The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5]

by Kazzie, David

“Be nice to see some rain for once,” she said. “It’ll be refreshing.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so.”

  They stood silently, the absurdity of discussing the weather embarrassing Rachel.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlotte said.

  “For what?”

  “That it all went down like this,” she said. “I know it’s not your fault.”

  Rachel didn’t reply.

  “I ever tell you about my brother?”

  She had told her several times, but Rachel shook her head and let her tell the story again. They needed to tell their stories, sometimes more than once, to flush the lines. It was one way of treating the post-traumatic stress disorder that had haunted all of them over the years. That was something you never saw in the movies or TV shows about the end of the world. It twisted your noodle something fierce, going through what they’d gone through. Even hearing someone cough was enough to set her off, make her feel panicky, sweaty, dizzy.

  Rachel frequently had bad dreams. A recurring one left her in the bowels of Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, wandering corridors lined with plague victims. She could never find her way out, no matter how far she walked. Hallway after hallway, the bodies stacked floor to ceiling, leaving barely enough room to negotiate. The bodies were fresh and she could smell the rich, sweet scent of decay, she could feel the heat generated by the exothermic reaction of steady decomposition. She would begin to tremble and panic chewed away at her insides like termites until she snapped awake, her breaths coming in big gasps.

  “His name was Joey,” Charlotte said. “Ten years younger than me. He was the sweetest little boy. When he got sick, he was so scared. He kept saying, ‘Charlie, Charlie’ – that was his nickname for me – ‘I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die.’

  Her eyes shone with wetness.

  “On the nights I’m not dreaming about the Citadel, guess what’s behind Door Number Two?”

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said.

  Charlotte laughed a sad laugh, wiped away tears that had spilled silently down her cheeks.

  “Oh, I know we all have sad stories,” she said.

  “Do you want to stay here for a couple days?”

  Rachel scrunched up her face in thought.

  “Much as I’d like to, we probably need to leave Omaha,” she said. “They’ll be looking for us.”

  “Yeah. Too bad, though. It’s quiet here, and we may not find much better out there.”

  “Let me get Will up,” Rachel said, her mind focused on the long to-do list facing them. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  She drifted back toward the sitting room to check on Will. When she got there, the room was empty, the sleeping bag crumpled up in a heap on the floor. A shimmer of worry, but she didn’t panic. His habit upon waking in the morning was to head outside to take a leak. Back at the compound, she had potty-trained him by teaching him to pee through the chain-link perimeter fencing. They made a game of it. But she felt uneasy. She pressed a hand to the cushions; they were still warm from his body heat. He hadn’t been up long.

  She went outside, priming her ears for the sound of a boy’s powerful urine stream. Eddie once told her nothing made him feel older than the sound of his son taking a whizz. When Will had to go, it sounded like someone spraying a firehose. But outside, the morning air was quiet, almost preternaturally so.

  “Will!” she called out, the worry swelling inside.

  No answer.

  Will was gone.

  15

  She began a loop of the property, picking her way along the creek bordering one side, then keeping close to the line of ash and birch trees that guarded the back side of the yard. In the absence of humanity, nature had been encroaching upon what had been a well-defined yard, thick grasses and small bushes laying the groundwork for the trees that would one day grow here. She didn’t think Will would have gone into the woods; it was dark and claustrophobic and he hadn’t been on his own enough to have the cojones for such an adventure. This wasn’t an indictment of her son; it was the reality. She had raised him close to the vest, for better or worse.

  “Will!”

  Now she was jogging, cupping her hands around her mouth and screaming at the top of her lungs. A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye drew her attention, her heart swelling with anticipation, thinking she’d found him. But when she turned her head, she saw it was Charlotte out on the deck.

  “What’s wrong?” she called out across the expanse of yard.

  Rachel stopped and turned toward the deck.

  “You seen Will?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll look inside,” she said, turning and slipping back through the sliding glass door.

