Resurrection

by Mark Kelly

  “Then you will tell them we are not infected,” she said matter-of-factly. “How else will we get on base?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, but we won’t even get close enough to talk to them, and even if we did, why would they believe me? Would you?”

  No, she thought. She wouldn’t.

  Baker started his motorcycle. “Let’s find a place to camp and figure out our next steps.”

  45

  Pile of dirt

  Baker seemed to know where he was going when he took them north and away from the base.

  A mile and a half from the main gate, he turned right into a subdivision full of unfinished row-houses and cookie-cutter single-family homes, and they rode down streets with names that didn’t appear to have any link with reality. Green Briar Lane circled a treeless patch of dirt, and Rough Creek Road wasn’t near any water that Lucia could see.

  They didn’t stop until they reached the gravel parking lot for an unfinished community park at the end of a dead-end street at the back of the subdivision.

  “Are you serious?” Lucia asked as she pulled up next to Baker. “This is where you want to spend the night?” As far as she could tell, the only thing the parking lot had going for it was its isolation.

  He shook his head. “Nope, not here, up there. I saw it from the entrance to the base.”

  Up there was on top of a man-made pile of dirt in the middle of the park. Lucia guessed the subdivision’s builders had taken all the rock and dirt from their excavations and piled it in one spot to form a man-made hill that could have passed as a mountain in flatter-than-a-pancake Kansas. A rough trail the width of a city sidewalk and barely wide enough for the trailer behind Baker’s motorcycle wound its way from the bottom of the hill to the top.

  The entire lump of dirt was treeless and barren. With nothing to break the biting wind, it would be bitterly cold at the top. She knew Baker wanted to figure things out, but surely he could do that in a more comfortable location.

  “Why there?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Because if I could see the top of that hill from the gate, then we’ll be able to see the gate from the top of the hill. Do you remember what else General Leduc told us when he gave us the coordinates for Raine’s satellite phone?”

  She shook her head, hoping this wouldn’t be another one of Baker’s guessing games.

  “He said his Comms Tech analyzed the phone’s GPS data and saw the phone had been at two locations. One was McConnell Air Force Base and the other was Kansas State University. They’re over one hundred miles apart which means the phone moves between the two locations. We might not be able to get inside the rat’s hole, but we can wait for the rat to come out.”

  She gave an exasperated sigh. More waiting, but this time there would be a reward at the end of it.

  “Ready for a little fun?” Baker asked.

  She grunted and looked warily up at the hill. In all the nearly two thousand miles they had ridden, most of it had been on asphalt and never on anything as extreme as this.

  Baker must have sensed her hesitation. “If you want, I’ll take my bike up first and then come down and get yours.”

  “Do not be stupid,” she said, pretending to be offended. “Why would I trust you with my motorcycle? You might wreck it, and then I would have to ride on the back of yours and pray for my life the entire time.”

  He grinned. “That’s the spirit. Let’s go.”

  Gripping the handlebars so tightly that her knuckles hurt, she followed him out of the parking lot to the bottom of the trail. Somehow, from up close, it looked more narrow and steep than it had from afar. Before she could change her mind, Baker revved his engine and took off.

  Not wanting to be left behind, she chased after him. Her bike’s rear wheel spun for a second and then caught traction on the loose dirt, shooting her motorcycle up the steep incline. With each bump and turn, her heart jumped in her throat. At one point near the top, she watched the left wheel of Baker’s trailer roll off the packed dirt into thin air and was certain that turn would be his last.

  When they reached the summit, Baker gave her a thumbs up. “That was one hell of a ride. You should be proud of yourself.”

  Embarrassed by the compliment, she scowled at him as the wind whistled around them, blowing up dirt that pelted her clothing and stung her face. Grateful for the distraction, she pulled her mask higher until it was just below her eyes.

  Baker did the same and pointed to a small flat area about the size of a large dinner table. “Let’s use the trailer and bikes as a windbreak and set the tent up there.”

  After the tent was assembled, they ate tuna from a tin can and crunched on saltine crackers that had somehow stayed fresh in the many months since they had been manufactured. The food filled Lucia’s stomach, but did nothing to warm her. She shivered inside her leather jacket and went into the tent to add another layer of clothing.

  Baker apologized when she came out. “I’m sorry, but we won’t be able to have a fire.”

  She understood. With a fire, it would be like luring moths to a flame; only it wouldn’t be moths they attracted.

  As dusk approached, the distant but unmistakable sound of a generator filled the air. Seconds later, massive halogen floodlights lit up McConnell Air Force Base, making it as bright as day.

  “Where do they get the fuel?” she asked Baker.

  “It’s an air force base and they probably have gigantic underground tanks with God knows how many thousands of gallons of fuel in them,” he answered. “Since the planes aren’t flying, that’s a lot of fuel they can use for other things.”

  Lucia looked down. On one side of the road were buildings with lights, even a handful of street lamps. On the other side, in the refugee camp, all she could see were dozens of tiny orange fires flickering in the wind.

  Somehow, it didn’t seem fair.

