Whitman knew better than to think that was a good sign. He tried to stand up but found that his knees had frozen. They wouldn’t do it down here, he thought. They wouldn’t want to disturb the senators with the noise of a gunshot. No. They would take him up to the surface, first.
“It’s best not to keep them waiting,” the page said, her smile dimming just a bit.
• • • •
It hurt to breathe. Whitman was pretty sure he’d broken a rib or two. He found just lifting his head was agony. He turned and saw Antlers racing toward him, head bent down low over his handlebars. Was he expecting Whitman to start shooting?
Too bad. Whitman hadn’t thought to search the wrecked van for the revolver or the shotgun. He stood there unarmed, waiting to be killed.
It wasn’t going to be quick. Antlers tore by him at speed. Something very hard struck him across the back of his legs, and Whitman fell down onto the road. He tried to grab the side of the van, tried to pull himself back up to his feet, but before he could manage it, Antlers swung back around and hit him again, this time in the side. He flopped forward into the van, almost on top of Bob.
He didn’t know if the kid was screaming or not, now. He couldn’t hear anything over the rush of blood in his ears.
Where was Grace? Did they already have her? Did they pull her unconscious and bleeding out of the wreckage? Whitman cursed himself for worrying about her when his own life was about to end. Surely there were better uses of his mental capacity in this, the last few seconds he had left.
Once he’d caught his breath, he could hear again. He wished he couldn’t. He heard a motorcycle engine putter out, then heavy footfalls come rushing toward him.
He turned just in time to see Antlers right behind him, raising a hammer over his head. Whitman rushed forward and grabbed the bastard’s arms, nearly impaling himself on a spiky bit of antler. The biker pushed back against him, but now that they were face to face Whitman realized how thin the man was, wasted away by malnutrition and hard living out here in the wilderness. He had a wiry strength, but Whitman bore down on him just by pure mass. He knocked the biker to the ground and kicked him hard — which probably hurt Whitman more than it did Antlers. He felt something tear in his abdomen, and he nearly collapsed on top of the biker.
He heard a shotgun blast behind him and whirled around. Through the van’s broken windows, he could see Grace on the other side of the vehicle. She had the shotgun up, and she blasted away again, and then he heard screaming. A grown man screaming his life away.
“That’s right! That’s right!” Grace screamed. Bikers jumped on their motorcycles and roared away, none of them willing to take her on.
“Grace,” Whitman said, trying to shout. It didn’t quite work. “Grace — reload.”
“What?” she asked.
“I said —”
Except he didn’t get to repeat himself. Antlers had gotten back on his feet. He wrapped an arm around Whitman’s neck and pulled him backwards, pressing hard until black spots danced in Whitman’s vision.
He couldn’t breathe — couldn’t move — couldn’t fight back. His body begged for air, but he had none to supply. He felt his consciousness dwindling away, vanishing.
Then a roar of noise and a shockwave went past his face, burning his cheek, and Antlers let go. Whitman bent over, gasping, wanting very much to sit down. To just die. But he had to know.
He turned first to look at Antlers. There wasn’t much left of the biker’s head.
He turned next to look into the van.
Bob still had his seatbelt on. Nobody had told him to take it off. The boy was curled forward with his whole body braced around the revolver, which looked enormous in his tiny hands.
• • • •
He was brought to a pleasant office with wood-paneled walls and a massive desk. Behind it sat the white-haired senator. And, of course, his guard, who looked as grave and deadly as Whitman’s own.
“We’ve made our decision,” the senator said. He waved for Whitman to sit down. “I’m going to do you a favor here and just speak honestly, if that’s alright.”
“Absolutely,” Whitman said. As long as he didn’t have to stand up when he heard the death sentence, he thought he would be okay.
“It didn’t come down to justice, or anything like that. It came down to the fact that your job — overseeing the quarantine, setting up the hospital camps — is essentially complete. Director Philips still has plenty more to do. If he can isolate the prion and find a vaccine, well. That would be handy, wouldn’t it?”
