Apocalypse of the Dead

by Joe McKinney

  “My guess is you’re an expert with that,” he said.

  Barnes just stared at him over the front sight. He was trembling and unable to stop himself. His mind felt like it was teetering for balance on a high wire.

  “You probably shoot a rifle with surgical precision, but my guess is that pistol there might as well be an extension of your hand. Am I right?”

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk,” the man said, spreading his hands apart as if to suggest there was nothing else he could want.

  “Just leave me alone, guy.”

  “Ah,” the man said. He moved to the stairs and sat down. He looked at Barnes and patted the spot next to him. “No? Well, okay. Stand there with your pistol if you must.”

  “You got a lot of nerve, talking down to a man who’s got a gun pointed at your head.”

  The man smiled. “Two things,” he said. “First of all, Michael, I’m not talking down to you. I will never do that. My promises don’t mean anything to you now, but they will someday, and I’m making you a promise now. I will never talk down to you.”

  Barnes was not impressed. “And the second thing?”

  “Just this. I know you won’t shoot me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Michael, I’ve thought a lot about death over the years. I’ve thought about the death of our self-respect, the death of our country, the death of the world. I’ve also thought about my own death, and I know I wasn’t meant to die like this. Not from a gun.”

  Barnes started to speak, then stopped. He kept the gun pointed at the man’s oddly square face. The man’s skin had a grotesque, plastic look about it, like an aging actress with a bad face-lift. He wore large sunglasses that hid his eyes from view. The combination of his features should have made him look ridiculous, but for some reason, Barnes found him oddly compelling.

  “How can you be so sure about your own death?” Barnes asked at last.

  “Mmm. Well, that takes some explaining, doesn’t it? Let’s just say that I’ve found a purpose for my life. I’ve found that thing that makes a life worth living.”

  “You’ve found the meaning of life? Tell me, please, I’m dying to know.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, Michael. But you’ve touched on something. Let’s talk about you.”

  “Not interested.”

  “But I am, Michael. I am, very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know you. I know the demon that drives you.”

  “You know jack shit.”

  The man’s smile didn’t waver.

  “Always on guard, aren’t you? Ever ready. Always set to take on the fight. You’ve been fighting a long time, haven’t you, Michael? You’ve seen more death and meaningless suffering than most men could ever imagine. You’ve come to see the world as a mean and brutal and selfishly nasty place. And you’ve met that world head-on, with your fists and your courage and your skill. Everything they heaped on you, you gave it right back to them. With interest.”

  Barnes nodded. He lowered the gun an inch.

  “You know what I see? I see exhaustion, Michael. You’re tired because no matter how hard you fight, you can’t make the world make sense.”

  Barnes nodded again, more slowly.

  “You’ve been going at it all wrong, Michael. You’ve been fighting the wrong battles. I can show you the right path. But you have to trust me.”

  Barnes looked at him.

  “You’re Jasper Sewell, aren’t you?”

  Jasper smiled broadly, confidently. “Guilty as charged.”

  Barnes looked at the gun in his hand. His body was still trembling. He said, “Can you really help me?”

  Jasper nodded. “I can. I will. But you must trust me completely, Michael. If you don’t, this will just be another wrong battle. Like all the others you’ve fought before.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  Jasper clasped his hands together above his knees. He said, “I want you to put that gun on the step between my feet.”

  Barnes lowered the weapon. The man’s expression never changed, but Barnes could feel the confidence, the positive energy flowing out of this man. He put the gun on the steps and backed away.

  “Now sit here beside me.”

  Again, Barnes did as he was told. Already, he was feeling better. He was releasing a burden, giving up the need to be in command that had kept him going for so very long now.

  It felt good, not being in control.

  Then Jasper did something that surprised him. He reached over and put his arms around Barnes’s shoulders and pulled Barnes’s face to his chest.

  Barnes surprised himself by letting Jasper pull him tight.

  And he surprised himself again by crying.

  “Do you promise to trust in me entirely?” Jasper said.

  Barnes nodded, still crying.

  “You’re no pansy, Michael Barnes. Don’t give me a pansy’s answer.”

  “I do,” he said, his voice muffled by Jasper’s chest. “I will.”

  CHAPTER 44

  When Mark Kellogg came into the control room, the group of three enlisted men at the monitors turned and stared. Word of the phone call has spread already, he thought. They knew. He ignored their looks and stared instead at the bank of monitors in front of them, lost in his own thoughts. They’d know the truth soon enough. The whole base would.

  He shook himself. It was getting hard to think straight. The pills he’d been surviving on for the last few days had made things soupy in his head, and there was a crash coming. He could feel it looming on his horizon.

  Gradually, the three enlisted men turned back to the monitors.

  Behind him, the door closed softly. It was Jane Robeson, one of the civilian doctors they’d picked up from the CDC down in Atlanta. Her team was working on mapping the antigenic shift of the population strains of the infected taken out of the Pennsylvania area by comparing them to the original samples recorded along the Gulf Coast. Kellogg ran down the latest progress reports from her team in his head. They were doing good work, though he was doubtful they were going to turn up any usable leads in the next few weeks. The kind of work they were doing was the stuff of years, and that was time they just didn’t have.

