by David Achord
I caught Parvis frowning. That seemed odd, or maybe I was simply reading too much into it. He focused on whatever he had on his laptop and seemed lost in thoughts. It was a long, uncomfortable silence before he spoke.
“Are you going to?”
I looked directly at him. “Eventually, it’ll have to be done, right?”
“Yes, it will,” he said quietly.
I stood and stretched. “Okay, I’m going to go visit Bret and then I have rat patrol.”
“Bret?” Parvis asked.
“Bret Conway,” I said. “After the surgery, he picked up an infection and your sweetie put him back in the hospital.”
Parvis nodded. “Oh, yes. Tell him hello,” I said.
“Sure,” I said and stood.
Bret was in the same room I’d been in years ago. It had not changed any. I gave a short knock on the open door.
“Hi, guys,” I said.
Kerry, Bret’s significant other, was sitting in a chair beside Bret, who had raised his bed so he was sitting upright. His arm was in one of those shoulder casts.
“Hey, Zach,” they replied.
Both men were of similar age and lean physiques, and both shared boyish good looks and kept the rugged, unshaved look. The single women at Mount Weather occasionally expressed their disappointment the two men were gay, usually during one of the women’s group activities which often involved an ample amount of wine and weed consumption.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“A low-grade infection,” Bret replied. “They’ve got me on some antibiotics that probably expired two years ago.” He gestured at his immobilized arm with his free hand. “It’s the same arm I broke a couple years back. Sometimes I feel like I’m jinxed.”
I smiled appreciatively. “I can certainly understand,” I said and waved a finger at the scars on my head. “I’ve felt that way too, once or twice.”
“You know, I always wondered about those scars,” Bret said.
“This one was from a knife, and this one is from a bullet,” I said, pointing to each one. I didn’t elaborate though; this visit wasn’t about me talking about myself.
“I’m sure the antibiotics will do the trick,” I said. “Is there anything you guys need?”
Kerry cleared his throat. “Is there any way to get out of work detail for the next couple of days?” he asked. “Bret is having a hard time doing little things, like showering and things.”
“Oh, I’m okay,” Bret protested.
I smiled in understanding and pulled out my handheld radio. “Come in, Lydia,” I said. When she answered, I asked her to call me and gave her the three-digit extension for the landline in the medical unit. I heard it ring and walked out of the room to answer it. After a minute, I walked back in the room.
“Alright, you have hospital duty for the next five days. That means you’re Bret’s personal nurse.”
Kerry grinned. “That sounds like fun.”
Bret groaned. We talked for a few more minutes before I wished him a speedy recovery and left.
Next on my list was rat patrol, and yes, it was one of those detested work assignments. There were maybe one or two people who did not mind rat patrol. I guess I was one of them. It gave me a chance to wander around Mount Weather and check on things. Grabbing the rat bucket, gloves, and a resupply of bait, I set out, making the rounds.
Sometime during the first or second year, the population of mice and rats increased exponentially. Mount Weather was not immune and was inundated with them. So, war was declared. We started with a dozen mouse and rat traps, but through our scavenging missions, we now had almost a hundred and had them set all over the place.
We had a list of where every trap was set, but I didn’t need it; I had each location memorized. I went through each room, starting at the bottom level. One would think there was no way a rat or a mouse could get down to the bottom level, but the little bastards somehow figured it out and so we had several placed in different areas.
On this occasion, the only trap containing a rodent was not found until the habitat level. This was a tricky area, because it required me to venture into the female locker room. I announced myself loudly before I’d venture in so as not to offend anyone.
The main level of Mount Weather contained the school, the recreation areas, and the cafeteria. This is where most of the traps held dead rodents. I dutifully dropped each one into my bucket, rebaited and reset the trap before moving on to the next one.
It only took me an hour to check all of the traps. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary while walking around, which was good. I headed to the front gate and checked in at the guard house. To my surprise, it was Slim and Priss on duty. I had a sneaking suspicion that when Lydia was scheduling guard duty, she paired them together on purpose. After all, she’d done it in the past. I wondered if it was because she didn’t like Liam.
“How many?” Slim asked.
“Eight. Two rats and six mice,” I answered and held the bucket for him to see. Both of them looked in.
“That’s good, right?” Slim asked. I nodded. “I remember a couple of years ago we were catching fifty or sixty a day.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. The rodent population exploded after the apocalypse, but now the numbers were tapering off. We’d never be completely rid of them, but we’d made significant gains.
“What are you going to do with them? Take them to Harold?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I know he’d like them, but I’m going to burn them.” I was referring to the dumpsters located three hundred yards down Blue Ridge Mountain Road.
Slim nodded in understanding. “How long are you going to be gone before I should get worried and send people looking for you?” he asked with a grin.
“Two hours, I guess,” I said. “If there’s any unburned trash, I’ll go ahead and tend to it.”
“Do you mind if I tag along?” Priss asked.
“Well…” I said, but Slim interrupted me.
“Sure, y’all go ahead,” he said. “It’s always better to go out beyond the fence with two or more.”
