Cured (30 page)

I crouch beside Jonah. His clothes are damp with blood and shredded in places. I press my hand against his cheek, and he groans and rolls onto his side.

“Gentlemen,” Dean calls. I shade my eyes and squint up at him. “Take a good, close look at these dogs. They are made to tear men to pieces. They listen to no one but me. They are an unstoppable weapon—it takes a bullet straight to the heart to slow them down, and more than one bullet to kill them.” He smiles—a real, true smile. “I have made them for a
very
special purpose.” Soneschen and Flint both step up to the edge of the building and peer down at the dogs. Dean looks at the two men and his smile grows wider, making his eyes mere slits. And then he puts a hand on each of their backs. And shoves.

Flint and Soneschen land with an audible thud, side by side on the courtyard grass twenty feet away from me. A blanket of silence seems to smother the world. The raiders stare down at the two men. Even the dogs freeze and focus their black eyes on them. Flint groans and rolls onto his side. Soneschen springs to his feet and starts to run to the nearest door. The dogs' hackles bristle, and their bodies bulge with tensed muscles. And then they start running, dead grass flying under their feet, until the Doberman gets Soneschen by the arm, and the other two dogs pounce on Flint.

Flint's cowboy hat falls from his greasy head, and he curls into a ball as the dogs tear into him. I cringe and look away. When Flint screams, I plug my ears.

A shadow falls over me, and icy hands clasp my wrist. I
swing my knife up, ready to fight, and find myself staring into a pair of dark-blue eyes.

“Dean.” The word barely comes out of my constricting throat. He nods and shoves me at the nearest door. While I walk in a daze toward the exit, Dean runs to Jonah and lifts him to his feet. Jonah can barely stand. Blood covers both of his hands, and there are claw marks gouged on his cheek and neck. Dean loops Jonah's arm over his shoulder and they stumble across the courtyard.

“Jack, open the door!” Dean orders.

I put my hand on the door and shove. It leaves a red print on the glass. “Zeke! Help him.” Dean unloads Jonah's massive body into Zeke's waiting arms. “We got Bowen out with the backpack—he won't leave until he knows Jack makes it out alive. You. Get her out of here now!” Kevin steps out from behind Zeke. “I'm going to let the rest of the dogs out to finish this!” Dean thrusts something into my hands—a folded piece of paper—and then goes back to the courtyard and starts propping open the glass doors that lead into the building. On the other side of the courtyard, all three dogs are intent on Flint, but Soneschen is gone. Sickened, I turn away and am pulled against a hard chest.

“I thought I'd never see you again!” Kevin says, holding me tightly. Dazed, I look up at him. His bottom lip is split and swollen, and on his belt are two guns—his Glock and my dad's Glock. “Come on. We have to run!”

I turn and look over my shoulder. Men are jumping off the roof, into the courtyard, weapons in hand, their attention focused on me. In their effort to reach me, they're throwing each other
down, trampling each other, and hitting each other out of the way with baseball bats. The first raider reaches the door I am standing behind, and his dark eyes lock on mine. It is Striker. He smirks and licks his lips, and then he lifts his blood-covered baseball bat to smash the glass.

Someone slams into him, taking him down to the ground. “Get her out of here
now
!” Dean shouts, wrenching the baseball bat out of Striker's hand and swinging it at his head. Kevin yanks me away from the door just before the bat makes contact.

We take two steps away and pause. “Look,” Kevin says. I turn and peer over my shoulder. All the doors leading into the courtyard except the one I am standing behind have been propped open and big dogs are pouring into the open space. The animals lunge for the raiders, pulling them down to the ground like prey. I look at my brother, standing in the courtyard with the dogs, and whimper. Kevin pulls me away. “You don't want to watch,” he says.

We run down the hall behind Zeke and Jonah, to a pair of glass doors that lead to the parking lot. Zeke shoves them open. There are three four-wheelers in the parking lot. Two are empty, and Bowen—wearing the backpack filled with the cure—is sitting on the third. Zeke helps Jonah onto a four-wheeler and climbs on in front of him. I step through the doors, into fresh air, and dig my feet into the ground. “Where are we going? We can't leave my brother in there!”

