The Holocaust Engine, page 28
He remembered the time before his injuries with a nostalgia that made him smile. The two of them laughed about some drug dealer who’d tried to set himself up as a mafia boss after the bridge blew, and some tough old broad no one had considered a threat.
This made Vera happy too, and soon she was laughing with them, even as the stories turned to killings and reprisals and bodies dumped off the ruined bridge. She’d never heard her husband talk about his life before the Rats. She’d asked a few times about his family, and he’d always answered with a single word, a sentence at most. He didn’t want to talk about it—not with her—but with this man who’d just killed with his bare hands, Hunter went on about the people he was with when they threw everyone out of the jail. Vera listened like a child, thrilling at every detail.
Hunter found his family gone. They’d not tried to contact him in the jail, hadn’t even left a message where they were going. He must have felt so alone. At the start, he was with two others from the jail that lived in a conch cabin on the south end of Stock Island. One of them was infected, but they didn’t know it when they first met Momma’s boys.
Hunter stood up and told the man named Reagan that he would come to check on him tomorrow. He thanked him for downstairs, told him that he owed him one, and then they left.
Vera felt like Granny had just closed a book, right before coming to the best part, and told her to go to sleep. When they went down to the room on the first floor, and to their dogs, she asked him if he had noticed how sad Reagan seemed, and how talking had seemed to cheer him up. Her husband’s face crinkled at the suggestion of going back, and she wondered if he was jealous, so she said that maybe they should introduce him to Lindsey, and maybe she could talk to him. At this, he looked positively mystified, but he agreed.
In the end—after Lindsey MC changed into a tank top and shorts that barely covered her rear, and put on makeup—the entire Rats group, and all three dogs, crowded into Reagan’s room.
“Better watch out,” Reagan said to the scantily-clad girl sitting next to him. “I won’t be tested all clear for a couple more days.”
“Well, if you’re not diseased now,” Shawn drolled, “you will be when she gets done with you.”
It took time for Vera to steer the conversation back to the past. Maximus jumped up onto the bed, and Reagan sat up and scratched behind his ears. Terrance lay content in Vera’s arms, while Cleo pushed the plate around the floor with a tongue licking for the last little bits of Reagan’s dinner.
The boys wanted to talk group business. The Rats could keep all the police weapons and equipment, as Reagan didn’t want any of it, including the pistol on the nightstand, which he’d taken from Dial.
Face and Thyroid started to argue over the fight on the patio and how Thyroid had messed up the plan.
“Nobody told me the plan.”
“We were kinda busy,” said Shawn. “I could have got every one of them with the acid bomb if your fat ass hadn’t gotten in the way.”
“I’d have gone with the poison,” said Reagan. “Clean, efficient... wait, did you just say acid?”
“Our regular bombs are too messy,” said Face. “We figured the bottle of battery acid that I boiled down could shatter on the table and splash all of them.”
“Risky,” Reagan mused. “Also full-on psycho.” He nodded. “I like it. Our regular bombs. Geez, Hunter, where’d you find these guys?”
Hunter smiled, and the conversation turned to their plans.
Lacewood said the next order of business was to put the twins to work finding and looting the rogue officers’ hideout, but Reagan said that was a bad idea. When Lacewood asked why, Reagan shook his head and started to look sad again.
Vera seized her chance. “Sweetie, maybe we should talk about how the two of you crossed the channel.”
“The channel? You want to talk about walking across Cow?” asked Billy.
“Boca Chica, you goof. They crossed it.”
“Three times,” Hunter mused to himself. “We made this raft covered in mangrove branches, used to wade across while some of us dumped bodies off of the end of the highway to keep the navy’s attention. But it’s no good now. They’ve got that whole area covered with spotters and drones. We’re safer here.”
Reagan’s laugh sounded filled with bitter, ironic, pain. “What do you want to bet? You didn’t see what I saw.”
“What’d you see?” asked Lacewood.
Hunter answered for him. “A navy SEAL turned zombie. It shot him and everything.”
“Holy shit.”
“You don’t know if that’s what it was,” said Vera, trying to be reasonable.
“I keep having this dream,” said Regan. “I go outside and they’re all like him, like that’s what they were all turning into in the first place, and they’ve changed... mutated into things like him. All of them. Smart. Fast.”
Lindsey chuckled and smiled while sitting next to him, gently rubbing his shoulder. She continued the story. “And it’s like they’re not zombies anymore. It’s like they’re ants and they have this big mound in the middle of the island, and if you fight one of them, they all start swarming like insects.”
“Freaking A.”
“C’mon, Lindsey.”
Reagan stared at the girl. “How did you know that?” He then looked over at Hunter with a kind of fascinated alarm. “That’s it. That’s the dream.”
The Day the Lights Went Out
East End of Stock Island
July 2
Little Angie is terrified, and I’ll be honest, I don’t know what to tell her. She just sits there, rocking back and forth at the edge of the table. I’ve told her twice to stop or she’ll fall.
