Apocalypse: I Hear My Genius Husband's Sins novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Forty-One Is Clear
On the roof with the stairwell door bending, Calvin refuses to board and sends Nina down to floor 41; she hears the truth, boards without him, and a black helicopter turns after them.
The steel door to the stairwell had started to bend, and my husband was still arguing with the pilot.
Eight of us stood on the roof of the tower with the rotors screaming over our heads.
Below us, the turned were climbing.
I could hear them hit every landing.
"Dr. Reeve, I'm lifting in thirty seconds," the pilot shouted. "With you or without you."
He had a scar through his left eyebrow and a hand held out toward the cabin door.
Calvin did not take it.
My husband was thirty-five, the man on every news channel, the genius who was going to end the plague.
He stood with his glasses fogged and his lab coat still clean.
"The second cooler is still in our lab," he said. "Seven years of work. Every dose we have left."
"I can't leave the cooler."
"This is for all of humanity. Just wait a little longer."
Behind him the door gave a long metal scream, and a gap opened at the hinge.
A hand came through it.
Somebody in the helicopter started to pray.
Lana Orsett, his lab partner, stood at Calvin's shoulder with the first cooler hugged to her chest.
She had been kind to me for four years.
An hour ago she had pulled a lab glove over my cut hand and told me the blood would stop faster if I kept it above my heart.
Now she squeezed my arm and spoke fast and low.
"He's right, Nina. It's thirty seconds. I'd go myself, but I can't put this one down."
She had a black earpiece in her left ear, and she kept touching it.
I did not think about that. I thought about the door.
Calvin turned to me.
"Nina, you're fast, and you're not afraid of them. Run down to forty-one. The cooler is on the lab bench by the window. Floor forty-one is clear. I checked an hour ago."
I am an ER nurse.
I have run toward worse than a stairwell.
I took one step toward the door, because my husband had asked me, and because for eight years he had never lied to me.
That was what I believed.
I had been hearing something for three weeks, and I had told nobody.
When a person near me lied to my face, I heard what they were hiding.
It came in their own voice, flat and quiet, from somewhere behind my ears.
A nurse in the lobby had said she'd changed a dying man's dressing. I had heard, *I never went back in that room.*
It had not happened once with Calvin.
I took that to mean he did not lie.
I grabbed his sleeve to ask him if he was sure.
"Is it clear, Cal?"
"It's clear," he said. "Go."
And I heard him.
His mouth said *go*, and his voice behind my ears said, calm as a man ordering lunch:
*Forty-one is full. She'll hold the door a minute. Her blood is already in the first cooler, so I lose nothing.*
My hand stayed on his sleeve.
He smiled at me, the same smile he gave the cameras.
"Nina? Thirty seconds."
Lana's hand was still on my arm.
I looked at the hand on the door and looked at the eight people behind me, every one of them watching.
"Floor forty-one is full of the turned," I said.
My voice came out loud enough to cross the roof.
"You know it is. You want me to hold the door for you."
Calvin's face did not change at first.
"You're panicking," he said. "Nina, you're scared. Think about what's at stake."
"I'm thinking about it."
"Everyone on this roof will die if that cooler stays down there. Is that what you want?"
The woman by the cabin door said, "He's sending his wife in there."
Nobody argued with her.
The door split open another foot, and the sound that came through was not a voice.
I let go of Calvin's sleeve.
"No," I said.
Calvin caught my wrist.
"Nina, do not do this."
His grip was tight enough to hurt.
I looked at the hand he had put on my wrist every morning for three weeks, with a needle in it and a smile.
Every day he had drawn a vial of my blood and told me he was checking my iron.
I had let him.
So I pulled my arm free and stepped onto the helicopter.
Jonas Mercer closed his hand around mine and hauled me in before I could trip on the skid.
His hand was dry and steady.
I waited for his voice behind my ears, the way it came for everyone who said something false.
He said, "Sit. Buckle in."
Nothing came.
He had told me the truth, and the quiet that followed it was the first quiet I had heard in three weeks.
"Dr. Reeve!" he shouted. "Last call!"
Calvin did not move.
He stared at me with his mouth open, and then he did something I had not expected.
He pointed up.
A black helicopter was coming down out of the clouds, low and fast, with no lights on it.
It put down on the far side of the roof with its blades still turning.
Calvin took Lana by the elbow, and the two of them ran for it with the coolers swinging.
Nobody had to hold any door for them.
They climbed aboard and Calvin turned in the doorway to look at me.
He lifted two fingers to his glasses, the way he did when he finished a lecture.
Then the stairwell door fell flat across the roof, and the turned poured out.
Jonas pulled up on the stick, and the roof dropped out from under us.
I watched the dead run across the place where I had been standing.
"They never needed me," I said.
Jonas did not look away from the sky.
"Hold on to something," he said quietly. "The black one is turning after us."
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