The Vault (A Farm Novel) (5 page)

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Still holding his hand in mine, I plunge the stake back into the hole I’d pulled it out of.

CARTER

“Is Josie okay?” I asked as Dawn led me across campus to the Dean’s office.

“She’s fine.” Dawn’s expression went all gooey as she said it. “We found infant formula in the storage center. Lily was right. The Farms were well equipped to care for babies.”

Before I could ask any more questions, Dawn showed me into the office, giving me one last worried look as she shut the door behind her.

Joe and Zeke were both waiting for me in what had once been the Dean’s office. Joe had always seemed like an old soul. Even though he was about my age, he’d always seemed wise. And I trusted him. That was important. I’d only known Zeke a handful of days, but we’d traveled across the country together to pull off a risky as hell coup at this Farm. So even though I didn’t know him well, I knew he was as determined as I was to stay in the fight. And that counted for a lot, too.

Since neither was much for bullshit and we didn’t have time for that anyway, as soon as the greetings were out of the way, I launched right into sharing the bad news about Sebastian’s betrayal. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We’re up shit creek. This betrayal didn’t help, but—”

Before I could continue, Zeke held out his hands. “Look, I know it sucks, but I didn’t know what else to do with him. Joe wanted to just leave him outside.”

“Yeah,” Joe said belligerently. “After what he did—”

“Wait.” Now I held out my hand. “What are you talking about?”

For a second we all just stood there, staring at one another as it sank in that we were having two different conversations.

“What are you talking about?” Joe asked. “Why are we up shit creek?”

“Sebastian lied to us. Roberto didn’t have the cure. In fact, Roberto didn’t create the Tick virus. Sebastian did.”

Zeke just sort of shrugged. He’d never met Sebastian, but Joe had known him, had fought side by side with him. He ducked his head, shaking it slowly. “Dude, I’m sorry. And Lily?”

“She’s with—” I hesitated before mentioning her father. Yeah, my own dad was no prize, what with the general disinterest interrupted by the occasional beatings, but at least he’d never helped launch the apocalypse. If Jonathan Price was my dad, I wasn’t sure I’d want my friends knowing. So instead of mentioning him, I said, “The doctors at El Corazon induced a coma to slow the progression of the disease. Then the doctor took her and some of the other patients to one of the nearby Farms. It bought us some time to find a cure.”

“But there is a cure?” Zeke asked, a note of awe in his voice.

I nodded. It wasn’t that I wanted to lie to them, I just still wasn’t ready to consider any other possibility.

“What were
you
talking about?” I asked.

Zeke and Joe exchanged a look. Finally Zeke cleared his throat and admitted, “Ely showed up yesterday afternoon. Joe wanted to leave him outside the fence. I had him brought in and locked up.”

For a second, I couldn’t even think. My vision tunneled as my blood pressure spiked. Ely was here?

How the hell had that happened? Ely had kidnapped Lily. He’d tried to abandon baby Josie in the desert and turn Lily over to Roberto. Lily—being Lily—had fought back and had won. The last anyone had heard from him, he’d been left in the desert with a gun and a single bullet. So how the hell had he survived?

But, of course, I knew the answer to that question. When it came to staying alive on his own, Ely was the best there was. Besides, he was too much of an asshole to die.

“Where’s he being kept?”

“Now wait a second,” Zeke said, palms out again, in a placating gesture.

I turned to Joe. “Where is he being kept?”

“In a copier room, just down the hall.”

I didn’t need Zeke to tell me which room Ely was in. There was only one room with two guards standing outside of it. They were guys I didn’t know and had never seen before, but either they knew who I was or they were too scared to get in my way, because they stepped aside and let me pass.

The mammoth copier sat silent in one corner. Cabinets lined three walls. Boxes of paper reams lined the other. There was no furniture, but Ely had stacked a couple of boxes near the copier and he was sitting on them, legs sprawled in front of him, head tipped back.

Some tiny part of me knew that I had to be logical about this, but when I saw him—in that split second that I first laid eyes on him—there was nothing in my brain except Lily. The fear in her voice when she’d first called to tell me he was working for Roberto, that he’d tranqed her and left baby Josie to die. The quiet desperation after she’d been exposed to the virus. The way her voice quavered when she asked me to kill her. To make it quick. Because she didn’t want to become a monster.

