Parker imagined butchering every single one of them with this teeth.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and did the best he could to keep himself calm. He wasn’t infected anymore. He wasn’t going to bite anybody.
He stood off to the side, away from the tables and the flow of traffic, unsure what to do with himself. Should he just find an empty seat at one of the tables and say hi?
Two men he hadn’t seen before approached him. They appeared to be in their thirties and looked nervous, but friendly.
“Good morning,” Parker said.
The two men nodded at him.
“I just got here yesterday.”
“Saw you come in,” said the man on the left.
“They’re supposed to feed us down here, right?”
A woman’s voice behind him said, “Food’s late.”
Parker turned around and saw a gorgeous young woman with defiance in her eyes.
“Third time in a row our food has been late,” she said.
“What are they going to feed us?” Parker said.
“If they feed us,” she said, “it will be meat and milk. That’s all there is. Hope you’re not a vegetarian!”
She was not trying to be quiet. Either she didn’t care if others were still asleep or she wanted to make sure the guards on the other side of the doors heard her protest. She didn’t seem like a cop.
“It’s snowing,” the man on the right said. “They’re just behind schedule.”
Parker hadn’t realized it was snowing. Not much point looking out the little smudged windows.
The young woman snorted. “Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” she said to Parker.
“Wonder what?” he said.
“If they’re going to feed us at all,” she said. “There’s no fruit and no vegetables. Meat and milk are expensive and precious. It’s snowing outside. How long until they pull the plug on this place and let us starve to death?”
“If Steele wanted to kill us,” the man on the left said, “he wouldn’t have put us here in the first place.”
“If he gave a shit about us,” the woman said, “he wouldn’t have put us here in the first place.”
The man on the left looked at Parker and shrugged. “Welcome to the conversation that never ends.”
The two men and the woman with defiant eyes laid it all out for Parker.
Opinion was split. Roughly half the prisoners thought Steele was gearing up to execute everybody while the other half figured the whole setup was temporary.
“Why go to the trouble to cram us in here if he’s just going to kill us?” said the man on the left.
“Because everyone in town would tear him apart if he killed us right away,” the woman with defiant eyes said.
“Well, that’s not going to change,” said the man on the left. “So he can’t do it.”
“They’re going to run out of food,” the woman said. “We’ll have our rations cut first. You’ll see.”
“You know what happened in Chile in the 1970s,” the guy on the right said.
“We know, we know,” the woman said. “How many times do you have to tell us?”
“Our new friend probably doesn’t know.”
Parker was only vaguely aware of what happened in Chile in the 1970s. Something about a military coup.
“There was a coup by the army,” the guy on the right said. “There were always coups by the army in South America during those days. The army arrested 20,000 people who protested, but had nowhere to put them. So it warehoused them in the national soccer stadium.”
Parker had no idea. “How long were they held there?”
“Just two months,” the guy on the right said. “Some of them were tortured and a handful were killed, but most of them were let go. It was awful, but it was temporary. That’s what’s happening here. That’s exactly what’s happening here. It’s scary and it seems completely insane, but it’s happened before. Human beings aren’t that different. We behave in entirely predictable ways when we’re under stress.”
“How do you know this stuff?” Parker said.
The man on the right shrugged. “I was married to a Chilean woman. The guards are our neighbors. They wouldn’t kill us even if Steele told them to.”
Parker wasn’t so sure about that. These people probably hadn’t left Lander since the infection broke out. Parker had seen people do unspeakable things to each other out there. He’d done unspeakable things himself out there. The end of the world changed people. The only difference between Lander and everywhere else was that the end of the world was slightly tardy in Lander.
Four armed guards entered the cellblock.
“Our food?” Parker said.
The woman with defiant eyes shook her head. “Do you see any food?”
“Listen up!” one of the guards said. “Mayor says we have to boil our water!”
Parker and the woman with defiant eyes exchanged glances.
“A couple of people in town have been infected,” the guard said, with less volume this time. Everyone was awake now. “And they weren’t bit. Doctors think the virus has gotten into the water supply.”
“Jesus,” the man on the right said.
“Bullshit,” the woman with defiant eyes said.
Parker heard nervous murmuring on both floors.
“So don’t drink any tap water,” the guard said. “Don’t even brush your teeth with it.”
The woman with defiant eyes snorted. “As if we have toothbrushes.”
“We’ll boil it and bring it to you in jugs,” the guard said.
“When are we going to eat?” the woman said.
“I eat when you eat,” the guard said.
“They’re full of shit,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” the man on the left said. “We’d better do what they say.”
“They’re just trying to scare us and control us,” she said.
“They’re already controlling us. We can’t go anywhere. And most of us are plenty scared already.”
The woman with defiant eyes said nothing.
Parker didn’t have to drink boiled water. Like Annie, he was immune now. But he’d drink it boiled anyway. He couldn’t let anyone know he was immune. Not now, not ever.
