by Greg Dragon
“Would you rather be?” she retorted. “I gave you the Plague to save your life. You’re a Sicko now. An Eden. We’re the same, you and me. I am…I was a Marine. You’re a combat veteran; I can tell. Do you like what your country has become?”
“I’m not a traitor,” he ground out.
“Then shoot me. What’s stopping you? And then when your buddies return, they’ll lock you away, because they won’t see you anymore. All they’ll see is a Sicko. Just like every time this ever happens – Japs, Jews, blacks, Bosnians, ragheads – dehumanize the enemy, then round him up and murder him. Well I’m still human, and so are you.”
His mouth worked, then he turned the weapon away from her. “You got a point. So what now?”
“Right now you can let us go and take your chances, or you can come with us.”
“Jill!” Sarah said from behind her, where she and the rest of the McConleys had been watching the tableau. “We can’t trust him. And he killed my boy.” She burst into tears, falling to her knees with her pillowcase sack.
“Miss Jill is right,” Big Jim said to her as he squatted down. “Everyone with the Plague is now on our side. We’re all runaways together. We lost Jimmy. Maybe this man can help fill his shoes.” The older man stood up and stepped forward, dropping his sack and shifting his shotgun to his left hand. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Clayton, sir. John Clayton.” He rolled painfully to his feet, supporting himself on the tree he had been resting against, and stuck out his hand. “And I’m powerful sorry for my part in this. I know it’s no excuse, but…well, when the shooting starts, you shoot back at the guy shooting at you.”
Big Jim wiped his hand on his trousers for a moment, then set his jaw. “I understand, John. I forgive you.” He glanced at Sarah. “Jimmy’s mother’s gonna have a mite harder time, though.”
“I want him with us. Someone go get him,” Sarah wailed.
“We’ll do what we can,” Jill broke in. “We really have to go. Clayton, can you walk?”
“Not very well yet.” Clayton looked around. “Are there any more of us alive and infected?”
“Yes, back by the truck there are two or three.”
“I have to help them.”
“Dammit, we don’t have time,” Jill said.
“Just tell me where to go. We’ll follow after you.”
Jill cursed again, but fully understood the man’s loyalty to his brothers in arms. Turning to Big Jim, she said, “Go ahead. Jimmy showed me the cave. I’ll stay here with these men and lead them in. And we’ll take care of Jimmy.”
Big Jim nodded to her. “Give me that sack. You gather all the guns and ammo you can and bring everything with you, hear?”
“Got it, boss.” Jill agreed, grimly satisfied now that everyone’s goals aligned. She watched for a moment as the McConleys started the hike up to the caves, then turned to Clayton. “Come on, John. You got any rations in that truck? You’re gonna get damn hungry soon.”
She helped him limp back toward the mess in the center of the farm, leaving him to talk to his men when she realized the one Jane had clobbered hadn’t been dosed with the Plague. Fortunately he was still out, so a quick cut and a few drops of blood solved that problem. She dragged him back over to dump him with the rest.
Five SS troopers had survived to become Edens, including Clayton. One she recognized as the man who had shot Klutz. “You,” she said, pointing with her assault rifle. “You see this dog you killed?”
“Yeah,” he replied, clutching his healing stomach. “Sorry.”
“You want to stay to be interned, or you want to come with us?”
His mouth worked, and finally he said, “I’ll come with you.”
“Then here’s your penance. You’re gonna pick up that dead dog and carry it all the way up to our hideout, and when we get there, you’re gonna bury him in a nice grave so that a twelve-year-old boy can grieve properly. You got me, soldier?” At that moment Jill felt as close to troop abuse as she’d ever gotten, and he must have seen it in her eyes, for he lowered his own and nodded, clearly ashamed. He got up and began wrestling the ninety-pound corpse up onto his shoulders.
“All right, men,” Clayton spoke up. “Like the lady said, you can stay and get locked up, or you can come with us, because I’m going with her.”
The other three looked around at each other, then as one stood up from their resting positions. “We’ll go,” one said. The others nodded.
