Chapter 20
NEW ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 82, 1200 GMT (8:00 a.m. Local)
“Raleigh Court is first,” Samantha informed Emma. “The Uninfecteds there seem real nice. They made those cookies I brought to work yesterday.”
Emma had parked the Honda CRV, which belonged to Roanoke’s public works department, at the end of the block opposite the barricades, and walked toward the armed men manning them. The middle aged, middle-class houses on the tree-lined street were presumably previously tidy. Now, however, the lawns were overgrown and filled with trash. Many had obviously been looted, and their inessential contents discarded in trails from front doors to the sidewalk. Some were burned to stinking shells.
“Halt!” came a shout from behind a mask. Armed uninfected men challenged them from thirty yards away—Dwayne’s uninfected troops assigned to guard the Uninfecteds they were guarding anyway before being assigned by Dwayne.
Emma raised her hands as if in surrender. Samantha did the same in imitation. “I’ve come to talk to your people! I’m Emma Miller!”
“We know who you are.”
Although they didn’t sound friendly, Samantha said, “See? They know you.”
The guards pulled a metal bike rack aside with a grating sound to open a narrow pathway through the barricade, which was built from a tumble of appliances and heaps of lumber haphazardly piled atop layers of collected debris, all anchored by three automobile hulks. The barrier ran across the sidewalks and lawns all the way to the two homes on opposite sides of the street.
“Thanks!” Samantha said as she and Emma, hands still raised, stumbled over the unsteady footing in the gap. None of the uninfected men dared come close enough to render aid.
“Everybody’s at the middle school,” said the elder most among the Uninfecteds. He pointed down the street, but neither Sam nor Emma saw any schools.
“Can you show us where?” Emma asked.
Looks were exchanged. The man seemed put out by the request and huffed before heading down the street. The two Infecteds followed, slowly lowering their hands.
Strangely, things were even filthier inside the uninfected neighborhood. Garbage was piled on the curb in front of every house. At the bottom of the piles, the refuse was in bags. At the top, it was loose and being spread by the wind. The smell of human waste was strong.
“Is the sewage system working?” Emma asked their silent escort.
He snorted with barely a glance over his shoulder. “Right.”
“Is that a yes, or a no?”
The man stopped. Samantha kept walking to close the distance, but Emma reached for her arm just as the man took his shotgun off his shoulder. “There ain’t nothin’ workin’ ’round here.” He headed off again.
Samantha wrote, “Nothing is working in Raleigh Court,” in her spiral notebook. When she pressed her pen to the ruled paper to make a period, they followed the man.
One house drew Emma’s attention. It was draped in yellow police tape, but also bullet-riddled, burned, and roofless. Red biohazard tape still crisscrossed its strangely intact front door. “What happened there?” Emma asked.
Their escort didn’t have to look back to know the house to which she referred. “They got quarantined.”
“Where are its occupants now?”
“Still in there, I s’pose.”
Samantha wrote in her notebook, “Uninfecteds killed the Infecteds in quarantine.” It was presumably her small contribution to the research on The Killing.
Emma asked Samantha, “How’s it going with organizing the research teams?”
“Pretty well.” Sam flipped pages in her notebook. “They’re asking about peoples’ experiences since The Outbreak. How many they’ve killed. How many members of their family they’ve lost. Whether the interviewees are refugees, and if so from where. That kind of stuff.” Their guide glanced over his shoulder at them. “They turn in their notes at the end of the day and we are typing it all up. Some of it’s useful, but sometimes the interviews kind of break down.”
“Come up with procedures—prompts—to get them unstuck. A script. And we ought to standardize the questions or they’re going to produce all kinds of inconsistent data. Remember, we want to understand behaviors—infected and uninfected—so we can manage them and anticipate problems.” There was another peek by the eavesdropping Uninfected. “How about the outreach teams?”
“The first ones are heading north tomorrow,” Sam replied. “They’ve got copies of the latest Rules and a brochure this uninfected guy made with colorful pictures of Infecteds and Uninfecteds working together to repair the conveyor belt at a sawmill. The Uninfecteds even took off their masks to show their smiles, but they weren’t happy about it.”
“Where are the first teams going?”
“Sixty people are heading up the coast toward D.C. and the Northeast, and twenty toward Chicago and the Upper Midwest. They’ll peel off two person teams when they reach recruitable communities, and they’ll try to report in periodically. They’ll also document local histories to add to our research. Do you think people will join when there’s no threat of force to back it up?”
“Trial and error, remember? If it doesn’t work, it cost only eighty people.”
Their shotgun toting host pointed with a gloved hand. People filed into the Patrick Henry Middle School. “Aren’t you coming?” Emma asked.
“Naw, not me.” She and Sam headed for the school. “You have masks and gloves?” he called out from behind them.
“I turned two and a half months ago,” Emma said.
“Fifty-seven days ago for me,” Samantha added.
“So, we’re hardly contagious at all.”