What the hell was I supposed to do with that?

My girl, asking me to kill her quickly, because of this guy. How was I supposed to be logical?

Ely barely opened an eye in the time it took me to get across the room and haul his ass to his feet. I whirled him around and slammed his back into the wall and held him there.

In that instant, logic didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Because Lily was sick. Lily was dying. Maybe lost forever. Because of this guy. This worthless sack of shit. This traitor who was supposed to keep her safe and didn’t.

I hauled back and punched him square in the jaw just once, then dragged him back up. There was nothing I couldn’t do to this guy that wouldn’t be fair. That wouldn’t be reasonable. I wanted to take him apart. Every instinct I had yelled at me to destroy him.

Instead, I just held him there, seething for a moment before I could even speak.

“I am going to kill you,” I said slowly. He made a strangled choking sound, but didn’t struggle to get free. He was shorter than I was, stockier, and I held him dangling several inches off the floor. “I am going to tear you apart with my bare hands. Whatever Roberto threatened you with to coerce you into betraying us, I will do worse.” Then I let go of him and he crumpled. “But I’m not going to do it today.”

He sat sprawled on the ground and brought his thumb up to wipe away a single drop of blood. “Why not just kill me now?”

“Because I’m going to go save Lily’s life and I don’t have time for you.”

And with that, I turned and walked away. I would make him pay, but not right now. Now I had more important things to do.

MEL

Sebastian writhes in agony as I thrust the stake back into his heart. I’ve killed him again, in hopes of saving him.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper once more. He’s deadweight against me and I struggle to get my arms around him. I heft him up so he’s leaning on me and his face is inches from mine. “You’re bleeding too much.”

“So you stabbed me again?” he gasps out.

“We have to get out of here. I don’t have time to bandage your wounds here. We have to get out of here before the Ticks wake up and—”

I break off when I hear a desperate howl rend the air. From behind me, Chuy lets out a panicked yelp. I glance over my shoulder. He has stayed precisely where I told him to, but he’s standing now, tense and poised to attack, staring off into the distance.

Sebastian nods toward the town. “Those Ticks?”

I turn and look out across the green. In the half-light of dusk, dark shapes loom at the edge of the square. Hulking, clumsy shapes. And they’re moving toward us.

The Ticks. Those lazy, sleeping beasts I was sure were too blood drunk to notice my arrival. Sebastian’s screams have woken them and they are clearly not morning people. Or dusk people as the case may be.

My gaze scans the town square. A dozen. No, two dozen. Maybe more. Chuy clacks his teeth together, too nervous to be still.

“You think we can take them?” I ask.

Sebastian laughs. “Ah, I have missed your wide-eyed optimism, dear Kit.”

“I’ve seen you take out a dozen Ticks.”

“I’m humbled by your high opinion of me, but I’m not prepared to die for your stupidity.”

“But—”

“I can fight a dozen Ticks when I’m well fed and healthy. And you, my dear, are no me.”

“Okay,” I snap, because I know he’s right. “What do you want to do? Just stand here and wait for them to come eat us for dessert?”

Sebastian looks around. All I see are more Ticks. Yeah. We’re definitely in trouble here.

Our only clear way out of the square is to go back toward Roberto’s house.

“Retreat?” I ask.

“Ladies first.”

I wedge my shoulder under his arm and pull him against me. “Come on, Chuy,” I mutter, and the dog leaps to my side. Together, we turn and run.

CARTER

Joe was waiting for me in the hall outside the copier room.

“That’s it?” he asked. “You just threatened him and walked away.”

I hadn’t seen Joe when I’d been in the room with Ely, but I guess he’d been listening. That didn’t surprise me nearly as much as the vehemence in his voice. “Yeah. That’s it. For now.”

“He doesn’t get any kind of punishment?”

Once I’d made it back into the Dean’s office, I turned to look at Joe. The guy wasn’t that much older than me. Maybe a year at most, which put him at around nineteen years old, but he looked much older. Older even than he had looked just a few days ago. Losing McKenna—the girl he’d loved and the mother of his child—had done that to him.

