by Munson, Brad
“Uh … that’s your name?” Rebecca said, more than a little skeptical. Stiles winced internally. He was hoping there wouldn’t be any tension between the two best-looking women in recovered Omaha.
“It’s what I am,” The Dentist said flatly. And that was the end of that.
“Okay!” Stiles said and popped his hands together. They made a pathetic little poof sound inside his padded gloves. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
They began their long and not-very-leisurely walk through the new community. He spoke loudly, slowly, almost proudly as he pointed to the solar collectors on the roof of the new Town Hall. “Let’s talk electricity first. Basically, it does two things in our world: It makes light and it makes heat, but electricity itself is hard and expensive to make and store, so if we can find any other way to get those two things, we do. The days of the centralized power grid and cheap electricity are over. So: Lots of reinforced and insulated windows and skylights, lots of solar panels where we can salvage them, and soon lots of windmills on roofs and in backyards and turbines in rivers and streams, not to mention as many batteries as we can find ... though batteries are a short-term fix. The longer-term idea is generators – tidy little generators, good for just a few structures. They can be steam-powered, using wood – but not too much wood – or more likely running on ethanol that we process ourselves. More on that later. Bottom line: We have just enough, barely enough, to keep the lights on and the heat at a steady sixty degrees for every citizen this winter, but so far none for recreation or extra comfort. Not yet.”
Rebecca cleared her throat and drove her freezing hands into the pockets of her coat. “That’s kind of our slogan around here these days,” she said. “‘Not yet.’ We’re planning on getting everything we need and want back up and running, and soon. But right now, we’re just one notch above survival mode.”
They turned a corner and started down a long, wide street that had been a main drag in northeast Omaha, back in the day. There were storefronts lining both sides of the street. Only a few were open for business, filled with lantern light or electrical illumination from a few carefully chosen bulbs. The rest – the majority – were solidly locked, with windows boarded over and doors sealed shut.
“A quick word about buying and selling,” Stiles said as they walked. “We don’t have money here in Omaha—” he cast a quick, sardonic look at Rebecca – “Not yet. Right now, it’s all about barter. You’ll exchange food for tech, goods for services. If you get ‘paid’ at all, you’ll usually get paid in things, like food or clothing, and when the government pays you for goods or services rendered, we try to pay you a little more than you actually need, so you can build up some savings, some extras. When you need something from somebody else – something to eat or wear or play with – you can use those savings or strike a deal. If and when there are conflicts – and there will be, there already have been – you have already agreed to work with a three-person Panel – yeah, I hate the name, too – that will listen and resolve the conflict. And read the fine print in your citizen agreement: You’ve agreed to be on one of these Panels now and then. The membership rotates all the time.”
Rebecca grinned. “Trust me, it’s not that bad. Free food.”
The others laughed lightly ... except The Dentist, whose lovely face scarcely changed expression. Once again, Stiles wondered if there was going to be trouble with her. The fact was, they needed a good tooth doc for this many people, and she was the first one who had shown up. The only thing as devastating as a gunshot wound to a community like theirs was a bad toothache, so her skills were essential and precious. Still ...
He stopped long enough to stomp his feet and get the circulation going again. Then they moved on, through two blocks of small houses and apartments. A third of the residences were newly rebuilt and inhabited; the other two-thirds were abandoned, thoroughly gutted, and prepped for eventual renovation or removal. Stiles was distantly proud of the state of the neighborhood. Even the wreckage looked well-kept.
“Right now, a few small outlying communities supply us with the food and the ethanol we need,” he said as they strolled. He wished the vapor from his mouth would stop; he was tired of being cold all the time. “The biggest and best of those is a town in Kansas that’s had a rough time but is on its way back: New Abraham. Some of us – some of you – will be visiting there in a few days. Someday soon, though, we hope to make Omaha and every other recovering community in America self-sustaining and strong. That’s the plan, anyway.” Even if there are hordes of infected still lurking in the woods. And cities. And deserts. And valleys ...
The group reached the huge, glass-fronted, unmarked building they called “the Fac,” the Facility. At first glance it looked like nothing more than another ten-year-old industrial space, slightly better-maintained than most in the post-apocalyptic world, but otherwise completely normal. Rebecca knew intimately how wrong that assessment was.
“You know this place,” she said as they passed it. “Everybody does. Even the RSA. But we don’t talk about where it is all that much. No reason to advertise it. Just know that a couple of you, at least, will be pulled off your current duties and reassigned here to Vaccine Prep when all the pieces are in place. This is the place that’s going to save the world.” And I helped it happen, she said to herself – a sentence she would never say out loud. It was amazing even to Rebecca herself, but in the last few months – since the RSA had been repulsed, and Sherman had taken firm control of recovering Omaha – she had actually allowed herself to … well, to actually hope. It was a feeling she hadn’t experienced since her first few weeks in pre-Morningstar Egypt, long ago, and something she’d thought she’d never feel again.
And, she had to admit, this goof Mark Stiles had something to do with it as well ...
