“I was whispering because I always like to have the element of surprise in an unknown situation. People do stupid things when they’re desperate. If someone’s going to get shot, I’d prefer it isn’t me.”
Tris held up her hand at a brief noise. It could’ve been a quick shout from a man or someone doing something unpleasant to a dog. She pointed ahead and left. Zara followed along as they crossed the bulk of the store, until Tris halted by another pair of flappy plastic doors between two cooler cases with price tags for milk, orange juice, tea, and other drinks. The white fiberglass bore liberal scuffmarks from pushcarts and boots.
The sight of it made her parched and in dire want of a drink.
“You can’t!” yelled a man.
“Please don’t make me!” shouted a young girl.
Tris shoved the door aside and ran down a plain grey cinder block corridor into a room full of warehouse shelves and pallet jacks. The din of people emanated from an alcove up ahead near what she assumed to be the outer wall of the store. Opposite a desk full of ancient clipboards, it held a stairway down into a basement level.
“Okay, okay!” wailed a childish voice. “Don’t shoot me.”
“Son of a bitch,” yelled a man.
“Easy,” shouted a different man.
Tris hurried down a set of stairs, paused at the corner of a landing, and aimed the Beretta down the next set. Shadows moved across the floor, but the people who made them stood too far away to be seen. She stalked the last six steps to the basement floor.
Beyond a series of hanging clear plastic ‘walls’ and shelves, a circle of people surrounded a skinny tween girl with straight, black hair down to her butt. She stood naked in the middle of them, arms raised, a wadded-up dress in her left hand. Clearly not yet twelve, she turned in a slow spin while shivering and crying, allowing the crowd to see every inch of her under pain of death. The only functioning light bulb in the entire basement hung directly above her, creating a cone of illumination in which her skin all but glowed.
A man with Hispanic features and a strong resemblance to the girl stood out due to the red in his cheeks, and sheer anger emanating from him. His rage appeared directed at a grey-haired pale man with a pistol leveled off somewhere between him and the child. When the girl had her back to the armed man, she looked up at the furious man, sniveling, trembling.
“Daddy… please don’t let him shoot me. Please… I didn’t do anything! I don’t wanna die.”
“Hold up your legs one at a time,” said a black man in similar armor to what she’d seen on the mannequins―only his looked real. “Need ta see if you stepped on anything and got cut.”
The girl, head down, face red, obliged.
A white haired, skinny man made an annoyed face and waved at the man with the gun. “I don’t see no bite―”
“What the fuck is going on?!” yelled Tris. She stormed in, Beretta raised at the fortyish man pointing a gun at a little girl. “Kid, put your dress on. You. Explanation right now or your brains are getting air conditioning.”
The man―Warren, she assumed―froze. He shifted his pale blue eyes toward her. The girl, sniffling, wasted no time wriggling into her dingy garment before clamping on to her father and sobbing into his chest. The tattered scrap of once-white cotton looked as though she’d been wearing it non-stop for a month.
“Easy, girlie,” said Warren, his voice dusty and slow. “I’m just trying to protect us. The child’s infected.”
Tris’ stomach gurgled. Oh, no.
“I’m not!” yelled the girl. She sniffled and coughed. “It’s just a cold.”
“It always looks like a cold at first.” Warren glanced at Zara who’d moved around to flank him from behind. “Okay… okay.” He let his pistol roll back on his trigger finger, barrel up and no longer aimed at anyone. “You’re making a mistake.”
Other children in the crowd stared on with mixed expressions of worry and terror. A scrawny six-ish girl with brown hair, barefoot in a child’s tee shirt and jeans, hid half behind a boy of about seventeen, also in a white tee with blue jeans. Near the white-haired man, a maybe ten-year-old girl with deep brown skin and puffy hair held the hand of an equally dark boy a little older. Both of them stared at the possibly-infected girl with fear in their eyes.
A Hispanic boy, perhaps thirteen, with a dense mop of black hair, hung back and faced away as though he didn’t want to watch. Tris’ arrival had apparently gotten his attention; he shifted enough to stare at her. He didn’t resemble anyone here enough to suggest family. Arms crossed, he glared at nothing in particular.
