Contain (16 page)

“Finn, just calm down.”

Calm down?
I stop my pacing and stare at him. How can he
expect me to calm down after what happened out there? After that
madman
stole
control away and locked him up in here?

“
Everyone else is in a
panic. I don't need you freaking out on me, too.”

I fall into the chair beside my bed,
but then pop right back up again. I can't sit still. “Maybe you
should have thought about that before you let him take over! You
know how I get.”

“
Enough excuses, Finn. He
hasn't taken over. And did I
let
him.”

“
Jack Resnick is crazy!
He's the one who should be locked up.”

Two rows of fluorescent lights in the
ceiling illuminate every possible square inch of the room, even
with half of the bulbs removed. To conserve them and to cut down on
the blinding glare, Dad recommended at the beginning that every
other bulb be stowed away. It turned out to be prescient, as the
people who prepped the place neglected to include extra
bulbs.

We've covered the bare cement floor
with flattened bits of cardboard and plastic matting to warm the
place up a bit, and I've taped drawings over the military gray
walls. Most of them are by the Largents' kids. Sammy is especially
fond of dragons, Mia of flowers and boats. They're easily
distinguished from my own drawings, which look infantile by
comparison.

I thread my way between the beds,
makeshift cots thrown together from the slats of disassembled
wooden packing crates which had once held food and other supplies.
The mattress pads are made from packing foam and other soft
materials, including the Army surplus sleeping bags we found
stacked in one of the rooms. They're better than the cold, hard
floors, but not by much.

The room is maybe a dozen feet on a
side, so it only takes a few steps to get to the wall. I turn
around and prowl back, quickly covering the distance. As far as
pacing goes, it's not very satisfying.

“
It would have been easier
if you'd just let him in,” I say.

“
Once we open those doors,
we compromise the seal on this place,” he tells me.

“
So Jack's right. You're
afraid people will leave.”

“
No, Finn. I'm afraid
something will come in. Need I remind you that we're alive —
have managed to stay alive for three years — because we sealed
ourselves away in here?”

“
There were Wraiths before.
Not anymore.”

He nods and waits, as if I'm missing
his point.

“
That man's not infected,
Dad.”

“
How do you know
that?”

“
Because he didn't look
like a Wraith. Because he was talking and acting normally. He was
out there for a solid hour. He's
still
out there. Jack managed to
convince him to stay.”

Another stare.

“
I know what a Wraith looks
like, Dad. He’s not it.”

He sighs and asks me to sit down. “I
want you to tell me everything you know about the
Flense.”

I don't see the point of the exercise,
but I humor him. What else am I going to do? “Fine. Nobody knows
where it came from or how it started,” I begin. “Nobody knows
exactly what it is.”

“
Tell me what you
know
, not what you
don't.”

I roll my eyes. “It's spread by
skin-to-skin contact, but nobody knows exactly how.” I tell him how
the instant someone who's uninfected is touched by a Wraith, the
transformation begins and that it's rapid and apparently
irreversible. The newly infected victim soon begins to lose some
sort of vital aspect of their self, something that makes them
human. Their eyes begin to go blank. They lose their ability to
speak within ten or fifteen minutes, followed by their
self-awareness in half an hour to forty-five minutes. An hour or so
after infection, they're completely gone. Dead, yet somehow still
alive, just empty shells of flesh and bone filled with disease and
driven only by the need to spread it.

Dad nods. “The reason the outbreak
spread so quickly and so silently in the beginning was that the
infected did not appear threatening to others. An infected person
could walk right up to you and all it would take was a fingertip on
your skin, the most casual of gestures, a fleeting contact, and
then they'd move on. Nobody realized they were spreading death
until it was too late. That's why nobody resisted or tried to get
away. But once some of us figured it out, once we started to
resist . . . .”

He swallows, and the raspy sound of it
draws my eyes back to him.

“
When we started to resist
is when all hell broke loose.”

“
It triggers some kind of
switch inside of them,” I whisper. “If you try to stop them or try
to—”

Run! Run!

No, please don't
run.

“
If you try to run,” Dad
finishes, “they become vicious animals. And they kill
you.”

“
I was going to say they
turn rabid.”

He nods. “Once that switch is flipped,
they don't stop coming after you until either they die, or you
escape, or something else comes along and draws their
attention.”

Run, Harper!