  “How’s it going, Jane?”

  “Good as can be expected, I guess.” She was a gray, bedraggled woman in her late fifties, with a frizzled mess of hair pulled back in a loose bun behind her head. She seemed anxious. “I was wondering…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we all heard about the call. We were wondering, was it really him?”

  In front of him, the three enlisted men stiffened without trying to make it obvious they were listening. Kellogg sighed. It was going to come out sooner or later. This might as well be the time. “Yeah,” he said. “It was him. The president. The slippery bastard said we have the hopes and prayers of a desperate nation riding on our efforts. He said he has the firmest confidence that we will see this thing through to a successful conclusion. He actually talks like that in real life, Jane. Did you know that? The bastard can’t have a simple phone conversation without making it sound like a proclamation.”

  “But what about reinforcing us? Additional supplies. Mark, I’m having to share computer time with three other teams. We’ve got equipment here that would be considered inadequate even for a high school chem lab. We can’t be expected to keep up any sort of pace like this.”

  “I know what you’re up against, Jane.”

  “But did you tell him that? Does he know how bad things are here?”

  “He knows.”

  “And what did he say?”

  Kellogg laced his hands together behind his back. A tension headache was building behind his eyes. He wanted one of his pills, but that would have to wait. On the monitor in front of him, he saw Nate Royal sitting at the edge of his bed, watching TV, a remote control in his hand. The man looked bored out of his head. He hadn’t moved in two days, and the nurses repor
ted that he hadn’t slept, either. He just kept watching Top Gun over and over again. He was depressed. You didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to see that. But what were they going to do about it? They were all prisoners here, of one sort or another. Rosetta stone to this pandemic though he may be, Nate Royal didn’t have a monopoly on depression.

  “Mark? What did he say?”

  “He quoted Abraham Lincoln to me, Jane. Can you believe that? ‘Endeavor to persevere,’ he said. Lincoln said that to the Indians as he was preparing to send them out to the reservations. Do you get the implication, Jane? Do you know what that means for us?”

  “But surely he can’t mean we’re not getting any help at all. Mark, is that what he said?”

  Kellogg’s gaze shifted once again over the monitors in front of him. One screen was split into six sections, each section showing a different part of the base’s perimeter. The infected were swarming against the fence. A week earlier, they’d seen a few stragglers from the town of Minot, and the guards had amused themselves with popping off headshots from their Humvees during their patrols. Kellogg had watched them and winced at their sport, but ultimately decided that he didn’t care enough to order them to stop.

  Somehow word had spread to Minneapolis that Minot was doing research on the virus. If there was going to be a cure, the rumor went, it was going to come out of Minot. Soon there were streams of refugees descending on the base, and the results were predictable enough. A hundred thousand people had brought their infected friends and family with them, hoping for some kind of miracle cure. They had tried to storm the base and had been repulsed. Now that flood of humanity was essentially an army of the infected, beating on the gates. The guards were no longer shooting them for sport. That had stopped shortly after the first incursions and a sort of besieged mentality had set in among the base’s population. It was just a matter of time now, like it had been in San Antonio and Pennsylvania.

  The truth was they were dealing with a global pandemic. There were reports coming out of every corner of the globe. Nuclear weapons had been used on refugees along the India-Pakistan border. China was in chaos. U.S. troops in Europe and the Middle East were collapsing as soldiers abandoned their posts and tried to find ways to make it home to their families stateside. Globally, they were past the tipping point. The great crash was already a part of history. Armageddon had come and gone. Now they were just witnessing the wreckage.

  “Mark?”

  Kellogg started. For a moment, the room had disappeared, but the sound of Jane Robeson’s voice brought him back.

  Kellogg’s gaze drifted back to Nate Royal. “That one is our best hope right now,” he said, nodding at the screen.

  Standing beside him, she watched Nate sitting at the edge of his bed.

  “He’s a tough nut to crack,” she said. “We’ve tried everything.”

  “But we’re going to have to crack him. There is an answer there, Jane.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  “Me too. God help us, me too.”

  Nate Royal sat on the edge of his bed, watching Top Gun. Again. The same scene. Over and over. Maverick and Goose are in Stinger’s office. They’ve just saved Cougar. Stinger is offering Maverick his dream shot, telling him, “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”

  Stop.

  Backtrack.

  Play it again.

  Like Kellogg, Nate was looking for answers. The absurdity of his position hit him a week ago. He was sitting here in his bed, eating raspberry Jell-O with his fingers, listening to Tom Cruise saying “I was inverted,” and it struck him. His life was a waste. He was a waste. He had burst into daylight one day during his sophomore year and rather than finding a world that made sense, he had found this world.

