by David Kazzie
“That was insensitive of me,” he said. “I apologize.”
She looked back over the crowd, many of them armed now with their own tumblers of liquid courage.
“Well, I suppose it’s time to address the troops.”
He polished off his scotch and wiped his lips with his fingers. Before he got up, he reached under the table, just over her lap, and for a moment, her breath caught, as she feared that he might simply cop a feel right here in front of everyone, let her know that she was simply his property, that he could do with her as he pleased, whenever he goddamn well felt like it. She vowed that if he touched her she would plunge the butter knife lying next to her plate into some vital organ, an eye, his neck, whatever, the consequences of it all be damned. At least she would die knowing she’d gone down fighting.
She tensed as his hand rooted around under the table. It could only have been a few seconds, but the moment stretched out interminably as she waited for his cold, sweaty hand on her thigh or worse.
But again, he didn’t touch her. He fiddled with something under the table, directly underneath her plate, before stepping over to the podium. She let out a quick sigh, her heart galloping, slamming against her rib cage as he approached the podium, her body icy with sweat. She trembled, and her breath came in shallow, ragged gasps.
She wondered what was under the table.
He tapped the microphone and immediately, the buzz of conversation died away. At a table near the front, Rachel could hear the crackle of ice cubes in a tumbler, sweaty as though with anticipation. A light clearing of the throat from somewhere in the back.
“Good evening, my fellow citizens,” Chadwick said.
A long pause, long enough that the partygoers began exchanging glances. The moment drifted past oddity and into awkwardness, until even Rachel found herself shifting in her seat.
“What a year it has been,” he said.
Chadwick began to clap, slowly, methodically, the pop of his hands echoing through the dining room like a metronome. A few moments later, the others on the dais joined in, and the applause spread across the room like the virus that had brought them all to this point in their lives. It was robust yet reserved. The way you might clap when hearing the name of the colostomy bag salesman of the year. Applause wearing its Sunday best.
He began to speak, issuing a series of platitudes. As he spoke, her curiosity got the better of her, and her hands drifted under the table. Her fingers danced along the grain of the cheap particle wood until she felt it. A bulky plastic bag, taped to the underside of the table. Whatever was inside the bag was irregularly shaped, about the size of a football. It was hard, smooth in the middle, with two protrusions on either side. She was careful not to dislodge it or make any sudden movements as Chadwick spoke.
She glanced up at him as he plowed through his speech, but he either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care about her exploratory mission. Her hands returned to her lap, but her thoughts remained fixated on the mysterious object under the table. She glanced to her left, toward the four other men on her side of the table. They, too, either hadn’t noticed what she was doing or were uninterested in her reconnaissance. She wondered if there were plastic bags taped under their place settings as well.
Chadwick kept speaking, and she re-focused her attention on his speech, the way she might have watched the President deliver the State of the Union address in the old days. Paying attention at first, ooh, a bag of microwave popcorn sounds good, think I’ll check my e-mail, and then coming back to the speech, and it sounding more or less the same than when she had tuned out.
“Now then,” Chadwick was saying, “perhaps the blame lies with me.”
A low murmur from the crowd now.
“Perhaps I didn’t do this the right way.”
He paused, and she stole a glance at him. A tear had broken loose from the corner of his eye, and he wiped it away with a finger before it had a chance to stream down his cheek. Rachel was on full alert now, the pit in her stomach growing deeper as the seconds ticked by.
“And that’s why tonight, we begin anew.”
He lifted a hand to his forehead and delivered a bizarre half-salute.
Then everything began to happen very fast.
Rachel detected movement from the corner of her eye. Four of the guests had gotten up from their seats, each streaming to a different corner of the room, where decorative pieces had been set up, topped with some kind of ornate covering. In one fluid, almost choreographed maneuver, the men yanked the covers clear like magicians and reached around to the back of the pieces.
Then Rachel realized what the item taped under her table was.
“Rachel!” Chadwick barked. “Under the table. Put it on right now!”
The room filled with a loud hissing noise, as though someone had dropped in a crateful of snakes, and when she blinked again, each of the men was wearing a gas mask. Her hands dove under the table, and she wrenched the bag free. The room erupted into screams as people realized what was happening.
Ohshit, ohshit, ohshit!
She fumbled with the mask as the hissing continued. She fitted the straps around the back of her head and tugged the faceplate down around her nose and mouth. She reminded herself to breathe normally, that the filter was taking care of whatever poison that Chadwick had just unleashed on his people.
Once it was on, she froze, unsure of what to do. She glanced over at Chadwick, now sporting his own mask, his hands clenched tight on the sides of the podium. The lower half of his face was a cipher, virtually blank. No smile, no frown. She briefly considered attacking him with the knife, but she dismissed the idea, as she couldn’t risk the mask being knocked from her face. So she simply watched the scene before her unfold. To her right, the others on the dais also were wearing masks, a police lineup of futuristic-looking bugs sitting calmly at their seats as the scene unfolded before them. They sat there, watching.
