Vampire Redemption (25 page)

They headed out about a half hour after. Gordon was doing much better, but the combination of the awkward pain from the broken clavicle and the nascent withdrawal had him morose and taciturn. Lee was in poor shape and only came down when it was time to drive. He ducked into the back of the car, hunched and refusing to talk to anybody, and slumped over to stare out the window. McKnight took the wheel and Selah and Dominique got into Chico's car, a brand new Honda Civic that fairly crackled with new tech.

Ethan and his team waved from the door, and they were off. It was a long drive, but the company was good. Dominique explained in greater detail what was involved in creating the vaccine, and Chico in turn filled them in about his flight from LA, the things he had seen, the horrors he had witnessed. The countryside rolled by, and soon the mountains were lost behind them. There was plenty of traffic streaming east, escaping the encroaching wave of Blood Thralls, and progress was slower than they had anticipated. McKnight drove close behind and Chico placed the Civic on autodrive for long stretches, leaning back and relaxing as the car navigated itself.

They stopped for lunch at a rest stop diner, where they loaded up on grilled cheese sandwiches and drinks. Lee and Gordon chose to remain in the car, both of them claiming they weren't hungry, so that Selah, McKnight, Dominique, and Chico enjoyed an impromptu picnic in the sun, sitting on the broad wedge of grass that separated the parking lot from the rest stop itself. Selah lay back, enjoying how the grass tickled the nape of her neck, and drank in the sun. It had been too long since she had simply allowed its rays to sink into her skin, which had grown ashen and dry. She would need to get some basic necessities, she decided. Shea butter, moisturizers. She tuned the others out and ran her hand slowly over her scalp. Her hair was growing out. She'd need to make some call about what to do with it soon if she wasn't to grow out a mini-fro.

McKnight forced them to get back in the cars and they were off once more. Selah pulled out Jane's Omni, and after excusing herself, she slipped on the Goggles and FingerTips. She logged into her Glade, and checked into the CNN news room. The shock was less the second time round, but she stopped in surprise at the sight of a familiar face. Fernanda, the reporter she had met in LA, was frozen in one of the screens, ready to give a report on student unrest in DC. Selah walked her FingerTips over and activated the video feed.

Fernanda looked fresh, beautiful, her hair grown long, black undulating waves curled behind her ears, her expression grave and forthright as she told Selah about the recent disturbances on the DC Mall as a few hundred students had gathered to protest the government's decision to work with the Miami vampires.

Selah shivered. The last time she had seen Fernanda had been in the LA Observatory. That final nightmarish night before the Blood Thralls had burst the Wall and the war had begun. Fernanda had been ordered by Arachne to interview Selah, extract a confession for the murder of Colonel Caldwell, and Selah had managed to convince her to escape and warn Chico of the impending crisis. She stared up at Fernanda's smoothly professional manner, so at odds with the panicked terror of that last night. She'd made it out. Had returned to work. Had probably filed a hell of a report too. The report finished and several related videos appeared, prompting Selah to learn more about the subject. Instead, she smiled with muted happiness for the reporter and moved on.

There was too much going on. She left the CNN room and toured a constellation of private news sources, from top profile video bloggers to Aggregate Response Visualizations. The war was endlessly complex and the US military was struggling vastly to contain it. Dispirited, Selah retreated to her Garden and stepped into the sterile space. She could rebuild it anytime she wished to, but that desire was wholly absent. The vampires in Miami had wiped it clean, and with it, severed her connection to her old life, the Selah from Brooklyn. She toyed with the idea of summoning an archived copy of the Garden, but didn't. That wasn't her any longer.

Instead, she began to browse the mass of messages and activity that had been piling up ever since she published that first video recording in Magnum, the Miami nightclub. She summoned an organization program and had it sort the friend requests into an artificial set of tiers, based both on proximity to people she knew, their own personal importance index, and the level of intimacy they were requesting. That took a good fifteen minutes, though in the end she didn't accept any of them.

