The Dead Series (Book 2): Dead Is All You Get (5 page)

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “How did you figure this out? I mean, I’m not exactly stupid.” I turned to Griffin for confirmation. She pretended to notice a flea on the dog’s ear.

Holly knelt and rested her head on my knee. “Dave, don’t try to think like a woman. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Shit—I suck.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, getting up.

“I’m an idiot.” She hugged me, probably out of pity.

“No, you’re a
guy
.”

So that was it. More evidence that women were smart and men were morons. Alert the media. I desperately needed a comeback, but I had nothing. So I changed the subject.

“I need to talk to Warnick.”

Holly shook her head. “I don’t think he can help you. Don’t forget, he works for them. I’m sure he has his orders.” I got up and headed for the door. “Where are you going?”

“To find Evie.”

“We’re coming with,” she said.

We found Evie, notebook in hand, interviewing a physician’s assistant outside one of the MMUs. I almost didn’t recognize her. She wore clean clothes that were, in truth, not her style. They fit well enough, but were nothing like the tailored jackets and skirts she normally wore and resembled something off the rack at Target. Her makeup and hair, though neat, were different too. She could have passed for a Tres Marias homemaker.

“We need to talk,” I said as we approached her.

“Thanks for your time.” She shook the interviewee’s hand and waited as he headed into the MMU. Then to me, “Not here.”

“There are Black Dragon people all over the place. Where can we go?”

“I know a place,” Griffin said.

We made our way along the main building and around the side, past the shed where we’d found Griffin being dragged away by her deranged, gangrenous stepfather. Like the rest of the school, the area was clean. The ground was swept and flowers planted along the pathway leading to the common area. I could still hear Griffin’s desperate screams in my head, and I had to look at her again to remind myself she was safe.

She led us to a basement entrance at the rear of the building and trotted down the few concrete steps while the rest of us stood watch. The door was locked. She slammed her shoulder into it once, springing the door, and went in.

“Griffin, how do you know this place?” Holly said as we followed.

The girl’s voice was low and afraid. “It’s where Travis kept me prisoner.”

“Who’s Travis?” Evie said.

“Travis Golightly,” I said. “Her stepfather. He’s dead.”

“Sounds to me like the girl caught a break.” Evie touched Griffin’s shoulder. “Listen to me, kid. For years my dad terrified my mother and … hurt me, which is why I left home at sixteen. It is what it is. All you can do is move on.”

I wasn’t sure if Griffin needed to hear the raw, bitter truth coming from this veteran reporter. It made me uncomfortable. When I turned to Holly, I saw a rising anger. I wondered whether it came from Evie’s powerful words or from the truth of what happened to Griffin in here.

Griffin nodded meekly. Maybe she’d found a kindred spirit—someone who knew firsthand what she’d been through, including the years of sexual abuse. “How … how did you get through it?” she said.

“Like you.” Evie’s voice was softer now. She smiled at Holly and me, then took Griffin’s hand. “I was lucky enough to find good people who were genuinely interested in helping me. Not wanting anything in return other than my promise to better myself. They made all the difference in my life. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“Thanks, Evie,” Griffin said.

Weak light filtered in through the dirty basement windows like distant starlight, and I saw the hard expression on Evie’s face melt like snow, leaving the careworn lines of worry that come from the wrong kind of experience. She was an attractive woman—older in person—but one who had been damaged in so many ways over the years. It made sense to me that she was fearless, having suffered at the hands of whatever demon had possessed her father and destroyed her childhood. She was a dark survivor who had not only found a way to live but discovered in herself a way to make a real difference.

As my eyes adjusted, I could make out dusty grey metal racks of junk—old homecoming dance decorations, pep rally banners and discarded furniture. Griffin froze, her body shuddering as if from the cold.

“You okay?” Holly said.

“Yeah. I need a minute.”

A pair of bloodstained handcuffs—the kind the police use—hung from one of the metal racks. On the floor lay an overturned grey plastic bucket. A shudder ran through me as I imagined Griffin trapped here, at the mercy of a deranged sex offender, forced to pee in a pail. I thought about my own ordeal, held prisoner by the Red Militia and beaten mercilessly. But I was a grown man—I was capable of moving past it. How was a young girl supposed to come out of this living nightmare?

Finally, with the grace of an angel, Griffin made her way to a sturdy metal table and chairs. Gently squeezing her hand, I took a seat with her and the others.

“So, formal introductions,” I said to Evie. “I’m Dave Pulaski, and this is my wife Holly. And this is Griffin Sparrow.”

“Well, you know me. Everybody knows me. I’m Evie Champagne, ‘star reporter.’ As you can see, somewhat worse for the wear. Sorry about the clothes. I’ll speak to my producer.”

“We saw you talking to that physician’s assistant,” I said. “I’m guessing you’ve tried interviewing everyone here.”

“Yeah, the civilians don’t know anything and no one in Black Dragon is talking—including the medical staff. It’s radio silence.”

“Speaking of which. Do you know what’s going on with the cell service?”

“That is one helluva mystery, isn’t it?” she said. “No one can explain it, nor can they tell us why the land lines don’t work. I’m guessing it’s intentional.”

“Well, it didn’t stop us from communicating with you a few days ago,” Holly said.

“I remember you wrote down ‘Robbin-Sear Industries.’ What do they have to do with all this?”

“Dave, you have to understand,” Evie said. “The evidence I’ve collected is sketchy. But it’s my belief that they’re the ones responsible for what happened.”

“You mean, the outbreak?” I said. “How?”

“Look, being a reporter is hard. Most of your time is spent chasing down leads, doing research, putting the pieces together until you have a story. You check and double-check the facts, you know, to make sure the station doesn’t get sued. Every once in a while, you get lucky. I mean,
really
lucky. You live for those moments.”

