Slocum remained unconvinced. He folded his arms across his chest. “That’s on the guy. No way did we tell him to go out and confront the infected.”
“But he did it because of the false belief that he couldn’t contract the disease. That false belief was instilled in him by the president.”
“Did you ever hear of placebos?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Doctors prescribe placebos to patients all the time. These prescriptions have no physiological effects. The doctors prescribe them solely for their psychological effects on the patient. The pills make the patient feel better only in his mind.” Slocum paused a beat, letting his words sink in. “This vaccine is the president’s version of a placebo.”
Mellors shook his head. “It rubs me the wrong way. This fake vaccine is gonna cause more harm than good.”
“I don’t want to argue ethics with you, Scot. This is the real world. In the real world somebody’s always gonna get hurt no matter what we in the government do. The president is trying to save the entire country, not just a couple of individuals in it.”
“I understand that. But I don’t think he’s going about it the right way.”
“This isn’t about morality. It’s about power. The president has the power to give the people the hope to go on living during hard times—and he’s doing it his way.”
Of course that was it, decided Mellors. Government was about power, not about anything else. Then why was his Johnny-come-lately conscience waking up and nagging him? It never had before. Mellors couldn’t get his head around it.
“He’s giving the people a false sense of security,” he said.
“If that’s what it takes to save them, he’ll do it. I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
Slocum turned on his heel and made for the door.
Flustered, Mellors watched him leave.
CHAPTER 29
Nevada
Quantrill took a dozen heavily armed men in three black SUVs in Las Vegas and headed for the nearest shelter that was distributing the vaccine. Halverson and Chogan accompanied them. Victoria and Emma stayed behind on the strip.
“Why do we need all the hardware?” asked Halverson sitting in the seat behind Quantrill, who was driving the lead SUV, as he scoped out the soldiers bristling with all types of guns jutting from their bodies.
“We don’t know what we’re gonna run into at this shelter,” answered Quantrill. “The walking dead might pay us a visit.”
“Why would the government set up a shelter in the middle of the ghouls?”
“The dead are everywhere. We can’t go anywhere without weapons.”
“Everywhere except the strip,” pointed out Halverson.
Quantrill said nothing.
They drove for two hours in the darkness. Quantrill used the GPS on the dashboard to locate the shelter. She made frequent detours off the road courtesy of abandoned vehicles blocking it.
Quantrill decided to leave the road once and for all and try her luck driving through the desert that skirted it. The two other SUVs followed her lead.
It wasn’t easygoing in the darkness. She kept running into ruts and mounds in the ground, slowing her progress. Going too fast she might damage an axle or worse while driving through a rut.
Halverson bounced uncomfortably in his seat as they drove through the nighttime desert lit up by starlight. His neck jarred at every bump that shivered up through his spine.
“I hope they’re open in the night,” said Chogan, sitting beside Halverson.
“They should be open 24/7 what with the demand there’s gonna be on the vaccine,” said Quantrill.
“But how many people are still left alive to use it?”
Nobody said anything.
A pall of silence fell over them.
Halverson peered through the windshield and picked up on lights twinkling up ahead.
“Maybe that’s them,” said Quantrill.
“They must have their own generator,” said Halverson.
“You bet. All the shelters have them. Otherwise, why go to a shelter?”
The lighted building turned out to be a bowling alley.
“Are you sure this is the right address?” said Chogan.
Quantrill glanced at the GPS on the dash. “Yep.”
“I guess the government uses what’s available,” said Halverson.
Quantrill pulled into the bowling alley’s parking lot.
“Maybe we can bowl a couple games while we’re here,” said Chogan.
Quantrill, her retinue, Halverson, and Chogan crowded out of the SUV.
“You two go on up ahead,” Quantrill told Halverson and Chogan. “We’ll meet up with you.”
She made a beeline toward the two other SUVs in their group as they pulled up behind hers. She met with her men that were clambering out of the vehicles and gathered them around her in a semicircle.
Halverson and Chogan made for the bowling alley’s entrance. A lone ten-foot-high tenpin stood over it on the roof lording over it like a sentry. They entered through the plate-glass doors.
Paramedics, nurses, and pharmacists clad in white lab coats were standing near long cafeteria-like tables and administering vaccines to a smattering of persons who had heard the president’s speech on TV and come to the shelter for their shots.
Tables were set up on the shellacked hardwood of the bowling lanes as well, making use of all available space in the establishment.
“I guess we won’t be doing any bowling,” said Chogan.
“Not that many people here,” said Halverson.
“There are more government workers here than patients.”
Halverson and Chogan approached a nearby table for their shots.
“How are you with shots?” said Halverson.
“As long as there isn’t any Jim Jones spiked Kool-Aid sitting around I’m fine.”
Halverson chuckled.
He stepped up first to get his shot. The nurse swabbed his upper arm with alcohol, prepared a hypodermic needle with a dose of the vaccine, held the needle up, sprayed an arcing squirt of serum out, then injected Halverson’s arm.
“Where’s my lollipop?” said Halverson.
The scowling fiftysomething nurse in her white uniform didn’t think his joke was funny.
