As she always did before entering, she sucked in a deep, preparatory breath.Serenity. Everything else, she left at the door.
Slowly, she opened the door, pleased to see that the curtains were open, the view absolutely spectacular, as always. Well, calmly spectacular—an English garden in the middle of West Virginia, not quite in bloom, though buds had started to spring up everywhere.
The nurse, who’d likely been reading to Fiona, stood up quickly. From her lap, hidden beneathAnne of Green Gables, a mobile phone dropped to the floor with a thud. So,notreading.
She cleared her throat and stared at the young lady, who couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“May I have a moment with my daughter, please…uh…”
“Catherine.”
Ah yes. She and the nurse shared a name—though spelled differently. How could she possibly have forgotten?
“Yes. Catherine. Thank you.” She smiled as the woman left the room, then waited until the footsteps faded before letting her eyes take in her sweet, perfect baby, frozen, eyes staring blindly ahead.
Every morning and every night, she came through this door, and every single time, this sight was like a spear through her chest.
She sank into the armchair she kept close to the bed and grasped Fiona’s cold thin white hand.
“There’s news, pumpkin.” She gulped back an unexpected wave of excitement. “Remember that man I told you about, who stole from us all those years ago?”
Fiona moved slightly, giving Katherine quite a start before she realized she was squeezing her hand too tight. She loosened her hold with an effort and leaned forward to stroke her daughter’s cheek. “We’re so close, my darling. So close to having a viable virus. And you know what this means, don’t you?”
Oh my, Katherine was breathing hard. But this was a lot to happen at once. The virus, first of all, showing up after all this time. Goodness, the excitement of that! And while the team at the South Pole wasn’t exactly the most efficient, things were happening now. Change was coming. She could feel it.
“All of our hard work is coming to fruition. Men like the ones who hurt you…Terrorists,” she breathed, hating the word, but needing to say it aloud every once in a while. Needing to remember the man attacking the school. Needing the ache of memory—the physical blow to her belly when she’d received the call. The news stories she’d watched for hours…days. Until they’d stopped airing them. And theangereven at that.Howdareyou stop talking about the death of my family? The loss of my grandchildren? One daughter dead, the other forever asleep.Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, they called it now, which she much preferred to the phrasevegetative state.
A syndrome was something she might wake from someday. A vegetable was grated, cut up, cooked into soup.
“We willobliteratethem.” The words emerged harsh and certain. She softened her voice with another long, slow stroke of Fiona’s pasty cheek.
Really, Catherine needed to take her out a bit more often. Even with the chill, she should give Fiona a little sunlight instead of sitting in here watching whatever it was on her telephone. Or texting some boyfriend. This generation…good God.
Odd, because Catherine wasn’t that much younger than Fiona. But she’d never let her daughters turn into one of the zombies. Never.
“I know you’re kinder than me, my dear, but I can’t forgivethat manfor stealing from us all those years ago. He took our virus.” The man who’d stolen it had called them evil when he’d done it. Vowing they’d never get their hands on it.
Well, he’d been wrong, hadn’t he?
* * *
Ford was alive.
Pummeled and shot and bleeding out in an underground forest of ice, yes, but alive.
Angel wrapped her arms tighter around him. She needed to keep him warm, then get him to safety. No. No, first she had to stop the bleeding. She could do that. Stop bleeding.
What she couldn’t do was lose it right now.
Okay. Okay. She blinked back the tears that threatened to freeze her eyelids shut and took a look around.
As fast as she could, she dragged herself the few dozen feet, over Sampson’s body, back to the sled. She pulled out a pack and rifled through it. Clothing. That would work. And the first aid kit. Sleeping bags and mats, too.
She yanked at the bag, dragged it behind her, and started to crab-crawl back to Ford, then thought better of it. The sled would come in handy and she needed to be efficient with her movements. Quickly, haphazardly, she pushed everything she wouldn’t need from the sled, then hesitated, staring at the five metal tubes. She ran her hand over the nearest one, gleaming at her like some cursed relic from the past. In a movie, she’d leave them buried for the next poor person to find.
Yeah, well, this isn’t a movie. And I’m not cursed.
She hefted the ice core back onto the sled and zipped the whole thing closed. She’d come back for them.
