“My name is Priya,” the woman said. “These two gentlemen that brought you here are Jesse and Phillip.”
Rachel nodded.
“We’re very sorry to hear about your father’s death,” Priya said. “My deepest condolences.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said slowly. She chose her words carefully, making her way through a minefield. Again, she marveled at the speed at which news traveled in this world. Forget electricity or the Internet. They didn’t even have a Pony Express. And yet there didn’t seem to be anyone who didn’t know about their staggering defeat.
“We’ll get back to the warehouse,” she said. “But I’d like to begin with some good news.”
“What good news?” Eddie said reflexively.
Rachel wished for a roll of duct tape so she could seal those flapping gums shut. She closed her eyes and waited for the wash of annoyance to fade.
“We’ve recovered the briefcase.”
Rachel’s stomach flipped. She didn’t know whether this was good news for Priya or for her and Eddie.
“I’m sorry we lost it,” Rachel said,
“Yes,” Priya said. “That was careless. But all’s well that ends well.”
“Good,” Rachel said. “Can we go now?”
The woman clicked her tongue rapidly.
“I’m afraid not, my dear. Would you like to know what was in the briefcase?”
“No,” she said.
“I’d like to know,” Eddie said simultaneously.
“Eddie, shut up.”
“You two are lovers, no?”
Again, they spoke over each other, giving diametrically opposing answers. Rachel did not know why it was important for this woman to know she and Eddie were most definitely not lovers. A word she detested anyway. It rang of thin men with slicked back hair smoking long cigarettes.
“Anyway, the briefcase contained a stock of seeds.”
“So?”
“Bred to grow in these unusual growing conditions with which we’ve been blessed.”
“Do they work?” Rachel asked.
“Not to date,” Priya replied. “But this batch is rumored to show promise.”
The idea of viable crops electrified Rachel. Years earlier, they had tried breeding weather-resistant crops, but each iteration had failed to produce any significant yield.
“So, you can see why this case was important.”
“Where did they come from?”
Priya smiled, revealing in the low light twin rows of radiant teeth.
“A girl has to have her secrets,” she replied. “But I know you understand the importance of this project.”
Rachel didn’t reply.
“Which brings me to the loss of your warehouse. That’s a devastating thing. I truly sympathize with your plight. In this day and age, it won’t be easy for your community to survive.”
“We’ll make do,” Rachel said. Eddie remained dead silent.
“Perhaps you will,” Priya said. She crossed one leg over another and tapped a finger to her lips. “The thing is, it didn’t have to go that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, I briefly considered having you killed,” Priya said, ignoring her question.
The statement itself did not surprise Rachel; it was the cool, detached way in which Priya delivered it that blasted her soul with ice.
“But as I said, all’s well that ends well. And I hate unnecessary bloodshed. It’s pointless. That being said, I was quite a bit put out by your carelessness.”
“You got your case back,” Eddie snapped.
Priya nodded to one of her goons, who punched Eddie in the side of the head.
Rachel had to fight the urge to smile as he grunted in pain.
“What can I do to make us square?” Rachel asked.
“I have a business proposition for you,” Priya said.
“What?”
“I’m talking about saving your community,” she said. “About saving your group from starving to death. Or worse.”
“Worse?”
“People will do anything to survive,” she said. “And I do mean anything. You’ve heard about what goes on outside Lincoln.”
Her skin crawled. Yes, she had heard about what was going on outside Lincoln. She had heard the stories of people disappearing, of the rich, gamey smell of cooking meat wafting for miles even though there was virtually no game left around here, culled by the twin specters of hunting and starvation. She had heard the stories about what people were doing when there was nothing left to eat.
She nodded.
“Tell me something,” Priya said.
Rachel raised her eyebrows.
“Are you a hopeful person?”
Rachel turned the question over in her head for a minute before responding. Her belly was quiet and sated. Weird how one’s outlook changed depending on which way the wind was blowing.
“I don’t know.”
“At least you’re honest. See, people these days lie to themselves. They don’t think it will happen to them. Because they’ve made it this far, they think they will keep on making it.”
“True.”
“And they let opportunities get away from them, opportunities that once gone are gone forever. In our world, opportunity rarely knocks and never more than once.”
Where was she going with this?
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
Something began to nag at Rachel. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she did not like where this discussion was going.
“Your son. He was born after the plague.”
Rachel’s stomach flipped. Of course.
“He’s not my son,” she said. “He lived in my neighborhood. I heard him crying one night after it was over. I couldn’t just leave him there.”
It was a story she had told many times, one she had rehearsed over and over until she almost accepted as fact. She had told it so often she had begun to accept it as canon. She did her best to conceal the miracle that was Will from the world at large. That was one thing the community did support her on; they didn’t want to draw any more attention to themselves than was necessary. It was a tough sell, she knew that. Without anyone to take care of them, most of the babies and toddlers who had survived the plague quickly perished from dehydration, starvation, or accidents. Other than Will, the youngest survivors were now deep into their teens. And he looked very young.
