At this point, Sergeant Dozer paused, as if to allow gasps from the audience to wrap up. Cheryl glanced over at Aidan. He was reclined in his seat with his arms folded over his chest, looking about as interested as a forced attendant at a timeshare spiel. When she returned her attention to the screen, the sergeant was finishing up a list of do’s and don’ts that included no fighting, no stealing, obeying all military personnel, and reporting any person on the premises who showed signs of illness.
“…a copy of the regulations is posted in each of the communal living areas. That wraps up the basics of what you need to know. There’s just one more thing. There is a Private standing by to take you on a little excursion. This field trip is mandatory for official admittance to this facility. It’s necessary for you to understand the seriousness of our rules and regulations. For those of you with weak stomachs, we will be handing out paper bags as you board the bus. Now, good luck to you all. And God Bless America.” He saluted, and the screen cut to black.
The people in the group began to stand. They muttered amongst themselves and began a hesitant walk to line up near the door where a guard motioned them to go. Cheryl rose, but Aidan remained seated. His face looked as blank as if someone had taken a chalkboard eraser and wiped his mind free of every word inside.
“Hey,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
He glanced up at her with startled eyes as if he’d forgotten she was beside him. “Some movie,” he muttered, and without another word, he stood and followed her to the line.
Private Cameron met them outside next to a caravan of Hummers. His lean, brick-solid body leaned against the first vehicle in line, silently watching through mirrored sunglasses with tiny reflections of the sun over each eye as the crowd filtered out. Once most of the group was outside, he glanced down at his watch and said, “Alright people, get in quickly. We’ve got to move along, because there’s another group right behind you.”
Cheryl glanced back into the building and saw the chairs in the movie theater starting to fill up again.
They rode through the desert in a caravan for almost half an hour. Then, the smell hit them. It was a sour, putrid scent a thousand times worse than any of the odors she’d been subjected to from the hordes before. It wafted on the dry wind, enveloping them and making it hard to breathe. Her eyes began to water and she started to cough, so she buried her nose in her sleeve.
The driver stopped in the middle of a sandy road, pulled black rubber gas masks out of a bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and passed them around. “Time to mask up!” After a quick explanation about how to use them and checking to make sure that they had secured them properly, he drove on.
Cheryl didn’t like the suffocating heat inside the mask. She looked around at the other passengers and thought that the strange masks gave them an alien appearance, adding an extra touch of the surreal to their situation. Aidan seemed to read her mind, because he picked up her hand and held it on top of her knee, interlacing their fingers. She looked at his unblinking green eyes through the plastic lens.
The first sign that they were close to their destination was the music. At first, it seemed to come from the sky itself, like a howling wind, transformed into screeching guitar chords and rumbling drums. She made out the tail end of Hells Bells by AC/DC then the Sinatra-like croon of Harry Connick, Jr. as he began singing something about a Louisiana bayou and a girl in a pretty dress.
A couple of helicopters crisscrossed the sky above them and circling vultures gave them wide berth. Minutes later, they approached a gargantuan square building with tall brick walls and no windows. Out in the middle of the desert, it seemed as out of place as an Egyptian pyramid in the middle of a cornfield. The music blasted from the top of each corner, blaring from loudspeakers hidden in grimacing gargoyle statues.
The caravan took a slight detour up to the top of a ridge and then stopped. Cheryl gaped at what she saw. Inside the building, there seemed to be a courtyard, and high above it there were bodies suspended on poles, swinging on chains, buzzing with thousands of flies.
“This is hell,” Aidan said through his voicemitter.
She closed her eyes, silently agreeing. The image seemed like something straight out of Dante’s Inferno. But why? What was this place?
“The music. It’s a dinner bell,” Aidan said.
Cheryl leaned forward towards the driver. “What is this?”
“The eastern baiting station.”
“Baiting? You’re luring them here?” The idea seemed both incredulous and dangerous.
“From miles around.”
“We saw a line of N.E.U.s in the desert…”
“You could reckon this was where they were headed.”
“I guess that beats a search and find operation. But what if…” She didn’t really want to ask, assuming that they’d already figured on the possibility. Her mind conjured up a picture of thousands upon thousands of Eaters converging on the fort. What if it was too many for the baiting stations to deal with, and enough to pile up and make it over the fence and the waterless moat at the fort? Surely they’d already thought of that. Maybe their sound system and scent lure only reached out so far, pulling in tens at a time, instead of hordes.
“There’s only one entry. It’s a door on the east side. The N.E.U.s find their way in there, then they’re dispatched.”
Her curiosity soared. “Dispatched? How?”
“Well, it’s sort of like a cattle operation. Once they’re confined in a small room, there are steel bolts that shoot out of the wall.”
“Into their brains?”
“Yup. That’s it.”
“What if they miss?”
“Well, that sometimes happens. There’s a few Stickers inside. Those dudes wear Hazmat suits over a suit of body armor, and they have one nasty job, but they’re paid real well. They use pitchforks, axes, and whatnot. It saves bullets.”
