by Bobby Adair
Austin dove for the sand out of instinct.
Bullets sizzled the air around him.
Three quick shots fired from behind. Mitch.
Najid’s body jerked with the impact of the bullets. His muzzle flashed as he continued to fire into the water, into the air, wild as he fell. Najid’s rifle silenced.
Mitch ran past Austin and sprinted up the dock.
Austin got to his feet and ran after. Seconds later, he came upon Almasi, gasping in fast pants as he lay on his back, eyes on the stars above. He was bleeding from three wounds in his chest.
Mitch asked, “Almasi?”
“That’s Najid.”
“That’s what I figured.” Mitch took a step forward, put the barrel of his rifle six inches from Najid’s forehead and fired three more times. He looked at Austin. He looked around. “Now we’ve got to go. We don’t want to be here if anybody comes to investigate all the shooting. Check the boat for keys. Check Almasi for the keys.” Mitch started back up the dock.
“Where are you going?”
Mitch spun around and ran backward toward the house while continuing his instructions to Austin. “Laptops. Cellphones. Anything I can find. Get that boat started. We’re leaving in three minutes. And get Almasi’s bag.” Mitch turned and sprinted.
Austin looked down at Najid. Three bullets had pierced his skull and left his dead eyes staring at the sky. Austin’s only thought was that Najid deserved so much worse than he received. He leaned over and picked up the soft leather briefcase that lay by Najid’s body. Austin ran to the boat, leapt over the gunwale and landed on the deck. He dropped Najid’s bag in a seat and stepped over to the captain’s chair. Keys dangled in the ignition. Austin didn’t wait. He turned the key, and a pair of powerful engines rumbled to life.
Austin buckled himself into the captain’s chair and waited for Mitch.
Chapter 77
Paul looked around as though help might come to his rescue, but nothing was on the grassy plateau nearby. Behind him stood the barracks full of the sick. The silos full of plasma cattle sank deep into the earth. Other people walked to wherever in camp their business took them. None gave a care that Paul was being taken outside the fence. He turned a pleading eye at the MPs, neither of whom changed their hard facial expressions.
At that moment, Paul decided to stop looking for a rescue, stop hoping for a reprieve. He looked up at the blue sky, thought about Heidi, Austin, and Olivia. He decided that he hated what his life had become, who he had turned into. Like Salim, he decided to accept his fate. It was time to pay the price for his sins. He was going to die under a crisp blue sky, not unlike the one that watched over Heidi’s funeral that day on the soccer field with all of those broken people carrying the bodies of their loved children and cherished spouses.
A tear found its way to creep down Paul’s cheek. He clenched hard on his teeth to control a sob, not for what was to come for him, but for the expectation, the hope that something might be up there in the ether, a life beyond this one, a life where suffering might not exist, a place where mistakes might be forgiven.
The chilly bite of the wind felt exhilarating. Paul would miss it.
He stepped through the hole in the fence and walked. Colonel Holloway was already a dozen paces on and turning to wait.
Paul wiped his eyes, cleared his throat, stood tall, and took confident steps. He was ready.
“You okay?”
Paul nodded.
The Colonel continued to walk in the direction of the distant mountains. “It’s beautiful out here. In a desolate way.”
“It is,” Paul agreed.
“I love the first snows when they come in October or November.” The Colonel looked over at Paul to see that he was listening. “I used to go outside with my daughter. We’d stand on the porch and listen. You can hear the snowflakes when you stop and just let yourself. They settle onto the leaves and onto your clothes with the faintest crunch. Hundreds and thousands of them all around you.”
Paul thought about the snow and the beautiful white blanket it put on the world when it came down at night, untouched by tire tracks, snow shovels, and booted feet.
“My daughter, she was four last fall when it snowed. She had long, curly red hair. We were out on the porch, and the snow was catching in her hair as she spun around, sticking her tongue out to catch the flakes.” Holloway sniffled through the cold wind. “She looked like an angel with the sparkle of the porch light hitting the snow in her hair. She didn’t know what was going on in the world. She wouldn’t have understood anyway. She was happy.”
They walked for several steps without a word between them.
Paul was confused. “Your daughter, why are you telling me about her?”
“To remember.” Colonel Holloway nodded a few too many times. “To remember. She died a few days before my wife. The weatherman says we have snow coming tonight. Late.”
“Will you go outside and stand in the snow and listen?” Paul asked.
“I might.” Nodding again, Colonel Holloway said, “I will.”
“You should.” A few more steps passed. “I buried my wife on a day like this. Last fall. The sky was blue like it is today, so blue it didn’t seem real. The grass on the soccer fields was still green. The trees hadn’t yet lost their leaves. They were covered in brilliant yellows and reds. The wind blew the leaves on the ground and they looked like fire running across the grass.” Tears were on Paul’s cheeks again. “The mass graves…”
“I know.” The Colonel had eyes glassy with tears as well. “Don’t think about that. Ugly necessities. Remember the beauty of your loved ones’ lives.”
The Colonel stopped.
