The Nothing Men, page 18
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
He softly hummed the opening bars from the famous theme song.
“Pretty crazy, eh?”
“It’s loony,” she said. “But I can’t say we have many other options.”
“I’ve been racking my brain, and there just doesn’t seem to be another way.”
She nodded.
“Hey, let me ask you something,” he said.
“What?”
“Are there other Havens?”
She sighed, and took a sip of her tea, a wan smile on her face.
“Supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
“Thompson occasionally mentioned other groups, but he always talked badly about them. Never trusted them, thought they were weak, corrupt. There was supposed to be a meeting of the leaders of the various Havens, but it never happened. What made you think to ask?”
“Whitmore asked me. One of the questions I was able to answer truthfully.”
He took a sip of his tea. It was weak and flavorless.
“So what do you think of my plan?”
“It’s insane.”
“Hear me out,” he said, holding up a palm. “The world is basically a giant third-world country these days. Security is a mess. The Volunteers are badly trained and organized. There are more cracks in the system than people probably realize.”
“But they’re looking for you,” she said. “That’s a big problem.”
“They’re looking for a guy with long hair and a beard,” he said, pointing his thumbs at his face. “I get rid of this before we leave.”
“OK, say you get in,” she said. “What then? Hope you stumble across a Tranquility briefing?”This he had no answer to. Of the skills listed on his resume, espionage was not one.
“I’m going to have to poke around a bit,” he said. “It’s a big place. If I have enough time, I might be able to dig something up.”
She pushed the mug to the center of the table.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said, her eyes boring into him. “I just don’t know if it’s worth it.”
“I thought you said we didn’t have any other options,” he said.
“Doesn’t mean it’s a good option.”
He laughed at that, and she smiled in return, and then he felt stupid because her smile made his heart race a little. It made him think of all the things that had once made him feel happy and safe. It made him long for a future similar to his past, where he had been a normal guy living a normal life and not a pseudo-rebel plotting a suicidal raid to accomplish a relatively hazy and undefined mission.
“So what about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you still at it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Luke wasn’t crazy about you being part of the Haven. And you don’t need to risk your life for this. You could still have a life.”
“Luke,” she said, a sad smile sweeping across her face. “He wanted me to go live my life. He thought I owed it to him and the other Reds to live my life the way I wanted to, the way that they wanted to themselves. His point was that no one wanted to be a Redeye. Sort of like that old dumbass argument that being gay was a choice as opposed to how you were born. Like why would someone choose to be gay in our society?”
“Anyway, I’m rambling. The point I want to make, the thing I need you to know, is that I couldn’t just keep living my life.”
“Why not?”
“Because of what I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed my husband.”
A chill rippled through him. He wrapped his hands around the mug, letting its good heat seep into his fingers. He said nothing, figuring that she would tell him whatever she was going to tell him in her good time and no one else’s. She leaned over and blew across the top of the mug, diffusing the steam across the table. The scent of the tea filled his nostrils, and he felt tired all of a sudden. Not sleepy. Worn out.
“His name was Mark,” she said. “He was an English teacher.”
She kept talking but in a disconnected and distant way, almost as if she were telling someone else’s story.
“He was a very sweet man,” she said, her voice softening with each successive word. “We’d only been married a year when the Panic began. He’d actually been married once before. It was my first.”
Ben lifted the cup to his lips and took a sip. It tasted weak and old and he wondered how long the bags had been kicking it under the cupboard, absorbing pipe smoke and mildew.
“He was infected on April 24,” she said. “A bunch of us had hunkered down in the biggest house on the block, eight adults, four or five kids. For a week, ten days, we holed up, twenty-four-hour watch, supply runs in pairs. We started to think we had a pretty good handle on things, started to talk about where we would go when things died down.”
Ben nodded while she paused to take a sip of her tea.
“A small group of them came at us just before dawn. They were so fast. That was something I think we forgot. Maybe we’d seen too many zombie movies. I don’t know.”
Ben nodded. He knew what she meant. As the crisis deepened, people seemed to have a hard time separating fact from fiction. The Internet was rife with tips and tricks to surviving a Red attack, mostly drawn from the slew of zombie movies and novels that had been all the rage, and nearly all of which conflicted with the advice from the Centers from Disease Control to avoid infection. People wasted time trying to kill Redeyes with head shots, forgetting that they weren’t undead, they were just sick. They bled and died just like anyone else.
The infection’s most unique characteristic was that the aggressive behavior only manifested itself in the presence of another living creature. Alone, Redeyes acted relatively normal, scrounging for food and water, looking to get home. Many experienced short-term memory loss. But the sight of an uninfected mammal activated the virus response in a way that scientists had never quite understood, and it remained a mystery that had never been unlocked.
“They overran the house,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I’ll never forget it. They must have seen someone in the window because just like that, they came crashing through. There must have been a dozen of them. One little boy, Evan, was asleep on the couch, and they just tore him to shreds. He was seven years old.”
