The Nothing Men, page 26
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
And what would lead them to believe there was no choice but to intern millions of American citizens? What could the Department possibly tell them to believe that there was no choice?
Tranquility. Tranquility. Tranquility.
He looked up at a sliver of moon, looking back down on him like a smirk. Alone in the indigo sky. Men had walked up there. More than half a century earlier, America had put a man on the moon, and now they were ready to start up a new version of Nazi Germany. Quite the cultural progression. He wished he’d been alive to see the moon landing. He couldn’t believe that he’d lived his entire life and never seen a man go to the moon. He couldn’t believe that one of mankind’s great achievements had occurred before he was born. It seemed backwards.
Tranquility. Tranquility. Tranquility.
He began to feel a nagging ache inside his mind, like a song lyric that was just out of reach, the name of an old classmate that had slipped away over the years.
“Well, Mr. Sullivan, I have enjoyed our little discussion, but I’m afraid that our time is up.”
What was it?
Tranquility. Tranquility. Tranquility.
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
Those amazing words, cloaked in static. He could still hear them, having watched the clips from the moon landing over and over and over, a reminder of what mankind was capable of.
Tranquility. Tranquility. Tranquility.
And now they’d poisoned the word with their monstrous vision.
Why?
Had it been some automatically generated code word, ruthlessly spit out by some Department computer in that building back in Washington? Or was it something more? Perhaps the Department felt that once they’d locked them all up, the people would feel tranquil again. They could start focusing on reality television and college basketball and hot yoga again.
“On your knees,” Whitmore said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.
Ben was barely listening now; he stood there, ignoring Whitmore as he tried to scratch the itch in his brain.
No. There was something else at work here. He was sure of it.
He looked back up at the moon; now it looked like the smirk of someone who’d told a joke you hadn’t quite understood. Possibly a joke at your expense.
Unless you win their hearts and minds…
Then it hit him like a ton of bricks.
You won the people’s hearts and minds in the simplest, cruelest way possible.
You made them think that the Orchid virus had come back.
And Ben knew how they were going to do it.
27
He had just seconds to execute his plan.
He waited until the two Volunteers pushed him to his knees and then he set his irreversible plan into motion. He fell to his knees and flopped over on his side before he could change his mind. He thrashed about the ground as violently as he could, fluttering his eyelids but keeping them half open so he could keep an eye on things. He didn’t know if people moaned during the seizure, so he kept as quiet as he could. As he flailed about like a marlin on a charter fishing boat, he waited for the report of a rifle, for the sudden extinguishment of light, of hope, of everything that had once been or would ever be Ben Sullivan.
“Grab his legs!” Whitmore barked.
“Fuck this,” a Volunteer barked. “I’m going to shoot him!”
“Don’t you dare,” Whitmore yelled. “Put the gun away or I’ll kill you myself. Get him into the truck. Now!”
This was what Ben had been counting on. Whitmore would be beyond excited that his prisoner, his fugitive, had relapsed. Ben had to hope that the man’s fear and contempt of the Redeyes would mask the coincidence that the relapse had hit just as Ben was about to be executed. And regardless, he couldn’t take a chance that Ben was faking it. Best to secure him, whisk him away to some secret government lab and let the doctors sort it out.
A pair of powerful hands slid under his armpits and lifted him off the ground. He kept twitching as best as he could as they dragged him along the compacted dirt. His body began to ache from fatigue; he was running out of time. Now. It had to be now.
He dialed back the convulsions as he positioned himself to strike. He lolled his head to the side toward the Volunteer on his right. When the soldier stopped to adjust his arm under him, Ben snapped his head at the man’s bare arm, the sleeves of his Volunteer uniform rolled up to just below the elbow. His teeth sank into the fleshy muscle halfway down the arm, and he bit down with all his might, feeling the sudden burst of blood in his mouth as his canines tore down into the man’s epidermis and subcutaneous tissue. The sensation repulsed him instantly, triggering dry heaves. He forced himself to keep it down, telling himself he had to get through this. He absolutely had to.
The soldier howled in agony as he let Ben go. Ben righted himself just as he began to lose balance, and he turned toward the other soldier, who was now frantically unslinging his rifle, his face locked in a rictus of terror. Behind him, Whitmore chambered a round, the sound of the metallic click unmistakable even against the backdrop of the wounded soldier’s wails. Ben rushed at the second soldier’s legs, and they crashed to the hard-packed ground in a heap.
His insides were still recoiling at the horror of what he’d just done to the other soldier, and he couldn’t bring himself to bite this guy as well. Instead, he scratched at the man’s face, his hands trembling as they tore at the guy’s flesh. Blood from the first soldier’s arm now smeared against the man’s cheeks and lips, and he whimpered in fear. As he waged his surprise attack, the man’s eyes widened with horror, Ben seeing in them the same thing he’d felt the day he’d been bitten.
“No, no, no,” he pleaded.
A burst of machine-gun fire crackled around him, and he looked up to see the driver rushing at them with his rifle blazing at him, just along the side of the truck. Ben rolled off his second victim just before the driver drew a bead on his target; the machine gun roared a second time, but the fusillade only found Soldier Number Two, riddling his prone form with bullets.
