The Nothing Men, page 14
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
Hope.
The sun was setting again.
It was low in the sky, spilling its oranges and reds across the sky like a child who’s knocked over his fingerpaints. Ben sat at the rock’s edge, huddled under the thermal blanket that had been in the pack, wondering how far the mercury would drop that night, wondering if he would survive the night. He’d already spent so many bone-shatteringly cold nights up here, some three thousand feet above sea level, and that was after all that time on the road. Darkness was rapidly approaching; he was dreading it, wishing there was some way he could slow the sun’s descent below the horizon. Spread out before him were the serpentine trails of the Shenandoah Park, looking dark and ominous, like a circulatory system about to blow out.
The rock formations cast long shadows across the network of trails, a perfect synergy of creepiness, as though the elements had worked together to make this as scary a place as possible at night. He hadn’t seen a soul since he’d arrived on the mountain, and that was fine with him. These days, Mom’s ancient edict to not talk to strangers took on a whole new meaning, especially in areas where the Department’s reach did not extend. There were lawless lands out here, places in the shadows. Not places like the Haven, but something else entirely. True danger. Ben had heard stories in the camps about these mysterious outposts beyond the Department’s reach. Rape, murder, human trafficking, especially of Redeyes. The most dangerous neighborhoods in America were no longer found in the inner city.
Ellie Campbell had been right. The view was breathtaking, hard and pure and unmolested. As though this was the way the world was supposed to be. Ellie had said this place, untouched by war and death, made her feel normal again, and it reminded her of why she needed to carry on in this new world. And it seemed so dangerously convenient that he’d latched onto that bit of Ellie Trivia, because it kept hope alive and flickering, a single pinpoint of light in the growing darkness. Hope was sneaky that way, always finding a way to weasel its way back into things, make him think that there was time for one more play, one Hail Mary pass down the field.
He really knew very little about Ellie, where she lived, whether she was even still alive, but he had still hiked for days into the desolate lonely heart of Virginia, following hope, that cruelest of mistresses. The only thing that kept him from simply accepting the fact that this was a suicide mission, that he would perish out here, was that simple hope he could deliver the message about Tranquility, whatever it was. If he could do something, he could avoid failing yet again, yet again, the way that he’d failed Carlos at the baseball complex, the way that he’d totally and utterly failed Sarah and Gavin.
There was no Plan B.
He was so cold.
He’d failed again. Of all the poor decisions he’d made in his life, he’d saved the worst one for last. And this was the decision that was going to kill him. Had he really thought that he would find her here? For all he knew, she’d given up these little sojourns because she worked seventy hours a week on the HARD team, and maybe she didn’t feel like traipsing across the badlands of Virginia for a quick view of these ancient rock formations. Or, knowing his luck, she did still come up here, but she’d taken off hours before he arrived. She’d be back in a week, just in time to find his corpse worked over by the vultures and the foxes and raccoons that called this place home, and she would wonder what had happened, what had he been doing here.
He felt bad for her.
“Tranquility,” he said aloud, and he jumped, startled by the sound of his voice, weak and scratchy, like a grumpy nursing home resident, his last bit of alertness fleeing the scene.
An idea popped into his head, but it was like a housefly buzzing around the kitchen. He couldn’t calm his mind long enough to grab a hold of it. He tried to sit very still and focus his thoughts, as though he were holding a rolled-up magazine over the little fly, ready to pounce. When he thought he had the idea locked in his sights, dropped the mental hammer, but it slipped away from him, the way the fly simply seemed to vanish when you’d just missed squishing it.
Stupid.
He ran his tongue across his lips and found them dry and cracked. His water had run out; he tried to remember how long the human body could survive without water. Three days? Four? It wasn’t like he was expending a lot of energy up here, and it wasn’t warm at all, so if he was dying of thirst, he was doing it slowly. Just more time to go insane before he died! Perhaps that was a blessing. Maybe he would be too crazy to be afraid.
