Feedback (40 page)

“We're not sheep, thankfully,” I said. “Dumb as hammers, sheep are, and likely to stand on your foot for no good reason when you want to get across the pasture.” Wool was still a major export for Ireland—what else were we supposed to do with all that pasture and protected land? But zombie sheep were a real problem, which made their pastures and paddocks prime Irwin territory.

I'd never expected to miss the sheep. Looking at the enormous black dog, with its fur hanging to hide its eyes and keep me from knowing what it was going to do next, I found myself thinking longingly of herbivores and their blunt, non-ripping dentition.

“I can see that,” said the woman. “I'm Beth. You've already met Scott, and most of the dogs. There are eleven people in the woods nearby, watching you through their scopes right now. If you twitch in a way I don't like, you're going to be a contamination risk for my dogs. I'd rather avoid that. Why don't you explain exactly what it is you're doing here, and what it is you think we can do for you?”

“Hello, ma'am,” said Ben, stepping up beside me. I willingly faded back. She seemed a bit more focused than Scott, and whether that was a “good cop, bad cop” routine or simply the difference in their approaches, Ben was the better match to her. “We're journalists.”

“I'm not,” said Amber.

Ben shot her a hard look and continued, “We learned some things we shouldn't have known, and attracted the attention of certain factions within the government. Since we don't want to die, we're heading for Canada. Some friends gave us a map of places we could stop for gas along the way without revealing our location to anyone who might have reason to hurt us. We have trade goods, since we understood that money wouldn't be the primary means of exchange out here. Medicine, and some food, that sort of thing.”

“What friends?” asked Beth.

“A doctor from the Epidemic Investigative Service, who wishes to remain nameless.” Audrey stepped up on my other side, putting a hand on my elbow. It was unclear whether she was doing it for my comfort or her own. “He said we could trust anyone who appeared on his map.”

Beth gave Audrey a dubious look. “We don't really hold with people who wish to remain nameless out here. This isn't the sort of place that rewards anonymity.”

“Yeah, but it rewards minding your own business and letting others mind theirs, doesn't it?” I asked. “His name's Gregory Lake, by the by. Besides, none of that matters, because we have peanut butter. I bet you miss peanut butter.”

“I remember Gregory—nice guy—and I
do
miss peanut butter,” said Beth. “What's to stop us shooting you and taking it, since you seem so happy to flaunt it?”

“It'd be rude, and nobody who has so many nice doggies would be that rude,” I said. “Nice doggies with lots and lots and
lots
of teeth and how do you sleep at night? I think I'd never sleep again if those were in the house with me.”

Beth laughed. The tension that had been hanging in the air lightened, and Scott came walking around the corner of the building with his attendant swarm of dogs, like he had been waiting for his cue to return. “So,” he said. “Who wants lunch?”

Twenty minutes later we were seated around a folding table in the farmhouse garage, surrounded by dogs, with plates of apple slices and fish sandwiches in front of us. The sandwich filling was an interesting mix of local seafood—catfish and bluegills and crawfish—blended with homemade mayonnaise and a small but tasty assortment of spices. As far as “living off the land” went, these people were doing it right.

Scott and Beth weren't the only people eating with us. Six more had come out of the trees and onto the property to join us. They were an even mix of men and women, and none of them had said a word since they'd come inside. That was apparently the job of the leaders: They were just here to eat and, if I guessed right, to provide backup if things got ugly. That made a certain amount of sense. Living out here had to engender a certain amount of paranoia, and not everyone who looked friendly was going to be.

“You said you were heading for Canada,” said Scott. “Do you have a goal in mind after that? Most of the communities close enough to drive to and safe enough to approach aren't looking for journalists. You're going to run out of trade goods sooner than you probably think.”

