Death Springs Eternal: The Rift Book III (16 page)

Sturgeon stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Uh, boss…” he began.

“What,” growled
Cody.

“Well…we’re not so sure about this.”

“About what?”

The kid pointed at the hotel. “About all
them
folk. We don’t think bringing them all’s a good idea.”

Cody chuckled.
“Oh yeah?
Why?”

“Well, the thing is…y’see…there’re rules.”

“Yeah.
And?”

“And there’s some, y’know, folks in there the general…well, the COC…don’t want around.”

This time, Cody outright laughed. “You don’t say?”

Sturgeon crinkled his nose, appearing confused.
As did Herb and Garret.
Hell, they
all
did.

“Listen,” said Cody when his guffaw calmed down, “don’t worry
none
about it. There’s fucking doctors in there, man, and freaking
bitches.
” His waning confidence started to gather again, and he felt much more himself. “Hell, we might never see that many chicks again. We gotta bring ’em back with us, and just by looking at the lot of ’em, they’re gonna stick together. Let Bathgate sort ’em all out when we get there.”

“Is she worth it?” asked Herb with a knowing shake of his head.

“Hells
yeah
she’s worth it.”

Just then, there was the sound of knuckles pounding on glass. Cody turned around to see the big cop, Forrest, standing at the door, ushering him to come back inside. Cody nodded and then flashed his mates an a-okay.

“Here goes nothing,” he said. “I betcha they say yes.”

Herb didn’t look so sure.
Fuck him
, Cody though.
I know what the hell I’m doing.

At least he hoped that was the case.

*
  
*
  
*

“This is not right,” said Billy.
“Not at all.”

Dr. Terry shot him an irritated glance. “You are more than welcome to stay behind.”

Billy stood rock-still and stared at the old man, not giving ground. But Dr. Terry was a strong one, and he didn’t give any either. They were two immovable objects, gazing across the short expanse between them, irritation shining in both of their eyes.

People moved around them as if they didn’t exist, excited faces attached to bodies that lugged bags of clothing and other personal items. The Omni was preparing for a grand exodus, getting ready to flee their safe haven and trudge south, where the promise of a better life and fresh start awaited them.

But it was an empty promise, and Billy knew it. He knew it when he first peered at Marcy’s expression as she gazed into the newcomer’s eyes, and the ominous words of warning she uttered in the moments afterward. She’d told him there was insanity there, insanity and a sort of corruption she couldn’t quite explain.
Like termites in the rafters
, she said.
It looks good on the outside, but once you peel back a few layers…

Dr. Terry finally blinked. He hobbled forward, grabbed Billy’s arm with a grip that felt quite strong for someone his age, and muttered, “Come with me.” Billy complied, following the old man across the carpeted floor of the lounge toward the office behind the bar.

Once Dr. Terry clicked the door shut, he turned to Billy and waggled a crooked finger at him. “Listen to me, Mr. Mathis,” he said, not without compassion. “I know the risks here. I don’t like it any more than you do.”

“So why are we leaving?” Billy asked with a sigh.

“Because there’s one thing that drives people, and if we remove that one thing, everything will eventually wither away. Hope. You know about hope, do you not, Mr. Mathis? We have already seen a few go missing, and of their own accord. These people can’t go on thinking this is all there is. We need to give them something to look forward to.”

Billy closed his eyes. “I understand,” he said, “but this is the wrong way.”

“What other way do you suggest then?”

Billy opened his mouth to speak,
then
snapped it shut. He had no answers to give, no grand plan. He had nothing to go on but the insights of a girl who knew something the old man may or may not believe, and it was those insights he trusted, though it was difficult to admit.

“You are being too trusting. I told you what Marcy saw. I told you what she
felt.
This is reason enough for me not to believe these men.”

Dr. Terry shook his head. “First of all,
I
don’t trust them, either. But what do you say we go on here? The ramblings of a woman who might well
be
insane? I think not, William…and for one, I am shocked you would put so much stock in what she says. You are a logical man. Start thinking logically.”

“I am.”

“No, you aren’t. A logical man would say we should leave, give the people optimism yet stay on our toes. At the first sign of trouble, I trust Kelsey and the boys to get us out of it. If what we come upon happens to be a band of marauders, we have enough capably equipped folks here to suppress any threats. But what if it
is
a rebuilding effort? What if this
is
a new beginning? Do we not owe it to everyone to find out?”

Billy squeezed his lips together and frowned.

