Apocalypse: I Hear My Genius Husband's Sins novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: An Honest Man

At a roadside motel Nina tests the pilot, hears nothing, and decides to walk into Larch Ridge and say it to the camp; the motel TV already calls her dead.

Jonas set us down behind a closed motel on the north edge of the city, beside four steel fuel drums he had hidden in the weeds.

The black helicopter was gone.

The seven passengers climbed out stiff and silent, and the older man with the sling stopped in front of me.

"There's a grain elevator six miles up the road with a fence and a lookout," he said. "We'll take our chances there."

"Thank you," said the woman with the backpack.

She did not say what for.

She walked off with her little boy's hand in hers, and the others followed her.

None of them looked back at the helicopter.

Jonas rolled the first drum under the tail rotor and began pumping fuel by hand.

I stood in the weeds with my cut palm held against my chest.

"You asked how I knew," I said.

"I did."

"Three weeks ago I started hearing people. When they lie to me, I hear the real thing underneath. What they're hiding."

He kept pumping.

"Their worst thing," I said. "In their own voice."

"That's why you stood up on the roof."

"That's why."

"And the man in the vest."

"The boy at the stadium. I heard it."

Jonas stopped the pump and looked at me for the first time without anything else in front of his face.

He had grey at his temples and a pale scar that split his left eyebrow in two.

"I should tell you something," he said. "I don't believe you yet."

"Good."

"Good?"

"I'd be worried if you did."

He almost smiled.

"Then give me the proof," he said. "Here. Hold my hand."

I took his wrist the way I would have taken a patient's, two fingers on the pulse.

It was warm and steady, and I felt myself breathe out.

"Ask me anything," he said. "I'll answer."

"Are you taking me to the camp?"

"No."

Nothing.

"Do you want the rations Calvin offered?"

"No."

Nothing.

"Do you know what that radio call was?"

"A man covering himself."

Nothing at all.

I held his wrist a little longer than I needed to.

"Is there anything you're lying about?" I asked.

He thought about it.

"I haven't told you everything," he said. "But I haven't lied to you."

Nothing came.

The silence was so complete and so clean that it scared me.

For three weeks I had heard everyone's worst thing, and standing in the weeds with his pulse under my fingers was the first time I could hear my own breathing.

"That's what honest sounds like," I said.

"Does it sound good?"

"It sounds like nothing."

"Then I'll take it," he said.

I let go.

My fingers stayed warm for a long time afterward.

"I have three rules," Jonas said, going back to the pump. "I don't lie to you. You don't have to trust me, but you can test it whenever you like."

"And the other two?"

"Nobody touches you unless you say so. Not me, not anyone I'm flying with."

"That's two."

"The third is that you eat something."

I laughed, and it came out cracked and wet.

He handed me a protein bar from his jacket, and I ate it standing next to the fuel drum.

Behind us the motel's glass door had been smashed, and a radio was playing inside.

We both went quiet and walked toward it.

It was an old battery set on the front desk, tuned to the Larch Ridge channel.

A woman's voice read the news in a flat, even tone.

"...an update from General Ames's office. Dr. Calvin Reeve has made it safely to the camp, along with his research partner, Dr. Lana Orsett, and the final stock of serum."

I listened to the next part with my hand flat on the desk.

"Dr. Reeve's wife, Nina Hartwell, a nurse at Deaconess-Aldine, remained on the tower roof to hold the stairwell door so that others could escape. She did not survive."

A new voice cut in, low and broken, and I felt every hair on my arms stand up.

"She was the bravest person I ever knew," Calvin said. "She chose to stay. I couldn't stop her."

He was crying.

I could hear him crying.

I had no way to know if it was real, because a radio cannot lie to me.

It only told me what he wanted the world to believe.

"That was taped inside the hour," Jonas said.

"I know."

"He told them you were dead before we landed."

"I know."

"A man who announces your death that fast is planning to make it true."

I picked up the radio and turned it off.

My hands were quite steady.

"Then he can find out," I said, "how hard I am to kill."

"Nina."

"I'm not hiding. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"I am going to walk into that camp. In front of every person inside it. And I'm going to tell them what he said to me on that roof."

Jonas looked at me for a long moment.

"Ames will back him," he said. "He's the one man in the camp who has a cure."

"Then I'll say it louder."

"The helicopter is spotted. We leave it here and go on foot, three days north. I will not take you in through the front gate."

"Then take me to a place where I can learn how to," I said.

He picked up his pack.

"There's a clinic on the county road," he said. "A doctor I trust."

"Do you trust him because he's honest?"

Jonas gave me the same look as before, with the scar standing out white.

"No," he said. "I trust him because he owes me."

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