by Munson, Brad
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and the whining keen in his voice made Sherman half-believe him. “It was working fine one second, and then just … poof.”
“You were the one who installed it. You told me it would work.”
“Well, okay, so I was wrong.” Some of the young man’s pugnacious tone returned. “I’m doing the best I can with kludged-together software that I didn’t even install. I don’t know what idiot put this piece of crap in place, but—”
“His name was Carl Atherton,” Castillo snapped. She glared at Boyd so viciously Sherman was anticipating her pulling her Ka-Bar and just gutting the fat fool. “He was the best we had six months ago, and he died saving assholes like you when we recovered the southwest quadrant of town. A sprinter bit his throat out.” She leaned forward from the waist, got her face right up against his. “A sprinter bit his throat out,” she said again.
Boyd actually pulled back in his chair, tried to make himself even a little bit smaller. “Okay,” he said, his voice quavering. “Okay, I’m sorry.”
It was time for Sherman to take back control. “How do we know it won’t happen again?”
“Um. Oh. ‘Cause I fixed it.”
“That’s not nearly a good enough answer, Boyd.”
“I mean, I rebuilt it. I made new code. We have complete control now. The default is for all gates to lock if there’s a power failure or interruption – to lock shut, not to lock open. It won’t happen again. I promise.”
“Right at this moment, Boyd, your promises don’t mean much to me.”
He opened his mouth to argue. Sherman could see the man-boy’s mind racing, running through a whole litany of acid responses, defenses, challenges ...
… and then he folded. One thing, at least, was certain: Duncan Boyd knew which side of the bread his butter was on. An important skill for a man his size, Sherman thought, with a little acid of his own.
“Let’s get back to work,” Sherman said, and turned away, pretending to concentrate on a computer screen on the far side of his desk. No “you are dismissed,” and certainly no thanks. Not to this one.
“Come on,” Castillo said, and levered the fat man out of his chair.
“I can get back on my own,” Boyd said, pulling his arm away again and succeeding this time. It was clear Castillo didn’t really want to touch him in the first place.
“The same way you came in,” Sherman’s XO said. “Try not to get lost.”
Boyd contented himself with a sneer and hustled out. They both waited until they heard his heavy footfalls on the metal staircase, fading away, before they spoke.
“You believe him?” she asked, entirely unconvinced.
“For the moment. It’s not like we have a lot of options.”
Castillo scowled. “We’re looking. We screen every single new arrival. Anybody who knows anything about computers, anything at all – straight to Basement Three. But so far …”
“So far he’s the best we’ve got. And God help us.”
There was a brisk rat-a-tat on the door that led to the terrace – the official entrance to Sherman’s office. He glanced at the wall clock: 10:00 a.m. precisely. Amazing: Stiles was actually on time.
“Come in,” Sherman said, mindful once again of the sheer economy of this world after Morningstar. No receptionists, no intercom systems, no paperwork. You just made a promise and you kept it. Then you walked right in.
Stiles entered, bright-eyed and ready for the day. Rebecca Hall, her hair clean and lustrous, a surprising half-smile on her face, came in with him, and carefully closed the door behind her.
“Thanks for coming,” Sherman said. “I’m sorry to tell you, our plans have changed.”
Stiles shrugged. “Can’t say I’m surprised.”
“It’s not so much yesterday’s incursion,” Sherman said, “though that certainly doesn’t help matters. It’s more about the RSA attack on Offutt. The support we’d been expecting from them is going to be … well, reduced for a while. For obvious reasons.”
Rebecca frowned – a ghost of her old, dour attitude. “So what does that mean to us? To the program?”
“A delay,” Sherman said, “but not a cancellation. We won’t get the big transports or the oil reserves we expected. So no help with shipping. If we want the fuel and the eggs from New Abraham, we’re going to have to get them ourselves.”
Her face fell. “Oh. Okay.”
