The Nothing Men, page 3
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
Ben hadn’t minded the Red moniker prior to meeting Danny Brooks, but hearing it cross the man’s lips made it seems ugly and harsh, every bit the slur it had become during the past few months. Ben sat silently as Danny continued his favorite pastime – telling war stories, recounting his brave struggle against the Reds. To hear him tell it, it was as if Brooks himself had neutralized the threat, as though the Orchid virus hadn’t simply burned itself out, the human immune system stepping up to the plate, later than everyone might have liked, perhaps, but just in time nevertheless.
Ben preferred to look out the window while Danny rambled on. They turned west onto Staples Mill Road, which meandered through a mixed residential/commercial district. This section of the county had flourished after World War II, when people had first left the city for the infant suburbs. Middle-class all the way, dominated by small ranches and Cape Cods on square lots, home to contractors and factory workers and police officers and social workers. The kind of neighborhood where someone was always in violation of one county ordinance or another, storing junk in the backyard, keeping an old Ford with no wheels and a decade-old inspection sticker in the front yard, the weeds growing up into the chassis.
On every block, people went about the business of rebuilding because when you got right down to it, all disasters were the same, they just came dressed in different threads.
They passed a billboard, long since commandeered by the Department, now sporting giant red letters against a black background:
Know the Signs of an Active Orchid Infection!
It amused Ben because it was probably fair to say that nearly everyone on Earth was pretty well versed in The Signs of an Active Orchid Infection, thank you very much. But it was a reminder of everyone’s ultimate fear. That the virus would resurface and finish off the job it had nearly completed. That was why the signs were still there.
“I was hunkered down in this one trailer, right near the front gate.”
Truly, the guy just did not shut up.
“Had this piece of ass with me. So I start picking them off one after the other, easiest turkey shoot ever. Then this dumb bitch I was with, she freaks out and runs out the door, right into their zombie arms. Stupidest damn thing I ever seen. Another few minutes, and we would have been safe. Stupid bitch.”
Ben sighed and let it out slowly. This was at least the fourth time that Brooks had told this particular story, and he was tired of it. He was tired of Danny. Every morning, he arrived at work hoping that Danny had had enough, but it wasn’t meant to be. Danny had struck Ben as an apocalypse junkie, someone who was happier with the state of the world after the Panic.
“Whaddya think of the new chick?” Danny asked, stealing a peek out of his sideview mirror, where he could see Ellie hanging from the back of the truck, her face impassive.
“They both seem nice,” Ben said, in no hurry to wander down Danny’s Hall of Planned Sexual Conquests.
“I’d hit it,” he offered. Then, slowly, more deliberately, his eyes still glued to the sideview mirror: “I would tear that shit up.”
“We’re here,” Ben said, pointing toward the approaching intersection and desperate to change the subject. Danny slowed the big truck down and turned off Staples Mill Road, one of the main arteries in the county.
Thank God, Ben thought.
Their assignment for the week was a subdivision called Fox Ridge, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of about six hundred houses in the northwestern part of the county, home to nearly 2,500 souls when the Panic had hit. A handful of residents had moved back since, but the rest were either dead or gone. The livable houses were occupied by Volunteers or heavily armed squatters, the pain-in-the-ass survivalists who’d made it through the Panic unscathed, or groups of refugees from the big cities, many of which had been devastated during the war.
Fox Ridge hadn’t been the swankiest subdivision in the county, but it was still nice, once occupied by successful lawyers and bankers and where some of the moms worked. These folks had driven Acuras and Infinitis here rather than the Range Rovers and Mercedes in the chicer subdivisions off to the west.
The Department had classified Fox Ridge as a Category B site, which meant it anticipated at least one thousand bodies that required processing. A Category A was a big one, at least five thousand bodies to clear. Clearing out the As and Bs was the Department’s main priority. They would be here for at least a week.
