by Joe McKinney
It bounced off the guard’s forearm and clanged against the wall near the door.
Nate backed up farther, looking around for something to fight with.
The guards advanced on him again.
“Enough!”
The two guards stopped. Nate stopped. Behind them, a man was walking into the room. He didn’t wear a spacesuit. He was dressed in green hospital scrubs.
He said, “Enough. You guys wait for me outside.”
The guards hesitated.
“It’s okay,” the man said. He stepped aside and let the guards walk out the door. When they were gone, he pushed the door closed but not all the way. There was no handle, and Nate figured the guy didn’t want to be stuck without a way out if he needed one.
“Nate Royal?” the man said.
Nate stiffened, but didn’t answer.
“I’m Dr. Mark Kellogg. I’m in charge of things around here.”
“Uh-huh.”
Nate thought the guy looked a little young to be in charge of things around here. He had a military haircut, military face, all sharp angles and a jaw that looked like somebody had cut it out of rock. But his eyes were kind, and that put Nate off his guard. There was a look there that was definitely not military, and Nate decided that the man probably wasn’t a soldier. Or if he was, he wasn’t all that serious about being one.
The man was still looking at him, smiling now, just waiting for him to come around.
“So what is this place?” Nate asked.
“You’re at Minot Air Force Base. That’s in North Dakota.”
“North…what about my dad? Where is he?”
“I’m sorry, Nate. Your dad and his girlfriend, Mindy Carlson, are not here. We tried to find them right after we learned about you but we haven’t been able to locate them. It’s been rather confusing in that part of the country, as you can probably imagine. There are a lot of people still wandering around looking for help. A lot of people we still haven’t talked to yet.”
Nate nodded. Then he frowned. “Why am I here?” he said.
“You mean you don’t know?”
“How could I know that? You people won’t tell me shit. Every time I ask something, you people stick me with a needle.”
“Yeah. Nate, do you want to sit down so we can talk?”
“No, I don’t want to sit. I want to stand. I want to go outside.”
“I’m sorry,” Kellogg said.
“I can’t go outside?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“That door’s open. How about I make a run for it, see how far I get?”
Kellogg shrugged. “You wouldn’t get far. Even if you got past the guards—which isn’t going to happen, believe me—that knee of yours is going to keep you from running more than twenty or thirty yards.”
“How do you know about my knee?”
“Nate,” Kellogg said. He sounded tired. His shoulders sagged beneath his scrubs. “I have been over every aspect of your medical record. I have been over every record on you we can find. You used to be a runner. Cross-country, right?”
“That’s right.”
“A good one, too. At least from what I can tell.”
“I was okay. I stopped my junior year.”
“Ah,” Kellogg said. He stepped around the bed and sat at the foot of it. “Nate, the reason why you’re here is because you got bit by a zombie.”
“So did lots of other people.”
“Yes, and they all became zombies. You didn’t. That’s why you’re here.”
“So you can figure out why I didn’t change into one of those things?”
Kellogg touched a finger to his nose.
“And what happens when you find that out?”
“Well, hopefully, once I know why you’re so special, I’ll be able to come up with a cure. That’s what this is all about, Nate. A cure. We find that, we could end a world’s worth of suffering.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s possible,” Kellogg said. “Right now, I’m banking on it, in fact. It’s about the only hope we have left.” He said, “Nate, things are bad out there. You have no idea. There isn’t a major population center in this country left untouched by this outbreak. There are millions of the infected now. Millions more are dead. Latin America, South America, all infected. Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, all those regions are reporting massive outbreaks. Nate, this thing is global. But with your help, maybe we can stop it.”
Nate felt sick to his stomach. Kellogg’s words were just a muddle. Jesus, the way some people talk. But he pulled enough sense out of it to know that Kellogg considered him some kind of medical miracle.
“With my help, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me, doc, how long have I been here?”
“We flew you out of Martindale on the ninth of July. Today is the twenty-ninth.”
Nate tried to do the math in his head and couldn’t. He started to count off the days, but Kellogg interrupted him. “About three weeks,” he said.
“And you say a lot’s happened?”
“A lot of bad stuff, yeah.”
“Can I get a TV in here?”
“There isn’t a lot on TV these days, Nate. I can get you a TV, though. The base has a movie library. Maybe you can at least get some movies to watch.”
“Okay,” Nate said, nodding. “That’d be cool.”
“We don’t have much in the way of reading material. Some paperbacks. I think we’ve got some old copies of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—if you’re interested?”
“Doc, I…I don’t read so good.”
“Ah.”
Nate looked toward the door. Earlier, he had seen some figures walking by, but there didn’t seem to be anybody there now.
He leaned forward and whispered, “Doc, you know, I ain’t really seen any women in a while. You think maybe the base here has got some pornos in that library of theirs?”
Kellogg smiled, even managed a little laugh. “Nate,” he said. “They got cameras built into the walls around here. You probably should, you know, put the brakes on enjoying yourself for a while.”
Nate stiffened again. He looked around, studying the walls, wondering how many times they’d watched him in here, jacking off in the dark.
