Lethal Seasons (A Changed World Book 1) (17 page)

“Ten years into a new world and the children we have may not be able to rebuild the world as we remember it.”

History of a Changed World
, Angus T. Moss

Wisp moved away from the frightened woman. He could feel Nick’s curiosity and went to join him down the hall where he stood before the next door.

“Is there a problem?” Nick asked in a low voice.

“She’s afraid of me.” Wisp watched the woman devour her food. She was obviously starving. Her long brown hair hung in greasy tangles down past her shoulders. Like all of the prisoners, she was slender, extremely pale and weakly muscled. Her large blue eyes narrowed in concentration as she stuffed her mouth. She had elegant long-fingered hands and narrow feet marred by long nails that were chipped and dirty. Clean and healthy, he thought she would be beautiful.

Nick huffed out a sigh of frustration. “She’s the first one that reacted. What makes her different?”

“She looks familiar.”

“You’ve seen her before? I checked the chart, she’s been here five years.”

“I don’t think it’s my memory.” He shrugged at Nick’s raised eyebrow. “It’ll take me a bit to sort that out. In the mean time...” He gestured to the next door. “No one alive in there.”

Nick opened the door to an empty room. Wisp could feel his relief. Despite the fact that Nick had no responsibility for any of the people imprisoned here, he felt guilty. Every dead body gave Nick another small burden of regret. Helping rescue the others seemed to ease that burden a little. All of which seemed very odd. Wisp wondered how long Nick would remain here. Every minute entangled them further into a disaster not of their making. He wanted to leave as soon as possible.

Nick shut the door and marked the room as empty. He tipped his head toward the next door. “How about that one?”

Wisp reached out his senses. He could feel Ruth, standing to one side as a cloud of disapproval laced with fear. Kyle focused on the task before him, calm and resolute. The rows of prisoners were still subdued, foggy, mildly confused when they could form a thought at all. Except for that one woman. She was struggling with her emotions, fear and anger and longing overlapping with top notes of desperation. He blocked those minds out and reached toward the row of rooms yet to search.

“Nothing. Empty or dead.”

“Good. I’m going to bet empty.” Nick pulled open the next door, glanced inside, then shut it and marked it. Took him only a few minutes to deal with the final ten doors.

“How many do we have?” Nick asked.

“Twenty-three living, four dead,” Kyle announced.

Wisp felt that twinge of guilt hit Nick again. “There wasn’t anything you could have done to stop those deaths,” he offered.

Nick gave him a sad smile. “Thanks.” He turned to survey the group of released prisoners. “Let’s get these folks upstairs.

“These people can’t climb the stairs,” Kyle pointed out.

Nick realized he was right as soon as he said it. The prisoners had barely been able to walk down the hall to the stairs. They were weak from their incarceration, and possibly malnutrition. “There’s an elevator.”

He saw that thoughtful, inward look on Kyle’s face again. He gave him a moment to think his plan through. “It makes more sense to remain in this building and bring the others here. They are more mobile.”

“Yes.” Nick eyed the prisoners. They were mostly staring into space. “You and Ruth stay here with them while Wisp and I find a place to settle them upstairs.

They took the elevator up to the kitchen. Nick and Wisp moved the dead cook into a back hallway. Nick’s first choice was the cafeteria. Unfortunately, there were too many bodies to move, and they’d already left a considerable mess. Nick didn’t want to spend the afternoon sanitizing the place. They located a large lounge that should accommodate everyone and had a minimum of deceased. Then they moved all the corpses that the prisoners might pass and the few from the lounge. Once they got all the prisoners upstairs and settled, Nick went with Kyle and Ruth to bring the rest of the survivors over. He watched them for reactions when they heard who these people were. Two of the guards exchanged guilty looks. Everyone else was amazed that Rutledge had locked up these people.

In the time that they had been dealing with the prisoners, one guard and the two members of Blue Team had left. Nick asked, but no one had thought to inquire why or where they might have gone. That made him uneasy.

“We reported in,” Jonas said. “They haven’t received any shipments. Should any arrive, they are forewarned not to use them. The agencies have been briefed on our situation. They will conference with us tomorrow afternoon with new orders.”

“
They
who?” Nick asked.

“Minister Ackerman?”

Nick was stumped. “When did we get ministers?”

Jonas gave him an odd look. “Ah, I’m not sure. He’s the Minister of Health and reports to the president.”

Nick chuckled. “Wow. We have a president.”

Jonas tipped his head like a puzzled dog. “Where are you from? Of course, we have a president.”

Nick shook his head, too full of questions to allow himself to start in that direction. “Never mind. What did he say?”

“He wasn’t available. We’ll conference with him tomorrow morning.”

Wisp came out of the kitchen area. “There is food to prepare.”

