Contain (18 page)

I find myself hyperventilating. By
habit, I focus on drawing in deeper breaths, metering my inhales
and exhales, waiting for the telltale whistle to signal the
beginning of the panic attack. But my throat doesn't close off as I
expect it to. My chest remains loose and the air passes through it
without restriction. If I had had any doubts before, I'm now
certain that those things inside of me have cured me of the
disease. “Have you told him?”

“
About my little mechanical
helpers?” he asks, rendering an answer from her
unnecessary.

“
I had to, Finn. Even he
knew this wasn't normal.”

“
And it is my body, after
all.”

“
What does Hannah
think?”

“
We haven't told her
yet.”

“
Doc seems to think we've
all got them, Finn.”

Not all, I think, but I nod and don't
correct him. “The vitamin D shots from the evacuation center. We
think that's where it happened.”

“
Well, they do appear to be
a good thing, don't you think?” Eddie asks. “Our little robot
helpers.”

“
I'm . . .
not sure.”

I'm still in a bit of a daze over
everything that's happening. It's scary. And those things I saw
under the microscope certainly don't feel right. They may be
helping, but they were put into us without our permission and under
false pretenses. But worst of all is not knowing if and how they
might be connected with the outbreak itself.

“
We can't keep this a
secret,” I say. “We'll have to tell everyone, and soon. They have a
right to know.”

Doctor Cavanaugh clears her throat. “I
know. But right now is certainly not the time.”

Eddie laughs, and the sound of it
again makes my skin crawl. “She's hoping my current appearance is
just an intermediate stage in my full recovery, and that I'll
magically end up looking just like my old self in a few days.” He
passes a webbed hand over the shiny dome of his head. “She doesn't
want the boogey man scaring anyone else.”

“
The musculature has
already begun to remodel to some degree,” Doc Cavanaugh says, her
eyes flashing, and I realize she hasn't yet told him about the
stranger. “I've already seen improvement, features taking on more
detail, even just since this morning. A couple more days.
Patience.”

Eddie nods. I can tell it must be hard
for him, being locked up inside here. It's been a week since the
accident, and I'm sure he hates that his own daughter is scared of
him.

“
Bren and Bix have been
watching over Hannah,” I tell him. “She never gave up on you. She
always believed you'd get better.”

I'm grateful to see some of the
tension leave his shoulders. His face — or what has taken the
place of his face — also seems to relax.

“
She's my angel,” he
says.

“
I do have to ask you
something though, Eddie. About the accident.”

He waits.

“
Mister Largent mentioned
something about the pipe that burst. He said it looked like someone
had messed with it.”

The corners of the opening that is
Eddie's mouth turn downward. “What do you mean?”

“
He said it looked like it
had been intentionally cut.”

He just lays there for several
seconds, his dark eyes glistening as he regards me. What is he
thinking?

“
If it's true,” he finally
says, and his voice is tight and sounds like broken glass tumbling
on a beach, “you find out who did it. Find them and bring them to
me.”

I need to talk to Bren, but as soon as I step out of the stairwell
and hurry across the hall to her quarters, Jack Resnick comes
around the bend of the hallway. He demands to know why I'm not in
my own quarters.

“
You should ask your son,”
I snap. “I told him where I was going.”

Mister Resnick glares at me for a
moment. He glances at the Abramson's door and then back at me
again. There's nothing but contempt written all over his face, in
the way his eyes flash and the muscles in his jaw throb.

I honestly don't understand why he and
Jonah hate us so much, why they hate Bix and his dad.

He takes in a breath and seems to be
mulling over what to do with me. Should he allow me to see Bren? I
mean, it's obvious that's why I'm standing here in front of her
door.

“
Get back to your
quarters,” he grunts. “Unless you'd like waste duty. I'm sure your
little hippie friend would appreciate the break.”

“
I have watch coming
up.”

“
The monitors?” He shakes
his head. “As of now I'm relieving you of that duty. I need people
I can trust.”

I can feel my face getting hot. Nails
bite into my palms as my hands curl into fists. “You may have
stolen your position away from my father,” I growl. “You may have
tricked or bribed or scared people into voting for you, but you
won't keep your power. Not like this.”

But he doesn't appear
worried by my warning. “Tell you what, convince your dad to turn
over
all
of the
security codes and endorsing me as your new leader, and I'll think
about lightening up.”

“
Mister Abramson and Rory
aren't having any luck then opening the door?” I can't keep the
satisfaction from creeping into my voice.

I expect him to get angry, but he just
sneers at me with that half smile of his. “Oh, you didn't
hear?”

“
Hear what?”

“
Your father has agreed to
a compromise. He's coming up with a proposal to bring the stranger
in.”

* * *

“I had no choice, Finn,” my father explains.

He sets the well-worn book he's
reading down on the sleeping pad next to him, a book he's finished
perhaps a dozen times already, and looks up at me.

