by J. B. Beatty
“Yeah but…”
“Yeah but fuck! Right now, it’s us or them. I don’t think that ethics really enters into it. We just need to know who we’re fighting against, and that’s knowledge that we need at any cost.”
“Gotcha, captain.”
“Don’t call me ‘captain.’”
“Just a figure of speech. You seem to be the one calling all the shots.”
“We’re all equals. Everything is a group decision.”
I shake my head. “Whatever. Democracy. I’m the one who got outvoted. We could be observing still, watching, learning, being a little patient. Instead we’re waiting for the full wrath of this pseudo military to come down on us and we’re slashing throats and cutting off fingers.”
Justin doesn’t respond. I brush off an insect.
“And this girl, this Rose, has to die, right? She’s seen us all. She can identify us.”
Justin looks at me oddly. “Are you stuck in pre-Apocalypse? Do you think she’s going to pick us out of a line-up? Do you think we might actually get arrested and she’s going to point at us with her nubs and say, ‘Those are the people who took my fingers!’ Dude. We are in the shoot-on-sight category, as is apparently every other thing on this side of the fence. Whether they think we’re the ones or not, they still want to kill us.”
Point there. Fine. We wait in the brush. An hour passes. And then some. In the distance, we hear vehicles. Helicopters.
The door to the cellar opens again. Carrie comes out. She doesn’t walk low, but instead stands straight as if she doesn’t care who sees her. She is carrying black fabric—the woman’s uniform. Her shirt and hands are bloodstained. In the sun, it’s as if she becomes aware of this for the first time. She looks at her hands, then slowly wipes them on the clothing she is carrying, and she tosses it into the brush.
Justin whistles for her. She looks in our direction. He gestures for her to get low and to join us. She looks around again—as in, “who are we kidding”—then stoops down and walks in our direction.
“Get down, take cover,” says Justin.
“Ay ay,” she says.
We watch her for a while but she’s expressionless and doesn’t offer anything.
“Did you get some information?” he asks.
She nods once.
“Good stuff?”
She nods again.
“Is she…”
Carrie looks at him. “Dead? No. She’s fine. I let her go.”
Justin and I both look toward the cellar door, still closed. Confused, we look back at Carrie.
“I cut the tape,” she says coldly. “I told her she was free to go whenever she wanted to. We don’t need her anymore. And I wasn’t going to kill her. I wasn’t ever going to kill her.”
Justin coolly assesses her words, her emotionless tone. Finally, he says, “They’re searching now. You can hear them. Humvees. Helicopters. In effect, we’re pinned down. We need to slowly edge our way deeper into these woods, and then just hunker down and not move until dark.”
“And then?”
“Then, if they’re still searching, we stay put. If they go back to base, we make our way back to the bikes and get the hell out of here. That make sense? Does everyone agree?” He pointedly looks toward me. Our eyes meet. Begrudgingly, I nod.
“Okay. Let’s move out. Stay low, move slow.”
We don’t make it 30 feet before we hear a helicopter coming in low. We hit the ground just past the treeline. It hovers over the abandoned house. The thumping noise shakes the earth and stirs up a storm of dust.
I see the door to the cellar move. It opens a bit, then closes, then she gets it open again and gravity slams the door the other way, open wide with a bang. She steps out. Her skin is bare and bloody, her underpants soiled. She waves her bloody hands at the helicopter and starts stumbling in that direction. She tries to run and falls, then gets up and enters the clearing, waving, yelling.
The helicopter spins about, as if it were just about to go, but now the soldiers see her. She is yelling, “Help!” over and over again.
A burst of machine gun fire from the helicopter tears her in half. The helicopter hovers for a minute more, as if scanning for more zombies, then lifts away in the direction of the fence.
Long after the sound of the helicopter fades, we stare at the scene. Justin says, “Let’s keep moving. They may send a ground team in to check this spot out.”
Carrie remains staring. I say to her, “You pulled that trigger.”
She looks away from me and doesn’t answer. She is no longer who she was.
38→PARTICKLER FRIENDS O’ THE DISEASED
The bikes aren’t as we left them, prone, covered with brush. Instead they are exposed, leaning against trees, ready to roll. As soon as we see this, we ready our rifles. It is pitch black, no moon in the sky. Each of us is looking in another direction.
“Nice wheels,” says the voice. “I like your style.”
I raise my weapon in the direction of the voice. “Uh uh uh, don’t shoot. For one, you’ll die first. And two, we’re not your enemy.”
“Who are you?” asks Justin.
“Friends. Admirers, now. We like your work. You’ve had a very productive day: spying, killing, stealing trucks. Actually, let me qualify that. We like the idea of your work. It’s the sort of activity we would like to do someday when we’re ready for it. It’s just that now it creates a few problems for all of us. You’ve turned up the heat in a big way, right at the point when we had them convinced that we were all dead. It will probably be many months before they drop their guard as low as it has been lately. Many months.”
Silence. No one moves. “What happens now?” I say.
“You could take off now. We won’t stop you. I’d caution you that they will have night patrols tonight and it’s unlikely you’ll make it back to wherever you came from.
