by Sam Sisavath
Will had begun counting, starting at the south end, only to stop when he hit fifty tents and realized he wasn’t even close to the middle yet.
He fished out binoculars from his pack and peered through them.
It was impossible to miss the large blue tent in the center. It looked like some kind of grand circus tent, and was literally and figuratively placed—purposefully, he assumed—in the very center of the camp. A long stream of people moved in and out of it, including men in white Level B hazmat suits, the sunlight glinting off the lenses of gas masks either over their faces or hanging from their waists.
“Collaborators,” Gaby whispered.
“Not all of them,” Will said.
There were at least two, maybe three hundred people for every collaborator he spotted. Regular people. Men and women, boys and girls, old and young. They moved between tents, reminding him of homeless refugees saved from some disastrous, unwinnable war.
Maybe not so far from the truth…
“What the hell is going on?” Nate whispered.
It was a good question, because the people down there didn’t look afraid. He saw small circles of people gathered around campfires, and smelled the very strong aroma of smoked meat filling the air. The voices drifting up from the camp were not dripping with mortal terror. If he didn’t know better, he would think he was looking at some kind of mass cookout.
There was hurricane fencing around the camp, and a group of twenty to thirty men were swinging axes at the north side, felling trees to make more room. A couple of men in Level B hazmat suits stood watch, though there was an easiness, a sense of familiarity and cooperation between the two groups that was obvious even from this distance. They looked more like friends instead of captors and captives.
There were vehicles on the other side of the fence—trucks, mostly. He counted thirty to forty in all, including a half-dozen green military five-ton transport trucks he hadn’t seen since his days in the Army.
“I’ve seen this before,” Gaby whispered.
“Where?” Nate asked.
“Back in school. During our World War II phase of world history. This reminds me of concentration camps.”
“Is that what this is? A prison for human survivors?”
“I think we’re looking at something else,” Will said, lowering the binoculars.
“Like what?” Nate asked.
“Like what the ghouls have planned for us. First The Purge, then the blood farms, and now this.”
“Yeah, but what is ‘this’?” Gaby said.
“You’re right, it’s some kind of camp,” Will said. “But I don’t think it’s a concentration camp. Maybe the better analogy would be an internment camp.”
“What’s the difference?”
“FDR illegally detained over 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. They weren’t harmed, and they were fed and allowed to work, but they were still captives. It’s one of the biggest black stains in American history, but people survived it, and they were eventually freed and allowed to return to society.”
“They look almost…content,” Gaby said, staring down at the camp.
“Blaine said there were thousands of people in the Beaumont mall when he showed up, and by the time he left, they were gone. Where did they go?”
“You think they were brought here?”
“Maybe not here specifically, but maybe a place like this one.”
Will shook his head, processing the information.
What the hell have you been doing out here, Kate?
“I think we’re looking at the next phase of whatever final solution the ghouls are moving toward,” he said. “This…is something new. Something we haven’t seen before. And it’s big, so it has to be a pretty significant part of their plan.”
Gaby shivered next to him, though she did her best to hide it. “What now?”
“The blue tent.”
“What about it?”
“It might be worth seeing what’s going on inside. It’s the center of whatever’s happening here, literally and figuratively.”
“You mean you want to sneak in there?”
“The suit,” Will said. “The one Harris wore. It’s still in the truck?”
Nate nodded. “We left it in the back seat.”
“Will,” Gaby said, “you’re not seriously thinking about putting that suit on and going in there?”
“That blue tent,” Will said. He couldn’t look away from it. “The answer is in there.”
“There has to be another way.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
She struggled for an answer, and finally said, “I don’t know.”
“There’s no reason why they wouldn’t think I belong if I wear the suit. Especially with the gas mask on.”
“You hope,” she said.
“Yeah,” he nodded.
He tried to eyeball the size of the blue tent. It had to be at least fifty meters in diameter, easily half the size of a football field. What the hell was going on in there? What would they need something that big for?
“How many hazmat suits did you see?” Nate asked.
“About thirty, give or take,” Will said.
“How many people do you think are down there?” Gaby asked.
“A thousand?” Nate said.
“Maybe,” Will said. “A lot, in any case.” He glanced down at his watch again. “Let’s head back to the vehicles. I want to get in there and out before it gets dark—”
Snap!
Will was already rising and spinning, the rifle lifted, before the sound of snapping twigs had even run its course.
He stared across the clearing at a figure in a white hazmat suit. The man stared back at him with light blue eyes, gas mask clipped to his hip.
No, he was wrong. It wasn’t a man.
It was a boy.
A teenager. Sixteen, maybe even younger than that. (Fifteen?) The gun belt was too big around his slim waist, and the holstered handgun hung too loosely from his hip. He looked like a boy wearing his father’s uniform.
