The smell of paper, books and mildew triggered nostalgic memories despite Tom’s dislocation in time and space, and his grimace eased and he drew in a deep breath redolent of long lost years as a tiny, hurried-looking old woman in thick gaffer-taped spectacles pushed past him, and voices from a heated but well-meaning argument carried from one of the back rooms. A young woman with velvety dark skin and a riot of black curls looked up from a desk she wasn’t quite sitting at, working up notes on a manual typewriter while flicking through an open manila folder with one hand. She smiled pleasantly, catching one of Tom’s fish-out-of-water looks, and rose from her crouch to come out into the corridor, framed photographs at odd angles along the wall and a history of past editions of the Herald taped between them for good measure.
“You look lost,” she said.
“Mr Earle?”
As if on cue, the editor’s baritone echoed to them, yet another participant in the back-room debate. The young woman smiled and motioned at the passageway headed deeper into the house.
“Through there, right?” Tom said, answering his own question.
“Are you here for a story?” she asked. “I’m Melina. I’m one of the reporters here.”
Tom offered his hand.
“Tom Vanicek.”
“Oh wow,” she said and grew far more enthusiastic. “The plane crash guy?”
“My calling card, apparently.”
“Listen, if you want to do a sit-down with me, I’d love to know –”
“I’m here for something else, today,” he said. “Sorry.”
“There’s a lot more to your story, Tom, and I’d love to help you tell it.”
Tom’s smile tightened and Melina Martelle was sharp enough to see it. She gave another self-deprecatory shrug.
“OK,” she sighed. “Just trying to do my job.”
“I think Delroy might pull rank on you anyway, even if I did want to talk.”
“He wouldn’t fucking dare.”
Tom grinned at her feistiness, just another sensory flashback to the troops he’d rubbed shoulders with for so many years that it only made their absence more painful as he wondered, briefly, about all his past colleagues and how they fared – indeed, if any of them survived. These were not new thoughts. Anna Novak’s face leapt out at him again, but as was his custom, Tom inhaled and bit down, replacing his casual grin with his game face.
“OK for me to go through?”
“You’re a VIP,” Melina said. “Help yourself. Welcome to behind the wizard’s curtain.”
He guessed it was a Wizard of Oz reference. It didn’t matter. Tom instead refrained from another of his cursory tipping-an-imaginary-hat gestures, excusing himself politely to poke his head through the doorless entrance at the back of the hall.
Two steps descended into the biggest room of the house, stripped of most its furnishings and old carpet to create a chipped, concrete-floored workshop with the massive contraption of an old-style printing press dominating the back. Delroy Earle stood toe-to-toe with an even bigger black guy as well as a balding, gray-bearded man with a surprising paunch, something about the hiker’s utility vest he wore marking him as one of the City’s journos too.
Earle spotted him and split into a wide grin, hastily patting the older reporter’s shoulder and ejecting from their mild-mannered dispute.
“Tom!”
The newspaper boss hustled across, jacket flapping as usual to reveal his perennial sidearm in its shoulder rig. They shook hands.
“You carry that thing even here?”
“Some people aren’t happy with just a letter to the editor,” Earle answered with a terse grin.
“I thought we could speak?”
Earle digested Tom’s tone in rapid time and nodded, motioning to a back door in the concrete workspace. They headed that way, past the antique printing press, and before they made the next exit, Delroy kenned Tom’s look and his good cheer redoubled.
“What do you think?”
“The press? A bit of a blast from the past,” Tom said. “You’re typesetting everything by hand like it’s the eighteenth century or something.”
Early chuckled and used a key to unlock the door, sweeping through with Tom in his wake in lieu of a direct answer, and Tom soon saw why.
The back office had two long desks and half-a-dozen swivel chairs corralling a single personal computer, a photocopier, and a pair of laser jet printers. A heap of similar broken and obsolete computer gear was stacked in the far corner of the cramped, windowless room beside a gasoline generator with a flue going through a hole up high in the wall, nothing switched on and nothing but the light of a single hurricane lamp which Earle quickly switched on to avoid pitching them into total darkness as he then circled around to shut the door for privacy.
“Maybe I spoke too soon,” Tom said.
“When we started, that’s how I thought things were going to be,” Earle told him. “Fortunately, the end of the world has been good for news print. People want to know what’s going on and they want reliable information.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Earle nodded, perhaps intrigued by the remark, though he finished up his preamble all the same.
“We live on donations, and scrounged enough that we have some limited old-world resources,” he said. “That’s what we have to call them now. ‘Old world.’ Until the Five sink their teeth into the currency problem, there’s no way we can make people pay for the Herald. Apart from the Citizens who advertise in our listings – and the occasional philanthropic donation – half our time’s spent just working out how to put out the next edition and keep everyone fed.”
Earle motioned to the sleeping computer.
“Fuel, electricity, paper, ink – everything’s got to be rationed.”
“Sounds like a hell of an undertaking.”
“Any interest for you?”
“No,” Tom said politely. “I think I’m better as a source for you anyway, right?”
“Maybe,” Earle said. “Does that mean you had a . . . change of heart?”
