The official story given over what remained of mass media, Liam learned, was that the Patriots unleashed the plague as they arrived at the capital. Instead of being done to soften up the defenses, it was done to eliminate the entire city so they could take it over. Though he was certain his father believed the city was already filled with mindless zombies working in government buildings throughout the area, the thought of his father unleashing anything so destructive on the innocent citizens of Washington D.C. was impossible to accept.
The letter proved that much, if nothing else.
“So your grandma Rose pretty much started the Patriot Snowball. Wow.”
“Yeah, so we can be sure she or my dad didn't release the plague,” he said with a weak laugh, “but we still can't be entirely sure the Polar Bears didn't plan the eventual violence. Maybe they did release the plague under cover of fighting a bigger conspiracy.” He thought of any number of heinous acts done in the name of a greater good. “They could release it because they knew my Grandma would never be thought capable of it. Nor my dad.”
“I don't think we know enough to say anything right now. It doesn't really matter, does it?”
Did it matter if his dad was associated with murderers? Probably not in the short term. Everyone was too busy fighting the encroaching hordes of zombies to worry about people in the next county, next city, next state. But part of him thought it was imperative to know for sure if the Patriot Snowball had been corrupted, or maliciously slandered by a collapsing government intent on hiding a more egregious sin committed by their own side.
“You're right. It doesn't change the basics. I feel better about my dad. And my mom.” He grunted. “I was a real jerk to her, wasn't I?”
He'd yelled at her and acted like a baby when she told him about his dad's death. Now that he'd regained his senses, he felt the sting of his own words.
“Well.” She looked at the floor, saying everything that needed to be said.
“OK. I'll go apologize. But you and I need to do something before we go back out there.” In happier times this may have been the point where he embraced her with a kiss—they had rare privacy and safety at that moment—but he continued to think about the overarching goal of finding the cure to the plague as well as documenting the whole thing for future citizens of whatever country emerged from this dark time. He wanted to write it all down in a book.
He spoke in a whisper. “We can't stay here. My mom is going to argue against leaving, I just know it. Now that we're here I feel like we have to get back to Cairo and help Grandma. Protect her. This is too big not tell her.”
“Maybe it's better to have your family spread out? Maybe she is safer there?” She gave him a hopeful look.
Liam wondered if Grandma Marty already knew about her own daughter-in-law's secret. If Rose was spinning up some big conspiracy theory, and she got his mother and father involved, it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine she'd gotten other people in her family up to speed as well. He tried to replay days of material in his head, searching for anything that would tip him off that Grandma Marty was aware of the people working with his parents. Either he missed something obvious, or she was in the dark, just like him.
Nobody is in the dark as much as me.
He looked at his girlfriend. She had gone with him into the black pit of the mine. She crawled out through the hollowed grave, same as him. She knew exactly as much as he did about the conspiracy that had engulfed his family. They were both in the dark. He was glad for the company.
“Nowhere is safe anymore. I vote we go back to Cairo and bring Grandma here. I want us all together again so we can look out for each other. That's the only thing we can count on, anymore.”
As she'd done so many times in the past, she took his hand and firmly pulled him out of the private space.
His spirits moved up just a notch.
3
They found his mom in another room of the administration building filled with radios. When they walked in, he was surprised to see a dozen older teen boys sitting around various types of radios in the small conference room. Most wore headphones to mask the sound, but some of the larger radios were on the back wall and one in particular was allowed to bellow across the room.
“...the last report from the would-be rescuers of Plattenville was they had secured several intersections and bridges around the bayou town, but there were too many infected to keep them at bay. We will update you if we get any live feeds out of that part of Louisiana.”
Another newscast began talking about Wisconsin, but Liam's attention was pulled away by his mother. She neared, but appeared afraid to touch him.
Liam reached out to her and, like Victoria, they embraced for a long time. The apology was understood. It brought down his animosity with his mother, but the radio continued to broadcast over his shoulder.
“...the guard units spread out and surrounded the former makeshift medical collection point in the school’s gymnasium.” The radio broadcast cut to what was obviously a local reporter. Gunfire was constant and boisterous. A woman's voice barely cut through. “What you are hearing is the significant effort being undertaken to subdue the infection here in Racine. For two days the Guard has worked to cordon off this section of the city and compress the circle by killing everything inside. Block by block they've managed to finally reach this spot.” More gunfire kicked up, making it all but impossible to understand the woman.
Liam looked around as he separated from his mom. Several of the operators had one earphone off so they could listen to the main radio.
“What's going on here?”
His mom shushed him, though she pointed to the radio to indicate why.
The woman could be heard talking to someone, but it was still washing out with the waves of violence in the background of the broadcast.
Her voice returned with her yells. “We have to leave! We are being told to leave. But I can see—”
Gunfire.
“—holy shit. They were hiding.”
Gunfire, though less of it.
The woman's screeching only increased in volume. “The little f—— bit me! Get it off!”
Liam was horrified by the scene, but inwardly laughed that of all government departments it would be the FCC that would survive. Here they were bleeping out the bad words of a dying reporter as she was broadcasting to a dying world.
