Ben considered this. On one hand, he wanted to get rid of it immediately, sever any connection that remained between him and Whitmore. On the other hand, if they just chucked it in the woods, the Department would know in a heartbeat that he’d found it. It might be in their best interest for Whitmore to think he was still surreptitiously tracking him.

  “Yeah. That’ll buy us some time. Out here in the woods, they may even think you’ve hooked up with another Haven.”

  “Agreed.”

  He powered down the window and flung out the transmitter. It disappeared into thicket of tall grasses along the side of the road. A moment later, they were cruising back down the road.

  “For the past couple of months,” Ellie said, “we’ve been hearing chatter that the Department has some big operation in the works. I was actually supposed to come back to the farm that following day. Calvin didn’t know much, but he seemed pretty confident that it was going to happen soon.

  “When I heard about the raid, I figured he was right.”

  “What do you think it might be?”

  “One popular theory is the commission of tribunals to hold Redeyes accountable for their actions during the infection period.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I am not,” she said. “There’s actually pretty big support for it. People have been clamoring for some kind of justice for the victims for months. People are still having a hard time accepting that all this death and mayhem was just a result of people not feeling very good.”

  Ben’s teeth ground together, so tightly he could feel the muscles around his jaw line constrict. He could picture being hauled into some kangaroo court dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his arms and legs in chains, the outcome predetermined.

  “What a bunch of bullshit,” he whispered.

  “I know,” she said gently. “Not everyone supports the idea.”

  “How would such a circus even work?” he asked.

  “Just like a criminal court is what I’ve heard,” she said. “Even if they arrest and imprison just a fraction of those who committed ‘Orchid-related incidents,’ they believe that will help make the public happy.”

  “Orchid-related incidents?” he repeated, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “This Department sure does like its euphemisms.”

  “Don’t they though?” she said, laughing briefly, a rich giggle full of joy and happiness, if just for a short while.

  There it was.

  The laugh he’d grown so enamored with during their short time working on the HARD team, the one he didn’t think he’d ever get a chance to hear again. They were quiet a moment, as if they both realized they’d just had a nice moment and didn’t want to spoil it with more discussion about the Department, about the challenges that lay ahead.

  These brief respites from reality were hard to come by, and when you stumbled across one, you treated it with reverence and care. This had been the world left behind when the Panic started, and this is the world you want to get back again. Because if it weren’t for these kind of moments, for the promise of more of these kinds of moments, than really, was there any point in fighting the Department? What difference did it make whether they dismantled every last refugee camp in the United States and they all vanished into history, the proof that humanity had been a terrible mistake, and the world was setting things right again, moving on without it. Because really, the world would go on, with or without humanity. If the planet had a preference, it would probably choose without. Such had been the legacy of mankind.

  Ellie was the first to break the silence.

  “I won’t let that happen to you,” she said.

  “And what about Tranquility?”

  “It could be nothing. It could be everything. That’s what we need to find out. Soon.”

  18

  They stuck to back roads in Ellie’s Jeep, one of the old boxy ones, bouncing along the cratered asphalt. The interior was a washed-out gray, the upholstery torn and sections of it hanging down from the roof like party streamers. Despite its cosmetic flaws, however, its soul was intact, its engine pure and strong, the vehicle still tight.

  It was almost noon, the sun high in the sky, the air clear and clean on this early October afternoon, a preview of the coming fall. The leaves had begun making their annual suicide plunges to the earth below. It had been a hot dry summer, and as such, the leaves were brightly colored. His head pressed against the cool glass of the passenger side window.

  “So what now?” Ben asked.

  The trees whipped by as they cut through the interior of Virginia; if he let his eyes un-focus just a bit, it seemed like they were in a tunnel of green.

  “We need a place to hole up,” she said. “And we need to figure out what Tranquility means.”

  Part of him, the small part that still didn’t want any part of this fight, recoiled at that, like he’d inadvertently touched a hot stove. This wasn’t his fight. He’d stumbled into the Haven by dumb luck as much as anything. He certainly hadn’t helped the cause. And most importantly, he had fulfilled his obligation to deliver Calvin’s message to Ellie. His conscience was clear. And his family was his primary responsibility. Nothing was more important than repairing the damage in the family unit. He could try going home again. If he could just show Sarah that there was nothing to fear, then maybe there would be some hope of reconciliation. If he could show her that he was, once again, the man she’d married, the father to her son.

  And if that didn’t work, he could just disappear, melt into the background of America, live out his days with some modicum of peace and dignity. Really couldn’t ask for much else. Maybe he could find a job somewhere, somewhere hard and tough where people didn’t want to live, apocalypse or no apocalypse.

  But then he remembered how the Volunteers had destroyed that camp and the smug look on Whitmore’s face as it had happened. The way he had ordered the camp leveled, as casually as a maitre’d directing his wait staff to clear an unkempt table for new patrons. It was always going to be this way for the Redeyes. Kept under the Department’s thumb, used as propaganda to keep the population in line, the way you told children old fables designed to keep them well-behaved. Like it or not, this was his fight. Whitmore had certainly made it Ben’s fight.

