Mark looked to Matthew and then turned back to his mother. “Why did they do it? Why did they kill all those people?”
“Oh honey, I don’t know why they did it. I wish I had a better answer or I could make one up like the magic pretend tea but I don’t want to make something up. I want to be honest because you’re grown up now. The truth is that sometimes you don’t know why people do the things they do. That’s one of the hard things about being a grown up. You realize things happen without any reason.”
“Will there be bad guys on the island?” Mark asked, his voice quiet.
“No and that’s why we’re going there,” Janet said. “It’s the one place that we can make sure the bad guys stay far away from.”
“Good,” Matthew said with a curt nod of his head.
“Do you want some magic pretend tea Marky?” Ruthie asked, holding out one of the Styrofoam cups. “You’ll feel better.”
The boy turned and took the cup his sister offered, staring down into it for a moment before putting it to his lips. “Mmm, tastes like chocolate.”
“Mine too!” Ruthie said, sipping from her own cup.
“You wanna give me some sugar?” Mark asked, holding out the cup to the girl and she grabbed up the tongs to mime dropping the sugar in.
“Can I have some too?” Matthew asked, spinning around so he could face the girls.
Kim stood up from the bed and held out a hand to help Janet to her feet. She wrapped an arm around her and Janet rested her head on her shoulder.
“Thank you,” Janet whispered and Kim squeezed her arm.
“No thanks needed.”
And it was true. She cared about all the children and she didn’t want to see them upset.
Jenny had been quiet, sitting in one of the two wooden chairs that matched the wood laminate table that was next to the only window in the room. Her face was pale, cradled in her upturned hands as she stared out the window.
Here was another lost soul, one that she was determined to help too. “How you doing, Jen?”
“Not good,” she admitted, her eyes staying on the window. Kim moved around to look out the window and saw Alan sitting on the hood of the truck while Quinton stitched up his head. “He could be wrong, right?”
“He could be,” Kim admitted. She didn’t want to give the woman false hope but it was true. They all knew so little about the infection and how it spread.
“The waiting is the worst part,” Janet said. “At first, Eric was listed missing in action. Normally, they don’t tell the family until they know for sure but since I was working administration at the base and had been an army brat, one of the men took pity on me and told me about it. It was three days before they got confirmation he had died. Those three days...they were worse than what came after. At least when you know, you can start processing it. Hanging in limbo, that’s so much worse.”
Jenny looked out the window once again. “How did you do it? I mean, when he was gone and you were left alone, how did you make it through?”
Janet glanced over at the kids, who were engrossed in trying to outdo each other on what crazy flavour of tea they could come up with.
“The children. When I got the call, all I wanted to do was lay down and die right then and there. He was my soul mate and he was gone. All I wanted was to be with him again but then I thought of the children and I knew I had to make it okay for them. They were the priority. Once I forgot about myself and put my attention to them, I could put the next foot forward.”
“And that’s all it is. Just keep putting the next foot forward. I’m not going to lie and say it was easy, because it wasn’t, but it can be done.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Jenny whispered.
“You can and, if the worst happens, you will,” Kim told her. “Remember, you aren’t alone in this. We are all here for you and the baby and Alan.”
“Really? After what he did?”
“Oh Jenny,” Kim said. “Today he stepped up. He saw those other guys in trouble and he’s the one who convinced all of us to go help them. He was trying to save Hillman when he fell.”
She could tell that her words did little to comfort the woman. She probably preferred for her husband to be hated and clear of any infection than lauded a hero and turn into a freak.
Still, Kim wanted her to know that her husband had been forgiven. “I don’t know if any of us would have made it out of there if it wasn’t for Alan. He did right today.”
“And if there is any mercy left in this world he’ll be okay,” Janet added.
They were comforting words but the problem was that Kim wasn’t sure there was any mercy left in this world.
Three good men died today and Hillman was likely to follow them. Mercy should have saved them or, at the very least, spared them from being eaten alive.
What other horrors were they going to witness on the road? And would it stop once they were off the road?
The longer they kept this up, the more impossible it seemed that they would ever find any peace. The deaths just seemed to keep piling up. Even now, here at camp, they weren’t going to stop. Hillman and maybe Alan...when was it ever going to stop?
Jenny suddenly pushed back from the table, eyes glued to the window. “Quinton’s done with him.”
She made a beeline for the door and Kim stood up, putting a staying hand on Janet before following Jenny outside.
Alan was still on the hood of the truck, a fresh gauze pad covering his wound and a strip of gauze wound around his head several times to hold the pad in place. He looked weary, his shoulders slumped and he was pale beneath the white gauze. Still, when Jenny rushed to his side, she saw his eyes light up and he managed a smile for her.
Kim had been so used to seeing the couple at odds with each other, she had never noticed that look of love between them. Maybe it took dire times for it to come out.
Malcolm moved to her side and she leaned into him, needing his strength at the moment. His arms came up to wrap around her and she let him hold her, her head nestled on his shoulder as they watched Alan and Jenny speak in low tones with Quinton before disappeared into their room.