  Rachel felt lightheaded, this yard, this house, this neighborhood suddenly feeling very far away. She drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to throw a little drag on the terror accelerating within her. She hadn’t had time to think about the impact Eddie’s death had had on Will. Would he ever understand what she had done? Would he play that game people often did and blame himself for Eddie’s death? She was an adult, and she was not dealing with her father’s death well. Now her young son had lost both his father and grandfather days apart. What a fucking nightmare.

  God, the abject unfairness of it all. It was enough to break you.

  Charlotte was back, alone. She shook her head.

  Jesus no.

  “Will!” she shrieked, drawing out his name until her vocal cords began to fray.

  “Let’s go,” Charlotte called out. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”

  Charlotte’s words galvanized her. They collected their guns and quickly loaded their packs with a day’s worth of supplies. As they headed out, she conjured up her last memory of him. He was wearing dirty blue jeans and a dark-blue hooded University of Virginia sweatshirt. He was probably wearing his hat, a red Washington Nationals baseball cap his grandfather had procured for him several years earlier. It was not among his things. With each passing minute, her panic grew exponentially and she wanted to yell at him, ask him if he knew what he was doing to his mother. But then all she could think of was what she had done to him.

  They made their way down the brick walkway, Rachel keeping her eyes open for any sign of him. At the sidewalk’s end, she noticed a tread print in the dirt, pointing away from the house.

  “C, look.”

  Charlotte paused and studied the shoeprint.

  “His?”

  “Has to be,” she said. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been around here in a while.”

  “You think he ran off?”

  She chortled as Charlotte examined the clue.

  “Wouldn’t you? I killed his father.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up about that,” Charlotte said.

  “I’ve ruined his life. I’ve been ruining it since the day he was born. He’s helpless without me.”

  “What are you, a shrink?”

  “Gotta be,” she said. “I don’t have health insurance.”

  Charlotte smiled, and it made Rachel feel good for a moment. Somewhere deep down, her sense of humor was hanging on, maybe in critical condition, but still breathing. She smiled as well, not at her own joke, but at Charlotte’s sudden flare of good cheer, and it helped calm her nerves.

  Rachel crouched and studied the thin layer of dust and dirt blanketing the wide street carving through the neighborhood. There. Another print. And another, all running at an angle away from the house. She motioned toward them, and Charlotte nodded.

  They crossed the street, curling around the side of another house, a big brick colonial. The long driveway sloped gently toward a big backyard, looping past the home’s side entrance. A big blue trashcan and a green recycling bin sat wedged against the house atop a concrete pad, giving Rachel a strange sense of déjà vu. Every now and again she’d see something like this, something frozen in time and it would rock her. One day many yea
rs ago, someone had dragged these cans back from the street for the last time and that had been it. Maybe they’d started feeling a bit under the weather or maybe they’d caught wind of this serious epidemic that was starting to worry people.

  Here the trail was harder to follow, but she found half a shoeprint at the edge of the driveway that terminated at the edge of the big open yard. A thick line of trees, about fifty yards wide, ringed the perimeter of the cul de sac. A few pines here and there, but most were bare, giving them a skeletal appearance, the bony branches twisted and wrapped around each other. She could make out the neighborhood on the far side. Even absent its foliage, the little forest was dark and shadowy.

  Then: a high-pitched shriek.

  She crashed through the brush, the branches and brambles tearing at her face and arms. Ahead, she could hear someone running, heavy footfalls crunching dead leaves and sticks. In a clearing, she paused to catch her breath and find her bearings. A flicker of movement to her right; Charlotte was on her flank, scanning to the north.

  “Will!”

  She waited a moment, her heart beating so hard it felt like it was choking her.

  “Mommy, help!” he called back, his voice scratchy and broken.

  His voice came from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing across tree trunks and rocks. That was followed by a low guttural growl that loosened her bowels.