Her eyes sparkled in a way that told me she was born for this.

“Before I became a television news reporter, I was a researcher at the
San Francisco Chronicle
. A friend of mine, Rudy Moritz—you might’ve heard of him—knew I was good and asked me to help him research a story he was working on. Something bizarre had happened in a remote mountain village in Guatemala, somewhere near Jacaltenango. There were somewhere around a hundred people in the village—mostly elderly. The place was so small it wasn’t even on the map.

“Something came over the AP wire. It seemed that practically everyone in the village had come down with a strange illness. The symptoms were very similar to what you saw here in Tres Marias in the early days. People wandering the streets like ghosts—their eyes blank—gibbering like idiots.”

“The jimmies,” I said.

“Exactly. At first, the doctors thought it was Hantavirus or Ebola. But everyone tested negative for those. Rudy, who has a medical background, went down there to investigate. I tried to find out what I could using public records, talking to immunologists, stuff like that. We explored every angle. Tainted water, drugs, the military. Nothing fit.

“Then Rudy called me on his satellite phone and told me he’d seen a group of Americans ‘sneaking around’ down there. That’s how he put it. They claimed to be researchers from some NGO and were very reluctant to talk to my friend. You can guess who they really worked for.”

“Robbin-Sear,” Holly said.

“Yep. Rudy was persistent, and he was able to get an interview with the guy in charge. He told Rudy that they were there simply as observers. That was bullshit, and Rudy knew it. But he played along in order to get the interview. The next day, he was expelled from the country. His notes, computer—everything—were confiscated. As a result, the paper didn’t allow him to write the story.”

“What happened to the people in the village?” Griffin said.

Evie gazed at the ground. “They never said, officially. But all of the bodies were incinerated.”

My head hurt. I tried sifting through the information, tying it back to what was happening in our town.

“Tell us about Tres Marias,” I said.

Evie laid everything out for us, based on all the investigation she had done up to then.

She and her cameraman, Jeff, had covered the story, getting what information they could from the locals. She hadn’t had much luck talking to Black Dragon, though. Understandable, considering the town was in lockdown mode. At the start of the outbreak, people had begun coming down with the jimmies. At the time it was thought that they’d either been bitten by infected animals or other people—no one was really sure. When they died off, the hordes appeared. And after death, people “turned” by the hundreds, becoming undead things that craved human flesh. There was no evidence, though, that this had happened in Guatemala.

“When Black Dragon rolled into town,” Evie said, “they got to work burning bodies.”

Things had really turned ugly when the Red Militia clashed with Black Dragon. It was open warfare in the streets.

“I was able to get an interview with Ormand Ferry, the leader of the Red Militia. He insisted that the whole episode was a government conspiracy, and he was trying to save the town.”

After that, things had become too dangerous on the streets, and Evie and Jeff went into hiding. But they continued to investigate. A break came when their news van nearly collided with another van traveling in the opposite direction and driven by a researcher from Robbin-Sear named Larry Evans.

“He was pretty wound up, if you ask me,” she said.

They both pulled over to make sure everyone was all right. Seeing the company name on the van, Evie went to work. I could just see her standing there in her fitted blazer, tight skirt and black stilettos, working Larry like a sock puppet.

Robbin-Sear was a privately funded bioscience technology company. They were under contract—he wouldn’t say to whom—to develop a vaccine to inoculate American troops fighting overseas. He claimed not to know anything about the current outbreak. But Evie pushed hard. That’s when Larry referred her to his boss.

“I tried getting more information, but it was no use. By then, Black Dragon had quarantined the town. There was no way for Jeff and me to get out. The evac center was overrun, and we needed to find a place to hide. We were lucky enough to discover that satellite building—the one belonging to Arkon.”

“How long were you there?” Holly said.

“Weeks. Seemed like forever. We had electricity and running water. Jeff made food runs, bringing back whatever he could scavenge.” She rubbed her eyes. “He kept me alive. One day we found the VTC equipment in one of the conference rooms. Jeff decided to try calling out on it. He worked on it for days, but there was no one on the receiving end. I think it was a total accident that we made the connection with you.”

“Then someone broke in,” I said.

“Yes, a horde. We were on the second floor and could hear them downstairs. We barely made it out alive.”

“And you headed straight for Robbin-Sear?”

“We were able to get the van out of the city—away from the Red Militia—and into the forest. It was dark by the time we got out, so we slept in the van, intending to drive to the facility in the morning. To meet you.”

“And you were attacked.”

“Yes. It was that horde that came after you. They found us. Jeff stayed behind, trying to hold them off so I could get away. I ran and ran—for what seemed like hours—but it was only a few minutes. I got to the top of a ridge and when I looked down, I saw the horde. They were already dispersing, and that’s when I knew they’d … that Jeff was dead.”

We waited as she choked down her sorrow and took a long, deep breath.

“When I saw the helicopters, I flagged them down, waving my jacket like a crazy woman. Fortunately, it was red, and they spotted me right away. I knew you guys were headed there too, so I told them to keep searching for other survivors. You know the rest.”

Holly touched Evie’s hand. Anyone else would have broken down, but this woman held it together.

“Sorry to get emotional,” she said.

“So you think these events are connected,” Holly said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“But how?” I said.

“Dave, history is filled with examples of the US testing modified viruses and experimental vaccines on its own citizens. I’ll give you one. In 1994, Senator John D. Rockefeller released a report stating that for fifty years, the Department of Defense experimented on military personnel.”

“Okay …”

“So what’s to stop them from sacrificing a few isolated villagers in a country nobody cares about?”