The Nothing Men, page 27
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
“I’m not following you.”
“It was actually something you told me that started the train rolling,” Ben said. “When you told me about the trucks from the processing centers. I figured out what those were for. For the fresher bodies.”
“Fresher bodies for what?”
“I’ll get to that,” he said. “First I need to tell you what Tranquility is.”
He nodded over his shoulder back toward the direction they’d come from.
“That place back there. It’s going to be a permanent detention camp for Redeyes,” he said.
“What do you mean permanent?”
“They’re going to round us all up. Whitmore told me the government has decided that’s how it’s going to solve its Redeye problem. Remember, I’m really lucky. I broke a few bones, a got a few scars. But a lot of us have extensive medical needs. This is how the country is going to get beyond the Panic. By sweeping us under the rug. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “So this is the end game.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And it’s all bullshit. The people that run the Department, they like the way things are. Before the Panic, our republic was messy. Hard to manage. Price of democracy and all that. You were right. Things are so fucked up that people are willing to follow anyone that can keep the trains running on time. That becomes easier when it’s more about survival than enlightenment.”
“I don’t quite understand this fake outbreak you’re talking about. Why go to all the trouble?”
“Honestly, I think it actually makes a sick bit of sense,” Ben said. “Not sure what says that about me as a person. Anyway, they figured people wouldn’t feel comfortable with these government-run camps. It feels too Nazi-ish. When you get right down to it, we still believe in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and apple pie and equality and all that. The only reason the people put up with the Department is because of how screwed up things are right now. But to sell the camps, they need something special. Because it’s a paradigm shift. It would be a fundamental change to how our society works. Turns out not everyone is created equal after all. And the only way the people would go along with it is to make them believe that there is no choice. And how do you do that?”
She thought about it for a moment, and he could see her working it out.
“You make them think the virus is back,” she said.
“Exactly.”
She sat quietly for a moment, picking at a fingernail.
“And they told you this?”
“More or less,” he said.
“How did you figure it out?”
“Since the Panic ended,” Ben said, “I’ve spent a lot of nights outside. Especially during the warm months. I would look up at the moon. It helped calm me down. Plus, I’ve always been a bit of a space nut. So there we were, back at the camp. Whitmore had just told me that he was going to kill me. I looked up at the moon, just a little sliver of a thing up there, and it helped calm me down a little. And staring at it, it all kind of fell into place for me.
“Anyway, how much of your NASA history do you remember?”
“A little, I guess.”
“What did they name the spot where they made the moon landing?”
She thought about it for a moment and then chuckled softly as her mind made the connection.
“The Sea of Tranquility.”
“Exactly.”
“But how did you make the leap from that to a fake outbreak?”
“I’ve always been a bit of a conspiracy nut,” Ben said. “You know the theory that NASA faked the moon landing, right? That it was too important to the American psyche that we deliver on Kennedy’s promise, that we take the lead from the Russians in the space race. So, the theory goes, when they realized they couldn’t make the moon, the government decided to perpetrate this hoax. Now, I believe a lot of crazy shit, but I never bought into that one. But that’s all I could think about as Whitmore told me about winning the hearts and minds of the public.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “You’re right, it does make sense.”
“They have to win their hearts and minds,” he said. “Whitmore’s own words.”
“But how will they pull something like that off?”
“That’s where the bodies come in,” he said. “They were harvesting them for use in the hoax. They’ll be able to show footage of fresh bodies, victims of a recent Redeye rampage.”
“Jesus. I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.
“And now?”
“We have to stop it,” he said. “Just like Calvin said. We have to stop Tranquility.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“We have to get to the F-One Network building and get on the air somehow,” he said. “We have to plant enough doubt in the public’s mind to make them scrap the plan.”
“What if they don’t buy it? We’ll be branded as terrorists and liars.”
“You can count on that. All we can hope for is that we reach enough of them before it’s too late. That we appeal to their better nature. Truly, I think this idea will repulse most people to their core. But when it comes down to internment versus the threat of a new Panic, I think the public will fall in line pretty quickly. They may not like it, but they’ll probably agree that it’s for the greater good. To be honest, even if we succeed at exposing the truth, they might go ahead with the plan anyway.”
“It makes sense,” she said softly. “I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Even after all that’s happened, I can’t believe it’s come to this.”
She was crying softly. Ben looked away, letting her deal with this revelation in her own way. It was a hard thing to accept. The Panic had been one thing, a truly terrible catastrophe that had been thrust upon all of them, forcing the world to change. He had hoped that after enough time had gone by, the world would emerge from the shadow of the Panic a stronger and greater if somewhat sadder place. But this was something else, a dirty, sordid affair, exploitation of the weak, not much different than a predatory adult film producer feeding on a starving waitress just dying to catch a break in Tinseltown. And now it seemed that the Panic was just a step, a big step, on the highway toward the final dismantling of what once had been good.
“I know,” he replied, his voice tight, as though he were speaking while holding his breath. “I know.”
“Back to D.C.?” she said.