She turned her attention to the million plus notifications of references to her account. These ranged from mash-ups of the videos she had published to extended essays speculating on what had happened to her in Miami and LA. She dipped in and browsed fifty or so connections to get a taste and found everything from bizarre fan fiction to political screeds. She turned then to another window and checked who was tracking her Garden. She blinked. Everybody was, it seemed, from CNN to classified links to different US government bodies. News groups, conspiracy theorists, even groups located within Miami.

She suddenly felt nervous. Anything she said or did or posted would instantly be picked up across the whole web. The pressure was suddenly enormous. People were reviling her, cheering her on, demanding she explain her actions, celebrating her as a heroine for more causes then she could count. Her silence seemed to have goaded them on more than anything she could have said; a quick check showed that she had only posted a half dozen items since she had arrived in Miami. The first was a photograph of houses lining the approach to the Miami Wall. A recorded caption blinked beneath it, and when she played it, she heard her hushed voice say, "Edge of the world. I'm going over, and I might never stop falling." She smiled, remembering how nervous she had been. Terrified. How dramatic.

Then there was a seven-second clip. Curious, she played it and immediately saw a shot of her face inside a car. She looked so young, so nervous, filled with bravado: "Going to South Beach. Fuck the law!" She blinked. It had over two million views.

The next item was her Magnum 360 degree recording. She didn't bother playing it. That had gone massively viral, over five million views. Selah couldn't believe it. There were tens of thousands of recorded reactions, endless copies made and then edited.

The next item was the message that hung in the empty space of her Garden. Turning to it, she read the words again:

I am alive and well. The bastards that did this are going to pay.

This one had received another million plus views, along with a huge response. She pulled out some stats. The avalanche of connections had started with this posting, sparking off conjecture and theorizing across the net. She shook her head. Ridiculous.

The next item hadn't been posted by her, but it had been tied so firmly to her Garden that it might as well have been. It was the video of her rescuing Cloud from the cage fight, and that had over seventeen million views. She hesitated then played it again. The memories came rushing back. She stopped it when she saw herself appear, almost too fast to follow on the high definition film. Her impossible rescue. It was here that the attention to her Garden had gone critical.

Then, nothing for almost three weeks. Endless public activity, especially related to Sawiskera's death. Then her public posting from LA. Her message to her grandmother, accidentally posted for the world to view. She couldn't take it any longer. A feeling of claustrophobia was starting to build in her chest, in her throat, so she pulled off the Goggles and squinted against the bright sunlight. Stared out the window, mind racing. She had posted four items, plus the rescue footage, and that had set off a wildfire. She looked down at the Omni and quickly logged off, suddenly terrified of posting something by accident.

Chico was slouched back, watching the car drive itself, half dozing in the sunlight that poured through his window. Selah stayed quiet. She couldn't begin to phrase to them the tight panic that was swirling in her chest. Everybody was watching her account. Cloud was right. Holy crap, Cloud was right. She needed to think really hard before posting her next item or video. What she said next could set off who knew what kind of reaction. She rubbed her face again, a sense of surreal disbelief swamping her. The Selah those people saw, the Sawiskera-killing Selah, the girl turned king-slayer who showed impossible vampire powers only to appear as human once more with that cryptic message on the eve of the Second War--that girl wasn't her. The girl was ... What? A creation, a cipher, a social construct, a projection from millions of minds. It had nothing to do with her.

They drove on. The sun rolled across the sky and the highway remained broad and immense, flung across the country like an endless spear tossed at the eastern horizon. Soon they were driving through fields of corn that stretched impossibly far around them, and for a while Selah slept. It seemed as if the War and Plessy and Theo and all the bad madness of it were suspended while she rolled across the earth in the car, a time-out that allowed her to lower her walls and breathe deeply for the first time in ages.

When she awoke, they were pulling up outside the Holyoke Private Clinic. Yawning, sitting up, she looked around. They were in a small town, and the clinic was an unprepossessing building, a single-storied complex with large tinted windows, surrounded on all sides by a parking lot. Behind them, a highway was filled with rushing cars, but here, everything seemed still and calm. They parked next to each other and Selah got out, stretching with her hands on her hips. She walked over to the Subaru and pulled open the back door, then recoiled in shock. Lee was curled up on the backseat, knees under his chin, face pressed into the fabric of the seat.

