Resistance: Pandora, Book 3

by Eric L. Harry

  “Okay,” Browner said, pushing back from the table and rising, but not before the dozen or so soldiers in the conference room shot to their feet at rigid attention.

  Isabel chased Browner into the corridor. He stopped and waited without even seeing her on his heels. Unbidden, he said, “We had one satellite overpass this morning. I was hopeful, but it was at an extremely oblique angle. They couldn’t see anything at the farms of Captain Townsend’s parents or uncle. No signs on lawns or fields or messages stamped down onto crops. No reflective panels or mirrors or white sheets. No signs of physical destruction or fighting. It still could be that there’s a big, log SOS right behind a hill, or some trees, or a barn, or a house—the imagery’s angle was, as I said, at an extreme oblique—but…I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do until I have some reason, any reason, to believe that he’s still alive.”

  “Nothing from the outpost where he landed?”

  “Yes, there is. We’ve counted the bodies, in uniform, uncollected out in the open, which is consistent with 100 percent KIA. And the position appears to have been totally looted by Infecteds. It’s possible that people scattered and are—or were—running for their lives.” Isabel’s eyes rose when he put his big paw on her shoulder. “But Isabel, I’m sorry. This is the way it ends these days. No dogtag collection and graves registration marker. No coffin. No taps. No folded flag. Two thirds of the forces we’ve lost are labeled ‘missing in action presumed killed.’ That latter label, presumed killed, we added to Captain Townsend’s jacket this morning. I’m sorry.”

  His hand felt warm on her shoulder.

  “I’ll do it,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’ll go back to Virginia. To Roanoke. I’ll meet with Emma and try to figure out what she’s planning.”

  “Isabel, I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “You’re not. I’m volunteering.”

  “Because of Captain Townsend?”

  She shrugged, shaking his hand loose. “Because of Rick. Because I don’t really have anything or anyone left. And because I’d like to think I might save my sister and all those people from annihilation if all they’re doing is eking out an existence.”

  “Do you realize how dangerous that mission would be?”

  “Yeah, I imagine. But it probably won’t be any worse than some of the places I’ve been recently. And Rick taught me a lot. I know my way around an M4.”

  Browner smiled, but not in amusement. More in recognition of something he thought he might have seen in her all along. Or so she imagined.

  “You know also, don’t you,” Browner said, “that if you report that we should trust your sister, there are going to be doubters who discount your opinion because they think you’re lying to save her.” Isabel nodded. “You’ll need facts to support any conclusion, but that conclusion especially. And the first place I’d start is what the hell they’re doing in gyms and auditoriums and theaters and churches all over her territory. All we know is that they’ve been sending military age males and females inside, and they’re either being dragged out one by one and getting a bullet, or they’re coming out en masse at the end of the day and sometimes going for group jogs…in formation. We haven’t detected any form of basic military training, outdoors at least where we can observe them, but my fellow chiefs are pretty convinced that’s the beginning of a general mobilization. Anything you can find out about what’s going on in those buildings would help fill in the blanks. Are you sure you want to try? Captain Townsend could still turn up.”

  “He will,” she said, “but I’ll go. At least maybe I’ll get to see my sister again.”

  Browner nodded. “Okay. We’ll get you fully briefed and kitted out. We’ll drop you as close as we can, but we’ve got an agreement with your sister that the defined Exclusion Zone in the Appalachians will remain demilitarized. We have reason to believe Emma is sending forces into the Exclusion Zone in violation of that agreement, presumably because they’re getting raided constantly by hungry people from there, mostly Infecteds, but we are still honoring our side of that deal. What that means is that your infiltration will require a few days’ march from your drop-off point to get through it.” She nodded, again accepting the mission despite her growing appreciation of its risks. “You probably oughta say your goodbyes to your family.” Another nod. “And one word of fashion advice.” She looked up. “I’d cut your hair to match your sister’s, which has grown out a little as best as I could tell based on her last TV appearance. It might come in handy.”