  The next morning, for the first time in days, the sun peeked out from behind an endless blanket of grey clouds. Seizing the opportunity to re-charge their nearly dead sat-phone, Lucia lay the solar blanket on top of the trailer and connected the phone to its charger. The phone made a sorry-sounding chirp and died.

  “Pedazo de mierda!”

  “What?” Baker asked, looking up from his binoculars.

  She pointed at the phone. “This piece of shit will not work. I have connected it to the charger, but still it is dead.”

  “Expecting a call from your boyfriend?”

  “Do not be stupid and joke about important things,” she said, glaring at him. “We must call the general and tell him we are at the base. Perhaps, he has news for us.”

  In reality, she didn’t care even the slightest about Leduc, she just wanted to hear how Mei and the others were doing.

  Baker made an annoyed sound, climbed to his feet, and took a quick look at the phone before pronouncing, “The battery must have drained to where it won’t even support a basic boot-up.” Then he sat back down on the empty plastic tub he had turned upside down to make a seat and resumed staring through his binoculars at the base down below.

  “What do we do?” she asked, irritated that one; he hadn’t fixed it, and two; didn’t appear more concerned.

  “We wait.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few hours.”

  She stared at him hoping he would turn and look at her. She was in the mood to argue, but he either knew that, or was so interested in what the soldiers on the base down below were doing that he couldn’t be bothered.

  She muttered to herself and began to talk as she re-arranged things in the trailer. “You have mixed things up so badly that I do not know what we have any longer. I will do an inventory to ensure we don’t starve.” When he continued to ignore her, she became exasperated and said, “And I will need the tub you are sitting on.”

  Finally, he turned to look at her. Then without speaking a word, he moved off the tub and crouched on the ground beside it.

  She gave up. She knew
Baker could be as stubborn as her. One-by-one, taking care to not remove so many items that they couldn’t leave in a hurry if they had to, she rearranged their supplies, placing lesser used items on the bottom and more frequently used things on top. An hour later, as she was finishing up, the sat-phone began to vibrate.

  Bzzzt…Bzzzt…Bzzzt.

  Baker jumped to his feet and disconnected the phone from the charging blanket. Lucia stopped what she was doing and listened while he answered it. In all their weeks on the road, this was the only time the phone had rung outside of their pre-arranged check-in time. She carefully watched his face for clues as to what the call was about.

  A flicker of concern crossed his face at the beginning of the conversation and he glanced over at her. After a minute, he spoke and told whoever was on the other end of the phone that they had reached the base and were waiting for signs Raine was there. Then he hung up and looked at her for so long she thought he had forgotten how to speak.

  “What?”

  “Saanvi’s in the base infirmary. She ran away and got caught in a bad snowstorm. They found her, but she’s suffering from extreme exposure.”

  Lucia felt her legs go weak.

  Baker’s expression softened and he reached for her hands. “I’m sorry. She’s in critical condition.”

  “I do not understand” Lucia said, pulling away from him. “What happened?”

  “All General Leduc told me is that Emma and Saanvi had a fight and Saanvi ran away.”

  Emma…just thinking the name left a bad taste in Lucia’s mouth. She glared at Baker. “What does Mei say? Does she know if Saanvi will be all right?”

  He shrugged and started to speak, but stopped as something down below caught his attention. He quickly brought the binoculars to his eyes.

  “We have to go.”

  “What about Saanvi?”

  Baker lowered the binoculars. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do for her from here. Our friend is on the move. It’s time to go.”

  Her mind swirling with conflicting emotions, Lucia took the binoculars from him and scanned the road running alongside the base’s perimeter. She spotted a small convoy with a Humvee in the middle.

  John Raine.

  She had never seen a photograph of him, but she had made Tony describe that cabrón until his image was etched in her mind; greasy black hair combed back to hide a bald spot, salt-and-pepper goatee, and flabby cheeks that made him look like a drooling dog. She would recognize Raine in the darkest of nights and he was sitting in the back seat of the Humvee.

  “I am going to kill him,” she said, her already strong hatred amplified by the news about Saanvi.

  “We have to catch him first. Let’s go.”

  In less than five minutes, they were headed down the dirt mountain. Baker drove like a maniac with the trailer behind him skidding precariously from side to side. Lucia didn’t know how he managed to keep it under control, but somehow he did.

  When they reached the main road, he stopped and looked in both directions. Thinking he had forgotten which direction the convoy had gone, she pointed left.

  “They have a twenty-minute head start,” Baker replied. “We’ll never catch them, and even if we could, we’re out-numbered.”

  “What then?” she asked, her hand quivering anxiously on the throttle. She was ready to go without him.

  “My guess is they’re going to Kansas State University,” he said, “and if it was me driving the Humvee, I’d go north and then east on the secondary roads to avoid the wrecks on the Interstate.”

  “So what?”

  He pointed to the right. “We’re more agile. If we take I-35, I think we can beat them by a half-hour.”

  “Then let’s go,” Lucia said, already turning her bike in that direction.

