by Joe McKinney
“You mean it kills you.”
Aaron nodded. He clipped the last of the fence and started peeling it out of the way.
“But there’s enough here to kill everyone in the village,” Thomas said.
“Leave it be, son,” Aaron said. “We have to go.”
“Dad, you knew about this?”
Reluctantly, Aaron nodded. “Come on now. We need to go.”
The boy’s eyes went wide.
“Thomas?”
The boy stiffened. He shook his head and Aaron’s stomach dropped. He turned slowly, and saw Michael Barnes standing behind him, two of his security guards flanking him with rifles at the ready.
“Evening, folks,” Barnes said. He scanned their faces, smiling.
Aaron hung his head. Above and all around him, the prairie wind howled. A moment later, rifle fire split the night.
At the sound of the shots, heads popped up from the snow outside the fence. Michael Barnes watched the infected moving toward the hole Aaron had made in the fence, the volume of their moans building. They were going to be a problem, but not a big one.
To his patrols Barnes said, “Keep this secure. Hold it as long as you can, but when you hear the call to come up, you come running. Understand? It won’t matter if they get in at that point.”
The two men nodded. Barnes took a last look at the dead bodies of Aaron and his wife and son, shook his head, and then headed back to the pavilion.
CHAPTER 59
Ed Moore walked out of the auxiliary dining tent and into the cutting chill of the morning air. A fine, powdery snow covered the fields and the roofs of the nearby buildings. Here and there, patches of brown grass protruded from the white sheets of snow and ice. An old-fashioned analog thermostat hanging from a nail on the side of the tent read twenty-two degrees. There was ice hanging from the face of it like a beard, and to Ed the twenty-two degrees seemed a little like wishful thinking. In the distance, the north fence was like a ghostly black arm protruding from a gray fog of low clouds. He could hear the infected moaning outside the gate, and he wondered how long it would take Barnes and his patrol to clear them.
Something was going on near the pavilion. People were moving up the road from the dormitories, and he could hear their voices, loud but indistinct, over the wind.
“What’s going on?” Billy asked. He had just come from the dining tent and was dressed in a red flannel shirt and jeans over thick layers of long underwear. His hair was getting long, but his beard was still spotty.
“Don’t know,” Ed said.
Jeff Stavers came out of the dining tent and stood next to Billy.
On the far side of the pavilion, children were breaking off from their parents and getting shepherded toward the education tents. A four-wheel-drive pickup with oversized tires was chugging up the frozen hillside from down near Jasper’s quarters, several white fifty-five-gallon drums in the bed.
“Ed,” Billy said. “Look at that.”
“I see it.”
“What do you think Jasper’s planning?” Jeff asked.
“No idea. I don’t think it’s gonna be good, though.”
A few of Barnes’s men came by with rifles slung over their shoulders. They seemed agitated and impatient. One went inside the dining tent and called everybody outside while the other one told everybody to head toward the pavilion.
“What’s going on?” Ed asked them.
“Just get to the pavilion,” the guard said.
Ed nodded, and when the patrol moved off toward the kitchen, he turned to Billy and Jeff and said, “I think we just ran out of time, guys. Start getting everybody together in one spot.”
“What have you got planned, Ed?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know? What about the military? Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said. There was a sense of urgency in his tone. “Just move. Quickly now.”
Ed watched them go.
Billy went off to the office while Jeff broke off toward the education tents. When they were gone, Ed drifted up toward the pavilion, looking for anybody he had seen at the midnight meetings.
More and more people were massing into the pavilion area. At the same time, Barnes’s men were positioning the chemical containers along the edge of the crowd. People watched them hooking the fifty-five-gallon drums up to sprayers, but incredibly, to Ed’s mind at least, nobody seemed concerned. Nobody questioned them.
