Then the urge to see another living person, any living person, became overwhelming, and she finally was ready to chance going outside. On the afternoon of the nineteenth, she tiptoed down the brick walk with a kitchen knife in hand, the sun shining the sky crystal clear blue, so blue it made your head hurt. And far away, she’d hear a wayward gunshot or a mournful scream, like she was hearing a television in another room. House by house in their tony subdivision she had gone, knocking on doors, looking for someone, anyone who was still alive, and every door remained pulled tight. Six doors down, her knocks had been greeted by a series of painful moans, which had scared her back down the porch steps and fleeing for the safety of her bedroom, her bladder letting go on the way back. Still wearing her soiled clothes, she hid under the bed the rest of that day and all that night, like Macauley Culkin in Home Alone.
By August 20, when the sirens and helicopters buzzing overhead were gone and the power was out and the silence encased the city in a thick crust, she decided it was time to take action. With her mom and Jerry lying dead in their bedroom, because she didn’t know what the hell to do with their bodies, she sat at their expensive antique dining table and made a list of Things to Do. It was a project, one she nicknamed Shawshank, a little homage to her mom’s favorite movie, the one with Tim Robbins spending two decades in a Maine prison for a double murder he didn’t commit. It was not unlike the programming projects or computer hacks she’d undertaken. You start with a goal, and you just worked backward from the end result you wanted and then figured out the pieces you absolutely had to have to get to that outcome.
Tahoe had been a bust. She’d made it to the outskirts of town on August 28, only to find it had burned to the ground, nothing left but smoldering ruins, thick tendrils of smoke still reaching for the sky. With that gone and done with, she decided to head east, holding out hope her dad was still alive. It sounded like he’d survived deep into the second week, and well, it wasn’t like she had many other options. The idea that he was still alive was grist for the mill, enough to keep her moving each day, especially as the scope of the disaster became apparent. So she had headed east, back toward the place she’d been born, for the first time since her mom had moved her out to California nearly two decades earlier.
By mid-September, she’d made it east of the Rockies, past Denver, feeling pretty good about herself. And then she’d gone and gotten herself caught by these yahoos.
At precisely seven a.m., the jiggle of the door, which, of course, only locked from the outside. She leapt out of bed to greet her guard, Ned. He was a tall, nervous fellow with a narrow face that he was constantly touching with his slender fingers. As captors went, he was about as good as one could hope for. He was almost apologetic about it. He rarely spoke and refused to make eye contact, as though he was embarrassed to be part of this.
“Good morning, Ned,” she said, as warmly and cheerily as she could. The greeting had become part of their daily dance, and per their usual agreement, Ned replied with an almost imperceptible nod.
“You just don’t seem like the kind of guy to get caught up in all this,” she said.
Each day, she’d dug a little deeper, a little at a time. She didn’t know where any of this was going, but it was a project that might one day bear fruit. An experiment you stuck in the corner of the lab and maybe it paid dividends down the road.
He let out a small sigh, one he may not have intended, and he caught himself midstream. He looked at her for a moment, scrunching up his lips as though he were deep in thought. Even though they were alone in the room, he glanced over his shoulder.
“What’s it really like out there?” he whispered.
Her eyes went wide.
“Don’t you know?”
“Management keeps things kind of close to the vest.”
“It was bad, Ned.”
She let that set for a moment before continuing.
“Every city and town in America is a rotting, stinking graveyard. It killed almost everybody.”
She paused for dramatic effect and then repeated the last word slowly, emphasizing each syllable.
“Now I want to ask you a question,” she said, moving in while his guard was down, while he was processing her report from the field. “What am I doing here?”
His eyes, which had been drifting, snapped into focus.
“We shouldn’t be talking about this,” he whispered.
Rachel’s heart leapt into her throat. Not a shut up, but the more conspiratorial we shouldn’t.
“Bad enough what your bosses are doing,” she said. Important to start separating him from the monsters at the top. “It has to stop.”
“Stop it,” he snapped at her.
Enough, she told herself. That was enough for today. But the plant was starting to bear fruit, if only a small bud. A healthy bud, perhaps, but still a small bud. Too much attention now could strangle it.
They ate breakfast together every morning, to the extent it could be called breakfast. They ate protein bars and MREs. Vitamins. Water. Coffee, but shit coffee, like someone had re-brewed it through a used diaper. Part of her was surprised that they let the women commingle like sorority sisters at brunch, but she gathered it was important to their captors that they enjoy a semblance of normalcy.
After breakfast was their hour in the yard. A six-foot-high fence had been strung around their building, leaving them just a little patch of hardpack to get all the fresh air they were going to get for the day. Rachel chose to walk the perimeter, ever mindful of the guards with their automatic weapons. The complex was unlike any place she’d ever seen. Fortress like. Off in the distance, to her west and north, high walls enclosed the compound.
Sounds of activity elsewhere in the compound filled the air. Generators, trucks, tractors, revving to life on this cool but not cold morning. Life was moving on here, and for the thousandth time, she wished she knew more about this place. So many questions.
Who were these people?
