And that wasn’t all. Fisher and that bitch (Honesty Hour!) Sarah were playing house now, all googly-eyed for each other. So to top everything off, the big fat cherry, Adam had a warm body to cuddle up with, polish his knob, make it all better in the off-chance they didn’t find Rachel.
He was sprinting now, his lungs burning, his quads vibrating into jelly.
Squish, squish, squish. He felt the cold rainwater seeping into his shoes, icing his toes, and it just propelled him faster, faster. If only those pathetic NFL scouts could have seen him now. He wondered if any other players had survived. Fifteen hundred of them, yeah, there were probably a few who’d made it.
Where was he going with all this?
He liked Evergreen, and he wanted to stay there. He liked the kids, and they would need a positive role model going forward. A role model for the new world, not for the way it had been. Who was going to fill that role? Adam? If it had been one of his daughters who’d survived rather than him, would he want Adam Fisher looking after her?
No. Hell no. He was selfish, that much was clear. And the kids were suffering for it. Just the other day, Max had had a huge meltdown when Freddie had tried to toughen him up a little while showing him a good time. Freddie had woken up that morning with the almost overwhelming urge to drive fast, way beyond what Evergreen’s sorry little fleet of electric cars was capable of. He checked the white pages in his apartment and found the listing for a dealership down in Guymon. Max, who’d been living with a group of older kids since their arrival, tagged along, always up for additional time with Freddie.
They took one of the town’s electric cars, its engine pathetic and flaccid. It was just depressing. And in Guymon, his spirits perked up when they saw the bright pennant flags lining the perimeter of the lot flapping bravely in the wind, the cars glinting in the morning sun. The small marquee at the front was still advertising 0% for 60 months on all new models. Dozens of cars lined the lot; they were dusty and grimy and speckled with bird droppings.
“How about that one?” Max asked, pointing to a cherry-red Mustang.
Freddie eyed it and smiled, pleased that Max was a boy after his own heart. Maybe there was hope for them yet.
“Absolutely, my good man,” Freddie had said. “Great choice.”
He made a note of the VIN number and then got to work. First, he broke the glass of the dealership with the muzzle of his gun, the sound of the tinkling huge and accusatory in the silence, like a lady screaming her pocketbook had been stolen. But it didn’t bother Freddie anymore because he was used to this unmooring from the old world. He could still see it in some of the others’ eyes. They were still nervous about taking canned goods from grocery stores, about breaking into people’s houses for water and supplies and so on. Even here in Evergreen, where they knew that their neighbors were dead and feeding the worms.
The air was musty inside the dealership, but there didn’t appear to be any bodies here. Freddie had figured out that a business’ relative importance in the old world revealed itself by how many bodies were still inside once the plague had burned itself off. No one had hung around Schaeffer Ford to die, that was for damn sure.
It was dim inside, but not dark. On one of the desks, he spotted a large rat, nosing in a box of crackers. He ignored it, and it ignored him. Rat’s gotta eat, he thought. They went behind the main desk and scanned the rows of keys until Max found the one matching the Mustang. As they made their way outside, he felt electricity buzzing through him, something that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
After checking the tires, Freddie unlocked the Mustang with the keyfob and climbed in. It roared, and Max squealed with glee. Freddie took a moment to feel the Mustang’s power, to really feel it, to know that there would be no more Mustangs for a hundred years, if ever. He felt life coursing through him like he hadn’t before, not even during his football days. He shifted into drive and raced out of the parking lot, out onto U.S. 64, a nice four-lane piece of road, stretching off to the north. They flew through a residential neighborhood, block after block of dead ranches and Cape Cods, skittering around abandoned cars. Faster he went, clearing the town limits, and still faster he went.
“This is awesome!” Max had screamed.
But Freddie barely heard him. Caroline’s face hovered there in the windshield, at first the way it looked when he’d found her on the back stoop of Pastrami Dan’s, under the black awning, relief and hope and answered prayers etched on her face like the happy slashes of a toddler’s fingerpaint. Back when baby Stephen’s fate had been unwritten, back when there’d still been a chance. But then that dissolved and bullying its way into place was her dead face, in the tent, the thin white film pasted on her lifeless lips and it had been his fault.
Ninety miles per hour.
“Yeaaahh!!!” Max shouted.
One hundred miles per hour.
One-ten, and the car still purred underneath him, as if to ask is that all you’ve got, you pussy?
By then, Max’s squeals had abated, and he’d grabbed the dashboard with both hands.
“This is pretty fast,” he’d said.
“You think that’s fast?”
Freddie pushed the pedal down a little farther and now the land rushed by in a blur. God, this was better than sex, he thought to himself, the needle now tickling one-thirty-five. And he was screaming now, his howls filling the car as he hurtled through the countryside like a bullet looking for a target.
“No, Freddie, please slow down!”
One-forty.
