The Nothing Men, page 25
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
“Of course.”
Whitmore’s phone began to ring again; he held up a finger and excused himself, right at the gates, just out of earshot. He chatted for a few minutes, hung up and slid the phone into his jacket pocket. He motioned for the Volunteers, and that earned Ben another tip of the muzzle in the small of his back. Ben winced, surprised at how much that hurt. It didn’t seem like it should, but it did. As soon as he got close enough to see Whitmore’s face, he knew he was in trouble.
Big trouble.
Whitmore was smiling, ear to ear, almost as if he were trying to get his lips to stretch around the circumference of his head and touch in the back. He looked like a man with a secret he couldn’t wait to share. Some juicy, juicy gossip.
“Mr. Sullivan,” he said, his voice positively dripping with glee. “I was just on the phone with the Secretary herself.”
Ben felt dizzy, and he found himself having to concentrate on breathing, and as he did so, he wondered how he had made it this far in his life without making sure that he was always breathing. He thought about his eighth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Martin, and how she had taught them that it was an involuntary reaction, and he was sure that had been a gigantic lie. Each breath seemed to get stuck in his throat.
“What did you talk about?” Ben said, his voice sounding small and far away, barely making its way over the stream of wind blowing by.
“Why, we talked about you, my good man!”
Ben didn’t reply. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Mr. Sullivan, would you like to know what Tranquility is?”
26
Ben found himself nodding stupidly, like a game-show contestant offered the chance to peek behind the Mystery Door #2. He did want to know what Tranquility was. He wanted to know what he’d sacrificed his life for.
“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Whitmore said, stepping closer and clapping Ben on the shoulder. “After all, you have worked so hard to find out. You’ve been quite the little eager beaver!”
More dizziness ensued, the feeling that Ben had gotten up too fast, faster than he’d ever gotten up in his life; his knees buckled underneath him. The Volunteers hoisted him back onto his feet.
“Why tell me now?”
“Because, Mr. Sullivan, after I tell you all about it – and trust me, I’m not going to leave out any details – I’m going to blow your brains out.”
Ben’s second seizure hit at 6:18 p.m. on July 26, some seventy-one days after he’d become infected with the virus. According to numerous studies conducted since the Panic, the mean symptomatic period for infection was approximately sixty-nine days (and hadn’t that been a source of amusement online). The quickest recovery on record had been fifty-four days; the longest, ninety-one. He’d been inside a Dumpster foraging for his dinner, when his body seized up and everything went dark. He flopped around the stinking trash container for nearly a minute; he fractured his right wrist and sliced his bicep on a shard of a broken beer bottle, but other than that he emerged from the seizure none too worse for the wear. He was lucky; about one percent of Redeyes died during this second seizure.
When it was over, Ben sat up, confused but alert. At some primal level, deep down, he knew that his body had prevailed over the infection. He was in disbelief; in those horrific hours after he’d been bitten, it had never occurred to him that he would recover. There had been no documented cases of recovery by then. The assumption had been that infection with Orchid was permanent, and the government’s sole objective had been to wipe out the Redeyes. He didn’t know why they had thought that; it just seemed weird that a disease that would push humanity to the brink would simply fade away like the common cold.
He was sitting atop a mound of damp, sweaty trash, cloaked in an invisible cloud of the stink of rotting garbage. As his insides curdled from the stench, he scampered over the side of the Dumpster and dropped down to the ground below. The ruins of an apartment complex, consumed by fire, stood before him.
He didn’t know what month it was, let alone what day it was. He certainly didn’t know where he was. Instinctively, he checked the bite wound on his calf and found that it had healed; a faded semi-circular scar of jagged dashes remained, a ghostly reminder of his attacker’s teeth marks. The sun had burnished his sleeveless arms to a dark brown hue, and he felt the stinging tightness of more sunburn on his neck and face. He was wearing filthy, loose-fitting jeans; these were the same pants he’d been wearing the day he’d been bitten. They were terribly loose around his waist, and that gave him his first clue that it had been a while since that terrible day. The pants had been snug back then, maybe a little too snug. A pat of his stomach revealed his paunch was gone.
And then it all came rushing back to him, a flood of blood, of beatings and wild rampages, like a hungry lion let loose on a roomful of wounded baby gazelles. His legs gave way underneath him as the faces of those whose lives he had ended slid by, like one of those In Memoriam photo montages from the awards shows. Except this wasn’t any black-tie affair, movie stars mourning the loss of the giants of the business who’d died after long, happy lives. No, this was a terrible slideshow through hell.
He screamed, a bellowing howl that originated deep in his soul and roared out of him like a runaway express train with evil as the conductor. And yet the faces of his victims continued to scroll by. Seven, eight, nine. Ten. Twelve. Sixteen before he lost count. No. It was impossible. He hadn’t killed those people. Hallucinations. From the fever that accompanied the virus. Psychotic visions that had anchored themselves in his head, like weeds taking root, making it difficult to discern what was real and what was imagined.
But he was just kidding himself.
