Resistant, no. 1

by Ryan T. Petty

  “They came. They actually came.”

  Clarissa threw an arm over my shoulder, ecstatically.

  “Hold your fire!” she yelled and the soldiers pulled back their arms. We walked up to the door of the first bus and it creaked open.

  “You the people who sent word you needed a lift?” the driver asked from behind his mask covering his mouth and nose.

  “We sure do. All of us do.”

  “Well, let’s get everyone loaded then,” he stepped off in front of us, his belly shaking when he hit the ground, “except your little friend here. No infected is getting on my bus.”

  “She’s resistant,” Clarissa corrected, causing the man to look at me again.

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing and we didn’t drive all this way to let you get our people infected. So I’ll just turn my bus around here and—”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” Clarissa cried, grabbing the man’s arm.

  “It’s okay,” I said, jumping between them. “We still have the truck. I’ll travel in there.” Clarissa gave the man a hard look before pulling away. We went back to the soldiers.

  “All right. Let’s get everyone on board.”

  * * * *

  Like evacuating the compound, the people moved quickly, only grabbing what they could carry. We were told three buses would be going to Shreveport and two to Marshall, so we divided everyone into family units and motioned for those who were alone to any bus we thought they would fit on.

  Dr. Swanson and two soldiers walked Stevenson to the last bus headed toward Marshall. He gave me a glare, but didn’t say anything, his hands still tied behind his back. Soldiers also escorted the mayor toward a bus.

  “What do we do with him?” asked Clarissa.

  “We’ll take him with us in the truck. Maybe I can help him when we get there.”

  “Why don’t you just let me—”

  “Clarissa, we’ll tie him tight so he can’t move. He’s still human and can be saved.”

  “I’m not questioning that,” she said, “but how do you find justice when the guy has been controlled by a virus? Even if you are able to save everyone, Jennifer, all of those people out there are killers. You think the rest of us can ever forgive them?”

  I sighed, not knowing the answer.

  “One problem at a time,” I finally said. I stepped forward and grabbed the mayor under the arm. “No Déracinés on the bus, so we’ll be taking him.” The soldiers quickly looked at Clarissa who gave a nod before they let go of him. I slowly walked him to the truck, remembering I had put a bullet in his foot.

  “Thank you. You’re such a nice person,” he said as I cuffed him to his seat.

  “Shove it,” I answered back, slamming the door.

  Each bus was filled to capacity and people sat in aisles or on the edges of seats as the doors closed. We had loaded Michael in the very back of the truck. Wellstone and I sat in the second seat in front of him, while Clarissa drove. The mayor turned away from her, staring out the window. I kept my gun on him just in case, not knowing whether he was telling me the truth about his resistance or not.

  The bus driver gave us a hand-written map to show us where to go. They said it had been a safe ride up here, but we hurried so we wouldn’t get caught in the darkness. We led the way as the buses drove behind us. Clarissa kept it slow, so as not to outrun them.

  The rock road eventually turned into gravel and within twenty minutes of leaving, we had run into the interstate. We turned west, headed toward the closest bridge that wasn’t destroyed, about ten miles away.

  “How is everything back there, Dr. Swanson?” Wellstone asked as static ran through our headsets.

  “We are good back here. How about the far back?”

  Another person said everything was good as our convoy made it up the road. Soon, we saw the overpass that would take us across the interstate. For many of these people, it was their first time over it since the outbreak began.

  I continued to look at the mayor, but also looked over my seat to see Michael. Wellstone had said we shouldn’t have moved him, and he should have stayed behind to doctor him back to health. But I couldn’t leave him, and Clarissa wouldn’t let me stay, saying she would knock me out and throw me in the truck before I did. Wellstone finally gave in as long as we took Michael in the truck.

  “He’s going to be okay,” Wellstone reminded me, giving me a kind smile. I hoped that he was right, but a person could only take so much of a battering, and Michael was pushing it.

  We took the ramp leading up to the overpass. Clarissa didn’t bother stopping at the stop sign and swerved around two vehicles that had collided against each other. She slowed down on the other side of the bridge, waiting for the buses to do the same.

  I looked out of our window, seeing the blue sky and few clouds. It was a beautiful spring day, and yet always in the back of my mind was the microscopic being that kept people from enjoying it. They had been prisoners in buildings and behind masks and somehow, out of all of the survivors, I was the one who was resistant to all of it. But how could I save everything? How could I bring back any sort of normalcy to these people?

  A loud sound brought me out of my trance. I noticed something in the sky, moving quickly, a streak of smoke behind it.

  “Missile!”

  The explosion in front of the truck shook us all. The smoke and debris overwhelmed us as we tried to recover from the attack. The sound of whirling blades cut through the air. When the smoke cleared, a large, white helicopter hovered beside us, its missiles pointed directly at me.