Max started to cry, pleading with him to slow down, but Freddie pushed the pedal to the floor, until the Mustang was a missile slicing through the Oklahoma sunshine. He blocked out Max’s pleas because this felt so goddamn good. It was an indescribable feeling, like Christmas morning combined with your first roller coaster, toss in your first kiss and that first stolen sip of beer, all rolled into this moment.
“PLEASE FREDDIE SLOW DOWN I’M SCARED!”
“It’s good for you!” Freddie yelled back. “Gotta toughen you up!”
“FREDDIE PLEAAAAAASSSE!”
Then Max had totally lost it, crying and kicking and flailing his arms, his face wet with tears and snot, until finally Freddie had eased up on the accelerator, disappointed in Max, disappointed in how soft they all really were. How were they going to survive in this world if Max, who would someday be looked upon to lead, was afraid of his own shadow? And he had news for these people. Things were only going to get tougher as the months and years went by.
“I wanna go home,” Max had said quietly.
“Fine,” Freddie had said. “Jesus.”
So they had taken the Mustang back to Guymon and driven the electric car home, the thirty-mile trip covered in silence. When Max had gotten out of the car at the apartment building he called home, his eyes were red and puffy from his pathetic little meltdown. He hadn’t seen much of Max since then; in fact, he’d been seeing the kid hanging more around Adam the last couple of days.
And Adam was blind to how weak they all really were. Everything was secondary to his quest to find Rachel. Freddie didn’t necessarily begrudge him that, but that didn’t mean he had to make it everyone else’s problem too. That focus on his own issue, his own story, meant he couldn’t be The Guy. Smart, fine. Organized, fine. But the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, big guy. What happens if the town comes under attack, and you’re out wandering the plains like Moses? Or if someone gets sick?
The more he thought about it, the angrier he got.
Squishsquishsquish.
He was flying now, the town limit less than a half-mile away. He felt the rush, that runner’s high, buzzing through him, as though he were floating along the road. His body felt strong, his mind clear. He blew into town like a rocket re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, decelerating, dialing back on the throttle, until he had slowed to an easy jog.
After taking a few minutes to stretch his tired muscles, he went inside and sponged his body off. T
hey had agreed to limit showers to two a week to conserve water, and he had gotten pretty good at this method anyway. When he was clean, he pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, grabbed a granola bar and sat down at the small dining table in the corner of the living room.
For the next two hours, he made a list of things they needed to do. He would show them. They’d fallen in behind Adam because he was a doctor, an understandable knee-jerk reaction to the situation they were in. If Freddie acted now, while things were still fluid, he could make his mark. Being a leader was something he was familiar with. His second year in the league, his teammates had elected him the defensive captain, a title he held until the knee injury. He ran the defense as a seamless unit, getting his teammates to buy into his team-first theory, pounding it into their heads until the Falcons were a perennial top-five defense.
That could be done here, too. It was really no different. These scared, tired folks were his teammates now, and they could be molded into a seamless unit too. You just picked a philosophy and worked from there. The philosophy was easy enough. Safety and security for this new community. Water. Food. Shelter.
Defense. Law and order would also be a paramount concern in establishing a long-term community. There would be dirty work, and it would be the dirty work people would blow off. Other-guy syndrome. They couldn’t mean me, don’t they know what I’ve been through out there?
Immigration. There was plenty of room for more survivors, but they’d have to watch the influx carefully as well. Should they take in anyone who wandered in from the wilderness? At some level, it bothered him to think about excluding those in need. But it was a dog-eat-dog world now.
This was a soft bunch. The episode with Max and the Mustang had just driven it home for him. Things were working fine now, and that meant they’d become complacent. They’d just think that things would keep working fine. Human beings didn’t like change; now that these folks had lived through the biggest paradigm shift any of them would ever see, they’d assume that the winds of change had stopped blowing. That they could stick their heads in the sand here and watch old DVDs and drink scotch and paint landscapes, and the heat would keep blowing in the winter and the canned goods would last forever and they could just live that life as some kind of reward for having survived the plague.
How terribly wrong they were. If they weren’t careful, things would just get worse and the world would become more dangerous. The strong would survive, the weak would perish. He revised his earlier thought. These folks, these survivors, weren’t like his teammates. Not at all. From high school through college and especially in the NFL, his teammates had been driven to succeed. Sure, there were exceptions, those who skated by on talent alone, at least for a little while, when it finally caught up with them, but by and large, they were self-starters. No one had to tell them to study film, to hit the weights, to run the drills until they were as ingrained as breathing.
No, this would be different. These folks would have to be told what to do and how to do it. Probably wanted to be told. The what and the how, that was the hard part. A lot of the work ahead would be tedious and repetitive and mechanical. They would rally around the person who greased the skids, the one who made it as easy as possible. He suspected that for the most part, people wanted to pull their weight and do their fair share. Hell, maybe it was because people were fundamentally good. But Freddie suspected that it was because no one wanted to be looked at as a slacker. Shame could be a powerful motivator, especially in this new world, where you couldn’t hide among the masses and get by on the herd’s efforts. The herd just wasn’t big enough anymore.
