The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Kazzie, David

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  In the end, it was the dreams that told her what to do.

  She’d wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, and it would take her a moment, sometimes a long moment, to realize that the world in the dream was the imaginary one. It would hold its shape long enough to leave her straddling both worlds, unsure of where she was, before it collapsed and she’d wonder if she’d screamed as loudly as she thought she had. But she would look over at Adam, his breathing deep and even, his sleep undisturbed.

  There wasn’t anything mystical about her dreams. She’d obsess about a problem, and her mind would work on it the way a jeweler might polish a stone, over and over and over, until she breathed it and perspired it, until it invaded her subconscious mind and revealed itself in her dreams. Sometimes, she found the way through in the dream world, and sometimes, the roadblocks that she’d encountered while awake would find her while she slept.

  She dreamed about Rachel.

  Each time, the dream was the same.

  Early morning. Sitting in the cafeteria of some antiseptic building, a hospital or a lab, maybe one where she’d gone for treatment of her Huntington’s. A large cloth napkin was tucked in her collar. In her left hand, she held a knife, in her right, a fork. She sat alone at a two-top as the cafeteria bustled around her, dozens of people, all wearing white lab coats, eating their breakfast, chatting, laughing, all sitting together in groups of four. She stared at the empty seat opposite her, unsure if she was waiting for someone, and she would become conscious of the fact that she was sitting alone, and then she would think wasn’t she a little bit old for that kind of nonsense, and then there she was. Sarah didn’t know how she knew it was Rachel. It was a dream, after all, and she just knew.

  Rachel wore a biohazard suit, a shimmery silver color that caught the lights in the cafeteria. In her hands was a tray of food, which she set down in front of Sarah. When Rachel reared back up to her full height, Sarah saw that everyone now lay dead on the floor, their noses and lips smeared with the blood of Medusa. Part of the breakfast varied every day. Sometimes, she’d get a plate of eggs and bacon, two triangular slices of wheat toast. Other days, it was waffles. Pancakes. A frittata. But with every breakfast, Rachel delivered her a bowl containing half a ruby red grapefruit. The fruit’s flesh was a deep crimson, the color of fresh blood, and Sarah could not take her eyes off it. Every time, she’d will herself to look at Rachel, talk to her, because she never said a word, but she couldn’t do it. Her gaze would be transfixed on that red iris, a bloodshot eye forever fixed open, its white center a dead pupil.

  “And that’s it,” she said, finally telling Adam about it one morning as they ate breakfast. She hated telling people about her dreams because she never quite understood the point. Oh, you had a crazy dream? How novel. It was like telling someone you’d had a really good poop.

  It had been a week since the fire. They’d found a huge abandoned horse ranch in northern Kansas and had decided to make a go of it there for the winter. No power, of course, but after the disaster in Evergreen, no one seemed in any particular hurry to deal with electricity anytime soon. The Caballero Ranch sat on hundreds of acres of Kansas scrubland, ringed by a long perimeter fence. At the center of the tract was the main house. A number of smaller houses dotted the landscape.

  “Sweetie, it’s just a dream,” he said.

  “I know it’s just a dream,” she snapped, and he recoiled.

  He smiled thinly.

  “We have to try and help these women,” Sarah said. “I’ll keep going until I can’t anymore. And I know you. You may not think I do yet, but I do. You’ll keep looking until you know for sure. Even after I’m gone.”

  Hearing her talk about her own mortality made his jaw clench. With each passing day since the Evergreen fire, her illness had become more and more a real thing. Their love may have surrounded them with its strength, but reality was pushing at the walls. Barbarians at the gate. He wondered what she would have thought of him if she knew the truth, that he’d been ready to give it up.

  “Anyway, I have a plan,” Sarah said. “It’s crazy. It almost certainly won’t work. And if you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  “Well?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I can’t believe I’m even going to suggest this.”

  “Well?”

  “Hang on, hang on. If this is going to work, we’re going to need some help.”