He started running, running as fast as he could. Perhaps if he ran fast enough he could stay ahead of the horror show looping in his mind. He ran behind the ruins of the complex into a woodsy area choked with pines and oaks and maples. The canopy provided good coverage from the sun, keeping it cool, the air ripe with summer pine. At the far edge of the trees, he crashed into a tent, knocking it flat, stumbling over its occupants like a bowling ball clearing a spare. Cursing and yelling ensued, and as they emerged from the tent, Ben scampered to his feet and continued running. The sound of gunshots cracked the afternoon. A round whizzed by his head and splintered a young sapling not ten feet to his left. But no matter how far or how fast he ran, he couldn’t get the images out of his mind.
He spent that first night under an overpass, huddled in a little recess between the metal railing and concrete wall, unable to control the flood of tears, the trembling, the never-ending loop of the images of his victims. He ran the gamut of human emotion, from fear and terror, to depression and melancholy, to joy and glee. One hour he wept, another he laughed hysterically, a third he spent quiet, almost catatonic.
As dawn broke, he was hanging onto a single frayed thread of sanity. He’d figured out where he was, some sixty miles north of the home he shared with Sarah and Gavin. It took him three days to cover the distance and slalom around scores of abandoned vehicles dotting the landscape like dead bugs. As he drew closer to the Raleigh metro area, the scope of the devastation came into ever-sharpening focus, as though he was adjusting the lens on the camera in his mind. The more he saw, the more he remembered about his time in the grip of the Orchid infection. The denser the population grid, the worse it got.
Things appeared to be dying down; the very few Redeyes he saw paid him no mind. He would later learn that Redeyes did not attack individuals carrying antibodies to the virus, even those who had kicked the infection. Yet another quirk of the virus that scientists were trying to unravel. By this point, most were injured or emaciated, usually both, and there were far fewer with an active infection. Food was particularly hard to come by in the latter half of that summer, as the distribution channels that had fed America before the Panic had been all but destroyed. It was nothing like the absolute chaos that they’d all become accustomed to in the weeks preceding his infection.
He made it back to his neighborhood just as the sun had begun its slow descent to the horizon. The twilight was still but for the sounds of the cicadas and crickets. The power was out, but when he saw the lantern burning in the bay window at the front of his house, his heart began to race, but in a good way. Not like the terror-fueled jackhammer that had been thrumming away since springtime. For the first time, he began to feel like things might work out, that he’d made it, that he’d survived this horrible thing. As he made his way up the front walk, checking out the lawn that he’d once lovingly cared for, long since choked with waist-high weeds, he began to think about the things he’d need to do.
But first, he needed to put his family back together.
He climbed the four brick steps to the front door, and before he could stop himself, he knocked firmly on the door.
And so when Sarah answered the door, looking thin, tired, like she’d been to hell and back, he was most surprised to hear her utter a blood-curdling shriek and raise a gun to his face.
The Volunteers escorted Ben behind the building, Whitmore trailing close behind. In a clearing about fifty yards north of the truck, they stopped and formed a triangle around him. The soldiers had their rifles trained at him, and Whitmore joined in as well, pointing a large-caliber handgun at Ben’s face. A brisk wind had picked up, and Ben was cold. Ben worked very hard not to shiver in front of Whitmore, lest the jackass think that he was afraid of him.
“So what now?” Ben asked.
“Now you find out everything you wanted to know.”
“Kind of Scooby-Dooish, isn’t it?” Ben said. “Telling me the master plan?”
“You know, I thought about that,” Whitmore said. “But I so desperately want you to know. I want you to die here knowing what’s about to happen. Otherwise, killing you is almost pointless. And besides, things are already in motion.”
“Tell me, don’t tell me. I really don’t give a shit.”
Whitmore smiled. One of his stupid smiles that Ben had come to associate with Whitmore sitting on a juicy bit of gossip that he was just dying to share with Ben. He was worse than a teenage girl.
“How did you ever make it as a covert operative?”
This earned Ben the butt of Whitmore’s hand cannon across his face. His field of vision lit up with white-hot pain, and his legs buckled underneath him. He tried mightily to stay on his feet, but the sudden burst of vertigo dropped him to his knees.
“The Department estimates that approximately one hundred eighty million people became infected with the Orchid virus during the Panic,” Whitmore said, with all the verve of a college professor who truly loved his subject matter. “As you know, these people…”
He paused, as though looking for just the right way to put his next thought.
“You people…”
There.
Now he looked satisfied.
“…caused untold devastation and carnage.”
“I’d tell you it wasn’t our fault,” Ben replied, “but I’m guessing you don’t care about things like facts.”
Whitmore ignored him and continued.
“There are about thirty million Reds still alive in the continental United States,” he said, “mostly concentrated along the East and West Coasts. A good chunk in Texas and around Chicago. The rest scattered through the less densely populated regions.
“And I have to be honest with you, Mr. Sullivan. The country is still in bad, bad shape. The economy is not coming along like we had hoped. The infrastructure is still a mess. The military is a shell of its former self. Luckily, the rest of the world is in the same shape we are. For now. But the race is on, Mr. Sullivan. The race to become the world’s first post-Panic superpower.”
