Lifeless.
What was wrong with her?
She tucked the note back into her pocket and ran her fingers through thick, perpetually messy brown hair. Bile crept into her throat. She looked at the women Adam had saved, at the others to whom he had meant so much. Her heart swelled, but not from joy, not from pride. It felt like someone was pushing down on her chest, the way it felt when someone had wronged you, when someone had gotten the better end of the deal, when someone had gotten away with it, whatever it was. When there wasn’t a goddamn thing you could do about it.
Like now.
The way they all looked at her with their sad faces, their tears running down their cheeks. They had that luxury, to see Adam as this post-apocalyptic savior, a martyr, might as well start calling him St. Adam, they could do that now here in the First Church of Omaha, Nebraska, in the People’s Free Republic of Whatever the Hell This Was. They did not have to know what she had known about him her whole life before the plague.
Anger.
“He was a smart man, my father,” she said. “He knew how to fix things, how to fix people. And I get why you all looked up to him. I do.”
She paused, conscious of what she was doing, giving herself one last chance to pull the emergency brake, bring this whole goddamn thing to a screeching halt before she passed the point of no return. But she couldn’t.
“I didn’t know my father well before Medusa,” she said. “I grew up in California, and he stayed back in Virginia. I kept thinking he would move out to be near me, but he never did. I never understood that. He was a doctor. People in California needed doctors. Wouldn’t he want to be near his only daughter?”
The words came easily now, spraying out of her like water from a hydrant.
“Let me tell you guys a story,” she said. People shifted from one foot to another, exchanged nervous glances with one another. She watched the scene shift from mournful to awkward, but she didn’t care. They needed to hear this about their superhero.
“He planned to fly out to San Diego for my high school graduation,” she said, thinking about all the good he had done in this new world but continuing with her story anyway. “This was about a year before the outbreak. The day before he’s supposed to fly out, he calls me and says that one of his patients needs him, she’s had a difficult pregnancy, he’s really sorry but he won’t be able to make it.”
Warm tears streamed down her icy cheeks, and she wiped them away with the backs of her wrists. The yard was silent now; no one spoke, no one moved a muscle. She turned toward the graves, where she could see her father’s body lined up with the others. Her wise, brave, selfish, shitty father. It came at her all at once, her emotions waging a terrible battle inside her for control about how she really felt.
There was more to the story, she was sure of it, but she simply stood there in front of the other survivors, rubbing her hands together, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, not sure what she was supposed to do next. She had a point to make, an important point here at her father’s funeral, but it was gone.
She clapped a hand over her mouth and ran, leaving Will, leaving Eddie, leaving all of them behind. She sobbed, her mournful howls filling the morning quiet. The tears continued to fall, her body shaking, she ran for the trailer, wanting nothing more than to hide away from Will, from Eddie, from everyone, from the world she was in.
#
Charlotte Spencer came to see her the next morning.
They sat at the kitchen table, drinking strong, bitter coffee. Rachel’s hands trembled from the caffeine, her stomach sour and tight. On the table was an old photograph of her father, back from his college days. She had found it in his old things as she wandered the trailer like a troubled spirit and had spent much of the night staring at it, entranced by it. The photo was old and yellowed, snapped at a semi-formal event more than three decades ago. Adam, dressed in khakis and a blazer, stood next to a pretty girl in a strapless red dress, a string of pearls encircling her slender neck. Their smiles were broad and deep, loosened perhaps by the cheap beer in the bottle each was holding, two young people with their whole lives in front of them. Rachel could just make out the time on the girl’s digital watch, tilted just so toward the camera. Seven twenty-six in the evening. On the back of the photo, in faint blue ink, the numerals 4/2, the date of the event, she supposed, were etched into the upper right corner. She felt bad for them, she hated knowing the dark future that lay ahead for them both.
Rachel had never told her father about how disappointed she’d been that he’d missed her graduation. He couldn’t find another doctor to cover that patient? Doctors did it all the time. They traded patients like baseball cards. Why was this one any different? Oh sure, he’d been apologetic, he’d watched a livestream of the ceremony from her mom’s iPhone, but the damage had been done. Ever since the day she was born, she had been the runner-up in the priorities of Adam’s life, second to all the women who came to see him.
She had never told anyone about it until the funeral. So many times, it had been right there on the tip of her tongue. If she could have told Adam this one thing, tell him how badly it had hurt her, maybe they could repair this rupture between them, the rupture that had been there all along. But she never did. And now it was too late.
The trailer was quiet. Will was in his room, the door shut tight. Rachel lit a cigarette, old and stale.
“I wanted to check on you,” Charlotte said.
“I’m fine,” Rachel replied, blowing a stream of blue smoke into the air.
“We need to talk,” Charlotte said.
“He was my father,” she said, her eyes down in her coffee. “Not theirs.”