Steele barely slept at all anymore, and this night he slept worse than usual. Half a dozen times he woke from nightmares, and he dreaded returning to sleep because the nightmares were waiting for him.
He dreamed about pipes and plumbing. In one dream, his wife Nadia screamed when she went to the kitchen sink to fill a glass of water and blood poured out of the tap. In another, blood gushed from the shower drain and filled the bathtub to overflowing.
In yet another, fountains of blood geysered up from the manhole covers on Main Street beneath a stormy red sky.
His last dream was the worst. His boy Charles was no longer locked in the basement. He was loose in the house, and he was still infected. He came for his mother and father. He banged on their bedroom door in a rage while blood from the sink and the tub flooded the attached master bathroom.
Steele sat upright in bed in sweat-soaked sheets, his head and heart pounding. Nadia moaned and fidgeted in the covers beside him.
Charles wasn’t loose in the house. Blood wasn’t coming out of the pipes. But something terrible was coming. He knew it. He could feel it. Something Biblical, like the plague of locusts, the plague of boils, and the plague of darkness in Pharaonic Egypt 3,000 years ago.
The clock on his nightstand said 5:54 a.m. in red electronic letters. It was still dark outside. First light was still more than an hour away.
He slipped out of bed, shivered, put on yesterday’s clothes and quietly padded out of the room and into the hallway. He crept down the stairs, slowly so the creaking wouldn’t wake Nadia.
The living room and kitchen were frigid. Normally he liked to throw some logs on the fire first thing in the morning. Today he just turned on the lights, flipped the switch on the s
pace heater in the living room and headed into the kitchen.
He stood in front of the basement door and collected himself. He should not get his hopes up. Nash had told him that if Annie’s blood serum worked, Charles might be better after two or three days, and this was only the second day.
Steele ran some rough calculations in his head. His boy would either get better or he wouldn’t. It was a fifty-fifty proposition. If he did get better, he’d get better on the second day or the third day. Another fifty-fifty proposition. So the odds that Charles was better already were just one-in-four. Today was only just beginning, though. There were many many hours left—18, to be exact—before the third day began. So the odds that Charles was already cured were less than one-in-four. Perhaps one-in-eight. Not great, but better than nothing, and the odds would improve all day.
Steele opened the door to the basement. He felt a damp and musty warmth on his face. The space heater in the basement was never turned off. Steele turned on the light, but it was still dark down there. It was always dark down there, even at noon during the summer.
He ducked his head and took the stairs slowly. He heard no sound. He wanted to hear his boy cry out Dad or Mom, and he dreaded hearing his boy scream or growl. He heard nothing as if his boy was not even down there.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and still heard nothing.
“Charles?” he said.
No response.
He walked past the furnace and the stack of boxes, carefully ducking his head so he wouldn’t get scalped by the low ceiling.
“Charles?”
Nothing.
He reached the door to the room where his boy was kept safe, locked inside with a rope around his neck. He could not keep his mind out of dark places.
He knocked on the door.
“Charles?”
Nothing.
He pressed his ear to the door.
Total silence.
He should just open the door. He’d have his answer. He’d be relieved from the torment of not knowing.
Or not. If there was no change in Charles, Steele still wouldn’t know. Maybe Charles would be okay by the afternoon. Maybe he’d come out of it in the evening. Perhaps some time tomorrow he’s cry out Mom and Dad and they could rush downstairs and hug him and be a family again.
No, Steele would not be relieved from the torment of not knowing unless Charles was okay right now. And if Charles was okay right now, he would have said something already. He would have cried out for his parents.
Unless he was asleep.
Steele opened the door.
Charles did seem to be sleeping. He lay on his side facing the door on the filthy mattress and looked peaceful.
“Charles,” Steele said.
The boy didn’t move.
“Charles!” Steele said, louder this time.
Charles still didn’t move.
What did this mean?
He shouted. “Charles!”
The boy did not move at all.
Was he dead?
Steele stood in the doorway and looked at his boy carefully. Charles was breathing. He was not dead. He was deep asleep.
Steele knew exactly how far he could cross that room before he reached the danger zone, before the rope would no longer stop Charles short. It was exactly halfway from the door to the mattress. Steele would be safe if he stayed on his side of the room, and he’d be in danger if he stepped even a foot into Charles’ side of the room. He’d rigged it that way on purpose so there would be no doubt, so he wouldn’t have to guess or draw a chalk line on the concrete floor.
He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to shake his boy awake. But what if Charles was still infected? What if the blood serum hadn’t worked yet? What if Steele, in his impatience, got himself bit by his own son mere hours before Charles recovered? Wouldn’t that be the dumbest thing he’d ever done?
Fuck it. Steele could move fast if he had to. He walked across the room and kneeled on the floor next to his boy who seemed to be sleeping.
He was overcome by a rush of adrenaline when he realized if Charles did bite and infect him that he’d have very little time to get himself restrained before he turned and ran upstairs and attacked Nadia.
He shook his boy’s shoulder.
“Charles,” he said.
And Charles opened his eyes.
