The Nothing Men, page 12
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
“Jesus, you’re not going to-?” Ben asked, his voice breaking.
“What do you think I am, some kind of monster?” Whitmore said. “Of course not. It’s just that these camps are no good for your kind. If everyone is in the same shitty boat, maybe it’s the boat that’s the problem. It’s just a self-perpetuating cycle of misery. You need to get out, re-integrate yourselves into society.”
His voice was dripping with condescension.
“You know that won’t work.”
“So I should just let these camps be? And take the chance that we don’t find the next Haven in time?”
“It’s all many of them have,” Ben said, turning to face Whitmore, almost pleading with him, hating himself for it.
“Well, they’re going to have to find something else,” Whitmore said, his tone the verbal equivalent of a blast door falling shut.
The discussion was over. Not that it had ever really begun. Ben turned his attention back to the twin movie-sized screens, focusing on the wide aerial shot. He couldn’t bear to watch it from the team leader’s remarkably clear helmet cam. It was awful in its immediacy and clarity. Wasn’t it just terrific that so much technology had survived the apocalypse!
The soldiers had split into smaller fireteams of four and were spreading through the camp like viruses. The first team to reach a tent began tapping the frame with the butts of their weapons, and although there was no audio, it was obvious that they’d begun shouting at the residents of the tent.
A moment later, a heavyset woman emerged, a baby on her hip, another one squirreled away just behind her. A thin man followed her out, yelling as the soldier shooed him away. When the tent was clear, two Volunteers wrecked it and then tossed something on top of it. Ben’s heart splintered like a crystal vase as the tent, the only home this little family had, erupted in a miniature holocaust. The incendiary device burned hot and fast until the tent and all its contents were nothing but a smoky mess.
“See?” Whitmore said. “That baby right there? We don’t know how the virus is going to affect it. That kid alone right there could restart this whole mess. We just don’t know, Mr. Sullivan. We just don’t know.”
The evictions continued for two hours. It was a slow-developing car crash, and Ben was unable to look away. The crowd of refugees grew steadily as each tent was reduced to a charred pile of rubble, a balloon of humanity being rapidly inflated. Ben wondered how much more the balloon could take before it exploded.
“This country is safer thanks to you,” Whitmore said.
Ben gagged, and warm bile crept up his throat, burning him from the inside out. He felt hot, his body coated with a thin sheen of cold sweat, but he shivered uncontrollably as the destruction of the camp continued before him.
And then it happened.
He could almost feel the balloon burst onscreen. A group of men, less than half a dozen, rushed the soldiers, approaching from the cover of a small outbuilding on the northwest side of the camp. One was firing a pistol wildly, belying the experience of a marksman who had taken up a gun for the first time earlier that day. He missed badly. Two Volunteers opened up on the erstwhile rebellion with their M4 rifles. The men had no chance, exposed, mostly unarmed, and the Volunteers shredded them into bloody ribbons.
“Dammit,” muttered Whitmore.
The remaining Volunteers formed a perimeter around the remaining residents, about a hundred or so, many of whom immediately raised their hands toward the sky. Others rushed up to check on the fallen camp residents. Ben focused on a skinny child, maybe six years old, his malnourished arms pointed skyward, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He turned in his chair, away from Whitmore, and buried his face in his right hand. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain as Whitmore wrenched him by the ear and turned his head back toward the screen.
“You’re going to watch this,” he said, his voice encased in ice. “I did not want this to happen. But you’re such a threat to us. You’re a threat to yourselves. You’re a threat to everything.”
Ben searched for an appropriate retort, something that would put Whitmore in his place, make Ben feel better about himself, but he couldn’t. The well was dry. He sat in silence as the soldiers searched the surviving residents and sent them on their way. They drifted away from the campsite in small groups of twos and threes, wandering off into the bright morning, carrying all the weight of the world on their shoulders.