“I didn’t think so,” said the Doctor.

Dr. Terry shoved his cane into the floor and turned around. As he opened the door he turned back to Billy and offered a couple last words. His expression was sincere as he spoke them.

“Stay if you must, but despite your past, you have proven to be an asset. It would be an honor if you decided to join us.”

With that the old man was gone. Billy leaned back against the desk and put his hand over his face.
If you decided to join us.
Those words grated on him. With the whole residency of the hotel evacuating, there was no decision to make. It was either leave with the rest of them or
get
overrun by the gangs that were slowly taking over the city.

He grunted, slapped his open palms against the desk, and then stormed out of the room. Outside he saw the activity had heightened, and people were shouting back and forth, smiling, helping each other load up for the journey. Just seeing this made him doubt his convictions, and that doubt built as he walked among them, heading for the main entrance. Dr. Terry was right. Who was he to take away their hope?
Not anyone at all
was the answer.

That doubt swiftly left him as he stepped outside into the sunset, and Marcy was the reason. She stood with Leon and Christopher, leaning against the railing that bordered the stairs, looking out at the commotion. Billy followed her gaze, watched the people pile their belongings into the vehicles the soldiers brought, as well as a few Forrest and company requisitioned from a nearby parking garage. The expression on her face said everything, full lips locked in a frown, eyes droopy and sad. Christopher fidgeted on one side of her, while
Leon
rubbed her back on the other. Both of them mirrored the girl in the middle—upset, frightened, uncertain.

He walked up to them and tried to smile. It must have come out better than he expected it to because Marcy and Christopher replied with half-hearted grins of their own. Billy ran a hand over his recently shaved scalp and shook his head.

“There is no convincing them,” he said.

“I know,” replied Marcy.

“What do we do?” asked Christopher.

Leon
shrugged. “We follow the pack.”

“Really?”

Billy placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He looked so frightened—even more so than when they’d shoved their way through the undead horde on the way to the hotel, if that was possible. “Yes,” he replied with a wink. “We will be fine.”

The small group then went about bringing their own meager belongings curbside. Billy grabbed his small bag and held it close to his chest, feeling the binder held within and the sheets of paper within that, documents that chronicled his long journey through both his own mind and the land of the lost. Other than his fellow survivors, it was his most precious possession.

They decided to ride with Forrest, who’d chosen a steel-gray industrial van as his mode of transport. The old cop seemed quite pleased they picked him, and Billy reciprocated that sentiment. For all of Dr. Terry’s words, he got the distinct feeling that Forrest was just as uncomfortable with the whole venture as he was.

 
A few hours later, as dusk settled over
Pittsburgh
, a caravan of twenty vehicles snaked their way out of
Pittsburgh
, Sergeant Jackson leading the way in his cannon-mounted Jeep. They encountered only a few pockets of resistance, as bandana-clad ruffians jumped out from the decaying buildings, only to be cut down in swift procession by the soldiers. The economy of the killing made Billy shiver. Death was an ugly thing to see, and the image of Eric Calhoun, the boy he murdered, entered his thoughts. He saw the kid’s family, drenched in his blood, as smoke wafted from the barrel of Billy’s revolver. He felt again that sense of power, of righteousness, and suddenly wanted to leap from the van right then and there. There was power in murder, power he wanted no part of, power he had a sneaking suspicion would be the basic tenet of any rebuilding process he came across.

It was Marcy who pulled him out of it, putting a hand on his knee and then laying her head in his lap.

“It’ll be okay, Billy,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I promise.”

Christopher leaned in. “You really think so, Marce?”

She nodded weakly. “Yeah, I do.” She reached across and clutched Christopher’s fingers with one hand while
Leon
rubbed her back. She winked. “I promise.”

Christopher sat back and exhaled deeply. “Okay. But you think we’re the only ones? You think other soldiers are out there, looking for survivors? You think they’ll save people?”

“I’m sure of it, Chris.”

Billy looked at her tired face, and knew she was telling the truth.
At least about half of it.

CHAPTER 5

THE SAD, SAD CASE

OF BRANDON HAWTHORNE

Brandon Hawthorne, former captain in the SNF, watched puffy white cumulus clouds whisk across a deep blue sky. Their speed amazed him.
Must be windy up there
, he thought. If only that wind would drop down in altitude. The temperature was probably closing in on a hundred degrees, and the sweat dripping off his body stung him in all the wrong places. He’d always loved the heat, from when he was a kid straight on into adulthood, but he wasn’t in any shape to enjoy it now. The fact that he couldn’t even fan himself only made matters worse.
You’re such a complainer
, he scolded himself. But truth be told, he’d take complaining about the weather any day of the week. At least it distracted him from the pain.

