by Platt, Sean
And so it had stayed in the background like ambient music: always there, never truly a presence.
Until now.
Now, Thom wished he’d paid more attention. The closer they came to the city’s center, the worse their cell reception became. A few miles before they had to pull over and walk, Rick announced his surrender. There was really no new news to be found about Hemisphere for the Shelton family. Thom had only his memories, and for once he hadn’t obsessed or worried enough.
Because, what was Hemisphere relative to all of this?
Rick seemed to know more than he was saying, but Thom was afraid to ask why for more than the usual reasons. Namely, because his father had sort of already told them where some of his information was coming from, and Thom didn’t want to believe it.
So far, most if not all of Rick’s tall tales had proven to be true. There probably had been vans following them on the way to the mall, there really were horror movie monsters in the world, the doctors might have given Rick special, top-secret treatment in his trial, and apparently Rick had seen it all coming.
If his father was somehow psychic as well (the drug worked on the brain and Hemisphere’s slogan was Upgrading Nature, after all), Thom didn’t want to know. Rick was bad enough outside his head without the risk of him being inside it as well.
The coincidences were too big to ignore. But, as they walked, Thom put a silver lining on that particular cloud. If he was forced to accept that Rick’s conspiracy theories might be more truth than Alzheimer’s Disease, it at least gave them a lead to follow. It was bizarre (and troubling) to think that his father’s pharma sponsors might be somehow involved in this, but at least believing it gave them all a goal and something to do.
A desperate sort of hope had infiltrated the group, but desperate hope that Hemisphere had the answers was better than no hope at all.
“I wish we had guns,” Brendan said as they crouched behind a wreck. Black and smoking, warm but not hot to the touch, with everyone pretending there wasn’t a charred body still sitting in the cab.
“No you don’t,” said Thom.
“Yes I do.”
“Then I guess I don’t.” Carly looked like wax, the off-yellow of recycled paper. She was limping more now, and the last time Thom had checked on her ankle, he’d hoped to never see it again. Her skin looked like meat left in the sun — the kind of thing you cut away because it couldn’t be saved.
Brendan seemed about to rebut again, but one look at his mother closed his mouth. Her words had the feeling of a dying wish, and he damn well knew it.
“How are you feeling, Carly?” Rick asked with surprising tenderness.
“I’ve been better.”
“Can you go on?”
“I will. I’m not fond of the alternative.”
Thom wasn’t sure which alternative she meant. Did she mean dying? Did she mean holing up alone, waiting out the boys’ excursion until they returned, dodging the looters and shooters and biters filling the streets? Or did she mean the third thing — the one that shouldn’t be possible, but then again monsters that didn’t fall when you cut them in half weren’t supposed to be possible, either.
Thom didn’t believe in zombies even now; in his mind he kept using “biters” because even kittens could use their teeth. But whatever he called them, the multiplying monsters around them were doing all those traditional zombie things.
They didn’t die unless you destroyed their brains; they shambled mindlessly; they formed groups and came on like a very patient army. If those things were actually true, then what Thom didn’t want to consider involving Carly was likely true, too. He had no idea why she hadn’t turned yet, since so many others seemed to be doing that quickly, but mostly it was just one more thing he needed to ignore.
Nothing they could do, anyway, other than keep on moving.
“How much farther is it?” Brendan asked.
“I’ve still got their webpage up,” Rick answered, looking at Thom’s phone. “I think it’s in that Minute Clinic that closed, by the Provisions. So maybe a mile or two?”
Something exploded in the right. Not a big blast — more like the crash-whoosh of a Molotov cocktail. Zombie warfare at its finest … but where were all the chainsaws?
They could see a crowd in the direction they needed to go. Whether it was more creatures or normal folks on a rampage, Thom didn’t have a clue. He only knew that neither was good.
“Look.” Carly was pointing at a line of scooters.
“We need to download an app if we want to use them.” Thom held out his hand and waited for his phone. Once he had it back he tried clicking over to the app store, but now his phone wouldn’t connect. He held it high, then looked again at the screen. “There isn’t any signal.”
“Maybe it’s just Verizon,” Carly said.
He fished out Brendan’s borrowed phone, which for some ancient forgotten reason they hadn’t bundled into the family plan. Brendan used AT&T, and yes … he had one bar. “I doubt we’ll be able to download the app on one bar, though.”
Brendan rolled his head back and forth, deciding whether to say something. “Well …”
“What?”
“I sort of already have the app,” he admitted.
“Why?” Thom asked.
“I … sort of used one once when I was with Melissa.”
His blood boiled. One more way his son hadn’t listened. Thom hated the urban scooters. He’d heard too many stories of injuries and deaths, and Carly had seen them firsthand at her hospital.
“Brendan, I told you and told you—”
“Knock it off, Thom. We’re lucky the kid’s got stones.” Rick snatched the phone while Thom resisted another urge to shout at his father for corrupting his son. But no, this very much wasn’t the time.
“Here,” he said, returning the phone to Brendan. “Show us how.”
He not only knew how, Brendan even had a way to activate more than one scooter at a time. One service bar was apparently just enough to activate the scooters, and a few minutes later Thom was blowing through the breeze, for some reason not nearly as scared of the zippy little things as he’d been before.