Paul looked around for the machine gun emplacements. He saw none. He and the Colonel were far from the fence and standing on the edge of the plateau. Below them, the ground sloped gently away and undulated into a deep, wide valley. Far away between the hills and the western mountains, the tall buildings in downtown Denver marked the center of the metropolitan sprawl. “Why are we out here?”
“Why did you kill Larry Dean?”
Paul thought about a lie, another lie, but he didn’t tell it. He decided lies were part of the Paul he didn’t like. He decided that they were part of his past. “He killed my wife.”
“How do you know that?” The Colonel’s face showed his confusion.
“Coincidence. Luck if you could call it that.” Paul looked back toward the camp, the scene of his last crimes. “I didn’t know when I went into the infirmary that he killed Heidi, but I knew—or strongly suspected—that he and his partner had killed people like Heidi for blood they thought might contain antibodies. When I went there to convince him to talk, I think I just wanted a guilty man to punish. A stand-in for whoever murdered my wife. I didn’t expect that Larry and his partner Jimmy had done it.”
“The staph infection? Was that part of your plan?”
“Bad luck for Larry.” Paul wiped his face. “I filled him full of Ebola blood. I wanted to overwhelm his immune system. I wanted him to suffer.”
“That staph was good luck for him, then.”
Nodding, Paul admitted, “I suppose it was.”
“What about this Jimmy guy?”
Paul looked at the dirt, ashamed, but only for a second. He looked back at the mountains and the blue sky beyond. “I freed a prisoner.”
“Rafael?”
“You knew?”
“Captain Willard lied to you. All of those cameras in the warehouse work.”
“I freed Rafael so he’d kill Jimmy.” Paul looked up at the sky again and then back at the Colonel. “I never expected to leave here alive. Not really. I think I hoped I might one day but I didn’t really believe I would. But I…I loved my wife. I had to do something.”
The Colonel took a moment to think about what Paul had said. “Larry and Jimmy won’t be missed.”
Paul looked around again. He and the Colonel were alone. Paul wasn’t going to be killed. Probably.
“I have to ask, you know, because of the way news channels are these days with all their bullshit. Did you really drive to Dallas and infect yourself on purpose?”
“Yeah.”
“God, that was a ballsy move.”
“Heidi told me I was depressed over my son’s death and that I wasn’t acting rationally.”
“Is that true?”
Paul nodded. “Who really understands why they do what they do when what they’ve done wasn’t the best decision.”
“But you’re alive.”
“And Heidi is dead.” Paul clenched his jaw again. He had an impulse to curse himself, but he didn’t. He accepted that he was a fool, a selfish idiot. “I took that trip to Dallas, and because of that, stupid men reasoned that my immunity magically transferred to her.”
“My daughter and my wife died,” said Colonel Holloway, “and we did everything we were supposed to do.” The Colonel put a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Life. It works that way. It’s hard enough shouldering the guilt for things you did. You can’t carry the guilt for other people’s choices too. Larry and Jimmy killed your wife, not you.”
Paul didn’t know about that. Well, he did. The Colonel was right. It was just hard to change his mind even in the face of blue-sky epiphanies.
“You know, what you did isn’t all that different than what people are doing now with the plasma they smuggle out of here.”
Paul did his best to keep the judgment out of his tone. “And you know about all that? The smuggling, I mean.”
“Not at first.”
Paul looked over his shoulder to see if the MPs were coming. They weren’t.
“It started early. We weren’t hitting our production numbers.”
“That makes it sound like you were managing a factory.”
Colonel Holloway looked at the camp far behind them. “You have to separate the emotions of what’s being done to human lives from the process if you want to make the sacrifices worth it. Yes. I run it like a factory. It’s the most efficient model. If the model is efficient, we achieve the goal sooner. We save more lives.”
Paul nodded. That made perfect, callous sense. But what else was there to do with it, run a shoddy operation and wring your hands over the moral ambiguity of it all? “What did you do about the smuggling?”
“We didn’t think it was smuggling at first. Not really. It was suggested at our first meeting on the subject. By Captain Willard if you can believe it.”
“He’s been a bit of an ass.”
“Doing his job.” Colonel Holloway tucked his hands in his pockets and shivered. “We eventually came to run two systems, the legitimate one where I maximized output and quality. The ‘factory.’ And Captain Willard’s system was that of managing the smuggling rings that he took control of. When we had control, we were able to make sure all plasma ran the through the process before it was smuggled out. Processed serum is much safer for the recipients than raw plasma.”
“Rings?” Paul hadn’t considered that there’d been more than one.
“There was a time when nearly half our production was being stolen, rerouted into the black market.”
“Wait.” Paul was confused again. “But Captain Willard didn’t stop the smuggling rings. He took control of them, and that means you have control. Why not just shut them down?”
“The question has a much more complicated answer than you’ll guess.”
“I won’t guess, but I’d like to hear the answer.”
Colonel Holloway said, “I don’t make any guesses about what happens to the serum after it leaves the camp and enters the government system. But after seeing the corruption at this level, I’m certain it’s not being allocated with any degree of equity to the American people.”
“I heard a similar speculation recently,” said Paul.
