I cock my head, and blink, slowly. “Order and stability.”
Sylvia makes a dismissive noise. “That’s fine, and I’ve no doubt that you ladies will have no trouble instilling it, even with your leaders missing. But the Havens falling—that will need to be addressed, and quickly.”
I make a sigh. The damn hordes are being problematic. Not for the first time, I wish Sawyer had said something—anyfuckingthing—about the change of their behavior.
But he hadn’t.
Sometimes I think that the change is because we’re doing his work. Killing every Third Day, corralling the Firsts for the yearly sacrifices. We’re close to the end—we have to be. After twenty years, how many could possibly be left?
Sawyer said that spilling their blood would end our apocalypse. So it makes sense that the zombies would change, as we near the end.
I just don’t understand why the tides have swung to favor them. Why are they bringing more of us down with every passing day?
“Will you announce who you are?” I ask, keeping my doubts tucked away and focusing on the old woman who started all of this.
She gives me a bland smile, and I see Finn in her. How many times had I seen that look on his face, when I was dealing with him and when I watched him from a distance.
Finn O’Malley had been watched by the Order for years, since Omar became the Black High Priest. Whatever history was between them—and none of my people’s extensive searching had turned up that history—it was strong enough that even estranged, Omar reached from the Stronghold and put his people around Finn. It’s why we had never touched the First—Finn claimed her so thoroughly in 8 that attempting to snatch her would have been suicide or his murder, and no one was willing to challenge Omar over a pawn.
Funny. We all thought he was a pawn. Her too.
They fucking changed everything.
“No,” Holly drawls from where she’s lounging. “We’ll keep that tidbit to ourselves for a while. I think we should bring the Gray priests to 1. They’ll be able to validate what Sylvia says, after a few tests. And her people are walking talking evidence. So we ease them into it. But the first step will be to appoint a president and bring the Stronghold to heel. The Order will flounder without a strong hand.”
I smile, slowly. “And you think you are that strong hand.”
Beau shifts as Holly rises, pacing the length of the train car. She’s a pretty girl, if a little too hard for my personal taste—but I can see what about her attracted Omar. She’s lovely and unassuming, with a streak of ruthless practicality that makes her a perfect priestess, and loyalty in spades. I shake out the sleeves of my robes, and lean back, studying her. “Why did you kill him?”
She pales, and her hands twist together. I smile. “I know we had decided that he needed to die. I understand that you agreed to that. But I don’t understand how you could kill the man who saved your life and brought you into the Order. So tell me, why?”
“He was a zealot,” she says hoarsely. “And his belief that he was right was going to get more people killed. Nothing is worth that.” She smiles, a sick weak thing that sends a chill down my spine. “Something Omar taught me when I first took my vows to the Order. There is no place for zealots. They need to be put down like dogs. I always thought he was talking about everyone else—the idiots who believe that sacrificing the Firsts would end this fucking plague of the dead. People like you.”
Beau makes a low noise in his throat, and I go still.
She’s fucking armed, and she wants me dead. I can see it in her eyes, hot and hungry as she stares at me, and for the first time in years, I am afraid. Of this fucking child.
“But in the end, it wasn’t the religious zealots that were the real threat. It was him, and his insane belief that we could take the East and that it would fucking matter. I won’t claim a wasteland to satisfy the fucking pipe dream of an old man, and I sure as fuck won’t do it while the Havens fall and we hold the key to keeping them alive.”
There’s a beat of silence, and I wonder if she realizes—we are all zealots. We are all invested in a belief that defies logic and sense. And maybe that makes us dangerous and stupid. But maybe that’s all we’ve got.
I clear my throat, shoving that too dangerous thought down and smile coolly at the little priestess and Sylvia. “So how do you want to play this, ladies?”
Chapter 3.
A Sorrowful Homecoming
People like the normal. Even when their normal is really fucking horrible. For us—for America in the aftermath of the change, the norm was a government we had always had. A president.
A Buchman in the White House, even if that White House was in a converted prison in the mid-West.
1 was in mourning. The last Buchman was dead, and the last normal that predated the zombies was dead with him. Even if he was a shit president.
The presidential Cabinet was gathered in the empty white house that had sat still and empty since Kenny was snatched by Finn and Omar.
“How?” General Orwell asked, his voice the only thing breaking the thick silence in the room.
“O’Malley. You know there wasn’t much love lost between the president and O’Malley.”
“Finn was Kelsey’s best friend,” Sonny protests. “He would never have raised a hand against her brother.”
“Finn would kill anyone who stood between him and his First. Kelsey was dead. Nurrin wasn’t and he was utterly loyal to her. Kenny sold her to the Blood Priests,” Holly interjects, and their gaze swings to me. I smile, and shrug.
“He knew the risks of working with us.”
“The Order is given leave to operate within our borders because the sacrifice is offered freely. No one is killed against their will. If that’s change—“
“What?” I snap. “You’ll what? Our Black robes are half your standing army, and the people belong to the Order, not to a fucking outdated government who has ignored them to keep themselves fat and happy.”
