It still didn’t make any sense. “So you brought down the zombie apocalypse on the world? How does killing so many innocent people make up for…” I cast around but came up empty.
Alders had the grace to look slightly, if not chagrined, disconcerted. “That was a minor mistake, but undoing decades of mistakes often demands a small tribute to be paid.”
“Small?” I stuttered. “You killed billions! Billions of people all over the world! That’s not a minor anything! That’s worse than all the atrocities ever committed all taken together!”
Alders made a dismissive sound, letting Dolores take over.
“We suffered a slight hitch in the execution, but that was a risk well worth taking,” she explained. “The goal was always to expose what had been hidden, and force the world to realize the damage they were doing. Don’t you remember how it all started? With the soldier going insane in the ice cream parlor? Our plan worked flawlessly. Not only did it expose the monsters that had been created, no, it also exposed just what kind of monsters in disguise they were. It worked, one hundred percent, forcing everyone to see the mindless killing machine behind the demure facade.”
The more they explained, the worse it got, at least for me. Judging from the stupefied looks on Jason and Torres’s faces, it didn’t end there.
“And everyone else who got sick?”
Alders shook that point off with a shrug. “You have to admit, Dr. Lewis, that using the high fructose corn syrup as delivery vehicle was a congenial idea. It only took days to reach maximum spread of the infectious agent, accomplishing what not a single contingency plan could have been prepared for. Did you know that the fastest estimated spread they calculated was over a hundred days? I managed this in under five.”
“We did,” Dolores insisted. “We, and hundreds of like-minded warriors who infiltrated the very establishments we knew were ruining our planet. Every coffee shop and fast food joint that catered to the instant gratification-seeking parasites. The factories and supply chains that continued the propagation of the exploitation of our natural resources. We were everywhere, and we accomplished the impossible. We cleansed the earth.”
I was seriously at a loss for what to say. Torres was the only one finding the perfect reply. “You people are so fucked in the head, you don’t even see that you’ve become a million times worse than the suckers you rail against.”
Alders was ready to protest, but shut his mouth when he realized that he didn’t have everyone’s attention. Nate was still staring at Dolores, his expression utterly blank. “Your offer to help me find out what had happened to Raleigh… everything you did—the spying, procuring funds, connecting me with people… all of that was a lie.” She didn’t protest, but the way her lips quivered I could tell that she was itching to defend herself. “And all for what? I fucking saved your life, over, and over, and over again. You would have died in that bunker we had to retreat to. I played bodyguard for you on more missions than I can remember. I spent months I should have dedicated to finding out what had happened to my brother running errands for you, all so you could access the resources we needed—or so you said. Was any of that good for anything but to propagate your petty madness and deceit?”
What little compassion there had been in her gaze when he started, it was gone by the end. “I think you can answer that yourself. After all, you’re a hint smarter than the average knucklehead.” She even allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. “I have resented helping your people since the moment I realized what they had done to so many of you. What abominations they had turned you into. But it ultimately took me meeting Dr. Alders to realize the full extent of the madness. He made me see that there was a way for me to atone for my sins. To wash myself clean of the guilt of what I’d been forced to participate in. When he approached me with the virus he’d created, I knew what had to be done. It was easy to find people who thought like us, ready to help, finally put action to words so often unheard and neglected. What you call our proud nation has fallen so far from grace that it took a miracle to cleanse it—but we did it. We equalized the scales, annihilated those that would suppress the weak in favor of furthering their own delusions of grandeur. We cut out the cancer, cauterized the wound. Humanity is back where it belongs—a part of the cycle, no longer the predominant parasite it has become. I will never be able to undo the damage I did before I saw the light, but it was more than a stroke of luck that turned you, part of the problem, into the vehicle needed to deliver retribution.”
Nate’s mouth dropped open, his scowl making me guess that he was about to deliver a scathing retort, but instead he asked, “And that’s why my brother had to die? Because he got in your way?”
Vexation crossed Dolores’s face, but none of the guilt I would have expected from someone who’d been close to Nate once—which, I figured, had just been an act. “Your brother proved to be an utter nuisance,” she bit out. “We tried to recruit him early on, but not only did he turn out not sympathetic to our cause, but he actively threatened to expose our budding resistance. Not openly, at first, but it only took him weeks to approach Thecla with a compound that he’d created that would have blocked the weaponized virus from activating. Such brilliance, wasted on a selfish ignorant.” Her eyes briefly flitted to me before returning to Nate. “We didn’t know if he’d shared these findings with possible candidates for his assistant, so we had to act fast. We took him out and two of his candidates, but because she’d started working for the company in the meantime, we had to bide our time not to attract attention. One accidental death nobody cares about, but two in quick succession might have drawn a full investigation, and we couldn’t risk that. Our people spent months scouring his documentation, but never came up with notes or the compound itself, so we had to make sure that none of the people your brother might have given both to could act on that information. We managed to follow all possible leads just in time, leaving only her as a possible last leak. But, of course, by then you had started screwing her, making it impossible for us to interfere, not to tip you off. It was a risk we had to take, and as it turns out, it was a minor risk to begin with. In the end, when the virus hit the streets, no one was left to work on stopping us. None of us could have expected the operation to succeed like this.”