He took the rear, with Rick at the front and Carly and Brendan sharing a ride in the middle. Carly pretended it was so she could help her son and keep him safe, but really it was the other way around.
Thanks to fancy maneuvering and a lot of luck, making it to Hemisphere wasn’t difficult. The scant news they could still get on Brendan’s phone (plus plain old observation) suggested that much of the population was moving away from the center toward the edges. Normal people were doing it to escape and getting rebuffed decisively by troops at the border, while the monster things seemed to be following the normals. Reports were fuzzy on how many there were of each. They’d spotted at least twenty of the diseased walkers on their ride downtown, and Thom found himself thinking of what Rick had insisted was happening earlier.
Exponential growth.
Because one turned two or three, then those two or three turned two or three each, and so on until the entire city was dinner. But that only worked with a short generation time — and given the recency of what had happened, it seemed to suggest that the normal generation time was brief indeed. They’d yet to see one turn and rage immediately after getting bitten, but that reality couldn’t be too far away.
Carly was, so far, the exception. Because Thom didn’t know why, he couldn’t relax.
Could it happen in the next five minutes?
Might it never happen at all?
They found the Hemisphere building surrounded — not by people, but by a battalion of army trucks. Their own vans were inside. Another circle, same as they’d seen in the parking lot. There was no way to know if the white vans were the same ones that Thom had seen at the mall.
Thom said as much out loud.
“Maybe, maybe not. But she’s here as easily as anywhere else.”
Thom stopped himself from asking Rick who he wa
s talking about. He’d forgotten Rosie again, this time in the mad rush to comprehend the impossible and keep on living, seeing this place as the beginning of a way out, maybe, rather than a place of rescue.
He kept his mouth shut and nodded, trying to project solidarity.
“Okay,” Carly said. They all looked closer. They were at a distance, but near enough to see that razor wire had been strung between, over, and around the army trucks, effectively freezing them in place among the world’s unfriendliest jungle gym. A line of camouflage-attired men and women with machine guns stood behind the wire. “But how are we supposed to get in?”
Thom was wondering if it was even worth trying. They’d come here on a lark, but the chance that a way out lay inside, now that they were here and saw how forbidding it all looked, suddenly seemed unlikely enough to feel foolish. Even if they could get inside, what were they planning to do? Ask nicely for Rosie back (if she was even in the place), then request a Golden Ticket to get them beyond borders that had been thoroughly closed?
He stopped wondering when footsteps sounded behind them.
They turned to see another two soldiers with helmets and long black weapons … plus one of those sliver things on the opposite hip.
“Are you Richard Shelton?” one of them asked.
Rick, surprised at last, nodded.
“Come with us,” the other said.
Fifteen
Stubborn
They flanked Rick, more like escorts than captors.
He rose and went without question — probably because dying by machine gun sounded preferable to becoming someone’s meal, and because even though the way it’d happened was different than they’d figured, Rick had already sworn to go inside one way or another.
A few steps on, Thom, still hesitating as if nothing had happened, looked at Carly and then at Brendan. Carly shrugged. Brendan said, “Come on, Dad, live a little.” It wasn’t entirely appropriate to the situation, but it did get Thom to stand ahead of his son. It at least gave him the dignity of following Rick directly ahead of Brendan, instead of trailing behind.
At a gate they’d built in the barbed wire, Thom thought the two soldiers with Rick might turn, see that they had company, and shoo the rest of the family away — possibly with prejudice. Instead, the first of them nodded at Thom and held the gate open for him. Thom, perplexed, could only say thanks. Carly and Brendan entered behind him, and only then did they close it.
They were greeted by a skeleton crew. There seemed to be only three staffers in the entire place, presumably because the others had found a way to evacuate. Maybe there were more in the back rooms, but the building had been hooked to a generator outside and only one of the back rooms was lit. Rick was right; this had once been a Minute Clinic. It was a fairly large building for just three people, but a couple dozen troops covering the walls like paper made up for it. Or, maybe, they turned it even eerier.
A dark-skinned man with salt-and-pepper hair walked right toward Rick and extended his hand. Rick, looking more lost than he ever had in the depths of his disease, shook it.
“I’m Doctor Sanjay Dhar. I’m second in charge here.” Brendan looked around and Sanjay laughed. “First in charge right now,” he clarified.
“Rick Shelton.”
“Oh, I know,” said the doctor. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“What? Why?”
Sanjay didn’t seem to hear him. He went to Carly, then Thom, then even to Brendan with an offered hand and a strangely formal hello. He was friendly like a pediatrician. It seemed so completely out of place with all the gunshots popping beyond the walls and the entire city on its way to ruins.
Once finished with introductions, Sanjay took a half second to smile at them.
Long enough for Rick to speak. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Sanjay said, “Oh my. Yes. Right to business. But that fits your tendency, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you are hard-charging. ‘No BS,’ as it were. You accumulated quite the disciplinary record during your time in the Marines and yet you were never held back from advancement, discharging highly decorated. To what do you attribute that?’
Rick made a face that was half incredulous, half scowl.
