The Last Blade Of Grass (31 page)

“You don’t seem to hold any loyalty toward your own men, Colonel, if you would send them off with us.”

“You are mistaken, Stockton. I can confidently make that offer because I know none of my people would show such disloyalty by attacking your men and breaking this agreement. You have fifteen minutes to get together with your men and decide what you will do.”

I turn and leave with Timothy and Samantha again falling in behind me. All I hear are three sets of footfalls walking off behind us, so at least we won’t be shot in the back. Finally turning around the side of the little mattress store at the edge of the Wal-Mart parking lot, I let out a sigh of relief, and lean against the building for support. I feel weak. I’m already tired, and soon I’ll be hitting the adrenaline low from the excitement of that encounter.

“He was looking at you quite intently, wasn’t he, Samantha?” I ask. “I mean, that guy Stockton kept looking over my shoulder in your direction, and looked like a trapped rat about to get squashed. What were you doing?”

“I was just getting so angry. I mean the idea of letting them go and start their own territory. It sounds so believable the way you said it, and I couldn’t help let my hatred show on my face.”

“Good, that’s what I was hoping for. That's why I didn’t want you around when I told everyone what the plan was. I wanted you to have an honest reaction to what you were hearing. Actually, I had planned on the possibility of Timothy needing to escort you back here, and me staying out there alone. I was sure you would say something or try to kill one of them right there and then.”

“I think I would have too,” she replies. “But they weren’t what I thought they would be. I mean, I was expecting something more, not a guy that looked like a law clerk.”

*

According to Arthur, the rooftop shooters left the roof while we were walking away from our meeting with Stockton. Ten minutes later unarmed men start walking out of the store. I feel like jumping up and cheering for this win, but it isn’t a win yet. Their men still need to be secured and checked thoroughly for weapons or tools that could free them.

*

I stand with Simone, Arthur, and Samantha in front of the group of men as six other ranch members search and secure our prisoners. Once everyone is finally secure, I walk up to Stockton, have him stand, and look back at his people. “I want you to check all of the faces in your gang and tell me if anyone is missing. I am going to send some of my people into the building to check that it is secure and then release your prisoners.”

“Everyone is here,” he says after looking around.

“I want you to check one more time, Stockton. You should know that I will ask your prisoners if any of your men are missing, or if anyone new has been added to the prisoner cages today.”

Stockton looks around, and says, “No. No one is missing.”

“Okay, go ahead and sit down. Once we clear the building, everyone will head back inside for the prisoner debriefing.”

“Arthur, double-check our prisoners.”

Arthur walks up to each one, double checks all of the zip ties, and puts pillow cases over their heads.

“Don’t be too concerned over the pillow cases,” I say as Arthur walks among the people covering them. “This is the best way to ensure we don’t have a mob of angry people trying to rip off your heads. If they can’t see which one of you abused them the most, they won’t have that anger burst to the surface. We will have the victims identify you and your crimes one at a time.”

As we walk away, Simone asks me, “Is that really necessary? Putting those people inside through all of that, having to see the men that abused them?”

“Yes. It is necessary for the victims, and for us, Simone. There is a strength that comes from closure. From being able to confront an attacker and know they will be punished for what they have done. If the men and women in that building don’t get to accuse these people and know that their pain is being acknowledged, then we might as well leave them in there to die. Without closure, they sure as hell won’t be any good to the future of humanity if they remain trapped by the abuse that they endured here. At least that’s what the latest therapy studies in rape treatment showed before the collapse,” I say and shrug my shoulders.

“Who are you?” Samantha says looking at me with an honestly puzzled look. “You having guns I get. Having spare military uniforms, I understand, and the survival supplies and ranch. But knowing therapy studies? That does not fit.”

“Sure it does. Survival isn’t just about living another day. It’s about having the will to live another day when you endure something tragic. Studying psychology and learning how to cope with devastation and loss are a vital component to any survival plan. One thing that remains a constant throughout human history is the increased occurrences of rape during any major upheaval, calamity, or war. It also helped that I found studies like that useful so the things I read actually stuck with me.”

*

There is a group of people hugging and crying off to our left just inside the front entrance of the store. They all just finished detailing what their captors did to them. All of the women, all four children, and a third of the men were raped. Everyone that was held captive here was beaten at least once. Many have substantial injuries. There are twenty-eight known murders to have occurred, eleven of which were people killed in the process of being captured by this group of thugs. The remaining seventeen deaths were post capture deaths; Three by gun for running, five by knife for fighting back during an assault, and nine beating deaths which the captives were forced to watch to keep them in line.

