Breathless City Read online

  “How has the city changed since you were a kid?” Xander stepped closer to Stella until they were side by side.

  “It’s worse. Completely infested. The food’ll dry out in a couple of years like everything else out here,” Stella replied.

  “Did you get into any trouble?” Xander asked, watching her.

  “Nothing that we couldn’t handle,” Stella said, and Gavin noticed the faint trace of a scowl on Xander’s face when she said “we” instead of “I.”

  Gavin shifted the box in his hands nervously, wondering if he should slow down and put some space between them. But Xander continued to ignore him, and Gavin’s curiosity drove him on.

  “Anything happen while we were away?” Stella turned the corner and started down a hallway ending in heavy double doors.

  “Sam reported a problem with Celia’s gang, and we’re following up on that now,” Xander said.

  “What sort of a problem?” Stella was calm.

  So Sam followed up on her advice to check out the other gang. But any thoughts Stella had about the mention of her friend, she kept hidden.

  “Sam was under the impression that the whole gang is dead,” Xander replied in a grim tone. His expression didn’t change at all—as if he always expected the worst.

  Stella’s eyes widened as she did a double take.

  A whole gang?

  If the numbers were comparable to Xander’s gang, that had to be at least twenty to thirty members. That many people should be able to hold off the infected. A general lack of supplies wouldn’t take out the whole group at once.

  What could cause death on that scale?

  “Let’s find out, then.” Stella pushed through the double doors.

  When the boxes were all stashed away, Stella drove them down the sand-covered road. Gavin found himself in the back of the van with several men he didn’t know. He tried to make eye contact with Sam, but the other man wasn’t looking his way, so he resigned himself to silence.

  As Gavin adjusted to the vibration and jostling of driving, he tuned out the conversations of the other men. He found his eyes drifting every so often to Stella and Xander in the front seat, trying to figure out the dynamics of their relationship.

  “Gavin,” came Sam’s voice, breaking him out of his thoughts. “Ben asked you what you do.”

  Gavin turned to look at the man that Sam indicated as Ben. He had a riot of tight black curls, graying at the edges, and a lined face. “Mechanical work mostly,” Gavin answered simply, aware that the conversations around them had ended as the other men listened for his answer.

  “So Stella found you,” Ben said, though he already knew the answer.

  Gavin nodded curtly in reply.

  Ben motioned Gavin to come closer, and he scooted over after casting one hasty glance at the front of the van. “Stay away from her,” he whispered faintly. Seeing Gavin’s frown, Ben explained, “That’s the girl Xander wants. If he thinks you’re getting between him and his girl, you’re dead.”

  “What does Stella think about him?” Gavin asked quietly before he could stop himself.

  Ben hesitated, casting a swift glance at the other men. “Doesn’t matter. Women don’t make it out of the underground as often as men. Xander would replace you easily. Seen it plenty of times before.”

  Gavin nodded in understanding. That explained a lot. It was the other men’s fear that kept them away from Stella. She was only free to hang around Sam because he was in a relationship with another woman. But just because Xander wanted Stella didn’t mean that she returned his feelings.

  “We’ll be there in five minutes,” Stella announced, watching the men in the rearview mirror. Gavin caught Stella’s eye in the mirror and held her gaze for a moment before forcing himself to look back down. He didn’t know what to do. He had never let himself get this close to anyone else before, and he wasn’t sure if he was willing to just let her go.

  It wasn’t that she was beautiful, or even that she was immune, that drew him to Stella. Gavin saw through her fierce exterior to the kindness beneath it. He knew she easily could have let him die, but she was driven to help him survive. He couldn’t think of anyone else like her who would dare to take on even a fraction of the risks Stella faced.

  The movement of the van slowed down and the brakes screeched before the van came to a stop.

  Celia’s gang lived in a building that looked like it was taken straight out of the yellowed textbook pages of fortresses built in the Middle Ages. The grand building was made of high stone towers stained gray with sand and time. The chipped lettering high on the left wall read “Hilton.” Even from the outside, an unnatural, oppressive quiet hung over the building.

  The other men looked to Sam, who crossed his arms nervously before he began walking toward the building. With the bent metal of a Swiss Army knife, Sam picked at the lock on an emergency exit until, with a soft click, the door swung forward.

  Harsh fluorescent lights illuminated the emergency stairwell, and the droning hum of electricity was the only sound to be heard. They followed Sam up the stairs, and Gavin caught more than one man clenching a sharpened weapon, more than one hand straying close to a gun holster.

  “They were on the fifth floor,” Sam said, breaking the silence. Xander nodded him on, and the group made their way up cautiously.

  Gavin heard the reactions before he saw it. The footsteps shuffled and ground to a halt, and the others ahead of him slowed down. The little groan of distaste and the soft whispered curse word probably came from Stella. He had that one extra moment to prepare himself before he followed the rest of them in.

  When Gavin walked out of the stairway and into the hall, he only saw two bodies at first, lying still on the ground. An ugly black line marked where the bodies touched the floor as gravity pulled dead blood cells down. If this dependent lividity had already set in, then these men were indeed dead and had been so for a while.