Did I look older, too? Jesus, I sure as hell felt older.

“I swear to you, I will make him pay. For what he did to Lily. For what he did to Josie. He will pay. But until I’ve rescued Lily, until I’ve found the cure, revenge is going to have to wait.”

Joe looked like he wanted to argue, but after a solid minute of clenching and unclenching his fists, he nodded. I exhaled in relief. Joe was a lot of things, but he sure as hell wasn’t a killer. “Okay. Then what’s next?”

“You have a map of Texas? We need to see where all the Farms are. We need to figure out where the helicopter might have gone.”

Zeke paused in the act of rummaging through a drawer in a desk. “You don’t know?”

“Things were . . . a bit confusing when we left El Corazon.” The fences had collapsed. Ticks were swarming onto the property. Lily’s dad had loaded her and a bunch of other Ticks-in-comas into the helicopter. They’d just gone. “I know the general plan: get to another Farm, but there hadn’t exactly been time to submit a flight plan.”

Zeke finally found a map and shoved some stuff aside to unfold it onto the desktop. We all bent over the map. I grabbed a pen and drew a big
X
just north of San Saba. “Here’s were El Corazon is. Roughly.”

Zeke, the only one of us who’d been a Collab and had actually worked in the Farm system, added circles around Dallas, Austin, College Station, Waco, San Marcos, and Abilene. I leaned over and added a circle at Georgetown just north of Austin and then a few in San Antonio. I’d been in and out of most of the Farms in Texas as part of the rebellion, trying to help people escape and looking for Lily. There were a hell of a lot of Farms in Texas. It had taken me six months to find and rescue her last time. How much longer would it take this time? What if her father went back on his word and tried to hide her from me?

I looked up at Zeke. “I assume you have some sort of directory of all the Farms? The Dean must have had the numbers of their satellite phones. We’ll need to find that list and—”

“If the Dean had a sat phone, he guarded it closely and took it with him. And as far as we can tell, it wasn’t used for the day-to-day stuff,” Zeke said. “But we have a ham radio.”

I frowned. I should have thought of that. Operating a ham radio had been one of the many obscure skills I’d learned at Elite, but we’d only spent a couple of days on it. But if the Farms all had ham radios . . .

“Who’s operating the radio at this Farm? Is the room secure?” Because if there was some Collab here who was sending messages to the other Farms, by now the guy could have told every Farm within a hundred miles that the rebellion had taken over here. Then our problems might be a hell of a lot worse.

“We secured the room right after you left to go get Lily,” Zeke told me. “I didn’t even know about the radios until after you’d left. Apparently the Dean didn’t want us talking to other Farms and comparing notes.”

That made sense. The entire Farm system was built on isolating people and controlling them with fear. “If you take me to the radio room, I might be able to figure it out. If not, we get Tech Taylor in here to help. I’m sure he remembers more about the radios than I do.”

“No need,” Zeke said, gesturing for me to follow him down the hall. “The Collab who was operating the radio is still here. Joe thought it was better to have someone at the radio. That way if one of the other Farms tried to contact this one, there’d be someone to answer.”

Zeke led me past the reception area outside the Dean’s office and down a narrow hallway to the radio room. Desks set up with several computers lined one wall. On the back wall, by the windows, were a pair of chunky-looking radios. An old-fashioned typewriter sat in front of the radio. A girl leaned against the counter picking at her nail polish.

I stopped short at the door. “You’re the Collab?” Every Collab I’d ever met had been a guy, and they were all brute force and muscle. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be female Collabs, too.

Her lips curved down at the term and her gaze darted warily to Zeke, who stood just behind me. “Who’s this guy?” she asked.

“He needs to talk to some of the other Farms. Maybe even without the Deans of those Farms finding out. You think we can do that?”

Zeke was right. The quieter we kept this, the better. I stepped farther into the room. “Actually, I can probably figure out how to use the radio myself.”

The girl stepped up to me, waving a hand in my face. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop right there. This is my radio room. You have any idea how long it took me to learn to use all this equipment?”

