by Pike, JJ
The man at Bill’s window leaned in close. “One more chance or we’re going to tip this over and take what we want.”
The shot came from the tree line. Two men ducked, the third went down screaming.
Alice emerged, gun in hand. “Step away from the car.”
Two men fled, leaving their friend writhing in the dirt.
Alice pulled him to the side of the road. She didn’t lift him, use both arms, or do anything to cushion the transition from the road to the grassy verge. She dragged him by one arm so he’d feel the consequences of messing with her and her man. “There are guards every few hundred feet, they tell me. They will have heard the shot. Someone will be along soon to see to your wounds.” She climbed into the van and backed up as fast as she could.
“Thank you,” said Bill.
“Here you go.” She handed the camera to him as she executed a three-point turn. The first picture held seven symbols carved into the bark, but they were too small to read. Luckily, Alice had taken close ups. Bill scrolled through them quickly and scrolled back to the beginning to understand what had happened. Aggie had made it out to their tree seven times. She hadn’t skipped days, the way she was meant to. She’d come out five days in a row. She’d said the same thing each time: I was here on this date at this time and no one else is here. Heading home.
“Shoot, home?”
Alice nodded. “Look at the next one.”
Bill slid his thumb over the screen and deciphered the sixth message. Aggie was here on this date at this time…
“She didn’t make it back for four days. That’s a long gap.”
“Guards, I bet. She took a big chance getting back in there. We’ll need to adjust the plan next time to include a secondary meeting point, in case the first is compromised like this one.”
Aggie was here on this date at this time…Bill stared at the final symbol. It wasn’t one of their agreed-upon pictographs. What was she trying to tell them?
“What do you think it is?”
“A bunker? But does she mean a root cellar? Not ours. She’d have used the parsnip and leaf symbol for that. Whose, then?”
Bill stared at it, hoping it would make sense. It was a hole of some kind, Alice was right about that. And she’d etched the family symbol for underground. But she’d added something new.
He looked at the final message. She’d crossed out the hole in the ground and added “home” again. Had they gone to ground, but been forced back home? That was always a problem when you bugged out. You were leaving the comfort and security of a place you knew well for a place that was poorly stocked and possibly new to you. It was the action of last measure for most preppers, but they weren’t like most preppers. They were the Everlees.
He scrolled back to the sixth picture.
“Oh!” he shouted. “I get it.”
“What? Where did they go?”
“The mines. She worked it out. Oh, my clever girl. Wow! She found the maps and worked out which mine I’d flagged. She’s a genius. Wow. That’s amazing.”
“But they couldn’t stay there. The seventh picture says they went home.”
“Perhaps they’re going between those two places as they transfer food and supplies? That would be right up Aggie’s street. She’d have them all working in shifts to get the job done.”
“So, we head home?”
“Yes.” Bill was buzzing all over. He didn’t need another Adderall to keep him awake. His favorite girl had picked up the torch when he’d dropped it. She knew what he’d planned to do with the family. She was the best. The best, the best, the best. He was going to tell her just as soon as he saw her. He scanned the road. She might be out here, on this road, right now. They might run into the kids. How incredible that they’d made it through this disaster and were about to be reunited. He hadn’t realized how much dread he’d been holding in his stomach until that dread was banished. If anything terrible had happened Aggie would have recorded it on the tree. They were okay. The kids were home, his plan already in action. He closed his eyes and imagined walking up the steps and into their lovely cabin. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was his idea of paradise. They were home. The kids were home. And he and Alice would be there within the next few hours.
They wouldn’t be the only ones. Rats. Alice had offered their home up to her people.
“Your team is headed there, too. That’s too bad.”
“Fran’s with them. She won’t let them interfere with the kids. She’s on our side.”
“That reminds me, she called your phone. I talked to her.”
“Fran?”
“She said to tell you that she has no regrets.”
Alice smiled. “She’s a good girl. She could have left the team at any time, but she hung in there.”
“She also said there’s a category two storm in the Caribbean.”
“Oh my word. That’s a game changer. If that makes its way up the coast and gathers strength we’re sunk.”
“Fran said as much.”
“You take the kids directly to the mines.”
“Are you serious?”
Alice pulled over, parked the car, and stared at him. “What kind of monster do you take me for?”
Bill didn’t want to say, “The kind who’d sacrifice her children.”
“With a storm coming in we have no way of knowing what’s going to happen next. It’s going to be extremely volatile. MELT, radioactive fallout, and a storm? It’s too much. We might roll the dice on one of those. Even two, if we could control the environment to some extent. But all three? I don’t think so.”
“You’ll let me take them? Really?”
“You’ve lost your mind, Bill Everlee. You need to cut back on the pills.” She started the car, chuckling to herself. “You thought I’d let my children die? Step up? Yes. Do their duty? Absolutely. Be the saviors we need right now? You bet. But walk into certain death with no chance of success? Only a madman would do that.”
