“I’m not sure.”
“It’s airborne, isn’t it?”
“No, Annie. The virus isn’t airborne. That’s extremely unlikely. Viruses mutate all the time, and this one is mutating like the dickens, but viruses don’t alter their method of transmission. Remember when everyone was afraid Ebola and AIDS would go airborne? Didn’t happen. It was never going to happen. This one won’t go airborne either.”
“So what’s going on?”
“I’m need to consult with some of the other doctors and confer with the mayor, but I came down here to talk to you first because I know you heard what happened earlier today. And I want to assure you that everything is under control. This hospital is secure. Those men outside in the hallway will keep you safe. They’ll move you if they have to.”
“To where? A jail cell?”
“That would probably be even safer than here, but you aren’t a criminal, Annie. You aren’t a prisoner.”
“I can’t leave.”
“I often order my patients to stay here until I discharge them.”
“I’m not your patient. I’m not even sick. You aren’t ordering me to stay here. The mayor is.”
Doc Nash said nothing.
“What’s going on, doc? How did that man get infected if the virus isn’t airborne? Did someone infect him on purpose?”
He was taken aback. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”
Annie could think of a couple of reasons. She, Hughes and Kyle had infected Parker on purpose. For all she knew, Walsh was their own little lab rat.
But Nash seemed genuinely shocked and appalled when she asked him, as if she’d asked him if he raped his daughter.
“How many people in this town have been infected?” she said.
“A lot. More than a hundred, now, I suppose. It hasn’t been easy, keeping this town in one piece. We’ve been hit by one wave after another. Outsiders brought it with them.”
“There’s nobody out there.”
“Out where?”
“Out there. On the roads. Everything and everybody is dead. I just drove through nothing for a thousand miles. There’s nobody out there to bring it in here.”
Doc Nash didn’t move.
“You have no idea, do you?” she said. “None of you have any idea how alone this place really is.”
Doc Nash did not say a word.
“It’s not coming from outside. It’s coming from inside. Have you checked the other bodies for bites? You said you’ve had several this week.”
“I’m not the pathologist. And we haven’t been doing autopsies on the infected. We assumed they were all bitten, but we’ve just been burning them.”
“You’d better go talk to your mayor,” she said. “Right now, doc.”
19
Hughes followed Carter into the garage to his car, an ancient Honda Civic that Carter had brought with him from Oakland more than a decade earlier. He said it ran just fine even after all these years, as he knew it would, which was why he bought it.
Carter manually unlocked the door with a key and manually opened the garage door while Hughes climbed into the back seat of the Honda. He lay down in the back out of sight.
Hughes shivered as Carter put the car into reverse and backed out of the garage.
“How far are we going?” Hughes said.
“Hang on,” Carter said and stepped out of the car and closed the garage door. He got back in. “Not too far,” he said. “House is just out of town a ways and up the slope of the Wind Rivers.”
Hughes sat up. “Are we going through a checkpoint?”
“Nah, man. No need for a checkpoint. Road doesn’t go anywhere except up the mountains a ways.”
Hughes lay back and down, and Carter backed out onto the street.
Hughes wasn’t comfortable, and he couldn’t see any landmarks with his head where somebody’s ass ought to be, but he sensed the turn onto Main.
“One of Steele’s guys up ahead in a Range Rover,” Carter said. “Going real slow. Like he’s looking for something or somebody. Looking for you?”
“I doubt it,” Hughes said. “If they wanted me now, they would have taken me when they took Parker. Just a bad idea for them to know where I am or who I’m with if they decide to look for me later.”
“Roger that,” Carter said and made a right. After another minute or so, Hughes sensed they were going uphill.
“Mountains technically begin right here in Lander,” Carter said. “Town ends not far ahead, and the road only goes a short distance, but you could get all the way to the crest if you kept on going on foot.”
Carter made a hard right, then picked up speed as if they were out in the countryside.
“Where are we?” Hughes said. “Did we just leave town?”
“There are a few more houses and ranches up this way before the mountains get too high and too steep.”
Hughes wasn’t sure how fast they were going, but he was surprised by the distance. It would probably take an hour to walk that far, and they weren’t even there yet.
Carter took a few s-curves, then pulled off the road onto a gravel driveway.
“And here we are,” Carter said. “There’s nobody around. You can sit up now.”
Hughes sat up and was startled by where he found himself.
Before him was a lovely two-story country house with dormered windows, a front porch the size of Carter’s living room and dining room put together, a detached garage and a guest house next door. The house itself was surrounded by dry grass. It was in a narrow ravine lined with the kind of red rock more common in Utah and New Mexico than Wyoming. A creek flowed through a gulch just below the house. Hughes could hear it gurgling. Despite the frigid temperature outside, it hadn’t entirely frozen over yet.
He saw an enormous canyon—more of a chasm, really—a couple of miles in the distance, like the Gods had split the foothills of the Wind River Mountains with a gigantic hammer.
“He doesn’t know you’re coming,” Carter said. “I’d have called ahead, but—you know.”
No phones.
Hughes and Carter stepped out of the Honda. The air was even colder up there. A frosty wind howled up the mountain from the desert below and burned Hughes’ ears and eyes.
