Bane

by Amelia C. Gormley

  “Jesus. Never get enough of you.”

  Rhys smiled against his forearm, reveling in the openness Darius shared with him and no one else, not even his closest friends in Delta Company. Two years ago he’d been a terrified virgin forced to do things he didn’t think he should want in order to save his own life. And Darius had been the gruff soldier who Rhys didn’t think had a sympathetic or tender bone in his body. Along the way, though, grim necessity had become passion and then something even better. Darius hadn’t just kept Rhys alive. He’d taught Rhys how to live.

  A familiar knot tightened in his chest, comprised of words Rhys couldn’t untangle to thank Darius for giving him that. To let Darius know that, however they started and for whatever minuscule amount of time they might have together, he appreciated what they had now. The sentiments tangled around themselves, threatening to choke him until he gave up the idea of trying to give them voice.

  Slowly, Rhys became aware of the prickly itch of dust clinging to his sweat-damp skin and tried to straighten, forcing Darius back.

  “I need a bath,” he announced, gathering his clothes and debating whether or not to try to get dressed.

  Darius smirked and tucked himself away, fastening his fatigues. “Do you now? Seem to recall crossing over a stream a mile or so up the road, if you don’t mind walking.”

  “I don’t mind.” The distance decided the matter of whether to dress or not. No way was he walking a mile barefoot. Reluctantly, he pulled on his pants, socks, and boots, though he decided to forgo the shirt. “I like this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Being able to venture out whenever we want to. Go for a swim after dark.”

  “I do too.” Darius caught him by the arm and tugged him close for a long, slow kiss that had Rhys ready for another round. “Did I mention that the place where we’ll make camp outside the Clean Zone is right on a lake?”

  “Sounds perfect.” Rhys pulled away and paused by the door to the lobby, waiting for Darius to shoulder his assault rifle. Even now, he wouldn’t go anywhere without it. The region might have been patrolled for revenants, but bears, wolves, and mountain lions might still be an issue.

  On their way out, they passed Schuyler, who was standing first watch in the lobby of the hotel. Rhys averted his eyes, unwilling to meet her scornful look. She hadn’t forgiven him for his role in the events that had led to her lover Kaleo’s death. For that matter, Rhys hadn’t forgiven himself. He ignored the bitter ache of disappointment that always accompanied his awareness of Schuyler’s hatred. One of the last things Kaleo had ever said to him was that Schuyler would love Rhys once they had a chance to get to know each other. But that had been before Jacob’s vendetta against Rhys had led to him blowing Kaleo’s head off. It would never have happened if Rhys had been honest from the start about how far Jacob was willing to go to indulge his malice.

  Now Rhys just tried to stay out of her way.

  Normally, it wasn’t difficult since she was usually out on patrol. They had only ever bumped into each other when he was provisioning her squad for another sweep. It was his bad luck that the squadron Schuyler commanded had been tapped to deliver this batch of uninfected survivors to the Clean Zone. He hadn’t had a choice but to travel with her. The only thing that made it bearable was that he wasn’t actually under her command. Darius had refused to let Rhys go to Colorado Springs alone, so his own squadron had split in two. Some had stayed to help with the transition to Lewis-McChord and the rest had gone with Darius and Rhys, accompanying Schuyler’s squadron on the escort detail.

  Xolani had been one of those to come along, at her own insistence. And where Xolani went, so did Titus. Joe still considered himself Rhys’s bodyguard when away from base, which meant he and Toby had come as well.

  In the parking lot of the hotel, they crossed the path of the other member of Schuyler’s squad standing first watch. Emilina Cruzado waved and grinned, jogging over to greet them.

  Rhys gave her a smile. “Hey, Emmy.” Of the three civilians Jacob had abducted, she had been the only one to survive. A full-fledged Jug now—and with none of the odd effects that had turned Jacob from a tyrant into a monster—Rhys was fond of her, and he often wished she had been assigned to Darius’s squadron to replace Kaleo, but Schuyler had insisted Emmy join her squad instead.

