Yeah, I think we’re all pretty goddamn familiar with the smell, Adam thought, and he felt shitty for thinking it. He hated the way such thoughts just crashed through like an unwanted party guest.
“I hated to leave my family there,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “but what could I do? What could I do?”
Sarah took Nadia’s small hand in between hers, enveloping it, protecting it.
“I walked for many days. It was so hot, and I felt crazy. Dead bodies everywhere. Sometimes I would hear a dog barking, and it sounded so close, but then I would walk ten miles and it sounded exactly the same.”
Adam felt like he was about to burst, but he kept quiet, knowing she had to do this, that she had to unload it. It was poison cargo, and if she didn’t get rid of it, slough it off like the dead skin it was, she’d have no chance to heal the terrible wound that had been inflicted on her soul.
“I ended up with a small group of people. Two men and an older woman. We were headed west. I’m not even sure why we were headed that way.”
Her olive skin colored red, as though her act of self-preservation had been something to be ashamed of.
“They came for us at night,” she said, her voice softening. “I woke up to the sound of screaming, horrible screaming, and then I was being pulled out of my tent. I remember the moon was very bright, and I could see them, there were four of them, so clearly even though it was the middle of the night. They marched us out to the road and they shot the men. Just shot them like they were dogs.
“Then they asked us how old we were,” her voice barely a whisper, and Adam had to lean forward to hear Nadia’s tale. “The other woman, she said she was fifty-one, and they shot her right in the head. So I lied and said I was thirty-four but this is a lie. I am really forty-one. And I thought they would shoot me, but they didn’t. They just shoved me inside this truck and drove me to this big place where they kept us in a building.”
Adam uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees. His mind was spinning, questions sprouting like mushrooms on a dark, damp forest floor. What was this place? Who were these people? How could there be so many still alive? They probably hadn’t seen a hundred people total since leaving Richmond, let alone that many in one place. Did they have a vaccine?
“They did tests on us,” she said, her voice cracking now. “They, uh…”
She jerked her hand clear of Sarah’s, as if she’d touched a hot stove, and her chin dropped to her chest. They were losing her. She was headed for a dark place, one she obviously had no desire to navigate right now, and he had to steer her away from it.
“And you met Rachel?” he asked, as gently as he could.
“Yes,” she said with a sigh, lifting her chin up. She seemed relieved that Adam had changed the subject, as though she’d lost control of her own narrative, a jetliner spiraling toward earth, its pilot frozen and unable to pull up.
“I met her the day after I got there,” she said. “At breakfast. She’s a very sweet girl.”
Adam’s heart thumped crazily, and he was certain they could all hear it.
“And she’s OK?”
“Yes, I think so,” she said.
“How did you get away?” Sarah asked.
She turned to Sarah.
Her face darkened again.
“One morning, they drove me away from the camp. Two of them. Out near the woods. They were going to kill me. So as soon as they stopped, I got out and ran as fast as I could into the trees. It was raining so hard, and the forest, it was very thick, so I think they didn’t look for me for very long. I ran and ran and ran. I didn’t stop until it was dark.”
It occurred to Adam that this mysterious camp was likely no more than a day or two’s drive from where he now sat.
“I was by myself until I found you,” she said, her voice going stiff and flat, the tone of a woman who was wrapping things up.
The trio fell silent. Adam massaged his temples with the points of his index fingers, trying to decide what to say next.
“Can I ask you a couple of questions?” he asked.
Nadia looked at Sarah, who nodded.
“Okay.”
“Do you remember anything about where this place was?”
“No, I really don’t,” she said, her face dour. “They wouldn’t say.”
“This place, was it like a city or a town?”
“No,” she said. “It was like a … castle. But not really. There were walls around it. There was a farm and they had electricity. They seemed very prepared for all this.”
“After you left, were you on foot the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Which way were you walking?”
“I’m not really sure exactly. Mostly east, so the sun wouldn’t be in my face in the afternoon. But I can’t say it was due east.”
“How many days before we picked you up did you escape?”
“A week,” she said. “Maybe ten days. I’m sorry. I wish I could be more helpful.”
He resisted the almost overwhelming urge to express his disappointment. After all, this woman was his sole link to Rachel. If they hadn’t found her, he probably would have never seen Rachel again.
He smiled his best smile.
“Please. You’ve given me the best news I could have hoped for.”
A thin smile appeared on Nadia’s lips.
“I think I’d like to rest,” she said.
Sarah escorted Nadia back to her room. While she was gone, he wrote down as much as he could remember on a notepad he found in the drawer of the end table by the bed.
“What do you think?” Sarah asked when she returned.
“Hard to believe,” he said. “But she did know Rachel’s name.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “What now?”
Adam sighed.
“We were near Topeka when we picked her up,” he said. “She said she’d been on the road a week, maybe ten days?”
“More or less.”
“Say she walked ten, fifteen miles a day. She probably made it a hundred miles or so on foot. So this camp she’s talking about is probably within a hundred and fifty miles of here. Let’s round up to two hundred miles. Hell, we may have driven by it already.”
