“Nella,” called Frank, his fingers closing around the smooth metal of the gun at last. “Move, Nella.”
But she didn’t hear him. He saw her arms reach far above her head and then plunge forward. Gray’s feet kicked and he tried to push her off. Nella grunted and pulled the knife free, raising it again and smashing it into his chest. His blood was warm and sticky as if sprayed over her. She grunted again, twisting and grinding it further. He half shoved her from his waist, but she didn’t stop, yanking the blade free and stabbing again. This time, the blade snapped off in Gray’s sternum as he howled. Nella dropped the knife. She punched his face, smearing blood and spit and snot with her fists, over and over. Frustrated that he continued to move, she picked up the broken knife again, the spiral corkscrew loose and falling into her palm. She struck his left ear with it and shoved as far as she could. There was a sucking noise as she pulled the corkscrew free. It fascinated her, drowning out even the sound of Frank’s voice. Gray spasmed and lay still, the blood still gushing in pulses around her. Her chest heaved and it wasn’t enough to satisfy the rage that made every particle ache with adrenaline. She stabbed again and again, until the corkscrew broke off the handle and her arms sagged, exhausted.
Then she heard Frank crying her name. “Please Nella,” he sobbed, “Fight it. You have to fight it. Come back. Come back to me, Nella.”
She turned slowly around. There was a click as he cocked the gun with a shaking hand, the other hand struggling to keep the spear straight.
“Say something,” he begged, tears streaming from his face. “Tell me you love me. Tell me anything. Please Nella, please come back.”
Thirty-eight
The pit’s dusty bottom had turned to mud and people sat on the edge nursing injuries, exhausted. Vincent and Father Preston carefully checked the scattered bodies and carried them to the center. There was nobody left alive on the floor of the pit. A dozen people sat on the sides like vultures watching the priests. None of them stumbled or slurred. None of them rocked or bit their nails. Some of the wounded called out to him for help, but Vincent ignored them. He knew he’d have to help eventually, but even his compassion stretched only so far. They covered the small mound with tires. He tried to light it, but they were short on gas. If he took more, the sprayer would never make it. He couldn’t leave them like this. Not just for themselves, they were a health risk too. He thought about using the sprayer on the pile. He’d thought about it earlier too, using the sprayer on the entire lot of them. Right in the tire pit. Just to make them stop killing each other. Father Preston had held him back, kept him sane.
He stared at the people who were left. “You’ve had your way, hurt people whose only crime was to be sicker than you. Now clean up your mess. We need to cremate them, so no one else will get infected. Go get as many dry branches from the woods as you can and bring them back.”
There were some groans. Vincent’s temper snapped. “You’ve brought this on yourself, and worse. Look at what you have done. You attacked them because you were frightened they’d turn. They would have attacked you without second thought. But you planned this. You got together and made a plan to hurt them. To kill them. Who is the true monster? You will never be able to atone for what you’ve done here. Not ever. But you can clean it up. You can prevent it from happening ever again.”
People got up slowly, stiffly. Limped along the incline until they disappeared over the lip of the pit. Several minutes later they began tossing dead branches down to him. He and Father Preston wove them into the tires, piled them over the bodies, until all that could be seen was a dull pile of bracken. Vincent lit it and stood in the choking smoke until he was certain it wouldn’t go out. Then he wearily climbed up to the road where the others waited in a sullen clot. Father Preston started the sprayer and headed off. Vincent walked behind it, saying nothing, not even bothering to look around to make sure the others followed. He couldn’t remember a more disturbing day, even when he’d been in the midst of Infection himself. They reached the Barrier at dusk, finding half a dozen more people waiting for them, drawn by the promise of a cure. They were helping Father Preston clear the main gate, boulder by boulder. Vincent made the others help too, unburying the City with their bare hands. He finally let them rest once it was too dark to see. It was unsettling, how silent the City was. Nothing came through the Barrier. No music, no conversation, not even the shouts and thumps of fighting. He didn’t sleep, just lay rigid, worrying on the cold tar of the road. He’d expected to be able to trust a few of them. He’d expected to be able to get help spreading the poison as people came to accept that they were at the end. But now— all of them had joined in. All of them had slaughtered someone in order to preserve themselves. Father Preston and Lisa were the only ones he could rely on. These people weren’t going to wait around to be poisoned either. They’d scatter, run, leak out the hole in the barrier he’d just made and the whole trip would be pointless. He realized his instinct about doing it at the tire pit had been the right one. He told himself it was mercy that made him wait, but some part of him insisted it was weakness. He couldn’t kill them all. How could he? He had willingly walked into this role, but he couldn’t really remember why. He’d known how it would end, even a month ago. And now it was here. He sat up and crept to the truck. He slid into the cab waking Father Preston.
