Deadlocked 8 (23 page)

Only a fool would agree to those terms, and
Covington proved himself to be the idiot I always suspected. He was
convinced that The Electorate wanted their Dawns safe, and wasn’t
privy to the information I had about how many of them had been
pushing to end the eugenics program all-together. Still though, I
had to feign agreement. I didn’t want to risk disagreeing with
Covington or The Electorate openly, which was why I had to work
with Jerald.

If we could locate Levon’s friends, then that
would add another bargaining chip to play with. Covington had told
The Electorate that he needed time to prepare, and had ordered that
rations be delivered to the Dawn’s level, robbing the families
above of their food and water. Jerald complied, and lied to his men
about the reason, but I knew that his faith in Richard had been
shattered. Jerald distrusted The Electorate, as did I, although I
had to be careful about confirming his suspicions. It was a
dangerous game, but I was determined to win.

Jerald and one of his doctors usually
escorted me to Levon’s room during my meetings, but this time a
member of his Wolf Pack had taken his place. The soldier was tall
and thin, with specks of ginger whiskers on his square chin. He
didn’t say a word, and I’d barely been able to get him to tell me
his name when he first arrived this morning at the room where the
other captured members of The Electorate and I were being held.

“Gabe,” I said to him as if his name tasted
foul on my tongue. “Come along.”

He walked beside me as we crossed the hall
that led to Covington’s chamber. I glanced down that way and saw
the two guards that were posted to protect the elusive mastermind
behind the rebellion that had crippled The Electorate. Next we
passed the area where the doctors and nurses were stationed.
Covington made sure to keep them close, since his survival depended
on them.

This level of the facility was a secret to
most of the people that worked and lived here. The only reason that
Levon was down here instead of upstairs where the other prisoners
were kept was because of his illness. The doctors were only able to
keep him alive with equipment that had formerly been a backup for
Covington. The elaborate system had been designed to extend the
lives of test subjects that our scientists were infecting with
various strains of the disease that had caused the apocalypse.
Covington had sustained his injuries while luring Charles Reagan to
one of those testing sites, and the only reason he’d survived was
because the medical team there had hooked him up to what was known
as a Libera Memento Mori, which the scientists referred to as LiMM
chairs. Someone had told me once what that phrase stood for in
Latin, but my memory fails me. It had something to do with being
liberated from the fear of death.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said as we
neared the last restroom before we reached the elevator.

Gabe didn’t respond other than to slow his
pace and nod in the direction of the ladies’ room. It was as if I
were being shepherded through the building by an android, devoid of
personality; another automaton in a dusty cuckoo clock.

He followed me to the door and I glared at
him as I paused while holding the handle. “You’re not planning on
following me in, are you?”

“No,” he stated flatly, not offering me any
of the respect that military men like him used to give graciously
to everyone they encountered.

I went into the bathroom and to the second
stall from the wall. I tapped on the divider twice as I sat, and
then paused before tapping twice again.

A man answered from the next stall in a
hushed, phlegmy whisper, “There was a problem.”

When would the day come when someone could
just get a simple task accomplished without there being some
complication or another? My frustration seeped into my words when I
asked, “What happened?”

My co-conspirator coughed a few times before
lowering his hand beneath the divider so that I could see the wound
on his palm. “I got cut.”

There was a minor slice on the inside of his
hand, but it was clearly infected. The edges had turned purple, and
a boil was swelling there.

“Christ,” I muttered as the implications spun
in my head.

“It’s spreading so fast,” said the doctor,
his voice trembling. “I don’t know how much longer before…” A cough
halted him.

“You have the blood though, right?” I asked,
trying desperately to figure out how to handle this unfortunate
development. Timing was an important part of my plan, and this
threatened everything. I needed Jerald to find Levon’s friends
before an outbreak happened here.

“Yes, but I…” Again, his cough silenced
him.

“What?” I asked, getting more restless each
second.

“You have to swear to me.” His words were
hampered by his escalating illness. “You have to protect Debra and
my kids. You have to swear.”

“I told you, already, Hank. Your family will
be fine. That’s the whole reason we’re doing this.”

“Swear to me.”

