by Joe McKinney
“I think a couple of the people in the Florida group are spreading lies about Jasper.”
Barnes’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of lies?”
Colin thought of Billy Kline with his girl, and the words came pouring out.
Michael Barnes spent the next two days keeping an eye on Ed Moore and Billy Kline. His experience as a cop had taught him that people never change. Reformation was a pipe dream. You start out as a piece of shit, you’ll remain a piece of shit no matter what the rest of the world tries to do on your behalf. Billy Kline was a car burglar, a thief, and in Barnes’s estimation, thieves were like sex offenders and drug addicts. They were broken on a fundamental level. The only cure was a bullet.
But he was surprised about Ed Moore, the retired U.S. Deputy Marshal. The man had been a cop for thirty-five years, a marine before that. If anybody could appreciate the way Jasper had stamped a sense of order onto a world that made absolutely no sense, it should have been Ed Moore. Didn’t he have everything he needed here? What was wrong with him that he couldn’t see that?
The screen door opened behind him and a young man of about seventeen came out. Jasper had his arm around the boy’s shoulder. They both looked disheveled, the hair on their brows matted with sweat. Jasper was wearing an enormous grin, and as he stepped outside, he breathed deeply of the cool morning air.
The boy looked docile, and he wouldn’t look Barnes in the eye.
“You’re doing well, Thomas,” Jasper said. “Very well. What did you think of today?”
The boy mumbled something that sounded like he said that he liked it very much.
“Fine, fine,” Jasper said, squeezing the boy’s shoulders tightly. “Very fine. I’m looking forward to sharing another session with you soon, Thomas. Can you come by tomorrow morning, say, just before breakfast?”
“I don’t know if—”
“You come by tomorrow morning, Thomas. I’ll see you here at seven, okay?”
The boy nodded. Then he slipped out of Jasper’s embrace and trotted back toward the center of the village, limping slightly.
“Fine boy,” Jasper said. He stared out over the prairie and breathed deeply again. “I’ve hardly seen you the last two days, Michael. What have you been doing?”
“I’ve been looking into some things.”
“I see,” he said. “You’ve found out something?”
Barnes nodded.
“Well, I guess you better come in, then. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
CHAPTER 54
Later that week, on a cold, gray October morning, Aaron Roberts walked with his wife, Kate, and his son, Thomas, across the narrow stretch of ground that separated his cottage from Jasper’s, marveling to himself how quickly the seasons changed here in North Dakota.
A fine powdery layer of snow lay upon the compound, and the dark wood of the cottages around Jasper’s private quarters stood out in stark relief from the whiteness of the snow and the depthless gray of the sky. The cold had been upon them for nearly a month, but not the biting cold that now stung his cheeks and turned his hands to claws. That had come upon them almost overnight. As a boy, he’d read stories of Indian fighters who passed this way during the 1870s and 1880s, men whose pants had frozen to their saddles and whose spit had turned to ice with an explosive crackle before it hit the ground. He’d known that the coming winter was going to be a hard one, but until this very morning, he hadn’t quite realized just how hard it was going to be.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught Kate looking at him. There were creases around her mouth and a sadness in her eyes that suggested the years were catching up with her. How much of that, he wondered, had happened in just the last few months?
Behind them, Thomas followed along with his head down, eyes on his shoes.
Aaron and Kate both slowed so their son could catch up. Aaron watched Thomas trudge through the snow, and a wave of grief washed over him. The boy—hadn’t he been calling him a man just a couple of weeks ago?—had grown increasingly despondent since his first visit to Jasper, and seeing it stirred up familiar feelings of anger and pity and self-loathing for the way it had happened.
