The Nothing Men, page 15
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
Home. He had to get home. Sarah was a nurse and could amputate his leg below the knee before the virus took hold. It could work. They had to try, right? They had to try. He checked his surroundings; he was less than three miles from the house. He could be there within thirty to forty-five minutes. Still within the asymptomatic window. Then Sarah could get to work. It would be awful, of course, bloody and horrific and awful, but she would do it because the alternative was Ben turning into one of them.
The tears stopped after a bit because he was too physically exhausted to create any more.
His legs gave out on him, and his body crumpled to the base of its trunk. He sat there in the woods. He ran his hands through the loose soil around him, squeezing clumps of the dark dirt, feeling its damp chill against his fingers. Around him, the trees were alive with birdsong, the air rich with the scent of pine, and he was reminded of his childhood home in mid-December as the smell of the Christmas tree had begun permeating everything. Just another day on planet Earth. His last day.
He ran.
A scraping noise behind him broke his trance. He’d become so accustomed to the silence, thick and heavy, that it sounded like a gunshot, but he wasn’t alarmed. He wondered if that was because he’d finally reached the point of no return, that whatever was going to happen was going to happen. The die was cast.
A hooded figure on the trail, small in build, eyeing him carefully. He had no idea if this person meant him harm, but he was not afraid.
“Ben,” she said.
“Hi,” he said. He started laughing. It sounded stupid and wonderful at the same time. He didn’t know why he was laughing. Maybe a sign of clarity. Or insanity.
“You’re famous.”
Then he passed out.
17
Ellie spent their first thirty minutes together warming him back up. She pressed handwarmers in his palms and fed him soup from her insulated container. When he stopped shivering, they started back for the car. Ben’s time on the mountain had weakened him, and he had to take frequent rest breaks as they covered the rocky, undulating trail back down the mountain and to the trail that fed back to the parking lot. His mind felt foggy, cloudy; he would not have survived another night on the mountain. He hadn’t noticed how out of it he was until he saw her in action, as he’d had nothing to compare it to. If you’re the only person in the room, you look perfectly sane.
She seemed strong, clear of mind, clear of purpose. She encouraged him gently, placed her hand on the small of his back as they negotiated particularly tricky stretches of trail. At one point, he stumbled over a thick partially exposed tree root and crashed to the ground in a heap. Despite his weakened condition, he felt hot with shame.
“Let’s take a break here for a minute,” she said. He searched her tone for a hint of judgment or disappointment, the way a food critic might linger over a bite to note a particular spice or herb, but found none.
“How long have you been out here?” she asked. She handed him a water bottle from her pack. He took it and sat down on a rounded boulder on the edge of the trail.
“A few days,” he said.
He cracked open the bottle and took a long pull. The water was pure bliss against his dry, chapped lips, and he didn’t care that the water’s chill made him shiver even harder than he already was. He was badly dehydrated; his body absorbed the water like a dry sponge.
“I kind of lost track of time.”
“How long were you planning to wait? I mean, I’m guessing you were waiting for me, right, or did I just embarrass myself?”
“As long as I could. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
He finished the bottle with another long pull and tossed it to the ground.
“Really?” she said sharply. “We don’t have enough problems we’ve got to keep polluting?”
He looked up at her with a flush of embarrassment, as though he was a kid who’d just been stealing cigarettes from his mother’s purse. She held out her hand; he bent over, picked up the bottle and handed it to her. She tucked the bottle back into her pack without a word.
“You know, I almost didn’t come up here today,” she said.
“Still on the crew?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was a bad week. We found, um…”
She stopped and took a deep breath.
“Anyway,” she said after gathering her thoughts and deciding to keep them locked down. “It was a bad week. I was just going to sleep it off, but I couldn’t sleep.”
“Lucky for me,” he said.
“Indeed.”
“What did you mean when you said I was famous?”
“They plastered your face all over the news broadcasts, the story being that it was your tip that led to the camps being dissolved.”
Ben sighed deeply.
“So dumb of me. I really thought they were planning an attack.”
“You sure you weren’t just looking out for number one?”
He looked down at his shoes.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So you were there that night,” she said. “At the farm.”
“Yeah,” he said. The images from the night came flooding back. The flames consuming the house like a fiery demon, the sound of the automatic weapons shattering the still night.
“We weren’t quite sure about that,” she said. “We didn’t know if you’d decided to stay or go.”
“Did Luke make it?”
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” she said. “He was a good man. Better than that lunatic Thompson.”
He looked over at her, puzzled, and she must have picked up on his confusion.
“It’s not that we didn’t agree on the big picture,” she said. “It’s just that…”
Her voice trailed off.
“He took a lot of unnecessary chances.”
“Why did they do it?” Ben asked.
“There are things you didn’t know about the Haven,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like its real purpose.”
