The Nothing Men, page 4
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
He turned toward Ellie, who now held the skillet.
“Look at him,” he said to her. “He’s a fuckin’ Red!”
This was enough to swing her attention from her attacker to Ben. Danny shivered and wiped his hands on his filthy pants.
“I’m OK,” he muttered to himself. “I’m OK, I’m OK, I’m OK.”
A vanity mirror was mounted on the wall to Ben’s right; he turned his head toward it and saw what had spooked Danny so badly. One of his bunkers, the black-market lenses he used to cover the sclera in each of his eyes, had popped out. And staring back at Ben in that dusty mirror was a single fiery red eye, a deep shade of crimson that meant only one thing. The gift that never stopped giving. The telltale sign that he’d been infected with the Orchid virus. He stared at himself in the mirror, and the memories came flooding back, pouring into his brain like raw sewage, polluting and infecting the fragile ecosystem of peace he’d managed to build in the last couple of weeks.
Then he heard a loud thunk, not dissimilar to the sound of a baseball coming off an aluminum bat. He tore his gaze from the mirror just in time to see Danny stagger forward like a boxer who’d taken a haymaker to the jaw. Standing just beyond him was Ellie, the skillet in her hands.
“You crazy bitch!” he cried, cradling the back of his head with his hands. Ben hadn’t seen her deliver the blow, so he didn’t know how much damage she’d done, how much danger they were still in. The three of them stood there, eyeing each other, three points of a constellation of fear and confusion and fury. Danny’s gaze bounced from Ellie to Ben and back again. Ben prayed that she’d rattled the man enough that he’d just split, that he was too dumb and afraid of becoming infected that he’d just run away and leave them alone. He couldn’t remember an occasion that he’d been thankful for his infection.
First time for everything.
“Fuck this,” he said between gritted teeth. “I’m out of here.”
He slipped out of the room without another word and banged down the stairs like a drunken dinosaur. A moment later, the truck revved up and groaned down the quiet street.
Ben took one step to the door and then paused at the threshold.
“Are you OK?” he asked without looking back.
“Fine,” she said. “You?”
“I’ll live,” he said.
“He’s going to report you, you know,” she said.
His shoulders sagged.
“I know,” Ben said.
It still hurt to hear her say it.
They stood silently, his back to her. He could feel her eyes boring in on him, and he could almost read her thoughts. What atrocities had he committed? What monstrous things had he done? Had he really been unable to stop himself? How was that possible? Cancer didn’t do that to you. AIDS didn’t do that to you. Not even Ebola did that to you. With Ebola, you just died painfully and miserably.
“Thanks,” she said. “I was in a lot of trouble there.”
“Don’t mention it. Are you OK?”
“No real damage done,” she said. “Go on. Get out of here before they come looking for you.”
5
About a year before he had joined the HARD Team, Ben had stumbled upon a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon whiskey while on a supply run in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he spent a few months squatting in an abandoned single-wide trailer. Booze was tough to find after the Panic, as many of the breweries, distilleries, and vineyards had gone offline and were slow to restart; not surprisingly, alcohol was in high demand and actively traded on the black market.
He hoped to open it when he’d returned home to his wife and son, when Sarah and Gavin were ready to put the past behind them and let Ben back into their lives. But as time went by and that prospect became less and less likely, the sealed bottle became a reminder of things that had once been possible but were no longer. Selling it for food was probably the wisest course of action, but he had been unwilling to do so.
You never knew when the occasion would call for it.
Losing his job on the HARD team turned out to be such an occasion.
And since he didn’t have much else to do, it made the days at the Richmond International Raceway refugee camp in the eastern part of Henrico County a little more bearable. It had been a week since the incident with Ellie, and he’d spent most of pleasantly buzzed on the aforementioned bourbon.
The camp was crowded but relatively well-organized. It was home to approximately a thousand men, women, and children who, like Ben, had survived infection with the Orchid virus.
The camp had been born during the lawless days following the Panic, when the Redeyes discovered how hostile the world was going to be to them, one that didn’t care that they’d once been mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, doctors, firemen, police officers, decorated war veterans, housewives, drug dealers or bank robbers. Eye color had replaced skin color as the currency for discrimination. The camp even had a governing body of sorts, a council that managed to maintain order among the camp’s residents and cottage industries that had popped up during its lifecycle.
Tents were set up in a grid pattern in the raceway’s infield, some fifty across. Clean water and food were at a premium, the most in-demand items on a robust black market. Every week or two, the Department would throw the camp a bone and drop off a few hundred cases of water and Meals Ready to Eat, which invariably led to fights and other assorted lunacy. Crime was a problem, but it was dealt with swiftly and severely. Redeyes had little tolerance for their own kind perpetrating crimes against one another, and this alone seemed to foster a certain détente in the camp.
It was early June now, and central Virginia was baking under a heat wave, as if the region didn’t have enough problems to deal with. The days were unbearable, the air like steaming chowder, and so Ben spent most of his waking hours huddled in his tent drinking, napping, or re-reading the few paperback novels he’d collected during his wanderings. Evenings, he did his best to socialize with his tent neighbors, not because he felt any particular attachment to them, but because it was in his best interest to remain friendly with his fellow Redeyes.