The feelings were unexpected, too. Aaron himself had shared Jasper’s bed numerous times over the years. As had Kate. For them, sexual congress with Jasper had been an act of faith, a form of communion with the man whose brilliance and spiritual guidance had made it so that their world made sense. Watching Thomas grow, he’d looked forward to the day when Thomas, too, could find the same sense of oneness that he’d found. But now, as he watched the transformation that had come over his son, he felt hollow inside, and he was aware that what had started out as an act of fatherly kindness had been transmuted through some horrible alchemy into sin and betrayal.
Thomas would not look him in the eye any longer—hadn’t since that first visit to Jasper’s bed. He complained of fatigue and nausea in the mornings. He seemed to have lost his appetite completely. And, worst of all, when Aaron put his hand on his son’s shoulder, he felt Thomas’s back constrict and a shudder move through the boy’s body. During those moments, he could picture once again the morning Jasper had asked Aaron to send Thomas to him. He could hear Thomas pleading with him, the tears streaming down his cheeks as he begged not to go.
They’d fought. For the first time in years, they’d fought. Screaming had filled their small cabin. And Aaron had responded with renewed anger, his self-doubt turning into a rigid demand for obedience. Aaron had not cried since he was a teenager, but he had cried that morning.
But what could he do? Really, honestly, what could he do? His whole world was here, in this place. He had devoted everything to Jasper. More than half his life had been steered by that man. The structure of his family, his worldview, his relationship with God, all of that had been shaped by Jasper, guided by his wisdom. Could he really divorce himself from that now, with the rest of the world in ashes?
“Aaron,” Kate said. “Baby, you okay?”
He looked at her. Between them, his eyes cast down at his shoes, Thomas seemed like a shell of the person he had once been.
“I don’t know, Kate. I just don’t know.”
They entered Jasper’s quarters and found Barnes and several of Jasper’s lieutenants seated around the coffee table, waiting for them. Jasper stood next to the small dining room table in the back right corner of the house. A tray of paper Dixie cups was next to him on the table, each one containing what looked like wine.
“Thomas,” Jasper said to Aaron’s son. “Come here and take this for me.”
He gestured toward the tray. With barely concealed reluctance, Thomas crossed the room and took the tray to the coffee table without a word, while Aaron and Kate took their places on the couch.
“I want each of you to pick up a cup,” Jasper said.
Everyone leaned forward and picked up a cup. A few of the younger lieutenants traded looks around. Aaron didn’t bother to meet anyone else’s gaze.
“The wine is mixed with potassium cyanide. Drink this and you will die within two minutes.” Jasper’s southern twang gave the words a chilly resonance. “Now raise your cups. Go on, each of you. Let’s see ’em.”
The group each raised their cups. Aaron could feel the nervous tension in the room, and yet he also felt strangely dead to it.
“Now drink,” Jasper commanded them.
Nobody moved.
A few cups wavered in the air as people traded anxious looks. The man across the table from Aaron swallowed, his Adam’s apple pumping in his throat like a piston.
One of the younger lieutenants, a black man named Lucius Johnson, said, “Jasper, I don’t wanna drink it.”
Aaron glanced up. He expected Jasper to fly into a rage and start screaming at the man. This was the kind of thing that set him off, direct disobedience to a command. But Jasper surprised him. He spoke quietly, softly, to the man. “Lucius, you drink that up, you hear? I got my reasons. If you love me, if you believe in me, you’ll drink.
”
Barnes drank his down in one gulp. Then he leaned forward and dropped his empty cup on the tray.
Kate and Thomas and a few other lieutenants drank theirs as well. Without raising his head, Aaron raised his cup and slowly sipped it down. The wine was overly fruity, with a cheap boozy aftertaste. He hadn’t had a drink since he was seventeen, not out of a sense of decorum or religious conviction, but because he didn’t like the taste, and he found age hadn’t changed him in that direction. It was still a foul substance.
He put his cup on the table next to the others.
Lucius was crying. He said, “Jasper…”
“Don’t be afraid,” Jasper said. “There’s no pain. You’ll just fall asleep.”
