Lock In (Lock In, #1)(66)

“Is it always like this?” Tayla asked.

“My job?”

“Yes.”

“This is my first week on the job,” I said. “So, so far? Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Like I wish I had decided to be the typical rich kid and been a sponge on my parents,” I said.

“You don’t really mean that,” Tayla said.

“No,” I said. “But at the moment I really want to feel like I did.”

Tayla came over and rested a hand on my arm. “I’m the house doctor,” she said. “If you need help you know where I am.”

“I do,” I said.

“Promise me you’ll try to get some sleep tonight.”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay.” She turned to go.

“Tayla,” I said. “Thanks for tonight. It means a lot to me that you helped my partner.”

“That’s my job,” Tayla said. “I mean, you saw me help a man who two minutes earlier was planning to bash my head in with a bat. I wouldn’t do any less for someone you care about.”





Chapter Twenty

“YOU TOOK YOUR time,” Vann said, as I walked into the room.

“Tayla wanted to talk,” I said, walking the bourbon over to her. “She’s worried about the both of us.”

“Seems fair,” Vann said, taking the cup. “Both of us survived an assassination attempt tonight. I’m worried about the both of us too.” She took a sip from the cup. “Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

“I thought we were saving story time until after the march,” I said.

“We were,” Vann said. “But then your friend Tony showed up with his discovery, and then someone tried to put a bullet into my head. So I’ve decided that sooner is better than later for story time.”

“All right,” I said.

“This is going to wander a bit,” Vann warned.

“I’m all right with that,” I said.

“I’m forty,” Vann said. “I was sixteen when I got sick. This was during the first wave of infections, when they were still figuring out what the hell to do about it. I lived in Silver Spring and there was a party I wanted to go to with friends in Rockville, but Rockville was quarantined because there was a Haden’s outbreak. I didn’t care, because I was sixteen and stupid.”

“Like any sixteen-year-old,” I said.

“Exactly. So me and my friends got into a car, found a way in that didn’t have a roadblock on it, and went to the party. No one at the party looked sick to me when we got there, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I finally got back home around three and my dad was waiting for me. He thought I was drunk and asked me to breathe so he could smell my breath. I coughed on him like an * and then I went to bed.”

Vann paused to take another sip out of her cup. I waited for what I knew was coming next.

“Three days later I felt like my entire body had swelled. I had a temperature, I was raspy, my head hurt. Dad was feeling the same way. My mother and my sister felt fine, so my dad told them to go over to her sister’s so she wouldn’t get sick.”

“Not a good idea,” I said. They had probably been infected but weren’t showing symptoms yet. That’s how Haden’s spread as far as it did.

“No,” Vann agreed. “But this was early days so they were still trying to figure these things out. They left and Dad and I watched TV and drank coffee and waited to feel better. After a couple of days we both thought the worst was over.”

“And then the meningitis hit,” I said.

“And then the meningitis hit. I thought my head was going to explode. My father called 911 and told them what was going on. They came to our house in hazmat suits, grabbed us, and sent us over to Walter Reed, which is where second-stage Haden’s victims were sent. I was there for two weeks. I almost died right at the beginning. They pumped some experimental serum in me that gave me a seizure. I tensed up so hard I ended up breaking my jaw.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What happened to your father?”

“He didn’t get any better,” Vann said. “The meningitis stage fried up his brain. He went into a coma a couple of days after we got to Walter Reed and died a month later. I was there when we unplugged him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” Vann said. She took another sip. “What really sucks is that my dad was one of those people who made a big fuss out of wanting to donate his organs when he died. But when he died, we weren’t allowed to donate any of his organs. They didn’t want someone to get his kidneys and the Haden virus too. We asked Walter Reed if they wanted to use his body for research, and they told us that they already had more bodies for that than they could use. So we ended up cremating him. All of him. He would have hated that.”

“What happened to your mother and sister?” I asked. “Did they get sick?”

“Gwen had a low fever for about three days and was fine,” Vann said. “Mom never got sick at all.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Vann said. “So, then I spent my next three years being self-destructive and in therapy, because I felt guilty about killing my dad.”