  Charlotte bolted ahead, continuing north. Rachel followed, hoping Charlotte had been able to triangulate his location. They ran hard for a minute, slaloming around a thick copse of pines, the air thick with their clean scent. A flash of movement in the corner of Rachel’s eye stopped her dead.

  “Wait,” she hissed at Charlotte, turning her head toward the movement.

  They were in a clearing now, the space enclosed in shadow under a sky thick with clouds. Will was about thirty feet distant, lying on his side. His eyes were red from crying and his face was drained of color, pale with terror. There was a hole in his pants and his knee was stained with blood.

  On the opposite side of the clearing was a large cat, probably a bobcat. It was large, full grown, but frightfully skinny. Rachel could count his ribs from where she stood. He looked mangy, his skin bare in multiple spots. She didn’t have to think hard about how hungry it probably was. The animal paced back and forth but its eyes never left Will. Charlotte was closer to both Will and the cat than Rachel was, about equidistant from the pair.

  “Will,” she whispered. “Don’t move.”

  She didn’t know why she was whispering.

  Rachel readied her weapon; she had a clear shot at the bobcat.

  “You got it?” Charlotte asked.

  Her hands were sweaty but steady.

  “Got it.”

  She nestled the stock of the weapon into her shoulder, tilting her head to sight the target through the scope. The bobcat had stopped pacing, perhaps aware of the dynamic changing around him. His big head twitched once, and then he licked his chops, a string of drool dripping from his mouth. Now his attention was focused squarely on Will, sizing him up, ensuring he wasn’t underestimating his prey.

  It was the biggest animal Rachel had ever seen in the wild; it was quite magnificent, a symphony of power and beauty and terror. Just being near it was disorienting and made it hard to breathe. People weren’t supposed to get this close to nature. As she eyed it, she considered her options. Ideally, she would take it down with a burst to the head, but that was a high-risk shot. Her best bet was to aim for the large center mass, for the cat’s torso.

  The cat was weak, Rachel could tell. Weak and probably crazed with hunger. She’d have to drop him with this burst, she had to empty the clip into him before it got within biting distance. Even wounded, he could finish Will off in short order. She took one step toward it. Then another. Then a third. Each step brought her a bit closer to putting her body between the cat and Will. But there was still a relatively clear line between predator and prey.

  As Rachel prepared to fire, Charlotte circled behind the wildcat, far enough off his haunches that he paid her little attention. She didn’t know what Charlotte was doing, but she pushed it out of her mind. She was no more than twenty feet away from it now, well within her firing range. Charlotte swooped in opposite her, leaving the animal pinned in between them.

  “Hey!” Charlotte called out, swinging her arms over her head.

  The cat ignored her.

  Rachel inhaled deeply and let it out slowly, the breath coming out in herky-jerky fits and starts. She pulled her finger taut against the trigger. A little more pressure and the gun would fire. She tensed her body in advance of the imminent recoil.

  A twig snapped underfoot.

  The bobcat charged.

  She fired.

  It all happened at once.

  The cat was little more than a flash in her field of vision. She held the trigger tight until the clip was empty, a span of no more than a few seconds. The gunfire was deafening but she could hear muted screams and grunts in the ether.

  The clip was dry, she was on the run, her feet working independently of any conscious thought. She had to get there, make herself the last line of defense between the cat’s jaws and Will’s flesh. The scene was still unfolding in blurry, jagged pieces, and she couldn’t process what was happening – she’d had a goddamn machine gun and she had missed and now they would all probably die out there.

  She heard a scream, a terrible, terrible howl of pain as she drew closer to Will, jumping across the last few yards and shielding Will’s body with her own. It had descended into total chaos now, a tangle of teeth and arms and legs and blood and hot saliva. She wrapped her left arm around Will’s torso while pushing back against the bobcat using her legs and free arm, waiting for the inevitable clamp of jaws around their legs.