And there was something else: the hazmat suit had a name tag, and the word “Ray” written across it. Nothing fancy, just an envelope label with the name scribbled on it in black marker. It was the first time Will had seen the collaborators putting any identifying marks on their uniforms.
Ray the teenager had curly brown hair, and he was holding an apple near his mouth. He had taken a bite, and was in the process of chewing when he saw them. Or more specifically, looked into the barrel of Will’s M4A1.
Gaby and Nate had both turned at his point and taken aim at the kid with their own weapons. The teenager gawked at them, the apple absurdly poised in front of his mouth, as if he didn’t know whether to drop it or continue eating it.
“Oh, shit,” Gaby whispered.
There was a radio clipped to the teenager’s hip, and Will watched—and wished he wasn’t seeing it—as the kid dropped the apple and reached for the radio.
“Don’t,” Will said.
The kid looked at him, then down at the radio, then back up at Will again. Blue eyes trembled, and the kid’s lips quivered.
“No, don’t,” Nate said. “Don’t do it, kid, just don’t do it, for Christ sake.”
Ray unclipped the radio and lifted it to his lips.
“Don’t,” Will said again, louder this time.
“No, please, don’t,” Gaby said.
The kid pressed the transmit lever and said, “Intruders—”
Will shot Ray in the chest.
The gunshot shattered the stillness, the loud boom like thunder flashing across the entire park. Birds took off in sudden flight, the sound of hundreds, maybe thousands, of flapping wings almost as loud as the gunshot.
“Go!” Will shouted.
They broke off into a run.
Will snatched up the dead teenager’s radio almost at the same instant it squawked, and a man’s voice shouted through: “Ray, was that you? Ray!
” Then, when Ray didn’t answer, the man shouted, “Converge on Trail #8 now! Trail #8!”
Gaby, running at a full sprint up ahead, looked back at him. “Where are we going?”
“The truck!” he shouted. “Get to the truck and get out of here!”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you!”
They hadn’t been moving for more than ten seconds when a white hazmat suit stepped out of the tree line ten meters in front of them. Will opened his mouth to shout a warning, but he didn’t have to. Nate, who was setting the pace up front, shot the man from nearly point blank range, his sprinting taking him almost on top of the figure when he fired.
Gaby smartly veered around the collapsing body so she wouldn’t have to slow down. The man had dropped an Uzi submachine gun as he fell. By the time Will recognized the weapon and its value, he had already leaped over the body, and kept running.
The radio in his hand squawked again, and another voice, this one female, said, “Barnes, where’s the truck? Where’s the goddamn truck?”
A man who Will guessed was Barnes replied, “I’m close!”
Will looked down Trail #8 and for the first time realized how wide it was. He remembered the faded tire prints from earlier.
He glanced back about the same time he heard the roar of a truck behind him, still hidden by the turn farther down the trail.
“Gaby! Nate!” he shouted. “We have to split up! Whatever you do, make your way to the truck and get out of here!”
“Will—” she began, but stopped when the truck appeared out from the turn behind them, forty meters back. There was a man in a hazmat suit behind the wheel and two more in the back with assault rifles. “Shit!” she finished.
“Now!” Will shouted, and darted right.
He looked back briefly and saw Gaby and Nate jumping out of the trail and into the woods, going left. He hadn’t turned his head completely back around when the rattle of gunfire filled the woods. Tree branches splintered and snapped, tree barks exploding under a torrent of bullets that seemed to be coming from every direction.
Will pushed his head down as low as he could and still maintained his speed, pushing hard through the woods, ignoring the slapping tree branches, the ground crunching under his boots, the sound of gunfire everywhere.
A man shouted through the radio he was still holding: “They’re in the woods! They’re in the fucking woods!”
“Where?” the same woman from earlier shouted.
“Off Trail #8, north sector! I got two heading west and one heading east!”
“Converge!” another man shouted through the radio. “If you’re in the woods, I want you to converge on them now!”
“What about the camp?” someone else asked.
“Stay back! If you’re not already in the woods, maintain your positions! I repeat: do not leave the camp unprotected!”
“Motherfucker, they killed Ray!” someone else said.
“We’ll box them in,” the woman said. “They’re not getting out of here alive!”
*
Seen from the wrong angle, the branches of oak trees could look like the spindly arms of some angry demon emerging from the darkness to snatch a child from his bed. To a grown man, they looked like shelter, hiding him from men in hazmat suits. If he couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see him. Of course, he could hear them, but that was only because they were big and clumsy and loud.
His watch ticked to 1:15 p.m.
Six hours, give or take, before sunset. He had to be out of the park by then. If he was caught in here, among these trees, he was a dead man. Or worse. He didn’t particularly feel good about the worse part, and the dead man part didn’t sit all that well with him, either.
Lara would be so pissed at me right about now.
