Affirmative grunts and sounds.
They drove into Fayetteville. Zeke led them to an unused corner of a large, well-lit gas station. “This is our ORP. Make your sweep, maintain commo, meet here.”
The SUVs split up, approaching Zeke’s suburban middle-class home from two different directions. They quartered and searched the blocks, looking for vehicles with the telltale signs of a surveillance team: being parked on the street, not in a driveway; extra antennas; roomy models, like vans or big SUVs; too-black windows; sitting heavy and low on their suspensions; magnetic business logos, the kind that can be slapped on and peeled off easily. There were lots of clues if you knew what to look for.
It didn’t take long. Skull spotted them first. “I got a cable service truck on your street. Old van, new paint, UHF and satellite, antenna, barrier between the driving and cargo compartment. Parked between houses.”
“That’s probably it. No cable technicians working this time of night.”
“Do they ever work?”
“Ha ha. We going in light or heavy?”
“No way to sneak up on them. If you want them deactivated, we have to do it heavy.”
“Understood. Rally now at the ORP.”
They met back at the gas station.
“We need a shock truck. Spooky?”
“If we can find it, I can steal it.”
“Okay, spread out, report when we got one.”
It took them twenty-five minutes to locate a suitable truck, a flatbed two-ton. Spooky had it gone in sixty seconds. Skull drove. They talked over their plan of attack on the way.
Zeke and Larry pulled up at the end of the alley that ran behind his house. “In position.”
“Roger. Commencing shock run.”
Skull put the truck into gear, coming around the corner nose-on the surveillance van. At the same time Spooky drove the Cherokee around the opposite corner, slowly, focusing the watchers’ attention on him as they looked out the back window.
The truck was going forty when its heavy steel bumper smashed into the nose of the van. Impact drove the van several car-lengths down the street, coming to rest on its side.
Spooky pulled up in the Cherokee. He and Skull jumped out of their vehicles, charging the van. Through the shattered back window they could see broken electronics and camera equipment, and two men lying amid the wreckage, moving weakly. The shock had jumbled them like mice in a paint shaker, and the smell of leaking gasoline wafted through the mess.
Spooky stepped through the opening and pistol-whipped each in turn, ensuring unconsciousness. Then he pulled out the syringe Zeke had given him and pumped half of the contents into each. “Get them out, Skull.”
“We should let ‘em burn,” he grumbled, reaching in to drag the men out with Spooky’s help, tossing them roughly onto the closest suburban lawn. He keyed his mike. “Van and their team out of commission and infected. We’re extracting, people are already coming out of their houses.” Skull popped a smoke grenade and tossed it into the van. The flaming smoke mix soon ignited the dripping gasoline and the vehicle caught fire with a whoosh. They drove rapidly away, around the block and back toward the ORP.
Zeke and Larry had already pulled up to his back gate, blasting twice on the horn. Zeke got out, fastening the barrier out of the way, and then bolted inside. A moment later he ran out, carrying a skeletal boy wrapped in a blanket. Larry held the door open. Right behind him followed an athletic woman of about forty and a girl of eight.
“Hi, Cass. Hi Millie,” Larry rumbled.
“Hi Mister Larry!” piped the girl.
Cassandra nodded to Larry, handing him a suitcase.
Headlights appeared and the roaring of an engine sounded at the end of the alley, accelerated toward them. Cass shoved Millie into the Land Rover, while Larry reached for his shotgun from under the seat.
Muzzle flashes sparkled from both sides of the oncoming vehicle, and Larry’s twelve-gauge roared over and over. Zeke hunched over Ricky, covering him with his body, while Cassandra drew a pistol from the small of her back, taking cover behind the door to return a rapid hail of bullets.
