by A. J. Sikes
“I believed Angie’s story,” Emily said. “When she told us, I believed her. I still do.”
“Just between you and me, I believed her, too. But I’m only one member of the council. There are six others, and five of them thought she’d gone too far.”
“So, you put a price on her head?”
“That’s how the Aftermath works. Everything has a cost now. The air we breathe, the water we drink, what little food we have left to eat. It all comes with a cost. That we can even be standing here having this conversation comes with a price paid by the people who are out there right now making sure this community is kept safe.”
Emily stared at the doctor, thinking about what she and Danitha had left behind, and knowing they’d made the right choice to flee. But where they’d landed wasn’t sounding very much better.
“What did you do with Dani? Where is she?”
“I’m right here, Professor,” Danitha said from the other side of the curtain. Doctor DuBois drew it aside and Danitha stepped in. Jenny was with her and said something quietly to the doctor before leaving again. A bandage covered Danitha’s left cheek, and she had cuts on her arms.
“What happened to you, Dani?” Emily asked.
“Hit the window when they rammed us. Got cut up by all the glass. Not as bad as you, but—”
Emily lifted her good arm to her face and felt bandages on both sides of her head.
Doctor DuBois put a hand on her shoulder again. “Rest up. You’re going to be fine. We set your arm and have you on a course of antibiotics. I have to check on my other patients now.”
Before the doctor could leave, Emily grabbed at her coat. “Wait, please. Are you in touch with the Marines on Galveston? Can you reach them? Tell them I’m here.”
Doctor Dubois’ face fell. She looked Emily in the eyes and said, with a flat voice, “We had radio contact with them, but…”
“What is it? Tell me!”
“We lost contact with Galveston yesterday morning, right about when the bridges were blown.”
“What bridges? What do you—My brother was on Galveston. He’s a Marine. Salvador Garza.”
Doctor DuBois paused. “We have some survivors from Galveston at our larger clinic. I don’t know if your brother is one of them.”
“The clinic? How were they hurt? Was it the dogs or the bats? They could be—”
“Dogs and bats? No, the men were all pulled from the water and had nearly drowned. They’re all in comas. Only one of them was conscious when we found them. The bay is full of pathogens; disease could spread quickly if we don’t keep it contained. We’re monitoring them, and I need—”
“I need to know if Salvador is here!” Emily screamed.
Doctor DuBois gently tugged her coat from Emily’s grip. “I’ll check with the nurses.”
Emily fought to keep her voice down and said, “Thank you.” After a breath, she described her brother, hoping it would help. “If he is here, please let me see him.”
“I can’t do that. Not until we’re sure they aren’t carriers of any contagion.”
Doctor DuBois held up a hand to stop Emily’s question.
“I will ask a nurse to find out if your brother is here. If he is, I will let you know. Now, I have to go back to the clinic, so please…”
She motioned for Emily to lie down and then left.
Danitha stood nearby, shifting on her feet. “Don’t feel right being here. Without Angie.”
“They would have killed her,” Emily said. “The doctor told me. They have a council of seven people. Five of them voted that Angie was in the wrong for what she did.”
“And what did she do but teach a man to keep his hands to hisself? Even if it was permanent. Don’t make it wrong in my book.”
Emily wondered if Danitha had something in her recent past that would make her guilty in the council’s eyes. She thought about her own past, the things she had done to survive since the virus. Had she been lucky, never having to make the choice between hurting or killing another in order to protect herself?
What choices would they have to make now that they had found this place of safety? How safe were they if their fate could be decided by seven people they had never even met?
— 18 —
The road back to Tiki Island was the same as it had been on their drive up the previous day. Empty of anything Jed cared about, except for the occasional wrecked vehicle that drew his attention as they passed by. He expected Variants to spring from every shadow and land on the truck. But nothing came flying at them, spitting and shrieking for his blood. Nothing but his memories anyway.
