Contain (24 page)

Bren scowls at her mother, I'm
guessing for not letting her go downstairs with us. “Bix told me
she found something in his blood.”

I nod, relieved that word about it has
finally gotten out and that I don't have to keep the secret
anymore. But I'm worried about the effect it's having on everyone.
It seems that we're standing on the very edge of the precipice that
Dad and Doc Cavanaugh had warned me about. But what madness lies in
wait for us?

They shined the flashlight
in your eyes.

“
You think it's the
Flense?” Bren asks.

“
No! I don't know what it
is, or even if it's good or bad. This thing in Eddie's blood seems
to have helped him heal, so that's a good thing. But the way that
guy in the keeper station freaked out doesn't give me a very good
feeling. He knows something and isn't telling us, something about
what happened in his own bunker. He said there was a breach in
containment.”

“
Yeah, and he's also saying
we should all leave this one and go find another one that doesn't
even exist, Finn.” She shakes her head. “It doesn't make sense.
Personally, Dad thinks he might be crazy. I don't trust him,
either.”

“
But what if he's right to
be scared of Eddie? What if he's . . .
dangerous?”

“
Finn! Hannah's already
been through the wringer,” she hisses at me. “Her father isn't
dangerous.”

I frown and look around, realizing she
isn't here. “Where is she, anyway?”

“
Um, probably down in the
med bay with her dad.” Her voice rises in frustration.

“
Bren?” Missus Abramson
cocks a disproving eyebrow at us. “Why don't you come over and sit
with us for a while.”

“
In a sec, Mom.” She turns
back to me. “Look, Finn, just stop this.”

“
What am I
doing?”

“
Scaring people, making
things worse than they have to be. Seeing conspiracies where none
exists.”

This last accusation is obviously in
response to the way I've been treating her since Jonah’s training
session downstairs.

“
Eddie may not be himself,”
I whisper.

She studies my face for a moment. “How
hard did you hit your head?”

I open my mouth to speak, but I can
see it's going to take more to convince her. She refuses to accept
what I'm telling her.

“
Okay, fine, Bren. I get
it. But maybe you'll believe me if you see for yourself. Come
on.”

“
Now?” She glances over at
her mother, who's still got her eye on us. “I can't just leave. Mom
won't let me.”

“
Your mom won't let
you?
” I sputter. “Damn it, Bren, you're
seventeen! You're an adult.”

I press my hand against my forehead in
frustration, only to be reminded again of the thick knot there. I
am so sick of the older people treating us like kids, like we
haven't aged a day since we arrived here. It irritates me so much
that, for the first time, I'm practically ready to walk out the
front door. It wouldn't take much at this point to convince me to
do it. “We're both adults!”

“
Then act like one,
Finnian!”

Missus Abramson gets up out of her
chair and starts walking toward us.

“
Okay!” I cry. “Then bring
your mom. We'll all go down and you can see for yourself what I
mean.”

* * *

“Level Six?” Missus Abramson says to me, as soon as I explain why
we need to go downstairs. She shakes her head. “Seth doesn't want
anyone wandering around.”

“
Please, I need you to talk
with Doctor Cavanaugh.”

“
We are not just going to
leave all these people here.”

The way she snaps at me, I
keep expecting her to call me
young
man
, like my great grandmother used to say
when I was a little kid. She was in her nineties by then, and about
as wrinkled as a prune, but she had the energy of someone half her
age and the opinions of someone half again as old.

I grab a flashlight and turn toward
the door.

Missus Abramson stops me with a hand
on my shoulder. “I will not have you making any more
trouble.”

“
You need to hear it from
her,” I say and pull out from under her hand.

Missus Abramson hisses in frustration,
but she finally relents and tells me we'll see if she's in her
office. The three of us follow the pale beam of my flashlight down
the hall.

Five minutes later, the stairwell door
clicks shut behind us as we enter Level Five, echoing hollowly
against the unlit walls, as if announcing our arrival. The metal
grates creak slightly beneath our feet. As we come around the
horizon of the hallway's curvature, I see the door to Eddie's room
near the end of the hall is cracked open, the impenetrable darkness
spilling out like ink from the mouth of a cavern.

"Eddie?" I call.

No one answers.

"Why's his door open?"

When we pull level with Doc
Cavanaugh's office, Missus Abramson's foot slips and she lets out a
slight squeal. Instinctively, I reach out and grab her arm with my
free hand.

“
Floor's wet here,” she
says, staring up into the murkiness above our heads, as if she
thinks the wetness might be dripping from a leaky pipe.

“
And the doorknob's
sticky,” Bren adds. “Finn?”

But my eyes are on the concrete
surface beneath our feet, at the dark streaks that shouldn't be
there.

“
F-finn?
”

The alarm in Bren's voice pulls me
back. I turn toward her, swinging the light up. She's staring at
her hands, rubbing her fingers together. And she's breathing funny,
sort of fast and shallow.

“
It's— Oh my
god!
”

My first thought is that it's oil.
There's a lot of it in a place like this. Jonah's hands and clothes
are constantly covered in it. So why would it be on the doctor's
doorknob?

