Absolution

by Mark Campbell

  Teddy turned to face Roger.

  “Took a big risk,” Roger said, studying his face.

  “I’d do it again, if I had to.”

  “If they searched the room…”

  “They didn’t though, did they?” Teddy asked sharply. “Besides, now those two have a chance.”

  “Nothing good lasts for long in this world anymore, hoss,” Roger said with a frown.

  “There has to be some good left out there,” Teddy said as he stared at him. “Otherwise, what the fuck is the point of moving forward?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Roger said with a thin smile.

  An old-fashioned air raid siren went off and made Teddy jump.

  “That’s our cue,” Roger said as he brushed past Teddy. “Quitting time.”

  A faraway voice shouted through a loudspeaker: All civilian work details report back to your bus at once! You have five minutes!

  Roger whistled behind his paper mask, sauntered out of the room, and passed along the empty cubicles. He kept the flashlight’s failing beam pointed at the floor taking care not to trip over the mess left behind.

  Teddy adjusted his mask and followed. He kept glancing uneasily over his shoulder as if he expected to see the woman’s face emerge out from the shadows. “Is all of this what you’d call a normal day?”

  “You betcha,” Roger answered with a nod. “Aside from that little sideshow at the end, that is.” He adjusted his pants as he kept walking. “When we’re outside clearing roads or digging ditches, we have to do some work, but it’s easy breezy when we’re assigned inside.”

  Teddy couldn’t picture himself ever getting accustomed to it. As far as he was concerned, he wouldn’t have to worry about it—as soon as he found Ein he planned to make an escape.

  The details of the yet-to-be-concocted escape weren’t coming together in his head.

  They couldn’t.

  He was too tired, too hungry, and too damn thirsty to do much thinking.

  The two men left the records department and followed the others down the main corridor towards the exit.

  A few FEMA officers stood in sentry positions against the wall with rifles across their chests, watching.

  Rubber flaps covered the exit doors and sheets of plastic were stapled along the walls. The worn plastic was marked with faded CDC logos and had its many rips and holes sloppily patched with duct tape. A string of halogen work lights dangled from the ceiling.

  The people at the front of the line dropped their flashlights into waiting plastic crates and then raised their hands as the passed through the flaps.

  “What’s this about?” Teddy asked.

  “Decontamination,” Roger explained as he dumped his flashlight and raised his hands over his head. “Get used to it… They do it every time we leave to go back to camp.”

  “Great,” Teddy muttered as he slowly brought his hands up.

  Roger passed through the plastic flaps. “Remember not to—” His voice was drowned out by the generator nearby.

  “Not to what?” Teddy asked, unable to understand him. He passed through the flaps and found himself in a makeshift plastic tunnel that led down onto the courtyard.

  Two people wearing sealed white biological protection suits stared at him through their mirrored visors. Both of the white-suits had chemical foggers attached to their backs and kept the device’s nozzles pointed at Teddy as he stepped through.

  “Move forward!” one of the white-suits ordered in a garbled voice through a speaker attached to its chest. “Arms up!”

  Teddy kept walking and was inundated by a thick white mist that burned his eyes and stole the air out of his lungs. He gasped ineffectively for air and staggered forward through the next set of flaps, snatching his mask off in the process. After he emerged outside, he nearly collapsed.

  “You alright?” Roger asked

  Teddy slouched down and placed his hands on his knees with wide-eyes. He wheezed and gasped as he slowly caught his breath.

  Roger extended a hand, chuckling. “I told you not to breathe.”

  Teddy weakly grabbed his hand and stood back up. “You didn’t tell me shit,” he managed to say in a hoarse whisper.

  “You just didn’t listen.” Roger shrugged. “I’m beginning to think that’s half of your problem, hoss.” He followed the others across the street and out into the courtyard. He crumpled up his mask and tossed it inside a waiting trash bin.

  “My ears aren’t the problem,” Teddy said as he followed after him. “It’s your accent—nobody can understand that shit.”

