Healers

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Healers Page 18

by Munson, Brad


  The engine roared to life. She shoved the flatbed into first gear, carefully pressed down on the accelerator and slowly, slowly let out the clutch.

  The flatbed rolled forward. The gunfire didn’t stop – in fact, a second weapon, Piper’s weapon she thought, joined in.

  She pushed through the mob. She saw half a dozen shamblers disappear in front of her, too numb or slow to move. She felt something close to satisfaction when the truck’s massive tires rolled over their corpses, crunching and slurping as they rolled.

  I’ll wait, she told herself. I’ll wait until we’re home, unpacked, debriefed, and put away before I let myself feel anything. Before I let myself cry.

  I just don’t know if, once I start, I’ll ever be able to stop.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Tristan Finnegan lowered his head a fraction and almost – almost – glowered at his Commander-in-Chief. “Sir?” he said carefully

  “You’re going to question my decision. You always do. Not in front of anyone else, ‘Huck,’ I know that – and good for you, or you’d be dead already. But now, here, alone: you’re going to challenge my authority, aren’t you?”

  Finnegan was almost taken aback. In fact, they were no more ‘alone’ than they ever were; The Chairman’s trio of bodyguards still held their traditional, motionless positions behind him, to his left, and at the door. But the tone was something new. He had been living with The Chairman in Mount Weather literally for months; he’d worked for the man for years before the outbreak. And he thought he actually understood him. He thought The Chairman understood the depth and power of Finnegan’s loyalty. But now …

  “I would never challenge your authority, Mr. Chairman,” he said, trying to put as much sincerity as he could muster into his voice. “I just … I want to understand your reasoning. I want to know why you would destroy the single greatest strategic advantage we had, the control of those satellites, when we’re already in crisis on so—”

  “You know why!” The Chairman said. He pounded his desk with a clenched fist on the second word as he said it again. “You know why!”

  Finnegan was dumbfounded. “I do?”

  The Chairman was no longer looking at him. His gaze had returned, as it so often did these days, to the bank of monitors on the far wall of his office. All of them were playing endless loops of video clips gathered by those now-destroyed satellite links. Scenes of the infected mobs invading cities. Scenes of soldiers overwhelmed by sprinters, neighborhoods burning to the ground, whole stadia filled with refugees converting to shamblers in mere minutes. The monitors had been windows on the current world for a long time – until Edwards had been incinerated. Now they were just endless repeats, clips of times gone by, used even now to energize or motivate the RSA’s followers, as if they were live feeds from around the world. As if the infection was still growing.

  “They’ve won,” The Chairman whispered to the wall. Finnegan wasn’t sure if he meant the U.S. government forces or the infected. “It’s over.”

  “I don’t understand,” Finnegan said. It was probably the one phrase in the English language that he hated more than any other.

  “Ever since they got the cure,” The Chairman said. “It’s been over.”

  Finnegan had to literally bite his tongue to keep from saying There is no cure. He knew it now. So, at some level, did The Chairman, or at least he had at one time. Now, Finnegan wasn’t so sure.

  “We blew it,” The Chairman said. “We had that one chance, that moment when we could have taken Omaha and that bitch doctor and had the cure for ourselves. But no. No. No, that would have been too easy, right? Right?”

  Finnegan had worked for men like The Chairman for most of his adult life, and he had acquired one invaluable skill along the way. He had developed the ability to keep his mouth shut and not make things worse, which was exactly what he did at that moment.

  “They’re not going to make it easy on us? Fine. We’re not going to make it easy on them. Boom go the satellites.” He looked closely at Finnegan’s expression and apparently didn’t like what he saw. “Come on, Huck. They stole the cure from us—”

  We never had it, Finnegan told himself. It never existed.

  “—and I wasn’t about to let them steal Edwards from us too.”

  “So,” Finnegan said. “If you can’t have it, nobody can.”

  “Precisely.” The Chairman was positively beaming.

  “You’d rather human civilization fall than let the old U.S. Government take control.”

  “Gold star! Yes!”

  “You don’t care who wins the game, really, because once it’s not you, you’ll just take your bat and ball and go home.”

  The Chairman’s expression froze. His increasingly wet and rheumy eyes blinked rapidly. “Is that some kind of crack?” he said, his voice rising.

  “No, sir. I just want to understand.”

  “Is that some kind of crack?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I overstepped my boundaries.”

  “You sure as hell did, ‘Huck.’ And that’s something you don’t want to do again!”

  “No, sir. You’re right. I do not.”

  A long, tense moment passed. Finnegan sincerely didn’t know what the squat, bald leader of the RSA would say next. Then finally the older man smiled – or the closest thing to a smile his lipless mouth could make. “Okay, then,” he said, much more quietly. He seemed satisfied with his intimidation. He leaned back in his massive black chair. It accepted his weight gladly. “Okay. Now get the hell out. We’ll figure out what to do next … later. Sometime soon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Finnegan had never been so glad to remove himself from his leader’s presence. The rising stink of madness was getting too hard to ignore.

