“You know it will take years—maybe four or five years—for a drug to get FDA approval. That’s a conservative estimate.”
“I’m counting on it,” June said, letting the hand drop. “We want the time. We need it. As long as you publicize the development of the drug, as long as Perrone knows you know about us, we might be safe. If there is such a thing as being safe.”
“Jesus,” Wes said. “How do I explain this to everyone else? You’ve terrorized them. Us. Your”—he searched for a word—“daughter shot one of our group in the head. Whatever Andy says about that, the bite, the infestation, it doesn’t matter. This is the guy who held an assault rifle to our heads and marched us through the woods all night. Why didn’t you just kidnap me and leave everyone else alone?”
“Because OLE procedure would have called for a halt to the excursion and immediate return to Quarantine, which would have set off alarms. As for terrorizing you, yes, I wish it hadn’t had to be that way. I wish we could have led you off kindly and been assured that you’d wait patiently for an explanation. But you know and I know that wouldn’t have worked. As for the man Violet shot, I believe Andy when he says he was dying. But it’s unfortunate. It wasn’t part of the plan.”
Marta said, “And who’s to say this plan will work any better than that one did?”
“It did work,” June said. “You’re here. You’re hearing me out. The question is: Will you help?”
Wes looked at Marta. Thinking of all she knew and hadn’t told him, even now—and could she? could she confess that she was married to a man who’d done the things June was saying he’d done?—she dropped her gaze. What would she do when all of this was over? Return to that house, that bed? Resume her place at David’s side?
But how else would she see Sal and Enzo again?
June was holding her hand out to Wes again. He considered it for an uncomfortably long moment, letting it hang in space. He was reaching out to take it when a cry rose up behind them, in the village, and footsteps pounded their way. Marta stiffened, startled. Her scalp prickled. She could hear the rasping exhalations of runners—sprinters—and braced herself to be leveled by a stampede.
Andy drew to a careening stop in front of them and hunched over. He put one hand on his knee and gasped. The other he pointed uphill, toward the Town Hall.
“She took out Miles and Leeda,” he said hoarsely. “She’s gone.”
“Who?” June said. “Who are you talking about?”
“Tia.” He drew fully to a stand, mopped his face dry with a rag, and stared balefully at Marta and Wes. “She killed Miles and Leeda. She disappeared. She has their weapons.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Wes said. “What do you mean, killed them? Are you sure they’re not just unconscious?”
Andy bum-rushed Wes, knocking him to his back, and Marta huffed out a startled little squeak that might have been funny under other circumstances. Andy slapped Wes’s cheek, leaving behind a dark print. Backhanded the other cheek, streaking it, too. There was a smell in the air, iron and mud, and Marta grasped suddenly that she was seeing blood, a lot of it. Andy’s fingers dragged red marks across Wes’s microsuit as Randall hauled him off by his armpits, and he screamed, “She bashed their heads in, you piece of shit! She murdered them!”
Wes lay on his back, too petrified to move. Marta knew the feeling. Her knees were so weak they couldn’t even knock together.
The expression on June’s face was cold. Cold. “Go after her,” she said softly to Andy, who was still being loosely restrained by the guards. “Get Roz. You know what to do. As for the two of you”—she turned to Wes and Marta—“well, I’m afraid this changes things.”
Eleven
Within three hours of Tia’s escape, the hostages, once again with wrists zip-tied, were moved roughly at gunpoint, through a driving rain, from Town Hall to a grim corrugated storage building with narrow horizontal windows positioned near the ceiling, so that only the tops of trees and a wedge of night sky were visible. A single doorway separated inside from out, and it would be guarded at all times, June promised, by an armed villager. A curtain strung up in a corner hid a waste bucket. “The facilities,” June said, loading those two words with more malice than Edie would have imagined possible. The floor was oiled dirt.
The group clumped together, cold and soaked, in the middle of the room, trembling as June directed Joe and Randall to pat them each down. Their backpacks had already been confiscated. Into a satchel the shoes went. “What’s going on?” Lee kept saying. “What are you doing?”
“Where’s Tia?” Edie dared to ask. Afraid of the answer.
“Gone,” June said. She gave Edie a shrewd look. “She killed two of our villagers and took off. A nineteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy. Good kids. Really good kids. They were found in the woods with their heads bashed in.”
Edie looked at Wes before she could stop herself. His eyes widened, and he shook his head, an anguished expression flickering across his face. I didn’t know she was going to do that, the headshake said. It wasn’t part of the plan.
“Those so-called good kids had guns,” Berto said.
“They weren’t loaded. But that’s not a mistake we’ll make again.”
“What are you going to do to us?” Wes asked.
“I haven’t decided,” June said. “I’d hoped to work this out peacefully. I had thought I could have you back on your way home in a few weeks’ time. But that required some trust and goodwill.”
Marta snorted. “Trust and goodwill.”
“That’s funny to you?” June asked.
“It’s absurd to me,” said Marta tiredly. “And not funny at all.”
June’s lip curled. “I was talking to Wes when this news came in.” She was addressing the larger group now. “We seemed to be close to an understanding. A mutually beneficial arrangement. Maybe Wes will tell you about it. Maybe that understanding isn’t out of reach. But I can’t look at any of you right now.” With that, she walked out. Randall followed her, eyeing each of them with cold amusement, and pulled the door closed behind him. A deadbolt turned.
The rain roared against the metal roof. It was a sound Edie normally loved, but tonight it felt like an assault. Like the sky was falling in.
“What’s this arrangement she mentioned?” Ken Tanaka asked. All eyes shifted to Wes.
He squirmed under the scrutiny. There were red streaks marking the chest of his microsuit, and angry red blotches on both of his cheeks. June had left them with a single lantern, and it flickered wanly across his face. “It’s a long story. Marta, you’ll have to help me tell it.”
—
“I don’t believe it,” Lee said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“You think I’m lying?” Wes asked.