by K. M. Fawkes
“What do you mean, they disappear?” Brad demanded.
“I mean that one day they’re in the facility, living their lives and doing the chores they’re assigned to do. And then one day they aren’t anymore. And there’s no funeral for them.”
“What’s the official story?” Brad asked. “Do they say they died? Or do they say they deserted?”
“Aren’t you listening? There isn’t an official story, man. They just disappear.”
Brad thought it over for a moment. “No one asks what happened to them?”
“No,” Caleb said with a shake of his head. “No one asks.”
“Why not?” Brad demanded. “They just watch people disappear and they don’t even think to ask what might have happened? It’s a close community; even if they just thought that a neighbor was sick, it would be worth asking around.”
“Because maybe they’re wondering the same thing I’m wondering,” Caleb said.
“Which is?” Brad was getting tired of yanking information out of the other man. He decided to be a bit blunter. “Just tell me what the hell is going on, okay?”
“I don’t know what’s going on!” Caleb snapped. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened to the old folks.”
Brad blinked, not connecting the two issues for a moment. “What? I mean, didn’t they all die from the virus?”
“Then where were the bodies?” the other man asked.
“I guess they buried them,” Brad said. “Why the hell would they just leave them lying around?”
“Sure, that sort of makes sense. Except that the Major never said a damn thing about a cleanup when he talked about moving into the facility with his soldiers. From his story, they just walked right in and set up. And does it look like those apartments had someone die in them?”
Caleb was warming to his subject now, speaking more quickly.
“I mean, you remember the virus and the things it did to people. It wasn’t exactly a clean way to go, you know? I mean, people hacked up blood like they were fucking fountains. Remember the CDC warnings? Hell, there were bodily fluids everywhere during the peak of it. And my apartment back at the facility is kinda spick and span for anything like that to have happened there; what about yours?”
Brad frowned, digesting the sudden onslaught of information. “Well…yeah. It is.”
His apartment really was very clean. Which didn’t really mean anything. The residents could have been moved out to a safe house. He thought back to the earring he’d found in the bathtub and the lady he’d invented in his head who might have worn it. Had she died of the virus? Or had something that was somehow worse happened to her?
“You said you’ve been here since summer?” Brad asked. When Caleb nodded, he went on. “Did you happen to find any personal effects of the residents?”
Caleb nodded again. “One of the first jobs I was assigned was helping them go through the apartments and separate what we could use from what we couldn’t.”
“Did it look like any of them had packed a bag?”
Caleb tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“I’m wondering if they might have ended up at a safe house. When the army came to take me to one, they let all of us have one small bag. That’s pretty fucking different from what the power-crazy soldiers did.” He remembered Anna’s story of the military coming to Island Falls and how very different it was from what had happened to him.
“I’m no expert,” Caleb said. “But it didn’t look to me like they’d taken a damn thing. Their luggage was still in the closet and all of their clothes and toiletries were the apartments, too.”
“Then the Army didn’t take them,” Brad said. “Or if they did, they treated them a hell of a lot differently than they treated us in Bangor.” His jaw tensed. “Do you have any ideas about what might have happened to them?”
Caleb sighed. “No. I wish I did, but there’s nothing I can pin down. There’s just a feeling…I don’t think they left because they wanted to.”
“It doesn’t sound like it,” Brad agreed. “Maybe we can work on getting the truth out of the Major.”
“I don’t know. I thought that I could trust him, but now—” Caleb broke off suddenly, going pale as he looked over Brad’s shoulder. “Hey, Mason. Did you need us?”
“No. I’m just wondering what you found that’s so interesting that you’re standing around.” Mason’s dark eyes were steady on Caleb, his voice as cold as the gray sky over their heads.
“Yeah, Caleb found some deer tracks here,” Brad said, pointing down at them so that the soldier could see that he was being honest. “The tracks aren’t all that fresh, but we thought we’d head over and see what we can find.”
“Then get to it.”
Mason accompanied them, effectively ending the conversation. Brad wondered what, if anything, the other man had heard. Caleb seemed nervous and Brad wished that he’d loosen up. If they hadn’t looked particularly guilty before, they certainly did now. Brad did his best to look nonchalant, pointing out a bear’s den and a source of water as they walked. The soldiers weren’t interested in the first, but they took note of the second.
After several hours of walking, Mason sighed and said that they could turn around. The sky was going from a pale gray to a darker, blacker color. Brad had been worried that it might be about to rain, but then he realized that it was simply growing dark. He still wasn’t used to how early it happened, now.
Brad handed his rifle back to the other soldier before he got into the truck. He sat down, resting his head against the back of the driver’s seat and pulling a blanket around himself. This was basically the same position he’d taken when he’d regained consciousness on the ride in. He glanced across at Caleb, but the man pointedly looked away from him. That avenue of conversation was clearly at an end.
With a shrug, Brad grabbed another blanket and balled it up, thinking he might as well try and catch some shut-eye. The hunt had been a long, cold, waste of time. He wasn’t interested in more of the same for the ride back.