“Or, you could come with us. We have a safe place we can get you to where you can lay low for a few days. We’ve got some food there. Mind you, this is strictly voluntary. You are not our prisoners. But maybe you can be our allies. Maybe you can help the Resistance.”
“There’s a Resistance?”
“Yeah, there’s a Resistance. Not every senior citizen wants to spend the rest of their days playing online scrabble and tending vegetable gardens. You can follow me. Or not.”
The man walks through our midst, past our guns. When he’s about 20 feet beyond us, Justin says, “Okay,” and grabs his bike. He walks it in that direction. We follow silently.
The route we follow stays in the woods but for one quick road crossing. Eventually we get to a house. The sliding door in the back is already open. We follow him in. “The bikes, too,” he says.
We go down the basement stairs with the bikes. He deadbolts the door at the top and flicks on the light. I look around. It’s just a concrete basement. An old couch. Box of canned food on a table. A toilet in an unfinished bathroom. Windows covered over.
We watch the man come down the stairs after us—we see his legs first, then his shirt, then his face. His hair is gray and short and he wears glasses on a face that looks like it could go on any retired college professor. His torso is thin, but he doesn’t look like he’s spent the last 50 years running 10Ks.
He checks us out. “Young ones,” he says with a note of surprise. “You can call me Cash. Make yourselves at home.”
I sit on the couch. Everyone else remains standing. I stand back up.
“You’re safe here,” Cash says.
“This is where you live?” asks Carrie.
“No,” he says with a look that indicates that he would set up his own place with a bit more style. “This is just one of our safe houses. We have a number of them.”
A key turns in the lock at the top of the stairs. Carrie reaches for her pistol. Cash holds out his hand. “It’s just my wife.”
The door opens and shuts again—locks. A small lady comes into view, her cheeks covered in black paint. She we
ars camo and is holding an M-16.
“I’m Tammy,” she says.
“She’s not really a Tammy,” notes her husband.
“God no,” she says.
“Everyone in the Resistance has taken a new name.”
“Of a country singer,” Tammy says helpfully.
“I guess it really doesn’t have to be a country singer, but that’s just how it worked out. No one knows each other’s real names for security purposes.”
“Except we do.” She playfully punches her husband in the arm.
“Yes, because we’re married.” He shrugs. “I’m sharing pretty freely with you because I trust you. We watched you today and we know you’re fighters. You’re not going to roll over and play dead for the Greater America Corporation. But we’re hoping that you will share with us too. And at the very least we can get some coordination going so we aren’t blindsided again by operations like the ones that you did today.”
“It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” says Justin.
“Shocker. Yeah. Anyway. We have a small network of people who aren’t going to take this occupation laying down. We stay low, we watch, and we share information.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Hmm?”
“Once you have information, do you fight back?”
Cash steps back and looks a bit chastened. “Everything’s still in the planning stages. We can’t afford to make a misstep. However, we’d like to spend some time with you tonight and share some of that information. Do you think we can do that? We’ll tell you what we know about them, and you tell us what you know.”
I look at the others for support. “Yeah,” I say. “Only a lot of the stuff we know I don’t really know yet, since Carrie has yet to share it with us. She had a little interrogation today. We still have to sort that out. Maybe it makes sense for you to tell us about this ‘Greater America Corporation’ as you call it.”
Cash spots a box, and drags it over to our makeshift circle and sits. He begins, “Their words, not ours. They call themselves Greater America. It’s incorporated. We actually found traces of them online, some of their corporate filings from before this all happened. It was set up as a security firm, on paper, very similar to paramilitary companies like Blackwater. Some funding from political action committees.
“When the shit hit the fan, they sprang into action. I can’t say that they had anything to do with starting the flu virus, but they knew it was going to hit, and when.”
“How do you know that?” challenges Carrie.
“We had front row seats. Our house—our former house—was in Traverse City, a block south of this wall they built. As soon as things went out of control with this flu, there were squads of young soldiers wearing black who started patrolling the streets, killing any of the victims they could find. Then the fence went up—it went up fast. They had all of the materials they needed stored somewhere in the area. They were ready for this.”
“Are you sure, though, are you sure this wasn’t FEMA?” I say. “I mean, they’re the emergency management people. You would hope they would have plans to deal with this kind of an epidemic.”
“No, definitely not FEMA. The federal government completely melted down in the week after the flu hit—and near as we can tell, so did most of the governments on earth. Their entire workforce died in the outbreak.”
“But Greater America’s didn’t.”
“Exactly. They knew it was coming and they obviously were vaccinated against it. They were ready when everyone else wasn’t. And the traffic was incredible. Every day—it started before the flu hit—there were planes coming into the airport here. Way more than usual. And convoys of Suburbans, Tahoes and Escalades, bringing people up here. Young, healthy people. Families. All of them obviously vaccinated.”
Tammy jumps in: “I saw families. Seriously, families and they had all their luggage with them like they had packed for a vacation. They even brought their dogs! And every family had a couple of soldiers in black protecting them. Meanwhile we’re dodging these creatures and just trying to survive.”
