The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (23 page)

His stomach jumped strangely at this detail, and he swallowed hard. Not wanting to alarm Dr. Lau, he did his best to ignore the fragmented memory that surfaced without warning. She kept her eyes on his face, measuring his reaction, and continued.

“We took a blood sample, and it’s showing some . . . strange reactions as well. We’re still working on that. And then you started to behave violently. You lashed out at the nurses and injured a couple of them. Nothing too serious, but we had to restrain you.”

The memory of the attack at Brent’s house was becoming clearer by the moment; Dr. Lau’s voice faded as he recalled the details, the terror, the pain, the ride to the hospital, the screams that had frightened him so much, the realization that they were coming from him. And then everything was black. He had no memory of hurting anyone.

“Everyone is okay?” he asked, hesitant.

She nodded confidently.

“You don’t need to worry about that, Bran,” she said. That she lapsed into a more informal nickname comforted him instantly; he couldn’t think that she was faking the warmth in her voice. But he could tell there was something more, although she seemed reluctant to start again. Finally, she told him about the resuscitation.

He didn’t know how long he was quiet, his ears ringing as his pulse raced and thumped in his neck and temple.

His voice was almost a whisper when he said, “I died?”

“Your heart stopped for a little under a minute,” Dr. Lau replied, her tone becoming authoritative, clinical. “You shouldn’t have any side effects to speak of, aside from some minor pain where the paddles were used.”

Nodding, he let his head collapse into the pillow again. She sat with him for a long time, but he quickly became unaware of her presence. He had died; his heart had stopped, and his family was nowhere to be found. But there was no anger left in him. There was no feeling aside from a dull ache in his stomach that reflected the discomfort in the rest of his body. He stared into space, trying to understand what had happened, to pull out more memories of the last few months, to decide if he felt that the cloud he had lived in was connected to the events of the day.

“Brandon?”

Dr. Lau’s voice cut into his thoughts, and he blinked.

“Can I take another blood sample?” she asked. He knew her well enough to know that the look on her face was an attempt to disguise genuine concern. She didn’t want to freak him out.

“Yeah. Can I have some more water?” he answered.

She nodded and refilled his paper cup from a water dispenser just outside the door. When she returned, she had two needles in her jacket pocket. As she prepared them, she said casually, “So, this trial you did . . . do you remember who was running it?”

He closed his eyes as she slid the needle into a vein in his arm, the pinching pain sending shivers along his skin. Every one of his siblings was uneasy around needles, but he thought he was the least affected among them. The one exception was giving blood; the whole process made him nervous, and the sight of it made him queasy and faint. With his lids pressed shut, he focused his attention away from the room and thought back to the waiting room he had entered three months prior. He tried to envision the building, but the generic clinic name had not matched the company that had been running the trial. Pushing further into the memory, he thought about the doctor with the wounded ear, and the girl at the front desk. Finally, he put the TV back up on the wall and remembered the promotional DVD that had been playing.

“Argo?” he said with a measure of uncertainty. “I think it was Argo. Or, maybe Argon?”

The needle came out of his arm with another pinch, and Dr. Lau pressed a cotton swab against the puncture. He tried to confirm his recollection, but it was all he could muster up. The memory was fuzzy, like he was looking at the world through seawater.

“Hm. Okay, thanks, Bran,” she said with a smile. “Try to rest for a minute, okay? I’ll go see if I can track down your brother.”

He thought he was not tired, but moments after she left the room, he felt his lids droop and his head begin to nod. It wasn’t until he tried to roll over into a more comfortable position that he realized she had not removed the restraints.

~

Karen Lau walked down the corridor with the measured steps of a woman who knew she was on the verge of losing control. Nurses moved aside without question, groups of them thinning out to allow her to pass. When she got to the elevators, she punched the call button and waited impatiently, tapping the toe of her low heel against the tiled floor. Overhead, a speaker buzzed to life, and a doctor she barely knew was called to the ER. The elevator arrived, and she rode it down to the third floor, stepping out briskly just as the door opened, sending a flock of med students scattering. She moved through them without a word and continued down the hall, focusing on the
click click
of her heels instead of the whirling thoughts she had relegated to the back of her mind.

