Judging by what I’ve seen so far, the medical care Steve’s received is probably far better than anything we could offer him at the commune, but still I’m not impressed. These guys weren’t forthcoming in providing that. They left him on that stage for a couple of days.
Again, I don’t respond, trying to appear detached, as though it’s no big deal. It’s a big deal, but I’m not going to let her know that.
I may not be swinging a baseball bat or packing a Glock, but I’m determined to be just as ruthless as I am with Zee. As I haven’t responded, the woman turns to make eye contact again. I guess she wants to make sure I heard her correctly. Outwardly, I smile, but inwardly, I’m as cold as ice. Marge taught me that.
I touch at my ear, which is weeping blood onto my surgical smock.
“We’ll get that looked at,” she says.
“Thanks,” I reply, appearing to concede some ground but, hey, my ear would be fine if someone hadn’t struck me with a rifle butt!
Astronauts, soldiers in biowarfare suits and fire-fighting equipment—I think I have these guys figured out. I don’t think there’s a real soldier among them. I think it’s all a show. At least, that’s my working theory. It’s an interesting idea, and one I want to test.
The woman in uniform opens a metal fire door and we step from one building into another. I think we’re in some kind of basement tunnel as none of the rooms have any natural light, and there’s a drainage ditch running beneath the floor. Water trickles past beneath my feet.
This new building looks as though it was built at an entirely different time. The corridor is wider and lined with linoleum instead of concrete, while the roof is higher. Also, the last corridor had a false ceiling, while this corridor has fire sprinklers set every ten feet, hanging from the unfinished concrete ceiling. A sheet metal ventilation duct runs above the walkway.
I’m learning far more about my captors than they are about me. There’s not that many of them. They’re too spread out. They either don’t or won’t expose themselves to the outside world. Like rats in a sewer, they hide from the sunlight.
The boots behind me echo down the lifeless, empty corridor as we walk on.
“And we’re still in the Marshall Space Flight Center?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“That’s a long way from the mall.”
“Yes, it is.”
She’s evasive, careful with her information. I believe her about being in the Marshall Space Flight Center, as I can’t think of what she’d stand to gain by lying. Maybe these are maintenance tunnels running between the main buildings or something.
We walk up a flight of stairs, through another steel fire door, and down another corridor. All this time, there hasn’t been a single other person in either the hallway or any of the adjacent rooms. Each detail is painting a picture for me of what I’m actually dealing with, and it’s not what I’m being sold.
As my captor goes to open a door leading into a side room, I catch the name on her uniform: Bennet. She has the sleeves of her baggy army fatigues rolled up, but not to the middle of her forearm or up to her elbow, just over her wrists. This isn’t her uniform.
“Elizabeth, is it?” I ask, pointing at her name tag.
“What? No.” she replies somewhat nervously. She works with a key in the lock, trying to open the door. It’s the wrong key, and she tries several more keys as she replies, asking, “Why did you call me Elizabeth?”
Wrong key. Awkward soldier act. This isn’t the norm for her. And she’s rattled by me calling her Elizabeth. It’s as though I said something I ought not to know. Interesting.
“It’s a joke,” I say, trying to appear lighthearted and nonchalant. “You know, Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice? You must get that all the time.”
“Oh, yeah,” she replies, finally getting the door unlocked. Her eyes drop away from mine. She’s lying. Looking at her, she must be in her mid thirties, which would put her in her twenties when the apocalypse struck. If she was in the commune, she’d have kids by now.
Kids are the antithesis of zombies. They’re the only means we have of increasing our ranks. Zee cheats. Zee steals. Even though children consume time and food, they repudiate the apocalypse. Kids remind us there’s always a tomorrow. I can’t be sure, of course, but I don’t think she’s had any kids. Giving birth changes a woman’s body. Elizabeth doesn’t strike me as someone that’s nurtured a child.
