Her mother turned yet again and headed south, toward the go bags.
“Three and a half saves,” Chloe mumbled as they took a meandering but preplanned route on surface roads leading to Ellington Field. Four saves, if you rounded.
* * * *
The roar of jet engines beyond the fence around Ellington Field punctuated the otherwise clandestine retrieval of their four go bags, which lay undisturbed right where they’d left them. Mom sat motionless behind the wheel. She wasn’t crying. She might have been developing a plan, but that seemed unlikely. Jake alternated glances out the front window at the climbing fighter-bombers, down at the half empty gas gauge, over toward their paralyzed mother, and around at Chloe in back.
“Mom?” Chloe said, getting no response. “Mom?”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. Where is it safe now? How will your father ever…ever find us, assuming he’s still…?”
Jake and Chloe shared a lengthy silent look of concern.
Chloe moistened her dry lips before venturing, “Well, we’re right next to that air force base. Where we stayed during quarantine, and…and where Dad flew out of.”
“If we just drive up,” her mom said, “with what’s going on, they’ll shoot us.”
Chloe had an idea and retrieved her residence permit from her backpack. Bingo. It was the fifth time that day that Chloe saved them all.
Five minutes later, they slowly wove between offset concrete barriers meant to slow any approaching traffic. A hundred yards from the base’s gates, an unseen loudspeaker at the heavily sandbagged guardhouse boomed, “Unknown vehicle! Halt!” Chloe’s mom stopped right beside a sign threatening deadly force against unauthorized attempts to enter. “Remain in your vehicle with your hands in sight and make no sudden movements!”
“Jake, put your hands on the dash. Chloe, put yours on Jake’s seat back.” All sat frozen as a half dozen airmen in full chemical warfare gear approached with rifles and a German shepherd straining on hind legs from a leash and barking. Their weapons were aimed through the windshield. An air policeman’s command was muffled by his gas mask. “Turn off the engine and roll down your windows!”
“What if they’re infected,” Jake asked, “and hiding popped pupils behind masks?”
“Then we’re screwed.” In slow motion, their mom complied.
“State your business!” came the command from behind the bug-eyed mask.
“My husband flew out of here on government business. See, the car has air force stickers and a parking pass. We wanta wait here for him.” When the air policeman asked how long ago he had left, she replied, “About two weeks ago.”
That was the wrong thing to say. The airman swung his rifle to point back toward the road and ordered them to reverse all the way to the exit. Chloe’s mom tried telling him that they had been guests at the quarantine center and they’d be happy to return to one of the trailers. “We’re not takin’ refugees, lady. Now move it!”
“We’ve got papers!” Chloe said from the back seat. Three rifles turned her way. “Signed by General Browner!” She shoved the crinkled paper through the open window.
“These are just residence permits,” replied the man after studying the form.
“But they’re signed by General Browner,” Chloe’s mom argued. “You know who he is, right? He’s your boss’s, boss’s, boss’s, boss’s boss.”
The airman stepped away for a sidebar with colleagues as the dog reared up and noisily scratched at the car’s fading paint. Each tug of its leash loosed a choked growl.
“If you don’t know who General Browner is—” Chloe’s mom began.
But the airman said, “I know who the fuck he is.” He ordered them to proceed, slowly, and the soldiers kept pace with them and their rifles pointed their way. Chloe had thought their plan had worked until they were directed to a turnoff, which lay outside the gate and its double fence. “You park here! No sudden moves!”
They could see the air policeman on the phone, which he hung up after alternating brief conversations and unseen nods with long waits. The muzzle of the machine gun amid sandbags would make short work of their rickety car. Fighter jets took off. Transports landed. A helicopter lifted an artillery piece into the air by a long cable. Civilian airliners taxied out toward the runway.
In the distance, on the other side of the gate, a Humvee arrived and disgorged two pilots in flight suits. One argued and gesticulated in animated fashion. The other hung back sipping on a cup of coffee. The guards argued back until the second pilot tossed his cup to the ground and said something that, apparently, settled the matter.
The gate rose. The first pilot jogged through it toward them. “Dad?” Jake said.
Their mother released the steering wheel, flung open the door, and embraced and kissed her husband. If anyone was infected, they were all infected. Chloe followed Jake out. In seconds, they were all enveloped in a family hug.
The other man in a flight suit approached. “You can take a trailer in quarantine.”
Chloe’s dad held out his hand for a shake, but the pilot backed away with hands raised to both sides. “Lieutenant Colonel Carpenter,” her dad said, “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Hey, you fulfilled all your duties on the mission. It was the least I could do. But remember cinco.”
Chapter 42
HOLLOMAN AFB, ALAMOGORDO, NEW MEXICO
Infection Date 110, 2215 GMT (4:15 p.m. Local)
“This isn’t right,” Isabel said to Rick’s chest as he hugged her goodbye. “No. I can fix this. Let me message Browner. He got my family back together in Houston. He can—”
“No, Isabel. He’s got other things on his mind. You know what they’re doing out west. Let the man do his job.”
She scoffed. “How hard can it be it to…to vaporize a bunch of mental defectives?”