She turned a corner sharply and took a few more steps, then leaned into the lab door, which opened easily under her weight. At the far end of the lab, Thad was still hunched over a microscope, scribbling figures onto a pad of paper and punching numbers into a nearby laptop.

“Thad,” she barked.

He jumped at the sound and turned to face her; when he did, she held up the two new vials of blood and said, “New samples from one of the patients. I want you to run the same tests, and I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

Nodding, he stood up from the stool and stretched.

“And I want you to look up a pharm company. Brandon said he was a part of a trial with a company called ‘Argo’ or something like that.”

“Internet is down,” he answered.

“You’ve got the reference books. Check those,” she replied, exasperated. She stepped forward and set the vials in a holder on the nearest desk, then turned on her heel and headed back to the door.

“Where are you going?” Thad called after her.

Quietly, she said, “I have to go put my nurses in quarantine.”

~

The lights were still out when they pulled off the freeway at Pearl City. The only illumination came from the eerie glow of flames that lit a cloud of smoke hanging low in the sky. Kai hadn’t said much since blowing past the Marine checkpoint; they had been alone on the freeway for miles, driving in the slow lane, watching for the signs to tell them when to exit. With only the moon to light the landscape, it was difficult to tell where they were at any given time.

“Must be a fire somewhere,” Paul commented as they neared the end of the off-ramp. Sirens wailed in the distance, too far off to be approaching the nearest plume of smoke billowing up only a few blocks to the north. Kai left the truck’s brights on and surveyed the crossroad at the intersection, trying to get a read on the atmosphere they were driving into. A block to the east, the road was jammed with cars that had been left in the road by their owners; most in the front were pulled off near the curbs, but toward the back of the cluster, drivers had simply stopped in the middle of the road. He thought he could see the evidence of a crash just beyond the reach of his vision and wondered if that was what had caused the gridlock. But he was unnerved by the absence of drivers, onlookers, or paramedics. To the west the roads were clearer, and so he turned right and headed that direction, watching for a convenient cross street where he could cut across and head back toward the police station.

“I guess everyone evacuated,” Jones offered. It was clear he was feeling the same uncanny sense of quiet as Kai, and as they moved along the streets, their shared tension only grew. At a corner, they passed a two-door coupe that had veered off the road and hit a fire hydrant. Water gushed out in torrents, flooding the street and refracting the light of the moon and smoke cloud. Kai slowed the truck to look inside the car, but found the driver’s side door had been left open, and no one appeared to be inside.

“There’s blood on the pavement,” Paul said quietly from the passenger seat.

Soon after, they passed a cell-phone storefront, where the plate glass had been shattered and the displays looted. Figures moved furtively inside the store, and a few shadowed faces looked out and studied them as they passed. A man standing near the front window wearing a black beanie and camo jacket was pulling handfuls of items off the shelves, shoving them into an already full backpack. When it became clear that they would not stop, he grinned, displaying a row of mocking white teeth in the dark. Kai clenched his jaw and turned his eyes back to the street in front of him.
Sarah is your only responsibility
, he told himself, and kept driving.

“It’s so creepy how there’s no one out.” Jones spoke up again a few minutes later. They had passed another minor wreck, with no sign of injured drivers, police presence, or ambulance. The streets were mostly empty of cars; only the intersections were occasionally blocked by a mess of unmanned vehicles. He drove slowly after nearly smashing into the back of a parked car left in a turn lane.

“They probably just want to get everyone off the street,” Kai said, trying to sound confident. “Get everyone home, or to the evacuation centers or whatever, and they’ll sort this stuff out when the power is back on.”

“Do you think it’s a terrorist attack?” Jones asked.

Shaking his head slowly, Kai answered, “I’m not sure, man. I have no idea.”

They had just weaved their way through a jammed intersection when Kai happened to glance down at the dashboard.

“Shit,” he said gruffly. “We need gas.” The needle hovered right above empty on the gauge, and he knew immediately that he would not want to have to make any stops with Sarah in the car. Despite his best efforts to keep himself and everyone else calm, he felt the uncomfortable, static-like energy that was fueled by fear building in his muscles. Whatever had happened to Lani and to Brandon was a symptom of something bigger going on; he was becoming more and more certain of that as they drove deeper into the city.