What were they doing here?
Had anyone died of the plague here?
Had they really just ridden it out?
And most importantly: What was in store for her and the other women?
She’d made a full loop of the perimeter when she noticed a handful of women had gathered at the center of the yard.
This was the crying group, the ones committed to telling their sad stories of the plague over and over, in new and horrifying ways. And they were at it again this morning. Stories of how this child or that spouse had died, when they had died, what they had done after the person had died. Why relive it? She tried to listen and understand it from their point of view. Maybe the simple act of telling it flushed it out, leached the poison from their systems. The fact that all of them had experienced the same kinds of losses, she supposed, didn’t make each person’s individual loss any less profound. She had to remember that. Her mom had died, but she’d known lots of people who’d lost a parent and it hadn’t been the end of the world (except in her case, it had been, ha-ha, will this gallows humor ever STOP?), and her dad might even still be alive, so who was she to judge them and their terrible fate?
Was it because she was still single and childless?
Was she just a sociopath?
Erin Thompson was telling her tale now, the tears flowing, her shoulders heaving. Rachel looked at her, she really looked at her. She was a pretty woman, down there deep, underneath the grief, underneath the hard shell that had formed in the years she had spent constructing her appropriate middle-class life. It no longer mattered whether it had made her happy or whether she had mortgaged her dreams to become a stay-at-home mom because all of it, from the endless parade of birthday parties to her husband’s somewhat lackadaisical attitude toward marriage and fatherhood and family in general, was better than this hellscape in which they’d been abandoned.
“All my life, I prayed to God to protect my family,” she said. Then: “God can go fuck Himself!”
A few of the other
women gasped, and two crossed themselves. Undone. These women were coming undone, a little bit at a time.
She glanced around the faces that grew more familiar every day. One of the faces that had been there in the early days was still missing. The Middle Eastern woman, Nadia. A sweet lady. This would be the third or fourth day that Rachel hadn’t seen her. Maybe she’d escaped. She was probably dead.
So easy, that word. Dead. Once spoken in hushed tones, never around children unless it was spelled out, and always with eternal respect, lest it be your lot sooner than later, now it was just a word. A market flooded with it, its value cheapened.
But that was the thing. While dead might have become valueless currency, life was now the gold standard. Simply by being alive, Nadia had earned some measure of respect. Undoubtedly, her very existence had been important to these people.
But why?
As sex slaves?
Given the number of female faces she’d seen, many of them quite attractive, that didn’t quite add up. Dozens of beautiful women here, lean, athletic, vibrant, intelligent. And Rachel’s group of twelve was, on the surface, very ordinary. She herself didn’t hold a candle to most of the women here. This wasn’t low self-esteem talking; it was just who she was. After a classmate’s messy death from anorexia in high school, Rachel had long since made her peace with her slightly pear-shaped build.
And just like that, the hour was up, and Ned and the other guard herded them back inside. Rachel took in a lungful of fresh air, fixating on its cool sweetness, something to remember as she spent the next twenty-three hours indoors. Ned escorted her again, his face looking long and drawn. He kept looking at her, long enough for her to catch him, and then he would cut his eyes away. She wondered if she could trade what she knew about the outside for more information about what was happening here.
As they made their way down the narrow corridor back to her room, the last one on the end, she considered faking a sexual interest in him, but she dismissed the idea just as quickly. For one thing, she’d never tried anything like that before, and she didn’t think she was a good enough actor to pull it off. But the most important reason was that she sensed she had the upper hand in the relationship. As a woman, she’d been a relative rarity in her chosen field. Something like ninety percent of engineers and programmers had been men, and she’d drawn her share of interest at CalTech and during her two summer internships. Even from the gross professors, who’d had years to perfect their game with the undergraduates, but still pathetic with their clumsy, one-beat-too-long invites for a programming session and “hey let’s order some Chinese food and I’ve got this bottle of wine someone left in my office,” like they were reading from a script of a romantic comedy making fun of dirty old computer geeks.
“You lose anyone?” she asked as they arrived at her room. All the other women were secured in their rooms.
“No,” he said harshly.
He shoved her into her room. As he stepped back out into the hallway, he paused and looked back over his shoulder.
“My sister and her family,” he whispered. “They lived outside Chicago. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He scraped a flake of dried paint from the doorjamb.
“Sometimes things are different in practice than in theory,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be back at dinner,” he said.
He walked away without another word.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A stomach bug swept through the group in the second week of October, and Adam called for a good long break from the road to let them recover and figure out their next step. Although the trip had been extremely difficult, especially in the wake of the deaths of Stephen and Caroline, and had taken its toll, Nadia’s bombshell about Rachel energized the group’s spirits as they recovered.
They took up residence in a dilapidated travel motel called the Cadillac Inn in South Haven, about fifty miles south of Wichita. It was the kind of place that had fallen on hard times long before Medusa, where the cheap electronic marquee always blinked VACANCY and made fancy promises of free cable and clean rooms. It sat on the access road paralleling I-35, a sad little island in the middle of nowhere. Adam couldn’t imagine it had been much busier before the plague than it was now.