“You made it!” shouted a blonde blue-eyed woman in olive-drab fatigues and a camouflage shirt too big for her, who could’ve been anywhere between seventeen and twenty-five; Tris recognized the voice from the radio. Cassie, bedecked in a vest full of small tools and a liberal helping of dirt smeared everywhere, jogged over. “Warren… please calm down. Abby’s only got a cold.”
“Yeah…” Warren scowled. “And so did Jason, and Patrick, and Rachel and―”
“Enough,” said the green-armored black man. He grumbled with a slight shake of the head. His tone carried enough military to quiet the room, even Abby who ceased sobbing into her father’s shirt. “I don’t know how you got in here, stranger, but I’d appreciate you standing down.”
Tris lowered her Beretta a little. “I walk in on a scene like that, you’re lucky I didn’t shoot first. What the f―hell were you doing to that child?”
“These fools think she’s bit.” The girl’s father glared at Warren as if trying to stop the man’s heart with his eyes. “My daughter’s got a cold. That’s all.”
Abby squirmed around behind her father, peering at Warren with huge brown eyes.
Warren’s gun emitted a faint snap as he clicked the safety on and slipped it into a black nylon holster under his left arm. “This is stupid. She’s going to kill us all. Is that how you want to die? Mindless?”
Abby whimpered something unintelligible into her father’s back.
Tris approached the girl. As soon as she crossed into the light, most of the people gasped. She beckoned Abby out from behind her father. “Hi, sweetie.”
“Hi.” The girl sounded stuffy when not screaming. She coughed, but put a hand over her mouth.
“May I?” Tris reached toward her head.
Abby nodded.
Tris gingerly prodded the girl’s eyes open a little wider one after the next. “Can I see your throat? Have you gotten any unknown blood on your skin?” She’d gotten a look at the child’s soles during the ‘exam,’ and hadn’t seen any wounds there.
“No.” The girl obliged. Nothing looked overtly wrong, though she had a runny nose.
“I don’t think this girl’s got the Virus.” Tris faced Warren. “Even if she did, and I think it’s unlikely, the Virus is not an aerosolized contagion except the stage one solution released from the drone. Once it’s in a person’s system, it mutates. The form that attacks the central nervous system is only transmissible via bodily fluids.”
“Are you a doctor, lady?” asked the tiny pale girl. She pulled a lock of brown hair out of her eyes, appearing a little less afraid of Abby.
“Isla, stay back.” The teenaged boy she’d been clinging to tugged her close.
Tris advanced on Warren, winding up under the light again, which made her hair appear almost phosphorescent.
“You expect me ta believe all that?” Warren scowled. “It’s a bad situation, but she’s already dead. Only a fool lets sentiment kill people. How you know all ’bout this stuff anyway?”
“You’re Enclave.” Another man with a shock of grey in the front of a flattop afro emerged from a shadow between two shelves. While not elderly, he looked old enough to be Kevin’s father. He also wore the green armor, but his bore the scars of combat. Though he had a pistol on his belt, he made no move to grab it.
“I was. It’s a long story, but I’m not part of that anymore. I’m from a roadhouse by Rawl
ins, Wyoming. My name is Tris, and my friend is Zara.”
“She came here to get us out!” yelled Cassie. “I told you I got someone on the radio. Please, can everyone relax?”
“Y-you’ve got a vehicle that works?” asked a woman in her early fifties with darkish skin and amber eyes. She couldn’t look right at Abby, a hint of guilt on her face. “We should get out of here before they find a way in.”
“We ain’t going anywhere with a ticking god damned time bomb.” Warren gestured at Abby, who let off an eep and jumped behind her father.
Her father mumbled in Spanish; whatever he said got a wide-eyed look of ‘oh, daaaamn’ from the thirteen-year-old boy in the back. After spitting, the man thrust his finger at Warren like a dagger. “Anything happens to my daughter and you’re gonna be wearin’ your fuckin’ testicles for a necktie.”
“How long?” asked the older armored man, eyeing Tris. “Before she turns.”
