“So are you waiting for an invitation?” she asked.
He smiled with embarrassment.
“Maybe.”
She blew out an exasperated sigh.
“So Doctor, you think you and your friends like to stay here in Evergreen?”
“Yes,” he said. He felt a lightness in his chest, the sense that he’d accomplished something. There was more to be done, of course. Rachel was still out there. But finding a permanent home had also been on the to-do list, a place where they could be safe from the world beyond. It was a dangerous world out there, of that, there was no question. For so many reasons, making Evergreen home seemed like the right thing at the right time.
“Yes, I think we’d like that very much.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Rachel had been watching Erin Thompson for the better part of their hour in the yard. Erin had spent most of her time in the corner, her fingers interlocked with the chain link fencing, looking west toward the wall. Despite a chill in the air, Erin had come outside wearing her short-sleeved orange jumpsuit, imprinted with the words South Nebraska Women’s Regional Jail, but nothing else. She wore no coat. She was trembling in the cold, Rachel could see that from where she stood, but Erin did not seem to care. It was a change in the routine, and that alone made it interesting for Rachel.
Erin was normally the chattiest of the bunch, the center of the largest clique of Rachel’s fellow captives. She liked to talk to everyone, to get to know everyone, as though the very act of socialization would make things easier to deal with or perhaps forget that they’d happened at all. Rachel liked her because she was good to the other women, the women still in shock from everything that had happened.
But today was different. A few of the others, Julie and Latasha and Robin, had approached her, tried talking to her, but Erin had acted like they weren’t even there. After a while, they’d given up and retreated back into their clique, forgetting, for the moment, their suddenly quiet friend.
Maybe it had all been an act, Rachel thought. Maybe Erin’s good samaritan was nothing more than a quick coat of paint over a devastated landscape. Maybe the wreckage that was Erin’s personal horror story was seeping back through that simple covering. It was possible that Erin’s shock was finally wearing off and she was now seeing the world the way it really was.
Rachel glanced at the guards, Ned and Jeremy; they were smoking cigarettes by the door, their machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. Then she drifted slowly toward Erin, walking casually, moving toward the fence. She didn’t want to come on too strong, make the woman feel like she was invading her space; she wanted it to seem natural, that she, too, saw the truth, that they were bonded. Erin needed someone now to look after her, the way she had looked after the others. And no one else was doing it.
Rachel feigned interest in the hardpack of the yard, crouching down and plucking small stones from the ground. She flung two over the fence, keeping her eye on Erin as she felt the dirt and grit embed her nails. Then she saw it. A flash, a shimmer in Erin’s left hand. Rachel glanced back toward the guards, who were deep in their conversation, not paying much attention. She wondered if Ned was feeding Jeremy the info she’d given him, about what things were like outside the walls.
She cocked her head to the left, hoping to secure a better view of the object in Erin’s hand. Erin’s head was turned to the right, away from Rachel, but back toward the guards. Rachel stood back up and moved a little closer to Erin, a tiny alarm sounding in her head that something bad was about to happen. Erin turned away from the fence toward the yard, her eyes locked in now on Jeremy and Ned. And now Rachel had a clear line of sight toward the object in Erin’s hand. It was some kind of homemade shank.
Oh, no.
Rachel picked up the pace; she was about twenty yards away from Erin. She had to get there before the guards realized that something was amiss, or Erin would be dead. She picked up the pace, as fast as she could go without running because that was something the guards would notice. Behind her, the other women continued to chatter, oblivious to the fact that death was now in the yard with them, waiting to see what would happen.
Ten yards. Then five. Then a foot. Then she clamped her hand on Erin’s elbow. Erin swung her head toward Rachel, a look of total mania enveloping her face. It was a look of someone who’d somehow managed to lose something even after all was already lost. She ripped her elbow free of Rachel’s grip and started to shove her aside. They tussled for a second as Rachel struggled to grab Erin’s arm again. Anything to interrupt her suicide mission.
“Don’t.” Rachel said as firmly she could.
This stopped Erin cold. Her face loosened, her jaw sagging as though some great burden had been lifted from her.
“Put it in your pocket,” Rachel hissed. “Do it now. Quickly.”
Erin’s breath was coming in ragged gasps, and her eye was twitching.
“But you don’t know what they’ve done. I have to.”
“Did they hurt you?” Rachel asked. Part of her dreaded the answer because if they had, she wasn’t sure she could begrudge Erin her wish to exact some sort of justice on these assholes. Hell, maybe she would join in, go all Thelma & Louise on these yahoos. They overpower these two, get the guns. Then anything would be possible.
“No,” Erin said. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
Erin’s legs buckled underneath her, and she dropped to the ground, sobbing. Rachel glanced over her shoulder; this had drawn the guards’ notice, but they didn’t seem inclined to intervene.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked, taking a knee next to the hysterical woman.
She looked up at Rachel, her eyes red, her grimy cheeks glassy with tears.