  * * * *

  “You cut your hair!” Isabel’s niece, Chloe, practically shrieked on opening the trailer door. Isabel hugged each of Noah’s children and wife in turn, followed with a long, meaningful, loving embrace by her older brother.

  “I’ve been so worried about you,” Noah said. “Come fill us in. What’s going on?”

  That consumed most of Isabel’s time with them before she had to present herself at the airbase’s hangar. Her description of what was happening in Emma’s Community left Noah and family with the same question as Browner—was that great, or terrifying?

  The one subject that wasn’t raised but was clearly in everyone’s thoughts was Rick. Isabel finally decided to throw it out there. “Rick’s missing in action.” She couldn’t bring herself to append, “and presumed killed.” Natalie slid her chair over to the trailer’s banquette and wrapped her arms around Isabel. Chloe knelt on the opposite side and did the same. To Isabel’s amazement, it actually helped ease her distress enough that tears began to flow. She was safe enough there in their embrace to confront the possibility that Rick’s luck had run out and his skill had finally proven insufficient.

  It was Noah who put things right again. “Rick Townsend is the most impressive soldier I’ve ever seen. Or Marine, I guess.” Natalie and Chloe released her. “If anyone can survive, it’s him. And if anyone can find a way back to you, he will. He loves you, and I’m betting on him making it.”

  “Thank you!” Isabel said, throwing her arms around Noah. “Thank you!”

  Jake awkwardly patted Isabel’s shoulder and got a hug. She forced out a smile to help put a stop to the tears, and wiped her face dry. Noah was right. Rick was a survivor, and he was as in love with her as she was with him. There was hope.

  “So…what’s up with you?” Isabel asked, sniffling, to change the subject. “Anything new?”

  “Mom’s preggers,” Chloe blurted out.

  “What?” When Natalie confirmed it with a curt nod and suppressed grin, Isabel congratulated her and embraced her again, and said, “Jeez, Noah,” in good-natured jest that mostly amused and simultaneously repulsed his children.

  “And we’re all immune now,” Natalie reported. “We got vaccinated.”

  “Wonderful! It’s such a relief, isn’t it? I mean, I didn’t wanta say anything before. But just not having to worry about infection….”

  “Now, we just worry about everything else,” Noah said. When Isabel checked her watch, Noah said, “You have to go somewhere?” She nodded. “Where?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m not supposed to say, but…Virginia.”

  “You’re kidding,” Noah replied. “Isabel, you can’t be serious.”

  “I’m gonna go try to meet with Emma. She and that crew from up at the cabin—her roommates at the NIH hospital, your clients—now have over a million people in the territory they’re governing, and they’re doing a pretty good job of getting their economy going. Towns and cities all around them—or parts of them—are applying to join despite the fact that, well, they’re a pretty brutal bunch.”

  “Don’t do it, Iz,” Noah said, grabbing both of her hands in his as he leaned over to her from his seat. “Rick will make it back here, and you’ll be way off in that hellhole we barely escaped.” He looked around at his kids. Natalie nodded at him. “I’m not supposed to say anything
about this, but when I was flying back to Houston from Las Vegas, I saw a nuclear detonation. They’re nuking people—Infecteds—out west, Iz.” That was obviously news to the kids, who stared at each other in wide-eyed, slack-jawed silence. “They could start nuking places back east, too.”

  “I know, Noah. I know. That’s why I’ve got to go. There’s a chance that Emma could get everything under control. Who else besides her—besides a freaking ruthless, sociopathic infected control freak—could restore order and security and put a stop to the violence.”

  “By using even more violence?” Noah pointed out.

  “We don’t have good intel, but there’s a sense that their executions are trending down as the number of crazies are reduced. There are always spikes when there’s a new spread of the infection, but what if she culls the most violent Infecteds and the ones who’re left are people we can live with? Trade with? Trust to honor pacts and treaties?”

  “You believe that’s possible?” Natalie asked.

  “Treaties are just contracts. Why not?”

