Nolan was brave, and Nolan was doing what he thought was right. No question. But he was a good servant. That’s what he was at the end of the day. A servant. And who did he serve? Governor Hank Burleson.
Nolan was like the clean-cut athletic boys who sat next to her in homeroom and dreamed of basketball scholarships and big futures and rising just as high as their parents had, or even higher. And no part of that ever involved questioning the coach about the play he had just called. To the contrary, such a thing would be a horrifying heresy to those boys.
Was Nolan looking for Madison because he had her best interests in mind? It was possible, sure. Anything was possible these days. The ravenous dead walking the countryside proved that. But it seemed infinitely more possible that Nolan was looking for Madison because her father had told him to. And that was that, was that, was that. He had thought about it no further.
Nolan was also a charmer. Kesha knew that once Madison looked up into his big, brown eyes, it would all be over. She would be seduced by his fame and his smile and his big safe shoulders, and he’d whisk her away to wherever the governor had told him to take her. But where was that? To a safe house up in Indy? Into some kind of rich-people perimeter surrounded by security guards with zombie-killing rocket launchers?
Sure, maybe.
But could it also be something darker?
Madison had said she knew secrets . . . secrets about what the governor was doing. Secrets that meant he had to be stopped.
And would they stop him? Could they?
With increasing alarm, Kesha realized that if Madison met James Nolan—here, now, like this—they would probably never know.
In a world of zombies and murder, it was not beyond conceiving that the governor might have anyone with purposes contrary to his own put out of the picture. Even his own daughter. Even permanently.
When the lights were out all across the state, and no one was looking, what would a man like that do?
Kesha put a finger to her lips and crept back down the hillside. The other teens huddled around, waiting for the verdict.
“Some hunters,” Kesha whispered. “They don’t look friendly. Lots of guns. I think we should go around.”
The group nodded seriously. Tara and Sara cast worried glances up to the top of the outcropping.
“We can backtrack through that thicket; connect with the creek somewhere further north,” Steven suggested.
“Yeah,” Kesha said. “That’s a good idea.”
As silently as he could, Steven took a knee and let Madison climb back on his shoulders. Then they set off into the woods. The sunlight twinkled through the trees, dappling their bodies as they moved.
Kesha looked back once and said a silent prayer for her father’s safety. Then she followed Steven and the others back into the underbrush.
19
A knock at the door roused Hank Burleson from his late afternoon slumber. He opened his eyes slowly. His mouth was dry. He could not remember being so tired.
He was lying on the couch in his office. He was on his back, looking up at the ceiling.
For a few sweet moments, he wondered if it had all been a dream. The zombies. The loss of power. The chaos in the streets. . . .
He stared up at the ceiling. His eyes lit on the smoke alarm. Hope! Its electronic light still blinked intermittently. Full of life. Full of power. Power that—the governor remembered an instant later—came from a nine-volt battery, and not from the grid.
With considerable effort, Burleson sat up and surveyed the rest of the room. His office was without power. Outside his window, an eerie dimness pervaded. The streets were empty, save for National Guard troops and police. Only the odd passing headlight brought illumination to the shadows cast by the capitol. Not a single electric light shone inside his office . . . save the tiny one, straight above, on the smoke alarm.
The knock came again.
“Yes, Huggins,” the governor called irritably.
It wasn’t Huggins. The door opened to reveal a scared-looking security guard who couldn’t have been more than twenty. The governor found it hard to believe a boy this fresh-faced was allowed to carry a gun. Yet there it was, in the holster at his side.
“Mister Huggins was called away,” the guard said sheepishly. “But he said I should tell you if anyone from Burundi Petroleum showed up.”
“BP!” the governor said brightly, jolting up from the couch as if the two letters had galvanized him. “Ah, yes, send him right in. Or her. Whoever it is.”
“Yessir,” said the guard, exiting directly.
The governor rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tucked his shirt back into his pants. Then he plopped down in the chair behind his desk and tried to look gubernatorial. Soon, he heard loud, confident footsteps coming down the hallway. Moments later, three tall men strode into his office. Two were BP private security, their body armor festooned with the garish yellow-green Burundi Petroleum logo. The other one looked entirely different, and it was clear that he was there to do the talking.
He was a towering man of indeterminate age (Burleson would have guessed forty-five, if pressed), wearing gigantic boots, mud-stained khakis, and a golf shirt with a tiny “BP” on the left breast. An Indiana Jones-style fedora sat atop his head, the brim pushed back. He had not one, but two scars—one on his left cheek, and one running down the center of his forehead.
Burleson understood right away that this was one of BP’s fixers. Oil companies did business in places all over the world. Some of them were nice, reasonable places that had things like democratic elections and fair trials. But others were . . . not. It was into this latter environment that BP sent men like this. (Burleson could picture him riding in the back of Jeeps down muddy roads, on his way to make deals for oil rights with warlords, pirates, or members of the armed opposition.)
“Mister Governor,” the man said in greeting. “I’m John Dawkins from BP. I’m here to talk about Eventuality Receivable Nineteen.”