The three most recent deaths are the hardest to deal with for all of us, but especially so for Samantha, Conner, and their son Jake. The woman that helped the two girls escape from this place and led us to this scene was Emily. As a punishment and warning to the others for helping someone escape, two innocent people were pulled from the cages, one man and one woman, and they were beaten to death. The man and woman were killed for the two who escaped.

According to the woman crying in Samantha’s arms right now, Emily was hit hard and knocked down when one of the men found out she helped two other girls escape. Emily died. She never got back up from the hit.

I’m sitting next to Simone at one of the checkout registers. Arthur, Timothy, and Mike are off to the side, watching the tear filled scene. Hannah is already sleeping a few feet away from us on a sleeping bag she grabbed from sporting goods.

Mike looks at us, and asks, “So what are you going to do with these guys now that the victims have all identified them?”

“We kill them. We have enough difficulties trying to survive in this world with the infected, it will get even worse now that they are running, and coordinating attacks. I don’t want to let any of these people go and have them lead some type of attack on our ranch that gets some or all of us killed,” I say this thinking back to Chad and turning him away the first day of the collapse.

“Arthur, I need to get some sleep, and I’m sure some of your men do as well. With the runners out there and having to get all of these new people up to speed, I don’t think we are going anywhere tonight. So could you please organize everyone into shifts of guard duty and sleep?”

“Sure, Eddie. What about the supplies from the store here?”

“Right,” I say trying to clear my mind. I’m already starting to drift off with the lack of sleep and the after adrenaline low I’m hitting. “Do what you can to find a truck and trailer that you can get running. Two trucks if you can find another driver besides Donald. Then organize teams to load everything we can from the store into the trucks. Just make sure that no one goes outside without at least two armed guards to watch for the infected. I don’t want to lose anyone to laziness now that we survived this ruse without any losses.”

“And the people we freed? They have heard some of the talk about a safe zone and also think we are a military force.”

“You’ll have to explain to them what’s really going on out there. Tell them everything. The ranch, the runners, what we know about the disease, and that we plan on killing all of the people that weren’t held captive here and why. You’ll have to decide when to tell them.”

“How will I know that?”

“Just give them an hour or two to grieve, and once they calm down and start to relax, they will probably start looking forward to leaving. You need to tell them before they get too involved in fantasies of a safe zone.”

Arthur nods with a frown on his face. I don’t blame him. Dashing people’s hopes and dreams just when they think they have a new start won’t be a pleasant job. I know I would pass out from exhaustion before I was able to speak with them, so I can’t do it.

Chapter Fourteen

The Discovery

I wake up to Donald shaking my shoulder.

“Is something wrong?” I ask, and he shakes his head no. “Something is up with one of the people we freed. He came here with Samantha’s daughter. You need to speak with him.”

I look at the time and it is just after 2 p.m. Two hours of sleep. “I’ve had it way too easy these last couple of months,” I mumble to myself.

“Too easy?” Donald questions.

“Yes. Way too easy. The last few months at the ranch were nothing like what these people have been through. We were all just shuffling around rebuilding and practicing for re-entering the world. We had plenty of sleep and enough food. We have books to read and movies to watch and aside from those attacks, only the rare appearance of an infected at our fences. Look at those people over there. Half of them look like they just got freed from a concentration camp.”

“Well, technically they were,” Donald adds.

“Yeah, I guess so. So what’s going on?” I ask as Donald leads me to where this man I need to talk to is.

“Well, this guy that got captured with Emily is a biologist of sorts. He says he developed the Zeus drug.”

I stop and look at Donald. The fog clears from my brain as his words sink in. “Are you serious? Emily was able to bring him with her?”

“Yes. You knew about him?”

“Just a little. The first day of the collapse, when I told Samantha about the General’s letter and mentioned the Zeus Drug, she freaked out and hung up to call her daughter. She told me later that Emily was in the honors program of pharmaceutical biology in Portland. The guy that developed Zeus was speaking at the University. Emily’s group was responsible for showing him around, making sure he didn’t get lost. He’s from Germany. It never seemed important to know any more since he was just another lost person in Portland that we would never see. So what does he have to say?” I finally ask.

“You can hear it all from him in a second.”

I purse my lips and nod. “Let’s go.”

Sitting next to Samantha on the far side of the group of freed prisoners is a man who has her complete attention as he talks to her. He has an unusual face and must be the man from Germany.

