by Bobby Adair
Or maybe the owners were just from Dallas.
At the door, Fritz pointed to a narrow, dark staircase. When I got there, I looked up and saw nothing but stairs. I led the way, as I was sure it had to be pitch black to Fritz’s unaided eyes. I whispered, “Grab my shirt and follow.”
Up we went.
At the top of the stairs, a door opened to an office that seemed to take up a good part of the space on the front half of the building. A storeroom and another office occupied the remainder of the space on the back half. The storeroom looked to have been cleaned out. Not even canned goods were left on the shelves although torn boxes and other packaging covered the floor almost knee deep.
I crossed over to a half-open door, the place I guessed Murphy and the other guy had gone. I peeked inside and saw them at the other end, past the messy desks, trying to look out the windows without getting too close. I went over to stand beside them while Fritz silently closed and bolted the door behind us.
Safe.
Kinda.
Down in the street, Whites were running. They were coming from the direction of the apartment building. One of them must have seen the door closing from up there on the stairs, and they chased through it once they got the door open. Now they appeared frustrated as they slowed and glanced around. They’d lost us. As long as they didn’t put their pea brains together and figure out how to organize some kind of systematic search, we were safe.
Murphy chuckled softly. “That was fun.”
“Yeah,” Fritz agreed. He was being sarcastic. He didn’t understand that Murphy wasn’t.
I said, “I’m going to go check the back of the building for a fire escape. Maybe look around quietly for a water heater and see if I can score something to drink.”
“And food?” Murphy said, completely ignoring the ‘quietly’ part.
I said, “The storeroom looked like it had been ransacked already, but I’ll check.”
“I’ll come,” said the other soldier.
“By the way,” I asked, “before we have to run halfway across Austin again, you got a name?”
“Gabriel Billings,” he answered. “Call me Gabe.”
“I’m Zed, that’s Murphy. C’mon.”
Chapter 42
Dinner or breakfast—whatever people on the night shift call the meal they have right before the sun comes up—was a thoroughly dented gallon can of beans we found under the shredded paper products in the storeroom. We washed it down with the remnants of the water from the water heater. It had evaporated down or seeped out so much that the dissolved minerals gave it a taste of crushed aspirins and gritty rust.
It was what we had.
After we ate, we divvied up the day-shift guard duty and Murphy went to sleep on the floor as the sun started to illuminate the sky in the east. Gabe sacked out as well, leaving me and Fritz to keep an eye out for dangers.
“The night vision goggles really help at night, huh?” said Fritz as we watched Whites on the street.
“Yeah,” I said. “It gives us a pretty good advantage.”
“What about the White Skins?” Fritz asked. “Do they still attack you? Do they know the difference?”
I explained to him all the rules I’d learned about Slow Burns and Whites. It turned into a pretty lengthy conversation as he seemed to take as much of an academic interest in the subject as I did. I explained that we’d found an electric car that combined with the darkness allowed us to travel the streets at night, so that Murphy and I were starting down the path to becoming night creatures. We had all the advantages at night and none during the day. It only made sense.
Fritz told me what he knew about White behavior, which as it turned out wasn’t that much. He knew about the suppressors and how much they helped in controlling the infected. It seemed like anybody still alive pretty much knew that. It was almost a prerequisite.
“I know you guys said you rescued me because you thought I was someone else,” Fritz said eventually, “I don’t get why you betrayed your guys because of that. Why didn’t you check to be sure, first?”
“Our guys?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The ones at the Capitol.” Fritz pointed vaguely in the direction of the Capitol building. “The Survivor Army. You guys really were with them, weren’t you?”
I laughed. “You think we were with those knuckleheads?”
Fritz nodded. “Why else would you be there?”
I smiled and went back to watching the Whites outside on the street. “Murphy thinks I’m an idiot,” I said. “We were staying up by the lake and saw the helicopters coming and going. I wanted to check them out.” I looked out at the sky. “I guess I thought, maybe hoped sort of, that civilization hadn’t completely broken down. I guess I thought maybe these guys were down here reestablishing order, you know, rebuilding.”
Fritz was perplexed. “Is Murphy that cynical? Does he think you’re an idiot for hoping for that?”
“No,” I shook my head and my smile melted away. “He never really said it, but he thought I was an idiot because every time we hook up with normals—”
“Normals?” Fritz asked. “Immune people?”
“Every time we hook up with them, things go to shit.” I put on a frown and shook my head. “They don’t like us. They think we’re virus-carrying, trouble-making, cannibal monsters.” I turned around, grabbed the edge of one of the desks, and scooted it quietly closer to the windows so I could sit on it and keep an eye out.
“Are you guys with a group of others, then?” Fritz asked. “Others like you?”
I shook my head. “Just me and Murphy.”
“Have you seen lots of others?” he asked.
“Some,” I answered. “Not as many as I’d hoped.” I pointed toward the Capitol. “That bunch of yahoos from last night is the first time I saw more than…” I was reluctant to reveal anything about the people on the island and especially about the ones who drove off to Balmorhea. “They’re by far the biggest group of normals we’ve seen.”
“It’s too bad they aren’t normal,” said Fritz.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Too bad about that.”
