Priya turned slowly to face Rachel, who did her very best to keep her jaw set, her eyes on her captor.
“I’m listening.”
#
Rachel told Priya everything.
She made Rachel repeat the tale to her chief lieutenant, a man named Kovalewich. He was a squat man with a thick gray beard. He listened carefully as Rachel told the story a second time, beginning with her capture by Chadwick’s goons all those Septembers ago and ending with the discovery of the tattoo on the man back in Lincoln.
“That’s a pretty amazing story,” he said.
“It’s the truth.”
“A mother’s love,” Priya said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You expect us to believe that not only are you mysteriously connected to the conspiracy behind the plague, but that you managed to get caught by these conspirators and that your father managed to rescue you? I’d have a hard time believing any one of those stories, let alone all three.”
Rachel took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She had to convince these people yet, it all sounded as ridiculous as Priya suggested. Rachel wasn’t sure she would believe the story if their roles were reversed.
“Is it any less believable than what we’ve all been through?”
“Meaning?”
“This world we’re in.” She turned to Kovalewich. “Did you ever think you’d grow up to be a lieutenant to a post-apocalyptic warlord?”
He ran a thumbnail against his lip. He glanced at Priya.
“What did you do?” Rachel asked, nodding her head to signify the Before.
“Director of HR for a small hospital chain.” He sounded small when he said it, as though it was the first time he had thought about who he’d been in a very long time.
“And now look at you.”
He looked at Priya again, but her face gave no quarter, showed no emotion.
“We’ll have a chat about this,” she said. “Wait here.”
Priya and Kovalewich climbed into their vehicle to palaver. Will was still under the guard of one of Priya’s henchmen, whom she approached as she waited for the referendum on her life to end. Will was in the front seat of the truck, his face pressed to the window. She waved at him, but it earned her nothing more than a barely perceptible nod of the head. Jesus God. This could be it. This really could be the last time she ever saw Will. There was nothing to stop them from simply leaving her here, from disappearing into the gloomy evening.
“Get back,” the man hissed, raising his gun at her. The exchange of words drew the attention of another, who sauntered over to join his comrade.
“I can’t say hi to my son?”
She stared at his round little face in the window, the panic rising in her.
A little more post-traumatic stress disorder for you, my sweet boy? After all, it has been almost two whole days since the last horrific thing I’ve put you through.
She watched Priya’s contingent shuffling to and fro, preparing for their departure, and she wanted to curse them. All these fools, mourning the fact they hadn’t been able to have kids. Did they not know how lucky they were? Did they have any inkling of the burden she carried? No. What did they plan on feeding these kids? Hopes and dreams didn’t do much for empty tummies. The more of them there were, the faster they could all starve to death.
And even if she found this place in Colorado, what then? The odds were excellent they were starving too. Probably hadn’t counted on mankind’s itchy nuclear trigger finger to wreck its cupboard, although looking back, she couldn’t imagine why that wouldn’t have crossed their minds.
She couldn’t save the world, she was no Vin Diesel, may he rest in peace, coming to save the day, finding the canister of Medusa virus and firing it into space seconds before it had been unleashed against humanity. The world was already dead. That’s what these people didn’t understand. They were already dead. They were all dead.
She was dead. Priya was dead. Will was dead.
All she could do was try to stretch it out a little bit longer. Will deserved better than a brief coda to his existence at Evergreen. He deserved to be happy and warm and comfortable, if only for a little bit. She would die to get that for him. If she had to hop in bed with this mass murderer, then she would. It didn’t matter. Because they were already dead.
“Hey!”
She was shaken loose from her daydream, looking up to see the guard pointing back toward Priya’s vehicle. She was motioning for her to join them; Rachel blew Will a kiss then turned to head back toward Priya without waiting to see if he reciprocated. If she didn’t see his response, then she wouldn’t have to know he hadn’t blown one back to her. That seemed too awful to contemplate.
The man was lighting a cigar as Rachel rejoined them.
“Good news,” Priya said. “We’re going to take a flyer on you.”
She let out a deep breath, one she’d been holding in since they retreated to consider her tale.
“Thank you.”
“It would be shortsighted not to explore this angle,” Priya said. “Despite the unlikeliness of it all, here you are. Your son was born after the plague. The very fact of Will is a huge thing, you see. He exists in a world where he should not. That gives me hope that all is not lost. That life will prevail. That we will prevail.”
Rachel considered this, juxtaposing it with the situational assessment she had just conducted. Priya, she of the mass execution order, she was the hopeful one. Rachel, trying to keep her son alive, was the pessimist. That was a crazy thing to wrap her head around.
“Let us be clear about one thing,” Priya said. “We’re going to find out why the babies are dying. And if we can find out, then all the better for you and Will.
“But if this goes sideways, there will be hell to pay.”
