Resurgence: Green Fields book 5 (35 page)

“He would be dead if not for the serum,” Ethan ground out but sounded reasonably cowed. “He was gravely injured in the attack at the factory.”

“Attack?” I huffed, smirking at him. “More like the botched operation. I’m not so sure you can call what he is still 'alive,' if you ask me. I’ve seen zombies do that exact same mental stumbling that he just did, as if the brain’s skipping into stand-by until there’s a new impulse shaking it up again. See how the one in her cell does the exact same thing? There’s only a very small degree separating those two. Would you want to continue existing like that?”

The alarm I’d been looking for didn’t show on Ethan’s face, but he didn’t seem particularly thrilled about my observation. “He’s deteriorating faster than we expected,” he admitted, giving me an entirely different reason to feel chill creep up my spine.

“You shot the women up with that exact same shit, right?” I asked, more guessing now, but it made sense. Gussy had known that she would turn as she died. With no actual zombie bite or contaminated food, that shit didn’t just happen.

Ethan looked away, hedging around for a few seconds. When he finally answered, it came out as one gigantic rush of words. “The latest round of experiments was conducted without a control, yes. We needed results, and the round before this one was inconclusive, so Taggard decided that we’d go all in.”

I had to take a deep breath to keep myself from screaming at him. I knew that losing what remained of my calm wouldn’t do me any good, but it was so fucking hard to hang on to what remained of my composure.

“So you call this round a success? All of them turned. I can hear them. Scratching. Clawing. Snapping their teeth at thin air because you already starved them before and now their brains are down to impulse-controlled killing machines.” He didn’t reply, but I could see the answer on his face and how he again avoided looking at me. “How can you justify doing this?” I asked. “How can you condone what is happening here? You’re killing us off, until there’s nothing left to save, cure or no cure!”

A muscle jumped in his jaw but he rallied himself once more. “The serum is the cure. It’s our only hope—“

“Bullshit! Women are our only hope! Young, fertile, child-bearing women!” I shouted. “Like the four that you just senselessly murdered, including the only hope for us all that they were carrying in their wombs!” He stared at me, mute, so I went right on. “How fucking stupid do you have to be not to see this? Women are our only hope at surviving! Everyone knows this, except for you bunch of murdering lunatics! Everyone is out there, rebuilding, establishing settlements so women can be kept safe, so they have a place to raise the next generation of humans. Why do you think there are so many scavengers out there, a good third of them former career soldiers? Because they have realized that it is their duty, their only reason for existing, to be the first line of defense! Have you learned nothing from history? Why do you think we’ve sent eighteen-year-old boys to Normandy to storm the beaches? Why do you think we’ve lost millions of soldiers over the last century, laying down their lives in theaters of war all over the globe? To ensure that here, on our home turf, their sisters, their wives, their daughters are safe to keep the ball rolling! Shit, even the damn Nazis had that one thing straight! They told their beautiful blonde, blue-eyed daughters to have as many children as possible because the Third Reich needed more future soldiers to burn up in their fucked-up ideology. And you honestly stand before me and can look me into the eye and tell me that you condone something that those fucked-up monsters wouldn’t even dare disregard? If you had even an inch of backbone left you would man up and realize that it is your personal duty to, if nothing else, use your own body to physically build a wall between everything out there that’s coming to kill us, and the women who will ensure that there are still humans around twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now.” I let that sink in for a moment before I repeated, “You disgust me. With your lies, and your sniveling and groveling for attention. But most of all because you’ve completely lost sight of the only thing that still counts, and that is survival.”

Someone like Taggard would have laughed in my face for delivering such a speech, but Ethan almost caved under the weight of my words. I knew I had him there, for all the good that did me. But if you’re all out of options, you’ll take anything you can get.

Eyes wide, his lower lip trembling, he swallowed repeatedly before he opened his mouth again. “And what would you have me do? What can I do? They’ll kill me if I don’t do what they tell me to! You don’t know how it is—“

“And whose fault is that?” I jeered. “You signed up for this, right? Did anyone force you to come here? Things seemed pretty quiet in Aurora when I was there.”