Tris stared into Abby’s terrified eyes, thinking back to Sang’s story of being unable to kill his son… and half a settlement getting wiped out because of it. Sang’s boy had bite marks… this kid doesn’t. She clenched her fists. It’s gotta be a cold. “She doesn’t have Virus, but if she did… a healthy adult man would last about two weeks before they lose all higher brain function. It varies on health, size, and degree of exposure.” She sighed. “This girl is ten or eleven, underweight, barely clothed, and filthy. If she had Virus, she’d probably be gone in a week at most.”
Warren’s face scrunched up like he’d bitten a lemon. “Couple more days. No one’s goin’ anywhere ’til then.”
The older woman, the white haired man, and the teenaged boy with the little sister started to raise their voices in protest, but the older of the two dark-skinned men with armor silenced them.
“We’ve been in here for twenty-six days. If the Infected haven’t found a way in by now, they won’t. There’s enough rations to make it out to two months, so unless you all prefer we play it safe and shoot her right now, we wait.”
“Sergeant Ellis is right,” said the younger man in armor. “Right now, half of you wanna kill the girl out of fear; half of you are horrified at the thought. One thing we do not need is animosity brewing internally. That will get people killed if we try to make a run for it.”
The young black girl and the boy holding her hand approached Zara, wide-eyed with curiosity. Her ‘don’t mess with me’ glare softened, and she spoke with them in quiet tones, answering questions about her fancy armor and why she had black hair if she’d come from the Enclave too.
Warren got in Tris’ face. “You ready to do what needs to be done if it comes to that?”
Tris cringed at a whimper from Abby. I’m not sure I could… “I…”
“If it comes down to that. I’ll deal with it.” Abby’s father held up a hand grenade. “I ain’t leavin’ her. It’ll be both of us going.”
“It’s too dangerous,” said the thirteen-year-old boy. “Somebody gonna get sick from her and we all gonna die.”
Somberness in his voice, quiet resignation of doom rather than hostility, kept the room in silence for a while. Awkward stares flew back and forth. A pale woman with black hair who’d been lurking among the shelves held a sour frown on Abby. She looked barely past twenty, with a physique almost as delicate as Tris’. Her black tank top, pants, and sneakers blended into the darkness, making her head and arms seem to float like a porcelain apparition.
The younger soldier made no secret of his distrust for Abby, while Sergeant Ellis betrayed nothing either way by his expression. Shuffling about, the man with wild white hair kept muttering “just a kid” and “not right” under his breath. He appeared to be the oldest person here. Tris put him in the ‘we don’t shoot her’ camp.
Isla gripped and released the concrete floor with her toes while biting her lip. She appeared wary, but most of her fear had vanished. The teen Tris figured to be her brother also appeared none too fond of the idea of killing an eleven-year-old… at least not without concrete proof.
Cassie, as well as the older woman with amber eyes continued to glare at Warren.
The dark-skinned boy ran up to her. “Gramma, you gotta see this lady’s armor. It’s so thin!”
Sergeant Ellis held out a beckoning hand, and the ten-year-old girl walked to him. Army-style boots a few sizes too big for her galumphed over smooth concrete and throw rugs. After she put an arm around him, he cleared his throat. “Alright everyone. It’s settled then. We’ll spend a couple more days here until we know.”
“What if the lady can’t stay that long?” Isla looked up at Tris, worry radiating from bright green eyes. “Are we gonna die? Can you make ice with magic like the girl in the story?”
“Sorry, sweetie… no magic here.” Tris shook her head. “I’m okay with waiting, but it’s not necessary.” She glared at Warren. “Abby’s got a cold.”
All the survivors except for Abby’s father edged away when she coughed and spat up a glop of phlegm.
Warren twitched, close enough to pulling his gun that Tris leapt between them.
“No. I’ll stay with her.” She gestured at Zara. “We’re vaccinated and can’t get sick from the Virus.”
The girl clinging to Sergeant Ellis mumbled something, only the word “Dad” clear enough to understand.
“My daughter’s right,” said Ellis. “Every minute we spend here is a roll of the dice.”
The younger soldier raised a placating hand. “It’s been three weeks, Mike. Another two or three days isn’t the end of the world.”
