She got away, too, because the one that attacked her turned its attention to the man on his back on the sidewalk, blood gushing from the open wound in his neck, his rifle now in the grass just out of reach.
So the man died and the woman got away. Soon enough, she’d turn and attack somebody else.
Thus the number of infected in Lander increased by one at the precise moment the number of armed men in Lander decreased by one.
It happened throughout the city, repeatedly, all afternoon. Hughes didn’t have to step outside even once to know what was happening, nor did he need to open the curtains again. His ears told him all he needed to know.
He couldn’t do anything about it either. All he could do—and all he wanted to do—was lay low, sit tight and wait for Nash to come home.
The prison stank of body odor and piss. Parker could hardly tell that the sun was up outside. Only tiny squares of light the size of a person’s outstretched hand at the back of each cell lit up the common area. The temperature was down too. The crowded cellblock must have reached at least 90 degrees when the power, lights and heat were on, but now that they were all off, the air had plunged to room temperature.
It didn’t help much with the smell, though. Parker’s own armpits reeked. He wanted to strip and take a “bath” in the sink in his cell, but nobody had dared to open the faucets yet.
They were about to, though. No one had drank so much as a drop of water for at least 36 hours.
Sam Beckett, Lander’s chief of police, held court in the common area. He stood with his back to the locked and only exit leading out of the cellblock and into the hallway that had been abandoned by the guards two nights earlier. Two of his deputies flanked him. Hundreds of prisoners stood crammed together as if they were on the subway. Some sat on the steel tables and benches bolted into the concrete. A few remained in the cells facing the common area on both the main level and the mezzanine level. A few dozen sat on the floor of the mezzanine with their legs dangling in the air above the common area.
Parker sat on the mezzanine floor next to his cell mate, Diaz. Two of his other cell mates, Logan and Bentley, stood behind him. He caught sight of Betty the therapist down below leaning against the far-left wall next to Terry, the Search and Rescue guy who’d told Parker about the stages of death by dehydration the day before. The woman with defiant eyes—Parker thought he’d heard someone call her Charlene—stood at the top of the stairs facing Chief Beckett with her arms crossed.
Parker’s mouth and throat were dry and his tongue was a little bit swollen. He felt a vague feeling of illness throughout his body, almost as if he was coming down with something, though he knew he wasn’t sick. His insides were just parched.
“Your attention, please!” said Chief Beckett, and a hush fell over the cellblock. He was comfortable with authority, and everyone in the prison—criminal and civilian alike—had long gotten used to doing what the man said.
“We all want some water,” Beckett said. A murmur of assent rose from the common area.
“You’re damn right,” said Charlene, the woman with defiant eyes. She glowered at Beckett like he was her enemy.
Parker glanced down below and made eye contact with Terry, the Search and Rescue guy. Terry nodded.
“We’re all thirsty,” Beckett said, “but we need to wait.”
“For how long?” Charlene said and glowered at him.
“Ma’am,” Beckett said. “I’m not finished speaking.”
Charlene leaned back against the wall at the top of the stairs and kept her arms crossed. Her entire body, not just her eyes, was defiant.
“Let’s wait until tomorrow morning, at least,” Beckett said. “We’re all uncomfortable, but another 18 hours isn’t going to kill anybody.”
Most of them were halfway dead, though, Parker thought. Nobody felt halfway dead, but the second day-and-a-half without water was going to be a lot more brutal than the first day-and-a-half.
“Somebody is going to come back here eventually,” Beckett said. “If the old guards aren’t coming back, someone else will replace them.”
“They’re dead!” Charlene shouted.
“Hear, hear!” said a man Parker didn’t know.
Parker hoped the man and Charlene were right. If the guards were all dead, there was more reason to hope he and everyone else would get out of there one way or another.
“If that’s true, ma’am,” Beckett said to Charlene, “and no one replaces them, our friends and family members will come down here and open this place up.”
