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

Cora rotated ninety degrees, and he gaped at the silhouette of her body.

“Dr. Ulrich Gettler,” she clawed at the patch of thick whip-mark scars on her back, “pain tolerance testing, 1959.”

Feeling suffocated, he tore off the mask.

She jerked up her pants, grabbed her top, and sprinted to the far wall. “The air I’ve breathed: it’s not safe for you.”

Willing to do anything to appease her, he covered his face again.

She began to put on her tank top, so he stared at the shackle around his ankle. He had to convince her that he was on her side, which would require playing along with her wild claims. “Why haven’t you flagged down one of the patrols?”

She settled onto the ground. “The police would never believe my story. They’d haul me away, and as soon as we reached deeper water, I’d be dead. Shortly after that, so would they.”

“Right. Because of VZ.”

“And my seven other pests.”

“Pests? Like rats?”

“As in pestilences. I have to stay here because of them.” She wrapped her arms around her middle. “For whatever reason, they only turn on me when I leave this island. There’s a force here that keeps them dormant. I think it’s God, though it could be another spirit, an element in the air, magnetism in the rock, or something buried deep within the schist. Whatever the source, it’s real.”

“I believe you,” he said, not sure that he did.

“I used to love swimming, before the Slocum.” Cora briefly covered her eyes. “Those waves, crashing on the beach.” She motioned for him to listen. “They’re like prison bars that never stop clang—”

She tensed, and he could tell she’d detected a foreign sound. Wondering if it was Rollie, he listened.

Cora army-crawled to the wall and looked through a chink. “They’re here.”

“They?”

“I specifically told Rollie not to bring Kristian,” she said, scowling. “Let them see you.”

Finn scrambled to his feet. “I’m up here!” He lunged toward the wall, and the chain jerked him back. Leaning forward, he caught sight of two figures in front of the physical plant, dressed in black . . . bio hazmat gear.

Holy shit.

This was a hot zone. Crushing the respirator mask against his face, he backed as far away from Cora as the chain allowed.

“Now you believe me,” she said with a sneer.

His forehead burned, and the low, Queens skyline wavered.

“Let him go!” Rollie yelled.

Cora rose slightly from her crouched position. “Not a chance. He’s a Gettler.”

“What do you want?” bellowed Kristian.

“Where’s the tunnel?”

“Slightly southeast of ‘Fuck you,’” Kristian replied.

Shocked, Finn grunted with disgust. He’d never heard Kristian speak that way to anyone before, aside from when he and Finn were ribbing each other. “Dad, just do what she says.”

“The mutt takes orders; she doesn’t give them,” Kristian said, and Rollie raised his hand to silence him.

Appalled by this new side of Kristian, Finn strained to see his brother’s face behind his visor.

“We think her antibodies can help your mom!” Rollie yelled.

Had they succeeded in isolating the chemical reagent from the ruins? But then why would they need Cora’s antibodies if they could directly give Sylvia the immune system-boosting compound?

Raindrops landed on Finn’s forehead. He wiped them away and looked at Cora questioningly.

She grabbed a brick and tested its heft. “They’ve never been able to replicate this island’s effect on anyone else. So they want to use me. To find a cure for her Lyme.”

A ringing sounded in Finn’s ears, and vertigo seized him. His mother lived with these same sensations. He spread his arms to steady himself. Could this woman hold the key to curing his mom? he wondered.

Suddenly Cora seemed a lot less crazy and a hell of a lot more vulnerable.

If she did possess special immunities, there might be some truth in her other claims as well. The fact that Rollie had kept her existence hidden from Finn certainly supported that possibility. A surge of pain shot from the pinched nerve in his neck. He shuffled closer to the wall. The whole thing was bizarre, and as even the slightest detail became plausible, Finn was feeling spooked. “What have you been doing to her?”

The wind howled.

“I need to know.”

As he waited for Rollie to respond, her list of his family’s transgressions cycled through his mind. Reality was proving to be far worse than anything he’d imagined after finding that note in their shed.

“She’s an asymptomatic carrier,” Rollie said. “I was working to eradicate her pathogens. Until 2001, when she asked me to stop.”

“But you didn’t listen to her, or Mom.” Finn thought of the bats and Kristian’s obsession with how woefully underprepared the world was for an “inevitable” mass pandemic. Curing Lyme couldn’t be their only objective. With so much at stake, they wouldn’t have allocated any of their time or resources to Cora’s welfare. “I don’t buy that your research has been at all for her benefit.”

“That’s not true,” Kristian said. “We’ve made several advancements with her case. We’re so close to getting her back to Manhattan.”

“They keep feeding me that line. Please! Maybe Otto originally wanted to fix me, but that hope died with his wife and daughter.”

Unsure what to think or whom to believe, Finn pivoted to face Rollie, who stretched his arms toward Finn. “I did suspend my work, for a year. But then your mom, the arthritis, and ongoing nerve damage . . .”

“You think Cora’s antibodies can cure her?”

“Yes,” he said, stepping closer to the building so Finn could better hear him. “If we can harvest Cora’s autoimmune T-cells. And inject them into Mom. It should wipe out the Lyme bacteria in her synovial fluid.”

Finn pictured Sylvia gripping a pen, her slanted cursive flowing across a journal page. It had been almost four years since she’d written her last poem.

He studied the woman whose blood might be able to save Sylvia, the same woman who’d apparently been the subject of his mother’s note.

Cora shifted forward onto her knees. “I won’t let him inject me with a ninth microbe,” she said, glaring