McKitrick took them down the highway as fast as she could, her determination reminding Jed of Sergeant Gallegos. But as she swerved them around another overturned car, Jed worried they’d spin out or flip.
“Keep it easy, McKitrick,” he said.
“We gotta get there, Sergeant. LT’s hurt. He could be bleeding out right now.”
“Won’t do him any good if we’re all in the same shape because you rolled the truck. Keep it easy. Drive on, but watch the speed.”
She backed off a bit, taking a longer arc around the next wreck they passed.
They were near the area where they’d seen the hunter and his dog on their way inland. Jed scanned the terrain, looking for any sign of movement. The more he thought about the hunter, the more he was reminded of the crackhead. Jed couldn’t let go of his suspicions about the two men, but he kept his worries to himself. Some of the civilians on Galveston had adopted pets. He didn’t need Keoh going rogue and shooting at every stray person who had found an animal to help them survive the apocalypse.
The causeway came into view on the horizon. Concrete chunks and burned up vehicles marked the gaps left by the bombs. The rooftops and fences of Tiki Island soon appeared off to their right. McKitrick angled them to the off-ramp.
Tiki was just a single street running down a strip of dirt sticking into the water. Storm-battered houses lined it on one side. The other side of the street was nothing but empty lots and the scattered remains of houses that once stood there.
Jed checked his notebook. “LT said tip of the island. Eyes out, and watch the roofs. We don’t know shit about what’s here.”
As McKitrick slowed their progress, Jed scanned their path ahead, always swiveling his view left to right. Now that the monsters were a reality again, anything could be a threat. Jed focused carefully on every mound of debris or shredded remains of a house, watching for movement and fearing that each yard the truck rolled might be the last.
The island was quiet, though, at least for now. Soon, the tip was in sight, jutting into the water like a sidewalk somebody forgot to finish. The last house on the street was only inches from the shoreline. A smashed-up fishing boat sat halfway in the water there, like it had been run aground on purpose. A radio lay in the mud beside it. Jed had McKitrick pull them up a few yards from the house. He got out and stepped to where he could see the front door. It was open a few inches.
“Garza, Keoh; dismount and stack on me.”
They exited fast and lined up behind him. The trio moved forward, rushing to the door. Jed put his foot into it and it flew inward. He raced in, feeling Garza and Keoh right on his six.
LT Staples was lying on a couch in the next room. He stirred as Jed approached him.
“That you, Welch?”
“Oorah, sir. What the hell happened?”
“Broke my leg jumping out a window. Had to—”
He grimaced and reached a hand down to his right leg. Smears of blood stained his hands and the left side of his face was an angry mess of blood and blisters.
Jed turned to Keoh. “Get the med bag. Tell McKitrick to back the truck up the drive.”
She moved out, and Garza came into the room with Jed and the LT.
“The fuck happened, sir?” Garza asked.
“Got caught in a fire. Had to jump. Secondary charges…outside the TOC. Somebody wanted me dead.”
“Who, sir?”
“Ewell did it. Had to be Ewell.”
“Gunny? No way,” Garza said. “Maybe Kip, but—”
“You sure about that, sir?” Jed said, cutting Garza off with a look. He wasn’t convinced Kip acted alone. LT knew something about the body they’d found that morning, and he hadn’t said anything yet. If he was injured in the blast, it might have been because he was careless with his act of sabotage.
“Couldn’t it have been someone else, sir? Or an accident?” Jed asked.
“No, Sergeant. It couldn’t. Why the fuck would there accidentally be demo charges anywhere near the building? It was all stored in lockers at the ammo point.”
“I mean, how do you know it was demo? The TOC wasn’t that far from the Galveston end of the bridge—”
Keoh was back with the corpsman’s bag. She got out a SAM splint and set to work getting LT’s leg ready for them to move him.
