by Tony Urban
Emory’s grin broke into a full smile and he let loose a tired, but joyful laugh. “I suppose you’re right, Mina. It’s all about faith, is it not?”
“I don’t right know. I’ve got a lot of pages left to read yet.”
Emory opened his mouth as if to speak, but the steady whine of a quad stole both of their attention and they looked toward the sound. Mina knew Wim was out gathering supplies and she always felt a little tied up inside with nerves until he got back. She hoped it was him.
They didn’t share another word until the quad, and its rider, came into view in the far distance. Behind her, she heard shouting voices, their inflections panicked and angry. She knew one of the voices belonged to Phillip and at the sound, Mina’s knot of nerves only got worse. She didn’t remember much of her schooling, but for some reason she never forgot the way a history book had described Europe leading up to the first World War. The term that book used was ‘powder keg’ and she thought that was also the perfect word to describe the Ark.
Chapter Five
The heartbeat pounding through the stethoscope was strong and steady and the sound of it made Doc smile.
Ba bum. Ba bum. Ba bum.
He counted 142 beats per second. Fast. Might be a girl.
He could sense the woman staring at him. To Doc, she was little more than a vessel. A human Petri dish. But he felt obligated to keep her in good spirits for the sake of the life inside her and he eased a gloved hand down onto her skin, which felt hard and warm through the latex. He gave her belly a consoling, if awkward, rub and pat.
“Good. Very good. Everything is going remarkably well.”
She might have smiled. He couldn’t be certain because her mouth was a swollen, purple mass of ragged gums where her teeth had once been before Doc had extracted them with a pair of needle nosed pliers. Several had shattered in the process and he’d had to dig the shards free of her jaw. The process took hours and he lamented the fact that he hadn’t recruited a dentist. But it had to be done and, although it wasn’t pleasant for either of them, they were much safer this way. She was strapped to a hospital bed, her hands and feet belted tight and additional straps crisscrossed her chest and thighs.
Can never be to safe. He grabbed her chart and began scribbling notes when the radio squawked to life.
“Doc! Come in Doc.”
It was Vince’s voice and in only those four words Doc knew something was wrong. He’d brought Vince into the group five years earlier, at a time when the Ark was nothing but an idea inside Doc’s overactive brain and when ending the world hadn’t even crossed his mind. Vince, of course, didn’t know that Doc was responsible for the virus that had gone a long way toward wiping out humanity. Only those he trusted the most knew that. And that number was quite small.
Doc peeled the gloves off his hands, which had gone moist and clammy under the latex. That made the air feel even colder. Because the laboratory was buried more than 20 feet underground, it was easy to keep the temperature at a steady 50 degrees. Doc preferred the cold for a multitude of reasons, the primary being that it kept the odors at bay. Plain white tile lined the floors and walls, adding to the sterile feeling. A few dry erase boards stood on easels, all filled with notes and dates and projections made in Doc’s neat, tight writing. At the far end of the room were seven gurneys, each cloaked in white sheets which covered human-sized lumps. Doc found the sheets kept those lumps placated and quiet, which was appreciated as sound echoed down there.
“Do-“
Doc pressed the ‘talk’ button on the radio, cutting Vince off. “Vincent. I’m here.”
“Oh, thank holy God. This is a shit storm, Doc. Clark and Caleb are dead. And Wim brought back some kid who looks like he’s infected and if he ain’t then he’s practically dead anyway. He threw the kid on my four-wheeler and is heading for the village. I—“
Doc stopped listening. He didn’t know if this qualified as a genuine shit storm but it had the potential to go very bad very quick if he didn’t make the right decision. The residents of the Ark, people like Vince who didn’t know the fine details about why they were alive and most everyone else was dead, were terrified of the infected. They droned on incessantly about their worries of getting sick and dying and becoming zombies. Their fear made them easier to handle. Easier to control. Doc needed to keep that fear alive and if Wim had indeed brought a sick or dying person into their midst, they had to stay afraid.
“Vincent, don’t let anyone near Wim or the boy. Keep everyone at least 50 yards away from them until I get there.”
“Okay.”
Doc turned and looked back to the pregnant woman tied to the hospital bed. He seemed to recall that her name had been Juanita, but that didn’t matter now. Her long, ebony hair was unwashed and matted under her head which rocked back and forth, the few millimeters movement the straps permitted. Her eyes, which stared back at him were pained, pleading. She groaned, a raspy, agonized noise. Waiting the next few months was going to be torture. He wondered if she grasped the importance of the life growing in her womb. About her essential role in the rebirth of mankind. He doubted she had the capacity to understand, but that was just as well. It wasn’t the test-tube that mattered. It was the contents.
“And Vincent?”
“Yes, Doc?”
“Tell the others, if Wim gets himself or the boy near anyone, they have my orders to shoot them.”
Doc shut off the radio before Vincent could respond. That should do the trick, he thought. Shoot to kill always managed to work the masses into a panic. And Doc enjoyed a good panic.
Chapter Six
“Don’t come any closer, Wim!”
