by Tom Abrahams
“No. Another one of our researchers did the interview just as the abdominal discomfort was becoming an issue. That was yesterday.”
A smile crept across her face as the man coughed up a spray of blood. “He’s the first to fully contract YPH5N1?”
“Yes.”
“Turn on the audio.”
Morel tapped the tablet to amplify the ambient noise in CV-04’s room. The man was, in fact, talking between coughing fits. He was cursing the scientists who brought him there, the diseases themselves, and the unrelenting pain.
He looked directly at the camera through which Sharp could see him. “I didn’t ask for this,” he growled. “I didn’t want this. This isn’t human. This is evil. I didn’t sign up for this.”
Sharp took a step closer to the screen. “Fascinating,” she said softly, to herself.
“What?” asked Morel.
She shrugged. “That he thinks we care.”
Morel didn’t respond but did mute the volume. He stepped back to his desk and sat in his chair, setting the remote beside the keyboard.
“So,” Sharp said, “the others are in the initial stages, correct?”
Morel nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Of the ten we have. None of the other seven have exhibited any symptoms yet, though I’m certain they will within the next twenty-four hours.”
“Deployment then?” she asked. “What’s the schedule?”
“As planned,” said Morel. “CV-01 and CV-02 go first to test our hypothesis. None of the others are slated for deployment. As you requested, they are test patients only.”
“Subjects.”
“Test subjects,” Morel corrected. “We’ll use them to gauge the progress of the disease in the two deployed subjects. Then we’ll dissect the corpses to learn more about what we’ve created.”
“Then?”
“Then—” Morel sighed “—as you requested, we’ll recruit another ten subjects. That’s when the full-scale deployment occurs. That’s when we are operational.”
“Good. Has your team selected a test deployment site?”
“We have.”
He faced his computer, tapped on the keyboard, and then touched the display to pull up a large interactive map. Running across the center of the map was a thick, dark line marked WALL.
“This is the wall,” he said. “And—”
“Seriously, Morel?” Sharp asked rhetorically. “I know where the wall is. I know what it is. I know why it’s there. I don’t need a primer.”
“That’s not—”
“Just give me the information I need.”
Morel pointed to a spot on the screen. The map zoomed, narrowing the area displayed on the monitor. “Abilene.”
“Why Abilene?”
“Based on what we know of the population size, its mobility, and the climate, we believe it’s an ideal test location for YPH5N1.”
“Very well,” she said. “If your team’s research finds it appropriate, then Abilene it is. Make it happen. Have you secured the transportation I arranged?”
“Yes,” said Morel. “It should be here any minute now.”
CHAPTER 9
FEBRUARY 7, 2044, 12:03 PM
SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS
BAIRD, TEXAS
Marcus rolled away from the open window and the sunlight that shone through it. He took a deep breath and exhaled loudly, touching his neck with his fingers. He opened his eyes. He had no idea what time it was, but from the sunlight that cast across his room, he figured it had to be close to midday. He’d only awakened because of the nightmare that had punctured his final moments of uneasy sleep.
His sweaty body was tangled in the lone sheet he used for warmth, and he blindly reached for a bottle of water next to him on the floor. He knocked over an empty jar of moonshine one of his neighbors had given him as a Christmas gift.
He pushed aside the empty mason jar and found the water. Gripping it tightly, he slid it across the scraped wood planks and rolled onto his back. He slid himself against the wall and drew a long pull of the water.
His head ached and his mouth was dry. The water helped both as he glugged it until the bottle was empty.
Marcus could still taste the sweet moonshine on the roof of his mouth and tongue. It had been a while since he’d had anything to numb his pain, to take the edge off the sharp corners of life.
A pair of his neighbors, Blake Peele and Aaron Cay, had stopped by to spend some time with him. He’d tried to shoo them away, but they’d persisted, so he’d invited them into his sparsely decorated house and they’d sat around drinking, talking about nothing.