“What’s his name?”
“His name is Will.”
Priya leaned back in her chair, crossed one leg over the other, clasped her hands around her right knee. She tapped her lips with her finger again.
“You’re not being honest with me.”
“Suit yourself.”
“We have very good intelligence on the issue,” she said. “You’d be surprised what you can learn for the right price.”
“You believe what you want. He was a few months old when the plague hit.”
Priya tapped her fingers together as she considered Rachel’s story. A thought took hold of Rachel, deep inside, but strong like an ocean current. She could feel it swelling up, a large wave, fear and terror, as she suddenly realized what it was Priya wanted.
“It was you,” Rachel sputtered with rage. “You attacked the warehouse.”
“Like I said, it didn’t have to go that way.”
“No,” Rachel said, jumping out of her chair, flipping it over, backing away from the woman like her body was strapped with explosives.
“He was there,” Priya said with a trace of annoyance in her voice.
“Wait,” Eddie said. “Let’s hear her out.”
“Will is the most important person alive right now,” Priya said. “The fate of the human race may depend on him. He’ll be perfectly safe, perfectly cared for. You won’t have to worry about whether he has enough to eat.”
“Let’s go,” Rachel said, turning for the door. “We’re leaving.”
“Lady, what
do you want?”
“You appear to be a reasonable man,” Priya said. “I hope you can help Rachel understand that this is the best deal she’s going to get. You get all your food back. Two years’ worth, if I had to guess.”
“In exchange for what?” Eddie asked.
“You goddamn idiot,” Rachel said as she made her way toward the door.
“She wants Will!”
11
They took the long way home.
She had waited outside nearly ten minutes as Eddie had heard the woman out, listening to her abominable offer to take Will away in exchange for a few truckloads of canned goods. It was ludicrous. And Eddie was actually trying to convince her to go through with it.
“Listen to me,” Eddie was saying as they curled around the edges of the dead city. “I don’t think we can dismiss this offer-”
“I will not listen to you,” she snapped. “Either you stop talking or I blow your fucking brains out.”
“You didn’t even wait to hear what she had to say,” Eddie went on. “Don’t you want the kid to be safe? To be looked after?”
The kid. The kid. Always the kid.
“Oh, I’m supposed to believe this woman has Will’s best interests at heart?” she replied. “She’ll turn him into a goddamn guinea pig.”
“And you’d rather he starve to death with the rest of us?”
“I’m not going to let that happen,” Rachel said.
“Listen to yourself,” Eddie said. “You know how naïve you sound? You can’t just say it and make it so. People are dying out there every day. Every day. This way he gets a chance. And if they can figure out what makes him different, all the better.”
“You know how naïve you sound? You think she’s going to give you a big warehouse full of food? I’ll tell you what she’s gonna do. She’ll put a bullet in your empty head.”
That he was even considering it mystified her. Did the man have no paternal instinct at all? Had he been born without it, shipped from the manufacturer missing this vital component? And God, the irony of it all. Eddie Callahan might be the last man to become a father and he wanted no part of it. It had a certain demented beauty to it.
Above them, a sliver of moon hung in the sky like a broken piece of pottery. The moon. Man had walked up there once. Had she ever told Will about how America had gone to the moon? About the space shuttles that had been lost, about the brave astronauts that had given all they had so mankind could push the boundaries of what they knew? Would he even believe there were human footprints up on the lunar surface right now? A little American flag, the symbol of these once-great United States? She’d been excited about the prospect of a manned mission to Mars, the preparations for which were well underway when the plague had hit. In fact, a year before the outbreak, NASA had successfully landed the first unmanned supply ship on the red planet. Now the vessel sat up there, alone and forgotten, perhaps forever.
And now here we are, killing each other over diced tomatoes.
Forget the moon. Will remained skeptical of the entire concept of electricity, and truly, trying to explain lights and televisions and iPhones and the Internet had been like trying to explain magic. He couldn’t grasp it, any more than she’d been able to grasp its sudden disappearance. She missed technology, she missed computers, she missed trying to make them better.
Some years ago, she’d gone up into Omaha after Market and taken an iPad from an Apple Store. It sat on the desk in her bedroom collecting dust, but she liked having it there. It reminded her of what they had been capable of, once upon a time, and perhaps could be again.
Unless, of course, the human race went extinct.
“Rachel!”
Eddie was talking again. She wanted to tune him out and slip back into her singular focus on the road, on the trip home, where Will would be waiting for her, asleep, his hair matted down on his sweaty forehead.
“What?”
“If you think about it, you would see that this really could be the best option,” he said.
“It’s a terrible option,” she said.
“I didn’t say it was a good option,” Eddie said. “There are no good options. We could be dead inside of a month. Will too. This way he has a chance.”
“We could hit them first,” Rachel said coldly.