“Sounds about right, but that’s a huge search radius. And that’s assuming she’s remembering things correctly. She had a pretty rough go.”
“I don’t know what other choice I have,” Adam said. “I’ll get some maps, lay out some search grids and start looking.”
“It could take months to find this place. If you ever do.”
“Months I’ve got,” he said. “Years I’ve got.”
A strange look crossed Sarah’s face. And then it hit him.
“You guys don’t have to stay,” he said.
Sarah chewed on a fingernail, her eyes focused on something behind him.
“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done,” he said.
More silence.
“I know this is a shithole in the middle of nowhere, but I have to stay and look for her.”
Sarah nodded and went back outside. She stood under the overhang and smoked a cigarette as the rain continued to fall. Adam watched her for a moment through the door and then joined her.
“I’ll stay,” she said, not looking at him. She held out a hand and let rainwater collect in her palm.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“It’s just sort of hitting me now,” she said, shaking the water from her hand. “There’s nothing out there. On the road for two months, and there’s just nothing. It was easy not to think about it while we were headed west. You know? Then St. Louis was a bust, and Caroline died, and now we’re here. You’ve found what you were looking for. Not exactly, but you know what I mean. It’s like the rest of us have been supporting characters in the story of Adam.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“I know,” she said. “I know. And that came out wrong. I was happy to be part of yo
ur story. It meant I didn’t have to think about what came next. But now, next is here.”
They stood silently as the rain intensified.
“You remember that night I asked you about God?”
“Yeah.”
“I think I was still in shock,” she said. “Like we were watching this terrible thing that had happened to all these other people. And it was a thing to talk about, like we were in some college seminar. But now, it hurts so bad. To be left here all alone. And being with you, with the others, it made it hurt a little less.
“So, I’ll stay. Nadia will do whatever I do. Max will stay. And we’ll just keep going like before.”
She walked away.
CHAPTER THIRTY
He always checked the mailbox first.
No specific reason. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
Dr. James Rogers flipped open the mailbox’s small metal door, which squeaked on rusty hinges, and pulled out a stack of mail, probably two or three days’ worth. A greeting card postmarked August 10, right around the time everything started going to hell. A credit card solicitation. An L.L. Bean catalog. The mail was mostly intact, but the catalog was damp and swollen, the ink having run and smeared. He gently closed the box and made his way up the driveway to the front door of the small ranch house, snaking around the silver minivan still parked in the driveway. Plastic toys littered the front yard, which was choked with knee-high weeds. Dead leaves and branches clogged the streets and storm drains, leaving a thick soup sloshing along the curbside.
“I’ll meet you inside,” he called back toward Ned.
Ned nodded and collected the gear from the car, the cleaning supplies, water jugs, mops, the garbage bags. Rogers briefly wondered if anyone had noticed his and Ned’s absence from the Citadel, but even if they had, he wasn’t sure he cared all that much. The first time he’d done this, about three weeks ago, he’d been terrified. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself from taking a pickup truck and making the twenty-minute drive here to Beatrice, Nebraska. In the weeks since Medusa had finished its terrible work, he hadn’t been sleeping, he hadn’t been eating. He’d lie down at night and picture the house he’d grown up in, a little rancher in Lansing, Michigan, not very different than this one he now stood before. Eventually, it was all he thought about. It began to eat away at him, a little bit at a time, knowing that the bodies of his brother Jeff (who’d bought out Rogers’ share in the house in Lansing after their parents had died), his wife Shannon, and their three kids were almost certainly in there, rotting away, that they would lie there for all eternity, until the bones were dust.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
This was his sixth trip to Beatrice, and it was the only thing that brought him any joy anymore. Well, joy might have been too strong a word. Relief. Peace. They were entering a period of terrible danger, and for them to be effective, they would need peace. There were five others, and each had already accompanied Rogers on an excursion. It had become their sacred pilgrimage. Today, it was Ned’s turn.
The front door was locked, but a swift kick at the lock took care of that. The door swung hard inward, slamming against the interior wall before bouncing back toward him. The house was a mess, as the others had been. Clothes and blankets and spoiled food lay everywhere. The stench of death had largely faded, leaving behind just a hint of mustiness and decay. The living room was dimly lit, the curtains drawn.
After setting the mail down, he did a quick loop through the house; in a back bedroom, the body of a small child lay on the floor, tucked under a pathetic-looking blue blanket. On the bed was a female body still dressed in a thin nightgown, the corpse gray, the skin drawn tight. He sat down on the bed. He always sat with the bodies.
You did this.
He cried.
The tears came harder with each successive trip he made here.
How had he let this happen?
Congratulations, Jimmy, you’re gonna go down in history as the man with the worst case of regret, ever!
