Bix shot her a surprised look, then glanced over at Finn, who was pacing across the worn carpeting between the couch and the doorway. He looked like a caged lion.
All the lights in the room were ablaze. Jennifer had turned them on after arriving ahead of Finn, who had carried Bix's slumped form over his shoulder the entire way back. Adrenaline had given him the strength, but now his body shook from the exertion.
"Goddamn it," he growled at Jennifer. He opened his fists and shook out his cramped fingers for the hundredth time. "You need to tell us what the hell is going on here."
Jennifer sighed unhappily. "I knew we shoulda told y'all the whole truth, but Adrian believed the demonstration would be more than enough to process for now. He planned on tellin y'all in the mornin."
"Telling us what?" Finn demanded. "What truth? Huh? That you're using the Wraiths to murder innocent people? That truth?" He pointed at the woods. "That it's all some sick game? We believed you! Instead, you turned out to be some kind of . . . depraved . . . ." He sputtered, unable to find the right words.
"I know what it looks like, Finn, but we ain't depraved. We're tryin to save those poor creatures, rehabilitate them."
"Infecting others sure as hell doesn't look like rehabilitation! It looks like you're making more of them. And how does inciting someone to break a Wraith's neck help save it?"
"Justice, Finn. That man sinned. And that feral was already too far gone to be saved. The only humane thing left to do was to put it out of its misery."
"You could just shoot it in the head! It's faster and cleaner. People should not be getting their kicks watching an execution!"
Jennifer stood up and crossed the room. For the first time, she looked exasperated. "Shootin is too easy," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "It's heartless and it's cruel exactly because of how fast and clean it is. There ain't no personal commitment to it, no thinkin, just doin and movin on."
Finn stepped back in stunned disbelief. "What the hell are you talking about?" he cried. "Those things are animals! You call them that yourself. You call them ferals! Like rabid dogs, and you shoot rabid dogs to put them down."
"Sit down, Finn," she snapped, finally reaching the end of her patience. "Sit down and listen for a moment."
"No!" he roared. "I need you to explain what we just saw back there! Tell us why a bunch of people cheered on while Father Adrian — I can't believe he thinks it's God's work — while he threw an uninfected man inside a cage with a Wraith. How is forcing someone to choose between becoming one of them or being torn apart by it saving anyone? It's not God's work! It's horrible!"
"That man we put inside that cage wasn't innocent. He betrayed his neighbor, stole his food. And for that he needed to be punished. It's about doing right."
"Right? What do you know about right?"
"Y'all may think this is the wild west again, that there ain't no laws, but that ain't true. Without laws, we'd all be animals, no more different than the ferals out there."
"So that was punishment?" Finn collapsed into a chair, squeezing his head in his arms. "Why?" he cried. "Why make him do something like that?"
"Because that's how we keep order, Finn. Everyone understands it. Everyone knows that if'n you break the law, then you'll be punished. It's a deterrent. You get a chance to redeem yerself. Ten seconds is more than enough time. Everyone gets at least fifteen. Only the truly repentant will be saved."
Finn shook his head. "You sound like Adrian. It's sickening."
Bix groaned. "How did I get here?"
"I carried you," Finn answered. He stood up and went to sit beside his friend, flicking Jennifer away with his hand and a hateful glare.
"I feel like shit."
"Here, honey," Jennifer said, offering a glass. "Sip some water."
Finn slapped the glass out of the woman's hand. He wanted to scream at her not to touch him.
She patiently went over and picked up the glass, refilled it, then gently helped Bix sit up and drink. When he was finished, she set the glass back on the table.
"It's a new world, Finn," she quietly said, "with new rules and new ways of doin things. And before y'all get to judgin, y'all need to know that some good comes out of our work. But nothin is free, and in a world that ain't got no use for money, sometimes we have to pay in other ways."
"Pay for what?"
"Goods that we need to do our work. Supplies. Wood fer buildin. Till the world is rid of the Flense, it's how we have to do things."
Finn rocked where he sat. The buzzing in his head threatened to blow him apart.
"What's going to happen to that man now?" Bix asked, his voice weak. He gagged and sounded like he was going to throw up.
Jennifer moved a large plastic bowl closer to the side of the couch.
"The one being punished," Bix clarified. "He's a Wraith now, isn't he?"
"Yes, he is infected."
"What's going to happen to him?"
"We'll try to cure him."
"And if you can't?"
Jennifer looked kindly down on the boy and gave him a gentle smile. "You think we're heartless, but we ain't. We ain't cruel."
"Quit defending your sick actions and just answer the damn question," Finn growled.
"Father Adrian will—"
"Stop calling him that! He's no holy man!"
"I will try to save him usin my methods. Me and him, we have different ideas about salvation, different paths to take. That man failed to save himself last night. Now it's my turn to try."
"I don't believe it for a second," Harry told Eddie at breakfast. "Danny wouldn't just up and leave without saying anything to the rest of us. And why? Did he think he could just go back to the bunker on his own? By foot?"
"Keep it down," Eddie warned. "No talking about that place in public."