“Very hard. You know it is.”
Her eyes were welling up. “But…why, Rick? After everything we’ve been through. With…with everything…falling apart. Why are you abandoning me now?”
“I’ve got a job to do. Just like you. Only your job now is back in Houston working with that task force studying your sister. Mine is in the field.”
“But even Houston is dangerous. They had that outbreak.”
“And they contained it to just the cordoned off areas.”
She knew better than to beg him to shirk his responsibilities. She needed to appeal to his sense of duty. “It could break out again. If it does, I’ll need you.”
He checked, but they were alone. “I’m not supposed to talk about these things.”
“I know. But…where are you headed?”
“Wisconsin. Not far from my uncle’s farm. Straight recon mission, but…. There’s a small outpost—Guardsmen, airmen, state police, navy boots from the Great Lakes recruit training center—that’s holding on, but they’re not trained for long-range patrolling. I know the area, so I volunteered to lead a team there. If it works out, I can check on my family.”
How could she argue? She had pulled countless strings for the benefit of her family.
“I love you,” she said. I don’t want you to go! she didn’t say.
“I love you, too.” They kissed until it was time and Isabel boarded the C-130 for her flight back to Houston…alone.
* * * *
After landing at Ellington Field, Isabel found Noah and his family back in a trailer there. “Full circle, huh?” She gave them her fantastically bleak report about the atrocities she had witnessed in the Rockies, to which Noah added his pessimistic reports from farther west. His one hopeful bit of news concerned the woman and baby from New Guinea who must have been naturally immune to Pandoravirus.
Isabel said nothing about the nuclear attacks, news of which was totally suppressed in what seemed like a repeat of the first month of th
e outbreak. Noah’s family painted a picture of an ominous life under martial law, in constant dread of a quarantine death sentence, failing daily by degrees and weekly in sudden step changes, all pointing at only one end. In the glum lull that followed, Natalie asked, extremely tentatively, about Rick.
When Isabel said he’d been sent on a mission, they all seemed relieved. Apparently, they had been convinced by his absence that Rick was dead. “He’s fine,” Isabel assured them. “He’ll be back in a week or so.” Their sympathy at so naïve and optimistic a hope led to exaggerated but obviously disingenuous reassurance that of course she was right.
“What’s your plan?” Isabel asked her brother to interrupt the annoying sympathy. “If the shit hits the fan here again?”
Noah’s well thought out plans systematically ruled out north, south, and west due to insufficient indigenous resources. The only compass point remaining at least led back toward fresh water and rich farmland.
“Toward Emma?” Isabel asked.
Noah shrugged. “At least they’re not bombing Virginia.”
“Yet.”
Their parting hugs and heartfelt goodbyes left Isabel in quiet tears. She felt she was losing everyone. And why wouldn’t she feel that way? The whole world was being lost.
The drive downtown had changed dramatically even since Isabel had last taken it seventeen days earlier. Houston was in the tightest grip of martial law possible. Her Humvee stopped time after time at checkpoints along the interstate, the ramp down from the interstate, and every other intersection on surface roads, and she had to endure temperature and pupil checks at each, and behavioral tests—“Soldier crushed under tank; yuck, how gross”—at most.
“Do those gas masks,” Isabel asked one questioner, “even work with the virus?”
“What?” replied the soldier. “They might not work?”
He startled Isabel. “I’m…sure they’re fine. I mean the army wouldn’t have you do something stupid, would they?” That apparently did very little to reassure him.
As the elevator rose in Browner’s Pentagon South, Isabel rubbed her eyes, which were sore from the repeated pupil checks. The rates of infection should be falling, if Emma’s math was correct, as the number susceptible to infection dwindled due to vaccination or, in the vast majority of cases, infection or death. Most Infecteds now would have perfectly normal pupils, but whatever. She was too exhausted to care.
The pace of activity on the floor to which she was directed felt hectic. Male and lots of female soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, many officers, hurried to-and-fro. When finally she found the numbered interior conference room to which she’d been directed, a handwritten sign was taped to the door: “Task Force Dixie.”
Cute, she thought, wondering if they dared hang a confederate flag on the wall to help climb into the mindset of her Yankee sister presiding over an atrocity prone, breakaway southern republic.
The activities of the eight people in the large room all came to a stop when Isabel entered. They must not get many visitors. “Hi. I’m—”
“Dr. Miller,” said a graying man in camo, who extended an elbow for a bump. A large printout of a screen capture of Emma in her hospital gown from the nationally broadcast DHS video was pinned to the fabric walls. Around that photo were others, like mug shots, presumably from intake at the NIH hospital. The little blond girl Samantha. The African American Marine Lance Corporal Dwayne something. The housewife Dorothy, in an action shot with broom in hand. Sheriff Walcott, with a large X across it. And, to Isabel’s immense surprise, former President Stoddard.
As she bumped elbows around the room, the introductions and names flew right over Isabel’s head. She was too distracted by maps plotting in red the largely, but not entirely contiguous territory constituting Emma’s realm together with distant red dots in New England and the upper Midwest. Other areas were filled with other colors—yellow depicting allied communities, she guessed, some crosshatched presumably to convey partial success in Emma’s ongoing annexation campaign. And blue around Norfolk and here and there in small dots, which Isabel concluded, when she finally stopped in front of the map, were U.S. armed forces still in the area.
