“Hello, everyone. I'm Liam and this is Marty.” None of the old folks looked as if they were as old as Grandma, but he didn't feel right asking them to call her “Grandma.”
“We were kidnapped at gunpoint two days ago and brought here in one of their military transports. Is that how you got here too?”
Before anyone could answer, a nurse came up to the tent, wearing camouflage scrubs, with a light mask over her mouth and nose. She asked “Ruth” to come with her. Once identified, the nurse moved to help one of the women rise from her cot—it took her some time to do so—and she went off with the nurse.
Once that distraction was over, an elderly man got up and introduced himself. He was thin and dressed in sweat pants and a well-faded Hawaiian shirt, but seemed energetic and alert. Qualities in short supply with the crowds he'd been hanging with lately.
“I'm Zachary Taylor—yes, like the President, my parents had high hopes for me—so pleased to meet you Liam. I look forward to meeting your grandmother when she's up to it.”
“She's my great grandmother actually. She's 104.”
The man let out a quiet whistle. “I'm sorry about how you found your way here. Most of us volunteered to be here.”
“Really? Did they promise you anything? Threaten you? Tell you why you're here?”
Zachary looked around to the few others sitting up and alert, as if to take their temperature on this point. “They told us the world was going to hell and that we had a chance to save it. Most of us—”
He looked around the room, scanning each bed.
“—yes, all of us here now were in various nursing homes in the area when they found us. You see, once the power went out, things became very—what's the word I'm looking for here? Terminal? Yes, things got terminal at the nursing homes. A few families came to get their loved ones, but many of us were already on our own when we went into the homes, and we had no family or friends left on the outside. No matter how bad things got in there, we had nowhere else to go.”
Zachary went on to explain how the loss of power was followed by a short but tense period on reserve generators at his home, but those failed pretty quickly. Power had been going on and off for a couple weeks before the final shutdown, so the generators had already seen hard use and poor maintenance. The final straw was lack of fuel. “Needless to say, many of the residents required power to live in comfort; some needed power simply to live. It was in the first day after the sirens people started to die—and the stream never stopped until there were only a handful of residents left. Even the help had scattered to the winds as things got progressively worse. Then Hayes showed up. At that point, it was myself and another woman—we joked about being the last man and woman on Earth, wouldn’t that be ironic? Hayes offered us a place to stay and explained why he needed our kind of people on his team, including the downsides.”
Liam interrupted. “Why! Why does he need people of your generation?”
“Experiments, of course. They are experimenting on us to try to solve the riddle of the cure.”
“And you let them?”
Zachary looked around, suddenly with a sadness about him. “Son, you're a bright-eyed kid—what are you, about 14?—so you can't see things for what they are. The world has collapsed. People are dying in the streets. What hope of survival do any of us old fogies have? What hope of ever contributing again? I can't speak for us all, but I'm doing this so my death means something. I see that look in your eyes. I know I'm going to die soon. We all do. If the Department of Homeland Security says I can help make a difference in finding a cure and protecting my fellow man, I feel it is my civic duty to try.”
“You said Homeland Security. Are you sure this isn't a CDC facility?”
“No, Hayes definitely said he was with Homeland Security. Why? Does it matter who he's with? Obviously this is a government operation.”
He couldn't answer that out loud. It mattered he saw a discrepancy. His dad would be shouting from the rooftops this was an ah-ha moment. He would never accept it didn't matter which entity of the government had shown up at his doorstep and asked for his cooperation. He would demand to know whose name was on the letterhead of the warrant. He'd want the address of the judge, in fact.
Hayes represented a group with lots of manpower, lots of military gear, and an apparent inside track on finding the cure to the infection burning through the population of the world. He was willing to tell lies to get them all here, including a lie about who he was with and what he did. Finally, he was willing to have Victoria shot in cold blood just to spank Liam into compliance.
Liam was agreeing with dad on this one.
I think it's pretty important who he's really with.
In front of Zachary, he just shook his head no.
2
The tent settled into a routine after the initial introductions and Liam's encounter with Zachary. Most of them were lying on their cots, resting. His watch displayed 2 p.m.
Two hours until bedtime!
He chuckled internally at the jocularity concerning old people. He knew it wasn't universally true, but Grandma was often in bed at the unnaturally early time of 7 p.m. For a fifteen-year-old, the night was just getting started at seven. Rather than take a nap, he pulled out his phone. Looking at it, he felt the sadness creeping back in.
I should have taken her picture with this.
How he missed that trick in all his time with her, he'd never know. Before the sirens, he was always snapping pictures of friends, pets, and even the odd pile of dog poop. He'd send them to friends as part of the life of a silly teenager. But he never thought to take her picture.
“Maybe I could ask agent Duchesne for a copy of the picture he took of her.” He could only laugh at the multiple layers of futility in that thought.
He was staring at the lock screen and noticed he was getting a Wi-Fi signal. Looking closer, the little display icon showed it was trying to acquire a signal. It hadn't found an open one. When he got past his lock screen, he swiped around a few times until he was looking at the available hotspots.
