Lethal Seasons (A Changed World Book 1) (19 page)

“Although many people depended on the train food, the ubiquitous Crunch and Stew-goo, no one knew where it was produced. Very few witnessed the arrival of train cars full of packaged food or the stocking of the supply rooms.”

History of a Changed World
, Angus T. Moss

Tilly went through the motions of her normal routine all the while knowing that they were in serious trouble. Three more deaths. Her heart ached with loss. She’d allowed herself a few tears at the graves, but no more. She had to be strong for the rest of them. Most of the time. Here, in her bedroom, alone, she could let down the wall for a little bit.

The people that had recovered from light cases of flu were now caring for the sick. It seemed logical that they would be inoculated. Angus couldn’t find any indicators that would let them know who might be hit harder than another. But in the end, she thought that might be a blessing. Who would want to know that this year’s flu was your death sentence?

Eventually it would come down to not enough hands to do all the work. She stifled a sob of frustration and loss. It all seemed so futile some days. Why fight the inevitable? Man had been stupid enough to sow the seeds of his own demise. She should just sit down and wait for death to overcome her.

Letting the grief and pain wash down through her helped ease it. You could only hold it at bay for so long without repercussions. She took a few deep breaths. Her image in the mirror showed her a stranger, a bony old hag with dark-circled eyes and chapped lips. This was the worst season in years.

She had a long list of things to do but couldn’t get started today. There were faces missing. Great gaps in the community that she didn’t know how to fill. The pain rose again, and she let the tears flow. Somehow she had to get everyone through this.

A knock on the door had her scrambling for a handkerchief. “Come,” she said wiping her eyes.

Angus came in with a steaming cup. “I brought you some tea, my dear.” He set it on the corner of her dressing table without comment. She loved him a little bit more for that. “Bruno has been foraging again and turned up three kinds of mint. Smells lovely, doesn’t it?”

She gave him a hug. He held her for a long time, not speaking. His arms were a familiar weight against her back. This was what made her put up with all his eccentricities. His ability to know when she needed him most. And the uncanny way he had of soothing her by doing nothing, just being present. “I love you.”

“And I you.” He kissed her forehead.

She slipped out of his warm arms and stood shivering for a moment. She felt so vulnerable all of a sudden. “Is breakfast done?”

“People have eaten, but they’re wandering around asking for you.”

“I take one day to sleep in a little and the world falls apart,” she chided with a forced smile.

“You are the queen of this small domain.” Angus gave her a courtier’s bow.

There it was again. He told her that she was needed without demanding she take her place, without accusing her of failing or insisting she work harder. He knew how hard she pushed herself. She didn’t need anyone to point out her lacks or failings. She just needed support. And she knew she could always rely on his.

“Is Martin pulling his hair out?”

Angus turned a hand up in a shrug. “Martin is always fussing about something. I don’t think we need to worry about some mysterious invasion in the middle of a flu season like this. Just about anyone with a brain will hunker down with family or friends.”

Tilly nodded. Like the ancients waiting to war until spring, bandits and bad guys waited for end of flu season to attack. People were more vulnerable then, recovering from illness and loss. Plus the med center had a plan in place now. If they were attacked, everyone would evacuate down to the storm shelters. Martin had rigged them to his own design, claiming they were highly defensible. Whatever that meant. And if the attack came from below, something Tilly hadn’t even considered, they should hide in the chapel.

“What would we do without Martin?” Her voice was a bit rough, but she managed to speak without a tremor to her words.

“We would muddle by,” Angus said gently. “I love them all too, dearest, but no one can be irreplaceable anymore. Including you and me.”

She chuffed out a sigh. “I suppose that means more planning.”

Angus paced a few steps in a way that warned her he wanted to broach a difficult subject. “This is a bad year.”

“Yes.”

“We need to make a plan for the center beyond our tenure.”

She smiled at his choice of words. “Planning retirement?”

He returned her smile. “Abdication at a proper age for the crown prince to come into his own.”