  “OK. So what’s the plan?”

  She told him. And she was right. It was an insane plan.

  #

  If he was going to ask them to do this brave thing, Adam would need to do it face-to-face. He would be placing himself in harm’s way, too, of course, but he had the most to gain from the gambit.

  He packed a lunch for the two women and one man who, along with him, would make up his team, and they walked out to a rock formation near the eastern border of Caballero. It was a cloudy day and a humid breeze was blowing across the prairie. A small herd of antelope was grazing upwind from them, and they could smell the pungent tang of their hide.

  “I have a favor to ask of you all,” he said.

  “I’ll do it,” Mike Still said.

  Adam laughed nervously.

  “Haven’t even said what it was,” he said.

  “Don’t care,” Mike said. “It’s a big deal to you, obviously, else you wouldn’t have brought us out here.”

  “It could be dangerous,” he said. “Strike that. It will be dangerous.”

  “Count me in, then,” Charlotte said.

  Adam felt his throat tighten. These people, he was about to ask them to go into harm’s way for him, for his little girl, and they hadn’t even blinked an eye.

  “You all mind if I tell you what it is?”

  Silence. The looks on their faces were blank, steely, almost as if they couldn’t wait to hear it.

  “As you know, my search for Rachel has not gone well. I’ve been picking through a gigantic haystack, looking for one tiny needle. It’s been hard to keep hope alive. And my search may have blinded me to the threat we all faced from Freddie. For that, I apologize.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Mike said. “If it wasn’t for you, he’d have taken over. You should’ve seen him in that hearing room that day. He was going to clean house.”

  This made Adam shudder, but he tried to block it out of his mind as he pressed onward.

  “But Rachel’s not the only one there,” he continued. “According to Nadia, there are at least a dozen women being held prisoner. Possibly more.

  “Anyway, there are two parts to this plan,” he said. “First, Sarah and Charlotte will travel together. Alone. Mike and I will be shadowing you with a GPS tracking device. You’re going to make a lot of noise, you’re going to build fires at night. You’re going to look helpless. You’re going to lay a trap. You’re going to get captured by Nadia’s group. And they’re going to lead us to Rachel and the other women. Part two. We’ll launch an assault on this camp and free everyone.”

  The group was silent as they considered it.

  “You think this will work?” Charlotte asked.

  “No idea,” Sarah said. “But it’s all we’ve got.”

  “What about everyone here?” Mike asked.

  “I can’t lead as long as I keep thinking about Rachel,” Adam said. “It’s not fair to them. These are good people here and they deserve better than me.”

  The others exchanged glances and nods, all of them coming to an agreement.

  “I’m still in,” Charlotte said.

  “Ditto,” Mike said.

  “Then let’s do it.”

  #

  After Adam resigned as mayor, the group elected Diane Williams, who’d been the cook in the Evergreen diner, as their new leader. Years at the helm of busy kitchens had left her well suited to lead the ragtag group of refugees. Adam liked her well enough, even as she all but came out and told him that his search for Rachel was
nothing but a wild goose chase. But it didn’t bother him anymore, even if what she said was true.

  “I wish you all the luck in the world,” she’d told him one afternoon. “When you’re ready to come home, you know where to find us.”

  He hoped they made it back. He knew they probably wouldn’t.

  #

  “The key to this whole thing is this GPS tracking device,” Adam said during their first planning session, holding up the small device, about the size of a flash drive. There was a hasp and clip on the end of it. “A few years back, I dated this real outdoorsy girl, wanted to go camping all the time.”

  “Is that right?” Sarah cut in.

  “That is right, ma’am,” Adam said. “You’d be surprised how in demand a handsome doctor like me was in the old world.”

  “Oh, here we go,” she replied, rolling her eyes.

  Laughter rippled through the room, and for a moment, Adam forgot about the dangerous mission that lay ahead.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I was trying to keep up with her, and so I bought all this stuff I never used until the outbreak. The ladies will keep this on them at all times.”