“Again, no,” Tom said. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude about it. Your reporter Melina out there already put the hard word on me.”
“I’d be disappointed if she didn’t.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“You could do worse than speaking with her,” Earle said. “Melina spent two years on the road before she got here, cataloguing everything she saw just like a real journalist would. Though, if you ever do want to open your notebooks, Tom, I’d really hope you come to me first.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Earle nodded, business-like, containing his enthusiasm as he motioned to a chair and took a seat behind the nearest desk as he scooped out a notebook ready to work.
*
TOM TRIED NOT to grimace at the ironic and uncomfortable feeling of being on the wrong side of the desk when he knew he was carrying a story that would set the City alight.
“I’m cool with you taking notes,” he said to Earle. “But I’m going to ask you something you’re not gonna like. You have to swear confidentiality on what I’m about to tell you, and the only way I’m bringing you into this deal is if you hold off running anything until I give the all-clear.”
“Really, Tom, that’s not the way I like to work,” Earle said. “You should understand that. As you might recall, the job here’s writing column inches. Background and off-the-record aren’t a big help with that.”
“You’re going to feel differently once you hear what I have to say.”
“Well, you can color me intrigued, that’s for sure,” Earle said like it was a confession of weakness. “You seem to’ve found a unique niche for yourself since you arrived, Tom. What’s the story?”
“I recovered a US Government laptop from the Raptor crash.”
“OK. . . ?”
“It was suggested to me you could arrange a private meeting – a very private meeting – with Councilor Be
n-Gurion. And I think I need Carlotta Deschain too.”
“You’re skipping the part where you tell me about the laptop.”
“The computer’s only part of it,” Tom said. “It’s encrypted. US Government security software.”
“You think Councilwoman Deschain can help?”
“Maybe,” Tom said. “But the laptop had a DVD in its drive. And it was . . . recent.”
“I gather you’re not saying you found the last Blu-Ray copy of State Of Play?”
“No,” Tom said. “I have evidence to suggest there’s a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that survived the apocalypse.
“From what I can tell,” Tom continued, “the USS George Washington evacuated at least a decent chunk of the surviving operational Government and a whole heap of upper-echelon randoms from the military and the CIA, and then they bugged out of US waters.
“And some time ago, within the past year, they’ve made contact with some kind of community of survivors on the east coast and then made landfall, just before the reconstruction effort started here . . . and it sounds like they have a working theory about what triggered the Fury outbreak, and more insight about the state of the rest of the world than everyone in our City combined.”
“Holy shit, Tom.”
“Now you understand why I’m asking you to keep this under your hat for now.”
“What, so you can go to the Council about it and then they’ll hush everything up?” Earle replied. “People will want to know about this, Tom. Hell, they’ll be desperate to – and they deserve it, too.”
“Agreed.”
“What caused the virus outbreak?”
“Like Dr Hamilton told everyone, apparently it wasn’t a straight-forward virus.”
“Hamilton?” Earle chuckled and stood. “I’m not sure he really knows.”
“He’s the best thing we’ve got to an authority around here,” Tom said though he frowned uncertainly as he did so.
Earle crossed to a position on the far wall covered in layer-upon-layer of tacked photographs. Many were poorly developed. He plucked one from the collection and sauntered back to his desk as casually as a man of his solid stature could manage, tossing the picture onto the desk in front of Tom.
“Does he look like an authority on anything?” Earle asked.
The photograph showed David Hamilton looking ragged and thin, dirt caked into the lines around his expressive eyes, a frizzly gray beard almost down to the middle of his chest. A look of deep sorrowful pain masked everything about him, not just his face, and the candid photograph caught him in a checkpoint line with several other equally miserable survivors looking like they’d made the City with only seconds to spare.
“That’s Hamilton?”
“He cleans up well,” Earle said. “That’s from when he arrived last month. He’s deeply damaged. Traumatized. No one knows what happened to his children, or if they were even in the country.”
Tom pondered the photograph a moment and then Earle asked him again about the Furies.
*
“THE DETAILS ARE unclear,” Tom said. “And I’m not sure I understand it all.
“The USS Washington is home to a lot of personnel from different fields – some of them what you might call ‘exotic’ in terms of Government functions. I haven’t had a chance to review anywhere close to all the information. But the information I scanned says a corporate research lab with Federal funding had a project looking into cellular regeneration, gene therapy, that sort of thing. They developed a hack, but they didn’t have clearance for human tests.”
“So?”
“So in their wisdom, they tested it on the dead.”
“That sounds . . . bad.”
“Exactly,” Tom said. “Dead bodies don’t respond to a viral carrier, so they developed a mold. A fungus. Spores.”
“And they got loose?”
“That’s the theory,” Tom said. “But it wasn’t a virus that got loose. Instead – the documents call them ‘clostroidal spores’ – they think these spores colonized North America, probably most of the whole planet over a series of months, following global wind patterns, and then lying dormant until the carriers died of natural causes . . . The bacterial therapy then activated, just like in the lab. That’s the reason bites don’t infect. There’s no ‘Fury virus’ because we’re all infected already.”