  “You’re one to talk,” Roger said with a grin. “That Texas twang takes some getting used to.” He looked off into the distance and his grin immediately faded. He turned his attention back to the road ahead and began walking away quickly. “Just follow me. There isn’t nothing to be done now…”

  Teddy coughed into the crook of his arm and followed him. “What are babbling on about now?”

  A drone buzzed low overhead, and Teddy followed it with his eyes. His attention was pulled towards the street and he quickly realized what Roger must’ve seen.

  Teddy stopped walking, dropped his crumpled mask, and stared down the street in a dazed stupor. The other workers did not pay him too much attention, and simply walked around him when he got in the way.

  Down the street, three idling prisoner transport wagons were crammed with frightened men, women, and children that had been plucked from inside the building.

  Officers gathered around the back of the vehicles, stuffed a final few inside, and then locked the doors.

  Drones hovered overhead.

  What horrified Teddy though, lay further in distance.

  Past the wagons, at the far end of the courtyard, stood a line of sick people with their eyes blindfolded and their hands bound behind their backs. They were coughing and hunched down—cowering before a line of officers who had their weapons pointed at them.

  A fiery knot formed in Teddy’s throat and he felt raging tears well in his eyes. “Those goddamn bastards,” he said furiously. “They can’t do that… Those people didn’t do anything to them.”

  Roger stopped walking and turned to face Teddy.

  “Be easy… keep your voice down,” Roger said quietly. He raised his hands and attempted to calm him down as if he were a wild animal poised to strike the nearest living thing. “I’m sorry… They normally do this somewhere out of view.”

  “I don’t give a shit where they do it—this is wrong!” Teddy exclaimed. His voice caught the attention of two officers who were idly chatting near the tunnel’s exit.

  “Is there a problem over here?” one of the officers, a young man with his gasmask tucked under his arm, asked.

  Teddy ignored the question and kept glaring at the execution line as if that was answer enough.

  The officer, annoyed, drew his truncheon and started advancing towards him slowly.

  “Teddy…” Roger said in an unsteady voice. “We have to go.”

  Over at the firing line, the officers raised their rifles at the civilians and waited as two more people were led from the side of the building towards the others.

  A woman and a young girl, both bound and gagged, were shoved into the sick crowd.

  Teddy’s eyes widened—it was the same two he had tried to help not even ten minutes earlier. “No!” he exclaimed in a feral rage, but it was too late.

  The crack of automatic gunfire reverberated across the courtyard and sent crows fleeing from their perches.

  The group of sick civilians jolted and then collapsed into lifeless heaps on the grass.

  Teddy felt his muscles tense. An overwhelming urge to run towards the group of executioners washed over him.

  Roger grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him firmly.

  Teddy, adrenaline surging, looked over at him with wild eyes and unsteady pupils.

  “Get yourself together, hoss,” Roger said.

  Teddy, heart still racing, looked over a
t the approaching officer who carried a truncheon in his hand.

  “I asked if there was a problem here!” the officer snarled.

  “None at all,” Roger said with a smile. “My new coworker here is just getting orientated—he came in last night.”

  Teddy looked at Roger in a daze and his rational mind slowly emerged out of the hazy delirium of seething rage.

  The officer stopped and lowered his weapon, shaking his head. “Then your coworker best orientate himself towards the bus before I bash his fucking head in!”

  “Yes, sir,” Roger said with a nod. He led Teddy away by his arm for several feet before he tore free.

  “I can walk,” Teddy snipped. “I’m fine.”

  “You sure weren’t fine back there.” Roger frowned. “What in the hell were you going to do? Take them all down with your bare hands?”

  Teddy gave a heavy sigh. “I… don’t know what I was thinking… I just wasn’t prepared to see that.”

  “Get used to it, sunshine. I already told you once—nothing good lasts for long in this world anymore.”

  Both men walked in silence with the others towards the bus.

  Vue stood waiting at the bus doors and collected the reflective vests and flashlights as the workers trickled back on.

