Unraveling (15 page)
Now I need to swim again—alone. And I can, because that old moment is just a shadow compared to the moment I died.
And the moment Ben Michaels brought me back.
T
he water is freezing when it hits my toes, my feet, and my bare legs, but I run into the water and try not to wince as the waves splash my stomach. The Pacific Ocean in September is hardly what we’d call tourist friendly. But the tourists keep coming—they’re like that.
When I’m knee deep, I throw my body forward and dive in. For a second the sheer cold pounds against my head, and I feel like my brain might shut off. My eyes water slightly, but I’m already moving. My body takes over without needing to be told what to do. It remembers this. My arms reach in front of me and pull the water underneath me with each stroke, and my legs move with a steady thrum.
At the very least, in fifteen days, a bomb is going to go off. If Alex and I are right, it might spread a genetically engineered virus that will do to everyone what it did to the man in that house.
Salt water stings my dry lips as I take a breath, and I only hear waves and the even rhythm of the beating of my own heart.
I picture the man’s detached jaw and wonder if dying like that was as painful as it looked.
A wandering piece of seaweed tangles itself in my fingertips, and I almost have a heart attack and die right there. Instead I grab it and fling it somewhere without breaking stroke.
Somehow the radiation and the UIED are connected to the unidentified man whose unidentified truck killed me. Somehow they’re connected to three old cases from 1983, and somehow—
Suddenly, with my pulse echoing throughout my body, the taste of salt on my tongue, and nothing but ocean surrounding me, it occurs to me that something about Ben saving me is just plain wrong. It’s incredibly convenient that a guy who can manipulate molecular structure was there, at the scene of the accident, to bring me back from the dead.
Unless it wasn’t just some unrelated phenomenon.
Unless it’s
all
connected.
Someone who can remake skin to get rid of a scar, someone who can restart a stopped heart, someone who can meld bones back together…
What else is someone like that capable of?
“S
o are you going to tell me what the hell that was last night or what?” I say when Struz picks me up.
Only I make a mistake. The car door’s open, but I’m not actually inside it yet, so he looks at me and just starts to drive. He catches me off guard, and I have to run after him for ten feet before I reach the stopped car. And sure enough, as soon as I’m an arm’s length away from the door he speeds off again.
I run after him again, but this time I slow down sooner and hesitate slightly on my way to the door. When I’m two arms’ lengths away, I burst forward and swing myself into the car, slamming the door shut behind me.
We’re already driving when I say, “Jerk.”
“You know better than to ask me about cases, Princess.”
I’ve known Struz just about my whole life it feels like, which means I know exactly what I can ask him about and how I can do it. “I’m not asking you about a case. I’m asking you about something I saw.”
Struz shakes his head. “Yeah, and you still haven’t told me how you ended up past the border at the crime scene.”
“Counterintelligence.”
“I’m not joking—”
“Struz, neither am I! I saw that guy in the doorway, dead with his freaking face melting onto the floor. You think I don’t know this isn’t something to joke about?”
And then I take a deep breath and tell him almost everything. I tell him about the files I saw in my dad’s study, about the UIED, about the autopsy report of my John Doe, about the theory that Alex and I came up with in the library.
I still don’t tell him about Barclay bringing me to the scene. Struz isn’t stupid. He totally knows how I got there. He just wants confirmation, but I’m not going to sell Barclay out, even if he is a douche bag.
And I don’t tell Struz about Ben. Yet. Because I don’t want Ben to be involved in this virus. Coincidences do happen even if they’re unlikely, and I’m probably jumping to conclusions by even considering that.
When I finish, Struz sighs. “This is a bad one, J-baby.”
And I wait, because I know there’s more coming.
“We’ve got the UIED downtown at the Federal Building. The good news is it’s not going any faster. We’ve still got a couple of weeks, but we’ve been calling in experts to look at the UIED for weeks now and nobody’s come up with shit,” he says, and somehow it sounds more serious coming from him than from my dad. Because Struz is almost always playful and funny. He never really gets serious. Only he is right now.
