The Nothing Men, page 20
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
The pale soldier tore one open and took a bite.
“Ugh,” he said, spitting the bite out on the pavement. “These are disgusting.”
He flung the remainder to the ground. The man’s face collapsed; all supplies were precious, moreso to Redeyes than anyone. Perhaps the man had been hoping that he could get through unmolested, or that maybe they’d just give him a hard time and then send him on his way.
“I’ll keep these for my men,” the soldier said. “No way I’m eating this nasty shit. But these guys are animals. They’ll eat anything. Now get the fuck out of here while I’m still in a good mood.”
The man climbed back into his truck, no doubt wondering how he was going to explain the absence of the food and water. Ellie tapped Ben on the shoulder.
“Hold your right arm against your chest and lean forward,” she said. “Rock back and forth like you hurt it and you’re in a lot of pain. Quick, do it now before they see us. Don’t overplay it.”
Ben cradled his right arm close to his body, partially shielding it with his left. As Ellie pulled forward in the queue, he focused on a spot of dirt on the top of his shoe, paying no mind to the soldier who would be delighted to learn that he’d detained a wanted fugitive, the catch of a lifetime.
Ellie wasted no time, taking the upper hand as soon as the soldier was in earshot.
“Oh, you’re not going to believe what my idiot husband did,” she said, her words coming like machine gun fire as the Volunteer bent down to talk face-to-face. The barrel of his rifle rested on the doorframe; Ben caught the black O of the muzzle eyeing them like a quiet but alert guard dog. “Climbing on the roof, trying to clean the gutter, and I told him to be careful, and of course, he slips.”
“Papers, ma’am,” the soldier said, his voice clinical and disinterested.
“And I’m there in the kitchen, thinking that he’s going to get himself killed just to get a few leaves out of the goddamn gutter and leave me a widow, and then all of a sudden…”
“Pap-” the soldier said, unable to get the complete word out before Ellie was on him again.
“I hear him yell, ’Oh, fuck!’, excuse my language, but my husband’s not a cusser, you understand and then there was this huge bang, and I swear to God, I thought he was dead. That was it, he’d fallen off the roof.”
“Ma’am, what is it you need?”
Boom, Ben thought, as he continued to rock back and forth. She’d struck a blow.
“Can you guys treat him? I think he broke his arm real bad. Is there a medic here?”
Ben froze. What was she doing?
A second soldier had drifted over, this one taking position outside Ben’s window. Ben maintained his metronomic movement, keeping up appearances. He didn’t have to do much, as Ellie was drawing all the attention from the soldiers.
“We got a medic here?”
Ben glanced in time to see the second soldier shrug his shoulders and shake his head.
“No? Jesus, he hit his head real bad, and I think he broke his arm, too, and you guys don’t have a goddamn medic? We gotta get to the hospital. Isn’t there one up the road a piece?”
The soldier, the name Spivey stitched over his shirt pocket, nodded his head enthusiastically.
“About a mile,” Spivey said. “Hey, why didn’t you guys get out of the car earlier? We could’ve helped you sooner.”
Ben tensed up, like he’d been hit with a stun gun.
“I don’t know!” Ellie barked, her voice saturated in hysterics now, cracking. Damn it if she wasn’t crying a little now. “I wasn’t thinking. I try to follow the rules. I didn’t know what to do.”
Ben began to relax as Ellie’s gambit came into focus. It was brilliant. She was using their authority against them. It was their fault. What else was she supposed to do? She didn’t want to get shot. She’d put the integrity of the system ahead of her husband’s well-being. And they would reward her for it.
Spivey stood up and spun his finger around in a circular motion.
“Open the barricade,” he barked. “Now!”
Like a well-trained housefly, Spivey fed from the pile of bullshit that Ellie had just dumped at his feet. Just as she knew he would. Ben figured he probably would have gone for it as well. It was hard to resist a pretty woman, especially when she was making you feel like a big important man.