Working in two-man units, the HARD teams moved from house to house, free to enter any private residence thanks to the sweeping authority granted by the National Recovery Act. The crew conducted a room-to-room search for bodies, wearing the biohazard protection suits and respirators. The sweeps loaded the remains into body bags and carried them out to the curb.
More than a dozen federal lawsuits were pending across the country, claiming that these HARD searches violated the Fourth Amendment right against warrantless searches. And the plaintiffs were probably right, but not a single court had sided with them; the appeals courts, which had been notoriously slow before Armageddon, hadn’t spun the wheels of justice any faster afterwards. There hadn’t been much of a public outcry, largely because the American people supported anything that would push the Panic into the history books. The motto after the September 11 terrorist attacks might have been Never Forget, but that was decidedly not the case for the Panic. There were no lessons learned, there was no sense of unity, and everyone wanted to forget it as quickly as possible
Ben and Randall cleared six houses in the first hour, hauling sixteen bodies out to the curb. The seventh and final house in the cul de sac was a heavily damaged colonial with a brick façade and a wide driveway that curled around to the back. The lawn was overgrown, rippling in the thick breeze as if it were alive, the neighborhood quiet but for the susurrations of the tall grass.
A badly-decomposed body greeted them at the front door, lying over the threshold, the lower half draped across the front stoop like a picnic blanket. The flesh was long gone, but there was still something more than just skeletal remains, necrotized fibrous tissue still clinging to bone, a ghostly reminder that this had been someone, that this wasn’t the bright white plastic skeleton from the high school biology lab. He scooped the remains into one of the body bags and wondered a bit about who this person might have been.
After tying the bag off, he hoisted it onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and took it out to the curb.
That was when he heard the scream.
4
Ben had been at work when he first heard about the thing that would eventually metastasize into the Panic. It was strange, the way it came back to him with such clarity, right down to the project he’d been working on, the tie he’d been wearing (a yellow silk thing peppered with Brazilian poison dart frogs), to the way one of the fluorescent bulbs in his ceiling was flickering, even how he’d kept meaning to call maintenance and kept right on forgetting.
As had so often been the case back then, he was tucked away in his office at the Raleigh branch of mega-firm Willett & Hall, where he’d spent the previous decade after two years as a prosecutor. It was a Tuesday, mid-March, spring just starting to send out feelers into what had been an unusually harsh winter. At his desk on the sixteenth floor of the Gale Building, he was snacking on a protein bar (cookies and cream, he still remembered the flavor), reviewing a financing document for a client that manufactured computer chips that was in the middle of buying another company that made circuit boards.
He didn’t mind the work; it appealed to his analytical mind, the ensuring of the t-crossing and the i-dotting so that the deals withstood the reviews of the various alphabet soup agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the other federal regulatory bodies who thrived on making things needlessly complicated. Who knew why they black-flagged one deal but not another? Probably because someone was on the take. Someone was always on the take. His work probably bored people at cocktail parties who made the mistake of asking him what he did for a living, and on the surface, it probably was boring, but he saw these deals as giant puzzles with many interlocking pieces that had to be set down in the right order.
Plus, they paid him a great deal of money to do it. He’d been elevated to partner two years earlier and had earned an equity share in the firm, which, along with the bonus, pushed his annual salary to within striking distance of half a million dollars, a veritable fortune in a reasonably priced market like Raleigh.
On that particular Tuesday, however, his mind wasn’t there, trapped instead in a netherworld between the end of winter and the approaching summer, zeroed in on his upcoming Vegas trip with his college buddies or drifting just over the horizon, once school let out, a week at the Outer Banks with Sarah, Gavin, and her father, a widower. More pedestrian and immediate obligations were bearing down on him as well. He needed to order mulch. Gavin had a soccer tournament that weekend.