Ben scrambled across the ground toward the dead soldier’s gun, which had fallen to the ground in between him and the bullet-pocked corpse. He tucked the stock under his shoulder and fired a wild burst at the driver. His first burst missed badly; he fired again, and this time, his salvo found purchase in the driver’s legs and abdomen. The soldier crashed to the ground like a puppeteer had cut his strings, and he lay still.
As he looked around for Whitmore, the sky echoed with the report of another gunshot and his leg lit up with pain. He looked down and saw a dark stain spreading across his right pant leg, just as Whitmore crashed into his flank. He went down again, hard, his world filling with white light of pain as the small of his back collided with the unforgiving ground.
Whitmore was on top of him now, the gun in his hand, but the barrel not quite centered on Ben’s face. Ben wrapped his fingers around the burning-hot muzzle and pushed it away even as Whitmore pressed the heel of his hand into Ben’s throat, reducing his intake of air to no more than a whistle. He grunted in pain from the scald of the gun’s muzzle and the gunshot to his leg burned like liquid fire. But those were the least of his problems; if he couldn’t break Whitmore’s grip on his throat soon, he’d black out. Already, he could feel things going fuzzy.
The gun. He had to get control of the gun.
He slithered his free hand between their bodies, jamming it through a tiny crevice where Whitmore’s ribcage was pressed down against Ben’s chest. His left shoulder burned with fatigue, but he refused to let go of the gun; he’d come too far to give up now. With all the strength he could muster, he pushed the barrel back toward Whitmore’s midsection as his right hand inched ever closer to the trigger guard. The periphery of his vision began to darken and fade away as his body screamed for more oxygen. Whitmore was so hellbent on strangling Ben that he couldn’t quite detect the tide turning beneath him.
Ben’s finger slipped around the trigger guard moments after he’d gotten the barrel turned 180 degrees away from his body. His sweaty hands fumbled with the trigger for a moment before finding their grip. He pulled the trigger one time, the muzzle pressed flush against Whitmore’s rib cage, and the pistol roared.
Immediately, Ben felt the hand on his throat go slack. Ben rolled onto his side, and Whitmore slid off, his hands laced together in a protective cocoon on the bloom of blood that had appeared in the middle of his abdomen. He lay on his back, groaning. Ben pushed himself off the ground, and then his legs turned to jelly underneath him. He crumpled back to the ground and looked at the scene before him. It was carnage. Total carnage.
The soldier he’d bitten was still there, cradling his wounded arm and muttering to himself. He seemed uninterested in the goings-on around him, focused as he was on what he believed was the imminent end of his life as he knew it. Ben watched him wander around, scanning the ground, like he’d dropped a contact lens. He stopped, and Ben followed the soldier’s line of sight. The soldier bent down to pick up his rifle, jammed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
“Nooooo!” Ben yelled.
But it was too late. The back of the soldier’s head disintegrated; he was dead before his body finished crumpling to the ground. Ben stood there in the shadow of blood, amid the dead and dying. He turned back toward Whitmore, who was crying and whimpering; his breaths came in ragged bursts, as though the act of respiration was pure agony.
Ben looked at him with equal parts pity and disgust. He couldn’t help it. Part of him was glad the man was dying. The world was in a shitty enough place as it was. The last thing it needed was a man like Whitmore.
“So when is it going to happen?” Ben asked, crouching next to the doomed man. It made him feel cold and callous and uncaring to question this man in his dying breath, but he had to know.
Whitmore groaned and pressed his hands to the wound, perhaps believing that pressure would relieve some of his pain. Instead, it just accelerated the blood loss, and the crimson liquid seeped through his fingers.
“Fuck off.”
“I know what you’re going to do,” Ben said. “You might as well tell me when it’s going to happen.”
“I said fuck off,” he replied, his voice softer and more muted. He didn’t have long. “You haven’t stopped anything. You got lucky tonight. This is all going to happen whether I’m here or not.”
His eyes closed as a wave of pain washed over him. His face tightened and he rolled onto his side, toward Ben, curled into the fetal position. Ben didn’t need to examine it to know there was nothing he could do for Whitmore, even if he wanted to, which, he had to admit to himself, he most certainly did not.
“Jesus,” he said. “Fucking hurts.”
Ben stayed low, his eyes locked on the man’s face, rocking back and forth on his heels as the life drained out of Whitmore. The Department operative didn’t speak again, and he died without telling Ben what he wanted to know.
He stood up, his knees popping like muted gunshots as he did so. He scanned the scene before him, stunned by the sight of so much blood. It was like the Panic all over again, a microcosm of the world around him, the world that they all called home. He couldn’t believe he’d survived. To them, he was the boogeyman, a specter, the evil clown from It, and instead of treating him like an out-of-control prisoner, they’d panicked. A one-in-a-million shot if ever there was one, but it had worked.
As the adrenaline drained away from his body like dirty bathwater, he became aware of a dull throb where the bullet had clipped him. Fortunately, it had grazed Ben’s leg, leaving a short shallow channel of devastated flesh running along his right knee. It burned like hell, but the good news was that the bleeding had stopped. He’d need an antibiotic, and he didn’t know where the hell he would find that. Medicine was hard to come by these days. He hoped that the heat of the bullet had disinfected the wound on its way through his flesh.