The headlights wobbled, then skewed leftward as the oncoming vehicle bucked and rolled down the alley with a grinding crash of metal. Cassandra reloaded while Larry ran at the smoking wreck of a Suburban. He looked inside, seeing two men unconscious. He reached in, taking their guns and tossing them into a nearby garbage can, then knelt down among the wreckage.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said aloud to himself, then bit them each in turn. “Feel like a freakin’ vampire.” He returned to the Land Rover.
Larry was almost there when he heard an anguished sob, choked off, then a high keening. He leaped forward, shotgun searching for a target, but there wasn’t anything to shoot.
Cassandra knelt over Zeke, who lay stretched out on the ground. Millie stood there, wailing, her small hands tangled in her hair, pulling. Larry pushed her gently aside, confident the Eden Plague would make it all right.
Not this time.
Zeke’s eyes stared sightless at the glowing suburban sky. Blood and brains leaked from the hole in his head. Cassandra stroked his face, crooning, “No, no, no…”
Larry cursed, a string of bitter vulgarities. “Come on, Cass, he’s gone. He’s gone. More might be on the way, we have to get going, we have to break contact.”
Cassandra growled with frustration, muttering under her breath, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Help me get him in. We’re not leaving him.” She forced down her grief.
Together they rolled Zeke in a blanket, then manhandled his body into the back of the SUV. Larry drove them away from the scene as rapidly as he could without attracting attention.
“What was that?” asked Spooky over the radio.
“They got Zeke. Lucky head shot. He’s gone,” Larry answered grimly.
Silence. Then, “Shit.”
“Meet at the ORP. We still have to get Zeke’s mom.”
“What?” asked Cassandra. “Why? She’s in a facility.”
“Because we can cure her, we think. But if we cure her we have to take her with us because if they find out we did, they will lock her up, quarantine her.”
Cassandra digested this as they met at the ORP. “All right, I’ll tell you where to go. Do you think they’ll be watching her?”
“We have to hope not. They can’t be everywhere.”
Twenty minutes later they pulled into a complex labeled ‘Green Pastures Managed Care facility.’ It was still early enough for visitors to just walk in without checking in. They took her out the back way in a wheelchair.
The return trip to the bunker went smoothly, but a nightmare clouded their minds. Ten bags of truck stop ice packed Zeke’s body in the back of the Cherokee; still no one could forget what had happened.
Larry drove the Land Rover, silent, bleak. Zeke’s mother Beulah sat buckled into the front seat, humming softly to herself for a while before falling asleep. Cassandra sobbed from time to time, an arm around each of her children in the back seat. Millie slept most of the way, which was a relief; it wasn’t real to her.
About two hours out, Ricky spoke up. “I’m hungry, mama.” He reached up to grasp her arm.
“Ricky!” She took her hand in his, feeling the strength of his grip.
“Mama, I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”
“Cass,” Larry said. “Cass, he has to eat. It’s really important. Here.” He rummaged in a cooler between the seats. “Have him drink this protein shake.”
“That’s not for kids!”
Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”
“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”
Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.
He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it
down.
“His hands are strong! That’s amazing, just yesterday he would never have been able to pick up that can!”
“I know,” Larry said. “It’s a miracle, a God-blessed miracle. I’m so sorry about Zeke. But this stuff…it’s gonna fix Ricky and it’s gonna fix Beulah and a lot more people in the world. We’ve got this place in the hills, you’ll see it soon…” He went on explaining, bringing her up to date on what had happened.
She listened with half an ear and half her mind, lost in the wonder of her son’s recovery.
-19-
Elise and I met them at the cavern with all the vehicles, what we called the Motor Pool. I knew there was something seriously wrong when I saw the expressions on their faces as the two men in the Cherokee got out.
“Weren’t you guys supposed to take off?” I saw the Land Rover but I didn’t see Zeke. By the time I had looked around, they had opened the back of the SUV and hefted his body onto the cold cavern floor.
I stared at it. At them. “How?”
Elise clutched my hand.
“Unlucky shot. They had four guys on the house. We only spotted two. The other two must have been a reaction force. They opened fire on us and we took them out. But Zeke…” Skull waved vaguely, a helpless thing. More emotion showed on his face then than I had ever seen before: grief, anger, bitterness.