“By spores?”
“Yep.”
“It wasn’t a virus?”
“People have been saying that . . . the whole time I’ve been here,” Tom said.
“Sure,” Earle agreed. “That might explain, in the early days, why things took so long to fall apart.”
“It was a slow-moving apocalypse, for sure,” Tom said. “They held order in Knoxville for nearly a month before things broke down for good.”
“So tell me how you know all this?”
“The disk in the drive I mentioned was a . . . download of some kind of web forum,” Tom said. “One that’s still operating – or was earlier this year, probably around the time the Raptor crashed.”
“You’re saying they’ve got a working Air Force contingent?”
“The crashed jet might speak against that,” Tom said and shrugged. “One thing’s for sure: as a nuclear-powered ship, the Washington would still have power, and the files on the DVD suggest they’ve kept their ‘old world’ tech up and running. If they’ve made contact with other survivors –”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Tom said. “That’s why I need an encryption expert. If word of this gets out, I don’t want to start a wholesale panic.”
“Or a celebration,” Earle said. “It’d be like VE Day or something, everyone hoping the Government’s finally coming to the rescue. But are they?”
“What?”
“Are they coming to the rescue?” Earle asked. “Do your . . . documents tell us anything about their intentions?”
“No,” Tom said. “But I have a . . . weird feeling about it.”
“Go on.”
“This forum, when you read the posts –”
“Which I’d like to,” Earle said.
“Hold your horses,” Tom said and barely suppressed a growl. “Let me finish what I’m saying. There’s something about the tone. If I didn’t know better, I’d say their back-room chatter wasn’t authorized. Call themselves the ‘Inner Circle’ and leadership’s the ‘Congress’. Hushed whispers. Against protocol. That sort of thing. If the people on the Washington are what’s left of the US Government, why are they swapping rumors and tidbits and anything anyone’s got to try and piece together everything that’s happened? You’d think they’d know, right?”
“That’s one theory,” Earle said. “Hard to tell. Even harder for me to tell. Can you give me access to this information?”
“I’ll do you one better,” Tom said and extracted the DVD disk itself from his coat. “Since you have working printers, I want you to run me off a copy of everything this disk contains.”
“Expensive,” Earle said. “But OK. I’ll make it happen . . . somehow. We struggle for print stock just for the Herald. And I need to review the information myself before I commit to anything, OK?”
Tom held the disk between gnarled fingers. Fairness alone made him drop his head in acknowledgement as he handed the precious object over into Earle’s nakedly hungry grasp. But Earle then only held the disk, reverential almost, thoughts playing out on his face increasingly faraway.
“The Government. . . ?” he slowly said aloud.
The newspaper editor lifted his bulging eyes to Tom.
“What is the other community?” he asked. “A city? Somewhere that survived?”
“There’s more detail in there,” Tom said. “I’m hoping the laptop can offer more details.”
“Tell me what’s your interest in this?” the editor asked and leaned back in his seat, seemingly in no urgent hurry despite holding all of the answers in his hand.
“Why not just hand it over to the Five and be done with it?” Earle asked. “Or hell, even me. Leave it to the free press?”
Tom’s lack of answer was cogent. And Earle knew as well as Tom that he simply didn’t trust anyone else with the task – Delroy Earle included.
*
TOM LEFT THE Herald brushing off Earle’s plea to join the meeting with Abe Ben-Gurion and Carlotta Deschain, returning to his complaints about the lack of newsprint to produce the bumper special edition he now envisaged.
“I’ve asked the Five to endorse a supply run,” the editor said. “There’s a printing press out in Northwest Columbus and they haven’t even cleared out the State University Airport yet. There could be anything out there. It could be . . . lucrative. I thought about asking you to take a run out there on my behalf. What do you think?”
Tom blinked at that, turned away from Earle and already standing out in the sunshine trying not to show the ache of his fresh injuries, nor draw attention to his slinged arm.
“Do I look in any state for that?”
“It suits them, anyway,” Earle said as if he’d heard nothing. “They’re more than happy to do anything they can to keep me quiet. This isn’t a democracy, Tom.”
For his part, Tom only squinted, depleted, nonplussed about the newspaper man’s occasional mood swings involving the City Council, which seemed to leave him irate – irate, and perhaps more than a little paranoid.
“Democracy might be a little too much to hope for,” Tom said.
“We can’t give up on democracy, Tom,” Earle replied as if he expected Tom to feel chastened. “When we turn our backs on democracy, we surrender to the savagery of these times. We can have a resurrection. Not a revolution. A reconstruction. Do you understand?”
Tom left Earle to his pontifications and cut across The Mile until he came to Montgomery Stewart’s radio shack. The old man was in a sour mood, treating Tom like a former shoplifter, but Monty was still keen for the trade when Tom fished out a new-looking combat knife from his backpack along with four D-type batteries. In exchange, he claimed a set of two-way radios he’d spied on his previous visit and completely forgot about – until he found himself unexpectedly miles from the City and with no way to contact his children.
After the Apocalypse Book 3 Resurgence: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 10