“They seem to be focusing,” said the gray haired army officer—Major Kravets, whose name was helpfully sewn above his breast pocket—“on moving east, to the south of Richmond. There’s not much population there, but it’s fertile farmland. They’ve also sent emissaries out as far as Detroit and Montreal to gauge interest in a much larger union. Norfolk is keeping a close watch, and if they turn their way they’ll call in USSTRATCOM.”
Isabel considered asking what the hell that was, but the context was obvious. Strategic had come to mean only one thing: nuclear. When Isabel’s eyes met his, he turned away. “It’s okay, major. She’s my sister, but I get what we might have to do. What we are doing, out west. Believe me, I’ve been there and I completely understand.”
“Was it bad?” he asked. His entire team listened intently.
She let out a deep breath. “It’s just…killing. Lots and lots and lots of killing. They rip us to shreds. We blow them to pieces. You almost don’t even notice the spread of the disease.” Except those raped women, came the thought and resulting wince.
“I’m sorry,” Kravets apologized. “We’ve been holed up doing intel, mainly mapping, since this thing started. The Pentagon. Raven Rock. Ft. Campbell. Don’t know where else we’d go after here. Maybe Colorado Springs. But we don’t get to see what’s actually happening out there.”
“Consider yourselves lucky.” She settled in for a go around the table update they had obviously been preparing. In the month since Isabel, Rick, and Noah’s family had made it out of The Community, as the task force called Emma’s kingdom, it had more than doubled in size. “With the latest gains to the east, we now estimate there are over a million residents—citizens, I suppose—of The Community, about half of whom are uninfected.”
“How is she feeding them all?” Isabel asked.
An army captain explained what they had been able to piece together. She said that Emma’s security forces had seized all remaining, unlooted, communal sources of food—stores, warehouses, granaries, mills—but left private supplies alone for now. The latter had contributed to earning her citizens’ loyalty, but the imbalance between haves and have-nots had led to a black-market barter system outside regime control and therefore a “network of potential insurgents with whom we have occasional contact.”
Potential insurgents. This task force hadn’t been convened to help Emma’s efforts.
One soldier down the table said, “Your sister has an issue with loyalty. We’ve been getting regular reports out of her council meetings that—”
“If they’re to be believed,” Major Kravets interrupted. The soldier fell silent.
“She’s definitely been executing people every day,” said a junior officer, straightening her glasses. “Almost every overflight reveals a new mass grave somewhere.”
“Are you sure those aren’t casualties of infection, or from fighting?”
“We’ve got imagery of the killings in progress.” He found aerial photos on his tablet, which he cast to the room’s projector and screen. In one, men and women used rifles to shoot captives from a distance at what looked like a quarry. In another, troops fired pistols point-blank into the heads of men, women, and children kneeling in front of a fresh trench. In a third, machine guns mowed down masses trapped inside a fence. “We’ve documented eleven established sites that we check daily by drone. She doesn’t do public executions, so she’s not making a big show of it. That makes us think that, in part, she’s culling the population of undesirables she doesn’t want to have to feed. We estimate her executions number at least 400 a day, which is in addition to the numbers who refuse her demands to join The Community and are executed in situ following her overruns.”
Isabel was appal
led at Emma, but also at the repeated use of she and her to refer to mass murder. There were half a million Infecteds in Emma’s Community, but their crimes—amid the backdrop of worldwide genocide—were being laid at Emma’s feet.
They worked till the wee hours of the next morning. Isabel reviewed photos of a large board on which were posted Rules—don’t breach the peace, everyone over age fourteen has to work seven days a week, no gatherings of more than six people per ten square meters, etc. Isabel argued that the fertilizer and pesticide plants Emma seemed intent on securing were of a piece with her recent seizures of fertile farmland. The soldiers’ suspicious minds, however, constantly veered toward fertilizer bombs a la Oklahoma City, or Zyklon B for her showers. Isabel’s defenses of Emma’s Community were half-hearted, but someone needed to play devil’s advocate, no matter what their true beliefs.
When one by one the soldiers hit their racks, Isabel said, “I don’t have a rack,” even though she wasn’t entirely certain what one was. Major Kravets found an empty cot for her on the far side of the elevator lobby several floors below. The light in the room was dim, and most of the hundred or so staffers there were asleep and snoring. Outside the floor to ceiling windows, little was visible other than the occasional headlights of a truck or searchlights of a low flying helicopter. There had been more lights on her previous visit.
“What we really need,” said Major Kravets in a low voice, avoiding eye contact as Isabel stood beside her cot clutching her blanket and pillow to her chest, “is boots on the ground. I’ve expended all my capital in begging for daily recon sorties out of Virginia Beach, but at this point aerial reconnaissance and signal intelligence doesn’t tell us what we need to know. We need HUMINT. We need somebody to go in there.”
“To figure out what?” Isabel asked in a low voice meant not to disturb anyone.
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 27