A pair of Volunteers raised the gate and waved them through. As Ellie lifted her foot off the brake, Spivey leaned down again.
“You folks take care,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice as syrupy sweet as he’d ever heard it. He found it unnerving and irresistible. “Thank you all so much for keeping us safe.”
Spivey smiled, stood up and banged the roof of the car twice. Ellie eased through the barricade and continued north. In his rearview mirror, Ben watched the next car in the queue pull forward and await its own personal drama with the Volunteer detachment assigned to the checkpoint.
Ellie started hyperventilating within a quarter-mile of clearing the checkpoint, just as the Key Bridge came into view, providing a panoramic vista of Washington, D.C.
“Hey, are you OK?” Ben asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “No, I’m not OK. I gotta pull over.”
She eased over to the shoulder and brought the car to a ragged stop, half on the shoulder, half on the embankment that gently sloped down to a thicket of trees lining the highway. She crossed her arms and took several deep, cleansing breaths. Ben gave her a moment, as much privacy as he could afford her in the cramped compartment. He looked out the windshield toward the northwest, where the sun had begun its slow descent for the night. It cast a soft orange glow across the city, and if he tilted his head just right, he could still see Washington the way it was once was, before it had been shredded by war.
“That was a hell of a thing you did,” Ben said.
“I didn’t think we’d be able to get through without some kind of scam. I just had this terrible feeling in my gut.”
“It was brilliant.”
“You were right,” she said. “We have to get to that apartment. No clue what we’re going to do when we get there, but you were right, we had to get inside the city, and this was the only way, short of swimming across the Potomac.”
“I wonder if it’s still mined.”
“Beats me.”
At the peak of the Panic, the Army Corps of Engineers had strung nets of floating mines up and down the river after a herd of Redeyes had swum across and overwhelmed a squadron of Marines protecting this edge of the capital. They were able to repel the onslaught but lost dozens of Marines in the battle. It had never occurred to anyone that the infected could still swim; the mines made it much easier to hold the city’s southern perimeter and kept D.C. off a list of cities marked for disinfection.
“How are we on gas?”
She tilted her head to check the gas gauge.
“Unless we can score some in D.C., this is going to be a one-way trip.”
Ellie was quiet a minute, picking at a jagged thumbnail. She started to say something and then stopped. She seemed to be struggling with some internal debate.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said.
“What?”
“There was a reason I was working on that HARD team.”
Ben was not entirely surprised by this. If the Haven was engaged in some struggle with the Department, an uninfected ally like Ellie would have been a tremendously useful resource, especially if she could get inside the Department’s operations.
“And what reason is that?”
“Not all of the bodies that the crews recover are disposed in the incinerator,” she said.
“How are they disposed then?” Ben said.
“We’d noticed that the Department had been taking custody of certain remains before they’re incinerated. Each of the processing centers has a refrigerated unit where fresher bodies are kept until they’re transported off site in unmarked tractor trailers.”
“Fresher bodies?”
“Bodies that haven’t degraded much. A fair amount of meat on the bones. We found quite a few like that. Especially folks that died later in the Panic, indoors. Especially the recent suicides.”
“Weird,” Ben said.
“Thompson was obsessed with it,” she said, giving up on the thumb and laying her hands in her lap.
“Maybe they just wanted bodies for medical research.”
“I don’t know what they wanted them for.”
“Did you ever try following the trucks?”
“Yes,” she said. “Once. But I got the feeling they spotted me, so I pulled off. The next day, they seemed to watch me really close at work. I never chanced it again.”
“Did you all think it was related to Tranquility?”
“Thompson must’ve thought it was,” she said. “I think he believed it was part of some larger plan.”
“It could have been something less sinister,” he said. “I would expect that medical research is pretty high on the government’s priority list these days.”
“True.”
“And fresh bodies, I expect, would be most useful, especially where organs, tissue, blood, are still intact.” Ben yawned. “I don’t know. I could be totally talking out of my ass here. Hell, maybe they’re trying to re-animate them, like zombies. You know, we did get a little shortchanged on the whole zombie part of the zombie apocalypse thing.”