Stiles forced a grin. “Hey. It’s not the end of the world. New Abraham’s got transports of their own they’ve been working on, remember? They’ve already agreed to it in principle. We can do this.”
“We’ll have to,” Sherman said. He stood up and rounded the desk, moving to a favorite spot in one corner of his office, and opened the blinds with a twist of his wrist so he could look down on the bullpen and see the huge map of Nebraska, Kansas, and the surrounding states that covered one wall. “We can get by for a bit on the fuel stores we have. It might even motivate people to move a little faster on self-sufficiency and use a little less.”
“... though they’re doing a damn good job of that right now, you know,” Rebecca said.
Sherman let himself smile. “I know. Point is: It’s the eggs that matter first and most. Right now.”
Rebecca nodded. “The eggs.”
The vaccine had been perfected. Demilio had lost days of sleep and half her sanity getting it exactly right over the last few months; her tests – both intentional and spontaneous – had proven the point completely: It worked. One intramuscular injection in an uninfected and relatively healthy human, and the Morningstar Strain was powerless. That human would never rise again, not as a sprinter or a shambler. Now the challenge was manufacturing enough vaccine to offer a dose to every living human in the fractured and crippled United States of America, at the very least.
The strange key to it all, at least at the moment, was eggs – chicken eggs. They were the perfect incubator for the virus itself, an essential vessel for creating the antigen that was then distilled into the vaccine. But eggs were a use-once-and-throw-away proposition. And even if their first goal was just enough vaccine for recovering Omaha and the other stable U.S. communities and bases, they needed a lot of eggs. Thousands. And they had to have all of them right here at the Fac.
They were halfway to that goal. When the Army and Omaha itself helped to rebuild the charred remains of Abraham, Kansas into New Abraham, they had also worked to make it into a true and sustainable egg and biomass factory, a place that could make fuel and supply eggs to the Fac. The farms were already in place; they had been storing eggs for weeks. And now all they had to do was get them from New Abraham to Omaha.
“I’m sending you two to New Abraham to check on the progress there,” Sherman said. “And to arrange transport. We need those eggs here, as many as possible and as soon as we can get them.”
“Nothing to it,” Stiles said sunnily. “Just a four-hundred-mile trip through a desolate post-apocalypse hellscape populated by nearly unkillable monsters.”
Castillo’s crossed arms tightened. “You think it’s funny?” she said, doing her best to hold in her anger.
Stiles looked her square in the face. He knew a little of what she’d been through: Two tours in Iraq, then barely a month on the Indianapolis police force before Morningstar arrived in America. Almost single-handedly keeping more than fifty people safe – all successful Omaha citizens now – before she heard the President’s broadcast and literally fought her way through six hundred miles of the apocalypse to join them. “No,” he said frankly, “I don’t think it’s funny at all. But I’m fresh out of tears.”
“You’ll want to take a few people with you,” Sherman said, ignoring the exchange. “I can’t spare any of our most experienced citizens, at least not yet. But you can have your pick of the new people.”
Stile
s nodded thoughtfully. “That new guy, Tomlinson—”
“No,” Castillo said shortly. “We need the shoes.”
Stiles grinned in spite of himself. “Yeah, I thought you’d say that. No harm in asking, though. Okay, The Dentist then.”
“No again,” she said. “We need—”
“Ah, come on,” he said. “Did you see her fight? Well, no, you didn’t, but trust me, she—”
“I saw her during orientation,” Castillo said. “I get it.” She gave a bitter sigh, but dipped her head. “Okay. The Dentist.”
Sherman lowered his brows. “Does she have a name? Other than The Dentist?”
“I’m sure she does,” Rebecca said. “We just don’t know what it is.”
“Hmm.” Sherman didn’t like that answer much.
Stiles mentioned two other soldiers – Boyarsky and Brent, Watchmen that he’d worked with for weeks. Castillo and Sherman grudgingly gave them up as well. “And that’s it,” he said. “Five of us, off to save the world.”