“Eddie, this is the man that came here with Emily and claims to have developed the Zeus drug.”

In what I think is a very slight German accent, he says, “Are you the man who was bitten and lived?”

“Yes, I am. Did you really develop this drug?” I say more angrily than I intended.

“Yes, Yes,” he exclaims with his head down. “But you must hear the whole story. Please sit, and I will tell everyone how this whole thing started. My name is Erde Fleischer, and my story starts two and a half years before this plague.”

Mister Fleischer has notebooks with him, in which he wrote a detailed account of how the disease was developed, so that he or others might use the information to try and fight the infected.

“It started with my studying the toxoplasmosis parasitic disease in an effort to reduce aggression in the prison population, so that they might safely return to society. After a year of study, we found that various aspects of this illness created reduced fear, reduced stimulus to pain, and reduced blood loss. The medical implications of this were astounding. I thought I found a way with this parasite to make every surgery safer and to keep more people alive after accidents and on battlefields.

“It was the potential military applications that provided me with the most funds for research, but even with the military’s involvement with financial support, there was never a push to develop this into some type of weapon. It was always being studied and refined as a way to save lives by reducing blood loss and shock in surgery.

“We did studies with apes that another doctor was previously using in psychological studies, and there were no adverse side effects from them. After receiving the genetically altered parasite, they changed metabolically for one to two weeks. Meaning, they would have no pain response, limited blood loss, and reduced fear and anxiety during the period where the parasite remained active.

“We moved on to human testing with a group of soldiers in the Middle East. It was the Tiger Squadron, and they also reacted the same as the apes in the previous study. I initially recalled there was none of this wild attacking behavior that occurred during its later implementation. However, after reviewing my notes, I realized we might have seen one instance of the violence that we attributed to other causes.

“One of the soldiers who was new to the squadron tried to kill his fellow soldiers shortly after his arrival to the group. That would have coincided with his inoculation with the Zeus drug. I didn’t see the correlation before because his record indicated a slightly unstable personality, and this assignment was his last chance to remain in the military. We all thought he just snapped, but in retrospect, it could have been the drug.

“After a month of testing on the Tiger Squadron, Zeus was put into mass production, and shipped around the world for implementation.”

“After a month?” a woman listening interrupts to ask. “Only a month of testing and you shipped it around the world?”

“A General’s letter that we grabbed from the internet said it had been tested for six months,” I mention.

“For the six months of testing, records were deliberately changed in order to expedite the release of this drug. It was actually a decision by the U.N. Security Council to change the records.”

I would hate to be on the receiving end of the looks and comments he receives from the group.

“Please, please, try to remember what the world was like before this plague occurred. There was mass rioting everywhere and even occurring in the U.S. Thousands of people were being killed every day, and Zeus was looked at as a way to save the lives of the doctors, nurses, and policemen that were dealing with the rioting populace. Yes, it was only one month of testing, but if it worked the way it did in trial, it would have saved thousands of lives during the rioting and millions more in the years and decades to come. I even dared to consider that longer term study of this could work toward extending human longevity…” The horrific irony of what actually happened causes Mr. Fleischer to pause, wiping the sweat from his brow before continuing.

“What I was working toward, what I saw was a world with barely any lives lost to car accidents, wars, or any other of the many ways we try to kill ourselves. I thought it would save lives. We all did. That is why it was rushed through production. The Zeus drug is a genetically altered parasite. I altered it to try and help the world, but ultimately, in our rush to use it without proper testing, I destroyed humanity.”

There is a hushed silence over the group as we all absorb what we just heard.

“So what went wrong?” I ask. “Was there a problem with the quality control of the drug production? Some kind of contamination”

“When I heard what was happening from Emily, contamination was my initial thought. I believed the drug was tainted somehow, but after reviewing notes, I saw something I had overlooked in the entire process. I missed the most basic item relating to Toxoplasmosis. Cats!”

“But you knew toxoplasmosis was from cats, right?”

“Yes, of course, that is why I was originally studying aggression, because of how the parasite affects mice and rats with respect to cats. But you must understand that in Europe, most people have toxoplasmosis as a result of eating raw or undercooked meats, it isn’t because of association with felines. This is where my research failed. The mice and rats we studied were not affected by toxoplasmosis the way that apes or we humans are. We missed the cannibalistic reaction to the parasite because the test subjects all had strong associations with cats.