“Sergeant, I’m telling you what I know,” Staples said. He curled forward, resting on one elbow to stab a finger at Jed. Gritting his teeth, he said, “I was in the TOC when the blasts started. I had enough time to stand up, look out the window, and see the explosions getting closer. I saw a duffle bag standing against the wall, right by the door. It wasn’t there when I entered, and it wasn’t there when Ewell came in. It was put there sometime between when he left and when the bridges went up.”
“Where’d he go? We figured—”
Staples laid down again, resting one arm across his chest. The other hand kept reaching toward his broken leg, like he could hold it together or squeeze it to stop the pain. Keoh was done with the splint and had saline ready, with burn ointment and bandages. Staples took the saline and sprayed it over his left cheek and around his hairline where the burns weren’t as bad. He let Keoh swab at the rest and apply the ointment.
Jed and Garza helped the LT up and got him into the back of the SUV. Jed told Mehta to move up front with McKitrick’s 203 while he wedged into the back seat with Keoh in the middle and Garza on the other side.
“Let’s get gone, McKitrick,” he said as he tried to raise Radout. He got nothing back and figured they were out of range. The bigger radio Staples brought with him could have reached, but it had a dead battery.
Staples filled them in as they drove, telling them how the TOC caught fire after the demo went up, forcing him to jump from the second floor.
“I grabbed the radio and went out the window. I yelled for Ewell, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Couldn’t see anyone. Too much smoke and dust from the bridges going up.”
“We lost Skip in that, sir,” McKitrick said.
“Sorry to hear that. Ewell’s guilty of manslaughter at least.”
“And you’re sure it was him?” Jed asked again.
“Can’t think of who else it could be. The duffle bag was there by the front door. I’m only alive because I stood up to see what was going on with the bridges. I saw the bag, my brain said IED. I ran up the stairs just in time. Ewell’s the only one who could have put the bag there. He’d been giving me shit all morning and walked out right before I sent you to deliver that body to the engineers. First time I can honestly say I was happy to see his ass.”
“What did Gunny go after you for?” Jed asked.
“I have no idea. He was just hollering about everything. First, he said he was tired of doing nothing but sitting and shitting; then he bitched about Kipler, saying how he never hauled enough bodies out of the water, so it wasn’t like we really lost anything when he went AWOL. I thought about ordering Ewell to stay put, but I couldn’t fault him. We had a fuck ton of nothing to do on Galveston. The refugee ship was overdue and nobody could tell me when it might show up.”
“Didn’t you have a line back to Plum?” Jed asked, wondering if Mercer’s story was about to proven.
McKitrick turned them off Tiki Island and they rode in silence for a while before Jed asked his question again.
Staples put a fist against his mouth, then said, “Only commo I’ve had was with Six Team, some of the civilians inland, and the refugee ship. They’re somewhere around Florida last I heard from them.”
“What about Plum Island?”
“Whoever was there is either dead or off-line. I’ve been trying to reach them since we got here, but nobody’s home.”
“And you didn’t think that might have been something we should know?” Garza demanded.
“Easy, Garza,” Jed said.
“No, fuck that. We’re out here on nobody’s orders doing nobody’s bidding, and this mother—”
“I said stand the fuck down!”
Jed stared Garza in the eyes, daring him to open his mouth again. The Lance Corporal was still fuming, but he backed down, then swiveled his head to look out the window.
“You’re a good Marine, Garza,” Staples said. “Hot-tempered and trigger-happy, but you’re right. I should have told you. Should have told all of you.”
Jed spoke up before Garza could get any more shots in. “Won’t lie to you, sir. I was worried you had a hand in at first. When you sent us over the water with that body, I thought you were hiding something from us.”
“Like what?”
“I didn’t know really, still don’t. Just had an itch about it.”
“Still feel like scratching, Sergeant, or are we good?”
“We’re good, sir. We—Shit, this is just adding insult to injury. We found these papers at a compound up the road. I wasn’t sure what to think when I saw them. It looks like Kipler was the one who did it. Or he knows who did.”