A cloud of gas filled the room as the terrified guests leapt from their seats. Plates slid off tables, shattering on the floor with symphonic crashes. A group at the back sprinted for the back door, which was locked. A man desperately rattled the door handles, and for a moment, it looked like his adrenaline might give him the edge he needed to rip it open. But then the mob was upon him, dozens of people attacking the door. Too many chefs in the kitchen. Just a mass of weight against a door that opened toward them rather than away.
Rachel’s eyes swung toward one of the corners, where a canister continued unloading its poisonous cargo. Half a dozen people lay writhing on the floor, overcome by the gas, their hands clawing at their necks and faces. One of them, a woman that Rachel recognized, had a smart idea to try and deactivate the canister, but she’d come up short and she lay still at its base, her hand slapping gently at the metal.
Back at the door, screams and yelps of pain and panic amid the mass of writhing, desperate bodies, as the gas continued to do its work. Some gave up and staggered back toward the center of the room, trying something, anything to escape. One covered his face with a cloth napkin, but it only bought him a few moments, nothing more. Gripped by a terrible coughing fit, he dropped first to a knee, then to both knees, and then lay down and curled up into a fetal position.
A gunshot rang out, its roar inside the room deafening. Rachel dove to the floor as a squeal of pain erupted near her.
“Shoot them! Shoot them!” she heard someone call out.
She stayed low on the ground, between the podium and the dais, which gave her a tiny sliver of a view toward the mob at the door. One of the doomed guests had come to the party armed, and was doing his level best to take revenge on his would-be executioners. He was down on a knee, firing blindly, his face buried in the crook of his arm.
“Kill them all!” another voice screeched. Sounded like Chadwick, his voice coated with panic.
The air filled with the staccato whisper of machine-gun fire. Two men who’d been stationed at the corners drew toward the pulsing mass of humanity and rak
ed the mob with their machine pistols. The screams ramped up in intensity as the shooters continued the slaughter, cutting down every last person trying to escape.
Rachel shut her eyes tight and tried to block out the screams of the dying; it was like watching the plague’s march through humanity concentrated into a few seconds. Eventually, the guns fell silent, and her sobs were the only sound in the room.
“Stand up,” Chadwick said.
She was on her hands and knees, her face toward the ground. She couldn’t bear to look at him.
“Fuck you,” she croaked.
He kicked her in her side, not hard enough to do damage, but sharply enough to sting, and she dissolved back into the floor. After taking a moment to catch her breath, she climbed to her feet, afraid his next reaction would be to strip the mask from her face.
“You’re going to treat me with some goddamn respect,” Chadwick hissed at her. “Or I’ll make you suffer like you’ve never known.”
Her shoulders sagged. She felt broken, finally, as though Chadwick had reached inside her and snapped her will to fight clean in half. If he was willing to do this to his own people, his own kind, what did he have in store for her? For the others? And, of course, his inattention toward her in the past few days now made perfect sense.
She felt the presence of the other survivors around her. A hand at her back, and she fell in line with the others as they made their way off the dais. She kept her eyes down, in no rush to view the carnage before her. She heard a moan to her left, which was greeted by a quick burst of gunfire that silenced it forever.
She stood by Chadwick’s side as his soldiers cleared the doorway of the bodies. It was as bad as anything she’d seen during the plague. The heavy-caliber bullets had done so much damage that it was difficult to tell where one body ended and another began. They worked silently and quickly, some of them slipping in the pools of blood, then getting right back up and dragging the victims out of their way. By the time they were done, they were shiny with it, their clothes sticky and glistening.
They lined up in front of their leader like a group of butcher’s apprentices.
“Let’s go,” he said. “It’s time for phase two.”
49
Adam Fisher spied on the building from a distance, trying to wrap his head around the formally dressed partiers arriving for what, unbeknownst to him and them, would be their very last meal, their very last anything. He’d been inside the walls for more than twenty-four hours now. He’d spent most of the evening slinking in between and around the buildings like fog, concluding that he was going to have to start taking bigger chances if he wanted to get anywhere. Otherwise, he ran the risk of running out of supplies, out of water, or just stumbling into a patrol and getting himself captured or killed before he accomplished anything. At dark, he’d made his move toward the developed sections of the compound.
No pain, no gain, as his father had used to say. His father had had a lot of sayings, most of them angry bullshit, but that one Adam had agreed with.
No pain. No gain.
He was in the east-central section of the compound again, near the security fencing ringing the array of generators that powered the Citadel. It was dark, the night gripping him tight with its chill as the snow continued to fall. He had deduced that there weren’t that many people who lived here. Oh, he was vastly outnumbered, of course; of that he had no doubt. But based on the ambient noise, the number of patrols, the general aura of the place, he thought the population numbered in the dozens, a couple of hundred at the most.
He wasn’t sure if this helped him or not. The larger the population, the better the odds would have been that he could simply blend in with the citizenry at large. But the smaller population made it more likely he’d be identified as an intruder.
As evening had leached the last weak light from the sky, he’d spotted a man and woman approaching his position behind an empty storage shed that he’d found the night before. They walked casually. The man wore a tuxedo, the woman a long blue dress.