  *****

  Finnegan triple-checked with the sentries before he did it, but finally he gave in to his own secret need yet again. He decided to take a walk outside – outside, in the grounds surrounding the entrance to Mount Weather. He wore a thick winter coat and a lovely long scarf he’d acquired on his last trip to pre-Morningstar Manhattan, and wandered along a series of winding flagstone paths and sidewalks that had been built inside the Mount Weather installation long before the outbreak, when it was still the exclusive property of the U.S. Government. The area had once been a favorite spot for employee lunches or even family picnics. Now he had them all to himself. Almost.

  The winter sun was weak but warm on his face. Even his hands were warm, buried in the pockets of his overcoat. They would stay that way as long as the wind didn’t kick up.

  Virginia really is a beautiful state, he thought, even in the midst of the zombie apocalypse.

  The Chairman was going mad, Finnegan realized. Maybe he had already crossed that river. The destruction of Edwards alone was proof of it, but now there was more: talking to the monitors like a latter-day Nixon; dwelling on conspiracies about secret cures; making elaborate master plans that wasted their dwindling resources in the midst of an extinction-level event.

  It was time to do something about it.

  Lieutenant Gabriel Sommers had been a friend and a colleague of Finnegan’s for years. They had worked together often; they had done things – things that many people would call “bad” things – in hot spots and hidden locations all over the world. When the invasion of Morningstar had proven irreversible, Gabe was one of the first people that Finnegan had brought to Mount Weather. He had placed him high in The Chairman’s growing network, and they had stayed close ever since.

  Now Gabe Sommers was waiting for him in a small, carefully manufactured stone grotto deep in the flagstone maze. He hadn’t even tried to sit on the icy stone bench that was waiting there. He just stood, ramrod straight. Waiting.

  “Gabe,” he said.

  “Finn,” Gabe said. />
  They didn’t look at each other. They looked out over the low, manicured hillocks at the above-ground installation, at the trees beyond the fences and sentries, at the brilliant and brittle winter sky above Virginia.

  “It’s getting to be that time,” Finnegan said.

  “I know.”

  “If it happens. If we step up ...”

  “You know I’m with you,” Gabe said. He mentioned five other names – last names only, carefully and slowly spoken. Finnegan knew them all, and he knew what mentioning them here and now really meant.

  “All right,” Finnegan said. He didn’t nod; he didn’t smile. He didn’t want to give any casual observers in the sentry towers or anywhere else even the slightest hint that they were doing anything but chatting about the weather. “I’ll let you know, then.”

  “I know you will.”

  Finnegan risked one direct look at this old friend, eye to eye, and volumes of information seemed to pass between them in that single look. After a moment, Finnegan shrugged inside his coat as if the cold was starting to affect him. He turned and walked back the way he had come, along the winding flagstone paths to the entrance.

  *****

  A man dressed entirely in black was watching the meeting from far away. He was crouched, motionless, barely inside the tree line that ran a few hundred feet beyond Mount Weather’s protective perimeter fence.

  The outfit was a close cousin to a Special Ops rig that had been developed by DARPA before Morningstar. The man in black had acquired it from another man in black who would no longer be needing it, and it had served him well in the months since. At this moment it made him virtually invisible to the guards in Mount Weather’s sentry towers. If they had any heat or motion sensors in the area, the thermal and electrical shielding woven into his body armor would make him look like just another shambler wandering the woods.

  He knew Finnegan. He’d known him for months. He had been watching his little excursions into the flagstone maze for quite a while, and even though the monocular he was using brought the image of Finnegan and his buddy close enough to read his lips, he didn’t need to. He knew what they were discussing.

  Finnegan was going to betray his masters yet again. It was what animals like Finnegan always did.

  There was a soft grunt and shuffle behind the man in black. Without a thought, he turned, still in a crouch, as he pulled his Ka-Bar from its sheath and thrust up, hard and fast.

  He caught the shambler who had been approaching directly in its sternum. Black muck poured out of the wound, but of course it kept coming. Shamblers didn’t care about being stabbed in the stomach.

  Half a heartbeat later, the man in black was standing, holding back the faltering creature with one shielded arm and jerking the knife out of its belly. The rest was easy: one slash across its throat. Reverse the blade, then another blow, directly into the creature’s temple. One, two, and the shambler dropped, knees unlocking, arms drooping, head twisting to the side. The man in black caught the body as it fell, held it close and lowered it to the ground so it couldn’t make any noise that would alert other shamblers, the guards, or even local wildlife.

  Not yet. The time would come when he’d make himself known, but today wasn’t the day.

  Today it was still watch and wait.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Keaton hauled himself out of half-consciousness when he heard the voices in the next room. It wasn’t the first time he had awakened, but he promised himself, promised, that it would be the last.

  The first time he had been awakened, only a few hours had passed since he’d been sucker-punched outside Eileen’s. His head alternately pounded and rang like a broken bell, and he found focusing to be damn difficult, but he’d come around quickly enough.