Chapter 9
Four Days Later
Brad’s eyes popped open at dawn. Groaning, he pulled the pillow over his head, burrowing deeper into the blankets, but it didn’t make a bit of difference. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to go back to sleep. He stuffed the pillow back under his head and sighed.
It made him think back to the time he’d spent with Anna. He would have given anything to sleep in during those frantic weeks before they’d found Martha. Now that he didn’t have anything standing in his way of an entire morning in bed, he couldn’t even manage to stay still.
Brad hadn’t gotten lucky the first day they’d gone out to hunt. Or the second day. The third day had been the worst of all. He hadn’t even found any tracks. He’d started to worry that they were going to think that he’d oversold himself.
But yesterday, he’d managed to bring down a moose. It was apparently the biggest kill anyone at the compound had made so far. Neal had come by his apartment last night and said that the Major was impressed. And he’d given Brad the whole next day off for his accomplishment. It had sounded great at the time, but Brad was very surprised to discover that now that he had it, he didn’t want the reward.
He got up and headed to the bathroom, where he changed the bandage on his ankle before getting dressed. Pleased that the cut was healing well, he wandered around the apartment, unsure what to do with himself. None of the books looked interesting to him at the moment. He grabbed the broom and swept the kitchen and bathroom and then sighed when that was over much too quickly.
A critical look around told him that the carpet was starting to look a little dingy, but there were nothing he could do about that. It wasn’t like he could plug in the vacuum cleaner and fix it. He couldn’t take a bath either because he needed the water he had left to last for three more days.
Brad dropped down onto the couch, facing the useless television with a frown. He wracked his brain,
but nothing came to him. He’d already done everything in the house that he could do except for reading. He pushed himself up again after a moment and grabbed his coat, scarf, hat and gloves. He’d go out. Surely there was something that he could do out there. Anything had to be better than staring at the four walls of his apartment all day.
He started with the animals.
“I thought you had the day off,” Ben said as he scattered some grain for the chickens.
“I do,” Brad said.
“Are you one of those compulsive types who thinks that no one else can do their job?” Ben asked.
“Nope,” Brad replied easily, sensing that he’d offended the man. “You took care of them before I got here. I just wanted a little walk and I’m used to heading this way every morning.”
Ben eyed him skeptically for a moment. “That’s not what I’d do with a day off if I earned one, that’s for damn sure.”
“You’ve never gotten one?” Brad asked.
“No,” Ben said flatly, putting the feed bucket down and snapping the lid onto it. “You earn them when you do something for the good of the whole community.”
“Keeping the animals fed doesn’t count?”
Ben snorted and then glanced around quickly. Brad thought that he saw worry flash over the other man’s face. “Listen, it’s whatever the Major decides, okay? And that’s fine.”
“Sure,” Brad said. “Sure, okay. Hey, Ben?” The other man was gathering his supplies, clearly getting ready to leave.
“Yeah?” he asked gruffly.
“How long have you been here?”
“Since summer,” Ben said. “I was one of the first civilians in the place.”
“Oh, really? Do you know what happened to the residents?”
Ben’s face was drawn when he looked back at Brad. “The Major never said. I don’t ask questions. And I’ve got to go.”
“Just one thing,” Brad said quickly.
Ben sighed and hefted the feed buckets. “What?”
“Do you know Caleb? You know, since you—”
“I said I have to go.” Ben turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Brad standing by the fence.
The man hadn’t answered, but Brad had seen recognition on his face. And hell, there was no way that he hadn’t known Caleb, anyway. It had been a stupid way to ask, but it had been an even more ridiculous way to answer. All Brad had wanted to know was if Ben had seen the hunting crew member yesterday. With a sigh, he headed back home.
The trouble with the facility being so well organized, he thought as he walked, was that no one needed his help with their chores. The animals didn’t need anything. There were no building projects going on, obviously. From the smoke rising and the scent in the air, the cooks were already hard at work in the dining hall. The fence sections he checked on the way back were fine, too. There was just nothing he needed to do.
“What are you doing out and about?” Neal called with a smile as Brad came back home.
Brad shrugged. “I guess I’ve just got a little bit of cabin fever,” he said. “I’m not used to having a day off.”
“It can be a hard thing to get used to,” Neal agreed. “After the virus hit, there was always something to worry about. There was always something to look out for, to test for, to avoid. Now things are easy, but it takes your body a while to slow down again.”
“I guess so,” Brad said.
Neal zipped up his jacket and pushed his hands down into his pockets. “I’m headed to get my own orders for the day,” he said with a grin. “I guess I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
Brad pushed the key into the lock and opened his door. With a heavy sigh, he went over to the bookshelf. Even a long day filled with reading was better than a long day filled with nothing at all.
And he did enjoy reading. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the buzzing in his intuition. The feeling that something just wasn’t right.
Brad shoved the feeling away and began looking at the book selection. Mysteries, gentle romances and health magazines were all stored neatly on the shelves. He was on the verge of reading an article that would tell him “10 Surprising Ways to Lower Your Cholesterol” when his gaze fell on something else. He tugged it free. The Farmer’s Almanac!