Wim stared ahead where Phillip had an assault rifle aimed in his direction and his finger on the trigger. He wondered if he would really shoot. Sometimes he thought the cop was all ego, but he also knew ego often led to poor decisions. And with a good thirty or forty people watching the situation unfold, he had more than an inkling that Phillip’s finger already had a one-pound squeeze on a three-pound trigger. Near him, four other men with guns, the ones who acted as the Ark’s safety squad aka security force, also had their weapons drawn and aimed.
“Phillip, I’m not going anywhere. But this boy’s dying and it’s not from the bug that killed everyone else. He’s injured and he needs help. Sooner too, because I don’t reckon he’ll be around long else wise”
Wim held the boy in his arms and he was so frail his muscles hadn’t even begun to tire. He did notice the boy was taller than he first thought and suspected he might not be a boy at all. He was probably a teenager, although he couldn’t hazard a guess whether he was early, mid, or late. Not with a face blackened with blood and swollen so full of pus that his skin looked tight as a water balloon getting ready to bust. Please don’t bust. I don’t want to see that.
A few yards behind Phillip, Wim caught Ramey watching. He couldn’t tell if the look on her face was concern or fear or anger or a combination of the three. He’d noticed that Ramey arrived at this scene with Phillip. And he also noticed that Phillip’s hair was wet and that Ramey’s jeans were unbuttoned. He tried not to think about that and told himself there were more pressing matters but his mind kept wandering back to it nonetheless. What was up with those two, he wondered. Whatever it was, he was pretty certain he didn’t like it.
Beyond them, he saw Emory and Mina’s faces peering out from amongst the crowd. He was a little shocked to see Mina there as she usually kept to herself when she wasn’t working. He wondered if everyone on the Ark had already got word of his exploits and from the way the crowd kept growing, he suspected that to be the case.
He didn’t recognize the voice of the first person who hollered but their words came through clear enough. “You’re going to get us all killed, you asshole! What were you thinking?”
With that, it was like a cork had been popped and a flow of angry shouts burst loose. Wim heard more accusations along with words like, ‘traitor’, ‘murderer’, ‘idiot’
and ‘dumbass redneck’. He took a little offense at the latter. He always thought himself to be a hillbilly and a hick but he wasn’t a redneck. A spattering of curses seasoned their accusations and Wim realized Phillip and his one-pound pull might not be the biggest of his worries after all. These people were one thrown rock or bottle away from becoming a mob.
How did we get to this point, Wim thought? Earlier that very year there had been hundreds of millions of people in the country and now most of them had either died or been eaten. It seemed to Wim that life should be more important now but as he stared out at that sea of accusing and angry faces, it seemed as if the only lives they cared about were their own.
He supposed that he was the fool in the situation. Nothing about life on the Ark had shown him that any of these people gave a second thought to the people who might be alive outside of this island. No one ever asked him if he’d found anyone alive during the supply runs. No one asked them what life was like out there. They were content to live inside their bubble and pretend as if the world wasn’t burning everywhere else.
As their shouts and screams became a chorus too loud to decipher, Wim took one more look at Ramey. She wasn’t crying out or joining in the verbal onslaught, but when their eyes met he saw something that hurt him more than if he’d have seen anger or fear, because, in her gaze, he saw disappointment.
Wim had little time to process that before Doc’s voice blasted over the crowd.
“Quiet please, everyone.”
As if someone had pressed the mute button on a remote control, the voices fell silent. All heads turned toward the sound of the voice and Wim watched as the crowd slowly parted. Through the now clear path, he saw Doc, at least he assumed that’s who approached him, wading in like Moses walking through the parted sea. He couldn’t be certain because the person coming toward him was clad in a HAZMAT suit with only a small rectangle of clear plastic to reveal the wearer.
Doc raised a megaphone to his face and his voice boomed out again. “Please, everyone go back to your business. This situation will be contained and any issues addressed. Everyone will be briefed at the meeting hall at noon tomorrow.”
About a third of the crowd dispersed immediately. The rest lagged behind and they reminded Wim of the lookie loos who slowed down when passing a traffic accident or fire, not because they wanted to help, but to get a good look at someone else’s misfortune. Soon enough, they too left.
All that remained were Doc, the men with guns, and Ramey. When Doc reached her, he covered her forearm with his gloved hand.
“Go on now, sweetheart. We’ll take care of this.”
She looked to Wim, then back to her father. “Don’t hurt him.”
Wim couldn’t see Doc’s face but when he saw the tension flow from Ramey’s body he imagined the man had smiled. “Of course not. He made a mistake. A terribly dangerous one, but I suspect his heart was in the right place.”
Now it was Doc’s turn to look at Wim. “Isn’t that right, William?”
Wim nodded. “Everything’s going to be all right, Ramey.”
She brightened and her reaction seemed to annoy Doc. “Sometimes our hearts get in the way of our brains, but that’s just human nature.” Doc gave Ramey’s arm a squeeze, then nodded toward the direction of camp. “I believe you have some children waiting for story time, do you not?”
Ramey gave a grin full of tired relief. “I do.”
“Then don’t keep them waiting any longer.”
Before she left, Ramey turned back to Wim and flicked her fingers in a barely there wave. He nodded in return.