She chuckled. “We’ll talk tonight?”

“It’s a date,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. He spun on his heel and left with a jaunty walk.

Tilly smiled at the door. Angus had cheered her up. She was ready to go out and face the day.

“The country was badly situated to lose its population. When the numbers were this low, in the 1800’s, local farms were hauling food into rapidly growing cities. We had no such infrastructure to fall back on.”

History of a Changed World
, Angus T. Moss

Nick flinched at the sound of a howl, human and deeply discontent. He was in the stock room trying to decide if he should pack food for lunch or bet on hitting the next station. The morning had been proceeding very orderly. As people woke, they came up from the cubbies, and collected train food for breakfast. They settled in small groups, some chatting quietly.

“What do you want from us!” The voice sounded young and female.

Nick followed the sound out to the waiting area. It was one of the teenagers who had slept with her family in the big cubby. She was standing in the middle of the room sobbing. Her long brown hair was knotted and snarled. Her clothes were awry from sleeping in them.

He approached her slowly. She raised her eyes to him, her face twisted in hysteria. “Who are you? What is happening!”

Nick glanced at her nametag, thankful that it had survived an obviously rough night. “Doreen?” He spoke very gently.

Her gaze locked on to his face, as her eyes widened in terror.

“It’s okay. You’re safe here. I’m Nick. Do you remember me?”

“What are they going to do to us? How did we get here? What did they do to Sara?” Her words ran together, slurred by drugs and fear.

“
They
are gone.” He stayed still, not moving any closer to her. “We have left the lab. We are going to a safe place.”

Her eyes clouded with confusion. “Lab?” She looked around, only now seeming to comprehend her surroundings. “This is a train station.”

“Yes. We spent the night here.”

“Doreen!” Mike shuffled into the waiting room, the rest of the family trailing after him.

Nick took a few steps back as Doreen stumbled to her father’s arms crying and stammering her confusion. He saw Kyle and Ruth watching from a bench where they were eating breakfast. He went over to check in with them.

“How many times is that going to happen?” Nick asked.

Ruth gave him a tight nod. “You handled that very well.”

Nick felt muscles tighten across his back at the way she sidestepped his question. “Do we need to have a meeting before we put everyone back in the vans? I don’t want any breakdowns like that while we’re in transit.”

Wisp jogged across the room toward them, a look of urgency about him.

“Nick.” Wisp waited until he was close enough to speak in a low voice. “There are three dead in the cubbies.”

“Damn. Flu?”

Wisp glanced at Ruth for a bare second before looking back at Nick. “I can’t tell. There’s no blood. No obvious wounds or violence. The doors were locked from the inside. Might be a reaction from the drug withdrawal?”

Ruth stood up, but spoke with her eyes on the floor. “It shouldn’t kill them.”

“Let’s take a look.” Nick ushered them all downstairs to the cubbies. Wisp had jimmied the doors open. The three cubbies were from different areas of the shelter, so it wasn’t location. The first one they checked was Cyril’s.

“He was very frail,” Nick said.

“I agree,” Ruth said. She pointed to his face, sunken and pallid. “Indications of cardiovascular complications.” She studied his hands for a moment. “I would say not flu. Natural causes, though. Heart attack or stroke.”

“Thank you,” Nick said.

He let Ruth enter the next cubby, first. She did a quicker examination. “This one is most likely flu.”

The third looked like flu also. Nick stood in the hallway staring at the doors as Kyle, Ruth and Wisp waited by the stairs. “Should we leave the bodies?”

Kyle tipped his head in thought. “I believe the stations are prepared to handle deaths like this. It must happen every flu season.”

“No.” Wisp’s voice was low but firm. “It’s a trail.”

Nick caught his eye. Wisp gave him a microscopic shrug. “He’s right,” Nick said.

“What kind of trail?” Ruth asked nervously.

“To us,” Nick said. He walked past her up the stairs. “I’ll find a shovel.”

