The Last Of Us Returns

4

Chapter 4

Damon could have lied to her. He had a dozen easy lies ready, and Lena was looking at him with her arms crossed and her jaw tight, waiting to catch every one of them.

"I'll tell you something true," he said. "And you're going to think I'm crazy."

"I already think you're crazy. You paid four hundred thousand for my dad's stores and then felt up every pallet in the warehouse."

Benji choked on a chip.

"In twenty-seven days, something is going to happen to this city," Damon said. "People are going to get sick, and they're going to turn violent, and it's going to spread faster than anyone can stop it. When it starts, I want you and Max inside this warehouse with the steel doors locked. Don't open them for anyone named Sterling. Don't open them for Jace, no matter what he says or what he promises you."

Lena stared at him. "Something is going to happen," she repeated slowly. "In twenty-seven days."

"Yes."

"How do you know that?"

"I can't tell you yet."

"Of course you can't." She pushed off the pallets. "Is this a cult? Are you going to ask me to drink something?"

"Lena," Damon said. "You don't have to believe me. You just have to remember what I said."

She looked at him for a long, hard moment, then over at Max, who was poking at a rice sack near the door.

"Fine," she said finally. "I'll remember. But if you show up here in twenty-seven days in a white robe, I'm calling the police."

"Deal."

The papers were signed on Wednesday. Lena's uncle's lawyer read every page twice, asked Damon four times if he was sure about the price, and then shook his hand with the face of a man who had just watched someone set money on fire. Damon walked out of the office with the keys to three supermarkets and a warehouse, and twenty-five days left.

That afternoon he went to see his mother.

Greenhill Care Home was at the edge of the city, a low brick building with a garden that nobody tended. Martha had moved in two years ago when her diabetes got bad enough that she couldn't live alone, and Celeste had offered to pay for it as a wedding gift. Damon had been grateful for that. He had thanked Celeste for it every single month.

In his last life, Martha had died in that building on the ninth day of the outbreak, because the insulin Damon had saved for her had gone into Mr. Sterling's medicine bag instead.

Benji parked the van and looked at him. "You okay? You've got that face again."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You look the way you looked in the van on Saturday."

"I'm fine, Benji. Wait here."

"No way. Your mom loves me more than you. I'm coming in."

Martha was sitting by the window of her room doing a crossword with a pen, her grey hair pinned up and her reading glasses on the end of her nose. She was sixty-one, small and sharp-tongued, and she looked up and frowned the second Damon came through the door.

"You're thin," she said. "Has that wife of yours stopped feeding you?"

Damon stood in the doorway and couldn't say anything.

"Hi, Mrs. Hale," Benji said, squeezing past him with a bag of oranges. "I brought you fruit. Damon didn't bring anything."

"Of course he didn't. Come here, Benji, sit down. Damon, close your mouth, you look stupid."

Damon crossed the room, bent down, and wrapped his arms around her, and Martha went still in his arms, then patted his back the way she used to when he was a boy.

"What's wrong?" she asked quietly. "Is it Celeste?"

"I left her, Mom."

Martha pulled back and looked at him over her glasses. Benji suddenly became very interested in the oranges.

"Good," Martha said.

Damon blinked. "Good?"

"Three years I've watched that girl talk to you the way she talks to her driver. I kept my mouth shut because you looked happy. You never looked happy, but you kept saying you were, so I kept my mouth shut." She tapped his cheek with her pen. "Who's paying for this room now?"

"I am. And I'm moving you somewhere better. Somewhere with a real garden, and a gate, and a nurse who doesn't fall asleep at the front desk."

"There's nothing wrong with this place."

"Mom."

She looked at him for a long time, then sighed. "Fine. But I'm keeping my crossword books."

They stayed for an hour. Benji peeled oranges and told her about the van, the football game and the four hundred thousand, and Martha laughed so hard she had to take her glasses off. Damon sat on the edge of her bed and watched her and memorized her laugh, because in his last life he had forgotten what it sounded like.