"Lee?" Selah reached out, then drew her hand back. McKnight got out, face grim.

"He's in bad shape. He stopped responding an hour ago."

Chico jogged off toward the clinic doors and Gordon pushed open his door and slowly climbed out. Selah immediately stepped forward to help, and he gratefully laid his large arm around her shoulders. He seemed to have lost weight already, his face sallow, and his eyes were no longer the jet black they had been before; now they were a smoky gray, his black irises wreathed in ashes.

"Thanks," he managed, leaning back against the car. Pinpricks of sweat were across his brow. He fumbled out the aviators that Selah had stolen for him and slid them on.

Dominique joined them and looked at where Lee lay curled with pain. She shook her head. "He should never have injected himself. God. Why did I let him carry the Serum? That was exactly the kind of stupid stunt that he always pulls."

"If it hadn't been for that stunt," said Gordon, "we'd all be dead now, most likely."

Dominique pursed her lips. A group of nurses hurried toward them, two wheelchairs pushed over the asphalt. Gordon sank into his gratefully, and two nurses began to extract Lee from the back of the car with the utmost care. Dominique immediately began to speak quietly with what must have been the heard nurse, an overweight and curly-haired woman in her forties who listened with gravity and asked pointed questions. The whole group left the cars and began to make its way to the clinic.

McKnight and Selah remained by the car. Half an hour later, Dominique and Chico returned, faces somber.

"Well?" Selah looked impatiently from one to the other.

"Well nothing," said Dominique. She looked drained, exhausted. "They're going to monitor them. Do their best to make them comfortable, provide them with all the medical attention they need. But there's nothing really to be done." She placed her hands on her hips and stared at the ground. "The Hybrid program placed them in a state of suspended transition between becoming a vampire and remaining human. A state of near biological impossibility, depressing certain key functions so that they stepped closer to death while enhancing others. Cutting off their supply of serum means that some of their systems are coming back to life, while others, like their endocrine system, are starting to normalize. It's painful. It's incredibly painful and nauseating and debilitating, and they just need time."

Selah looked back at the clinic doors. "At least ... at least we'll be close, right? In case they need anything?"

"An hour away," said Chico. He reached out and placed a hand on Selah's shoulder. "I've seen friends go through DT. There's nothing much you can do but let them work their way through it. We'll be here when they're ready for us."

"Yeah," said Selah. "All right." She shrugged and hugged herself. "I just hate it, you know? Losing people. It's all I seem to be good at these days."

"Grow up," said McKnight. It wasn't particularly malicious, but it still stung. Selah stared at her. "You're not losing people. They're either dying or leaving you to heal. And it's not that you're good at losing people. You just happen to be in a war. That's what happens. Quit with the pity trip."

Selah opened her mouth, outraged, and then snapped it closed. McKnight met her gaze with weary sympathy and raised eyebrows. Selah turned away. She struggled with her anger, and then forced it down. Hell, McKnight was right. She nodded.

"Let's get going," said Dominique. "We don't have much time."

The Brightstar Lab was an hour away in a small neighboring town, a large complex of townhouses and office buildings that housed a variety of different medical practices and privately-owned research labs. The buildings were painted in pastel hues and arranged around simple fountains, with plenty of trees and grass everywhere. It was surprisingly pleasant and bland at the same time. They escorted Dominique into one of the buildings, met with a small cadre of doctors who were very curious to meet Selah, and then waited fifteen minutes before Dominique took a battery of blood samples from Selah to begin working with. Despite her clear fatigue, she asked for them to come pick her up around 9PM, and then gave each of them a tight hug and left to get to work.

Dispirited, Chico, McKnight, and Selah grabbed dinner at a local Chinese restaurant called The Great Wall. Selah snorted when she cracked open her fortune cookie. 
You Will Be Showered With Great Luck!
 Yeah, right. From there, pleasantly full, they drove to a hotel close by and checked into two rooms, a single for Chico and a double with king-sized beds for the women.