“Quinton covered up all his wounds, cleared him to be around others,” Malcolm told her. “The concern is Hillman. Lorraine said his temperature has risen another two degrees since she last checked it. She said it isn’t normal to jump that high, that fast. He’s definitely infected.”
“Damn it,” she mumbled, burying her face in the crook of his neck. He pressed a kiss to her temple before resting his cheek against the top of her head.
“Yeah, damn it.”
Subject File # 742
Administrator: You don’t talk about Alan’s death that much.
Subject: There’s not much to talk about. Another Wakefield died to keep the rest of us alive.
Administrator: Why do you see his death that way?
Subject: Because that’s how it was. They sacrificed themselves for us and I don’t want to forget that. They’re heroes and you shouldn’t forget heroes.
When he walked into the sick room, Malcolm was assaulted by the stench of bleach. Lorraine was at the table, thick rubber gloves on her hands and a mask over her face, scrubbing the table furiously. It smelled like she had cleaned every other surface in the same fastidious manner.
Not that he blamed her. After seeing how deadly the blood was, he felt like scrubbing his whole body with some Clorox wasn’t such a bad idea.
Lorraine stopped her furious scrubbing and looked up at him. “You come in here, you wear a mask and gloves. They’re on the TV stand.”
“She’s serious about it.”
He looked over at Mendez and Banks, surgical masks over their faces and rubber gloves on their hands. It was almost comical, if it hadn’t been for the sight of Hillman on the bed next to them.
His face was pale and his eyelids fluttered rapidly as he twitched on the mattress, the sheets and blanket wrapped around his hips. He was in real bad shape.
&
nbsp; Malcolm kept his eyes on the man as he pulled on gloves and a mask, watching the way his limbs danced and his head thrashed on the pillow. He mumbled a few words but they were incoherent and he tried to take a swing but his hand got caught in the sheet. The fever was burning up his brain and, mixed with the morphine, probably had him half out of his mind with delusions.
“He was talking before,” Mendez said. “Mostly calling for his mom. We went to find her in Davisville but half the city, including her house, had burned to the ground. We never found her.”
Well, maybe at the end of all of this, Hillman would finally find her.
Malcolm had been raised a Methodist and he truly believed in God. Even after he went to war, he still believed. Even now, with everything that had happened, he still believed.
He had to, because if he didn’t it would mean that there was nothing after this. With no God, there was no Heaven and if there was no Heaven, there was no reward for the suffering that people endured on Earth. He couldn’t accept that idea and so his faith remained.
He had to believe that Jose and Ana were up there together, maybe with his parents and Janet’s husband, watching over them. That Hillman’s mother was up there, patiently waiting for her son to join her in eternal peace.
“So, what was up with those kids before?” Banks asked, pulling him from his thoughts. “They okay?”
“They’re my nephews,” Malcolm replied. “Apparently it was your uniforms that upset them. We had a run in with the military when all this started and it’s left some scars.”
“What happened?” Mendez asked.
“Fort Lee was the evacuation point for the area. Everybody and their cousin ended up going there which jammed up the roads. It left everybody stranded on the highway.”
He sat down in one of the chairs, shaking his head as the buried memories of that night came to the surface.
“I don’t know if it was because they thought we were a danger to the base or that they couldn’t risk the possibility that people were infected. It doesn’t really matter why, but one night they came out and started killing the civilians. We got out of there with our lives and what was on our backs.”
“Same thing probably happened all over,” Mendez said. “Last ditch effort to get control. Just like how they napalmed the cities.”
She was right. Military protocol would take over and smart strategy said that the best way to contain a biological threat was to annihilate it.
“You can see how that would leave an impression on the kids,” Malcolm said. “They see your fatigues and they think you’re like them.”
“We aren’t like them,” Banks said, his voice low with anger.
Malcolm nodded. “We know that and their mother explained it to them. They’re just confused kids who have seen way too many horrible things. I think all of us took for granted that it hadn’t affected them. All of the kids in the group have seemed to take everything in stride or so we thought.”
“There are more children?” Mendez asked.
He nodded. “My niece, Ruthie and two girls, Audrey and Hannah, sisters. They lost their parents at the start and were unofficially adopted by their neighbour.”
“Good,” Mendez said, her eyes far away and it took her a moment to realize he was confused by her response. “It’s good that kids have survived. The freaks always seem to go for the little ones first. Weaker prey, I guess. It’s good to hear that they didn’t get all of them.”
He wondered exactly what these two had seen. There was a haunted look in their eyes, one that he was sure had nothing to do with their infected friend.
He knew that look. Not only had he seen it in fellow soldiers when they came back from the frontlines, he had seen it in the mirror more times than he could count. It was the look of someone who had seen too much horror. It was the same look he had seen in the twins’ eyes earlier.
And maybe he was just going to have to get used it. There were going to be few people in this new world untouched by some horrific event. The death of loved ones, of strangers, of everything they had once known. It didn’t matter. All of it was going to leave scars on them and there was no hiding from it.
