He pedaled onward, a little more pep in his legs as he saw his destination. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do out here, but he’d decided to make the trip out here shortly after Adam and Sarah’s nuptials. Their marriage was a watershed event for the town. This plant was a watershed place. There was nothing more important to the town’s future than its power supply. It’s what made Evergreen special and had his traveling party talking about things like fate and destiny. It all linked together.
A long perimeter fence surrounded the complex, and he saw a single sentinel standing guard at the outer gate. This duty was rotated among the townsfolk, and today, the watch was in
the hands of John Ochoa and a woman named Felicia something-or-the-other. Ochoa was pacing around the fence line, smoking a cigarette, holding a rifle and looking generally clueless. A camper was parked at the top of the access road that led into the plant.
He coasted to a stop near the main entrance and dismounted from his bike.
“Ho, there, Freddie,” John said.
He greeted everyone with “ho there,” and it annoyed Freddie immensely.
“What brings you out this way? How was the big weddin’?” The way he said wedding, dropping the “g” like it was optional, annoyed him too. And the way he peppered you with questions like a five-year-old.
“It was a wedding,” Freddie replied. “Felicia in the camper?”
“Oh, you know her,” John said, miming the act of tipping a bottle to his lips. “Half in the bag. What brings you out this way?”
“Just thought I’d take a look around,” Freddie said, his eyes focused on the large plant
behind John. “I was talking to Adam, and you know he said he thought it’d be a good idea if we all started learning more about the plant.”
He thought back to the tour that Townsend had given him, Adam, and Sarah shortly after their arrival in Evergreen. It had been a superficial look at the plant, one suggesting that Townsend really didn’t understand the first thing about how it worked. She was able to give the brochure tour, the explanation that NorthStar had undoubtedly put in its investment materials, that explained at the very shallowest level why it had been the place for your hard-earned capital.
Ultimately, all he gleaned from her was that NorthStar had developed a process for extracting more power from lower levels of wind and sunshine. Wave of the future, she’d said. Evergreen was the pilot project, and before you knew it, towns and cities across America would be coming online and that would be the end of America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
“Oh, you know, I’m not sure about that, Freddie,” said John. “I didn’t hear anything about any visitors today from the mayor.”
“That right?”
The Adam’s apple in John’s neck bobbed visibly, and Freddie could tell the man was a bit frightened. John went to lick his lips, sending the forgotten cigarette that had been dangling from the corner of his mouth tumbling to the ground. It hissed when it hit the gravel road.
“It’s just that Mayor, I mean, Doctor Fisher said we really ought not to have you, I mean, anyone walking around inside unless there was reason for people to be here.”
The rifle that had been slung on his shoulder had come askew, looped around his elbow and scraping the ground. He seemed to be caught in that middle ground, unsure of whether he should sling it back on his shoulder or shoot Freddie with it.
“Me?”
“No, no!” he said, backpedaling now, still fumbling with the rifle.
“Did Fisher tell you to keep me away from the plant?”
“No,” John replied.
A metallic scraping noise drew his attention, and Freddie glanced over to see the rear door of the camper swing open on its rusted hinges. Felicia climbed out, bleary eyed and gin-blossomed. The stink of gin was evident even from where Freddie was standing. Jesus, what the hell did Adam think he was doing with this protection detail?
The best he could, a little voice squeaked out.
“What the hell is going on out here?” the woman croaked.
“Nothing,” John said, never taking his eye off Freddie. “Go back to sleep.”
She didn’t move, holding her ground at the camper’s rear bumper.
Freddie felt a bit of food stuck in his teeth, and he swirled his tongue around until he jostled it free. The image of his tongue poking around his cheek must have been intimidating because it precipitated another step backward from the good John Ochoa. The act relaxed him a bit, as he processed the news that Adam had given orders to bar him from entering the power plant. As if anyone in that shitburg town could stop Freddie Briggs from doing whatever the hell he wanted.
He could just picture Adam meeting with the security crew, taking them aside all conspiratorially and saying, “Hey, Freddie, he’s a bit upset about not becoming mayor, let’s all keep an eye on him, m‘kay?”
The rage hit him squarely in the gut, rippling around his sides in a wave of heat. Sweat beaded on his body and traced icy trails down his flanks.
That mother-fucker!
“Why don’t you head on back home?” John said, summoning what must have been every ounce of courage he had on reserve in that skinny, underdeveloped body of his.
“Do you even know how this plant operates?” Freddie asked.
“Not my job to know.”
“Not my job, he says,” Freddie repeated. “There’s a hundred fucking people living in that town, and you don’t think it’s your job to know how our most important asset works?”
“Uh.”
“We should have people out here every goddamn day,” he went on, “learning the ins and outs of this place. It’s nothing but a giant machine. And you know what happens to machines, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure what you’re asking, Freddie, but I think you should-”
“They break down,” Freddie said. “They break down, and then where would we be?”
“Time to go, Freddie.”
