by Barry Napier
Instead, he hurried over to the man he’d kneecapped and picked up his gun—another M9 just like the one he’d taken off of Jolly’s partner. He clicked the safety and crammed it between the waistband of his jeans and his lower back.
The man muttered a string of curses at him, screaming and crying the entire time. Paul considered putting a bullet right through the plastic shield, between the eyes, but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. At least this way someone could come along and hopefully get the man the help he needed.
“Think you’re going to just roll out of here?” the injured man said, the words seething out of his clenched teeth. “You’ll get your head blown off before you even see the road again.”
Hearing this, Paul did allow himself a quick kick to the man’s ribs. The relief of it was exhilarating, and he hated how good it felt.
Paul hurried back over to the front side of the second trailer. A metal flight of stairs went up to the front end of it, where a door was built into the side—the same sort of flimsy door he’d opened to exit his own trailer. He was shocked that he did not have to use the keycard to open it. He assumed the security of the place had lost a lot of integrity when the larger structures had been torn down.
He pulled the door open and walked inside, once again puzzled by the sheer contrast of the way the place was built. He was standing in the hub of three holding rooms, and it was nothing but the painted interior of an old 18-wheeler trailer. But the rooms that had been installed into the sides were almost futuristic, like something out of a sci-fi movie…and he was so glad to be out of his. He ran over to the door Jolly had indicated and pressed the keycard to the black plate by the door. A green light flickered and then the sound of hydraulics came from within the walls.
He pushed the door open and saw Olivia right away. She’d been sitting on the edge of the cot but when she saw him, she leaped to her feet and dashed at him. “Oh my God,” she said. “How did you—”
“Not right now,” he said, breaking the hug and stepping away. “Right now we have to move. It’s already not safe and the longer we wait, the worse it’s going to be.”
Olivia turned to Joyce and got right in her face. Paul could tell even without getting a clear look that the girl was in a bad way. She looked pretty much checked out. And he assumed the rich smell of urine in the room had something to do with it. Thinking of what Joyce had likely gone through during their stay here briefly made Paul wish he’d shot that last guy through the head.
“We need to go, okay?” Olivia told the girl. “And we need to do it quickly.”
Joyce did not move. She continued to stare at the little tablet, her eyes unexpressive. Paul could tell that Olivia was struggling, doing her best not to cry. Slowly, Paul walked to the cot and knelt on it.
“Hey there, Joyce. I sure did miss you.”
The girl’s eyes flickered and she looked up for a moment. “Mr. Paul?”
“Yep, it’s me. You want to get out of here?”
“Can we?” she asked. She still looked to be in a dreamlike state, and there was something about the blankness in her eyes that made Paul very uncomfortable.
It was Olivia that answered as she slowly took Joyce’s hands off of the tablet. “We can go,” she said. “But we have to be fast and very quiet. There are people that don’t want us leaving and we have to stay away from them.”
“Like the doctors?” Joyce asked with fear in her voice.
“Like some of the doctors,” Paul said. “So come on…let’s go.”
“Our bags,” Olivia said. “They took everything. We only have this one change of clothes for Joyce and—”
“I think we just have to deal with that,” Paul said. “I don’t want to be rude, but we’re wasting time. I’ve already had to…had to do things I don’t like to do.” He nodded to Joyce and said, “You okay carrying her?”
“Yeah,” Olivia said, already opening her arms for Joyce. Joyce moved slowly from the bed and Olivia picked her up. “No matter what you do, stay behind me. And if I go down, you both run to the forest behind this place, okay?”
Olivia could only nod. Tears were running down her cheeks and her eyes looked absolutely terrified. Paul checked to make sure the second gun was still tucked in at his back and then exited the room. He nearly started for the exit but then realized there were two other rooms in the trailer. He looked into the little porthole window of the first one and found it empty. He then checked the last one along the row and saw a young man, surely no older than twenty, sitting on the floor.
Paul pressed the keycard against the plate of this room and the door unlocked. When Paul pushed it open, the young man didn’t even seem to notice. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted slightly upwards as if he might be praying or meditating.
“Hey,” Paul said. “Come on. This place is going to hell and we’re leaving.”
The young man shook his head slowly from left to right. It was then that Paul noticed the bruises on his face. One of his eyes was nearly swollen shut. Apparently, the guards and soldiers had been particularly rough on him.
“Not going anywhere,” the man said. “Death is everywhere. At least here I know its face.”
The young man finally opened his eyes and looked directly at Paul. “You can’t outrun it, you know,” he told Paul. And then he let out a high pitched laugh that was like glass being pressed through Paul’s brain. Whatever they’d done to this young man was not his problem and he was not going to waste another second trying to get through to him.
Paul waved Olivia on to follow him as they went to the exit at the far side of the trailer—the same side Paul had entered through. The man he had knee-capped was still on the ground. He was slowly pulling himself toward the few vehicles parked near the top of the field. Paul ignored him completely and stuck to the instructions Jolly had given him: make their way to the woods, walk south for several miles before venturing back out to the roads.