  “Ay ay ay! When’d you get those muscles, papi?” she demanded, giving Rhys’s naked chest a friendly leer and laughing when he blushed. He’d bulked up somewhat from working in the warehouses, though he didn’t think anyone but Darius had noticed. Except, perhaps, Xolani, who was as smug about it as if she’d raised Rhys up from a runt by tirelessly hand-feeding him.

  Darius’s arm came around Rhys’s waist and pulled him a little closer, making Emmy laugh harder. For all that he teased Rhys with the possibility of sharing him around—it turned them both on to think he had the right to exert his claim on Rhys to that extent—it was all talk. Darius’s possessive streak was well-known. It had grown intractable once Rhys had no longer required multiple partners to try to pass on the sexually transmitted Alpha strain that they had thought would save his life, and it didn’t appear to have a sense of humor where even the most harmless flirtation was concerned. Which made it ridiculously easy for members of Delta Company to get a rise from Darius.

  “We’re going swimming,” Rhys called over his shoulder as Darius propelled him toward the road.

  “Have fun!” Emmy gave him a knowing wink and waved, then continued her patrol.

  It was gearing up to be another sweltering summer. The thaw had come early to the mountains, leaving the stream swollen and just barely slow enough to bathe in. The evening air was muggy, but the water was frigid, and if not for the dust clinging to his skin, Rhys wouldn’t have dared it.

  But Darius’s body was hot against his in the water, his hands deliberate as he helped rub away the sweat and grime. When they finally mounted the bank again, he was shivering, but Darius surrounded him, squeezing warmth back into his flesh.

  “Hey,” Rhys murmured, turning his head to kiss Darius’s jaw. “Is that shadow over there a willow tree?”

  A soft chuff of laughter brushed his damp shoulder. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Then why wait until tomorrow?” Rhys turned more fully for a thorough kiss, his hands sliding down Darius’s broad back to cup his ass. Darius groaned and set him back.

  “Go get a switch.”

  Rhys’s first assessment of Colorado Springs was that it looked more like a demilitarized zone than a clean zone. Miles of trenches had been dug around the suburb that was being resettled, but the rest was desolate and empty. That shouldn’t have been unusual after all the ghost towns he’d seen while traveling with Delta Company, but he’d never before seen what appeared to be an old battlefield. A couple of areas they walked past had been damaged during the skirmishes that had taken place when the Jugs and the surviving civilian population had overthrown the military government.

  They paused for a moment within sight of a cluster of apartment buildings that had been demolished. The rusted-out remnants of several tanks stood nearby. Rhys watched the people he’d lived among for two years bow their heads and pay their respects to the comrades they’d lost in that long-ago battle, and then they’d turned away and continued on.

  The path Darius’s and Schuyler’s people took through the rubble also led them past the burned-out skeletons of some old employee-housing tenements. The sight of them made Rhys shudder. Within those massive complexes lay thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of corpses. People who had been denied the opportunity to quarantine themselves and had wound up wasting away inside their own bodies from the Beta strain, or waiting to starve to death or be cannibalized by revenants.

  Sometimes it seemed that the whole world was haunted, but if there were any places that were truly, actually inhabited by restless and vengeful spirits, it would be the tenements.

  “Creepy, aren’t they?” Xolani asked, startling Rhys. He’d bee
n so absorbed in staring at the charred remains of the buildings that he hadn’t heard her approach.

  He nodded. “Looks like they had a fire when they were sealed off by the National Guard.”

  “Not quite,” she said. He glanced sideways to see Xolani’s lips tighten, the scar down her cheek growing pale. “When the military government at Cheyenne Mountain first established a quarantine for the survivors, they were put in those buildings. Predictably, though, all it had done was enclose the uninfected population with the infected, and when they decided the plague was beyond containment, they firebombed the buildings rather than risk anyone getting out.”