Oil doesn't normally have
a deep red sheen to it. And it’s not sticky.

With my heart pounding in my throat, I
shove the door open and swing the light in. The laboratory is
completely destroyed. The microscope has been hurled to the ground
and the pieces smashed and broken.

I grab Bren's wrist and pull her
away.

“
What happened?” Missus
Abramson cries.

A half second later I hear them
running after me as I make my way back to the stairs. “Finn? Where
are you going?”

But I don't answer. I fear for Doctor
Cavanaugh one floor down. Something tells me the blood is
hers.

The flashlight fails just as Bren reaches the apex of her scream,
but the encroaching shadows cannot make us unsee what has happened.
There's too much light coming in from outside. It glues me to the
spot, glues my eyes to the unspeakable horror before us.

Thick puddles of blood are pooled
before the shattered window. It drips off the jagged sill in thick,
clotted ropes. Giant swaths of it cover the walls. Crimson dots
speckle the ceiling inside the keeper's station.

What looks like a severed hand,
stripped of skin and most of the muscle, yet, incredibly, still
held together by silvery pink tendons, has been flung — or
perhaps dropped — to the floor a few feet inside the room. I
can't tell if it's been eaten. The ragged tears look like bite
marks. But they could just as well have been made by forcibly
ripping the hand from the arm.

There's a single, bare, bloody
footprint at the base of a counter. And a chunk of Doctor
Cavanaugh's scalp, her long brown hair still attached to it, sits
like a stuffed rat to one side, looking like it's ready to pounce
on anything that might enter.

I push Bren, still screaming, back
away from the room, back deeper into the hallway. I shout at them
not to touch anything. But even as I'm doing this, I already know
it's too late for Bren. She's touched the blood on the door
upstairs. She's already been—

infected

—
contaminated.

My mind won't accept it. It can't be
true, not Bren. Not a Wraith.

She's still screaming. I can hear her
mother sobbing. I think I might be screaming, too. And I find
myself stumbling away.

I slam into the wall beside the door
to the food storage. The blood trail extends beyond me, back toward
the stairs.

I don't know how long I stand there,
staring, not comprehending. Trying to force the scene into some
sort of logical framework. The usual buzz inside my head is a roar,
threatening to crowd everything else out. I push it away. I need
silence to think.

What the hell happened
here?

The stranger's gone. But to where? Was
he eaten, too?

It was Eddie, had to be.

finn?

Those things in his blood. In all of
our blood.

Were they dormant?

Eddie killed the doctor. He went after
the stranger.

Finn!

I'm only vaguely aware of the voice,
of the other voices joining in, calling me, screaming. I feel
myself jostled, hands pummeling me, pulling, people shouting in my
ears.

“
Finn!”

Someone pulls me around, shakes me,
shouts my name. A face appears. It's Jack Resnick.

He slaps me, hard, and I blink and the
roar of my shock pops into silence.

“
What the hell happened
here?” he screams.

I don't answer.

“
What— what did you do,
Finn?”

“
I— No! It wasn't
me!”

“
I asked you, what did you
do?”

I pull away from him, tearing my arm
out of his grip. His fingers are like steel, and his nails shred my
skin.

“
Bren?” I call, scanning
the hallway before me. It's filling with people.

Mister Resnick wrenches me back,
forcing me to look at him. He drags me over to the keeper's
station. “What happened here?” he roars.

I lash out with both hands, striking
him across the chest. He stumbles back, pinwheeling his arms. He
grabs the window frame and screams in pain as his hand slices
open.

I turn and start to run.

“
Bren!
BREN!
Oh God!
Nooo!
”

“
Stop him!” Jack yells at
my back. “Stop Finnian Bolles!”

I'm grabbed and wrestled to the
ground. My chin hits the cement hard, and there's a flash of pain.
I try to cry out, but someone's arm circles my throat, cutting off
my air supply.

“
I knew you were trouble
from the very start,” Mister Resnick growls into my ear. He
wrenches my head back. “I told my son to stay away from you, but
how can you do that in this place? It's practically impossible to
avoid anyone.”

Darkness crowds around me, shrinking
my vision. The last thing I see is the terrified look on Bren's
face as Mister and Missus Caprio lead her and her mother away. The
last thing I hear before the blackness takes me is Harry Rollins
terrified shriek:

“
Oh God! What is it?
It's . . . . No, stop!
Eddieeeeee!
”

* * *

“Stop the bus!” I shout.

The engine rumbles louder as we
accelerate toward the burning van. “Brace yourselves!” the driver
shouts, and revs the engine even higher to ram it. The cliff on our
left blurs by us. Faster and faster!

Behind us, ahead of us, the infected
haven't turned vicious yet, but they will. They're still closing
in, slithering along in that way that makes me think of snakes and
lizards and fake Halloween smoke drifting through
tombstones.

Then, just like that, the change
sweeps through them, a physical thing, like an unexpected wind
bending a field of grass. They break their silence, and their mute
advance becomes one of anguish and longing. Their terrible howls
crystallize in my mind, freeze it until my sanity might shatter.
The ice steals into my soul.