12
I HALF-STUMBLED, HALF-CRAWLED ALONG THE metal walkway as the feeling returned to my legs. My hands were scored from pulling myself up the grated catwalk. When I reached a fork in the walkway, I looked left, then right, and saw Jamie and Stella standing maybe a hundred feet away.
I didn’t have to say a word before they began to run toward me. Stella slipped in her socked feet, and she grabbed the railing to steady herself, dropping some files she’d been carrying under her arm, but soon they were by my side. They didn’t ask what had happened. They didn’t say anything at all. Each of them took a shoulder, and hauled me up. They half-carried me out of the hallway that led up a brutal, narrow flight of stairs and eventually outdoors.
“We got worried you weren’t coming out,” Jamie finally said as the three of us collapsed, panting, against the concrete building we’d just escaped from.
“What about Ebola?” I asked breathlessly.
Jamie coughed and wheezed, then said, “What’s a little hemorrhagic fever between friends?”
I smiled, despite everything.
“Guys?” Stella asked. “We should probably not stay here.”
Probably not.
“We need to hide,” Jamie said. “Until you can walk.”
He was right of course, but we didn’t have too many options. The building I practically crawled out of had to be the uppermost level of the maintenance shed. It was mostly hidden by trees, but it was nearly dawn and they weren’t that thick. We could even see Horizons—part of the treatment facility, anyway—in the distance, on No Name Island. Unfortunately, that meant that someone standing on No Name Island might be able to see us, too.
I looked down at my useless legs, smeared with blood and dirt. I felt a twinge of panic. “What if I can’t walk?” I swallowed thickly. “What if—what if—”
Stella knelt at eye level. “What does it feel like?” she asked gently.
“Like parts of my feet and legs are just dead, but other parts—other parts are stinging.”
“I remember feeling like that once, in there,” Jamie said, glancing at the closed door. “I woke up and couldn’t feel my legs.”
“What did she do to you?” I asked, but I was scared to hear his answer. Why would she make it so we couldn’t walk? What had she done to us?
“It wasn’t Kells, it was Wayne,” Jamie said. “And he wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”
Not comforting. But at least Jamie could walk now. Which meant I would again, too. I hoped.
“How long did it take to wear off?”
Jamie shrugged. “There were no clocks, not that I saw anyway, so I’m not sure, but I think an hour or two maybe? I felt strange after . . . like my limbs just floated away—like they were clouds.”
“A spinal block, maybe?” Stella suggested. “So you couldn’t feel what they were doing to you.”
“You know this how?” I asked.
“My mom’s a nurse.”
“Can I just take a second to say, I am so happy they’re dead,” Jamie said, running a hand over his scalp, then over his face. He peeked at me through two of his fingers. “She is dead, right?”
Oh yes. “Yes.”
“What happened in there?” Jamie asked me.
“It wasn’t really Noah. It was just his voice. Kells recorded it, played it, played me.”
“So, ’twas a trap?”
“Yup,” I said. “You were right.” I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Mara,” Jamie said.
“It’s okay.”
“No, about—about Noah, I mean.”
“He’s not dead.” Jamie said nothing. I pushed myself up until my spine was straight. “I don’t know how I know it, but I do. He’s out there, somewhere.”
“Then why isn’t he here?”
That was a very good question. One I would do anything to answer.
“Kells said the building collapsed,” Jamie started.
“She told me that too. But that doesn’t mean it’s true.”
There was no way to know without going back there. But even if it had collapsed, there was more to Horizons than just the treatment facility, we now knew. And if Jamie survived, and Stella survived, I had to believe Noah survived too. He was the only one of us who could heal. He had to be alive.
“Do you still have the tape?” I asked. Jamie’s forehead creased. “The tape Jude made me?”
“Stella had it last, I think,” Jamie said.
I spun around. “Where’d she go?”
Just then, a rusty hinge creaked. Our heads snapped up, but it was only Stella, emerging from the building holding three bags. One was Jamie’s, another must’ve been Stella’s, and the last one—the last one belonged to Noah.
An image of him appeared in my mind, of Noah standing with that bag over his shoulder, guitar case in hand, dripping wet from the rain, waiting to be led into the Horizons Treatment Center so he could save me. My heart leapt. “Where’d you find this one?”
“She kept our things—boxes of stuff—in a little room near the morgue,” Stella said, handing the bags to me and Jamie. “I guess if we died or something, she wanted to make sure we were in our own clothes and not hospital gowns or whatever. Stage the scene.”
I wondered what she’d done with my things. How she’d planned on staging that scene.
I gripped Noah’s bag with what was probably excessive force. “How did you know this was—” No, not “was.” Is. “How did you know this is his?”
“There were cubbies labeled with our names. And his guitar was next to it.”
His guitar. He wouldn’t have left that behind. An ache rose in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.
“Did you look in the morgue?” Jamie asked Stella.
“Um . . . ” She shot me a nervous glance. I both did and didn’t want her to answer.
“No,” she finally said.
“One of us should.” Jamie’s voice was soft.
I shook my head. “Noah isn’t in there.”
“If you don’t want to go, I will,” Jamie said.
I thought of what he would find there if he went—the blood, Kells’s body. I thought I should go with him, to explain it.
Stella decided to come with us, and the two of them helped me up and let me use them as crutches as we opened the door and began the trek back down.
Despite our lack of shoes, our footsteps echoed loudly on the metal grates, and I knew I wasn’t the only one wondering if what we were doing was smart. If we weren’t alone down there, someone else would easily hear us. But we kept walking (in my case, limping) anyway. We had to see what was there . . . or wasn’t.
The door to the morgue was slightly ajar, and a bloody, smeared handprint wrapped around the edge, just beneath the handle. It was mine. Jamie and Stella just stared at it. I pushed the steel door open with my fingertips.
Dr. Kells was where I’d left her, her dead eyes fixed on nothing. Stella’s chin wobbled as she surveyed the scene. “What happened?” she whispered. But Jamie spoke before I could answer.
“I’ll look in the drawers,” he said, but made no move to enter the room. I urged both of them forward, breaking the spell. We stared at the rows of large metal cabinets, wanting and not wanting to know what was inside them.
In the end it was Stella who opened the first drawer. I leaned on Jamie as she unlocked it. We collectively held our breath as she slid out the tray, and collectively sighed when it turned out to be empty. Every nerve in my body felt raw and exposed as she unlocked drawer after drawer, each of them empty, until one wasn’t.
A sheet covered a shapeless mass. No, not shapeless. Body-shaped. Person-shaped.
Stella didn’t reach for it, so I broke away from Jamie, using the wall to support myself. I slid the sheet off and found Adam. Dick-Adam. Whom I could have saved, maybe, but had chosen not to. And now he was here, and dead, like Kells and Wayne and everyone else I’d hated.
But not Noah. Not Noah.