  “How did Calvin even know Tranquility was even a thing?” Ben asked.

  “We had someone inside the Department,” she said. “I didn’t know much, just that the person wasn’t very high up. He could snoop a little, maybe overhear things he wasn’t supposed to hear, but that was about it.”

  She’d answered without pause or hesitation. Sharing one of her most critical bits of intelligence with him. For all she knew, Ben had cut a deal with the Department on the condition that he deliver the rest of the Haven, the last of the loose threads that needed to be snipped. When doctors went after a cancerous tumor, they excised all of it; they didn’t leave anything behind. And so it would be with the Department. The Haven constituted a threat, one that could metastasize, and it had to be completely and utterly destroyed.

  “And you don’t know who it is?”

  “No,” she said. “Calvin called him Mercury. I begged Calvin to tell me or my brother who it was, in case something happened to him, but he wouldn’t hear it. He claimed he had given Mercury his word. Honestly, I think he just liked the idea of knowing something the rest of us didn’t.”

  Ben considered this, and they sat in silence as they continued east, traversing the gently rolling hills. The landscape was still green and lush, like an older woman hanging onto her looks with all her might.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, sighing as she said it. It was as if a balloon had deflated inside her, letting out a little bit of her essence, her hope.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Mercury is probably dead,” she said. “Obviously, they knew Calvin knew something about Tranquility. Probably wouldn’t take them very long to figure out where the information had come from.”

  “Probably, you say. But you don’t know for certain.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Maybe he got wise and went underground.”

  “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “How did they interact with each other?”

  “Calvin would leave him a signal.”

  “Where?”

  “Calvin still had a little apartment he kept in D.C.,” Ellie said. “Mercury lived there. Whenever he wanted to meet with Mercury, he left a chalk mark on the mailbox out front. They had this system worked out so they knew when to meet based on when he left the mark. I took that to mean that he checked the mailbox every day, probably at the same time.

  “We could try to make contact with him,” Ben said. “Maybe he’s got more information about Tranquility.”

  “You really want to get involved with all this?”

  “Look, I just can’t take it anymore,” Ben said. “What the hell else do I have to do? You’re right. They’re never going to let us live a normal life. They’re just hellbent on driving us all into the ground. Reconstruction and Recovery, my ass.”

  A match had been struck against the dried-out husk of his soul, its contents desiccated, ignored, left to wither away to cosmic ash. He could feel it rising up in him, like a pot of water starting to boil, its contents starting to froth and swirl around. It felt different than what he’d been feeling the last few months, what he thought had been anger. That had been more self-pity, a metaphorical and half-hearted middle finger at the way things were. This, though, was different. This was anger. Some good old-fashioned, time to shove-it-up-someone’s-ass anger. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, like a pressurized canister venting off gas to relieve the building pressure.

  He pointed at a pack of cigarettes lying on the console and asked: “You mind if I have one?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He stuck one between his lips and punched in the cigarette lighter.

  “I’ve just been stumbling around for the past few months,” he said. “Thinking I was going to figure things out, maybe that if I just waited long enough, everything would go back to the way they were.”

  The lighter popped free from the cigarette adapter with a loud snap. He lit the cigarette and powered down his window to vent the smoke. The first drag burned his throat and made his eyes water and he tried to remember the last time he’d smoked a cigarette. Probably a poker game or night out with the boys a few weeks before the Panic. It seemed like such an unnecessary vice, a relic of a bygone era.

  He let out a long plume of smoke and banged the inside of the doorframe with a clenched fist. The muted thud echoed through the quiet cabin of the Jeep. His hand stung, but it felt good. It felt good to feel something. His act of violence against the car door did not seem to faze Ellie Campbell, as though she’d been expecting it. She said nothing.

  “They’re no good,” he said. “They’ve made this disaster their own personal playground. And you say people are just going along with it.”

  “Fear and ignorance,” she said. “They’re powerful motivators. People want to feel safe again. It hasn’t been that long since the world was normal. In many ways, people are like you. They’re just waiting for things going to go back to the way they were. And the truth is, for many people, they feel like it’s right there. They see construction vehicles and soldiers and they watch F-One every night. They see stories about new schools and hospitals and think we’re right back where we were before the Panic, but the fact is we’re years away from going back to the way things were. The damage was too great, too personal, too intimate to simply undo with brooms and sandbags and ribbon-cuttings. It might take a couple generations. Maybe our grandkids can have the world we once had. And this constant promise that a new day is just over the horizon simply keeps people calm and collected. No one wants to rock the boat the world might be getting ready to turn a corner.”

  “I’ll tell you something else,” she continued. “The Department has stepped up its crackdowns on civil rights. They want to keep things copacetic as they push this narrative that we’re getting back to the way things were. And of course, they hang the threat of relapse over everyone’s head.”