“Good. Then grab all the weapons and ammo you can carry and bring them to the barn. There’s one more thing I have to do.” Jill left them to their salvaging, walking resolutely over to the barn.
Inside lay two dead cows, and the barn cats were already sniffing around at the smell of fresh meat. Jill opened the henhouse and let out all the chickens, then did the same with the rabbit hutches, taking no more than a minute. Then she began breaking open hay bales and scattering the straw.
Next Jill steeled herself, and then climbed the ladder. She forced herself to look at him one more time, with the flies gathering already around the sticky, blood-soaked boards. Blinking back tears, she picked up his beloved Browning, and the shotgun he died clutching, and then backed down the ladder.
On the ground, she grabbed a fuel can and opened it, waiting for her little squad. Once they arrived laden with weapons and ammo, she upended the gasoline onto the straw, tossing it into the pile, then took another and began to lay a line of flammable liquid out the back of the barn. “Get on ahead of me,” she instructed, and when they were all a hundred feet away, she asked for a lighter.
A moment later, fire streaked toward the barn, sending the barn cats running. A muffled whump and a puff of smoke signaled the structure’s ignition. “Viking funeral,” she whispered. “Best I could do. Goodbye, Jimmy. Hope you find that Heaven your ma talked about.”
Less than a minute later, flames had engulfed the old wooden structure. “Come on, men. Even discounting your former buddies, the smoke will draw people from miles around.” Jill turned toward the hills. “Follow me,” she said.
Chapter Six
Four weeks later
Jill hugged Owen first, looking into his bright inquisitive eyes. “Be good, little brother,” she said.
“You too, Miss Jill,” he responded shyly. “Thanks again for letting me out.” She knew what he meant; out of the prison of his body, and his brain’s broken biology.
Jill said her goodbyes to each in turn: dour Sarah, smiling more now as the age lines fled from her face; gentle giant Big Jim, looking more like his dead son Jimmy every day; Jane, seemingly the least affected by the Plague, though at seventeen she had little to rejuvenate.
“Clayton.” Jill shook hands with the man who, with four of his fellows, formed the nucleus of a resistance cell in this area. They struck from the high hills and hidden valleys, stealing supplies, damaging military equipment, and infecting everyone they could.
“Reaper.” He smiled, his eyes less haunted now that he had come to terms with what he’d done, and Sarah had explicitly forgiven him. In fact, he seemed to be doing his best to be the son she had lost. “We’re going to miss you.”
“Me too, but I can’t stay. I know it makes no sense up here,” she tapped her head, “but it makes sense in here.” She patted her heart. “I have to find out what happened to my family.”
“I know.” He squeezed her hand one final time and let it drop. “Good luck, and good hunting.”
“Not me,” she replied grimly. “I’ve killed enough for one lifetime. Anyway, I’m a cop at heart. I’m not cut out to be an insurgent. All I want to do is go back to being a cop, in an America that isn’t murdering its own people.”
“Too late, I think. We’ll have to fight the Unionists to bring the real USA back. When you’ve found out what you need to know…remember us, all right?”
“Yeah,” Jill replied. “I’ll do what I can, from wherever I’m at. And remember to get in touch with the contact I gave you. The pe
rson on the other end of that email is completely trustworthy. Helped me escape. Just remember what I said about avoiding keywords that the NSA might pick up on. They can’t read everyone’s email, so the trick is never to get flagged.”
Clayton nodded. “I got it. We got it. Now you have to get going, before these folks start bawling.” He looked a little teary himself.
Jill smiled one last time, hoisted her rucksack, and walked out of the cave into the Tennessee Appalachians. She consciously resisted the urge to look back, but sensed their loving eyes upon her until she was down the trail and out of sight.
Night fell as she walked, the sun lingering below the mountainous horizon, shedding a long twilight. After dark, the moon allowed her to see well enough, perfected Eden eyes picking out every root and rock. Eden ears heard every night cry, the hoot of owls, the piping of bats that normally only children could. Fully fuelled, her body felt like a smooth-running machine.