They go still and stare at me, shock and outrage in their old gazes.
“The Blood Priestess might not have a lot of tack, but she has a good point,” Holly murmurs. “You all know me. You know I want what’s best for the Havens. It’s why I worked with you and Finn in the first place. It’s why I’m back. The Order fucked up in the past, and so did Kenny. But you need to realize that the only way we keep the Havens and our citizens whole is if we work together. You can’t afford to ignore the strength of the Order, and we can’t ignore the authority you have. We work together.”
That’s the sticking point. They don’t want to work together.
“How many have fallen since we went to the East?” Holly asks.
There’s a breath of silence. Then, “Three. 38, 15, and 12.”
“Fuck.” Holly breaths. “Any survivors?”
Silence is our answer and I feel my heart sink a little. How many thousands dead in those havens? How much stronger was the horde, with those dead to swell their numbers?
“We can’t stop them. We’ve tried. The horde—it’s like a force of nature. We can’t stop that.”
I glance at Holly, and she nods once. I shift. “We don’t need to stop them.”
Part 3
The Plague Bringer
Chapter 1.
The Dead that Haunt Us
Everyone thought the world changed when the dead rose and walked. That it was the end.
And it was, I suppose. I don’t know. The world is remarkably stubborn, and humanity has the tenacity of a cockroach—I think sometimes, that it would survive a nuclear holocaust.
Zombies, in the end wasn’t that bad. Dead wandering and haunting the living—it’s not that new a concept.
Some people reviled me. Most people, if I’m very honest. Even in the Holdout, where I was protected and respected, there were those who couldn’t understand why. I was the one who created Synthrix. I was the one who started the apocalypse.
But long before Emilie Milan died and rose, I was living
with the walking dead.
Sometimes I wish my brother had died when we were still children. There was a few close calls, when the demons he lived with chased him too hard. I found him twice—and both times, he ended up in therapy and rehab, and he came back a shell, but he came back.
I fought so hard to keep him with me, keep him sane. My living dead.
And now, my sons.
Pain is supposed to get less sharp. But losing Keifer has never dulled. Not even for a moment.
Neither has the stabbing pain of Finn and Josiah leaving me. All the years of believing Finn was dead—I close my eyes, and a smile turns my lips.
The dead walking has been our normal for twenty years, but I’ve been living with the dead for a long time. My entire life. Is it any wonder that I am the one who ensured that the entire world would live in my nightmare?
Chapter 2.
A Strange Sort of Government
The thing about the Holdout is that it was tiny. Even with the thousands we harbored, we were small. Intimate and insular, and so incredibly backwards.
Because after twenty years, there was only that. Things break down. Civilization breaks down.
But this. 1. I stare at it, and keeping my face blank while we drive through the busy streets. Trent, sitting next to me is less circumspect. “Shit, Doc. Did you ever think this shit was still out there?”
I glance at him, and he’s grinning, a wide happy smile that makes me laugh, softly.
Let him enjoy it. The price of this will smack us both soon. I’m just the only one to realize that.
The car bumps to a stop in front a small white house. A few soldiers are standing there, weapons held alertly in front of them. “Ma’am,” Trent murmurs, and I hide my smile.
He’s a good boy, but he’s still just that. Josiah was training him, but—my smile falls off and I smoother my sigh as I nod at him. “Let’s not keep the government waiting, Trent.”
He pushes the door open obediently, slipping out and adjusting his own rifle.
I know that move—the one that draws the soldiers attention to the obvious weapon. Focus on that, they might even miss the array of weapons he has hidden on him.
Josiah was training him, after all.
Holly steps out of the white house and the soldiers relax a little. The tiny priestess has surprised me, and that’s something I thought had ceased to happen years before.
“Are you very sure about this, ma’am?” she asks, and I can hear the tension in her voice. The worry.
“Do you know of another way to save them?” I ask calmly, stopping and staring at her.
Her features fall, and I nod once. There isn’t another way. The infected won’t stop coming, and even with the serum to stop the virus from mutating, I can’t turn off the nature of a zombie. They’ll feed, and if they can’t infect, the victims will die.
I shove that thought down, where it’s kept company by so many other thoughts I can’t be bothered with at the moment.
The government that rules the remains of the United States is nothing like the government that I saw. The one that #husband’s name# spent his life serving and protecting.
Tangled webs. That’s what took my little drug from my home and Keifer to the thing that would change the world. If I had stayed in my tiny hamlet and never gone to school, I wouldn’t have had the knowledge to save Keif. And it wouldn’t have dammed the whole world.
If I had stayed—
“Sylvia?” Holly asks, her voice pitched low. I’m standing in the hallway, too still and silent.
“Sorry,” I murmur, forcing myself into to motion.
The cabinet is made of four men. A grey haired general, a white toothed politician, and—
“What the hell?” he breathes, and I go still. Of course. Even here. A lifetime later, even at the end of the world, I will be confronted by my past. “Sylvia?”
There is a woman in the room, an older woman with a neat bun of hair at the back of her head, and she recoils, her entire body jerking away from me.