“Still….” That was all the man said. After exchanging brief looks with Samantha at the mystifying truncation of his sentence, Emma extracted from her backpack a mask and latex gloves, which she carried for the comfort of Uninfecteds. Samantha found only a mask in hers. “Here,” said their escort, handing her a pair of disposable gloves.
“Thank you.” They walked on toward the middle school alone. “See,” Samantha said from behind her mask. “They’re very helpful. And a lot of Infecteds are real jerks.”
But Emma had her doubts. The man hadn’t seemed too nice. Samantha had this vision of a future, Emma realized, that was far rosier than Emma’s. Maybe the little voice in Samantha’s head was an optimist. But the one in Emma’s head definitely was not.
At the door into the school’s auditorium, the converging crowd did a double take. Although they, too, wore protective gear, they instantly made way as everyone recognized Emma. “Thank you,” Samantha said as the door was held open by a masked woman who squinted, held her breath, and leaned as far away from them as possible.
Inside, the loud buzz of conversation rapidly fell silent. Metal chairs facing the podium on stage scraped noisily as shoulders were tapped and heads were turned. The room was full, and people lined the far walls as Samantha and Emma walked alone down the central aisle. “Hi. Hi. Hi,” Sam kept repeating. Some of the Uninfecteds, especially the children, replied in kind. Even though light streamed through the high windows of the basketball gym, the cavernous space seemed dark and the still air thick with stale sweat.
An unshaven man, incongruously wearing a rumpled suit and unstarched white shirt with a loosely knotted tie, descended from the stage. His graying hair was unwashed and unkempt. Samantha’s long blond hair, Emma noted in contrast, was clean and perfectly straight. “Hi,” Sam said. She turned to Emma. “This is the man I was telling you about.”
“Richard Ames.” The man clasped his hands behind him.
“Emma Miller. Pleased to meet you.” She used words that were now mere habits and whose linguistic origins were quickly being lost.
Ames motioned toward the steps up onto the stage like a glib master of ceremonie
s or an unctuous undertaker. Samantha sat on the front row facing the stage. One by one, Uninfecteds all around her rose after hushed debates and went to stand along the walls of the packed auditorium. Undaunted, Sam kept saying, “Hi. Hi. Hi,” as her neighbors departed until she was separated from the others by five empty rows behind her and ten empty seats to her side.
Emma was not introduced. The undertaker bid her take to the podium with an outstretched hand. “Hello,” she said to the crowd. But the room and the audience were large and her voice muffled. She lowered the mask.
There were gasps, and people on the front row across the aisle from Samantha rose even though they were fifteen feet away. “I’m not really that contagious. Neither is Samantha. By the time Infecteds’ pupils return to normal a couple of weeks after infection, you can’t catch Pandoravirus through the air anymore, only through bodily fluids.”
The reasoning, or social discomfort, or both were sufficient for many of the reluctant Uninfecteds to return to their seats.
“I am Dr. Emma Miller. I’m an epidemiologist who contracted Pandoravirus in Siberia on Infection Date 7 while deployed on a World Health Organization surge team. This is Samantha Brown. Her father was the U.S. ambassador to China.” Samantha stood, turned, and waved, but got silence in return. “She was infected when the virus reached Beijing on Infection Date…?”
“Twenty-four,” Sam squeaked in her juvenile voice. “Glad to see you all.” Her wave was again met with no replies.
“So, we’re well past the two week mark and don’t need to wear protective gear.”
“We’ll wait till we get the vaccine,” someone called out from the crowd.
A general disturbance arose. Questions arose about when that would be. Some sounded hostile. Samantha had worn an ill-fitting and frilly dress for this first meeting with Uninfecteds, and sat with her blue gloved hands primly folded across her notebook.
You should’ve brought security, said the voice in Emma’s head. A rush of anxiety caused Emma to grip the podium tightly. In through the nose; out through the mouth.
“We obviously,” Emma said in a vibrating voice, “don’t have the vaccine yet.”
More shouts arose. Emma cobbled together a question from the disparate snippets she heard while locating the emergency exit to her right ten sprinted paces away. “We don’t have any contact with representatives of the former government or military.” More shouts. “But we’ve got more pressing matters to discuss.”
“Pressing for you!” came a reply that rose above the others.
“If we establish contact with the former government, which is off in Texas—”
“They’re in Tennessee,” came an interruption.
“They’re closer than that,” a man said, turning and craning his neck to address the first person to interrupt. “There’s a whole bunch of Marines and sailors over at Norfolk.”
“Samantha will put your concern on her list,” Emma said. Sam opened her notebook and held her pen at the ready, but had no idea what to write. “We will inquire about the vaccine.” After an exaggerated bob of her head, Sam made that notation. “In the meantime, I’m here to answer any other questions you might have about the new government.”
“When are the elections?” came a question.
“What elections?”
“For…the new government.”
“There are no elections planned.”
After a silence, an uninfected woman said, “Who made you head honcho?”
It was a good question. Samantha listened with pen in hand. “No one. I made myself head honcho, although my title is technically Chief Epidemiologist.”
Again, the room fell silent.
“Where’d you take the people you arrested?” came from the back corner.