“We should go,” said the willowy black-haired woman.
Warren glanced at the shadows. “Well. We either wait it out, leave her behind, or I deal with this right now.”
“You wouldn’t live long enough to get all six inches of gun out of the holster,” said Zara. As if to prove her point, she pulled her scavenged Sig Sauer handgun so fast her arm seemed to disappear and reappear aimed at him.
Everyone gasped.
The dark skinned boy detached from his grandmother and ran back to Zara, adoration all over his face. “That’s so cool! How did you do that?”
Warren’s forehead reddened. He scowled at Tris.
“Don’t give me that.” She narrowed her eyes. “I drove across the god damned country to get you out of here. You’re the one being unreasonable.”
“I’m being cautious.” He stared at Abby, vitriol melting to blank. “Too many already have died to soft hearts.”
“People go crazy when they turn.” The black-haired sprite strode out of the dark. “One minute she’ll be all innocent and sniffling, next thing she’s throwin’ people around and gets six of us before we noticed she’s turned in the middle of the night. Waiting is stupid.”
The younger soldier pulled handcuffs off the back of his belt, and glanced at Tris. “You seem to know a lot about Infected. You reckon’ one of ’em could break these?”
Abby recoiled from the sight of the restraints, whimpering a repeating loop of “please Daddy no” into her father’s side.
Tris pondered shooting Warren for a second, but sighed. “Infected, an adult man could snap them like a toy. Probably a smaller woman too. I…” Hope I never, ever, see a child Infected. Knowing that it had to have happened somewhere already made her want to throw up, but she kept her face stoic. “Given her size, I’m tempted to say no… But even if she could, it wouldn’t be easy and someone watching her would have plenty of time to react.”
“All right.” Ellis looked down for a moment. “Abby, I’m sorry, but it’s better than letting him kill you. Emilio, please take her to the supervisor’s office. We’ll give it a couple days.”
Abby, sniveling, offered little protest as her father led her by the hand to a small room built in the innermost corner of the basement. A large window next to a door looked in on a desk and a steel-framed bed. Zack, the younger soldier, fell in step behind them.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” whispered Emi
lio.
Tris followed, taking Abby’s other hand. “That goes for me, too.”
evin guided the Challenger along the narrow two-lane highway marked as NM-15 on his paper map. Ridges of varying height between a few inches and taller than the roof passed on either side beneath a sparsity of pine trees and scrub. Head-sized rocks scattered on the road forced him to swerve every now and then. He slowed as a rust-colored building came into view on the left. A four-columned porch fronted half of a building with two huge garage doors on the right side, giving it the look of an old west saloon married to an auto shop.
The dinky, bullet-riddled sign at the end of a gravel drive marked it as the Pinos Altos Volunteer Fire Department. He chuckled at the thought of other drivers who’d been confused, thinking ‘fire departments’ were pre-war services to start fires. Knowledge of what they’d really done led him back to the TV shows he’d watched on a battered laptop in his adoptive parents’ trailer. Whenever he found a DVD as part of a scavenge, he’d take it back to Wayne’s. Hah. Guess the security computer was good for something after all. I’d find those historical documentaries all over. He sighed. He’d meant to think ‘old movies,’ but the phrase leapt out. Those words put Tris at the forefront of his thoughts, and made him feel all the more an idiot.
“I should’ve gone with her.”
A small farm property passed on the right, where a metal fence surrounded two horses on a field opposite a battered building with a slanted orange roof. On the left, a handful of long-dead cars rusted further into oblivion in a wide field of open dirt.
He drove past another house on the right and a huge barn-shaped building on the left with a piece of ancient sign advertising coffee. Nine e-bikes clustered out front, steel horses crowded up on a feeding post full of electrical outlets. It had a roof full of solar panels, and a room full of people. Down the curving road to the right, lay the spread of a normal-looking settlement. People, even a few children, walked and ran about. Their clothing provided the only indication war had ever happened here: all of it handmade from prewar scraps or animal hide. Few wore shoes, and the ones who did had moccasins or sandals. One boy about five even had on a pink dress. Scavengers couldn’t be choosy.
The Redeemed Page 31
