Apocalypse Of The Dead (51 page)

“What can I do about lies, friend? People tell lies.”

“Will you let them leave?” Briggs repeated. “If I come back here tomorrow with enough trucks to get them away from here, will you let them leave?”

Jasper threw up his hands.

“Leave us, friend. I beg you. Leave us. We’re not hurting anybody. We just want to be left alone. There’s no racism here, no hatred. It’s not like it is out there in your world. We just want to be left alone.”

Briggs sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

“That’s a nice sentiment, Mr. Sewell, but it doesn’t answer my question. Will you let them leave? Yes or no?”

Jasper dragged his fingers over his face.

He said, “Anybody who wants to go can go. Just go now, please. Leave us in peace.”

Briggs looked at the others in his delegation, then scanned the rapidly dwindling crowd of Family members at the surrounding tables.

“Okay. We’ll be back tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred.”

“Fine,” Jasper said, and waved them away without looking at them. “Just go, please.”

Briggs and the others stood and walked out. Jasper remained at the table, his face in his hands. Aaron was shocked to see Jasper so deflated. But as Briggs and the others left the pavilion, Jasper suddenly sat up again, and his face was grim.

He motioned for Michael Barnes, and though Aaron couldn’t hear what he whispered to Barnes, he was pretty sure he knew what was being said.

And it made his stomach turn.

Aaron was standing on his porch again when Barnes and his men drove the delegation out to their helicopter. Thick gray snow clouds were hanging low in the sky, though the air was, for the moment, clear. It would be dark in another hour, and the night promised to be a cold one.

He was leaning against a wooden post, thinking of all the ways his world had changed, when he thought he saw a bright flash from inside one of the trucks.

He stood up straight, straining his eyes to see.

Three more flashes erupted inside the lead truck, followed by a few more in the back truck. Aaron listened, but there was no sound save for the wailing of the wind coming off the prairie and the faint mechanical whine of the helicopter’s rotors.

The trucks pulled up to the helicopter and two soldiers came forward to greet them. Both had rifles, but the rifles were slung over the shoulders.

Barnes stepped out of the lead truck and shot them point-blank with his pistol; they never had a chance.

Aaron could almost picture the pilot’s reaction. He heard the whine of the engines growing louder, higher in pitch, and he knew the man was trying to power up fast.

It did little good, though.

Barnes jumped aboard, and a moment later, two bright flashes finished the matter.

Then Barnes turned to the lead truck and motioned for his patrols. They climbed out with the young man from Briggs’s delegation in tow. The kid looked scared. The patrols dragged him up in front of Barnes. Behind the kid, other members of the patrol pulled the dead bodies from the vehicles and put them on board the helicopter.

When it was done, they climbed back into the vehicles with the terrified long-haired kid and sped back toward the quarantine room.

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

The Grasslands, North Dakota: October 18th, 8:40 P.M.

We were called to curfew early tonight. Jasper got on the PA and told us the military delegation was dead, that they had attacked without warning, but that Michael Barnes and his security forces had managed to put them down.

“I didn’t plan this,” Jasper said, “but I know that it happened. We didn’t want this, but now we’ve got to deal with it. People, people, people, don’t you see? It’s only a matter of time now. We’re gonna get more soldiers in here now. They’ll parachute in here and burn our houses and bayonet our children and all because they cannot abide the life we’ve made here.”

There was more, but there’s no point in recording it here. He talked in circles. He said the same thing over and over again. I could tell he was becoming unhinged. One minute, he’d be ranting, full of paranoid conspiracy theories. The next, he’d be pleading with us to understand that he’d done all he could to save us.

But I think Sandra Tellez said it best. She was sitting between Ed Moore and Clint Siefer, holding Clint’s hand, as Jasper’s speech came to an end. She looked around the room and said, “That man, he’s about to kill us all.”

Not get us killed.

Kill us all.

None of us bothered to contest it.

P.S.: Ed says we need to make a break for it as soon as possible. Like, maybe, tomorrow morning. Minot will almost certainly send a party out looking for their missing delegation. He says that when they do, we need to be ready to flag them down. We need some way to separate ourselves from the rest of the Family.