*    *    *

Kyle, Jonas and Lester, the janitor, helped Nick dig graves to bury the three bodies. They got on the road a lot later than Nick wanted. He headed the convoy north toward High Meadow. They spent the day driving in and out of showers. A couple of times, they had to stop until a cloudburst moved on past them. The dirt roads were mud pits. The paved roads were pocked and shattered. By lunch time, they were battered from the rough ride.

“Any idea where we are?” Nick asked Wisp under his breath. They sat on worn benches at a derelict rest stop on the remains of an old highway. He had handed out train food, relieved that he’d chosen to pack it, in case.

Wisp glanced at the sun, then across the road to the woods. “Closer than we were.”

“I’d hoped to be there by tomorrow.”

“We might still make it.”

Nick slumped in his seat. The tension was knotting up his shoulders. His gut was so tight he could barely eat.

“We are safe for now,” Wisp said.

“For now,” Nick repeated sourly. He forced down the rest of his Crunch. He couldn’t face the Stew-goo today. He walked around the vehicles checking the tires. Then he checked all the chargers. They’d parked in the sun, to top off the batteries.

“Nick?”

He turned to find one of the ex-prisoners approaching him. His nametag said
Tonka
. He was a middle-aged man who looked like he’d be burly once he put a little more weight on. Right now he was starvation thin with the thick knobs of bone showing at wrist and knuckle. “Everything okay?”

“Any seconds?” he asked with a shy smile.

Nick chuckled. “I think there’s a couple left.” He led Tonka over to the van with the food.

“I, um, wanted to, you know, thank you.”

“No problem,” Nick said automatically.

“No, I mean it.” Tonka grabbed Nick’s arm. “I know what was going on. I know that if you guys hadn’t found us, we would have all starved to death in that place.”

“Why were you there?” Nick asked as he handed him another packet of Stew-goo.

“I didn’t do anything wrong.” He avoided Nick’s eyes as he eagerly took the food. “Thanks.” His hands shook as he stood there, holding the food, not looking at Nick. “Why do you want to know.”

“Rutledge’s men killed a girl. I’m trying to figure out why.”

Tonka’s mouth tightened for a minute before he nodded. “He was ruthless. A bastard. An evil bastard.”

Nick waited, wondering if the drugs would keep Tonka just babbling without any clear point. “What do you remember?”

“Not a lot. I know I hate him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Good.” Tonka’s gaze flickered from the ground to Nick. “Okay to go eat?”

Nick sent him on his way with a mental note to check back in with him in a day or two. He started packing up when Kyle approached him.

“You want seconds, too?” Nick asked.

Kyle looked uneasy. “If there is extra food, I would like some.”

His passive response reminded Nick that Kyle lived as property. Just as Wisp preferred to be unseen and disregarded, Kyle had no expectations of equal treatment. Nick handed him an extra packet each of Crunch and Stew-goo.

“Thank you. But I came to tell you that I was thinking about your question concerning the Cyril Project. I believe there were a number of researchers that worked on that project who then went on to work on the first team that researched the virus.”

“And why would that get them locked up in Rutledge’s basement?”

Kyle’s unease increased, as did his careful phrasing. “In the early days of research there were many different approaches put forward. Some were more, um, aggressive than others.”

“Let me guess, Rutledge was aggressive.”

“He was very vocal concerning his thoughts on the proper direction of the the research. I wasn’t present, but I heard from others that he was very angry not be put in charge of the federally funded lab.”

“And the old man was?”

“No. It was a woman, if I remember correctly. At least at the beginning. I think they lost a few directors in the first year.”

“So the old guy could have been involved in that and Rutledge locked him up out of spite?”

“Dr. Rutledge had a very...um, volatile personality.” Kyle looked away, clutching his packet of food.

“Go eat,” Nick said, waiving him away. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“It’s simply conjecture, without any further information...”

“All the same, thanks.”

