Deadlocked 6 (10 page)

"Why?" asked Annie with disdain.

"First off, because we want to ask him some questions. Second, because we're not barbarians."

"Okay, that's enough." I stopped the conversation before it escalated into a fight. Tension was high in the camp since my election, with half of us yearning for peace and the other half pushing for war. Clyde was on my side, and had become increasingly frustrated with Billy's push for retaliation against the military. "Is he going to make it?"

Clyde grimaced, and then shook his head. "I doubt it."

"Can he talk? Can we get any answers out of him before he dies?"

"He's in a fevered state, and the poppy's not helping." He looked at Annie and added, "Without the poppy he'd be unconscious, or dead by now."

"Have you been able to get any information out of him?" I asked.

"No," said Clyde. "He just keeps asking for his brother."

"Do we know anything about this guy?" I asked and looked at Annie.

She shrugged. "Not much. He showed up at Vineyard with Harrison. I think Kim and Stitch found him at Hanger."

"So we've got to assume he was working with the military," I said.

Annie grimaced and shook her head. "I don't think so. He was the one that took the helicopter down. He's the one that shot the pilot."

"His brother," said Clyde, dismissive of Annie's opinion that the man had nothing to do with the military showing up at Vineyard. We were all struggling to put the pieces together, and people were jumping to conclusions. It was my job to try and decide the best path to take, and I could tell that Clyde was frustrated that I didn't immediately agree with him. "Come on, Laura, this seems pretty obvious. The reason they attacked Vineyard was because of this guy. He probably went AWOL and they sent some people out after him."

"That doesn't make any sense," said Annie. "They came with trucks filled with zombies. That seems a little bit over dramatic, doesn't it? And what about what happened at the other towns? There's more to this."

"It can't be a coincidence that this guy shows up in Juniper and then, suddenly, his brother shows up," said Clyde.

"I agree," I said cautiously. "But we've got to examine all of it before we jump to any conclusions. What are the reasons they might've attacked Vineyard?"

"And Juniper," said Annie. "And Hanger."

"Right," I said as I walked around the table to retrieve a pad of paper to start writing down what we were talking about. "But let's focus on Vineyard for now. Why do we think they attacked?" I looked at Clyde and Annie, waiting for answers.

"Shouldn't we get the others?" asked Annie.

I shook my head. I wasn't sure whom I could trust anymore, and I wanted to get as much information as possible before including the other lieutenants. I knew that I could trust Zack, who was a lieutenant that had become one of my closest friends over the years, but he was always overprotective of me, and I didn't want to stoke his anger by revealing what Billy had started.

I
find it helpful to write out my thoughts before making any final decisions, and having Annie and Clyde here could help me decipher my muddled head. "Let's just run through this first. What are the possible reasons they attacked Vineyard?"

"To find the pilot's brother," said Clyde. "The guy named Ben."

I wrote down that as the first possibility.

"To find the girls that escaped," said Annie.

"What girls?" asked Clyde.

"We picked up a couple girls that escaped from DIA," said Annie. "They had been imprisoned there, in…"

"What were you doing at DIA?" asked Clyde.

I looked at Annie with raised eyebrows. "I don't think there's any avoiding it. You're going to have to tell him what was going on."

Her jaw tightened as she pulled out one of the lawn chairs and sat down at the table. "Hero and I found out what happened at Hanger."

"So it's true?" asked Clyde. "The other medics were talking about it, but I hadn't heard for sure. Is the whole town dead?"

Annie nodded. "Not just dead. They were infected."

"Everyone?" he asked.

"As far as we could tell," said Annie. "And the same thing happened in Juniper."

Clyde scowled and shook his head as he sat down at the table. "That doesn't make any sense."

"They were poisoned," said Annie. She leaned forward and used a pin to point at Hanger on the map. "We found stacks of crates, and Hero found some white powder that he said was the same thing they used to distribute the disease twenty years ago."

Clyde crossed his arms and looked pensive as he listened to Annie. Then he looked up at me and shook his head. "That still doesn't make sense. Where are the survivors? Where are the ones that were immune? There had to be a few people there that didn't catch the disease."

"I don't know," said Annie. "Maybe they were killed off when the disease started."

"All of them?" asked Clyde, unconvinced. "And what about Juniper? If the same thing happened there, then there should be some people that were immune and survived. This doesn’t make sense."

"Okay," I said. "Let's stay focused. Annie, what happened next?"

She traced a line across the map that led from Hanger to Denver International Airport. "We found a caravan and Hero thought they might be responsible for delivering the poisoned food, so we followed them."

"And they went to the airport?" asked Clyde.

"Yeah." Annie pushed the pin into the map, sticking it into the table beneath.

"Which is where you stumbled upon these girls?" asked Clyde, confounded by the coincidence. Then his tone changed to accusatory as he started to realize what Annie and Hero had been up to. "These two girls just happened to escape right when you showed up? Really?"

Annie rolled her eyes and settled back into her seat. "Hero dropped a few of his bombs down into their airshafts, and it must've broken the girls out or something."

Clyde angrily guffawed and shook his head. His face was turning red as he spoke. "Well that explains it then, doesn't it? God damn it. No wonder they attacked Vineyard. You went and provoked them into it."

"No we didn't," said Annie.

"What do you mean you didn't? You dropped bombs on them and they chased you back to Vineyard. What's not to understand?" He stood up and his chair fell over backward. "You fucking idiots."

"Calm down," I tried to intervene.

"You got a whole town killed," said Clyde. "You know that?"

"Calm down!" I screamed to silence them both. "There's a group of people here that want to continue fighting back, and we'll deal with that later. For now, let's focus on the problem at hand."

"We've got it figured out," said Clyde. "They bombed them, and the military struck back."

"That's bullshit," said Annie, threatening to start the heated argument back up again.