He floated through a sea of human flesh. People surrounded him on all sides, but when he craned his neck to see them they turned away, as if not looking at him would save them from his fate. They were filthy and dressed in torn rags, and they pressed against the bars of steel and wood that held them captive. None ever talked to him, and if he hadn’t heard them whispering amongst themselves, he might have thought them mute. He did wish they would
at least offer him a kind word. He was alone and helpless. He could’ve used the company.

But then he thought of the long, dark nights, when all he could hear were these same people crying, and felt suddenly irritated. When the sun set and the world went black, all
Brandon
wanted was to escape the truth, to withdraw into his mental shell and wish reality away. Their incessant bawling always brought him back to the real world.

Fuck them.

That attitude’s not helping.

He closed his eyes and retreated inward, isolating himself even further from his helpless state. He thought of his wife, Susan, and how she’d succumbed to RF, even after they’d taken every precaution to avoid exposure to the damned virus in the first place. He remembered the look on her face when she started showing symptoms, on a surprisingly chilly fall day as they hid away in their bayou cottage, as far away from civilization as they could get.
Brandon
did his best to help ease her pain for the two weeks she suffered, and in the end left a loaded 9MM on the bed stand. She used it. Susan, who never liked guns, never understood
Brandon
’s obsession with survivalist culture, and loved the Church, sat all alone in the dark, put the pistol to her temple, and pulled the trigger. When he found her, he closed her eyes and left the bayou, actively seeking out danger.
Screw being safe
, he’d thought at the time.
There’s nothing left to live for anyway.

It ended up being a long time before he saw another soul, other than those murderous bastards who’d succumbed to the disease.

When he ran across General Bathgate just outside
Baton Rouge
, he’d been living in squalor for weeks. As a retired naval officer,
Brandon
was immediately cleaned up and given the rank of captain. He assisted with raids and search-and-rescue missions, never once questioning the orders given him. He’d heard whispers of less-than-savory beliefs being the cornerstone of the newly formed SNF, but turned a deaf ear to them. All he knew was that the general had given his life meaning again, had allowed him to put Susan out of his mind. Because of that, he owed the man a debt he could never repay. So when Bathgate asked him to take up the reins of a new, risky operation—he was to head south on the coastal roads, searching for men of value to add to the SNF ranks—he agreed without question.

As he lay there, being whisked away through the crowd of filthy onlookers, Brandon summed up the last half-year as such: What started out as sorrow became a death wish, then somehow turned into an opportunity, which eventually became responsibility, and finally found him coming full circle, dreading death with each passing moment yet wishing someone would grant it to him, and soon.

An itch crept from his ankle to his calf, a stabbing sensation like a thousand tiny pins. He squirmed in the hands that held him, trying to free up his arms and relieve the tingling, but he couldn’t, and realized he didn’t need
to scratch at all, for his arms, legs, hands, and feet were gone. It was all phantom pain, filling up his phantom life.

You fuckers
, he thought. He wished he could say it out loud, but he didn’t have a tongue to speak with.

More memory hit him, just as the deformed bastards hauled him out of the pen and across a field of dead grass. He recalled the day his small platoon was overrun by these beasts, when the strange man with the glowing eyes killed Brad Luckman while
Brandon
watched, helpless. The guy had squeezed poor Brad’s head until it popped and then ordered
Brandon
to be dragged away. He was beaten mercilessly and then dumped in the goddamn pen he’d just left, by himself in the crowd, without one word of explanation.

To pass the time in those early days,
Brandon
would watch the beasts come into the pen, snatch up a handful of people, and then count the seconds until the screaming began. From his experience, it never took longer than eighty-six seconds. Seventeen seconds was the quickest. No one who was taken ever came back.

When they showed up for him,
Brandon
almost danced a jig. He was tired and bored, living each day without food or purpose, simply watching survivors get tossed into the pen, survivors get removed from the pen.
Monotonous to no end.
His heart raced with excitement, thinking the end of his tedium had finally arrived. He didn’t care if he would be released (not likely) or die horribly (most probably), at least it was
something.
Either way, he wouldn’t have to stay in that goddamn paddock with those feeble, whimpering people any longer.

Oh, how wrong he’d been about
that
.