*    *    *

They got back on the road and continued heading in a general north-westerly direction. Nick was getting more tense. Without the mapping site, he had no way of knowing where he was. Wisp seemed to know from the lay of the land, or the angle of the sun or some other arcane method. Nick wasn’t sure if he should trust Wisp that blindly, when he had no way to corroborate the biobot’s assertions.

About an hour after lunch, the road they were following dead-ended into a massive chasm with white water at the bottom. Nick called a halt. They all got out to look at the water.

“That looks like it’s new,” Jonas said.

“I don’t know this river,” Nick grumbled. He was worried about how much backtracking they were going to have to do. Somewhere in the past hour, he’d gotten the feeling they were being followed. He looked around to find Wisp.

“He’s up a tree,” Jonas said with amusement.

Wisp came back down with a plan. To Nick’s relief he’d found an alternate route that took them past the new river and back to a highway that was in reasonable shape. They traveled due east for another hour until they saw the remains of an old sign that told them they’d driven twenty-six miles past their turn off. Instead of turning around, Wisp found a new road with a more north-westerly route.

As the sun sank behind the trees, Nick’s stress kicked into a higher gear. Since he didn’t know where he was, it stood to reason no one else knew where they were. So maybe they weren’t being followed, or tracked, or watched. His nerves were so raw that everything seemed a problem. They might have to sleep in the vans. He wasn’t sure if they had enough supplies to cobble together some kind of dinner. Should they build a fire? Would it attract attention? He’d gotten himself pretty worked up by the time they hit the barrier.

“Shit!” In the dim light of the late afternoon, the barrier looked imposing. It reminded Nick of the cannibals. He didn’t want to have to try to protect three vehicles in a situation like that. He had no idea how Kyle or Jonas would react. Did any of them even know how to use a firearm? Which made him realize that he should have distributed weapons before they left. He only had the handgun he’d tucked into the driver’s side pocket. He started to reach for it when Wisp put a hand out to stop him.

“There is no one here,” Wisp said.

Nick almost grabbed for him as Wisp jumped out of the car. He followed a second later after taking a big breath. His hands were shaking. He wasn’t sure if that was his nerves, lack of food or something else. He loosened his collar which was damp with sweat despite the air conditioning in the van, and wondered if he was running a fever.

Wisp was already hauling timber out of the road when Nick got to him. Now that he was up close, Nick could tell it was just flotsam. Thin streams of sand across the road showed where a flood had traveled, pushing and pulling branches and mud with it. In a minute Jonas, Lester and Tonka joined them. Using his muscles, stretching, lifting and dragging the debris helped loosen some of the tension. By the time the road was clear, Nick was feeling much better.

Unfortunately, the flood had done serious damage to the roadbed for over a mile. They limped through the remains of the pavement, around more piles of debris and over mounds of mud. Nick was thinking about where they should stop for the night when Wisp made a pleased sound.

“There it is.”

Wisp pointed to a side road, clear and in excellent condition. Nick turned up it hopeful that they were getting closer to a train station. If they could find one in the next hour or so, they’d be set for the night. But an hour later, they were deep into the woods with very little sightline ahead and the last vestiges of light failing. Nick’s nerves kicked up again. Why was this road in good shape? Who used it? Wisp seemed to know it, did he know where they were going? He was about to start barking questions when a light appeared up the road.

It was a handmade sign with a solar powered light on it. “Creamery 3 miles.”

“That’s a good place, too.” Wisp said.

Nick nodded.

“We can stay there tonight.”

“Okay.”

Wisp frowned at him. “You don’t believe me.”

“Things change. We’ll see when we get there.”

Wisp gave him a half nod, half shrug. Nick forced his fingers to loosen on the steering wheel. They approached the turnoff. Nick slowed and turned onto a well maintained gravel road. He slowed again as it wandered around a big oak and over a short bridge. In the gloaming, he could see open land to either side. Split rail fences lined the road. Ahead there was a stockade wall that stood close to ten feet tall with spotlights mounted to shine on the road. The wood was raw, probably just taken from the fields on either side. The gate was closed. Five men with shotguns stood facing them.