Freddie looked over and saw the woman leveling her gun at him. The firearm trembled in her hand, and he knew she would no more shoot him than she would break into show tunes.
“You gonna shoot me?”
“I want you to leave,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but this is my job.”
Freddie smiled, a real smile that curled his lips upward without any chicanery on his part.
“OK, you win,” Freddie said. “I just want to help the town. I want to be part of the crew that takes care of the plant. Looks like I’ve got some things to talk about with our good mayor.”
Felicia cut her eyes toward John, who nodded. She lowered her gun, and Freddie felt a sense of relief flood through him. He hadn’t handled this well at the outset, but he was getting things back under control. He was man enough, after all, to admit his mistakes, unlike a certain pig-headed doctor he knew.
With a tip of his hand, he turned to leave, and then stopped mid-turn.
“Hey, you guys want a bite to eat?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder. “I got some sandwiches in here.” He tapped his backpack.
“Sure,” John said without missing a beat. “Tired of the protein bars anyway.”
“How about you?” Freddie said to the woman.
“Yeah, sure.”
He knelt down and unzipped his pack. On top of the extra change of clothes lay his nine-millimeter pistol, which he’d picked up before they’d made it to Evergreen. It had good heft to it, felt good in his hand. He thought about the line he was about to cross, the one he could never uncross. He thought about Susan and Caroline and Heather lying in the Georgia soil, now part of the Earth, elemental, natural. This was the way things were, the way they had to be.
Well, he was either going to do it or not.
He came up firing.
The first two rounds hit John in the stomach, and his body curled up like a roly-poly before tumbling to the hardpan. Freddie turned the gun on Felicia, whose flight instinct had kicked in a hair too l
ate. She’d been leaning against the side of the camper, which gave Freddie a huge target to aim at. He stepped into the shot and pulled the trigger three more times. The first two rounds missed, but the third found purchase in the hollow under her neck. The impact of the round slammed her against the chassis, and her body hung upright for a minute, as though it couldn’t quite believe what had happened, even as blood sprayed from her wound. Then, she collapsed to the ground, dead.
The sounds of moaning broke Freddie from his trance; he looked back toward the main gate to see John writhing around, his shaky hands fumbling with his rifle, which had landed underneath his body.
“You fucker,” John hissed, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. “You fucker.”
Freddie knelt by the mortally wounded man, his mind on cruise control. It was as if the entire sequence had been pre-programmed. He really hadn’t had to do anything. John rolled onto his back and pressed his hands against his ravaged abdomen. The blood seeped through at an alarming rate.
“I think I will take a look around,” Freddie said.
“The next shift’s on their way,” John muttered between labored breaths.
Freddie smiled. “You know just as well as I do that you’re on until seven tonight.”
A wave of pain washed over John and his face contorted into a terrible grimace.
“Fuck, why?”
Freddie considered the question for a moment. Then he pressed the barrel of his gun against John’s temple and pulled the trigger.
#
There.
It was done.
It had to be done.
Freddie sat in the driver’s seat of the camper, sipping Felicia’s gin, gazing at NorthStar’s crown jewel. The power plant was large, gleaming, new. A promise of a better tomorrow. It had kept its promise even after the plague. A starter kit for a new society. Around them, a land blanketed with darkness and cold, but this place was immune to all that. A sort of symbiotic relationship existed between it and the denizens of Evergreen. Without them, this place would have no purpose, no raison d’être. It would have dutifully continued churning out power with no one to use it until it decayed and rotted and crumbled.
He considered what he had done. There was no going back now. And he hadn’t killed Felicia and John, whose bodies were now tucked in the cargo area, for the simple sake of killing them. He wasn’t a psychopath. There was a reason, a justification for this act. It wasn’t because John, little shit that he’d been, had hurt his feelings. No, that would be juvenile. Immature. This was simply a link in a chain.
When you got right down to it, all their hopes and dreams were wrapped up in this place. These hopes and dreams flowed from the town through the buried cables, into this place, which converted them into gorgeous electricity and sent it back to them. But not for Freddie. What were his hopes and dreams now?
The girls. His girls. Susan and Heather and Caroline.
It was a wound that wouldn’t heal. The thinnest filament of scar tissue would form and then it would split open like it hadn’t been there at all. How these folks had simply moved on astonished him. They had their meetings and their dinners and Kumbaya. It was like their loved ones hadn’t existed at all, and they’d been dead less than four months! Didn’t these people have souls, hearts? Why would he want to lead these people anyway?
They didn’t deserve Evergreen.
And there it was.
They didn’t deserve this bounty they’d been granted, whether by fate, karma, divinity or just plain dumb luck. The callousness, the total disrespect for the world gone by was horrifying.
Chewie.
The guinea pig, may he rest in peace, had had more sense than these people. Yes, Freddie thought. The guinea pig, and all of a sudden, Freddie wished he’d buried Chewie with his girls because they had loved him so much. Instead, he’d condemned him to an eternity rotting in his sad little cage in the family room. Freddie should have stayed back in Smyrna with them. He’d left because he was selfish. He’d been too much of a coward to stay where he belonged, to be the man of the house at the most critical juncture of their lives. It was all coming clear now.