“Freedom One Network, here we come.”
28
Camp Alpha was in Buchanan County in southwestern Virginia, a rural chunk of the state that had known plenty about hard times long before the Panic. Unemployment, poverty, and drug addiction were rampant long before the Panic, and the area had been all but abandoned in its aftermath. The towns were small and far apart, and many had since ceased to exist.
Ben and Ellie rolled through one ghost town after another, dark and empty. They were quiet as they passed by the spectral storefronts and under dead traffic lights, gently swinging in the breeze, the emptiness of the towns huge and sentient. They saw one car in the first two hours on the road; it seemed ghostly as it passed them by, and Ben felt a chill as he watched its rear taillights recede into the darkness.
In Roanoke, Ben turned over the driving to Ellie and tried to get some sleep as they winged northeast toward D.C. They’d been on the road for about four hours when the call came in. Ben had all but forgotten about the phone that he’d pilfered from Whitmore’s body; its rhythmic buzz caused him to jump. He’d been sleeping hard, and it took him a moment to pinpoint the source of the vibration.
“What is it?” Ellie asked. She began decelerating.
“Oh, shit,” Ben said, digging the phone out of his pocket. “It’s Whitmore’s phone. I snagged it from him.”
“Does it say who’s calling?”
“Restricted.”
The phone buzzed again.
“I’m going to answer it,” he said. “I heard him take a couple calls. I can probably skate by. Maybe we can get some something useful.”
His hand was trembling as he pressed the button to accept the call and held the phone up to his ear.
“Whitmore,” he said, in as flat and unemotional voice as he could, the way the man had answer the phone on two separate occasions.
“You were supposed to call an hour ago,” a female voice at the end of the line said. It was dusted with a hint of a southern accent. “What the hell is going on? Is Sullivan dead?”
It felt like a million volts of electricity ripping through him. He pulled the phone away from his ear and activated the speakerphone feature. He looked over at Ellie and pressed a finger to his lips. She nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s all taken care of.”
A brief pause. Nausea rose in his belly, like he’d just eaten some bad shrimp.
Jesus Christ, this was such a bad idea.
They’re on to you.
The phone has a tracking device, and they’ll be on you before you can say boo.
“Excellent,” she said finally. Her voice sounded tinny and small echoing in the passenger cabin. “We’ve been listening to the chatter. No martyrdom for our good friend Sullivan. He’s a pariah. He turned out to be quite the asset. We took something that could have been a serious problem and turned it to our advantage.”
Ben’s heart was pounding so hard he could feel the rush of blood in his ears. An idea bloomed in his mind like the first spring flower, unfurling its petals for a rush of sunlight and life and growth. It was the sum of all the inferences and deductions he’d made recently. He needed one more piece to the puzzle, and if he could get it on this phone call, he was confident that the full picture would become clear.
“Are we still on for the broadcast then?”
Silence. Fear coiled itself around his heart as he waited for her to respond.
“What are you talking about?”
Undoubtedly, the woman’s antennae were up now. She may not have known why yet, but already, suspicion was creeping in. Ben had to reel it in before it metastasized. There were a number of ways he could interpret her question, and he needed to respond with the precision of a cruise missile. There was zero room for error.
“I had heard a rumor that it was being postponed.”
“Where did you hear that?”
Relief flooded through him like water from a hydrant on a sweltering summer day.
“It doesn’t matter,” he snapped back. “Is it still on?” He put a little mustard on each word, lacing them like a fastball pitcher reaching back for his best stuff.
Silence again, but far less ominous. It seemed almost subservient.
“Yes, of course it’s still on. The broadcast is still scheduled for tomorrow morning at 9:03. They’ll interrupt the morning show with a breaking news alert and cut to footage of the rampage.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, dialing back the tone of his voice and trying to contain a swirl of fear, horror, shock, and excitement. He turned on the charm again, now that he was hearing what he wanted to hear. He suspected that the woman was Whitmore’s professional equivalent, perhaps assigned to a different department. Either way, he needed to end this call quickly. Eventually, he’d make a misstep, and that would be that.
“At six p.m. tomorrow, the President will address the nation and announce the opening of the internment camps.”
He’d heard all he needed to know. Staying on the phone any longer was foolish.
“Very good,” Ben said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
He ended the call and let out a large sigh. He was sweating heavily; his shirt was soaked through, stuck to the small of his back. His stomach felt tight, as though he’d spent the last fifteen minutes doing crunches.
“Holy shit,” she said. “That was unbelievable.”
A laugh burst out of him, a loud, sharp explosion that seemed aware of the ridiculousness of what had just happened. He slid the phone back into his pocket and tried to regulate his breathing.
“I figured that my execution would be closely tied to Tranquility,” he said. “That if someone knew about one operation, they’d be likely to know about the other. Once the loose end that was me was snipped, there’d be nothing to stop them from proceeding. There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though.”
“Which is?”
“The camps. They already exist. Won’t it be suspicious that they have these camps ready to go?”