He glanced suspiciously over at a group of men who had just entered the dining hall, their clothes dusty, fully automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Their faces were black with road grime, except for the patches covered by their goggles.
Someone at another table said something that elicited a roar of laughter from the others, and they looked unabashedly over at the new people seated at Eddie's table. There was open curiosity in their eyes, but they made no attempt to interact.
The previous day, once the medical examinations were completed and the survivors were cleared, each individual was assigned a task. A couple of women came in to explain the process. "Everyone has to work for their keep here," they told the group. "Yes, even those just passing through."
"You get a lot of people just passing through?"
"A few."
"Anyone change their mind after leaving and come back?"
"Usually when people leave here like that, it's permanent."
"And why is that?"
The woman gave them a perplexed look. "Because it's dangerous outside the fence. And it's not just roamers and infected. There's wild animals. People die out there."
They talked a while about the various jobs that needed to be done. Most of it sounded like busy work, but some of it was clearly necessary. Three hundred people living in a small space produced a lot of waste and required a lot of food, water, and supplies.
They were assured that the assignments were on a rotating basis for most residents, so if they didn't like the job they got, it wouldn't be long before they would move on to another. "But seniority plays a role, too. If you choose to stay on here—"
"Which we won't," Eddie declared. "Once our bus is fixed and we have all our people together again, we'll be moving on."
They gave him looks that suggested they knew better, but didn't argue.
Danny had been assigned to sanitation detail, but no one saw him for the rest of that day. And when he failed to show up that night in their quarantine barracks, some began to suspect that something bad had happened to him.
"Now, we don't know," Harrison told them. "It's possible he got assigned to regular quarters, like Harry and his fa
mily."
But other than the Rollinses, no one else had been reassigned.
Then, just that morning, their second at the base, Eddie overheard one of the two guards talking about how Danny had demanded to leave in the middle of the night with nothing more than a backpack and some water. Eddie was in complete disbelief. He hid around the side of a small storage shed about eighty feet away to eavesdrop on the rest of their conversation. Though they spoke in normal tones, he had no problem hearing them.
He saw Captain Cheever emerge from the administrative building, where he shared an office with Colonel Wainwright, and wander over to the guards. He acted surprised by the news of Danny's departure. "And you just let him walk out?"
"You informed the newcomers they could leave whenever they wanted to."
"Dammit, Sergeant Bolton! Not in the middle of the night! It's suicide! You should always advise with me first before letting anyone go."
"I wasn't at the gate," the sergeant insisted. "Private Ramsay was! Do you want me to discipline him?"
"Ramsay? Dammit. No, I'll deal with him myself." The captain spun around to leave.
"Um, sir?" Bolton asked. "I heard the search team found Private Singh's bike yesterday."
Cheever stopped. He took a moment to allow a couple people to pass out of earshot before stepping back over. "They found it abandoned by the side of the road about a half mile from the fuel truck. It was covered in blood. The tank was full, but the men couldn't get it to start." He sighed and shook his head. "It sounds like a mechanical failure. They were attacked."
"By infected?"
"Them or mountain lions."
"Jesus," Bolton said. "I'm sorry to hear that. Singh was a good man."
"Yes, he was," Cheever snapped. "We're not telling anyone just yet what happened, understood?"
"Yes, sir."
The captain nodded and walked away. He didn't see the smirk on Bolton's face, but Eddie had.
He couldn't decide if he should tell any of the others what he had seen and overheard. They already guessed that Jonah might be dead, but now he wondered if there might be more to the story. There had been something sinister in Bolton's smirk, and the convenient explanation of Danny leaving in the middle of the night didn't sit well with him.
Which is why he decided to wait for Harry to show up at breakfast. He needed to talk it through with someone, and he didn't want it to be Harrison— not that he didn't trust the man, but because he seemed too blasé about things sometimes, too willing to accept the status quo and not expect something more. He was too accommodating. After all, he'd let his only son run off on what was almost certainly a suicide mission.
Harry had echoed his own alarm. "This stinks," he said, when Eddie finished telling him what he knew. "Danny had no reason to leave. He didn't want to."
"So, what do we do about it?"
"It's that Cheever guy. He's as crooked as a dog's hind leg."
Eddie frowned. Until that morning, he'd have agreed, but now he wasn't so sure.
"I'm telling you," Harry went on, "that man is trying to break us apart. First, it was separating the men and women."
"You and Fran and the boys are together."
"Because I went straight to Cheever's boss, that Wainwright guy, and demanded it. You should do that, too. It's wrong that you and Hannah are separated."
Eddie nodded in the direction of the girls at the other end of their table. "At the moment, Hannah and Bren need each other more than she needs me."
Harry's forehead furrowed. "That's not the Eddie I know. You used to be a lot more protective of her."
"I still am. But I know exactly where she is, and I know she's safe with Kari and Susan. I'm also confident enough in my own . . . abilities that I'll be able to protect her if I need to."
"Hey, what are you two talking about?" Fran Rollins asked, shifting closer to her husband. "Making secret plans to blow up the latrines so you don't have to dig them out?"