“There are hundreds of these camps across the country,” Whitmore said. “Possibly thousands. And they are just little Petri dishes of trouble. It was your report that convinced the Secretary to liberate these camps.” He put air quotes around the word ‘liberate,’ a gesture that Ben found slightly horrifying.
He turned his eyes back to the screen. The ruins of the camp were virtually deserted but for a handful of soldiers scavenging the infield for anything useful that might have been left behind. After a few minutes of this, the soldiers loaded back into the back of the carrier, and it chugged away from the campsite. The bodies lay where they fell; the picture was clear enough that Ben could see the dark red blood soaking the grass.
“What’ll happen to the bodies?”
“We’ll leave it for a HARD unit. You know all about those, right, big guy?” he said casually, clapping Ben on the shoulder, as though he were talking about an overflowing garbage can, waiting for the trash truck to swing by and make its weekly collection.
“What now?” Ben said. He said it almost as much to himself as he said it to Whitmore.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Whitmore said. “To be honest, I’m not real crazy with the idea of giving you food and shelter while you kick back in that little condo of yours.”
Ben smiled stupidly at Whitmore’s joke, assuming that the man had never spent the night in a claustrophobic room infused with the essence of urine, its walls lacquered with fecal matter. Why was he smiling? Did he think the joke was funny?
“Yes,” Whitmore said, clapping his hands together with a single sharp crack. “I think it’d be better for you to be out with your people.”
Whitmore flashed a smile of his own, cold and dead, bearing as much sincerity as a viper.
“And don’t worry, we’ll make sure everyone knows that you were the one who helped the Department, that because of you, these camps are being dissolved,” Whitmore said. “We’ll get it out in time for the Freedom One News tonight. Your picture will be all over the F-One Network! You’re going to be famous, my friend.”
A monster to the uninfected. A traitor to the Reds.
An enemy of two states!
More struggle. More misery. More drifting through the nightmare that would never end, like a sailboat lost at sea, its mast snapped, its navigation systems fried. What the hell was the point? Then he realized that was the point. Whitmore wanted to draw out his suffering, make sure Ben knew how little they thought of him and those like him. Divide and conquer. They’d be scattered across the country, unable even to take solace or draw any strength from their shared misery. And now he would be alone, a pariah, a Judas, a Benedict Arnold.
Whitmore stood and gestured toward the Volunteer guarding the observation room, and Ben took this as his signal to take his leave of this terrible place. He put Whitmore and the Department out of his mind because they were already part of his past. He said nothing as the Volunteer guided him down the narrow staircase toward the main hall, the barrel of his rifle tickling his back.
He thought about saying something, a profound statement that might make him feel better about himself, about his recognition of the evil inherent in this shitty new world. But there was nothing to say, nothing that would change anything or make things better. His big fat mouth had already done enough damage, and all at once, he felt stupid, naïve, guilty and awash with shame. His mind was seized with the faces of the men who’d charged the Volunteers, and he imagined what they would have thought if they knew it had been one of their own that had brought this hell to their door.
Along the way, they passed other Volunteers and Department staffers, and he could feel their eyes boring in on in him, smiles of satisfaction on their faces, like they knew what he had done, how badly he’d screwed himself, how he’d just become famous in the very worst way.
They arrived at the double doors through which he’d entered the building, where another heavily armed Volunteer was waiting. Outside, the day was gloomy and dim, the sky a sea of angry roiling clouds.
Just then Ben remembered he didn’t have his blue backpack, his constant companion of the past year. His meager food supply, his water purification tablets, his blanket, his everything. He turned suddenly, feeling an icy grip of panic around his throat.
“My stuff!” he exclaimed, the words slick with desperation. “Where’s my backpack?”
Whitmore eyed him the way a lion might stare at its prey on the savannah.
“Right,” Whitmore said. “Your backpack.”