Poor guy. I’ve gotten to spend some quality time with Ed these last few days. He blames himself for not getting these people out of here sooner. But from what I’ve heard and seen, I can’t imagine he could have handled the situation any differently.

It was nearly dawn, and neither Jasper nor Michael Barnes had slept.

Barnes was coming out of the quarantine room, rubbing his bloody knuckles. There was blood splattered on his face and on his clothes and smeared along the toes of his boots. Behind him, inside the room, the kid from the Minot delegation was on his side, curled into a fetal ball, whimpering.

Jasper studied the young man for a long time. His name was Nate Royal, and it was much as Jasper suspected. Things at Minot were bad. They’d been overrun, and Briggs and his delegation had been bluffing. They’d had nowhere to go back to. But Jasper had already suspected that from what Barnes had told him earlier. What he really wanted to know was what a senior group of military officers was doing with a mullet-headed peckerwood in tow.

Barnes had stripped the man out of his heavy winter gear before beating him, revealing a blue air force utility uniform underneath that was completely devoid of insignia. It only reinforced Jasper’s hunch that the man was not a soldier.

He had nodded to Barnes from outside the glass and the beating went into high gear. Moments later, Nate Royal was babbling something about a cure for the necrosis filovirus the military had distilled from his body. Barnes had stopped then and looked at Jasper. Jasper took in the news and was furious. It was a lie. An awful, insidious lie.

“Where is this cure?” Barnes asked.

He kicked Nate in the gut and Nate vomited blood on the floor.

“At Minot,” Nate said. “The doctor who developed it died yesterday. His research is there.”

Jasper motioned to Barnes to come out.

He said, “It’s time. Go tell your men to get started.”

“Thomas.”

The boy groaned and rolled over.

“Thomas, come on, son. Wake up.”

The boy groaned.

Aaron gave his son a hard shake.

“Thomas,” he hissed. “Wake up. Come on, we gotta move.”

The boy’s eyes fluttered open. He looked up at Aaron as though he hoped all this was a dream, like they were still back in Jackson, Mississippi, living a normal life. But the look faded, and Aaron could almost see the light bleed away from his face.

“We don’t have much time, okay? We gotta move.”

Thomas nodded. There was no fear in him. No emotion of any kind. Not really. His expression was dead. He got up from his cot and grabbed his small duffel bag and stood in the middle of his small room, waiting patiently for instructions.

“Your mother’s waiting on us,” Aaron said. “Did you wear your long johns like I asked you to?”

Thomas nodded.

“How about a gun?”

Thomas nodded.

“Okay. Might as well get it out. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble, but just in case.”

They walked to the living room where Kate stood waiting. Husband and wife traded looks. Then Kate’s gaze shifted to Thomas coming out of his room, stuffing the pistol into his belt, and she gasped.

“So this is it,” she said. “This is where it ends.”

Aaron nodded. He held out both hands and his wife took one and Thomas took the other and they formed a circle.

They each bowed their heads and quietly Aaron prayed for their safe deliverance.

Aaron had planned their escape in haste, but he thought his plan was a good one. During one of his many forays into the deserted towns that surrounded the Grasslands compound, Barnes and his men had brought two trailer loads of chemicals into the camp. Those chemicals were now hidden down near the west fence, just south of the auxiliary-vehicle storage lot. The barrels were placed into two separate piles, so that they didn’t accidentally mix before Jasper was ready for them to, and then each pile was covered with several layers of heavy-duty tarp. Snowdrifts had covered the piles during the previous night, and the twin mounds created a perfect break for his family to hide behind while Aaron cut the fence. From there, they’d have to cross a few hundred yards of open, snow-covered grassland, dodging the infected as best they could, before coming to the old county road. Aaron had used his ability to move in and out of the gates to leave a fully gassed Chevy pickup about a quarter mile up the road beyond that. With any luck, they’d reach it in less than forty-five minutes.