“It’s not always so cold here,” Carter said. “Just wait until we get a Chinook.”
“What’s that?”
“Warm wind that comes down off the mountains. Like the Santa Anas in California. They can warm this place up fifty degrees. Sometimes they last for days. Like going from winter to spring in two minutes.”
Hughes followed Carter to the front door of the house. Carter reached up to knock, but the door opened first. There was no sneaking up on this place if you drove and parked on the gravel.
A mountain man filled the doorway. He stood well over six feet and had broad shoulders like a lumberjack or a football player. His wavy brown hair could have used a trim a month ago, as could his beard. His eyes were blue, piercing and intelligent.
“Carter,” he said as he looked at Hughes. “Looks like you found a new friend.”
“Levan Hughes,” Hughes said and stuck out of his hand.
“Elias Sark.” He gripped Hughes’ hand like a vise when he shook it and his eyes narrowed a little.
“Friends call me Hughes,” Hughes said.
“Mine just call me Elias. Come on in.” He said it in a way that suggested he didn’t want company, but he had company anyway so he might as well open the door.
Hughes and Carter stepped inside and Elias shut the door behind them.
“Don’t linger outside,” Elias said. “I’ve had a couple infected coyotes on the property the last couple of days.”
Infected coyotes? That was new. At least it was new to Hughes. He recalled, though, that patient zero in Russia had been bitten by some kind of wolf or fox rather than a person. He wondered how many species were susceptible to the virus. There were a lot more wild animals in Wyoming than there were around
Seattle. A hell of a lot more.
Elias led Hughes and Carter into the living room. The inside of the house was an architectural version of Elias himself. Everything was made of wood—the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and the handrail on the open staircase. Hughes wouldn’t have been shocked to discover the kitchen counter was also made of wood.
Elias had decorated the walls not with artwork, but with rifles, saw blades, a bear’s head and an entire stuffed cougar on a wall-mounted shelf. Every piece of furniture in the living room was upholstered with brown or black leather.
A crackling fire roared in a fireplace the size of a bathtub inside a hearth made of black rough-hewn rock that appeared to have been blasted out of a mountainside with dynamite.
“Take a seat,” Elias said. He sounded annoyed. “I’d offer you coffee, but I’m out. We’re all out.”
“Thanks,” Hughes said and eased himself in a brown leather recliner. It was softer and more comfortable than he expected. A lever on the side would have produced a place for Hughes to rest his feet, but using it seemed a little presumptuous.
Elias and Carter each took one of the couches.
“So,” Elias said to Carter. He didn’t say anything else. That was Carter’s cue to explain himself.
Carter told Elias about Hughes, that he’d driven all the way to Lander from Seattle with two friends, that they’d barely been in town for a day and one them was arrested already, apparently ratted out by the other, and that Hughes was interested in helping take down the mayor.
Elias stared at Hughes the entire time Carter spoke.
“Sound like you do a piss poor job choosing friends,” Elias said when Carter finished.
“Didn’t choose ’em,” Hughes said. “They were the only people I found after I left Seattle. Only ones that survived, anyway.”
Elias leaned forward and scrutinized Hughes with squinted eyes. “You ever kill anybody?”
Hughes couldn’t tell if Elias wished he’d say yes or say no. “Once,” Hughes said. “Not counting the infected.”
Elias rose from the couch and removed a bolt-action hunting rifle from the wall. The stock was made of wood like everything else in the house. He pointed it at Hughes’ head.
Hughes didn’t move. Neither did Elias’ hands.
“Who’d you kill and why’d you kill him? And you’d better tell me that the person you killed was a him.”
“It was a him,” Hughes said. “Name was Roland. I shot him in the back while he was running away.”
Elias stepped forward and leaned forward. The rifle was a good three feet closer to Hughes’ face now. About eight feet away, not close enough to bat it aside and take down the man holding it.
Carter did not move or speak. He looked like he was trying to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible. Hughes could tell he hadn’t expected any of this.
“He and his friends Lane and Bobby had taken me and my friends prisoner,” Hughes said. “They robbed us of everything, including our weapons, and were going to kill us.”
“How’d you shoot him in the back then?” Elias said.
“First, Bobby was bit. Roland beat him to death with a hammer.”
Elias lowered the rifle a fraction of an inch, perhaps without even realizing it. Hughes would be fine. He wasn’t worried. Elias wasn’t going to blow Hughes’ head off in his own living room. Hughes had had guns pulled on him before. No one ever pulled the trigger.
“Roland beat Bobby to death before he turned,” Hughes said. “While he was still conscious.”
“Jesus,” Carter said.
“You didn’t ask him about any of this stuff before you brought him to me?” Elias said, keeping his eyes locked on Hughes’ the entire time.
Hughes heard Carter gulp.
“One of my other friends stabbed Lane to death in a bathroom with a knife she took off Bobby after Roland beat him to death. Roland was the last asshole standing, so he ran. I got one of my guns back and shot him. I could have let him go, but he’d just victimize somebody else.”
