It took fifteen minutes for his group to process through. Noah tried to go thank the helicopter crew for rescuing them, but had to settle for a wave and a shouted thank you when one of the armed guards stopped him.
His reassembled group were issued masks and gloves, which they donned. “Where are we going now?” Noah asked.
“Temporary quarantine,” the airman said as they climbed into the back of a canvas-covered truck. Although no one raised objection, he quickly added, “Temporary quarantine, not quarantine.” Noah wasn’t sure he understood the difference, but the airman’s stressing of the word temporary was vaguely reassuring.
That reassurance evaporated when they reached the sandbagged gates through the double fences guarded by machine guns and snipers in raised manlifts. Natalie, Isabel, even the kids exchanged looks of concern. Inside, however, they found row after row of white, nondescript mobile homes. “At least it’s not open air,” Isabel said.
They were led to a no frills trailer home that troops in full protective gear and hardhats were leveling while other troops kept watch over them with assault rifles. When the driver opened the home’s front door, it crackled and squeaked like it was the first time it had been entered. Inside smelled of plastic. He tried the switch on the wall repeatedly, but no lights came on. He leaned back out and said, “Hey! No power.”
One of the soldiers who was packing up the huge wrenches they’d used for the leveler waved and went over to plug in a thick orange cable with a snap of electricity. The cheap fluorescent lighting in the trailer flickered until it came on. Or mostly came on. One lamp on the low ceiling continued its flicker even after the airman banged on the fixture a few times with the back of his closed, gloved fist.
“Home sweet home,” said the airman through his mask.
“For how long?” Townsend asked.
“Fuck if I know. Two meals a day—eleven hundred and eighteen hundred. There’s a cold shower in your unit if you can squeeze inside the thing, and one hot shower at the admin building per week.” He read a piece of paper taped to the inside of the flimsy front door. “Yours is on Tuesdays.”
“Wait,” Natalie said. “We’re all staying in here?” She looked around. There was one bedroom, and one sofa.
“I’m sorry,” the man replied. “Did you reserve a suite?”
“Airman!” Townsend snapped. Although the man had no reason to know that Townsend was an officer, stripped as he was of his uniform and insignia, the tone of his voice—and maybe his short Marine haircut—evoked a quick, “Sorry. Yes, ma’am. All of you. Bed check is between twenty-one hundred and twenty-three hundred hours. You gotta all be here for that, or there’s a helluva shitstorm.”
He tapped the doorframe to signify the end of their orientation, and closed the door behind him. Natalie began looking in cabinets and closets. The meager bedding, airline pillows, and cheapest possible towels they had been supplied were wrapped in plastic and stacked atop the coffee table. Townsend peered out the filmy window at the streets and alleyways and the innumerable mobile homes arrayed in all directions. “Where is everybody?” Isabel asked on joining him.
“Probably baking a pie to welcome us,” Chloe suggested sarcastically. Sullenly.
Jake made a face. “Where are they gonna get stuff to make a pie?”
Noah opened the door and stepped outside. Townsend and Isabel joined him. Behind them, Natalie gave orders to her kids to collect all the cushions, linens, blankets, and pillows out of which they would fashion beds for everyone.
We made it, Noah thought in an attempt to rejoice at the accomplishment. But not Margus. He didn’t make it. And not, he feared, some part of his daughter’s humanity, which she left back at that nightmarish landing zone.
Chapter 24
NEW ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 85, 1200 GMT (8:00 a.m. Local)
Emma Miller convened a meeting of The Community council at Samantha’s request. For some reason, the girl had invited no uninfected representatives.
The twelve-year-old opened her notebook. Dwayne and Walcott waited patiently to be addressed or for the meeting to end. If Dwayne still heard voices in his head, he didn’t show it. And Walcott clearly heard nothing. Dorothy, on the other hand, sat at the far end and didn’t seem to know who to look at. She had been invited by Samantha out of tradition, presumably, since they, minus Walcott, had all been roommates at the NIH lab in Bethesda.
“I wanted to report some preliminary numbers,” Samantha said, “from the census.” She referred to her notebook. “The Community consists of eight counties in the Roanoke and New River Valleys: Allegheny, Montgomery, Bedford, Floyd, Botetourt—weird name—Craig, Franklin, and Roanoke. I’ve included the towns of New Roanoke, Blacksburg, Lynchburg, Salem, Covington, Bedford, and Radford, but have excluded Lexington and Virginia Tech until Dwayne figures out how to deal with them.”
She looked up at Emma, who decided not to interrupt.
“One of our interviewers is really smart—almost as smart as some of the Uninfecteds. She was, if you’re interested, one of the scientists at the NIH lab where they experimented on us. She caught Pandoravirus while getting out of D.C. Anyway, I borrowed her from the interview teams documenting the history after The Outbreak for work on the census, and she estimates the pre-outbreak population of our territory at 475,000, of which 228,000 have died from the disease and violence. But there are also about 190,000 refugees from up north, making our total population around 412,000, plus or minus.”
“How are we going to feed all of them?” Dorothy—surprisingly—asked.
