Rewriting the Apocalypse novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

Jo ties Eli up, sets three rules and learns the Institute expects her by noon; at the clinic the friendly doctor's car is already outside.

Sam's garage was a two-bay shop on Fulton Street that smelled of oil and cold coffee.

Nobody else was in yet.

Sam rolled the door down behind the truck, and Jo made Eli sit on an upturned milk crate in the middle of the floor.

She tied his wrists behind him with a ratchet strap.

She did it badly, and he let her.

"I could get out of that in a minute," he said.

"Then why aren't you?"

"Because you'd have to trust me to stop you from doing anything worse."

"I don't trust you."

"I know."

Sam stood by the tire rack with a tire iron in his hands and his jaw working.

"Jo, I need someone to explain this to me in small words. Who is this guy, and why did you turn him into a statue?"

"He works for the people who kill me," Jo said.

Sam stared at her.

"Not yet," she said. "Not for fourteen months. I woke up this morning and I remember all of it. Everything that happens."

"Remember what?"

"I die, Sam. In a chair, slowly. Then you turn into something, and so does everybody else."

Her voice had not shaken once.

She was amazed at that.

Sam looked at Eli, and at the strap, and at his sister.

Then he sat down hard on a stack of tires.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm going to pretend that's a normal thing to say before nine a.m. Is he lying?"

"I don't know yet."

"Ask him something only you would know."

"I did that already." Jo turned to Eli. "Tell my brother what I said at the end."

Eli's face did something complicated.

"You didn't say anything," he said. "You were paralyzed. You couldn't."

It was true.

She had not been able to say a word, and he knew it.

Jo felt cold all over.

"Fine," she said. "Here are my rules."

She held up one finger.

"One. You don't lie to me. Not about the big things, not about the small ones."

"Agreed."

Two fingers.

"Two. You don't touch me. Not my arm, not my shoulder, not my hand. If you hurt me, I'll stop your heart for ten seconds and see how it feels."

"I won't touch you." His voice was very quiet. "I've been careful about that since I woke up."

She noticed that.

She did not know what to do with it, so she put it away.

Three fingers.

"Three. You stay where I can see you. Every minute. You don't go anywhere alone."

"That one I'll fight," Eli said. "But I'll try."

"Why would you fight it?"

"Because some of what I need to do, I'd rather you didn't watch."

"Then that's rule three," Jo said, "and you can try harder."

Sam snorted out loud.

Eli almost smiled. He did not quite manage it.

A phone buzzed in his jacket.

It buzzed again, and then again, a short urgent rhythm that did not stop.

Jo reached into his pocket and took it out.

The screen showed a name, F. Faulk, and a message under it.

Status? She played my voicemail. Bring her to a pre-screen at noon, I'd like to meet her early.

Jo read it twice.

The pre-screen at noon had never happened the first time.

In the first life, she had signed the papers at home, slept one night and been driven in the next morning at nine.

Something had already changed.

Eli's chair creaked. "Let me answer her, Jo. If I don't, the vans come early."

"What would you say?"

"That you're skittish and I'm taking you for coffee. She'll wait an hour."

"I'm supposed to hand you a phone because you ask nicely?"

"No. You hold it. You tell me what to type. I don't want your trust. I want your eyes on the screen."

She watched his face.

He meant it, or he was very, very good.

She crouched in front of him with the phone and made him dictate the message, word by word, and she typed it herself.

Running late, she's nervous. Will bring her by one.

Eli's wrist shifted against the strap as she typed.

The cuff of his glove had slid back an inch.

A strip of bare skin showed, pale, with the pulse going hard under it.

She had not planned to touch him.

Her fingertips were on his wrist before her mind caught up, light, checking.

His whole arm went rigid.

She felt his heartbeat under her power, fast and uneven and wrong. It was not the pulse of a man who was afraid of her.

It was the pulse of a man straining against something inside himself.

"Your rule was no touching," Eli whispered.

"My rule was that you don't touch me. I'm the one touching."

"Jo."

"I'm checking whether you're lying."

"And?"

She took her hand away.

"Your heart's going like you ran here," she said.

"I did run here."

"Not fourteen months ago, you didn't."

His mouth went flat, and he looked away.

Sam coughed.

"So where do we go?" he said. "Because the truck's the first thing they'll look for."

Jo stood and slid the phone into her back pocket.

"Bess," she said.

"The clinic? That's the first place anyone would look."

"No. Bess hasn't gotten mixed up in any of it. She'll hide us and she won't ask questions until I'm ready to answer them."

"And him?"

"He comes with us. In the back seat, with his hands where I can see them."

She cut the strap with Sam's shop knife and he rubbed his wrists.

His gloves stayed on.

They drove across town in Sam's truck with Eli folded into the back seat.

Bess Mulligan's free clinic occupied the ground floor of an old Linden Street rowhouse, with a faded green door and a hand-painted sign.

Jo had spent six years of her life in that building.

She leaned on the bell, and then she saw the car.

A silver sedan sat at the curb in front of the green door.

It was parked neatly, one wheel an exact inch from the curb.

The driver's window rolled down, and a woman with an ash-blonde bob and reading glasses on a cord leaned out and waved with a wide, glad smile.

"Jo!" Dr. Faulk called. "Oh, thank goodness. I've been looking everywhere for you!"

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