“You’re pretty much the coolest dude I’ve ever met,” Blake had admitted. “You look like a regular guy; then you go all crazy on people.”
Marcus had downed a shot and smacked his lips. “I don’t go crazy,” he said, pouring another round.
“Yeah, you do. I’ve seen you end a man’s life faster than a flash of lightning,” Aaron had said, snapping his fingers for emphasis.
Blake had laughed, nodding enthusiastically.
“It’s not like I set out to kill people,” Marcus had said. “It just happens. Death seems to find me.”
“I wish I could be like you,” Blake had said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “You know, like some sort of ruthless killing machine.”
Marcus had eyed both with a frown, their naive excitement grating on him. He’d bitten down on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from spouting off something nasty. The boys didn’t know better.
He slugged another shot and made them an offer. “You wanna know what it’s like to be me?” he’d asked rhetorically. “I’ll make you a deal. The next time we got a big threat coming to town, you can be my deputies.”
The men had shaken his hand in gratitude. They’d toasted their forthcoming jobs as the Marcus Battle’s deputies.
“If I call on you,” Marcus had cautioned, “it’s a big deal. It means you’ll be doing some killing. It also means you could be the ones getting killed.”
Blake and Aaron had laughed off the suggestion. They’d had another round of drinks and had left Marcus with dreams of glory in their heads.
For Marcus, it was increasingly difficult to sleep. He couldn’t be sure if it was the onset of arthritis in his knees and shoulders or the ghosts of those he’d sent to their graves that kept him restless. It was probably both, though the previous night had most definitely been the latter.
He tilted his head back and shook the remaining droplets of water from the bottle and licked them onto the roof of his mouth. His room was getting warm from the sunlight and he shook free of the sheet, which was damp from his night sweats.
Marcus slept on the floor as a sort of self-imposed penance. When Sylvia died in the early days of the Scourge, he’d tried sleeping in their bed alone. It was uncomfortable. So he’d moved to the floor beside the bed. He’d slept there until the house burned down. When he’d returned to the ranch, he’d slept on the barn floor for several months until Lola coaxed him into the canvas cot to sleep next to her.
Now, more than a year removed from her bloody death, he was again most comfortable on a hard floor. Though comfort was a relative term, given his insomnia.
His moonshine-amplified nightmare from the night before was fresh in his mind as he sat against the cool plaster wall behind him. The man was coming for him. He could taste the gun smoke that trailed from his weapon and up into his nostrils after he slugged the man with a pair of bullets.
In the real world, that man was buried in the graveyard outside town. The weeds and grass had grown over the grave and the mound of dirt that marked the freshness of the burial had long since eroded.
In the dream, though, the man kept coming. It didn’t matter how many bullets drilled through his body. They were inconsequential, and the target moved unfazed. He was growling and taunting Marcus, assuring him there was nothing that would stop his advance.
“You’re a dead man, Marcus B
attle,” said the seemingly immortal threat, laughing as he spoke. “You don’t have enough ammo to end me. Go ahead. Empty the magazine.”
Marcus had woken as the man lunged at him, scrabbling at his throat. It was a recurring dream.
Countless nights, Marcus found himself at odds with someone he’d killed. In the dreams, though, they’d come back from the dead and were unstoppable. The literal ghosts of his past were haunting him. The bad guys, the thugs, the would-be notoriety-seekers were tough enough to cope with. Their deaths clung to Marcus’s memories like the tiny burrs that stuck to his jeans when he wandered into untamed fields, looking for birds or small game. But they paled to the nightmares fueled by the ghosts of the ones he’d loved. When they came calling, when their relentless pursuit haunted him in his dreams, he couldn’t shake the unease of their memory for days afterward. Nightmares involving Sylvia were the worst.
She came at him with questions he couldn’t answer, with reminders of his obsessions and failures. She was his guilty conscience manifested in an angry, unforgiving reminder of how he’d inflicted the most pain on the ones for whom he’d have gratefully died in their places.