Ben heard a faint plip noise; Ellie was crying, the tears splashing against the worn wood of the tabletop. She cleared her throat before continuing.
“The fighting was just horrific,” she said. “In this nice suburban house. Blood everywhere.”
The depth of the Reds’ rage was the hardest thing to adjust to. People simply could not fathom the violence the Redeyes were capable of, often to their fatal detriment. Ben closed his eyes as she continued recounting her tale.
“We lost nine people that night. Six were killed outright, the other three were bitten or scratched and became symptomatic overnight.
“Mark was bitten by our neighbor during this terrible scrum out in the yard, a retired Army colonel who didn’t do much but run marathons and drink whiskey. It was such a little thing, the bite. Just above his elbow.”
She fell silent for a moment, undoubtedly playing a what-if game in her head. Ben knew what she was thinking about, and he let her run through it. A million little decisions stacked one on top of another, each domino toppling over until it reached its coda, his right leg on the business end of that woman’s teeth. Ben had gotten good at training his mind to keep the What-If door closed, because behind it was nothing but trouble. But sometimes, the door creaked open, giving him an unobstructed look inside.
Behind it he saw a different life, one with Sarah and Gavin, one where they’d survived the Panic together, one where he and Carlos had had a bad feeling about the baseball complex and they had passed it by. Maybe in some parallel universe, another version of Ben had done just that, and he and Sarah and Gavin had survived. Maybe in that parallel universe, the Panic hadn’t happened at all, and Parallel Universe Ben knew nothing of the horrible thing that begotten this version of Ben Sullivan.
“Yeah,” she said, wiping the tears from her face with the heels of her hand. “Didn’t even realize he’d been bitten at first. We took off, we just ran like hell. We’d made it a few miles before he started complaining about his arm throbbing. I looked at his arm by the light of the goddamn moon.
“It was just a little flap of torn flesh, right here,” she said. She folded her arm, like she was flexing a bicep, and pointed to the thin bolt of flesh right at the tip of the elbow.
“At first I didn’t think anything of it. Just a scrape from the battle. When I went to put the antibiotic cream on it … that’s when I saw the teeth marks. It was like getting kicked in the stomach.”
She pressed a hand against her lips and shut her eyes tight; Ben’s heart broke as the memory played back in her head again. No matter how many times she saw it, he knew, it would be as crisp and clear as the first time.
“And the worst part was that I had to tell him. He couldn’t see the bite.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“He just kept saying, ‘are you sure?’ over and over, his voice getting higher and higher each time.
“I hugged him as hard as I could,” she said. “He begged me to leave him there and run away. I just kept telling it was going to be OK. That was when the seizure hit.”
Ben felt cold. The seizure. A violent grand mal seizure that killed one percent of the virus’ victims and constituted the pathogen’s final stage direction in the terrible play of converting its human host into mindless killing machine. He’d long wondered how about his own conversion, and he supposed that hearing Ellie’s recollection was as close to it as he would ever get. He didn’t know if hearing this play-by-play made him feel better or worse.
“I rolled him on his side while it was going on, trying to get him through it. I knew I should have taken off, but I just couldn’t leave him there in the woods. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking about your husband,” Ben said.
“Probably thinking he wouldn’t come after me,” she said, laughing, a cold, terrible giggle. “Stupid. Like I was a special little flower. Idiot.
“Once the seizure ended, his fever had broken, and I thought he was OK. He stumbled to his feet, and as soon as he saw me…as soon as…”
Her voice cracked and the last of her words trailed away like the sound of a car racing away in the night.
“He came after you,” Ben said.
She nodded.
“Believe me,” Ben said. “It wasn’t personal. It was like every thought in our heads had been shut off, save one.”
She nodded again.
“That’s what people tell me.”
“I suppose I was lucky that he had staggered away from me before he realized I was there,” she said. “It gave me the few seconds I needed.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if keeping her personal horror locked up had been weighing her down, preventing her from putting it behind her.
“One shot, right in the chest.”
“You had no choice,” Ben said. “He would have killed you. And it wouldn’t have been as merciful as a bullet in the chest. You did him a favor.”
“A favor.”
“Yeah.”
“Know what else?”
“What?”
“After he died…” Then she stopped. “You know what really sucked? I hated myself.”
“Why?”
“I was happy to be alive.”
“Of course you were.”
“How did that make me different than the Reds? Killing to survive?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“That's when things really started going to shit,” she said. “And I really didn't care all that much. I holed up in an abandoned hotel for a couple weeks, did what I had to do to find food and water. A front-row seat for the apocalypse.”
“And then…”
Ben sat stone still, knowing what she was thinking. About a world where Mark was still alive.