Elias relaxed and pointed the barrel of his rifle down at the floor. He clicked on the safety, returned the gun to the wall and sat back down on the couch. “Okay.”
Carter blew out his breath.
“You know much about guns?” Elias said. “How well can you shoot?”
“I dropped Roland from a hundred yards,” Hughes said. “And that weapon you just stuck in my face is a C model Marlin 336. Takes 30-30 Winchester and 35 Remington cartridges. It was designed by L.L. Hepburn and T.R. Robinson and first introduced in 1948. Manufactured in New York and Kentucky by Remington Arms, which bought the original manufacture Marlin Firearms in 2010. Best deer rifle in North America.”
Elias just sat there and looked at Hughes for a while. Then he leaned back, took a deep breath and said, “okay” again.
Carter wiped his forehead.
“Carter tells me you have some kind of a secret weapon,” Hughes said. “Something Steele won’t see coming. You want to tell me about it?”
“We have two, actually,” Elias said.
20
Kyle locked up his room, bundled himself up in as many layers as possible, and stalked off toward downtown. He wasn’t interested in shopping. He didn’t need anything and didn’t have money anyway. He just had to get out of his room. Had to move. Had to be active. Had to do something—anything—to get his mind off what happened.
Sullen and heavy, he walked past the Indian jewelry shop, a used clothing store and a bank that would never be open again.
All Kyle wanted was a simple life in a small house in a safe and orderly place with a few friends and neighbors, and he wanted Annie in his life. That was it. He didn’t care about losing his loft condo in Portland. Couldn’t give any less of a shit about his old career in the tech industry and his stock options and his accumulation of stuff that he never needed in the first place. None of that crap ever made the least bit of difference.
What does a person need to be happy in this world? Some security, some food, some clothing, some shelter, some friends and family and maybe a little entertainment once in a while. That’s it. Anything more is just extra. Busting your ass seven days a week so you can accumulate more and better consumer products was no way to live. It was stupid, and Kyle didn’t miss it.
He’d lost his friends, though. Parker was out of his way, but was it worth it? If he also lost Annie and Hughes?
Before Lander, he had friends but no place to live. Now he had a place to live but no friends.
A bad trade.
He walked past the Wind River Bookstore, a furniture gallery and a vape shop.
He didn’t need a furniture store. He sure as hell didn’t need a vape shop. So he kept walking.
He stopped in his tracks when he came to a café advertising espresso.
It was the kind of coffeeshop that had been basically invented in the Pacific Northwest, and it was open. The giant windows had steamed up a bit, but he could see inside. Almost every seat in the place was taken. Everyone in there was clearly under the age of fifty and most appeared to be under the age of thirty.
One side of the café was furnished with dainty tables and hard-backed chairs while the other side was stocked with comfortable reading chairs and sofas. The walls were decorated with Indian-themed paintings with the artist’s name and hand-written price tags taped to the wall underneath. A magazine rack displayed a wide selection of Wyoming’s alternative publications. Customers ordered at a long coffee bar.
Kyle had spent much of his time in dozens of such places in Portland back in the old days. Once in a while he worked his computer programming job from home instead of the office, and he’d set up shop in cafés that looked exactly like this one. He supposed he did miss some things from his old life. Back then he still had friends. People knew him and cared about him and considered him a valuable and contributing member of society.
The door chimed when he opened it. A young barista with sideburns
and a sleeve of tattoos worked the counter.
“Hey, man,” the barista said.
“Hi,” Kyle said.
“I’m Freddy,” the barista said.
Kyle paused for a moment before introducing himself in kind. It felt awkward. No barista or bartender had ever told him their name just because Kyle stepped into an establishment for the first time. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“I’m Kyle. Do you actually have coffee?”
Freddy the barista looked a little dumbfounded. A young couple sitting at one of the tables turned their heads.
“I guess that means you don’t,” Kyle said.
“We have water,” Freddy said. He sounded bummed out now, like Kyle’s question had punctured a little fantasy they were all living out in their minds. Even though the café felt normal, it wasn’t. “You new in town?”
Kyle nodded.
So Freddy hadn’t known Kyle wasn’t from Lander when he introduced himself. He’d apparently just assumed Kyle was a local friend he hadn’t met yet.
Kyle registered with faint interest that he could make new friends in Lander. He didn’t care. He wanted his old friends. He had no idea where Hughes ran off to or if they’d ever even see each other again. He missed Annie so badly he ached. He’d even tolerate Parker’s company right now—at least the old cranky version of Parker before he turned and went crazy.
Hughes was probably right that the mayor wasn’t going to let Annie out of that hospital any time soon, but maybe they’d let Kyle visit her. She wasn’t in jail. He decided he should head over there.
“You want some water?” Freddy the barista said.
Kyle had no idea what he should say if they let him see her.
“Sure, I’ll have some water.”
He wasn’t ready to talk to her. What would she say if he told her he’d gotten Parker arrested? Parker had sworn an oath to protect her on their crazy-mad trip across the country, and she clearly had a bit of a soft spot for him. Kyle didn’t understand it, but that’s how it was. Maybe she was a better person. No, she was definitely a better person. He’d never live up to her expectations.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 18