He set a thick financing prospectus down on his desk, and ran mindlessly through a series of web pages bookmarked on his laptop. The college basketball tournament was just around the corner (and had he known that the tournament would be cancelled after the second week due to an unusual viral outbreak sweeping the nation, he might have pocketed the fifty-dollar entry fee for the office pool, cash that might later have proven useful – decisions, decisions!).
In his old life, he’d often failed to recognize those moments that had ended up having great import. A decision to go to this college or to take that job offer. To break up with this girl. To take that flight to Paris. Little decisions, little pebbles dropped into the center of the lake of his life that sent ripples to the far edges of his existence. But in this new post-Panic world, he’d become hyper-aware of all the decisions he had to make, conscious that his life depended on these choices. People literally lived or died by the choices they made these days. He often wondered if he’d be in this mess if he’d made better decisions in the opening days of the Panic, primal, survival-of-the-fittest decisions, back when it might still have made a difference.
He was slightly alarmed when he saw a series of somewhat disturbing Tweets rolling through his feed hashtagged #RedFlu. There were reports of a few deaths, of violent behavior in a few cases, supposedly attributable to the delirium and high fever. The Centers for Disease Control had gotten involved but were reporting that the outbreak was localized and not indicative of a wider epidemic.
Decisions, decisions.
The trail of flu-related tweets went cold. Ben promptly forgot about them and went onto read about spring training opening, about Iran rattling its nuclear saber again, about cheap flights to Jamaica if you dropped everything and left that afternoon. He bored quickly, turned his attention back to the big merger and buried himself in his work.
The next day, he flew to Chicago for a meeting with the client’s in-house counsel, a lawyer with whom Ben had been decidedly unimpressed, a forty-hour-a-week guy who kept looking at his watch when their meeting had drifted past the no-no hour of five o’clock. Ben worked and worked, ignoring the news, ignoring Twitter and Facebook and the news sites and only heard chatter about a worsening flu outbreak, the kind of chatter that blended into the background of polite chit-chat, just something to talk about while waiting for a meeting to start or for the elevator to finish its interminable trip from the first floor.
By the time he boarded a flight home at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport that Friday night, sipping a gin and tonic, reading a novel, he was blissfully unaware that they were all reaching a tipping point, that things were about to get out of hand, that the entire human race was on a roller coaster approaching the highest point on the track.
Ben froze as the scream dialed up in intensity, every muscle pulling tight, like fishing line that had snared something big. He hadn’t heard anything like it since the darkest days of the Panic, when every moment of every day had become a bad horror movie that wouldn’t end and blood-curdling screams were a dime a dozen. The market had become flooded with them, down to the point that they had no meaning, no real value. Just indicative of another day in hell.
It was piercing, close by, maybe just down the street. It hadn’t had a chance to soften in the open air, no chance of editing it for content. Just pure unadulterated terror.
“What the hell was that?” Randall asked, his head swiveling around loosely like a bobblehead doll’s. Fear lined the man’s face, as if he half-expected to see a herd of Redeyes stumbling down the boulevard, back for an encore presentation. Not that Ben could blame him. The fear was huge inside all of them, with the deep roots of an old oak, stretching its branches everywhere.
Then: AWAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHH!
“Shit,” Ben said.
He heaved the bag into the back of the truck and set out down the street in a full sprint. The second howl had helped triangulate its place of origin. He ran as fast as his legs would carry him, sucking in huge gobs of warm, humid air that seemed just as likely to drown him as sustain him. At the next intersection, he turned left into a large cul de sac of a half-dozen colonials, their lawns sporting shaggy beards of grass, as if they’d unified in a refusal to shave. Their DRR truck was parked in the middle of the circle, pointed outward, and a handful of bagged remains had been piled haphazardly by one of the driveways. The other houses on this short street had sustained heavy damage and seemed devoid of any human life.
Ben burst through the door, half-expecting to see a gaggle of Reds slaughtering a co-worker in the living room, but the scene was unmolested, as it the family who’d lived here had just stepped out for some ice cream. He was in the foyer, bright from the sunlight streaming in through the skylights, steamy from the lack of air conditioning. Straight ahead was a long hallway, leading toward a galley kitchen.
