“Why? I mean, why now? Isn’t it too late for your little attempt at redemption?”
“Not for your fellow captives.”
Rachel leaned forward in her seat, her head spinning. She rested her elbows on her knees to regain some balance.
“Why not just kill Chadwick and let the women go?”
“Aren’t you the bloodthirsty one all of a sudden?”
“Fuck you.”
“Sorry,” Rogers said, holding up his hands in surrender. “You’re right. It’s a reasonable question. I haven’t seen Chadwick in a week. We communicate by walkie-talkie now. I don’t know where he is half the time.”
“No way to run a railroad,” Rachel said.
“Dr. Chadwick has been growing increasingly unstable,” Rogers said. “He won’t meet with anyone directly. Has bodyguards with him all the time. They’ll do anything for him. Anything. And they’re not the only ones. The others, as best as we can tell, are in for the long haul. We’re too scared to approach anyone else.”
“Not much of a rebellion.”
“It’s all we’ve got. And the time to strike is now.”
“You got me out tonight,” she said. “You could just let us all go.”
“We can’t take that chance,” Rogers said. “We’re making our move tonight when we get back to the compound. You need to be ready for our signal.”
“But I still don’t understand what you want me for.”
“When the time comes, we want you to help them get out. They look up to you.”
“That’s bullshit. I’m barely old enough to vote.”
“And they’re scared and weak. They admire you.”
“Why did we have to do this out here? You could’ve told me all this back at h…”
She’d started to say ‘home’, but she stopped herself. She ran her hands through her hair, feeling a wave of nausea ripple through her. This was crazy. She should have been in her dorm room at CalTech, studying materials science or linear engineering, possibly passing around a joint with her friends. Instead, she was here, being recruited into this bizarre amalgam of mass killers. And then it hit her.
She had started to feel sorry for these six people, these rogue lines of code that had diverged from the mainframe’s original programming. She had started to identify with them. The enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend. Transitive property. If-then. She gave her head a hard shake and reminded herself of the women back at the compound, their numbers growing bit by bit. That’s why she would do this. For them.
“There’s something else,” Rogers said. “Something I haven’t told the others.”
He looked around at his confederates, who were looking at him with confused stares.
“I’m sorry,” he continued. “I should’ve told you all from the beginning.”
He lowered his head and scratched his chin. Then the door to the warehouse office exploded off its hinges like an overcooked turkey leg ripped from its joint. A flurry of bodies rushed into the room like locusts, and then she heard the heavy thwack of metal and wood on flesh. Black-clad figures overwhelmed the group, which barely had time to blink, let alone raise any kind of serious defense. A few screams and grunts, and it was over.
Rachel scurried for a corner in the room, where she huddled and watched her six co-conspirators beaten and pinned facedown to the ground. Zip ties cinched around their wrists and ankles, and one by one, the rebels were carted out of the warehouse like sides of beef.
“You,” the last one in the room said, pointing at Rachel. He was aiming a large handgun at her face. “Let’s go.”
Rachel crawled out of her sad little hiding spot and went outside, the last commando falling in line behind her. She followed the queue to the far end of the warehouse parking lot, where two black Suburbans and a Lincoln Police SWAT truck sat idling. The black-clad figures tossed Rogers and the others into the back of the SWAT truck and latched the door shut.
When she saw Miles Chadwick standing there in the glow of the truck’s headlights, wearing a black duster, his hair rippling in the cold wind, her blood turned to ice.
#
Rachel rode in the backseat of the lead Suburban, her head leaning against the frosty glass of the window. Chadwick was seated next to her, stone cold silent. The rage radiated from him like heat from a charcoal grill. She was wearing zip ties now, tightly fastened, pinching and chafing her no matter how much she tried to adjust them.
“You’ll forgive the restraints,” Chadwick said coolly, not looking at her. “But we’re in a state of emergency right now. I am very sorry you had to be part of that. I didn’t realize how brazen they’d gotten.