“Where the hell are they, then?” she said.
“Ma’am,” Beckett said. No change in his facial expression. As a police officer he had to be used to dealing with angry and yelling people.
“Don’t ma’am me,” Charlene said.
“Shut up, Charlene,” a woman standing next to Charlene said. Parker didn’t know her.
“Ma’am,” Beckett said. “We don’t know what’s going on out there, and people on the outside might not know either. Give it some time. No one’s dying of thirst in two days.”
Parker exchanged knowing glances again with Terry, the Search and Rescue guy. People would start dying, and fast, after three days.
“We drank the tap water before and none of us got infected,” a man in the common area said.
“We don’t know how long it’s been contaminated,” Beckett said.
We don’t know for sure that it is contaminated, Parker thought.
“You don’t know that it is contaminated,” Charlene said.
“You’re right, we don’t,” Beckett said.
Diaz nudged Parker’s shoulder and said, “This is it.”
“This is what?” Parker said in a low voice.
“This is how they get rid of us!” Diaz said, louder this time so the entire cellblock could hear. “They don’t want to come in here and shoot us, they don’t want to burn the place down because they’ll probably need it again, and starving us to death takes too long.”
“Exactly!” Charlene said. “They’re killing us in here by telling us we can’t drink the water and then leaving us to die.”
Beckett sighed and exchanged glances with his deputies.
“You think the gunfire we heard two nights ago was staged?” said a woman down in the common area. “It lasted all night.”
“And there were more gunshots this morning,” another woman said. “Something is going on.”
“Enough!” Beckett said, clearly frustrated now. “If you want to drink out of the tap, my men and I can’t stop you. But you know what’ll happen if you get sick. And you know what we’ll have to do about it.”
He paused and let that sink in. Anyone who got sick would have to be killed, and there were no weapons of any kind on this side of the prison walls. Parker shuddered. It would be beyond brutal. So of course Beckett wanted everyone to stay off the water. He and his men would have to do the grim deed, and there’d be no way to clean up the mess or bury the bodies.
“So I’m asking you,” Beckett said, “please, for your sake and for ours, just wait until tomorrow morning and see if this works itself out.”
Kyle was in the bathroom in his motel room and rubbing toothpaste around in his mouth with his finger when he heard gunshots. He spit the toothpaste into the sink and listened.
And heard no return fire.
It wasn’t a fight then. Just an incident.
He put on his jacket and stepped outside into the parking lot.
His neighbor Andy opened his own door and stepped out at the same time. It was still relatively warm outside.
The two men looked at each other.
“I’m gonna go check it out,” Kyle said. The shots had sounded a good half-mile away at the least.
“I’ll come with you,” Andy said.
Kyle grabbed the crowbar from his room and slipped it under his jacket. He didn’t want to look like some kind of street thug prowling around Lander with a piece of iron in his hand. He wish
ed he had a gun, but Hughes had taken the Suburban with all the firearms inside.
Andy took his hammer with him and also concealed it under his jacket. He looked terrible. His hair was a mess and he hadn’t shaved, nor had he showered in almost a week. Neither had Kyle. They didn’t dare. Not if the water wasn’t safe. They couldn’t even clean themselves with a wet towel anymore. If Andy hadn’t saved up some bottles of water, they’d both be severely dehydrated.
They locked up their rooms and headed out.
Main Street was dead. Kyle saw no cars, no bicycles and no pedestrians. He dry swallowed. His tongue felt swollen. He wasn’t drinking enough. He only had five small bottles of water left, and they had to last. He wondered how many people in Lander hadn’t thought ahead like Andy, and how many people were drinking out of the tap.
Probably a lot.
Lander felt surreal. No one but he and Andy appeared to be out and about. Kyle had expected to hear some kind of commotion after the gunfire, but he heard no more sound than if he’d stepped out at four o’clock in the morning.