He grabbed the book and then dug through the next shelf for the empty notebook he’d found there a few days before. The extremely tidy junk drawer in the kitchen yielded a pen and Brad sat down at the kitchen table to draw up a calendar. It wouldn’t be very pretty—Brad didn’t really have an artistic bone in his body—but it would be accurate and that was all that mattered. He needed a calendar the way he needed water to drink and a roof over his head.
He’d asked around for one the day after he’d gotten to the facility, but he’d been met with either blank looks or shrugs. It seemed like no one here had any interest in knowing what the date was. “I mean, what difference does it make?” Charlie had asked when he’d questioned her. “Did you have somewhere to be?”
Brad had smiled and allowed the subject to change to other things rather than try to explain, but he really didn’t understand why they didn’t care. Dates were important.
For one thing, they would help him mark how long he’d been here. From his own careful timekeeping, he knew that today marked his sixth day in the facility. And he also knew that he hadn’t heard a thing from Walker in the last five days about going to look for Anna and the kids. Or anything else, for that matter. Caleb’s words rang through his mind.
“I thought that I could trust Major Walker. But now…”
Now what, damn it? He still hadn’t managed to figure it out. Caleb had avoided him the next two hunts they had gone on, keeping his distance so pointedly that it would almost have been funny if it wasn’t so blatantly obvious that the man was terrified. He might as well have carried a sign that pointed out that he and Brad weren’t friends. Brad hadn’t seen him on the hunt yesterday, but it hadn’t bothered him at the time. He hadn’t really wanted to seek him out, anyway. Caleb was a nervous guy and Brad didn’t exactly need any more stress in his life.
On the other hand, Brad would have assumed that Walker would have wanted to interact with him a little more, considering how new he was to the place. But in fact, he’d barely seen the man at all since he’d assigned Brad his duties. At first, it hadn’t bothered him too much, even with Caleb’s suspicion. Like he told himself, Caleb seemed like the type to be suspicious of everything.
He’d planned to simply corner the Major at a meal and relieve himself of his lingering worries in the wake of his conversation with Caleb, but it turned out that Walker took his meals in his office. When Brad had asked why, he was told brusquely by Mason, the leader of the hunting party, that it was because he worked so much. Then, he’d told Brad to shut up and hunt.
Brad had ignored the last part, his mind going to work on the first bit of information he’d gleaned from any of the soldiers. So, Walker had to take breakfast, lunch, and dinner in his office because he was so busy. Okay. But what the hell was there for him to do all damn day? It wasn’t like he worked under anyone else’s command. He had no superior officer to report to, nothing he had to make sure was in order before he handed it in. And he certainly didn’t have a massive amount of paperwork to file.
In fact, when it came down it, everything ran with very little input from the soldiers or the Major himself. Chores were divided pretty evenly. In Brad’s opinion, there should be a little more variety. He would have trained everyone to do everything as much as they could, but since no one had asked him, he hadn’t mentioned it. Everyone in the place knew what they were supposed to do and they simply did it.
Brad was actually surprised at how seriously the people here took their jobs. They didn’t seem to see it as anything different from the jobs they’d probably worked for paychecks before everything fell apart. Hell, even the kids did as they were told without complaint!
He wondered what it
would have been like to have that level of cooperation when he’d had the cabin. Then, he smiled and shook his head. No, he wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d always liked that Anna had challenged him and that Sammy came up with his own ideas so frequently. He had a feeling that if there had been time, Martha would have come out of her shell as a rampant individualist, too. It would have been boring if they’d been like the people here.
A deep sense of loss ricocheted through his chest and he pushed their memory away. It didn’t do any good to think of them now. He was stuck in the facility for the time being and he would only succeed in driving himself crazy with what-ifs. It was better to keep them as far in the back of his mind as he could get them. That way, he could focus on one thing at a time.
Like Major Walker. He got back onto his original train of thought. The facility ran smoothly. Brad would even go so far as to say that maybe part of that was due to administration, but surely not that much now that everyone had settled in.
There wasn’t a massive influx of people coming in every day. Brad had been told that he was the first new citizen in at least a month, meaning Walker should know the other residents pretty well by now, but he didn’t seem to. Most people seemed to have an idea of him, but no real interactions to back that idea up.
Caleb’s words came back to him again. He’d thought that he could trust Walker. Brad would have said the same thing. The man seemed warm. Caring, even. But what did he really have to base that on? The fact that he’d given him soup? The fact that he’d let him stay in this facility? The fact that he’d been…human? Before the EMP, before the virus, it was what he would have expected of anyone. Brad hadn’t been the most social guy, but he’d always carried the belief that humans—at their core, at least—were basically good. Almost everyone he’d met since then had challenged that assumption. The power-hungry soldiers. The insane “Family.”
Had he simply been so relieved not to be killed in cold blood that he hadn’t noticed anything else? Or was the Major simply very good at hiding the weirdness?