Ben was trying to parse meaning from his words, but he was missing something. Something that Whitmore hadn’t shared yet. Or maybe Whitmore was just screwing with him.
“But we can’t reclaim our spot at the top with this drag on our progress,” he said. “We did a survey a couple months ago. Asked people how things were going, their concerns, what they thought the country needed to work on. You know, we’re pretty far afield here. Uncharted waters. We thought the input would be useful.”
“Do you know what the respondents’ number one answer was?”
“Let me guess,” Ben said. “The Redeyes.”
“Precisely,” he said. “They’re afraid, Ben. They’re afraid it’s all going to start up again. You remember what it was like, don’t you? Before they got you?
Ben did remember.
“You really don’t know how close we came to going under,” Whitmore said. “Some projections said that we had another week. Maybe two. You know what happened on the West Coast?”
Ben shook his head. The news had been filtered, sanitized and spun until it was as clean as an operating room.
“The Redeyes outnumbered us eight-to-one, ten-to-one in the metro areas. San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Fifteen million infected in California by the beginning of June. That’s more than the goddamn Chinese Army. The President authorized a tactical nuclear strike on each of the cities. To disinfect.”
“Millions of people, vaporized in the blink of an eye. The West Coast, it’s uninhabitable for the next fifty years. And it didn’t help. Y’all absolutely destroyed the Midwest. They were too scattered for the military to make an effective campaign against, especially since they were having such a hard time here and farther north.
“We can’t go through that again,” Whitmore said. “It could finish us off. The Secretary meets with the President daily. This is all they talk about. They review reports of suspected outbreaks. They review pathology reports, looking for any sign that the virus could make a comeback. Like shingles.”
“You’re comparing the Orchid virus to shingles?”
“You know what I mean. The point is, Mr. Sullivan, is that if the virus ever reactivates, we’ve got to be able to get a handle on it quickly. And so the administration has decided that for the safety of your people-”
“My people?” Ben repeated. “Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?”
“Spare me your judgment,” he said. “For the safety of this country, this is what we’re going to do. This is Camp Alpha. If the Secretary hadn’t decided that you were too dangerous, this would have been your new home. There are nineteen other camps like it.”
“Nineteen more?”
Ben was confused.
“Why do you need twenty camps this size? How many people do you plan on arresting?”
“Why, Mr. Sullivan, I’m surprised that you haven’t picked it up yet.”
Ben’s gaze bounced between the look of satisfaction on Whitmore’s face and the empty camp that lay before him like a brand-new subdivision, awaiting the influx of young families and minivans and bottles of Pinot and golf bags. Behind the camp, the sun was dipping toward the horizon; the approaching darkness bothered Ben at his core, and he silently pleaded with the sun to stay aloft a little longer, to not abandon him with these monsters.
And then it came to him in a flash, all at once.
“Jesus Christ,” Ben said, stumbling backwards away from Whitmore. His feet tangled together and he fell on his ass, hard; the shock of the impact fired a bolt of pain through his spine. They laughed at him, and as they laughed, he was more certain than ever of what they were doing.
“You finally figure it out?”
Ben stared at him, his eyes wide with horror.
“You’re starting up camps. Permanent camps.”
“You’re a bomb just waiting to go off,” Whitmore said. “And if it does, we can keep it under control.”
“But there haven’t been any outbreaks since the end of the Panic.”
Terror fluttered in his chest, a can of butterflies tickling his insides.
“We cannot take that chance,” he said. “We don’t understand how the virus works. We still don’t even know where it came from. For all we know, it could be fatal next time. Or more easily transmitted.”
“Even if that were true, this isn’t how you do it. This is what the Nazis would do.”
Whitmore slapped Ben hard across the face. Rage rippled across his face, which was flush and tight.
“We’re doing this to save the country,” he barked at him. “This goddamn thing was nearly the end of everything!”
Ben took the slap in stride. He didn’t even raise a hand to check on his cheek, which felt warm and numb. He poked Whitmore in the chest and shook his head violently.
“It’ll never work,” Ben said. “The American people aren’t going to stand idly by while you guys start up a bunch of concentration camps.”
“Very good, Mr. Sullivan,” Whitmore said, his tone changing course dramatically, as though they were a couple of political science graduate students, kicking back in a Starbucks, sipping a little organic free trade coffee. Wearing thick sweaters and discussing the dynamics of a totalitarian regime.
“You’re right,” he said. “The people probably wouldn’t stand for it. I think they’d have a very hard time accepting the permanent internment of their fellow citizens. That is, unless you win their hearts and minds. If you do that, the people will follow you anywhere, because they’ll believe that you’re looking for out for their best interests.
“And you believe that, don’t you? That we’re looking for out for your best interests?”
“Like it matters what I believe,” Ben snapped.
They were quiet a moment as Ben considered the ramifications of Whitmore’s confession.
How do you win their hearts and minds?
They were still Americans. They’d been to hell and back, sure, but would they be so eager to turn on millions of their fellow citizens? On their neighbors, their friends, their families, their children’s teachers and pastors and pizza delivery guys and nice ladies who cleaned their teeth?
They wouldn’t.
Unless they felt there was no choice.