  Then Charlotte was on the cat’s back, her left arm coiled around its throat, and she rode it like a rodeo bull, pulling back on its windpipe, using her right arm for leverage. Its oxygen supply cut off, the animal went berserk, struggling to buck Charlotte free, but giving Rachel and Will enough margin to wriggle free to safety. When he was safe, Rachel crawled back toward them, scrambling for the weapon Charlotte had dropped in the clearing.

  Charlotte struggled with the animal, which had knocked her to the ground and pinned her under his baseball-glove-sized paws. Charlotte’s arm was up, pressed under his jaw, and he struggled mightily to find purchase with his teeth. Rachel wrapped her fingers around the grip of the gun and rolled onto her back, less than five feet away from the bobcat’s head.

  Charlotte lost her grip and the cat’s jaws snapped down on her left arm, biting clean through the flesh and bone, taking her arm almost to the elbow. She howled in agony as blood sprayed from her ruined arm like a geyser. Rachel pressed the muzzle to the animal’s temple and pulled hard on the trigger; the gun roared, the blast deafening her. The bullet pierced the cat’s cheek and blew out the side of its head.

  The cat slid to the ground, a strange moaning noise emanating from its throat. That brought everything to a dead stop, the cacophony of chaos around her frozen, and then she could see, she could really see what the cat had done to Charlotte. She was on her side, cradling the ruined stump of her arm close to her chest. Her jacket was soaked with blood. She was making strange noises and her eyes were rolling around in their beds, unable or uninterested in focusing on anything.

  Quickly, Rachel peeled off her jacket and wrapped a sleeve tightly above Charlotte’s bicep as a makeshift tourniquet. She yanked the knot tight, as tightly as she could, until the flow of blood had slowed to something resembling a trickle. This seemed to settle Charlotte down, and her flailings began to subside. She rolled onto her back and looked skyward, her eyes open but blank. Her breathing was slow but steady.

  It was quiet around them, so quiet she could hear the dry ground drinking up the pools of Charlotte’s blood. She glanced over at Will, who was standing over them, his eyes wide, his face pale as the reality of the situation settled ove
r him. In those eyes, she could see the man he might one day grow into. A hard man, hardened by days like today.

  “Will, don’t-”

  She almost told him not to look. Not to look at Charlotte, who lay dying here before them. How cruel that would be, to tell him not to look at the woman who had saved his life. Besides, what was she protecting him from? The truth? This was what happened. This was how it was.

  She looked back at Charlotte.

  She was still breathing, but her eyes were closed.

  16

  Heavy clouds blocked the sun for the balance of the day. Will gathered wood and together they built a fire. Charlotte was too weak to move, and Rachel didn’t know what else to do but keep her warm and hydrated. When Charlotte bubbled up to something resembling consciousness, Rachel would tip a bottle of water to her lips. Charlotte would drink it down quickly, but then her strength would flag and the water would overflow her lips and spill down her cheeks.

  The blood loss had slowed, but it had not stopped. Eventually, Charlotte would reach a point of no return, and that would be that. Will sat huddled against her, silent. He hadn’t said a word since it happened. Rachel focused on the small fire before them, ripping, cracking, biting. The corona of flame, its wild hair flailing in the wind. The heat radiating from the blaze felt good, and for a moment here and there she would forget their terrible predicament.

  The afternoon wound on and the daylight, weak as it was, began to fade. The fire grew brighter in the dimming light, the blues in the core of the blaze drawing Rachel’s focus. She wanted to help her friend but she had no idea how. Major trauma. Life-threatening trauma. She thought about her father, about how he would handle this. He wouldn’t beat around the bush, he would tell it like it was. Focus on the problem.

  The bleeding.

  If she couldn’t stop the bleeding, then nothing else mattered.

  The bleeding.

  She stared at the fire.

  It crackled with terrible heat.

  An ember popped, landing on Will’s arm before quickly dying.

  “Ow!” he mumbled.