“Jane, listen to me.”
“You didn’t happen to keep back a knife, did you? I suppose a broken beaker could do just as well as a knife,” she mutters.
“I think I am dying.”
Jane pauses and turns to me, slowly. “Kate.”
“I am being serious,” I say, collapsing against the bars of the cage.
She kneels beside me. “How do you feel?”
“Awful,” I say, and it is the truth. I am dying. I can feel it. This is no usual sickness. A fever already burns through my body, and my fingertips are going numb. I came with Jane to try to save her, and maybe I did.
But I have sacrificed myself in the process.
The door to the lab opens, and Mr. Redfern enters. “Why are you still in there? Come on, before Gideon comes back.” He has our weapons in his arms, and I am sorely relieved to know the man stayed true to our cause. I take the key from my pocket to open the lock, but my fingers are clumsy and Jane has to take the key from me. She has no sooner gotten the door open, slipping out of the cage, when we hear the conversation of approaching men.
“I think taking a blood sample now will let us track the resistance to the introduction of a more active form of the sickness. If Miss McKeene is correct about the incubation time, we can see how the blood is changed.”
Jane grabs a beaker, smashing it against a table just in time to stab the jagged edge into the neck of the man who enters first. It is Plimpton, and he burbles a scream as blood fountains out in an arc. He is on the floor before the man behind him is through the doorway.
“What in the—”
But before Gideon can finish his thought, Jane has shoved him up against the wall, pressing the bloody edge of the broken beaker to his neck. Redfern quickly shuts the door and steps back by the table with the lab equipment.
“Go ahead,” Gideon says, struggling to get the words around the pressure on his throat. “Goodness knows I’ve thought about doing the deed myself. But if you kill me now, who will help Katherine if something goes wrong with the injection I’ve given her?”
“Don’t try to weasel your way out of this,” Jane growls.
“All of the lives lost because of my experiments,” Gideon continues, thickly, “they are but a small fraction of the number of people who will die if I don’t finish my work.”
“It’s a fantasy, Gideon,” Jane shouts. She pins him in place with the edge of the glass. Gideon’s eyes go wide. “Everything I said to you, about time taken after vaccination? It was all just a damned guess. You don’t know for certain what you’re doing any more than I do. The people you’ve killed died for nothing.”
“You don’t know that,” he squeezes out, and swallows. A thin line of blood drips from where the glass meets his skin. “If anyone is going to figure this out, it’s me. How long do you think you can stay on the run, keeping the people you care about safe from the undead? We need a cure, or the human race is finished. Everyone you know will die eventually. Everyone but you. Do you want that on your conscience?”
“If you’re our only hope for the future, the human race was finished a long time ago,” Jane says. Her tone is rife with malice. “And as for my conscience, well, if we’re all done for, what’s one more killing on my soul?”
“Jane!” I shout through the bars of the cell, over the pounding in my head. “You do not have to do this. We can take him with us. We can make him face justice. You and Mr. Redfern and I, we all know what he has done.”
“It’s too much of a risk, Kate, and it’s more than he deserves,” Jane says, turning slightly back toward me.
In the moment she takes her eyes off Gideon he picks up a glass container from where it sits upon the table and swings for her head. Jane deflects his attempted blow, and the container sails toward another that sits over an open flame. The glass smashes, the liquid inside splashes, and flame licks across the counter, shattering more glass as it goes. Jane was right. Some of the things on the counter were flammable.
All of them, to be exact.
Gideon shoves Jane toward the burning counter and runs back the way he came, out the door and toward the woods. Mr. Redfern jumps over the dead man on the ground to follow.
Jane waits only long enough to skim her pistol from its holster before she makes to give chase.
“Wait!” I shout, and she whips around to face me.
“Kate,” she says, as if just remembering I am here.
“Gideon is cornered, and Mr. Redfern is giving chase. Let him go, Jane. Let God deal with him and his sins. All of this violence has gotten you nowhere, just the same dead end over and over again. Please, let it go.” Already the smoke grows thick, and I cough as I pull myself out of the cage, barely able to move, and crawl on hands and knees across the floor toward the door. The stink of blood has set off a flurry of activity in the back room as the dead, heard but not seen, begin to react to the disaster.
A burning beam crashes to the ground a little ways off, sending out a hail of sparks. She glances at it and then at me, and my heart shrivels at the hard expression on her face.
“I can’t let him get away,” she says, before dashing out of the door. It is just that easy for her. She had a choice and she has made it.
Jane has left me behind to die.
Even the deadliest, savviest bounty hunter will eventually make a mistake. And that will be the last one he ever makes.
—Bounty Hunter Rufus Green, 1875
—JANE—
Chapter 47
In Which My Fight Ends
Gideon Carr is yellow, just as I’d always suspected. He takes off running down the path to the woods, yelling all the way. Redfern is hot on his heels, and I am right behind him when a bullet nicks the brim of my hat.
I duck behind the nearest building, the one that lists to the side, and take stock of the situation. Tom and his boys run toward me full tilt, without the common sense God gave a flea. Just running out in the open, begging to be shot.
I lean around a rotting timber and oblige Tom and his boys. Moving targets, but I’m a better shot than I used to be. I hit Tom in the chest, and each of his boys in the gut. They go down, screaming from the pain. Something about their anguish grabs at me, and I feel remorse like I ain’t felt in a long while. Those poor men can’t help that they were dumb enough to get wrapped up in Gideon Carr’s machinations, and I pity that they met their end out of nothing more than stupidity.
But then I remember Irish Tom killed ten men to get his nickname, and I push the remorse aside, hard. I doubt his compatriots were any kind of saints, not as itchy as their trigger fingers were. And I have three bullets left, all of them bearing Gideon’s name.
I run down the path toward where Redfern and Gideon dashed, but I don’t see a damn thing. My heart is pounding, and despair fills my mouth with ashes. Angry tears prick my eyes and I scream out my frustration.
Gideon Carr is once more in the wind.
The chance I finally had after a year to end the man has dissipated like smoke in the breeze. I have given up everything and let myself travel down a road of violence and pain, and for what? I have nothing, nothing to show for it.
That’s when it sinks in that I have left Katherine to her doom.