“What about you?” I asked. “You were pretty cagey about where you’re actually from.” I sighed, “I guess that’s the way it is now.” I recalled how I’d been reluctant to tell Nico about the group I was with after he and I had escaped from Nancy and Bubbles. “I guess it makes sense—you know to protect your people.”
“Yeah,” Fritz agreed. He shrugged. He looked around as he thought about it. Finally, he said, “I’m with a bunch from a university back east. You and Murphy should come back with us.”
Shaking my head and smiling, I said, “I think you missed the part about regular folks not taking a shine to people like me and Murphy.”
“We’re not like that there,” said Fritz.
“Everybody’s like that everywhere,” I argued. “Tell me you’re not that naïve, please.”
Shaking his head, Fritz said, “I’m sure we’ve got people back there who won’t want you around, but that’s not what I’m asking exactly. I’m not asking you to come live there.”
I laughed. “Fritz, what are you even talking about, then?”
He said, “You’ve heard of the Corps, right?”
I nodded. In Texas, everybody knew about the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. It was a student military organization. They dressed up in uniforms, marched a lot, and had nice boots. With Texas A&M being a rival of my alma mater, The University of Texas, I guess a lot more could be said, but the luxury of game-day rivalries was another memory slipping into the oblivion of things turned trivial and forgotten.
Fritz said, “When things were going bad, back at the beginning of the outbreak, the Corps decided it was their duty to protect the professors on campus from the Whites—that’s what you called them, right?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “Whites. How’d that protection thing work out?” I tried not to show my certainty that it had failed
entirely.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Fritz, “I’ve been around a good part of East Texas since the outbreak started. I’m going to say, compared to that we did pretty good. We quarantined nearly sixty professors in one of the buildings, then set up a perimeter to defend it.”
“Didn’t the Corps guys get sick?” I asked.
Fritz nodded. “Look at me, do I look like I’m a college boy?” He laughed. “I graduated ten years ago. I used to build houses. I had a wife and four kids.”
I didn’t ask about any of them. The answer to those questions was always the same.
“Just like everybody else, the virus nearly annihilated the Corps, at least the students on campus anyway. When they saw the way it was going, they put out the call to alumni. Those of us who could, came. Going there to protect our intellectual heritage seemed like a better thing to die for than staying in my empty house protecting my flat screen TV and my pantry. I went.”
I laughed at that. “Yeah, I guess it was kinda like that in the beginning, wasn’t it?”
“Enough of us showed up who were immune,” said Fritz, “and enough of us survived long enough to learn how to fight the infected. We managed to keep it together. Now we’ve still got the sixty professors holed up in that one building. They haven’t been exposed yet. That’s why they’re all still alive. We’ve got just over a hundred volunteers, half of us from the Corps at one time or another, and we protect the professors.”
“So why are you all the way out here in Austin?” I asked.
“The professors, some of them are doctors and biologists and stuff—don’t ask me the details, I have a Construction Science degree—they’re working on a cure.”
“A cure?” I asked.
“Well, a vaccine,” said Fritz. “If we want to have a chance as a species, we need to find a way to inoculate our children against the virus.”
“Makes sense.” I nodded.
“I volunteered to go out and collect blood samples for their research,” Fritz said.
“Why?” I asked. “Shoot off a gun and they come running. Seems like the samples come to you.”
Shaking his head, Fritz said, “The docs say the virus mutates too fast. That’s why you’re different than the other Whites. We don’t have guys like you back in East Texas. There are too many strains. We need to find a vaccine, or a series of vaccines, that will fight all the strains of the virus.”
“So why do you need me and Murphy to go to A&M, then?”
“Blood,” said Fritz. “We need to get samples of your strain of the virus.”
Chapter 43
I tried to tamp down the derision in my laugh. “You just run around Texas trying to talk brain-fried Whites into taking a ride with you back to College Station?”
“No.” Fritz didn’t seem to pick up on how stupid I thought his endeavor was. “We had a Humvee that we drove—”
“Armored?” I asked. I already knew, though. Everybody who was still driving was in something with that level of protection—that is unless they had a stealthy quiet electric hot rod Mustang they drove around in the dark. Weird how that made me feel like a superior badass. I tried not to smile.
“Yeah,” said Fritz. “I guess you figured that out too?”
I nodded.
“We had a little refrigerator built into the back between the seats,” he said. “One of the engineers back in College Station put it together. As far as the samples, we got those using pretty much any method we needed to use.”
“Not much catch and release, I guess.” I half smiled at my witticism.
“Most times, we’d shoot ‘em and get a sample real quick,” said Fritz. “Through that effort we came to understand that different outcomes meant—”
“Outcomes?” I asked.
“You know,” said Fritz, “The crazy ones. Survivors. People who recovered completely, and now people like you. At first the thinking was that different people responded differently to the virus. I guess that’s true to a degree. I don’t know. The doctors figured out that lots of different strains are out there.”
“Sounds like dangerous work,” I said.
Fritz nodded. “We lose a guy or two nearly every time we go out.”
“Jeez.” That was bad. I asked, “How many times have you been out?”