“Hello, Luke,” I murmur, and step into the room.
He stares for a long enough moment that I feel the first stirring of panic, and I bite on it, clenching my hands until my nails dig into my palms. “I survived. Obviously. It’s complicated.”
“The Priestess informed us,” he says, dazed, and my gaze darts to Holly. “But I didn’t believe her. It isn’t possible.”
I raise an eyebrow. “That I am standing here says that it is very possible.”
“Where is Finn?”
I twist to look at the woman, at her wide dark eyes and the subtle tremble in her hands. “Who are you?”
Her gaze goes flinty. “The woman who raised him, when you didn’t.”
I flinch, and Holly shifts. Her voice is sharp, “Claire!”
“Where the hell is he?” Claire demands, and I understand, suddenly and almost painfully.
Finn was loved. Tears spring to my eyes, and I blink, shoving them down. Why did I assume that he wouldn’t be? That the only one to grieve his leaving would be me? I shake my head, “Finn and Nurrin left the Holdout. Where they were going wasn’t clear—somewhere where they could both find a way to live without his past.”
Claire’s eyes go wide but she doesn’t say anything further, just sags back against her chair.
“What are you doing here?” the politician says. I eye him and he flushes. “Sonny Kamen. I was Kenny’s VP.”
“So you’re in charge, now that he’s gone. What are you doing to stop the horde? Your job is to protect the Havens. How do you plan on doing that?”
There is a beat of silence, and then Claire laughs. “You bastards should have listened to O’Malley when he was still hear to beat your stupidity down.”
“What he suggested is impossible. We can’t abandon the Havens. They’re the only protection we have.”
I laugh, a soft noise. “They aren’t any protection at all,” I say.
Silence sifts through the room, and I grit my teeth. “If the walls were actually a protection, you wouldn’t be losing havens. But you are. We’ve held the Holdout in the East with less than five deaths a year for the better part of twenty years. Even when you can hold your walls, what kind of casualty rate do you have?”
Silence greets me, and I nod once. “You can’t hide behind the Walls, gentlemen. Luke, correct me if I’m wrong, but you were never meant to.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sonny snaps.
Holly is staring at the former Chief of Staff. Once upon a time, in a different life, I sat across from him as my husband flanked me and we talked about life with the most powerful men in the world. Once upon a time, we thought we were untouchable—they thought it.
We were all wrong.
“Is that true?” Holly asks quietly.
There’s a breath of hesitation. “We planned on using them for a staging ground. We needed to evac the East and we needed to give them a safe place to go. We didn’t have a choice—if we didn’t offer somewhere for them to go, they would never leave. It would have been a bloodbath—even more than it already was. We would have lost everyone.”
“Finish,” I murmur, and he glares at me, furiously. I stare back, utterly serene. “Tell them the truth.”
He sighs, and there is a world of defeat in that noise. “It wasn’t going to be a long term solution. We would take care of the zombies, the army would put down the plague and the doctors would find a cure, and we would go back to the world we had always known.”
“Except that we didn’t win the East and they never found a cure.” Sonny says bitterly. “And you let us rot behind the walls.”
“The Havens held against the infected for twenty years,” Holts snaps. “We were scrambling, the army was falling, we’d lost millions to the infection and we finally did something that the American people were happy with. They didn’t even think about the fact that our solution was putting them behind prison walls—literally for most of the havens. They
were happy to have anything between them and the infected. And it was easier to let what was working keep working. Why fix something that wasn’t broken?”
“Because it was,” I snap. “The whole world was broken and you had one job. One. And you fucking failed.”
“You don’t get to talk to me about failing the world,” Holts whispers, his face ghostly pale. “Not you, Sylvia. You fucking created this.”
“And you were all too happy to take it when you thought it was a miracle cure,” I say bitterly. “My son was the only one with any sense at all. He’s right. Get your people out of the Havens. We aren’t meant to live behind walls our whole life.”
“And when the infected come?”
I shrug. “Spread your people out. Arm them and put them in areas that provide natural defenses, while still allowing you to live. Stop living in fear, waiting to die.”
I shift, and drop a small glass vial on the table. “You have two important tools that you can use, and if you’re smart and stop living afraid, you can win.”
“We can kill the infection?”
I laugh, because even now, even here, they still think that this is the answer. I lean forward and tap the vial. “That’s the only cure you’ll ever find.”
There is a long moment of silence, and I stand. “I created this virus. I know, better than anyone, how it works and how to treat it. There isn’t a cure. The infected aren’t going to stop. But this—it will stop the virus from mutating in you.”
“What does that mean?” Claire asks, softly.
I smile, sadly. “It means a bite isn’t a death sentence. This means that you have the upper hand. Use it.”
Chapter 3.
The Edge of the World
The guard house is small. Tiny, really. A kind of cramped space only a child would love, or a soldier would use.
Holly stands in the doorway as I turn a tight circle, and I can feel her gaze on me. “Has it been changed at all?”
The World Without End [Box Set] Page 62