In the last room, Adam had found a family of five, dead long enough that the smell had either faded or they were all becoming way too used to it. He pulled the door together as quickly as he could and retreated to the other side of the motel, where the rest of the group had started establishing camp. Adam took a room with Max. Nadia had agreed to share a room with Sarah, and Freddie moved into a room at the far end of the corridor, which was fine with Adam. The less he saw of the man, the better.
Adam had taken a chance that one of the two vehicles still in the parking lot, a red Subaru Outback with nearly a full tank of gas, had belonged to the deceased family in the last room, and it had. It seemed terribly morbid, returning to ransack their room for the keys, but it was necessary. Adam didn’t know whether to be happy or depressed about understanding the necessity of these things. But they’d walked nearly 130 miles in the last two weeks, and they were exhausted. Worse, having to walk limited the stock of supplies they could carry, making them more dependent on what they could find out here. The further they got away from the metropolitan areas, the harder it was to find your Walmarts and your big grocery stores. Sure, the supply of goods was far exceeding demand these days, but if you weren’t able to find those goods, they didn’t do you a hell of a lot of good.
And the truth was that he was having a hard time thinking about all these variables. Ever since Nadia had recognized Rachel’s photograph, Adam had forgotten everything and everyone. The stolen kiss, his concern about Freddie, all these issues had evaporated under the bright light of the news of Rachel’s whereabouts. But all he knew so far was that Nadia had known Rachel, that they had been held captive together, and about a week before they’d found her, Nadia had escaped. He’d bitten his tongue when he considered asking her if it would have been too much trouble to take Rachel with her, and that was probably a wise move. Even without that bit of commentary, he’d come on too strong, way too strong, peppering her with questions about who she was, where she’d been, what she’d been doing there. Within seconds of unleashing his fusillade, Nadia had closed up tight like a turtle drawing up in its shell. This had just made Adam even more desperate, his questions becoming ever sharper and more pointed, the way a fly trapped in a spider-web made things worse simply by struggling harder.
Eventually, Sarah had stepped in, draping a comforting arm around Nadia and shooting Adam an icy stare that would haunt him, and that had been that. That had been days ago, and Nadia hadn’t spoken since, not even to Sarah. In the meantime, Adam and Max had ranged out in every direction gathering supplies. In addition to the basics, they each found their special treat – Nadia’s tea now added to the list. Freddie, in all his stubbornness, still refused to ask for anything. Adam desperately wanted to begin a focused search for Rachel, but without help from Nadia, he knew he would be wasting his time and energy.
They started taking their meals together in the motel’s reception area. Afterwards, they’d play cards or just sit around and talk. Freddie rarely joined them, choosing instead to eat in his room, which bothered Adam immensely. The more he tried to include the man in the group, the more he pulled away. He had taken Caroline’s death incredibly hard; in his mind, he was oh-for-two in the protection business.
On their fourth day at the Cadillac Inn, Adam was propped up in bed, reading an old John Grisham book, when a knock on his door interrupted him. A steady rain was falling, the patter of raindrops on the rooftop comforting, as it always had been. Max napped on the other bed. Adam opened the door to find Sarah there, Nadia standing just off her left shoulder.
“Got a minute?” Sarah asked.
“Of course,” he said, backing away f
rom the door to give Nadia her space. He invited them in and then propped the door open with the table in the room. It might make her feel more comfortable, knowing the door was open.
“Nadia wants to talk.”
“Great,” he said, his heart racing, his body flush with shame. He held his hands out toward the two cheap chairs. “Please, have a seat.”
His formality struck him as a bit ridiculous, but he was desperate not to mess this up. He couldn’t have done a worse job handling Nadia’s revelation about Rachel had he sat down and planned it. As they took their seats, he sat on the edge of the bed facing them, his left leg crossed over his right one, his hands laced around the knee.
God, please let this be the least offensive, least aggressive pose possible.
Jesus, his career had put him between women’s thighs on a daily basis for more than a decade, and he’d become a pro at neutralizing the uncomfortable, keeping it cool, professional, as clinical and un-unsavory as possible. He kept his mouth zipped tight, waiting for Nadia to kick things off.
“Go ahead,” Sarah said. “Tell him what you told me.”
Nadia was sitting ramrod straight, her hands stacked neatly on her lap. She eyed him warily, the look of a child after a severe beating at the hands of an angry father.
“I met your daughter at the camp,” she said. She paused, as though she were trying to figure out which way to go with the narrative.
Adam desperately wanted to unload a barrage of questions, but he bit his lip, sinking his teeth into his lower lip until his eyes welled with tears from the pain.
“There were a lot of people there. Dozens.”
Even these vague descriptions set off explosions in his mind.
“After, uh…” She stopped and gently tapped her lips with a clenched fist. She cleared her throat, shoving aside the emotional roadblock, and continued. “After my family was gone, I left Stillwater. It was very scary at night, and the smell…”
Sarah placed a well-timed hand on the woman’s knee, and Nadia looked over at her, nodding her head.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 29