The pale sun was rising in the east. The walk had been long but worthwhile, and they were nearly done. “Okay,” Stiles said. “One more stop, and then Q’s and A’s.” They trudged five more blocks to the north, past locked-off industrial spaces and thoroughly looted and sealed storefronts, to the nearest portion of the perimeter fence. He stopped them a few yards short of the nearest line of chain-link.
The first perimeter fence was tight and unmarked. Fifty yards past that was the second fence, equally sturdy. The new citizens lined up unconsciously, all facing outwards, looking at the shamblers that wandered beyond the second perimeter.
“So there they are,” Stiles said. He worked hard to keep the hatred and bitterness out of his voice. “As you can see: mostly shamblers. Very few sprinters left.”
“Why is that?” asked Barrington, one of the young men who would be joining the Watch later that day. He was slightly shorter than average, solidly built, with a thatch of dirty blond hair that defied control. He was staring hard at the shamblers, looking at the no-man’s land between fences – the zone he would soon be patrolling.
“Because sprinters are temporary,” Rebecca said, and all the new citizens turned to her, frowning.
“It’s important you understand the difference,” Stiles said. “It’s key to your work, and to our future. It’s got to do with the vaccine, too.”
Rebecca squared her shoulders. “Look: The Morningstar Strain starts its work in a living human. Though they’re totally, violently insane, sprinters are really nothing more than infected humans. They breathe, they have a heartbeat, they eat, they even reason to a degree. The virus has permanently destroyed their ability to communicate or cooperate or even reproduce—”
“—Thank God,” Stiles muttered.
“—but they’re alive, and a bullet in the chest or massive blood loss or even starvation will kill them. In fact, that’s how most of them die these days, we think: starvation.”
The new citizens were still frowning.
“However ...” Stiles said, putting one gloved finger in the air.
“However,” Rebecca repeated.
“When they do die, they’re not done. Not nearly. The minute vital functions cease, the virus takes over. The forebrain may be gone, but the virus floods into the amygdala, takes over, and reanimates the corpse. It’s dead now – it’s not human anymore, not even a little. No memory, no higher functions. We don’t think it can even see or hear that well. No heartbeat. No sensation. No hunger.”
“No hunger?” Tomlinson, the shoemaker echoed. “But they’re after us. Always. They’re trying to kill us.”
Rebecca was already shaking her head. “No, actually, they’re not. Sprinters want to kill you, yeah: they hate you. But shamblers don’t want to kill you, not even for food. They don’t want your brains or your flesh or your spinal fluid. Shamblers – not sprinters, but shamblers – are just carrying-cases for the virus, and the virus wants only one thing.”
“To spread,” Tomlinson said with a flat, ugly voice. Stiles looked at him more closely, really for the first time. There might be more to this man than he’d thought.
“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “It’s all viruses have ever wanted, for as long as we’ve known they exist: to spread. And the only way Morningstar can spread is blood to blood: A bite or a scratch from an infected source.”
They started to walk the length of the inner perimeter fence, still watching the shamblers. Stiles was well aware that the distance between the barriers wasn’t arbitrary or accidental. This was the minimum distance needed to keep the shamblers at bay – just far enough away so the smell and noise generated by recovering Omaha was below their limited perception, so they wouldn’t gather in mobs along the fence, but close enough so the Watch could keep an eye on them – and on anyone else who might be approaching from any direction. Still, seeing them stagger past, oblivious and relentless, was enough to chill his blood.
“Sometimes the virus gets carried away,” Rebecca said. “It just wants to bite, because that’s the most efficient form of transmission, and sometimes it bites too hard or in the wrong place and damages the new host so badly it can’t rise. But whether the newly infected comes back as a sprinter or a shambler, the virus doesn’t care: Its work is done. It can move on.”
“And meanwhile, that carrying-case is very hard to kill,” Stiles told them. “They don’t die of starvation, because they don’t eat. If they can’t sense any new humans to infect, they just stop, they go into a kind of stand-up hibernation and just wait for a sound or sight or smell to wander by, and then they jump at it. Fast.”
“How long can they ... hibernate?” The Dentist asked. It was her first questions since they’d begun. Her voice was as deep and rich as he remembered.
“We don’t know,” Rebecca said. “We’re watching some ... subjects ... right now, and so far, it looks to be indefinite. Years rather than weeks or months.” She didn’t tell them the whole story: about the RSA soldiers who didn’t make it through Dr. Demilio’s trials, who were still locked away in BL-4, in hibernation, being watched and measured every day by the doctor. It was a horrible way to die – or rather, to not die. She didn’t want to think about it.
“It’s hard,” Stiles said. “You have to destroy the brain or burn the body to cinders or rip the shambler limb from limb, so physics takes over and it literally cannot walk. You–” He looked into the faces of the new citizens and stopped. Too much, he realized. They all had the haunted look of people remembering their worst moments during the weeks and months of the Outbreak, before they had found the relative safety of Omaha. Stiles cleared his throat. “Uh … sorry.”
