Avi sat on Theo’s other side, her feet drawn up underneath her. Gray smiled slightly as he saw the way the woman stuck so close to Theo. She’d barely moved from his brother’s side since they’d set out from the safe house in Maplesville. He wondered if Avi had taken a liking to Theo. Though he could guarantee nothing was going to happen there, not after what had happened to Theo and his friend Dillon. He wondered if Theo had bothered to even tell Avi his preferences or if he was simply letting things ride and avoiding addressing it with her. He couldn’t imagine something like that turning out well at all.
Gray turned his eyes to the last object of examination. Cade sat near the end of the truck bed, reasonably close to Brandt, her hand loosely gripping a handgun that rested on her thigh. She’d leaned her head back against the side of the truck in a manner similar to Ethan’s. But unlike Ethan, she was actually asleep. The fact that she could sleep in a situation like this quite frankly impressed him.
“So did you have a plan?” he asked Brandt.
Brandt stared down the highway at a road packed tight with cars, bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. The worst traffic jam Gray had ever seen sat on the Georgia side of the barricade, laid out before them like a long, winding metal snake. He silently thanked whatever deity looked down on them and still bothered to listen to humanity that he hadn’t been there for it. “Yeah, I have a plan,” Brandt admitted. “But like I told Cade, I’m not sure how any of you are going to feel about it.”
“Care to share?”
“No, not right now. After Cade wakes up from her nap,” Brandt said idly. He lifted the rifle and set it against his shoulder, aiming it down the highway. Gray scrambled for his own gun, but Brandt only laughed softly and set the rifle back down beside him, putting his hand up in a placating gesture. “Calm down, Gray. Chill. It was nothing. I was just checking to make sure the scope wasn’t busted.”
He let out a breath that was a perfect mixture of relief and annoyance. “Damn it. A little warning next time?” he requested, setting his own gun on the tailgate beside him. “You know how jumpy being out like this makes me. waving that damn thing around doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Feeling exposed, huh?” Cade’s voice said from behind them.
Gray turned at the sound of her voice and nodded in agreement. “Yeah, fairly.”
She moved to join them at the end of the truck, sitting on her knees just behind Brandt and taking her rifle from him. Her dark hair was tangled and still wet, plastered to her forehead and cheeks. If he’d had a hairbrush handy, he’d have given it to her.
“You don’t know exposed until you get into Atlanta,” Brandt said, his voice mild but tinged with exhaustion. “Downtown, there’s nothing but buildings all around you. There’s no clear line of sight. And there’s a shit-ton of places for those bastards to hide. Plenty of places for you to hide, too, fortunately, but that’s assuming they haven’t chosen the same spot you have.” He waved a hand, indicating the congested highway before them. “Out here is nothing. This doesn’t bother me. There’s hardly anything to even worry about, and we’ve dealt with very few of the infected since we left the safe house? This is a fucking vacation. You won’t see me get nervous until we actually get into Atlanta.”
“So we’re still going in, then?” Gray asked. He looked first at Brandt then shifted his eyes in the direction of the embankment, across the highway, over the makeshift concrete barricade that separated the two sides of the highway. He thought of the battered van at the bottom of the hill, a makeshift tomb for the youngest member of their group.
“Yes,” Brandt said simply. “We have to, if we go with my plan.”
“No,” a voice spoke up. Gray, Brandt, and Cade turned to see Ethan sitting straighter at the back of the truck, watching them across the dark interior. He still looked pale and wan, but the expression in his green eyes was all hardness and coldness. He shook his head, and his eyes met each of theirs in turn. “We can’t go. We shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Brandt asked. Gray could see the gears beginning to turn in Brandt’s head as he too sat up straighter. The Marine was obviously grinding up for an argument. Gray hoped he wouldn’t be dragged into it; he was too tired for this mess.
“Because it’s too fucking dangerous. You said so yourself,” Ethan pointed out. “Or have you conveniently forgotten your own argument against us going in the first place?”
Brandt let out a slow breath, as if he were trying to maintain his cool and not start a fight, then shook his head. “I have not. And I’m not going back on that, either. I’m not saying I want to go into Atlanta. I’m saying we have to.” His voice was surprisingly calm and steady, though he appeared to Gray as one warring with something inside himself. Brandt turned to face the inside of the truck so he could see them all and said suddenly, “Avi is right.”
Avi blinked in confusion and frowned, raising an eyebrow. “I’m right?” she repeated. “I…I haven’t even said anything.”
“No, I mean about Atlanta. On both counts. About helping the survivors that might be there, but also about the government,” he clarified. “You’re right about them hiding something about the Michaluk Virus.” They all perked up at Brandt’s statement, and Gray twisted to face him.
“Wait, you know something about the virus that you haven’t told us before?” Theo asked.
