His blood began to turn cold. There was real anguish in the boy’s eyes. He had been there when those video feeds had been running and saw the cold detachment Ben had displayed when staring at those screens. It had been disconcerting, but understandable. He wasn’t out in it and couldn’t get as invested with the violence of those acts like the rest of them could. But that detachment was now gone.
What was there in its place terrified him.
Ben’s hand was shaking as he poured himself another glass of Jack. He didn’t add anything to it, just downed it straight. His eyes were turning red and it looked like he was going to start sobbing at any moment. He poured himself another, but just sat there and looked at the glass, as if trying to collect his thoughts. “There is a ninth compound. One that fucking bastard never told me about; one that he would have killed me for if he knew that I found it.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t have killed you,” he responded quickly, trying to comfort the poor tortured soul before him, but he lacked the conviction to make it work and the eyes that drifted up to him called his bluff. “Why would he hide it?” he asked the haunted face glaring at him.
He was having a hard-enough time reconciling that there were seven other compounds out there full of people just like them. It was just too big; too complicated. He needed time to think it through and try to figure out what to do; what came next.
The young man brought the glass to his mouth; his eyes starting to tear. “He wanted to see if it could be done,” Ben said softly, then downed his drink.
His mind was racing; if what could be done? “Ben—”
“The virus! The goddamn virus! Don’t you see? That fuck had to research each of us down to whether you washed your underwear with Tide or Gain. Do you think he didn’t do that for each of the scenarios that might end the world? Do you not think that insane motherfucker would not look into whether you could actually create a zombie outbreak? Whether or not it was realistic? What were the terms he used? Oh yeah, it was more realistic that aliens would come down and we’d have a Battlefield: Los Angeles kind of action than have actual zombies in the world. Don’t you see Todd? This fucker wanted to see if they could actually create a zombie outbreak! You saw the way he was acting when he got here; tell me it wasn’t that fucking monster that did this to the world! Tell me! Because at this point, I just want to “opt out”. It’s just too much. What did we do Todd? What did we do?” the younger man screamed, the sobs ripping from his chest.
The horror of what he was saying struck him at his core and he found himself speechless, unable to get his vocal chords to respond, unable to move.
There’s no fucking way! He wouldn’t have done that! Would he?
Unable to process it, he felt the bile stinging his throat and realized he had thrown up on his feet.
Chapter 33
Revelations
Todd
Compound 2
“It can’t be; he wouldn’t,” he moaned, his throat raw and his words coming out in a horrified croak. He had to get himself a bottle of water out of the fridge and even that wasn’t helping to wash the taste of vomit out of his mouth. “There’s no way.”
Ben’s face was covered in tears, his puffy and red, “you have to believe me, I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know?” he thundered, the anger coursing through him unabated.
The idea that he was somehow responsible for what was going on out there in the world was infuriating the hell out of him and he took it out on the cowering young man before him.
“According to you, he was lying to us from the very beginning, about who he was, where the money was coming from, what we were doing—all of it. You said you found out about those other compounds, are you telling me you didn’t look any further? That you trusted that you found everything you could? That there was nothing else?”
Now he knew why Ben had insisted that they lock the door and he had a hard decision to make about whether he would tell them any of this. The guilt he felt was bad enough; did he really want to make the others share it? Were they not better off being ignorant?
“When he came forward and told me about the other compounds that I had stumbled on, about his past, about what he was doing, I believed him. He was quite frank about the whole thing, apologetic for keeping me out of the loop, and he had me convinced that there was nothing else out there to hide. I didn’t see the harm in building the other compounds. We were preparing for the end of the world, wasn’t it right that others out there do the same? I mean, fuck, they have a fucking TV show about that,” Ben returned, his voice cracking.
“Had,” he corrected, and watched as the young man’s face filled with anguish.
“I know, all right? I know! I can see what’s going on out there. You may think that I don’t understand it all, that it doesn’t affect me, but it does! I’ve just been so busy trying to keep everyone alive that I haven’t had time for it all to sink in yet. Can’t you understand that? Don’t you realize that I’ve been working almost non-stop since yesterday morning to figure out where this shit came from? How it all started?” Ben’s eyes were pleading for him to be understanding, and though his anger wouldn’t relent, he couldn’t meet those eyes; they mirrored the anguish in his soul.
“How do you know it was Sean?” he asked, taking another drink of Jack, this time letting it burn its way down slowly instead of draining it quickly. This was just too much.
“You didn’t see him when he got here. You arrived long after his plane touched down. He looked like hell and was scared out of his mind. I mean, we are all scared, but this was on some higher level that I just couldn’t understand. He kept talking to himself, saying things that made absolutely no sense. Kept going on about a plane, and at the time I thought he was referring to the one he flew in on, so I didn’t think about it much. It looked like he was suffering from post-traumatic shock and there was a lot going on to keep me distracted from what he was saying or doing. Then I saw how drunk he was last night—I began to question what was really going on. He had always been a social drinker, but no matter what, I’ve never seen him drunk off his ass like that; it set off warning bells in my mind. He was a control freak, obsessive about it, and alcohol has quite the opposite effect. What would drive a man like that to want to give up his control? What was he trying to forget? I had to look, I had to know why,” Ben explained, hitting on things that Todd had seen and experienced himself.