Nick was thankful for the change in subject. He was battling a scope of emotions about this. Where was this government? He’d talked to plenty of people in settlements all up and down the train lines. No one else knew about them. He needed to get more information, but right now, he was hungry. He asked for kitchen volunteers and wasn’t surprised that it was the janitor, the file clerk and the groundskeeper that came forward.

He joined Wisp in the kitchen. The supplies were shocking. They had things he didn’t think still existed. There were oranges, bananas and boxes of sugar. It made him wonder if the archipelago of Florida had started trading, or perhaps one of few remaining Caribbean islands. There was a whole cabinet full of packages of coffee. The walk-in refrigerator had cold cuts, fresh vegetables, margarine and fruit. He felt tears sting his eyes as he stood there with the chill sinking into him. It was like stepping back in time to a pre-virus world. Wisp called him away to show him a rack filled with loaves of bread. For a few minutes his swirling emotions coalesced into anger. Apparently, in the new world, he was a member of the have-nots.

“Why does this make you angry?” Wisp asked.

“Do you know where to get supplies like this?” Nick snapped. His anger was getting the better of him. It seemed so unfair that the settlements could be closed out of access to food.

“I try to live off what I find. I don’t go looking for things like this. Perhaps it is some sort of compensation for the work they do here.”

“Huh,” Nick grunted a reply. It made sense. Money didn’t exist. Why else would people do work that wouldn’t put a roof over their heads or food on the table? Food and shelter had to be a given. Maybe for their families too. Which gave him another idea. “I want to bring some of this back to High Meadow.”

“There is more here than the existing survivors would need. Will you ask, or just take?”

Nick stared at the overflowing shelves. They must have just gotten a shipment. The fresh food would spoil soon. He needed to find out who the survivors had put in charge. Once he knew who that was, he’d know whether asking would work.

*    *    *

Nick went to see what the volunteers had come up with. A couple of the guards had dragged in two long tables from the cafeteria. Quinton, the groundskeeper, had assembled a tray of sliced bread with margarine and was handing it out to the prisoners. Nick was glad to see that people were warming to their tasks. Most of them were shocked and scared. Familiar things helped. In a very short time, they sat down to a meal of sliced turkey in canned gravy with carrots and peas. He would have liked mashed potatoes, but he wasn’t about to complain.

After they’d eaten and gotten volunteers for clean up, he waited to see who would take charge. As he was stacking dirty plates in the dish room, Jonas came over to him. “What should we do now?”

Nick handed his stack off to Lester, the janitor, who was doing double duty. “This isn’t my gig.”

“I’m a chemist,” Jonas said simply. “And I’ve got no place to go now. We can’t do the work Rutledge contracted to do with a handful of people. They’ll give the contracts to our competitors, and I doubt they’re hiring.”

“Competitors?”

“There are a couple of labs that do similar work.”

Nick nodded, relieved, but a small voice nagged at him that the damage done here was irreparable. Of the men and women he’d seen sprawled across sidewalks, hallways and desks, the youngest was probably in his late thirties. There had been a decade of chaos after Zero Year. Schools closed and people were too worried about survival to think about education. He knew of older children at High Meadow that hadn’t learned to read yet. The young men and women now in their twenties had left formal education ten years ago. There were no brilliant science majors competing to fill these positions. A portion of the smartest, most skilled people left in the world were gone. The loss of workers was bad enough, the loss of teachers was crippling. He pushed down hard on the rising fear. “Who trains you people?”

Jonas stared at him for a long minute. Nick could see the realization crowding in behind his eyes. “We lost a lot of good people here.” His voice caught. He cleared his throat, looking at the floor. “I hate to admit it, but Ruth was right. Rutledge was pushing us all the time. The vaccine wasn’t ready.” He glanced over to the prisoners. “And I haven’t a clue who those people are. This all just stinks. I need a new job.”

“You’re welcome to come to High Meadow Med Center. We can always use another pair of hands.”

“Thanks, but I’ll wait to hear what my options are when we hear from Ackerman tomorrow.”

Nick slipped away to an office to contact Angus. He sat at the console with a groan. He was tired and achy and just wanted to walk away from this mess. He opened a line to High Meadow knowing that Angus was probably still at dinner, but hoping he was working.

“Nicky!” Angus greeted him with a smile. “I am delighted to hear from you. Is all well?”

“All is very complicated. Don’t want to go into it right now.”

Angus’s smile slipped. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Might be delayed a day or two returning. I didn’t want you folks to worry.” Nick saw Angus look past him for clues to his whereabouts. He’d picked up on Nick’s hint that all was not going as planned.

“Have you found what you were looking for?”

“Found what we needed to know. Don’t think there will be any vaccine this year.”

