The Immune: Omnibus Edition

by David Kazzie

  44

  For sixteen days, Adam and Mike trailed the women like loyal shadows, trusting the GPS signal to keep tabs on Sarah and Charlotte when they drifted beyond the reach of the field glasses. The women quickly established a routine, traveling from about nine in the morning, making camp an hour before dark, giving them just enough time to set up camp before the sun dipped below the horizon. They made large, smoky fires and played loud music from an old battery-operated boombox. Adam and Mike mirrored them, traveling when they traveled, breaking when they broke.

  It was maddening for Adam to be able to see Sarah from a distance but unable to talk to her. He missed her desperately, and being able to lay eyes on her made things worse. It was as if she were already dead, and he was just watching a recording of an event gone by.

  Their search field grew with each passing day, pulling them farther and farther away from the ranch he doubted he would ever see again. He missed the people there, and he hoped he’d get a chance to make up his absence to them. It was lonely out here, empty. The land was flat and desolate, miles of grassland stretching away in all directions, broken up here and there by the black asphalt veins criss-crossing the plains. It was like standing on a different world. They saw elk and antelope loping across the landscape. Flocks of birds darkened the skies. Deer were abundant, but they couldn’t risk building a fire, and so a potential venison feast remained just that – potential.

  The one thing they did not see was other people. It had only been four months since the fall of man, and already it felt like the natural world was wresting control back after humanity’s reign had ended. It wasn’t dramatic, no palace coup, more of a subtle shift that they noticed as they continued their daily patrols. On this, their seventeenth day on the road, they passed through a border town in northern Kansas called Mahaska, where kudzu had wasted little time in launching a full offensive. The vines had invaded the small Main Street corridor and were stretching their green tendrils into every doorway and window. The sign at the town limits, reading Mahaska, Population 83, was sporting a very serious kudzu infection, the long, loose vine already curling up the signposts.

  “Holy Jesus,” Mike said, under his breath. They’d paused in front of a general store, the one with a stoop and rocking chair out front, carpeted with the green plant.

  “We come back through here a year from now,” Adam said, “this town’ll be gone.”

  “Kind of makes you wonder what kind of future we’ve all got.”

  “Makes me realize we can’t fail,” Adam replied. “These people that are holding Rachel, I doubt they have anybody’s interest but their own in mind. If we’re to have any chance, we need to start rebuilding things sooner than later. Us. The right way. Or these monsters will do it for us. The rest of us will just vanish into the shrubbery.”

  “I hear you.”

  They resumed their trek through town, stopping in the general store for supplies. As Mike wandered the aisles, Adam found himself transfixed by the sight of mushrooms sprouting from the popcorn ceiling. Dark and humid in here for months, and why wouldn’t there be mushrooms growing here?

  Adam found himself glancing over his shoulder as they put Mahaska behind them, as though the kudzu might reach out and grab them, pull them down into its tangled network of vines. Adam’s shirt was damp with sweat and his head hurt. Neither spoke much, focusing instead all their energies on the trek. By late afternoon, they were twenty-five miles east of Mahaska.

  The women stopped for the day a little after five-thirty, right near the Kansas-Nebraska border. Adam and Mike dropped their packs and lay on the ground, too wrung out from the day’s travels to do much else. In the distance, the whine of a motorcycle engine revved, but it was impossible to tell how far away it was in a world absent noise pollution.

  After a quick meal of cold beans, Adam took the first shift on watch while Mike slept. It was a cloudy night, and the coldest they’d had on the road. The wind blew in from the west, cutting through them. Flurries danced in the sky. Adam watched Charlotte and Sarah with his binoculars, huddled around their fire, wishing he were there with Sarah, holding her.

  The girls’ campfire dwindled as the hour grew late, and Adam switched to the night-vision goggles. At two a.m., he tried rousing Mike for his shift, but the man was dead to the world. Adam decided to let him be, even as his own eyelids sagged with fatigue. Desperate times called for desperate measures, he thought. He checked his bag for a little pick-me-up and settled on a handful of coffee beans from their stash.

  As he chewed the beans, a few at a time, he paced the edge of their tiny little camp, the image of the women’s tent appearing in sharp relief in his goggles. An hour went by, then two. A light rain began to fall. He felt himself falling asleep on his feet, the fatigue pulling him down like concrete blocks chained to a river-bound Mafia snitch. Each blink of the eyes became a short nap.

  Then he saw it.

  A flicker of movement in the corner of his goggles, just at the edge of the periphery. At first, he thought it was a wolf or fox, but then the blur took shape. Four figures, approaching the camp, each carrying a weapon. His eyes bounced back to the camp, which remained still. His heart was pushing on his throat now, he could feel it almost sealing off his airways. In the planning stages of this mission, he had understood the fact that these women would be risking their lives for him, for Rachel, for all the women they had never met. But seeing it in action was an entirely different matter. A single misstep, by any of them, could mean the end.

  He violently shook Mike awake. Of course it would happen tonight, he thought to himself. Freezing rain, the worst possible conditions. Of course it would. Mike seemed to sense the urgency in Adam’s touch, and he was awake within seconds.