Ed entered the pavilion floor, pushed on by a wave of people. He spotted Julie Carnes up near the stage. Looking at her now, he couldn’t believe she was the same woman he’d flirted with back at Springfield. She’d seemed so like him then, angry at growing old and refusing to be cowed by it. He had gravitated to that spark in her. But now, as she waved her hands over her head in a ridiculous display of devotion to Jasper and sang along to a rocked-up version of “Shall We Gather at the River,” all he felt for her was a deep and abiding disgust.
On the stage, Jasper gripped the podium with both hands, staring grimly over the crowd. Barnes was at his side.
Off to the east, Ed heard the sound of the fence cracking. A few of the others heard it, too, and soon there were people pointing, shouting.
From behind them, down near Jasper’s quarters, came a few isolated gunshots.
The crowds turned anxious. People were panicking, trying to round up children, asking confused questions.
Onstage, Jasper raised his hands. Some people were still singing, but that stopped when Jasper motioned to them. The sudden silence caught people’s attention and heads turned toward the pavilion.
“People, people, people,” he said. “Listen to me now. You’ve got to hear me. You must come closer. We’ve been betrayed. So terribly betrayed. You all know how hard I’ve worked to make this the best life you could have. But in spite of everything I’ve done, and all the work we did together, some of the people here have told the military lies about us. And in doing that, they’ve made our lives impossible. We have to confront this now, people. There is no way to live with what has happened in the last twenty-four hours.”
A murmur rose from the crowd, but Jasper silenced them.
“We are all joined by what we tried to do here in the Grasslands. We belong to each other. But we’ve been betrayed. The wrath of the U.S. military’s war machine is on its way. It will swoop down upon us, people, but I have a plan. They will not murder us. The infected that even now are swarming inside our gates will not murder us. We will be own masters. Here, in a few minutes, we will take control.”
He stared at the silent crowd. Hardly anyone moved, even though the moaning of the infected could be heard on the main road now.
Jasper went on. “I don’t think this is what we wanted to happen to our children, but it is what must happen. We will not lie here like cowards and let the military kill us. The infected will not kill us. It’s just like I’ve been trying to tell you all this time. The outside world wants to stop what we’ve achieved here, which is happiness. It is good and peaceful. We will not let them take our lives from us. We are going to lay our lives down ourselves. We have been terribly betrayed people, but we are not beaten.”
Ed listened in horror as the people all around him erupted in applause. Here and there, people would shout out some asinine bit of praise for Jasper, and he would respond with a smiling “Thank you, thank you,” and a nod of his head. Did none of them see what Jasper had planned for them? Ed pivoted in a circle, watching the crowds, listening to their chants, and his mouth dropped open in stupefied shock. The madman was up there talking about mass suicide, and these people were ready to follow him.
Gunfire erupted from his left. The patrols there were shooting the infected as they reached the center of the village. Ed glanced behind him and saw more zombies coming up the hill from Jasper’s quarters. There was no one there to stop them.
Jasper pointed at the Family members around the perimeter of the gathering and motioned fo
r them to turn on their machines.
Across the crowd, Ed saw Sandra Tellez. He took off his cowboy hat and waved it over his head. It caught her eye and she waved back.
Ed pushed through the crowd to reach her.
Over the PA, Jasper said, “Be brave in the face of what’s about to happen, all of you. The world is a violent, terrible place filled with terrible people who will hurt us if we let them. Well, that’s what we’re putting a stop to today. We’re stopping the violence of the world. Even if this is the only day this works, then it’ll be worth it. This one act of defiance will be our legacy. So think about your children. Think about our seniors. Do you want them to suffer in that world? Do you want them to be raped and killed by the soldiers who have vowed to destroy them? Bring them forward, people. Bring them into the pavilion near the sprayers. This is not suicide we’re doing, people. This is a revolutionary act of defiance. Things’ll be better on the other side, people. You’ll see. Now bring them forward. That’s it, that’s it. There’s no pain. It’s just like falling asleep.”
