The Vault (A Farm Novel) (3 page)

What he could actually do is force me to change my mind.

His determination is already swaying my will.

He is so dangerous and he doesn’t even seem to realize it.

I back away, slowly, palms raised. “No. But I won’t turn her. Not as long as we have any other options.”

“Okay then,” he says firmly. “Let’s go get those other options.”

I take another step back and another, because I can still feel it, tugging at my mind. Biting Lily is the only solution. The only way to guarantee her safety. And I know I need to get out of there before he’s convinced me.

“I get Sebastian, you go to Sabrina’s.” Suddenly, sending him far, far away from me doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Before Carter can say anything else, I turn and run. Not just from him and this strange power he holds over me, but from myself as well.

Because I know, deep inside, that it wasn’t my restraint that saved his life just now. It was something else. Not something within me, but something within him. I didn’t stop because I got control over myself. I stopped because his blood tasted wrong. Horribly repugnant. Deadly.

The truth is I was dangerously close to killing one of the few people I’ve ever really considered a friend. And he is
Lily’s
. He is her love. He may be the one person who can save her. Killing him would have risked her life and destroyed her happiness.

Those are things I didn’t even consider when his throat was in my mouth. They wouldn’t have stopped me. That is the kind of monster I am.

I can’t do this to her. Not as long as there’s another choice.

Out in the parking lot, far from Carter, I consider my options. There are plenty of cars, but I pick the one we came in. I only learned how to drive in the last three days. I need familiarity.

I don’t even know how to hot-wire a car, but we took this one from El Corazon and we have the keys, so I slide into the driver’s seat. Except—dang it—the dog is in the passenger seat. It’s nearly as large as a wolf, but fluffier. Chuy, Carter had called him. The dog of a friend.

I reach past the dog and open the passenger-side door. “Get out,” I tell him.

The dog just stares at me, his thick black tongue lolling out of his mouth.

“Get out,” I say again. I move to give him a push, but he just nuzzles my arm. “I don’t like dogs.”

He looks up at me from under his eyebrows and makes a little whining noise—like he wants to stay with me. Like he’s begging to do it. This is why I don’t like dogs. I have trouble believing the truthfulness of anyone who claims to want my company.

But even when I give the dog a shove, he just shifts his weight and then settles back into the seat. Finally, I snarl, “Fine.” I turn my attention back to the car. I start the engine and shift into drive before pushing my foot on the gas hard enough that the car lurches forward, momentum shutting the door on Chuy’s side of the car. Beside me, Chuy lowers his chin to his paws and lies down.

Carter has plenty of options left to choose from and I’ve seen him hot-wire cars before. He’ll be fine. Worst-case scenario, he has to stay at Genexome until I can return with Sebastian. That wouldn’t be a bad thing.

CARTER

Moving a lot slower than Mel’s vampire sprint, I followed her out to the Genexome parking lot, only to realize she’d stolen my ride. Which shouldn’t have surprised me. My suggestion that she bite Lily and turn her into a vampire had freaked her out. Hell, it freaked me out.

As plan C’s went, it was crap, but it was all I had. I just hoped to God I wouldn’t have to use it.

Maybe, just maybe, plan B would be enough to save our asses. Plan B started with me going back to San Angelo, where a large chunk of the rebellion was trying to wrestle control of one of the Farms.

Hopefully, from the Farm in San Angelo, I could figure out where Lily’s dad had taken her. I knew they’d been headed to a nearby Farm, but I didn’t know which one. But the Farms had ways to communicate, and hopefully, once I reached San Angelo, I’d be able to figure out where the helicopter had gone. Once I knew where Lily was, I’d need to go get the cure from Sabrina. As much as I didn’t want to drag anyone else into this mess, I wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t take on Sabrina all by myself. Not when Lily’s fate and the fate of all humanity rested on my success. I needed backup.

I looked around, cursing. In the Before, Genexome had been a sizable company—not huge, but certainly one of the major employers in this South Texas town. Unfortunately, it was one of the epicenters of the outbreak. The company, the grounds, the town, had all been hit hard by the Ticks. The upside was there were a lot of cars left in the lot.