“Yes. Well,” Sanjay said. “I suspect it’s neither here nor there. How are you feeling?”
“I’m sorry,” Thom interrupted. “Do you have any idea what’s happening outside?”
“Oh my, yes,” he replied, as if Thom meant a parade instead of an apocalypse. “We’ve had a bit of a spontaneous, unplanned experiment. Now our challenge is to solve it, but I appreciate a challenge. Do you appreciate a challenge, young man?”
Brendan was so confused, he didn’t answer in the doctor’s allotted time.
Sanjay smiled as if he had.
“Do you have my Rosie?” Rick asked.
“Pardon?”
“Rose Georgia Sandoval. My grandson said your people rounded up a bunch of folks at the mall. Threw them into vans like you have outside. She was one of them.”
It was still a leap. They only knew that Brendan had seen unknown people herding mallgoers toward where the white vans had been parked, and Rick’s tone was clearly one of accusation.
Still, Sanjay smiled as if he’d borrowed a pencil and forgotten to give it back. “Oh. Yes. She is in back, resting comfortably.”
That sounded medical.
“What did you do to her?” Thom asked.
“Nothing, Mr. Shelton. Why would anything be done to her? To any of them?”
“The others are here, too?”
“Yes, of course. We couldn’t just put them out on the street. Bakersfield is not exactly alive with the sound of music. I’ve been telling my new Army friends that the streets are thriving with the sound of regenerative necrosis … but honestly, I don’t think they get it.”
“I don’t get it,” Brendan said.
“Are we prisoners?” Rick asked.
“Prisoners?” A laugh. “Oh my, no. You are one of our valued subjects, and it’s my sincere hope that you’ll be willing to help us in ways far more beneficial than our original agreement.”
Thom wondered what would happen if Rick didn’t want to help. The two other medical types in the room looked like assistants, maybe nurses, but there was also a lot of coercive power within the building’s walls in the form of automatic weapons and muscle.
“Help how?” Rick asked.
“Oh, I’d just like a sample of your blood.”
“You’ve taken gallons of my blood.”
“Yes, but something curious happened lately and I’d like to know how your body is responding. Or more accurately, I’d like to know why your body doesn’t appear to be responding at all.”
“Does this have something to do with my drug trial?”
Sanjay looked to a man in blue scrubs. The man shook his head. So, not an assistant after all. Probably quietly in charge no matter what the doctor claimed.
“Not at all,” he said.
But Thom thought, That’s a lie.
“What’s your role in this, then? Why are you blocked in? Why are there all these soldiers inside to protect you, and a generator to keep the building running, if it all has nothing to do with you?”
“It currently has nothing to do with Hemisphere.” Sanjay looked again to the other man, who nodded. “It is our sincere hope that we may soon have everything to do with it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Carly.
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. Would you care to take a seat?”
With no better ideas, they all did.
“Anything to drink? We have soda. I even plugged the coffeemaker into the generator cord; don’t tell anyone!”
“No, thanks,” said Thom.
Rick shook his head, but Carly and Brendan asked for water.
As the man in scrubs brought the drinks, Sanjay sat down opposite them. Thom felt like they were all in the cente
r ring of a circus. It was as if the building had been kept open just for them and they were the only ones who didn’t know why. The soldiers and other medical personnel circled them like a live studio audience.
“All right, then,” Sanjay said. “If I were in your shoes, I suppose I’d want to know what I was cooperating with and why.”
Rick, the primary subject of the doctor’s interest, shifted in his seat.
“Without going into a lot of boring detail, we think the drug you’ve been taking, BioFuse, has potential to reverse what’s happening outside.”
“What is happening outside?”
“It’s technical.”
“It’s not technical at all,” Rick said. “A bunch of dead people got up and started walking. Then they started biting other people, and those people started walking, just like—”
“Like zombies, am I correct?” Sanjay was still smiling. “Yes. We have also reached that conclusion. In truth, I can’t answer your question. We don’t know what’s going on or why. What we do know is that some … parameters we’ve been watching spiked severely when it all began.”
“What kind of parameters?”
“Tell me, Mr. Shelton, have you noticed any side effects while you’ve been on BioFuse?”
“What kind of side effects?”
“Oh, the usual. Dry mouth. Headache. Loss of appetite.”
“No.”
“Bizarre ideation. Unusual mental phenomena.”
“Like ESP?”
Sanjay pulled out a tablet. “We intended BioFuse to help the brains of patients suffering with debilitative memory and cognitive impairments build new nerve cells. You see, when a person has, for instance—” he extended a hand toward Rick, “—Alzheimer’s Disease, these tiny little buildups happen in the brain and slow it down.”
“Plaques,” Rick said. “I know this part. Move on.”
“We thought we knew how the drug would work in patient brains, but it turns out we were wrong. Or at least weren’t always right. The agent at work in BioFuse sort of has a mind of its own.”
“In what way?”
“It’s not important.” Sanjay waved a hand dismissively. “But because it’s meant to ‘work around the damage’ instead of ‘remove the damage,’ it means your own body is an active participant. There’s a lot of variability in that way, simply because every body and every person — and hence every response — is different. Much more than expected.”