He prepared to follow them, but just as they passed his hiding spot, he’d noticed a slightly larger group approaching from the same direction. They, too, were dressed to the nines, and Adam felt his heart begin to race. He didn’t know why he was getting excited; just the idea that he might be witnessing something important unfolding was fuel enough for his flagging engine of hope.
Over the course of the next quarter hour, he counted no less than fifty people, all migrating west toward the center of the complex. When the coast had finally cleared, he fell in behind them, marking their progress as he slipped down alleyways and through clusters of trees. About a quarter mile west, the smaller groups began clumping together into a larger mass in front of a low-slung building near the intersection with the road that cut through the middle of the complex. They filed inside, their chatter growing in intensity as it did when crowds began to gather, and a thought took hold in his mind. He checked his watch again, looking at the date rather than the time.
31 DEC
New Year’s Eve.
A New Year’s Eve party.
A wave of rage swept through him. Killers and kidnappers and God knew what else, and they were going to put on their Sunday best and dance the night away. The last five months had been a post-apocalyptic wet dream for these psychopaths, their dark fantasies fulfilled beyond anything they could have hoped for.
He kept his eyes peeled, but he didn’t expect to see his companions. He tried not to let them dominate his thoughts, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Rachel and Sarah had met. What would they think of each other? How would Rachel react to the news that he was still alive, that he had used Sarah and Charlotte as bait? Did they regret coming on this mission? Had it seemed a much better idea in theory, from the safety of their camp?
Adam had a nice line of sight toward the main door. He didn’t know what he would learn by maintaining this stakeout, but at least he’d gotten a sense of their overall numbers. Maybe he’d wait until they were all good and sloshed, walk in and party along with them.
Maybe they’d just tell him where the women were being held!
This wishful thinking buoyed him as he bobbed slowly along the river of time, every second and minute stretching out into an eternity. It was cold, perhaps the coldest night he’d experienced yet this season, and as he huddled between the drum and the exterior wall, the chill burrowed into his bones until he couldn’t feel anything, pushing his outerwear to their limits. A cold wind was blowing in from the west, and the snow continued to pile up. Another night of precipitation, and he’d probably die of exposure.
A few minutes past seven, the howl of the wind spiked in intensity, but, oddly, it wasn’t blowing any harder. He primed his ears, cupping his hands around them. It wasn’t wind. The howls were coming from inside the building. Screams.
Terror gripped him like a vise, the fear of not knowing what the hell was going on. Perhaps they’d brought in the captives from another entrance and were executing them as part of the festivities. What if Rachel was in there, dying right now?
Then gunfire. Multiple shots, one after the other. That was followed by the steady chatter of automatic weapon fire. It was over before Adam could crack the shell of terror that had hardened around him. The screams died away, as though someone had pulled the plug on the speakers during a horror movie, and Adam was left with the ghostly echoes of the howls.
He was afraid.
He was afraid of whatever had happened inside that building, he was afraid of what had happened to the world, of what the world would become. He was afraid that the world had already become a dead place inhabited by dead souls. People immune to the virus but susceptible to the horrors man was capable of without the watchful eye of civilization. The thing that had inoculated mankind from the evil inherent in itself.
That’s what civilization was, really.
Mankind’s immune system, creating antibodies that protected the people. Law. Order. Community. The th
ing that let kids grow up and play with trucks and dolls and have first dates and go to movies and become interior designers or bus drivers or surgeons or soccer players. The thing that let them devote their leisure time not to primitive survival but to strengthening the body and the mind. And now that membrane of protection was gone, erased, ironically enough, by a plague, leaving the patient sick and vulnerable.
Few subjects had fascinated Adam in his life more than the human immune system. The idea that the human body could adapt, on its own or with the assistance of vaccinations, to virtually any pathogen had been nothing short of revelatory, a single point of focus that had hustled him along a path toward a life in medicine. What really took his breath away, the thing that made his mind spin like a top, was that the body protected itself against microscopic invaders with a version of the invader itself. Much like civilization. Controlled chaos, in an organized world where there were rules and freedoms alike, where people were even free to kill one another as long as they were willing to pay the price, kept the civilization healthy. That’s what immunity was, really. Controlled chaos. And when you had a Hitler or Osama bin Laden, the immune system kicked in, strafing the malignancy until it was destroyed.
That’s what these doomsday nuts didn’t understand. They probably envisioned some perfect society that they controlled, where thoughts and actions were homogenous. But it didn’t work that way. To stay healthy, the human body required exposure to a variety of pathogens, both naturally and via vaccination. Civilization needed the same. You’d always have your sexual predators and suicide bombers. It kept civilization strong, on its toes.
But without civilization, you had children slaughtered with impunity and Freddie Briggs destroying an entire future with no way to undo it. And he was afraid that it would continue this way, that they’d all toddle along until there was no way back. And these last few months, struggling to survive, his desperate search for Rachel, would be nothing more than epilogue. That’s why he couldn’t fail here. He had to find Rachel and whomever else was here. As stupid as it sounded, the good guys had to win.