He gnashed his teeth as he admitted, “I signed up for a promotion.” And another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“There’s one thing you can do,” I offered, doing my best to soften my tone. “You can open this door and let me out. That’s all you really need to do. I can take it from there.”

He squinted at me, then shook his head. “I’m already in trouble for talking to you. Besides, you’d never make it out of the complex. There are guards. Combination locks. They don’t even let me out to get some fresh air without a security detail. I’m sorry.”

Well, it had been worth a try. I did my best not to let my disappointment crush me. Looked like I had to do everything myself. But now that he was already here, ready to spill his guts, I might as well try to get the most information possible out of him.

“So what’s up with that latest version of the serum? I’ve seen the effects of the old one on both sides of the grave. Why’s that dude over there just a step above a mindless meat puppet? And why infect the women? There are cases in abundance that prove that the old serum did in fact not render the males infertile, but I’ve yet to hear of a single female who managed to get knocked up.” Which I doubted would happen, or it would have already occurred. It made sense that the guys didn’t know they had possibly fathered legions of offspring, long before the apocalypse. So few of them had had steady relationships to settle down and try to have kids, and if the guy insisted he couldn’t knock you up, did you really suspect him after a one-night stand? “Is it to see if you’ve managed to tweak the serum without ensuring that your cure really sterilizes us all?”

Ethan hesitated again, but shook his head. “We’re not along far enough to get to those finer points—”

“Because complete and utter stop of procreation is a minor point,” I taunted.

“It is if all your subjects turn into mindless meat puppets, whether they die or not,” he snarked back, letting out an exasperated breath. I had that effect on people sometimes. His eyes sought out mine again and held my gaze, the look on his face imploring. “I think they actually select for that trait. I’ve heard Taggard and one of the guards talk. One of their biggest gripes is that they have no way of controlling all the others out there. Like your guys. Before, they had rigid military structures, but that’s all in shambles now. If they had the manpower, they’d hunt down every single one of them to neutralize them.”

“Because kidnapping innocents isn’t enough,” I huffed, but forced myself to drop the point. “Still, why infect the women?”

He shrugged, as if that should have been obvious. “To test if that changes anything about the fetus. The tests have been inconclusive so far.” I felt like adding the acerbic remark that the test conditions maybe had a thing or two to do with that but, again, not the point.

“So this is all about control? And you still insist that your serum is a cure?”

Ethan was silent long enough that it was an answer in and of itself, but in the end he shook his head. “But we still need it,” he pointed out. “We’re utterly defenseless as it is right now. An attack similar to the one that almost wiped us out could come again. Or take the streaks. I’m still amazed that this one town that was under attack made it.”

His answer confused me. By now I’d pretty much assumed that my theory with someone controlling the tagged zombies was right—and originated with the same people who nabbed women now. Or maybe the right hand just didn’t know what the left was up to.

“Yeah, we’d be a lot more united if someone wasn’t out there kidnapping our women and killing off entire trader groups,” I pointed out.

Ethan’s face hardened. “We have to do something, don’t you see?” he complained. “You yourself got infected. How many people have we lost this year alone? Maybe what we do here isn’t pretty, but if the loss of a few can save thousands—“

And that was about where he lost me. “And how exactly do you defend that this bunch of assholes here wanted to gang-rape a fifteen-year-old girl? Explain to me how exactly that helps our society. How that advances our scientific knowledge.”

He had no answer for that, of course, but the defiant glint remained in his eyes. Scrubbing my hands over my face, I tried to hold on to what was left of my composure. Right now that was running through my fingers like so much fine sand.

“It’s partly your fault, too,” he said, making me look at him.

“Come again?” I asked, irritation screaming to take over.

He let out a derisive snort. “If you hadn’t destroyed all the samples from Raleigh Miller’s work, we wouldn’t have to reverse-engineer his progress. So in a sense, all those women’s blood is on your hands as well.”