  “Of course,” Ben said.

  “It’s the ultimate weapon. It keeps everyone suspicious of each other, watching each other for the first hint of infection. The Department has a phone bank set up to field reports of symptomatic behavior from the public. From what I hear, the phones ring off the hook.”

  “Pretty goddamn brilliant,” Ben said.

  “No one said they were stupid.”

  “And you think this Tranquility is just going to be more of the same?”

  “No. I think it’s going to be worse.”

  Ben took a drag from his cigarette.

  “We need to stop it then,” he said. “Somehow we need to figure out what it is and shut it down.”

  “What we need is a place to hole up.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  Ben took the wheel for the second half of the trip while Ellie napped; he avoided the interstates, which kept them clear of the Department checkpoints but doubled the length of the trip. As the sun began to set, he negotiated the narrow, winding roads that ambled through a heavily wooded section of rural Caroline County, about an hour northeast of Richmond, twisting through huge expanses of trees, their skeletal branches stretching across the road like oversized Halloween props. Every now and again, a car would pass them headed southbound, the wink of sun glinting off the approaching windshield. He watched each car as it zoomed by, feeling the slight push of the draft as the cars passed each other, and wondered where it was headed, who was driving it, what their story was.

  At a familiar billboard for a local truck stop, Ben slowed down and turned onto Route 815, a partially paved afterthought. Ellie sighed and sat up, taking in her surroundings.

  “You get some sleep?” he asked.

  She yawned.

  “Didn’t realize how tired I was.” She rubbed a hand against the side of her neck and winced. “Great. Just what I need. Freaking stiff neck.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  She took in her new surroundings as the road sloped downwards toward the large clearing in which the cabin was nestled. Fall was in full swing here, the leaves a kaleidoscope of oranges, yellows and reds, and for a moment, everything felt normal. Just for a moment. He tried to hold it in his mind like a snapshot, something to remind him that their world wasn’t always littered with three billion corpses, that families made weekend trips to the mountains to look at the leaves and then capped off the night with a trip to the local pizza joint, the one serving up the big floppy slices that you folded in half to eat.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “My father-in-law still lives out here,” he said. “I need to see him.”

  The house came into a view a moment later. Ben’s heart fluttered as he craned his neck to see whether Sarah’s car was here, but Walter’s pickup truck was the only vehicle in the driveway. He was slightly relieved that she wasn’t here, but part of him was disappointed. He wanted to see them so desperately. Ben didn’t know if it was the time of the day or the way the sun was draping its soft beams of light and splash of gold across the roof or if he was just flat-out losing his mind. It reminded him of their good visits here, when Walter would entertain Gavin and he and Sarah could hike in the woods and he would make his chili and they would play board games after dinner.

  He puttered down the gravel driveway and rolled to a stop at the back of the house. Walter Clark was standing in middle of the yard, his arm curled around a large rake, watching his visitors pull in. Large, dome-shaped piles of leaves were scattered throughout the yard like bunkers, just begging for a mischievous five-year-old to scamper through and undo two hours’ worth of work in a few seconds. The man was a cipher; it was hard to get a read on what he was thinking as his Redeye son-in-law invaded his solitary existence out here in the woods.

  The engine ticked and hissed as it cooled down, Ben thought about all that had transpired since his last visit here. It was December, and he’d only seen them once, a few days after he recovered from his infection. He’d come here, begging Walter to facilitate a meeting, which he had agreed to do. It took weeks to get Sarah to agree to the meeting; at the last second, she had changed her mind and chose not to come. Sarah and Gavin had been too afraid to even be in the same room with him.

  In the end, Walter told him that while he felt badly for Ben, Sarah and Gavin had to be his main priority. He would prefer that Ben not come around again, but he’d left the door open, saying that if he really had no other place to go, if it was a matter of life and death, he wouldn’t turn him away. Ben had honored that request, but he would be cashing in that chip today.

  “You planning on getting out of the car?” Ellie asked, her voice warm but firm.

  He glanced over at her, nearly forgetting that she was there at all.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  They alighted from the car in tandem, like a pair of TV detectives arriving at a crime scene. It was warm out, the air pregnant with humidity. The clouds were swollen and purplish, like a bruise against the sky. Ben approached Walter while Ellie lagged behind, parking herself in the V of the open door. Her elbow propped on the roof, she rested her chin behind her arm, concealing the lower half of her face.

  He was conscious of how he walked, as though Walter would judge him on the way he moved, as if he were wearing the answers to any of the questions that his father-in-law might have for him on his shirt.

  They sized each other up for a moment, not a long one, but long enough to make him worry that he wouldn’t be welcome here. That as deep as Walter Clarke’s reserves of patience might once have been, he’d finally run out of the stuff.

  “Been a long time,” Walter said.

  Ben cut his eyes away, too embarrassed to hold the man’s gaze.

  “Yes, sir. It has.”

  Walt paused to wipe his brow with and handkerchief, letting loose a long sigh.

 

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