The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning (10 page)

“Well, I think this says it all, really,” David said, passing her an envelope.

She tore open the envelope even though it wasn’t sealed. Out fell a patch, one she’d been working for years to get: the Hunter Squadron insignia, proof to everyone that she was a full Hunter. She looked up and saw that her parents were all smiles. “But I thought I failed! I mean, I barely made it back, and the colonel basically told me I’d screwed up royally…”

“He mentioned that,” Kim said. “But he felt that the fact that you killed the Driebach even though you’d been hunting a regular walker merited due consideration. He wanted to go over it with us, though, before he made the decision.”

“He wanted to present it to you himself,” David said. “But I asked him to let me and your mom do it, just this once. You’re in, Eden. The equal of anyone on the team.”

Eden forced herself to smile and get up to hug her parents as well as she could. She hated having to fake it, but she didn’t know how to tell them how much trouble this would cause. Yet again, special treatment for Eden Blake, and now, even something she’d worked so hard for would be tarnished. Did she really earn it, or was her acceptance only because of who she was? That’s what she would hear from whispered conversations and hushed tones.

This should’ve been part of a ceremony in front of the other Hunters like all the other graduations, not hidden in her parents’ quarters, away from everyone, like there was something bad or deceitful about it.

After the hugs, she sat back down and picked up her fork. She still wore the fake smile, but then remembered her promise earlier to just have one night of reasonable happiness. It wasn’t too much to ask.

Maybe, just maybe, at least for a little while, things would be okay. Just for a little while. It was a nice dream, anyway. She just wished they had one piece of good news to brighten things up.

CHAPTER THREE

Gated Surface Area
Bunker Four

Logan felt bad for the creature that had once been Malcolm Dagger, so he’d argued for a brief exercise time once a week. Davies had relented, preferring to keep his pet somewhat healthy so that it could live longer and continue to provide him with amusement. Logan shook his head at the memory, wondering what had happened to the military men he’d gone into the bunker with. These deranged maniacs were as bad as the walkers—worse even, since they knew what they were doing.

They played at being military, with their patrols and their secrets and their ranks and all the rest of it, but the military Logan had known growing up as the son of a Navy man would never have treated prisoners like this or done half a dozen of the other things he’d seen.

He leaned against the side of the bunker as Dagger circled the area on his long chain. The former warlord of Bunker Four sometimes went down on all fours, but he usually walked around the area in a shambling half-crouch, mumbling to himself the entire time. Logan had long ago stopped listening to the madman’s ramblings and concentrated on soaking up what little sunshine he could. Dagger wasn’t going anywhere.

Except today, apparently, he was.

The man took Logan completely by surprise as he came in from the left side and slammed the younger man up against the side of the bunker’s entrance. Dagger threw an arm across Logan’s throat, and Logan was sure he felt something sharp poking into his gut. But where would Dagger get anything sharp?

“It’s a broken tree branch, boy,” Dagger coughed. Then he giggled. “A tree branch! Can you imagine what Davies would say if he knew I’d captured his tech wizard with a tree branch?”

Logan said nothing and struggled to breathe.

“Now, I’m going to let go of you, but I’m going to hang on to this,” Dagger said, the chain wrapped around one bony fist. “Anything weird, and you’re the first to die. I’m not going back in that cell, you understand?”

Again, Logan said nothing, the arm across his throat barring all movement. Dagger seemed to realize this and grunted as he lightened up but did not release Logan.

The technician coughed as air rushed back into his lungs and nodded. “Yes, yes, sir.”

“Good. Then here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to take us back into the bunker and we’re going to pretend like nothing is different… except we’re not heading back down to the kennel—
the cell, we’re not heading back down to the cell
.” Dagger’s voice got more than a little crazed at the end, and Logan wondered if he was going to survive the day.

“We’re going to Ops to see Davies.”

“But Davies—”

Dagger leaned on Logan’s neck once more. “You arguing with me?”

Logan struggled to shake his head, and Dagger relented.

“No, no, sir, but Davies isn’t there. He’s in officer country now.”

