Infected (6 page)

“All right,” she breathed against his neck, hoping Tanner looked convincingly like a guy consoling his distraught girlfriend. She felt his muscles tense under his shirt.

“On three, okay?” he said softly, and she subtly shifted
her stance, finding purchase on the gravel, wishing she weren’t wearing such ridiculously high heels.

“One … two …”

When Tanner got to three she ran harder than she’d ever run in her life, ignoring the shooting pains in her feet from the shoes, narrowing her focus to a single thought:
Get away
.

Before Carina had gone three strides, Sheila started yelling.

If Carina had been holding on to any hope that Sheila really did care about her welfare, that she was merely a dedicated scientist with a few paranoid notions, those hopes came crashing down when she heard the fury in her voice. “Baxter, Meacham!
Go!
Stop them!”

Meacham grunted with exertion as he chased them, hindered by his close-fitting designer suit. Carina held tightly to Tanner’s hand for balance as she ran, terrified of coming down wrong on her high heels and twisting her ankle. But the shoes didn’t seem to be slowing her down at all. In fact, the strange jittery buzz she’d been feeling all day had roared to life, swelling to a crescendo in her ears, energy flowing through her body as though someone had flipped a
switch. Tanner seemed to feel it too. He wasn’t even breathing hard as they leapt over a cart loaded with folding chairs rather than swerve around it. Carina, who held a school record in the high jump, couldn’t have done any better.

As they rounded the corner, Carina felt a surge of relief to see that the wall opened onto the street that ran along the south side of the cemetery. The tall, ornate gate was open, and a man pushing a handcart piled high with boxes was coming through.

“Excuse us!” Tanner shouted as the startled man hesitated in the opening. Carina swerved around the cart, unable to attempt the jump in her shoes, while Tanner headed straight for it. This time he didn’t quite clear the tall boxes, hitting the top one with his foot; it fell to the ground, spilling small flowerpots that rolled in every direction behind them.

After she and Tanner passed through the gate, Carina pulled it shut with a clang, and the latch fell into place. She heard frustrated cursing behind them as their pursuers tripped over the flowerpots.

“This way!” Tanner shouted, running down the grassy median between lanes of traffic.

“Wait—”

Carina paused long enough to yank off her shoes and discard them on the ground. Then she was running barefoot, her feet sinking into the soft grass, her lungs filling with air as her arms and legs moved in tandem. When they reached the end of the block, she barely even felt the pavement beneath her feet, and she was sprinting faster than she
ever had. Was her speed the result of terror? Adrenaline? Tanner was keeping up effortlessly—was he experiencing the same thing?

After another block they turned down an alley behind a row of bungalows, little square detached garages lined up on either side. When they came to a garage with its door open, the interior crammed with boxes and bikes and sports equipment, Carina had an idea. She swerved into the garage, praying that it was unoccupied, with Tanner right behind her.

Carina frantically scanned the wall for the button to close the garage door and slapped it hard. The door began to close, casting them gradually into darkness. When it groaned to a halt, the only light came from a grimy window facing the house. Through it, Carina could see a heavyset, sweating man mowing his back lawn with a push mower, sending up a spray of cut grass.

He’d only done a third of the backyard. If she and Tanner were lucky, they had a little time. Tanner was standing up against the garage door, his face pressed to its surface.

“What are you doing?” Carina whispered.

“There’s a crack. I can see—wait—”

Carina held her breath until he spoke again. She stayed as still as she could, but her left eye was twitching. She rubbed it and it stopped immediately.

“He just passed by,” Tanner said softly. “Meacham. And, Car—he had his gun out.”

A chill ran through Carina. Would the man really shoot them? Or was the gun just to scare them into coming along?
She couldn’t imagine that Sheila would actually risk killing anyone, no matter what the truth was about Walter, the gangsters, and the mysterious research.

She remembered something Sheila had said:
Our intelligence suggests that his contacts believe you have access to the data
.

If that was true … was it possible that Sheila actually believed that Carina had something valuable? Something Walter had given her, a way to access his private data? Sheila had said he had blocked access to his work the week before his trip: maybe he had actually been hiding the information from
her
?

Carina frantically racked her brain, trying to remember if Walter had given her anything that might contain whatever it was that Sheila wanted. They’d had breakfast together on the day before he’d left for Houston, oatmeal for Walter and a protein bar and a banana for Carina, as always. He’d brought a pizza home that night, after picking up the dry cleaning. Carina had been the one to bring in the mail, and there hadn’t been anything unusual, just a couple of bills and some junk mail. Walter had gone to bed by ten since he had an early flight.

Nothing unusual at all. At some point, Walter must have hidden the letter under the recycling can in the hall. But if he’d left her anything else, she had missed it. And this wasn’t the time to worry about it.

“We have to keep moving,” Carina said. “Baxter and Meacham are both out there, and Sheila—”

Depending on how determined Sheila was to find her, there could be others. How many security agents had she
seen at the edges of the crowd? A dozen? More? If they all worked for Calaveras, and if Sheila had the authority to order them around, the alley outside their hiding place could soon be crawling with people looking for them.

Baxter had always been kind to her, but Carina knew he wouldn’t defy Sheila. She was his boss, and besides, he was a professional to the core. He wouldn’t turn away from the job he was paid to do just to help her.

Tanner moved around the edge of the garage, pushing boxes out of the way. “There’s a bike … only one, though. Oh, flat tire. Don’t suppose a Jet Ski will do us much good—”

“Tanner, my biggest problem is
shoes
,” Carina said.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Near the door leading to the backyard was a rack containing ski boots, gardening clogs, and old sneakers. Tanner rifled through it, knocking over half a dozen shoes in his hurry. “How about these?”