“For violating the Rules?” Emma clarified. “They’re awaiting trials.”
An even deeper stillness settled in after that response. Emma gripped the lectern tighter. Samantha remained at ease. Her feet, in black patent leather shoes and lacy socklets, didn’t quite reach the floor and swung forward and back with her ankles crossed.
“For not feelin’ up to work! One fuckin’ day! You gonna fuckin’ kill ’em?”
A quarter of the auditorium joined in the chorus of anger. Another quarter tried to calm them. But fully half the room sat stock still and awaited Emma’s response.
“The Rules say you have to work.”
The disturbance grew. Samantha looked over her shoulder one way, then the other.
“Which brings me to my first point,” Emma said in a raised voice, quieting the commotion. “You need to follow the Rules.”
“Whose fuckin’ rules…?” shouted a man in back, who was muscled out of the room. After the door closed with a bang that caused the most rapt Uninfecteds to jump, the disturbance continued indistinctly in the lobby outside.
“You must follow the Rules, leave during the prescribed exit time, or be punished. Those are the same choices you were given when you first joined, and they’re the same choices you’re given each morning when the Rules are updated.”
A man, wearing a mask and baseball cap that made identification difficult, said, “What if we don’t wanta leave our homes…or follow your Rules?”
The answer seemed straightforward, so Emma glanced at Sam. She made some kind of face hidden behind her mask and shrugged. “Then you’ll be executed, as I mentioned.”
That satisfied them. After another long pause, the next questions centered on getting a greater variety of food delivered to their barricades. “We’re awfully tired of tofu.”
Samantha noted the complaint. But it occurred to Emma that her audience didn’t fully appreciate the situation. “We’re getting you enough calories to maintain your body weight. Right now, we have a lot of soybeans, but that will change as different crops come in or new food supplies are located. But since you don’t venture out of your neighborhood much except on work details, let me tell you what’s going on out there. People are starving. Pandoravirus crossed into the U.S. on Infection Date 39—forty-three days ago. Almost all economic activity, including agriculture, came to a halt before we restarted it. If it weren’t for the massive number of fatalities from the disease and from the fighting, we’d be completely out of food. As it stands, we’ve got…how many days of food supplies currently?”
Samantha flipped pages, still swinging her skinny white legs. “Twelve days.”
“Twelve days of food left.” There was a stir as heads turned to seatmates. Tell them more, came the voice. “In the Exclusion Zone—in the Appalachian Mountains to the west—we’ve had seven credible reports of cannibalism—”
“Eight,” Samantha corrected, finding the right page. “There was that hog rendering place Walcott found last night outside Danville that was selling meat.”
“Eight cases of cannibalism,” Emma amended. They were listening now. “Our Community’s goal is to provide you with enough to eat that you don’t start killing each other for food. Variety and taste are things we’ll work on after the crisis passes. But I hope you see why we need every member—Infected and Uninfected—to work every day.”
“But do you have to execute people?” came a woman with long, almost white hair, who rose with a slight scrape of her chair. “Can’t you show some decency? Some mercy?”
“No. We thought about it, but we just don’t have the resources to jail people. And as I assume you know, we’re culling the Infecteds rather more aggressively. If an Infected shows an obvious inability to maintain self-control, we’re shooting them on the spot. That reduces the number we feed and should prove to you that we’re committed to maintaining order. And if you’ve watched the news on TV you should appreciate how preferable order is to what’s going on everywhere else in the world.”
“But,” the woman said with a strange emphasis, “mass murder?”
&nbs
p; “Most of the executions are Infecteds. What were the numbers?”
Samantha again found the right page. “I’d have to do the math. But two days ago, we executed 1,302—” There were gasps that confused Samantha. “Uhm, all of those were Infecteds, pending trial of the eighty-nine Uninfecteds in detention. Yesterday, we executed 467 Infecteds. Today—you haven’t approved these executions yet,” she said, looking up from her notes to the podium, “—but we’ve rounded up another 278 Infecteds for execution, and only eleven Uninfecteds for trial.”
“How about you let us try Uninfecteds?” came a request. “We’ll take care of it.”
Emma shook her head. “No. You won’t punish them. We will. And we’ll keep you safe and fed. All we ask for in return is that you obey the Rules. If you can’t, you’re free to go. But if you stay, the Rules and the punishment for breaking them are nonnegotiable.”
A man stood and hurled his metal chair against the wall, making a huge racket. “You got my son, you fucking bitch! You let him go today,” he said, shaking a fist but being restrained, “or this is fucking war!” Uninfecteds hustled the man toward the rear door. “You touch one hair on his head…!” he shouted through his struggles.
The door again closed with a bang.
“Any other questions?” There were none.
Outside, Samantha said, “That went well, don’t you think?”
No, Emma didn’t think it went well. Was there some way to woo Uninfecteds back into the fold? Or were they going to be a threat, perpetually, until they were eradicated or infected en masse? They couldn’t get by without them now, when their Community hovered on the edge of collapse. But the day would come when the economy improved.
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 13