Roads Less Traveled (Book 3): Shades of Gray

by C. Dulaney

  “Kasey?” someone called. I heard feet shuffling and then someone gasped.

  A woman with curly blonde hair lay prone on the table. Her IV bags were empty, and her eyes were closed. She was still asleep; whatever godforsaken change these bastards had forced upon her had not yet woken her. I slipped alongside the table and stopped at her side. She looked like she was sleeping that kind of peaceful slumber it would be a shame to wake someone from. Gently, I reached out and traced the back of my hand along her sunken cheeks. Her skin was warm.

  So they really are living, not deadheads.

  A shot rang out from behind me, followed by another.

  Center 35 was officially closed.

  A tear finally sprung and slid with agonizing slowness down my cheek, landing on the woman’s own. I touched a fingertip to it, causing it to fall.

  We’re the same.

  “Mrs. Stratford?” Mia ran to the other side of the table and grabbed my mother’s arm. “Liz?” She was frantic, and was about to start shaking the sleeping figure. My hand shot out and shoved Mia away.

  “Leave her be.”

  Mia’s eyes widened and she backed away. It must have been something in my voice, compounded by “that look” I had been lectured about. Either way, she left us alone.

  “What do we do now?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michael answered.

  “We can’t just leave these civilians, sir,” Rabbit whispered.

  Jonah cleared his throat. “We can’t do anything for them, either.”

  I mumbled something and gripped my mother’s hand, my thumb rubbing her knuckles. Mia eased around the table and stood next to me, afraid of what I might do. I mumbled again, and she put her hand on my shoulder.

  “What was that, hun?”

  “I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to go home.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  November 25th

  After staring down at my mother for what felt like hours, I wandered off and found myself in the “Private” room adjacent to the laboratory. It was the office of the late David McAlister. The others stayed behind, removing IVs and restraints from the “Terminators,” mostly because they didn’t know what else to do. They assumed that once the people woke up, the drive to return home would cause them to react violently, and regardless of what had been done to them, they were still people. There was no sense in letting them rip their arms open trying to rid themselves of needles and straps that were holding them down.

  I sat down in the oversized and overstuffed chair behind the desk. Besides finding my mother, I was still dizzy and shaken from almost having my neck sawed in two. There were papers scattered and strewn over the top, an empty coffee cup, a computer, and a framed picture of a woman and kids. Since I wasn’t yet thinking clearly, my finger reached over and hit the power button on the computer. Force of habit, I guess. I knew I was in shock, but also knew from experience that McAlister’s personal notes would be somewhere on that computer. The entire complex was being supplied with power from an unknown source, and I didn’t need the internet, just needed to find his notes and get all the details.

  I understood what Evelyn and Harvel had said earlier. I’d feigned ignorance, as I had been since my group first came together. I didn’t want any of them to know about my background. Hell, even Mia didn’t know everything. She was still under the impression I had worked in a chemical plant. That was the story I had told everyone. It had always been simpler that way. Mom and Dad were the only two people who had known everything. I kept to that cover story after the outbreak, knowing damn well if any of them knew I had worked in an R&D facility, I would have never had a moment’s peace. They would have either been at me night and day about what I could do to stop the deadhead virus, or what I knew about its origins.

  And I had answers for neither.

  My previous employment had not been with the government. I’d had no access to any information regarding the z-virus. I had no knowledge of what was to come, though I had been tipped off by a friend of a friend who had connections way above my pay grade, about two months before the initial outbreaks. His name was Brad, weird guy, and he was most likely dead now. Regardless, information had been leaked to certain folks in my field, folks who didn’t work for the government. The majority had laughed it off. Admittedly, even I hadn’t taken it seriously. That hadn’t stopped me from formulating The Plan and stocking my house with six months’ worth of supplies, though.

  All this had to be kept quiet because staying alive, and keeping the group alive, was top priority. It didn’t matter anymore what I had done to pay the bills. I knew I couldn’t do anything about the virus, so why give any of them false hope? Or, on the flip side of that, why create any more distrust than what there had already been? Before Ben and his group came to me, I’d simply decided to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t have a past.

  Only the present.

  I took a deep breath and started searching through the files on David’s computer. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. The startling blow I’d felt after learning I was immune like my dad, then seeing my mother on that table, faded while I scanned through the documents relating to the z-virus and the research concerning it. Mia and Jake stepped in and checked on me once, but left soon after once they figured out I still wasn’t speaking to anyone. Later I would find out the group had moved on to search the rest of the facility, to make sure there weren’t any more survivors.

  Dad had been allowed to come into the lab and sit with Mom while she slept. He checked on me too, but I hadn’t known it. Gus was even sitting at my feet, though I didn’t notice. I had to know the truth. Or what little bit of truth was contained in McAlister’s notes.

  * * *

  The rest of the CC was empty. There were signs that others had been there, living and working, but those people were long gone. The corridor the faculty used to herd the Terminators out into the world branched directly off of the storage room, the room that contained all of the isolation cells. It was long and narrow, and surprisingly led to an exit outside the complex’s wall and fences. The ground in the area just outside the door was beaten and trampled, indicating dozens upon dozens of feet had traveled over the same dirt over an extended period of time.

