Banished

“They’re doing research into cell regeneration,” she said. “His systems have responded well. I guess I should thank them.”

She didn’t look all that thankful. I didn’t blame her. What must it be like to see someone she loved here, kept alive artificially? I tried to imagine him at Kaz’s age, full of life, laughing, but all I saw was an empty shell made of skin.

“What does he… do?” I asked.

“He’s very good at simple tasks, like sorting beads and solving shape puzzles. But he’s completely nonverbal. They keep hoping. I… don’t know if that’s worse. Here, watch this.”

She stood in front of the bed, in Vincent’s line of vision. “Vincent, clap three times.”

Without any change to his blank expression, the man raised his hands and slowly slapped them together. Once, twice, three times. Then he let his hands fall back on the covers. His eyes never focused.

Watching him sent a chill through me, but I didn’t want Prairie to know how horrified I was. “You can’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known.”

Prairie shook her head miserably. “I did understand. And I did it anyway. I have to make sure this doesn’t happen again, and that means I have to stop Bryce, no matter what.”

I couldn’t stand to see her this upset. “Don’t worry. If people know what happens when you heal a dead person, they would never do it, not on purpose. Even if Bryce manages to make more Healers, he wouldn’t make-”

“Hailey,” Prairie cut in sharply. “You don’t understand. This is exactly what Bryce wants to make… things like this. He wants to sell them, to the highest bidder. The Healers are just a tool, like an assembly line.”

I looked at Vincent, who was staring at nothing, a faint, shiny bit of drool pooling at the corner of his mouth. I didn’t understand. “What could he possibly want with…”

Prairie’s face darkened. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the bedside, until I was standing only a few inches away from Vincent.

“Vincent, hit yourself,” she whispered, and he immediately started to smack himself on one side of his face and then the other, his palms flat and hard, the sounds of flesh on flesh sharp.

Prairie turned to make sure I was watching, and the pain in her eyes was staggering. “Harder,” she whispered, and the thing that used to be Vincent curled his fingers into fists and now each blow caused his head to jerk and roll, but still he kept at it-

“Stop!” I cried. “Please, Vincent, stop, don’t, don’t hurt yourself.” And just like that, the Vincent creature, the zombie that lived in the ruins of his body, put his hands back in his lap. His face bore fresh bruising and a few cuts; his lip was beginning to swell. But there was no sign at all that he noticed, much less cared.

Prairie backed away from him, her eyes shining with unshed tears.

“Why?”

“Because you can send them into battle, Hailey,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “You can load them up with explosives and tell them to blow themselves up, tell them to walk into shopping malls or schools, and they’ll never think twice, never blink an eye.”

“No,” I whispered, horrified. “No one would-”

“Yes. A dozen of them, deployed the right way, could bring a major city to its knees.”

“But Bryce couldn’t… he wouldn’t…”

“I saw it. I saw the list. On Bryce’s desk. Unstable governments overseas… there were half a dozen or more. And he doesn’t care who he sells to, as long as they show him the money first.”

“But where would he get the…” I stopped, unable to come up with the right word. Raw material? Bryce would need the newly dead, and a lot of them, if he was going to manufacture enough zombies to sell.

Prairie laughed bitterly. “He’s smart, Hailey. He’ll find people that won’t be missed. There are so many more of those than you’d ever imagine… the homeless, and mental patients, people abandoned by their families. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface. If he’s getting help from inside our government, and I have strong reasons to believe he is, he could go to veterans’ hospitals. Soldiers killed overseas-the remains shipped home could be faked, while the real corpses were taken.”

“You can’t think our own government would be involved in something like this!”

“No, of course not, not officially. But there’s corruption at every level. Hailey, Bryce used to get visits from men who looked official. I never paid much attention, since I assumed it had to do with our funding. But thinking about it now, you could totally tell they had once been in the military. They had that air about them. There was someone he just called the General, and we used to joke about that in private-but now I’m thinking that was his principal contact.”

“But why would they let him sell to enemies of the United States?”

“The governments on the list, their battles are on their own soil. They’re extremists, terrorists, at war with each other-or with their own people. I’ve wondered if that wasn’t part of the plan, that some rogue branch of the military might want them to exterminate each other.”

Zombies.

Terrorists.

Shadowy operators, working outside the control of our own government, funding this study in horror.

It was too much. Especially when I thought about the fact that, without even knowing it, I was one of the keys to its success.

A day ago I would never have believed that there could be something worse than being hunted by killers.

But now I knew different. There was something much worse, and it was in me.

CHAPTER 22

WHEN WE GOT HOME, Kaz was in the backyard with Chub, teaching him to throw a lacrosse ball.

“Hailey, watch me, watch me!” Chub shouted, waving the stick around, his voice clear and distinct, the improvements in his speech growing every day. Kaz waved, grinning. But I raced past them with nothing more than a mumbled hello.

Anna had been cooking, as promised, and the house smelled wonderful, but I couldn’t bear to talk to her. I went straight to Kaz’s room, closed the door and lay down on the bed and pulled the pillow over my face, trying to block out the images in my mind.

Vincent in the hospital bed, staring without seeing.

Rascal, after I found the bullet wounds and pushed him to the floor, unhurt and uncaring.

Zombies walking straight into battle, unfazed by the sights and sounds of war.

Public squares full of people, erupting into explosions and flames.

I didn’t know how long I lay there trying not to think. There was a gentle tap at the door. I pulled the pillow off my face but didn’t answer.

“May I come in?”

I couldn’t very well keep Kaz out of his own room, so I sat up and pushed my fingers through my hair, hoping I didn’t look too messed up. “Come on in.”

He opened the door hesitantly and gestured at the bean-bag on the floor. “Mind if I…”

“It’s your room,” I said, blushing. “I mean, I should be asking if you mind.”

He sat, strong forearms draped loosely over his knees, and looked at me. I mean, really looked at me, in a way I wasn’t used to.

“Prairie told me about Vincent and everything. Wow, that’s a lot, you know, to find out. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. At least the healing… well, I was kind of getting used to that part.”

“But the rest?”

“It. Um. I can’t…” I tried to think of a way to describe how I felt-almost like I was guilty of something, because if Bryce did manage to find me, I was pretty sure he could force me to go along with his plan. “The zombie thing. Just, I don’t get how anyone could do that on purpose.”