out them. “No.
Abducturae
are sought out. Cultivated. In the best of all possible worlds, bred. But you never simply happen upon one like a four-leaf clover.” She turned, pushing herself off the glass, and strolled toward me, her gait smooth and controlled. “You’re the one who said no games. What is it you want from me?”

There was really only one way I could play this. If she hadn’t guessed I was an
abductura
, I might have used my powers to sway her. I had convinced Sebastian to bite Mel. I might have been able to bide my time until Ely brought Marcus and Lily here and then convince her to bite them. But since she knew the truth, it was time to move on to plan B.

B
as in ballsy and desperate.

“Two of my friends have been exposed to the virus. I want you to give me the cure for them.”

CARTER

“You honestly think that even if I have the cure to the Tick virus, I’m just going to hand it over to you?”

“Yes. Because you need me. You give me the cure. I take it to my friends and treat them. If it works, I’ll come back and I’ll work as your
abductura
.”

She eyed me and I hoped she couldn’t see past my poker face. Hell, I hoped I had a poker face.
Abductura
or not, I didn’t know enough about how this all worked to have any faith in my ability to even nudge the emotions of a vampire who’d once been an
abductura
herself.

“You’ve come here to ask me for the cure, but you don’t even believe it works?”

“Look, I don’t know what to believe anymore.” Ah, hell. Maybe straight-up honesty was better than a poker face. “I’ve been lied to and manipulated so much by you people, I don’t have any faith in anything you say. But if there’s a chance the cure works, I need it.”

“It seems we’re at an impasse.” She gave my cheek a maternal pat, then stood and crossed to the media center. She selected one of the remotes and clicked on the TV. “Perhaps this will convince you that you can trust me.”

I stood there—terrified of what I was about to see, of what she thought might sway me—as she clicked through a series of menu screens. It could be a live video feed of Dawn and Darren. Probably being tortured. Maybe killed. Or maybe something even worse. Someone I cared about even more. Maybe somehow—against all odds—she’d found Lily first. But how?

Before my imagination could go even crazier, the image on the TV flickered into view. And it wasn’t anything I expected. Not Dawn or Darren or Lily.

It was a Tick. A male. Strapped onto a table in a hospital room somewhere. The table was in the middle of the room, well out of range of the cabinets lining the walls and the trays of surgical equipment. What looked like a refrigerator was just barely visible on the left-hand side of the screen.

The Tick was awake and alert. And clearly both angry and terrified. He bucked against the thick restraints holding him in place. The straps bound not just his wrists and ankles, but his calves, his thighs, his waist, his arms, even his head. They really wanted him to keep still. The volume had been lowered so I could barely hear his howls of rage.

I took a step closer. I’d never seen a Tick. Not like this.

Yeah, I’d fought and killed plenty of them. But in the heat of battle, you didn’t really have time to take a good look. When a Tick was bearing down on you, ready to rip your heart out of your chest, you didn’t have time to do anything but aim a stake at his heart and pray your brains might trump his brawn. I’d been lucky. Mine always had.

Now, watching this guy on film, I really looked at him. The transformation from human to Tick was incredible. He was naked—which meant either he’d been a Tick awhile or they’d taken off whatever scraps of clothes he’d had on. Ticks didn’t bother with clothes. They didn’t put them on, but they usually didn’t take them off, either. The longer a person had been a Tick, the more likely it was their clothes had simply been ripped off at some point. This guy’s muscles bulged beneath his skin, making him look bulkier than even the biggest professional bodybuilder. His very bones looked bigger. As always, it was his face that creeped me out the most. His brow ridge was thick and distended. His jaw was huge. His enormous, leonine teeth made his lips protrude. Everything about him repulsed me.

Despite that, I felt pity nudge through me. He was a monster, but strapped down like this, he was pathetic.