Brandt paused for a moment, hesitating, and Gray wondered why the older man would look so uncertain about what he was about to say. “I don’t know very much,” he said. “But what I do know is more than common knowledge.” He stood up in the back of the truck, balancing against the tailgate, and grasped the canopy above his head. He looked almost like a professor about to give a lecture. “I wasn’t supposed to know any of it. I had a friend named Derek who worked for the CDC,” he explained slowly. “I was never clear on the details, but there was some sort of…I don’t know what. Some sort of drug or serum or something that was either discovered or developed in the lab—I don’t think I was ever told which. The government had the CDC doing tests and studies with it. There was talk about military benefits and about treatments for certain types of diseases, but I don’t think I ever really believed that version of the story.
“Anyway, I was told that the federal government had both hands in on the testing, because they were interested in the whatever-it-was. I don’t know why they jumped in on the testing, but the feds started to fund the project at some point about two and a half years before the outbreak. Since it showed some promise for whatever they wanted it for, they pushed for testing on human subjects entirely too soon. They put out a discreet call for human subjects for clinical trials by the December before the outbreak happened.”
“Why did people never hear about this?” Gray asked. “I mean, you’d think there would be evidence of clinical trials or test subjects talking or something.”
“Because the subjects were culled from the military,” Brandt answered. “They specifically asked for military men and women only. No civilians, only officers and NCOs with a rank of E-6 or higher, Marines preferred. They lived in isolated quarters right on the CDC base and were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement swearing they wouldn’t tell anyone about what was going on, and they stuck to it. I thought it was an odd way to go about it. Why soldiers and why officers? I asked Derek, but he didn’t know the answer, either.”
“Super soldiers,” Remy murmured.
Brandt looked at her, a curious expression on his face. “You know, that thought did cross my mind,” he admitted. “But it seemed a bit outlandish at the time.”
“Wait, what do you mean by super soldiers?” Ethan interrupted.
“Super soldiers,” Remy repeated emphatically. “Have you ever seen the movie Soldier? It’s about genetically enhanced soldiers being used in the military to fight wars or some shit. Had Kurt Russell in it?”
Ethan continued looking lost; obviously, he’d never seen the movie, though Gray vaguely remembered seeing it
on TV once. Brandt shook his head and started speaking again. “Moving on,” he said. He took a slow breath and considered his next words. “I never really believed a word of it. So I just sort of blew the whole theory off as a bunch of bullshit created by an overactive imagination.
“But then in late January, I think it was on the twenty-fourth, I was woken up by Derek practically beating down my door. He said there’d been an outbreak that was spreading very rapidly, and the military had been deputized to contain it, to shut it down as fast as humanly possible. A quarantine zone had been established around Emory University, and eventually the entire metro area of Atlanta, and all testing in the CDC on what became the Michaluk Virus was terminated immediately.”
A hush descended upon the group at Brandt’s words. The ominous meaning behind the word “terminated” was evident in Brandt’s tone, and they all stared at him. His words had shocked them into some level of submission, as if everyone were afraid to speak, afraid to hear anything more for fear of what he’d say next. But someone had to break the silence, someone had to ask the questions, and Gray decided it might as well be him.
“What exactly did the quarantine entail, Brandt?”
Brandt sank down to the floor of the truck, closing his eyes. Cade slid over to sit beside him, giving him reassurance with a gentle squeeze of his wrist. “The total sealing off of the CDC, the university campus, and later the city itself, at all costs. No one in, no one out. It didn’t matter whether they were infected or not. The military…” He paused and looked away, back down the highway again, staring at the traffic jam before them for a full minute, clutching Cade’s hand tightly. “They had orders. Shoot anyone who attempted to breach the containment areas, regardless of the level of infection. Civilian or military, it didn’t matter. They didn’t pass.”
“Jesus,” someone in the back of the truck murmured. If Gray wasn’t mistaken, he was pretty sure it was his brother who had said it.
“So no one was even given a chance to try to save themselves?” Remy asked in horror. The emotions in her voice were painted onto her face. “They were trapped like…like rats in a cage, and nobody tried to help them?”
Brandt shook his head. “Remy, you have to understand that they had no choice. Once it was understood what the Michaluk Virus did, everything had to be tried to keep the virus contained within that small area. It couldn’t be allowed to spread. The hope was that it would feed on itself and kill itself after a time. They were trying to keep our world from becoming what it is now.”
“Fucking lot of good that did,” Ethan muttered. He gave Brandt a cold look, and Cade gave it right back to him, the fingers of her free hand flexing against her knee into a warning fist.
“But what about the people still in there?” Remy protested. “Are they still there? Speaking of which, how the hell did you get out of there? The word was that no survivors escaped metro Atlanta when all those people tried to break out.”
“People didn’t break out,” Brandt corrected. “The infected did. They organized as best as those things were able to, and they attacked en masse. They just completely overwhelmed whatever defenses the military tried to put up. I only just got through, and it was only because of a combination of luck and training that I even managed it. Please don’t ask me for any details on that. I really don’t want to talk about it.”
The group hushed once more as he bowed his head, looking numb and exhausted. Gray tried desperately to process everything he’d learned in that short time, but it seemed like it was almost too much for his brain to handle. He could feel a headache rapidly approaching; he weighed the option of asking Theo for aspirin against the option of toughing it out.
The silence was broken again as he considered this. But this time, it was Avi who spoke up.
