Prep For Doom Read online

  Darting a panicked glance over at her sister, she had no idea what to think when she saw another guy, covered head to toe in black, gingerly picking her up. Sidney snapped her eyes back to the guy pinning her to the ground and demanded, “Who are you?”

  “Not a PFD soldier, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He let his hands fall from her shoulders to the ground and shoved himself up to a crouch. Reaching a hand out to Sidney, he clearly expected her to take it, but she pressed herself into the asphalt instead. “I’ll explain everything,” the guy said, “but not here. It’s not safe.”

  “And going with you is?” Sidney demanded.

  Hissing at her to be quiet, the guy’s face contorted in irritation. “We just saved your life. Could you be quiet and just trust us for a few minutes until we can get you back to the safe house?”

  “Saved my life?” Sidney was dumbfounded. They had stopped them from escaping. Why would she trust them?

  Clearly out of patience, the guy yanked Sidney up from the ground and dragged her over to the edge of the dock. For a moment, she thought he was going to toss her over, but instead, he pointed to a rounded beacon that flashed a soft light every few seconds. It wasn’t the only one. They were lining the dock, like a barrier. Like…

  “It’s a fence,” the guy grumbled “Like the kind used to keep dogs from running away. Except this one isn’t electric. It’s biologic. It doesn’t need a collar. All it needs is the biological deterrents that PFD has been pumping into you since you got here.”

  “What?” Sidney gasped. She wasn’t exactly surprised by the idea that PFD was somehow monitoring her and Vivi. In fact, she’d suspected it after the first hour when no alarms announced their escape. She’d suspected something more traditional, though, like cameras.

  “The amber liquid in the IV,” he said. “It’s loaded with deterrents. It won’t let you leave.”

  Sidney sagged against him. “No.”

  It wasn’t a refusal to believe. It was her last, empty protest. His words were enough to convince her that escape would never come, but he must have felt she needed proof. Sidney didn’t bother to struggle when he put his hand over her mouth to smother the inevitable screams and shoved her arm toward the beacon, where it immediately began to burn her skin. The pain was horrible, but nothing compared to the way she broke in that moment.

  There was no way out.

  “We have to go,” he said.

  She nodded, but she had no strength left to move on her own. The last of her effort went into looking behind her for Vivi. Relief flooded her when she spotted the second guy in black cradling Vivi against his chest. She couldn’t tell if her sister was asleep, unconscious, or just too exhausted to lift her head—but she was safe. Maybe.

  “My name is Harley,” the guy holding up Sidney said. “Ellis is the one carrying your sister. We’re going to take you somewhere safe, but we need to leave now before PFD finds out we’ve made contact. They were happy to let you two wander around when they thought you couldn’t escape, but if they find out we have you, all hell will break loose.”

  His words inspired a thousand questions, but Sidney was too numb to ask any of them. She knew she should be more curious, or wary, or careful. Why? What was the point? She was trapped here. Forever. Did it really matter if they were in the hands of PFD or whoever these guys were?

  Harley pushed her to run, and she did. The fear that had pushed her all day was strangely absent…until Ellis and Harley came to a stop in front of an old metal door hidden behind a false wall that looked like something off of Lost. Sidney balked, but sirens began to wail through the night air a moment later, and Sidney was shoved forward into the darkness.

  Stumbling, she struggled to get her feet under her before she face planted into the damp earth beneath her. A hand reaching out to grab her was the only thing that saved her. “Sorry,” Harley mumbled. “I didn’t mean to shove you that hard.”

  He helped Sidney steady herself, and someone else flicked on a light. Blinking in surprise, Sidney gripped Harley’s arm, even though hiding behind him was the last thing she wanted to do. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ellis setting Vivi gently down on a cot to her left. Sidney reluctantly let her concern shift to the group of anxious faces staring at her in amazement.

  “Where am I?” she demanded.

  Sidney doubted Harley was the leader of this group, given that he looked like he was barely older than she was, but he was the one to answer her question. “This is our safe house. PFD has no idea it’s here. It used to be an old bomb shelter, built completely under the table, so it’s not on any city schematics.”

  “How do you know that?” Sidney demanded.

  “Because this is where I grew up,” Harley said. “My great grandfather built this.”

  That was the first piece of news to really shock her. “You lived here, before the outbreak?”

  The few answers she’d been able to get out of the other residents had convinced her that Staten Island had been completely sterilized before being turned into a promised safe haven. On the outside, everyone had been told that the majority of Staten Island’s original inhabitants had been taken down by the virus and those that remained were being kept safe from further contamination.

  The survivors willing to talk when they first arrived told a different story. Even those who had outlasted the virus were now gone, either put down as punishment for rebellion or escape attempts, or victims of the same experiments Vivi and Sidney had been subjected to.

  “I thought everyone who lived here was dead,” Sidney said quietly.

  “Most are,” an older man said, “but a few of us survived and went into hiding.”

  “What’s the point?” Sidney asked. “There’s no way out.”