I wanted to make some kind of gesture. If it had been Larry I might have hugged him. I settled for putting a hand on Alan’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing him back.”
He shrugged my hand off, spat on the ground at my feet.
I could smell his buried rage. Maybe that was a good thing; maybe rage meant he wasn’t sociopathic, just…angry.
We took Zeke’s body and put it on ice in the bunker’s morgue. The scientists wanted to make sure they had the cadaver to study later. That was what Zeke would have wanted, I was sure. We got the family settled into quarters and turned in.
My sleep was troubled with images of death and horror.
The next morning brought relief. I was delighted to see Ricky walking and eating. I hadn’t been sure the Eden Plague would work on him. I found him shoveling canned ham and eggs into his mouth, with Cassie and Millie next to him, eating more sedately. I got a plate of breakfast and sat down with them.
“How you doin, sport? You remember me?”
He shook his head.
“That’s all right, it was five years back or so.” I looked at Cassie. “Sorry to be such a stranger. And I’m sorry to have brought this on you and your family. If I’d have known…”
“None of us can know, Dan. We’re in God’s hands.”
That made me angry, though not as angry as I might have been before the Plague. “How can you believe that? With all this crap going on, how can you believe God cares?”
“Maybe because I think things would be a lot worse if He didn’t.”
“Then why doesn’t he clean the world up? Why just keep things not too bad and not too good?”
“Maybe He expects us to do our part. Make our own mistakes. Take responsibility. Maybe He doesn’t want to be our nanny. And maybe he works through people – people who make things like the Eden Plague.”
I nodded reluctantly, holding up a surrendering hand. “Okay, okay. That’s as good an answer as any, I guess. He did get me out of some jams, I think. But Zeke…”
She reached across the table to put her hand on my arm with earnest, tear-filled eyes. “My heart aches for Zeke, but he died doing what he wanted to. Protecting people. Saving people. Saving us. He passed this Eden thing on to Ricky and saved his life. Elise treated Beulah and she recognized me this morning! We have to hold on to the good he did. And I was talking to Elise…this is so amazing! This whole thing. It will change the world.”
“Yeah. But for the better? It could be a wrecking ball.”
Spooky caught my eye from across the room.
“I have to do something. I’ll see you later.” I walked over to the Vietnamese man.
“We go now. Skull and me. Better that way. You want to reach me, you talk to Van Vinh.”
“What about…what about Alan?”
“I don’t know. He love Zeke. He very angry. Maybe he stir up the hornets. What can we do? No man can live in another’s heart.”
I licked my lips. “You still have that other syringe?”
“Yes.”
I stared at him, willing him to understand.
His eyes widened fractionally. He nodded, slowly. “Only if I must.”
“It’s better than killing him. At least then he has a chance to change. Maybe the Eden Plague will help him heal some of his pain.”
“But you say with the psycho, they maybe turn very evil.”
“That’s just a guess. We have no evidence or proof of how any of this works. I just know we have to give him a chance. What you do is on your own conscience.”
He looked at my face for a few more seconds. Searching. For what, I don’t know; certainty perhaps, but he wouldn’t find it. He swallowed, then bowed, formally. “Goodbye, Daniel Markis. I think you are the Colonel Zeke now.”
I bowed to him, shaken. Master Sergeants don’t become Colonels overnight; I guess now I had no choice. I sure didn’t feel ready. I pushed the thought aside and watched him walk down toward the motor pool.
Good luck, Spooky.
***
A week of being buried alive here in Sosthenes made me realize the idea about quarantining myself wasn’t going to work. Physically I was not limited; it was the oppression of the mountain above me, the damp cold air anywhere not heated by machinery, and the lack of open spaces that was getting to me.