  “What?” Rhys gasped. “But . . . how did the civilians rise up and overthrow the military government, then?”

  “That was the second wave of survivors to arrive. The military government got smarter about how to quarantine them, put them in pens on an old fairground and delivered rations there. It was still a squalid setup. There was no climate control.” Xolani shook her head, her mouth twisting in disgust. “People were dying of heat stroke in summer and freezing to death in winter. The latrines were badly dug, the water supply was compromised, and the rations were barely enough to survive on. But believe it or not, it was an improvement.”

  Rhys took a moment to study her. Xolani could be bitter about the plague under the best of circumstances, but the closer they’d journeyed to Colorado Springs, the worse she’d become. In fact, she’d been violently opposed to Rhys answering his summons in the first place.

  “You don’t know what it was like, Rhys.” Her husky alto was rougher than usual, and he thought he saw a sheen in her eyes as she stared fixedly at the tenements. “We didn’t know what they were doing to us when they gave us the nasal spray. If we had, I’d like to think we would have refused, but we’d probably have faced court-martial, so maybe not. But once we started noticing the Alpha changes, they briefed us medics. I was there when they fed us a line of bullshit about what the virus was supposed to do, and I could tell from the way the R&D brain trusts dodged my questions that corners had been cut in the testing process.” She turned her bleak gaze to him. “We weren’t chosen for Project Juggernaut because we were the Army’s elite forces. We were chosen because if it went wrong, we were expendable. They could terminate us and try again.”

  She growled, a feral sound Rhys had only heard her make once before, when she’d snapped Jacob’s neck.

  “And then the fuckers brought us in to put down a rebellion by the few civilians who’d managed to survive the death and destruction we had caused.”

  “You didn’t cause this,” Rhys murmured, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. “You know that.”

  “I don’t think any of us know that, Rhys.” She huffed a soft, bitter chuckle. “Not truly.”

  He stood there at a loss for what to say to comfort her, but after a moment, she straightened, and he watched the Xolani he knew reappear.

  “C’mon, kid. Let’s catch up with the others.”

  Rhys fell into step beside her, his longer legs easily keeping up with her brisk pace. As they walked, Xolani began speaking again, her voice as steady and brusque as ever. “Listen, Rhys, I don’t know who the scientists studying the virus here are. After the overthrow, when we were exiled from the Clean Zone, there weren’t many scientists left to speak of. A couple of the Pentagon R&D types had made it to Cheyenne Mountain, including McClosky himself, but they were tried and executed for their roles in bringing about the plague. I tell you, the thing that pissed me off most was that we were exiled before the trials, so I never got to see those fuckers die.”

  “What are you saying?” Rhys adjusted the straps of his rucksack, watching their surroundings. He thought he could see the first hint of the perimeter fence in the distance. “You think the researchers might not be qualified?”

  “I don’t know.” She grimaced. “A number of scientists were among the survivors the Jugs have recovered and brought back to the Clean Zone for the last ten years. We’ve known that since the Clean Zone announced the formation of the DPRP about six or seven years ago, when they asked us to relay our observations of the virus in the field. That’s why I wrote that report about you after we realized you hadn’t been infected, despite your exposure. I knew you would be of great interest to them because if you are immune, rather than merely asymptomatic, it might help them understand this thing.”

  “But?”

  “I don’t trust them.” Xolani stopped abruptly and faced him. “Don’t believe anything they tell you. If you don’t like what they’re saying, if you get so much as an uncomfortable feeling about anything they’re doing, come to me immediately.”

  Rhys blinked. “What do you think they could do to me?”

  “I don’t know. But knowing what I do about the Bane virus, if I were a scientist completely lacking in scruples and I found someone who was immune . . .” She looked away and began walking again, leaving Rhys to scramble to catch up. “The first thing I would do is imprison you to harvest your immunoglobulins and produce a crude antiserum.”

  “What’s that?” Rhys asked, frowning.