“I'm still an Irish citizen,” I said. “We can get ourselves onto a plane and go back to the Republic. Let the people who don't like what we have to say come and try to blast us out of my homeland.” Even as I said the words, I began to feel uneasy about them. Dr. Lake had implied that every major medical organization in the world knew about the situation with Kellis-Amberlee—and they'd have to, wouldn't they? At least in the start, there had been a race on to find the cure. Every doctor on the planet had been trying to be the one whose name went on that all-important step toward salvation. And somewhere along the way that had all slowed down, until no one really noticed when people stopped talking about it. We'd all had other things to worry about.

The CDC didn't have much power in Ireland, but the World Health Organization did, and they weren't going to let us walk away if we started talking about what we knew. Maybe we could get out of the country and maybe not. Regardless, our lives were never going to be the same.

And there was always Australia, if it came to that.

“I'm a doctor,” said Audrey. “That's always going to be a trade good.”

“Assuming someone doesn't try to take you for their own, and dump the people you're traveling with in a shallow grave.” Scott made the statement sound almost casual. There was no way he could remove it from its context, however. We were in an enclosed space with dogs and strangers. If he wanted to turn that comment into a threat, he could do so very easily indeed.

“Ash and Amber are both very, very good shots,” said Audrey, sounding unflustered. “Ben isn't the best gunman I've ever met, but he manages data manipulation and signaling remarkably well. If someone tried to take me, they'd either wind up dead or with their location broadcast to the entire world. A Pyrrhic victory, sure. It's still a victory. If it came to that, we'd take it.”

“I like you,” said Beth. “You're not fucking around, and I respect that. So I'm going to give you a little advice: Go back to your lives. If there's any way you can make this right with the people you're running from, go back. You're nice kids, but that's exactly what you are right now. You're kids. You think you know what you're getting into, and you don't. Go back to your comfortable, confined lives, and let this be the only glimpse you get of the way the rest of the world lives. We're a nice enough outlier. We're more Norman Rockwell than Norman Bates, at least, and that's more than I can say for some of the folks you'll find out here.”

“There used to be a farming community over the ridge,” said Scott, waving a hand to the east. “They figured since women don't infect themselves when they menstruate, and kids don't infect themselves when they lose a tooth, that the trick to avoiding amplification was drinking each other's blood. They all donated a pint a week to the cause, and drank big ol' glasses of the stuff. Yum yum vampirism.”

“That worked?” asked Ben, sounding horrified and fascinated at the same time.

“That makes no medical or scientific sense,” said Audrey.

Scott snorted. “Hell no, that didn't work. Virus is virus, and being resistant to your own blood doesn't make you resistant to anybody else's. They drank their special protein shakes and thought they were building up an immunity, right up until the first person with a cut in their mouth took a swallow. Amplification, zombification, and slaughter followed, in that order. It took the rest of us months to track down all the stragglers. Their fence wasn't as good as they thought it was.”

“Charming,” said Amber.

“Normal,” said Scott. “Do you follow? We're the weird ones out here. We went into the woods because we weren't going to let them take our dogs away, and we've been breeding and placing pups ever since. We don't hurt anyone. We don't take things that aren't ours or force people to take things that aren't theirs. We're just in it for the dogs, and for the chance to live our lives the way
we
want to, not the way we're told to.”

“There are costs,” added Beth. “Don't start thinking this is some idyllic paradise for the individualist. It's hard as hell out here. There are always pirates and raiders around, and you have to keep a close eye on what's yours, or chances are that it won't be yours for long. I was a marathon runner once. Not Olympic level, but I did okay. I enjoyed myself, and I wasn't willing to stop running just because the world was locking the doors. Hell, I got through the Rising because I ran faster than the dead did.” There was a faint, wistful note in her voice, and for one shining moment, I felt like I could see it: the woman with the cane and the big, floppy dog, stripped of two decades of time and consequences. She would have been twenty, maybe twenty-five, fleet as the wind and light as the moon, racing down the streets of a dying world with mobs of the infected running in her wake. She must have been amazing. When you're running that kind of race, you only get to come in second once.