His entire body ached. Apocalypse or no, time continued its never-ending assault on his body, and the aches and pains were showing up right on schedule. His back was tight and stiff. He could only imagine the pain he’d be feeling tomorrow.
What now, he wondered. What now?
The camp was empty now, but it wouldn’t be for long. And certainly, when Whitmore and his team didn’t check in, they’d send reinforcements to find out what the hell had happened. He hustled over to Whitmore’s corpse and took the wireless phone. Part of him felt strange about violating the man’s personal effects, but he had to do what he could to survive, right?
He slipped the phone into his pocket and scanned the area for anything else useful. The guns were next, which he scooped off the blood-soaked ground like stray branches before an afternoon mowing of the lawn. The soldiers each had daypacks, stocked with protein bars, first-aid kits, bottled water. And first-aid kits. This stuff was gold.
Ben was so engrossed in scavenging the scene to outfitting himself that he didn’t hear the vehicle boring down on him until it was too late. He was in the wide open, some thirty yards away from the truck, as the headlights bounced down the road toward him. He dropped all the rifles save one and brought it up into a firing position. It was nearly full dark now; there was nowhere for him to go. The DRR truck was the only way out of here.
The headlights, initially bright and fixed and ominous like some terrifying sea creature, began flashing wildly, as though someone was trying to signal him. He could hear a voice shouting; he primed his ears to cut through the night chatter and the sound of the car’s engine revving, trying desperately to isolate the voice itself.
“Ben! Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
Ellie.
Ben and Ellie spent ten minutes clearing the scene of anything useful, during which time she explained the story as to how she’d managed to tail them all the way to the camp given that they hadn’t had a car when they’d last seen each other. After Ben had slipped inside the DRR building, Ellie had flirted with the other Volunteer for another quarter hour and then disappeared into the darkness.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” Ben asked.
“I should’ve bought you a little more time,” she said. “But he was starting to get a little aggressive.”
Her voice was stern and tight.
“He looked for me a little while, which gave you a little more time. But eventually he found his partner unconscious back at his post.”
“Brilliant infiltration on my part,” he said. “It was an idiotic plan anyway.”
“He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the drawer, but he did seem to piece together that I was probably in on it, and that I’d lured him away from his post. I gather that’s a big no-no among these idiots. He didn’t call it in right away, and I could see him there, thinking it through, trying to figure out how he was going to explain the mess he’d made.
“Eventually, he called it in,” she said.
They continued picking through the scene, conscious of a clock in their minds, that they would have to be quick about it, but careful not to overlook anything that might come in handy. They were pretty far off the reservation now, with no backup, no support, and no one to count on but themselves. She told him the rest of the story in the truck, as they chugged away from the now deathly quiet camp.
“A van showed up about two minutes later,” she went on, “and an entire squad of Volunteers poured out. They were in riot gear, loaded for bear. That’s when I knew you were in trouble.”
Ellie had watched the building entrance for an hour, skulking in an out of the shadows like an alley cat, waiting to see if there was anything she could do to help Ben, quickly realizing how long a shot this would be. After an hour, she spotted a small Honda sedan idling across the street, its door swung open, its headlights shining in the dark like a rabid beast. A man stood in the V between the door and the chassis, partially illuminated by the car’s interior dome light; his arm was draped across the roof of the car, and he was arguing with a woman standing on the sidewalk. Ellie couldn’t hear the specifics of the discussion, but the woman must have said something she didn’t like, because he slammed the door, chased her down and began beating the ever-living snot out of her, right there on the sidewalk.
Ellie froze, unsure if she should intervene and risk getting caught, or simply stand there while this man violently beat this woman. He was really getting into it, and Ellie had finally decided to get some help when she saw two Volunteers approach from the west and drag the man off in handcuffs. The woman pleaded with them to let him go as they dragged him down the street. A swirl of smoke from the car’s exhaust pipe revealed that the man had left it running.
The Volunteers disappeared around a corner with their detainee, the woman in tow, leaving the car abandoned. A car with the keys in the ignition, the engine running quietly. Ellie waited one minute, then two, and no one came to recover the car. Seeing it just sitting there was pure agony, an itch just begging to be scratched. Ellie took a quick glance toward the building perimeter, where the activity level had begun to increase.
“That’s probably when they sounded the alarm for me,” Ben said.
Ben, driving the first shift, checked the gas gauge, praying that he’d have enough juice to get back to D.C.
“I got lucky,” she said. “I happened to drive by just as they brought you out of the building. Another five seconds later or earlier, and I would’ve missed you.”
“Lucky,” Ben said, whistling softly.
“So what’s this all about?” she finally asked.
“We need to get to the Freedom One Network building,” he said.
“Jesus, why?”
“The Department. They’ve filmed a fake outbreak of the virus. They’re going to broadcast it. They’re going to make it look like the Panic has started back up again.”
“What?”
Her voice cracked with incredulity.
“That’s what Tranquility is all about,” he said.