That explained why both Aimes and Nate had been suspecting the wrong people responsible for the killing of so many innocent civilians. If I hadn’t been so distraught by her explanation, I would have laughed out loud. So what had, in the end, saved me was that all I’d done for months was work and start a sordid affair with a random guy I’d bumped into at the park? That, and Thecla keeping watch over me. Knowing what I knew now, I realized that when guilt had started to eat her up, she must have seen me as her salvation. Raleigh hadn’t confided in me, but she couldn’t have known that. Maybe she’d held out hope until the very end that I’d stumbled over that missing part of his research—or that Nate would use me to undo the damage she’d done. While that didn’t exactly exonerate her, it made me feel for her. If only she’d said something… but that point was moot now, a million times over.
There was a world of anguish, heavily laced with frustration, in Nate’s exhale, yet rather than continue to argue with her—or demand answers that we both knew wouldn’t do a thing to alleviate anything—he straightened, dropping his weapon to his side. Turning to me, he jerked his chin toward the door. “Let’s just go. There’s nothing in here worth dealing with.” I didn’t miss how his hand shook. He must have been minutes away from crashing, too exhausted to still give a shit.
Part of me wanted to protest. Wanted to grab Alders and shake him until he told me every little detail of his research; how he had turned the virus and serum into the most devastating weapon ever imagined; but above all else, how he could live with himself. How he could just sit here, smiling faintly, proud of himself, ignoring that what he obviously considered just a glitch in the execution had cost billions of people their lives. I could, on some basic level, relate to t
he latent guilt so many scientists carried with them—what if what I’m doing will ultimately be turned around and perverted into the opposite of what it was intended for?—but his brutal detachment from reality was nothing I could even begin to comprehend.
Part of me wanted to demand every scrap of his documentation so I could sift through it, find the active reagents, maybe even work on a cure, because now that phantasm that Stone and the researchers in Aurora—and wherever else they had bugged down—had been working on might actually be in my grasp. It was that thought that made me voice one last question—a question I figured I already knew the answer to, but needed confirmation, for closure.
“You managed to iron out the one flaw in your creation, didn’t you?” I asked. “That they weren’t yours to control, the super soldiers you helped to create. That they remained autonomous, thinking humans who could gauge risks and decide for themselves. It wasn’t the possible acts of atrocity they might commit that you objected to. It’s that they still had a choice that was unacceptable for you.”
The smile spreading on Alders’s face was giving me hives. “Very good, Dr. Lewis. I see that while you chose, time and again, to throw your lot in with the wrong side, your intellect isn’t completely wasted. Indeed, I managed to perfect my creation last winter, in the lab facility you must have passed on your way in. I think you already got to see it in effect for yourself.”
It got really hard not to pull the trigger to blow his smirking face to smithereens. “How exactly did Taggard manage to get his grubby hands on this?”
The belligerence in Alders’s smile made it all the harder to resist. “Why, that was the easy part, of course. He’s my son.”
“Your what?” Even with all the madness he still managed to add one more layer of insanity.
“My son,” Alders continued to explain. “With my second wife. She re-married and had that idiot adopt him, but couldn’t change his first name that he’d inherited from me. Who do you think helped us set up shop here?”
“You infected your own son? You do realize that he went batshit crazy in the end?”
A muscle jerked in Alders’s cheek. “He joined the Army straight out of high school, didn’t he? You don’t have to repeat what an utter disappointment he was. I considered it a stroke of luck that in the end, he came around, although his usefulness was rather limited as you can see.”
That was too much. I knew what would come next—some rationally sounding but utterly incomprehensible bullshit justifying what they’d done to all those women they’d impregnated and kidnapped, or kidnapped and raped. If the last months had proven anything to me, it was that I could take a lot more than I’d ever thought, but this was where I drew the line. Dolores’s explanation, if you could call it that, just strengthened my conviction. Maybe it wasn’t even her own, special kind of madness. Maybe Alders had infected her as well. Who could say? It didn’t matter in the end. When Bucky had sent us here, I’d felt a glimmer of hope flare alive deep in my chest to finally get some answers, but it was obvious that we would never get them—because they simply didn’t exist.
Turning to Nate, I gave the tiniest of nods. “I’m done here.”
