by Angel Lawson
The area we’re in is called the Piedmont Triad. Three academic cities linked together. It’s probably less rural than most of the country we’ve seen lately. Fast food restaurants pop up and down the road. Neighborhoods old and new. The farmland is less frequent although when we do find some, tobacco grows wild, withered and unharvested.
I’d never traveled much before the Crisis and one thing I’m struck by now is the familiar landscape. The stretches of road and pine trees. The architecture tugs at my memories, the plants and the occasional regional chain restaurant I haven’t seen since we left.
It feels like home, and that brings a flood of emotions I haven’t prepared for.
We approach another small intersection; gas station and pizza shop on one corner, a tanning salon on the other. White bones are strapped to the front door of the salon and I can’t stop looking and trying to hear something—someone. It’s too quiet around here. I feel the eyes but I don’t see any people, human or otherwise. I clench my arms around Wyatt’s waist and say, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I’m sick and tired of the Death Fields.
*
We reach the edge of Raleigh, taking the same path that my mom, Paul, and I took when we left. I see the charred remains of the school bus—the one Paul wasn’t on, but where we thought he’d died. That was the beginning of his long journey as a test subject and eventual Mutt. I avert my eyes from the black smudges I know are bodies, away from the river where the infected drowned, shot on the spot by snipers Erwin placed on the rooftop. I didn’t know then that he was fighting my sister and her unholy plans. I just ran for my life, unaware that two men would follow me out of the city—both intent to keep me safe.
I rest my head on Wyatt’s back, wondering where he was when I traveled through here. He didn’t catch up with us for a bit further down the road. As much as I do remember, other things have faded. The sound of my mother’s voice. The exact way she looked before this all started. For months I couldn’t keep the image of her bitten and dying out of my brain. Now, I’d probably sacrifice the sleep to get it back.
“Can you check the map?” Wyatt asks. He doesn’t know how this place tugs at me. I nod, unsure if I can breathe, much less speak.
Without really looking I point ahead. “Turn right.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
As we get closer to the side of town I grew up in, near the university, the more things trigger memories. Not just of the escape but my life before. The more familiar it seems, the further away I feel from it. I’m not that girl who went to the Taco Hut after final exams or the girl poised to read her valedictorian speech to her senior class. We pass neighborhoods where friends lived, and my old elementary school, all looking like a poster for a horror movie. The roads are blocked, houses in decay. Cars rot and rust in driveways. We pass the occasional abandoned military vehicle with vines and wildlife creeping over the wheels. I feel a pang when I spot my old bus stop and eventually the sign leading into my neighborhood.
Not once in our journey here did we pass a human, dead or alive.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say quietly. Wyatt had stopped the horse and is waiting for directions.
“Go back?” His eyes hold mine. It’s afternoon. It’s cold. We’re both exhausted with painful backsides from riding this horse for two days. “We don’t have to. We can stop somewhere else. Anywhere. You name it.”
“No, we can’t. We came here for a reason. I can’t let a little sentimentality stop us.”
“I can go in without you.”
The thought of Wyatt in my childhood home without me makes it hurt even more. I think that’s part of my apprehension, letting him see that side of my life. The ‘before’ Alexandra.
“I’m being stupid.”
“No, you’re not, but this street corner is making me nervous. I know it seems quiet around here but it’s unlikely everyone is gone, don’t you think?”
My street had been mostly evacuated by the time my mother and I left, but I agree. He’s not talking about survivors.
“Okay, it’s the third house at the end of the street. Black shutters.”
Wyatt takes the horse all the way up to the house. I’m not particularly surprised it’s left untouched. Further evidence there’s less people left around than we’d like to admit. He dismounts and helps me down, two hands on my hips. My thighs ache and my butt feels bruised from the ride. I can tell he feels the same from the way he grimaces when he walks toward the backyard. “There’s a detached carport in the back. We can block the horse in with some of the stuff out there.”
It’s surprising how quickly it comes back. The tools and equipment that made our lives so easy back then. The hammer I gave my dad for Father’s Day. A wheelbarrow and several heavy cardboard boxes. We tie the horse up to the metal workbench and step into the yard.
“So this is it?” he asks. “Home of the infamous Ramsey sisters.”
“This is where it all started.” I point to a window. “Jane probably spent hours coming up with her diabolical plans up there.”
“And you?”
I point to the opposite room. A tiny bathroom connected the two. “I spent way too long coming up with ways to beat her up there. Grades, approval…that kind of stuff.”
“And in the end it didn’t matter.”
“No,” I say softly. “It didn’t. We had to go through all of this to realize we work better together than against one another. Tough price for civilization to pay.”
“You ready to go inside?”
“I’m ready.”
I fish the spare key out from the empty bird feeder and push it in the lock. Wyatt grabs me before I turn the knob. “I love you, Alexandra Ramsey. Never forget that.”
“I love you, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
The house carries the chill of abandonment. Unlike every other building I’ve rummaged through, slept in, and used for shelter over the last two years, beneath the thin layer of dust lay memories as well as useless objects from another life. My life.