Even Caroline Braddock.
Her death had been a warning, designed to teach him a lesson.
The lesson had been a painful one, but he had learned it now. Clinging to the old world would spell doom for all of them, the way it had for Caroline. Adam had gotten her hopes up with old-world thinking. If the baby had been doomed from the start, he would’ve handled it better than Dr. Doolittle. That’s what these people needed. A swift kick in the ass about the way things really were, the way they were going to be.
This power plant wasn’t going to last, that’s what these people didn’t understand; it was an illusion, a beautiful one perhaps, but still just an illusion. Like a crust of ice over a lake, shimmery and glinting, but underneath was cold, cold death. None of them knew how to maintain it, let alone fix it. It was already deteriorating, from the inside out. He could feel it, he could almost hear it.
It was their last link to the old world. He understood its allure, its siren call, but he also understood that it was already fading away, like a sailboat drifting over the horizon, out of sight. That’s what the others needed to see.
And sooner than later.
He was doing it for them.
They would thank him later.
The Israelites may have been afraid to leave Egypt, may not have even wanted to, and so it had fallen to Moses to take the reins and lead them to the Promised Land. That would be his job. A world beholden to this power plant, that was the threat, that was the real danger to all of them. Once they were free of the shackles of this place, of the inevitably doomed quest to keep the lights on, only then could they find salvation and truly become part of this new world.
He unlocked the gates with John’s keys, got back in the camper and followed the access road running around the perimeter of the facility. The windmills churned on silently; the place hummed, a deep penetrating buzz that drilled down to the very core of his mind. As he completed the circuit, he stumbled across a few bodies here and there, shift workers who hadn’t made it out before succumbing to Medusa.
He opened the door, which was unlocked, and went inside, feeling the metallic chill of the building envelop him. Inside, the buzzing was even louder. The place was cavernous, much bigger than he had thought based on his views from the outside. The walls were outfitted with switches and levers and dials and touchscreens, more than he could even count. Somewhere, a compressor hissed intermittently, like a metronome.
A handful of darkened offices ringed the interior, centering on a large control booth in the middle. More bodies here, a pretty significant concentration of them. Given the chill inside the building, they hadn’t deteriorated much. Freddie took the metal steps to the control room at the middle two at a time, his heavy footsteps echoing through the dead plant. The door to the control room was locked. The mummified bodies of two workers stared back at him from their chairs inside the room.
He began anticipating the imminent silence, the way a hungry dad looked forward to his porterhouse on Father’s Day. It felt so good to know that the hum would soon be gone. He could scarcely contain himself. He went back out to the truck and began scouring it for ideas.
The smell of stale grease and cigarette smoke hung limply in the air of the camper’s small kitchenette. As he scratched his chin, it hit him. Grease didn’t smell like that unless it had been cooked. That meant there was a cooking source on-board. After a few moments of searching, he found the small propane tank under the counter, a hose snaking upward to the stovetop.
He loosened the valve, hearing the welcome hiss of gas being piped to the burner. He shut it quickly and opened his pack, looking for a lighter but coming up short. Then he remembered John had been smoking upon his arrival. A quick search of the dead man’s clothes revealed a cheap lighter. Freddie snapped the metal wheel and smiled when the tiny flame erupted from its p
lastic depths. He held it as long as he could, releasing the button only when it began to burn his thumb.
He lugged the propane tank into the control room and then surrounded it with anything flammable he could find. Papers, manuals, clothes of the deceased shift workers, anything that would burn. Then he strung the trail of kindling toward the door, which would buy him a little time before the propane ignited. He opened the safety valve. The pressurized gas rushed out in a whoosh.
He backed away from the tank, this soon-to-become ground zero of all that Evergreen had been or would ever be. Every few feet, he paused and touched the flame from the lighter to the kindling. Clothes and papers that had been indoors for months had seasoned and went up immediately. Tongues of flame danced across the fabric, looking for more fuel to consume.
The fire moved faster than he anticipated, and he turned to run. Even as he hit the threshold of the doorway, he could feel the heat thickening behind him; he pictured one of those cartoon thermometers, the red bubble of mercury expanding comically. As he burst through the door, into the freshness of the outside air, he began to shiver uncontrollably, the sense that he was surrounded by forces he could no longer control. The camper was dead ahead, and he was flying now, the muscles of his legs rippling as he chewed up the ground between the plant and his getaway vehicle.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat, he planted a hand on the roof and glanced back toward the open doorway, which was now rippling with a red-orange corona, a throat of fire. Something twisted and broken inside him, a ruined clockspring, kept him rooted there for a long moment, but he finally forced himself to the wheel, and he backed the big camper away from the security fence. The tires spun briefly, throwing up a spray of dust and gravel, before catching. He turned the wheel hard to the right, and the camper fishtailed; for a moment, he thought the whole thing would tip over, and that would be that.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 40