Ben had given up trying to find a house months ago; occupied homes made easy targets for bandits, and besides, there weren’t that many to be had anyway. A fifty-percent reduction in population had not made finding permanent shelter any easier. The war had devastated many urban areas on the coasts and in the Midwest; millions of refugees from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia had streamed toward the smaller cities and more temperate climes in the south. Many neighborhoods, the ones not occupied by Volunteers, had fallen under gang control and weren’t safe.
The nights were the worst. It was the worst cliché possible, but when after the last bit of twilight had been rubbed away, Ben’s mind filled in the space left empty by the darkness. It was natural selection up there, the strongest memories pushing out the other ones, leaving them alone to lord over his gray matter. Even when he’d been working body disposal, his sleep came in small bursts, twenty or thirty minutes at a time, whatever his body needed to keep functioning, before the memories and the nightmares crept back in like mold.
Ben was reading an old Larry McMurtry novel, waiting for a can of ravioli to heat up. His food supply was running low; this was his third meal noshing off the same can. Tonight’s supper would be it for this can, leaving Ben with one can of tuna and a protein bar until he could restock his supplies. Even worse, he was getting near the end of the whiskey. He had a steady buzz going, which helped keep his mind off the pressing issue of where exactly he would locate these supplies. The cash from his time on the HARD team was running low; they paid a pittance, and he hadn’t collected his pay for his final day.
Around him, the camp had started to stir. This was the time of day that worried Ben the most. Although it was generally safer here than in the world beyond, safety was a relative thing these days. The troublemakers came out at sunset, after the heat of the day abated, full of piss and vinegar like cooped-up first-graders. Usually drunk, generally dissatisfied with their new station in life.
He sat in a small camp chair outside his tent and ate his tiny portion of ravioli, which stopped the hunger shakes but left him still ravenous. His tent was on the outer perimeter, near the racetrack’s steeply banked third turn. It was a rowdier section of the camp, home to a string of men and women in their twenties and thirties, young enough to cause trouble, their station in life exacerbated by the fact that they were old enough to have been settled in life when the Panic exploded around them. The air was ripe with a symphony of aromas - marijuana, body odor, urine. Ben’s neighbor, a short, stout man, was smoking a joint with the diameter of a Cuban cigar. Ben didn’t know his name.
“Wanna hit?” he asked.
He was thin and his skin was loose and gray, leaving him with an unhealthy pallor. He’d shared his sad tale with Ben at some point, but eventually, they all started to run together. Crazy news stories, bad shit happened, infection. The saddest three-act play in the world.
“No,” Ben said. That was sort of a lie. He did want a hit, very badly in fact, but he was still a little too wigged out to swap saliva with a fellow Red. He’d been lucky to emerge from the Panic without any severe infections; he’d heard horror stories of fellow Redeyes contracting hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis, and every other conceivable infection, viral, bacterial and fungal, and he didn’t want to push his luck any farther than it had already been pushed.
“What are you, some kinda pussy?”
Ben ignored him, turning his attention to activity brewing several tents down; a woman was yelling at two men he didn’t recognize, two guys who didn’t quite fit in. They looked clean, well-fed, healthy. Just by looking normal, they stood out. They moved from one refugee to another until a flock of index fingers began pointing in his direction.
Shit, he thought mildly. They’d tracked him down.
But strangely, escape wasn’t the first thing that crossed his mind. He sat there and watched them approach, equally relieved and disappointed in himself. Where was his goddamn survival instinct? Where was his fight, his goddamn spunk? And yet, it felt good not to run. All he’d done was run.
He locked eyes with them, and they knew they’d found their man.
“You Sullivan?” asked the first one.
He nodded.
“Why don’t we step inside?”
Ben had never had guests, and it seemed especially silly that three grown men had wedged themselves into his small tent, sitting with their legs criss-crossed before them. He felt self-conscious, but his visitors didn’t seem to care about their environs.
“My name is Luke Coleman,” the first man said. He gestured toward his partner. “This is my associate, George Laprade.”
Coleman was a regular-looking guy, the kind you’d see while sitting in traffic, when you’d glance over to the late-model sedan inching along the freeway with you, checking his phone or listening to Howard Stern on satellite radio. His partner George fit the generally accepted definition of muscle. He wore black jeans, a tight black T-shirt, and wraparound sunglasses.
“How do you know my name?” Ben asked.
“I believe you know my sister,” Coleman said.
“Your sister?”
“Ellie Campbell,” he said.
The woman from the HARD Team. Fear prickled his skin like a bad sunburn. Had Ellie told them that he was the one who had attacked her? Had she gotten the names confused? Were they just here to kill him? Vigilante justice for an attempted rape? He’d survived the Orchid virus only to come down with a deadly case of Mistaken Identity.
“She told me what you did,” Coleman said. He removed his hand from his pocket, sending Ben in full retreat to the back of the tent. He tried to speak, defend himself, but the words were lodged in his throat, trapped in a quicksand of fear.
