drowning in bile? Red thought, shocked by the stream of thought that had burst inside her. She never realized how much contempt for him she’d been holding inside, and it made her feel sick and ashamed.
He was her brother, after all. If his choices were boring then they were his choices and he was the one who had to live with them, not her.
But I can still be angry that he’s happy we got caught, Red thought. Because that’s not just about Adam. It’s about me, too.
She thought about the trenches she’d dug, the barbed wire she’d put up around her heart when Adam blamed her for their parents’ deaths. And she fortified her defenses because she was certain she was going to need them.
Sirois put the little staple gun machine up against Adam’s arm and pulled the trigger. A second later he pulled it away and checked the LCD readout screen on the side.
“What does it do?” Red asked, her tone loaded with suspicion.
“It takes a small blood sample and determines if you are infected,” Sirois said.
“I didn’t know we had technology like that,” Red said. She was still pretty sure that the gun was actually implanting something inside them
(like a tracker)
and not doing something as benign as taking a blood sample.
And anyway, if they’re so worried about us being infected . . .
“How come you aren’t wearing masks?” Red asked, finishing her thought out loud.
She backed up a little more as she said this, because Sirois was approaching her with the tracker/staple/blood sample gun and she was not going to submit without a fight. In fact, there would be no submission at all. If he wanted to shoot her with that thing, then he was going to have to hold her down.
Sirois stopped, and Regan gave her a sharp look.
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re so concerned about infection, then why aren’t you wearing masks?” Red asked, gesturing to her own mask. She’d almost forgotten it was on her face, and she yanked it down to her neck.
“We’ve been immunized,” Regan said.
His tone was bland and his face was blank but Red knew he was lying. Even if no other muscle on his face gave him away, his eyes said that he was lying.
And if he would lie about that he’d lie about anything.
“There’s no vaccine,” Red said. “Before the lights and the Internet and everything else got turned off there was no vaccine, and I know for damned sure that nobody has found one in the last few weeks.”
“How would you know that?” Regan asked. He sounded genuinely curious about her answer.
Red held up a finger. “First, tons of people have died, and that means lots of smarty scientist types also died. So you’ve got brain drain right there. Fewer people to try to find a cure or a vaccine decreases the odds.”
“Go on,” Regan said.
He seemed, at that moment, like a professor encouraging a bright student in class. It was like there was no urgency, no shouting men outside, no Sirois standing there with his magic gun poised.
“Second, it’s a lot harder to find a vaccine quickly without technology. And technology is also in short supply these days.”
“Edward Jenner found a vaccine for smallpox by observing milkmaids in the eighteenth century,” Regan said.
“Yeah, and the vaccine that he created had nothing like the efficacy of current vaccines,” Red said. “Most vaccines were discovered and/or perfected after 1950 using modern methods and technology, and those methods have only become more refined in the last sixty or so years. Man, don’t use an outlier as your example. That kind of shit pisses me off.”
The corners of Regan’s mouth twitched. Sirois gave her a curious look.
“Are you a med student?” he asked.
“No, I just like science,” Red said.
“She’s a liberal arts major,” Adam said. “No special concentration.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Red said. “And I probably would have been better off taking a survival class or something at