Bill felt the edges of his heart begin to knit themselves together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The military convoy was headed out again. They’d already re-dressed the men’s wounds with plastic, apparently.
It was fabulous to have a staff. Jo made requests and her wishes were granted. They weren’t actual requests, she was aware of that. When you were as senior as she was and attached to a general, “request” was a polite way of saying “order.” You want a football field of plastic wrap? You’ve got it.
Professor Baxter seemed satisfied with the progress the sick men were making. None of them had died. She’d even been to see Angelina, their famous patient zero, in the lead truck and declared her “in tip-top shape.”
“What does that mean?” said Jo.
“Also not dead,” said Christine.
Jo sensed the professor was doing her best to fashion what might pass for a joke in her world, so she smiled politely and let it go. “Have you learned anything by looking at her wounds?”
“Absolutely. The tilapia saved her. No question. If anyone else has her profile—muscles full of plastic and no genetic resistance—they’ll need tilapia skins to save them. I doubt very much that our current plastic wrap workaround would do the trick.”
“Why is it working now? Not all those men can have that profile, surely?”
Christine held up her hands. “Maybe Rayton wasn’t lying about MELT having a half-life? I need to think on that some more, but it’s not an insane proposition.” She checked her seatbelt, folded her hands in her lap, let out a long breath, and closed her eyes. “I’ll be thinking for the foreseeable future,” she said.
Jo settled into her seat. They were headed home. In a way. Her home wasn’t going to be her home, but a barracks. There’d be no long, hot showers; no cuddling up with her pupperdog, Reggie, and scruffling his ears and telling him how much she’d missed his furry face; no listening to Pink Floyd at full volume when she was sure Alice and Bill weren’t home. But
it had to be better than peeing in a ditch for a week; eating only MREs; and worrying you were about to contract a flesh-eating virus.
She started divvying up the rooms, planning who’d go where. She was going to be bunking with Professor Baxter and Fran, but she’d done worse. There were rooms downstairs that they could turn into sleeping quarters. With only a half bath downstairs and a gravity-driven shower upstairs, some of the men were going to be washing in the stream at the south of Alice’s property; that or the lake.
Alice and Bill had a spare room in their cabin; they could take at least two soldiers. If Midge and Aggie doubled up that would free up yet another room. Jim and Betsy had plenty of space. Jim might not like it, but if they moved his vintage cars out of the garage, they’d have another full dorm room in no time. All three households had camp beds and sleeping bags galore. Tents, too. She had to smile. Jim would fire up his famous barbeque; Betsy would fret and fuss and fill them full of pie. Even at the end of the world, those old-timers knew how to make people feel welcome. What other delights were waiting at the end of the road? Bill and Aggie would go hunting; bring back a buck (in season? out of season? what did those things mean now?). Alice would hold court and ask great questions and get everyone talking. The twins…well, they were sort of a law unto themselves, but from time to time they’d pitch in and do something to keep a party going. Midge would have every last soldier in the convoy eating out of the palm of her hand in under 24 hours. No one could resist her. She was sweet and tart at the same time, in ways that only a little one could pull off, but underneath the charm, smart as a whip.
The sick men would need to remain under quarantine in her barn. Was that far enough from the action? She’d have to talk to Christine, when she opened her eyes and let the world back in, about how to deal with an infectious agent of this kind.
The domestic details—who was going to stay where, what they were going to eat, how to organize showers for this many people, what the professor’s lab was going to look like—were so soothing. She wished she could think about bedroom assignments for hours, but she couldn’t. She had work to do. One hour in the truck and she’d head back to her private car. That way Alex and Sam would have had time to consider their options. She knew who she thought they should go to, but she was interested to hear what Alex might have to say. Eh, Sam hadn’t been too bad, either. She needed to give the guy a break.
Fran was in the corner, ordering and reordering her backpack, making everything neat and tidy. They each had their own way of dealing with the stress they were under.
Jo took out a small notepad. She flipped the pages until she came to a clean sheet of paper and wrote ELOISE FARMANDAY across the top. Were they on the wrong track? Was it a red herring? The anagram possibilities were endless. The first one that jumped out at her was “FAIRY.” That didn’t mean anything. That was just her scrabble brain trying to use an F. “FEDERALISM.” She crossed it out. They were looking for names.
“Oh, are you a Scrabble fan?” Fran was by her side.
“I used to play,” said Jo. “With my husband.”
“You’ve got ‘eel’ and ‘sol.’”
Fran was a low-scoring player.
She laughed. “And Fran.”
Jo looked at her, sharpish, but Fran was looking at the page.
“Fran. Franc.” She looked up at Jo. “Foreign words are allowed now, right? And proper nouns?”
