“What do you mean?”
“Back in the world,” the official said. “Before everything went to hell.”
“I did a few things,” Tom said. “What do you need? I can drive a truck. Hunt. Fish.”
Rose made a note on her form. Tom watched her close, though he also tried not giving it away.
“Is that what you’re doing, rebuilding America?” he asked. “I saw the tank.”
“Just making a start with Columbus,” she said. “The tank was here when we got here. Don’t tell anyone it doesn’t move.”
Rose sniggered and Archie returned from his duties giving Tom a dubious kind of scrutiny.
“You know, I noticed something about you, Mr Vanicek,” the guy said. “Or can I call you Tom?”
“Sure, Archie.”
“You’re big,” Archie said. “I don’t mean that in a flattering way, though you can take it that way if you want, handsome. You’ve still got good muscle mass. Your kids are in good health, too. You can see we have a sick bay out there?”
“Yeah.”
“We had a group through here this morning,” Archie said. “They’re out waiting for transport now, half-starved. They spent two years in a human abattoir.”
The last detail caught in Tom’s throat with surprise. He suspected Archie was talking about Walter’s group from the night before.
“A human . . . abattoir?”
Archie made a deliberately queenly turn, hands clasped together and fingers under his chin as he kept scrutinizing the new arrivals like they might get voted off the island any minute.
“What did you do for micronutrients?” Archie asked. “Scurvy, things like that?”
“Early on, there was a vegetable garden,” Tom said. “Later, you know, on the road, we scrounged vitamin supplements.”
“And your food supply?” Archie said. “Plenty of protein. Fresh kills?”
“Told you I could hunt,” Tom agreed. “My father taught me when I was young.”
Archie mused on the answer while Rose continued adding to the Vanicek dossier.
“We have a standard battery of questions, Tom,” Rose said and gave a bright smile she couldn’t really pull off. “But in the interests of efficiency, it really only boils down to two things.”
“I’m listening.”
“Have you killed any people? Living ones,” Rose said and waited with her pen.
Tom hesitated, considering his options while knowing delay looked like guilt.
“Yes.”
Rose made a note and continued on with no obvious reaction.
“And have you committed any actions during the Emergency you believe should be subject to further investigation?”
“No.”
Sans pause, that time.
Rose handed the clipboard to Archie like he was her assistant, but Archie just tucked her board under his own folder and started writing notes.
“You never answered my question about your occupation, Tom,” he said. “I get in trouble if I leave anything blank.”
Archie made a mock sad-face and then relished waiting for Tom’s reply.
“Everyone in Columbus has work, Mr Vanicek,” Rose said and sucked in a breath, nonsensically choosing that moment to check the ample waistline on her coveralls. “There’s no free rides in the future we’re trying to build.”
“We’re not looking for handouts,” Tom said. “Put me down as a hunter.”
They ignored the vague answer.
“What do you think, Archie?” she said. “I’m thinking Foragers.”
“He’d be good for that,” Archie agreed.
“OK,” Rose said, and that seemed to settle it.
“What about my kids?” Tom asked. “What are the arrangements around housing?”
“You’ll get to all that,” Rose said. “We’re just the welcome party.”
“Aren’t we welcoming, Tom?” Archie asked.
He shot Tom another look designed to challenge him, and when that failed, threw in a fey, but sleazy wink.
“Now, if you can empty out your pockets and leave your bags here,” Rose said, “we have to go through everything, look for biohazards, and remove contraband while you get your medical.”
Tom was still absorbing the information when he took in Archie’s wry smile.
“What else?” Tom asked.
“First, we have to tag you.”
*
ROSE COLLECTED A dish full of blue plastic strips while the guards eyed Tom as if to say this was the point they usually encountered problems.
Understandably.
Tom stood dumbly flicking through his options, eyes on the zip ties, conscious of his children waiting to take their cue amid the fast-flowing increase in general anxiety around them – and followed just as quickly by the inevitability of Tom’s surrender.
“This is really necessary?”
“Necessary and mandatory,” Rose said.
“You wear your tag until an official from Administration cuts it off,” Archie said.
He did a bad job keeping the bemusement from his voice, smothering his bureaucratic joy at their distress. Tom abandoned any appeal to sympathy, pride alone tightening his face back into its customary mask. Lilianna rested fingertips on his arm. Drake motioned for him to lift his wrist.
“You have ‘officials’ already, huh?” he said.
Neither of the self-styled officials took his bait.
“It’s a big city, Mr Vanicek,” Drake said. “At least by standards now. Tags are a necessary evil. Just like the Curfew.”
“Are they color-coded –?”
“Everything’ll be explained,” Rose said. “Please put out your arm.”
She drew a zip tie and passed the container for Archie to hold.
“Colors are just to help co-ordinate our records,” Drake said like it was her job to soothe him. “You want to get your things back, right?”
“You don’t need to tag us,” Tom said.
“The others don’t like it either,” Rose said.
She didn’t do much to hide her impatience.
“You’ll change your mind after a shower and a hot meal,” she said. “Your wrist. Now, please.”