“Jack, it's what he wants.” Kevin tries to pull me away from the doors but his fingers slip against my bloody skin. “You got bit?” I nod and two deep creases form between Kevin's brows.
“How hurt are you?” he asks, lifting my arm for a better look. Blood is dripping down my arm and splattering on the ground beside my foot.

“I don't know,” I say.

He takes Dean's folded note out of my bloody grasp and starts poking and prodding my arm. My stomach roils and I close my eyes. It is one thing to look at other people's wounds. But when they're on my own body, the sight is too much.

Kevin sucks a breath of air in through his teeth. “You're losing a lot of blood. If the dog hit an artery, you could die. We need to stop the bleeding.” He guides me to the third four-wheeler.

“Is she all right?” Bowen asks.

“I don't know, and I'm not going to risk her losing too much blood,” Kevin says. “I'm going to put coagulant on her wound and then we'll be right behind you.”

“You sure you don't want us to wait, Kev?” Bowen asks.

“No. Get the cure out of here! This won't take me more than a minute or two. Zeke, you remember how to get into the tunnel through the wine cellar?”

“Of course I do,” Zeke says. “Let's get moving!”

Bowen revs the four-wheeler, and as he peels out of the parking lot, I look at the giant backpack on his back. The cure—what's left of it after using it on the dogs and the raiders' beasts. Zeke cranks the other vehicle, and he and Jonah follow Bowen.

“Climb on,” Kevin says, straddling the four-wheeler.

“But my arm . . .”

“We need to put a little distance between us and the raiders first.”

I climb up behind him. We drive two blocks and then Kevin pulls the vehicle into a gas station with rusted gas pumps. He climbs down and gets his backpack and rummages through it until he finds a small square packet of coagulant.

Even this far from the raiders' compound, I can hear the sound of dogs barking and men fighting. I squirm in the seat of the four-wheeler and try to ignore the sounds. “Why did we use the cure on the dogs?” I ask. “If the raiders are just going to kill them, why go to the trouble? Why waste it if it's so precious?”

“If a single infected dog got loose, it would terrorize the city, preying on anything that moved. It would kill lots of innocent people before it was stopped because the dogs are nearly impossible to kill.” He tears the coagulant open and pauses. “This will hurt. Are you ready?”

I nod and watch as he sprinkles tiny white coagulant beads onto my bleeding wound. My blood starts to bubble and then turns hot like it's on fire. The pain is bad but not
that
bad. Until the coagulant seeps down into my arm, reaching the deepest spot where the teeth sank into my skin. It burns like I've put my raw flesh into a pan of boiling oil. The coagulant starts to expand, so each puncture wound feels as if it is getting a flaming briquette of charcoal wedged into it.

I scream. I scream and scream, and Kevin holds me in his strong arms. Sweat beads over my entire body. The pain reaches a plateau and then starts to fade, and as the pain eases, my body begins to quiver and tears pour down my face.

“There. All done,” Kevin whispers, gently wiping the tears from my cheeks with his callused thumbs. Something moves
behind him, and ex-governor Soneschen steps out from the shadowed side of the gas station. His face is splattered with blood, and the left sleeve of his white shirt is torn off. His left arm is dangling lifeless at his side and so bloody I can't tell if there's any skin still on it.

“Get off the machine and I won't kill you,” Soneschen says.

Kevin whips around and backs up until his body is pressing against my thigh. He takes his gun from his belt, but the governor is inhumanly fast. He sprints to us before Kevin has his gun aimed. A blood-streaked hand slaps the gun from Kevin's grip, sending it skidding across the parking lot, and Soneschen's right hand cinches around Kevin's neck. Tremors wrack the ex-governor's body, and purple veins pop out on his neck and forehead from the effort. Slowly, Kevin's feet come up off the ground. Kevin thrashes and claws at the ex-governor's hand, but the man doesn't loosen his hold.

I jump off the four-wheeler and kick Soneschen's knee, trying to knock him down, but his leg feels like steel against my bare foot. He doesn't even look at me. And then I think of the blood that was on his teeth, and the beasts kept at the compound. He's been drinking beast blood. He's as strong as Jonah.