The two Volunteers suppressed chuckles. The whole scene stank of the high school archetype, the quarterback of the football team, his two lackeys at his side, giving the academic overachiever, the dork, the business. All they needed was a trashcan to stuff Ben into, and the picture would be complete.
“Just messing with you,” Whitmore said. “Of course we’ll get it for you. We know how precious these things are to people in your situation.”
“You’re an asshole,” Ben said.
“It’s on its way down here,” he said, ignoring Ben’s jab.
A few minutes later, a third soldier delivered the backpack to Whitmore, who then handed it over to Ben.
“Wouldn’t want you to leave without this,” Whitmore said. He gestured to one of the soldiers. “See him to the outer gates. Take care, Mr. Sullivan.”
Ben watched him go, taking his perfectly knotted tie and inexplicably pressed suit with him, strutting down the hallway like he was on a Milan runway. When he reached the stairwell, he looked back over his shoulder at Ben. Their eyes locked, and right there, Ben felt a rage build inside him, not quite like the manic fury coursing through his veins while in the grips of the infection, but not terribly dissimilar from it. Whereas the Orchid-induced rage had been random, scattered, like grains of sand on a beach, this one had a laser focus, a cruise missile locked on its target.
He looked like he couldn’t wait to get back inside and tell his Department buddies about this great prank he pulled on the piece of shit Red out there while they shared cigars and brandy and eighteen-year-old hookers and the other accoutrements and spoils of being the head jerkoffs in charge.
Like, yeah, I thought he was going to cry when I told him he wasn’t getting it back! I mean, you should’ve seen it! Priceless! Fucking priceless!
More than anything that he’d wanted in his whole life, Ben wanted to kill Mr. Whitmore.
15
Ben spent that night in a badly damaged sporting goods store about three miles west of the Department command post. Before settling in for the evening, he inspected the site carefully for squatters, the way a small boy might examine his bedroom for monsters. Then he constructed a makeshift bedroll from the remnants of singed and scarred cardboard boxes, quite possibly the most pathetic-looking thing he’d ever laid eyes on. He found an old painter’s blanket balled up in the corner, so worn it was nearly transparent in spots. Still it was better than nothing, and when a cold front pushed through in the dead of night, sending the temperatures dropped into the low forties, leaving him shivering and awake, he was happy to have it. Sleep eluded him for most of the night, and he longed for the safety and comfort of the Haven, cursing himself for even thinking about selling them out, even posthumously.
The little sleep he got was fitful, and he was wide awake as the sun began its climb into the sky, sending tongues of orange light over the rooftops. Ben was cloudy with fatigue, his eyes gritty, like they were full of sand. He was exhausted and afraid, wondering when the shoe would drop on Whitmore’s promise to expose him to the world as a turncoat. The fear and anxiety eroded the rage he’d been feeling like an ocean chewing away at the beach, and he’d never felt more alone. Even the very idea of killing Whitmore seemed ridiculous, the ranting of a crazy person, the way one might briefly think about killing a driver who’d cut you off in traffic.
He peeked out onto a rapidly brightening Midlothian Turnpike. A few cars motored by, but gasoline was still running more than thirteen bucks a gallon, keeping vehicle traffic was still way down. Traffic patterns had fundamentally changed in the last three years, and rush hour was a thing of the past. On the plus side, the air seemed a bit cleaner, especially now that the smell of human decay was starting to fade.
The roads themselves were in bad shape, pockmarked with potholes, really starting to show the signs of neglect with very little money to maintain them. Tax revenue had dropped precipitously; it was a terrible Catch-22 they were all in. The government couldn’t fix the infrastructure without tax revenue; businesses couldn’t generate revenue without a functional infrastructure. Pockets of survivors made their way along the edge of the highway, trying to eke out another day.
Tranquility.
It was all he had left.
Ironic, too, given that he was feeling anything but tranquil.
