Chapter 4 — Welcome to Mercy Ridge

Tess turned the key.

The engine clicked.

Outside the warehouse, the loudspeaker repeated her name.

“Tess Navarro. We’re here to help.”

She turned the key again.

This time the engine caught.

“Rear lane,” I said.

“I remember.”

Ben pulled June down between the seats. Eli braced his injured leg against a box of tools as Tess drove around the back of the warehouse.

A white truck blocked the broken section of fence.

It hadn’t come from the highway with the others.

It had been waiting.

Two men stood beside it. Neither raised his weapon.

One lifted a hand.

“Stop the vehicle.”

Tess kept driving.

The man stepped aside at the last second.

Our front bumper caught the chain-link fence beside the truck. Metal shrieked against the windshield. The van tilted, dropped hard, then bounced onto the drainage road.

A shot cracked behind us.

June screamed.

“Down,” I said.

Tess fought the wheel through the mud. I looked back and saw the truck trying to reverse out of our way.

Then we reached the trees.

Eli’s radio hissed.

“Vehicle eastbound. Don’t damage the Navarro subject.”

Tess’s knuckles went white.

“Subject?”

“Keep driving.”

We stayed on logging roads until the station was miles behind us.

When Tess finally stopped, steam rose from the hood.

A branch had punctured the radiator during our escape.

She stared at the spreading puddle beneath the van.

“We can patch it.”

“How far will that get us?”

She didn’t answer.

Behind us, Eli made a sound through his teeth.

I opened the rear door.

Blood had soaked through his bandage.

The hard landing had pulled the wound apart.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

June watched from the opposite seat, holding Ben’s hand.

I changed Eli’s dressing while Tess worked under the hood. His fever was coming back. The skin above the bandage looked redder than it had that morning.

“We need a doctor,” he said.

I nodded.

He looked at the speaker box in my bag.

“An actual doctor. Not another person with a locked cupboard.”

Mercy Ridge was the only place we knew had one.

I hated that Graham had left us with a choice he had already described.

Tess came around the van.

“Patch will hold for a little while. We can reach the county road.”

“And then?”

She wiped her hands on her jeans.

“We decide who we’re more afraid of.”

We reached Mercy Ridge before sunset.

The walls surrounded a former medical campus on a wooded slope. Solar panels covered the roofs. Water tanks stood above the service buildings.

There were children playing inside the fence.

That was the first thing that made me hesitate.

Not the armed guards.

Not the thick gates.

A little boy kicked a ball toward a woman carrying laundry. She stopped it with her foot and sent it back.

Something ordinary.

Something I hadn’t seen in years.

I parked beneath the inspection canopy.

Tess had wrapped her arm in a clean bandage and pulled down her sleeve. Before we approached, I had hidden Graham’s list and the speaker box beneath the van’s loose passenger-floor panel.

I kept my rifle across my knees until a guard asked me to put it down.

“Medical emergency,” I said.

He looked past me at Eli.

His expression changed.

“Bring a chair,” he called.

They checked our eyes, our temperatures, our hands.

Another guard asked about bites.

“No,” I said.

Tess looked straight ahead.

Eli’s injury was visible, obvious, and bad enough to occupy their attention.

They confiscated our weapons and gave me a numbered receipt.

Then a woman in blue scrubs approached the van.

“I’m Dr. Ortiz.”

“Can you help him?”

“Let me look.”

She examined Eli without making promises.

That helped more than if she had smiled and told me everything would be fine.

“We need to clean this properly,” she said. “When did he last take antibiotics?”

I showed her the time on my hand and the packaging.

She read it.

Then she looked at me.

“You did what you could.”

I nearly lost my grip on the receipt.

A man in a clean gray coat met us outside the clinic.

“Adrian Bell,” he said. “Welcome to Mercy Ridge.”

He shook my hand.

His palms were warm.

“We were attacked by men in white trucks,” I told him.

His gaze moved briefly to Tess.

“Outside the city?”

“At a transfer station.”

“We have recovery teams in that area. There are independent groups using similar vehicles.”

“They called her by name.”

Tess folded her arms.

Bell took a moment before answering.

“Were you expected here?”

I thought of Graham’s list.

“Someone may have registered us without asking.”

“Then they probably had your information.”

It was a reasonable explanation.

That made it worse.

“I’ll investigate,” he said. “For now, your brother needs treatment.”

Ben and June stayed close to Tess while I followed Eli into the clinic.

Through the treatment-room window, I watched Lena cut away damaged tissue and irrigate the wound. Eli gripped the sides of the table.

When she finished, he looked exhausted.

But the dressing was clean.

An intravenous bag hung above him.

He was getting help.

Real help.

Later, Lena found Tess washing her hands.

Her sleeve had ridden up.

Lena caught her wrist.

Tess jerked back.

For a second, both women stared at the bandage.

“How old?” Lena asked quietly.

“Old enough.”

Lena checked the corridor.

“Come with me.”

I followed them into a supply room.

Tess unwrapped her arm.

Lena examined the punctures.

“How long since the bite?”

“Thirty-six hours,” I said.

She looked at Tess’s eyes, checked her temperature, asked several questions.

Then she replaced the bandage.

“What are you going to do?” Tess asked.

Lena closed the door.

“Write down that you have a contaminated laceration.”

“You saw teeth marks.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Lena held her gaze.

“Because I want you to reach tomorrow morning.”

They gave us two rooms in a converted staff residence.

Eli remained in the clinic. Ben and June slept in one room. Tess and I took the other.

There was running water.

I stood at the sink long after I finished washing.

Outside, a bell rang for the evening meal.

We ate bread, beans, and roasted vegetables at long tables beneath electric lights.

A man named Owen distributed extra pieces of bread to the children. He wore dark-framed glasses and apologized when June dropped hers.

He gave her another.

I watched her smile at him.

Later, I volunteered for maintenance.

The supervisor took one look at my hands and assigned me to a blocked drain beside the clinic’s service wing.

I cleared it in twenty minutes.

While he fetched replacement pipe, I checked the notices behind the workbench.

Ordinary schedules.

Laundry. Water testing. Staff rotations.

Then a second clipboard beneath them.

DONOR SERVICES.

Names had been replaced with numbers.

Collection times filled the columns.

Some numbers appeared every day.

A door opened nearby.

I stepped behind a shelving unit.

Owen came into the washroom across the corridor.

He leaned heavily against the sink.

Then he removed his glasses.

In the bright overhead light, his pupils remained wide and black.

He took a small vial from his pocket with shaking fingers.

Our eyes met in the mirror.

I stopped breathing.

He didn’t turn.

“Leave,” he whispered.

I couldn’t move.

He squeezed his eyes shut, struggling with something I could not see.

“You shouldn’t be here.”