  Harley and the older man shared a look. A whole conversation seemed to pass between them in a matter of seconds. Sidney had no clue what the details were, but she saw enough to understand that they were trying to decide whether or not to trust her. A few minutes earlier, she had been the one fearing them. She wasn’t exactly sure when that fear had turned into acceptance, if not outright trust, but whoever these people were, they were at least better than PFD.

  That thought heartened her, but the memory of rantings from her mother put her on edge only a second later. “Are you part of that Prep for Doom movement?” Her eyes darted around the room, pausing only a split second on each face.

  “Why does it matter who we’re aligned with?” Ellis asked. “We saved you and your sister’s lives. Isn’t that enough to earn your trust?”

  His expression was indignant, but Harley put a restraining hand on his arm. “Of course it matters to her,” he said to his friend. Turning to Sidney, he continued. “No, we’re not preppers. We’re just survivors. Somehow, we didn’t fall to the virus or the experiments PFD put us through. We want the truth, Sidney, and we think you and Vivian have it.”

  “What?” Sidney backed up against the concrete wall behind her, pressing herself against its cool surface as fear bubbled up inside her chest. A million questions sprang to her lips, tumbling over themselves until one tipped the balance and stumbled out. “How do you know our names?”

  Sidney had assumed—well, as much as she’d actually had the presence of mind to think about it—that these guys had been watching the docks when she and Vivi ran up, and that they had tackled them to keep them from getting burned up by the beacons in their foolish escape attempt. Could they have actually been searching for them? Why would they think either of them knew anything? They didn’t.

  “Everyone here knows your names,” the older guy said. “You’re the only two girls here who are guarded around the clock. Even when Mrs. Otis steps out, there are always a dozen cameras on you, guards put in place around the city to watch for you, patrols that know your faces better than their own mothers.”

  Shaking her head, Sidney stared at him. She knew they were being watched carefully, but she thought everyone was. “Why?” her mouse-like vo
ice asked.

  The older guy and Harley shared another look. When Harley received a nod, he turned back to Sidney. “Your mother brought you to Staten Island, right? Edith Jaynes?”

  “Yes, so?” Sidney shrugged in confusion. He asked the question like the answer was important, but who cared if her mother had lied to them, tricked them into following her as a trade for her own life. It didn’t even work.

  “Do you know who your mother was?”

  Now Sidney was really confused. “Of course I do. She was my mom. She worked on vaccines for PFD. Chicken pox. That’s it. She wasn’t anything special.”

  Ellis’s eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to discern whether or not she was lying just by looking at the freckles sprinkled across her cheekbones. “Your mother didn’t work on a chicken pox vaccine. That’s been around for a while now.”

  “But she…she was you know, adjusting it. Viruses, they change. She had to keep working on it.”

  The older guy shook his head slowly. “If she were working on minor adjustments to the chicken pox vaccine, why did she run from PFD?”

  The soot stains. The fire in June. Every night she brought home her folders and binders, all with that horrible gray diamond on the front. She didn’t always bring home the little box with the matching logo, but they were never allowed to touch any of it.

  “She burned it all,” Sidney whispered before thinking better of it.

  Ellis, Harley, the older guy, and the others in the room all leaned forward. Their interest and eagerness was palpable. “She burned what?” the older guy demanded.

  Glancing up at the sound of his voice, Sidney immediately pressed herself back against the wall. The older guy was less than a foot away from her, his eyes burning for answers. “I don’t know,” Sidney gasped. “She never showed me what was in the binders or the box. She came home that night, went to her bedroom, started a fire, and I never saw any of it again. She didn’t bring it with us when we left our apartment for Staten Island. I swear, I don’t know what it was.”

  Harley put a hand on her shoulder, making her jump, but he didn’t remove it. Instead, he squeezed lightly and said, “Sidney, your mother wasn’t just another virologist at PFD. She studied viruses, sometimes to find a vaccine or cure, sometimes to make them worse, more deadly. To weaponize them.”

  “No,” Sidney argued, “she wouldn’t do that.”

  The older guy stepped back, letting Sidney breathe, but reached for a plain manila folder on a table behind him and held it out to her. Sidney didn’t need to be any closer to see her mother’s name on the index tab. Her head started shaking back and forth.

  “We’d heard rumors from the others, gossip that they’d overheard from some of the chattier soldiers, about a woman scientist on the AVHF virus team who was supposed to have answers about the virus because she’d been studying it longer than anyone else,” the older man said.

  “Why? Why was she studying something so terrible?” Sidney asked.

  Harley’s expression tightened. “Because of Vivian.”

  “What?” Sidney shoved his hand away and scurried back, along the wall, to gain some distance and room to think. “What does Vivi have to do with the virus? She’s immune, just like me.”

  Everyone else in the room stood stock still, not willing to risk frightening her. Only Harley took a step toward her. “You are immune, but Vivian isn’t. She never has been.”

  “But, if she wasn’t immune, she’d be dead already,” Sidney argued.

  “No,” Harley said slowly, “if your mother hadn’t been treating her with a mutated form of the virus since birth, she would have died as an infant from the blood disorder she was born with.”

  “What blood disorder?” Sidney demanded.