  We saw another fly around in front of the truck, and I noticed another behind us, pointing at the buses themselves. Five helicopters soared around us and we watched a sixth land in a field not too far away. Men in hazmat suits, with the circle and lightning bold patch on their arms, disembarked and some of them came forward.

  Clarissa immediately grabbed her gun.

  “No!” I said, “They want me.”

  “Well, they can’t have you! Not after all we went through to keep you safe.”

  I watched the men approach and looked at the firepower of each helicopter. Hundreds of people were packed together in five buses. They would all die for certain.

  “Clarissa, get these people to safety,” I said, “I’ll be fine.” I looked at Wellstone and handed him my pistol. He said nothing, but gave me a sympathetic nod, knowing, like I did, that there was no other choice.

  Looking over the back of the seat, I saw Michael’s pristine face behind his mask. I wanted to kiss his hidden lips one last time. I wanted him to hear me say that I loved him. But maybe this was better. If he had been awake, he would have given his life for me, which he had risked time and time again. Maybe this way was the only way he was going to survive. I leaned over the backseat.

  “I love you, my captain.” I ran my hand over his mask, his chest, trying to remember everything about him before I left one last time. If they were going to take my memory again, I wanted him to be my last.

  “It’s the only way,” I said to Clarissa, placing a hand on her shoulder before getting out of the truck.

  I could not see the faces of the four men who approached me. Two of them held rifles and I immediately put my hands up.

  “Are you armed?” one asked.

  “No.”

  “Put your hands on the back of your head.”

  As I did, one of the men came forward, checked me for weapons, and then tied my hands behind my back with plastic wire.

  “You have me now, so just leave them alone.”

  “We intend to, once we get him.”

  “Who?”

  “The man in the front seat.” He pointed at the mayor and waved for him to come out of the vehicle. The three other men moved forward, their rifles pointed at the truck. They opened the door and forced the mayor from his seat. Slowly, he limped toward us, making his way to the helicopter. We were both loaded and cuffed to a seat.

  Soon enough, the engine
s of the helicopter began to push us off the ground, and I looked at the truck, hoping Clarissa would understand and that Michael would be able to live with himself once he woke. Once we were above the treetops, the helicopter jolted forward and I desperately tried to get one last look at the loved ones I was leaving behind.

  But I screamed when I saw the missiles fly into the side of the overpass. Others quickly struck the bridge columns from both sides as the buses frantically tried get to safety. A missile hit the center bus as smoke engulfed the scene. I looked for the black truck, but it was gone behind smoke and debris.

  “No!” I screamed. “You said you wouldn’t hurt them!” I kicked frantically and pulled at the cuffs that held me to the seat.

  “We don’t need them anymore,” the man said, forcing my head back and placing a syringe into my neck. I could see the yellow substance being slowly pushed into me and felt it burning as it made its way through my body.

  I tried to fight it, but the injection quickly made me weak.

  My head began to hurt and I squeezed my eyes shut. I could hear a young girl crying, yelling for her mother to help her, frantically fighting as she was forced into a vehicle and driven away.

  A hand shook me and I opened my eyes again.

  “Well, it looks like we got lucky, finding both of our birds hiding out here in the brush,” the man said behind a dark visor. “You might have escaped once, but it won’t happen again. We are going to find the cure with you two and then you will both be dealt with accordingly. Until then, welcome home, C1,” the man said, tapping the syringe with his finger. He got up and moved to a seat in front of us.

  My head fell and I saw the small chain around my neck fall out of my shirt. The symbol caught my eye for a split second. Michael said it stood for forever, but I wasn’t sure that the human race was going to last much longer.

  Forcing my head back up, I looked across from me, at the mayor, who also was fighting the substance injected into us.

  “Here is your humanity,” he said.

  About the Author

  Ryan T. Petty is a fifteen-year high school social studies teacher in a small town in northeast Texas and an adjunct history professor at a local junior college. He grew up in the country and has been doing Civil War reenacting for twenty years. Resistant is his third novel and the first of the Resistant Series. His young adult fiction, Finding Hope in Texas, and historical fiction, The Life He Never Knew, were his first two books. Ryan is married to his wife, Megan, and they have two boys together.

  ryanpettybooks.blogspot.com

  ryan.petty@hotmail.com

  www.facebook.com/ryan.petty.988

  Coming Soon from Fire and Ice!

  Reluctant: The Resistant Series, Book Two

  Awakening in the testing facility in which she had previously escaped, Jennifer finds herself in the hands of a ruthless examiner that will stop at nothing to find the cure to the SA8 virus. Coerced into a sinister game of her willfully complying to resistance testing in exchange for knowledge about her past, Jennifer confronts the dark truths about the exploitative history of human existence and begins to blame herself for the death of so many. Can she find the strength and determination to carry on as she is faced with a new pathogen created by her captors or has she given up on society and its continual efforts to destroy itself? Reluctant is the second dystopian novel to the Resistant Series questioning how much one is willing to sacrifice in order to do what is right.

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