Then there was movement on the left. The refrigerator door swung open and then closed. A second later, a pair of doctors walked into view. They wore white lab coats, surgical gloves, and masks. I got the feeling from the way the Tick roared at them that they’d been there all along, just offscreen. They spoke to each other, but it was impossible to hear them over his cries. One of them held a syringe. The other used a piece of surgical tubing to tie off his bicep. Just as the second doctor approached with the needle, the strap holding the Tick’s head in place slipped and he reared up off the table. The straps on his upper body had more give in them than they should have, because he was able to buck maybe five inches off the surface—enough to bite into the arm of the doctor closest to him. The doctor wrenched away, but he wasn’t fast enough. The Tick left a bloody hole in the doctor’s white sleeve.

The second doctor plunged the syringe into the Tick’s arm and then dashed to safety. The wounded doctor stumbled out of the frame clutching his bloody arm.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Sabrina held up a hand to silence me. Then she clicked a button and the video started fast-forwarding. “I assume you don’t want to watch this in real time,” she said. “It gets a little tedious.”

On the screen, the Tick jerked and spasmed at superspeed. His already quick movements—the ones he was capable of while still mostly strapped down—slowed and stopped as he apparently fell asleep.

With Sabrina fast-forwarding the video, it was impossible to tell how much time was passing or to see the minute changes transforming his body. At some point the camera shifted positions. Other than that, it ran on fast-forward for maybe ten minutes before Sabrina clicked it to normal speed.

The Tick’s arms and legs were bloody where he’d struggled so hard against the straps. The blood was dried and crusted. His skin looked chafed and raw. But the creature on the table was no longer a Tick. He was a man.

A doctor came in, still wearing gloves and a surgical mask, and undid the man’s straps. Slowly, the man sat up. The doctor moved in front of him as if checking his vitals. Then the doctor stepped out of view again, leaving just the man, staring at the camera, haunted and hollow-eyed.

Sabrina paused then, leaving the image of that man on the screen, leaving my heart pounding and my mind racing.

“And so you see,” she began. “I am more trustworthy than—”

“When was that?”

“Approximately three days ago. I sent a team to Genexome to retrieve the cure immediately after Sebastian and Mel left here. They found the cure and—”

“In the underground vault?”

She blinked, looking a little startled. “You know this might go faster if you stopped interrupting me.”

“Yeah, I guess when you’re the grand empress supreme people don’t interrupt you a lot, but if you want me to work with you, you’ll answer my questions.”

“If we are going to work together, I expect you to learn some manners.”

“And I expect you to stop treating me like a child and plaything.”

“Very well.” But her eyes glinted with annoyance as she reached her hands behind her and untied the bow on her bright red apron. She slid it off and folded it neatly as she spoke. “No. Not from the underground vault. Marek couldn’t access that.”

So the dead bodies outside the vault had been Sabrina’s men.

“The sample of the cure that Marek found was right where Sebastian told me it would be—in the research facility on the fifth floor. There were five samples of the cure stored there in a refrigeration tank. I suspect Sebastian has a much greater supply in the underground vault as well as the documentation about how the cure was manufactured in the first place.”

“So you still have four samples left?”

“No. Three. The man you saw was our second test subject. The first time my doctors tried to administer the cure to a Tick when he was sedated. The results were . . . less successful.”

I didn’t bother to ask what she meant by that. I could only assume it was bad. Probably very bad.

“I want to meet that man. Talk to him.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

“If you want me to cooperate—”

“You can’t meet him because he’s dead.”

“The cure killed him?”

“No.” She blinked before turning away, and for an instant, I would have sworn I saw regret in her expression. “The doctors failed to supervise him properly. I didn’t speak to the man myself, but it seems he was rather distraught. He was left alone in the hospital room while the doctors tended to another patient and he cut his own wrists.” She held up the remote again. “There is footage of that as well if you’d like to see it?”

“No,” I managed to choke out past my nausea.