I caught a flicker of disappointment on Torres’s face as we turned, but found agreement in Jason’s. Pausing, I told Torres, “Just because I don’t feel the need to slice him up for what happened to Gussy doesn’t mean that you can’t. I’m just beyond the point where I believe that anything I could do will undo what happened.”
With that, I followed Nate out of the room, barely noticing that only half of the Chargers and the Vegas guys, and none of the Raiders, filed out with us. The heavy door fell into the lock with a final boom, shutting out any sound of what might have been happening behind it.
No one said a word as we walked out of the building, then through the blast doors and the tunnel back into daylight, where we halted briefly. Jason seemed ready to offer something but left it at a strong hug only. Nate and I climbed back into the Rover, but after starting it I just stared through where the windscreen used to be at the dusty road before us. “Where to?”
Nate didn’t make a grab for his maps as usual, looking as wiped as I felt. “Just drive. Into the mountains. There are a million lakes and cabins up there, I’m sure we’ll find one that’s not infested.”
I nodded and eased the car into motion, ignoring how much it shuddered, and that driving over thirty miles an hour was a thing of the past. All that was important now was to get away. Just far, far away.
Chapter 29
The golden rays of the setting sun were warming my wet, naked back as I dragged the last part of my gear out of the water, leaving it sitting there, too exhausted to give a shit. We’d ended up driving south, hugging the line of the mountains, until we found a lake that was perfect for our needs. There was a small island toward the north shore, easy to reach by boat with the waters too deep to let any random shambler cross it on foot. We’d left the Rover parked by the sandy shore, dumped what food and gear we thought we might need in a small boat bobbing up and down where it had washed up on a pier and tangled in the struts, and swam across, not bothering with undressing, except for anything that had mechanical, moving parts. Took care of part of the cleanup, and the distance was short enough that neither of us drowned. Then it was just dragging our tired asses out of the water and getting out of the now somewhat less stinking clothes. The temperatures were already dropping with the warmth of the sun diminishing, but I didn’t have the energy to care anymore. Keeping the car on the road had leeched what little power my body was still running on right out of me.
Nate dropped like a stone next to me, ending up so our heads were side by side with our bodies stretched out in opposite directions. While he was catching his breath, he looked wide-eyed at the sky before he turned his head with visible effort, staring straight into my eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Uttering those two—three?—words was all my brain managed before it ground to a blissful halt.
“For what?” came his question a good thirty seconds later.
“Stabbing you in the back?” I proposed, partly exasperated by him forcing me to stay responsive a little longer. I felt like shit. Not even tired in the sense of needing rest, but bone-deep weary, and like I’d barely survived alcohol and food poisoning while battling influenza all at once. Even the roots of my hairs were hurting. “I knew you were out for blood. And I forced you to turn your back on Hamilton and just walk away.”
He considered that for a long while, not a single muscle in his face moving. “I didn’t think it was possible to be both incredibly mad at someone while being equally relieved about the actions they set.”
I couldn’t help but snort, although it came out as barely more than a noisy exhale. “So happy I didn’t disappoint.” We remained like that for a while, neither of us moving a muscle. “Exactly how long does this shit take to wear off?”
A long pause. “About three to five times as long as it made you burn through your reserves. We have to eat something before nightfall or else we might fall into glycemic shock, and we all know how well treating comas works in the zombie apocalypse.”
The very idea of eating was making my stomach revolt. Besides, I was too worn out to get up and go the five feet over to where our packs were resting next to the boat that we’d dragged up onto the shore. “Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Another sigh. “Because you damn well deserve to suffer through all the scorn and silent glares I can heap on you before I start feeling too petty and ridiculous to continue. Deal with it. You knew all that when you married me.”
Near silent laughter made my body shake. That was all the answer I could give.
Time crawled by. The sky changed colors—glorious yellow, flaming red, bright magenta, until it faded into purple, then blue. I knew that my skin was cold and dew was forming on it, but I was just as incapable of wiping it away as suppressing the light shivers that passed thro
ugh me from time to time.
“Nate?”
“Hm,” came his eloquent response, but at least he turned his head to look at me once more.
I tried to grin but didn’t find the energy. “Love you, too.”
It was rather funny to watch the emotions chase each other, in slow motion, across his face—joy, satisfaction, and then the inevitable exasperation that finally got me cracking a smile.
“Woman, of all the times you could—“
“Oh, shut up,” I said, batting a hand in the general direction of his body, only hitting grass. “Has it ever occurred to you that I’d wait for a moment exactly like this one? When you’re too exhausted to start any of your usual BS and I’d end up regretting saying it the second the words left my mouth?”
Green Fields (Book 6): Unity Page 41