“Not a job I’d want to have!” She nudged Aidan, but he didn’t respond. He was looking out the window, watching a vulture dropping from the sky towards the dangling eyeballs of a suspended corpse.
Cheryl assumed that these were the corpses that had been donated to science as Private Verace had mentioned.
When the driver said they had to go inside the building and watch through a one-way glass window, some of the passengers protested and refused to go in. Cheryl’s morbid curiosity got the best of her, and she agreed to go, but Aidan remained in the vehicle.
Half an hour later, she sorely regretted that decision. Despite the horror and violence she’d witnessed (and inflicted) over the last few days, what she’d seen inside took the cake. Some people didn’t handle it well and had to use the paper bags that they brought with them, barely getting their masks off in time.
* * *
Back at Fort San Manuel, they were led to their separate living quarters. Cheryl’s Spartan room had three triple bunk beds for a total of nine women in each. The female unit leader spoke to them like they were new recruits in boot camp.
“…and I don’t want to see any ghost turds under your bunks. We keep our living quarters clean and tidy just like our minds. A lazy mind leads to death, remember that. If we don’t keep our guard up at all times, the enemy will find our weak spot.”
After she met the other roommates and they were settled in, a list of available jobs was passed around. She looked it over, and saw that the place was truly like a self-enclosed village. They needed cooks, gardeners, seamstresses, plumbers, security, daycare attendants, sanitation workers…
She backed up to the list of security jobs. After all she’d been through, sitting inside playing house or sitting at a computer didn’t appeal to her. She yearned to get back outside, feel the wind in her hair, and fire a gun again. So she signed up for bike patrol.
Before the unit leader left, she asked about a list of residents in the fort. She knew it was a long shot that her dad or her aunt had survived and made it to the compound, bu
t she had to check.
“There’s a list near the cafeteria.”
* * *
At lunchtime, she made a beeline for the cafeteria. She found a computer screen on the wall and watched the scrolling list of names. Dead soldiers from Arizona came first, then those who were still alive or in the infirmary. Lists of civilians followed. Cheryl stumbled backwards and bumped into someone behind her when she saw the name Donna L. Erickson. It was her aunt, and she was on the deceased list.
At least that meant that she made it here.
With a heavy heart, she returned her eyes to the screen. After watching the lists cycle through three more times, she did not see Jack W. Malone on any list. That meant he hadn’t made it to the fort and was still in Tucson, either alive or dead. She decided that not knowing for the moment was better than having his death confirmed. She hoped that getting onto the patrol duty would have a potential side benefit. She’d heard that troops made weekly forages into the city to destroy N.E.U.s and pick up supplies. She intended to get to know the right people to be on one of those tours as soon as possible.
When Aidan found her, her knees were still weak from the bad news about Aunt Donna. He gave her a hug as they stood in the lunch line. When they got to the cashier, he proffered his tan ration card that gave him a meager allotment of rice and beans and a hard biscuit. Cheryl’s navy blue ration card that said Patrol Duty on the front got her a full tray with a hunk of canned ham, mashed potatoes, steamed squash, and a slice of cherry pie.
As they sat down to eat, she offered some of her rations to him, but he declined. He told her that he was offered a job as a carpenter, helping to build bunks and dressers but had turned it down. That meant that he had to move to what was the squatters’ quarters, a place for those who could not or would not work. They packed them in thirty per room, with even sparser conditions.
Then, he became really quiet. He ate his meager meal, looking away from her and watching the other people in the cafeteria. His eyes darted nervously from side to side as he watched the movement of the guards as well.
She told him more about her job, hoping to get him interested in signing up, but he didn’t seem to be listening.
After a few more minutes, he took a gulp of water to swallow a chunk of biscuit then leaned in towards her and said, “Something really stinks here.”
“What do you mean?”
“They knew.”
“Who knew? Knew what?”
“You think this fort is just a happy coincidence? It was built for this sort of apocalyptic scenario.”
“So? So what if they had the foresight to—”
Aidan shook his head violently and banged a fist down on the table, stirring glances from the people around them and causing a nearby guard to move his finger towards the trigger of his gun. He leaned in towards her and lowered his voice. “This place wasn’t built as a just-in-case for a flu epidemic or biological warfare. It was created specifically for this scenario. Sure, it’s a self-contained city—that might be helpful in a number of situations. But, the tall walls, the moat of spears, the baiting station? That was all created to lure and trap Eaters. N.E.U.s…whatever the fuck they call them. They didn’t just throw this place up in a week. It took months—maybe years—to design, get approval from the proper higher channels and build .”
“Maybe that’s true, and even if it is, we’re very lucky to have found this place.”
“I don’t hold water to most conspiracy theories, but if the Internet is still alive and well, you can be sure that more than a few people out there are wondering online if the government wasn’t involved in this.”
She lowered her voice now, looking up to see if the guard was listening. “Government?”
“Government. Military. Whatever.”
He’s losing it, she thought. Paranoia. Desert sickness. Or…
She glanced down at his hand. The wound he’d incurred from the motorcycle ride up the mountain was healing. There was a fresh pink scar on it.