“But I can—”

“You want to send a message, it goes through me.”

I glanced at Zeke. “You sure we can trust her?”

She answered before he could. “You think I don’t know that the Dean abandoned this Farm and everyone in it? You think I don’t know we’d all be toast if you guys hadn’t gotten here to keep the electric fences up? Yeah. You can trust me.”

I guess that was the good thing about Collabs—they would always act in their own best interest. “Okay,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Charla.”

“Okay, Charla, here’s the deal.” Then I summed up what I needed her to do.

Only a few seconds in, she was frowning. Again she stopped me with a wave of her hand. “I don’t know if it’s the helicopter you’re looking for or not, but an SOS went out yesterday about a helicopter crash.”

My stomach dropped through the floor. “What helicopter?”

She moved toward me. “Are you okay?”

Shoving a hand through my hair, I tried to slow my racing thoughts. “Tell me about the helicopter.”

“They had some kind of engine problem. They had crashed.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s no way to tell where the message came from?”

“No. He said they were fifty miles from a Farm, but I don’t think it was this one, because he sounded farther away than that.”

“You can hear how far away someone is?”

“The radios only transmit within line of sight. Then there are repeater stations set up at intervals between the Farms. There’s a slight degradation of the signal every time it repeats. The farther away they are, the more static you hear.”

“But there’s no way to tell for sure how far away it was?”

She shook her head, dropping her gaze.

Great. Well, that effing narrowed it down, didn’t it?

“It might not have been the helicopter you’re looking for,” Zeke said.

Yeah, I knew he was right, but I also knew statistics weren’t on our side in this one. “You seen many other helicopters zipping around the state in the past six months?” There was a moment of dead, awful silence in the room. “Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.”

Shit.

Lily’s helicopter had gone down. With her in it. She could be dead already.

Almost without realizing it, I dropped my hands to my knees and bent over, struggling to suck air into my lungs as panic clutched me.

Everything I’d done, and I could have lost her to this, an accident. God damn it!

The freakin’ apocalypse happens and takes out seventy, maybe eighty percent of the entire population. And the one person I really care about somehow survives. And I actually manage to find her. We get a couple of months together before the world starts ripping us apart again. Then she’s exposed to the Tick virus, but at least there was still hope. But now?

Jesus, if her helicopter crashed . . .

How the hell was I supposed to keep hoping?

I really was going to kill Ely, because she never would have been on that helicopter if it wasn’t for him. If it wasn’t for him, she’d be safely back at Base Camp. If it wasn’t for him, she’d be . . .

I sucked in another breath.

No. I couldn’t think like this. Not while there was still a chance. I pushed myself up to see Charla and Zeke exchanging worried looks. “The message that went out, was it an automated SOS? Something the helicopter would have sent out on its own?”

“No, it was from a person. A guy named Jonathan Price.”

I scrubbed my hands up and down my face. So definitely Lily’s helicopter. But if he’d survived long enough to send the message, then maybe she had, too.

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t—”

“How long ago did the message come through?”

She lowered her gaze again before answering. “Maybe twelve hours ago.”

“Are the messages recorded?”

She shook her head.

The helicopter had left El Corazon just a few minutes before Mel and I had pulled out. That had been just about thirty hours ago. They should have reached the closest Farm within a couple of hours at most. Instead, they’d crashed. There had been a doctor and a pilot, as well as four people who’d been exposed to the Tick virus and were sedated to slow its progress. Jonathan wasn’t the type of guy to do a lot of heavy lifting. If he’d put out the distress call, it meant there was no one else to do it. Which meant the helicopter had gone down and there’d been . . . ah, shit . . . at least twelve to sixteen hours where he’d been too out of it to send out a call.

None of this sounded good. At all.

Even if Lily was still alive, those intravenous meds she’d been getting on a drip, those probably hadn’t survived the crash. Which meant she wouldn’t be sedated anymore. Which meant the Tick virus would continue to progress. And she’d turn into a Tick. Within the next couple of days.

And again, that was if she hadn’t died in the crash.

My time line for getting to Sabrina’s had just gotten a hell of a lot shorter.