“My mistake. It won’t happen again,” he said, almost apologetically and more to himself than to anyone else.
She dropped her hands into her lap and remained silent. She tilted her head just so and could make out the panel truck carrying Chadwick’s new captives in the Suburban’s sideview mirror. The truck’s lightbar oscillated, throwing pulsing blue shadows across the dark landscape.
She couldn’t imagine the fate awaiting them. Rogers had tried to undo it, all of it. Yeah, if she were Chadwick, she’d be pretty pissed too. The very thought of his brand of justice made her shiver.
By the time they reached the main gates, a bit of pre-dawn light had begun to leak into the night sky. The caravan slowed, turned onto the main access road, and then followed the road around toward the amphitheater at the north end of the compound. Rachel was surprised to see dozens of people waiting for them, sipping coffee and milling about. Rachel had seen folks out here playing catch or spreading blankets out for a picnic when the weather had been warmer.
The vehicles jerked to a stop, and a flurry of activity commenced. While Rachel, Chadwick and their driver stayed put, the others poured out of the SWAT vehicle. After a minute or two, someone rapped twice firmly on Chadwick’s window and opened the door.
“It’s time.”
As he got out, another person opened Rachel’s door and guided her by the elbow over to Chadwick. The morning was brightening fast, the sunshine gilding the field like golden paint. Everyone was here. The whole gang, she thought, shielding her eyes from the sun as it slid skyward from its invisible nest just beyond the horizon.
“Take her over with the others,” Chadwick said.
The woman nodded and led Rachel to the other women, who stood deathly quiet.
“What’s going on?” Latasha asked her when they were alone. “Where the hell were you? We thought you were dead.”
Rachel shook her head. She wanted to say something, but she stood there, empty, frozen, unable to keep a single thought in her head save one. They had done it. They had destroyed the world.
The stage, looking south toward the growing fields, was bare but for a square wooden table and a cone-shaped object set at the center of the stage. Chadwick headed in that direction, trailed by one of his lackeys, and then hoisted himself up onto the platform. From where she stood, he looked silly and small to Rachel, like he was a little boy playing an imaginary game with his little friends.
As he strode across the stage, his heels clicking on the wood and echoing into the morning air, the crowd fell silent. He inspected the table, pressing down on the center, checking its stability. When he was done, he picked up the cone - a megaphone - and turned to face the crowd, which had drawn in tight, like a hive ready to listen to its queen.
“My friends, today is a dark day for our fledgling nation,” he said. His voice sounded tinny and mechanical. “Perhaps the darkest we have faced.
“But, I believe that it is always darkest before the dawn. Much like the world we left behind, which was truly a wretched and dark place before the birth of this new paradise.”
Heads began to nod. A few yeses and mm-hmms fluttering about like birds.
“Now,” he continued, his voice starting to ramp up, “before we can see that dawn, before we can see that glorious sunrise over this new world, we have to excise the darkness. Beca
use will the darkness fade away on its own?”
“No,” the crowd murmured.
“I ask you again, will the darkness fade away on its own?” Now he was getting worked up, his voice starting to crackle and thunder.
“No!” the crowd boomed.
“Hell no!”
“Hell no!” they repeated.
“The darkness is like a cancer, and you don’t sit around waiting for the cancer to shuffle off with its tail between its legs. You go in there and you cut it out.”
More yes-sirs and mm-hmms, getting louder now, and Rachel began to be afraid, more so than any time since all this insanity had begun. She looked at her fellow captives; their jaws were set, their lips tight.
“You cut it out,” he said again, his voice softening, his demeanor calming, a tempest dissipating.
“Bring forth the accused,” he said.
A commotion from near the caravan as Rogers and the others were removed from the paddy wagon and lined up single file. Armed men marched the group toward the wing of the stage, where a large cinderblock served as a step. The six prisoners shuffled heavily along the platform, their heads down, looking defeated. Their legs were cuffed together, their hands bound behind their backs. Someone had tossed black hoods over the heads.