  46

  Missed opportunity

  Driving faster than was safe for the road conditions, they pushed their motorcycles and their luck to the limit, dodging wrecked vehicles and garbage as they raced down the highway. Lucia’s eyes ached from the dust stirred up by the relentless wind. She blinked sparingly, afraid she would run into something if she lost her concentration for even a second.

  In between moments of fleeting panic and near misses, she thought about Saanvi and hoped the teenager would be all right. She turned her thoughts back to the road just in time to see Baker exit off the interstate and followed him as he led them onto the university campus.

  A large sign outside one of the buildings read: National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility. That must be where Raine is going, Lucia thought. To her surprise, Baker drove past the lab’s entrance and into a nearby parking lot. She followed him to the back of a building with lettering on the wall that read: Veterinary Health Center.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, becoming even more frustrated when he switched off his ignition. “The entrance was back there. We must hurry. What if Raine is already here?”

  Baker checked his watch. “If they took the route I think they took, they won’t arrive for another twenty or thirty minutes. I want to do a little surveillance and see what we’re about to walk into.”

  She glanced around the parking lot. There was nothing in it but half-emptied garbage bins and a handful of cars with their doors open. They couldn’t even see the lab.

  “You want to check things out from here?” she asked, sarcastically.

  “From there.”

  He pointed up. The bunker-like building was constructed of tan and brown brick resembling stone. It had small rectangular windows running from the ground floor to the roof. It looked like a prison but was one of the tallest buildings on campus.

  Grudgingly accepting that Baker was right, she turned off her ignition and climbed off her bike. She walked over to the door beside the loading dock and tried the handle.

  “It’s locked.”

  “Not for long.”

  Baker flipped back the tarp covering the trailer and peered inside. He scratched the top of his head and then looked at her.

  “What?”

  “Where did you put the crowbar?”

  Muttering to herself, she walked to the trailer, pushed him out of the way, and removed the boxes she had so carefully organized a few hours earlier.

  The crowbar was at the very bottom of the trailer, tucked beneath one of the burlap bags of corn. Corn she had purchased at the river market in Canada. Corn that had cost them irreplaceable gold. Corn they had never eaten as Baker so frequently reminded her.

  “Here,” she said, pushing the crowbar into his hands. “Next time tell me when you will need something so I do not have to waste my time packing and unpacking things.”

  He took the crowbar and wisely said nothing. Wedging the flattened end into the tiny gap between the latch and door frame, he pushed as hard as he could. Chips of faded brown paint flaked off the metal. Slowly, the steel bent until the door popped open.

  Lucia held her breath and braced herself for what would come next: a blast of musty air filled with the stench of decaying flesh, mildew, and dust. Every building was the same, some worse than others, but this building smelled different. It stunk of chemicals and antiseptic like the hospital in New York where Blanca and Alejandro had died.

  She stared into the empty darkness and thought about her children as the memories flooded back. They were a thousand miles away, their bodies taken by the soldiers after they had died. She didn’t even know where they were buried—or even if they had been buried. They might still be in one of those black body bags, stacked in a pile in the Bellevue loading dock with a hundred others. Every muscle in her body knotted with revulsion and guilt. She was their mother and she had allowed that to happen.

  “Are you okay?” Baker asked. “It’s just a school for Veterinary Medicine. I don’t think anyone has been inside since the pandemic struck. There’s nothing to be afraid of—just relax.”

  She felt his hand on her arm and pulled away. “Do not ever tell me to relax,” she screamed at him.
>
  He looked at her with a pained expression. “I’m sorry. I thought something had upset you.”

  She turned away so he couldn’t see her face and she couldn’t see his. “I am upset because we are wasting time. Go get a flashlight.”

  “Already have one,” he said. When he spoke, there was a tightness in his voice that made her wish she hadn’t snapped at him.

  He turned his flashlight on and stepped towards the door, taking care not to brush against her. “You know I’m on your side. I will always be.”

  She knew that, but she couldn’t open her mouth to tell him without crying.

  They moved through the dark with only the tight beam of his flashlight to guide them. When they reached the second floor, she pulled her mask up over her nose. The odour she had smelled earlier became stronger as they neared the entrance to a large lab.

  Baker shone his light through a small window, illuminating a row of glass jars lined up on a stainless steel table. The lid was off a jar and there was something on a metal tray next to it.

  “This must be a teaching lab. The smell is formaldehyde.” He leaned in closer and peered through the window.

  “And I think that’s a cow’s—”

  “I do not want to know what it is,” she said, catching a glimpse of the bowling-ball-sized chunk of shriveled pinkish-gray flesh on the metal tray. “Please, can we keep going. The smell is making me sick.”

  Baker paused. Even in the dark, she could tell he was looking at her.

  “What?”

  “I think that’s the first time I ever heard you say please,” he said lightly.

  “Do not be ridiculous. I say it all the time. Can we please leave?”

  “There you go again.”

  He was smiling. She could hear it in his voice. She tried to be angry, wanted to be, but couldn’t. He didn’t deserve it. None of this was his fault and he had done nothing but be kind to her.