He was crouched behind a large oak tree, one of thousands in the area, indistinguishable from a thousand others. He had been in the same spot, in the same position, for the last few minutes, listening to the men moving around him.
Three of them. Heavily armed and moving with all the subtlety of civilians in combat boots, lugging around assault rifles they weren’t trained for.
He had turned down the radio to almost a whisper, and he lifted it to his ear whenever it squawked, which translated into soft vibrations against his palm. He got a squawk now, and raised it to his ear.
“Give me a sitrep,” a male voice said.
“I got nothing,” another man answered.
“Givens, is that you?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is he?”
“I dunno,” Givens said. “We thought we had him a moment ago, but he’s gone again. Donner lost his track a few minutes back.”
“Hey, I didn’t say I could track,” Donner said defensively.
“Keep looking,” the first man said. “He couldn’t have gotten very far.”
“What about the other two?” Givens asked.
“Don’t you worry about them. You just catch your guy.”
Easier said than done.
Footsteps were approaching from behind him. Boots moving loudly over dry grass and brittle twigs. He lost the initial pursuit about twenty minutes back, but he knew eventually they would get close again. He didn’t plan to keep running, but he needed a distraction. Some kind of camouflage…
What’s going on in that blue tent?
The good news was that there was just one man close enough that Will could hear his loud, laborious breathing. The bad news was that there were two more somewhere nearby.
Will turned off the radio and clipped it to his belt, then slipped his rifle’s strap over his shoulder. He reached down to his left hip and slid the cross-knife soundlessly out of its sheath.
The man walked past him, sticking to the other side of the giant oak tree.
Will stood up and maneuvered around the large tree trunk, moving right, continuing until he had performed a full ninety degrees and could see the back of a white-clad figure walking ahead of him. Ten meters between them.
He switched the knife to his right hand and took the first step toward the figure in front of him. The man didn’t hear Will coming until he was almost on top of him, and even then, the man only stopped to listen, cocking his head curiously to one side.
Will slipped his left hand around the man’s face, clasped his palm over the mouth, and drove the point of the cross-knife into the back of the neck, pushing it in deep until the body went slack against him and collapsed like a marionette with its strings snipped.
He caught the man halfway, then lowered the lifeless body all the way to the ground like precious cargo, careful not to get any blood on the plastic, shiny white hazmat suit.
CHAPTER 23
GABY
Nate was shot. Gaby had no idea how or when it had even happened. He had been running in front of her the whole time ever since they abandoned Trail #8, but somehow he had ended up getting shot anyway, while she remained unscathed.
The bullet had gone through his left arm, somewhere between his elbow and shoulder, and he was wincing as he ran, keeping his other hand pressed against the wound to slow down the bleeding.
When they had finally put enough distance between them and their pursuers, she felt safe enough to force him to stop next to a big oak tree, while she pulled out the first aid kit from her pack and stopped the bleeding, then wrapped gauze around the wound.
“You’ve done this before,” he said, watching the woods with the Beretta in his good hand.
“I’ve had practice.”
“You think Will made it?”
“I’m sure he did.”
“I don’t hear them.”
“We might have lost them a few minutes ago, unless they followed your blood all the way to us.”
He gave her a crooked grin. “Sorry about that.”
“When did you get shot, anyway?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah,” he said.
She finished up with the gauze around his arm before stuffing the roll back into her pack. The result wasn’t much to look at, but he wasn’t bleeding anymore and that was all that counted.
Gaby snatched up her rifle and looked around. “How far did you think we ran?”
“No idea. I was too busy hauling ass.”
She nodded.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“We were running away from the camp, and Will was running in the other direction to split up the chase. So that means he was running toward the camp.”
“You think he did it on purpose?”
“I know he did it on purpose.”
“So now what?”
She shook her head and thought about it. Nate leaned against the tree trunk to rest, looking a lot paler than when they stopped a few minutes ago, though his eyes seemed alert enough.
“He’d want us to leave, regroup at the game warden’s place,” she said.
“And are we going to do that?”
“He’d want us to do what he said.”
“That never stopped you before.”
She looked at him again, this time with a more critical eye. He was hurt and bleeding, trying to fight through the pain. Could she drag him back there to find Will? If it were just her, it would have been an easy choice. She would never leave Will behind, because Will would never leave her, even in a hospital full of gunmen. With a healthy Nate, it might have been a no-brainer. But she didn’t have a healthy Nate…
Goddammit, Will.
“He’s your friend,” Nate said. “It’s up to you.”
“He’s more than that.”
“The big brother you never had.”
“Or wanted,” she smiled.
He smiled back. “I wouldn’t leave him behind, either.”
“Even if it means dying in here? In this place?”
“Eh. I always figured I’d end up somewhere like this.”
“In a state park filled with traitors to the human race?”
“Okay, not exactly like this, but close.”