29
By the time the group finished strip-mining Deephaven, it was full dark. Priya made the call to make camp and shove off in the morning. To ensure Rachel didn’t try anything stupid, Priya split her and Will up for the night. Rachel didn’t know where Will was sleeping, but she was back in the same dorm room. Priya placed a guard outside her room and left her with two cans of food – corn and black beans. Rachel ate them slowly by the light of the lantern, savoring each bite. When each can was half-full, she mixed the remaining portions together. Black-bean-and-corn salsa. A full belly, a clear head. Nothing extraordinary. That was natural, that was the way things were supposed to be.
She found herself wondering about the others they had left behind in Evergreen. What had become of them? Had they gone their separate ways, the bonds tying them together having finally dissolved? Maybe Priya had gone back to kill them after discovering Will was gone. Her train of thought continued motoring along the track to the future, as unknowable as the fate of those in her past.
The quest had shifted. Before, it had been a matter of idle curiosity, something to pass the time while they foraged for food. But now the tables had turned. For as long as she could remember, food had been her primary mission. Protecting the warehouse at all costs. It had consumed all of them, her, her dad, Harry and the others. And it had broken them all; they had lost something along the way. It was as if they lived to support the warehouse rather than looking at it as something to support them. And not just her group. Even these monsters, these cannibals that fed on weary strangers were no different.
But for now, food was no longer the issue. This group was well-equipped, well-armed. Her very life now depended on this quest. Will’s life. To save Will, she would have to save them all.
She slept fitfully, waking up every little bit, cold, sore, her eyes gummed with goop. She dreamed about Schrodinger’s cat, both alive and dead at the same time until you opened the box and the world would collapse to one choice or another and the cat would be either alive or dead. There were no other options. Terror gripped her tightly. What if there were nothing there? What if they made it to Colorado only to find her family had been nothing b
ut the random byproduct of an experiment gone terribly wrong?
The dim light of dawn filtering through the window shades put an end to her sleep for the night, and the morning rolled into being. Game pieces moving into place, small moves that would begin to snowball into bigger moves, into big decisions that would determine how this all turned out.
Calm. She needed to be calm. A bit of yoga loosened her stiff muscles, cleared the lactic acid that had built up. Vinyasa. Downward dog. Warrior One. Warrior Two. She did the moves until her muscles began to burn, until they began to ache. The exercises helped her clear her head, wash away the dregs of fatigue still lodged in her body.
A knock at her door. She waited, assuming correctly that whoever was on the other side of it would open it without being invited. Kovalewich stood in the doorjamb, looking fresh and rested. Just another day at the office for this guy. All he needed was a cup of Starbucks, his name misspelled on the side of it, steam curling skyward. Headed to the morning budget meeting.
“Ready to hit the road?” he asked congenially.
For a man who had helped execute thirty people the evening before, he seemed remarkably at peace. How was that possible? It was supposed to matter, killing someone. It was supposed to be a hard thing to do. Not that it could never be done, sometimes it had to be done, but good God damn. What had the years done to these people? Had she missed that much in her little cocoon? Was this how it really was? Had the last ten years of her life been nothing more than a carefully constructed illusion?
“Let’s go,” she replied, strongly desiring to shut down this conversation before it got started.
She followed him outside, where the group was busy breaking down the camp, loading the trucks. Four black Suburbans idled in the access road that swirled toward the front door of the administration building. A woman emerged from that doorway, carrying a banker’s box under her arm.
She looked anxiously for Will, her rational mind knowing he was fine but panicking nonetheless.
There.
He was sitting in the front seat of the first van, his legs dangling over the side. Priya was with him, playing a game of some kind. Rock-paper-scissors, from the looks of it.
Will shot Paper.
Priya shot Rock.
A big smile opened up his normally dour face as he covered her dark-olive fist with his hand. She couldn’t see Priya’s face, but she seemed at ease, her shoulders rounded, her movements lithe and soft.
They shot again.
Will, Paper again.
Priya, Paper.
A woman approached her, drew her attention. Priya tousled his hair and went back to work. Immediately, her body went rigid again, her shoulders stiff and square.
It hit Rachel like a truck.
This was what they were looking for.
Will’s inherent innocence and spunk. Childhood. The spark of life that had been missing for so long. When you were around it all the time, you forgot what it was like when it wasn’t there. After all, it wasn’t only the fact that Will was born after the plague. It was that he was so much younger than everyone else. The plague’s brutal aftershocks had been unkind to its very youngest survivors. Sometimes late at night, her thoughts turned toward the immune babies and toddlers that had died simply because there had been no one around to take care of them. For every ten small children immune to Medusa, Rachel bet that eight had died in the ensuing weeks, simply unable to care for themselves.
“It’s time,” a voice behind her said.
It was Kovalewich. Rachel had not heard him come up behind her.
One by one, they loaded into the caravan. Will was in the third vehicle, Rachel in the fourth. They were a fearsome sight together, this many people, vehicles, weapons. It exuded an aura of control, of power. All these years, they had been on the defensive. Reacting instead of acting. Look where that had gotten them.
The caravan began to move, chugging away slowly from the Deephaven Administration building. The day was cloudy but bright, the sense that blue skies were right around the corner, even though they weren’t. Every now and again, a thicket of clouds would break, revealing a swatch of blue behind it, but then it would seal up just as quickly, like it had remembered its place in the world.