“But it’s important you understand this,” Rebecca said, a hint of the old, grim Rebecca returning to her voice. “There’s a ton of misinformation out there, and it’s scaring the hell out of people. Here’s the proven, scientific fact: You can only turn into a sprinter if you’re infected. If you were to drop dead from a heart attack right here, right now, you’d just die, the way humans have always died, never to rise again. Because the Morningstar virus isn’t in you. It’s not airborne. It’s not in the food or water. It doesn’t work that way. Yes, an uninfected human who is bitten or scratched will turn into a sprinter in a matter of minutes or, at most, hours, depending on their resistance and the severity of the bite. But the vaccine that Dr. Demilio has created keeps the virus from ever getting a hold in you, even if you are exposed by a bite or scratch. It stops the virus before it begins to replicate.”
“How easy is it to get infected?” Tomlinson asked. “I remember ... you know, at the beginning. It seemed like the tiniest little splash of blood could turn somebody into a sprinter.”
Rebecca was nodding again. “Yeah, it seemed that way. Turns out – and we’ve been studying this for months now, so I’m sure this is true – it turns out that every human has a different level of immunity to Morningstar. Some have almost no resistance. The slightest blood-to-blood exposure, like a mist of blood in a wound or in a cut on the fingertip – and they turn. For others, it takes a much larger and longer exposure. And the sad fact is that pretty much everybody with a low level of natural immunity is … well, those people are gone already. They didn’t make it past the first couple of weeks. The fact that you’re still here is an indicator that you have a relatively high natural immunity, and it would take a full-on bite or wound from a sprinter or shambler to infect you. You don’t need to worry – not even you guys, the ones who may encounter them up close and personal – about easy or accidental infection.” She looked at the future Watch members, who nodded back at her.
“What about a complete natural immunity?” The Dentist asked. “Isn’t anybody totally safe?”
Rebecca resisted the temptation to look at Stiles. They had all agreed long ago to keep his nearly miraculous immunity a secret. He had already given gallons of blood to Demilio; the antibodies had been duplicated and stored in half a dozen secure locations from Omaha to Offutt to McCoy and beyond. Even so, he would become a celebrity and a target if anyone knew he’d been bitten twice already and not only survived, but – with Dr. Demilio’s help – even healed. “It’s very rare,” she said, carefully keeping her eyes on The Dentist. “Literally one in a million or more. We’ve only encountered a single individual with complete immunity, but we’re looking constantly for another—”
There was a sudden, deep, metallic sound from the fence – from a half-dozen locations along the fence, where sturdy gates had been installed. They were there so Watch members could enter No Man’s Land at almost any point, address breach issues or problems at the outer fence without having to take lengthy detours. And those gates were solidly designed, as strong or stronger than the fence around them. They could only be opened by a physical key in the lock with a matching signal from the base computer network – essentially a double-key system. But ...
CHUNK.
It was the sound of the gate lock opening wide without the touch of a human hand.
Stiles spun around, stunned by the sound of it. He was even more stunned when he heard it again … and again … and again: CHUNK ...CHUNK ... CHUNK.
Every gate in the perimeter fences opened wide, swinging free like screen doors with broken latches. Almost instantly, as if on cue, shamblers, responding to the sound, began pushing through into No Man’s Land.
And there was no alarm sounding at all.
“Oh, shit,” Stiles said.
The new citizens gaped at the swinging gates. Two of the future Urban Farmers took a step back, suddenly and deeply terrified at the sight of the approaching infected.
“Is this some kind of … drill? Another test?” The Dentist asked, her arms wide from her body, her feet flat and braced. Already in fighting stance, Stiles realized.
“No,” Stiles said. “It’s not. It’s ... this is bad.”
Three of the creatures had already crossed No Man’s Land, more quickly than any of them had thought possible.
All of a sudden, in a matter of moments, the shamblers were coming for them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Just as the new citizens’ orientation tour was setting out from Town Hall, Doctor Anna Demilio was beginning her day in BioLab-4. She began it the same way she had every day for months: checking on her imprisoned patients, double-checking the locks and atmospheric seals, and then pausing to re-read the last words written by a very brave man.
She stood in the middle of her pristine workspace, ignoring the hiss of the air pumps and the acidic bite of disinfectant in her nose as she stared at the handwritten note. It had been scribbled hastily on the back of a medical form using a nearly exhausted ball-point pen. The block letters faded in and out; the last few were more carved into the paper than written, but she was familiar with every stroke. She knew exactly what it said.
It was from Agent Mason, the federal operative who had gotten her safely to Omaha in the mad weeks after the virus had come to America, who had protected her and her work from the RSA and other predators. Who had died saving her life.
Anna, the note read ...
I’m dying. That rat bastard Sawyer shot me three times in the belly, but even point blank the man’s a moron. I’m still not dead. But he knows that. He’ll be back to finish the job.
I hate the idea of becoming one of those monsters. But maybe I can help one last time if I do.
Our old buddy Harris died last night, in the bed right next to me. You don’t know that yet. His wounds were much worse than we thought, I guess. And ten minutes after he passed he came back as a sprinter.
I killed him again. I had to. I was about to tell you when all hell broke loose.