[30 second delay]
I knew Donald Tiune. I didn’t know him as Donald Tiune. He was just Mr. Tiune to us. Some old guys came around the fleet once a week and serviced the cars. I think I remembered hearing somewhere that he had retired from the city. I might have even known that he worked with Energy Services.
What I did not know—had no idea—was that for forty years, Donald Tiune was the Lower Keys power grid, heart and soul. He knew every line, every transformer... hell, every power outlet on Stock and Key West.
Just inside the front door, we found the first body, a man on the short side of twenty. Although I found a bullet in his pocket, he seemed ill-equipped for a security job. I could only hope that he enjoyed the last cigarette from the empty pack on the floor beside him. He had ligature marks around his neck, but the overlapping lines across his throat meant he hadn’t gone fast. Someone had stopped just short each time, maybe asking questions, before finally finishing him off.
Wisdom found a second body. I recognized what was left of the guy. He used to volunteer at the library, but I can’t recall his name. He was beaten bloody and tied up, still alive, in an office chair, bound by about ten feet of barbed wire. The skin had tiny pick-marks all over his arms and legs, but a spray of blood down his shirt and across the wall made me think he had ended it himself, like he pressed the side of his neck into one of the barbs and squeezed it in with his shoulder until he passed out. There’s something about a man who’d take his own life rather than face whatever is standing right in front of him. I can’t say for certain he did it because he was looking at our SEAL, but it feels right.
We found Donald Tiune in the center of the building, in a steel-walled control room that looked like the cockpit of a 1960’s spaceship, complete with more dials and gauges than I had ever seen. As I looked down at his body, it was like meeting him for the first time. Tiune was always small, but at 78 years of age, curled up on the bare cement floor next to that big rusty turbine, he looked like a child’s toy tossed unceremoniously into a toy box.
Blood spatter layered the entryway, fine droplets indicating blunt force. We found more in the hallway next to the office rooms, darker, meaning from deeper wounds. Little tidal pools of blood lay all around where Tiune’s body had finally given out. Any ounce he had left in him, he left right there on the floor. That man had put up the mother of all last stands.
As a cop, I’m not supposed to jump to conclusions—let the facts lead to conclusions, not the other way around. Still, this smelled like our guy—like Cauthron.
The only satisfaction I could draw from this was that, hopefully, underestimating Tiune had cost his attacker something in the end. Based on the blood trail, the old man had kept getting back up, struggling to his feet and answering the bell for another round. Maybe our SEAL wasn’t as lethal as the Navy thought.
It wasn’t much comfort, though. I stood outside the building with Wisdom and a couple of the other guys, just listening to the sound of the island—or more like the lack of sound, the quietest I’d ever heard it. You could almost make out each cricket. When we turned off our flashlights, complete darkness enveloped us, and it felt like the whole island was holding its breath. We knew the screams and gunshots and all the rest of it would start up at any time, but for those few minutes, only the anticipation lingered. Everyone was probably wondering if the power would come back on again, as it had last time.
Zero chance of that. While we pulled security and walked the grounds, Ronnie McKenzie went to work inside. He was the last real city engineer on the island, and our last hope to figure out what Tiune had been doing, and more importantly, how to do it. The warehouse had an old diesel turbine, and somehow Tiune and his buddies had run wire all the way out of the building, down the beach into the water, then up the channel to the transmission station on the northeast end of Stock Island. The wires were tied together, a “really professional job” according to Mackenzie, including a lineman’s splice that held together even under tension. Mackenzie told me that, even if the system had been functional, he still couldn’t figure out how Tiune had worked the switchboard with the huge differences in current, or how he modified the turbine. Now, the main switches and controllers had been broken or bent, and the entire operating command board had been destroyed. A pair of steel rods had been jammed directly into the contacts, rupturing them and scorching both the wiring and the distribution nodes. Even if we had the know-how, MacKenzie was a few million dollars short on supplies to even attempt any repairs.
“It’s hopeless, Boss,” he said.
We drove back to the compound in the dark, defeated.
For the last six hours, it’s been nothing but shouting and emergency this and emergency that. Nobody has said it yet, but I know at least some of them blame me. We had a couple guys out here early on, for security. That was weeks ago. Nobody ever messed with the building, and Tiune said that he’d made his own arrangements. We needed everyone back here, so we just stopped posting it. Like I said, weeks ago. Sins of the past.
If they decide to pin this one on me, fine, but I don’t see what I could have done. If Cauthron had wanted the power off, he could have just damaged the transmission station. We never had anyone watching that. And if it was him, anybody we left out there would probably just be dead along with those three.
I’m worried. I’ll admit it. No power means we can’t pump water. It means even more open flames and even more fires and burns and smoke inhalations. No, I know. This will probably all get laid at my feet.
Just like the bridge.
[1 hour, 22 minutes later]
The mystery is solved. Peduto knew the story. He caught me outside of the chambers and we started to talk. This, this is what he told me....