Yeah, I know that sounds callous as hell, but once you’ve seen what I’ve seen, and done what I’ve done, you can’t think about the people who are already gone. There’s only enough room in your head to worry about the people who are still here. The people you can still save.

When I looked out at the parking lot, I didn’t let myself think about the people who’d driven those cars. Instead it was: What can I hot-wire? What will have gas? What will get me to San Angelo? Fast.

At the far end of the parking lot was a long building so low to the ground I’d almost missed it. In this barren part of Texas, the featureless horizon and the dust have a way of messing with your perception. But that building, it almost looked like an airplane hangar. Or a private garage. Exactly the kind of place an eccentric vampire would store his collection of sports cars.

True, I didn’t know whether or not Sebastian had a collection of sports cars, but if I was rich as hell and couldn’t die, that’s how I’d spend my money.

I took off at a jog toward the hangar, glancing at my watch as I did. Fifteen minutes and a couple of miles later, I stopped, panting, in front of the hangar. It was farther away than it had looked and a lot bigger, about as big as a football field. All four sets of bay doors on the structure were locked from the inside, but when I circled around back, I found an open window. Because Alpine was ground zero, there hadn’t been enough humans around to loot it and Ticks didn’t care about anything they couldn’t eat.

I jumped up, caught the edge of the window, pulled myself through, and dropped down on the other side. Light drifted in from the windows on the bay doors and from skylights. Dust motes filled the air, giving each beam of sunlight tangible weight as it fell on the line of cars. There were seven in all, each looking fast and sleek. A Lotus. A Pontiac GTO. An Aston Martin. A couple I didn’t even recognize. Any one of them would get me to San Angelo a hell of a lot faster than the crossover SUV Mel had taken. Then, glancing into the shadows at the far end of the hangar, I saw something even better. A pair of planes.

I walked down to that end. I ignored the bigger plane—a passenger jet that was way out of my league—to focus on the smaller one. A little single-engine Cessna Skyhawk.

Strictly speaking, I hadn’t ever flown a plane. But I had spent two years at Elite Military Academy, which was owned and managed by Sebastian. We’d learned all kinds of crazy shit at Elite that probably should have tipped us off that it wasn’t just an ordinary school. We’d learned mixed martial arts and how to pick locks. We’d learned battle tactics and strategy. And, in our free time, we’d logged hours in the academy’s flight simulator.

Knowing what I knew now—that Sebastian had founded Elite because he was looking for an
abductura
and because he was building his own army—it seemed obvious that everything at the academy—every lesson, every course, every pastime—had been designed to equip the people in Sebastian’s empire with the skills to survive and to protect him during the apocalypse. And if need be, to fly him around.

Because the plane I’d learned to fly in that flight simulator was a Cessna Skyhawk. And now I’d get to fly one for real.

I did a quick run-through of the preflight maintenance, opened the bay doors, and climbed inside the Cessna. Despite my fears, my doubts, my anxiety—despite all that, adrenaline pumped through my body. First time in the cockpit of a real plane. The layout of the instrument panel was exactly what I expected. I could do this.

I’d spent less time getting this puppy ready than it would have taken me to hot-wire a working car and I’d get to San Angelo in a third of the time—assuming I remembered how to navigate, which I was pretty sure I did.

They say you never forget your first flight, but mine wasn’t filled with exhilaration and joy, but with nerves and desperation. I will say this: if I didn’t survive the apocalypse long enough to fly again—when I could actually enjoy it—I was going to be pissed.

*  *

I landed the plane—badly but safely—in the deserted airstrip outside San Angelo. I didn’t have any trouble finding a car. When civilization had collapsed, everyone with a plane or money for a ticket had booked it, which meant airports were the easiest place to find cars and gas.

That was a tip I’d learned from Ely Estaban. Ely had gone to Elite also, but he hadn’t joined the rebellion. Not really. He’d spent his time searching for his family and he’d been better at surviving on his own, outside the Farm system, than anyone else I’d ever met. That was why I’d trusted him to keep Lily and McKenna alive when they’d left the safety of base camp to search for a hospital where McKenna could have her baby.