The trail she had planned took her through a series of lightly populated areas, many of them state parks – Cove Lake, Frozen Head, Obed, Cumberland Mountain – eventually debouching near Huntsville, Alabama, nearly two hundred miles on foot. As long as she had food, though, she should be able to make twenty to forty miles a day, assuming she didn’t run into any trouble.
A stolen GPS would keep her on track, and a faked Security Service ID card should get her through anything but a high-level database check. She had food, fluids, and camping gear, and the burner phone she had bought so long ago.
The one thing she didn’t have was a gun. With her cover as an SS trooper on vacation, she might have been able to get away with it, but she had decided it was more risk than it was worth. Her combat knife would have to do.
She’d learned one lesson at least during the long swim from the cruise ship. Now her ruck and her pockets were packed with high-nutrition items – protein powders, nutrient bars, MRE packets, home-jerked deer meat, smoked fish and duck. She sincerely hoped that she would never feel that gut-ripping hunger ever again.
As she hiked, Jill wondered about the rest of the world. Apparently whole nations had embraced the Eden Plague, or at least, didn’t have the security apparatus to keep it under control. The poorer they were, the more likely that it spread like wildfire, becoming accomplished fact. Now formerly corrupt and terrifying places like the Congo and Zimbabwe, Sudan and Colombia and Rwanda, nearly overnight had become functioning nations. Without the load of medical costs, and with the Eden Plague’s virtue effect dramatically reducing corruption and crime, the only problem many countries now faced was food supply.
However, the world had always produced enough food. In most cases it was transportation, distribution and economics that caused shortages, and those issues remained. The world was still a long way from perfect, but it seemed like it was getting better, despite the tremendous disruptions, and resistance from the fearful elites.
They’re afraid of change, Jill realized. Afraid that disruptions in the markets and healthy, long-lived populations would erode their traditional power bases. Like the Unionists, reactionaries throughout the world are exploiting fear to maintain power.
She camped that day in an out-of-the-way nook in the mountains, with no fire and no tent, just some brush to hide her. Insects seldom bothered her, and she wondered if that was a Plague effect as well. Even if she did get bitten, the bites healed so fast they were no trouble.
Traveling by night and sleeping by day gave her a lot of time for similar thoughts. An earbud and a radio no bigger than her thumb let her pick up a lot of information, though most of it was obviously censored. Even so, some things leaked through.
The USA, even under the Unionists, still claimed to be a republic. The Constitution might be getting trampled, but it was not yet completely gone. Courageous judges, statesmen, clergy and legal organizations fought rearguard actions, trying to limit the tide of lies and fear sweeping aside citizens’ rights.
They seemed to be losing.
In the past months, tensions with the Chinese had run high, and the paranoid North Koreans launched a missile at Japan. Though shot down by interceptor missiles, Tokyo immediately revealed that it was even now assembling one hundred atomic warheads from secretly prepared components, and would defend itself with nuclear weapons if necessary.
Shortly after, seven more nuclear detonations occurred on American soil. Though blamed on terrorists, speculation ran rampant that some enemy state had supplied the bombs – China, Russia, or North Korea being the usual suspects.
The Unionists pushed for more Federal police powers, and the rump Democratic-Republican coalition, now joined out of sheer political necessity, was happy to oblige. More surveillance, more arrests without charges, more curtailment of rights naturally followed.
By the time Jill got to Huntsville, the USA had become a police state. Less than one year from Infection Day, the world had convulsed and remade itself, and most Americans didn’t care. They were too busy trying to keep food on the table, money in the bank and themselves above suspicion to be courageous.
Most people were sheep.
Jill remembered a resistance training exercise she had participated in. She and the rest of her MP platoon had been run through a prisoner-of-war scenario for three days.
Despite briefings, despite education, and despite knowing full well it was only a training exercise, many if not most of the troops had found themselves complying with their “captors” instructions in all things, with little question or resistance. Videos shown afterward had been eye-opening and embarrassing, as Marines seemed to make statements denigrating the United States, their officers, and everything they had sworn to uphold, with just a bit of trickery, persuasion, and selective video editing.