He thought about the Internet, about how, once upon a time, he could just run a simple search for “how long can you survive without water” and his shiny laptop would spit out six hundred websites, each with a slightly different answer. He recalled its insidious way of eating up time, the way you’d look up and two hours had gone by when all you’d meant to do was write a single e-mail, the way it fragmented your thinking process, not unlike what was happening to him here on the mountain.
Sarah and Gavin. Were they still living in the house? What had it been like for them after he’d become infected? Whenever he considered this, he’d bump up across the mental equivalent of a Road Closed sign. Perhaps it was simply a matter of self-preservation. His mind wouldn’t let him see the things that might fracture it, that might prove to be its unraveling. So there were no images of Reds swarming the house, pinning them down while they hid, wide-eyed with horror and misery and fear until they were overwhelmed and infected like him. He dug deeper, farther back, to happier times, his mind downloaded old images, cached away for future use. Of weeknight dinners and soccer games and a trip to the emergency room when Gavin had fallen off his bike and fractured his elbow.
He yawned; sleep was sneaking up on him again, a thief in the night, and he worked to fight it off, knowing what happened to folks who laid down in the cold, just for a minute. His eyelids felt heavy and gritty. He wanted to take a nap. He could sleep. He could do that. What the hell was he fighting to stay awake for, anyway? He pushed the thought out of his mind, quickly, the way one might escort an embarrassing dinner guest to the door. He was just talking about a little nap here.
He wasn’t that far gone now, was he? After all he’d been through? But the idea seemed more and more appealing, the benefits outweighing the risk. Like an alcoholic thinking he can handle just one drink, hey it’s my kid’s graduation, I’ve been sober six months, what’s the harm in a glass of champagne?
Time crumbled around him, and before long he was only able to distinguish night and day, and then grew fuzzy, as he wasn’t quite sure if he were asleep or awake or whether he was even alive at all, until everything ceased to have any meaning at all.
Shortly after nine in the morning on the last day of his old life, Ben and his neighbor Carlos Farmer, a software engineer, headed out on the last supply run he and Sarah had agreed on. It was the sixteenth of May; the situation was growing more dire with each passing day, and news reports were becoming increasingly unreliable. One morning, there was a report that the military had dropped a tactical nuclear weapon on Chicago; that afternoon, he’d heard that FEMA had constructed massive refugee camps there. But he listened as often as he could, just in case there was wheat in the chaff of rumor and panic. But news outlets were still run by human beings just as scared as everyone else. Nothing made sense.
As the morning crept by, Ben and Carlos drifted farther and farther afield, the distance they were willing to venture from home in direct correlation to their level of desperation. Shortly past ten, they stumbled across the area’s Little League complex, a huge sprawling tract of manicured with a dozen fields and a sparkling indoor facility that was one of Raleigh’s crown jewels. It was abandoned, the grass in the outfield looking shaggy and unkempt, like an invalid relative who’d been forgotten about. A handful of bodies lay scattered about the outfield, but they ignored them. By then, dead bodies had embedded themselves into the fabric of daily life, like traffic or ringing cell phones.
Ben scanned the building with a pair of binoculars and found it to be remarkably intact. Cars were still parked in front, their windshields intact, the sunshine winking back at them like a pretty girl smiling from across a crowded bar.
“What do you think?” Carlos had asked.
“Worth checking out,” Ben said. “We need the supplies.”
“Hey, we need to talk.”
“What about?” Ben replied absently, his focus still on the building.
“This is it for us,” Carlos said suddenly, exhaling slowly, as if it had been something he’d been holding in for a while. “We’re gonna try and make it to one of the safe zones.”
Ben wiped his hand across his cheek, suddenly aware of the thick stubble that had grown in, his face as neglected as the baseball fields before him. Sarah had reminded him of their deal just as he left that morning. This was it. If they didn’t come back with at least a week’s worth of supplies, they would be on the road by noon.