  The others were farther ahead, having passed this pair of corpses without a word. Gavin tore his eyes away and continued walking, dreading to see exactly what it would take to get a reaction out of someone like Stella, or any of the others who were accustomed to death.

  At first, all Gavin could see was the sleek maple table surrounded by leather chairs. It took a moment for his brain to process the devastation. Then the awareness of what had happened here in this room settled in, the weight of it pooled into the pit of his stomach, and his muscles tightened in anxiety, tense and ready to act.

  There were bodies, many of them. It was obvious from their contorted positions and from the painful grimaces still etched on their faces that none of these people had died natural deaths.

  “What the hell is this?” someone whispered.

  “I've never seen anything like it,” another one said.

  The worst part was that Gavin knew. It only had taken him one glance to recognize the symptoms. The tests they had run were still etched in his memory. He knew exactly what had happened to them, and who was responsible. The only question left for him to answer was how.

  Xander was the first one to come out of his shocked daze. He turned to Ben, who stopped gawking at the sight and snapped to attention.

  “Take a team and do a security sweep. Bring back any survivors and anything that looks out of place,” Xander directed.

  Ben signaled for four others to follow him, and they strode out of the room. From their tense expressions, some were glad for the excuse to get away from that meeting room.

  Xander turned to Sam. “How did you find out about this?” The question was asked in a quiet voice, and it wouldn’t have seemed like an out of the ordinary thing to say. Except that Stella looked quickly over at her friend in alarm before turning her head back to survey the room in a forced calm.

  Now there was nowhere left for Sam if he got kicked out of Xander’s gang, and he had no legitimate reason to have been here. More than anything else, Sam needed time to figure out a new way to keep himself and Natalia safe. He
couldn’t afford to come under suspicion.

  But Sam lied smoothly. “I wasn’t having any luck last raid, so I just came near to see if Celia’s gang was doing any better. Things were too quiet, and I thought something had to be wrong.”

  “So you entered into enemy territory alone? On nothing more than a hunch?” Xander asked skeptically.

  “I knew something big must have happened. There’s no other way a gang as big as Celia’s could be that quiet,” Sam replied, refusing to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong.

  At any rate, Xander didn’t push the issue. He kneeled close to one of the bodies before turning next to Stella. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  Stella looked carefully at the bodies on the floor. “No, never. What about you, Gavin? Have you seen this before?”

  Gavin didn’t know what to say. He just nodded his head yes. Stella faltered when she saw his nod, and Gavin wondered if he had made a mistake.

  Everyone in the room—Stella, Sam, and Xander—were all staring at him. He felt the weight of those stares. He no longer had the option to sit tight and keep the truth all to himself.

  “They died because they took defective oxygen pills,” Gavin said quietly. When no one responded to his statement, Gavin realized that he had to explain.

  “When the oxygen is harvested, the pills need to be able to withstand a lot of pressure. The pills have to be able to hold and release the right amount of gases to exchange in the lungs over time.” Gavin walked over to one of the bodies of a girl who had died clutching her chest. “Defective pills can’t hold the pressure. They go into the body and work for a while, then all the gas gets released at once. That’s why her chest is contorted, from when the pill exploded in her lungs.” Gavin lifted her hand out of the way to reveal the misshapen bulge where all the gases tried to escape. He didn’t want to mention that all the pus seeping out from her eyes, nostrils, and mouth were the liquefied remains of organs that were forced out of her. It was a horrible way to die.

  Gavin noticed that the others were all still quiet. All he had done was tell the truth. But he wondered if that had been enough.

  “You believe this guy?” Xander said, breaking the silence. He had directed the question to Stella.

  She straightened from where she had crouched to examine the body and stared Xander directly in the eye. “Yes, I do.”

  Xander scowled at her show of support. “They don’t make defective pills. I’ve never seen one in my life.”

  “They are made, but they get tested and they don’t get shipped out,” Gavin explained.

  “If they don’t get shipped, then what are they doing here?” Xander asked again.

  “I don’t know.” Gavin had been wondering the same thing. He couldn’t rid himself of the suspicion that things going wrong here meant that not everything was safe back at his home, either.

  Xander had opened his mouth to ask another question when they were interrupted by the return of Ben and his team. Ben hesitated for a moment when he saw how close Xander and Gavin were standing and saw the irritated expression on Xander’s face. Ben didn’t say anything until Xander stepped away and turned his attention back to him.

  “No survivors,” Ben reported. “We found more bodies scattered around, but nothing out of the ordinary. Only strange thing is they got themselves a whole shipment of oxygen pills. And Celia’s gang doesn’t go underground for raids.” Ben handed over a sample of the green pills to Xander.

  “So I suppose you’re going to tell me that all those pills are defective,” Xander said, rounding on Gavin once more. Gavin took a look at the pills and saw that they were unmarked, unlike those that had been tested and approved for shipment. He replied once more with just a nod, not sure of what to say around Xander.

  Xander shoved the pills aggressively close to Gavin’s face. “Prove it.”