She laughed softly.
“Doesn’t that sound all conspiratorial and mysterious?”
Ben smiled.
“This is a war, Ben. Not every person who was infected hates the Department, and not every uninfected person loves it. People are choosing sides.”
“Okay.”
“For the most part, though, the world is lined up against you,” she continued. She said it matter-of-factly, without judgment or passion. “But you knew that.”
He nodded.
“Hate crimes are commonplace, and the Department does nothing. The Volunteers do nothing. A dozen Reds are murdered every day. The world just turns the other cheek.”
Her voice cracked a little at the end of the sentence.
“Couple weeks ago, this seventeen-year-old kid got jumped by a mob down in Virginia Beach. He was panhandling for food for himself and his sister. They dragged him into an alley and beat him to death. When they were done with him, he looked like roadkill.”
Ben simply shook his head in disgust.
“Before the attack on the Haven,” she went on, changing the subject, “we’d become the point group for a growing band of freedom fighters, if you will,” she said. “The world is in bad shape, and the Department is just making things worse. Everything they do is designed to perpetuate this so-called state of emergency. They wants the world to think that those who were infected will be dangerous until the end of time. You see the signs, right?”
Ben nodded, thinking about the DRR signs plastered all over the place.
Avoiding Orchid Testing Is a Crime
“You know why they do that? They’re trying to scare people into thinking the virus is just waiting to come back.”
“Well, we don’t know that we won’t relapse,” Ben said. “I worry about it all the time.”
“It’s bullshit,” she said. “That’s what they want you to think. It’s been almost three years since the last documented case of Orchid. What better way to scare people into obedience than to make them think that they themselves are the potential problem?”
“I’d never thought of it that way,” he said. “But why? To what end?”
“Want to hear something crazy?”
“Sure,” he said, even as he wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear it at all.
“Every day, people turn themselves in, claiming that they’re experiencing Orchid symptoms. They want to be good little citizens, and they support the Department efforts to maintain order. There’s an Unauthorized Pregnancy Reporting Hotline. That’s why they’re always showing footage from the Panic on that goddamn network.”
The virus had been devastating to babies in utero. The jury was still out on the effect of the virus on babies conceived after the mothers had recovered, the women’s bodies still lit up with Orchid antibodies. No one knew if the virus would someday activate in the children or if they would be immune. For that reason, the government had banned reproduction in cases where one of the would-be parents was Orchid-positive and mandated termination of Orchid pregnancies. The penalties for violating the Unauthorized Pregnancy Control Act were severe indeed. In a remarkable reversal, the American Civil Liberties Union had taken up the pro-life mantle, arguing that the UPCA was unconstitutional and that the government could not order someone to undergo an abortion.
“Freedom One,” she said softly, her voice coated with contempt and sarcasm as she said the words.
“They call it a tribute to the victims,” she said, her voice hardening now. “I mean, really, we need to see footage of Redeyes killing people to properly memorialize the victims?”
She was getting revved up now, her voice taking an edge like a freshly sharpened knife.
“But again, to what end?” Ben asked. “What’s the point?”
She smiled, a sad grin that spread across her face. He realized how pretty she was, and he immediately felt uncomfortable for thinking it.
“The Secretary has an incredible amount of power, and she and her cabal love having that power. Jesus, even the President is basically her bitch. I wish it were more complicated than that. But it’s not. Remember how loud everything had gotten before the Panic, how polarized everything was? Conservatives versus liberals, that whole song and dance?”
Ben nodded.
“Well, that’s all over with,” she said. “No cable news wars. No protests or marches. Democracy, free society, it’s a pain in the ass to maintain. A million different moving parts. Now the power is concentrated in even fewer people than it was before the Panic. People are just happy to be told what to do because in their minds, anything is better than we went through. It’s the oldest trick in the book. When the people are scared, they’ll listen to anyone that promises them and provides them stability.”
An owl hooted in the distance, and Ellie turned her head toward the sound.
“We should get going.”
They made it back to the car just as night had leached the last bit of light from the sky. Ellie had parked in a small scenic overlook cutout, providing a panoramic view of the park. Months of neglect had left the parking area overgrown with weeds as nature had begun to reclaim what was rightfully hers. That had been an interesting phenomenon; with a radically reduced population, many lawns and gardens and parks had gone unattended and had begun to devolve into their natural state. He wondered what the world would look like a decade from now.
She handed him a thermos of coffee. He drank it greedily and with scant regard for the skin on the roof of his mouth, which the hot liquid promptly sheared off. He didn’t care. The chill had sunk deep into his core.
She started up the truck and a moment later, they were on the move, bouncing down the narrow dirt road. She drove fast, her handling of the Jeep pure and true. After about a mile, the trail intersected with the main road; she turned left and raced north into the darkness.