“Yeah, I hear you, brother,” he’d said, and he still chuckled about that one, that things had reached the point where he was calling his next-door neighbor, the guy he’d maybe exchanged a hundred words with before the Panic ‘brother.’ He didn’t want Carlos to leave; they’d become a good team, looking out for each other. He was cautious, smart, and fair.
“We should go together,” Carlos said. “The six of us.”
Carlos and his wife Lisa had a six-year-old daughter named Cassie.
“Let’s deal with this later,” Ben said.
Carlos nodded.
They drew their weapons and hustled across the four fields, easing to a stop in the parking lot. The sun beat down hard on Ben’s neck as they ran. They searched the cars first, starting with the six unlocked ones first, finding a few choice bits. A flashlight. Half a pack of cigarettes. Matches. A six-pack of bottled water. Those went into Ben’s blue backpack. He debated breaking the windows on the locked cars but worried about drawing attention from Reds or uninfected bandits. From the cover of an abandoned SUV, they watched the building, silent, unmoving, a sleeping monster sunning itself. In the distance, the crackle of automatic weapons.
“Still want to do this?” Carlos asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “But the pickings are getting slim.”
His gut was telling him that they should skedaddle right then and there, that it was all about to go south. But he didn’t listen. At the critical moment in his life, when all the useless layers of polite living had been scraped away like old paint, leaving his true self behind, he’d ignored his own personal emergency broadcast system the same way he’d used to mute it on television when that terrible screech would interrupt a basketball game or that reality dating show that he and Sarah had enjoyed watching and mocking together.
“In and out,” Ben said.
Carlos nodded firmly, his eyes set on the front doors. He drew it open slowly, training his weapon on the dim corridor just beyond the doors shimmering in the late spring sun. Ben crouched down and shuffled inside. His gun was up, his heart thudding away crazily in his chest. Behind him, the door squealed shut as Carlos followed him inside.
The reception desk’s shadow ensconced the room in a gray gloom. A long dark corridor stretched away to the left, down to a large utility room. The staff had stored bottled water and snacks for the baseball camps held at the facility; if there were any extra supplies lying around, they would be down that way.
But it was dark, and fear tightened around his airway like a python. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this skittish on a supply run, as if they were blowing through their hourglass of good fortune, the tiny grains of sand slipping away with each passing day. He took a deep breath, tried to relax, and that was when the pod of Redeyes attacked. The glass behind them shattered; three of them were fighting their way in, a fourth one lay face down, her body impaled on large shards of glass from the door.
Carlos opened fire first, his fusillade wildly off the mark. The first two Redeyes were on him in seconds, and he crumpled to the ground under their assault, curling into a ball, throwing his hands over his head. The violence was pure and huge, like a star exploding. The first Red, a teenage boy dressed in a soccer jersey and dirty boxer shorts, wrapped his skinny fingers around Carlos’s throat and slammed his head into the ground like it was a wrecking ball. The second one, a middle-aged woman with a chunk of cheek torn out, the wound deep enough to expose her jawbone, leapt onto Carlos’s torso and bit into his face while Carlos tried desperately but fruitlessly to wriggle free as she held on like a rodeo cowboy.
The third Red came at Ben like a heat-seeking missile locked onto its target. She was an attractive young woman, in her mid-twenties, dressed in tight athletic shorts and a bikini top. Her hair was tied off in a ponytail; her fresh face was tanned and unlined and relatively unscathed, as though she’d only recently become infected. Ben got one shot off, one good shot that buried itself into the girl’s midsection, but it was too late. Before the bullet brought her down, her hands, radiating with heat, gripped his right arm like a vise. He twisted away from her, but he couldn’t break her grip or her singular focus to kill, despite outweighing her by at least fifty pounds
Even as Ben struggled against the girl’s relentless onslaught, he could hear her cohorts tearing Carlos apart. Ben’s neighbor and friend had screamed only once, a guttural howl cut short when his head had hit the concrete floor hard enough to crack his skull, a thick, splintering sound. But nothing distracted the girl from her goal of ending Ben’s life. He couldn’t believe how much energy he’d expended to keep her teeth away from his arm, how hard it was to do the one thing he had to do stay alive.