I couldn’t help but imagine the confusion, the anger, the grief that man must have experienced. He’d spent months living like an animal. Only to awaken as a human again. What had that been like? Had he—dear God—had he remembered?

That would certainly explain his suicide. I’d seen the things the Ticks did. I wouldn’t want to live with those memories, either.

What if living with the cure was worse than living with the virus?

But it didn’t matter. I pushed aside the dread coiling within me. I wasn’t going to let this happen to Lily. I’d get to her before it was too late.

“This happened here? At Smart Com?”

“Yes.”

“Then I want to see the doctors. The room. Everything.”

Sabrina clicked the remote and the TV went blank. She turned back to me with an expression that was almost sad. “Were you always this distrustful?” But then she held up a hand. “Never mind. Of course I know the answer. It’s Sebastian who did this to you. Who turned you against all vampires. Who made you think we’re monsters. We’re really not.”

“Right. I’m sure you’re just like everybody else. Just trying to get by in the Tick-pocalypse.”

Sabrina smiled then, giving a delighted chuckle. “Oh, you do have a sense of humor. That will make working together so much more pleasant.”

Had she thought I would simply forget that she’d been manipulating me? That she’d been acting bat-shit crazy and then weirdly maternal?

“You forget, I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

“You still don’t trust that I have the cure? Even after the video?”

“Special effects may be new to you, but I spent my whole life watching dinosaurs destroy Costa Rican forests and aliens invade earth. Anything can be faked well enough to make a convincing video. Until I see the room where that was filmed, the doctor who was injured, and the body of the guy who killed himself, I won’t believe there’s a cure.”

CARTER

“Very well, you want to see the room where this happened before you agree to my offer, fine. But I have something to show you on the way. Something that may sway you further in my favor.”

Before I could even agree, she swept out the door. I followed her. Unless I wanted to seem like a pouting child, I didn’t have a choice. The Freezer—what had she called him? Marek—was still waiting right outside, along with a second guy who could have been his twin. As she and I walked past, Marek peeled off the wall and fell in line right behind us, staying several steps away to give us privacy in case she kept talking. She didn’t.

As she led me silently through the halls, I was struck again by how empty the building seemed. In the Before, this building would probably have held the company’s executive offices. We passed a couple of doors that were closed and may have had someone behind them, but we passed far more that were open and revealed empty rooms.

And okay, sure, Smart Com probably wasn’t doing a lot of marketing these days, but surely a vampire like Sabrina had an empire big enough that she could have used the space for something.

She led me to the elevator and down to a basement level that seemed to connect the buildings, which would have explained the lack of people on the upper levels, except that there seemed to be few people down here as well. What the hell was going on?

Before I could ask, we’d reached a reception area set up like a doctor’s office, right down to the fish tank and the selection of dated magazines. Sabrina breezed through the doors, past a few people dressed in scrubs, and into one of the rooms. Obviously, this was her compound’s clinic, but I couldn’t imagine why she’d brought me there until I saw the man laid out on the bed. He was hooked up to an IV as well as all kinds of machinery, including a ventilator. He had a sizable bandage around his arm.

“This is Dr. Bonard. We’ve been treating him for the Tick virus. He doesn’t appear to be succumbing to the transformation, but he is very sick. Needless to say, you can’t ask him any of your questions.”

When she led me into another room, I expected this one to have the body of the man who’d killed himself, but instead it was a different man.

He was about my father’s age. Maybe a few years older. It was hard to tell for sure with the web of tubes and equipment that covered his face. He had thick dark hair, graying at the temples. I would have recognized him even if it hadn’t been for the Smart Com brochure, because his picture had been all over the media just a few months before the Tick outbreak. He was Paul Workman and he’d been the CEO of Smart Com. Until his death, that is.

“I thought he was dead.”

“He was.” She crossed to stand on the other side of Workman’s bed and gazed down at him. “Or rather he is. Sort of.”

I looked up at Sabrina. “So this is Paul Workman?”