He worked until his brain was mush and then lay down for a nap. As he drifted off to sleep, he recounted his work so far. He had the ideas. He had a plan. He just needed a way to implement them. When he woke up at around four in the afternoon, he felt good. Refreshed. And he knew what he needed to do.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It took him two full days, but eventually, he tracked down nearly every citizen in Evergreen and told them he was calling a meeting on November 24. And hoo boy, had it ever become the talk of the town, to Freddie’s immense delight. As he strolled down Evergreen Boulevard on the evening of the meeting, he felt a lightness like he’d felt the day he’d driven the Mustang.
Everyone had responded positively, glad that Freddie was kicking them out of the stasis they’d seemed to settle into. People were ready to move onto the next phase of things, whatever it was that happened to be. And they were more than happy to let Freddie get that train moving out of the station. He even began to hear whispers that people were ready for a change at the top. He’d gotten a few people on his side. Bill Irwin, an engineer at the plant. Chuck Danley. Peter Salomon. Kate Crawford. They’d act as his proxies in the crowd, help him run the plan through before the town would know what hit it.
Just show us where to board, Mister Conductor!
It was bitterly cold out when Freddie arrived at the town hall a little after five-thirty. There were four chairs on the dais, the tables still marked with nameplates of the mayor and the now-dead members of the Evergreen’s governing council. Freddie threw them in the trashcan in the corner of the room.
Onward and upward!
He was furiously scribbling notes as the others arrived, streaming in from wherever they’d been dicking around while Freddie had been getting his ducks in a row. He felt good, ready, the way he felt after a solid week of practice and film study in his old life. When he called the meeting to order at precisely six, there were more than a hundred people present, standing room only, like it had been for the Falcons home games the year they’d finished 14-2 and nearly won it all.
The group took their seats, filling the hearing room to capacity, and he could sense their eyes on him sitting in the center chair. Good, he thought. He wanted them to take notice that there was a new sheriff in town. He saw them glance at Mayor Townsend, looking for some semblance of an objection, but she just seemed to accept it. Freddie had banked on her silence, that she’d be a little too intimidated to raise a stink about it.
He banged the gavel three times, and it stopped the incessant chatter dead.
“Let’s get started.”
He had considered opening with an invocation or the Pledge of Allegiance or something similar, something to remind everyone they were the same people they’d been not four months ago, but he had dispensed with the idea. He needed to bum rush the quarterback, for lack of a better analogy.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do if Evergreen is going to remain our home.”
Heads nodding, people exchanging surprised glances.
“Evergreen is a special place, I think we can all agree on that,” he continued. “But the power plant is not going to maintain itself. How many people worked at the plant before the plague?”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then a short, stout man in the front row stood up. His hands trembled, and he kept his eyes focused on his feet.
“Uh,” the man said. “My name’s Irwin. Bill Irwin.”
“You’re gonna have to speak up,” Freddie said. “We can barely hear you.”
“I was an engineer at the plant,” Irwin said. “We had about five hundred on any given shift.”
“How many are still alive?”
“Just me.”
“Just you? The plague got all the others?”
“No, two others survived. One died in the attack a few weeks ago. The other, uh, well, he sort of went crazy and took off.”
“Have you been out there?”
“Every day.”
Freddie leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin for a moment. He knew all of this. He’d been out to the plant several times with Irwin, who’d been flitting about the place, checking on things he knew how to check, replacing plugs and wire when needed. But they were living on borrowed time. Irwin, no fan of Townsend, hadn’t come right out and said it, but Freddie could read between the lines. Irwin could
n’t do it alone, he didn’t even know how. The plant was too complex, required too much specialized knowledge to maintain and troubleshoot its various systems, wisdom that largely had gone to the grave. Sooner or later, it would fail.
“Mayor Townsend?”
“Yes?”
“Isn’t it high time Mr. Irwin had some help out there at the plant?”
The sound of one hundred necks turning toward the mayor filled the room. Townsend shifted in her seat. Freddie had planned this next bit, where he’d just stare at the mayor until she said something, until she tried to say nothing by saying a lot, the way all politicians did.
“It’s just that, uh…”
Her words trailed off like a revving engine disappearing in the night.
Then he pounced.
“Gwen, I don’t think the good people of Evergreen are really interested in your excuses.”
He allowed himself a quick glance at the crowd. A hundred sets of eyes, boring in on the mayor like lasers. Jaws tightened. Heads nodded. He caught Adam’s eye and was pleased to see a look bordering on horror on the doctor’s face.
That’s right, Doc, Freddie thought, briefly holding Adam’s gaze before turning his attention to the mayor. God, that look was priceless. He wished he could have gotten it on camera.
“They expect leadership.”
He looked back down at his notes.
“What about the food and water supply?” he asked with a deliberate sigh, as though he expected to be disappointed in the answer. “We can’t rely on canned goods forever. We’re going to need to start making our own food.”
“There’s a reservoir not far from here,” Townsend said. “With our small population, we should be OK with water.”
“We won’t always have a small population though, will we?” Freddie asked.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 36