Dagger’s eyes scrunched shut, and his incoherent mumblings returned. After a moment, he opened those batshit-insane eyes and stared back at Logan.

“We’re going to Ops anyway,” he said. “I need that room. And if you try anything funny… Well, just remember what I said. I have nothing to lose. Understand?” Dagger gave him an extra push on the tree branch just to emphasize the point.

Logan looked into those eyes, the eyes of a true madman with, as he said, “nothing to lose” and realized that any chance he had of getting away from the man was gone. Dagger would kill him at the slightest provocation, and Logan was nothing if not a survivor. No, no “funny business” from him.

The pair entered back through the main doors as they had gone out, a pet and his walker. Except that when they normally would have turned to the right to go to the secondary elevators, they turned to the left instead and approached the Ops corridor. Logan shook his head at the lack of guards or even questioning looks as they approached the Ops door, but then again, maybe the others just didn’t want to see their former commander led around on a chain. Dagger held his short piece of broken tree branch cradled in the crook of his arm and held to his chest, as if in pain.

The door was open when they got there, and Logan didn’t bother to stop, fearful of what Dagger would do if he did. The room was mostly empty, with only one guard and a technician on duty. Logan knew the Ops chief was probably in his office off to one side. As he was about to head that way, he heard a scuffle from behind and turned to find Dagger stabbing the guard over and over again with the tree branch.

Covered in blood, Dagger turned to the technician, who had frozen in fear. The guard’s body slid down the wall as the tech bolted for the door, and Dagger cackled as he watched her leave.

“Secure the door, Logan,” Dagger said with a grin, and some small part of Logan died as he saw the craziness in the man’s eyes. “I have something else to take care of.” Dagger moved toward the Ops chief’s office.

“Yes, sir,” he said and rushed to close the door. He closed his eyes as he heard a short, sharp scream come from the side room. By the time he’d locked the Ops room door, Dagger had returned, covered nearly head to toe in blood, and Logan didn’t have to wonder whose it was.

Dagger approached and slapped Logan on the back of the head, hard. “Patch me through to the whole bunker,” the man said as he watched the feeds from the many monitors. “I want everyone to see this.”

Logan grimaced at the pain in his head and the anxious ache in his gut as he raced to one of the chairs in front of the controls and began typing in commands as fast as he could. Moments later, a feed came up on the big monitor showing Dagger. “You’re live, sir.”

“Attention, Bunker Four,” Dagger said. “This is your new commander. Your old commander? Your commander.”

Logan noticed Dagger had somehow got his ramblings and random giggles under control. Maybe that had all been an act.

“I have taken control of Ops, and as most of you know, that means I control everything in this bunker. I have all the codes, and I can do anything I want to all of you.” Dagger danced around in a little circle. “You’re mine! But I’m not a greedy person, and I have no use for most of you, so I’ll let you go on about your lives as usual… with one condition.

“Bring me the head of Alfredo Davies.” Dagger cackled.

Logan shuddered at the madness evident in that noise. His frayed nerves had him on edge, and he thought he, too, might snap at any moment.

“Or no, not just his head. I want the man mostly whole and intact and delivered to me by 1200 hours. Or I’ll release the aerosolized prion into one level of the bunker at a time until he is.” Dagger cackled again. “How many of you will be Driebachs by the time we’re done is up to you!”

Logan’s heart sank. Dagger would’ve co-opted whomever had taken him on his walk, but those walks had been Logan’s idea. Logan had unleashed this monster on the world, all because he was too soft to watch him suffer. Rickman had been right. Everyone was better off with Dagger in a cage.

But Logan had set him free.

He put his head in his hands and wept.

Bunker Seven
Governor’s Conference Room

“So that’s it, gentlemen and ladies,” Jim Atkins said as he sat down in the chair next to his wife, across from Bunker Seven’s command staff. “To sum up, we’ve refined the treatment as much as we can, but there might still be some complications. We just don’t know what those will be and have no way of knowing. Thanks to some volunteers, we’ve begun trials and will keep everyone informed. It’s a two-phase treatment: one for our current people and another for those yet to come. We’ll need to give it at least four generations to make sure the modifications have taken hold completely. But we’re looking at the end of our biggest weakness against the walkers.” Jim took his wife’s hand and smiled at Mary, sitting on his other side.