“I don’t think I can do this,” he confessed.
Father Preston nodded. “This is not what I wanted either. We’re out of options. We can’t let them go. They’ll expose other groups if they haven’t already. We could lock them up and try to care for them, but we both know we only have a week— maybe ten days left until we start showing symptoms ourselves. They’ll starve. It will be very painful. Or we can follow through with the plan and it will be over by tomorrow night or the day after.”
“How are we supposed to do this without panicking them? Just herd them into a building and hope they stay?”
Father Preston glanced out the window. “We could do it now, Vincent. They are all here in a group. It’s too dark for them to wander far even if they woke up. Maybe they won’t wake up. Maybe they’ll just sleep and never get up.”
“And tomorrow? What do we do with the bodies? And how do we get the truck into the City?”
Father Preston peered out the dark windshield. “I’m pretty sure the hole is big enough now, but even if not, it would take you and I no more than an hour to shift enough of what’s left. As for the bodies— Didn’t the man who gave you the poison say it would wipe out everything, sterilize everything?”
“Yes,” said Vincent, “but we can’t leave them here—”
“It’s too much,” said Father Preston, “We can’t bury them all. We’ll never finish before we turn. And there’s the rest of the City to cover. We have to let it go. We have to hope that they will rest here, at the gate. Maybe they will be a warning to anyone who comes looting or for curiosity’s sake.”
“You can’t be serious, Father. You know how important burial is—”
Father Preston laid a heavy hand on Vincent’s shoulder. “Yes, I know. I also know that millions of people died during the Plague and were never buried. That people die every day in the empty wilderness beyond our Colony with nobody to bury them or mourn them. I told you I wanted to help. I wanted to be worthy. You told me to put aside ceremony and find out what practical use I could be. We have a task to do. A dreadful, sad, important task. We are the only ones left who can do it. We must save ceremony for another time. God will understand.”
Vincent took a deep breath and then nodded. Father Preston handed him a suit of plastic. “I’ll wake Lisa,” he said, “she can turn on the sprayer for us. You and I can climb to the top of the rubble with the hose.”
Father Preston began pulling his own suit on and grabbed a third for Lisa. Vincent slid into the slick plastic, careful to seal each seam. He got out of the truck and slowly uncoiled the heavy hose loop by loop. It hissed against the gravel as he pulled it up the ja
gged chunks of concrete toward the top of the Barrier, but it was too quiet for any but himself to hear. Father Preston quickly joined him, a rustling, faceless ghost. They hovered over the sleeping Infected from the top of the wall. Vincent winced as the sprayer rumbled to life when Lisa turned it on, but most of the sleeping people simply shifted. The rest didn’t even move. He supposed it was too late to worry about it now, if they woke up, he’d still have to finish what he’d started. He turned the hose on, aiming it high so that it fell on them in a thin mist instead of a rain. He could smell it, even through the mask. At first, it was pleasant. The scent of fresh cut grass. It made him think of his father on a Saturday or football practice when he was a child. But the smell intensified, became acrid. They let the mist fall for some time, more willing to risk overdoing it than underdoing it. The first coughs started as Lisa turned off the truck and Vincent recoiled the hose.