  Now they were telling him that he was some kind of cure. It was absurd. He had never mattered to anybody, and now they were telling him he mattered to everybody. Nate found it hard to believe, and even harder to stomach. That wasn’t the kind of responsibility he wanted. He remembered Jessica Metcalfe’s husband, the big-shot city attorney who had offered him the job painting his pool house, telling him that he had to take some responsibility and put his life back on the rails. That had seemed like an empty load of shit at the time. How could he really be expected to do that? He was just one man, and the world was so huge. It didn’t make sense.

  And that was the problem, really. Nothing made sense. Dr. Kellogg had promised that the lab people would start telling him what tests they were doing on him and why, and they had. They’d been good to their word. But it didn’t help Nate any. He still didn’t understand why it had to be him and not somebody else.

  Nate stopped the DVD. Made it go back a track. Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.

  He didn’t know about his ego, wasn’t even really sure what that was, but he did know his body wasn’t up for cashing any more checks. He’d reached the end of his rope, and he didn’t have anything left. So, really, it boiled down to one simple question: Did he want to go on living? He decided that he didn’t, and it surprised him how easy the decision was to make. Screw what everybody else wanted. It was his life. He wrecked it, so it was up to him to fix it. Maybe Jessica Metcalfe’s husband was right. Maybe it was his responsibility. Running into daylight hadn’t worked. Maybe he’d find better luck with darkness.

  Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.

  He stopped the disk. Looking down at the remote, he found the Eject button and hit it. The disk slid out. Nate took it from the carriage and watched the light dapple off its surface before snapping it cleanly in half. He studied the edge he’d made and decided it would do. It was going to hurt, but that’d be over soon enough.

  He pushed himself up to the head of the bed and climbed under the sheets. The cameras Kellogg had told him about picked up the whole room, and it wouldn’t do him any good to get caught before he could make good on this.

  Nate spread his legs butterfly fashion, his hands on the bed between his knees, the sheets pulled up around his elbows. Just below the surface of his wrist he could see two green lightning-bolt-shaped veins. Using the corner of the broken disc, he picked at the skin there. He winced at the pain.

  He eyes were shut and he couldn’t remember closing them. He forced them open.

  His wrists were marked by a pair of deep scratches. There was a smear of blood on the white sheets. The wound was stinging, but it didn’t hurt as bad as he thought it would.

  Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.

  Not this time, he thought.

  Nate took a deep breath. And another. Then he put the disk to his wrist and began to cut.

  CHAPTER 45

  Ed Moore found that he wasn’t alone with his feelings of unease. A few others had noticed that something was wrong with life in the Grasslands, and they came to him with their concerns.

  It is funny, he thought, how like-minded people tend to find each other.

  Now it was late, dark outside, and cold, and Ed stood before a group of six young men and two women. Among the group were Billy Kline and Jeff Stavers. Ed looked at Jeff now and thought of the beating the young man had witnessed, and how he’d been forced to hide to avoid a confrontation with Jasper’s most loyal followers. Ed figured they would be watching Jeff closely, just as they were no doubt watching anybody he associated with, and that meant they were all going to have to be extremely careful.

  “I have no idea what they will do if they find us out,” he told the group. “Maybe nothing. Maybe kick us out.”

  “Yeah, or maybe worse,” said Jeff.

  The room echoed with mutters of agreement.

  “Yes,” Ed said. “Maybe worse.”

  He shivered. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing a coat. He was dressed in a black flannel shirt and jeans. He’d been issued a heavy winter coat, but it was as white as a show pony, and they were going to have to maintain a low profile if this was going to wor
k. That meant dark clothes worn under the cover of darkness.

  He said, “That’s why I can’t ask any of you to go along with us if you’re not serious about this. If we get caught, you can bet they’ll try to find out who else is with us. So please, if you’re not committed to this, back out now. I only ask for your silence.”

  He looked around the room. Nobody stirred. He saw eight stalwart faces staring back at him.

  “Okay,” he said. Outside, the wind howled, and Ed stopped to listen. The constant roar of the wind made it hard to hear the guards who patrolled the camp at night. “Tonight,” he said, “what I want to do is get inside that supply shed and see if there are any radios. After that, we’ll distribute what we find and see what happens. Just remember. Keep a low profile, okay? I don’t want anybody getting discovered.”

  Ed took a small, dark beanie cap from his back pocket and slipped it over his white hair.

  He looked to Billy and Jeff and said, “You guys ready?”

  Both men nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s roll.”

  The three of them knelt under the eaves of dormitory number two and glanced across the common area of the village. A narrow sliver of a moon cast a faint bluish tinge over the grass. Buttery yellow sodium vapor lamps lit the road at even intervals from the pavilion all the way down to the cottages. An armed patrol walked along the road. They looked bored, but still attentive. Ed, Billy, and Jeff waited for the patrol to crest the small hill that led down to the cottages, and when the guards were out of sight, they ran for the education tents.

  Once there, they had to wait for another patrol to cross the space between the radio room and the office. The two armed men wandered slowly toward the pavilion, where they stopped and talked for a few moments before continuing their way down to the dormitories.

  “How many of them are there?” Jeff asked, indicating the patrols with a nod of his chin.