I grab the governor's arm that is holding Kevin and pull, but the man kicks me squarely in the stomach, sending me flying backward. I slam into a gas pump and slide down to the ground. Cement collides with my head, and I stare up at the rust spots on the metal roof that shades the pumps. I lie there and stare up, trying to force movement into my aching, exhausted body while I listen to the sound of Kevin's thrashing. My eyes shift
and I can see him. He is still clawing at Soneschen's hand, and his face is changing color—going from pale to red to a bulging, swollen purple—and I know he's slowly suffocating to death.

I force movement into my body and don't think—just act. I stumble to the gun Soneschen knocked from Kevin's hand and wrap my bloody fingers around it. For a split second I pause and stare at the thing, so familiar in my grasp. I am holding my father's gun.

Without wasting another second, I stand. Soneschen has his back to me. Kevin looks at me over Soneschen's shoulder and mouths the word
run
. But I'm
sick
of running, and there is no way I am going to watch someone I love die when I have the power to stop it. I shake my head and lift the gun, but because of my wounded arm, I can't hold it steady. So I trade hands.

The gun feels awkward in my left hand. I raise my left arm and grip my wrist with my right hand to steady it as much as possible. If I'm off, even a little, I will kill the wrong person. Bracing for the recoil, I aim at the middle of Soneschen's back. On an exhale, I gently squeeze the trigger, and my entire body lurches a step backward as the bullet leaves the chamber.

Soneschen drops Kevin, and they both crash down onto their hands and knees. I don't breathe as I stare at the two of them, identically posed, both gaping at the ground and gasping for breath. And then, like an answered prayer, a tiny red circle appears on Soneschen's white shirt, slowly expanding like a flower opening to sunlight. Soneschen's body starts to tremble, his nostrils flare, and he glares at me. A deep, guttural rumble starts in his throat, and he climbs unsteadily to his feet.

“You,” he says, looking at me like I'm trash. “You're the dentist's daughter.” He starts staggering toward me.

“Yes, I am,” I say, “and if you were as smart as King Solomon, you never would have underestimated me. I am smart, and I am brave.” I lift the gun. And shoot. The governor topples backward and lays still, his bloodstained white shirt glowing stark against the grimy cement.

Kevin stands and hangs his head like it weighs too much. He's still gasping for breath. I lower the gun and run to his side, drape his arm over my shoulders, and guide him to the four-wheeler. After I help him up, I climb on in front of him. Kevin wraps his arms around my waist and leans his head forward onto my shoulder. I turn the machine on and floor it. And then we speed away, with me too shocked to speak, and Kevin still gasping for air as if his throat is half-crushed.

“Dean always said you were a good shot,” he rasps, lips beside my ear. I tuck my father's gun into my belt and lean back against Kevin. He pulls me close and we drive west.

We hide the four-wheeler in a dense patch of brittle shrub high up in the foothills. The other two four-wheelers are already there, but Bowen, Jonah, and Zeke are long gone.

“Put these on,” Kevin says. He pulls something out of his backpack and hands it to me.

“Socks?” I ask.

“I don't want you hurting your feet,” he explains. “We have a little ways to walk, and these will help a bit.”

Instead of going to the shelter, we walk to a two-story house that is surrounded by a ring of brown pine trees—the house with the telescope.

“Why are we here?” I ask. It feels like weeks have passed since I ran from this house, down the mountain and into the raiders' hands.

“If we're being followed by anyone, they'll have a harder time finding the shelter if we go in this way,” Kevin explains. His voice is still weak and raspy, and his neck is swollen and turning blue.

The front door is locked. Kevin takes a scrap of wire from his pocket and sticks it into the keyhole and the lock clicks. We go inside, shutting and locking the door behind us, and go down to the wine cellar. He opens the hidden door and we step into darkness.

“I used to have a flashlight,” I say. “But
someone
smashed it into the ground and broke it.”

Kevin laughs a hoarse laugh and wraps his arms around me, holding me close. “Yeah. I'm lucky you didn't kill me. Your bite is a
lot
worse than your bark.” He lets me go and I can hear him unzip his backpack. Something clicks and a flashlight flickers to life. “I guess it's a good thing I brought my own. Can you hold this?”

I take the light and he puts his backpack back on.