The door opens out into a cafeteria. I’m expecting to see soldiers, but the people inside the cafeteria are wearing jeans and t-shirts along with the occasional lab coat. They look relaxed. A couple of them are sitting on the tables with their feet on the benches, chatting with each other.
Steve is seated at one of the tables facing the door. He sees me and his face lights up.
“Haze!”
That sudden smile melts my heart.
“Steve!” I cry, rushing over to him and hugging him tight. Like me, he’s dressed in a surgical gown. We embrace. I never want to let him go.
As he holds me close, he whispers softly in my ear, saying, “Be ready to grab a gun.”
I love Steve. Those weren’t quite the romantic, tender words I was expecting, but I was about to say the same thing. I give him another squeeze, wanting to assure myself he’s real.
Reluctantly, I push back, taking a good look at him. He’s covered in bandages, including one around his chest just visible beneath his semi-transparent surgical gown, but they’re clean, fresh and new. Actual sterile bandages—I haven’t seen these for years!
“Oh, look at you,” he says, playing his part well. He leans back, still holding my arms just above the elbow. He glances at my gown and suddenly I’m acutely aware I’m not wearing anything beneath the flimsy cotton.
“God, it is good to see you,” he says, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek.
Cheek?
To hell with that!
I make sure he lands one on my lips!
Steve looks fresh and alert, too fresh and alert. He’s sore, I can tell that from how stiff he is when he moves, but when I last saw him, he was at death’s door. I’m left wondering how much time has elapsed between when I was knocked unconscious by the astronaut in the mall and waking in the chamber of illusions, for lack of a better term. PBS? Was that the acronym they used to describe it?
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Elizabeth Bennet says, leading me to the next table.
I’m still not ready to let my guard down, although I feel it dropping somewhat automatically after seeing Steve again. I have to remind myself, I was knocked out by these guys and dragged into that chamber. They then unleashed two zombies on me. Okay, only one of them actually attacked me, but it was hardly a warm, friendly welcome. And the rifle butt to the head. Too heavy-handed. There has to be more to what’s going on here than anyone’s letting on. The veneer of civility has to be an illusion.
Bennet slips on a pair of surgical gloves, pulling them from a fancy first aid kit sitting on the table. There’s more medicine in that plastic carry case than I’ve ever seen in my life. Elizabeth Bennet, or whatever her name really is, daubs at my ear with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol. Yeah, that’s a sting I’d recognize anywhere. I grimace.
“Hold still,” she says, stitching up the cut.
She examines the old bite marks on my arm, looking carefully at the rough stitching I received back at the commune. Gently, she rubs some ointment onto the scab forming on my arm and applies a fresh bandage.
“Bitten by a zombie, all right. I’m going to have to run bloods to figure out why neither of them have turned.”
“Natural immunity?” one of the others asks.
“In both of them?” she replies. “What are the odds of that?”
Steve and I are silent. I catch his eyes darting to one of the distracted soldiers, looking intently at the firearm sitting holstered on the old man’s hip. The soldier with the rifle looks too relaxed, almost as if he can’t wait to put it down. This isn
’t the intense, proud look I’d get from a marauder, treating his rifle as more important than his life.
These guys are sloppy. They should have buttoned down their holsters. As it is, we’ll have to wait till they face away from us as holsters are designed for a quick release only in the direction your arm would naturally move. Ferguson taught us that back at the commune, telling us what to do if we were ever snatched by bandits. I remember him telling my class, “You’ll only get one shot at escape—make it count.” I intend to.
Bennet’s sidearm is within easy reach.
I wait for Steve to make his move.
Elizabeth says, “Well, she might not have turned, but she’s picked up a nasty bacterial infection.”
She tips a couple of tablets into her gloved hand and offers them to me along with a bottle of water.
“The pink tablet’s a painkiller. The two green ones are broad spectrum antibiotics.”
I swallow the tablets, trusting they’ll help, and I start having second thoughts about reaching for her gun. Elizabeth is out of her depth. She’s clearly a doctor and far more comfortable treating someone’s wounds than roughing them up as a prisoner. I think she genuinely cares about us, which is confusing. I feel bad, but I know what needs to be done. Feeling bad hasn’t stopped me before.