Jo hadn’t played in so long she didn’t know, but perhaps that was right. Perhaps the rules had changed. Nothing stayed the same for long.
Fran kept scribbling. “France. Frail. Frame. Friend. Mind if I keep going?”
“Knock yourself out,” said Jo.
Fran chewed Jo’s pencil. Why did people do that? Didn’t they know it had to be covered in germs? Also, it wasn’t her pencil. Such bad manners. Jo laughed to herself. She was worrying about points of etiquette while New York burned.
What were they going to do about Chappaquiddick? And their Chinese Profumo situation? And the money that, in all likelihood, implicated everyone on Capitol Hill? The weakest link in that whole set up was RDJ, for sure. She’d already shown she could be bought. But going after all three of them at the same time was the surest way to get to data. How was that even possible? Wouldn’t they be in seclusion? Who’d told her that the Cabinet was on its way to Colorado? Or had she made that up? She’d heard no reports of DC being infected, but with the rate of MELT’s spread it made sense to get the major players to safety. She tried to remember who was evacuated during a national emergency. All she could think of was Battlestar Galactica and the Secretary of Education, Laura Roslin, becoming the president because she was the only member of the government left alive after the Cylon attack. Oh, to be watching BSG with Cory. She turned her head so Fran wouldn’t see the tears pooling in her eyes.
This was a time for hope, not despair.
They had a lead.
No! More than one. They had three leads. Any one of those leads might pan out. They’d find out who did what, when, and why. The professor would be given critical data that allowed her to prevent MELT from spreading and they’d all be home in time for a brandy and a game of Scrabble.
She’d nodded off. Just for a second, but she was drooling out of one side of her mouth. She wiped herself off with her sleeve and checked on her fellow travelers. Nothing had changed. The professor was still deep in thought, light snore notwithstanding; and Fran had a long list of words. Two columns, in fact.
“You’re awake. I didn’t want to disturb you, but here you go.” Fran handed her the notepad.
She’d made a list. Jo cast her eye down it. There was no order after she’d played out her own name. She wasn’t a systematic thinker.
“Foiled, defame, mailer, loaf, dines, dial, mane, merlin, maladies, manslayer, morels, seldom, name, lame, same, dame, may…”
“Thanks,” said Jo. “Manslayer would be high scoring.”
“Think if you could put it down on a triple word score!” Fran was pleased with herself. She might have won the game with that word, if they’d been playing for real.
That was what it was all about. Jo’s dream had seemed simplistic, almost embarrassing, when she first woke, but in fact it was a deep reflection of her desire to curl up on the couch with her (dead) husband, a glass of wine in one hand, her dog at her feet, and spell stupid words out in hopes of making him laugh. “Manslayer,” she’d say. “Like ladykiller, but with more gore.”
He would have liked that. Cory was a good, good man. He’d be proud of the work she was doing now: sleuthing and scheming and trying to find out who’d released a toxin on Manhattan.
The convoy slowed and stopped. She looked out of the back of the truck. She knew the terrain. They were so close she could almost taste home.
“If you’d like to get out, ladies, and walk to the back of the convoy?” It was that nice young man who’d been running between her and the general all day.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Staff Sergeant Sandrino. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, ma’am?” He held a hand up.
Jo sensed the undercurrent of panic in the young man’s voice. “What is it, Sandrino?”
“Just a roadblock, ma’am. Nothing we can’t handle.”
“We heard about this. The highways are packed with parked cars. We’d probably do better to go across country. I can show you where, if you’d…”
Sandrino took her by the elbow and propelled her to the back of the convoy. Not a physical roadblock, then.
Christine and Fran had already gone on ahead of her.
When Sandrino finally left them, Jo jogged around the side of a car and crept towards the head of the convoy.
There were three spike strips across the road, their long metal teeth pointing at the sky. Someone had been waiting for them. No flat tires meant their lead driver had spotted the trap in time. This was always going to be a possibility: people who believed the rule of law had ended because there was a dis
aster. She hated opportunists like these. They were taking advantage, when they should be doing their part.
There was gunfire up ahead.
People all around her hit the ground. She did the same.
From behind her, the general was barking orders.
The soldier beside her—she’d never seen her before, she was just a kid in a uniform—dropped dead, blood pooling around the shot to her temple.
Jo crawled under the nearest vehicle. She tried to orient herself to the various sounds: boots on tarmac, gunfire everywhere, more orders. As far as she could tell, shots were coming from every direction.
The army trucks had seemed so huge when she’d first seen them down at K&P’s labs, but now the khaki vehicles felt almost homey. She was glad of the massive tires. She curled herself into a ball and hoped her stupidity wasn’t going to cost her her life. If she’d done what Sandrino told her to do, she’d be down at the back of the convoy and better protected.