“James Rogers. Martha Koontz. Ned Gartner. Jeremy Daniels. Maria McCleary. Margaret Baker. Each of you stands charged with the crime of treason against the Citadel,” Chadwick called out. “I hereby find each of you guilty of treason and sentence you to die.”
Rachel felt a little gasp escape her lips.
Two of Chadwick’s foot soldiers took Rogers by the arms and dragged him, his heels scraping the wood, toward the low-slung wooden table at the front edge of the stage. He did not make a sound, and he did not resist, but he did not assist them either. They swept his legs out from underneath, sending him to his knees. His covered face smacked soundly against the heavy wood of the table, and one of Chadwick’s goons secured his head to the table with a strap of leather.
A metal skrink pierced the silence, and Rachel saw a black-hooded figure approaching from the edge of the stage. He carried an enormous broadsword, slick with morning dew, its blade glinting in the morning light.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,” she whispered, her breath catching in her throat. Little gasps from her fellow captives.
“James Rogers,” Chadwick said, “do you have anything you wish to say before your sentence is carried out?”
“You have no idea what you’re up against,” Rogers said.
“Wonderful,” Chadwick replied. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. How about you go fuck yourself,” Rogers spat.
Chadwick stepped back and nodded to the executioner. He reared back with the sword, raising it high above his head, and Rachel found herself praying it was the sharpest goddamn blade in North America, that it would come down through his neck in one stroke, please God, don’t let us have to watch him hack through it like he’s chopping firewood. Her eyes were full of tears and her stomach began to heave.
The blade rang true, stopping only when it bit into the wood of the table. Rogers grunted once, just once, when the sword’s edge found flesh, and then it was over. The crowd gasped, but almost guardedly so, as if no one wanted to attract too much attention to their visceral reaction to the beheading. Rogers’ body slumped down to the ground; the head lolled to the side, rolling toward the edge but stopping just before tumbling off. Arterial blood, still pumping from a heart unaware that its owner was dead, sprayed crudely across the front edge like a dye pack had exploded, before slowing to a steady gush. The grass darkened as the field greedily drank the blood cascading off the stage.
Not a sound from the crowd. Nary a cough or clearing of throat. At the back of the stage, the five condemned prisoners remained quiet.
Chadwick approached the blood-soaked table and examined the head, as casually as a man studying the produce bin at the supermarket. He lifted it by Rogers’ ponytail and held it up high for the crowd to see.
“This is the price of treason!” he bellowed. The draining blood ran down his palms, down his wrists, but he did not seem to care. His eyes were manic now, nearly bugging out as he held the head high.
One at a time, the other rebels took their turn at the table, either unaware of or too traumatized by what had happened to put up any resistance. Each seemed to jerk when their faces came in contact with the blood pooling on the table, but by then, the blade was already in flight, and the doomed prisoner joined those who had preceded him in death. To his credit, and to the benefit of the condemned, the executioner was a skilled swordsman, brutally and efficiently doing his assigned duty.
When it was over, Rachel felt like she was floating. She remembered thinking that she should cover her face so she wouldn’t have to witness the slaughter, but she hadn’t. As she looked around the faces of the crowd, she saw no one else had either. She stood there, her ability to react somehow stripped away. Perhaps it was a function of having seen the things she’d seen, that they’d all seen when the world was in the grip of the epidemic. Had she been so deadened that the executions of six people would have such little impact on her?
That they were dead meant nothing to her.
But she wanted to feel something. She wanted to feel horrified and angry and repulsed.
But all she could muster was a terrible sense of sadness, radiating out from her core and spreading like a sickness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Freddie Briggs liked to run in the mornings.