Whitman knew enough about the disease to understand that would probably never happen. Still. He wasn’t here for debate. Just sentencing.
“You were right, we need a scapegoat. And you’re it. I’m sorry.”
Whitman nodded. He looked down at his hands in his lap. His left hand with its tattoo. Had that made a difference? Maybe.
“I understand,” he said, meekly. His bravado had deserted him. “So what’s next? A quick firing squad? Or do I go on an apology tour first?”
The senator grunted. “You think we’re going to kill you?”
“Isn’t that why I’m here?” Whitman asked.
“No. Oh, I’m sure some of my colleagues would like that. But no. Your name will go down in history as the man who bungled the Crisis. Part of the official record. But honestly, we don’t have enough people left to throw any of them away.”
Whitman looked up in surprise. “So — what’s going to happen to me?”
“A very serious demotion, to start with. Your salary is going to take quite a hit. But we’ve got a new job for you. There are still new positives being discovered all the time. We can’t very well keep them in the cities where they might spread the infection. They need to be taken to the hospital camps, God help them. Somebody has to be in charge of that. Transportation and the like.”
“I don’t understand,” Whitman said.
“We’re giving you another chance,” the senator told him. “A chance to make amends.”
• • • •
The bikers didn’t come back for their dead. Maybe they were scared off permanently.
The van was totaled. Surprisingly, the semi rig ran just fine. It took some work extricating the snow plow blade from the van, but in the end they had a vehicle again. Even if it stank inside like home-made liquor and road pirate blood.
Between them, Whitman and Grace figured out how to drive the thing. Within a couple of hours, they were cruising down the highway at a steady twenty miles an hour, Bob curled up in a little bunk behind the cab.
Grace had fallen asleep too by the time Whitman pulled off the highway, just over the Florida line. He drove another couple of miles to a place he’d only ever seen on satellite maps.
It wasn’t a city. It wasn’t big enough to be a village. He thought it might’ve been a country club, before. It had a high fence and a parking lot full of patched-together cars. Snipers up on the gate waved them through.
Inside the lot, he saw people dressed in outlandish clothes working on the cars. Women in furs and floppy hats wrestled with carburetors. Men with blue hair or dressed in suits with torn shoulders changed oil filters.
The truck’s brakes squealed as he pulled to a stop. The noise woke Grace and she sat up slowly, looking around with bleary eyes. “This isn’t a hospital camp,” she pointed out.
“No,” Whitman told her. “It’s a place we can trade some of our water for gasoline, though.”
“Who are these people? Road pirates?”
He shook his head. “Looters. They work their way through old suburban subdivisions, finding what food and supplies they can get out of old houses. It’s a living, I guess, if you can’t score a place in a walled city.”
Grace’s brow furrowed. “What’re we doing here? We have some gas left.”
Whitman turned to look at her. He tried to smile. It had been a long time since he’d done that. “We’re here to give you a choice. You and Bob
both.”
He parked the rig and let the engine rumble itself to sleep. “I’ll take you to the hospital camp if that’s what you want. It’s safe there, more or less. Not very comfortable, though — and it’s a twenty-year sentence. You have to stay there until you can prove you’re not infected.”
She didn’t appear as though she liked the idea.
“Otherwise — you can start over here. Get to know the looters. Figure out how they survive. You can have this rig and everything in it. That ought to get you started. The only thing I ask is that you and Bob stick together. He can handle a gun, but he’s too young to even understand what’s happening to him.”
Grace stared at him. “Why?”
“Because I think you might have a better chance here.”
“No — I mean, why are you doing this? Giving me a choice. Your job is to take us to the camp.”
Whitman shrugged. “I’ve seen you two can look after yourselves. I know what it’s like in those camps — and what it’s like here. Don’t think I’m giving you any good options. Life here is going to be tough, and you might not make it. But you won’t be a prisoner. You’ll be free to move about as you please.” He lifted his hands, dropped them again. “I guess that’s something, right?”