“I’m pregnant.”
The words were like a knife to the heart.
“What?”
“I think that’s what we’re here for,” Erin said robotically, without a hint of emotion.
Her words chilled Rachel to the core. They chilled her because she knew that Erin was right. That’s what all the testing was for. Prenatal testing. And she knew that Erin hadn’t been raped, at least not in the traditional sense of some young thug crawling through an old lady’s window at three in the morning and forcing himself on her. But it was still a violation of the highest order, done with syringes and petri dishes and blood draws. It was clean and dirty all at the same time.
She stole a glance at the guards, chatting, laughing, smoking their stupid cigarettes like they were at a post-softball-game keg party, and she hated them. Never had she thought it possible to hate something with such breadth and depth. It radiated from her core, replicating like the virus that had overcome the world, braiding itself to the thing that had once been Rachel Fisher. She understood now what it meant to give oneself over to something completely and totally, the way a late-blooming evangelical found God late in adulthood, the way a jihadist was willing to sacrifice his own life in furtherance of his cause. Her cheeks felt warm with it. If it was the last thing she did, these monsters were going to wish they’d never captured her.
She thought these things, and she came to one conclusion.
There could be no other outcome.
Miles Chadwick had to die.
#
She was silent as Ned escorted her back to her room, chewing on the news that Erin was pregnant, trying to read the tea leaves. Why was this happening? Who were these people? What was the endgame? But it just made her head throb. Trying to unravel the mystery of this place was beyond her powers of comprehension. She had no reference point, nothing to start from. It was like trying to solve a thorny programming issue in a language you didn’t even know. She wondered how the others would react to Erin’s pregnancy. Nearly all of them had been mothers, which meant that nearly all of them had experienced the singular misery of outliving their children. This could destabilize the group’s tenuous calm.
Before she knew it, she was back at her door.
Ned removed the zip ties
and she went inside her room. As she stood there in the center of the cell, she became aware of a presence behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Ned still standing there, like a bellman waiting for a tip. He had a goofy grin on his face.
“What?” she asked. She was in no mood for him right now.
He took one step inside the room.
“Thank you for stopping her,” Ned said. “That could’ve been ugly.”
The comment caught her off guard, and she didn’t know how to respond; she stood there dully, watching Ned watch her.
“Be ready,” he said. Then he disappeared down the corridor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It was closing in on dark on the last day of October.
At dusk, Evergreen’s streetlights kicked on, bathing the town in a soft, warm glow, leaving it an illuminated oasis in a world gone dark. It was Adam’s favorite time of day. The lights made things seem almost normal, the indigo sky softening the edges of their harsh world. Adam had been busy all day with his preparations, which had been complicated by the secrecy of his plans. At five-thirty, he conducted a final inventory of his supplies. When he was finished, he threw on a jacket, loaded everything into a large wheeled suitcase and headed out of his small apartment on the north end of town.
He found it hard to believe they’d been here a week. Harder still that their group had remained intact. Getting Freddie to agree to come here had been nothing short of a miracle. When he and Sarah made it back to the Cadillac Inn the morning after they’d found Evergreen, courtesy of one of Evergreen’s electric cars, Max and Nadia were beside themselves with worry, and Freddie was on the warpath, packing his bags, ready to hit the road without them. And Adam would have been happy to let him go but for the fact that Max wanted to go with him. The argument had been terribly bitter.
“This could be a place we can call home,” Adam had said. “I think it’s the best move.”
“Best for us? Or best for you?” Freddie said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You act like you care about what happens to the rest of us,” he said. “But you don’t give a shit. All you care about is finding Rachel.”
“Haven’t I taken care of the group?” Adam shot back. “Haven’t I made sure we’ve stayed safe and healthy?”
“What have you done for us?” Freddie bellowed, his voice booming across the parking lot and out into the emptiness. “Stephen’s dead. Caroline’s dead. Just our luck, hooking up with the shittiest doctor in America.”
Adam pointed at the desolate road fronting the motel, trying not to show how much that last barb had stung.
“Well, there’s the road, big guy,” he said. “There’s the road.”
Freddie stood there, frozen.
“Well?”
“No, please!” Max begged. “I want him to stay.”
Freddie stomped off, Max trailing behind him.
“Please, Freddie, can I come with you?”
The combatants retired to their rooms. An hour went by, then two, and then finally, Freddie emerged from his room. He agreed to travel to Evergreen and check things out, but he wouldn’t commit to anything until he’d seen it with his own eyes.
“Fair enough,” Adam had said. “For what it’s worth, I think we should stay together. I think we’re better off together than we are out on our own. We’ve all seen how dangerous it can be. If we’re going to stay, I think we should all agree on it.”
Freddie’s barbs had stung, as much as Adam hated to admit it. He was only doing what he thought best, and yeah, that probably meant thinking about himself and finding Rachel. But if the shoe had been on the other foot, if it were Freddie’s daughter out there, he wanted to believe he’d be there for the big man, that he’d be the sidekick in the story of Freddie.