  Parham stood nearby watching with hooded eyes—his gaze fixated on Teddy. There was something about Teddy that aggravated him, but he couldn’t place his finger on it.

  It was his face, Parham figured; he had seen it before, but from where?

  Before FEMA amalgamated his agency into theirs, Parham was a shift supervisor for the Transportation Security Agency. Thousands upon thousands of faces used to pass by his gaze every single day, so what made Teddy Sanders bother him so goddamn much?

  He couldn’t figure it out and the longer he ruminated on it the angrier he became.

  Was it the man’s lack of respect?

  Parham’s eyes widened slightly as an answer came to him.

  No, it wasn’t about respect at all, he thought with sudden clarity—what bothered him was the man’s lack of fear.

  A man who knew no fear was dangerous, he knew.

  Yes, very dangerous indeed.

  Eventually, and soon, he knew that he would have to break him.

  Still, as Teddy approached, Parham noticed the man’s crestfallen expression. It was clear that Teddy had a bad day and somehow that brought him a sadistic tinge of pleasure.

  A shallow smile formed across Parham’s lips, but Teddy didn’t notice.

  Teddy took off his vest and approached Vue.

  “Remember what I said about talking,” Vue warned him as he collected his vest.

  Sure, Teddy remembered, and normally he would’ve come up with a snarky response, but he didn’t feel like talking and didn’t think he’d be doing much of it on the bus.

  Teddy lowered his head and trudged up the steps.

  Salguero sat at the driver’s seat and chuckled when he saw Teddy enter. “Look at this cupcake’s sour little face,” he announced to nobody in particular. “I was right—he won’t last a week.”

  Roger, walking in front, tensed; expecting Teddy to react the way he always seemed to react.

  Teddy, however, didn’t take the bait and kept walking.

  The men took their seats and after a few more minutes the security grille was locked and the bus was headed away from Topeka and back towards the camp.

  During the long bus ride, everyone in the back was silent.

  Up front, Vue kept yammering on about some old television show and Salguero reminisced about hunting deer back home in North Carolina. Occasionally the good sergeant cut-in with tales of his sexual conquests which seemed as fabricated as a Charles Dickens novel.

  Teddy glanced out of his makeshift peephole only once and saw a shallow mass grave that had been dug out next to a rural Wal-Mart’s parking lot. Derelict trailers, abandoned excavators, and dump trucks were stationed around the pit which were full to the brim with skeletal corpses.

  Teddy wondered if things would ever get any better—he had witnessed enough death and despair to last him ten lifetimes. He decided to keep his tired gaze at the seatback in front of him.

  He felt Roger glancing over at him from time to time, no doubt wondering if he was okay.

  In truth, he wasn’t okay.

  He was tired of death.

  He was tired of loss.

  All he could think about was saving Ein and getting the fuck out of this awful place.

  Maybe Roger could find some uneasy peace by playing house with men who masqueraded as federal officers working for an agency that had stopped existing months ago, but Teddy sure as hell couldn’t.

  CHAPTER 8

  Teddy walked along the footpath between the dormitories. The crisp air had turned bone-chillingly cold as dusk approached and cleared out most of the vendors and residents who may have been loitering inside the makeshift tent cities in the alleyways. Those who remained outside took refuge by steel drum fires, but the exhausted faces gathered around the fires looked strained and the conversation was sparse. There was the odd strain of music from guitars and some idle conversation, but for the most part the only sound was the wintery wind whistling through the compound.

  The bus had unloaded a long time ago, yet Teddy’s nose still hurt and leaned askew from Parham’s blow earlier in the morning.

  Probably broken, he figured.

  It didn’t matter—he wasn’t going to win any beauty contests anytime soon.

  Roger had asked him to accompany him back to the dorm for another round of cards, but Teddy declined.

  Teddy had a mission to complete and had no time for gin rummy.

  Despite the weariness that overtook his aching body and the persistent throbbing of his wounded nose, he walked the footpaths for hours looking for Ein.