Tom slowly lifted his left hand and met her eyes.
“How long until it comes off?”
The question stayed in the air as Tom not-quite complied with the order, and the others neither wanted to keep explaining nor force it on him.
“It depends,” Archie said.
“On you,” his partner added.
Tom took one of those breaths that were also a lot like swallowing a turd. He sniffed, liking it not one bit, nor telling his kids to do the same.
He thrust out his arm and pulled back the sleeve in the one quick reluctant motion.
*
LILIANNA WAS ON him the moment they stepped out of the tent, Drake and Loxley in tow, but allowing Tom a moment’s privacy.
“This doesn’t feel right, dad.”
“Dad,” Luke said too, not adding anything else except threatening tears.
“I don’t like it either,” Tom said. “For now, we have to play by their rules.”
“Why didn’t you tell them what you used to do?” Lila asked.
“It’s not important.”
“But there’s a newspaper in the City,” his daughter said. “They said everyone has to work.”
“I’ll work,” Tom said. “You too, probably.”
“What about me?” Lucas asked.
Lila wasn’t to be deterred, cutting over her brother.
“A newspaper sounds better than foraging, whatever they mean by that,” she said.
“I left that work before everything happened,” Tom told her. “Years before. I don’t want to go back.”
“But it’s not TV, dad.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“You never even told us why you quit.”
“You were still little,” he answered. “Then it didn’t matter. N
ow, it really doesn’t. It’s nothing.”
Tom threw a half-assed smile at the equally terse Drake hovering just out of easy listening distance. The woman motioned with an open hand, a by-your-leave sarcasm gesturing across to the medical tent. Tom glanced in at the other survivors, maybe a dozen people laid out in the adjacent pavilion. Half were hooked up to IV drips, too weak as yet even to make the next step.
Tom rubbed his wrist where the blue tag chafed, glancing briefly at the same tags on his children’s wrists and pondering their composure.
“They’re looking after those people,” he said quietly to his kids. “They’re trying to help.”
“I want to give this a chance too,” Lila said. “But this is freaking me out a little. I feel like a prisoner.”
She held out her own blue-tagged wrist. Tom stared at it ineptly, ashamed somehow. The silence paused their momentum and Drake came to a halt with an annoyed grunt.
Tom kept his cool, irritation surging through him in a burst he had to suppress.
“Listen, my kids and I have a lot of questions,” he said to her and the other sentry.
“Good,” Drake replied. “Then buckle up.”
*
THERE WAS A television and a portable DVD player rigged to a battery pack, six more outcasts like Tom and his family already gathered around. An astonishingly good-looking doctor and her two assistants stood off to one side consulting in murmurs, a movie villain scar running down one side of the doctor’s face as she glanced their way. Her left eye was frosted white beneath her glasses, lending her a sinister gaze. Tom nodded to her, ducking his head as he ushered Lucas and Lilianna ahead of him as a single gunshot sounded close enough that most the newcomers flinched. Distress was etched into their dirty faces like part of their native habitat – or perhaps because they were out of it, within the unaccustomed safety of the checkpoint.
The two nurses moved to block the Vanicek siblings, drawn to the TV like a natural lure. Something a lot like an amateur infomercial started playing and the small crowd around it hushed each other, men, women and children alike hungry for the novelty as much as any news.
“The show’s on loop,” one of the nurses said. “You’ll get to see it, kids.”
“Medicals first,” her partner added.
The women nodded to Tom that he was free to go.
“You can do me first, let the kids watch TV?” he said to them. “Might need the two of you to hold me down, huh?”
He tried to make it sound like a joke, but it fell flat instead. The older nurse readjusted her false teeth, but the doctor swept between them as if by silent appeal, inspecting Vanicek through her glasses like an insect worthy to be pinned.
Drake handed the one-eyed doctor a clipboard.
“We can do Mr Vanicek first, Cindy,” the scarred woman said. “I doubt you’ll need to put him over your knee like you did with Mr Devereaux earlier.”
The two nurses bristled and Tom held up his hands as if to show he wasn’t armed.
“Just a joke, folks.”
“We’ve seen a lot of damaged people come through here,” the doctor said like the act of speech cost her something. “We like to joke around when we’re behind City walls.”
“Gotcha.”
Tom made a hand signal and his worried children abandoned their cares, hurrying to the television and the man’s voice warbling over the silhouettes of the other watchers, an overview of the project in Columbus.
“With our growing City now home to more than forty thousand individuals, there’s a few rules for those choosing to accept our protection and become Citizens in this great endeavor. . . .”
“It’s fifty thousand now,” Drake said.
“And climbing,” the other nurse said.
Tom felt like he should say something, but the words failed him, social vertigo making the room spin. And then he saw the doctor’s fine eyebrow raised at him.
“When you’re ready, Mr Vanicek.”
*
THE MEDICAL WAS basic, though they stripped him down to his disgraceful shorts and the nurses checked him over with pen lights – and then they asked him to take off his pants, bend over and cough.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, Mr Vanicek,” the doctor said. “We don’t have the luxury of offending anyone’s sensibilities – if you have any left.”