He exuded a confidence that Burleson knew well—that of a man who understands his wishes are backed by unimaginably large sums of money.
“Shut the door,” Burleson said gruffly.
Nobody moved.
“Please?” the governor tried.
Still nothing. After a beat, Dawkins gave an almost imperceptible nod, at which point one of his guards pulled the enormous wooden door closed behind them.
Burleson was not an easily intimidated man, but at that moment—with these three large men from BP in front of his desk—he would have liked to have had his own fixer in the room. James Nolan was taller than all three of these jokers. Bigger, too. And probably faster with a gun.
“Mister Governor, as you must already know, events in the last twenty-four hours meet the qualification threshold for ER-19,” Dawkins said from beneath his scars and fedora.
Burleson nodded. He respected big companies for the way they pushed people around and made money hand over fist . . . but he could have done without the corporate doublespeak. (Who were they trying to impress with it, each other?)
“I’ll say they meet the goddamn qualifications,” Burleson said, hoping to make clear that he was a plain-spoken sort of man. “You know, when we had that briefing back in the day . . . eight years ago now . . . you all made it sound like—what did you call it?—‘reanimation of fast-twitch muscle in necrotic tissue’ was just one of a bunch of possible side effects. You sort of snuck it in there, didn’t you? It did this. It did that. Gee willikers, what didn’t it do? You probably thought I wouldn’t even notice—and if I noticed it, that I wouldn’t remember . . . but I did notice . . . and I sure as hell do remember.”
Dawkins smiled at Burleson by quickly lifting the corners of his mouth and lowering them again. It was intended to impart a shared understanding, but only for a moment—the equivalent of a wink, Burleson gathered, but with the plausible deniability of having technically been a smile. Burleson wondered: Upon how many banana republic dictators had he honed this e
xact expression?
“So you were telling the truth . . . in your way,” Burleson continued. “Hell, I’m not mad. I respect you for it! I just hope you were telling the truth about the rest of it. About the antidote and such . . .”
Dawkins flashed the mouth-corner smile once again.
“Well then,” Burleson said. “Just tell me what the fuck we do next.”
“I take it the federal government has not been involved?” Dawkins asked.
“You take it correctly,” Burleson returned. “I’ve disconnected the damn satellite phone. There’s no way they can be involved, that I know of. Unless you guys are in the mood for a road trip out to D.C.”
“I will trust that you are telling the truth,” Dawkins said. “You will recall that that qualification was necessary to comport with our resolution to move forward.”
“Yes, yes, fine,” Burleson said, waving his hand back and forth as though the corporate jargon were smoke he could disperse.
One of the private security handed Dawkins a heavy black briefcase. Dawkins set it on the governor’s desk—quite as if the desk were his own—and opened it.
“We are ready to begin the resolution phase of ER-19,” Dawkins said as he produced several manuscript-length documents from the briefcase. “Distribution of the phytochemicals. We simply need your signature on these documents in order to begin.”
Good Christ, Burleson thought. Even at a time like this, lawyers still ruled the world.
Dawkins flipped to the back of one of the manuscripts and pointed at a dotted line. Then he took the governor’s own pen from his chestnut and leather pen holder and offered it to him. The governor leaned in to take a closer look.
“Nobody said I needed to sign anything for this to happen,” Burleson said. “Should I go and fetch my attorney?”
In point of fact, Burleson was ready to sign anything put in front of him, with or without counsel. (He had no idea where his lawyer was, but sincerely hoped the man was dead.) However, Burleson knew the value of being difficult when dealing with an entity that wanted you to do something expeditiously.
“This simply says that you are authorizing us to release several thousand tons of phytochemicals into Indiana’s waterways, and into Lake Michigan. And that this authorization has nothing to do with the current . . . breach of ER-19 threshold.”
“Which of course it does,” Burleson said.
Dawkins flashed the little smile again.
The governor took the pen from Dawkins and intentionally doddered like a nonagenarian before the book-length document. With great dramatic skill, he moved his shaking pen down until it almost touched the page . . . then abruptly pulled it back.
Dawkins winced.
“How is your intelligence regarding the radius of the . . . breach of ER-19 such-and-such?” Burleson asked.
“The radius?” Dawkins asked.
“What I want to know is how widespread this is,” Burleson told him. “That’s what no one can tell me. Is it just my state? Just the Midwest? Or has the whole damn world gone sick with zombies? You’re about the wealthiest company on the planet. I imagine you have communications when the grid goes down. . . .”
Dawkins said nothing. Did nothing.
“Well?” asked the governor, drawing his pen even further back from the page.
Dawkins stared at him hard. Then looked around the room. Then at the door behind them. Then back at the governor.
Burleson realized that Dawkins was probably considering whether or not to kill him. It would not be difficult. Do it silently, and Dawkins and his two guards could be out of the capitol building before any of the exhausted, underpaid police and National Guard knew what was going on. (The governor’s signature could, of course, always be forged at a later date.)
“I mean, I’ll sign it, sure,” Burleson said, hurriedly returning the pen to the extremely long document and giving it his John Hancock. “There. There you go. I just wondered how much you could tell me.”