Ellie laughed at that, but Ben barely heard it. The door in his mind was opening again, and he couldn’t keep it closed. It was as if he were inside the ruptured hull of a ship, trying to hold back the ocean from pulling him down into the depths of his mind, where his darkest secrets remain trapped, like cargo aboard a ship lost to the depths.
It was dark out when Ben regained consciousness, the seizure having knocked him clean out. The pain in his calf had faded to a dull throb, but it was manageable. It felt like there was something he should be doing for such an injury, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what it was. It was too complicated to think about, and everything in his head felt very simple.
1 + 1 = 2
The cat. Sat. On a hat.
He needed to urinate (Piss!) and so he unzipped his pants and relieved himself where he stood. And then he was done and that was out of his head, in the rearview mirror of his consciousness like a billboard for a decrepit motor lodge advertising FREE CABLE and POOL! slipping by on the highway.
1 + 1 = 2
He was hungry. He looked around. It was a forest. The moon was fat and round, God’s flashlight shining down on a dark, dark world. The shimmery coin hung proudly in the sky, cutting a channel of white light across the clearing.
A noise.
A noise!
Ben’s body tensed up, and he began scanning his surroundings for the target. For his prey. Again, this felt wrong in some way, deep down inside him, but everywhere else, it felt right.
There! In the trees!
A small deer traipsing through the woods stopped to look at him, eyeing him through the branches spreading out from the trunk of an old oak. And Ben didn’t know anything else at that moment other than the knowledge, burning through him the way spent uranium would burn through an un-cooled reactor core, that he had to kill this deer and he had to kill it now or it would kill him first and he started running at it, full bore. The deer was so startled by this aggressive move, one usually not seen in the humans it had previously encountered, that it staggered and lost its footing on the humus covering the soft forest floor.
An instant later, Ben lowered his shoulder into the muscular flank of the doe as it struggled to regain its footing. With everything else forgotten, the Ben of yesterday gone, he wrapped his arms around the deer’s neck and squeezed tightly as he could, cutting off the animal’s air supply. It thrashed about like a bucking bronco, stunned by the ferocity of this unimaginable offensive, unable to break free of Ben’s rage-fueled inferno. As he strangled the deer, he began kneeing the deer in its right flank over and over and over, eliciting a pathetic hooting sound from the doomed animal. Then Ben lost his grip, and the animal broke free of his grip; it crashed into the brush, barely escaping with its life. Immediately, his heart rate decelerated like a racecar entering pit row. His mind, apparently unable to multitask, cycled over to a single new thought, that the threat had been neutralized.
The struggle had taken its toll on Ben; he collapsed to the cool forest floor and fell asleep. He woke up an hour later, and another new thought snapped into place. It was like having a compact disc changer in his head, each slot holding a single discrete thought.
He walked until he was too tired to walk anymore, and he slept in the front yard of an abandoned house. After a few hours of sleep, he woke up covered in dew. It was still dark, but the concept of going back to sleep was beyond the scope of what his infected mind could comprehend, and so he got up and continued walking. He was on the west side of Raleigh, but that didn’t mean anything to him. He didn’t care where he was. He didn’t even care that he was.
He cut through a park and came upon a small creek, swollen with the heavy rains from an earlier storm. He licked his lips and found them dry and cracked. New thought. Thirst. Ben bent down and scooped up water with his cupped hands, enjoying the cool liquid splashing against his lips at an almost primal level, until his thirst was quenched, and he continued his walk to nowhere. As the bright boiling sun traced its ancient course across the ancient sky, his skin began to feel hot and when he looked at it, the skin was flame-red. It had no bearing on his survival and he so gave it no thought. The survival disc continued to spin in the great compact disc player of his mind.