“
Seth is worried that if
Jack forces him to compromise the locking mechanism, we won't be
able to seal it again. Then we'd be completely at risk to whatever
might still be out there.”

“
But I thought you were
afraid bringing him in could expose us.”

“
I still am, which is why
Seth and I have come up with an alternative plan that will prevent
exposure. Son, we need to know what's happening out there. If the
stranger knows something we don't about the Flense, or the other
bunkers, then he needs to tell us.”

“
But if he's so determined
to get us out,” I say, “why will he tell us anything if we stay
inside?”

Dad shrugs. “Something in the way he's
acting tells me he's just as desperate for sanctuary as he is of us
opening up. It's clear he doesn't trust us. But that's
understandable, even to be expected. We don't trust him, either. He
says he has information, yet we can offer him safety from whatever
he may be frightened of. So we both need to make concessions, which
is why I think this solution might work to everyone's benefit. It
seems to have appeased Jack enough so that he'll back off a
bit.”

“
He's an
asshole.”

“
Finn! While I agree that
he can be impulsive and egotistical, his concerns have always been
for our welfare.”

“
Don't you mean his
own?”

Dad's face clouds. “I confess that I
am troubled by this recent change in his behavior. His usually
moderate attitudes have certainly shifted to the
extreme.”

I shake my head. The rage I felt
outside in the hallway after speaking with Jack flares up inside
again. “You're giving him too much credit,” I spit. “You've always
been like that with people, always giving them the benefit of the
doubt. Always assuming they'll do the right thing.”

“
That's not
true.”

“
No, you're right,” I say.
“It's not. I've always been your one exception.”

He blinks several times but doesn't
speak. He looks stunned by the revelation, as if he finds it
inexplicable that I could feel this way. In truth, my words pain me
as much as they must him, but I'm too angry to stop now.

“
If you'd had a choice
between me and Harper to be here with you, which would it have
been?”

Again, he just blinks, but I can see
something new in his eyes, something that suggests he's been
expecting the question and dreading it.
“Finn . . . .”

“
I knew it,” I mutter. I
spin around. I can't look at him.

“
It wasn't my decision to
make, Finn. That's the truth.”

I was just about to walk out the door,
let him stew for a while, but this stops me. “Decision?”

“
Which of you to save, you
or Harper. It was your mother's decision.”

I slowly turn.
What the hell is he talking about? Me or Harper?
What about Leah?

He stands up and steps toward me, but
I thrust out my hand to stop him. I've gotten taller than him in
the past three years, but right now the difference in our heights
feels greater than I remember it. He seems to have shrunken even
more, even since just this morning.

“
Tell me the
truth.”

There's a weary look in his eyes, one
of resignation, a silent plea for forgiveness. He's always telling
me you can't manage the past, as if that excuses all our mistakes.
But all I can feel is sick to my stomach at what he might tell me
next. Already I regret asking, and yet I can't bring myself to make
him stop.

“
We were part of an
organization,” he finally says.

I narrow my eyes. “What, like the
Rotary?”

He shakes his head. “An organization
of like-minded people who believed that something terrible was
going to happen to humanity. Preppers. We were preparing for the
end of the world.”

It sounds fatalistic, until I realize
they'd been right. “How did you know?”

“
It was inevitable. You
look at scientific and technological and military advances and you
try to extrapolate to where we're headed with them. Artificial
intelligence, quantum computing.” He shakes his head. “The
internet. We became totally dependent on it all. And then there
were the things we had so much less control over — climate
change and the global spread of disease and overcrowding, water
shortages — and you're forced to accept the conclusion that
the day will come when it's all going to come crashing down. Sooner
rather than later."

He takes a deep breath and shakes his
head.

“
We didn't wish for it. We
didn't want it. But to ignore the data would have been
irresponsible. That's what the deniers do. So, we knew that
something was going to give eventually, something was going to get
out of our ability to control it. The end was coming, and so we
prepared as best as we could to survive it.

“
And . . .
as it turns out, we were right.”

“
You knew about the
Flense?”

“
No. Like I said, there
were so many different ways it could happen, so many possible
scenarios. The organization taught us to find and build places
where we could go that would be completely unreliant on the outside
world, places that would be able to sustain life with minimal
intervention, indeed, with no external assistance, for extended
periods of time. Your mother and I had a cabin up in the woods
outside of town. It included a small underground bunker, which we
had stocked with food and water. It could hold the five of us for a
year, maybe longer.”

“
A year? That's
it?”

“
Well, of course it didn't
take us long to realize that a year would be totally inadequate,
and so we began to look elsewhere for something more long term. We
joined a more select group that was selling slots in large, durable
bunkers, ten total shelters in all, all different, each with its
own strengths and challenges— you can never eliminate all risks.
Their locations were kept secret, even from the subscribers. All we
knew was that they were spread out over a large geographic area. A
total of just over one thousand spots were available. They promised
us five years of protection.”

“
If you knew, if you
prepared, then what happened to Mom and the others? Why didn't they
meet us at the rendezvous point?”