  “And so,” Noah summed up, “some Green Berets or whatever are going to escort you back through all that shit—”

  “I’m going alone, after they drop me in. We have a deal with Emma that we won’t make incursions into her territory, and the military doesn’t want to breach it.”

  Noah rocked back. “Jesus. Okay. You, alone, are gonna fight your way into Infected territory, and if you make it march up to Emma’s headquarters and do what?”

  She shrugged. “Figure out what she’s doing, and report back my opinion about whether we can, you know, get along with them, or whether….”

  “Or whether we nuke them? Don’t do it, Iz. Don’t go. How would you get back?”

  “Norfolk isn’t that far. And I’ll get one of their precious military sat phones. They’re gonna give all that stuff to me in a few minutes when I show up at the main hangar.”

  Isabel suffered through the urgings of Noah and his entire family until she finally said, “No. It’s decided. I’ve decided. It’s something I can do that maybe will help. It maybe will save Emma’s life and the lives of those million people who seem to be getting a handle on things. You know what it’s like out West. And in the Northeast and Midwest. Basically everywhere the infection has spread except Emma’s Community. If there’s a chance—even a glimmer of a chance—that she’s on to something and we can coexist with Infecteds, we can’t blast them to pieces. We’ve got to try and help make it work. And no one is better situated than me to go on this mission. It’s me, or it’s nukes.”

  After a long silence ensued, she asked—again to change the subject—what Noah was going to do if the outbreaks resumed and Houston fell. “Where would I find you?”

  He had an answer. “Because we’ve been vaccinated, they’re letting us come and go from the base…for now, anyway. We went on short rations so we could build a surplus of food. This is Texas, so there are lots of guns. I traded food for four rifles and a pistol. We’ve repacked and hidden our go bags. If they kick us off the base, or if Houston goes under, we’ll grab ’em and hit the road again. Like I said before, my plan is to head east parallel to I-10 until we find someplace. There are still a number of uninfected towns back that way. They’ve got water and are still farming, I hear. Being vaccinated may make us useful to them. So somewhere along I-10 East is where we’ll be…if the worst happens.”

  The farewells were heartbreaking. Isabel had to endure more pleas of, “Don’t go.” She knew she might never see them again. But if she were honest, she would’ve told Noah that the one thing she still sought most from whatever remained of her time on earth was to reestablish some connection—any connection—with her sister. She could save Emma and her Community, and help bridge the divide between Infecteds and Uninfecteds, by rebuilding bonds with her twin. That was Isabel’s personal plan.

  She waved one last time at the huddle of Noah, Natalie, Chloe, and Jake, who embraced each other inside the quarantine center’s gate. The walk in darkness toward the well-lit hangar gave Isabel time to compose herself. To convince herself that she was doing the right thing even though she knew Rick would have totally opposed it. But Rick was probably dead. She knew it. It was bound to happen sooner or later, probably to all of them, if she were honest with herself. You tempt fate, over and over, and win, until you don’t and fate finally prevails. At least it hadn’t been Isabel or her stupid ideas that had gotten Rick killed.

  They were waiting when she arrived. An army sergeant issued her weapons and gear. “I’d prefer an M4,” she said, nodding at the now familiar carbine. “And a 9mm.” An air force lieutenant handed her a rugged military satellite phone. “It has DoD GPS, voice, and data.”

  There were a series of button pushes that sent codes that she was tasked with memorizing. The first were milestones along the route that a Special Forces captain joined in to teach her. Arrival at checkpoints in the Exclusion Zone, culminating in contact with Emma’s forces or officials. “The Exclusion Zone is a demilitarized region in the mountains west of The Community. It’s filled with people—infected and uninfected—who fled The Community, and they’re now starving and desperate. That’s the most dangerous part of your ingress.”