Lander sounded as quiet as all the dead towns and cities he’d passed through on his way to Wyoming. Nothing stirred. Everybody was hiding. Kyle heard no automobiles, no footsteps, no voices, no distant hum of activity.
The late morning light cast an eerie glow through a thin cloud layer high up in the stratosphere. The sun cast no shadow and their footsteps made no echo. Kyle’s mouth tasted metallic and he detected a faint whiff of smoke.
Glass crunched under Kyle’s and Andy’s boots when they reached downtown just up Main Street from the motel. More than half the windows along that part of the street had been shot out. None of the businesses even pretended to be open.
“You’re not working today?” Kyle said.
Andy shook his head. “Nobody’s working today.”
“How come?”
“Business as usual is pretty much finished, wouldn’t you say?”
“What have you heard?”
“A lot of rumors, mostly. What have you heard?”
“I haven’t heard anything. I don’t have a job and I hardly know anyone.”
“No one knows where the mayor is,” Andy said, “the head of the militia is dead along with half of his men, the power is apparently out on purpose, and it’s supposedly the fault of some asshole who lives outside town who may or may not even be a real person. I’d never heard of this guy before, and now he’s attacking our town?”
”So you’re not going to work?” Kyle said.
“Nobody except the hunting crew is going to work,” Andy said. “I don’t even know who’s in charge. Doesn’t look to me like anybody’s in charge.”
“You planning on going back to work?”
“Tomorrow,” Andy said. “We don’t need to know where the mayor is to do our jobs. Mayor doesn’t even need to be alive. Boss just told everyone to take two days.”
Kyle and Andy passed in front of a closed restaurant advertising burgers and billiards. God, what Kyle would give for a cheeseburger, a pretty young bartender, a frosty mug of beer, the crack of billiard balls and some tunes on the jukebox.
“You like mountains?” Andy said.
“Sure,” Kyle said. He loved mountains, actually. He used to go hiking almost every weekend during the summer, even on the rare summer days when it rained. He occasionally got snowed on as early as September when he went high enough on Mount Hood and Mount Rainier.
“I hate them,” Andy said.
“You hate mountains?” Kyle said.
“My sister disappeared in the Wind Rivers when she was a teenager.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No one ever found her. I haven’t been up there since. I don’t want to be the one to find her, you know? The animals probably got to her, but still. I’ve always been afraid that I’d run across a pile of bones and wonder if they were hers.”
Kyle said nothing.
“She’s lucky,” Andy said.
“How so?”
“She missed all this. She probably died alone, freezing and terrified, but at least she missed this.”
Kyle heard voices up ahead and on the right past the bank, perhaps at the site of the shooting. He and Andy made a right.
It wasn’t the site of a shooting. A dozen or so neighbors gathered around a propane barbecue in somebody’s front yard. The grill was a small tailgate model. It sat low on the grass instead of high up on legs.
Kyle counted seven men and five women. No children. They were boiling water in pots. None of them seemed to notice him and Andy coming.
“Morning,” Kyle said.
Heads turned. Some of the men nodded and raised their eyebrows in silent greeting.
“Hey,” one of the women said.
“Got some extra propane tanks,” one of the men said, apparently the grill’s proud owner. “You guys have some bottles, bring ‘em over.”
“You all heard the shots a couple of minutes ago?” Andy said.
The grill man shrugged. Nobody else reacted. Two single gun shots weren’t a big deal anymore.
“Ain’t no thing,” the man said, “long as they’re not in front of my house. They were over that way.” He waved down the street like he was swatting a mosquito away. “Go get some bottles.”
“You’ll have to wait your turn,” a woman said.
Kyle looked at Andy. Andy nodded.
“Okay,” Kyle said. “We’ll come back with some bottles and we’ll be happy to wait and help out.”
“You have any propane?” the woman said.
“Angie,” the man said, “if they had any propane, they wouldn’t need ours.”
Angie—apparently the grill man’s wife—looked pained. More and more people were using up her propane.