Why? Afterward, she had deduced the answer, the same answer: most people followed authority figures, especially if backed up by force and even the veneer of legitimacy. Add fear and misplaced patriotism and the recipe was complete, and no one was more susceptible to this seductive stew than young military troops, trained to follow orders.
In fact, in the exercise, she’d seen junior personnel ignore the lawful orders of their own officers and NCOs in favor of the “captors’” instructions, completely ignoring the Code of Conduct that they should have internalized. How much more likely was it they would follow despicable orders that proceeded from those same officers, whose careers, whose lives, or even whose families were threatened?
Jill understood. If the Corps was your family, what do you do when your family betrays the very things it is supposed to uphold and defend? Without another family, some kind of support system, what could one poor Marine, or soldier or sailor or airman, do?
Now she realized that, although she loved the Corps, the Corps did not love her. God might love her, if He existed the way Chaplain Forman believed. Her family might love her, and her new family, the McConleys, certainly did. Beyond that…she just didn’t know.
She made it two hundred miles in five days without trouble, traveling from sundown to sunup and a bit more. Park rangers generally did not walk trails at night. At most they might drive around and check campgrounds and scare the bears away. They were easy to avoid.
But near Huntsville, her luck ran out.
Jill had planned to make her way west by hitchhiking, by bus, or even perhaps by “borrowing” a government vehicle if she thought she could get away with it. The corridor between I-20 and I-40 seemed ideal; smaller state highways that would be watched less, perhaps, but still with a heavy presence of truckers.
This time she resolved not to let anyone get the drop on her. This time she was ready.
As so often happens, it was just bad luck that tripped Jill up. She’d made it to Monte Sano State Park overlooking the Rocket City of Huntsville – home of both the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army’s Redstone Arsenal. As the sun came up over the Von Braun Astronomical Society’s observatory, a pickup truck with Alabama State markings came into view on the forested road.
/> Perhaps if she hadn’t been tired, been more alert, or if the park ranger had had her lights on, Jill would have had time to dash into the woods and hide, as she usually did. Then again, what was one more hiker in a state park?
Jill kept cool, nodding as the truck passed her going the other way. Her heart dropped and her adrenaline surged as it swung around to pull up next to her.
“Mornin’, ma’am,” called the middle-aged female ranger out her passenger window. “Can I ask what you’re doin’ here?”
Jill put on her best clueless smile. “Hiking?”
“The park is closed right now, ma’am. Been closed to the public for almost a month.” The woman stared at Jill with a strange mixture of suspicion and concern.
“All right. I’ll go back.” Jill made as if to turn around.
“Wait a minute, please,” the ranger called with a hint of authority in her voice. “Can I see some ID?”
“Sure,” Jill said with false cheerfulness, and dug out her fake SS card, handing it in the window across the passenger seat.
The park ranger looked it over front and back. Her face twisted sourly. “Would have thought you’d have heard the advisories, Ms. Clayton. Or did you think just because you people control the processing center, you have the run of the park? Closed means closed.”
Jill hid her confusion. Obviously something was going on of which she was unaware, and she found herself in the middle of it. In any case it appeared the woman did not like the SS, which was a plus in Jill’s book.
“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” Jill replied. “I promise I’ll head right back out the way I came in.” She held out her hand for the ID.
“And what way was that?” The ranger’s face sharpened suspiciously, holding onto the card.
Jill realized she’d made an error, and tried to cover it with as much truth as possible, which she knew was always the best way to lie. “I’ve been hiking and traveling on leave, and my GPS led me to your lovely park. I’m sorry I intruded.” She changed her tone from apologetic to matter-of-fact. “Now I’m going to go. I don’t like to throw my weight around, but I am a federal agent and I don’t have to put up with harassment from fellow officers. Feel free to file a report. Now please return my ID card.” She gave the ranger her best no-nonsense stare, the one she reserved for stupid suspects who couldn’t follow simple instructions, holding out her hand insistently.