“Oh.” Angus looked like he was struggling to contain the million questions that Nick knew were boiling around in his brain. Normally, Nick contacted him from train stations, as that was about the only place with ether access anymore. Whatever Angus could see of the office must surely have him puzzled.

“I’ll give you the long story when we get back. I might be bringing guests.”

“Guests are always welcome.”

“How are things on your end?” Nick felt sure that anything Angus would say would be generic enough that it wouldn’t get them into trouble. And that thought had him skidding to a halt. He didn’t know what he was trying to hide from whom. But in a situation like this, he decided to follow Wisp’s lead. He did not want to bring himself or High Meadow to the attention of anyone who had access to heavily armed men. It would be best for them to leave first thing in the morning.

“When a people are migratory they do so in clans and tribes carrying their traditions, their very civilization, along with them. When our people went on the move, it was often solitary and without plan.”

History of a Changed World
, Angus T. Moss

The breakfast meeting in the lounge was brief. Nick did a head count and saw that more of the guards and another lab tech had left. That made less people for him to worry about. The prisoners trooped in, guided by Kyle. Someone had brewed up an urn of coffee. There was orange juice, toast and hard boiled eggs, brought from the kitchen on the food carts from the basement. Adequate, but he missed Susan's cooking. With all these supplies, she’d have whipped up something really special.

Angus had warned him that the flu was moving quickly through the settlement. It seemed to randomly hit some people harder. So far they couldn’t tell when it would be a mild case or lethal. Angus warned him of fatalities but didn’t mention any names. That worried Nick most of all. But other news about the Riverbank folks lightened his mood. Jean was back on her feet and Bruno and William were making progress. He made Angus a promise to get home in a few days and signed off. Although he would have loved Angus’s advice, he didn’t feel comfortable talking about the situation on an open format. For all he knew, the calls from this lab were monitored by the government. Nick got a coffee and joined Kyle and Ruth at a table. “Where's Wisp?” he asked them.

Kyle shrugged. “He's around somewhere.”

Ruth gave him a searching look. “Why don’t you know where he is? Isn’t he your responsibility?”

Nick decided the truth could come later, when it wouldn’t interfere with more serious issues. “I give him a long leash.”

That didn’t seem to satisfy her. She snatched Kyle’s empty plate and stacked it with hers, slamming the china hard against a plastic tray. “I’ll check on the prisoners.”

Nick waited for her to get out of earshot before going into the problem at hand. “I need to find out what kind of drugs the prisoners are on.”

“I don’t know. I’ve spoken to some of the others. No one knew they were down there.”

“Can you test their blood?” Nick asked.

“I am not a phlebotomist,” Kyle said with alarm. “We don’t deal directly with people.”

“We need to know what's going to happen when this stuff wears off.”

A muscle twitched in Kyle’s jaw. His eyes scanned the room for Ruth. “I can research the drug, its effects and duration.”

“Thank you. I would appreciate that.”

Nick figured that Kyle was probably the best person to ask about the prisoners. As a biobot, he understood the workings of ownership. “Will the government assume authority over the prisoners?”

Kyle looked lost for a moment. “This is Dr. Rutledge's lab. He is dead. He won the contract for the vaccine, but we are no longer in a position to fulfill our obligation. Another one of the consortiums will have to take over the contract. I don't believe that the people he detained would be part of that contract because our research is proprietary information. The lab is not required to share its sources.”

Nick felt almost dizzy with the shift in perspective. There was a whole world he wasn't privy to involving consortiums, contracts and ministers and even a president. But a great rush of relief hit him because there were backups in place. “So there's another lab that will start making vaccines?”

“I believe so. We will know later today when we receive our orders.”

*    *    *

The prisoners remained at the tables after they’d eaten. Some looked more alert than others. Nick got a second cup of coffee and made the rounds. One by one, he sat down, introduced himself and asked a few questions. Most of them couldn’t even remember their names. They gave one word answers or stared at him blankly. He wrote everything down, even garbled nonsense in the hope that it might make sense later. The woman, Melissa, seemed in better shape. She couldn’t answer his questions either, but in her case, he felt that she was hiding something. When he finished, he saw Wisp had arrived and was filling a tray with food.

“Where were you?”

“Made a circuit. The bodies out in the open are in bad shape. Looks like we had some small predators in here last night. Crows came in this morning.” Wisp took a mug and filled it with coffee. “The people that left took equipment along with vehicles.”

“I don’t care about that.”

Wisp nodded agreement.”I didn’t know what the equipment was for, so I don’t know its value to a place like High Meadow.”

“Not on the agenda today,” Nick said shortly. He hadn’t even thought about that. If he had more time, he might consider looking for things they could use in the infirmary, but he wanted to be out of here as soon as possible. His gut was telling him to move, pronto.

“There are six vans like the one we took from the mercenaries. I think we could fill one with supplies and leave.”