  Isabel’s briefer said Emma’s security troops would probably confiscate her equipment, so the next time they’d expect to hear back from her would be when she sent one of two codes. The first—Function, D, 1, Send—meant she was in contact with her sister and able to speak free of duress. The second—Function, D, 2, Send—meant she was under duress, and nothing thereafter that she said was to be trusted unless and until she sent the first code. “There is one more code, however, that you should know about. You can send it at any time, notwithstanding a duress code having previously been transmitted. That’s Function, X, 9, Send. You transmit that if, in your opinion, there is no possibility of ever striking any reliable agreements or cooperating in any beneficial way with your sister’s Community. Remember this one. Function, X, 9, Send. One more thing you should know. If you send a code indicating entry into your sister’s territory or contact with The Community’s forces, that starts a twenty-four-hour clock. If you haven’t called or sent any other codes in the next twenty-four hours, they’re going to assume the worst. It’s like it defaults to X9. Twenty-four hours.”

  “What happens if I send X9?” Isabel asked. “Or if the twenty-four hours lapse?”

  The army captain caught the eye of the air force lieutenant but said nothing. Two newly arriving men, both looking out of place in dark suits, entered the room. “I would try to get away from populated areas,” one said, “as quickly as I could.”

  Chapter 48

  NEW ROANOKE, VIRGINIA

  Infection Date 122, 1730 GMT (1:30 pm Local)

  “Who was the first person you killed?” asked the interviewer in her monotone.

  “Do you mean last night?” Isabel replied. “Or ever?”

  The Infected bureaucrat on the far side of the bright yellow line, uncaring and yet persistent, said, “Last night.” Isabel’s count began on a thumb and ended on a pinkie. “The man coming through the door.” The typing resumed. “The boy outside. The old man on the stairs. And the girl and old woman in the parking lot. Five.”

  The expressionless scrivener was both doll-like and grotesque. Brown, helmet-shaped hair, loose clothes draping a scrawny, nondescript figure, no makeup of course, maybe thirty-five, maybe fifty-five. The Infected chic of shabby automata. Spartan shells, like the interview room all drab colors…save the bright, impossible to miss line down its middle. On either side of the optic yellow border, dark hardwoods were worn tan by countless trudges. But the neon boundary between was untrodden. Our side. Their side. Isabel’s involuntary reach up found no mask—a defining postapocalyptic twitch.

  “Did you kill anyone before The Outbreak?” the Infected woman asked.

  “Of course not.�
��

  “What were you before The Outbreak?”

  “Why?”

  The interviewer turned worn, yellowing, laminated pages in the ring binder on her desk across the room. “Is it difficult to talk about ‘before the outbreak’?”

  “Is that what it says? What to do when they won’t talk? ‘If they say this, ask that’?” The interviewer stared back, repeatedly blinking. A tell? Getting jumpy? Welcome to the club. The door and ground floor windows in what signs said had been a title company were wide open. That’ll help her nerves. But talking was what she really needed to calm down. Doing her job. Typing mindlessly. “Life was easy.” The clacking resumed. “So, yeah, it’s hard on me. All the emotions. You know?”

  The interviewer nodded. No, you don’t know shit. You have no idea what that means. She typed every word, then looked not at her binder, but at a form on a clipboard filled with notes in neat handwriting in multiple colors. So, Emma knows I’m here. “It says you have insights into the Pandoravirus epidemic. The Outbreak, The Killing, The Schism.” They’ve named everything. A first draft of their history of the world.

  “What says that I have insights? What is that on your clipboard?”

  “The intake form. Please describe what’s happened since The Outbreak.”

  “I thought this was a trial or whatever. About the five Infecteds last night.”

  “It’s an inquiry,” the infected woman replied.

  “Into what though?”

  Silence. You know when to lie, just not how. “You can start at Infection Date Zero.”

  “What? From the beginning, to now?” Isabel asked. “All four months?”

  “No? Okay.” She turned plastic pages. “How about begin with The Killing?”

  “And when was that? It seems to me like the killing began at the very beginning.”

  “Why don’t you describe what happened around the time Vice President Anderson took over?”