They ran west for the balance of the day, averaging about twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. Compared to the snail’s pace she had become used to, it felt like she was aboard a rocket ship. With each passing mile the caravan chewed up and swallowed, they cut deeper into a world totally unknown to Rachel. Until this trip, she hadn’t ventured farther than a ten-mile radius of the compound since they had moved there. Around her, the world was returning to nature. The road they were currently traversing, Interstate 44, had devolved into a weed-choked nightmare. What would Dwight Eisenhower say about his beloved Interstate System now?
It had never seemed this menacing when they were on foot or bicycles, but from inside a moving vehicle, the highway felt haunted. The familiar thrum of tires on concrete had been replaced with a mild susurration. In some spots, especially along the shoulders, where the weeds had really thrived and contributed to a thick layer of humus, small bushes had begun to grow. A burgeoning forest on the edge of the roadway. A few more years and these roads would be impassable by car.
Moss-coated billboards advertising truck stops and tobacco outlets and the WORLD’S CHEAPEST FURNITURE MADE IN AMERICA were a reminder of the world gone by. There weren’t many cars out here, a few, but they were more part of the scenery than anything. They stopped at each one because you never knew where you might find a can of food, but that first day, there was nothing for the effort.
Exit ramps.
Exit 143B.
Towns called Coalfell and Norwich.
Faded highway signs.
Taco Bell –> 1.3 miles
Kayleigh’s Diner <– 0.5 miles
These exit ramps led to dead places now.
It made her sad.
They drove for ten hours, covering about four hundred miles. One stop about midway to refuel. Rachel was fascinated by the group’s fuel supply, all of which was stored in the trail car. Fuel had been like a unicorn for her community. They had tried to make their own a few times, but all they got for their efforts were a few blown engines and one explosion that killed Debbie Coleman, an Evergreen resident. A woman who had played guitar and sometimes ate up the quiet and the lonely with her beautiful, mournful music.
As dusk fell, the lead car took the exit for Clearmill. Rachel caught a glimpse of a motel marquee as they sledded down the ramp. They made a quick right, then another, which put them in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express. Like locusts, they descended upon the long-forgotten motel, and, with the precision of a special-forces unit, quickly took over the building. Around them, a dark Hardee’s and a gas station, probably still sitting atop a lake of thousands of gallons of inert gasoline. How much easier their lives could have been if the gasoline had lasted even a couple of years before going stale.
Priya and two others stayed behind with Will and Rachel while the rest made quick work of the three-floor establishment. Rachel was alone in her vehicle with the driver, who smoked a foul-smelling homemade cigarette. The smoke burned her eyes and made them water.
“You mind if I wait outside?”
“Go ahead,” he said, his voice rough like sandpaper. It was the first time the man had spoken all day.
She alighted from the vehicle, relishing the thick cold air she pulled into her lungs. As she wiped the smoke-induced tears from her eyes, the passenger door of the lead vehicle creaked open, Priya climbing out.
“The cigarettes,” Rachel said.
“Ah, yes,” said Priya. “He’s very proud of those.”
A moment of silence.
“How was the ride?”
“My back hurts. It’s been years since I’ve been in a car that long.”
“Like the old days.”
“Other than the skeletons in rusted-out vehicles and bushes growin
g in the middle of the interstate, it is exactly like the old days.”
Priya laughed, an honest-to-goodness laugh. The sound was almost alien to her. It felt good to make someone laugh, even Priya. Pride, man. That’s why it was one of the deadly sins. Pride goeth before the fall.
“You’re going to honor our deal, right?”
“Of course,” Priya said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Not much honor these days. Thieves or otherwise.”
“This isn’t personal, my dear. Like I said, I’d be a fool not to explore all options, all contingencies.”
Silence.
“I had a son,” Priya said, her voice suddenly small and far away. “He was eleven. We lived near Philadelphia. The virus hit there early on. He died that first week, before anyone really knew how bad it was going to get. It was still just a bad flu then, an early start to flu season. Remember how hot it was?”
“I was in San Diego. Weather never really changed there.”
“Oh,” she replied.
“So he died, and the doctors told me it had gotten into his lungs, and that’s why he had died. Bad luck. I was a single mother. My husband died in a car accident when Raj was two. Just the two of us. And then it was just me. And then it was really just me. I watched everyone around me die. Every single person I knew died.”
She paused and smiled.
“Isn’t it funny?” Priya asked.
“What?”
“We tell our stories of surviving the plague like they’re unique. As though my story is extra special or somehow more horrible than yours. It’s all rather self-important, isn’t it? We all want to be the best, the most unusual, the standout.”
She paused.
“Why do you think that is?” Priya asked.
“Same as anything else,” Rachel replied. “People want to think they’re special. Even when we’re not.”
“Do you think we are special? People, I mean?”
“We evolved. Evolutionary luck.”
“You’re a scientist,” Priya said. “Perhaps an engineer. Or you were, once upon a time.”
“How did you know?”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 80