“I swear,” I said to placate him. “Now who
can you trust to take the blood?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’d put too much faith in Hank, and now I was
paying the price for it. My plan was stretched so thin, depending
on too many things to go my way. I’d asked Hank to retrieve some of
Levon’s blood as a failsafe. I knew that there was an active virus
sitting in those blood bags from when Levon had first been brought
here. While Jerald and Richard thought that the cure had destroyed
the disease in him, I knew that it hadn’t worked initially.
Unfortunately, the LiMM chair had then eradicated the disease in
Levon, leaving me with only a small sample of the actual disease
left. Hank had been using these samples to re-infect Levon, which
then kept the doctors uncertain if the LiMM chair was working,
necessitating that Levon be kept on Covington’s floor. However, now
that we were reaching the end, I no longer wanted Levon to be
poisoned. I knew that he would die within days if detached from the
LiMM chair, but I wanted him to gain back some strength so that his
final act could be killing the man responsible for so much of his
misery, and thus ending a major threat to The Electorate. With the
virus gone from his blood, the doctors would stop injecting him
with the chemicals that attacked the strain, and that would give
Levon back some of his strength. However, it would also mean that
the doctors would lose interest in doing tests on Levon, figuring
that he was just like all the other experiments that had failed in
the past. While Levon could survive while hooked up to the LiMM,
just like Covington, there would be no need to keep him alive once
the doctors lost interest. With Hank out of the equation, Levon
would be living on borrowed time now.

“Isn’t there someone else we can trust?” I
asked. “Someone else that can take the blood?”

“No,” said Hank. He was pitiful and weak,
which was exactly why he’d worked out so well for me in the first
place.

I knew that Gabe was waiting outside the door
for me. The last thing I needed was for his curiosity to compel him
to open the door.

“Give me the blood,” I said in desperation.
“I’ll figure something out.” I left my stall and then went to his.
I opened the door to take the blood from him and saw the horrible
condition the man was in. His skin was pale, and his hair looked
greasy as it clung to his sweaty forehead. Dark circles hung from
his eyes, and I was certain he hadn’t slept all night. I muttered a
curse in shock when I saw him.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he wiped away his
tears. “Just make sure my girls are okay. You’ve got to…”

“Yes, I will,” I said as I held my hand out.
“Now give me the blood, quickly.”

He had a bag beside the toilet that he opened
to reveal the various blood bags and vials that he’d stolen from
Levon’s room. “They’re all here.”

“Why did you take so many?” I asked,
dumbfounded.

“I took some of the oldest samples. I wasn’t
sure which stage you needed. His infection has been mutating. Here,
take the whole bag. Take it all.”

“I can’t take all of it, you idiot. Just give
me the oldest sample.”

Hank searched through the bag until he found
a plastic pouch of blood that had been drawn when Levon first
arrived. He handed it to me and I struggled to figure out where I
would hide it. The pouch was large, and wouldn’t fit in any of the
pockets on the tight slacks that I’d been given to wear. I settled
on clamping the bag beneath my arm, under my shirt.

“I need your badge and your key.”

Hank looked distressed. “I need my badge to
get back to the upper floors.” His badge activated the elevators
and the doors in the lower levels of the facility, without it he
would be trapped on this floor.

“Hank, you’re not going back up.”

“But my family. I want to see them.”

“You want to risk infecting them?” My
question sounded like an accusation.

This brought tears to his eyes. Apparently
he’d thought he might get a chance to say goodbye.

“Hank, we don’t have time for this. Give me
your badge and the key to Levon’s LiMM.” I held out my hand, palm
up, and waved it expectantly.

Hank did as he was told. He unclipped the
badge from his shirt pocket and took the small key out of his
pocket that would allow me access to the LiMM chair that Levon was
bound to. I pocketed them both.

“This is what you’re going to do next.” I
pointed down at the satchel with the rest of the blood samples that
he’d stolen. “You’re going to pour that blood all over you. Soak
yourself with it.”

“Why?” he asked, confused by my
instruction.

“That way they’ll have to burn your
body.”

He winced and started crying again. He hadn’t
come to grips with how his failure would lead to his death, and I’m
certain thoughts of his family plagued him.