I drove myself hard, to keep the oppression and the black thoughts of Zeke’s fate away. I spent as much time with Elise as I could spare, and with Millie and Cassie and Ricky, trying to make up for the Zeke-shaped hole in their lives.
Cassie bore up well, and she quickly established herself as the master of our spycraft, what is called tradecraft by those in the business. She spent long hours with Vinh, who ate up the knowledge and reveled in his job as gopher, supply specialist and intelligence operative. She soon had him taking trucks to various towns and cities, never the same place twice, selling currency and coins to private collectors and shops and jewelers, buying loads of electronics, spare parts, cabling, fresh food, everything that the bunker needed.
Vinny and I set up several satellite and microwave dishes and other antennas on the mountaintop, under cover of the trees and some extra radar-scattering netting strategically placed to mask any overhead surveillance. The bunker entrance nearby was one of a dozen or so that led to various points on the mountain, providing access or escape for people on foot. By midweek everyone was taking sunlight breaks at least once a day at the nearest hatchway.
We also got all the internal telephones working, at each entrance and in all of the main rooms and offices. They weren’t connected to the outside world but they were useful for our work.
By the end of the week the lab equipment started arriving. I risked going outside driving one of two trucks, following Vinh to pick up several large crates in Richmond. It was a great relief just to be up in the sunlight and out in the open, bouncing along the country roads down to the freeway feeders to the Virginia capital and back. I thought if I could do that once a week I might be all right.
Larry had taken off on his own the day after Zeke died, heading back to Atlanta. That gave Cassie enough time to set up a rudimentary anonymous webmail system with him, using free accounts for communication. As long as everyone stayed away from certain keywords like ‘Eden’ or ‘Plague’ or ‘Markis,’ everything should be fine. Computers might be able to look at every e-mail in America, but people couldn’t: they could only see what the software flagged. That was how to stay below the radar of the creeping Big Brother that America’s government was becoming since 9-11.
We decided to keep to a more or less similar week to the outside world, work five or six days but
for sure take Sunday off. Everyone was pushing too hard. So it was on a Sunday afternoon right after the barbecue outside our best hatch that I found Elise.
She was sitting against the mountainside a couple of hundred yards up on a granite ledge that I remembered she liked. She gave a little wave when she saw me hiking up but didn’t smile.
“Elise…I need to talk to you.” Awkwardly. It seemed like she had been a bit standoffish for the last week or so. Or maybe it was me.
“I know. I mean, okay. Let’s talk.”
I took a deep breath, then sat down beside her, not touching. Staring out into space. “I need to know something first.”
“Sure.” She didn’t sound sure.
“Can the EP be fixed? Really? Can the conscience-enhancing portion be overcome?”
She did a kind of double-take, as if I had asked her a completely unexpected question.
I wondered what she had thought I would say.
Then her face relaxed. “Not easily. Not soon. It repairs cells. It repairs a lot of things. It balances processes. If you tell it not to change brain cells – theoretically, I mean – then it won’t repair nerve cells either, which will preclude a lot of other injuries getting fixed. But it’s more than just brain cells or neurons or axons or whatever. It’s the regulation of hormones and a thousand delicate neurological processes. The fact this thing works at all is a miracle, testimony to the Russians’ work. They did amazing things with primitive technology.”
“So the improvement in, well, let’s call it ‘virtue,’ is intrinsic. Impossible to separate from the advantages. That’s good.”
“I’m not so sure it’s good, if we can’t defend ourselves. I think this imperfect Eden Plague will push some people into being puritans and pacifists and Pharisees. It’s falling off the horse the opposite way. You feel it yourself, don’t you? You risked lives back there on the island because you used nonlethal ammo, when one shot to the brain would have put Rogett down for good. But you couldn’t do it. Is that good or bad? What’s the lesser of the evils?”
“I don’t have easy answers. We have to operate within the parameters we have right now. Maybe later you can tweak the virus to keep the reluctance-to-kill virtue without making it a vice.”
The Eden Plague Page 14