“Obviously.” Her hand fluttered over a bare spot on his arm, almost as if she wanted desperately to touch him but was afraid it might hurt him. Then with infinite care her fingers grazed his skin.

“And he’s not dead.”

“Dead, not dead?” She shrugged. “That’s a gray area.”

“Not for most people it isn’t. Even for vampires. Even with all the mythology about being the undead, it’s still pretty clear when one of you actually dies.”

“True. However, circumstances being what they are . . .” Her fingers trailed down his arm. She’d done the same thing to me just a few minutes ago.

“You’re going to have to connect the dots for me, because right now this all seems very random.”

But even as I said it, the pattern was becoming clearer in my mind. Paul Workman hadn’t just been Smart Com’s CEO, he’d practically been a celebrity. He was handsome and intelligent, and his charisma had created something of a cult following. People bought Smart Com’s products in large part because they trusted him. They believed that any product he had helped design would be good and the shopping population had blindly handed Smart Com a stunning share of the market.

Knowing what I now knew about
abducturae
, it seemed so obvious that he was one.

Sabrina hadn’t said a word, but when I looked up from Workman’s face, I could see she’d been waiting for me to make the connection on my own. She smiled faintly, her expression almost proud.

“Okay,” I said. “So, obviously, Workman was your
abductura
. He worked for you and for Smart Com. What went wrong? I thought he had cancer. He died from it.”

She waggled her hand in a “maybe” gesture. “Yes, he had cancer. Still has cancer, technically. Unfortunately, his decline couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

That’s when the rest of the dots joined up. “Oh sure,” I scoffed. “Nothing sucks like having your pet
abductura
die a month before the apocalypse. That must have really blown. What choice did you have but to keep him alive on life support, regardless of his personal wishes?”

Her gaze hardened infinitesimally. “You may make light, but this issue is far more complex than you understand.”

“No. I think I understand exactly what’s going on here. You don’t have an
abductura
. Without one, you have no way of convincing your kine to stay here and feed you. Which is really inconvenient now that the apocalypse has happened and you can’t just go hire more people. So, instead of just letting Workman die, you hooked him up to the ventilator in hopes that he still has a little bit of juice in him. You are literally sucking him dry. And now you want—”

“Yes,” she said sharply. “Now I do want. In fact, I will lay all my cards on the table. I don’t just want an
abductura
. I need one. Desperately. The population here is dwindling and—”

“And you can’t convince people to stick around long enough to open a vein without Workman here to do your dirty work.”

She didn’t look shocked or offended, but something else flickered in her gaze. Something harsher. Something ugly. “Do not mock me. People are leaving the compound.”

“Good for them.”

“They are putting themselves in danger.” She slammed her palms down on a tray and leaned over Workman’s body. “It’s not safe out there—”

“You think I don’t know that?! I know it’s not safe out there. But maybe they’d rather be in danger than be your next meal. If they finally have a chance to think for themselves, kudos to them for doing it.”

“No,” she said sharply. “Not kudos to them. They are my people and I’ve been protecting them.”

“They’re not your people. You don’t think of them as people, do you? You think of them as kine. As livestock.”

Again her gaze took on that hard glint. “Fine. My kine are in danger. They are leaving the security of the compound, which is one thing I can’t allow. Here they would be safe.”

“Here they would be food.”

“They would be alive,” she said fiercely. “You think they will fare so well out there? You—with all your military training and your knowledge—you are barely surviving. Do you think they have a chance?”

“Do you expect me to believe you genuinely care about whether or not they survive?”

“Believe or don’t believe. But it is the truth. If you think I only care about them the way a human would care about her cattle, then fine. I care that my cattle are in danger. They are mine. I had promised to protect them. I have the knowledge and the power to keep them safe. But they are fearful and they have scattered. I cannot imagine what has happened to them nor can I devise a plan to get them back. Now the best I can hope for is to hold on to the remaining kine I have. But you can help. You can convince them to stay. To stay here where it’s safe. Where we can protect them.”