As he swung his left arm wildly, raining blow after blow against the side of her head, he began to form a plan. He had to get out of the building before the other two turned their attention toward Ben as well. His blows were landing, but she simply would not let go. Then it came to him. He rushed the gaping hole in the ruined double doors, aiming for the post, hoping the impact would jar her loose just as he broke free of the building.
He crashed through the opening, twisting counterclockwise as the girl slammed into the post, and for a wondrous moment, he was free. Her grip came loose, and he turned to flee. As he did so, he slipped on the carpet of broken glass left behind by the Redeyes’ breach of the door, his right foot sliding out behind him. It all happened in slow motion. He looked back over his shoulder just in time to see the girl sink her teeth into his exposed right heel, just below the cuff of his pant leg. It was like a pinch at first, not totally unpleasant, followed by the sensation of meat being torn from a T-bone.
Time slowed down, and a deep, wondrous calm washed over Ben like a summer rainshower. For that moment, that brief instant, he was free, and he wasn’t afraid anymore. All the struggle and the terror and misery, the endless battle to stay alive was now behind him. Then the moment passed and the reality of what had happened slammed into him like a drunk driver running a red light. She’d BITTEN him, this cute little thing upon whom his gaze might have lingered if he’d seen her at the gym had bitten him and dropped a gigantic viral bomb in his leg, and now he was going to become one of THEM. She let go of him briefly, perhaps to get a better grip on him. As she turned over, he kicked at her hard with his wounded leg. His foot caught her square in the throat; and her windpipe crumpled like a cheap cardboard box. She flopped over on her back, clawing at her neck, unable to draw in a breath, and he watched her for a moment with the pride only the victor in mortal combat can feel. Low guttural sounds emanated from her throat as she suffocated to death in the vestibule.
And then he remembered what she had done, and he was having a hard time breathing himself. He staggered to his feet and stumbled out into the parking lot, acutely aware of the burning sensation in his calf. Made his way across the lot and onto the baseball diamonds, where he thought about his own playing days when he’d been a boy. He ran and ran and ran, until finally, he had to stop, right at home plate on the main field, where he bent over and vomited. As his body bucked and heaved, he had a hard time focusing on anything but the bite, but the terrible gift that the pixie had just given him. He ran some more, deep into a thicket of pines across the street from the complex, stopping only when his stomach began to roil again, and he paused at the base of a tall pine, placing his hand on the cool, rough bark of the trunk.
In the shadow of the trees, where the air was cool and fragrant like an eternal Christmas tree lot, he screamed. A long, deep howl, drawing from the capped wells of every mistake he’d ever made, every regret he’d ever had, every wrong he’d ever committed, combining together into the biggest fuck-up of his life. It filled his ears, echoing through the trees, which stood quietly as they had for two hundred years, decidedly uninterested in the affairs of one Ben Sullivan, whose existence on the planet had been but a tiny insignificant thing and was now over. It was like his brain was reformatting itself, deleting years of old files and memories and images that he wasn’t going to be needing anymore.
Why had they gone inside that building? Were they that desperate? They hadn’t needed to go in there, had they? No, it was his own carelessness, his own stupid laziness. Carlos’s announcement had distracted him. He cried, his mind simply cycling through its basest emotions, looking for one that might calm him down before he totally snapped and broke with reality. He wept like he’d never wept before. The sobs were huge and uncontrollable, His body shivered, as if he’d stepped out of a hot shower on a frigid morning.
As he cried, he twisted his foot on its instep to check the wound. The girl had torn out a small hunk of flesh from the calf, like a golfer leaving a divot in the fairway. Blood had smeared across his lower leg, soaking into his right sock and sneaker. Reflexively, he pressed a hand against the ruined flesh, and he watched as the still-flowing blood seeped through his fingers, like water breaking through a failed dam. And that’s what had happened. His personal dam, the one he’d built up against this shitty world around them had failed, and the monsters were breaking through.