The manufactured memory stirs in my
mind, spawned from a hint of truth and nurtured by years of
sustained terror and uncertainty. It sears through my thoughts,
etching scenes of imagined horror on the backs of my eyeballs. I
know where this particular scene comes from. It's the day we
arrived here, though it's always Harper and Leah in place of Bix
and his father whenever I remember it. And unlike Bix and his dad
succeeding in their escape, my siblings never manage to get away.
They never make it to the bus.

The driver was supposed to keep going
and not stop for anything. “Leave them!” someone shouted.
“Go!”

But there were others, myself
included, who told him to stop and allow the two to get onto the
bus with us. I remember turning around to see who could be so
heartless that they would leave people along the side of the road.
There was a man, and he was ordering the driver to keep going. I
remember the terrified look on the girl's face as she clutched at
her father's arm. And I will never forget how she begged him to let
the driver stop.

He did. What choice did we have? The
van was blocking our way, the engine smoking and flames beginning
to leap from beneath the hood. He swung open the doors and started
to get out of his seat. But then the Wraiths started coming out of
the woods and everything changed.

Each time the memory resurrects
itself, the Wraiths are always closer, more numerous. If I allow
the mental movie to reach its climax, it always ends with Harper
and Leah overwhelmed, always with them fighting. And always the
change takes the Wraiths and they kill.

But as terrifying as the nightmare is,
my mother's absence from it has always bothered me equally as much.
The guilt of that betrayal is as bad as the horror.

I shudder and force the vision away,
though the reality that replaces it isn't much of an
improvement.

“
I've given this presumed
virus a lot of thought,” Dad tells me.

“
And?”

“
All biological entities,
viruses included, are driven to propagate, to make more and more
copies of itself. Parasites, which is what this is, are obligated
to live off the energy of other living organisms, so the very
nature of parasitism exacts a cost on the host. It's this cost that
maintains the balance between a parasite's success and the host's.
If the infective agent is too successful, it weakens the host too
much, which threatens the host's ability to survive and propagate,
and, by extension, the parasite's. A dead host isn't a very good
carrier, is it?”

“
No. But some diseases are
very good at killing,” I counter. “The plague,
Ebola . . . .”

But he shakes his head. “They all have
a weakness of some sort, a bottleneck which limits the parasite's
ability to spread. But not the Flense. As far as I've been able to
tell, this agent is a hundred percent effective at transmitting
itself. What happens when it runs out of hosts?”

“
It dies out.”

He nods. “Or?”

“
I don't know.”

“
Or it must
adapt.”

“
Adapt, how?”

“
By becoming less
successful. By finding new hosts. By incubating longer inside a
carrier. There are many different ways it can change. It has to
become less successful in order to survive. It has to be able to
hide.”

And now I begin to understand his
unwillingness to opening the door. “You think the man outside might
be a carrier?”

“
I think it's a risk, Finn.
He appears uninfected, but how can we know for sure? We know
dangerously little about the Flense. But we know even less about
the stranger outside our door.”

As I leave our quarters, I give the man sitting just outside my
door an angry look so there's no question how I feel about his
betrayal.

But Dominic Green just stares fixedly
away, refusing to meet my eyes. He slumps in his chair and messes
with the metal bar resting across his knees. It forces me to
consider whether he'd actually use it against my father if he
decided to leave the room in defiance of Jack's orders. Dad's a man
of his word, and he told Jack he'd sit tight, so I know wondering
is an exercise in futility.

On the opposite side of the hall is
Jonah. Talk about an exercise in futility.

I don't bother even looking at
him.

“
Where are you going?” he
asks me, a low, threatening rumble in his voice.

His tone takes me straight back to
grade school, not to any bully, but something else. There was this
dog a couple blocks away from the house on a street Harper and I
always walked home on. It would always bark at us from behind a
wooden slat fence as we passed. One day, the gate was left open,
and the dog ambushed us when it came flying out from behind a tree.
The way it growled right before attacking us is what I remember
now.

“
None of your business,” I
tell Jonah.

“
Dad says everyone's to
stay in their quarters unless they're on official
duties.”

I keep walking, and when he shouts at
me, I yell over my shoulder that I'm going to finish counting food.
The hair on my neck feels like it's standing on end, and my palms
are sweating. “That official enough for you?”

He doesn't answer. But he doesn't come
after me, either.

What the hell must be going through
his mind? Both he and his father have always been stubborn,
opinionated know-it-alls, but I've never seen this side of Jack
Resnick before. It's like somebody fed his ego steroids or
something. Flipped a switch and made him go crazy.

The look on Jonah's face when Dom was
taking my father away was enough to convince me it's a side of Jack
that not even his own son has seen before. Or if he has, it's a
side that terrifies him.