  Gavin picked up a pill, dropped it to the ground, and stomped on it with his boot. The pill erupted with a bang like a gunshot, leaving a crater of cracked marble. The little green pill spun in a circle, hissing as all the gas leaked out of it.

  “Good pills don’t do that,” Gavin replied calmly.

  “I’d say that you just destroyed a perfectly good pill,” Xander disagreed. “Why should we waste a whole shipment of perfectly good pills on your word? You’re just going to have to find another way to prove your little theory.”

  Gavin sighed in frustration. He wasn’t used to having to explain his every action and justify the things he knew. Back home, all of this was common knowledge. But he couldn’t risk that they’d take the pills—they were lethal.

  He looked once at Stella and saw the worry in her eyes that she tried to hide. He didn’t want her to have to feel like she had to look out for him all the time. He was just going to have to reveal a little of what he could do.

  Gavin reached into an inner pocket where he had hidden the machine. He ran his finger across the cool metal, switching it on. It unraveled out of its tight coil, spreading out its mechanical wings. The lights on the machine’s little face flickered on as it hummed to life. The wings began flapping up and down with a mechanical whirring noise, faster and faster until it became a blur. Then the machine, which now resembled a little mechanical hummingbird, jerked into the air and swooped around in quick, circular patterns. Then it really began to fly, zooming its sporadic path over and around everyone in the room, avoiding obstacles with agile grace.

  The others watched, completely transfixed. All eyes remained set on the little metal bird. After a minute, the machine flew back toward Gavin, who reached out for it. The bird landed in the palm of his hand, nestling down as if it had returned to a home made of sticks and twigs. The lights dimmed from its eyes and the machine curled up once again into a tight ball. When Gavin removed it from his hand, they could all see that it had deposited one green pill there. An oxygen pill.

  Gavin placed the machine back into his inner pocket. “I know those pills you have found are defective because I help harvest oxygen back at the factory.”

  The understanding lit up in the faces around the room. The men who had regarded him before with indifference now stared at him openly, shocked.

  Xander approached Gavin differently, with that same caution he had briefly shown when they had first met. He picked up the oxygen pill out of Gavin’s hand for a closer examination, rolling it around between his thumb and index finger.

  “You’re not going to want to take that,” Gavin warned him. “That one will be contaminated with traces of the open air. It’s no good.”

  “You said that you worked as a mechanic,” Xander replied, still focused on the oxygen pill like he had never seen one before.

  “That’s most of what I do, building the machines. But there’s a lot of other work there.” Gavin thought through his lists of odd jobs. “Plants and animals to raise, tests to run. Sometimes I help my brother with the collection and distribution of resources.”

  “Can I see that bird thing of yours?” Xander asked.

  Gavin paused before he reached back into his pocket, taking out the machine once again. “It’s keyed into my fingerprints, so it will only work for me,” he said as Xander fiddled with the machine, trying to figure out how to activate it. “It’s useless here anyway, out in open air.”

  “You built this.” Xander held the machine up close to his pale eyes.

  “I did,” Gavin answered, wondering where the conversation was headed.

  “So you know how to build other machines? Could you help us to make our own oxygen pills here?” Xander’s eyes narrowed in cold calculation.

  Gavin thought about everything that Xander was asking for, the tools and materials for the job and the sheer scope of the task. Yes, it would take time, but it was possible.

  “I’ll help you make your own oxygen pills if you change one of your rules,” Gavin offered, struck suddenly with an idea.

  “I don’t negotiate the rules,” Xander said. “And you might want
to rethink bargaining with me. This isn’t your factory. Things could get pretty dangerous out here for you.” Xander rested his hand casually against his side so it was just touching his gun holster.

  Around the room, the others reacted to the threat, some even moving slightly in Gavin’s defense before stopping themselves.

  “There are three people in the world who know how to build that machine,” Gavin said, unperturbed. “And the other two are back in a factory under the ocean. Killing me won’t get you anything.”

  “What rule do you want changed?” Xander asked.

  “The rule against pregnancy. The one that says that your gang members can’t have babies,” Gavin said.

  Xander blinked in surprise. Distracted, he glanced over at Stella. “Why that rule?”

  “If there’s no kids, there’s no future here. No point in building anything if it’ll just be useless in a hundred years when there’s no one left,” Gavin replied.

  Xander rolled the machine between his thumb and pointer finger.

  “Fine,” Xander said at last. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  9

  Stella wanted to smash that mechanized hummingbird into pieces. She had seen Xander tracking the movements of that little bird. She knew that calculating look. Even after taking Gavin into an infested city to avoid suspicion, his cover was blown. She knew what Xander would want to do with a scientist from the factory.

  Stella watched Gavin in the rearview mirror as she began the drive back. He looked merely uncomfortable with all the stares. He had no idea about the kind of trouble he had brought down upon himself. With all the increased attention on him, Gavin was never going to be able to just slip away. All eyes were going to be on him from here on out.

  Stella drove in quiet anger, and she wasn’t alone in her silence. The men in the back of the van watched Gavin in open curiosity. It was only a matter of time before one of them gathered up the courage to ask him about the factory.