“We need to get people farming,” Emma said. “Less sweeping and road repair. More farming jobs on the boards.”
Samantha made a note on the last page of her notebook, but no one else moved. Emma couldn’t imagine how she could manage everything without the girl. She showed almost as much initiative as an Uninfected. “What else?” Emma asked.
“Well, except for spikes during Dwayne’s operations—and executions, of course—most of the deaths these days come from encounters by Infecteds or Uninfecteds with the 7,500 or so crazies still roaming around, or from those crazies’ starvation, exposure, or accident. They don’t even know to get off the streets at night. Sheriff Walcott and I hit one yesterday in his truck and broke a headlight, right Sheriff?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Anyway, Dwayne needs new ones almost every day because of spoilage, and hundreds after every attack, and stocks are running low. The Selective Eradication police are trying to tase them, or use rubber bullets, or capture them with nets or traps, but about half they injure so badly, or they’re already so beat up and ratty, that they’re useless. And given that the rate of infection has fallen because the Uninfecteds have figured out hygiene and isolation—and as order was reestablished—we’re down to only a few hundred new infections a day, with crazies being only about 10 percent of the half who turn.”
Emma knew she was over reliant on Samantha, so she asked Dwayne, “What’s your plan?” When he failed to reply, she rephrased her question. “How are you going to get enough incompetent Infecteds as fodder for your military operations?”
Still, nothing. Emma was forced to turn back to Samantha, who consulted her notebook like a junior version of Emma, whom the girl had carefully observed at the NIH hospital. “I can think of three options.” It was thinking like that that left Emma unable to imagine replacing Samantha with another Infected. Could she risk putting an Uninfected in such a key position? “Option one would be to infect more Uninfecteds.” That was why Samantha hadn’t invited any Uninfecteds to the meeting. “But it would take about 1,000 Uninfecteds to yield fifty crazies. It seems ridiculously inefficient to lose 1,000 decent workers just to get fifty short-term…what did you call them, Dwayne?”
“Hm? Oh, berserkers.”
“Berserkers. I like that.”
&nbs
p; “What are the other two options?” Emma asked. Walcott and Dwayne didn’t appear to be listening anymore.
“Head into the Exclusion Zone and round them up there,” Samantha proposed. “That violates our contract with Norfolk, if you can call it that since they never replied to Dwayne’s messages. But there are more crazies running around up there now than down here in the territory we’ve pacified. And they keep coming down out of the mountains looking for food or sex, so we could characterize our incursions as security operations.”
“And your third option?”
“Change tactics…and forces. Use stable, normal Infecteds for Dwayne’s attacks. And maybe use Uninfecteds, too.”
No way, came the voice in Emma’s head, whose opinion Emma would need time to consider. “Dwayne, what do you think about that?”
“About what?”
“Using regular Infecteds for your forces…and/or Uninfecteds?”
Emma waited as he considered her hypothetical. “Um…well, I don’t think the trick with the trucks would work with Uninfecteds.”
“No,” Emma said. “It won’t.”
“And if we fill those trucks with regular Infecteds, the crowd behavior will take hold. But when we stampede ’em, they’ll fan out, cool off, and either go to ground or run away if the enemy fire is stiff.”
“What if you change tactics?” Samantha asked, not waiting on Emma. Dwayne had no idea what she meant. “Instead of trucks full of crazies, what if you raised a real army?”
That, too, momentarily stumped Dwayne. He hadn’t once, apparently, ever considered that alternative. “We could train them to use small arms, fire and maneuver, basic orienteering, comms, logistics. But….” They waited.
“But what?” Emma finally prodded.
“Why would they fight?”
Samantha said, “Because it’s their job.”
“Yeah,” Dwayne replied, “that works…to a point.” He fell quiet.
“To what point?” Emma asked.
“To the point where it makes more sense to run away than follow orders. They wouldn’t charge an enemy if that meant a high risk of death. They wouldn’t care if we branded them cowards or traitors, or shot deserters if the risk of death from the enemy was even more certain. And once one turned tail, they’d all run. Crowd behavior in reverse.”
“What about the Uninfecteds?” Samantha asked. “If we risked arming them?” Dwayne had little idea how to respond. “What makes Marines fight?” Sam asked.
“Love of country. Love of the Corps. The respect of your fellow Marines. Pride.”
“Would you or your regular fighters charge an enemy position if it meant almost certain death?” Emma asked.
Dwayne blinked several times before replying. “No.”
“But U.S. Marines or army soldiers would?”
“Yes.”
Emma returned the gaze of Sam, who said, “Then we’d better not fight U.S. Marines or Army, I guess.”
A single shot rang out. Their heads turned to the window. Emma asked, “What about, instead of just shooting people who fail temperament testing, using them?”
Dwayne addressed another apparently novel question. “No. They’re too high-functioning. We’ve made the mistake before—more than once—of misidentifying a crazy. They were competent enough to escape, and twice those escapes involved prematurely triggering attacks by the real crazies. We lost over a dozen of my regular fighters in one.”