Grace ran her fingers through her hair. Clearly she had a lot to think about. “What about you? What happens to you if I say yes?”
“I’ll call for a government helicopter to pick me up. I still have a job.” There would always be more positives who needed rides. There was no end to that demand. Always more work. The world never did end, it seemed.
He took the keys out of the ignition. Held them out to her.
“What do you say?” he asked.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Wellington is the author of the Monster Island trilogy of zombie novels, the 13 Bullets series of vampire books, and most recently the Jim Chapel thrillers Chimera and The Hydra Protocol. “Agent Unknown” (The End is Nigh) and “Agent Isolated” are prequels to Positive, his forthcoming zombie epic. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
GOODNIGHT EARTH
Annie Bellet
Karron leaned over the rail of her boat, the Tarik, and watched the meteor shower from its reflection in the river below. The bright streaks of light looked like underwater fireflies and the Ring more like a soft blue disk, a monochromatic rainbow that ruled their lives in constant reminder of how broken the world was.
“Water, water, everywhere,” she murmured to herself, the words half-forgotten, something she’d read in the Covenant Archive a world — and a lifetime — ago. In their case implanted at the top of her spine, her nanos stirred with the memory.
The Tarik rode low in the Missip river as it tacked up the shoreline. She was a smaller boat, fifty feet and built with a shallow draft for sailing rivers and canals. Usually she carried only Karron and Ishim, and whatever cargo they’d bartered for, bought, or stolen.
The ship wasn’t equipped to handle six people on board. Karron glanced at their passengers where they huddled on makeshift beds around the steam stack toward the aft of the ship. A man and woman, who had provided what were probably fake names, and two kids. A week ago now they’d appeared on a small dock upriver from Looston, asking about getting around the Covenant checkpoints between Looston and Ria, a good two week journey if they did it straight. No papers for the kids, the woman, Jill, said.
Plausible enough story, and their Covenant coin would spend all along the river. The thirty gallons of pure water they’d offered as bonus had decided it. Karron and Ishim would smuggle the four up to Ria, where Nolan, the man, said his parents and jobs were waiting.
In the pale earthlight coming off the Ring, Karron could almost make out the little family’s faces. The adults appeared asleep under their blankets, but the two kids were awake, their dark eyes glinting. Oni, the boy, was supposedly seven years old, and his sister, Bee, was four. They were well behaved, the two kids. Creepily so. Quiet as fish lurking in the rocks, and as nimble as Button, the ship’s cat.
Karron bit her lip and glanced to the fore where Ishim stood keeping the ship steering smoothly through the dark water. She hadn’t told him her suspicions about the children. Her thoughts were impossible, and she knew as well as he that even if she was right about what they were, there was nothing she nor Ishim could or would do about it.
She’d always been too curious. Her instructors at the Academy had always said so in varying tones of annoyance or amusement.
Curiosity killed the cat, she thought, turning over the phrase in her mind, a phrase from the old times, before the Ring, before the sky broke and war came to the world.
“Satisfaction brought it back,” she whispered. She had to know.
Creeping over the deck — the shush of wind in the mainsail and the lap of water against the hull covering any sound she might have made — Karron approached the sleeping passengers. She brought her finger to her lips and saw both children nod. The adults to either side of them didn’t move, apparently asleep.
She knelt in front of Oni and reached for his head. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to breathe as she slid her hand around the back of his neck and felt the base of his skull.
The hard knot was there, distinct and familiar beneath her trembling fingers. Oni reached up and touched her arm. Karron bent her head and let him feel her own knot for himself. Bee’s tiny hand replaced Oni’s.
“Not your aunt and uncle,” Karron whispered, her mouth moving but hardly any sound coming from her throat. The kids would hear her, if they were like she was.
“No,” Oni whispered back. “Help us?”
“How?”