The moon was nearly full, but the sky was full of heavy gray clouds and falling snow. Aaron put his family into the hollow behind the mounds and went to work on the fence with a pair of wire cutters, hoping that the bad weather would offer them a little extra cover from the roving patrols and the zombies.

“Dad,” Thomas said, his voice barely a whisper.

Aaron turned around, his eyes scanning the village for movement.

“Dad, what is this stuff?”

Aaron saw where Thomas had cleared some of the snow away with his hand and lifted the tarp, exposing several barrels of Bonide.

“A sulfur spray,” Aaron said. “They use it as an insecticide.” He nodded at the other mound. “That one over there is muriatic acid. The muriatic acid is used to clean pools.”

“We don’t have any pools here, Dad,” Thomas said.

“No, we don’t. But if you mix the two together, you get a noxious gas. Makes you pass out.”

“And then?”

“And then,” Aaron said, “the heart stops.”

“You mean it kills you.”

Aaron nodded. He clipped the last of the fence and started peeling it out of the way.

“But there’s enough here to kill everyone in the village,” Thomas said.

“Leave it be, son,” Aaron said. “We have to go.”

“Dad, you knew about this?”

Reluctantly, Aaron nodded. “Come on now. We need to go.”

The boy’s eyes went wide.

“Thomas?”

The boy stiffened. He shook his head and Aaron’s stomach dropped. He turned slowly, and saw Michael Barnes standing behind him, two of his security guards flanking him with rifles at the ready.

“Evening, folks,” Barnes said. He scanned their faces, smiling.

Aaron hung his head. Above and all around him, the prairie wind howled. A moment later, rifle fire split the night.

At the sound of the shots, heads popped up from the snow outside the fence. Michael Barnes watched the infected moving toward the hole Aaron had made in the fence, the volume of their moans building. They were going to be a problem, but not a big one.

To his patrols Barnes said, “Keep this secure. Hold it as long as you can, but when you hear the call to come up, you come running. Understand? It won’t matter if they get in at that point.”

The two men nodded. Barnes took a last look at the dead bodies of Aaron and his wife and son, shook his head, and then headed back to the pavilion.

Ed Moore walked out of the auxiliary dining tent and into the cutting chill of the morning air. A fine, powdery snow covered the fields and the roofs of the nearby buildings. Here and there, patches of brown grass protruded from the white sheets of snow and ice. An old-fashioned analog thermostat hanging from a nail on the side of the tent read twenty-two degrees. There was ice hanging from the face of it like a beard, and to Ed the twenty-two degrees seemed a little like wishful thinking. In the distance, the north fence was like a ghostly black arm protruding from a gray fog of low clouds. He could hear the infected moaning outside the gate, and he wondered how long it would take Barnes and his patrol to clear them.

Something was going on near the pavilion. People were moving up the road from the dormitories, and he could hear their voices, loud but indistinct, over the wind.

“What’s going on?” Billy asked. He had just come from the dining tent and was dressed in a red flannel shirt and jeans over thick layers of long underwear. His hair was getting long, but his beard was still spotty.

“Don’t know,” Ed said.

Jeff Stavers came out of the dining tent and stood next to Billy.

On the far side of the pavilion, children were breaking off from their parents and getting shepherded toward the education tents. A four-wheel-drive pickup with oversized tires was chugging up the frozen hillside from down near Jasper’s quarters, several white fifty-five-gallon drums in the bed.

“Ed,” Billy said. “Look at that.”

“I see it.”

“What do you think Jasper’s planning?” Jeff asked.

“No idea. I don’t think it’s gonna be good, though.”

A few of Barnes’s men came by with rifles slung over their shoulders. They seemed agitated and impatient. One went inside the dining tent and called everybody outside while the other one told everybody to head toward the pavilion.

“What’s going on?” Ed asked them.

“Just get to the pavilion,” the guard said.

Ed nodded, and when the patrol moved off toward the kitchen, he turned to Billy and Jeff and said, “I think we just ran out of time, guys. Start getting everybody together in one spot.”

“What have you got planned, Ed?” Jeff asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know? What about the military? Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said. There was a sense of urgency in his tone. “Just move. Quickly now.”

Ed watched them go.