  “It’s happening,” he hissed.

  As they tended to do, things began happening quickly. Mike checked the GPS receiver, which was receiving Sarah’s signal beautifully, while Adam broke down their little camp. Meanwhile, the intruders surrounded the women and hustled them to their feet. The group was on the move less than a minute after the attackers first appeared. Mike and Adam could only hope the assailants had been so focused on their prey that they hadn’t been spotted, and they waited until the group’s backs were to them before beginning their pursuit.

  “The GPS, it’s working fine,” Mike said. “I’ve got’em.”

  As they edged away from the camp, the rain changed to sleet and picked up in intensity, showering the frozen grass with a creepy, rattling sound. The conditions were awful, but, Adam realized, in their favor. The bad weather helped mask their presence, and besides, Adam was betting these silent kidnappers had no more desire to be out in the elements than anyone else did. They’d be focused on getting their prey back to home base, not worrying about some one-in-a-million-chance plan unfolding behind them.

  After a few minutes of cycling, Adam saw two vehicles looming in the distance, parked on the shoulder, maybe a quarter mile away. It was almost time. He held up a clenched fist, signaling Mike to stop. There was no need to draw any closer and risk being spotted. As they crouched down, among the tall grasses, Adam watched the group board the vehicles, Charlotte in the second vehicle, Sarah in the lead. It looked like their wrists were bound.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What have I done?”

  His dark vision had come alive. His reckless, stupid, suicidal, homicidal, and insane plan was underway. The two sport utility vehicles roared to life, the sound of the engines echoing in the still night air, and Adam wondered how he could’ve missed their approach. With their lights twinkling in the endless darkness that stretched around them, the vehicles looked like interstellar cruisers in the cold vastness of deep space. A moment later, the trucks shoved off into the frigid night. Above them, a sickly orange sky spit down sleet on them.

  #

  They ran as hard as they could. Sarah and the others had long disappeared into the night, swallowed by the darkness like it was some ancient, mystical creature feeding
on unsuspecting innocents. They could only hope that the kidnappers wouldn’t find the transmitter before Adam and Mike found the compound. They followed the GPS signal as the crow flew, across the plains, through farmland, through barren tree lines.

  Eventually, they tired out, and the pair took a break on a long stretch of road fronting two adjoining horse ranches. Around them, the crackle of sleet filled the dead night with sound, as though the storm was alive.

  “You all right?” Adam asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  Adam handed him a bottle of Gatorade.

  “One good thing about this shitty weather?” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “At least it’s cold,” he said. “Warm Gatorade tastes like piss.”

  Adam laughed and brushed icy pellets from his clothes.

  “Goddamn right about that. You ready to push off?”

  “Let me check their position.”

  He tucked the bottle under his elbow and studied the receiver’s small display screen.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?” Adam asked, a chill running through him. “What?”

  “They’ve stopped. About sixteen miles northeast of here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” Mike replied. “Well, I’m positive the transmitter has stopped moving.”

  “It’s possible that they found it and threw it out of the car. Or worse.”

  Their eyes met for a moment, but Mike couldn’t hold Adam’s gaze.

  “Yes, that’s possible,” he said.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Wait,” Mike said. “They’re moving again, but much more slowly. Now they’ve stopped again.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They pushed off again. It was still bitterly cold, and the thin sheen of ice coating the land crunched under their tires. As they moved north, Adam’s mind wandered. Who were these people they were following? Survivalists? Doomsday fanatics whose wet dreams of a world blasted by cataclysm had come true? One of those places featured on that stupid Doomsday Preppers show? Adam tried to picture it in his mind. These people live here for God knows how long before their dark dream comes to life. They pull up the drawbridge, isolate themselves as they watch their horrific fantasy play out on television. Did they enjoy it? Did they take satisfaction in knowing they’d been right all along, especially since the world had mocked them for their bizarre obsession?

  How had they survived?

  They’re cut off from the rest of the world, able to avoid exposure to the virus. As devastating as Medusa had been, you couldn’t catch it unless you were exposed to it, right? It was still a virus, subject to the same laws of virology as all the others. When it ran out of hosts, that would have been that. Right?

  But baby Stephen had died, and he hadn’t been exposed to the virus at all. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had been exposed, just like his mother had been, during the epidemic. And perhaps he had inherited some resistance from her, but not enough. Because even a mild case of Medusa was like a bullet to the head. Plus, there was always the possibility that Medusa had mutated into a less severe illness, doing whatever it could to stay alive (to the extent a virus was, in fact, alive), after exterminating its hosts. He then had the terrifying thought, zooming through his mind, that Medusa could mutate into a deadlier strain, one to which he and the others weren’t immune. He wished there had been some way to know what, in fact, had killed Stephen.

  But back to these survivalists. They wait until it’s all over, and then what? They chance sending someone out into the world, risk them getting infected without knowing if the virus was still percolating? Maybe desperation had driven them beyond the safety of the wall. Maybe their food supply had failed. Maybe they were experiencing their own little custom-made apocalypse.