I shrugged. “Alright, come on then. Bring your radio and rifle.”
As we walked, I pointed. “We still have a fair amount of black ice here and there.”
Priss offered no comment and deftly stepped around a patch. When we got to within a hundred yards, Priss wrinkled her nose. “It’s especially bad today.”
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it,” I said.
Priss looked at me in confusion for a moment. “Faulkner?” she guessed.
“Kipling,” I said.
She scoffed. “I should have known. You love Kipling.”
“He’s a man’s poet,” I said. She scoffed again.
We carefully approached the dumpsters, watching for any zeds, bears, or anything else that might have been attracted by the odors, but we were alone. Two of the dumpsters had tendrils of smoke lazily drifting out. There was a step ladder leaning against one of them. I chose the dumpster with the most smoke coming out of it and dumped the rodents in it. We had a jerry can of diesel nearby, along with a trashcan full of diesel-soaked pine needles. Priss brought it over and helped me through some in. I then used a rusty length of pipe to stoke the fire back to life.
Stepping down from the ladder, I stood by Priss and watched as the smoke increased. Priss pulled a one-hitter out of her pocket, lit it, and inhaled deeply. She then offered it to me. I shook my head.
“Oh, I forgot, you like to keep your head clear,” she said.
I smiled. “Yep.”
She took another hit. “Well, I need it just to tolerate this place.”
I smiled. “So, how’s it going with you and Liam?”
“Pretty good, actually,” she said and gestured at her one-hitter. “He doesn’t smoke either, but he can sure put away the shine.”
“Do you think you have a future with him?” I asked.
She shrugged. �
��I think so. We seem to click, but you never know these days.”
“True enough,” I replied.
There was a minute of silence before she spoke again. “It’ll never get back to the way it was, will it, Zach?”
“Not in our lifetime,” I said. “But, you’ve got to admit, it’s a lot better than it was eight years ago.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. She tried another hit off of her little ceramic pipe, but she was out.
I’d been looking around, keeping a sharp eye out, and saw some movement down the road. “Look,” I whispered. It was three deer, maybe fifty yards from us.
“They look hungry,” she said.
“Yeah, probably. We can put some feed corn out for them,” I said.
“Would you?”
I nodded. “Sure. Let’s head back.”
I know she was looking at the deer like they were Bambi’s sisters, but I was planning on getting them fattened up and then later harvesting them for a nice venison dinner, but I didn’t tell her that.
Chapter 22 – Suicide
“GM, Reusen,” I keyed after we’d given the authentication codes, GM being shorthand for good morning.
“GM, Weather,” Seth replied in Morse code, which was much faster than mine. “How’s the weather?”
It was a corny pun, but he couldn’t help himself. Seth Kitchens was a JAG Captain in the Army and was serving on General Fosswell’s staff when it all went bad.
I thought out the words before tapping. “Sunny and 38. Minimal melting.”
“Same,” he instantly responded. “Progress is slow.”
There were three hydroelectric dams on the James River which we were working on to get back online. Seth was the leader of the work crew which had our only two electricians, a couple of men named Briscoe and Stallings. They were currently at Reusen’s Dam, which was a couple of miles outside of Lynchburg and a hundred and seventy miles from Mount Weather. It was going to be a long project, but we needed the power for a couple of manufacturing plants we wanted to get operational.
We tapped out code to each other for several more minutes before signing off. Garret watched in silence while he did his own tapping on his computer keyboard.
“Why do you guys use Morse code?” he asked. “The satellite uplink is better and more secure.”
“It’s fun,” I replied.
“Heh, yeah, fun. How’s the landline project going?” he asked. He was referring to our project of restoring telephone operations. We’d gotten the telephone system operational within the Mount Weather compound, but we’d not yet been entirely successful with reestablishing phone lines to any of our fortified houses or to Fort Detrick.
“It’s not,” I replied. “Everything is in place, the switching stations have power and seem to be working properly, but we can’t get it working. There’s some kind of glitch we can’t seem to identify.”
“It’s a shame we don’t have any phone techs here,” Garret said.
“Rachel is the closest thing to it. She had a communications MOS when she was in the Army, but she can’t figure it out either.”
He shook his head. “They must all be dead.”
“Yeah, or out on the west coast,” I said. “I think it’s something in one of the switching stations, or maybe a router is bad, or maybe it’s in the programming. It’s perplexing.”
Garret pondered it while he rubbed his chin in thought. “Speaking of the west coast, we’ve tried off and on for the last year to make radio contact with anyone on the west coast without success. We’ve had contact with multiple settlements in the midwestern states, but nothing on the coastal states. I tell you, it’s strange.”
There was a sudden beep from the radio. It was a signal indicating an incoming coded burst transmission. Garret sat up quickly and punched the appropriate buttons. We then listened in rapt attention to the voice message.
“Wow,” I muttered. I admit, I didn’t see it coming, but looking back to my last conversation with the man, all of the clues were there. I simply didn’t see it.