The governor smiled at Dawkins, who promptly placed two more copies of the enormous document in front of him.
“It’s just, as you can see, we’re a bit limited right now,” Burleson said, signing the other copies. “Generator’s used up. No phones. And it’s going to start getting dark again soon. All our intelligence comes from firsthand reports.”
The final copy signed, Dawkins placed two of the enormous manuscripts back into the briefcase and handed it to his security escort. The third copy he left on Burleson’s desk.
“It’s been a difficult time for all of us,” Dawkins allowed with a sympathetic frown.
Then he was done. It was over. He’d gotten what he came for. Burleson could see it in his eyes.
Dawkins nodded to his escorts and they began to exit Burleson’s office.
“What . . . ?” Burleson managed, surprised. “So . . . are you just . . . ?”
“Thank you,” Dawkins said perfunctorily, without turning his head.
“When will I hear from you?” Burleson called as they paraded underneath his doorway. “What happens next?”
“Thank you . . .” the BP official called again, waving his hand in the air without turning around.
And then they were gone.
Burleson stood behind his desk, confused, panting.
That was really it. They had come and gone in a matter of seconds, and he had learned . . . not a damn thing. The impressive legal document was the only evidence their visit had even happened. It sat like a fat cancer on the edge of his desk.
Burleson glared at the offensive thing for a long moment, then brushed it into the trash with a powerful swipe of his arm.
To do whatever BP wanted—whenever they wanted it—was one thing. Hell, that was what Indiana governors did! But to threaten him inside his own damn office? That was too much!
Where was his muscle? His brawn? Burleson imagined James Nolan head butting the BP fixer and knocking out the security buffoons with swift punches before they even knew what was happening. That would show them. That was what should have happened!
The more he thought about how he’d just been treated, the more blinded with fury the governor became.
James Nolan—that fuck!—Where on earth was he?
20
Though he had initially resolved to stand, Purdue biology professor Richard Niel found himself leaning against a tree by the end of Nolan’s tale. (This was not necessarily due to the content of what Nolan had had to say; the day had been hot and Richard was already beat when the two strange men had showed up.) He kept his eyes locked on Nolan’s, though, and nodded periodically to show he was following the narrative.
When Nolan finished, there was a long silence. Richard had not interrupted him, or asked for clarification at any point. The biologist looked down at his own shoes, and then down at the tackle box full of water samples.
“I suppose you’re looking for some kind of verdict from me?” Richard said. “Well . . . what would you say if two strangers with guns showed up at your place and started talking about zombies?”
An awkward beat passed.
“I’d say that anybody who just wanted my ATV could come up with a much more believable story than that,” Nolan replied.
“It’s true,” Drextel added. “This sounds crazy, because we’re telling the truth. You can go all detective on us, if you think we’re lying. Separate us. Ask us questions about the tiniest details of our story. Our answers are going to line up.”
Nolan, who had questioned suspects before, smiled at the notion. He also reflected that it was not a bad idea.
“Then here’s my question . . .” the biologist said, absently stroking his beard. “And I don’t care who answers; I’m asking you both. If you’re telling the truth—if this is happening—then is it just here, or is it all around the world?”
Drextel shook his head. Nolan swallowed hard.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Nolan said. “I haven’t met anybody who knows.”
“It could just be the Midwest,” Drextel ruminated. “It could just be Indy and the southern part of the state, actually. Those are the only places we’ve been.”
The biologist looked the two outsiders up and down for a long moment.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be good God-damned . . . but I think I believe you.”
Drextel and Nolan smiled.
“What did it?” Nolan asked.
The biologist bit his lip underneath his wild beard. Then he looked left. Nolan and Drextel followed his gaze. There was only the burbling creek that ran beside his makeshift hut.
“I’ve been studying these waterways for most of my life,” the biologist said. “I didn’t start with that, of course. No kid wants to study water. I wanted to study fish. These amazing little creatures that live in their own little world—right next to ours, but so different—you know? But when you start studying fish in Indiana, you start noticing all the shit—for lack of a better word—that contaminates the waterways. After that, you can’t in good conscience spend your time looking at anything else. I realized early in my career that instead of studying trout and bass and sunfish, I was actually gonna be looking at parts-per-million of mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, and about twenty different kinds of pesticide.”
“I could throw statistics at you, sure. What percentage of our waterways have stressors and pollutants above the national mean. It’s a lot, but you wouldn’t care. Nobody in this state seems to. Our goddamn politicians . . . this governor we have now . . . there’s no way to say it, other than they pimp the state out. That’s what they do. They say to these polluters: ‘Doesn’t Indiana look nice? Isn’t she just the prettiest little thing you ever laid eyes on? Well, if you come here and open a factory, we’ll let you do anything you want to her. And I mean anything. Nobody will be watching.’”
Nolan had heard a few folks—most of them political opponents—characterize his boss as a pimp or a hustler before. Usually it happened during the election debates. Nolan crossed his arms to show he was not entirely receptive to the idea, but still kept an even smile on his face.
Zombie, Indiana Page 20
