The two workers looked at each other, then shook their heads. But the man in the basket said, “We did see a crowd down in Roanoke that got too big. They were handin’ out food—the Uninfecteds on one side of the highway, Infecteds on the other. When it looked like they were gonna run out, the Infecteds started crowdin’ up. The deputies used a bullhorn to try to spread ’em out, but they didn’t listen.”
“They got all quiet like,” said his partner. “Stopped and stared right at the people handin’ out the food. We were workin’ on the lines ’bout a quarter mile down the road.”
“I was up in this same basket,” said the other worker from on high. “The Uninfecteds ran away. The deputies brought up trucks filled with armed folks. They kept shoutin’ over the bullhorn, ‘Disperse! Disperse!’ But the mob attacked the trucks and got shot up. Musta kilt a hun’erd.”
“More,” said his partner. “That’s one of their biggest rules.” The man finally calmed enough to settle again onto the truck’s rear bumper. “No crowds. They stagger the times you can come look at the new rules based on your last name. You know, A through E from eight to eight thirty. F through J from eight thirty to nine. That sorta thing.”
“Any of the rules cause you any problems?” Isabel asked.
The two men exchanged a glance. “Yeah,” said the man on the rear fender. “No sex unless you get a permit, even if you’re married and your husband or wife survived. And the office that hands ’em out is only open till five o’clock, and we work most days till six or later.”
“I told you, Hankins,” said his coworker up in the basket. “First thing you gotta do is get yer wife or some lady friend to cosign the form. Then you take it to the window and show ’em your work card. You gotta get three days punched to get a permit, and that’s only good for two weeks.”
“No. First thing is to get a copy of the form. They was out when we went by there on our lunch break. If they don’t get more soon, I may just have to head west.”
“What’s west?” Rick asked the man sitting in front of him.
“They call it the Exclusion Zone,” replied the other man up in the bucket. “He wouldn’t last ten minutes up in them mountains afore somebody shot his ass. Most ever’body who quits heads that way, and they’re the hard cases. The ones who know they cain’t control their urges and are gonna be put down soon enough.”
Rick and Isabel eyed each other before showing the man at the rear of the truck the photo of Noah’s family on Isabel’s phone. The worker seemed surprised by how close they approached. He removed his sunglasses and squinted in the sunlight, then looked up with black eyes and shook his head. “You’re perty close. Hope you don’t get sick.”
“Much obliged,” Rick said, touching the mostly imaginary brim of his Kevlar helmet. Both white hardhats bobbed in nodded reply before Rick and Isabel walked on. When they were around the bend in the highway and out of sight of the electric utility crew, Rick said, “Sex permits?”
Isabel sighed. “Emma was always a bit of a control freak. I couldn’t be her lab partner in high school because her procedures drove me fucking crazy.”
They walked mostly in silence after that. Isabel’s muscles warmed and felt less sore, at least until they stopped for a break. The soles of her feet, however, and the raw skin atop her shoulders where her pack’s straps bore down both stung from injury and sweat.
“Maybe we should get one of those sex forms,” Rick said out of the blue. It was growing darker and he took off his sunglasses.
“I’m not consenting to anything until I’ve had a shower.”
“Probably never find a notary public out here anyway.”
Isabel snorted more out of politeness than amusement.
Darkness always fell more slowly than it should. First, their sunglasses came off, seeming to extend the daylight further. Then, Isabel’s eyes kept adjusting as the sun sank, dragging out the lingering twilight. The official beginning of the night wasn’t the nautical sunset, or astronomical sunset, or when a few lights became visible here and there. No, the official onset of darkness came when Rick lowered his night vision binoculars from atop his helmet and his eyes began to glow behind them.
There was occasionally dim starlight and moonlight on clear nights like this one. And every so often, when the power in the area was on, they passed an incongruous, brightly lit billboard advertising a local insurance broker or brake repair shop. But most of the houses were either totally dark and seemingly abandoned, though maybe they weren’t, or leaked light muted by thick blankets nailed over the openings, indicating that they meant to be left alone…or else.
