“We’ll keep two on the perimeter all night,” Adam said with as much authority as he could muster. “We’ll stagger the shifts so that each of us can get a little sleep. Freddie, you stay here with these two.”
Freddie nodded, the look in his eye of someone who had no intention of sleeping, and Adam and Sarah set out on the first shift. She gave him some pointers about using the gun as they circled the camp, but eventually, the conversation drifted off into silence. They walked quietly for a while. In the shadow of what they’d found earlier, everything seemed petty right now.
“Ask you a question?” Sarah asked.
“Sure.”
“Let’s say we find your daughter.”
“Rachel.”
“Right, Rachel. Say we find her.”
“We’ll find her!”
“Okay. But what then?”
“What do you mean?”
“What next?” she asked. “How do you spend the rest of your days?”
“I guess we do what anyone else left will do. Join up with other survivors. Find a safe place to live. Clean water. Food. I don’t know. Maybe write a book.”
She laughed at that, a light, infectious laugh that danced across the space between them and for a moment made him forget all the problems surrounding them, a broken world shattered into a million pieces. He glanced over at her, and saw a wide smile on her face. She wasn’t looking at him, she wasn’t really looking at anything. She just seemed to be enjoying the fact that she was enjoying something.
She ran a hand through her hair, tugging on the end of her jet-black locks, and a flash of sadness flickered across her face. She flipped her ponytail behind her back with authority, as though she’d caught herself engaging in childish thoughts, and the time for that was over.
“What?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“This might be the way things are for a while. We’re gonna have to be extra careful.”
“I realize that,” he said.
“And, you know…” she said, her voice softening. “I just think it’s important to stay realistic about what we’re doing.”
She doesn’t think we’ll ever find her.
They stood perfectly still, their eyes locking in the late-summer night. The silence was overwhelming, crushing, almost suffocating. Humanity’s very existence had sported an ambient noise, a kind of radio static buzzing at the lowest threshold of one’s attention, but now, with mankind scrubbed away like a chalkboard at the end of the school day, it was gone.
The look on his face must have given him away, told her he was bruising for an argument about it, readying his catalog of reasons why she was still alive, because she fell silent and resumed their patrol around the camp. He bit his tongue because he didn’t want to make an impassioned argument totally devoid of objectivity only to realize a month from now that Sarah had been right all along, that Rachel was gone, vanished into the ether. Her surviving the plague was just one piece of the puzzle and that alone didn’t mean he’d ever find her. Even if he made it to Tahoe in the next couple weeks, that didn’t mean she would still be there. For all Rachel knew, he had died in the plague. And their link, the cell phones, was gone. Although he’d managed to charge his phone using a car adapter, it had been a week since he’d been able to draw any signal at all, rendering the device a useless brick.
These thoughts swirled about as Sarah continued her patrol, her head sweeping from side to side, using a flashlight to blow away the darkness. There was a hint of a chill in the air, nothing fierce really, but a coolness they hadn’t felt yet in their time on the road. He didn’t know much about this part of the country, particularly its late-summer weather patterns, and so he reminded himself they needed to start thinking about properly outfitting themselves for the elements.
He fell in step beside Sarah again.
“What do you think you’ll miss the most?” she asked. “From before, I mean. Something you took for granted.”
He thought about this for a moment, searching his memory banks for the things that had made the old world his own.
“There was a little barbecue place around the corner from where I lived,” he said. “Ralph’s, it was called. Made the best pulled pork sandwich I’ve ever had. They had this hot pepper vinegar. I probably ate there two, three times a week. Bring it home after work, sit on the couch. Slap your momma good.”
“Excuse me?”
“You never heard that? Something so good it makes you want to slap your own mother?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
He looked at her and saw her smiling wistfully at his anecdote. Stupid as it was, he could see himself, weary after a long day at work, carrying a bag of greasy food into his house, plopping down at his old coffee table, eating his dinner while watching episodes of Family Guy he’d saved on his DVR. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had done it, and that pissed him off. Never had it been more apparent that he hadn’t enjoyed the little things than in the face of their total disappearance.
“You?” he asked.
“Christmas,” she said. “Christmas lights. I know people complained about how commercial everything had gotten, but it didn’t bother me. I loved the sweaters and the decorations and the smell of Christmas dinner. I think being on duty a lot at Christmas made it easier to really like it. They tried to go all out for us when we were overseas.”
“Well, I don’t think commercialism at Christmas is going to be a problem this year.”
“No. No, I guess not.”
Her eyes shone in the moonlight, and he became conscious of how close they were standing. She was almost as tall as he was, maybe an inch shorter, and it was easy to stand there looking into her eyes, watching her chew on the corner of her lower lip when she was thinking about something, as he’d seen her do several times.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think Christmas is the thing I will miss the most.”