The sound of a grunt caught his ear. Upstairs. He bolted down the hall and found the stairs at the back of the house. The smell of rotted food and animal droppings, rich and sour, permeated the air. He scanned the kitchen for a weapon, anything that he could use to defend himself. A cast-iron skillet hanging from a pot rack mounted over the island countertop caught his eye. It was glossy and black, shiny with the ghosts of a thousand meals gone by. He grabbed it. His heart throbbing like a redlining engine, he pressed his back to the wall and took the steps gingerly, one at a time.
Then he heard a voice, harsh, cold and dead.
“Fucking bitch!”
Then another grunt. Louder. Clearer. And definitely female. Ellie.
Ben picked up the pace and made it to the landing. The sounds were clearer now, and Ben’s fear grew exponentially. Two bodies were stacked to Ben’s right, pushed up against the railing, carefully wrapped in bags. He heard another grunt, and then a choked voice coming from his right, the female voice again, pleading, “no, no, no.” Ben looked over and saw a door, half-open; beyond, just inside the room, shadows swam against the wall. He eased up to the threshold for a better view. It was a small room, an office or a study. An ornate Oriental rug covered most of the floor, and a large modular desk in the corner anchored the room. A bookcase pushed up against the wall at the edge of the door gave him just a sliver of cover. He poked his head around toward the commotion on the floor.
Danny was holding Ellie to the ground with one arm, his huge hand plastered across her small mouth, and he was trying to shuck his camouflage pants off. Ellie was putting up a stupendous struggle, twisting this way and that, a crazed gazelle pinned under the paw of a lion. But the man had at least a hundred pounds on the diminutive woman, and that was the way it was in this brave new world.
Ben crept up, crouching low behind him, and readied a home run swing of the skillet. As he came up on the attacker’s left, he locked eyes with Ellie; the man noticed just in time, just as Ben brought the skillet down, swooping down like a pile driver. The wannabe-rapist shifted just slightly, rolling onto his left flank, and so instead of taking fifteen pounds of cast iron to the skull, the flat bottom of the skillet crashed into his beefy right arm; the skillet slipped out of Ben’s grip and thudded to the ground. Danny howled like a wounded bear, rolling over onto his back and then up to his feet. Terror swelled inside Ben as he realized how quickly the big man had moved.
Ellie rolled onto her stomach and staggered to her feet, but Ben kept his primary focus on the injured and extremely pissed off man.
“You just made a big mistake,” he said, his breathing shallow and ragged.
He shuffled to his right, circling around Ben like a shark moving in for the kill. Then he charged, his shoulder low, crashing into Ben’s midsection like a freight train. The men rolled to the floor in a heap, and Ben knew instantly he was in an enormous amount of trouble. Ellie leapt onto Danny’s back, raining down punches, but Danny was too big, too strong, too fueled with rage. He bucked her off like she was a rookie rodeo cowboy, and he concentrated his attack on Ben.
Flat on his back, Ben was defenseless as Danny slammed a closed fist against the side of his head. The room fractured in front of him, and a rush of nausea washed over him. Strangely, he pictured the videos games of his youth, the health bar in the top corner of the screen illustrating how much more punishment his character would be able to take. As his consciousness faded, he saw Zelda, he saw Street Fighter, he saw Karate Champ. Another punch like that, and the bar would slide to empty, and that would be it for Ben Sullivan.
GAME OVER! GAME OVER!
There was nothing he could do; he pulled his arms up over his face and waited for the final blow.
Then Danny suddenly stopped.
He leapt off of Ben like he was on fire, squealing like a frightened child, backpedaling toward the door. He pointed an accusatory finger at Ben, as though he hadn’t been the one guilty of a brutal attempted rape.
“Jesus Christ!” he bellowed.