A couple of weeks…
“The timer just keeps counting down. Nothing we do seems to work to disable it. And none of the tests can figure out what it even is. We’ve started coming up with backup plans for what to do if we can’t shut it off, but we can’t just drive it into the desert if we’re not sure what’s going to happen.”
“Fly it out into space?” I say, even though that’s a bad sci-fi movie cliché.
Struz glances at me out of the corner of his eye, and I feel sick. Because I can tell that’s something that’s actually on the table.
“Is it a virus?” I ask. “The radiation?”
Again he sighs. “We’re not sure. It could be. Or it could be nothing. But we have to consider every scenario so we can plan for them. We’ve got a theory that a virus in small doses, injected right into the bloodstream, would kill via radiation poisoning, whereas if it’s induced into the atmosphere—converted to an atmospheric pathogen—it could be pumped through the air vents, for instance, and
that
might do what happened to the people in that house.”
People. As in more than one, more than just that guy.
I have to take a deep breath to keep myself from throwing up all over Struz’s car.
“How many people were in the house?” I ask.
“There was a family of four, all identities confirmed,” Struz says, and I wonder how old the children were. I wonder if they were boys or girls, what their mother was like, what kind of job their father had, what schools they went to, what dreams they had. I wonder if they loved one another the way I love Jared.
“And the other three bodies we still haven’t been able to identify.”
“Wait?” I ask. “So there were three more bodies in the house?”
Struz nods.
“And you can’t confirm their identities?”
“No, but we do know they didn’t live there.”
I shake my head, trying to wrap my mind around all of this.
“What?” Struz asks, giving me his sidelong glance again.
“I can’t help wondering where all these unidentifiable people are coming from.”
W
hen I burn the macaroni and cheese beyond repair and drop one of my parents’ nice crystal wineglasses, I admit to myself that I can’t wait until tomorrow to talk to Ben. I might have a limited time frame to figure things out. Nothing can wait. My mind is running in circles, and my hands have developed a slight tremor. I have to know what he’s keeping from me. I have to know if he’s somehow connected to this.
Things like laundry can wait. Even if it means Jared will shrink another one of my sweatshirts.
I order a pizza and leave Jared money and a note. Alex can’t get away from his mother to drive me, and I refuse to ride my bike that far, so I decide to chance having my license taken away and just drive myself. I only had that one seizure, and it was right after Ben messed with my body’s
molecular structure
. A seizure as a side effect is probably getting off easy.
Alex calls as I’m driving. He’s whispering, and I can barely hear him over the running water in the background—this is how he hides from his mother.
“Are you going to tell me what your obsession with Ben Michaels is all about? I thought you were over the whole thing.”
“I just need to talk to him about some stuff,” I say. It’s lame, even for me.
Alex says something about my obsessive personality and looking for things in people that I want to see, but I don’t hear him because my phone is beeping.
As I pull it away from my ear to see who’s calling, it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t be driving with a suspended license
and
talking on my cell phone and checking my call waiting.
It’s Nick.
“Alex, I gotta go,” I say into the phone, more because of the whole illegal driving thing and less because of Nick. “I’ll call you later.”
He tells me to be careful and hangs up.
Nick is still calling on the other line, and I don’t know what to do about that. So I do nothing and just let it go to voice mail. We never really had the official “we’re together” talk so I don’t know if we are, but it’s becoming abundantly clear—if it wasn’t before, and it sort of was—that I don’t really want us to be “together.”
He’s pretty and he’s got great abs, like the kind that are so toned you can sometimes see the definition through his T-shirts, and when it’s just us, he’s funny and charming and smart and interesting.
But he’s also immature at least fifty percent of the time. It’s like he’s two different people. I like the thoughtful guy who listens to what I say and is sweet to my brother. I even like the guy who will make me laugh when I’m stressed out. But when he’s with Kevin and his boys, he’s the guy performing to a crowd, doing things just for the attention. And I don’t really want to be with that guy.