“Kill them. They are going to sell us.”
She shook her head. “Not my problem,” she whispered.
“You are like us,” the boy said. Beside him, Jill stirred, and all three of them froze until she settled again.
“Not anymore,” Karron lied.
For a long moment they sat in silence, watching one another. Then Karron crept away, her heart in her throat, and went back to her own blanket. Her head buzzed and her adrenaline spiked and the nanos at the base of her skull woke up, reacting to her heightened emotions. She took careful, slow breaths and forced herself to calm.
War Children, they’d been called. The program was dead, dismantled and torched fifteen years ago. She thought she’d been in the last generation, the last raised in the crèche in Deecee. Genetically altered, infested with nano-tech that even the Covenant didn’t understand, trained from the day they could walk to hunt, kill, be soldiers at the front of the Covenant peace-keeping forces.
She’d seen the Academy burn, seen her fellow Children burn with it. Only a few escaped that she knew of and many of them had been hunted down or gone insane. If Ishim hadn’t pulled her from the river, she would have died as well.
It was luck and staying calm and quiet that had kept the nanos from driving her insane, kept her from being caught. She’d told Ishim what she was, but he didn’t seem to care. Karron had warned him if she went crazy, he’d have to put her down.
“If you go crazy, will I even be able to kill you before you get me?” Ishim had asked.
Karron had looked away. They both knew the answer was no. No one man alone could take out a War Child.
Now there were three of them on this boat, though what training the two kids had, Karron didn’t know. At Oni’s age, she’d already run her first mission. Was there a program again? Why were these kids traveling with the suspiciously normal-seeming man and woman who Oni said were going to sell them? Sell them to whom?
Too many questions get smugglers killed, Ishim would say. Karron stared up at the Ring and pushed the questions away as stones fell out of the sky, flamed bright, and died away.
• • • •
The Missip branched into a hundred waterways as the Zouri joined up with it. Ishim and Karron knew many of those ways. Which ones were patrolled by Covenant boats or led to Covenant
settlements, which ones were dead ends, which were safe for a boat with a shallow draft to pole down or steam up. Reeds and willow branches shivered in the cool spring air as they tacked west and north along one of these myriad of ways. By afternoon they would join up with a bigger branch of the Zouri and in another week they’d be able to steam toward Ria, the worst of the checkpoints and danger zones.
Ria itself was controlled by a Baron, one of the gang leaders set up by the Covenant to keep a semblance of order on this side of the Missip. Long as the trains ran on time and the tithes got paid, Covenant didn’t seem to care what else happened or how the Barons went about their lives.
Ishim was catching a nap and Karron had the wheel as she guided the ship, keeping the boat turned so the big sail held a bellyful of wind. This way would narrow too much for sailing soon and they’d have to break out the poles or risk the racket of the steam engine for a while. They’d decide when Ishim woke, probably with a shared glance, a look at the river conditions, and a nod. A decade and a half relying on each other made words irrelevant. Karron smiled to herself as a Kingfisher dove into the water ahead. Sometimes they’d go weeks without words.
Not like their passengers. Nolan and Jill talked to each other a lot and sometimes attempted to engage Ishim or Karron in small talk, more and more as the days went by. They said idle things mostly. When they spoke to each other, they used Esper instead of Covenant. Their accents in that tongue put them from the south, maybe from as far as Nawlins. She and Ishim never sailed too far south. Too many sharks and crocodiles, too much heat, unstable weather, and biting insects. Too many Covenant Peace Keepers. The north was safer.
Nolan had insulted Karron and Ishim the second day in Esper, calling Ishim a night pig and Karron his little white slut. Ishim didn’t speak Esper and Karron had decided not to respond, curious as to why the man went off on them with such a pleasant tone and a smile on his face. She’d figured he was trying to see if she spoke the language. Her training was still there, lurking beneath her skin like the nanotech. So she said nothing, just shook her head as though she had no idea what he was saying.
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