He stood guard, waiting for the panic, waiting for the people to start running. Most of them only coughed in great croupy gasps, then turned to reposition and fell asleep again. Some didn’t even do that much, their lips slowly bluing and their bodies cooling under their blankets. Vincent was relieved that it was so peaceful. He knew he looked frightening in his suit and he prayed it wouldn’t be the last thing that they saw. He stood still until the sky dulled to pale gray. Then he bent over each face and checked. Vincent tucked each one into their sleeping bag, as far as they could fit and zipped them in an apologetic version of a shroud. He didn’t want to leave anyone to wake up alone. Lisa and Father Preston carefully moved a few more chunks of rubble until the sprayer could fit through the gate. Satisfied that they were each gone, Vincent trudged behind the sprayer. They stopped inside the gate to pull the spray arm down. Vincent grabbed one of the portable tanks and poured in a canister of chloropicrin. He helped strap it to Father Preston’s back, and then prepared his own.
“We have to coat everything,” he said, shouting to be certain he was heard through the thick plastic of his mask and over the rumbling truck. “It’s been quiet, but that doesn’t mean we’re alone. Do you have anything to defend yourself?”
Father Preston shook his head. Vincent opened the truck’s passenger side door and fumbled around until he found the tire iron behind the seat. Lisa looked pale through the clear plastic face guard. “The sound will probably draw them to you first, Lisa. Just keep moving, the gas will incapacitate them within a few moments. Keep your mask on and your windows rolled up.”
She nodded. “What if— what about Immunes?” she asked.
Vincent shook his head sadly. “If they get to you, it’s probably too late, they’ll have breathed in too many fumes. But if they can make it. We’re meeting a boat at the docks, anyone still healthy that can get there, we’ll take. The City is a grid skirted by the barrier. It’s large but it’s hard to get lost. If you went straight from this point, you’d hit the docks. There’s too much ground to cover in one day. Take a left here and keep the docks behind you and to the right as you work your way down. Tomorrow we’ll do the other side. You could probably get through the streets today, but you’ll have to stay a little close, we’ll have to change canisters often.”
She nodded and he shut the door, turning to hand the tire iron to Father Preston. “There’s only three of us,” shouted Preston, “We’ll never cover the whole City.”
“Five,” said Vincent, “Dr. Ryder and Mr. Courtlen will be here tonight. They’ll help. And somebody has destroyed the entrances. They knew what was happening. They would have gathered people up for defense or for quarantine. We have to find those places.”
“We still won’t be able to coat it all. Even if we had the strength to do it, we’d run out of chemical.”
Vincent nodded. “You’re right. We just have to do what we can. Anywhere that looks promising to a looter, and anywhere that looks like it might have people still living in it, we have to douse. We saw the fires several weeks ago, I think a good portion of the buildings are gone. It’s up to us to take care of what we can.”
Vincent headed into the sagging entrance of the barracks where the tank had collided. He walked up to the top floor and glanced out the window. Lisa was creeping ahead with the spray truck and Father Preston disappeared into a building across the street and further up. Vincent called a few hellos as he sprayed, not expecting any answer except the hollow echo of his own footsteps. The first building took a while as he became used to the sprayer and tried to hit every surface. As he went on, he picked up the pace and concentrated on surfaces people would have touched, objects that looters would want. The emptiness started to unnerve him a few hours in and he kept glancing over his shoulder and calling out into the dim twilight of the buildings as he went. The chloropicrin became a cloudy fog that spilled from shattered windows and opened doors and rolled along the road in a thick smoke as they worked their way up the hill toward the airport. The buildings gradually petered out and left a rural road to the flat expanse of the airport and beyond. They joined Lisa in the cab until they returned to the City’s grid. Vincent gasped as they passed the power plant. It was a twisted bloom of metal and ash. The hospital as well, had been gutted, its walls blackened with soot. A huge pile of ash stood in its parking lot surrounded by military trucks.