“How did the virus get out in the first place, Brandt?” she asked. “Is what they say about that part of the narrative even true?”
Brandt stared at his lap, and for a moment, Gray thought he wasn’t going to answer the question. When he did start talking, though, his voice was flat and dull, almost a monotone. “I don’t know all the details of that, either. I only know what I was told, and there’s no telling how much of it was changed from actual record or just flat-out exaggerated. It mainly involved the antibody mutating in one of the test subjects, and someone who worked at the CDC—Kevin Michaluk—getting accidentally infected somehow before the subject was contained. No one knew how contagious it would turn out to be, and since the virus didn’t officially even exist at that point, Michaluk was allowed to clock out and go home when he should have been quarantined with the rest of the subjects. He infected nearly everyone he came into contact with on the way home, and the following day, he attacked his girlfriend and a couple of bystanders on the MARTA. That’s how it began to spread, and on a crowded bus, that’s how it exploded. In a city with a population the size of Atlanta’s, you’re bound to run into more than a few people to pass the virus on to. It mutated so quickly…caught everyone by fucking surprise.”
“So what exactly are you saying?” Avi asked.
Brandt looked up at them, his eyes focusing on Ethan’s face with a hard expression in them. “We never stood a chance against Michaluk,” he said quietly. “Nobody did. And we still don’t.”
* * *
Remy startled awake from a very heavy sleep, blinking hazily as she tried to get her eyes to focus in the dark. She was exhausted, and it took her heavy mind a few moments to slog to the realization of where she was: somewhere just over the Georgia state line, in an abandoned military truck on a barricaded and congested highway. She rubbed her face, grimacing as her fingers brushed against her dirty hair, and squinted at her companions.
They all still slept, reclining in various positions of semi-comfort. It was cold, so there was more huddling against each other than not. Brandt and Cade were at the very end of the cargo area; Brandt sat with his back against the side of the truck, and Cade lay with her head against his leg. Remy smiled slightly and slid her eyes to Avi and Theo, who both sat near Cade’s feet, propped against each other for support.
Gray was near Theo and Avi, on the side closest to the end of the truck. His hand was loosely wrapped around a gun resting on his thigh. He was supposed to be on watch but wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Remy supposed his exhaustion had gotten the better of him. She stretched, arching her back as she extended her arms into the air, then looked to Ethan.
He wasn’t there.
That in itself didn’t surprise her. Since she’d met him, she’d noticed that he had a restless nature. She’d get up in the middle of the night and find him pacing up and down the dark hallways of whatever safe house they were in, his brain stuck on plans and problems and whatever else bothered him. Usually, once she approached him, they’d go in his room and he’d talk his way through whatever was on his mind, and then she’d do her damnedest to distract him from it for a while. The thought that he was doing the same thing he usually did out in the middle of nowhere, in one of the most dangerous regions in the country, didn’t sit well with her.
Remy hesitated, uncertain if she should get up to find him. The night before, she’d promised Ethan she’d be more careful and not take so many crazy risks; it was one of the few things he’d ever asked of her, and she was determined to do as he requested. But she couldn’t just leave him outside by himself, either. She looked around the cargo area one more time, as if Ethan would just spring out of the truck’s shadows and surprise her, then resigned herself to going after him. Someone had to track him down. Considering his earlier state of mind, it was probably a good idea for her to be the one to do it.
Remy slowly stood and began picking her way around the others, choosing each step with care. The last thing she wanted to do was step on someone and then have to explain where she was going. She eased her foot carefully down beside Cade and slid the next step over Brandt’s legs. She paused at Cade’s duffel and scooped a handgun out of it as silently as possible; sh
e’d lost her own gun in the accident, and she was unwilling to climb down to the van to find it. she eased onto the edge of the tailgate and ejected the magazine to make sure it was loaded—trusty Cade, it seemed like all their guns always were, thanks to her monumental efforts—and then clicked it back into place. She slowly slung her legs over the tailgate and dropped to the cracked pavement. After tucking the gun into the waistband of her jeans, she squinted in both directions through the moonlit night and tried to decide where to start looking for Ethan. Her first instinct was the van, so she headed that way first.
She walked quietly across the road, climbing over the concrete barricade between the two lanes with less grace than she’d have liked, and paused at the top of the embankment to look at the remains of the van. It still sat on its roof, the tires jutting up toward the sky like the legs of a dead animal. She thought of Nikola inside it, all alone, and shuddered. She wished there was a way they could give her a proper burial. But they didn’t have the equipment, time, or security needed to do so.
Remy didn’t see any movement near the van, so she continued on. She turned left and walked alongside the road, her boots crunching softly over the gravel lining the edge of the pavement, on alert for any unusual movements or sounds. She glanced to the truck again and noticed movement in the cab. Frowning, she headed to it and climbed over the barricade again, freeing her gun from her jeans and easing up to the passenger door. Her hand found the door handle, and she took a deep, steadying breath—it’d be her luck she’d open the door and one of the infected would fall out on her—before flinging the door open with a loud creak. She jerked her gun up and pointed it inside the cab, only to find a gun aimed at her face in return.
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