Well done, FCC. Well done. You've protected my delicate ears.
“If anyone can hear me. They were dead, then they came back to life. Right in front of us. Right—”
A loud squeal blasted out of the speakers, like the signal was lost. Liam, and the others, lamely stared at the radio for several seconds before someone thought to turn the volume down.
His mom led him and Victoria out of the room. “It's bad out there. I mean places beyond our valley. The sick behave differently in different parts of the country.”
Liam had been out there. He knew. But it was disheartening to hear the situation was just as bad in Racine, Wisconsin as it was in St. Louis, Missouri. He'd hoped somewhere had it better.
His mom surprised him as she grabbed both his arms and held him fast. “Listen, you two. There's something heading this way. A convoy. A big one. It's parked in West Virginia right now. It's coming to St. Louis from the East Coast. You know what that means?”
Liam had no idea. Victoria shook her head in the negative, which helped him feel better at his own ignorance.
“It means St. Louis is about to become an armed camp.”
“Isn't that a good thing? They can protect everyone from the zombies.”
Mom looked at Liam. “Every indication is this convoy is made up of all the remnants of the previous government. All the senators, representatives, judges...the new president. They're traveling with tanks, helicopters, planes. They have a hundred miles of big rigs. Two hundred miles of civilians in tow. All trying to get through hordes of zombies. And they're bringing it all here.”
The problem was
staring at him, he knew it.
“But isn't the point to rescue people?” He looked at Victoria, as another check on his sanity, but she had the look of someone in the dark, too. He thought it would be great to have all those military forces ringing the city, fighting off the zombies so they could rebuild a little of the city and eek out survival there.
His mom appeared agitated. “Did your dad not mention the NIS?”
He nodded. A wisp of anger returned at his mom's obtuse implication. His dad asked him to show the letter to his mom after he'd read it. He wasn't ready to do that.
“Well, the people coming here are the same people he warned you about. The National Internal Security agents will be at the head of that column. And they'll be at the back, too, probably cutting people loose they consider to be threats to them.” She looked at Victoria and him in turn. “The people coming here are evil, guys. They have to be stopped.”
Liam looked at his mom, seeing something in her for the first time. Something of his father had rubbed off on her. Instead of being the nurturing woman he'd always known, she was now advocating for something deadly in an already dangerous world. It surprised and scared him.
His mom was suggesting they go to war.
4
“War? With America?”
“No Liam, the USA is dead. The people coming here are not the same people that ran things before the outbreak. Sure they might look the same, and function in some of the same roles as before, but their motives have been exposed. These are the people who knew the infection was coming and prepared for it. They left everyone else, including your father, on their own. Now they're coming to pick up the pieces as heroes, instead of the villains they deserve to be labeled.”
He thought back to the first victims of the zombie outbreak. The woman he dubbed “yoga lady” was his first direct experience up close with a zombie, though he'd seen one other zombie before her. Grandma Marty's nurse Angie had become one, and chased his grandma to a photo finish. He'd also spent a lot of time among the survivors down under the Arch, and on the escape out of the city. In those travels he'd also run into several layers of government, none of which seemed to be any better off than him. That included police captains, Army generals, and scores of policemen from several jurisdictions. If any of them were “in on it,” they wouldn't have let themselves get caught in the often hopeless positions out in the wilds of the Zombie Apocalypse. How many of the people now heading to St. Louis were part of that ruling cabal that might be most directly responsible for the plague? Even if those people existed, did that mean those with them deserved the same fate?
Or, put on its ear, was the Patriot Snowball movement about making everyone with any association to government pay for the sins of the inner sanctum of politicians? If this was to be a war, he didn't expect judges and senators to be out on the front lines.
He didn't have the energy to argue with her. “How long until they get here?”
“I've heard a few things on the news. They're reporting it in the clear, as your dad would say. The convoy is moving very slow. Lots of downed bridges and wrecks to clear. They could be here in a week or a month. Depending on what's in front of them...”
A month in zombie time was forever. The whole city could have gone feral by then.
“Victoria and I are going to get Grandma before they arrive...” He didn't look at Victoria. They had discussed it earlier. “Wait. Back up. The Snowballers are in front of that convoy. You aren't going out to slow them, are you?” His dad he could see as part of a noble group of saboteurs, but not his dear old mom—no matter what the letter implied.
“What? Why do you say it like that?” She held her arms out from her sides, offering herself as exhibit A. “What about me, specifically, makes you think I wouldn't go out to try to protect you? Your father and I got into the city, then back out, without a single scratch on us. I think I can take of myself pretty damned well.” She finished by putting her hands on her hips, daring him to disagree.
When he said nothing, she continued. “You won't understand this, but I have to stay busy. If I stop and think about your father wasting away here in the infirmary with no help to give him, and the fact he is now buried on that hilltop...well, let's just say my thoughts aren't pretty, right now.” She smiled at Liam, then at Victoria. “But protecting you two. That's something worth fighting for.”