“You’ve had it pretty rough out there,” she says.
“I’m alive,” I say in reply, trying to stay detached.
“I’d like to fire up the MRI and take some brain scans to look for lesions,” one of the other men says, and I’m pretty sure an MRI has nothing to do with the army. If I remember correctly, it’s a machine used in hospitals. Something like an X-ray.
“Delayed onset?” one of the others asks. “We saw this in the early days.”
“But not from bites,” Elizabeth says. “A bite overwhelms the immune system in hours. A day at most. No, these bite marks are several days old. Something else is going on at a cellular level.
“I want to see if either of them are carriers. Perhaps they’re infected but they’re asymptomatic, or maybe, just maybe, they really are immune.”
“Agreed,” one of the men says.
Elizabeth finishes applying a salve to the blisters on my hands and wraps a bandage around them. She’s careful not to restrict the movement of my fingers, which is quite considerate considering I’m about to grab her gun.
The door to the cafeteria swings open and an older man storms in. He’s military. Just a glimpse of his posture, his physique, and his facial expression tells me this guy would be a leader among the marauders.
“What the hell is going on?” he demands. “They’re supposed to be in restraints!”
All eyes turn to the real soldier, all eyes except ours. Steve and I both grab a sidearm. In a split second, I have the gun up against Elizabeth’s temple. I grab her, pulling her close and using her as a shield.
Steve holds his gun squarely in the middle of the forehead of one of the bewildered faux-soldiers and the poor man drops his rifle in panic.
“Put your guns down,” Steve yells, positioning himself so the fake soldier is between him and the real soldier standing in the doorway. “Now!”
The soldier in the doorway has a silver star next to his name: Doyle. There are silver stars on his shoulder boards. I’m not sure if that designates him as a captain, colonel or general, but he’s clearly in charge. He pulls his gun from his holster, and I push mine hard into Elizabeth’s head, saying, “Drop it, general.”
He hesitates.
“Don’t think I won’t do it,” I say, with a good grip around Elizabeth’s shoulder. My arm is across her chest, while the barrel of my gun pushes her head to one side. She’s shaking like a leaf. “I have no problem watching someone’s brains splatter across the floor. Done it plenty of times.”
The other fake soldier puts his rifle gently on the floor before standing up right with his arms raised in surrender.
Doyle edges back toward the door. He’s about to make a run for it.
“Don’t,” Steve says, clearly thinking the same thing. He has his gun pointed squarely at Doyle’s chest. “Drop the gun.”
Doyle drops his gun. I didn’t expect him to take Steve so literally. I thought he’d bend down and place it gently on the tiles like the others, but he lets his pistol clatter to the floor.
Steve limps forward, moving around behind Doyle and pushing him well into the room, away from the guns and rifles lying on the tiles.
“You will not make it out of here alive,” Doyle says as Steve locks the door.
“Neither will you,” I say coldly.
I take the gun from the other fake soldier. He has to be fake. He didn’t even think about drawing his gun.
Steve and I herd everyone around two tables at the back of the cafeteria near the kitchen. I’m not sure what Steve’s thinking, but I’m thinking that’s the only other way in here, so if anyone else was to sneak in, we’ll see them come through the rear swinging door.
I push Elizabeth over with the others. Having been shoved around, it feels good to be in control and yet I’m not vindictive. I can’t bring myself to shove Elizabeth or to strike her the way I was hit on the back of the head. My push is more of a nudge, directing her to join the others.
“I don’t know what you think you’ve accomplished,” Doyle says. “You won’t escape from here.”
His eyes turn to Elizabeth. He is pissed.
“I’m going to make this really simple,” I say. “No one needs to die. What needs to happen is this—you are going to give us some answers. Who the hell are you? How have you survived so long here in the heart of the city without anyone knowing?”