Major Bill Shaw, Bunker Seven’s military commander, his wife, Jennifer, and the bunker’s governor, Tom Ridgely, all sat stunned. Jim and the other scientists had expected that.

The governor recovered first. “Did you get that, everyone?” he asked, directing his question to the speakerphone in the middle of the table. They’d set up a conference call for the Bunker Council to give them the news first. It was evident from the silence that the council, too, was surprised.

Someone cleared their throat, and they heard a whispered, “Wow,” but no one spoke for a long moment.

“I feel like I’m stating the obvious here, but this is huge,” a woman said. Jim knew it had to be Angela Gates from Bunker One, as she was the only female governor.

“It certainly is, Governor Gates,” Ridgely said. “Let’s start with some questions, but we’re going to be orderly about this. Angela, since you were the first to speak up, you can go first.”

“I’ve got a lot of them, but here’s the first: will this work on everyone?”

Mary spoke up. “We expect that there will be a very small percentage of people for which the treatment may not work. They may reject the first part of the treatment, the one with the antibodies. But the second phase, the gene therapy, should work on all but a vanishingly small percentage of people. Children born in the next two generations will need the first phase as a booster, just in case. But the generations after that should be fully immune.”

Jim recognized Frank Anderson’s voice on the line as the general asked the next question. “What about logistics? How do we get the treatment everywhere? You’ll need a lot of these treatments too. Can you make them there?”

Jim answered that one. “We’re already making the first phase down in the labs, so that’s covered. The second phase will roll out in a year or so, after we’ve seen the first group of children born from the test subjects. If there are no obvious problems, then we’ll start mass-producing it. I want to stress that we’ve seen no complications in more than twenty generations of mice now. For transport, that’ll involve coordinated efforts from all the surviving bunkers. Plane flights or truck convoys, probably both. There’s a lot to iron out yet, but it’s just planning at this point.”

“There’s something the rest of you haven’t asked yet, and I can’t believe it wasn’t the first question,” another voice on the call said.

“Governor Belkins?” Ridgely asked. “Is that you, Walter? What’s your question?”

“Should we do this at all? Genetic modification. Playing God… Is this something we can live with?”

Jim had been waiting for this one to come up. It was the question he and Mary had wrestled with for years. There was no easy answer.

Sabrina answered the governor for him. “Governor Belkins, this is Sabrina Atkins. I’m going to answer you with a question of my own. Is this something we can live
without
?” She paused as she let the idea sink in, then continued. “We know what we’re risking by not doing this. The end of everything, for good this time. We can’t stay down here forever. And no, we can’t say for absolute certain that this gene therapy won’t cause problems down the line somewhere.”

Jim watched as Sabrina leaned forward to get closer to the speaker. “Yes, we’re playing God, messing with the programming of our species. We’re making changes that we can’t guarantee will last forever, and there may be repercussions we can’t see right now. No one will be forced to accept the treatments. It’s a personal choice, but we’re giving them the option. Fifty years from now, humanity may be cursing our names for what we do in the next year. We may be reviled, we may be hated for all eternity.” She paused for emphasis. “
But they will be alive to hate us
. And isn’t that the most important part?”

Sabrina sat back and looked around the room, and Jim squeezed her hand once more. At that moment, he couldn’t have been prouder of his wife. Not just for her logic and poise, but because she’d helped him and Mary both come to terms with what they had to do.

“I think that just about answers that question,” Ridgely said as he looked around the room. No one objected. “We all know what’s at stake. We’ll send you all the research and data, make everything public as much as possible.”

“How soon can shipments begin?” Gates asked.

“We’ve got Bunker One scheduled for the first flight out next week, Governor,” Jim replied. “General Anderson, with limited flight capabilities, we’re going to truck supplies to you instead.”