The man had tears in his eyes as he raised the cup to his lips and swallowed it down in a hurry. He sat there for a moment longer with the cup to his lips, his eyes closed, his fingers trembling. After a while, he put the cup down and waited, the dark skin of his cheeks looking flushed.
“Excellent,” Jasper said. “Excellent. Each and every one of you.” He pulled out a chair from the dining room table and sat down with them in the circle. “I believe in each of you, just as you believe in me. This is our covenant, and it will not be broken. Now listen. None of you will die today.” He looked at Michael Barnes. “Some of you, perhaps, have already figured that out. What you did just now was prove yourself to me. And that proof will be important in the days ahead.”
He leaned forward and laced his fingers together, pointing at the family members with his doubled index fingers.
“Something terrible happened this morning, and I need to tell you about it.”
Aaron glanced up. He expected to hear about the zombies they’d been seeing more and more of. Aaron had heard Barnes’s reports from the field, and they were not encouraging. The hard, cold weather hadn’t done a thing to slow the zombie advance. If anything, their numbers were increasing, and each morning, Michael Barnes had to lead teams out through the gate to clear the roads.
But then Jasper surprised him. He took off his sunglasses and broke into the deep, resonant voice he reserved for the pulpit.
“For months now, I have been telling you that the American government has betrayed us. They have set their sights upon us because we dared to speak up against their injustices. While they sought to preserve the privilege of the rich, we preached to the poor. While they sought to contain the nonwhite races, we held out our hands to all the races. They created a pressure cooker in the form of the Gulf Coast Quarantine, and when it exploded, we dared to survive. We set up this outpost of progress here on the prairie in open defiance to their ways, and it has driven them to distraction.
“I listen to them on the radio, talking about us. Spreading lies about us. Ah, if you only heard the filth they talked about us. Well, it seems they have finally decided to test us directly.”
Aaron took Kate’s hand.
“Yesterday morning I was contacted by the United States Air Force Base in Minot. They want to send a delegation here. They told me they’ve heard of the wonderful things we are doing, and they’re looking to see why we’re doing so well.”
Lucius Johnson said, “It’s a trick. They want to take our homes away.”
The others murmured in assent.
“A moment,” said Jasper. “Brother Lucius, you’re absolutely correct. I know it’s a trick.” He turned to Barnes. “Go ahead, Brother Michael.”
Barnes looked around the room, making sure the others were all looking at him.
“I went to Minot last night,” he said. “It’s a large base, well supplied, but they are surrounded by the infected.”
“Surrounded?” Lucius said.
“Far worse than we’ve seen here. Our worst days have brought us four or five hundred at a time. Last night, I saw tens of thousands of the infected around the base. Another three to five thousand were dead, piled up against the fence. They’re under siege. From what I saw, it’s only a matter of time before their defenses collapse under the weight.”
“But how could they be surrounded?” Lucius said.
“I killed a few of the infected along the road leading into Minot,” Barnes said. “I checked the IDs in their pockets. Most are from Minneapolis. What they’re doing there I couldn’t say. But almost all of them have come from Minneapolis.”
“Perhaps they’re looking to the government for help,” Jasper said. “But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The one thing that does matter is that all those government troops will surely be looking for a place to relocate, and you know what that means. They will try to come here. They will try to destroy the way of life we’ve created. They will parachute in here and kill us if they have to. Imagine a whole battalion of soldiers, coming in here, guns blazing. They haven’t seen a woman in months. They will rape our women. They will spear our babies on their bayonets. Do you see it, people? Please, listen to what I am telling you. The end of this good thing is near. There will come a day very soon when we will have to make a decision. Do we let them take our lives away, or do we end our lives with dignity and purpose? My soul is prepared for that day, and you’ve just proven to me that yours are as well.”
He stopped there, looking at each of them in turn, a barrel-chested, gimlet-eyed man with lips pulled back over rows of large white teeth.