I point to a basket next to the TV. A comfortable blanket folded neatly on top. “My mother hid her gossip magazines in there. People, Us Weekly…all the trashy tabloids she knew better than to believe.” I walk over and reveal them. Pristine and untouched. “My dad thought they were ridiculous. I mean, they were, but it was just her guilty pleasure.”
I walk through the kitchen and see the note on the refrigerator. We left it for my father—hoping he’d catch up to us at any minute. I pick it up and study it, reliving those last moments in the house.
“There’s not any food in here. We either ate it or took it with us.”
“I’m not hungry.”
I glance down the hall. “My father’s office is down the hall.”
Wyatt follows me quietly, clicking on his flashlight, which doubles as a lantern. The white glaring beam leads the way. The office door is shut and I take a deep, dusty breath before I open it.
The hinges creak and Wyatt holds the light over my head, splaying it across the room. The shades are drawn and my mother and I moved a large shelf over the window early in the early days of the quarantine.
Everything is in place. His chair and the framed certificates on the walls. The picture of him and my mother at some conference in Texas.
“Can I have that?” I ask, reaching for the light.
He hands it over without a word, silently taking in the room. I walk around the desk and pull out the heavy, padded, leather chair. It rolls easily on the hardwoods and I tug at the lower right drawer.
“Locked?” he asks, looking away at a photo of me and my sister when we were in preschool.
“Yeah, but…” I open the middle drawer and feel around under the bottom of the desk. My fingers catch on a strip of tape and I pry the metal out of the drawer. “He left a key.”
I open the drawer and reveal a long row of files. I pull out half with both hands and pass
them over. Wyatt takes them and says, “What am I looking for?”
I lift out the other half and place them on the desk.
“When Jane created the original virus, E-TR, she was working around the bureaucracy of the official government. She was tired of the red tape and wanted to do something to fight the growing fanaticism around the world. She saw ISIS coming long before the rest of us were paying attention and she used Avi’s laboratory at PharmaCorp to make it happen.”
“Right—except we know Avi was almost a pacifist. He was adamantly opposed to biological warfare.”
“Which means someone else backed her project.” I look up at Wyatt. “Do you know who hired and paid for your mission? The one to find me?”
“I worked through PharmaCorp, you know that.”
“But who really paid for it? Because we both know Avi didn’t.”
He frowns. “There’s no way your father paid for it. He was involved in stopping the spread of the virus. Not developing it.”
“There are two things I know about my father.” I pulled open two more drawers and showed Wyatt the contents. Then the closet and another file cabinet disguised as a bookshelf. “He kept papers about everything. Compulsively.”
“So he was a pack-rat.”
“He was tracking this thing from the beginning. Maybe even before the beginning. If there’s a connection between an outside source and Jane, he’ll have it.”
He sighs and sits at the chair across from the desk, files piled in his lap. “And you want that connection.”
“I don’t want it. We need it.”
“Why?”
“Because I have a hunch it’s going to lead back to Hamilton and that’s how we’re going to convince Perez to fight back.”
*
Truth be told, I think my father may have been more than a pack rat. The term hoarder comes to mind—particularly with papers. Anything he found useful, newspaper clippings, articles, torn out scientific journal entries that caught his eye was squirreled away, yellowing and fading in one of his cabinets. Whatever we’re looking for is a needle in a paper haystack, but just before dawn my bleary eyes stumble across a thick envelope marked ‘Grant Proposals’ in my father’s scratchy script.
“I may have found something.”
Wyatt drops the stack of files on the seat next to him and walks around the desk. He rubs his eyes, red from dust, and leans over my shoulder. Together, we flip through the sheath of papers.
The file is full of grant proposals, requests and receipts, all stamped with the seal of HSA—Homeland Security. Each a correspondence between a private company, PharmaCorp, and a particular office within HSA—research and development. Hamilton’s signature is scrawled at the bottom of each page. He’d been appointed by the President.
The first contacts were between Hamilton and Avi, starting years before. They’re not about the E-TR virus or anything pharmaceutical-related either. It seems that Hamilton was in charge of the early concept of developing Safe Cities and Avi’s building and its top-of-the-line survivalist features were of interest to the government. They wanted his expertise on how to make sustainable cities in case of a regional emergency.
Avi shared his knowledge—agreeing to a multi-million dollar consultation fee. In the files there are blueprints of Cincinnati, Winston-Salem, Bangor, and Birmingham. Unspecified money was given to HSA to start the construction. These projects were never announced publicly—only the highest state officials aware of their existence—and even then, it seemed like a distant worry.
“It seems normal until Hamilton’s needs changed,” Wyatt comments, pointing to a printed email exchange. Hamilton expressed ideas about the possibility of using parasites to make our enemies sick long enough to allow soldiers in and out of a combat zone safely. By this time my sister was a rising star at Emory University. Avi and Hamilton plucked her out of academia and into biological warfare research. That’s when Hamilton asked for the experiments to move to test subjects. Human subjects.