“Alpha male,” her withering, sick frame would taunt. “Always know best, do you? Take us from our friends and family. Isolate us in the name of preparation. What a joke.”
Of course, Sylvia would never have spoken to her husband that way. And the gentle apparition to whom he’d spent the better part of five years post-Scourge talking to and whose counsel he sought was nothing like that seething slither that manifested herself in his dreams.
She was too much. She reminded him of his shortcomings, of his single-mindedness, his inability to take the advice of others.
Marcus stood and stretched his lower back and aching shoulders. He knew these demons were the real reason he needed to retreat from the world of activism. Lou had merely reminded him of that need, she hadn’t been the cause.
He crossed the room to the bathroom and rested his weight on the inoperable porcelain sink, looking at his face in the mirror. He ran a finger across the long, deep crease that ran across his forehead. It was deeper, more pronounced, than he remembered. It had new friends above and below it. His crow’s-feet fanned farther away from the corners of his eyes, and increasingly, the stubble on his face was white. There were large freckles on his cheeks and across his forehead that hadn’t been there months ago. He smiled and eyed his teeth.
They weren’t sparkling white, but for a decade without a visit to the dentist, they looked okay. Nothing was sparkling white anymore, except maybe for the thin hair at his temples.
Marcus looked into his own eyes, recalling the nightmare. He touched his neck, where the ghost had grabbed him with long, bony fingers that gripped with an otherworldly intensity.
If he was going to save any semblance of the man he’d once been, let alone a shred of humanity, he needed to stop killing. He also understood that might be like telling a scorpion it couldn’t use its stinger or a snake its bite. Some things were made for a single purpose.
A loud, hurried knock at his front door pulled Marcus from his reflection. He stepped back into the bedroom and snatched his Glock from the dresser, the lone piece of traditional furniture in the room. He checked the magazine and slapped it back into the grip, crossing the floor in his bare feet and moving into the front room.
The visitor pounded on the door again. Marcus slid to the side of the door, pressing his back against the plaster wall. But there was low mumbling beyond the door, an exchange of some kind. There was more than one visitor.
More knocking, and then whoever it was tried the handle, wiggling it. Marcus slid his finger onto the trigger, his finger resting on the thin safety that split the center of the trigger. He slid from the wall and raised the weapon, aiming it at what he figured would be center mass for whoever it was came calling. His pulse raced but his breathing was steady. He could empty the magazine into the pine door and take out both visitors within seconds.
He steadied himself and focused beyond the door, imagining his targets readying their own weapons. He exhaled and…
“Are you in there, Dorothy?” asked Lou, her voice muffled through the pine. “C’mon, dude. Answer the door.”
Marcus pulled his finger from the trigger. He lowered the weapon and swung the door inward. Lou and Rudy stood next to one another. A smirk crept across Lou’s face and she pushed herself past Marcus into the house, thumping him on the arm as she passed. In the grass close to the lake, about thirty yards from the house, Fifty was licking himself.
“You look awful,” she said. “Rough night?”
Marcus nodded toward the front room, motioning Rudy into his house. Once they were both inside, he pushed the door shut and glared at Lou. She was standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips.
“You have any idea how close you came to getting killed?” he asked. “You come banging on my door without warning me who you are?”
“You were going to shoot us? Seriously? You are paranoid.”
“It’s not paranoia when people really do want to kill you.”
“We need you downtown,” said Rudy.
Marcus pulled a thin flannel shirt from the square table that separated the living area from a cramped galley kitchen. He sniffed it and, with all but the top button fastened, slid it over his head and across his arms.
“What for?” he asked.
“We’ve got a visitor who claims he’s got some important information,” said Lou. “Says he needs to talk to you.”