“I can’t tell you how thankful I am,” Coleman said, holding his hand out.
Ben was stunned. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had offered to shake his hand. A simple societal nicety, taken for granted until it had all but disappeared during the Panic. Social distancing, they called it in the early days of the outbreak, when people were still having a hard time comprehending the fact that their neighbors might try to murder them.
He took the man’s hand, reminding himself to go hard with the grip, make sure the guy didn’t think that Ben was a sponge-wristed loser. Strength. Confidence. Things that Ben wanted other people to think he had, even if he didn’t. They shook for a moment.
The other man, Laprade, lit a cigarette. It was a bit ballsy of him, but Ben suspected that was kind of the point. Marking territory. The cigarette smoke burned his eyes, and Ben wished he had the balls to ask him to extinguish the cigarette, a Bruce-Willis-in-Die-Hard kind of moment, but he chose to let it go.
“I’m just glad I could help,” Ben said, his voice cracking like a thirteen-year-old boy in the throes of puberty. Great. So much for the firm handshake.
“Me, too,” Coleman said. “Me too. Ellie’s all the family I’ve got. Do you mind if I call you Ben?”
Another territory marker.
“Sure, Luke,” Ben said. He had to score points somehow.
“You can call me Mr. Laprade,” the big man said, expelling smoke from his nostrils like an ornery dragon.
“Don’t mind him,” Coleman said, waving Laprade off.
Ben again glanced at Laprade, who continued to smoke. The orange dot of the cigarette tip brightened as he took a drag from the filter.
“How is she?” Ben asked.
“She’s pretty tough,” he said. “She was rattled, but she’ll be fine. Which is more than I can say for that waste of space.”
Ben’s eyebrows rocked upwards.
“His uncle’s a Department bigwig. They know what happened. They just wouldn’t have done anything about it. They’d blame us for the Kennedy assassination if they could.”
“Us?”
Coleman peeled off his sunglasses and held up Ben’s lantern. The white light illuminated Coleman’s red eyes. They shined red and bold, as if Luke Coleman were proud of the mark that made him and Ben and millions of others pariahs.
“April sixth,” Coleman said. “You?”
“May,” Ben said. “May sixteenth.”
“When did you recover?” Luke asked.
“Late July,” Ben said.
“Yeah, ten weeks was the average.”
“I guess,” Ben said. “I haven’t really done a survey.”
“So you’ve had a rough go of it,” Coleman said.
“Par for the course, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.” Coleman said. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Coleman said. “My sister vouched for you, and that’s good enough for me.”
“You know, I didn’t really get to know her all that well,” Ben said. “I kind of kept to myself, for obvious reasons.”
“She’s good at reading people,” Coleman said.
“Wait, is she-” Ben paused. He pointed an accusatory finger at Coleman and then back at himself in a conspiratorial pantomime.
“No,” he said. “She was never infected.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “So why are you here?”
“We have a proposition for you,” Luke said.
Ben stood silently, still on guard, still unsure what was happening.
“We’re with a group called the Haven.”
“And what is that?” Ben asked.
“I’d say we’re like a family, but that would come across a little hokey, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Like drink-the-Kool-Aid kind of hokey.”
“Believe me, I thought the same thing.”
“So what’s this proposition?”
“We’d like to invite you for a visit.”
“For what? A keg party?
“We have a place out in the country,” Luke said. “People like you and me. Just Reds.”
Ben’s heart raced. For months, an emptiness had been growing inside him, like someone had been carving out a little bit at a time the thing that had made him who he was. His soul, the part of him that mattered, was vanishing, leaving ruin and waste behind. And this simple statement, from a man he did not know, had been the cold glass of water to slake his thirst.
“No commitments,” he said. “Just come out and let us repay you for what you did.”
Ben turned the offer over in his mind like an appraiser examining a Ming vase. He chewed on his lower lip, his gaze ping-ponging between Luke and Laprade.
“Let me ask you this,” Luke said. “What do you think of the Department?”
“R & R?”
“Do the other ones matter?” he asked, a sudden sharpness in his voice, like he’d just traded out a dull blade from his razor for a new one.
“No, I guess not,” Ben said, a wave of fright washing over him. “I mean, I think the government got dealt a pretty shitty hand.”
“That they did,” Luke said. “No argument there. But do you enjoy being treated like a second-class citizen? For something that wasn’t your fault?”
The memories started poking their way into the edges of his mind.
“No,” he said, his voice soft, a whisper.
“Do you like the fact that there are two Americas?” Luke asked. “One for them, one for us?”
“No,” he said, his voice even softer now. He was looking down at his shoes, unable to look at Luke in the face. He didn’t want to look up and see those red eyes again; that would just remind him of that terrible summer.
“And you shouldn’t, Ben,” Luke said, his voice soft and warm and encouraging again. “You shouldn’t.”
Ben nodded, his head still down. Tears dripped silently from his cheeks. In the silence of the tent, he could hear them splashing against the hard-packed ground.
Way to go, big guy! Weeping in front of two men you’ve just met. That’ll convince them of your hearty and hale.
He wiped a hand over his face and cleared his throat.