“They were killing them,” Cash says. “They were killing as many of the infected ones as they could around here. In other places, we understand it wasn’t like that. No one was stopping them. It’s just like them zombie shows. On the second day, I got together with a couple of neighbors and we went out armed to get some food from the grocery store. We actually ran into a patrol from Greater America and back then they weren’t shooting at us. Their guy actually said that the zombies were a big surprise for them. ‘Not part of the plan,’ he said, whatever that means.”
“But they got the shots,” says Tammy.
“Yeah, they got the shots. So, something bad was part of the plan, just not the zombie thing. But every young person—except the kids—who didn’t get the shots got the flu and turned into one of those monsters. Which raises the obvious question: how did you get shots?”
I swivel my head to see if Justin’s going to handle this one or Carrie. She clears her throat and says, “No shots. It’s not just the old and the kids before puberty who weren’t affected by the virus. It was also people with compromised immune systems. In other words, the very sick. Cancer, HIV, Lupus, etc. We haven’t encountered many survivors like us, probably because the breakdown of society led to an end to their medical care. Not to mention many of the compromised were not healthy enough to fight off the caregivers around them as they succumbed to the flu. They were sitting ducks.”
“Oh honey,” says Tammy. “Is there anything you need?”
“We’re good,” says Carrie. “Keeping stocked on our meds has been a top priority.”
“How big is this?” asks Justin pointedly. “This Greater America? How long does this fence go?”
Cash sighs. “The fence itself? Not very long. It just separates out the Leelanau Peninsula, the Old Mission Peninsula, and the airport from the rest of the state. They’ve made the other side a “safe zone” and have been trucking in supplies and people who have all been vaccinated. The other side of that fence is paradise. This side is hell. At some point after the first week, they made the decision to shoot anything that moves on this side. Even us.” He looks at his wife.
“We’re the only ones left from our original group, the neighborhood people,” she says. “Some of them were shot. The others must have been attacked by the infected.”
“So, the Resistance,” I ask, “It’s just you?”
“Oh no. It’s not massive, but we have people all over North America, and even some contacts in Europe,” answers Cash. “This is at least a North American phenomenon, in terms of Greater America setting up safe zones for certain people. The flu hit Europe too, and probably the rest of the world, but right now we don’t have any idea if Greater America or a similar organization is setting up safe zones elsewhere.”
“Where are the other safe zones that you know about?”
Carrie interjects, “Our captive mentioned Beaver Island and Mackinac Island.”
“That’s just here in this district,” says Cash. “What we’re hearing is that most of the safe zones are islands. I guess that makes sense—easy to defend, hard for zombies to get to…”
“But you said the zombies were a surprise to them,” says Justin.
“Yes, at least to their soldiers. As for the other safe zones, we hear they’re set up on some of the Hawaiian Islands, the San Juans outside of Seattle, Catalina in California, the Outer Banks, Hilton Head, Martha’s Vineyard…”
“And the Caribbean,” interrupts Tammy.
“That’s just speculation.”
“Playgrounds of the rich,” says Justin.
“No,” I say. “When I was a kid we went to Mackinac Island.”
“Oh, that’s right,” says Justin. “You weren’t black.”
“You know? Fuck you.”
“Now, now,” says Cash, with an older man’s distaste for foul language.
“How do you communicate with
your other Resistance friends?”
Cash sits back. “We’ve got to keep our channels confidential. We’ve already lost a few of them. And some of the sites we use on the Internet have shut down.”
“The Facebook group is gone,” says Tammy.
“Wait, you had a Facebook group for the Resistance?”
Cash shrugs.
Carrie says, “You know, any decent hacker would be able to trace your IP addresses and send a missile into your house.”
“That’s probably happened a time or two,” he says. “We’ve been using Internet proxies—and trying to use VPNs, but we’ve had a lot of problems teaching people how to do it all.”
“They’re old farts,” says Tammy. “Like us. For some of them, just getting the computer turned on is a challenge without their children around.”
‘The other thing,” says Cash, “is even though they’re going after us harder and harder every day, they haven’t been as effective as you might think in tracking us down using electronic resources. Especially for people holding all the cards and seemingly very well-prepared militarily. My theory is that they didn’t expect to have to deal with a Resistance. They thought the flu would kill everyone a lot faster.”
Carrie stands and paces about the room. I look to her. “Does their information match what you heard?”
“Yeah,” she says thoughtfully. “Though I did get some operational info. What the Greater America soldiers do every day, who’s in charge, what their numbers are—there’s not as many as you would think. Only about 500 or so in this safe zone. But they are very heavily armed. And all have military experience. They might have hired these guys right off the streets, but they were dumped on the streets by our government after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. They know how to fight.”
“What we need,” says Justin, turning to face Cash, “is the vaccine.”
“Why?”
“You’re fine, we’re fine, but there are kids out there who are dying as soon as they reach puberty. The virus is still active somehow. As soon as someone reaches the target age—or hormonal mix, I should say—they are hit with the full flu symptoms.”