  He wagged a finger at each of them.

  “At all times,” he said again. “I really mean that.”

  “We got it, chief.”

  “I can follow the signal with this receiver,” he said, holding up a slightly larger device, about the size of a deck of cards. “Fortunately, it’s battery-operated, and if there’s one thing we can find a lot of, it’s batteries.

  “Does the GPS still work?” Charlotte asked.

  “The GPS in the car navigation systems are still functioning, maybe not as good as they used to without someone to keep the satellites in line, but close enough for our needs. I think as time goes by, the GPS will become less and less reliable, without anyone to herd them back into place when they drift out of their orbit, but if we haven’t found the camp by then, we probably never will.”

  “Guns,” Mike said. “We’ll need guns.”

  “Tents,” Charlotte jumped in. “The best we can find. We may be out there for a long time.”

  “I have a question,” Sarah asked. “What if we’re attacked by someone else? Some other group that’s not connected to Rachel?”

  “We’ll be close enough that we won’t let anything happen.”

  “Basically, you’re saying you have no idea.”

  “Sort of,” he said.

  Nervous laughter.

  “I’m playing the odds here. I really believe we’re within fifty to a hundred miles of the camp. I think if you make a big enough scene, they will find you. Which is why, again, I’m going to ask you, all of you, if you’re sure you want to do this.”

  “Adam,” Mike said. “Listen to me now. I think I speak for all of us here. I’m not doing this for shits and giggles. Believe me, I’m in no hurry to die. I’d just as soon stay here at the farm, learn how to raise chickens and sheep and drink lukewarm scotch for the rest of my life. But I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror, knowing there was someone, a lot of someones maybe, who I could’ve helped and didn’t.”

  Adam looked around the table and saw steely eyes staring back at him, heads nodding. He saw the resolve in their faces, and he vowed never to ask them again if they were sure about wanting to help him.

  “If you’re right, and they’re that close, who’s to say they don’t find this place first?”

  “They might,” Adam said. “All the more reason to put an end to this.”

  He hoped he sounded more convincing than he felt.

  “You can’t beat yourself up,” Mike said, reading him as though Adam were projecting his thoughts right up against the wall like a PowerPoint presentation. “This is the hand we’ve all been dealt.”

  “You’re right,” he said.

  They moved on.

  As Adam and the others prepared to ship out, the farm bustled with activity. Body removal, consolidation of canned goods, sorties to nearby farms to scavenge what they could. Adam hoped they made it back someday. This was a good group, one that he wouldn’t mind sailing to the great unknown tomorrow with.

  On his last day at the ranch, he helped clear the last of the dead. They stacked the bodies, which had decomposed badly in the humid Kansas air, in a large pile at the ranch’s main gate and set the remains ablaze. Adam stood as close as he could to the fire, until he felt the invisible heat billowing against his face, never wanting to forget what had happened to these people, to their world. It was becoming harder to remember that the world hadn’t always been this way, blank pages inserted at the end of a novel.

  #

  After a series of supply runs to nearby farmhouses and a dozen meetings, the team was ready to ship out. It was December 13, and although the weather had stayed mild, it had been raining almost nonstop for the past three days.

  They’d followed Sarah’s lead in outfitting themselves, the way she would have done it on their long-range patrols in Afghanistan or Iraq. Each carried a full pack, complete with sleeping bag, nested pots and pans, water purification tablets, a compass, a hunting knife, MREs, personal hydration system, first-aid kit, several changes of clothes, cigarettes, energy bars and handwarmers. They went light on water, counting on the abundance of supplies that were still lying around out there in the dozens of tiny towns they’d pass through. The GPS was working splendidly, accurate to within fifty feet. Adam had wanted to give them walkie-talkies, but Sarah had disavowed him of that idea. She didn’t want to take the chance that their communications were picked up.

  The plan was simple enough; they would trek eastward by mountain bike for three miles and then begin moving in ever-widening circles out from the point of origin. Adam and Mike would lag behind, but never following too directly, in the event the bad guys were watching them too.