Sherman gave him a smile. “Nothing new there,” he said. “You should be used to that by now.”
Stiles looked at the ceiling with an entirely artificial expression of righteousness and self-sacrifice. “Oh, it’s hard,” he said. “Being a superhero.”
Rebecca covered her eyes. “Oh, my God.”
Sherman had to keep himself from laughing. “You’re dismissed,” he said. “Take the Cougar and go.”
Stiles flipped him a two-finger salute and got the hell out of there.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“My fellow Americans,” The Chairman said. “True Americans. Our moment has come.”
Tristan “Huck” Finnegan stood two steps to the right and two steps behind The Chairman and surveyed the silent, motionless audience. They filled Presentation Room A, the largest single room in Mount Weather, safely insulated by hundreds of feet of solid stone and the full weight of a West Virginia mountain above them.
Safely? Finnegan asked himself as he looked at the assembly. Over five hundred men and women – mostly men – sat before him, dressed in identical khaki jumpsuits with no insignia, each male’s hair precisely the same length as the man next to him, each female’s bob exactly the same length as the other women in view. In the lowered light of the meeting hall, even the color of each listener’s hair looked the same: a sullen, dull brown.
Finnegan wondered about that safety. Any one of them could be harboring bad thoughts about The Chairman. Every one of them had been issued a weapon, and he had to wonder how many had ignored the order to attend this all-important meeting unarmed. How many were carrying right now? How many could stand up and make history – the wrong history – at any instant by putting a bullet in the leader of the RSA?
Any one of them, Finnegan knew. Any time.
Finnegan was dressed in a costume of his own, a near-parody of the old Secret Service uniform from before the outbreak: a severely tailored, sleek black suit with a dark blue tie, wrap-around sunglasses that betrayed no eye movement at all, and a white ear-bud in his left ear, connected to a radio unit mounted on his hip. Anyone looking closely could see the hump of his shoulder rig under the jacket, giving his left lapel a gentle rise and fall.
This was the way The Chairman liked it: Classic. Dark. Threatening. Just like the good old days.
The two-man camera and sound crew were safely, silently installed in the tech booth at the far back of the hall, behind the five-hundred-plus bodies that were listening so intently. Their signal was going out to every RSA base, encampment, and squadron in the country, beamed through the air from the hi-jacked satellites they had acquired in the chaotic few weeks after the traitors fled Washington and the Pentagon fell. It was The Chairman’s response to the President’s message from a few weeks earlier; his own statement of what the future held for all of North America.
“Last night,” The Chairman said, leaning a little closer to the pin microphone than he needed too, making his voice boom and distort, “we successfully repelled another assault from the remnants of the old, defeated U.S. Army. You all heard the alarms. Look around the room: You may see some of your comrades missing. They will never return.”
Finnegan’s hidden eyes scanned the room. Yes: Many of the attendees allowed themselves a look left and right, back and forward, searching for the presence or absence of familiar faces.
Keep looking, he thought. You won’t see anything different. The alarm had been a sham. There had been no attack last night; just another dead-quiet night at Mount Weather. But The Chairman had insisted his inner circle trigger the alarm. They moved security troops noisily up and down the corridors, set out a string of urgent, meaningless orders, even detonated a few high-impact explosives beyond the three concealed entry/exit points to the vast base. They did absolutely no damage, but they sent out impact waves that could be felt throughout the installation.
“To remind them,” he had told Finnegan. “To keep them ready.”
To terrify them, Finn told only himself. As if they needed it
“Those missing comrades,” The Chairman boomed, “were murdered by our enemies. Murdered. They have tried, over and over, to break the backs of patriots, to grind the last true Americans into the rocky Virginia soil, but I’m here to tell you: It won’t work.”
