15
I rose abruptly as if the floor had pitched me upward. My dad didn’t know he had to do a fetch for Director Spurling, didn’t know that his life depended on it. Maybe there was still time to find him. How far could he have gone? Rafe gripped my arm. I stared at his fingers, tan lines against the white of my forearm. Why was he holding me so tightly?
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Going back to Arsenal,” I said.
“What exactly is going on?” Hagen demanded. “How did biohaz find out he’d come east?”
“They’ve got a recording of Mack in the exodus tunnel,” Rafe explained. “Now he’s got to grease a big wheel or they’ll turn him into target practice.”
“Oh no,” she whispered.
Rafe tugged me back into my seat. “Rushing off hot-headed isn’t going to help Mack.”
“You’re right,” I said, pulling my ponytail tighter. “If he’s going to try bribing a line guard, he’ll probably go through Dr. Solis, and Dr. Solis will tell him that I’m here.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Hagen said with relief. “Now all you have to do is wait for him to come looking for you.”
“But what if he doesn’t go to Dr. Solis?” They were friends. Maybe my dad wouldn’t want to implicate him. “Or even if he does go, what if the doctor is so whiffed out on Lull that he can’t tell my father he saw me?”
“That’s a lot of ifs that you can’t do anything about,” Rafe said and turned to Hagen. “What’s on the grill today?”
He couldn’t be serious. He wasn’t going to eat at a time like this…. Even Hagen looked put out until Rafe pulled a wadded-up shirt from his knapsack and unrolled it to reveal a bottle of viscous pink liquid. “Amoxicillin. That should be worth at least two meals.”
Hagen rose and slipped the bottle into her apron pocket. “We’ve got the usual, chicken and fish for the noninfected.”
“Is that how most people pay?” I asked. “With medicine?”
“If you live in the compound, you don’t pay, as long as you’re signed up for work duty. It’s the hacks who have to trade for food,” Hagen said.
“Ammunition, matches, weapons, booze,” Rafe said. “They’ll get you everything you need. Like a plate of Hagen’s grilled chicken, which is what I need.” He pointed at me. “You?”
The thought of food made me ill, and the mastiff-man at the next table wasn’t helping as he wolfed down a hunk of bloody steak and then licked his lips with his black tongue. “I don’t eat meat.”
“No one eats mammals,” Hagen said. “Well, unless you’re already infected, then it doesn’t matter if the animal had the disease before it got turned into a hamburger. The rest of us won’t take that chance.”
“Can you catch Ferae from eating an infected animal?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Who’s going to put it to the test? Since we know for sure that birds and fish can’t get Ferae, that’s what we grill up.”
“I don’t eat birds and fish either.”
Rafe exchanged a look with Hagen. “Are you sure you’re Mack’s daughter?”
How many times had my dad made that same joke while devouring a drumstick? “Do you have oatmeal?” I asked.
“Sure, but it’ll taste old to you.”
“That’s okay.” My brain was dangerously close to clicking into “thrash mode” — where anything and everything that made me feel crappy flashed through my mind at once. Until this moment I’d really thought that I would find my dad in time and he’d do the fetch. Now I didn’t know what to do.
As soon as Hagen headed off, I pulled out Spurling’s instructions and my hand sanitizer.
Rafe plucked the paper from my fingers. “Is this the job?”
I nodded and tried to squeeze gel into my palm, but the bottle was empty. “Great,” I muttered, tossing it onto the table. “Guess I’ll be getting dirty.”
Rafe glanced up from the letter. “You can wash your hands in the river.” He hooked a thumb at the back door.
I managed to stifle my ew. “There’s bacteria in the river. And parasites.”
“And fish pee. So what? The only germ that matters is the one that turns you into a slobbering animal. And that you can’t catch from a river.” He dropped the letter on the table. “All this for a photo?” he said with disgust. “Her kid died nineteen years ago. When is she going to get over it?”
Never. And if my dad couldn’t come home, I wouldn’t get over it either. He had to come home. But if he didn’t know about Spurling’s offer, how was that going to happen?
“I have to do the fetch for him,” I said quietly.
“Right.” Rafe chuckled and then saw my face. “Wrong! You’d get infected or killed.”
“I won’t,” I said firmly, though the words infected or killed did give me a mental shiver. “I’ll manage.”
Rafe groaned. “Fine. All right. I’ll go to Chicago.”
“You’ll do the fetch?” I wasn’t sure whether to be suspicious or hug him. “Why?”
“Mack saved me from the orphan camp. I owe him. Okay?”
“Okay.” I was too grateful to pull apart my tangled feelings about my father’s secret life. A life in which Rafe had played a major role. My gratitude slipped a notch. “But I’m going with you.”
“Not happening,” he said firmly. I opened my mouth to protest but he held up a hand and said, “I know that Mack would rather face a firing squad than risk his pretty princess getting Ferae.”
I smacked his shoulder, but Rafe didn’t so much as wince. Still, it was satisfying. “Call me that again and I will mess you up,” I added for good measure.
“Okay, that’s hilarious, but it doesn’t change the fact that Mack wouldn’t want you going into the zone for him.”
“I’m already in it.”
“Please. This is the cradle of civilization. The quarantine compounds around here are actually on the map. But head east and who knows what you’ll find. Those compounds have been isolated for eighteen years — enough time to go native. And they have. There are cults and cannibals that come in more flavors of scary than you want to sample.”
Cannibals? He was exaggerating for effect. He had to be.
Crossing his arms, Rafe tipped back in his chair. “Remember the chimpacabra?”
I shuddered, remembering it too well. It would be a miracle if I ever got a good night’s sleep again.
“Well, there are mongrels out there a lot more dangerous than a chimpa, and then there’s the feral that’s ripping out people’s —”
“Okay, all right.” I put up my hands to ward off any more nightmare fuel. “I get it. I’ll stay here.”
“Glad that’s settled,” he said as Hagen plopped a whole spit-roasted chicken in front of him. “Is Mack’s bike still in the garage?” he asked her.
“Yep.” She set a steaming bowl of oatmeal in front of me. “If you take it, it comes back in the same condition.”
“Bike as in motorcycle?” I asked.
“Bike as in bicycle.” Rafe ripped off a chicken leg. “Ferals don’t hear you coming, you can carry it over rubble, and you don’t have to feed it.”
“Why not take a car?”
Rafe snorted. “Why not a hovercopter? We can fill the tank with magic fairy dust and wish ourselves there.”
Got it. All the gas in the East had probably been siphoned out of the stations long ago. “How long will it take you to bike to Chicago?”
“Eighteen hours.”
“What? Why so long?”
“It’s one hundred seventy miles from here,” Hagen explained. “Over broken road.”
“But I have to get back to the tunnel by Thursday, before the line patrol fills it in with rubble.”