  Sarah and Charlotte were leaving first, just after sunrise, so that they could open up a little cushion. They’d said their goodbyes to the others the night before, and the farm was quiet but for the patter of light rain. The rain, the gloomy sky, all of it reminded Sarah of the day the Bronx quarantine had broken, the day the Apache helicopters had blown the Third Avenue bridge. It seemed like a long time ago.

  There was little chit-chat, just the nervous energy of a group on a journey whose ending was unknown. Sarah felt good, though, she felt alive. Her symptoms had subsided in the past week, a development for which she was eternally grateful. They’d be back, of course, but for now, she felt strong and full of purpose.

  Adam and Sarah stood by the main gate now; Charlotte and Mike had drifted east a little to give the couple some privacy. Mike checked the GPS device, making sure for the hundredth time that it was working properly.

  “So this is it,” Adam said. His voice was caked with anxiety.

  “What you’ve been waiting for,” she said, taking his hand in her own. “We’re going to find her.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He smiled, and she kissed him.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she said.

  She leaned in and wrapped her arms around him, and they stood there, entwined in each other’s arms. It was one thing to realize that they might all be living on borrowed time. It was a much different thing to know for certain that she was, that their marriage was, that his heart was. But whatever happened out there, it was far better than staying here and waiting to die. At least this way, she could thank him for giving her the life she’d always wished she could have, if only for a little while.

  She was the first one to break the embrace.

  “Gotta go,” she said. “Stop being such a pansy. We’ll see each other soon. I promise.”

  After one last kiss, she hoisted her pack onto her shoulders and jogged down the road. She paused to exchange a few words with Mike as he made his way back toward Adam and then joined Charlotte.

  #

  Adam and Mike watched as the women’s profiles drew smaller along
the horizon, until they were out of view. The die was now cast. If things went according to plan, he wouldn’t see her again until she was being held captive. The whole thing made his head swim. The rain intensified some, leaving him cold and feeling alone.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a weather report,” Adam said.

  “What, you want this to be easy?” Mike replied, clapping Adam on the shoulder and laughing.

  Adam couldn’t help but laugh. He was glad Mike was coming along. He exuded calmness, he never seemed to get rattled. Part of it stemmed from his work as a photographer for the Associated Press before coming to run the Evergreen newspaper. He’d seen some crazy shit overseas, he’d told them, from North Korean prison camps to genocide in Darfur. He’d made it back to the States less than a week before the outbreak began. He was divorced and had no children (that he knew of, he liked to joke).

  “You ready to roll out?” Adam asked.

  “You bet,” Mike said.

  #

  They hit the road an hour later, cycling east, two tiny specks of dust in a big, empty world.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  For sixteen days, Adam and Mike trailed the women like loyal shadows, trusting the GPS signal to keep tabs on Sarah and Charlotte when they drifted beyond the reach of the field glasses. The women quickly established a routine, traveling from about nine in the morning, making camp an hour before dark, giving them just enough time to set up camp before the sun dipped below the horizon. They made large, smoky fires and played loud music from an old battery-operated boombox. Adam and Mike mirrored them, traveling when they traveled, breaking when they broke.

  It was maddening for Adam to be able to see Sarah from a distance but unable to talk to her. He missed her desperately, and being able to lay eyes on her made things worse. It was as if she were already dead, and he was just watching a recording of an event gone by.

  Their search field grew with each passing day, pulling them farther and farther away from the ranch he doubted he would ever see again. He missed the people there, and he hoped he’d get a chance to make up his absence to them. It was lonely out here, empty. The land was flat and desolate, miles of grassland stretching away in all directions, broken up here and there by the black asphalt veins criss-crossing the plains. It was like standing on a different world. They saw elk and antelope loping across the landscape. Flocks of birds darkened the skies. Deer were abundant, but they couldn’t risk building a fire, and so a potential venison feast remained just that – potential.