Shortly after night vision goggle sunset, they approached a nondescript house that glowed brilliantly. The trash cans along the highway were filled with neatly bagged rubbish and encased in mesh fencing to repel wild animals. The mailbox read, “Wilson Family.”
“What is it?” Isabel asked.
“A little weird, is all,” Rick said, surveying the drive, front lawn, and house, from which the faint sound of music could be heard. “I know we’re not writing reports to the Pentagon anymore, but….”
“You know what they say about curiosity. But if you insist…whatever.”
They ditched their heavy backpacks just off the road. She felt almost joy to be out from under the ridiculous burden, even if they were wasting their time and taking some unknowable amount of risk on a totally unimportant detour.
They tracked alongside the driveway through the relatively thick brush of the woods. Branches dragged across her body armor, scratched at her exposed and damp neck, and scraped her raw and wind chapped hands, which gripped her M4’s plastic pistol grip and foreguard.
They lay on the ground at the edge of the rutted flat area at the top of the drive. Country music emanated from the house. Enough light streamed through the trees from the stars and low hanging, nearly full moon to give Isabel a general view of the yard. But the garish illumination from the windows spotlit areas with almost shocking displays. The house’s flower beds were ringed by low fencing that appeared would be ineffective even against rabbit intruders. A gazebo sat beside a dry swale that hinted at an intermittent stream. A concrete fountain had a broken bowl and a moss-covered statue of a naked cherub at its center. There were a couple of homemade birdhouses, some chimes under the eaves, two large and two small pink plastic flamingos, and crosses standing in front of each of two freshly dug graves—one adult sized; one child sized.
Isabel glanced at Rick’s glowing eyes, which darted this way and that, searching, she knew, for danger. There was no garage. Two pickup trucks were parked under their respective discolored and mildewed plastic roofs, which were held aloft by rickety metal poles. A plastic shed, leaning too dramatically for the doors to close, housed what looked like a lawn mower and gardening implements.
Through the picture window across the front of the house she could see a glowing TV screen in the living room. Its picture changed and its music fell silent, but Isabel couldn’t tell much about what she was seeing until Rick handed her his binoculars.
The house was neat and tidy inside. A man sat in a reclining chair watching TV while eating dinner from a metal tray balanced on his lap. On screen were images of large explosions in the distance that shook the camera a half second after the detonations. In place of the previous music, they could hear through the open windows the booms like in an old war movie. But it wasn’t a movie, it was the news. Some of the blasts shown on TV were visible over treetops and at a distance, their targets unseen. When the locale changed, others flung cars skyward, left all the windows on entire city blocks shattered, and toppled trees clinging tenaciously to urban life and metal poles secured firmly to the pavement. The view switched to a local anchorman in a studio. Isabel couldn’t hear any audio or see his eyes, but guessed they were black given the total absence of expression on his face.
The picture was replaced
with a graphic. The two columns of bullet pointed text was too small for her to read, but the heading—“Today’s Rules”—told her all she needed to know.
A preteen girl wandered into the living room. The man paid her no attention. She sat in a chair and stared into space. She moved not a muscle. Her hands were wedged between her thighs. Her head was tilted slightly, and her gaze was generally downward. The two said nothing to each other. The girl was uninterested in the TV news, which ended while Isabel and Rick lay there watching. A clock face appeared in place of the broadcast, and the country music returned. The man continued staring at the TV as if waiting for the second hand to sweep past twelve, then waited again.
A superimposed scroll rose past the clock. Isabel missed the heading, but squinted until she picked up a word here and there. “Backhoe operator,” she caught on one line. “7:00 am, Costco parking lot,” she read three listings later.
A dog out back began barking. Rick’s rifle reacted, changing its aim.