Harry gave her a dirty look, then shook his head. "Eddie says Danny's gone. He heard the guards say he decided to leave in the middle of the night."
Fran shook her head. "That doesn't sound like Danny. In fact, I know it's not true."
Eddie leaned in and asked, "What do you know, Fran?"
"I saw him yesterday, right after lunch. He was coming from talking to the captain."
"What did he say?"
"Nothing really. He was in a hurry and couldn't talk because he was supposed to go report to some guy about work. He said he'd see us at dinner."
Harry shook his head. "He was assigned with my team on latrine duty, but he never showed up. I just assumed he was still with the captain."
"If the captain was finished with him, and he didn't show up for work, then what happened to him?" Eddie asked. "And why are they saying he decided to leave last night if he didn't? He had no reason to. He had no place to go." He shook his head. "It doesn't add up."
"Do you think it has something to do with Jonah?"
Eddie grimaced. Should he tell them what he'd overheard? They had a right to know that Jonah was dead. But how would they react?
"Looks like you're the one who knows something and isn't telling," Fran said, studying his face.
"Is it that obvious?"
She nodded.
"We don't know for sure what happened," Eddie said. "They haven't told us anything. And I don't want anyone to worry unnecessarily. Let me gather some more information."
He stood up from his uneaten breakfast, then bent back down again. "Regardless of what is happening, everyone needs to watch each other's back."
He glanced over at the group that had come in earlier. The man who had brought Danny back on the motorbike was with them, but he had moved over to where Sergeant Bolton was seated in the opposite corner of the hall. They were in the middle of a heated discussion, though the background noise was too loud for Eddie to hear what it was about.
He turned back to Harry and Fran. "Don't get too comfortable. We should all be ready to leave at a moment's notice."
Finn woke the next morning with the sunlight streaming into the room and memories of the night before filling his head like a bitter hangover. His entire body ached from carrying Bix, and his stomach wanted to revolt. But as badly as he felt, he knew that Bix must be hurting even more.
He lay in bed for a while with his arms tucked under his head, staring up at the sag in the mattress just a few feet away from his nose, and listened to the sounds of his friend's restless sleep.
They hadn't gotten to bed until nearly four by the clock on the bedside stand, after Adrian had returned and the argument they'd had with Jennifer repeated itself in a somewhat abbreviated form. The explanations had done little other than baffle and frustrate Finn, and Bix had remained mostly silent, likely because he hurt too much to move.
The worst part was that he had been terrified that Adrian would do something to them for sneaking around. After all, as Jennifer said, it was a different world with different rules, and he was still trying to understand exactly what they were.
But Adrian had looked sympathetically down at them and said, "Y'all are just babes lost in the wilderness." He told them to go to bed, that things would look differently the next day. It bothered Finn because it made him doubt whether he was right to be so self-righteous. After all, the world had indeed changed, and maybe it was wrong of him to judge others based on ideas that might no longer be relevant.
The clock now read nearly noon. That he'd actually slept at all was surprising enough, but to have slept so soundly was a shock.
"Bix?" He nudged the mattress with the tips of his fingers. "Hey, man, you awake?"
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
"Surprisingly . . . yeah. But I'd recommend keeping your distance for a while. I think I may have absorbed some of that electricity, because I've got some wicked lightning farts going on up here."
Finn wrinkled his nose. The room did smell stale. "What're we going to do?"
Finn frowned. "Be serious."
"I know. It's just . . . ." He sighed. "I guess it's time for us to leave, bro. This place is seriously whacked."
"Yeah, that's pretty clear. I mean, do we tell them we're leaving? Or do we just sneak away? Do we ask for horses?"
"We owe them enough to tell them. Whether they want to give us horses . . . that's up to them."
"It's a hundred and fifty miles to Bunker Two. That's a hell of a long way to walk, especially through territory infested with Wraiths."
"Yeah." Bix was quiet for a while. "You know, I still can't get over what they did to that man last night."
"Me, neither. It was crazy."
"Insane in the membrane crazy."
"Do you think they can be rehabilitated?"
"The infected or us?"
"Either."
Bix didn't answer for a long time. Finally, he said, "Not them. But I do believe Jennifer and Adrian believe they can be, in their own twisted minds."
"I don't believe they do," Finn said. "I think they know it's all lies. They're just crazy."
"Well, they did prove that they can make a Wraith uninfectious, at least temporarily. If they managed to figure out that much, why don't you believe they're trying to figure out the rest?"
"I don't know that they did, actually. I'm not convinced they proved anything."
"You saw it. You watched Billy touch that Wraith. Nothing happened to him."
"I know. I believed it right after, but then . . . . I mean, I guess after last night, after them trying to explain it to us, I just don't buy any of it. I've been working on a theory of the Flense, and so there may be other explanations for what we saw."
"Like what?"
But Finn avoided the question. He didn't want to get Bix's hopes up. Or worse, make him believe that it was possible for some people to be immune.
"I just don't understand," he said instead. "They seem to genuinely care about the Wraiths, but then they're profiting from them at the same time."
Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) Page 12