Before he left, he went to the nurse's station to ask about her transfer papers, and the nurse on duty, a young man with a coffee stain on his scrubs, looked up at him with a confused face.

"Mr. Hale? The transfer's already been arranged."

"What transfer?"

"Mrs. Sterling's office called this morning. Your mother's being moved to the Sterling private clinic on Friday. They said you'd approved it."

Damon felt the floor tilt under him. "I didn't approve anything."

The nurse looked down at his computer. "It says here the bill is paid through Sterling Pharma, and the request was signed by Mrs. Sterling, as next of kin's spouse."

"I'm her son. She's my mother. Cancel it."

"I can't cancel it without the account holder, sir. The account's in Mrs. Sterling's name."

"I have her medical power of attorney," Damon said. "She signed it two years ago, when she moved in."

"I know, sir, it's in her file. But the clinic contract names Mrs. Sterling as the financial sponsor. They won't discharge a patient until the sponsor signs off on the bill."

"Then put it in mine. I'll pay. Right now."

"I'm sorry, sir, the transfer's already in the system and the clinic's already accepted her. You'd have to talk to them directly." The nurse swallowed nervously. "There's someone from the clinic here, actually. He came to check her room."

A man stepped out of the hallway behind the nurse's station, tall and thick-necked, in a dark jacket instead of a uniform.

Grant.

"Damon," Grant said. He nodded politely. "Didn't expect to see you here."

"What are you doing here?"

"Mrs. Sterling asked me to look over the transfer. Make sure your mother's comfortable." He glanced down at Damon's feet. "How's the ankle?"

Damon went still. "What?"

"Your ankle. You were limping on Saturday when you walked out of the dining room."

"I wasn't limping."

Grant shrugged and smiled. "My mistake."

Damon looked at him for a long time, and the bite marks on his forearm gave a hard, cold throb under his sleeve. He hadn't been limping. He knew he hadn't. The last time he had limped near Grant was on the north wall, three years in the future, with a broken ankle and Jace's boot coming at his chest.

"Stay away from my mother," Damon said quietly.

"I'm just doing my job," Grant said. "Same as always."

Benji came out of Martha's room with orange peel on his shirt and saw Grant and stopped. "What's he doing here?"

"Leaving," Damon said.

Grant smiled again, nodded to the nurse, and walked out through the front doors without looking back.

Benji came to stand next to him. "Okay, what was that? Why did he ask about your ankle? Your ankle's fine."

"I know."

"Then why did your face go white?"

Damon didn't answer. He was watching Grant through the glass doors, walking across the parking lot toward a black car, and he was thinking about how Grant had only ever looked at him on Saturday night for half a second, and how Grant had stopped walking when Damon turned around, and how no one in the Sterling family had ever once asked how he was.

His phone rang. He looked down at the screen.

Celeste.

He answered and didn't say anything.

"You went to see your mother," Celeste said. Her voice was soft and even. "Good. She's a lovely woman. I've always liked her, you know. She's never liked me, but I've always liked her."

"Cancel the transfer, Celeste."

"I can't. The clinic's the best in the city, and she needs proper care. Greenhill can't even keep her insulin refrigerated half the time. You know that. You've complained about it to me twice."

"She's my mother. You don't get to touch her."

"I'm not touching her, Damon. I'm taking care of her, the same way I took care of her for three years while you thanked me every month." She paused. "She'll be safe with me. I promise you that. But I've been thinking about the fish tank, and the football game, and the way you walked through Lena's warehouse touching every single pallet. And I think you know something I need to know."

Damon's grip tightened on the phone. "You had me followed again."

"I've had you followed since Saturday. Dinner on Friday, my place, eight o'clock. Come alone, and we'll talk about what you know." She paused again, and when she spoke, her voice dropped. "And Damon, please don't make me ask your mother instead."