The Vault (A Farm Novel) by Emily McKay Read Free Book Online Page A

the helicopter you’re looking for,” Zeke said.
    Yeah, I knew he was right, but I also knew statistics weren’t on our side in this one. “You seen many other helicopters zipping around the state in the past six months?” There was a moment of dead, awful silence in the room. “Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.”
    Shit.
    Lily’s helicopter had gone down. With her in it. She could be dead already.
    Almost without realizing it, I dropped my hands to my knees and bent over, struggling to suck air into my lungs as panic clutched me.
    Everything I’d done, and I could have lost her to this, an accident. God damn it!
    The freakin’ apocalypse happens and takes out seventy, maybe eighty percent of the entire population. And the one person I really care about somehow survives. And I actually manage to find her. We get a couple of months together before the world starts ripping us apart again. Then she’s exposed to the Tick virus, but at least there was still hope. But now?
    Jesus, if her helicopter crashed . . .
    How the hell was I supposed to keep hoping?
    I really was going to kill Ely, because she never would have been on that helicopter if it wasn’t for him. If it wasn’t for him, she’d be safely back at Base Camp. If it wasn’t for him, she’d be . . .
    I sucked in another breath.
    No. I couldn’t think like this. Not while there was still a chance. I pushed myself up to see Charla and Zeke exchanging worried looks. “The message that went out, was it an automated SOS? Something the helicopter would have sent out on its own?”
    “No, it was from a person. A guy named Jonathan Price.”
    I scrubbed my hands up and down my face. So definitely Lily’s helicopter. But if he’d survived long enough to send the message, then maybe she had, too.
    “When did it happen?”
    “I don’t—”
    “How long ago did the message come through?”
    She lowered her gaze again before answering. “Maybe twelve hours ago.”
    “Are the messages recorded?”
    She shook her head.
    The helicopter had left El Corazon just a few minutes before Mel and I had pulled out. That had been just about thirty hours ago. They should have reached the closest Farm within a couple of hours at most. Instead, they’d crashed. There had been a doctor and a pilot, as well as four people who’d been exposed to the Tick virus and were sedated to slow its progress. Jonathan wasn’t the type of guy to do a lot of heavy lifting. If he’d put out the distress call, it meant there was no one else to do it. Which meant the helicopter had gone down and there’d been . . . ah, shit . . . at least twelve to sixteen hours where he’d been too out of it to send out a call.
    None of this sounded good. At all.
    Even if Lily was still alive, those intravenous meds she’d been getting on a drip, those probably hadn’t survived the crash. Which meant she wouldn’t be sedated anymore. Which meant the Tick virus would continue to progress. And she’d turn into a Tick. Within the next couple of days.
    And again, that was if she hadn’t died in the crash.
    My time line for getting to Sabrina’s had just gotten a hell of a lot shorter.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    LILY
    I wake to pain. That dull achiness from a virus. The chills. So strong I can’t stop shaking long enough to ask Mom for a blanket. Or to move me somewhere more comfortable. A strange dizziness that makes the sky above me seem to shift and buckle. A weird scratching, scuffling sound, too. Loud and close and somehow soothing. Despite the pain, I close my eyes and sleep again.
    It’s harder next time, to drift away again. But I do. I slip in and out with the pain and the scuffling and the jabbing, scratching at my back and the bending, shifting sky overhead. It doesn’t stop.
    Until suddenly it does.
    Then I’m out.
    Next time I wake up, the sky above has stopped moving. Why am I outside?
    The pounding in my skull and the chills racking my body tell me I’m sick. Very sick. But why am I