He had the same questions and it was comforting to know he wasn’t the only one that had picked up on how strange their older friend had been acting.
“So, before everything went completely to shit, I took another look at his financial records and found that a large portion of money has been funneling into offshore accounts unconnected with any of the compounds. It was well hidden and I had a bitch of a time tracing it. I think after I hacked his system he installed some upgrades and that made me even more curious, what else did he have to hide? I found a shell company that he had set up; a biotech firm in Maine. Nothing out of the ordinary, there are self-starter biotech companies setting up shop all over the world. Mostly outside the U.S. though, to get away from our stringent laws restricting research. But this one was being funded by those offshore accounts! Now, remember I set up our security network and I cannot explain to you how surprised I was that this biotech company was running my shit on their computers! I had helped Sean set up the other compounds and interlinked us so we could communicate, but I didn’t set any of this shit up. Yet, here it was, and a trap door I built in let me breeze right through the firewall.”
He tried opening another can of Red Bull to mix with his drink, but his hands were shaking so bad that Todd had to lean forward and do it for him. “Could he copy your program that easily?”
Ben shook his head. “No. There was a problem with one of the compound’s servers, something that I couldn’t fix over the wire. So, he had it brought to me and I had to straighten it back out. It never occurred to me that he had tri
ed to set it up on his own and that these were new computers meant for a different compound. These new ones had another level of encryption added since the last time I worked on them, but I was able to bypass it easily since I had designed the core system it was protecting. So anyways, I get in there and I start rooting around, and I realized that the reason I didn’t recognize most of the software being used is because it’s used in the medical field—to research pathogens!”
“Fuck me,” he whispered, taking another drink.
“He had a large group of scientists researching viral strains! I didn’t have enough time to figure out exactly what they were doing, because the government started shutting things down, cutting off my access. But I did catch an alert on their system that someone had removed one of the samples and that they were looking for the man. There was a memo there to Sean about it and it scared the shit out of me. One of their scientists was AWOL and whoever wrote it was going ballistic. Whatever that guy took, it was bad.”
He let out a deep sigh. “I don’t believe in coincidence,” he said, drowning his glass of whiskey and feeling a bit woozy as the alcohol started to do its work on his now empty stomach. “There’s no way that a scientist goes missing with a sample being developed by a guy preparing for the zombie apocalypse, which then happens, and it not being connected. Oh, fuck me, what are we going to do?”
The youth gulped. “I tried to find out more. They thought the guy was on a plane to DC, that he was either going to sell it to the Defense Department, or rat them out. They weren’t sure because it was too early to tell what was going on. But that’s all I got. Then I got shut out and when I tried to ask Sean about it he went crazy and took off. I had no clue what happened to him until you called to tell me he killed himself. Then I went back and looked at the security feeds and watched as he disconnected all the cameras,” Ben said. He looked guilty as hell and he suddenly had the urge to hug the kid. “Don’t you see? If I hadn’t said anything, maybe he wouldn’t have gone over there—”
“It’s not your fault,” he told him. “Did you have any idea that he was doing any of this before all this shit began?”
Ben shook his head, a tear falling from the corner of his eye. He wiped it with his sleeve. “If I had just let it alone—”
“Don’t do that,” he told him firmly. “You did the best you could with the time you had. None of us knew what he was doing, he had us all fooled. You didn’t trust him, you found out what he was up to. Without you, maybe nobody would ever know what started all this shit.”
The youth’s puffy eyes glanced at him; he was still not going to let himself off the hook. “If I had found out sooner—if I had just looked.”
“We can do the what if’s all day long, in the end it doesn’t matter—it’s done. God forgive us for what we started, but we can’t do anything to stop it now. Pandora’s Box has been opened and we’re just going to have to do whatever it takes to make it right. Did they have a cure?” he asked, not sure how they’d get it if they did, but feeling a slight bit of hope anyways.
Ben shook his head once more. “The memo said they were working on one, but they hadn’t been able to beat it yet. It was too aggressive.”
He thought of the images on the screens, the amount of death taking place out there in the world, and felt the weight of guilt fall upon him. He had initiated this with Sean; he had fed that man so many ideas. If he had kept his mouth shut would this have happened?
Goddammit, now he was doing it.
“I’m not telling the others and neither are you. This stays between us,” he told Ben, certain that the weight of what he had just been told would be too much for any of the others to handle.
Ben was nodding in response, wiping at his eyes. “What do we do?”
“Whatever it takes to survive,” he responded. “You said you’ve been in contact with the others?” He didn’t know for sure what to make of all of this, but it was too much for him. Right now, he could only concentrate on moving forward.
