Twenty-One - Ella

I couldn't believe it.

I could not believe it.

The thought had entered my head. I hadn't been one hundred percent certain that H-26 would be there. But to have my worst fears come to fruition wasn't something I had prepared myself for. Not even close.

But my dad was an intelligent man. Evil or not, he wouldn't have left something to chance. He wouldn't have given away everything, no matter the reward he may have expected. Which meant there was a copy of H-26 somewhere, or, at a minimum there are journals that would help us to recreate it. There had to be.

But they weren't necessarily here. There were a handful to safe-keeping spots I could look around the labs, but I had a feeling they weren't in the labs.

I should have been more embarrassed over my outburst in front of Kyle, but after all was said and done, I was too drained of all emotion to give any thought to worrying over how crazy he thought I was.

Embarrassed or not, I didn't have the energy to talk. So I sat in silence, avoiding his watchful gaze as he reapplied the bandages to my arms. I stared at my arms as he silently worked, applying fresh gauze and securely wrapping the stretchy bandage. They looked every bit as awful as they felt. Worse maybe. I looked mangled, like a victim from horror movies I used to watch but never though could come true. I knew the barbs had ripped into the muscles of my forearm and wondered if they would heal normally or if I would have muscle damage or pain that was more permanent. Seeing them now, I was thankful that I hadn't been able to get a good look at then when I was tied up. I'm not sure I would have made it if I realized how mangled I was.

I was also thankful that Hunter had been far enough from me that I couldn't see how bad his own wounds were. I could only see that he was covered in blood and knew I was as well.

Part of me felt that I should go check on him. At a minimum, I needed to find antibiotics - something I knew with certainty I could find in this building - and made sure he took them to stave off infection. I wondered when the last time he had a tetanus shot was. In school, they required we got one, so I knew I was current, but if this were the old world we'd probably both be pumped full of booster shots and antibiotics just in case. I may not have been able to help much with the booster shots, but I could make sure we both got antibiotics.

I finally looked at Kyle. His lips thinned and eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he carefully, but tightly wrapped my arm. A part of me wanted to reach out and smooth the wrinkled skin between his eyebrows. I was sure he knew I was staring at him, I thought I saw his lips twitch, but he didn't call me out.

When he was done, I cleaned up the mess I'd made of the lab. Sweeping up all the glass shards and picking up things I had pushed off of tables, I worked to get the lab back into the same condition it was when we'd arrived. At some point Kyle told me he was leaving, going to get us food. I stopped long enough to tell him where the antibiotics would be and to make sure Hunter got a proper dosing and then got back to work.

He wasn't gone for long - I think he was worried to leave me alone for more than a few moments - and when we returned he had bags of chips and power bars. A meal fit for champions.

"Ella, baby, what's going through your head?"

I liked when he called me baby, I decided. It rolled off his tongue like he'd said it a thousand times before. Like he didn't realize he was even doing it - a habit. Like it was this comfortable, natural thing between us and not a word that distracted me from all my real life problems and made me think too much about a boy.

I was a little surprised it took so long for him to demand we speak about my little outburst, a full day had easily passed before he gently urged the conversation. He was watching me as though I might flee the room or start to cry. I didn't blame him though, I wasn't acting as though I was the most stable person in the building. I'd had a couple major flip-outs in as many days. It didn't help that Hunter, who had gone through the same thing, was doing just dandy. Completely unaffected. Well, I didn't know that for sure, but I felt that I had a good enough handle on who he was to know that he wasn't the emotional wreck I had been.

"Zero asked about you," Kyle said when I didn't answer.

None of them had come looking for us, or maybe they had but hadn't been able to find where we were hidden.

"Hmm," I hummed.

"Joel and Miles too. Hunter was sleeping, but I'm sure he would have."

"I'm okay, Kyle," I said when it became clear that he wasn't going to let this go. "You don't have to babysit me."

"That's not what I asked," he said gently. "I asked what's going through your head?"

There were a million ways to answer that question because there were just as many thoughts running through my mind. It was probably best not to unload the more ridiculous thoughts and I didn't want to tell him how scared I was that something would happen to me. To him. To all of them. It seemed silly but it was real to me then. The idea that we might not all survive. I had known it was possible, sure. Miles and Joel hadn't let me forget it. But knowing it and facing it were two different things.

"There a chance that the samples are somewhere else," I said finally, deciding to speak about the one thing that might be of use. "If there are any at all left."

"What makes you think that?"

"Dr. Fairchild was acting sort of, I don't know, off, in the days before. I didn't think much of it at the time, but now... There's a chance he moved it all to the safe in our home."

Instead of questioning more about H-26 and where it could be or more details about why I thought it was in a safe at our home, Kyle surprised me when he asked, "Why don't you call him 'dad'?"

I shrugged. I never put much thought into it. I guess I had called him dad when I was little, but the more he groomed me into become him, the less I used the term.

"He wasn't much of a dad. It never really seemed like a fitting name for him."

Kyle nodded thoughtfully. "You think it's in your home?"