Right now with everything else going on, blowing him off requires less thought and less energy. So even though it’s a shitty thing to do to someone and he probably does deserve better, right now there are too many more important things I need to worry about.
Like whether I’m going to die of radiation poisoning in fourteen days.
P
acific Beach is the epitome of predictable. It’s full of people who are overtanned and underdressed. And not just the MTV-type frat guys and blond chicks in their twenties; there are also all the people who
used
to be those people twenty years ago and are now leathery-skinned women who need to stop smoking and eat a burger or middle-aged hairy-chested guys with beer bellies who are still hitting on college girls, or younger. Gross.
It’s also got some of the most kickass vintage shops, yoga studios, and beach cruisers in the whole city.
Kon-Tiki Motorcycles is on Garnet Avenue, PB’s main street, and it’s not what a normal person would expect when thinking of a place that’s famous for fixing up motorcycles. It looks like you’re stepping into someone’s home garage instead of a professional establishment, and there aren’t a ton of glitzy bikes out front or anything. Reid once told Kate that the bikes on the sidewalk aren’t even the ones for sale.
I move through the front door and am greeted by cool air. I keep my hands firmly at my sides while I look for Ben. I don’t need to give myself away with my giddy nervousness.
But the shop isn’t that big, so it doesn’t take me long to realize that Ben is nowhere in sight. Disappointment settles and twists deep inside my chest, but I keep looking anyway.
Instead I find a well-built Filipino guy in his midtwenties or so. He’s sweaty, his T-shirt is stained, and he’s got a set of skull rings on his fingers.
“Hi, I’m Kale, what can I do for you?” he asks with a huge smile that makes him look like a little kid. The sheer cheerfulness of his voice makes me less annoyed that he’s the one in front of me instead of Ben, and I’m tempted to smile back.
“I’m looking for Ben,” I say, and then clarify just in case, “Ben Michaels, he works here?”
Kale nods, though he looks a little crestfallen. “Right, I know Ben,” he says. “But he left for the day.”
“Seriously?” I ask, then cringe at the whine in my voice. I probably look like some clingy wannabe girlfriend.
Kale looks at the clock. “You missed him by, like, ten minutes, maybe less.”
I nod and start to head to the door when it occurs to me that Kale might know something worthwhile. “Hey, so do you guys sell motorcycles here too—or just fix them up?”
Again, his whole face transforms into a huge smile. “Yes! We give lessons to new riders, too!” he says, opening his arm and gesturing for me to follow him. I do. “I can show you a great starter bike we’ve got.” He keeps talking as he shows me over to one of the motorcycles. The price tag reads $4,075, which would be all I’d need to see if I really was interested. A dangerous toy that’s going to cost me four grand? It would never happen. And my dad would probably kill me before he let me ride one anyway.
As Kale talks, I smile and nod, and as soon as he pauses to take a breath, I say, “Is this the kind of bike Ben works on?”
“Um, no,” Kale says, visibly deflating like air is escaping through his pores.
But he recovers only an instant later, standing up straight and gesturing to another bike, one that even in my inexperienced eyes does look kind of awesome. “Ben did this one. He restores all the really old bikes and he does custom work on some of the racing bikes, too.”
“How often does Ben work here?” People with part-time jobs aren’t also into bioterrorism, or at least it seems doubtful, like selling motorcycles wouldn’t fit the profile of someone genetically engineering a virus to end the world.
“Oh, he works every day after school and sometimes on Saturday and Sunday, too.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. Ben is a totally normal guy—well, except for the whole molecule thing.
“But he has a few of his own projects that he brings in too.”
I can feel goose bumps raising up on my arms. “His own projects?”
Kale nods. “That kid can work on anything mechanical or anything electronic. He can fix anything.” He pauses and looks me over with a smile that makes me want to punch him a little.