His sense of violation returned, and with it, his anger.
“Nate, you all right?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Is there anything you’d like? Different food, maybe?”
“Can you tell me one thing?”
“Sure.”
“I’m never gonna leave this place, am I?”
“Nate—”
“Tell me the truth, doc. I’m stuck here, right? It doesn’t matter that I’m immune to this zombie virus. It’s like I got it just the same, right? I may not be one of those things, but I’m sure as hell not gonna be me again either.”
“Nate, this may be hard for you to believe, but you’re not the only one who’s a prisoner here. This outbreak has bound each of us to this place in a very real way. You’ve got your reasons why you can’t leave, and me, well, I’ve got mine. We’re both stuck here, Nate.”
Kellogg rose from the bed and chaffed his palms against the thighs of his scrubs.
He laughed. “I’m sweating,” he said. “Stress, I guess. I don’t get to sleep much these days. Nate, I’m going to send in the nurse again. Are you going to let him take your blood?”
“Why do you want it?”
“Would that help, knowing what we’re doing? Would you like us to tell you what it is we’re doing before we do it?”
“What good would that do?”
“Well, it wouldn’t change our tests any. We’ve still got to do them. But it would be more than you’ve got right now. It’d give you some measure of dignity back.”
“Dignity? You’re kidding.”
“It’s a start, Nate.”
Nate nodded. That was true, it was a start.
“All right, Nate. I’ll talk to you soon.”
And with that he was gone, and Nate was left staring at the cell.
CHAPTER 34
From the notebooks of Ben Richardson
Pine Prairie, Texas: July 16th, 1:40 A.M.
We got hit hard today. Four dead. Lost both buses. Now we’ve only got three trucks and a minivan left.
It happened as we were leaving Huntsville earlier this morning, around 8 o’clock. Jammed-up traffic on I-45 forced us off the freeway and we had to drive through town—something Barnes didn’t want to do because Huntsville is home to eight different state prisons, and, as he put it, all them prisoners had to go somewhere when the shit hit the fan. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.
What we saw as we entered town from the south was a mess of traffic on the freeway. A lot of the surface streets were even worse. All except Avenue Q. That was clear, and on the map it connected us back to I-45 north of town, so we took it. We made it past the Huntsville Municipal Airport, swung north again, and got on the connector ramp to I-45.
That’s where the trap was.
Barnes and I were in a pickup truck, leading the caravan, as we had done since leaving Houston. He stopped the truck at the base of the connector ramp and just sat there, rubbing the stubble on his chin as he watched the road up ahead.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
I tried to see what he saw. There were bodies lining the road, but they were obviously dead. You could see it from a hundred and fifty feet away. They were all shot up. On the right shoulder, the back left tire just barely over the lane line, was a broken-down van. Beyond that was a barren stretch of highway.
I didn’t see what the problem was.
“Look at the fat white guy on his back up there on the left.”
I did. I didn’t see anything wrong.
“What is that beneath him?” Barnes said. “See it? Right there under his back? Looks like a paint can.”
Somebody behind us honked.
Barnes ignored them. He had been watching the dead guy lying on top of the paint can, but now he was scanning the surrounding countryside. It was flat, green, uninteresting. Nothing moved.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
He got out, talked to some of the drivers behind us, then climbed back into the truck.
“We’re gonna drive through first. If everything’s cool, we wave the others through.”
I didn’t ask what the trouble was. Barnes scares the crap out of me. I think he’s a fucking lunatic. But I also think he’s a genius when it comes to surviving.
We drove up the ramp without incident. We stopped right where the ramp joins the highway and we got out. I looked back at our caravan. There were a lot of people standing next to their vehicles, watching us, a lot of them with what-the-fuck-is-going-on looks on their faces.
Barnes gave them the okay sign.
The buses started up the ramp. The lead bus got as far as the fat white guy on top of the paint can when the explosion happened. It was the paint can, an IED. The blast was tremendous. Must have been a shaped charge. The road, pavement and all, swelled up in an enormous ball, like a giant was below it blowing up a balloon. I saw it all in the slow-motion sensation that comes with shock and disbelief. The ground exploded upward. The front of the bus dropped down into the hole the charge had just made. People fell forward and I heard screaming.
Then the screams were drowned out by a second explosion. Our other bus had stopped right behind the first bus, right next to the minivan broken down on the right shoulder. Barnes was next to me, yelling, “No, get back. Get that bus out of there.” Something inside the van exploded. Our second bus was lost in a gray cloud of pulverized asphalt and car parts. It rocked over onto two wheels, hovered there for a long moment, then fell the rest of the way onto its side. Barnes was still yelling for people to back away, clear out of there, but nobody listened. They got out of their trucks and cars and raced forward to help the injured. They were standing there, confused, scared, unorganized, when our attackers popped up from their hiding holes in the ditches along the road and started firing into the crowd.