Hoping to calm him down, she told him that there was a computer room with public access, so he could check for himself on all those conspiracy theories.
“I’ve been in there. They’ve got so many controls on what sites you can see, it’s damn near useless. I asked about it, and they said that some sites are blocked to prevent people from panicking due to false information. How about that, hunh? So much for the freedom of speech.”
Cheryl couldn’t argue with that, but her intuition told her that the people running this fort weren’t bad or doing something shady. They had just perfected and adapted their disaster procedures to make survival as efficient as possible, given the number of refugees in their care. “So, maybe they had some head’s up about this. So what?”
“I’m telling you, somebody knew this epidemic was a possibility and had preparations in place, from how to kill off the infected to how to control the survivors. How could they have possibly known this was coming? It all happened so fast.”
A hunchbacked man with ragged grayish skin limped towards their table. Cheryl was so alarmed that she nearly upset her tray. “Jesus, what happened to him?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Aidan said, also staring at the man.
A young man at the table across from them leaned over. “Keep it down,” he whispered. “There’s some who got the vaccine in time after they were infected, but their skin still got messed up pretty good. I heard they had to peel off their dead flesh.”
“Ugh,” Cheryl winced. “That’s awful.”
“Better ugly than dead, right?” the man laughed.
“From the looks of him, that’s a coin toss.”
The man hobbled past their table, carrying his tray, piled with apple and melon slices.
“Fresh fruit?”
“I heard that the survivors can’t stomach any cooked food, anything dead. They’re letting them have the fresh fruit rations.”
Cheryl wondered how far the disease had progressed before his miraculous recovery. Had he eaten garbage, human flesh? She supposed it might be hard to eat anything at all with those memories in his head.
Aidan continued with his rant, and she had to stop him to ask him why he was so adamant the government had not only known but had some hand in whatever had caused the event.
“Could be a number of reasons. Economy was tanking. No more jobs, because they’ve all gone overseas. We were headed towards a collapse of the free market, so to prevent widespread riots, it was either take complete control or risk anarchy. They decided to thin out the population by turning the dead against the living. Put the survivors in concentration camps. Maybe that’s why we saw so few people while we were on the road. Those that weren’t dead or in hiding had already been killed or removed.”
“I don’t buy it,” Cheryl said, fighting the almost uncontrollable urge to double over in laughter. “That’s so far-fetched. I don’t think the government would set brain-eating zombies loose on the population. It’s absurd.”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t warn anybody about the virus—but they had a vaccine. In the time it took them to build this place, they could have mass produced it.”
Cheryl stood up and held her hands out in front of her face like two brakes to stop his tirade. “I’m sorry. I gotta go. My duty starts in ten minutes.”
She started to walk away, and he yelled after her. “Look at you in your fancy uniform! You used to own your life. Now, they tell you when and what you can eat, when you can take a piss. We’ve even got goddamn numbers stamped on our hands!”
* * *
Later that evening, towards the end of her shift, the sun blazed a fiery orange, and a trio of dark clouds drifted across it, making it look like a giant jack-o’-lantern. She was in the lookout tower with a pair of binoculars, squinting against the harsh light. Unable to see clearly towards the west, she swung around to the opposite direction and noticed a dust cloud moving away from the building.
“What’s that?” she asked,
pointing, and handed the binoculars to Corporal Stinton, her trainer.
He took them from her and studied the moving dust for a second before handing them back. “That there is what we call a Suicider. Some people just can’t make it here. It’s just not their cup of tea. He won’t get very far. He’s headed towards a baiting station. Not too smart. I heard the incoming head of cattle is pretty thick today.”
She lifted the binoculars up for another look at the poor chap who’d given up and gone AWOL. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t heard any details yet about the scuffle at one of the guard stations; she saw the tip of a rifle poking up and the back wheel of a Harley Electra Glide Classic during a peek through the dust.
God Speed, she thought. Wherever you’re headed.
Chapter Twenty Five
There was little time to mourn Aidan’s departure and probable death. She had a patrol shift six days a week from four p.m. until midnight. Patrols had been ramped up due to reports of Eaters bypassing the baiting station and wandering towards the fort. Even on days that were relatively calm, news reports from cities around the world played constantly on the flat screen televisions that dotted the walls in the communal areas. As Cheryl passed by them, it was hard to tear away from the horrifying images of Eaters descending on hapless victims being attacked as cameras panned across the bloody battlefields from the safety of helicopters perched in the sky.
She was told that she had to complete another week of duty before she’d be allowed to go on a detail into Tucson where she could check out her father’s house. Another week was a long time to worry about his fate, but she’d heard enough terrifying reports about the city to know that she’d better be patient and wait until she could go in with some serious firepower behind her. She held on to her hope of his survival on days that were tough on patrol duty, especially when she had a close call helping with body removal from the barbed wire or spikes. Corpses sometimes popped back to life, lunging at her with gnashing teeth.
Eaters Page 30