  Tanner Whitehead had been waiting for him to wake up that time. He had looked hungry and excited and more than a little terrified at the time. He’d tried to goad Keaton into talking, or shouting, or something, but the sheriff hadn’t given him the satisfaction. He didn’t speak a word. “Fine,” the little shit had finally said, scrunching up his face like a petulant child. “Just you wait.”

  They’d used some local-brew version of chloroform on him after that. A hand came from behind, clamped a stinking rag over his mouth, and moments later he passed out for a second time. He could still feel the burn of it in his throat and lungs. He wondered what bargain basement amateur chemist had cooked up that particular witches’ brew. He’d be sure to make them pay.

  The second time he’d woken up on his own, and a woman in a mask had fed him some tasteless cornmeal mush and given him water. He could see rays of sun, pale and sharp as the afternoon waned, slicing through the planks behind her. The two of them were alone in a small barn or a large shack somewhere in New Abraham. He was sure of that much; he recognized the architecture, if not the specific building.

  He’d recognized the woman in an instant. He wasn’t an idiot. “Adelina,” he’d grated. He remembered how she’d stopped moving, frozen like a damn deer at the sound of a gunshot. “Why are you doing this?”

  She didn’t speak. She moved forward to give him some more water from an ancient plastic bottle.

  He tried to stand, and couldn’t do it. He tried to raise his arms, if only to bat the water bottle out of the masked woman’s hands, but his arms wouldn’t move. It took him a while to clear the chemical fog from his brain so he could see what was happening.

  He was tied to a rickety wooden chair, his wrists handcuffed behind him (with his own cuffs, goddamn it) and his ankles were lashed to the chair legs. He had no leverage and less strength. He was stuck.

  “Adelina,” he said again. “Think about this.”

  “Shut up,” the woman in the mask said. “Just … shut up.” She put the water bottle down on the floor near the exit, then turned and walked out. The door chunked and clunked behind her, clearly being locked from the outside.

  Keaton smiled. They’d made the mistake leaving him alone … and awake.

  The moment she was out of the room, he hunched his shoulders, jerked his legs, and moved the chair three inches to the right in a stunted half-hop. He took a deep breath and did it again. Then again. And five more times until he was a foot away from the rough wooden wall of the shack and half-turned so his back was to it.

  “One,” he said under his breath. “Two. Three!”

  He threw himself back as hard as he could. The chair tipped on its rear legs and Keaton threw his weight into it and his head forward, so the back of the old and creaking piece of furniture hit the wall at a brutal angle and snapped underneath him.

  The sheriff of New Abraham was not a small man. The fall he took to the worn plank flooring hurt him in ten different places, but by the time he rolled away the chair had become a scattered set of splinters and shards, and he was nearly a free man. A little more grunting and squirming, and he had his hand-cuffed wrists in front of him rather than behind. A moment after that, he was on his feet and ready for a fight.

  He could still hear voices from the next room, the room that the masked woman he was sure was Adelina had walked into. Now he hobbled across his wooden cell, painfully aware of the hunks of rope around his ankles and the bruises that were forming all over his body. He put his eye against the biggest crack in the wall that he could find, right next to the crude door that separated the two rooms, and gulped in air, trying to catch his breath. He had a bad feeling he was going to need all the energy he could muster, and soon.

  Tanner Whitehead was standing in a rough semi-circle of citizens, his hands clenched tightly behind him. His best buddy Chick Harrison, all long stringy hair and weirdly thin fingers, was glaring at him.

  “I don’t get it,” Harrison was saying. “Why don’t we just kill him? Get this done?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Whitehead said, and when Harrison bristled and stepped forward to ma
ke it physical, it was Adelina – stripped of the mask now, looking very worried – who put a restraining hand on Harrison’s arm. “He didn’t mean that,” she said. “Come on, we’re all tense.”

  “I’m not fuckin’ tense,” Harrison grumbled. “I just want to get this done.”

  “Look,” Whitehead said to them all, his hands still clenched, “the man’s a symbol. He’s got a lot of power in this town. Most of the assholes actually believe him when he tells them there’s no cure, that we’re going to get this ‘vaccine’ when it’s ready.” Keaton almost snarled when the over-blond asshole actually made air-quotes around “vaccine.”

  “So how do we convince them otherwise?” said Sadie Teak, an older black woman with high cheekbones and trust issues. Keaton had been forced to deal with her and her abusive husband a couple of times already; he wasn’t really surprised to see that she was part of this.

  “We use him,” Whitehead told them. “We show them.” He turned to a narrow-shouldered redhead with small eyes and an explosion of freckles across her cheeks. “Charmaine?” he said, as if they’d been planning something all along.

  Charmaine Tilly pulled a small hinged box out of her jacket pocket and opened it so she could show the contents around without touching it. It was a syringe filled with a thick red-and-black fluid that everyone in the room recognized all too well.

  “It’s infected blood,” Tanner said. “Charmaine got it for us, just last week.”

  He recognized the redhead, too. She had been an EMT, before Morningstar; she worked in the tiny little clinic they’d set up in the center of New Abraham, but she’d always been … quiet, anyway. A little strange. Now she was looking at Tanner Whitehead like he was a messiah done up in a bleach blond ‘do.

 

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