"I can check his private office here, but I think there's a good chance. That is, if he kept any. It's a big if. But Ky, I'm not asking you to take me there."

"Why do you think he would have moved it?"

I closed my eyes and dragged in a breath. I forced myself to remember the day the world changed and spell every moment out for Kyle.

I was working long hours with internship and Dr. Fairchild had his other assistant and me pulling weekend time with him for the month to perfect H-26 before he presented it to the FDA for human trials. Funny that I never noticed how easily he'd lied. H-26 was never going to be in for human trials. I never once complained though, about weekend hours or long shifts. I thought we were working on a regenerative treatment. Something that could heal things like paralysis. It was amazing. I thought I was going to be a part of something that would change the modern world... and I guessed I was. Just not in the way I hoped.

So I stayed at the lab until late finishing up all the grunt work and taking notes on the mice. The house was much closer to the labs than my dorm, so instead of going back to campus, I stayed in my old bedroom the night before the world turned upside down. When I woke up, I was the only one in the house that morning which meant either Dr. Fairchild left early for work, or he hadn't left the labs at all, opting instead to work through the night. I hadn't thought much of it and showed up to work on time as always. When I got to work, I thought the dark circles under his eyes must have meant that my father worked through the night. He was acting strange though, jumpy and on edge for the entire morning. I thought maybe he'd had too much caffiene. He never could handle it well and when drank more than a couple cups he was always jittery and on edge. Before leaving, he mentioned his lunch might run over. He was meeting new investors and liked to wine and dine them a little in hopes that their pockets would be deep. He gave brief instructions on what we should spend the rest of the day working and then all but ran out of the building with his briefcase.

I thought it was strange that he left his I.D. badge and keys behind. They were just sitting on his desk, forgotten. And when I left for the day, instead of going straight back to the dorms like I'd intended, I swung by the house to drop off his keys and badge.

I pushed open the door to the house that I grew up in and shouted for him. I knew he was home because his car was sitting in the garage, but he didn't answer. Finally I yelled that I was leaving his stuff on the kitchen table because I had to get back to school.

But as I was leaving, I heard it. My name. It sounded tired and weak and quiet.

I didn't hesitate, I ran down to his home-lab in the basement concerned he had been in some sort of accident. But what happened wasn't an accident. I got down the stairs to see my father in his chair. He was pale and sweating despite keeping the house cool. Dark circles had formed under his eyes and veins seemed to pop out from under his skin.

"Dad." I never called him dad. Not in years. But in that moment, I was just a girl worried about her dad who was very sick. I touched his head, feeling for fever. "Come on, we need to go to a hospital."

He shook his head.

"You're burning up. Were you exposed to something?" I looked around for any sign of a spill or something that may have caused this. "What happened?"

"H-26," he said quietly.

"H... That's not ready for human trials. And why would you...?" I couldn't even finish the thought, I was so shocked, confused.

"I've made so many mistakes," he said. "Stop them. Stop them before it starts."

"I don't know what you're talking about." I thought he was delirious with fever, he had to be at least a hundred-four degrees. It made no sense. I was lost. I didn't get it. But then my father, the man who I thought was superman. My hero. My idol. The one I wanted to be just like. He looked me in the eyes and I saw clarity. I saw that he wasn't delirious or hallucinating.

"It's a weapon," he said. "H-26 is a weapon."

"I left him down there," I told Kyle. "He lied to me and I was so angry that I left him down there. I slammed the door and walked away. I didn't ask questions. I didn't beg him to tell me how to stop it or get him to spend his final hours walking me through an anti-dote. I didn't hunt down the people who bought or stole H-26 and try to stop them. I was angry that the image I had built up of my father had just been shattered. So I pouted in my childhood room while he died in the basement and people took the weapon to airports and spread it around. By the time I went back to the basement, ready to listen to him, he was already gone. And back."

"That's why you blame yourself?" Kyle said. "You think you let it happen while you pouted in your room?"

"That's exactly what happened."

I could have stopped, prevented, all of this is I had gotten past myself and my own hurt. But I acted lied a spoiled child who didn't get her way.

"Anyway. The point is, he didn't have a lunch meeting, he met the people at our house. So there's a chance that he still has the virus in the basement... with him."

"With him?" Kyle asked.

"I didn't... I couldn't... He's locked in the basement."

"Did he," Kyle said, choosing his words carefully, "do it to himself?"

"I don't know."

And I didn't. The people who bought it could have decided they didn't want him growing a conscience and decided to make him their first test subject. He could have done it to himself - killed himself before he could see the results of his work. I had no clue because I didn't let him explain any of it.

"Okay," he said nodding. "How far is the house?"

"Kyle, I don't think-"

"How far, Ella?"

"Couple miles, I guess. Just on the other side of 495 in Old Town."

"Then we're going."

"No."

He lifted an eyebrow. "No?"

"I don't think...I won't put you all in more danger for a hunch." I straightened my shoulders and pulled confidence out of the air, because I knew this wasn't going to go over well. "I think I should go. Alone."

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AN - Finally got a little more background story! Hope you guys enjoyed :]]