I didn’t bother doing anything to secure the plane once I landed it at the small regional airport. I found an older Toyota that I was able to hot-wire easily enough. It only had a half a tank of gas, but that was more than enough to get me from the airstrip to the college. Even though I’d only been to San Angelo a couple of times, it wasn’t hard to find a midsize college in a town that small. It wasn’t until I was almost there that I thought about what I was going to say.

There’s no easy way to return in defeat.

I left the Farm in San Angelo just two days ago, determined to save Lily and bring her back safely. Instead, she’d been exposed to the Tick virus. She’d practically been kidnapped by her own father. Oh, and the vampire who we’d all thought we could trust—the person who had been our greatest source of information—turned out to be a lying bastard.

I had no good news to bring back to San Angelo. Zip.

Having a plan helped, but I couldn’t sugarcoat things. Not to people I liked and trusted.

Of course, that was assuming the good guys—my people—were still even in control of the Farm in San Angelo. I’d left to go get Lily and baby Josie thinking that I’d only be gone for six or seven hours. That had been two days ago. We’d just taken over the Farm when I left. For all I knew, while I was gone it had fallen back into the hands of the Collabs we’d wrestled it away from. In a perfect world, I could have used the satellite phone to call Zeke or Tech Taylor for a sitrep when I’d landed in San Angelo. But—no phone.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this crap?

It was close to dusk when I parked a block away from the campus behind a fast-food place and went in on foot, keeping in the shadows of the building until I was close enough to scan the fence line.

The good news was, the gates were still standing, and secondly, there was a security detail up in the guard tower. Moreover, the security detail was made up of a single beefy guy in a Collab uniform with a rifle and three other people, all wearing hoodies and carrying tranq rifles. The three people in hoodies were obviously Greens. They were thinner and smaller than the Collab and they held their tranq rifles with caution rather than arrogance.

The fact that they were on the security detail and had rifles to hold meant that the takeover at the Farm hadn’t collapsed after I’d left. The fact that the security detail included a Collab and Greens meant things were going well enough that the two groups were actually working together. Which seemed like a friggin’ miracle given how bad things had been at this Farm before we’d taken over.

I walked out into the open, hands raised and clearly visible. I made it to within a hundred feet before the Collab swung the rifle around and got me in his sights. I’d spent a lot of time in Farms over the past year. I’d spent time pretending to be a Collab so that I could help people escape and I’d spent time around weapons. Even from this distance, I was pretty damn sure that the weapon that Collab had trained on me was not a standard Farm-issued tranq rifle, but something much more powerful.

I stopped and waited. There wasn’t much I could do. The Collab looked trigger-happy, and if he was even a halfway decent shot, I was a dead man.

Then one of the Greens in a hoodie placed a hand on the arm of the Collab. There was a short exchange, and finally the Collab lowered the rifle. The Green who’d been arguing in my favor waved me forward before dashing down the stairs for the gate.

I blew out a relieved breath as I jogged the rest of the distance to the gate.

I made it just as the Green was pushing back her hood. It was Dawn, the nurse from Elderton who had come down with me from Utah. Dawn wasn’t actually a nurse. She’d been home on break from nurses’ school when the Tick outbreak had happened. Still she knew a hell of a lot more about medicine than anyone else at Base Camp.

She threw open the gate to let me in. The second it closed behind me, she gave me a fast hug.

“Man, am I glad to see you!”

“Likewise.”

I nodded in the direction of the guardhouse and the asshole Collab. “Things okay here?”

She pulled back. “Better than they were when we first arrived, but still . . . tense. As you can see. Everyone’s been freaking out because we saw a plane.”

“Oh. That was me.” It hadn’t occurred to me, but yeah, it would have been months since anyone had seen a plane. When martial law had been declared, all commercial air travel had been suspended. For a month or so after, you’d see a plane here and there, but since then, since things got really bad, there’d been nothing. I shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t think about it freaking people out.”

“You’re a pilot?”

“I am now.”

She laughed at that, shaking her head. “Let’s get you inside. I know Zeke and Joe want to talk to you.”

I was sure they would. I just wish I had better news. Things here were tenuous. We obviously needed every good person we had to keep things stable, but now I would be asking them to send at least two people with me, quite possibly on a fool’s errand. On the other hand, if we succeeded, we’d save Lily. And possibly the human race.

Yeah. No pressure there.