They came to the edge of the trailer and Paul turned to the left, towards the towering trees. Oaks, firs, spruces, they all seemed to beckon them. Yet as he took two quick steps in that direction, a gunshot sounded to his left. He shouted and jumped back. Specks of dirt and grass slapped against the leg of his pants. It was this oddity that helped him to realize it had been a warning shot.
He looked to the left, where the shot had come from, and saw a man standing about fifteen feet away. It was Ramsey. He was not wearing a protective suit and he was holding an assault rifle of some kind. Ramsey looked like he had been sweating profusely and his face was incredibly red and strained. For a moment, Paul thought of those horrendous hours in New York City when the virus had been running rampant. He had to shake it away because, though they had managed to escape it all, the memories of it were still like living nightmares.
“Going somewhere?” Ramsey asked. It appeared that he was struggling to hold up the rifle. As a matter of fact, it looked like his knees might give out at any moment. Still, sick and weak or not, he’d had the foresight to hide behind the trailer to get the jump on them.
“We serve no purpose being here,” Paul said. “You took our blood, you ran your tests, and that’s that. Seems you guys are also headed somewhere else, too.”
“Oh, I sure as hell am,” Ramsey said. He giggled at this and through it, Paul could hear the virus in him. He could hear the weak voice, the thick phlegm, the fluid in the lungs. “I figure I have another fifteen or twenty minutes. But you…you have however long this wrecked world will allow. Or maybe as long as I allow. Why should you live when so many others are…”
He stopped here to allow himself to cough. When he was in the midst of it, Paul bought the gun up. He was fully prepared to pull the trigger but was halted by a loud voice from behind them.
“Drop the gun, Mr. Gault,” the voice said. He wheeled around and saw a man in one of the protective suits. It was a man he’d seen once or twice before but did not have a name for. He was holding a service pistol in his hand with
a shooter’s stance that told Paul this man knew what he was doing. A bit further behind him, he saw another person in a protective suit approaching. They, too, had a gun pulled.
Paul had no idea what to do. If he dropped the gun, he was sure they’d either kill them or pack them up and ship them to the next testing facility. And if he tried to win a firefight in a three-on-one situation, he would most likely lose and be risking the lives of Olivia and Joyce. So, with no clear path to take, he did the only thing he could think to do. He moved slowly, stalling without being obvious, and hoped some miraculous opportunity would present itself. The most frightening aspect of it all was Ramsey. He was un-suited and sick. He was right…he’d be dead very soon and it seemed that this knowledge had made him vengeful.
“Mr. Gault, this is the last time I’m going to say it,” the suited man said. “Drop the gun.”
Paul raised his arms in the air, the M9 going over his head. “Okay, I’m going to get rid of it. But before I do, you have to—”
“Oh, we’re done making deals,” Ramsey said from his left. “The time for deals is over. Hesitation and doubt is why this virus got spread so far in the first place. Drop it now, or I’ll take your head off right in front of the girl. Do it now!”
Paul’s heart was slamming in his chest. He was just a moment away from tossing the gun to the ground and planning to use the one at his back if he could reach it when another voice chimed in.
“I’d do what he says, Mr. Gault.” It was the figure that he’d seen in the background, quickly approaching behind the man that had gotten the drop on him. It was a female’s voice and it seemed almost entirely conversational. The suited man turned to face the figure, too. He seemed a little confused as the woman in the suit went on. “They aren’t messing around anymore and they will shoot you. Last warning, Mr. Gault. And also, I’ll take six if you take nine.”
The last bit made no sense until he heard the first gunshot. By the time he saw the man closest to him jitter backwards from the shot, Paul finally understood. He swung around to his left—to his nine o’clock position—and fired off two rounds into Ramsey. Ramsey screamed and tottered backwards. His fingers twitched as he fell, firing off five rounds from the assault rifle.
It took Paul about two seconds to realize he’d been shot. The first round from Ramsey’s rifle had taken him high in the shoulder on his left side. He felt as if he’d been pushed back hard, but managed to keep his feet.
He then swung around, stumbling a bit, searching for the woman who had started firing. She was approaching him, the gun still aimed at the fallen man in the suit. Paul could see where the plastic shield that covered his face had been blasted open. He also saw the neat and perfect little hole just below the man’s right eye and the second hole just over the bridge of his nose.
Between Paul and the woman with the skillful shots, Olivia was clinging to Joyce. She was shuddering and looking to the woman. Slowly, something like dulled understanding came to her face. This was followed immediately by surprise.
“Doctor Chen?” she said.
Paul had not met a Doctor Chen since he’d been here but he already liked her quite a lot. She hurried over to Paul and looked at the wound on his left shoulder. Paul knew it hurt but the stress and adrenaline of the moment seemed to be temporarily overriding it. The sensation of flowing blood out of his body and down his shirt was somehow more noticeable than the pain at the moment. He’d spoken to enough cops who had been shot to know that this was a momentary form of shock and it was not going to last long.