The door opened and Quinton came in, his eyes weary above his mask. He nodded to the others as he walked over to the medical bags on the TV stand and rifled through them before pulling out a bottle of alcohol. He poured some of it on a piece of gauze and began to wipe down the ear thermometer and the blood pressure cuff he had been carrying.
“Alan’s temperature is up another degree,” Quinton finally said after he had finished cleaning the instruments. “His wound reeks too.”
The crash of the table hitting the wall sounded and they all turned in surprise to look at Lorraine. Her fists were clenched at her sides and she listed to one side as she kept her weight off the foot she had used to kick the table.
“Sorry,” she said, unclenching her fists and pulling the table back to its place. “It’s just...it’s not fair to Jenny.”
“It’s not fair to anyone,” Quinton said.
“Life’s never been fair,” Banks said, bitterness in his voice. “Best get used to it.”
Before anyone could agree or disagree, Hillman jack knifed on the bed, his limbs spasmed as he began to twist about, his jaw clenched tightly as sputtering sounds issued from between his gritted teeth.
“Shit, he’s seizing,” Quinton cried out and rushed to Hillman’s side.
“Grab him!” Banks called out as he reached out to grab Hillman’s shoulders but Quinton batted his hands away.
“No, if you hold him down, you could hurt him,” Quinton said. “We just turn him on his side and make sure he doesn’t fall off the bed.”
“It’s happening,” Lorraine moaned, her hands going to her throat as she backed up from the bed. “This is it.”
Hillman continued to convulse, kicking off his blankets to reveal his injured leg, the gauze bandage crimson with blood.
“Fuck, he tore his stitches,” Quinton said. “Stay clear of any blood.”
“You’ve got to fix them,” Banks ordered but Quinton shook his head.
“I can’t when he’s like this,” Quinton said.
“When it stops, you stitch him back up,” Banks said, his eyes fierce with determination. “You don’t let him bleed out.”
“He’s already gone!” Lorraine cried out. “Don’t you get it? This is how it happens!”
They all stared at her for a moment, what she was saying slow to sink in but then their eyes went wide as Hillman’s violent spasms ceased and he was still.
“Kill him!” Lorraine yelled at Quinton. “Do it before he wakes up!”
Quinton hesitated but Malcolm drew his knife from the sheath on his belt and took a step towards the bed. Hillman’s eyes shot open and he looked up at them with milky white irises.
“Oh God no,” Lorraine moaned.
Hillman’s white eyes swung around the room, blinking rapidly as if he was trying to clear them until he focused on Banks. Hillman let out a growl and lunged for Banks, gnashing his teeth as he tried to bite him.
Banks jumped away, the back of his legs hitting the other bed and he toppled back on the mattress, his face horrified.
Malcolm moved fast, snatching Hillman’s hair in a fist and plunging his knife in his ear. It made a sick squelching noise as it hit home and Hillman’s struggle ceased, his body going limp on the mattress.
Malcolm carefully pulled his knife out of Hillman’s head, cautious of the blood that began to trickle from the wound. He placed his knife on the bedside table and then bent down to retrieve the blanket that had fallen on the ground. He shook it out and draped it over Hillman, pausing so he could pull off the dog tags that hung around his neck before covering his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Mendez and Banks, holding out the tags.
Mendez nodded her thanks, her fist clenching around the tags, but Banks just kept staring at Hillman’s body, all the fight and anger that had been i
n him gone.
Lorraine went and grabbed his knife from the bedside table. “I’ll disinfect this. We should also wrap him up in a few more layers of sheets before we take him out.”
“Where are you taking him?” Banks asked, his voice hollow and confused.
“We’ll bury him,” Malcolm told him but Mendez shook her head.
“No, we bury our own.”
Malcolm looked over to Banks, who was seemed like an empty shell. “Let me help you. Hillman helped my people, it is the least I can do for him.”
Mendez nodded and with Quinton and Lorraine’s help, they wrapped Hillman up in the sheets from the bed, tying them together at his head and feet. They wrapped the blanket around him and secured it using a sheet from the other bed as a makeshift rope.
“Banks, come on,” Mendez said from her place at Hillman’s feet.
Banks had remained standing in the corner, shell shocked, just staring at them as they had worked.
He didn’t respond to Mendez and when she repeated his name, her voice was much firmer.
“Pull it together,” she barked at him when he still stood there like a statue. “We’ve got a duty here. We bury our own.”
That seemed to pull Banks out of his stupor and he dipped his chin once before moving to Hillman’s head. Malcolm reached under Hillman’s hips and together they lifted him up. Lorraine held the door open for them and they moved him out and down the walkway in front of the motel. They passed by the room where the others were still shut up and he saw Kim and Janet standing in the window.
Kim disappeared from the window and the door opened a moment later. “I’ll help you carry him.”
Malcolm shook his head, shifting Hillman’s weight slightly to get a better hold on him. “Can you look for something to dig with instead? I remembered seeing a couple shovels in the maintenance room behind the office. Get the ax from the Tahoe too.”
Sanctuary Page 26