The word continued to have no meaning for him, but had been important to Calvin Thompson, and it sure as hell had been important to Whitmore. He went over Whitmore’s quiz and tried to recall all the code words he’d been grilled on. Roadrunner. Emerald. A third one that had drifted beyond the tractor beam of his memory banks.
A code name for the attack he’d heard them planning? A place? A person? Plant, animal, mineral?
Ben massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger, dreaming of a cup of coffee. Nothing fancy, just a good old-fashioned cup in his oversized Cleveland Indians mug. That sent him down a mental highway toward an exit marked Baseball. Under normal circumstances, the first game of the World Series would be imminent. It was weird not having baseball anymore. Not that he watched much of it, a few innings here and there when he had a chance, but he always liked having it on. It seemed like the appropriate background for life, the routine of the season, day after day, a game that seemed so simple on the surface but maddeningly complex when you scratched beneath the surface. A good metaphor for something, he thought, but he didn’t know what that something was.
Tranquility.
The word continued to nibble away at him like a robin pecking away at a bird feeder. Ellie might know what to do with the information. At the very least, she would be better equipped to take action than he was. Besides, what the hell else was he going to do?
Before he set off, he scoured the store in the light of day, see if he could salvage anything for this new phase of his life. This store had once been home to a variety of gear that would have been tremendously useful in a post-apocalyptic world. Camping gear. Clothes. Weapons. Backpacks. Energy bars. Water bottles. And in a fully post-apocalyptic world, emptied of most of its population, Ben might have stumbled across a place like this that hadn’t been picked clean. But his was a near-apocalyptic world, and places like this had long been stripped to the bone. He wandered among the displays and racks, so barren it looked like a new business awaiting its first delivery truck. Even the cardboard boxes were gone.
He drifted back to the storeroom, where he’d spent the night, and poked through the debris, finding nothing. He was just about to give up when he spotted a small door tucked away at the back of the storeroom, the kind that might lead to Narnia. It was half-blocked by a rack of metal shelving and the door was locked tight. The paint was old, flaking. A dark stain on the door caught his eye, and he leaned in for a closer look. It was dried blood, concentrated around the doorknob, a small rust-brown handprint. Ben gave the doorknob a quick jiggle, scanning the room for anything that might help him pick the lock.
There was an old paint can in the corner of the storeroom; he gave it a quick shake to test its weight. It was still heavy, the can’s seal tight. The paint inside had long since congealed. Using it as a battering ram, he reared the can back and slammed it into the lock, hoping that the years of disrepair had weakened the wood. He smiled as the wood gave way, splintering under the heavy impact of his makeshift mace. After a couple more blows, the door splintered clear of the lock and swung open.
The door creaked on its hinges in the morning quiet, a sound that was still creepy even after all the creepy shit he’d seen. That was a creepy sound with staying power. The air was musty and sour with mildew and dust and who knew what else. Ben’s heart thrummed in his chest as he stood at the threshold of the small door. A dim haze of light greeted him; there must have been a window back there, and his spirits soared. A window meant that this was more than just a closet, and the fact that the room had been undisturbed meant that there might be something worth salvaging inside. He waited for his eyes to adjust and then, when he was convinced he could navigate the room with something short of total blindness, he edged his way inside.
The Sullivans lived in a subdivision called Cortlandt Farms, a sprawling subdivision of about eight hundred houses on the north side of Raleigh, home to doctors, lawyers, bankers, all manner of folk who had done what they were supposed to do, who had studied hard and worked hard and had been in the right places at the right times at the critical moments in their lives.
The neighborhood was dotted with bright, spacious homes. Kids rode their bikes and played at each other’s houses. Yards were meticulously maintained and greener than nature could ever manage on its own. A never-ending arms race of bigger and bigger grills was constantly underway, and when the weather was nice, the evening air was redolent with the scent of inch-thick ribeyes or marinated chicken sizzling on cast-iron grates. It was a lively neighborhood with an active social life, progressive dinners and parties marking Independence Day, Halloween, Christmas.