He wasn’t killed, wasn’t released. Instead, he was systematically dismembered. First the bastards took his left arm, then his right. Then his tongue, then his right leg, then his left. His balls came after that, followed by his cock. Each time he was taken away, he was brought to a dank, stinking building filled with human remains, where three of
them
waited for him. They’d tear into him with their claws and teeth, devouring him, and then the one who brought him from the pen—a massive, hunched-over, decayed-looking brute whose clothing, a set of coveralls, seemed to have merged with its flesh—would press a red-hot sheet of metal against the wound, cauterizing it. Then it was back to the stall to wait God knew how long before the next mutilation. He felt like an unfortunate pig whose owners liked their bacon
really
fresh.

Now he was Brandon Hawthorne, human paperweight, who had to wiggle across the ground just to drink from the dirty, piss-filled water pooled on the ground. He felt the burn in his lower abdomen as infection spread up through his intestines. He wouldn’t last long like that. When the fuckers took his penis, they never gave him an outlet for waste.
Heck of an oversight on their part
, he thought.
Unless, of course, they didn’t plan on keeping him alive much longer.

Now there’s a thought.

The scent of burning flesh brought him back to the real world. He didn’t know how long he’d been out of the pen, hoisted above his warder’s head, but it seemed much too long. He opened his eyes, wished he had a hand to shield them from the sun, and saw that he was being carried indoors. This wasn’t the warehouse they always brought him to, and the burning-flesh scent was actually burning
rubber
, as the parking lot of this new place was filled with discarded tires. The tires, and the sun and everything else, disappeared from view as he was lugged through the doorway. His personal jailer roughly tossed him to the ground, and then went about getting him into an upright position, resting against a stone slab. The thing’s claws tore into his flesh as it worked, but that pain wasn’t any more noticeable than the other aches that pervaded his being.

When he was sufficiently propped up, the beast trudged away, leaving him alone in near-darkness.
Brandon
sat still—as if he had a choice—and waited. He felt blood trickle from the new wounds the monster’s claws had forged, dripping to the concrete beneath him like water from a leaky faucet.

A faint yellow flicker, like that of a candle, caught his vision.
Brandon
blinked. Then it came again, and he noticed it wasn’t one but
two
flames, evenly spaced apart. A form began to emerge in the distance, that of a man sitting cross-legged. The flickering came again, and he realized they weren’t burning candle wicks, but eyes. Very slowly, the figure rose to its feet and then walked toward him, deliberately, as if each step needed to be measured, needed to be perfect. As it moved into the area in front of him the figure leaned forward, entering the sparse light from the doorway.

It was
him.

Brandon
thrashed about on his ass and shouted incomprehensibly, but the eerily human face and those glowing yellow eyes never moved. They stared at him, taunting.

“Interesting,” the man said. There was no emotion in his tone. He lifted his hand.

Brandon
froze. The guy held a knife.
A
big
one.

“Uf ooey,” he screeched.
Just do it.

“I may,” replied the man. “If you give me what I desire.”

Brandon
scrunched up his face and ran his teeth over the stubble below his lower lip.
“Wha ooh-ooh wah?”
What do you want?

“Information.”

When
Brandon
opened his mouth to reply, the man put the index finger of the hand not holding the knife to his lips. “No,” he said. “Not like this. I need you to let me
inside
.” He waved his arm in a half-circle. “If you allow it, all this will end.
All of your suffering, your fear, your pain.
All of it.
Do you understand?”

“Weff.”

“Very well.”

The man closed his eyes, and
Brandon
followed suit. At first he felt nothing, but then he let his
body relax
, let the pain wash away, and suddenly his mind was filled with images. He saw fields of burning
grass,
livestock slaughtered, heads propped on stakes, stone huts with thatched roofs, the burial mound of a beautiful woman—

Enough.

Brandon
’s eyes shot open. The man was now sitting across from him, gazing intently, his eyes blazing brighter than before.
Now, you will disclose everything to me.

Brandon
nodded.
What do I need to do?

You are closed to me still. You are dedicated to another. Raze that loyalty, and I will end your suffering.

He tried. He really did. But nothing seemed to be happening.

I can’t
.

The man sighed.
What is more important to you?
An end to your suffering, or your allegiance?
Should you not help me, I will prolong your condition…indefinitely.
The man reached behind him and brought forth a plastic bag filled with clear liquid, a small rubber tube, and a scalpel. On the bag was printed
ANTIBIOTICS
.
Brandon
gasped.