“How?”
“We find out where they are,” she said. “Kill them and take their supplies.”
It sounded dumb, but she didn’t want Eddie to know she knew that. She didn’t know who Priya was, where she was from, how large her group was, how heavily armed they were. She could be bluffing, or she could have an army of cannibals at her disposal. You never knew anymore.
“You live in this fantasy world,” he said. “Everything is black and white to you. We’re the good guys, so we’re going to win. Is that it?”
“I’m his mother,” Rachel said. “How many times do I have to explain that to you? It’s my job to keep him safe. Our job, actually.”
“That attitude really worked out for all the mothers who watched their kids die in the plague, didn’t it?”
“Go to hell.”
Eddie dismissed her with a wave of his hand, and for that, she was thankful. She had no desire to continue this ridiculous conversation.
They made it back the outskirts of the compound a little after midnight. They walked in silence, the void between them catching bits of civilization here and there. A shout. An engine revving. The occasional gunshot. Those sounds blew in on the breezes in the preternatural quiet from miles away, like distant radio broadcasts. The cold air felt good as she walked; it re-energized her, cleaned out the bad funk that had permeated this disastrous trip to Market.
The silhouette of the perimeter fence came into view. The end was coming for their little community, for her time with these people. How long before they all went their separate ways, off to find their own destinies, off to deal with the terrible, inevitable end facing all of them? Sooner than later, she feared. Much sooner.
“You change your mind?” he asked when they were at the door.
She ignored him and went inside. Charlotte and Will were asleep on the couch, tangled in a mess of blankets. She picked up Will, groaning a bit under his weight. As she carried him to his bed and covered him with the blanket, he sighed and mumbled something under his breath. Her chest tightened and the tears fell again. He rolled over onto his side and curled up into a fetal position.
She watched him sleep, his side rising and falling rhythmically.
Why you?
What was it inside him that had gone so right when inside all the other post-epidemic babies it had gone so wrong? What gene, what cell, what bit of DNA, what antibody flowing through his veins, invisible, hidden, infinitesimally small, had risen up and kept him safe from the most terrible of invaders?
She sat with him for a very long time.
#
The next morning, she found Will in the living room, where he was messing around with one of his latest projects, a Lego Death Star he’d been working on for weeks. He loved playing with the famous toy bricks. Over the last couple years, she’d made a point to snag him a set whenever she came across one during their scouting missions. Charlotte was on the couch reading.
“Look who’s up,” Charlotte said, looking up from her book. “Feeling better?”
Sunlight streamed in through the window; particles of dust danced in the curtains of light shimmering in the middle of the room, a tiny little ballet. Rachel stared at them, mesmerized by the synchronicity of the seemingly random, swirling, circling, twisting. They seemed to coalesce into something bigger and then dissemble just as quickly.
“Yes.”
“You never sleep this late.”
“Worn out, I guess,” she said.
She could feel her old self coming to the forefront, taking over, declaring an emergency. The engineer inside her, the computer scientist who had no use for emotion, no use for anything but deductive reasoning, solving problems
, testing hypotheses, discarding wrong answers, hammering away the impurities until the only thing left was the shine of truth.
“Anytime,” she said, climbing out of her seat. “I’m gonna head home.”
“Thanks for looking after Will.”
The women hugged, Charlotte’s strength taking Rachel’s breath away a little bit. It reminded her how hard Charlotte worked around here, how hard she had worked to keep the warehouse safe, to keep them all safe.
Charlotte knelt and rubbed Will’s head.
“See ya, shortie,” she said.
“Bye,” he said, never looking up.
Charlotte left, leaving mother and son alone together.
“Willy?”
“Yeah?”
“We need to talk, buddy.”
He rolled his eyes as he sat up.
“Don’t do that,” she said firmly.
His face went blank. He hated being scolded, but there was something inside him that insisted on defying her. Just a part of growing up, she supposed. If Will was to be the last kid to grow up, then he was going to play the part perfectly.
CHILDHOOD’S FINAL RUN! WILL NOT BE HELD OVER!!!!
They sat on the couch, Will’s eyes darting around the room, clearly anxious to be done with this little pow-wow so he could get back to the business of being eleven years old.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this,” she started, “but I think we’re probably going to be moving soon.”
“Why?” he asked, his eyes wide and worried.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Maybe bringing this up now was a mistake, but it had to be done eventually. The sooner the better. It wasn’t going to get any easier. In fact, it would get harder as the reality of their situation set in deeper. She couldn’t hide her son from the way the world was.
“Because we need more food,” she said. “And there isn’t enough here for everyone.”
“Oh,” he said.
He sat quietly for a few minutes.
“Can I take my toys?” he asked.
She felt her heart shatter, splinter into a million pieces as the very little boy he was appeared before her.
“Yes,” she said. “I can’t promise we can take all of them, but we’ll take as many as we can.”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 65