The creek petered out at a short ramp connecting two thoroughfares, and he climbed up the embankment. A vehicle, a green sedan, passed by, and each time, he felt the threat level ramp up into the red and then back down almost instantly as they pulled clear of his location. It was getting dark and he was hungry for the first time since he’d become infected. A commotion to the south caught his attention and he went in that direction because although there wasn’t necessarily any reason to, there was no reason not to.
He came across a low fence and climbed it because it was as easy to climb it as it was to find some other way around. This put him in a large square backyard, the grass long and shaggy. A fresh bed of mulch covered a semi-circular flowerbed in the corner, still waiting for its first seedlings. Opposite that, an expensive-looking playset sat unattended, the swings drifting back and forth in the early spring breeze.
Another pang in his stomach reminded him how hungry he was, and he set his sights on the back door, which stood open invitingly. The house was abandoned. He scavenged the kitchen, ate crackers and moldy roast beef and drank orange juice and flat, lukewarm ginger ale.
His first encounter with another person happened late that afternoon, just as the sun had started to dip low in the late spring sky. He felt the bullet whiz by, like a puff of hot breath across his cheek, before he’d even heard the report of the gun.
Click. Spin.
Survive.
He dropped to the ground and scanned the area around him. He was in an old neighborhood of Cape Cods and small ranchers, and again, this meant nothing to him besides the context it provided. Nothing. His heart was racing, racing, racing. It was out there, this thing that would kill him. Unless he killed it first. There was no want, no joy in this decision. It was survival.
“I’ll kill you!” the voice boomed through the quiet neighborhood.
Ben’s head swiveled to the left. His would-be killer poked his head around the side of a large pickup truck that was parked in the driveway. He was heavyset, shirtless, wearing dirty jean shorts. Several bodies lay strewn about the yard, and these posed no threat.
Ben rushed him the way he’d gone after the deer, but zig-zagging, making it difficult for the shooter to get a clear shot. He didn’t think about this, he just did it, but it seemed like the most natural thing in the world and it was going to get him to his would-be killer and he would be safe again.
The man’s eyes filled with terror as Ben drew on top of him. His weapon ran dry, leaving him to fumble with the ammunition, but before he could get the chamber loaded, Ben tackled him to the ground. The man got one solid blow, connecting against the side of Ben’s head with the butt of the gun, but that was it, and it wasn’t enough.
Ben grabbed the man the ears and slammed his head against the concrete, once, twice, three times. The back of his skull collapsed like the wall of a coal mine giving way, and his body went limp. Ben got up and stood over the man for a moment. Empty, dead eyes looked up at the bright blue sky, seeing nothing. Dark red blood began pooling under the shooter’s head. Ben turned to find a group of other infectees, about a half dozen of them, behind him. He gauged them carefully and decided they posed no threat. The group, five men, and two women, absorbed him into their ranks, and they moved on as one unit until they linked up with other smaller packs.
The group dynamic among the Redeyes had never been fully understood, even after hundreds and thousands of hours of interviews with recovered Redeyes. One never consciously acknowledged the fact that other Reds posed no threat to him; it was simply something he understood at a deep primal level. Together they became something bigger and more powerful than each of them could be alone, a great machine of death and destruction, a snowball of horror rolling down a hill. It was a bond that couldn't be broken, bought, or compromised in any way until the final seizure; coming ten to twelve weeks after the initial infection, it marked the human body’s ultimate victory over the Orchid virus, except for the one percent that succumbed to the second seizure.
Ben’s flock swelled in size as it drifted northwest, picking up men, women, and children. The tsunami of infected humanity swept him along, the mass undulating, stretching, contracting, but never breaking. Victims wore the clothes that had been on their backs when they’d become infected, three-thousand-dollar suits and nightgowns and Little League outfits, dirty and torn, stained with the sickly stench of filth and waste, the stink of a full garbage can that has gone over. Some wore nothing at all, their clothes ripped from their bodies, or worse, having been infected in the nude, karma’s ultimate slap in the face. A wave of rage and violence, sweeping over the land and leaving death and ruin in its wake. There was no limit, no cap, no restrictor plate on their ferocity.
