The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

Attached to the ceiling was a spigot. Holy shit.

He rushed to the fence that blocked him from the broken windows and gulped the humid air. Frantically, he tugged on the grate, but it wouldn’t budge. The gas would fill the room faster than it could escape through the latticework.

“There’s a major storm headed this way. You won’t be safe here. I brought a raft to get you out of here.”

The woman laughed, and the sound whistled through the tube of her ventilator. “Is that supposed to scare me? Hurricanes are my favorite weather.” She put her face to the mesh, and her ice-cold expression, through the bulging eye windows, lacked humanity.

A pins-and-needles sensation seized his limbs.

“There’s got to be an entrance near the shore,” she clipped. “I know it connects to their secret laboratory, probably under one of the ruins. I’ve searched everywhere. It makes no sense.”

The journals hadn’t referenced an on-site facility, although it would be a safer destination for the bats than his father’s lab, in the back room of his medical practice.

She pressed the pages in his sketchbook with the map against the window. “Show me.”

To alleviate the tingling in his legs, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “If I’d known, don’t you think I would have marked it on there? Or better yet: used it?”

Clicking her tongue, she tilted her head. “Fair point, but it’s not my style to quit.” She strummed the canister. “You’ve got ten seconds to put everything, including your hat, by the door. Then put your hands on the fence, facing the forest.”

He touched his lucky cap. Lily had bought it for him during one of the Subway Series games they’d attended, and the Mets had won.

A pinging sounded.

She was tapping the canister.

Reluctantly, he set his stuff beside the door.

“Hands on the fence. Now.”

Clenching his jaw, he pressed his palms to the metal, hot from the direct sunlight.

When that door opened, he would charge her. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched for her to leave his line of sight.

She tapped the canister once more, a clear warning, and vanished from view.

Finn tensed, ready to spin and pounce.

Behind him, the hinges groaned, and he dove toward the exit.

The door slammed shut, and his shoulder met metal. He yelped in pain and frustration.

“I came to help you,” he said in a tone more bitter than he’d intended.

She didn’t respond or reappear.

With nothing else to do, he stalked over to the windows.

Outside, the herons had resettled, and the tree canopy rippled in the gathering wind. He might never walk back through that forgotten world. He might never leave this room.

Finn listened for her footsteps but detected nothing.

From the floor above came rodent-like skittering and squeaking.

If he died here, he suspected his bones would be picked clean before he could rot away.

Midafternoon

rotten stench filled Finn’s nostrils, and he gagged. Expecting to see the isolation room shrouded in a green vapor, he opened his eyes. The verdant forest beyond the grate taunted him with its proximity. Clutching the metal, he gulped the breeze through the broken windowpanes. The smell had been only in his head. Yet the risk that she would gas him remained real.

Again, he considered screaming for help. Soon he might cave to the impulse. For now, however, he still had the presence of mind to know it would be pointless—the only person near enough to hear him would be her.

His gaze raked over the bolts that pinned the fence to the wall. If he could rip the barricade free, he would attempt the three-story drop. No doubt she’d hunt him down. He’d rather take his chances, slim as they were, than stay here, completely at her mercy.

Finn yanked on the fencing, and his muscle fibers fired like a semiautomatic weapon.

The grate barely rattled.

He crouched in front of the locked, rusty access panel to the windows. Its blood-like smell hung thickly in the air. He wrenched the chain, and it scraped across the fence with a screech. Cringing, he glanced at the nurses’ window.

So far, his efforts to escape hadn’t elicited her return. Either she knew he wouldn’t succeed or there’d been a development with his phone. If Lily had texted that she’d asked Kristian to check on him, the woman could be lying in wait for his brother now. Or the woman might have answered a call from Lily. Finn knew his girlfriend wouldn’t take shit from this woman, which wouldn’t improve the situation.

Fucked. That’s what he was.

If Kristian did arrive, maybe his dry, intellectual commentary would disarm her. Then again, he could be somewhat of an elitist. More than once, Finn had seen him turn his nose away from the smell and outstretched hand of a beggar as Finn was opening his wallet. Similarly, Kristian might look down on this vagrant, despite her poise, and she would sense his disdain.

Finn rubbed his forehead. For all he knew, they’d already formed their opinions of each other. In which case, her hatred of his family suggested that it hadn’t gone well.

If Finn and Kristian both died here, Sylvia would have only Rollie to care for her. And Lily wouldn’t have Finn there to keep her safe the next time she had an epileptic seizure, a latent side effect of the radiation to her brain.

God, he missed her already. When they’d started dating, he’d thought it was so cool that she had zero interest in marriage. Two months later, she’d disclosed that her treatments had stolen her fertility. It had taken another three years for her to admit that she would never be ready, despite his reassurance that he was okay with not having children. In a tearful voice, she’d explained that she feared the arrival of a third cancer that would leave him a widower.

Lately, she always seemed to be planning his “Life After Lily,” or LAL. While they were at a restaurant or on the subway, he’d catch her staring at another