  “It’s a serum containing your antibodies. It’s not a vaccine; it wouldn’t teach someone’s immune system to make its own antibodies. So it wouldn’t be a practical solution for widespread inoculation, as the passive immunity would only last a few months and then everyone would need to be injected again. Depending on how much serum we could harvest from you, you might not naturally produce enough blood to cover the whole population.” She shot the words at him in a rapid-fire torrent, rattling off the possibilities. “So I’d probably give you the maximum doses of drugs to accelerate your blood production, which wouldn’t be good for you long term, and you’d feel like shit. In the meantime, I’d be trying to isolate the antibody and synthesize it. I doubt the DPRP has the technology or expertise to do that effectively, though. I’d also look into seeing if your immunity was genetic, and if it was, I’d harvest your sperm to begin inseminating as many people as possible.”

  “You really think they’d try to do all that?” Rhys swallowed hard, stopping her and asking her to face him with a hand on her bicep. “Xolani? Do you really think that’s a possibility?”

  “I don’t know, Rhys.” She sighed, tugging her silver-shot braid over her shoulder and fiddling with it. “I don’t know these people. It’s possible this new civilian government hasn’t gone corrupt the way every other government seems to, but . . .” She shrugged. “You know that if they try, we’ll fight them. We’ll get you back.”

  “Can you do that without risking the civilian population? I mean, if you’re wounded and there are civvies around . . .”

  Xolani licked her lips. “Probably not. But if that’s the sort of corrupt shit they pull, I’m not sure we’d care. Not after everything they’ve already done to us. We’ve dealt with being exiled. We understood the why of it, even if we don’t like being denied a home with the rest of humanity.” Her mouth pressed into a tight line and she folded her arms over her chest. “We’ll bring them the survivors we find to help grow the population, and we’ll even share information about the virus when we see it in action. But we won’t put up with them making one of our own a lab rat.”

  “But—” Rhys looked down, shuffling his feet “—if it’s the best way to prevent another outbreak, can I really refuse?”

  “Aw, Christ, Rhys.” His gaze snapped back up when she groaned loudly. She closed her eyes, a pained expression on her face. “Look. For once, just once, can you not be so fucking self-sacrificing? I know it’s who you are. You’ll always think of the greater good before yourself. You’ve been doing it since the day we found you. But think about Darius and what it would do to him to lose you. And to the rest of us. You’re our brother. We need you, kid.”

  His eyes began to burn, and he quickly leaned forward, pressing a kiss to her scarred cheek. Xolani gawped in surprise, but Rhys turned and began walking again before his blush could incinerate him on th
e spot.

  His cheeks had cooled by the time Xolani caught up. “You’re not getting out of this that easily. Promise me you won’t play the heroic martyr.”

  “I promise,” he said, his throat tight. “I won’t let them take me from you.”

  Fences surrounded the perimeter trench on both sides. Anyone trying to get into the Clean Zone without going up the causeway and through the checkpoint would need to scale twelve feet of razor-wire-topped fence—now electrified, since they’d gotten the power plant back online—traverse a steep gully twenty feet wide and filled with more razor wire sharpened, rusty shards of metal, and wooden stakes; and then scale another electrified fence. The measures were intended to keep out both revenants and potentially infected survivors trying to bypass the mandatory quarantine, but they made the Clean Zone look and feel like a prison camp.

  Within the outer perimeter was the quarantine ring. It wasn’t much different than what Xolani had described, though houses had replaced the tents, and the revival of the hydroelectric plant on the river had provided climate control. Each residence had two fences and ten yards of space between it and its neighbor. Groups that arrived together were housed together in as few units as possible, and kept separate from other groups. If any member of a group turned out to be infected and began to manifest symptoms, the entire group would be euthanized and the residences they’d inhabited would be burned to the ground and rebuilt. Or so Joe explained to Rhys.

  Luckily, since almost all of the survivors had already been quarantined for up to six months by the Jugs who had recovered them, this was more a case of planning for the worst rather than a procedure that was habitually instituted.