  Michael tried to do the math in his head. Without his journal back at the club, he just couldn’t remember the number of survivors they had picked up over the past several months. That wasn’t even taking into consideration the survivors he assumed the other districts had recovered. The entire thing was almost too much for him to wrap his head around. The woman, Evelyn, had mentioned “counterparts.” Michael was smart enough to realize what she had been implying. There was a Command Center in every state. Rabbit had basically told him the same thing as they searched the complex. Assuming all of the CCs were still functioning, how many survivors of the outbreak had been sacrificed?

  And for what? To save humanity?

  It was a contradiction. How could there be anyone left to save if they were all being twisted into zombie killing machines, no longer resembling the people they had been before? At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before the world was not only filled with deadheads, but deadhead assassins as well. There wouldn’t be room for regular old people.

  Michael could almost understand the reasoning behind what they had done. Or rather, the point behind what they had done. He would never understand and would never condone how they had treated the survivors, even if Harvel had been responsible for most of it. There was no excuse for it. Hence the reason he had killed the two scientists back in the lab. He had no control over what the rest of the country did, and no control over the fates of the other CCs. All he could do was make damn sure that this never happened again in his state.

  “We didn’t know,” Rabbit mumbled on their way back to the laboratory.

  “What?” Michael had been lost in his own thoughts. Rabbit stared ahead, his sidearm holstered and his shoulders slumped.

  �
��We didn’t know, or we would have stopped it.” His boots plodded along in a steady rhythm, accompanied by those trudging behind.

  “Hey, man, we’re not blamin’ you,” Jake spoke up. They were entering the “holding” room, the one with the massive cage. “Hell, that’s the reason we’re all here, isn’t it? If we thought you and Waters and all the rest of ya had been a part of this knowingly?” He snorted angrily. “We wouldn’t have been workin’ with ya. We’d have been fightin’ ya.”

  “Yep,” Jonah agreed. His shotgun was hanging from his shoulder by the sling, a cigarette dangled from his lips.

  Michael was beginning to notice a change in the group. In their voices, their attitudes, everything. He may have been mistaken, yet it seemed to him everyone was settling down and behaving like themselves again. Not completely, though, not yet. Finally figuring out what had been going on, and knowing it would not be continuing, must have knocked the monkey off their backs. But there was a huge difference in being satisfied with working out a puzzle, and knowing what it all meant; a huge difference in coming to terms with what had been done, and coming to terms with the implications, not only for them, for the people who were now changed as well.

  Those people, the z-soldiers, were living, breathing beings. They were dangerous killers, that was a fact. Unless Michael had missed something, it hadn’t appeared as though the ones they’d run into before were a danger to them. Thinking back on it, those people had paid hardly any attention to Michael and the others. It was like they’d honed in on the deadheads and engaged. It had been terrifying and damn gruesome, but the Terminators had never threatened the living. That being said, did they now have the obligation to put the z-soldiers down as they would the deadheads? Or did they need to leave the new army alone, let it do its job? Allow a twisted and abused nature to take its course?

  They were still people. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children. They were the living, not the walking dead.

  “None of that matters now. What does matter is that this never happens again. You think we’ll be able to talk the other districts into shutting down the experiments?” Michael asked. He was worried that once the commanding officers in charge of the other three districts found out what had really been going on, they’d start shipping survivors into other states, to Command Centers that were still operational.

  “Absolutely. Districts One through Three are led by men Captain Waters grew up with. From my understanding, they’re all good guys. When the Captain first contacted them and let them know what was going on, before we headed out on this mission, well…” Rabbit finally grinned. “Let’s just say you could hear the yelling coming out of that radio all the way over in the mess hall.”

  Michael shared a chuckle and sighed. It was good news indeed. He would have to step back into his old life, but it would be worth it, coordinating with the other districts, saving people instead of what…killing? He still wasn’t sure of the proper term for what the CC had done. These people weren’t dead, but neither were they living. Well, they were living, by definition only. They were hollowed out shells of what they used to be, living machines programmed to destroy. Terminators, without the hard endoskeleton.

  * * *

  “I’m so sorry.” Caleb stroked his wife’s hand and cried.

  His oldest child was in the office next door, no doubt throwing herself into understanding what had been done to her mother and her brother. Neither one had any idea what had happened to Sophia, Kasey’s younger sister. The only thing Caleb knew for sure concerning his youngest daughter was that she had been alive a week after the outbreak, the day before he and his family had been picked up by the Guard. Caleb had talked to her over the phone. Sophia would have been with the three of them, but like Kasey, had moved out and away from home some time ago. She had been living in the northern part of the state, at the base of the northern panhandle. He hoped Kasey would find a list of test subjects, anything that would tell them whether or not Sophia had been brought to this hell hole.