When the tears finally stopped flowing (a minute, an hour, he didn’t know…), he got up and got to work. They started in the living room, cleaning up the trash and the junk that had piled up as this woman and her son had succumbed to Medusa. He dusted and fluffed pillows and washed dishes and scrubbed the little gas stove. He made the beds and scoured the toilet and the bathtub and stacked mail and magazines. He shined the counters and swept the floors. He carried out two trash bags and set them in the can on the side of the house.
Then they carried the bodies of the woman and her child outside and buried them in their tiny backyard. It took them the rest of the afternoon, but eventually, they were both in the ground. When he topped off the makeshift graves with the last bit of dirt, he felt better. It would be short-lived, of course, because dead was dead, and they were dead because of him, because he had been too much of a coward to stop it and there were tens of millions of other houses just like this one, and what the hell difference did it make whether he cleaned these poor people’s houses anyway?
Dead was dead.
This was probably going to be the last time he did this, he realized.
He was due to leave the Citadel in a week. To leave forever.
They were waiting for him.
It had all been part of the plan, you see.
But then the plan had changed. And no one knew it but him.
When he and Ned were done, they sat on the back steps and smoked stale cigarettes. Rogers was up to a pack a day, and he prayed he would develop lung cancer. At least emphysema or COPD. He deserved it. Suicide was too good for him, he knew that. He needed to suffer. He would smoke three packs a day if that’s what it took. They sat in silence for a few minutes. In the distance, a coyote howled its mournful cry.
He was scared, so scared.
“How are you feeling?” Rogers asked.
“I don’t know,” Ned said, his voice cracking. “A little better, I guess.”
“We can’t undo what has been done,” Rogers said.
“I know,” Ned said, his shoulders sagging.
He’d recruited Ned last. Ned’s last few psychological evaluations had revealed markers of guilt and remorse about what they had done. He was growing erratic, his work performance was suffering. He’d originally been brought on for his survivalist skills, one of these apocalypse junkies, but when the shit had hit the fan, he hadn’t been able to handle it. Their stupid psych evals. As if they really would have been able to tell how people would react after they murdered seven billion people. When Rogers had finally broached the subject with him, Ned had seemed almost relieved.
Ned dropped his cigarette to the brick step.
They drove back to the Citadel in silence. It was raining when Rogers made it back to his quarters on the eastern side of the compound. He fixed himself a cup of tea and sat down with the file that had brought him to this point, the file that had finally pushed him over the edge.
Rogers had debated telling the others what he had found, but he hadn’t been able to form the words. Not that it mattered, really. But he should tell them. They had a right to know that they’d been lied to. Lied to from the beginning. He could barely wrap his head around it. He thought he’d known all there was to know about the project. But then they’d captured her.
He ran the tip of his finger over the name hastily written on the tab.
Rachel – Last Name Unknown
It was supposed to be a routine physical. Gynecological examination, fertility testing, blood, urine, the whole nine yards. The results of her tests, however, had been anything but routine. There, clear as day, flowing through her veins, was the nanovaccine. Not the one that he’d administered to Chadwick and the ninety-eight other residents of the Citadel.
It had all been part of the plan, you see.
The sterility hadn’t been an unintended side effect. Rogers had programmed it into the nanotech under Gruber’s orders. Miles Chadwick didn’t know what the Citadel really was. C
ompartmentalization and all that. Gruber had desperately wanted Chadwick to succeed, but it was never guaranteed that he would. And if things had gone south, Gruber had wanted to make sure that there was no link back to him. Everything had been carefully constructed to make sure that the trail ended with Chadwick. Cut the loose thread.
Rogers thought he had known everything. But he hadn’t, and he really shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d made a deal with the devil, after all.
But who was this girl?
How had she gotten the vaccine?
Did Gruber know about her?
Did she know about Gruber?
He was too afraid to ask her.
When he saw the nanovaccine coursing through her blood, that’s when he knew that it was all doomed to fail. It was too big. A crack here. A fissure there. It would all come apart. Nebraska. Colorado.
Colorado.
Chadwick had changed the game by bringing in these women. It was something Rogers hadn’t counted on, and looking back, it was pretty goddamn stupid of them. Chadwick was brilliant. Of course he’d want to use survivors as surrogates. It made sense. It was a good idea. And the truth was Rogers was a bit curious about whether it would work. But then he’d think about Jeff and Shannon and Mikey and Jessica and the little one, the cute butterball whose name he always forgot, and he’d hate himself all over again.
Why?
Why had he agreed to it?
Had he let Gruber brainwash him?
All those years working at NanoMed, one of Penumbra’s many subsidiaries, Rogers had always looked up to the man, even saw him as a bit of a father figure, where his own had been an abusive, alcoholic plumber who couldn’t hold a job. And there’s your Freudian link, Jimmy! Good job.
What a goddamn mess.
He closed the file and set it on his lap. The tea had cooled enough to drink, and he took a swallow. He couldn’t do undo what had been done. But he could help these women. And then he would disappear.
It was almost time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
By the evening of October 23, Adam had spent fifty-four hours looking for Nadia’s camp and had nothing to show for it.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 30