[11-second delay, deep breathing]
Donald Tiune has a wife, Elizabeth. It had to be a fucking Elizabeth, didn’t it?
[18-second delay, audible crying]
In the hospital. Oh God, keep it together. Keep it together. They married when they were like 20 or something. Let’s see. He said 54 years. So that would mean he was 24. Okay. Yeah, she had an aneurysm or something. She’s on life support at the hospital.
So the bridge blows, and the power lines are all down in the water with everything else, and the power goes off all over the city. And... and... and so this old guy goes to the hospital to check on his wife and they’re all freaking out because... okay, I’ve got to explain. Lower Key’s Medical has two backup generators. The main one runs off gas just like that turbine. The auxiliary runs on batteries. The gas one can go as long as you keep feeding it gas, but the battery one is only good for a few hours.
So he goes to check on the missus and finds out that the gas generator isn’t working. Problem with old fuel or something, and everybody is scrambling around and he’s trying to help, but they’re going to have to flush the lines, and it’s going to take too long, and they don’t have enough batteries and they’re going to lose power. With no way to transport them out, everybody on life support is... is going to die.
[13-second delay]
That guy... that little guy, he asks their repair people what they need and they say, “A miracle.” And he says, “You keep going.”
[5-second delay]
“You just keep Elizabeth alive. I’m going to get you your miracle.”
And that’s what he did. We’ve had power for the last eight weeks because of one man... one man who loved his wife so much... that he found a way to get power to the hospital until they could fix their diesel generator. It wasn’t for us. He did it for her.
[33-second delay, audible crying]
And he fought that guy. He went at him... just swinging a wrench, then a ball-peen hammer, finally just his hands, trying to keep that thing away from the turbine, doing anything to make sure the hospital wouldn’t lose power again—to make sure his wife would have just a few more minutes.
[1 minute 45 second delay]
I know everybody here thinks it’s hopeless, thinks this place is going to be a slaughterhouse any minute now... but they’re wrong. They’re wrong. I know it looks bad. We need a miracle. But you just hang on. You hear me, people? You just hang on.
I’m going to get you your miracle.
This is the plague with which the Lord will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.
Zechariah 14:12
The Welcoming Committee
Lower Keys Medical Center, Stock Island
Seventy-three days after the power went out, two men were lowered by rope onto the hospital helipad. They introduced themselves as Dr. McCaffrey and Dr. Thorpe, both in civilian clothes, both carrying black duffle bags—no masks, not even gloves.
Thorpe was in his early forties, McCaffrey a little older. McCaffrey was short, with a biting smile and dense brown hair that looked like a wig. Thorpe’s beard was nearly as long as most of the men’s beards at the hospital, but better kept. He had a strong frame that slid down the rope ladder with ease, and he stood among the welcoming party with an expression like a shy child on his first day of school.
The air above swirled with the sounds of the support aircraft, jet fighters and attack choppers that covered the drop. McCaffrey’s smile faltered when he saw the filth and squalor of the grounds.
The area was surrounded with a fortification of hurricane fence, some sections topped with barbed wire, some with razor wire. The tents were still up... barely. Both of the large medical tents had rips, and their cloth rippled like the bodies of enormous kites in the helicopter’s downdraft. The grass and pavement were strewn with campfires, and people in their underwear washed themselves from buckets suspended on the tree trunks. Everywhere the doctor looked, dirty, suspicious faces looked back. This homeless camp had poured up to, and inside of, a hospital like a lava flow of grime and desperation.
Dr. Dave White and the others brought them into the cafeteria. He had originally planned for them to meet outside, but the wind and clouds made the inside of the hospital bearable, and the cafeteria would allow a more intimate setting. Fluorescent lights lit the hallways.
“You have power!” McCaffrey said, as if giving a compliment.
“We have to make the most out our gas generator,” Dr. White said, “while the gasoline we can find on the island will still burn. If you don’t mind, it’s this way.”
“Where’s Dr. Morenz?”
“He left to make contact with the city officials. I’ll tell you as soon as he gets back.”
People filed in behind the new arrivals, as quiet as if they had all arrived late for a church service. Over two hundred of them crowded into the room and sat on the benches, or chairs, or floor, or just stood.
McCaffrey addressed them as Thorpe stood off to the side, adjusting his tie.
“Okay,” he started. “So, I’m sure you all know that the crisis stage is almost over—lots of noise, lots of school closures, and a few outbreaks that kept us busy. Now, everything is going back to normal. Well....” He rubbed his hands together. “Now it’s time to finish this thing off. I know everyone is probably wondering when we’ll administer the vaccine, and I can tell you that it will be very soon—within the next few days. When Dr. Morenz gets back, my colleague and I will need to... go over a few specific matters. After we iron out the loose ends, we can start planning for the evacuation of the island.”
At this, he stopped and looked over the room, waiting for applause that started slow, but picked up to a satisfying roar.