Strangely, Liam did understand her. Losing Victoria had been a possibility since the moment they'd met. He had in fact “lost” her several times—thinking she was dead or had abandoned them. But she had found her way back to him. Those times while she was gone, though. He'd had some dark thoughts; he wondered if his mom would be encouraged to know he had felt similarly bad or disappointed his thoughts involved his own death. Rather than say that, he opted to only nod in the affirmative. Whatever he felt at thinking Victoria was dead, it couldn't play on the same ball field as his mom, who knew Dad was gone.
“So you're leaving us?” He tried to keep it from sounding like a baby bird that fell from its nest.
His mom laughed, with her best fake smile. “Oh Liam. Do you think I would leave my only son at this dark hour? Not a chance! But, if I can do anything to slow down those people, I'm going to take it. I'll help anyone willing to try.”
“OK, then you'll go with us to get Grandma?”
“If what you told me was true about that mine—and I have no reason to doubt you—it sounds to me like the fight is already here in St. Louis, on multiple levels. The Polar Bears are nearby and are exploring the same rabbit holes started by your Grandpa Clyde, and continued by Rose. I think the sooner we can get Marty up here and in their care, the better off I'll sleep at night.”
“Do you know where Grandma Rose is?” he asked his mom.
“I don't think anyone knows where she is, for sure. Your father and I often talked about that, toward the end.” Her face displayed a tight-lipped smile, but her eyes and the bags underneath refused even a suggestion of humor. Liam knew her pain was too fresh.
“I want to get Grandma Marty, then I want to find Grandma Rose. She knows how this all fits together better than anyone. I need the answers to the big questions about this plague.” He didn't mention his mom's role, which he now knew was more than she was admitting.
He waited for his mom to speak up, but she said nothing.
5
Camp Hope had grown so large it was difficult to get a meeting with the camp directors. In prior visits Liam was famous for getting impromptu meetings with them, at all hours of the day. But he also knew one of the Boy Scout leaders personally—Mr. Lee, a man who fell victim to forces searching for Liam—and thus had an “in.” Today he had no cards to play.
His mom had spent most of her time since arrival hovering around the inside of the administration building. First as a helper for her husband, and later she stuck around because she didn't know where else to go. All her time there allowed her to make many friends in the Scout hierarchy. That's what got her into the radio room and what now got her into the food supply area.
If they'd been there to sack the place, they would have gained nothing. There was no food remaining. Not a crumb. The only thing in the pantry was water. Bottles and bottles of it. The Scouts were good about saving bottles, purifying water, then re-filling them for future use. The three of them each pulled two bottles from the shelves.
They returned to the radio room, as that seemed to be the only official place in the building they could all access. His mom stepped away to talk to one of the radio operators, leaving him with Victoria.
“We aren't going to get far if we don't get some food,” Victoria whispered to him.
The sparse larder helped him comprehend the grim reality of the valley. All the people had come here as a safe place to get away from the zombies, but without food there was no long-term hope for the place. His stomach rumbled loudly at the mere mention of food. Even with all the noise in the room Victoria heard it. She held his arm, but didn't offer her
usual cheer at the prospect of another adventure. That was unusual.
He spoke while staring at a tiny yellow shortwave radio held by a young man sitting close by. “Am I being stupid? Should we find a place to hunker down and be like everyone else—ride this thing out?”
“I don't know where that place would be. Not here. You saw the food storage. I'm not sure how this place isn't in riot mode already. Maybe the Scouts help with that. Who knows. But I do think bringing Grandma here would be a mistake. We should get back to Cairo and stay there, instead. Whatever's going to happen when that convoy arrives, or all those tanks roll out of that cave...we need to be far away.”
He'd wondered if they should have stayed in Cairo almost since they'd left that town two days ago with such high aspirations. He desperately wanted to find the cure, and find the people responsible for releasing the plague, but losing Dad was a left jab to the gut. Learning that the group of men and women most responsible for causing the plague were coming to St. Louis to make it their new home—that was an uppercut to the jaw. Now he was swooning in indecision about his future. The thought of going anywhere dangerous with his own mother just added to the confusion.
He motioned Victoria back a few steps, and she took his hint.
“Hold on, you two.” His mom was on him in a flash. “You aren't thinking of leaving without me, are you?” She gave him a knowing smile, then touched her nose. “I know how you two operate. I'm on the lookout for you to sneak away. I'm glad you two weren't together back in the time before. I couldn't ever let you kids out of my sight.”
He wasn't sure what she meant by that, though the blush on Victoria's face gave him a hint. He wanted to move on. “We could just walk away from you in the middle of the night somewhere.” Liam said it to be funny, but knew he'd failed. He would never leave his mom for dead, which was a more realistic term for “alone” out in the world.
She scowled. “Just wait here. I'm getting the most up to date information I can, before we leave this camp.”
When she was back with the radio operators, Liam let himself relax. “I can't leave her. I couldn't leave anyone I l—love.” He looked at Victoria. “I just don't know how effective I can be if I have to watch out for my girlfriend and my mom at the same time.”
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 115