Halverson was loath to part with his shotgun. “Guns won’t find a cure, but they sure kill ghouls.”
“Maybe we should push off,” said Reno. “Maybe there’s some other island we can go to.”
“I want to meet up with this Bascomb guy before we leave. I want to see what’s what here. This might be an OK deal they’ve got here.”
“They do seem to have some kind of functioning society here,” said Parnell.
“Then it’s decided,” said Victoria.
Halverson didn’t want to say this, but under the circumstances he didn’t see any other option. “Let’s hand over our guns.”
“I hope we don’t live to regret this,” said Reno.
“We still have our knives.”
“Knives aren’t much good against AK-47s.”
Halverson, Victoria, and Reno approached Jones and his security detail and handed over their shotguns to Jones’s men.
“Now can we meet Bascomb?” asked Halverson.
“Sure thing,” answered Jones. “Let’s go. He’s eager to meet you.”
They all struck out toward Alcatraz prison.
Halverson went with a sense of foreboding. His training at Camp Peary had taught him to always be prepared for danger. Being unarmed wasn’t his idea of being prepared.
“Where’s this Bascomb fellow?” asked Reno.
“Right now he’s in the warden’s office,” answered Jones, “but he lives in the warden’s house.”
“It sounds like he’s special. Where does everyone else live?”
Jones paused imperceptibly before answering. Halverson would not have heeded it except Jones’s demurral was accompanied by a tic in Jones’s droopy right eye.
“In the cell house,” said Jones.
“No wonder he wants to be leader,” said Reno with a wink and a smile.
Jones in front, the retinue of security guards and Halverson’s group climbed the short flight of steps at the main entrance to the prison.
Directly in front of them was the sally port to the cell blocks. To their left was the accounting office. The walls were painted a dreary institutional green. The color reminded Halverson of pea soup.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t a prison anymore, the atmosphere still felt clammy to Halverson. Maybe it was his imagination playing tricks on him because of all the movies he had seen about the Rock. In any case, he figured he would not want to live here for the rest of his life. Still, it was better than living among the walking dead.
Instead of bearing straight ahead toward the main gate to the cell house, Jones took a right.
Halverson saw the warden’s office ahead. Its door had a frosted glass window with Warden printed on it at shoulder height.
Jones motioned to his security detail to remain outside of the office in the corridor. He opened the warden’s door and ushered Halverson and his party into the office.
Halverson wasn’t prepared for Bascomb’s appearance. Not knowing what to expect, Halverson pegged Bascomb for a no-nonsense military type in the manner of Jones. Halverson discovered that wasn’t the case.
Bascomb was sitting behind his desk. With his clean-cut features he looked like a matinee idol for a TV soap opera. Pushing fifty he had a high forehead and wore his full black hair brushed back with a widow’s peak in the front. He had a dusting of grey on his temples.
He wore a navy blue Hugo Boss suit and a lavender silk moiré tie.
He smiled at them. “Welcome to Alcatraz.”
Even his toothy smile looked like it belonged on TV, decided Halverson. But something wasn’t right. Halverson could not put his finger on it. Again, maybe he was imagining it. This place gave him the creeps.
Halverson and Reno approached Bascomb’s desk.
“We’re looking for a sanctuary from the ghouls,” said Halverson.
“You came to the right place,” said Bascomb. “We’ve got a pretty good deal here, isolated from the plague. A sanctuary in steel, you might say,” he added with a chuckle.
“Not exactly the Ritz, though,” said Reno, flicking his eyes around the office.
“These aren’t exactly salad days we’re living through.”
A loud bang behind his back knotted Halverson’s shoulders and made him flinch. He wheeled around.
A commotion was breaking out in the hallway.
“What’s happening?” asked Reno.
“Nothing to be alarmed about,” answered Bascomb. “They’re escorting an accused criminal to his cell.”
“What kind of a criminal?”
Not answering, Bascomb unfolded himself from behind his desk, all five nine of him, strode toward the open door, and closed it.
Stride for stride, right behind Bascomb, Reno latched onto the doorknob and heaved it open elbowing Bascomb out of the way to espy the nature of the brouhaha in the corridor.
Bascomb did not appreciate Reno’s maneuver, noticed Halverson, but made no effort to shut the door again.
“No need for you people to have to witness that,” said Bascomb.
Chapter 27
Through the open door to the warden’s office, Halverson could see the commotion erupting in the hallway that led to the cell house’s main gate.
Two security guards were wielding animal grabbers, like the ones dogcatchers used on stray dogs, to propel a ghoul down the corridor. The metal tongs at the end of the animal grabbers were squeezed tight around the ghoul’s decrepit neck.
The male ghoul, in its sixties with mussed-up grey hair, was lashing its arms out jerkily in different directions straining to glom onto anything in its path. The guards judiciously kept wide of the creature’s reach keeping the creature away from them with the animal grabbers.
The creature was wearing wire-rimmed glasses that perched askew on its crooked nose.
“That’s not a criminal,” said Reno from the warden’s doorway. “That’s a ghoul.”
