Mission Cure

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - M:FAC/1 - Dreary

DREARY

"It's a normal door. Just break it down. You have to get in there to see if she's okay!" Dreary was doing her best to help Roslava without being there. She'd been young, but she remembered her own mother going into labor with the twins. It was a lot of yelling and crying and proclamations of dying before her time. Dreary and her father had encouraged her as best as a man and child could.

"Break down the door? Are you serious? Do you even know what these doors are made of? It's not like I have an axe," Jace responded.

"Actually," she told him, "you do have an axe."

"This is a hatchet. It's not heavy enough to do anything except scare Roslava even more. She sounds like she's in a lot of pain. How long does this take? An hour?"

Dreary rolled her eyes and chuckled. "It can take days."

"DAYS!?"

"Sorry this is so uncomfortable for you," Dreary told him in her driest tone. "What if you slipped the blade between the door and the jam? Pried it open?"

"There's not enough room."

"What about using a credit card?" she asked. They'd seen enough movies where that particular trick worked to open doors. And her dad had to have one of those around here somewhere.

"I don't think that's real, Drear."

From the couch, Charlie was watching her and squirming. He was probably itching to run his fingers through his hair, but he couldn't. "You can open that door with a key," he told her.

"Really?" she asked. "Where is it?"

"General's office. In the Hull, somewhere. He has a master key for all internal keyed entries. We had to use it once when the twins locked themselves in the bathroom, remember?"

Dreary tried recalling a time when the boys did such a thing, but maybe it was during one of her many trips to the library. It didn't matter now. It only mattered that they got that key. She started to tell Jace he needed to search the General's office when Charlie brought up a very valid point.

"Dreary, honey," he began. "What if he opens that door and she's not just in labor?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean, what if she's also infected. And she just hasn't changed yet?"

"Jace?" Dreary spoke into the phone.

"Yeah," he answered. "I heard."

"What do we do?" she asked.

Jace sighed. "I'll get the key, and then we'll figure it out. But my phone is almost dead, so I'm hanging up."

"Tell him to bring a latte," Charlie told Dreary.

Dreary scrunched her face. "What?"

Charlie shrugged. "I promised Melvin a latte."

"Did you hear that?" she asked Jace who sighed.

"Yeah."

"Be careful."

"Okay."

When she hung up the phone, she noticed her dad's typical dad smile. The smile that was supposed to reassure her. The lying smile.

"It's gonna be okay," he said.

"I know," she lied back. How could everything possibly be okay? Marcia and Jim were as good as dead. They all talked about a cure like it was a real thing, just around the corner, but it wasn't. So, what then? Just lock these Void things in a closet forever? And what about her dad? If he changed, she would be left to raise the boys alone...