“Others are going to be coming from the initial roadblock two miles up the road,” Chen said as she checked his wound. “There are dirt trails through the woods that will connect back to the road. If we leave now, we can beat them.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Olivia asked, looking back and forth between Paul’s gunshot and Dr. Chen.
“If I can tend to him soon, yes, I think so. The shot went through and does not seem to have hit his collarbone or shoulder. But that’s just a preliminary look—and if it’s right, he was very lucky. But at the risk of seeming heartless, we have to go right now. We can take one of those trucks and beat them into the woods. After that…I don’t know. But every second counts.”
“We?” Olivia said, her brain processing the information too slowly. Was Chen proposing to come with them?
“Then let’s go,” Paul said through a grimace. Jolly had told him to walk through the woods but he trusted this woman, too. And if the trails she mentioned went through the woods, he supposed they were still following Jolly’s orders. He started walking forward, wanting to place an assuring arm around Olivia but unable to do so as his right hand held the gun and his left arm was starting to feel like taffy. With each step they took up to the trucks, the pain started to register in his left shoulder. It was a burning ache, sharp and insistent. He started to get a tingling sensation that ran down his left arm. Coupled with the feeling of blood still oozing down, it was a little surreal.
They reached the first truck and Chen shook her head when Paul went to it. “No. It’s the third one,” she said. “I’ve already checked. The keys are in it. I also managed to grab your bags with all of your things.”
Paul heard this but found it hard to accept or even fully understand it. She’d planned this? When? Why? At what point did she know it was going to end like this? These were all questions that seemed to present themselves and then trickle away just like the blood from his shoulder. He reached for the door and pulled it open, and that seemed to be the single motion that keyed his body in to the fact that he’d been shot.
His head swayed and his legs started to buckle. Someone—either Chen or Olivia—caught him under the arms and guided him into the back seat of the truck. Distantly, as if it were coming over an AM radio that had been submerged under water, he could hear Joyce starting to cry.
“S’okay,” he said, though he was starting to wonder if that was true or not. “Gonna be okay, little girl.”
He searched for her face but the world was becoming a blurry haze. The back of the front seat was just a foot or so in front of his face and it looked like nothing more than a green smudge. He wondered if this was dying or just passing out. By God, he was losing a lot of blood. He could feel it and even smell it as he heard the grumbling of an engine. His body then lurched back as the truck started speeding ahead. In that same sort of almost-underwater way, he barely caught pieces of the conversation between Olivia and Chen from the front seat.
“You ever use a gun before?” Chen asked.
“No,” Olivia answered, her voice slightly high and growing hysterical.
“If we see trucks or Jeeps coming after us, you might need to learn. I doubt they’d be able to catch up, but…I don’t know. We can—”
That was the last thing Paul heard. There was some bumping and a huge bounce. Before a veil of darkness swept in over everything, he craned his neck up and looked out of the windshield. He supposed the fragmented blurs of blacks, browns, and greens could be the forest but he didn’t know. And, in the face of that rushing darkness, he really didn’t care. Paul collapsed back in the seat and let the darkness have him.
Chapter 23
Katherine got her first true worry about radiation sickness about two and a half hours into walking. Her stomach churned in a way she’d never felt before and when she stopped to figure out just what the hell her stomach was trying to do, she realized that she was also pretty dizzy.
Why jump straight to radiation poisoning? she asked herself. It could just be the Blood Fire Virus. Hey…take your pick. Which is going to be more fun to obsessively worry about?
She stopped on the side of the road, sitting almost casually on the back of a white SUV. She sipped down some water and had a light snack that consisted of two mini donuts. She toyed with the idea of a third but her stomach was already cautiously gurgling. Sure, a banana or toast might have been better for her stomach but she was all out of both.
S
he looked back the way she had come. The sky had settled down to an odd sort of pink as the destruction from the day before had started to settle. The mushroom cloud was a distant memory now and she could envision it settling on the ruined city like some sort of poison, ravaging the land to kill off anything the bomb had not managed to eradicate.
She waited a moment, sipping some more water to give her stomach a chance to figure out what it wanted to do. As she did, she thought of Rollins and the call he’d made not too long before the nuke had detonated. Smaller bombs just before the big one. She tried to connect all the pieces but couldn’t make it work.
“Why, though?” she asked the quiet road. “Why smaller detonations first?”
With no answer coming, she finally hopped down off of the bumper and looked ahead. She was pretty sure she could see breaks starting to form in the traffic up ahead. Several cars ahead of her, she saw a well-used tow truck, the hitch dangling proudly on the back. She wondered if she could drive that and just start hauling cars out of the way to free up the road. It would take forever but then at least she’d have some sort of control over the situation.
Before she left the white SUV behind, she looked into the windows. There were two corpses inside, a man and a woman. The man was behind the wheel, leaning slightly in the direction of the woman in the passenger seat. Katherine knew what she wanted to do and though she was pretty sure it was a dead end, she had to at least try. She’d been thinking of it all morning but had not been able to bring herself to break into anyone’s vehicle. But now she felt a little more desperate and figured the world was a very different place than it had been just a few days ago.