“What was that?” asked Father Preston quietly.
Vincent shook his head. “If I had to guess— I’d say it was a cremation pile. Marnie said the people they’d let into the bunker had told her that the military was taking sick people away. They had to do something with them… looks like maybe some of them fought back. Or some of the soldiers turned.”
Father Preston crossed himself and said a prayer behind his plastic shell.
“This is where the bunker was supposed to be. We have to check,” Vincent waited until Lisa pulled into the large covered lot and slid out. The metal door to the basement was twisted open and down, its back dusty with ash. Vincent turned on a flashlight and headed carefully down the stairs. The bunker door hung from one hinge and pieces of the generator’s red painted sides were curled and spearing the walls all around the basement. Vincent pushed the bunker door farther open, just in case. All that was left was an empty cement tube and the melted metal of the bunks like ragged spider webs. He sighed and returned to the truck. It had been his best hope at finding survivors.
They went back to spraying after that, finally reaching the town square as the sun set. Vincent was convinced there would be people in the large town hall and he didn’t want to quit without checking. He pushed through the large glass doors, remembering the last time he’d been there with Henry, begging for the City’s help with Phil. Begging for justice. It was very dark, the large rooms echoing with his footsteps. He picked his way up the stairs in the gloom. The Military Governor’s office was at the very top. He knocked on the large doors, calling out a hello. There was a scrabbling and a thump behind them. Vincent reached for the knife at his side. “I don’t mean you any harm. We’re here to help. Who is in there?”
There was no answer. Vincent curled his hand tightly around the knife, letting the sprayer hose drift behind him. “I’m coming in now, there’s nothing to be afraid of—”
He pushed gently on the heavy doors and they opened a crack. It was too dark in the office to see anything through the crack. There was a low moan from the other side. He pushed the doors open further. The right-hand side door caught up on something and wouldn’t open farther, so he pushed past the left door and into the large room. The military governor was lying against the other door. His uniform gave him away. Vincent wouldn’t have recognized him otherwise. Crouching on the desk, in the ragged, torn remains of what was once a pristine white silk blouse and smooth pencil skirt was the secretary Rickey had thought was so pretty. She snarled and Vincent could see the broken tips of her long fingernails glint in the half light, jagged and bloody. Her face was scraped in stuttering strips where she’s scratched herself. Her mouth dripped with drool.
“I’m sorry,” s
aid Vincent, sadly and held up the knife as she leapt at him. She flopped onto him and he threw her sideways, withdrawing the knife. Another stroke to the neck, and it was done. He looked around the dark room. Dozens of folders, maps, plans all scattered and crumpled. The heart of the City, and it was dead. He and his friends hadn’t been comfortable here. They hadn’t agreed with some of what the City did, but its loss was devastating anyway. The Colony was truly alone. The loss exhausted him. He sprayed the room and gradually worked back down to the lobby, sagging with the weight. “Let’s find the boat,” he said, climbing into the truck.
Thirty-nine
The harbor was empty. The plastic suits had become uncomfortably hot and Vincent could hear the others gasping to draw breath. Where was the boat?
Father Preston groaned. “It was Gray. I know it. He killed them.”
Vincent shook his head. “They’ll be here. They promised.”
Lisa killed the engine and they sat in the large arch next to the beach. “There’re no docks here,” she said. “Looks like they were destroyed. Maybe they couldn’t land here.”
Vincent got out of the truck and walked down toward the beach looking out over the water. He itched to strip the plastic mask from his face but he turned to see the silvery trickles of the poison gas spilling down onto the sand. He sat on a stone bench until the moon rose. A sleek shadow pierced the horizon and a white speck flashed in the waves. They had waited to be able to see, they were rowing toward the City now. Vincent stood up and walked back to the truck. “They are coming.”
The 40th Day (After the Cure Book 5) Page 23