Through the clouds of smoke and dust, I saw three men with rifles charging out of the ditch. They were using the gutted and burned skeleton of the minivan for cover. One of the front tires was still burning, sending off a thick black smoke that hid our people from view. I looked for Barnes, intending to follow his lead, but he was already in our pickup, throwing it into reverse.
“What the…” I said, watching as Barnes raced toward the men. Two of them never saw it coming. They stood there, firing from the hip at anyone they could see, right up to the moment that Barnes ran them over.
The third man tried to fire at the truck as it slipped into the smoke, but he lost it.
I watched him turning around, trying to track the noise of the pickup’s engine in the smoke and dust around him, but he couldn’t get a fix on it. He was looking in a completely different direction when Barnes erupted out of the cloud and sandwiched him between the back end of the pickup and the wrecked bus.
Two other men had come out of the opposite ditch. They ran straight at Barnes, one armed with a shotgun, the other with a pistol. Barnes stepped out of the truck with his AR-15 and lit up the man with the pistol, dropping him at the edge of the pavement. The other man fired once, then, realizing he was outnumbered and outgunned, turned and ran as fast as he could back across the empty field between us and the airport.
Barnes motioned for me to help the others, then chased after the man on foot.
I didn’t bother to watch. I knew Barnes could take care of himself. I started helping the injured. A few minutes later, I’m not sure exactly how much later, I heard a single shot.
Barnes showed up a few minutes after that. He studied the scene and gave a disgusted snort at the four dead members of our group we’d laid out on the roadway.
“Anyone else dead?” he asked me.
“None of our people,” I said. “We got a bunch of injuries, though. Who the hell were those guys?”
“Prisoners out of the McConnell Unit. They were looking for food.”
“Are there more of them around here?”
“Apparently not,” Barnes said.
“That one you chased, he told you that?”
Barnes nodded.
“I thought I heard a shot,” I said.
“You probably did.”
“You executed him,” I said.
“Best thing that ever happened to him, trust me.” He surveyed the damage once more, our two damaged buses, our people soot-stained and hollow-eyed, some of them crying. “What do we have left, three trucks?”
“And a minivan.”
“Let’s pack whatever supplies we can salvage. We need to move out of here.”
“But these people aren’t going to all fit in the vehicles we’ve got,” I said.
“Anybody who doesn’t fit walks.”
And so, two hours later, our limping, crestfallen caravan made its way out of Huntsville.
Most of us on foot.
Latexo, Texas: July 29th, 11:40 P.M.
Tired. Jesus, I think the soles of my sneakers have melted.
We’ve followed a crazy path the last two weeks, zigzagging all over the map like Cabeza de Vaca on acid. Supplies have been hard to come by, and there aren’t many places to scavenge for more. Most of these places have been cleaned out already. So we’ve been going from one little Texas town to the next, taking whatever we can find. We passed through Staley, Sebastopol, Chita, Pogoda, Cut, and now we’re stuck here in Latexo. They all look the same, run-down, a lean-to look about them, like the wind just sort of blew a bunch of lumber into piles and they called them towns. I grew up in a tiny little Texas town, so I understand, up to a point. Sometimes, there’s not a lot you can do with the cards you’ve been dealt. But Christ, who comes up with all these crazy names? Sebastopol, Cut, Latexo? Seriously?
Alto, Texas: August
1st. 2:40 P.M.
Stopped for lunch. I’m eating a Snickers bar, a couple pieces of bread, some beef jerky. Washing it down with a warm can of Coke.
I want to talk about something that happened here in Alto yesterday. A lot of people, Sandra Tellez especially, have been complaining to Barnes about the pace he’s keeping us on. We made it into Alto yesterday about 10 o’clock in the morning. The heat was just starting to make the walking unbearable, and most of us were ready to stop, find some place to hole up, and take it easy for a few days. Barnes refused. He wanted to push on. He always wants to push on.
Sandra told him they had a few elderly folks and children. Even a few of the young people in their twenties were getting sick. She demanded they stay in the area for as long as they could, until they could get healthy.
Barnes said, “Sure. Okay. How about food?”
“We have a few trucks. You can take a few men out to gather what you can from the surrounding towns.”
“And the zombies? What about them?”
“What zombies?”
He pointed behind her.
I was standing next to Sandra. I looked where he pointed and didn’t see anything but a large, grassy field. Here and there, I saw a few dead bodies. At least I thought they were dead.
“They’re not dead,” he said. “They’re sleeping.”
I looked again, and sure enough, you could see a few moving here and there. One of them rolled over.
I was shocked.
“Why?” he asked me. “I thought you made a reputation for yourself studying these things. Isn’t that what you made that field trip to San Antonio to do? Isn’t that what you set out to write your great zombie book about?”
I was too stunned by the field of sleeping zombies to answer.
He said, “You’re the one who’s been telling me that they’re just living people with a disease, like leprosy or something. Well, living people have to eat. They have to shit. And they’ve got to sleep.” He turned to Sandra. “Well, if you want to stay here, what do you want to do about them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then, more quietly, “But these people don’t have anything left, Mr. Barnes. They need to rest.”