“Five or six,” said Fritz.
“Not exactly sustainable.”
Fritz shook his head and looked absently out the window. “It’s necessary work. One day, people will want to have kids again. Murdering your kids when they turn white and crazy is the hardest thing a man ever has to do. If we can find a vaccine, it’s worth whatever price we pay.”
I didn’t ask Fritz to expound on that. The sudden blackness in his mood told me all I needed to know. I guessed that he’d been forced to kill his own children when they turned. God, that must have sucked.
We didn’t talk for a bit after that. The sun slowly rose in the sky. Murphy snored. Gabe stirred and woke frequently. When he did sleep, he mumbled and squirmed. Nightmares. It didn’t take Sigmund Freud to guess what those were about.
Finally, I asked, “So what was your beef with the knuckleheads at the Capitol? Why’d they lock you up?”
“We came across them a couple of days ago when we arrived in Austin,” said Fritz. “It was our first trip here. We were out east of town and saw the helicopters.”
“Same with us,” I said.
“We drove right up to the gates,” said Fritz. “We didn’t have any reason to believe they were anything other than a well-organized group of survivors. It wasn’t until they let us in, took our weapons, and locked us up that we knew they were a different kind of survivors—the kind that aren’t quite right in the head.”
I nodded. The guys looked normal enough at a distance. It wasn’t until you were close enough to see their eyes that you knew for sure, and then only when the light was bright. I said, “Me and Murphy were hiding up on the third floor of the rotunda when those guys were yelling at you downstairs. That’s the first time we saw you. What was up with that?”
Fritz half chuckled. “That was Justice Baird doing the yelling.”
I shrugged. The name and title meant little to me besides what I’d heard when Murphy and I were on the second floor of the annex and the talking guards walked by beneath us.
“The way the line of succession works in Texas,” said Fritz, “is if the Governor dies, the job goes to the Lieutenant Governor, then the Speaker of the House, then the Attorney General—”
“The Attorney General? Seems like a weird line of succession to me,” I said, realizing I should have paid more attention during my high school government class.
“It get’s better,” said Fritz. “After the Attorney General comes Chief Justices of the Texas Courts of Appeal, in order by the number of their district.”
I shrugged at the seeming arbitrariness of it. Then again, I guess any such system was.
“Justice Baird is from the 3rd District,” said Fritz. “He thinks he’s the legal Governor of Texas.”
“No shit.” I laughed. “That guy who was yelling at you in the Capitol rotunda? That’s our new Governor?”
Fritz nodded. “Legally, for whatever that means anymore.”
“Is that why he’s at the Capitol?”
“That’s what I understood,” said Fritz. “He’s trying to legitimize his power by sitting on the king’s throne, so to speak.”
“Wow.” That was interesting. “So why did he want to lock you guys up?”
“He was going to execute us at dawn,” said Fritz. “Being the Governor, and us being in uniform, he told us he was our legitimate Commander in Chief, at least until the President of the United States turned up. I told him my duty was to the Corps and to protecting the professors at Texas A&M.”
“And he didn’t like that?” I guessed the obvious.
“Exactly,” said Fritz. “He said he was going to send one of us back to College Station to lay down the law, that h
e was the boss, and they all worked for him now. The rest of us were going to be hanged over the fence.”
I asked, “Is Baird a Survivor? Or is he normal?”
“Survivor,” said Fritz.
Chapter 44
It was full dark again by the time Murphy nudged me with his boot. “Get up, Sunshine.”
I rolled over on my back, looking up at the underside of a desk. Apparently I’d been squirming a bit in my sleep. “What time is it?”
“Nighttime.” Murphy grinned and turned away. “Leftover beans for dinner. Get ‘em while they’re cold. Room temperature really.”
I leaned out from beneath the desk. Fritz and Gabe were also up. That made me the slacker. I groaned and crawled up off the floor, as the talking between Fritz and Gabe suddenly stopped. Murphy sat down in a chair near them. I looked over. “What?”
“What, what?” asked Murphy.
“You guys stopped talking,” I said, as I picked my pistol up off the floor, ejected the magazine, saw it held bullets, and made sure that the safety was off. I sheathed my machete and adjusted my gun belt. I picked my Hello Kitty bag up off the floor and sat it on a desk so I could grab it and go at a moment’s notice. That’s often the way it went. I was ready to face another night. The guys were still silent and looking at me.
“Nice bag.” Fritz pointed at my dirty pink and white pack. “Why not something—”
“More manly?” I asked.
“Less…” Fritz threw his fingers out as if in silent surprise. “Less dazzling.”
Murphy grinned silently.
“It’s my good luck bag.” I noticed a clean and empty plate sitting beside the bean can. They were all finishing up plates of their own. I figured the plate to be mine and helped myself to a big serving.
Murphy leaned back on a creaking chair and said, “What’s the plan, Batman?”
I shrugged as if I hadn’t already thought it through. “It’s dark.” I looked out the windows at the city. “Things have settled down. I’d say Fritz and Gabe can go find their way back to College Station, and we go get our car and go back to Sarah Mansfield’s place.” I’d wanted to say home, but the word ‘home’ didn’t seem right.