I put out both of my hands to shush them. "It's possible that the attack on Vineyard was retaliation, but that's not the whole picture here." I pointed at Juniper, then slid my finger down to Hanger, and finally to Vineyard, tracing the path of destruction. "They poisoned Juniper and Hanger, and then directly attacked Vineyard. Clyde, as much as I want to agree that this was retaliation for Operation Slugger…"

"Slugger," said Clyde. "Is that what this is about?" He looked at Annie. "Were you guys continuing on with that plan despite your orders to stop?"

"Yes," I answered for Annie. "And we'll deal with that in a minute. We've got to face the facts here, though. This isn’t about retaliation. They planned this."

"So what does that mean?" asked Clyde.

I thought about it, mulling over the various possibilities. There was only one explanation that made any sense. "Maybe they've got a new virus. I don't know if they're just testing it out, or if they’ve perfected it, but that's what we're dealing with here. That's why there were no survivors. Either everyone died, or the survivors were taken back to their labs. It has to be one or the other." I glanced at them both, and then back at the map. "Kim and Hero took all of the people that were bit during the attack on Vineyard, and I'd bet damn good money that none of them are still alive."

"When are they getting back?" asked Clyde. "They just took them out to the dumping yard, right? Shouldn't they be here soon?"

"They had to go to the southern yard," said Annie. "The north one is full. It's a bit of a haul, but I'd expect them back here fairly soon."

"I thought the southern was in The Department zone," said Clyde, referring to the area that was controlled by a different group of nomads similar to the High Rollers.

"It is," said Annie. "Billy worked out an arrangement with them to handle any overflow."

"Christ," muttered Clyde. "So he's going around behind our backs and setting up allegiances with other groups? Perfect."

"We'll deal with that later," I said, and then corrected myself pointedly. "I'll deal with that later. For the time being, keep your mouths shut about Operation Slugger and what Billy's been up to. I don't want that conversation happening with the other lieutenants here, especially not Zack. You know how he can get whenever someone disobeys me."

I looked down at the map and thought of the hundreds of people that had lived in each of the three towns that were now marked with a red 'X'. The past two decades had been spent struggling to survive, and the last thing I wanted was to try and start a war that I knew we couldn't win. What sense did it make to try and exact revenge upon a faceless enemy? Why was it worth sacrificing the lives of so many innocents just to strike back at the people that started the apocalypse? Once anger and bravado fade, revenge becomes pathetic and self-obsessive. It had been two decades, and the Reds needed to let go of the past. They needed to look at the future, and try to build a world that the Greens could live in.

I thought of my grandson, and the wounds that scarred him. He was innocent, yet had suffered because of a war he had no part in. The attack on our caravan was retaliation by the military for an assault that Billy had put together against a nearby base. The wave of Greys had been delivered in trucks and released in the dead of night. Afterwards, Billy and several others drafted plans for a massive attack that called for all able-bodied survivors to take up arms and fight back. This was what finally initiated the change in guard, and when I was elected captain I pushed for a new focus on peace. The High Rollers were tired of a two decade long war, and were ready for a new strategy. We decided to focus on providing protection for the local towns, with the intention of establishing our own permanent base soon.

It was supposed to be the beginning of a new, peaceful time for us.

Things have a tendency of not working out like we hoped they would.

"Say what you want about why it's happening," said Annie. "But there's no doubt, the shit's about to hit the fan."

Ben Watanabe

The back of the truck smelled like wet cardboard and blood. It was enclosed, a camouflage tarp stretched taut overhead, and the afternoon sun shone through the fabric to cast a green pallor over me. My arms looked like they belonged to a monster.

My head pounded hard enough to cause my eyesight to quiver, but the pain that should've been associated with the sensation was mysteriously absent. In its place I was afforded a lofty feeling, as if I were being carried along on a sheet held at each corner, taxied through the world with no ability to stop. This was a flatbed, military transport, and I was on the floor beside Harrison, who was unconscious. We'd been rescued from the roof of the building when Vineyard was evacuated, but the rest of the night, and following morning, were a blur to me.

"Harrison," I spoke his name, but it died in my dry throat. All that escaped was a desperate whimper and a gasp of air. I tried to swallow, to wet my throat, but there was no moisture in my mouth and the sensation made me gag. I could taste metal, as if I were sucking on old world
coins. The continuing sway from my drugged state caused my stomach to stir. It felt as if we were drifting through the ocean.

I reached out, but my arm didn't respond, and I stared down at it in wonderment. There were bandages on my wrists and forearm, each sullied with old blood. My chest was wrapped and when I saw the bindings I finally felt their restraint. It was like someone had suddenly pulled me into a tight hug.

"Harrison," I tried again, with more success, although my voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, raspy and almost unintelligible.

The old man was turned away from me. We were both on the floor of the truck, only inches apart, but I couldn't reach out to him because my body wouldn't respond to my commands anymore.

His long, wiry hair was wet with blood and sweat. It flowed out from under a bandage that wrapped his head, and the green light from above twinkled in the blood on the floor. He was breathing, and was mumbling in his sleep, so I settled back and stared up at the kaleidoscopic display emitting from the tarp.

A morose acceptance seeped into me, like a terminal patient complacent with their impending end. I closed my eyes, allowing the flow of the painkillers to send me on my way. My body felt like it was going one-way, and my gut another. I imagined my stomach as a bellicose sergeant, barking directional orders that his squad ignored. He bounced around, his beret threatening to fly off his sloshing head as the top half of his body rose out of a slat on the top of the vehicle. My chest was the car, and my heart the driver, with my lungs as two twin jokers smoking cigars filled with marijuana and dusted with a liberal serving of hallucinogenic toad scrapings. It was the mad dream of a drugged mind, and I laughed at the vision.