“Bo?” came the high-pitched call of the little girl. The screen on the front door clapped shut loudly. The eleven- or twelve-year-old appeared in the bright porch light carrying an impossibly large hunting rifle. “Beau-re-gard! What is it, boy?”
The dog, obviously tied up, was barking with wild abandon.
Rick aimed at the girl. “Riiick,” Isabel whispered, shaking her head.
“Is anybody out there?” the girl called out. From inside, her father said something. “But if we do,” the girl replied, “he could run off like last time.” He again spoke, but she remained unpersuaded. “But they could hurt him. He’s more use bein’ a guard dog here at the house.” She raised her voice and shouted, “If anybody’s out there, go away!”
Rick turned to Isabel. “They’ve got hot food. A bed. A shower.”
“So…what? You wanta kill them? For a fucking shower?”
“Hello!” the girl shouted in their direction. Then, “I thought I heard somebody,” in the direction of her father, who joined her at the front door carrying a shotgun.
“No, I don’t mean kill them,” Rick replied. “Jesus. Maybe they’d invite us in like that last house.”
“Those people were Uninfecteds. These look pretty infected to me.”
They made their way back down to the highway and shouldered their heavy packs. Isabel took a few seconds attempting first to brush free the prickly burs stuck to her body armor and magazine pouches, then peeling them off individually like Velcro seeds in the glow of her penlight.
“Let’s get going,” Rick said, nervously scanning in all directions.
“One sec,” Isabel said, tugging at what appeared to be the last of the little pests.
Both heard the low rattle of a guttural warning. Two eyes glowed from the ditch in the feeble and inadequate illumination of Isabel’s penlight.
The dog attacked with a sudden growl that became a continuous bark and rose in volume with each bounding leap it took toward Isabel.
Bam! Bam-bam! Three brief, jarring strobes flashed from the muzzle of Rick’s rifle. The first illuminated a crouched German shepherd, fangs bared. The second a confusing tumble of fur and skittering claws. The third a whimpering pile of dying family pet feebly licking fatal wounds inches from Isabel’s boots.
“Beauregard?” came the little girl’s high-pitched shout from the distance.
Chapter 11
OUTSIDE RURAL RETREAT, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 72, 2030 GMT (4:30 p.m. Local)
Chloe Miller found life along I-81 to be strangely comforting. South of Roanoke, the highway was filled with stranded refugees. Normal people, like them, with no Infecteds anywhere to be seen. But rumors of Infecteds on both sides of the narrow ribbon of concrete abounded.
The drama of the road, however, had given way first to blisters, then to boredom. She picked up her pace until she caught up with her brother. “Hi.”
“Dad said ten meter spread,” was Jake’s only reply.
“Dad said ten meter spread,” she repeated in a mocking tone. “You’ve been such a kiss ass ever since you fell asleep on watch.”
“I did not! How did you know?”
She ignored his question and they walked through the hills in silence past millions of trees, any one of which could hide an attacker that could put a bullet straight through their chests. “Have you ever thought about the last thing you’ll do before you die?” When Jake seemed confused, she amended her question. “I mean…we could get shot any second now. We may not even see or hear anything before—bang—it’s all over. And what would the last thing we did be? Scratch an itch on your nose? Yawn? Look up at those big birds circling something dead in the woods?”
“Vultures,” Jake supplied.
“My point is, you know, anything we do could be the last time we do that thing. The last drink of water. The last time you stretched your back on a rest break. The last breath. Doesn’t that make everything seem more special, more important than normal?”
“I guess. I dunno. Everybody has a last breath, I s’pose. But these days, it’s not that special. Everybody’s dying. There’s nothing that special about it.”
He didn’t get it. Chloe heaved a big sigh. “Okay. How about this one? How much longer would you have to live before you’d consider this whole survival thing to be a success? Like, if some magical genie could offer you a deal and say that you’ll live for X amount of time, how much time would he have to offer before you’d accept the deal?”