“I can answer that one,” she said. “The government began building the camps in mid-May. They were supposed to be camps for us. For the uninfected. They built them in the extremely rural areas, away from the biggest Redeye concentrations. That was when everyone thought the battle was lost.”
“How many would they hold?” he asked.
“Millions,” she said. “Truly, it looked very bad.”
“Yeah, that’s what Whitmore told me. Repeatedly.”
“He wasn’t lying about that,” she said, her voice trailing off.
Deep down, part of him that was glad he’d been spared the darkest days of the Panic. He’d never admit it to Ellie. He could barely admit it to himself, but he didn’t want to think about what it must have been like when all seemed lost. He couldn’t bear to think about the despair and horror that Sarah and Gavin had felt, knowing the end was near, wondering when a pack of Redeyes would corner them in a convenience store while they scavenged for food. Being there for the end of the world.
“Anyway,” she continued, “they began making arrangements to transport survivors to the camps. When the first reports of the recovery began to go national in late June, plans for the camps were abandoned, and that was pretty much it for them.”
“And there they were, just sitting there for when they hatched their little plan.”
“You got it,” Ellie said softly.
They drove on.
They hit their first checkpoint around dawn. The day was breaking grey and overcast and a fine mist was falling. Twin threads of city-bound traffic curled back toward them as Ben downshifted; Ellie looked up from a map and pointed toward a shorter stub of traffic on the far right edge of the highway. A banner strung across the overpass read Government Use Only.
“Look,” she said.
Ben looked over and saw a string of Department vehicles – SUVs, pickup trucks, and larger trucks lined up at the government-use checkpoint
“Think we should risk it?” Ben asked.
“It would be risky not to.”
“You’re right,” Ben said.
He jerked the truck across two lanes of traffic, drawing no objection from the civilians he was cutting off. He fell in behind a troop transport truck, its cargo area full of Volunteers. The bright orange points of their lit cigarettes in the gloom of the morning looked like strange constellations.
He studied the Department vehicles ahead of him carefully. The checkpoint guard lazily waved each vehicle through, the only apparent prerequisite being a Department logo stamped on the driver’s side door. Ben let his foot off the gas, slowing the big truck to about five miles per hour, but he didn’t stop, nor did the guard indicate that Ben should stop.
And just like that, they were through. Inside the District again, a path to the Freedom One Network headquarters open before them. It was a strange feeling, operating outside the bounds of the law. He was suddenly ashamed. Would he be fighting for the rights of the Reds if he’d made it through the Panic unscathed? Would he fear and judge them for bringing the world to the brink of ruin? He wanted to think he’d be their champion, demanding equal rights, but he knew better.
He’d have supported men like Mr. Whitmore.
Because he’d have listened to Freedom One, and he would have decided Mr. Whitmore was right. He’d think back to the darkest days of the Panic, paralyzed by the feeling that there was nothing that he could do to protect his family. He’d have accepted the reprieve they’d all been given, and he would do his level best to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again. There was no way to know if or when the virus would suddenly re-appear. No, it didn’t seem fair.
But hell, life wasn’t fair.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
And many other important clichés in which he could have wrapped himself in the bleak cold of the world after the Panic.
Much of the world’s communications network infrastructure had sustained heavy damage during the war, and so the government had commandeered SpaceRock and established a fierce perimeter around the building housing the world’s biggest satellite radio operation. Relying on a series of satellites deployed high above the earth, the company had been the last worldwide media outlet broadcasting during the Panic.
From the relative safety of SpaceRock headquarters, the government broadcast news and propaganda to those satellite radio subscribers and counted on word of mouth to spread news or some facsimile of it to the rest of the population. Throughout, the calm, steady voices of their deejays bubbled across the nation, reassuring the rapidly dwindling population that the tide was turning.
When the Panic was declared over in mid-November, the government moved quickly. The President ordered the Federal Communications Commission to seize all available bandwidth and enjoin all media outlets from broadcasting or printing all news until the state of emergency was lifted. The country was too shell-shocked to raise too much of a fuss, and it all went down like a perfectly mixed glass of chocolate milk. The Army Corps of Engineers reprogrammed the SpaceRock satellites so that they’d reach terrestrial radio and television.
On October 1 of the following year, about eleven months after the cessation of hostilities, Freedom One came to life, beginning with an evening news broadcast during which the beautiful anchors discussed all the progress the country had made in the previous year. A new routine was created, and slowly, the world began adjusting to its new paradigm.
Ben found the trendy brick building just after eight in the morning. Less than an hour to go.
“Maybe we go with a different approach this time,” Ben said as he guided the truck down Florida Avenue and toward a driveway at the back of the monolithic building. He turned right down a wide alley ran alongside the structure. A series of rollaway doors lined the rear of the complex; two were closed, but the other three were wide open, which made the façade of the building look like a large mouth missing a few teeth. Two men, both wearing dark coveralls, were on a loading dock at the end down the alley, tossing bags of garbage into the back of a Department pickup.