  Teddy found a few dormitory doors propped open and peeked inside them during his search—Perry had not embellished about the other dorm’s cramped and dilapidated condition. Clothes lines, Christmas lights, and an assortment of junk cluttered the wall space and the bunks were piled-high with broken trinkets and extra linens. The people inside didn’t give him a passing glance as they were too preoccupied with their newly formed cliques and seemed to be clinging onto what remained of their family and loved ones.

  Ein wasn’t anywhere in sight and none of the people Teddy questioned recalled seeing a young guy with piercings and messy purple hair.

  To be honest, Teddy didn’t know why he even gave a fuck.

  It wasn’t like they had some special bond or any history.

  Hell, Ein was just a stranger from the stadium.

  Maybe, Teddy figured, what happened at the stadium was the whole reason for his obsession—he wanted to latch onto something, anything, after losing so much.

  Teddy didn’t know what drove him and he didn’t care—all he knew was that he wasn’t leaving that camp without finding him.

  He peeked inside every tent and down every alleyway but had no luck.

  Eventually, hunger forced him to stop his search for the day and find his way to the dining hall for dinner.

  The chalkboard menu claimed to serve chicken and greens.

  Instead, he was served something that resembled pasta and white sauce.

  The pasta was chewy and the sauce tasted like watered down flour; it was an ordeal just to get it down his gullet.

  Others in the dining hall complained, but the officers in charge of the serving line claimed that the chicken had expired so they were forced to improvise.

  Teddy noticed that there were more officers inside the dining hall that evening as opposed to the morning and it struck him as something worth noting. Most people wouldn’t think twice about it, but the years spent behind Tucson’s walls had altered his perception. He figured that the administration had anticipated more resistance from the people.

  However, Teddy knew it would take more than one bad meal to set the crowd off.

  Un
like Tucson, most of the folks at the camp were soft.

  After so many hours of fruitless searching in the frigid cold and a stomach full of sickening food, he gave up. “I’ll find you tomorrow, kid,” he muttered to himself.

  Teddy stuffed his hands into his pockets and headed towards his dorm, defeated. A deep tension formed between his shoulder blades and his neck ached.

  The dorm’s shower, that had appeared so disgusting to him last night, suddenly started to sound appealing in his mind.

  “Teddy!” a familiar voice beamed from the alleyway next to his dorm.

  He turned and saw Roger sitting on a small crate beside a dying fire lapping out of a rusty steel oil drum.

  “Sit down, hoss, and warm your hands for a bit!” Roger said jovially. He kicked a plastic milk crate out towards him.

  Teddy looked down at the crate and then over at the dorm with some slight hesitation.

  “Unless you have some pressing dinner plans…” Roger teased with a wrinkly grin.

  “I already had whatever mess they were serving, so I reckon I’ll sit and rest my bones for a bit,” Teddy said with a shrug. He flipped the crate over and took a seat across from him. “I was just thinking about taking a shower.”

  “There aren’t enough showers in the world to get that feeling off of you, son,” Roger said thoughtfully. “Dirt like that gets down deep.”

  Teddy was never one to speak metaphorically or wax poetic, but he agreed with Roger all the same. He held out his hands towards the fire—the warmth felt good and brought sensation back to his fingertips.

  “Hell of a first day, wasn’t it?” Roger asked as he studied him.

  “Yeah… That’s an understatement,” he admitted as he turned his hands to warm the back.

  “I should’ve warned you about what they’ve been doing lately with the sick,” Roger said regretfully. “Sometimes… I forget how harsh things are, and I feel bad about that…”

  “It’s fine,” Teddy said. “It certainly wasn’t you pulling the trigger.”

  “No, but still…” Roger said, choosing his words delicately. “Afterwards, when we got back on the bus, I could tell from the look on your face… Something bad happened back at the stadium, didn’t it? That’s why you acted out the way you did. Hell, I should’ve warned you.” He paused and shook his head, “Whatever happened, I—”