“Guns down, gentlemen. William isn’t going to do anything rash. Are you William?”
“It wasn’t in my plans.”
“Good. Good. Now tell me what happened out there today.”
Wim did and Doc and the men with guns watched. He told them everything including the gory details and he noticed one of them, a man he thought was named Buck, looked like he was about to lose his lunch when Wim told of the two halves of Caleb. When he got to the part about the boy, Doc motioned for Phillip and the others to leave them. They did.
“You’re aware that you took a terrible risk, are you not?” Doc said.
“I take a risk every time I go out there.”
“Yes, but that’s requirement. A necessary evil, you might say. If you and the men who gather supplies never left this island, we’d all starve.”
“With proper planning, I’d say much of that could have been avoided.”
Wim knew Doc was examining him even though the plastic face shield had gone cloudy under a haze of condensation.
“You’re always willing to share your opinion, William. Regardless of the situation or to whom you are speaking. Some could say that’s a character flaw.”
“No sense sugar-coating things. I just say how I feel.”
“Indeed, you do. And I’m pleased that I always know what to expect from you.”
Wim shifted the boy in his arms and in doing so, a small sigh escaped through sick, cracked lips.
“Are you going to kill him?”
Doc smiled and Wim thought that an improper reaction to such a dire question.
“Am I going to kill him?” Doc took a step closer to Wim, to the boy. He was close enough to touch them but he did not. Instead he peered down on the boy’s swollen, wounded face. “What a silly question, William. No, I’m not going to kill him. We’ll take him to decontamination and, after that, to the medical clinic. Doctor Sideris will do her very best to make him well again, but if those efforts fail, I’m not going to kill him.”
Doc turned his face from the boy to Wim. “I’m not the zombie killer, after all. You are.”
Chapter Seven
“Beefaroni.” Emory read from the label as he poured the contents of a can into a pot which sat atop a propane powered burner. “I believe this is a first for me. I wonder if it’s as tasty as spaghetti o’s.”
“It’s not.”
Emory glanced over at Mina as she set aside her bible, then rubbed her hand against her right temple.
“You’ve eaten it before?”
“Any time it was on sale.”
“But it’s not good?”
“Not very.”
“Then why did you eat it?”
“Because it was ten cans for five dollars every fourth week at Save-A-Bunch.”
Emory had never shopped at Save-A-Bunch but recalled seeing them, usually in poor sections of the cities or in downtrodden rural areas, on his travels. He felt rather guilty for bringing it up and felt a change of subject was the wisest action.
“Still on Job?”
“No. I finished that one. I still think God came off like a bit of an asshole.”
“Well, he is God. I suppose the complex must have started somewhere.”
Mina’s face clouded over and Emory again feared he’d made a faux pas. He liked the woman, but always felt like he was walking on the proverbial eggshells when in her presence. And since their current accommodations were a forty plus year old Airstream trailer, he had that feeling almost constantly.
He felt guilty that she should have to live in such conditions. The vinyl seats were cracked and torn. The floor creaked underfoot. The only blessing was that, autumn had brought with it cooler weather and the tin can in which they lived was no longer a sweat lodge. Yet, as the yin to that yang, he worried how they would stay warm through the coming winter.
Emory often thought that this shoddy dwelling well summarized their life in the Ark. Not even a week after they arrived, following hours of interviews about their experiences with the plague and subsequent travails, he, Mina, and Wim were led to a cramped compound on the outskirts of the island where a handful of run down mobile homes were stacked in with little room to spare. The other men and women who occupied those trailers had arrived in the weeks after the plague, but before Emory and his friends. No one had been admitted to the Ark since that day and, to Emory at least, it was clear that Doc on
ly had interest in saving one person from the horror show that had become of the real world. And that was Ramey. Once she had arrived, the Ark was on lockdown and the ones who had gained admittance before or with her were second hand citizens in this new world, housed as far from the chosen ones as possible.
He often found himself wishing they could have avoided this place. Life was dangerous and terrifying and deadly outside the walls but somehow it was still better. Here they were trapped, caged up like dangerous animals and tossed scraps no one else wanted.
That brought him back to the Beefaroni and he again found himself feeling guilty over Mina’s station in life prior to this. He’d always known he had lived an almost foolishly blessed life, but being around her and picking up the offhand remarks she made or the curious things she said made him realize just how privileged he had been. He’d often thought a rich black man was still less accepted in society than a middle-class white one, but he was certainly far more fortunate than a poor black woman.
As he looked at her, he saw her bones poking against her taut skin like wire hangers under cheap clothing. He almost said something. Maybe an apology of sorts. Was there such a thing as ‘rich guilt’? He wasn’t certain. It was probably for the best that the door opened before his mouth.
Wim stepped inside, his black hair dripping wet. He glanced up, saw Emory and Mina looking back, then cast his eyes toward the floor as he sat on a metal folding chair and began to untie his boots.
“It wasn’t raining when I was last outside,” Emory said and he tried to inject some humor into his voice. It half worked.
“Still ain’t.” Wim pulled off one boot and started at the other.
“Did they hose you down again?” Mina’s voice was tight, nervous. She stood and crossed the short divide between them.