“Broken leg?” asked Audrey.

“Broken leg might have been all right; those are easier to set when you're the only doctor you're going to get,” said Beth. “Broken ankle. I couldn't figure out how to immobilize it safely, so I wrapped it as tight as I could and walked another two miles to the nearest safe house. By the time I got there, the damage was done.”

“That could still be corrected, if you went to a hospital,” said Audrey. “Titanium implants are safe.”

“Surgery is never safe,” said Beth. “I haven't been near ‘real society' in more than fifteen years, not since they started rounding up and outlawing any dog that weighed more than twelve pounds. I'm not going back because I miss going for a jog. Not when there's a chance I could be followed back to the compound.”

Ben tilted his head, looking at Scott, and asked, “When you let us in, were you planning on letting us leave again?”

“Not necessarily,” said Scott. “You did make a point of how you had trade goods. We try to be decent people here. We try not to prey too much on the ignorant and the underprepared. But we can't afford to have you go telling anyone where to find us.”

“The EIS knew where to find you,” said Audrey.

“There are some people at the EIS who slip us medication for our population and our animals in exchange for certain medical information,” said Scott. “Dogs are a unique population. There are plenty of pigs being studied, but dogs? Those have basically gone the way of the dodo.”

“I see.” Audrey reached into her pocket and produced a slim black wallet, which she tossed onto the table in front of Scott. All motion at the table ceased, and I had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that we had all just moved a lot closer to being shot. “My badge. I'm EIS—or at least, I used to be, and I still have a lot of friends there.”

“Is that so?” Scott picked up the wallet, flipping it open. He showed its contents to Beth, who whistled. “This isn't a recent picture.”

“Like I said, I'm retired.” Audrey held out her hand. “You're going to give us the fuel we need and let us leave, aren't you?”

“I guess I am.” Scott slapped the wallet back down into her palm. “I'm also going to give you some unasked-for advice. Don't go flashing this around. Most people aren't as friendly toward the government as we are.”

“You know, every time you say that, I become more convinced that you're going to kill us all, grind up our bodies, and feed them to the dogs,” said Amber.

“They can try,” I said stiffly.

Scott laughed. “We don't want our dogs to get a taste for human flesh. That's Life With Carnivores 101. We feed them fish and poultry, neither of which can carry the Kellis-Amberlee virus. But it's good to be cautious. You need to know that this world is not on your side.”

“It never has been,” said Ben. “Now. About that gas…?”

The bartering process went fast, once we got started. Over sandwiches and surrounded by dogs, we agreed to swap two bottles of painkillers, some condoms, and a dozen jars of caviar for ten gallons of gas. I felt like we were taking advantage. From the way Beth kept looking at anything but us, so did she, which meant that this was really a relatively fair exchange. If both parties come away feeling like they got the better side of the deal, then things were done correctly.

Scott escorted us back to the fence. He paused before opening the gate, looking toward our over-packed vehicle—which was less tightly packed now, if not measurably so; still, the holes we had opened in our supplies spoke of more holes to come, and a journey that wouldn't end until we were exhausted—and shaking his head. “You don't have to go,” he said. “We can support some more settlers here, and there's always a need for more people who can use their hands. You've got enough trade goods in that trunk of yours to get well situated before we have to put you to work. And you wouldn't have to go back out there. That's the best thing I can offer you. The chance to
not
go back out there. The world isn't kind to runaways anymore, if it ever was in the first place.”

“Thanks for the offer,” said Ben, who had taken Amber's place in the front seat, at least for the next stretch of road. “We have places to go and stories to tell, and it wouldn't be safe for us to stay with you. There are people after us; we'd get you hurt. Still, we appreciate the fact that you were willing to let us. It means a lot.”

“You're going to learn just how much,” said Scott. He sounded… not disappointed, exactly, but grim, like he had been expecting this answer and had made his offer anyway, more out of obligation than anything else. “Good luck. Try not to die.”