“When I heard the first reports of folks recovering, I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it. At first, no one believed them. Crazy rumors, the desperate hopes of a civilization on its last legs. But then I saw that Army colonel, the one who’d bitten Mark, back at his house, sweeping up debris, trying to get his shit back together. He tried to apologize, but he just couldn’t. He didn’t bother asking where Mark was.”
She paused, took a sip of her tea. It had long since cooled off, but she didn't seem to care.
When were you infected?” she asked.
“May sixteenth.”
“Late May, early June, that was the worst of it.”
Ben knew this, but he let her talk. This had been building in her for a while, pressure building up like in a helium balloon and she was finally getting a chance to vent it. The longer she talked, the more relaxed she became. The clench in her jaw, forever present since he'd met her, seemed to loosen, and her face softened a little, like twilight taking the edge off a harsh summer day.
“So there you go,” she said. “My own dark secret.”
She chuckled softly to herself.
“What’s so funny?”
“A billion people out there with the same sad story.”
“True. But it doesn’t make it any less shitty. I'd tell you not to beat yourself up, but I gather you already know that rationally.”
“Seeing you, you know, it's hard for me. You remind me of him a little. Sorry I was such a jackass to you on the HARD crew.”
“No worries,” Ben said.
They finished their tea in silence, each on a private island of contemplation and reflection. He couldn't imagine having to put down a loved one.
“So you really want to carry the torch for the Haven?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I really do.”
20
Ben finally grabbed a few hours of much-needed sleep on the couch in Walter’s small office; it wasn’t much, but it was a high-octane snooze. When he woke up, his head felt clear, as though a terrible afternoon storm had blown through and left clear blue skies in its wake. He was full of purpose for the first time in a long time. It reminded him of his days playing soccer in college, and later, his days in the courtroom. The adrenalin, the fear, the way the world felt bigger and more alive, almost as if he could feel the pulse of the world, a current of good strong electricity buzzing along underneath the surface. He flung the curtain opened and took in the vista, a bright sunny morning greeting him.
After a quick shower, he trimmed his hair down to the scalp and wrecked one of Walt’s razors removing his beard. When he was done, he barely recognized the man in the mirror. A fresh start.
He went out to the main room, where Walt and Ellie were watching television. Their backs were to him, and they didn’t seem to hear him approach. Walt had his hand on the rabbit-ear antenna, holding it just so to catch the signal, enough to keep the picture from snapping out of focus. Ellie was sitting on the loveseat that was perpendicular to the screen, her elbows propped on her knees, her hands clasped at her lips.
“Morning,” he said.
Ellie looked up at him, and immediately Ben knew that something was wrong. The clench in her jaw was back, and her eyes looked pained. He looked to Walt and saw in his face the same look he’d had the day his wife Nancy, Sarah’s mother, had been killed in a car accident a decade earlier.
“Again, our top story this morning,” a soothing female voice was saying on the screen. Ben blinked and turned his focus to the screen, where he saw a pretty blonde Freedom One anchor delivering a report. A BREAKING NEWS banner was striped across the bottom of the screen. But that wasn’t what really caught his eye. The thing that had his undivided attention, the thing he had zeroed in on like a heat-seeking missile, was the thumbnail photograph over the anchor’s right shoulder. It was a photograph of Ben, a passport picture, snapped long ago. The photo was at least ten years old, his face smoother and free of the lines that had later carved themselves in like riverbeds on the surface of a rapidly maturing planet.
“A massive manhunt is underway this morning for this man,” the anchor said grimly. “Department officials have identified Ben Sullivan, a forty-year-old former attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, as the prime suspect in an early morning bombing at an R&R job site in Norfolk, Virginia, that’s left a dozen people dead, including six Volunteers. A Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, has told Freedom One that the Department has credible evidence that Sullivan, who was previously infected with the Orchid virus, had been acting erratically and may be showing signs of an active infection.”
Ben gasped, a quick sharp breath, as though the F-One anchor had reached through the screen and punched him in the sternum. He felt dizzy, like he had stood up too fast, and he grabbed the top of the couch as his legs began to give out underneath him.
“If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of this man, Department officials are requesting that you notify your local Department office. He is considered armed, dangerous and infectious, so officials are asking that you do not attempt to make contact with Mr. Sullivan.”
“What is this?” Ben said, not really to anyone. He heard the pitch and alarm in his voice, and he could only imagine what it sounded like to Walt and Ellie.
“What is this?” he said again, the sight of his photograph on television difficult to comprehend.
“I guess they got tired of waiting to see what you’re going to do,” Ellie said.
“This is bad,” Ben said. “Why would they do this?”
“Because we found the transmitter,” she said.
Ben cursed himself; they should’ve held onto it a bit longer.
“They still see you as a threat,” she continued. “Now that they know there’s no chance you’ll lead them back to other Havens, they can just make you radioactive to everyone, Pures and Reds alike.”
“So whatever Tranquility is,” Ben said, “it’s a big deal.”
“Yeah,” Ellie said. “It would appear that way.”
