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Okay, fine. The rest of hers.
When the bump announced her level had been reached, there was another pause, like the elevator was gathering the strength to open its doors. In that period of stasis, she closed her eyes and pictured the way Gus had always strode through the aisles of the workstations, everyone else in a white coat, him in a concert t-shirt featuring the Grateful Dead, or Pink Floyd, or maybe Peter, Paul and Mary, his Afro framing his face and shoulders, his body moving so confidently.
Bing!
At the sound, the doors parted, and as she caught a whiff of mechanicals, floor polish, and disinfectant, her gut rolled.
Stepping out, she tugged at her black suit jacket, and as her weight settled on her high heels, her balance wobbled a little. Her Achilles tendons had ached for the past few days while she had been in flat shoes, but now that her feet were artificially arched again, they were quiet, the position they’d grown used to reestablished. Cathy couldn’t say she felt the same as she walked down the screening hall with the double mirrors. Her clothes were not constricting in the slightest, as she hadn’t been eating well, but the makeup felt like she’d spray-painted her face, the outer corners of her eyes tickling because of the liner and the mascara. Oh, and her hair was frozen in place, the swoop like a sculptural effect instead of anything that grew out of her head.
Theclip-clipas she marched down the polished concrete floor was the metronome of her life, and the Armani suit was her uniform, and the look was that which she had cultivated and perfected a decade ago. In the past, the illusion had been skin-deep, going right down into the core of her. Now? It was window dressing that she was hoping would give her some false courage: The cramping in her lower belly was a constant reminder of what she’dlost, and the creeping exhaustion she felt like she was battling harder every day was a marker of what was coming—
What if Gus had already left the property?
She’d known as soon as he and Daniel had gone out into the woods at dawn. She’d been upstairs in bed, not sleeping, when her monitoring system had gone off. Sheer terror had thrown her over onto the laptop that lay open beside her, and she had felt no relief as she’d watched the pair walk across the field.
What if he just strode away without a goodbye?
But come on, she’d told herself. First of all, it was a helluva trek back to Plattsburgh on foot. Secondly, there was no getting over the perimeter wall—no easy way, that is. And finally, Daniel was sensible. He understood the reality of what they were all in, maybe even better than Cathy herself did. He would talk sense into the good doctor.
And they had come back, the pair of them.
Whereupon Gus had gone down to the lab.
Theirlab.
As she was cleared for the last time and the lab’s main door was opened, she entered the cavernous area of workstations. Researchers looked up and nodded at her—then promptly went back to whatever they were doing, and their focus was something to envy. She felt so scattered and scrambled that she wondered how in the hell she had done all this: Hired these people away from jobs thatwere on the up-and-up, found this facility and renovated it for her purposes, created a drug that had real potential thanks to her head of R&D.
Then again, she hadn’t been where she was now when the journey had started.
And of course, for all her efforts, the lab had cost her everything. Literally.
The fact that the enterprise needed to be wound down was a reality that she couldn’t ignore, and she had to get started with that right away.
Tick-tock with the clock.
As she entered the hall of patient rooms and examination spaces, she had a flashback to her and Gus planning everything out, from those workstations, to the cold storage units, to the organizational chart with the employee positions and the reporting lines of authority. She could remember them walking down here, and him shaking his head at the bald concrete and empty, cave-like space.
Where the hell did you find this place?
I have my sources. And it will work.
And it did. For a time.
When she reached the doorway to what had been his office, she hesitated before she knocked, and she thought about the elevator’s pauses. Then she got with the knuckling.
No answer.
More with the rapping, and then she leaned into the door. “Gus? I need to talk to you.”
He’d left his patient room, and she knew without checking there that that hospital bed would be empty. Having gotten up on his feet, he would not go backwards. Not unless it was a medical emergency, and she would have heard about that.
“Gus?”
When there was still no reply, she pictured him stretched out on the bare floor by the desk. He’d done that sometimes when his body’s need for sleep had finally trumped that incredible mental engine of his. She’d never understood how he could find anything REM-related without so much as a pillow—
She pushed things half-open. “Gus?”
Shoving the door all the way wide, she told herself she was making sure he hadn’t had some horrible complication. This was a medical necessity—