Paul pointed down the street.

“Station,” he said.

Kai nodded as he slowed the truck and turned off the headlights.

“Okay. We’re going to stop and fill up the tank. Keep your eyes open for anyone on the street. Anyone.” He could hear the tension in his own voice and see it reflected in Paul’s face. Jones sat in the backseat, peering out into the darkness, his arms crossed over his chest.

They slowly pulled into the station and alongside a pump. He cracked the windows and turned the truck off, then sat in the driver’s seat listening. He was used to quiet out on the farm; some nights the way the wind moved through the taro fields made his hair stand on end, and he would remember the stories his grandpa told him as a child, about the dead warriors who stalked the foothills, or the myth of the taro that said the plant itself was grown from the dead body of a god so that he could live again. But he was never truly afraid of the quiet in the fields or the hills around his home. Now, sitting in the truck, surrounded by another kind of silence, a heavy, expectant, foreboding stillness, he felt the hair on his neck and arms and legs prick up almost painfully. The only sound he heard was a very distant siren, just a tiny, shrill whine edging along the outer rim of the city.

They saw no one moving on the streets or in the gas station. But this, Kai realized, posed an entirely new problem. With the power out and the station unmanned, he had no way to purchase gas or even pump it. He frowned and considered his options.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said, the sound of his voice making Paul jump.

“What?” his brother asked.

“We can’t pump the gas without power.”

“We can siphon it,” Jones responded immediately. Kai turned to look at his brother’s friend, who shrugged and smiled mischievously. “It’s Hawaii, man,” was his only response to Kai’s questioning face.

“We need a hose, and something to put the gas in,” said Jones, his tone getting slightly more somber as the thought of getting out of the truck settled in his mind. He jerked his head toward the station and said, “We can probably find something in there.”

“We should all go,” Paul chimed in. He had his eyes locked on his brother, and Kai could see that he was afraid too.

He had specifically chosen the pump farthest from the station to give them enough time to react if they found looters, or someone else, waiting inside for someone to stop. Now Kai regretted that decision; the same fifty feet of open lot that would have alerted them to someone approaching the truck would now work in the same way against them. He briefly considered moving the truck closer, but decided that might draw even more attention. If they had managed to pull up to the pump without alerting someone inside, a stealthy approach was their best bet. He pulled the keys from the ignition and his bat from beneath his seat, then opened the door and stepped out of the truck. Paul and Jones followed immediately.

“Make sure you lock it,” Jones whispered. He walked with a slight hunch, clearly feeling exposed outside of the cab. Paul leaned over the side of the bed and fished around for a second. When he stepped away, he was holding the tire iron.

Jones raised an eyebrow. “Nice,” he hissed.

Kai led them straight across the lot toward the back of the mini-mart. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he noted that there was no broken glass on the asphalt near any of the windows or the door. He took it as a good sign, but was still unwilling to approach the store head-on. The station was positioned on a corner and backed up to a row of broken-down duplexes, all sitting dark and quiet, their windows covered in wrought iron bars on the outside and foil or sheets on the inside. A rotting wooden fence separated the last backyard in the row from the lot and alley behind the gas station. Trash lined the fence and rustled with the movement of the breeze, highlighting the quiet that pervaded their surroundings.

They hugged the fence as closely as Kai dared to take them, but he was careful to keep a few feet between them and the wood, knowing that it would provide a poor defense from anyone hiding in the dark yard that lay behind it. He thought he would be able to watch the alley in front of them and keep an awareness of his periphery, but he found that his vision had narrowed so that he had to swivel his head every few moments to maintain a good scope of their environment. Once they were within a few feet of the store’s outside wall and he was relatively certain that no one was hiding in the alley, he put a shoulder to the stucco and snuck forward toward the first of three windows. He was only inches from the glass when he stopped to check behind him. Jones had positioned himself between the two brothers, Kai saw with mild irritation; he had hoped not to have Paul bringing up the rear. But his younger brother gave him a thin smile and brisk nod, signaling him to continue on. He clutched the tire iron with both hands, keeping it in the half windup that Kai had taught him when they were much younger and playing baseball with dirt clods.