In any normal crowd, Finn knew, there would be whispers and rumbles now. Disturbance. Concern. But here, at this moment, these brave men and women didn’t dare to speak or even stir. Not in front of The Chairman. It might be interpreted as weakness, as lack of commitment, as fear. And they all knew what happened to Mount Weather residents who showed fear.
“They hate us because we know the truth,” The Chairman told them. “They weave fairytales of recovery and a non-existent ‘vaccine’ to hide the real facts. They are the ones who brought this upon us. They allowed Morningstar onto American soil. And they are the ones that have a cure, even now, that they are secretly sharing only with their closest friends and allies, while they let the rest of us – you, your friends, your families – turn into monsters or die by the monsters’ hands.”
Finn didn’t believe that anymore. He wasn’t sure anyone but The Chairman and his closest advisers, his Guard, still believed that. But it didn’t matter. Vaccine or cure, the reasoning was sound: He who controlled that medication, regardless of its real effects, controlled America and quite possibly the world. And once it was in the possession of the RSA, they would decide who received it, and the price to be paid by the RSA’s subjects.
And Finnegan was quite sure the price would be high. As it should be.
“I’m here to tell you the singular truth behind all that has happened to us,” The Chairman said. He barely referred to his notes. He had written most of it himself, and committed every line to memory the night before. Finnegan had watched over him as he had prepared. “What is that truth? That the Morningstar Strain was not the greatest disaster ever to befall our nation. It was not. Morningstar was a blessing, my fellow Americans. It rooted out the rabble and the weak, it cleansed this country of doubt and waste and indulgence. It has left only the deserving. It has made us strong again.”
And still, Finnegan saw not a tremble in the crowd, heard not a word. All those millions – hundreds of millions – who had died in the first few weeks. The broken families, the dead children, all of them replaced by ravenous, relentless walking corpses. That was a good thing, The Chairman told them. It was worth it.
If he had doubted it at all – and he no longer did – this would have been the end of it for Tristan Finnegan. It was painfully, agonizingly clear: The Chairman was completely insane.
“Morningstar has given us a new beginning,” the man said. The stage lights made his bald pate glow, made his carefully groomed fringe of white hair glitter. “The truth can be found in the very name of the virus itself. It is a morning star. It is the first hint of light in the
darkness that had all but swallowed America in the last few decades. It is the first, fragile sign of a brilliant new day. And my fellow Americans, you true Americans: That new day belongs to the RSA.”
Finally, Finnegan sensed a reaction from the audience: A single, nearly silent exhalation, a great sigh released from almost every throat in almost perfect unison.
Relief, he realized. This was what they had been waiting for. The lie that they desperately wanted to believe: That all this was justified. All the horror they had gone through, all the hiding and plotting, all the thievery and violence and sacrifice had been worth it. They would be the new rulers of America. They would win the day.
“In the days to come,” The Chairman told them, perfectly sensing their hunger as he always had, “we will move to exterminate the last cowardly traitors who oppose us. We will take back America. We will seize the fruits of their science that they have so foolishly hidden from us, and build a better, smarter, stronger America.”
He poked a finger into the walnut podium, eyes aglow. For all his manipulation, all his sinister planning, Finnegan believed that in that moment, as he spoke, The Chairman actually believed every word he was saying. And that terrified Finn more than anything else.
“It begins here,” their leader said. “It begins now. Take heart. Stand tall. We will win.”
The lights shining on his bald pate dimmed. The single spot on the seal of the Reunited States of America grew brighter, and Finn saw the subtle movement of the camera as it dropped a few inches to focus on that seal.
His address was over. The Chairman had given his message. He had set the wheels in motion.
Now the real, deadly work would begin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Are we there yet?” Rebecca said for roughly the five hundredth time. She was only doing it to get Mark Stiles’ goat. It was her favorite new hobby, and she was getting very good at it.
“If you ask me that once more,” he said from behind the wheel of the Bradley M2, “I will stop this bastard and leave you out right here.”