“He’s an infected person,” said Bascomb. “The infected can commit crimes as well as the uninfected.”
“A dead person can’t commit crimes,” said Halverson, standing next to Reno watching the eerie procession in the hall. “That’s one of the walking dead.”
“If he’s dead, how can he walk?” demanded Bascomb. “He has a disease. Having a disease doesn’t make him immune from the law. We run a civilized democracy here governed by rules of law. Everyone that commits a crime has the right to a speedy trial.”
Reno shook his head in disbelief. “What crime did this ghoul commit?”
“We’re charging him with murder. Eyewitnesses saw him murder and eat two women in San Francisco.”
Reno chortled, despite himself. “You gotta be kidding. That’s what those things do. That’s all they do. They go around killing and eating people.”
“What gives them the right to do that?”
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” said Halverson. “They’re already dead. They can’t think. They have no rights.”
“Everybody has rights in our society, infected or not.”
“How can the dead have rights?”
“Who said anything about the dead?”
“You don’t get it,” said Reno. “You should kill that thing right here and now.”
“We’ll leave that up to a jury to decide. That’s the difference between the civilized society that we run here on the island and the anarchy on the mainland.” Bascomb walked to his window, planted his fists on the sill, and gazed across the bay at the mainland that was wreathed in smoke from fires burning out of control. “There’s no law outside these walls unless we impose it.”
“You said you busted this ghoul on the mainland, not here.”
Bascomb turned to face Halverson. “That’s true.”
“Does that mean you go over to San Francisco often?”
“We go there to get supplies. Also, if we find anyone that’s not infected we bring him back here to live with us.”
“And you go over there to get ghouls.”
“If we see one of the infected committing a crime, we arrest that person.” Bascomb’s face clouded. “By the way, we don’t use the term ghoul here.”
Reno smirked. “Yeah, I guess it’s not a politically correct term. But it’s more accurate than infected.”
“The infected have no more or less rights than the uninfected. If you have a problem with that, maybe you should leave.”
“You’re basing your whole society on a fallacy—that a walking corpse is really alive.”
“If you want to prosecute this accused criminal, be my guest. We need another district attorney here. Do you know anything about jurisprudence?”
“I’ve covered trials as a journalist.”
“It’s settled then. You can help the prosecution with their case.”
Reno looked dumfounded. “I can’t believe I’m having this discussion. You want me to prosecute a corpse in a court of law?”
“If you believe the infected is guilty, present your case to the court. You can have your say there. As for now, let’s move on to another subject.”
Halverson was as taken aback by Bascomb’s words as was Reno. Halverson had killed hundreds of the ghouls and had felt no compunction whatsoever doing it. As far as he was concerned, the ghouls were dead and had ceasing being human the minute their hearts ceased pumping.
Halverson changed the subject. “How many people do you have on the island?”
“Over a hundred,” said Bascomb. “That number increases, though, whenever we find any uninfected on the mainland.”
“Do you have any communication with the outside world here?”
“As you probably already know, cell phones don’t work. The cell towers were destroyed in the fires.”
“What about landlines?”
“They’re not much better. Who can you call, anyway? Most everyone is dead or infected.”
“No smartphones, iPhones, iPads, Bluetooth, Internet,” chimed in Brittany. “How can we go on living?”
“People lived fine without them fifty years ago,” said Bascomb. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“It isn’t? It sure feels like it.”
“That’s not gonna happen under my watch.”
“Wake me when it’s over.”
“I’m being remiss. Let me show you your new quarters.”
Bascomb led Halverson and the others down the corridor to the main gate of the cell house where the security guards had just escorted the zombie.
Halverson didn’t like the looks of this. “You’re taking us into the cell house.”
Chapter 28
“This is where we live,” said Bascomb, gesturing toward the main gate of the cell house.
“You live in the jail cells?” said Halverson.
“That’s right.”
“Except for you. We heard you live in the warden’s house.”
“I’m the delegated leader.”
At that moment two guards manhandled another ghoul through the main entrance toward the cell house, using animal grabbers like the previous guards had done with the grey-haired ghoul.
Bascomb, Halverson, and the others in their group backed away out of the range of the ghoul’s thrashing arms.
This ghoul was a sixtysomething female with white hair piled on top of its head in an abbreviated beehive do. The creature was at least five ten, rail thin, and wore a yellow unbuttoned cardigan sweater. What with its withered lips, tiny aquiline nose, and narrow jaw, it looked like nothing so much as a large bird jerking around on its two scrawny legs that protruded from a pale green, besmirched skirt.
“What did this one do?” Bascomb asked the guards shepherding the creature.
“We saw her eating a guy’s brains out of his skull,” answered the first guard, a short teenage Hispanic with a swarthy complexion and a narrow black mustache.
“Cannibalism isn’t a crime if the victim’s dead. And if the guy was already dead, that rules out murder.”
“We didn’t arrest her at that time,” said the other guard, a barrel-chested man who wore aviator sunglasses with mirror lenses.
He was wrestling with his animal grabber trying to get the ghoul under control with it.