  “Kasey is okay, she’s with me now. I’ll watch over her.” Caleb leaned forward and kissed Liz on the cheek. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

  Earlier, he had listened to the men in Kasey’s group recount the journey here and their run-ins with what they were calling Terminators. He knew what Liz had become, what his son Ryan had become, and what they were going to do. Because of that, part of him wanted to put his wife out of her misery, kill her, before she could begin the rest of her slaughtering life. The other part of him knew he couldn’t, because he didn’t know for sure if she truly was suffering. His love for her was beside the point. He could set that aside and do what needed to be done, if she was in pain, or if she asked him to. He knew that wouldn’t happen either. These new…beings didn’t talk.

  He wasn’t surprised at all by the news that he was immune to the z-virus; the other prisoners were clearly shocked, but he wasn’t. Caleb rotated his wrist and glanced down at his forearm. The scar was already starting to fade, a broken circle of pale skin. Their old mailman’s teeth marks were barely visible.

  Being immune actually made more sense than the other theories Caleb had pondered during his time in isolation. If he let himself think about it too long, an overpowering urge to stick the barrel of a gun in his mouth came over him. If he and the other men hadn’t been immune, his wife wouldn’t be lying on a table. Caleb would always blame himself and the other immune for the terrible things that had been done to not only his family, but to an unknown number of others. Folks would tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he had been as much a victim as the rest. Yet Caleb would forever hold himself accountable. The guilt ultimately rested on the immune’s shoulders.

  His train of thought was abruptly cut off when he felt a twitch. He looked down at Liz’s hand and saw her fingers trying to squeeze his. Except he knew it wasn’t her, she wasn’t holding his hand because she recognized him. Her muscles were simply reacting. His eyes moved slowly to hers, and saw they were open and staring at him. No, she didn’t recognize him one bit. Her upper lip moved and snarled just enough to be noticed before relaxing again.

  Is she warning me?

  Caleb went with his gut and stepped away, only then noticing that everyone else in the room had woken up. Carefully and deliberately, the new z-soldiers sat up and found their feet, unsteady at first.

  “I’m sorry, Liz,” he whispered one more time, backing up until the knob of the adjacent office door jabbed his lower back. He reached behind and turned it, then eased himself inside.

  * * *

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Dad. I’d been going through the last of McAlister’s notes when the click of the door closing startled me.

  “They’re awake.” He faced the door and held the knob in a death grip.

  “It’s alright, they won’t hurt us.”

  My voice was so dismissive that Dad spun around to glare. I hadn’t meant for my words to come out as they had. Spending all that time reading and studying the lab journal, field notes, and subject inventories had been like taking a Prozac.

  “You’re detaching. Stop it.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Okay, listen, Dad.” I tapped my fingertips on the computer screen. “I figured out what they were doing.” I pointed another finger toward the door. “They can’t hurt us. Literally can’t. I went back through all his notes. In the beginning they really were trying to find a cure for this thing. But the results were fatal, so they went the opposite route. Instead of making more deadheads, they genetically engineered living humans that are specifically designed to attack and destroy anything infected with the older strains of the bio-weapon.”

  Dad started as though he’d been slapped. “What?”

  I nodded and continued. “The outbreak was the result of a bio-weapon. You didn’t really assume otherwise, did you?”

  “No…” he replied slowly, “I suppose not.”

  “Exactly. So in the end, they found a way to fight fire with fire. Now, I went through all the
records. They didn’t perfect their work until recently. These last few batches finally showed zero aggression towards uninfected humans and animals. Before that, well…” I let my statement hang in the air.

  “Don’t call them that.” He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw.

  “What?”

  “Don’t call them ‘batches.’ They’re people, Kasey.” Dad jabbed a finger toward the door. “That’s your mother in there.”

  I stared at him, confused for a moment. I was only trying to explain it to him, what had I said that was so wrong?

  “Don’t you understand? This means we’re safe. Safer than we’ve been since all this started. They, she, won’t hurt us. And eventually the zombie threat will be eliminated.”

  He shook his head at me, and the first pang of pain began working again in my heart. He was disappointed in me.

  “I do understand, honey. But what happens when there are no more zombies?”

  Again I stared at him. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. The truth crept its way into my mind like a wolf stalking its prey.

  “No,” I breathed.

  Dad nodded. “Yes.”

  “No, no, no, no…” I turned my back to him and covered my face.

  When the zombie threat had been crushed, the true victims of the outbreak would slowly starve to death.

  Chapter Eighteen

  November 25th: mid-afternoon

  We began the long trip “home” on foot. Rabbit used the last of the batteries to call ahead, letting the prison know we were returning with six survivors. He informed them of the deaths of Waters and the others, and requested an Evac at the location of the washout. There was simply no way we could cram everyone into two Humvees. Collins would have to meet us and pick up Dad and the other men. Apparently there was some argument then, about the distance the Blackhawk would have to go to meet us, that it was past the halfway point designated prior to our leaving, and that if Collins was needed elsewhere, it would take him longer to return. Rabbit put a quick stop to the bullshit and repeated his request, his tone making it obvious that the subject was not up for debate.