He held up a pair of women’s golf shoes with fringed tops. Carina grabbed them and tugged at the laces. “A little big,” she said, jamming one on her right foot. “But I can tie them tight and—”

“You’d better hurry,” Tanner said urgently. “The lawn mower man’s—Oh, shit, I think he must be out of gas, he’s coming over here—”

Carina yanked on the second shoe and fumbled with the laces. “I’m ready,” she said just as Tanner hit the garage door opener. He grabbed her arm and they dove for the door, crouching low as it slowly creaked open, the man coming toward them.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” he shouted, but Tanner and Carina were already out.

“To the right!” Carina said. Coming down the alley at a run was Meacham, closely followed by Baxter and a third man who wasn’t making any effort to hide the fact that he was talking into a radio as he jogged along. Carina recognized the Calaveras Lab’s silver-and-red logo stitched on his jacket as he spotted her and veered toward them.

“This way,” Tanner said, pulling Carina with him. They raced through the backyard behind the garage where they’d been hiding, through the lazy spray of a sprinkler, around a pair of little kids playing on a plastic slide.

“Gate ahead,” Carina yelled without slowing. “Gonna jump it—”

The wooden gate was set into a fence, at least four and a half feet tall, that circled the yard. There was a latch, but if Carina took the time to unhook it, their pursuers would use those critical seconds to catch up. She hit the gate without slowing down, placing her hands over the tops of the boards, then jackknifing her body up and over, the way she’d practiced on the vault a hundred times before. The tops of her thighs scraped against the rough edge of the wood, but then her feet struck ground on the other side—a perfect landing.

She dashed out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by Tanner, who’d hit the gate right after her. He didn’t nail the landing as well as she had, coming down heavily and nearly falling before righting his balance. She waited to make sure he was unhurt; then they both took off running down the street as someone slammed into the gate.

Their pursuers apparently lacked the dexterity and strength to clear the gate the way she and Tanner had. She heard cursing and shots fired. Something whizzed by her ear.

“Tanner, watch out!” she screamed, but he was one step ahead of her, grabbing her hand and pulling her abruptly toward the cars parked along the edge of the street. She couldn’t believe the security men were shooting—were they really trying to
kill
them? Hadn’t Sheila said that she wanted to
protect
Carina?

She looked over her shoulder, despite knowing it would slow her down. There—there was Baxter, running in front of Meacham, pushing him out of the way. It might have been accidental—but from where Carina stood, it sure didn’t look like it.

Was Baxter trying to protect her?

“Stay low!” Tanner called as they raced for the cover of the cars.

Something struck her upper arm. “Ow!” She slammed her hand over her biceps and touched a barbed piece of plastic. A
dart
? “Tanner, I’ve been—”

“Two blocks to the BART station,” Tanner yelled. “Inbound train’s coming!”

Carina looked where he was pointing. Rising over the street, the elevated tracks ran through downtown Martindale, carrying commuters the thirty miles across the mountains and the bay, and into San Francisco. And there, in the distance, was the train, its headlights winking as it approached.

If she really had been shot, Carina was just going to have to deal with it after she got on that train.

As she plowed forward, her vision began to swim in front of her. A strange, buckling sensation rippled through her muscles, and she stumbled. But Tanner didn’t let go. The borrowed shoes hurt her feet, the leather rubbing against her toes and the backs of her heels. She ignored the pain and focused all her effort on not falling.

Forward … just keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other
. Again. Again. It was like when she used to run the 800-meter in middle school. Carina wasn’t cut out for the event, but she’d given it her all, even as the other girls surged past her. She never placed in a single race, and more often than not she came in last, but she didn’t stop trying. Each time, she hoped that her mother would come to the meet, that she would leave work early like she was always promising to do and stand in the bleachers with the other parents, watching her run, cheering her on.

That possibility kept her going through an entire losing season, before the coach finally decided to let her compete in the field events. It was just a matter of narrowing your attention until all that was left was the next step, and the next, until you hit the finish line and could collapse. Pain meant nothing; the raw scrape of air in your lungs meant nothing—that was what Carina had trained herself to believe as she surged toward the finish that would never be good enough.

The turnstile was in sight. Tanner dug into his wallet for his transit card and slid it through. “Go!” he shouted, waiting for her to pass. She let her momentum carry her, the
metal bars sliding out of the way. But her legs felt wrong. Her foot flopped down at a strange angle, and this time, without Tanner to catch her, she couldn’t recover. She fell hard on her hip, feeling the cold concrete scrape her skin as a startled woman jumped out of the way.

Tanner was through the turnstile now, and he took her hand and pulled her up. “Son, is she okay?” an old man asked, but they were already on the move. The train had arrived, and they raced for the escalator, Tanner practically carrying her.

“Too many people,” Tanner panted as a crowd raced to make the train. “We’ll never make it on the escalator. We have to use the stairs.”

“I … can’t,” Carina gasped. Her vision had worsened; now she was seeing black spots, and the edge of the handrail seemed to waver in front of her.

And then she was airborne. Tanner had picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder, grunting as he took the stairs two at a time. Carina felt the blood rush to her face, watching the stairs pass below, her body limp and her muscles useless.

The train doors were starting to close as Tanner burst through them. He staggered to an empty seat and fell heavily into it, holding Carina in his arms. The last thing she felt before she lost consciousness was the train starting to move.