  “She nearly died after birth from blood clots that kept forming,” Harley said slowly. “A mutated form of AVHF saved her by attacking the platelets in her blood instead of the blood vessels. Your mother helped develop it.”

  Sidney’s head was spinning. He had to be lying. It just wasn’t possible that her mother had done something like that. But she remembered how sick Vivi had been when she was born. The doctors told her parents to prepare for the worst, and then, two nights after Vivi was born, there was the fight that changed everything. The words were lost between layers of walls and doors, but the screaming was terrible.

  She remembered how angry her dad had been, how her mom had pleaded with him. There was another voice, a man from her mom’s work named Luca. He sided with her mom, telling her dad it was the only way. It wasn’t just the fact that her dad mistrusted Luca that had put Sidney on edge, but something about his insistence that they do what he was suggesting. At six years old, Sidney didn’t understand what he meant or why they were fighting when Vivi was so sick, but when she heard the front door of the apartment slam shut, leaving only her mom and Luca’s voices, she knew in that moment that her dad would never come back.

  The file was still there for her to read, but as the pieces fell into place, her knees buckled and she sank to the floor. That was why he left. He had always been leery of her mom’s work, fearing it. Sidney could imagine the words behind their fight then…her mother suggesting the virus, using it to save their daughter…her father being terrified and angry that she would even think about infecting their child with something so deadly and unpredictable. It was a rift they couldn’t cross.

  Conflicting emotions raged through Sidney as she tried to process the idea that Vivi had been saved by a virus that had killed so many. Was it her mother’s fault the virus became so deadly? Had she twisted and manipulated it too much in her search for a permanent cure for her frail little daughter? Was it her fault so many people had died? Sidney knew her mother wouldn’t have done something like that on purpose, and her blame began to fall on the man who had pushed her to use the virus on Vivi in the first place. Saving a child had never been his end goal, Sidney was sure of that now.

  That stuff her mother had burned, it must have been about Vivi, but that realization brought up a new question. “How did you know about Vivi?”

  A girl who looked vaguely familiar stepped out from behind Harley. “My parents,” she said quietly. “They knew about Vivi. They used her case to market the potential of the virus to investors and buyers.”

  On top of everything else, that revelation was crushing. The company her mother worked for was using Vivi to sell weapons to terrorists? “But, the virus they used on Vivi, it wasn’t a weapon.”

  “It is very much a weapon,” Harley said. “Used on Vivi, it saved her life. Used on a healthy person, it would be devastating and very hard to trace.”

  This was all too much to take in. Sidney could barely process everything. Oddly, the only thing she could really focus on was the girl. She had seen her somewhere before. Narrowing her eyes, she demanded, “What’s your name?”

  “Sierra,” she said quietly. “I had no idea about any of this until Harley found Kylie and me and brought us here.” She gestured behind her, at a little girl and the teenage boy holding her. “Jake’s the one who actually found out about it. We were separated, and well, it’s a long story, but he made it to a prepper compound, hoping someone would help him come get us, but he accidentally overhead this foreign sounding guy talking about my parents…and Vivi. He came back to find me, and…” She shrugged.

  And they ended up sitting in this strange room, dismantling what was left of Sidney’s life.

  As more questions than she could count poured down on her in a deluge, her lips formed a single question. “What do you want from us?”

  Harley kneeled down next to her, not risking another attempt at a comforting touch, but near enough that his body heat crossed the space between them and hummed against her skin. “We want the virus in Vivian’s blood. It’s the only one that’s stayed stable without killing the host.”

  “So?” Sidney asked, her voice empty. “PFD has been taking her blood for weeks and they haven’t saved anyone.”

 
“PFD isn’t trying to save anyone,” Harley said. “They’re just trying to cover up their mistakes. Maybe they’ll find a cure using Vivi’s blood and swoop in as the world’s savior before the virus runs its course; but if they don’t, they’ll need to hide any evidence of what happened to Vivi in order to protect themselves.”

  “So PFD did this on purpose? Released this virus in New York?” Sidney asked.

  “We know they created it,” Harley said. “The outbreak was supposedly an accident, but what we’ve been able to learn suggests there’s more to the story, and Luca is somehow involved.”

  Sidney finally looked up and met Harley’s eyes. “What do you want the virus for?”

  “To show people the truth.” His voice and eyes were earnest. Everything about him begged her to trust him. He was a stranger. Sure, he had saved them from being charred by the beacons, but how could she bring herself to trust him? Trust any of them? She hadn’t even been able to trust her own mother.

  “How?” Sidney asked.

  “Vivi carries the virus. It’s a different form, but it can be linked to AVHF and they can both be traced back to Peter Franklin Donalds,” Harley explained. “We still don’t understand how or why the virus was released, but we do know PFD created it. Exposing their role in this is the only way to take away their power. People keep coming here, becoming prisoners and lab rats. It’s only going to get worse until we stop them.

  Stepping forward, Ellis squared up in front of Sidney. “You only have two choices. You can let PFD find you and keep draining your sister until they finally get what they want, or you can help us put an end to the war that’s brewing.”

  “War?” Sidney asked.

  “A few weeks back, we caught someone trying to escape.”