Ed quickened his pace through the crowd. He could see people moving forward in a slow wave. People coughed and gagged as the sprayers hummed to life. A dirty white cloud spread through the crowd nearest the stage, and still the people moved forward, heads down, right into the jaws of death.
The sound of gunfire had stopped now, and over the low, resonant roll of the moaning zombies, Ed could hear children crying.
Jasper said, “They’re not crying because it hurts. They’re scared. Mothers, take your children. Hold them. Help them come forward. If you don’t, you’ll see soldiers landing out there in the fields. They’ll torture your babies.”
Ed couldn’t listen. He blocked out everything but the sight of Sandra Tellez working her way toward him through the crowd. She had Clint Siefer with her. Behind her, Ben Richardson was helping some of the others from the midnight meetings.
They met near the back of the pavilion. Sandra said, “Ed, we have to go now.”
One of the people behind Richardson said, “What about the military? Where are they? Jasper said—”
“I don’t know,” Ed said.
“Ed, what are we going to do?” Sandra asked.
He scanned the pavilion area. People were staggering away from the sprayers, some falling right into the arms of the infected. People were screaming and coughing, children were crying. Adults were wandering the clearing with tears running unabashedly down their faces, their mouths twisted into grimaces of fear and confusion. And the zombies were on them now, staggering through the spreading fog of chemical death.
“You and Richardson move everybody that way,” he said, pointing east toward the vehicle storage lot. “Those RVs are still over there. Try to get everybody you can on board.”
“But where are you gonna be?” Sandra asked.
“Bringing up the rear. Hurry it up, now.”
Sandra and Richardson led the group away from the pavilion. Ed was waving the others after them when he heard Jasper’s voice again.
“What’s that? What’s that, sister?”
Ed followed Jasper’s gaze, and he saw Robin Tharp standing in front of a group of about thirty children. Here and there, a few parents stood among the kids.
He saw Margaret O’Brien there, too, her grandchildren standing close by her side.
Robin said something that Ed couldn’t hear.
Jasper said, “No, no, that’s not right, Robin. It’s the people who go on living after this who are cursed. This world is wrong. Do you really think it’s fair they have to go on living in it?”
The crowd, those who were still able, applauded.
People were collapsing all around them. Ed saw people staggering drunkenly out of the pavilion, the gas still swirling around them as they fell into heaps on the ground, and in the fog it was impossible to tell who was the poisoned and who was the infected.
A man stood up on one of the tables and said, “This ain’t nothin’ to cry for. We should be cheering this on. For me,”—and he turned to Jasper—“for me, Jasper, you brought us all this ways and my vote is to go with you.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Jasper said. “Please, people, let’s get moving. Let’s do this. Breathe deeply everyone. This isn’t self destruction you’re breathing in. This is defiance.”
“But all these children,” Robin said, and this time her voice rang out loudly and clearly above the others. “There’s no reason they should have to die. What did they do wrong that they should have to die? They didn’t make this world.”
Jasper said, “Sister, they deserve a whole lot more than to die the way that’s coming. Maybe you can’t see what’s gonna happen here in a little while, but I can. Those babies deserve some peace. Let ’em have it. Don’t do this. Don’t create fear. Let them die with dignity. Everyone, stop the drama. Death is better than what life is gonna be like in the days ahead. Defy that and die with dignity.”
Jasper motioned for his patrols to move on Robin. One of the guards grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the pavilion. A little girl behind her grabbed her shirt and tried to pull Robin back. One of the guards grabbed the little girl and threw her to the ground. The girl screamed, and it was that scream that tapped something inside Ed.
With a wet handkerchief over his face, his eyes burning with chemical-induced tears, he ran into the gas.
Billy Kline started to choke with the first burn of chemicals in his lungs. All around him people were staggering away from the pavilion, falling on the ground, their muscles jerking in uncontrollable fits. Here and there, he recognized the infected by their soiled clothes and steered clear of them. His nose was running uncontrollably. His eyes burned, and he couldn’t stop blinking. Everything was blurry, and he needed to vomit.