Jed handed the pages over the seat and waited while Staples read them.
“Looks like a bomber’s diagram, but it also looks like bullshit. Who the fuck signs his name to something like this? Don’t tell me you really thought Kip was responsible.”
“I hope not, sir. But I can’t figure it any other way.”
Jed was quiet for a moment, holding in his anger as best he could. After everything Gunny Ewell had been through in Iraq, for him to use the very tactics that had taken so many American lives…
“You think Gunny’s still alive, sir?”
“I don’t know. If he is, and he’s out here somewhere, I hope I see him before he sees us.”
“What about the other squads, sir? Any word from them since we’ve been gone?” Keoh asked.
“Haven’t had any contact since they left. I’d assumed they were dead, or adrift out here. But maybe Kip’s alive and had a finger in this pie.”
Staples asked for a report of their activities since they’d left, so Jed downloaded. He told the LT about linking up with Radout, then described Mercer’s operation, how they were greeted and treated, and how the monsters came back and have evolved into canine forms.
“That’s where we found the papers, sir. In Mercer’s place.”
“I knew Mercer. He was on the Truxton when the virus hit. Thought for sure he was dead, but I—Hey, where’s your other man? Where’s Parsons?” Staples asked.
“We lost him that night, sir,” Jed said. He explained and Staples listened, nodding with his eyes closed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s on me, sir,” Jed said.
“Don’t do that to yourself, Sergeant,” Staples said.
They followed the highway in silence for a bit, until McKitrick aimed them at the fork going around Mercer’s AO.
“Your plan is to link up with Radout?” Staples asked as they followed the highway around the refinery.
“Yes, sir. He said he was taking his people to Baytown. Said they got a barter system in place to gain entry. We helped him haul a lot out of Mercer’s supply.”
“That should do the trick. They’re good people there as far as I know.”
“How so?”
“I only talked to them a few times, and that was just to get with the Six Team crews in the area. But
they sounded legit to me. When’s the last time you talked to Radout?”
“Just before we left to get you. I should try him again here; we’re probably in range.”
Jed made two attempts to reach Radout, calling their location and ETA, but they still weren’t close enough yet. Either that, or Radout wasn’t listening.
“Why would Gunny do it?” Mehta asked. “I don’t get it.”
“That’s because you’re a boot,” Garza said.
Jed shot a look in the Lance Corporal’s direction and Garza smirked. “Just fucking with him, Sergeant.”
“Well stop it,” Jed said. “No buddy fucking in my squad without consent.”
Staples spoke up before Jed could answer Mehta’s question.
“Ewell knew there was nobody up top anymore, so he went rogue and tried to lock down his own fiefdom. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It’s like that Mercer guy you ran into, setting up a little kingdom to rule over. That’s my take anyway.”
“That’s pretty fucked up, sir,” Mehta said.
“Exactly. But that’s the reality we’re faced with. World ended, Private Mehta. Out here, everybody is either a warlord, working for one, or they’re prey.”
“Can’t be that way, sir,” Keoh said. “We have to remember where we came from.”
“Where we came from is how we got here.”
“What do you mean?” Jed asked.
“None of you know this, and I’m technically not supposed to tell you, but—easy Garza—fuck the rules. Here’s the truth about the monsters. The virus was a government project started during Vietnam. The mastermind was a man named Colonel Gibson who thought he knew how to make the world perfect. He lost his son to the war and wanted to develop a biological weapon that would end any war America got into, with our side coming out on top every time and without shedding a drop of American blood to do it. That way, no other American parents would have to bury their children. In other words, he was fucking crazy and ended up doing the exact opposite of what he hoped. The country had a good run, but we’re done. And all this rebuilding around here? All the clean up? Waste of fucking time. We’re a long damn way from being ready to rebuild as long as people like Mercer are out here playing like they know what’s best for everybody.”