May Sean burn in hell for what he had done, but he had a family that needed him now, and he couldn’t dwell on it and stay sane.
The boy turned on the other monitors and video feeds began to appear showing similar rooms like theirs, but with very different faces on the other sides of them. None of them appeared to have heard their conversation and he felt relieved that Ben had muted their microphone. Seven faces turned to look at them now that their feed had begun streaming live and he saw the grief and misery on their faces. There was something else there as well, a glimmer of it fleeting along the edges; hope.
“Sorry about the delay, had to bring Todd here up to speed,” he told them, trying to sound less emotional and clearing his face before facing the webcam. He then pointed at the left monitor and began talking once more. “This is Arkansas,” he said, motioning to a Native American youth who nodded at him. “He’s at the Icecrown Compound in Northern Washington. Next is Kate,” he said introducing a young female with purple streaks, piercings and icy blue eyes, “she’s at the Shalozar Compound in South Dakota.”
“Icecrown, Shalozar?” he asked the young boy, interrupting his introductions.
The youth smiled at him. “He may burn in hell, but he’ll be doing it with that sick sense of humor of his intact. This is Brian,” he said, indicating a young man with long ratty brown hair and pimples, “out of the Grizzly Hills Compound in Georgia, home to the Walking Dead TV show by the way. And finally, this is Jenn from Sleepy Hollow, New York,” he finished, pointing to a young female with pink highlights and a huge smile.
He nodded at them all and they each welcomed him in turn.
“Do I dare ask what he named our compound?” he asked wearily. Probably something horrible, like Darnassus.
“Rattlesnake Lake,” Ben returned, giving him a dirty look for interrupting him.
“That’s it? No WoW reference? No off the wall name that no one will get? Just Rattlesnake Lake?” he asked, surprised. It was the name of the area they had built their compounds in and maybe it was because their group had started all this; that they had all taken part in the planning, that he had failed to give them a corresponding name to the rest.
“Nope, just Rattlesnake Lake. Now for our European friends—,” Ben continued, ignoring his questioning look completely.
So many faces, so many compounds, how did he not know about any of this? How had that man looked him right in the face and lied to them like that? He shook his head and as he greeted the other three compounds in turn, he felt a sickening feeling in his stomach. Had everything come out or was there still some secrets out there just waiting to spring on him?
Ben signed off, told them he’d be in touch shortly, then turned to face him. “Now you know.”
“I wish I didn’t,” he responded, sitting back in his chair. He was still going to have to go out and try to convince his family to come here, but did he really want to do that? Did he truly feel safe now? What else had Sean done to the place while they were away? He was going to have to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. They had to know every little detail, because with the world ending around them, their lives depended on knowing their surroundings and not having anything unknown lurking in the shadows that could cost them at the wrong time.
“There’s one other thing,” Ben said softly.
“There can’t be,” he returned, shaking his head. Hadn’t there already been enough? What else could go wrong? They were ultimately responsible for ending the world, for setting the madman loose that had done all this, what could possibly be still out there that could be worse than that?
Ben cued up the video feed from Compound 1 and began to run a playback. Sean’s plane exited the hangar, went to the end of the runway, and took off. “How closely did you check him when you found him there in that entertainment room? How sure are you that he was dead? Because while you and I have been in here talking, someone just flew off in his fucking jet!”
Chapter 34
Naima
Saint
Queen Creek, AZ
There was a dark cloud on the horizon and she knew that at that very moment, Phoenix was burning to the ground. They had driven without seeing much of the way of traffic, just the sporadic car here or there, all of them going the opposite way. From what she was seeing, she doubted any of them had come from the fire and destruction ahead.
She felt the sorrow at the thought of so much death and it took all she had to choke it back down. She needed to focus, put everything she had into their mission so they could get in and out safely and back on the road to Safford.
They had taken the 79 south to avoid going into the city; knowing that it would take her longer but not caring as long as it kept them safe and out of the path of destruction flowing towards her from the west. Not that even this route felt particularly safe. Now that she was preparing to turn off of N Hunt Hwy she prepared herself within for what was about to come. They were on a deserted street and she wondered if everyone had fled or if they were in one of the houses hiding out.
Surely that many people couldn’t just up and disappear?
“Erik, we’re almost there,” she told her companion, who was looking anxious and kept looking at the houses lining the streets.
“You know, shit can just come flying out of one of those any minute, right?” Erik asked, the fear creeping through every word.
“You volunteered to come along,” she reminded him, trying to smile; it didn’t work.
“Don’t remind me,” he muttered. They were coming to a stop in front of a brown house, and she found that it was no different than any other she had seen sprouting up on the south-west side of Tucson. The new houses all looked the same, no feel of individuality and if she didn’t have GPS coordinates telling her exactly where to go she might have missed it. Sourly, she thought that it would be a long time before new houses would be in demand again and shook her head in despair.
Charon's Blight: Day Two (the Rotting Souls series Book 2) Page 21