“We followed her after we witnessed her eating the guy’s brains,” explained the mustachioed guard. “That’s when we saw her catch a kid coming out of a parked car. She tore the poor kid’s throat out with her teeth and proceeded to eat the flesh.”
“A child killer, huh,” said Bascomb. “I’m gonna throw the book at her. That’s the lowest of the low. Toss her in a cell. The infected have got to be taught that they don’t get special privileges just because they’re infected.”
“Just blow the damn thing away, is what I say,” said Reno.
“That’s exactly why you’re not the Chosen One.”
“The Chosen One? Who the hell is he?”
“Let me guess,” said Halverson, locking his eyes on Bascomb’s.
“The Chosen One is the one duly elected by the people to represent them because of his unique abilities and superior intelligence.”
“Sounds like Nietzsche’s superman,” said Reno.
“He is the next phase of man in the evolutionary process.”
“That’s funny. It sure looks like these ghouls are gonna inherit the earth. Just take a gander outside. Who the hell is this Chosen One you’re talking about?”
“I have the feeling we’re looking at him,” said Halverson.
“You are, indeed,” said Bascomb. “I am the Chosen One.”
Reno hung fire. “You could’ve fooled me, by jingo.”
“You’re wrong about the infected. They won’t be the ones running the earth. They’re too stupid.”
“They seem to be running it now,” said Reno. “Running it into the ground, I grant you, but they’re still running it.”
“Their time won’t last.”
“I don’t see any indication we’re getting the upper hand on them.”
“It won’t happen overnight. We need to create more outposts where we’ll be able to rule the roost as we rise to power.”
Halverson figured Bascomb was talking through his hat. Bascomb had no authority anywhere except over this tiny island.
Bascomb led the way into the cell house.
They walked under the East Gun Gallery, where armed guards used to patrol when Alcatraz was a maximum-security prison, and entered B Block.
“I want to show you what we do with the prisoners,” he said.
He turned right then took a left in the second corridor.
“How many prisoners do you have?” asked Halverson, scoping out the prison as their footfalls echoed through the dank hall.
“I’m not sure. At least fifty. This is Sunrise Alley right next to A Block where we are now.”
Halverson peeked into the first cell on his left. Painted a lima bean green, the cramped nine-by-five cell contained one bunk, a tiny sink, and a toilet.
Inside the cell stood a stoop-shouldered geezer all of seventy years old wearing a yellow gimme cap, a maroon rep tank top, and black nylon track trunks. The lower part of his sallow face looked like a shriveled prune. Drool spilled out the corners of his open mouth that revealed teeth the same green shade as his cell’s enamel-painted walls. Not a man, but a ghoul, decided Halverson.
Halverson was quick to notice the creature had its hands manacled behind its back and its legs fettered in steel shackles.
“Aren’t the cuffs a case of overkill?” asked Victoria. “The creature’s already locked up.”
“I don’t think so,” answered Reno. “You don’t want those things’ hands touching you. They could reach out between the bars and grab you.”
“I guess.”
Most of the cells were filled with creatures, Halverson saw. Some cages even had three or more ghouls incarcerated inside, yet the cells ran a uniform size—a paltry nine feet by five feet.
“Have these creatures been tried yet?” asked Halverson.
“No,” answered Bascomb. He glanced to a locked stairwell to his right. “That stairway leads to the dungeon. That’s where we take the creatures that we’ve found guilty.”
“What if they’re found innocent?” asked Reno. “Do you let them go, for Christ’s sake?”
“If they’re found innocent, they must be released.”
“This has gotta be somebody’s idea of a sick joke.” Reno shook his head incredulously.
Bascomb strutted down Sunrise Alley.
Apparently the filled prison cells bolstered his opinion of himself as a leader, decided Halverson.
Halverson fetched up in surprise at one cell. He could not believe his eyes.
“What’s up?” asked Reno, sensing Halverson’s reaction and gazing into the cell.
“This prisoner looks human,” answered Halverson.
Reno did a double take. “What’s going on here?”
Chapter 29
Clad in grey sweatpants and a white T, a shockheaded brunet man in his late twenties was staring out at them from his cell. In contrast to the ghouls, he wasn’t lurching around his cell. He was sitting at the end of his bunk regarding his visitors, his hands folded on his knees.
The man’s brown eyes didn’t have any white film on them, Halverson noticed.
“There must be some mistake,” Halverson told Bascomb. “I’m convinced this man’s human.”
“Of course, he’s human,” said Bascomb. “All these prisoners are human.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, indicating the surrounding cells.
“But he’s alive,” put in Reno.
“They’re all alive.”
Reno was fed up with Bascomb’s hairsplitting semantics. “This man’s not a ghoul.”
“I never said he was.”
Ticked off, Reno burst, “He’s not one of them!”
“Why are you arguing with me? We’re in complete agreement.”
Annoyed, instead of soothed by Bascomb’s calm voice, Reno stood speechless, simmering.
Halverson took over for Reno. “This prisoner isn’t one of the infected, as you call them.”
“Why are we belaboring this point?” asked Bascomb. “I already know that.”
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