“Turns out I have a few,” he said.
“On with it, handsome,” the nurse Cindy said.
Tom shot a look at Drake sniggering and probably looking forward to the show. Her young sidekick had his eyes on the TV, as transfixed as Tom’s children. It played images of crowded City streets, lots of shanty structures, the old wide avenues of some portion of Columbus cluttered now despite the lack of cars.
Tom shucked his shorts down and did as instructed. It was mercifully quick, one of the nurses crouching down to shine a light up there. Then he rebriefed.
“You’re not doing that to my kids, huh?”
“There’s a screen,” the unnamed doctor said.
“Now you tell me.”
The doctor met his eyes with a snort of dry amusement.
“We’re not animals, Mr Vanicek.”
“Funny,” Tom said. “I didn’t catch your name, but I prefer you calling me Tom.”
The doctor smiled – mock smiled, maybe – and declined the implicit request.
“You’ve got a clean bill of health, Tom,” she said and motioned to the TV. “Enjoy the show.”
He turned to the screen without otherwise moving. The doctor stood in her pose, one good eye watching him over the rim of her glasses.
“You look like you’re not sure if you want to be here, Mr Vanicek.”
“I don’t like being tagged,” he said. “Remember Auschwitz?”
He showed the blue zip tie as if that were necessary. The doctor gave off little other than a sort of clinical interest.
“What brought you here then?” she asked. “What made you come?”
“My children,” he said without hesitation. “And the chance to be . . . normal again, who wouldn’t want that?”
“A proven survivor used to self-reliance.”
Tom acted as if taken aback by the comment. They made eye contact and he broke it straight away, just another surprise for him in a day already full of them.
“What assignment did they give you, if they gave you one yet?”
Tom motioned to the clipboard the doctor now held.
“It’s on there,” he said. “Foraging, whatever that is.”
“That’s a good starting place if you don’t mind physical work.”
“Unarmed?”
“Public Safety draws from the Foragers,” the doctor said. “Once they clip your tag, that is.”
Tom’s fingers continued unconsciously massaging his wrist as if he had a wound.
“Dad?” Lucas called.
“Your turn, kiddo,” his father said. “Go with the doctor. She’s OK.”
And then Tom met the woman’s gaze, nodded once, and joined the crowd.
*
THE CLIP WAS only ten minutes long, most of it shot on old film stock as far as Tom could tell. He joined Lilianna and Lucas in time for the third repeat, all of the other newcomers except for a freaked-out-looking dude with an afro making no sign of moving anywhere fast.
The narrator’s voice was old school, like someone who knew what they were doing. The camera guy maybe not so much. Some of the footage looked out of focus until Tom realized the lens had seen better days too. Other frames – panning shots of a market place lit up with Christmas lights, daytime shots of men working on a solar array, more images of men and women venturing into grimy places, and then cuts to beleaguered-looking Citizens bottling running water – were better quality, some of it maybe video transferred in the editing process by unknown means. Tom was pretty sure some was taken on an iPhone, the idea sending his imagination about the City into overdrive
.
“When international airlines first shut down,” the voiceover man said, “a core group of early founders were part of the military response, operating out of the City’s Rickenbacker Air Force Base. After trials and ordeals of their own – and as the weeks turned to months, and the relief efforts into a holding pattern – the City’s founders fortified themselves and dug in during the first four long hard years of the Emergency.”
The screen switched to a series of still images, instamatic photographs of the early days, or just headshots clipped from old albums showing serious-looking military personnel as the voiceover played on.
“Through trial and error, and combining their expertise, the early founders of the City – those we call the First Citizens – kept more than three hundred survivors alive, and brought in two hundred more from the surrounding areas in the first weeks after contact with the Government was lost,” the narrator said.
“They weren’t big numbers. In those early days, many were lost. We have all lost someone. Many someones. At first, it was just enough to survive. If you are watching these images now, you understand that only too well.”
The photos now showed other moments captured during that first year, images of grief and madness conjured with a surprising ruthlessness that startled Tom, he and his children taking in the raw and unedited scenes of dramatic interventions, traumatic surgery, almost artistic portraits of those unfamiliar military figures united in their peril. The camera returned for a panoramic sweep of the Airbase cemetery, improvised along one stretch of runway, distant fencing peopled with the risen dead. However brutal and roughly-made, the infomercial exorcised any thoughts about television. This was its demented, Fury-driven step-sibling. Tom felt Lucas squeezing into him and he took his daughter’s hand, unable to read her mesmerized expression side-on.
“The cause of the Emergency remains unknown,” the voiceover said.
“Undeniably, numbers among the Fury have greatly reduced in the past year. While all living people remain vulnerable to whatever caused this . . . disease . . . this aberration . . . last year, at the end of Year 4, it was decided to undertake an ambitious effort to re-secure a portion of the City for habitation.
After the Apocalypse Book 1 Resurrection: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 3