There was another, single shot down the street outside the church where they were doing the testing. “A lot of failures today,” Samantha mused. “We should’ve anticipated this problem.” She wasn’t looking at Emma, who hadn’t imagined a lack of crazed Infecteds being problematic. But Emma couldn’t help but feel Samantha was being critical of her judgment. “We’re victims of our own success,” Samantha said, recollecting from somewhere the old saying, which seemingly greatly impressing both Dwayne and Walcott, who nodded in recognition of the comment’s profundity.
Samantha filled the void left by Emma’s increasingly anxious silence. “The outreach teams say there are plenty of crazies roaming around Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.”
“They’re too far away,” Emma replied. “Most wouldn’t survive shipment. But since you brought it up, how are the outreach teams doing?”
“Great. They’ve gotten a whole bunch of interest. In fact, they’ve asked if you could get on a call, if the phone lines are working, or the radio with prospective new towns and communities to answer their questions.”
“What questions?”
“Like what benefits do they get if they join? What will it cost them? Can we send troops one day to help with their security, or food, or do they send those things our way?” When Emma had no immediate answers, Samantha said, “I was talking to an uninfected lawyer working in body disposal who said he was an expert in franchising, whatever that is, and he can draft contracts that address all our issues. He’s probably just trying to get out of body disposal, but…”
“I’ll meet with him,” Emma said, intrigued that there was a form of ready-made contract dealing with all those things. She turned back to Walcott.
“Sheriff, send your SE police up into the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains—into the Exclusion Zone—and start rounding up crazies there. Avoid contact, if possible, with anyone else. Dwayne, send a message to Norfolk that this is just a border security issue, not an attempt at westward expansion.”
Dwayne looked at Samantha, who said nothing, before turning back to Emma. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. But his delay in responding—and his check of Sam—had been significant. Uh-oh, said the inner voice as Emma’s anxiety spiked.
* * * *
When the meeting ended, everyone left except Samantha. “Was there something else?” Emma asked.
“I’m worried about the executions,” the girl said. Again! came the voice in Emma’s head. “The Uninfecteds are really upset about them.”
“We held trials, just like they wanted. And I released a good number of accused Uninfecteds when the evidence against them seemed weak. What more could they want?”
“I was talking to a doctor,” Samantha said. “A psychiatrist. She said—”
“An uninfected psychiatrist?”
“Yes. She said that Uninfecteds are suffering from,” Sam searched her notebook, “traumatic stress disorders, and their health, productivity, and loyalty to The Community are suffering as a result.”
Emma had heard of soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after war. “Samantha, there’s not much I can do about what they went through when the infection broke out and The Killing began. They’re just going to have to toughen up and get over it.”
“I’m not talking about that, although she did mention preexisting psychological damage from The Killing. What she was talking about was the threat of execution hanging over them. She said they were falling ill from immune systems weakened by the stress and fear of being detained, tried, and executed.” Samantha rose from her seat at the table. “Would you follow me down the hall? I want to show you something.”
“I don’t have time to talk to some uninfected psychiatrist, Sam.”
“It’s not that. Just give me a couple of minutes.”
Emma followed Sam down a back hall toward the employee parking lot of the city hall building. One of Dwayne’s troops stood guard, and opened a door beside him when Samantha and Emma arrived. Curled up in a small broom closet, cowering in a fetal ball in the corner, was a quivering man. “Come on out,” Samantha said in her high pitched voice. “Come on. Come on.”
The shaking man crawled out on all fours and, at Sam’s urging, reluctantly rose to his feet. He was stooped, arms wrapped around himself, wincing, looking anywhere but at the two infected women and his armed guard, and he was crying.
“What’s your name?” Sa
mantha asked. The man cringed and shut both eyes, loosing a whimper like an abused animal on seeing a raised hand. “What’s your name?”
“Buh-Buh-Bob,” he finally managed. He tried to look up at Emma, but he was too busy twitching, and serious tics caused not only his eyes, but his entire face to seize. He abandoned the effort and half turned away, lowering his gaze.
“This is what the doctor was talking about,” Samantha said to Emma. “Look at him. How can we expect someone like him to work productively, or do much of anything at all for that matter?”
“Where did you find him?” Emma asked.
“He was next up to be shot. I thought he was a perfect example of what that woman was talking about.” The man was almost doubled over, as if he were experiencing severe abdominal distress. He clutched himself in an embrace that seemed less for comfort than to prevent uncontrolled shaking of his limbs. His lips quivered, and he was pale. “Apparently, the Uninfecteds are all so worried about getting arrested and shot that they are suffering from,” again Sam consulted her notes, “mass psychosis, or something like that. It’s causing them to fall ill, to contribute only as much labor as is minimally required to avoid detention, and to plot and scheme against The Community, which raises the potential that they might rebel against it.”
Emma tilted her head as she studied the man. He really did seem ill. It wasn’t agitation, a feeling with which she was familiar. It was debilitating fear—a term whose definition she recalled, but which she could not, no matter how hard she tried, conjure up. “And this…whatever is all because he was going to be executed? Are you sure?”
“Watch this. Pardon him.”
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 16