“I can see why Avi balked,” I say, scanning the remainder of the page. “It was too risky, not to mention violating a dozen codes and regulations.”
“That Hamilton was willing to ignore.”
“So then I guess this is where Jane came in,” Wyatt says, flipping to the next page. The paperwork continues but it’s no longer on official letterhead. They seem to be a series of handwritten notes between my sister and Hamilton as they continue the research. But it’s not just science talk—it’s something more—a philosophy.
I move the paper closer to the flashlight on the desk.
“The plans and completion of the early stages of the Safe Cities made me realize that although we’re prepared for the effect—we’re not really addressing the cause. The government is required to go through so many channels. A ridiculous amount of red tape. We’re seeing the change happen right now—the fabric of society is being altered as we speak by radicals and religious idealization. Women and children are enslaved in the name of God, while boys are led to the slaughters of war.
These battles have already reached our shores, but what is happening, just out of our line of vision, has the ability to rewrite history. And although technically my hands are tied, I’m unwilling to sit by and let that happen. There’s an answer—a way to keep our Safe Cities from ever being used. We just need to get to the warzone before our enemies gain ground. We need to eliminate the threat. We need to maintain the purity of our nation by striking first.”
I hand the paper over to Wyatt and move away from the desk. My nose itches from the dust and I have a headache. Running my hands over my face I say, “So he was the one that got her the funding to create the E-TR virus and send you and the others to spread it.”
“Looks like it.” He shuffles through a few more papers before setting them on the desk, but one. “Listen to this one, it’s dated from March—right when the Crisis began gaining speed.”
“I understand your concerns about the spread of the E-TR virus. We both knew it was a possibility. A chance we were willing to take. I think you called it “Collateral Damage,” and it’s not as though we’re unprepared. Within ten days the Safe Cities will begin lockdown protocol. The citizens in those areas will become our highest priority. Just as your facility and the staff you have acquired. Granted, it’s happened much faster than I expected but maybe that’s not a bad thing. The weak shall be culled. Yes, we will lose many good people along with the bad, but in the end the cream will rise to the top. Once the population declines we will be able to weed out the unfavorable. We can start fresh. We will be safe, our families will have protection and that is the most important thing.
Dr. Ramsey, I have no doubt that even with all of our precautions several of the Safe Cities will struggle in the aftermath of the virus. This is where you and I will step in and continue our shared vision of the future…”
“Okay I’m done,” Wyatt says with a scowl on his mouth. He drops the paper on the desk.
“Here’s the thing,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “I thought my sister was crazy, but Hamilton is a whole other level.”
“He knew Winston-Salem and Birmingham would have problems. He probably sabotaged them to give himself the upper hand.”
I think of the charred remains we walked through on our way out of town. It could have been natural—we’ve seen many fires along the way but then again, they should have been prepared.
“Do you think he assumes Jane is still on his side?”
“I hope so. She said she would make sure she remained useful to him.” I recall our last conversation before we left New Hope. “I knew she was hiding something. I just had no idea what.”
We blink at one another and I try to process everything. Being in my house, finding more secrets about my sister, the never-ending deceit that started the apocalypse. I’m tired but I say, “We need to get back and warn them. The Hybrids were probably an unexpected road block—one he planned on using us to clean up. But he can�
��t be far behind.”
“We’ll go, but not until after we fuel up and rest. It’s a long ride back.”
“Four hours.”
“Each.” He holds my eye. “Four for you. Four for me.”
I sigh but nod. I’m conflicted anyway. Once I leave the house this time I know it really will be for good.
“You sleep first and I’ll check on the horse and do a perimeter check.” When I hesitate to move, he stops. “You okay?”
“It’s just a lot to take in.”
He brushes my cheek with his fingers and kisses me soft on the lips. “Rest. I’ll be back in soon.”
He leaves and I’m well aware that although he’s just doing the same thing we do every time we rest on the road, he’s also giving me space. I walk out of the office and climb the stairs to the second floor. The house feels colder up here but there’s carpet on the floor and the doors to all the rooms are open. My parents’ empty room is to the left of the stairway. To the right? My room. I feel a sense of contentment walking back through the door.
My computer sits on my desk, keyboard and screen coated in dust. My quilt, the one my aunt made and I stole out of my mother’s closet so many times that she finally gave it to me, stretches wide over the bed. Several posters I had up on the wall have fallen and are rolled up against the wall. I spot a picture of me and Liza at eighth grade graduation tucked into the corner of my mirror. We’re wearing dresses with glitter woven in the fabric and have silly smiles on our faces. I pick the photo up and stare at it. The sun was shining and no one carried a gun. We were both alive.
I hear a creak on the floorboard, the one right outside my door. The one that my mom could hear late at night if I left my room. I glance in the mirror and see Wyatt, who is large and out of place against the splash of aqua blue walls.
I hold up the picture. “Sometimes I’m jealous that she didn’t have to go through all of this.” I push it back where I found it. A relic of another life. I definitely don’t feel like that girl anymore. “Everything okay outside?”