“Right,” I said bitterly. “Because once Workman finally keels over, you’ll need another brainwasher to convince them not to be afraid of you, even though you’re a bloodsucking monster.”

She ignored my jab. “As long as Paul remains alive, they will stay. Probably. But he has been dying by inches for years now.”

Almost as if he’d heard his name, Workman let out a low groan, a sound of pain torn from deep within his hollowed chest. Jesus, maybe he had heard his name. Or maybe he’d just responded to the anger in her voice.

I recoiled from the bed and stared down at him in horror. His limbs shifted weakly and an expression of agony seemed to cross his face. And for one brief second, I felt it. First pain and confusion. Then a moment of alertness that was swept away by a sense of calm resolve.

When I glanced back to Sabrina, I didn’t see the face of a monster. I saw only love and concern. Complete benevolence. Of course I would stay. Of course I would help her. Why would I ever want to do anything else? We both desperately wanted to protect people. Why couldn’t we work together? Why wouldn’t—

I tore my gaze away from her and looked down at the man on the bed between us. His eyes had flickered open. They were filmy and gray. And desperate. And full of agony.

Jesus.

And somehow—still, despite the agony—he’d made me believe. Was still making me believe.

I whirled away and damn near ran from the room. Out into the hall, pushing past the doctor or nurse standing there. I took a wrong turn, which I knew because I didn’t end up in the waiting room, but in another section of the clinic. The kind of place where they drew blood to do lab work. There were chairs and sturdy workbenches and the little rubber-topped vials for collecting blood.

Without the table in the middle, it took me a moment to recognize the room where the film had been made. But this was it. The room where a Tick had been transformed back into a human. And there, just a few feet away from me, was the refrigerator where the cure was being held.

Before I could search the fridge, she was there behind me, her hand on my arm.

I jerked out of her grasp.

“Is that what you want from me? To suck the life out of me until there’s nothing left?”

“You think I want him to be like that? I’d much rather put him out of his misery. I hate seeing him in so much pain! He begged me to keep him alive until I found another
abductura
. He won’t even let the doctors give him pain meds because it would dull what little power he has left. It’s why he refused traditional cancer treatments. No one has ever been more devoted to this cause than Paul. You felt that. In the state he’s in, even the most powerful
abductura
that ever lived couldn’t project something so strong unless he believed it himself.”

Was she right?

Did Workman really believe helping Sabrina was the right thing to do?

I didn’t know what to think. Sebastian had told me that a powerful
abductura
could convince people of anything, but it took tremendous effort. It was far easier to convince someone when it was an issue you believed in yourself. It only made sense that for Workman to sway me now, when he was dying and in pain, he had to believe Sabrina was right. Believed it enough that he was willing to spend the last days of his life racked with pain. Tortured. If I had any faith in Paul Workman, that would be a powerful endorsement of Sabrina’s intentions.

Which mattered only if I trusted his opinion. And I didn’t. Yeah, I was letting my daddy issues show again, but I didn’t trust any CEO with money and power and the ability to force his views on others.

But that didn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t help Sabrina.

Maybe she sensed I was about to cave, because she started in on me again.

“Don’t you see what I’m offering you? I have the room here to house and feed and protect thousands more people. Everyone you know. Everyone you love. Everyone you want to protect. I could accept them into Smart Com. Once you get me the information from Genexome, we can work on the cure together. You and I can cure the Ticks. Save civilization.”

As I stood there in the lab, with Paul Workman still sending me wave upon wave of adoration, my imagination took over. Lily, yes. I could save her. Mel could take over one of the nearby vampire territories. If we combined the two, there would be even more room. Space enough for all the rebels at Base Camp. All the Greens and Collabs in San Angelo. Even all of Elderton if they wanted to come. Joe would never again have to worry about baby Josie. Lily and everyone else I know would be safe. All I had to do was convince them to come.