“I know,” Charlotte said. “And it’s easy for people to forget that. To them, he’s a folk hero. To me, too, if I’m being honest.”
Rachel snorted in disgust.
Charlotte held up her hands in surrender.
“It’s not fair, I know that,” she said. “I know no one is perfect. It was nice to have someone to believe in, someone who never let you down.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Rachel snapped.
They sat quietly. Will coughed, and Charlotte’s eyes cut toward the bedroom. She took a sip of the coffee and set her mug back on the table.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Charlotte said. “Must’ve been hard.”
“No one’s life was perfect.”
“Cheers to that.”
Charlotte took a sip of her coffee. She started to set the mug back down but paused. She lifted the mug back to her lips and took another sip.
“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
As Charlotte gathered her thoughts, Rachel scraped at a piece of long-dried food encrusted on the tabletop. A cylinder of ash fell from the forgotten cigarette still clamped between her two fingers and landed in a perfect little pile. She traced her finger in the ash, leaving a dark smudge on the tip of her finger.
“You know I love Will, right?”
“I guess,” she said, but not really knowing. Truth be told, she didn’t know how Charlotte felt about Will at all. Everyone had their own unique relationship with Will, but she wasn’t sure if any of them were normal. A bitter reminder of the past. A possible savior. A target of envy. No one knew how to act around him. It was a lot for an eleven-year-old to carry. She didn’t want to open another front in this discussion, so she sat quietly. Let Charlotte say her piece and move on. She traced a circle in the ash deposit on the table with a finger.
“It’s just that…”
She paused.
“It’s just what?” Rachel said.
“Now that your father’s gone, I worry people will forget how special Will is.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, a spike of discomfort making her shiver.
“Your dad loved Will,” Charlotte said. “Talked about him all the time.”
Yet another twist of the knife from dear old Dad.
&
nbsp; “I know.”
Charlotte cast her eyes downward; perhaps her words were floating in the coffee mug.
“I get it,” Rachel said, her argument with Eddie playing back in her mind. “Will freaks people out.”
Charlotte smiled thinly.
“No, sweetie, I don’t think you do.”
“Enlighten me.”
Charlotte glanced at the ceiling and took a deep breath.
“I mean, that’s a part of it,” she said. “But it goes deeper than that. They’re afraid of him. Of you. They’re jealous. They’re angry. They want to know why.”
“I knew that,” Rachel said, although she was still a bit surprised by the depth and breadth of her hostility toward her friend. She looked back across the years, understanding now her sense of connection to the group weakening as Will had grown up. Her shoulders sagged. Alone again. As it had always been.
“Don’t you think I’ve wondered about it?” she asked. “Don’t you think I’ve lain awake at night, wondering what was so goddamn different about me? About my family? You think it didn’t crush me to see all those babies die?”
“I know,” Charlotte said. “But people are scared. And now that the warehouse is gone, it’s getting worse. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people have said.”
“Like what?”
“Crazy stuff,” Charlotte said. “But your father always shut it down. He made them believe we’d had a little bad luck, that eventually, things would turn around.”
Rachel laughed bitterly.
“It’s been thirteen years,” she said. “I think that ship has sailed.”
“Whether it has or not, your father kept the ship steady, kept it afloat.”
“And now he’s gone.”
“Right,” Charlotte said. “And without your father here to cover you, I wanted to make sure you knew the score. When people get desperate, they do crazy things. Be very careful. And what happened at the funeral yesterday, it made people angry.”
Still, she felt no regret. In fact, she felt better than she had in months. Maybe years. Maybe ever. Clear. Cleaned out.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Rachel said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “How are things with Eddie?”
She dismissed the question with a wave of her hand.
They sat in silence for a long while, the coffee cooling in their cups, the seconds ticking by, time winding toward the inevitability of it all. She looked at Charlotte, her face hardened by the passage of time but still quite lovely. She’d been on her own all this time; her sexual orientation was well known in the community, but as fate would have it, there were no other gay people living in Evergreen. Or none that had come out.
“What about you?” Rachel asked.
“What about me?”
“Do I freak you out?”
Charlotte smiled.
“No more than anything else,” she said.
Rachel tried to laugh at the joke, but she couldn’t.
“I never wanted kids,” Charlotte said. “Even when I was a little girl, I knew in my core that it wasn’t for me. So I look at this a bit more objectively than the others. I think Will is a gift. I think you’re a wonderful mother. I agree with your dad. He explained it to me once. Will can’t be the only one. It doesn’t make any sense. It would be one thing if none of the babies had survived. That, at least, would be explainable. But Will survived.”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Sometimes I think he would say those things, but he didn’t actually believe them. He wasn’t the same when he got back from that trip back east. I think he got out there, in the big open, and saw what he was most afraid of.”
Charlotte was shaking her head forcefully.
“No!” Charlotte snapped, slapping her hand on the table. “I refuse to believe that this is it. This isn’t the end. It can’t be.”