Every day since they’d moved here, he was up just as the morning bled its first hints of purple across the black sky. He would pull on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, lace on his shoes and head out into the ever-colder morning air. He didn’t wear a watch anymore, as he didn’t really give a shit what time it was. He had mapped out a nice loop, about five or six miles long, first along Route 815 away from Evergreen, then cutting through dead farms, sheep and horse and cattle, along a long riverbed and back to 815 and home again.
As he pounded the pavement that mid-November morning, he admitted he had been dishonest with himself about a few things. The first two were the hardest ones to admit, but didn’t they say to deal with the hard stuff first or you might never get around to it?
Anyway.
Point 1.
He didn’t care whether Adam ever found his daughter again. It wasn’t that he wished she were dead, although he could understand how someone might see it that way. But truly, whether they had their reunion was of no consequence to Freddie Briggs. The world did not revolve around the good doctor and his sad, almost certainly futile quest. The thing Adam did not seem to understand was that just because there were fewer people around did not mean that some larger proportion of that subset would necessarily care about his problems. They didn’t. He didn’t.
He focused on the route ahead. Into the trees, stutter-stepping over thick, exposed roots, watching his balance on the layer of dead leaves blanketing the ground. The last thing he needed out here was to break an ankle.
Point 2.
He wished he’d gotten in that stupid truck and ignored Caroline’s pleas for help. He would have drifted off into that great beyond, quietly, peacefully, and he might be with the girls again. There. He’d admitted it to himself. And yes, Caroline probably would have died at that sandwich shop, but guess what? She had died anyway. But she’d had to watch her son die first. So instead of saving her, Freddie had merely condemned her to a fate worse than death. She got to see what he’d seen back in Smyrna. She got to see her baby, the light of her life, liquefy from the inside out. Oh, one might argue that at least she got to hold her son, if only for a little while.
Bullshit. Watching his girls die had been a far worse proposition than never having gotten to hold them at all.
His mind quiet again, he sprinted across a horse pasture, climbed over the retaining fence to add a little excitement, and then zipped back out to Route 815 toward Evergreen
. He picked a line down the middle of the highway, which he found liberating after years of running along the shoulder, constantly checking for the inattentive driver who would hip-check him into roadkill. A cold rain had begun falling, slicking his arms and stinging his face. Steam billowed from his overheated skin; despite the low temperatures, down in the forties, he could feel sweat pouring from his body. He must have been really pushing himself.
Point 3.
This one was sort of tied to the second point. The urge to take his own life had passed. He didn’t know why, as he wasn’t feeling all puppy-dogs-and-rainbows, but maybe his original plan had been an emergency response, an overreaction to what had happened. He wanted to see his girls again, but not that way. Even if he lived another fifty years in this mortal coil, barely the blink of an eye for his family, wrapped in the warm blanket of eternity.
Point 4.
He did not like Adam Fisher.
At all.
Part of it was envy. After all, this was the Hour of Honesty with your host, Freddie Briggs, right? For one, it seemed brutally unfair that Adam’s daughter was still alive. Oh, sure, she was being held captive, maybe, at that compound Nadia had allegedly escaped, but of course he’d find her, because that’s how things went for people like Adam Fisher. People like Freddie Briggs, they suffered catastrophic knee injuries in the prime of their careers and then they watched their families die, and if that was going to happen, then what the hell had been the point of any of it?
If there was one thing nearly all of them had in common, the unifying thread, it was that they’d all lost everything and everyone, and they would all be starting from scratch. A level playing field, if you will. But not Adam. Oh, no. He still had one foot planted firmly in the old world, and so what had he really lost? If you survived, and your family survived, then this empty new world really wasn’t all that bad. Sure, it came with its own inherent risks and dangers, and it would call for a new skill set, but it wasn’t all bad. This wasn’t the aftermath of a nuclear war or a zombie apocalypse. They had power here. Thousands of grocery stores and millions of homes across the country stocked with food. Those wouldn’t last forever, but the folks in Evergreen had been socking away seeds since late summer and would be ready to start planting in the spring.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 35