“And stay uninfected?” Chloe nodded to him. “Uhm, maybe, say, three months?”
“Three months?” That was a lot shorter than she was expecting. “Jeez. I was thinking maybe a coupla years or something. You’d really take…?”
“Chloe! Jake!” their dad yelled back at them. Without another word, Chloe slowed to allow Jake to pull ahead. Margus, trailing them, came to a stop to maintain the spacing, but he swayed from one boot to another as he waited for Chloe to resume her progress. The subtle movement back and forth—one foot this way, one foot the other—was to make a sniper’s aim more difficult. Standing totally still was too easy a shot.
Chloe’s mind blanked until they approached another roadside collection of stalled vehicles. People stirred around the cars and trucks, which still provided them shelter and a store of presumably declining stocks of food, water, and supplies. She gripped and regripped her AR-15. Her right thumb rested on its selector switch, ready to flick it forward at a moment’s notice.
“Where you guys from?” asked a cute boy about her age as she passed his immobile SUV.
Chloe stopped and smiled, trying to look pretty but not straying too close. She hadn’t bathed in days, plus there was the whole Pandoravirus thing. “D.C. You?”
“New York.” His hair was a little shaggy, and a lot hot.
“New York City?”
“That’s what people mean when they say New York.”
“Chloe!” her dad called sharply from up ahead.
“Hold up a minute!” she shouted back and turned to the boy. But she could only think to say, “What are you doing?”
“In theory, fleeing.” He shrugged. “My parents are off looking for gas. You guys are just hoofing it?”
“Yeah. Taking in the sights. Fresh air and exercise.” She smiled. “And meeting interesting people.”
Her flirtation went right over his head. Was she suddenly hideous looking or something? “Where you headed?” he asked.
“I dunno. Texas or something.”
“Jeez. Long way. Looks like you’ve got enough guns, though. My dad has this old shotgun that’s been in the family for, like, a hundred years. And we spent my college fund outside Philly buying this.” He retrieved a black revolver from the seat behind him, which he handled, Chloe thought, a little carelessly. “Six bullets. I’m supposed to save three.”
“What? Like,
for you and your parents?”
“Chloe!” her dad interrupted as he headed back her way. But the boy nodded.
She gave him one more smile before her father dragged her off. “Dad,” she whispered, “can I give him my pistol?”
“What? No!”
She sighed. “It’s heavy, and I still have the AR. All they’ve got is antique crap.”
“No, Chloe. And stop talking to people. Try not to make eye contact.”
He resumed his position at the head of their single file column. Margus, who brought up the rear, had kept his distance behind her but had maintained his fixed gaze on the boy, especially after he flashed his pistol. Now, she felt his eyes on her…probably. She was wearing baggy camouflage clothes, and nothing was certain anymore.
“Hi!” she said to an African American woman with three kids at a semipermanent camp around an old station wagon, whose hood was propped open and doors flung wide.
“Do you have any food?” the woman asked, approaching Chloe too closely.
“Wait. Stop! Get back!” Chloe backpedaled as the woman neared and swung the AR-15’s barrel toward the threat.
A jarring shot rang out. Margus lowered the aim of his smoking rifle straight at the starving woman, who instantly hunched over and cowered beneath bowed shoulders and lowered gaze as if expecting a rain of thudding blows.
“That’s your only warning!” Margus shouted as everyone within sight stared at the confrontation, many reaching for whatever firearms they had handy. “Back off!”
The woman returned to hug her two young sons and wiry daughter to her sides. She never again raised her gaze toward Chloe, who felt extremely guilty. Was Margus a racist or something? “Sorry,” Chloe said so softly the woman didn’t hear. Chloe’s mother, father, and brother, who had each taken cover behind abandoned vehicles, all resumed their steady march southward.
Margus passed the African American family’s station wagon with his rifle at the ready and its aim never straying from the woman, then pivoted and walked backwards while riveting his attention on the poor, hungry, stranded people.
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 7