“But what if it is?” Rachel said.
Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, but Rachel held up a hand to cut her off.
“Hear me out,” she said. “He never would. But please hear me out. What if this is it? What do we do? Live out our days, knowing this is really the end?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think about him growing up in this, and it rips me to pieces,” Rachel said. “Sometimes I’ll lie awake all night thinking about what his life will be like. Who’s the next youngest person here?”
Charlotte scrunched up her face and gazed at the ceiling.
“I think Emily, maybe? She’s twenty or so.”
“And that’s assuming he lives that long.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m trying to be realistic,” Rachel said. She pushed the coffee mug to the center of the table.
“We’ll figure something out.”
Charlotte took Rachel’s hand between her own.
“We’ll do the best we can,” Charlotte said. “We fight like hell to make it. We enjoy this life as best as we can. Did you know I’ve started praying?”
“Oh?”
“Every night. I know you’re a science geek,” Charlotte said, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “And I never had much use for organized religion. But in the past few years, I’ve started to see God everywhere. It makes me feel a little better. I don’t know if there’s a heaven. If there’s a hell, I’m pretty sure we’ve lived through it.”
“You think all this was God’s judgment?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t a judgment any more than my shaking an Etch-a-Sketch is a judgment on all those little bits of aluminum powder. Maybe we don’t even understand what judgment means.”
Charlotte laughed out loud.
“I sound like a lunatic.”
Rachel did not reply.
“Besides, we have far more immediate concerns,” Charlotte said. “How are you on food?”
Rachel glanced toward Will’s bedroom.
“Few days,” she said, suddenly feeling like they’d been dropped back on the shore of their current mess. “Maybe a week.”
“A lot of arguing after the funerals last night,” Charlotte said. “I hung in there until dark, and then I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“What’s the consensus?”
“There isn’t one,” she said. “Some folks want to hit the road and see what’s out there. Others don’t want to abandon the water supply. Eddie’s headed up to Market to see what he can find out.”
“And the others?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about them,” Charlotte said, nodding toward the door, to the community beyond.
“Why do you say that?”
“Another week, and this place will be empty.”
8
They set the trap before dawn, under a spray of stars stretching away to infinity. They were about four miles west of the compound, along Interstate 80, one of the few still serviceable freeways approaching the city. Still road mostly, but shaggy with moss and weeds. She and Eddie worked in silence, Rachel knowing the best way to avoid yet another go-nowhere argument would be to keep her mouth shut.
It was a chilly night, cloudy and damp. There would be rain by midday. On the trek out here, they passed by the familiar buildings in this industrial section of southwest Omaha. She knew every nook and cranny of every one of them. Metalworks here. Equipment rental over there. Inside and out, every one of them, every structure in a ten-mile radius of Evergreen, explored, dug through and spelunked.
The intricate network of roads crisscrossing America had fallen into disrepair over the years, more evidence of a world winding down. Most resembled the surface of some dead planet, pockmarked with large potholes resembling craters, the pavement buckled from endless cycles of freezing, thawing, expanding and then cracking again. Cars abandoned on the highways at the height of the plague sat where they’d last hitched to a stop, rusting, cracking, peeling, disintegrating. Many still contained the skeletal remains of plague victims
who had died during their futile attempt to outrun their invisible slayer.
The steady traffic along the busier thoroughfares kept the weeds at bay a little, but it too was a losing battle. Each day, little by little, they retreated a bit more as these titanic forces of life, of nature, gained more ground. Within weeks of the plague ending, a generation of weeds and grasses had risen through the tiniest cracks and died, succeeded by their descendants, which rose before dying as well, decomposing, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, until a carpet of humus blanketed the asphalt and it disappeared forever. You could feel it all slipping away now, their grim fate set in concrete that was almost finished curing.
It had been two weeks since the attack on the compound. Even limiting rations, they were burning through food faster than they had anticipated. A day of reckoning was approaching rapidly; each night she had lain awake and decided as to whether to stay or go, whether the time had come to pull the ripcord and flee with Will. If there was food, they would stay.
But now this.
Highway robbery. Literally.
Every day for the past week, Harry had been sending two-person teams out here with orders to rob any travelers they encountered. To date, the results had been mixed. Five teams had come home empty-handed, but one pair – Dave Thompson and Brigid Correll – had returned with a few grocery bags of canned goods, some medicine, and a small cache of ammunition. They had taken the beat-up old pickup without firing a shot, sending their victims away on foot. Rumors were flying that some of the unsuccessful sorties had been because they didn’t want to rob innocent people.
The trap was simple enough. Eddie used a pair of binoculars to scout for any approaching traffic. If the target was promising, he and Rachel pushed the rusting chassis of an old Honda Civic into the middle of the roadway, in the blind curve, right at the point it would be too late to turn back. Then they’d circle in behind the prey and take them before they could put up a fight.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 61