Wearing his jeans from the day before, Marcus plopped into the lone chair at the table and slid on a dirt-stained boot sock. He scratched at the salt-and-pepper scruff on his neck and sighed. The jeans were tighter than he liked. But in the post-apocalypse, one wore what one could find. He adjusted them self-consciously and eyed Lou.
“Why me?” he asked. “Can’t you handle it? I mean, you want to be sheriff and all.”
Rudy shot Lou a look with a knitted brow. “What?”
Lou’s cheeks reddened. “That’s not what I said, Marcus.”
“What did you say, then?” asked Rudy. “I didn’t say I wasn’t doing it. Norma and I need to have a heart-to-heart, that’s all.”
Marcus winked at Lou and shrugged. “I’m not lying, am I?”
“No,” said Lou. “I mean, yes. I mean—”
“Spit it out,” said Marcus, pulling on a boot. “Tell the man what you said.”
Lou touched the brim of her Astros cap with both hands and tugged at it. Her knuckles were white as she pulled the cap down and then slid it back up on her head. “I said I was hurt that Marcus didn’t think to ask me if I’d be interested in the job,” she said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t try to steal it from you or say you wouldn’t be good at it.”
Rudy chewed on the inside of his cheek and nodded. “I guess I see that. Why didn’t you ask her, Marcus?”
Marcus pushed his heel into the second boot and stood up. “Don’t you have someone you need me to meet?”
“You’re a jerk,” Lou said under her breath. “A full-fledged, misogynistic jerk.”
“Misogynistic?” Marcus asked. “Good word. Remind me to look it up when we get back from town. By the way, I thought I wasn’t Dorothy.”
“Changed my mind,” said Lou. “Dorothy was an immature, whiny narcissist. That fits you.”
Marcus walked gingerly back to the bedroom for a minute and, when he returned, was wearing his gun belt. “Let’s go,” he said, opening the front door. “Somebody wants to see me.”
* * *
The Baird jail at the center of town wasn’t much. The former Callahan County jail, it was a faded red brick two-story building that looked more like an early twentieth-century mansion than a house of incarceration.
Marcus used the second floor to store weapons, explosives, and detonators, what little they had. There was also a room that housed the old radio communications hardware. There were a couple of old co
mputers, some even older typewriters, and a half-dozen solar-powered two-way radios that got occasional but infrequent use. Only a couple of them still worked and they were unreliable.
The first floor was a single cell and an office. What had once been multiple cells was reconstructed as one larger secure space. Most of the iron that made up the bars and doors for the other cells before the Scourge had been sawed off and recycled in one way or another. Marcus used the old reception area as his office in the center of town. It served its purpose, containing threats and would-be threats. But given what looters had done to it over the years, it looked like something Otis Campbell might wander into every Saturday morning after a drunken Friday night in Mayberry.
The man who’d come to town asking for Marcus Battle, as so many ill-intended men had before him, was thought a threat. Rudy had treated him politely, but relieved him of his rifle, which hung on a rack on a wall opposite the cell, and asked him to wait patiently inside the locked cage.
Reluctantly, the man had obliged. He was pressed against the bars when Marcus, Rudy, and Lou waltzed into the room. Marcus figured the man was in his mid-thirties. He was tall, standing at least six feet four. His thick brown hair covered his ears and the nape of his neck. His deep-set eyes were round, as was his face. His mouth was wide and sat halfway between the tip of his nose and his clean-shaven dimpled chin. His clothes fit him reasonably well, which was saying something.
“You’re looking for me?” asked Marcus.
The man nodded. “Can I get some water? I ain’t had nothin’ to drink since last night, I don’t think. I’m parched.”
“Sure,” said Marcus, “we can get you some water. But let’s start with why you’re here. You looking for a fight? I’m not much for men who come here looking for a fight. Men like that aren’t much for leaving here alive.”
The man tightened his grip on the bars. He shook his head. “I don’t want a fight, Mr. Battle. Not at all. But I know someone who does and I come here to warn you.”