He was about to scroll through the list when he was aware of the nurse returning to the tent. He put his phone into his pocket just as the nurse arrived. She seemed to pause her eyes on him, but he admitted it could have been his imagination. He wondered if he looked guilty.
“Liam and Marty? Come with me, please. You need to meet with the base director.”
Liam moved to the nurse. She was still wearing a mask. “Would it be OK if I let my grandma sleep? Can I come with you now and then tell her what I learned later?”
The nurse nodded in the affirmative and she began walking away without comment.
He waved to Zachary so someone knew he was leaving the tent.
He tried some clumsy small talk, but the nurse was not very friendly. Soon they were at another of the smaller tents, but this one was closed on all sides and they had to go through a small door flap on the front.
Inside was nice and cool, though it had a strong musty smell common to all canvas tents left outside for any length of time. Several dim fluorescent lights were hanging from the tent's roof, their wires all running into a bundle near and under the back tent wall. He also noticed a tube of some kind was blowing air directly onto the man sitting at the lone desk in the middle of the tent. No, not just a man. A soldier. He was an older man with near-total gray hair, including a gray mustachio. He was wearing a camouflage uniform, the eagles visible on his shirt as he looked up at Liam.
“Hello, Liam and...Marty.”
“Uh, hello, sir. I'm Liam. My grandma is sleeping. The nurse said I could take notes for her.”
He turned around but the nurse was already gone.
Dang it!
“Welcome, Liam. I'm Colonel McMurphy. I run this place. I've asked you and your grandmother here so I could explain what it is we do here and why you two are so important to our cause. I would have preferred to tell her directly, but we'll roll with it. I expect thorough notes for
her.”
Liam couldn't tell if that was a joke.
The colonel stood up and moved to a row of silent computers against a side wall. Instead of taking a seat at one of them, he grabbed a few sheets of paper from a printer tray and handed them to Liam. The topmost appeared to be a satellite photograph of the city of St. Louis. There were a few red blotches in the middle of the photo, and some near the top.
“This is unclassified, by the way. I think everyone knows what you're about to see, even if they can't visualize the world from space. The first sheet shows the areas of the initial outbreaks in your city as best we can tell. Things moved so quickly we may never know for sure how the disease spread in those first few days. The second sheet is more in line with what we all know today.”
The second printout was the same view of the city, but the coverage of red was absolute.
“A bit dramatic perhaps, but true. The disease is now everywhere. If I had a globe, it would pretty much be a red orb. There are holdouts of course, places like this, but anywhere man can walk, the disease will be walking there.”
Liam handed the papers back, and looked at the colonel as if ready for more impressive information.
“You know, most people see that second sheet and practically wet their pants. You seem unconcerned by what I'm telling you.”
“I escaped the city with my grandma—no thanks to you military jerks who killed a lot of my friends when you bombed the Arch—and I've seen the zombies up close for six days now. I'm scared as hell around them, but I'm more scared around Hayes—he killed my girlfriend thankyouverymuch—and I'm scared silly standing here in your office waiting to learn what you are going to do to my grandma.”
The colonel walked back to his chair and sat heavily in it. He motioned for Liam to sit in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “You call them zombies, huh? I'm hearing that more and more, and from unexpected places. I've seen what these things become, so I guess I could see why you'd use that word.” He seemed to chew on his lip as he thought about something, but he continued on a different tact, “Normally I'd give a dog and pony show about saving the world, and my audience would be willing to step into an acid bath if they thought it would help further the research of this disease. I don't think you or your grandma will be so easily swayed.”
“Thanks?”
He studied the boy intently while sitting behind his desk. Liam felt very uncomfortable, as if he was under a bright light in front of a large audience. He couldn't help but squirm in his chair. The man's gaze was iron, but he looked down to his desk and seemed to dwell on some picture frames sitting off to the side.
In a quiet voice, the colonel began speaking again. “I'm very sorry about your girlfriend. I won't try to give you any excuses, but Hayes does what needs to be done in this crisis. There just isn't any time for pleasantries such as inquiries, criminal investigations, and so on. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.” He was looking down at his desk as he spoke, suggesting he might really be sorry. Or maybe he was pushing a red button somewhere to have the guards take him away?
“Let's go for a walk.” He stood up, motioning Liam to follow. They exited through a gap in the back flap. The day was overcast, but it was still a bright shock after the dim tent. Liam followed the soldier as he waved to a guard and then headed down a wide, well-worn double track path into the woods. When they were clear of the camp, he continued talking. “I’m glad to be with a young person again. I've seen a lot of old timers come through here, and frankly, I'm sick of them. They all seem resigned to die. Welcome it. It's not natural. Very much a downer.”
Liam could only agree. Many of the old people he'd seen were very morose in their outlook. Zachary summed it up nicely by stating most of the elderly had already died because they had no one to care for them, or they lost power, ran out of meds, or whatever. It shouldn't surprise anyone when the surviving oldsters resign themselves to die. His grandma had largely avoided such talk because he was there to take care of her. While the other survivors were arriving here with boosted spirits at doing something useful with their remaining time, she would undoubtedly view this camp as the complete downer it really was. She wasn't plucked from a sinking ship either. She was kidnapped at gunpoint.