“If they find your badge missing, then they
might deactivate it. We can’t risk that.”

“I don’t want to die,” said Hank.

“And what about your family?” I asked
sharply, intent on ending any doubt festering in him. “Do you want
them to die? You saw what Covington’s planning. If we don’t stop
him, then your family is as good as dead. This is the only way to
save them.”

“Okay,” said Hank, utterly defeated. He
nodded as he looked down at the bag of blood beside him.

I reached out and touched his shoulder as I
said, “I’ll make sure your family knows what you did. You’ll be
remembered as a hero.”

He took comfort in that.

“Wait until I leave, and then get across to
the men’s restroom. Smear the blood on yourself there, otherwise
they might suspect me. And clean up any blood in here. Do you
understand?”

“Yes,” he said before coughing again.

There wasn’t anything left to do, and Gabe
was waiting for me. I closed the door and left the doctor
behind.

Hank had made a mess of the plan, but I was
confident that I could make the best of it. When Hank hadn’t
reported in, I immediately asked to meet with Levon as soon as
possible. That gave me the opportunity to get in here, where Hank
and I had agreed to meet if anything went awry.

“I need to speak with Covington,” I said to
Gabe when I met him in the hall.

He shook his head and said, “Nope. Not going
to happen.”

“Perhaps you should leave that decision up to
the General.”

“He’s in with his Dawn,” said Gabe as he
walked towards the elevator.

That was a revelation. I knew that Richard’s
condition confined him to this floor, and he rarely left his LiMM.
Gabe hadn’t said that Richard was meeting with his Dawn, which I
could’ve mistaken for meaning that he was conferencing with the
Dawn, the same as I did with Cobra. Instead, the phrase that Gabe
used suggested that Covington was physically meeting with his Dawn.
That meant Covington’s Dawn was here somewhere, on this level. That
was an intriguing development, and another thing that I might be
able to utilize. It made sense, too. If I were in Richard’s place,
I would want Cobra as close to me as possible.

“Then let him know I’d like to meet with him
today, if possible.”

Gabe shook his head as he waited for the
elevator. “I don’t have contact with Covington. You’ll have to go
through Jerald.”

“And where is Jerald today?”

“He’s monitoring the Pack. They’re out
collecting the other Sons of Reagan.”

“Sons of Reagan?” I hadn’t heard that name
before.

Gabe nodded as the elevator chimed and opened
for us. He ushered me in as he explained, “That’s what we used to
call them, back before we knew they called themselves the High
Rollers. Some of us still call them the Sons of Reagan. It’s a
reminder of how they were teamed up with that terrorist scum.”

I held my arm at my side, trying my best not
to appear suspect as I clenched the bag of blood at my side. It was
cold, having sat in Hank’s bag beside ice packs for the past
several hours, and I could feel condensation dripping down my skin,
wetting my shirt.

“So is Jerald with his men?” I asked.

“No, he’s monitoring from here, but he
doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

I would have to concede for now. I’d hoped to
antagonize Jerald into leaving to accompany his men in the field,
but that hadn’t worked. I wanted to get together with Richard
alone, but that might still be an unreasonable goal. I had to work
harder at breeding distrust between the two of them, and to cement
myself as the only one they could depend on. Driving a wedge
between the two of them was the trickiest part of my scheme.

“I’m supposed to monitor my Dawn later, will
I still be allowed to do that?”

“We’ll see,” said Gabe. “It depends on how
long it takes to round up the Sons of Reagan.”

It was an odd coincidence that Gabe and his
fellow soldiers referred to Levon’s friends as the Sons of Reagan
considering that the man pulling their strings was inhabiting the
body of a clone of Charles Reagan’s actual adopted son. Of course,
Gabe and the others were probably ignorant of that fact. Their
decrying of the sins of the Sons of Reagan held a double meaning
that this poor soldier was unaware of. It was clear to me that
Jerald was manipulating these men with selective information,
allowing them to know only so much as he needed them to so that he
could earn their trust. Despite how he’d convinced himself of how
much he cared for these men, he still wielded his knowledge as if
it were power; which it most certainly was.