“In a way, I viewed the smugglers and black marketers as only marginally worse than the government system. Nevertheless, I had my orders like everyone else, and I had an efficient camp to run. There was no room for thievery as far as I was concerned. At first. So, we cracked down with tighter inventory control for one. That’s when a funny thing happened.”
“What’s that?”
“We made our numbers, but the smuggling didn’t stop. Somehow our production went up enough to feed both systems.”
“Because of the increased amount we take out of the volunteers.” Paul knew the answer to that.
“Yes. But not just from the prisoners in the silos. Actual volunteers in the recovering population that elected to stay on. The smugglers, unable to get their hands on tightly controlled inventory found a way to increase production at the source, the immune.”
“But it’s not healthy,” Paul protested. “It’s not sustainable.”
“No, it’s not. But it doesn’t need to be.”
Paul didn’t like what he was hearing. It all sounded like a rationalization for illegal profit.
“You don’t understand yet, but be patient.”
Paul nodded.
“By doubling production, we save more lives. To a sick person, it doesn’t matter how the serum came to them. The more lives we save, the closer we get to the goal of a one-hundred-percent healthy population.”
“But you know half that black market serum isn’t being given to people who are sick with Ebola, right?” Paul thought it was a valid point. “People are taking it as a preventive. They all get sick, and not all of them get better.”
“Pretty much what you did, right?” The Colonel drilled Paul with a hard stare. “Only their odds are much better than yours were.”
Reluctantly, Paul agreed.
“So maybe five percent die if they take the Ebola serum. They catch the virus and their immune system, despite having the antibodies to fight Ebola, can’t react in time. They die. But five percent mortality, those odds are far better than the sixty to eighty percent who die if they get the disease and don’t get treatment.”
“But only the folks who can afford that option get that choice.” It was the next argument on Paul’s list.
“At first,” Colonel Holloway agreed. “But all the camps have produced more than enough serum to service every person of means in the country if that’s true. The black market for serum is crashing in the sense that there’s more and more serum available and the money—or trade goods people have available—grows smaller and smaller. Anybody out there who can get on the Internet and has an engagement ring or a handful of silver coins from grandpa’s collection can buy a bag of serum now.”
Paul didn’t want to admit it, but he was starting to see the Colonel’s point.
“It’s not just this camp where this is happening. Similar things are going on everywhere and at the rate we’re moving, every person in the country will be Ebola-free in three or four months.”
“Ebola-free?” Paul couldn’t believe it.
“We’ll have saved nearly forty percent of the population, and we won’t need this camp anymore. We won’t need the volunteers or the prisoners to double dip. They only need to stay alive until then.”
“And you’re double dipping too?” Paul made the guess. That had to be the reason the Colonel’s health appeared to be waning.”
Colonel Holloway pulled his arm out of his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve, showing Paul the K tattoo on his inside forearm. Scabbed dots marked the spots where the needles had punctured his veins at each of his recent donations.
“Wow.”
“Wow is right. Four months ago it looked like the world was coming to an end. Now we know we’ll survive, not just you and me but the country.”
“How’s the rest of the world doing?”
“Some countries are working on solutions not that different from ours. Some got organized faster. Most didn’t. Some didn’t get organized at all. The death rate probably topped ninety percent in Africa and most of Asia. About half of Europe did okay. Japan and South Korea will come out better than us. Some of the Pacific islands will do al
l right.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
The Colonel laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“I didn’t want you killing off all my black marketers.”
Paul laughed, not heartily, but it was a laugh, at least, the first in a long, long time. “I told you why I killed Larry.”
“Yeah. But now you know the truth of what’s going on here. Now you know there are no machine guns out here. Now you know what goes on inside the camps. You can go if you want.” Colonel Holloway took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Paul. “I signed the order. You can go home. You’ll be under house arrest for awhile. I don’t know how long. That’s up to some bureaucrat somewhere who might be dead or hasn’t even been hired yet. All you need to do is report to your donation center weekly. That’s the only requirement.”
Paul unfolded the paper and read it through.
“And don’t tell anyone about anything you know about this place. If you don’t mind. Hell, I guess you can if you want, just not yet, please. As for me, I don’t care what happens. If it comes out later that everything we did here was illegal, I’ll take my sentence, and I’ll go to jail. Why not? I’ve got no family to go home to. I’ve got no friends left to be embarrassed in front of. I just want to get through the next three months and save as many lives as I can.”
“I can understand that.” Paul folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He had another question. “What do you do with the money?”
“Gold and silver mostly. Diamonds. Money’s damn near worthless.”
“What are you going to do with it? Buy an island in the Caribbean?”
Colonel Holloway shook his head. “Everything is in short supply, Paul. We use it to buy black market supplies for the camp.”
“Seriously?”
“One-hundred-percent true.”
Paul took the order out of his pocket and tore it up, letting the pieces float away in the wind. “I’ll stay in the camp. I want to help. I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”
Colonel Holloway slapped Paul on the back. “You’re a good man, Paul.”
“No, I’m not, but I want to be one. Maybe one day I’ll be good enough.”