“Do you want to do the honors of informing the president?” he asked.
“Yeah, I may as well. I have to see him anyway.” I looked at my wristwatch. “In fact, I have to be there in five minutes. I better get going.”
I hustled out of the TOC and took the stairs two at a time. I made it to the conference room with two minutes to spare. Even so, I was the last one other than Stark to come in. When I walked in, Ruth gave a curt nod and left the room, soon returning with Stark. When he sat, I stood.
“I have some priority news from Detrick,” I said and recounted the radio transmission from General Fosswell. As I spoke, I heard a faint chime emanating from Grace’s laptop. She started reading something on her screen and her eyes widened, much like her brother did a few minutes ago. When I’d finished, she raised her hand.
“Yes, Grace?” the president asked.
“Garret forwarded a follow-up communication from Detrick. It says Captain Fosswell was found last night after someone heard a single gunshot. He apparently shot himself in the head. When General Fosswell was informed, he ordered an immediate cremation. Since then, he has been incommunicado in his suite.”
“Who sent the radio communication?”
I looked to see who asked the question. It was Senator William Rhinehart. It amazed me that he was still alive and hadn’t died of constipation, or something similar.
“General Fosswell,” Grace answered. “He also stated he does not want any kind of delegation to come to Fort Detrick and when he has recovered emotionally, he will come to Mount Weather.”
“He’s telling us to keep our nose out of it,” Rhinehart muttered loud enough for everyone to hear. I had to agree. Fosswell definitely wanted us to stay away.
“Mister Gunderson,” President Stark said.
“Sir?”
“You had a conversation with Captain Fosswell when you were at Detrick, correct?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I did,” I replied.
Everyone was staring at me now, obviously wanting me to elaborate. “Frankly, he looked different and acted oddly.”
“How so?” Bob Duckworth asked.
“He’d lost a significant amount of weight,” I said. “His paunch was gone and his face was thinner. I would’ve said maybe he was watching his diet, but his complexion was pasty-looking, like he’d been ill recently. Or he was hungover.”
“What do you mean by acting oddly?” one of the other senators asked.
“Well, this may sound funny, but he engaged me in a casual, friendly conversation. That normally wouldn’t seem odd except for the fact we’d never really gotten along and had hardly spoken to each other for the past three or four years. On the day we left, he met us at the motor pool, and like I said, he engaged in a light, friendly conversation. He then fixed us up with a deuce without even making a fuss about it.”
“A deuce?” Senator Rhinehart asked.
“A two-and-a-half-ton truck,” I explained. “It has six-wheel drive and can drive across almost all types of terrain.”
Rhinehart nodded in seeming understanding. “No cross words were exchanged between the two of you?” he asked with a healthy tone of skepticism.
“None whatsoever,” I said. “Flash and Joker were present during the conversation. They can corroborate this.”
“Can you tell us what specifically the two of you talked about?” the senator asked.
“He asked about my kids, he asked about my dog, and then talked about a dog he had during his childhood.” I stopped suddenly. A thought had formed in my head. Rhinehart must have seen the change in my expression.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I replied. “I was just thinking about his demeanor. It was like he’d already reached his decision at that time. He never gave any overt indicators of his emotional state though.”
There was absolutely no way I was going to tell Rhinehart what I’d suddenly realized. I caught Grace
staring at me. I liked Grace. She was horribly introverted, but she was also one of the sweetest people I knew, and extremely intelligent, like her brother and father, but she was the more intuitive of them. So, she knew I was holding back but, that wasn’t a problem; I was going to talk to her about it at a later time.
The meeting droned on and on. I was convinced one night this little so-called elite group got together one night and conspired to make every meeting last until exactly fifteen minutes before lunch, so as not to be assigned to any morning work details by Lydia. I waited in silence until the meeting was formally adjourned. I glanced at my watch. Yep, in fifteen minutes lunch was going to be served. Time enough for them to amble down the hallway from their chairs in here to their chairs in the cafeteria.
As everyone shuffled out of the conference room, I lingered behind. I caught a glance from Grace and made a tacit sign for her to stick around. She responded with her own tacit nod and then worked on shutting down the projector screen.
Chapter 23 – Roggenwolf 1199
“I need to talk to you,” I said to Grace in a hushed voice.
She gave me a questioning look and glanced around to see if anyone was lingering and listening in.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I need for you to do something and I need for you to keep it a secret.”
She listened intently as I explained the conversation with Junior in far more detail.
“I’m convinced he was trying to tell me his password. So, I don’t know how simple or hard it’ll be, to open up his personal files. I’m hoping you might have some thoughts,” I said.
“Let’s find out,” she said and rebooted her laptop.
After a moment, she’d entered a couple of typed commands and the screen lit up with the individual files of everyone who had an intranet account.
“Administrative access,” she said to my unasked question.
“You have access to everyone’s account?” I asked.
“Not like you think,” she said and pointed. “I can see the last time you accessed your account and if you modified it, like entering new data, but unless I have the password, I can’t actually access it.”