He staggered forward, stepping over bodies as he made his way toward the office on the far side of the pavilion. The gas was spreading over the lawn. Billy made it to a clear spot, and his visibility opened up. He caught a glimpse of Kyra standing under the eaves of the radio room and he called out to her.
“Billy?” she said.
He was still too far away and she couldn’t get a fix on where he was. She kept saying his name, turning this way and that, looking helpless and confused.
He pulled his shirt over his burning nose and mouth and ran for her.
“Kyra,” he said as he reached her. “Oh, my God. I’ve been looking all over for you. Are you okay?”
“Billy—”
“We’re gonna get out of here,” he said. “Come on.”
“I didn’t know which way to go, Billy. I heard Jasper talking over the PA. Oh, God, tell me it’s not really happening.”
He put an arm around her and led her around the back side of the radio room.
But then he stopped.
“Billy?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
Colin Wyndham was blocking the path ahead of them. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and jeans. The skin on his arms and face was bright red from the intense cold, but he didn’t seem to notice it. He was holding a wooden baseball bat, his eyes wide open and staring with the dark malignancy of insanity.
“Colin, let us by.”
“You’re going back to the pavilion,” Colin said. “We’re all going back. We’re part of the Family.”
“That’s not gonna happen, Colin. Put the bat down, okay? You don’t have to do this.”
But Colin was as unreachable as the zombies swarming into the pavilion. Billy could see that, and when he ran at Billy, Billy was ready.
Colin swung wildly at Billy’s hip and Billy jumped backward, landing off balance and falling back against the side of the building.
Colin rushed him. He swung again, and this time there was no jumping out of the way. Instead, Billy stepped into the swing, catching Colin’s wrists and twisting his whole body around so that Colin went tumbling over his leg.
Colin snarled at him. The bat lay on the ground between them.
“Don�
��t,” Billy said. “Just let us—”
But the rest was lost as Colin ran for him. Before getting lessons from Ed Moore, Billy would have wrapped him up and wrestled him down to the ground, relying on his superior strength to come up on top. Now, he knew the key to winning a fight like this was to always stay on the offensive, never miss an opportunity to hit the other guy. When Colin ducked his head for the charge, Billy slammed his elbow down onto the bridge of Colin’s nose, the bone breaking with an audible crack.
Colin went down on his knees and groaned. He swayed, then fell over forward.
Billy watched him fall. Colin was down, but not out. He tried to get up but only managed to raise his bloodied face a few inches off the ground before falling back down into the thin layer of snow on the grass.
A zombie staggered around the corner of the building behind Colin, his ratty clothes still trailing a wisp of chemical fog.
Billy scooped up the bat, grabbed Kyra by the hand, and led her around the building just as the zombie fell on Colin. There was a short, muffled scream that was almost lost against the sound of so many others screaming and coughing and crying.
He guided her away, but she stopped him after a few hurried steps.
“What is it?” he asked. “Kyra, we gotta go.”
“Thank you,” she said. “God, I would have died.”
They were very close at that moment, their lips only inches apart. He could taste the wintergreen coolness of her breath. In a movie, he’d have kissed her then. But this was really happening, and he could taste the sting of chemicals on his lips and feel it gathering in his chest. The best he could manage to get out was a strangled “You’re welcome,” as he pulled away from the pavilion.
Jeff Stavers heard Robin’s voice above the crowd and ran to it. He saw her standing in front of a large group of children and a few adults, the only voice in the crowd to challenge Jasper’s insanity.
The patrols moved on her before Jeff could push his way through the crowd. He saw one of the guards grab her by the arm and pull her away while her children screamed. Jasper was still talking over the PA, trying to get everyone to calm down and just get on with it. Jeff ran at a dead sprint for Robin and threw his shoulder into the guard who was pulling her toward the pavilion.