“Thanks,” Kyle said. “We’ll be back.”
He and Andy walked back to Main.
They had enough to water to last two more days, and if they could fill up their empties they’d have enough to last four days.
Four days would be more than enough because one of two things would happen by then. Lander would get the power back on and Kyle could boil water again in the microwave. Or it would be clear as day that the power was out permanently, staying in Lander was no longer viable and Kyle would have to leave whether or not he found Annie and Hughes.
There was a real chance the power wasn’t coming back on. It had already been off for a day and a half. No one knew where the mayor was or even if he was still alive. Half of Steele’s men were dead, and Kyle had barely seen hide nor hair of the other half.
An SUV cruised Main in the direction of the motel. Steele’s men weren’t entirely down and out yet.
The driver slammed on the brakes and screeched to a stop at an intersection three blocks ahead.
Kyle saw no reason for it to stop. There was no other traffic and no pedestrians in the road.
Andy gripped his elbow. “Something’s up.”
Kyle heard no sound but the SUV’s idling engine. It just sat there in the street. The driver could be doing anything—arguing with his passenger, checking a map or picking a lit cigarette up off the floor—but judging by the way he’d stopped, he’d almost certainly seen something down the residential side street.
Andy slid the hammer out of his jacket and wielded it.
Kyle didn’t want to go there just yet, but he reached under his jacket and wrapped his fingers around the handle of his crowbar. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s just be careful.”
As soon as they resumed walking, a young woman with long purple hair ran at full speed from the residential side street into the SUV’s driver side door.
Kyle froze. Andy gasped.
At first, the SUV didn’t move. The young woman with purple hair growled like a pit bull and hurled herself at the door again. She hadn’t yet seen Kyle or Andy.
Kyle did not move. He did not make a sound.
The driver pulled forward and cranked the wheel hard, driving in a tight circle around
the intersection until the woman with the purple hair faced the passenger side door.
The passenger window powered down and a rifle barrel emerged horizontally. The woman growled again and an explosion of gunfire nearly took her arm off.
She screamed. Instead of falling to the ground, she hurled herself yet again at the SUV like a rabid animal. She left a gory red wet splotch on the door panel.
The driver hit the gas again.
The SUV spun again, this time until the woman faced the grill, and the driver ran into and over her.
She went down hard and her head smacked the pavement as she disappeared under the wheels and the chassis. She’d bleed out before getting up again, but the driver ran over her a couple of times to be sure.
33
Frank Nash fortified Juliette’s house.
He yanked the curtains closed, shoved the couch in front of the front door, barricaded the back with a dresser from Juliette’s bedroom and opened the trapdoor into the attic so he and Annie could climb to relative safety if the house was breached.
There was nothing else he could do.
He wanted to board up the windows, but there was no wood in his house or in Juliette’s. Even if he did have boards, hammering would just attract the infected.
The tap water was much more of a biohazard now that it used to be. Nash no longer had any doubt whatsoever that it spread the infection. The instant the boil-water order went through, Lander stopped seeing new cases, and 36 hours after the power went out, new cases were popping up everywhere.
There must have been a dozen just in his neighborhood.
Brothers Mason and Wyatt Gunner, who’d butchered Nash’s neighbor Robert like a pair of wild animals right in front of his house. Olivia Colton. She had a gruesome bite mark right on the side of her face and ran screaming down the street and attacked Bill Ryker as he tried to get into his car. Owen Camden jumped through his own front window and out on to his lawn. He nearly sliced off one of his ears, but it hardly slowed him down. He prowled the street in front of Nash’s house for a good twenty minutes before wandering off. Nash had seen Scarlett Hadley and Morgan Dawson out there, too, along with Mrs. Simmons from around the corner and a few more people Nash didn’t know personally. Olivia, Scarlett and Morgan had clearly been bit, but near as he could tell, the others had been turned by something else—and that something else was almost surely the tap water.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 31