Quantrill and her armed detail entered the bowling alley. They fanned out and lined up at tables to get their vaccines.
Quantrill approached a sixtyish blue-eyed pharmacist who stood near a table overseeing the operation. He had sparse grizzled hair cut short and wore wire-rimmed spectacles to correct the cast to his left eye.
“We need more doses for our members in Vegas,” said Quantrill.
“We’ve got plenty of vaccine serum,” said the pharmacist. He gestured toward a dozen rows of corrugated boxes piled up in front of a wall. “Tell your members to come here and get their medicine.”
“There are too many of them. I don’t have enough vehicles to bring them all here. Couldn’t we take the medicine back with us?”
The pharmacist frowned. “We’re professionals. We know how to administer it. You don’t have the training to administer vaccines.”
“We have trained medics back in our refuge.”
“The surgeon general has designated us the official administrators of the vaccine.”
“It would be much easier for all concerned if we did it ourselves.”
The pharmacist massaged his jaw and thought it over. Mottled with liver spots, his hand trembled slightly from a case of palsy.
“You have to admit this is an emergency and the people need their vaccines ASAP,” went on Quantrill. “Taking the medicine with us is the fastest way to do it.”
“OK. You can take some of the boxes with you. But make sure only trained physicians and nurses administer the drug.”
“No problem.”
After her men received their inoculations, Quantrill ordered them to gather boxes of the serum and carry them to th
e SUVs.
When they were done, the men returned to the bowling alley and shot everyone inside.
Flabbergasted, Halverson could not believe what he was watching.
“What are you doing!” he shouted at Quantrill amidst the clatter of the gunfire and the screams of the health professionals and their patients being gunned down.
“They’re working for the feds!” she said. “They’ll tell the government about us and the feds will hunt us down. This is the only way to keep these guys from talking.”
Chogan’s jaw dropped as he beheld the carnage unfolding in front of him.
Bullet-riddled bodies were dropping everywhere—on tabletops, on bowling lanes, on orange plastic contoured chairs. Blood soaked the bowling alleys and ran in the gutters. Arterial spray scrawled the walls with arabesques. The acrid odor of cordite percolated through the air. Brass cartridges from M4 carbines and semiautomatics clattered to the floor in a steady cascade.
“This is insane!” exclaimed Chogan, finding his voice.
A twentysomething female patient burst out one of the entrance doors, screaming her head off. A soldier spotted her, peeled off after her through the door, and shot her in the spine in the parking lot. She collapsed to the blacktop with a groan.
“If the feds find us we’re goners,” said Quantrill. “The government is using these shelters to track survivors.”
“Why would the government want to kill us?” said Chogan.
“Fuck the feds! They’re the ones who brought this plague down on us in the first place. We can’t let them know we’re here or they’ll hunt us down and destroy us.”
“Why would they?” said Chogan, eyes bugging out.
“They want complete control over the country. They know the militias will fight them tooth and nail every inch of the way.”
Chogan shut his eyes and shook his head, incapable of fathoming what was going on. “Don’t you see? They’re trying to help us by giving us the vaccine.”
“It’s a ploy. A pretext. They’re using it to track us and kill us.”
She pulled out her pistol and shot a wounded brunette nurse who was crawling face-up toward her on the floor. The blood-soaked back of the nurse’s skull blew off her head and landed six feet away, followed by dollops of pulped brains. The nurse sprawled on the floor, motionless.
Chogan had seen action before during a tour of duty in Afghanistan, but he had never witnessed anything like this. This was a wholesale massacre. He felt like he was going to throw up as Quantrill whipped her gun hand around and plugged the head administrator in the chest three times.
Screwing up his face in pain, the man groaned, gripped his bleeding chest, and fell to his knees. Then he pitched forward onto his chest, smashing his glasses as his face crashed against the floor.
For the few who survived the initial carnage, their minutes were numbered. Quantrill strode up to any wounded survivors that were writhing on the ground and shot them in the head.
McLellan followed at her side, guarding her against an attack, his FN 5.7 at the ready. He swiped the pistol back and forth, eyes cutting to and fro in search of weapons being aimed at Quantrill.
Halverson noticed that McLellan wasn’t shooting any of the wounded. He was leaving that to Quantrill and her soldiers. Halverson wondered why McLellan wasn’t firing. Maybe his job as bodyguard took precedence over everything else. Halverson didn’t know. He could not tell anything from McLellan’s poker face.
Halverson filed the information in the back of his mind. He could not remember if he had seen McLellan open fire on any of the medical personnel during the massacre. Halverson was too appalled at the enormity of the slaughter to be able to concentrate on anything.
“Kill everyone,” Quantrill ordered her men. “No survivors. Nobody can live to tell about us.”
Her men searched through the crumpled bodies that littered the tables and floor and prodded the bloody flesh with their gun muzzles for any signs of life. If any figures moved, bullets flew into them, rendering them lifeless.
“Get the rest of the boxes of vaccine and store them in our SUVs,” said Quantrill after her soldiers had finished killing off everyone in the shelter—patients as well as the medical staff.
Chogan sat in a chair, bowed his head, and held his face in his hands.