That made absolutely no sense whatsoever. When I told him that—with the odd expletive added in—Ethan’s humorless grin just grew. “How should this even work?” I wanted to know, taking another step toward the glass pane. “He never got his vaccine working. He damn well died because his body couldn’t build up any immunity when Thecla infected him.”

Now it was Ethan who looked confused, but when realization hit, he let out a low chuckle. “Christ, you still don’t get it, do you?” He waited for my response, but when I just kept staring, he allowed himself a small, real smile. “Raleigh Miller didn’t die because of the serum, or the virus that it was based on. Sure, both kill when your body won’t adapt quickly enough to it, but that’s the end of it.” His smile grew. “But he turned, get it? The vaccine would only have protected him against the old strain, but what he was infected with, that was the pure, first-iteration zombie strain.”

My thoughts ground to a halt, my mind taking a momentary break to process this.

Raleigh had died over eighteen months before the outbreak.

But if what Ethan had just told me was right, he’d been the first ever zombie on record, independent of what the last phase of the serum did to those that had received it.

The ramifications of that weren’t something I ever wanted to consider.

They’d known. People in key positions—at the CDC, at USAMRIID, at the very biotech firm that was already working on the project—had known that there was a strain of a virus in existence that could, indiscriminately, wipe us right off the earth. The only thing needed had been a way to distribute it.

And someone, somewhere, had made damn sure to send one of their top operatives who they knew would finish the job to wipe out any and all evidence. For the first time since I’d learned that Thecla had been responsible for murdering Nate’s brother, I had a motive for the deed that made a hell of a lot more sense than misplaced professional jealousy.

Of all the times and places where I could have learned of this, now was, without a doubt, the most inconvenient of them all.

I could tell from the way Ethan jeered at me that he knew I’d come to these conclusions. That what I had become part of hadn’t been a rescue mission, or a somewhat shady attempt to put things right. It had been a cover-up. And by sending Bucky Hamilton in after Nate, whoever had set this in motion had likely counted on the fact that their personal animosities would ensure that no one walked away who could tell the tale. Only that the apocalypse had gotten in the way, and probably for the first and only time in their lives they’d managed to put their differences aside and bail, preserving all those lives that should have ended that day. Bucky had likely counted on the zombies doing the dirty work for him, seeing as Nate had been gravely injured and most of his people had abandoned him.

Now the setup at the factory made so much more sense. We, Nate and I, were still around. We both knew what had been going on at Green Fields Biotech—or at least had thought we’d known—so that made us extra inconvenient.

Shit.

No, more than that, but my mind was lacking the ability to express just how much this tiny tidbit of news really shook me up. But Ethan knew because I’d never been able to properly school my face.

Ethan had to die. Preferably before he could tell anyone else.

But I was still locked up in this fucking cell, and not exactly in the position to take anyone down.

I had to think, and fast. Somehow I got the sense that Ethan hadn’t wanted to reveal quite that much, but if anyone listened in to our conversation, or reviewed it at a later time, they might very well come to the conclusion that he’d inadvertently told me too much. It was too late to pretend that he hadn’t just turned my world upside down, but maybe I could still steer the conversation in a direction that made my epiphany seem like a small, insignificant one.

“But you have Raleigh Miller’s research data,” I said, swallowing hard to get the lump out of my throat that still threatened to choke me. “That should be enough to follow along his steps, right?” I put just enough conviction into my tone to turn it into a half-taunt. A scientist like me could do that, but was Ethan quite there yet?

Ire sparked in his eyes, making me want to cheer. He’d swallowed the bait.

“It’s not quite that simple,” he grunted. “Particularly as you didn’t get his entire research, just the notes he’d compiled along the way. He had years to get there, and one of the best-stocked laboratories in the country at his beck and call.”

“But you have a new version of the serum.”

He nodded, not without a hint of pride. My guess was that he had been involved in that somehow. “We do. We’re reverse-engineered it from the virus.”