Adam leaned in and kissed her gently. Her lips tasted like the peppermint gum she chewed constantly. Every nerve ending in his body lit up, the kiss feeling new and fresh and yet like something he’d done a million times before. She leaned in, sliding her hand around the back of his head, their bodies pressed against one another, full of racing heat in a cold world of the lost and the dead, but she suddenly pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”
“I, uh…” He started to say he was sorry, but that would have been a lie. He wasn’t sorry.
“I, um…” she began, brushing her lips with a fingertip. “Maybe we split up for the rest of the shift.”
He cleared his throat.
She looked down at her watch.
“Freddie’s due to come on in an hour,” she said. “I’m pretty wired, so you take the next break, and I’ll take the one after that.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He circled the perimeter for another hour, savoring the taste of her lips on his own, feeling somewhat stupid. Good job, Adam.
Freddie was awake when he went back to camp, sitting in the cone of light spilled by the LED lantern. Caroline and Max slept just beyond the shadows.
“You get some rest?” he asked the big man.
He nodded slowly, barely making eye contact with Adam. Adam unrolled his sleeping bag and slid in, feeling that anticipation of a good night’s rest earned after a hard day.
“Are you OK?” he asked, propping himself up on his elbow.
“Fine,” Freddie replied. He stood up and dusted off his legs. “Gun?”
Adam paused ever so slightly at the request, not long enough that Freddie noticed, but long enough that Adam wondered why he had done it at all. He handed the gun over to Freddie, the barrel pointing toward the ground like Sarah had taught them.
A yawn escaped Adam as Freddie joined Sarah on the watch. The two chatted briefly and then took up opposite positions on the imaginary circle surrounding the camp. After they fell
into their respective patrols, Adam lay on his back and looked skyward. The stars were bright, burning their ancient fire millions of light years away, totally indifferent to the cataclysm that had enveloped this blue-green rock.
This is it now, he thought. This is the way things are. His little house on Floyd Avenue was empty, surrounded by other empty houses. The sidewalks were quiet, the bars and restaurants dark and stuffy and hot. School wouldn’t be starting up this fall, no groan of yellow buses chugging through the neighborhoods. There would be no college football. No Halloween parties or pumpkin-spiced coffee or mall Christmas displays two months before anyone was ready to see them. It was all gone.
He was tired, but sleep wouldn’t come. As much as Sarah’s rejection had stung, it wasn’t her she was thinking of. Instead, he found his thoughts swirling around Freddie Briggs. He still hadn’t said much to anyone but Caroline; his devotion to her was nothing short of evangelical, the way a man might cleave to God after a miraculous experience. Adam didn’t know if it was powered by love, dominance, obsession, duty, or some combination of the four. He seemed like a decent man, but Adam had been hoping they’d have made a deeper connection by now. They’d been on the road for days, and Adam knew nothing about him other than his name and that Caroline trusted him.
He lay awake for hours, thinking about the way he’d paused when Freddie had asked for the gun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A few minutes before eight in the morning, Miles Chadwick entered the communal area of the de facto women’s dormitory in the northwest corner of the compound. Tucked under his arm were the dossiers on the twelve women his hunting parties had rounded up in the previous week. Several cups of coffee sloshed around his stomach, but they had done little for the gumminess in his eyes. Sleep had eluded him again, as it had since they’d confirmed that Citadel women were infertile. He probably needed to try a sleeping pill, as he could feel the cloudiness increasing in his thinking process, an approaching cold front in his mind. He needed to be sharp, to make sure these women understood what their new roles were.
Twelve women.
He’d been hoping for twice that number, but the Citadel was, in some ways, a victim of its own morbid success. It had taken a lot longer than he’d anticipated to round up these twelve, let alone the two dozen he was hoping for, and they’d had to range out much farther from the compound. It was just more evidence of the totality of Medusa’s work. Already, the hunting parties had drifted as far east as Illinois, north to Sioux Falls. Wichita to the south, west to the Nebraska/Colorado border. Some days, they wouldn’t see a single survivor.
His orders had been simple. Find women of childbearing age and bring them back. Kill everyone else. This served to begin thinning the ranks of potential threats to the Citadel, albeit slowly, but then again, Rome hadn’t been built in a day either. Ordering these executions pricked him with guilt, needling at him like a paper cut. Strange, really, given the fact he was guilty of murdering billions of people, but ordering the executions of Medusa survivors had seemed particularly barbaric to Chadwick. Simply by not succumbing to the virus, these folks had managed the nearly impossible, and here he was, having them murdered for the effort. Part of him wanted to bring them all in, part of the new regime building a new world from the ashes.
But he couldn’t do that.
Control.
Everything had to be carefully controlled, especially in these early months and years. The future would depend on what they did now, the steps they took now. And introducing too many variables too soon could threaten everything.
Plus, there was the matter of protecting the Citadel’s darkest secret.
He turned his thoughts back to their new captives.