For his part, Halverson, too, was bowled over by the butchery. His wasting hundreds of the walking dead had annealed him to killing. He had whacked so many of them that their deaths did not impact his emotions. But this cold-blooded massacre of unarmed civilians was a different kettle of fish. These were fellow human beings that he had just witnessed murdered. There were no other words for the slaughter: it was mass murder.
Sickened by the corpses around him, he nevertheless felt relieved he had not told Quantrill that he was heading for DC. Divulging that information would have tripped all sorts of alarms in the government-hating, raving paranoid Quantrill.
Chogan jerked his head up out of his hands and faced Quantrill. “Aren’t you gonna kill us too?”
“Not unless you work for the government,” said Quantrill. She paused. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Do you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“They didn’t send you to infiltrate my organization?” Quantrill bored her eyes into Chogan’s.
“I already told you no.”
Quantrill turned to Halverson. “What about you? Did they send you after me?”
“No,” said Halverson. Which was true.
“You don’t work for the government?” Quantrill searched his face.
“No,” Halverson lied.
Quantrill cut her eyes from Halverson to Chogan and back again. “If I find out you two are lying to me, I’ll torture both of you, cut off your heads, and mount them on stakes.”
An uneasy silence filled the air.
Gunshots erupted outside.
Quantrill pricked up her ears at the rapid reports.
Gasping for breath an overweight soldier burst through the plate-glass doors into the bowling alley, his face blowsy. “Armies of the dead are storming us!”
CHAPTER 30
Halverson, Chogan, Quantrill, McLellan, and the portly soldier bolted out of the bowling alley into the parking lot.
Armies was an understatement, decided Halverson.
He could discern what looked like thousands of dark figures slogging out of the dim-lit desert toward them. The full moon and the jagged stars overhead glowed down on the approaching figures, highlighting their misshapen bodies as they scrabbled and hunched forward over the dirt through the indigo night.
A vast array of ravens wheeled overhead, drawn by the reek of death that emanated from the ghouls and anticipating fresh carrion.
“The ghouls must have heard the gunfire,” said Halverson.
Gun in hand, Kwang-Sun darted up to Quantrill’s side. “They’re all around us.”
“They always zero in on loud noises,” said Chogan.
“They’re not here for the noise,” said Kwang-Sun. “They’re here for us.”
“We’ll have to make a run for it,” said Quantrill.
“How? We’re surrounded.”
“The sons of bitches,” muttered Chogan, watching the dark silhouettes of the trudging dead loom out of the night.
“We’ll punch a hole through their lines,” said Quantrill. She turned to Kwang-Sun. “How many grenades do you have?”
“A couple dozen,” said Kwang-Sun.
“That’ll have to do.”
“Maybe we could just run over the ghouls,” said Chogan.
Halverson shook his head. “They might grab onto our axles after we run them over and get tangled up around our wheels. We’d get stuck in the middle of one of their mobs and wind up sitting ducks.”
Chogan spat onto the blacktop. “Not good.”
He and the others were huddled under a sodium vapor lamp in the half-empty parking lot, hashing over options as the walking
dead closed in on them inexorably one shambling step at a time.
Watching Chogan, Kwang-Sun stuck his pinky into his ear, twisted the digit a few times, and cleaned out his ear canal.
“Bombing them’s the only way to clear a path for us,” said Quantrill, her face twisted into a mask of hate. “If they’re killed by the grenades, they’re not gonna be able to latch onto our axles and clog the wheels.”
“Then we can run over the stinkers,” said Kwang-Sun.
“Stinkers is right,” said Halverson, crinkling his nose as he caught a whiff of putrescent flesh that wafted from the legions of walking dead.
Kwang-Sun’s face turned white. “I think I’m gonna have diarrhea.”
“You’re not having diarrhea in our SUVs,” said Quantrill. “Get a couple of our soldiers, grab all the grenades, and regroup here.”
Kwang-Sun selected two soldiers and scampered off with them toward the SUVs.
Quantrill turned to Halverson, Chogan, and the rest of her detail. “After they hurl the grenades at the ghouls, we drive straight over the corpses out of here. And don’t stop for anything. Keep going, no matter what.”
“What if we get stuck in the piles of blown-up dead bodies?” asked the portly guy.
“Don’t. Or you’ll be a dead body.”
“What if we have to clear dead bodies out from under one of our wheels?”
“I’m only gonna say this once. On no account leave your vehicles.” Quantrill inspected the faces of her soldiers huddled together around her. “Everybody got that?”
Nobody said anything.
“We only get one chance at this,” Quantrill went on. “We bust a hole through them and vamoose. We hang around here, they’ll be all over us in droves.”
Kwang-Sun returned in jig time with his two men carrying two cardboard boxes stuffed with grenades.
“This is all we could find,” he said.
The two men set the boxes down on the asphalt and opened them.
“Everybody grab a grenade,” said Quantrill.
Her soldiers crowded around the boxes, bent over them, and dug in, scrounging for grenades. A round of pushing and shoving ensued. Elbows flew. Tempers flared. A six-three guy took a swing at another shorter guy who had jostled him out of the way.
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