Steve keeps his gun trained on Doyle. He doesn’t seem too worried about the others. I swear, if Doyle blinks the wrong way, Steve will kill him.
Chapter 09: Lab Rats
“First of all,” I say, directing a question to Elizabeth Bennet. “What’s your real name?”
“Elizabeth O’Connor. You were right about the first name.” She touches at the name embroidered on a small patch on her army fatigues. “Bennet was one of the original team, but she died almost five years ago.”
“What is this place, Elizabeth?”
To my surprise, Elizabeth relaxes, leaning back on one of the tables. She looks more relieved than scared.
“It’s a research facility,” she says.
A man of Indian descent speaks from the back of the group. He looks and sounds like the counterpoint to Doyle. If I’m not mistaken, he’s their version of Marge. Even after all these years, his accent sounds as though he’s only just stepped off a plane from India.
“At the close of the war, when it became apparent we couldn’t win, the army took control of the research facilities in Huntsville, Birmingham, and Atlanta. Buildings that had been used for scientific research into zombies suddenly became command and control facilities, only there was so much chaos in those final days there was nothing left to control.”
He stops for a moment, and I can see his eyes gazing up at the ceiling as he picks between dozens of thoughts explaining what happened.
“We were trying to find a cure. We weren’t set up to care for survivors. We were quickly swamped, and like everywhere else, we were overrun.”
“And you are?” I ask.
“Ash Ajeet,” he says, with a regal accent. There’s pride in his voice, but not the bullish, pigheaded sense of privilege I’ve seen in others. Ajeet carries himself with an air of dignity and kindness. “Geneticist and chemist. Prior to the outbreak, I had twenty years in medical research at Johns Hopkins.”
“We’re scientists,” another man says, waving his hand and introducing himself. “David Jameson, anthropologist. I’ve been studying their behavior, finding parallels with prehistoric species extending back as far as Homo habilis.”
Doyle interrupts, barking at the others as he says, “You need to shut up. Don’t tell them anything.”
“How many?” I ask, knowing t
his is a direct challenge to Doyle’s authority over the group.
“Don’t—” Doyle says, but Elizabeth cuts him off.
“Seventeen.”
“And soldiers?” Steve asks, picking up on an important distinction in their group dynamic.
“Three,” Ajeet says
That’s good to know. It means there’s only two other people out there that could realistically take us on.
Doyle’s face is flushed with anger. Ajeet is no fool. He and Elizabeth seem to have a better read of the situation than Doyle, realizing we’re no real threat.
Ajeet says, “Doyle’s afraid we’ll lose our supplies. He thinks you’ll come in here and steal our stuff.”
It’s interesting to hear Ajeet volunteer this perspective. I get the feeling there’s some deep-seated resentment between him and Doyle. I cannot imagine how they’re going to function once we’re gone. Ajeet is burning bridges. There’s no going back to the status quo for him or Elizabeth after this. They’ve collaborated with the enemy, only we’re not the enemy. The only enemy is Zee. But they’ve betrayed Doyle, or at least that’s the way Doyle must see this. Ajeet must know. Somehow, he’s read the situation. He understands our motives and he’s banking on the decisions we’re about to make being the right ones. It’s a huge risk, and I can see that in his eyes, but he keeps his nerve.
“We don’t take from the living,” I say, and it’s true. And yet I understand Doyle’s concerns. There are plenty that would kill just for that first aid kit, but not Marge, not Ferguson. They play the long game, knowing rash choices have a way of backfiring in the apocalypse.
I miss Ferguson.
Now, there’s a thought I never considered possible. I wish he were here. Ferguson would know what we should do next. As for me, I’m tired of running. I’m tired of fighting. A glance at Steve suggests he’s not sure of the next step either. But as for me, I know what needs to be done.
I raise my gun so it points harmlessly at the ceiling and hit the magazine release on the side of the pistol. A black magazine pops out and drops into my hand.
All Our Tomorrows Page 13