The directive to capture women of child-bearing years had been, of course, open to some interpretation, and so the hunting parties had snared two young teenage girls in their patrols. Initially, Chadwick had not known what to do with them, but eventually, he’d had them blindfolded and dropped off a hundred miles away. So desperate for test subjects had he been that he had overlooked the potential benefit of bringing children into the Citadel fold. Maybe they’d start bringing in children in a few weeks. That it hadn’t been discussed in the planning sessions of the Citadel high command made him feel a little stupid, and it made him think worriedly about what else they might have forgotten.
Because, as it turned out, it had been the vaccine that had rendered the original fifty women of the Citadel infertile. These twelve women were fertile, although one had had a pre-plague hysterectomy, and thus was of no use to Chadwick. He was still trying to decide what to do with her.
They were holding the women in a converted warehouse, which they had retrofitted with cheap walls to give them each their own room. Security at the warehouse was high, and he’d sedated the women. It wasn’t the Waldorf-Astoria, but then again, these women were not guests here. It was important he reminded them of that, if only subtly. Quite frankly, these women were the Citadel’s most important asset, whether they knew it or not, whether they wanted to admit it or not. But that meant expanding their footprint sooner than they had anticipated.
It was these women that would help usher in a new generation.
For the most part, they hadn’t been too much trouble. Most were still in shock, either because of the cataclysm itself or by the manner in which they’d been taken. Some seemed happy to be here, enjoying the Citadel’s hospitality, not asking any questions. And a couple of the women worried him.
It was the first time he’d seen all his new recruits assembled together. Several were crying softly. Eight Caucasian, two blacks, one Asian, one Latino. A fairly representative cross-section of the American female population before the epidemic. Their average age was thirty-four. All but one was under the age of forty, which he was particularly happy about. All had at least six or seven good years of fertility ahead of them, and Chadwick intended to take full advantage of every one of those. Two had refused to identify themselves, which annoyed him, but he really couldn’t do anything about that. He needed them, and so they didn’t realize the power they wielded. Yet. He needed to make sure they never figured that out. He wondered if any of them had figured out he was the one responsible for the end of the world.
He thumbed through each of the folders, scanning the names.
Marilyn Tate, 27 years old. Denver, Colorado.
Julie Micco, 37. Sioux City, Iowa.
Unidentified Caucasian woman, Mid-20s.
Nadia Obeid, 34. Stillwater, Oklahoma. (hysterectomy)
Erin Thompson, 30. Des Moines, Iowa.
Robin Cobos, 33. Springfield, Missouri.
Patricia Williams, 44. Indianapolis, Indiana.
Sharee Hawkins, 34. Enid, Oklahoma.
Latasha Gilman, 28. Lincoln. Nebraska.
Kimberly Lockwood, 29. Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Sasha Goodell, 34, St. Louis, Missouri.
Unidentified Chinese woman, Late 30s.
They were seated in a semi-circle in metal folding chairs, as though they were about to begin a group therapy session. Taking no chances, Chadwick had their ankles and wrists bound with zip ties, and two of his most trusted advisors patrolled the room with machine guns. He hadn’t sedated them this morning, as he wanted them awake and alert. None of the women spoke.
He sat down in the empty chair and crossed one leg over the other.
“Good morning,” he said, smiling broadly. “My name is Dr. Chadwick. I want to welcome you all to the Citadel.”
“Where are we?” moaned one of them, her voice caked in sobs.
“Patricia, is it?”
She nodded, wiping her freely running nose with her bound wrists.
“This is your new home.”
A stream of angry Chinese spewed from the Asian woman. She spoke no English, but tone was nothing if not universal. This triggered outbursts from the others, and Chadwick let them vent. Cutting them off would serve no purpose. Letting them get their say in would
make them feel included, as though their opinion mattered. It didn’t, of course, but they didn’t need to know that.
The invective continued for another minute and then began to tail off.
“I’m happy to hear from each of you,” he said. “But let’s do this in a civilized manner. Ms. Williams, you were asking where we were.”
She nodded. Patricia Williams was a short, slightly overweight woman with brown hair. When they found her, she’d been traveling with four men and an older woman; the group had not put up much of a fight. It would have been easy to attribute her forward question to a streak of self-confidence, but Chadwick didn’t think that was the case. She struck him as impulsive, her mouth guided by sheer terror. She was a wonderful physical specimen for her age, her fertility tests belying a woman fifteen years younger.
“We’re in a safe place,” he said.
“What is this place?” asked Latasha Gilman.
“We’re a group of scientists and engineers and doctors,” he said. “This was a government installation. We’re trying to build a completely self-sufficient society, off the grid. At least, we were trying to, before the outbreak.”
“Why did you kill my friends?”
“My men felt like their lives were in danger.”
Someone let loose a sarcastic laugh.
“How can so many of you still be alive?”
He paused for a moment, to maximize the dramatic effect of his response to the question.
“We had a vaccine.”
Murmurs first, and then explosions, as he expected. A few broke down in tears.
“A vaccine?”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!”
“They said there was no vaccine!”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 24