23
Six inches of snow covered the ground at Elias’ compound when Hughes woke in the morning. A space heater kept his bedroom warm. The rest of the guest cottage felt like a freezer.
Though he knew the snow was coming sooner or later, and was surprised it took so long, he felt crushed. He could not take Annie across the Great Plains, not easily anyway, if the roads were covered with more than a few inches of snow. No one would plow the roads ever again.
Hughes had never wanted to stop for more than a day or two in Lander and should have insisted they keep going. If he had, they’d be in Iowa by now already. He found the idea of a still-intact town just as compelling as the others did, though. It was a hard thing to pass by. Maybe impossible.
The Chinook winds might eventually melt the snow near the mountains, but he doubted the effect would reach all the way to the Missouri River.
He got dressed, laced his boots tight and didn’t bother putting on a jacket. Elias’ back deck was only a few dozen feet from the front door of the guest cottage, so it wouldn’t take him more than a couple of seconds to return to the main house for breakfast.
He heard two things as he crunched through the snow. Running water in the gulch next to the house, which still hadn’t frozen solid yet, and an alien sound toward the mountains like the screaming of human babies being stabbed to death with butcher knives.
He stopped in his tracks. That sound could not be human. It was a pained and menacing animal sound. What kind of animal sounded like tortured screaming babies? Not birds. Not bears. Not cougars. Not deer.
Not elk. Not bison. And not moose.
Not wolves, either.
It had to be coyotes unless some other medium-sized animal Hughes had never heard of before was running around in Wyoming.
Elias had said he seen a few infected coyotes on the property.
The sound was getting louder. It seemed at least a mile away, but it was coming closer.
Elias slid the back glass door open and stepped onto the porch. He wore a red flannel shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots. His hair was a mess. He hadn’t yet showered. “Get in the house.”
“Is that coyotes?” Hughes said.
Elias nodded. “Infected.”
“You sure?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“Never heard coyotes before, but it sounds bad.”
“It is. Get in the house.”
Hughes clomped up the stairs to the deck and stepped past Elias into the warm living room. Elias had a big fire going. It hissed and popped and blew sparks and felt like a furnace.
Elias slid the door most of the way closed and retrieved a hunting rifle from the wall—the same one he’d pointed at Hughes the day before.
“They know this house is here,” Elias said.
“How can they remember if they’re infected?” Hughes said. Even infected humans seemed to lose object permanence and only responded to what they could see and hear.
“They can smell it. They can smell us.”
“From a mile away?”
“Sure, from a mile away. Wind is blowing their direction. They can smell us, the house, the fireplace, even what’s left of the food we had last night.”
“You gonna shoot ’em?”
“Damn right, I’m gonna shoot ’em.”
Hughes wondered how the infection had spread to the coyote population and couldn’t help but wonder if it had spread to other animals too. Would bears catch the virus if they were bit by an infected coyote? He shuddered. An infected bear would be a goddamn nightmare.
“Want a hand?” Hughes said. There were plenty of other rifles on the
wall where Elias’ came from.
“On the wall,” Elias said. “They’re all loaded.”
Hughes chose a scoped Al Biesen Custom .243. He checked to make sure it was loaded. It was. He didn’t need the scope, but he wasn’t going to complain that he had it. He slid the glass door open all the way and stepped outside.
“What are you doing?” Elias said.
“I don’t like using a weapon I’ve never fired,” Hughes said.
He walked six paces out and pointed the rifle into the snow. Elias hadn’t objected yet, so he fired two quick shots. The rifle worked perfectly, so he went back inside.
Elias nodded and said nothing. He understood.
Now that Hughes knew what the sound was, it was obviously coming from a pack of coyotes. It sounded like a cacophony of angry yips, higher pitched than dog yips because the animals were smaller. The sound was also wilder, and more menacing.
At first, he didn’t see them. A slight ridge brought the near horizon low. All he could see beyond Elias’ back deck was a field of snow at a lazy tilt upward toward the mountains. Low clouds obscured the gorge cut into the rocks he’d seen earlier. Those clouds were probably dumping more snow. The coyotes were coming from there, running through the gorge from higher up in the forested part of the mountains and heading down into the scrubland below, toward the house.
The wild and angry yipping grew louder. Soon Hughes couldn’t hear the creek in the gulch anymore. Elias cocked his rifle and aimed down the sights. The coyotes would be in view any second now.
And in a few seconds, they were. They appeared over the lip of the small ridge a few hundred feet from the back of the house.
Hughes counted eight of them. Elias dropped one with a loud crack of his rifle and Hughes dropped another through his sights. Shot it clean through the chest.
They coyotes were small, no bigger than medium-sized dogs, but through the rifle scope they looked ferocious, as if they were rabid. Hughes could read their facial expressions. He could tell from their squinted eyes and bared teeth that they were going to attack until they were stopped by bullets or walls.
Elias and Hughes each dropped another coyote. The remaining four were less than a hundred feet away now.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 21