Nick refilled his mug with coffee and took an orange, feeling very luxurious about the amount of food available. “I want to wait and hear what this Minister has to say.”

Wisp gave him that pale blue assessing look again, but didn’t question him. “After I eat, I’ll start loading a vehicle.”

Nick nodded, absently. He didn’t know when he’d gotten to be in charge. It seemed to be happening to him an awful lot lately.

*    *    *

Nick arrived just minutes before the conference call. It was set up in a small briefing room. The remaining survivors settled in seats facing a smartwall. He stood out of the sightline of the camera. He didn't have a right to be here, but he wanted to hear what was going to happen.

“Gentlemen.” The link opened without notice. A stern looking man in a suit greeted them. A wave of nostalgia hit Nick. He hadn't worn a suit since Zero Year. The man looked pressed and starched, and it made him wonder where he got that sort of thing done. Laundries and dry cleaners, department stores and tailors, there were so many things gone out of the world.

Jonas took the lead. “Minister Ackerman.” He gave the man a courteous nod. “You have the recommendation of the Health Agency for us?”

“Yes, Dr. Pruitt. We have spoken with the other labs. They are preparing to take on the additional work. They are also willing to take on some of the staff there. I’m sending you the lab locations and which positions they are looking to fill. We all agree that it is best to abandon that installation. We have no use for it at this time. We are sending an army unit to take an inventory of any equipment that might be helpful at the other labs. They will also deal with the deceased.”

“And the rest of us?” demanded a man.

“What are your skills?”

“I'm a lab tech.”

Ackerman glanced to one side, his eyes moving as if reading. “I believe there are positions available.”

“For what kind of pay?”

Nick perked up. Were they using some kind of money?

“The usual. Food, shelter and access to private markets.”

The disgruntled man jolted to his feet and stomped out. Nick wondered what he expected from the world as it was. Or maybe these people didn’t know about the world the have-nots were living in. There couldn't be many places where he could work. He was curious about the private markets. He’d like to know a little more about that.

“Will we be required to remain here until the army arrives?” Ruth asked.

“Is there any danger to leaving the place empty?”

“There aren't any bandits in the area that we know of,” Jonas said.

“The unit has already been dispatched. They should arrive there sometime tomorrow, I believe, and everyone will be expected to depart at that time. If the place is empty when they get there, I suppose that makes their job easier.” Ackerman leaned forward, frowning into the camera. “Once the army takes possession of the compound, they
will
be in charge.”

It seemed pretty cold to Nick. This was their home, and they were being kicked out with barely twenty-four hour notice.

“Understood Minister,” Jonas said smoothly. “Anything else?”

“No, I think that covers it Dr. Pruitt.”

Jonas cut the connection and tossed the list of positions on to the side wall. The scientists and lab techs crowded together to get a look. The guards left the room arguing among themselves. Nick was tempted to follow. They posed a greater threat than any of the other people in this room.

Ruth turned from the list with anger in her eyes. “Are they serious with this?”

“What?” Nick asked.

Jonas slumped in his chair. “All low level positions. Cleaning test tubes for some big shot.”

“We’re being punished,” someone grumbled.

Ruth folded her arms tightly, scowling at the blank video screen. “We failed. We go to the bottom of the ranking now.” She gave a frustrated huff in Nick’s general direction before marching out the door..

Jonas rubbed his face and turned bloodshot eyes on Nick. “We gotta get out of here before they arrive.”

“You think there will be trouble?”

“I think that anything I want to take with me might suddenly become government property.”

“What are these private markets?” Nick asked.

Jonas gave him that curious look again. “Why do I get the feeling you just arrived on the planet?”

Nick smiled, trying to put him at ease. “You’re a have. I’m a have-not. The settlements and med centers don’t have access to the private markets.”

“Well, yeah, ‘cause they’re
private
.” Jonas scoffed at him. “Wait, you guys didn’t even know about them?”

“Nope.”

“Huh, that doesn’t seem right. I mean, how do they hire people if nobody knows what the rewards are?”

“When’s the last time they were hiring?”

Jonas frowned. “I think you’re scaring me.”

“I think you’ve got an elite system going here.” Nick leaned against the wall. The rest of the people filed out, grumbling to one another. Nick watched them go. They were all well fed. Their clothes were new and varied. “Most of this stuff isn’t available anymore.”

Jonas cracked his knuckles, one by one, his frown deepening. “I don’t understand what that means.”

“I travel around looking for settlements to barter with. Very few are self-sufficient. More than a few survive entirely on train food. I haven’t seen an orange since I went out to the Nevada coast. And even then it was just a few trees in an mostly destroyed orchard.”

“Really? I didn’t think things were that bad.”

“Out there it feels like nobody’s minding the store.”