The truth was that nothing was keeping them together but the promise of human companionship and the possibility of a happy ending in a world woefully short on them. Then again, although it may not have seemed like it on the surface, in this empty world, that was pretty strong glue. He’d watched Freddie stare out across the open road, wondering what, if anything else, was out there. What was the old saying? The devil you know?
And so they’d made the hour-long trek back to Evergreen, where Adam and Sarah had introduced them to the residents of the town. Freddie spent hours exploring the town, drilling the mayor about the power, about the residents, about who would be responsible for watching after the kids, about where their supplies would come from, about mounting a defense against future raids, about immigration (he’d actually called it that). They took a tour of Evergreen’s mystical power facility. Finally, that evening, he’d cast his vote in favor of staying. Max, of course, voted to stay, and Nadia went along with whatever Sarah wanted.
So on his first full morning as a resident of Evergreen, Adam had gone to the town library at the north end of town to do a little research. The musty aroma of old books and dust hung in the air. He found a large map of the plains states, rolled up tight, in the reference room, and he spread it out on a long oak table. The corners insisted on curling up, so he weighed them down with encyclopedias from a dusty, forgotten shelf. In the absence of the Internet, the day of the book had returned. No more movies, no more Facebook or Twitter, no YouTube videos. What they needed was an army of librarians who could shepherd this new world through the mountain of information they’d need, information that would only be available in books.
He spent hours studying the map. Using a black Sharpie, he enclosed Evergreen in a thick square and divided the rest of the map into searchable grids, about five miles by five miles square. It had taken him all day, processing all the variables, their current location, where they had found Nadia, her own reports of her time on the road, but he wanted to do this right. He wanted to make sure he didn’t spend the next month walking in circles, especially as cold weather set in.
The next day, he and Sarah had set out on their first expedition.
They were gone one night, making slow progress through the search grid. They saw nothing resembling Nadia’s description of a walled compound in the middle of the plains, and that first night, as he lay in his tent in the cold, wrapped up in Gore-Tex and long johns and gloves and hat, the needle-in-a-haystack-ness of it all swirled around him. He dreamed he was wandering the plains, his hands gnarled with arthritis, unable to remember what he was looking for. He woke up, afraid he’d yelled out in his sleep.
And so it had gone since then, six trips into the empty wilds of the American plains with nothing to show for it. It was a hell of an expedition, that was for certain. They passed through empty town after empty town, south to Amarillo, north into Kansas, through border towns, all silent and still but for the trash and debris swirling through the streets. He spotted elk and antelope loping about the grasslands, venturing closer to the highways and back roads that they had long avoided as the balloon of humanity had swelled around them. At night, the sky rippled with starlight. He stayed up late watching them, the billions and billions of stars shining their ancient light on this little blue-green rock. It made him sad to think there was no longer anything down here worth shining a light on. If there was intelligent life out there, and he’d believed there was because it made scientific sense to believe it, they’d no longer have any interest in them. Unless they needed a move-in ready planet.
As for Sarah, there was no revisiting the kiss weeks earlier, but Adam still wondered about it, even as time clouded the details of the memory. It seemed like a lifetime ago. He didn’t know why she had pulled away from him; he had sensed her interest, he had known it was there, but there was no answer to these things sometimes. His second year in medical school, before he’d met Rachel’s mother, a girlfriend had ended things after a year-long relationship, after they’d been talking seriously about marriage and a future and children. Just like that, she’d said she didn’t love him anymore. Just like that.
So they searched and searched, but those excur
sions had turned up nothing but the big black X through one of Adam’s sixty search grids.
But today, he was putting all that aside. It was time to think about someone besides himself. These were good people he’d found here, and they deserved whatever he could give them. They had welcomed him and the others without question, and on the condition that they help out, to start transitioning to a life worth living rather than one spent looking back at what could not be undone.
He needed a break from the increasingly maddening search, the frustration of chewing up mile after mile with nothing to show for it. A break from the little voice in his mind that sometimes drowned out all the other ones and shouted at the top of its lungs that it would all be for nothing, he could search for the rest of his life, and he would never see his daughter again.
He continued wheeling the suitcase down Evergreen Boulevard, the wheels thrumming over the pristine asphalt as he made his way toward the town hall. It was a chilly, cloudy night, and the low sky threatened rain. Another few weeks, and this kind of sky might be bringing a load of the white stuff. He hated snow and pushed that out of his mind for now. He wasn’t quite ready to deal with that.
When he got to the town hall, the others were already there waiting, buzzing with anticipation. Dozens of Evergreeners were present, and it looked like all the kids, about fifteen of them in total, were there. He didn’t know if any of the children had an inkling of what he had planned, but he doubted it. As hard as it was for the adults to keep track of the days, the calendar had ceased to have any meaning for these kids. Probably be a long time before the day of the week mattered again.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 33