He said, “Go now. But be prepared. The day will come very soon when we must exercise the one option left to us. I know you’ll be ready.”
The group filed out into the gray, cold day in solemn silence. Aaron held the door open for his wife as she stepped out. He glanced back and saw that Michael Barnes had not moved. He still sat on the couch, Jasper standing next to him with his hand on his shoulder.
Aaron nodded to them both and closed the door. Then he stood there, lost in thought, watching the limitless vista of white waves that stretched out before him.
From behind him, he heard Jasper say, “Tonight, Michael, I have something I need you to do.”
Aaron had a pretty good idea what that was, just as he was also pretty sure that he had just been bumped as Jasper’s personal confidant.
As Aaron closed the door, Michael Barnes let his gaze turn on Jasper.
“You’re gonna have a busy night ahead of you, Michael. I’m sorry. I hope you’re up for it.”
“Whatever you need, Jasper.”
“Those troops are coming here because their base is overrun with the infected. When they get here, I want them to see that things aren’t any better here.”
“A few hundred zombies won’t deter them, Jasper.”
“No. But a couple thousand would.”
Barnes looked at him for a long time.
“Our fences wouldn’t be able to hold against that many.”
“They won’t have to, Michael. Because there’s something else I need you to do, too.”
CHAPTER 55
Sirens echoed through the building.
They were inside the hospital again. Over the sirens, Nate could hear shouting and gunfire and people running down the hallway outside his room. Kellogg had made sure Nate knew what to do when the infected got inside the hospital, and Nate didn’t waste any time. He threw a heavy flannel shirt over his T-shirt and jeans, laced up the boots they’d given him, and slipped into a thick gray jacket with a fur collar. Then he went out into the hallway. Soldiers were running down the stairs to his left. A faint odor of electrical smoke hung in the air. There were bodies on the ground and blood splattered on the walls. One of the bodies off to Nate’s right was still moving, trying to claw his way toward him.
Nate turned to his left and headed for the stairs. The building was a large, ten-story cube built around an oval-shaped central hub. Nate’s room was on the fourth floor. In order to reach the cafeteria, where Kellogg had told him to go in case the hospital was overrun, he had to take the south stairwell down to the second floor and then come back toward the hub. He and Kellogg had walked it several times after that day on the column, and he
knew the way even through the thickening smoke and the darkness and the wailing of the sirens.
He didn’t get scared until he stepped off the landing on the second floor. There were bodies everywhere. Not just people in regular civilian clothes, either. Dead soldiers, too. In the darkness it was hard to tell who was still moving and who was dead. He could hear moaning. A hand grabbed his ankle and he jumped.
“Get off,” he said, and kicked at the hand until the grip slackened and he was free.
He started to move, watching his step through the mangled bodies and the still-writhing fingertips clutching for a grip on the bloodstained floor.
There were spent shell casings all over the floor. They skidded out from beneath his boots and made it hard to walk. Somebody spoke to him from the floor, but he couldn’t understand what the man was saying and he kept walking.
Farther down the hall from where the double doors to the cafeteria hung open was the entrance to the building’s central hub. Nate knew that from there he could look down onto the first floor and the main entrance to the hospital. The walls around the entrance were glass, and Kellogg had said that if the zombies were going to enter the hospital, it would almost certainly be through there. There was no practical way to defend against it. Now, listening to the moaning coming from behind the doors that led to the building’s central hub, Nate figured the big one had already happened. The volume was tremendous. It sounded like a train was going through the downstairs lobby.
He turned toward the cafeteria’s double doors. There was a thick puddle of blood just inside the doorway, and a long blackish smear leading off into the darkness.
“Doc?” he called out.
A groan from the back of the room.
“Doc?”
“Nate. Back here.”
Nate followed the sound through a jumble of overturned tables and chairs. After a few steps, he could smell something bad, like shit and rot mixed together. He gagged on the smell, but didn’t vomit. The black smear on the floor glistened like oil.