Their discussion had left his head swimming, Ellie pulling the curtain back on the way the world was now. He’d been so caught up in his own existence, the universe of Ben, that he hadn’t had a lot of time to think about the larger picture. As brutal as Whitmore’s destruction of the camp had been, it hadn’t been all that surprising. What scared him was the notion that the government wanted to keep things this way, and worse, that the people were content with this new status quo. He thought about his son Gavin growing up in a world like this.
Calvin’s last words suddenly came back to him. Jesus! How could he be so stupid? The raison d’etre for his trip to the mountain! It reminded him of one of the first cases he’d worked on as a new lawyer. He’d glossed over an important internal memorandum they’d obtained during discovery, one that devastated their opponent’s position. He was so inexperienced, only schooled in the theory of law, not the actual day-to-day practice, that he had not yet learned that good lawyering was often nothing more than good-old-fashioned detective work. And had his supervisor read him the riot act on that one. He spent the next six months working ninety hours a week, fueled by high-octane terror that he’d be shown the door.
“I saw Calvin right before he died,” he said. “He’d been shot, and he was just barely conscious. He did manage to say something just before he died.”
She slammed on the brakes, and he felt even dumber now for not having already told her about Calvin’s statement. The Jeep fishtailed and stopped in the middle of the road. The headlights cut a channel of white light into the pitch blackness.
“What was it?” she asked. She wasted no time inquiring why he hadn’t mentioned it already. Another glimpse into the no-bullshit persona of Ellie Campbell.
“It was just six words,” he said. “Tranquility. You have to stop tranquility.”
“Was that it?” she asked.
“He died right after that, so I don’t know if that was the entire message or if there was more to it. I didn’t think anything of it at first. He was in pretty bad shape when I found him, so I thought it was just gibberish.”
“But you don’t think so anymore.”
“No. The guy from the Department asked me about it. They mixed it in with other code words, asking me if I’d ever heard of it. I’d never heard the others, but I figure they were decoys, control words, so they could differentiate my response when I heard it.”
She was staring at him, her eyes wide and fearful and yet full of focus.
“Now it makes sense,” she said.
“What?”
“Why the Department branded you as a traitor to the Reds,” she said.
“Why?” Ben asked. He was completely mystified. “Why not just leave me to rot? Or just put a bullet in my head?”
“It’s hard for you to connect with anyone,” she replied. “Maybe they did see you as a rebel, someone who might start a new movement now that the Haven is gone. Maybe they were afraid you’d become a martyr. But now that you’ve betrayed the Reds, you’re no longer a threat. To be honest, they probably think you do know something about Tranquility but let you go anyway.”
“But isn’t that a huge risk?”
“Yeah,” she said, tapping her lips with her index finger. “It does seem a little strange that they would let you go.
Ben felt self-conscious; a seed of suspicion had been planted in Ellie’s mind.
“If I was really working for them,” he said, “they probably wouldn’t have outed me on the news.”
“True,” she said.
But she didn’t seem entirely convinced.
“But you’re right,” he said. “They must have some hedge.”
“When they let you go, how did that go down?”
Ben thought for a moment, pinching his lower lip.
“It was right after they’d busted up the camp,” he said. “This Department asshole Whitmore was busting my balls about it, telling me how he was going to make me a star. I was terrified, to be honest. Nowhere to go, nothing to my name. I thought they were going to send me out with nothing but the clothes on-”
Lightbulb.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered.
“What?” she asked.
Ben spun around in his seat and began digging through his new backpack, pawing his way to the bottom, where he’d jammed his trusty blue companion, a relic of his old life, a memento he hadn’t been able to part with. As Ellie watched, he palpated the old pack’s outer shell, the way a doctor might feel for a strange growth, feeling, feeling, feeling, there! Just inside the outer seam, near the bottom of the pack.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Feel the bottom here,” he said, holding out the base of the pack.
Ellie felt around for a few seconds before she felt it.
“What is it?”
“You have a pocketknife or anything like that?”
She did, and a minute later, Ben was cutting into the seam of the bag.
“Someone sewed this up,” he said, pausing to examine his work. The stitching around the object was noticeably different than the original work.
He kept at it. Once his fingers had purchase, he peeled back the outer skin of the pack. There. A tiny cylinder in a pouch, sewn right into the dead space between the blue nylon shell and body of the pack.
“It’s a goddamn tracking device,” he said.
“Wow.”
“What do you think?”
“A backup plan. Just in case their plan to discredit you didn’t work.”
“What should we do with it?”
“Smash it to bits,” she said. “They probably figured you’d find it eventually.”
“Yeah,” he said. “No, wait. It’s still transmitting, right? As long as it keeps transmitting, they won’t know I’ve discovered it. I’ll just leave it somewhere.”
“How about now?”