“The apes we used from the psychological study all had pet cats that they were trained to care for. The Tiger Squadron had as its mascot several cats which the soldiers interacted with regularly as a matter of group luck in combat. And I would bet that you, Mr. Keeper, are a person with a high exposure to cats as well. Am I correct?”

“Yes. I am definitely a cat person. I’ve always preferred them as pets. I’ve had dogs as pets throughout my life as well but there was always at least one cat.”

“So I believe you are immune to the altered parasite from Zeus because you have been exposed to the feline variant of toxoplasmosis. Without that exposure, you would have turned just like everyone else.”

“But why haven’t we seen more people survive this? There are far more cat owners in the U.S. than me.”

“Yes, but most of those people weren’t set up to survive the way you and your people were. Unfortunately, most of the people that could have survived this disease were probably killed and consumed by those that became what you call the infected.”

“Are you absolutely certain about this?”

“I cannot say I have a hundred percent certainty, but I have a way to test my hypothesis, if you will agree.”

“I can only assume you mean testing the virus on people. Is that what you have in mind?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you will find any volunteers for that kind of study, Mr. Fleischer. And I will not allow any of my people to volunteer or these people who were locked up to be tested on.”

“Yes, Yes, but you have your prisoners.”

My mind flashes through history to what I know about World War II. The Nazis and the Japanese did horrific medical testing on their prisoners. The Nazis did tests on the Jews, homosexuals, and communists they captured. Japanese did their tests mostly on the Chinese. Then I think to my own experiments with torture on my captives in the stable.

“Mr. Keeper, please consider the implications. You are already going to kill these people for what they have done. Their deaths might help the rest of us continue to survive. We can interview the prisoners to find out if any of them have had extensive contact with cats and infect them. If they do not turn, then you have your answer of certainty.”

“What about the change? What about the fact that there are runners now and they can manipulate objects?”

“To that I’m less sure, because I have not been able to observe them and was only told about them a few hours ago.”

“My wife, Simone, was thinking it might have to do with the cold temperatures during winter preventing the fever from wiping out so much of the brain.”

“It is possible, Mr. Keeper, but I think we can even test for that. These men that held us captive kept the infected secured in pens at the back of the building. If any are still alive, we could use one of them to test, as well as a fast moving infected if you could capture one.”

“You want us to capture one of the runners? Alive?”

“Yes, if they are in fact alive, which I believe they are,” Mr. Fleischer replies.

“I think we could capture one pretty easy,” Conner offers. “The runners have been moving right up to the building to look for us or a way in. I bet we could grab one right at the front doors.”

“You can’t bring those things in here!” a man yells.

“You can’t be considering testing this sickness on living people!” another one of the people from the freed group says.

“I will consider every possible way to keep people alive,” I reply. “Mr. Fleischer is right about one thing. I don’t plan on letting any of those people live for what happened here. They are too much of a danger to us if we let them go. They are even more dangerous than the new runners. If studying their deaths helps the rest of us live, then that is what we will do.”

“So what are you then?” a former captive asks me. “Are you our new Stockton? Are you going to tell us what we have to put up with in order to survive?”

I look briefly at Arthur and Simone standing next to me, then turn back, and reply, “Not at all. I have only one voice in this group but everyone has a say in what we do. We should have a large majority, say seventy-five percent of us agree to experiment on these people, or we won’t do it.”

“What about killing them all? Who decided that? Because I don’t remember being asked what should happen with them.”

“What is your name, sir?” I ask.

“Dave. Dave Cromwell, and I’ve been locked up here longer than most of the others. So I’ve seen what these men are capable of. But I still don’t think all of them should be killed just on your word alone.”

“Dave, you’re right. They can’t all be killed just on my word alone, that is why you people filled out those notebooks to explain what each of Stockton’s people did to you. So we have all of your words on what they did, and if it makes you feel better, we will have a vote to ensure that everyone agrees these people should be put to death. Then we will have another vote to see if we should experiment on them. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Do you promise to hold to the vote, even if we all vote to let them go?”

“Absolutely not!” I reply immediately. “I don’t promise that. I will not let any of the men that committed rapes or beatings leave here alive, because they are a danger to my family and friends. You can have your vote to clear your conscience, but they will still die.”

“That’s bullshit. A vote like that is meaningless,” he replies.

“What, Dave, you don’t like it? Perhaps we can do it this way then. If the majority votes to allow Stockton and his men to live. When my people and I leave, we will release Stockton and his men, and leave those people that vote against executions here with them.”