  As they trudged northward, picking their way across the ice-crusted plains, Adam began noticing a dark outline in the distance. At first, he thought he was just imagining it, but it loomed ever larger and sharper against the horizon, tinted green by his night-vision goggles. It was dark, monolithic, devoid of the visual spectacle they’d encountered upon first spotting Evergreen. He and Mike exchanged a glance. It was exactly as Nadia had described it. A walled compound, a fortress, a citadel smack in the middle of nowhere.

  He took stock of their location, there in the middle of the Nebraska plains, not far from the town of Beatrice. A light snow was falling now, which wasn’t great, but better than sleet. There was a highway off to the east, identified by the outline of the utility poles lining the shoulder like sentries. The land was flat, endless, but the grasses here were tall, which might give them some cover as they approached whatever lay ahead. They hunkered down in a relative dead zone, a place that didn’t seem likely to draw any interest from anyone.

  Adam told Mike to catch a little shuteye while he kept the watch. Adam was too amped to worry about nodding off. As dawn approached, the compound began to come into focus, like a vision, a dream finally coming true. Was he really here? Was Rachel in there?

  Take it easy, cowboy. Take it easy. You didn’t come this far to just bust through the doors and get yourself killed like a sci-fi movie redshirt.

  Dawn began breaking in the east, spreading its light across the land, enveloping their position and then continuing west toward the compound, which had held its dark, monolithic nature as it came into full view. It was still a ways off, probably two miles distant. A long wall, roughly eight feet in height, ran the length of the compound’s perimeter. There was a heavy gate at its east entrance. From their slightly elevated position, he could make out beyond the wall a number of buildings scattered about the interior.

  “Holy shit, this place is enormous,” Mike exclaimed.

  Adam was chewing the nail of his left thumb as he watched the place come into full view. Mike was right. It was huge. The perimeter fence ran at least a quarter mile in either direction before cutting at a right angle and running south, away from their position.

  His heart beat faster with each passing moment.

  They had arrived.

  45

  Only when his fingers scraped the oily bottom did Miles Chadwick realize that he had eaten the entire bag of barbecue potato chips. They were his weakness, the comfort food he turned to in times of stress. He extracted his fingers and licked them one at a time, savoring the salty tang of the faux barbecue, not afraid to admit, to himself at least, that he wanted another bag.

  There were no other bags for now, and so he stood at his large bay window, looking west toward the fields. They were bare now, stripped. Depending on how you looked at them, you might say they were a dead place. Or you might say they were unspoiled, ready for the coming growing season. It was late December now, and they were living on the fruits of their summer labor, literally, the storehouse stocked floor to ceiling with food. Winter had finally come to these plains; a light snow had begun to fall on this, the third-to-last day of this momentous year.

  Erin Thompson was twenty-one weeks along now. Last week’s ultrasound had confirmed that she was carrying a boy, which delighted Chadwick to no end. The baby was his, of course, as the Citadel’s first baby should be. A girl would have been fine, he supposed, but it seemed right, it seemed just, that the Citadel’s first baby would be a boy.

  Maybe they’d name him Adam.

  Things were coming full circle now.

  Fatherhood. Chadwick should have been a father in another life, decades and worlds before. But that had been taken away from him in an instant, in a moment that had become the keystone for the balance of Miles Chadwick’s life. He thought back to that terrible day, that terrible phone call at work that changed everything.

  This unborn son deserved a world like the one awaiting him. A carefully ordered and controlled world, where life and death wouldn’t be subject to the whims of chance, subject to the evil that had stolen his family from him. Impossible, some might say. But did not the world
that now lay before them speak as a testament to what man could do, what man could control? Miles Chadwick had directed the fate of the human race! He had not merely changed history, he had ended it! And now he could bring a child into a world where the strongest survived, where the gene pool wasn’t diluted by those who’d depended on modern convenience to stay alive, suckling at the teat of society and never offering anything in return.

  Sure, there would be complications. Like the one he now faced. But he could control it. He could control all these things now.

  Outside, the snow had changed back over to sleet, and he found himself enjoying the reassuring tinkle of frozen rain against the windows. He loved nighttime storms; they comforted him, providing another buffer from the outside. It helped him forget that there was anyone else in the world.

  He thought back to the night he’d signed onto the project. What if he’d said no? Gruber probably would have had him killed. No, not probably. He’d be dead. Perhaps there were other worlds, other universes in which Miles Chadwick had heard Gruber’s pitch under clear skies and recoiled in horror and run screaming from the compound.

  But he hadn’t said no.

  Because the world was ready to go.

  That’s what it all came down to.

  The world had been sick, not just sick, but terminally ill, and Chadwick had done it a favor. You had your racists and your religious extremists and your corporate greed, and your never-ending war, a battle for money and power dressed up as a fight for democracy. You had overfished oceans and climate change that you ignored even though the facts, the goddamn facts had been there in front of your fat, pre-diabetic faces. You had a population no more enlightened about science than their ancestors had been two centuries earlier; somehow, the more scientists had discovered about the natural world, the less inclined the world had been to believe them. You had more than a billion people who didn’t even have access to clean water.

  And you had your family-slaying drug addicts.