“I couldn't help but notice you rescued a lot of these folks from their failing nursing homes, but you kidnapped my grandma.”
They were walking at a good clip, deeper into the woods, but the colonel slowed at that. “That was Hayes' call. He said he met your grandma days ago on the run out of St. Louis and he said she was a prime candidate for our research. She's a survivor of a remarkable age, and we need her.”
“So you can kill her?”
“So we can study her.”
“But you're going to kill her eventually, right?” Liam was leafing his books in his mind. He was hard-pressed to think of any stories where the experiments were happy and friendly, leaving the patient in better shape than when they walked in. He was disinclined to believe an organization run by people like Hayes would have the best interest of the test subjects, no matter how much they plead otherwise.
“Damn kid, you're a downer, too. I brought you out here to show you why we need your grandma, but now I'm wishing I hadn't.”
“Sorry, sir. My mouth runs away when I'm nervous.”
He looked around and saw nothing but woods in all directions, getting an inspiration. And a genuine chill. “And I'm being walked into the woods by a man with a gun on his hip. There are no witnesses. Hayes said he could have me killed at any time.”
The colonel gave a tart laugh. “Well, maybe you have cause to be a boat anchor. Look, I promise you I'm not here to kill you. I'll go ahead and show you what I came out here to show you.”
They walked for another five minutes or so, almost entirely in silence. There was no break in the woods along the trail until they reached the destination. The trail split at a junction. To the left was some kind of wooden enclosure. To the right, the path went up a sharp little hill, and then over. Liam couldn't see over the hill, but he could see a lack of trees in that direction. There was some kind of clearing, or maybe a lake.
The colonel walked toward the enclosure, indicating Liam should follow.
“We call this place 'the back forty.'” He thought it was funny, but Liam had no idea why. “This enclosure was originally a round corral built to hold animals, but we've modified it to hold some of our infected friends. Then we built this walkway over the top. It allows us to study them up close, and this particular pen is useful for one important experiment I'd like to show you.”
“You're not going to toss me in, are you?”
The colonel didn't even reply. He just walked up the flight of steps to the platform above the corral. Liam couldn't see any of the infected inside because large sheets of plywood had been strung around the outside of the pen. It made it look like a wooden coliseum, with a large wooden arch built across the middle. Exactly the kind of place victims would be tossed to the lions.
Liam climbed the stairs. He couldn't make a run for it and risk leaving Grandma to her fate, and he admitted he could have already been killed a hundred times by this man. And he was terminally curious.
I'm going to regret this.
3
When he reached the top, he could hear the moans and cries of the zombies below. One side of the walkway had a railing and a very fine metallic mesh wiring between the top rail and the floor, but was otherwise open to zombies 10 feet below. The other side of the walkway was lined with more of the plywood sheeting, so Liam couldn't see what was on that side of the pen.
“On this side, we have infected taken from the vicinity of St. Louis. These are the fellas you've been avoiding since the sirens went off almost a week ago. On the other side, behind these sheets, are infected from the Chicagoland area.”
He pointed straight down.
“You see this wire mesh hanging down from this walkway? Not the stuff up top, but the stuff below the walk and down
to the ground. There's an identical one hanging on the other side of this walkway. We did that so the two sides couldn't touch each other beneath us.”
Liam was looking straight down. A handful of zombies were in the pen, and they were all grasping for him while pressed up against the wire mesh. Fortunately, they were well below the walkway and no immediate threat.
“Do you think you could climb up that mesh?”
Liam suddenly panicked. He took a quick step back from the railing.
“I'm not going to push you in! I'm just asking a question. Move away from me. Stay away from me. I don't care.”
Nervous laughter. “Sorry. Now I have you and zombies to worry about.” After stepping back to the rail, he conceded the mesh was spaced so a man could climb out of the pen easily, much like climbing a chain link fence.
“You'll notice in a moment what makes this experiment so interesting. I want you to look on this side.”
As he pointed Liam to the closed-off side, he slid a piece of plywood along the walkway so they could both get a look at the subjects below. There were only two. They were both middle-aged men dressed in business suits. Well-bloodied with horribly mutilated necks. Liam wondered how their heads didn’t just fall off. They immediately became agitated. With visible targets, they moved directly below Liam and the colonel, much as the ones on the other side had done.
The zombies seemed to notice the wire mesh in front of them. They saw it going up to their prey. So they grabbed on. After some initial fumbling, one of the zombies started to climb the fence.
“Oh shit!”
The other zombie took a cue from his friend. Soon both were on the wire mesh, climbing directly below Liam.
The colonel slammed his hand on Liam's back, not violently, but in a sportsmanlike-manner. “Oh shit indeed!”
Liam froze again. How easy would it be to toss him in now? He tried to push back at the fear, but he was frozen solid in anticipation of what would happen next. If he had to pee, he might have had wet drawers just then.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 43