Genesis Plague (32 page)

T
he first thing I noticed was that I would never be alone.
Howard the security guy was following me as I walked back toward the
intersection. He stayed a hundred feet back on the other side of the street,
not making any effort to be inconspicuous. As he walked, I could see the hard
outline of a heavy pistol beneath his shirt, near his hip.

I tried to walk faster,
but the more I moved, the more I limped. My muscles were slowly loosening, but
it still felt as if someone pounded every inch of my body with a rolling pin.

Back at the
intersection, I headed straight for the farmer selling produce. He watched me
approach with a suspicious look in his eyes, which continued as I surveyed his
offerings. My gaze landed on a basket of ripe plums.

“What will you take for
one of those?” I asked.

He thought it over for a
moment, then he tossed me the biggest plum. “On the house for the new guy in
town. But I’m warning you, they’re addictive.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said
with a grin.

I could play the part
of a grateful guest just as well as anybody else. I took a bite of the plum and
almost passed out from joy. I felt like I just crawled across a desert and
found a piece of fruit on the Tree of Life.

“What does someone do
around here for work?” I asked.

A woman approached the
fruit stand as I ate my plum. She exchanged pleasantries with the farmer, then
gave him a stack of hand-sewn washcloths.

“These are lovely,
Irene,” said the farmer. “Joanna will love them. Here you go.” He handed here a
basket full of potatoes.

She smiled meekly as
she took the basket and walked away. The farmer set aside the cloths and brushed
off his hands.

“You looking for work?”
he asked me. Then he pointed at the cut on my scalp. “Thought you’d want to
take it easy for a while.”

“Why work later when
you can start now?”

He chuckled. “Maybe you
should come work for me, then. Lord knows I’ll need the help once our supplies
run out. I’ve been trying to get Donna to approve more land for farming, but
she doesn’t want to spread out too far just yet. I get where she’s coming from,
but if we don’t have food for the table, nothing else much matters.”

“I had something a
little more sedentary in mind,” I said. “At least until I feel like I won’t
fall over in a light breeze.”

The man laughed hard.
“I think you’re going to fit in just fine, friend. You might ask around at the
school. We always need teachers.”

“I ran security for a
men’s prison when I was paying my way through college,” I said, lying through
my teeth. “I was thinking I could help run a night shift if you guys have a
need for someone like that.”

The farmer’s demeanor
changed instantly, from welcoming to withdrawn. He frowned and shook his head
quickly as he rearranged baskets of fruit.

“Nothing like that
around here,” he said, avoiding eye contact. “Best bet is the school, like I
said.”

“But you guys must have
a jail, right?” I asked, pressing my luck. “I mean, there’s bound to be looters
or people who go a little nuts, especially with everything that’s happening.”

“Everything okay here?”
asked Howard, who had suddenly appeared at my side.

The farmer looked
visibly relieved.

“Hiya, Howard,” I said.
I took another bite of the plum and spoke with my mouth full. “Fine day, isn’t
it? This nice gentleman was just telling me I should apply to be a teacher at
the school.”

Howard looked between
the farmer and me, squinting. “I suppose that could be a good idea, yeah. We
only got Ms. Miller now, and she teaches the younger kids. Could use someone
for the teenagers.”

“Thanks for the plum,”
I said to the farmer.

He nodded, but still
wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Let’s get moving,
doc,” said Howard, grabbing my elbow. “Donna said she wants to see you at the
town meeting.”

My clenched fist shook
with the urge to swing at him. Even if I knocked him out and got to the truck,
I wouldn’t be able to leave without the others, wherever they were.

Poor Emma. She was
probably so confused. A child needed stability and routine. She was being shown
a false view of the world, and it was going to take a heavy toll down the road.
Would it be worse to leave her with Donna’s son at the expense of a skewed and
myopic upbringing, or to rip her away from potential comfort in the hope that
someday she could be given something better?

It was yet another
question for which I had no answer. To be honest, I was getting awfully tired
of asking those questions. I figured it was time to do what I could to change
the world, and that started by finding my friends and getting the hell out of
Townsend.

C
ity Hall was a red brick building on Front Street, a few blocks
down from the high school. The meeting room was surprisingly packed when I walked
in and took a seat near the back. Howard, my shadow, stood against the back
wall, one hand casually resting on the concealed gun over his hip.

Nearly every chair was
filled, all the way to the front of the room, where a wooden podium stood in
front of a white wall decorated only with a large painting of the American
flag.

The residents of
Townsend chatted quietly with each other until Donna walked up to the podium
and knocked on the side. The chatter died instantly as everyone settled back
into their seats. They watched their leader with eager eyes. Most had a docile
smile plastered to their waiting faces.

“Afternoon, everybody,”
said Donna loudly. She didn’t need a microphone to project her voice all the
way to the back of the room. “Just a few things to go over before you can get
back to that beautiful day outside.”

She smiled broadly and
soft laughter rippled through the audience.

“You’ll be glad to hear
that Matt Dower and his boy have reported in. They found an abandoned
refrigerated truck out on Route 12 loaded with frozen steaks, so I hope you’re
all ready for another barbecue.”

There were excited
hoots and hollers from the audience.

Abandoned my ass
,
I thought. Matt Dower and his boy were probably the ones that chased the Chevy
to the overturned semi before the men from Helena picked us up.

A woman stood up near
the front, her hand squeezing the shoulder of a woman next to her. “What about
John and Michael Wallace?” she asked. “They should have been back two days
ago.”

A concerned murmur
rustled through the group as the woman sat and hugged the lady next to her, who
dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.

Donna nodded
sympathetically.
Mm-hm, yep
, I could almost hear her thinking.

“Now you folks know the
risks when our boys volunteer to hit the road. We haven’t lost one of them yet,
and they always come back with something useful. If we haven’t heard from John
and Michael, it just means they’re onto something
really
good.” She
offered the crying woman a friendly smile.

Jesus, the woman had
charisma. I found myself almost believing everything she said.

“Some of you have
expressed concern about the fresh water supply, but I can assure you that we’re
taking all of the proper precautions to ensure that you’ll have drinkable water
for years to come.”

She went on in this
fashion for some time, addressing questions and discussing strategies for the
town’s survival.

I became interested
again when a small man with wireframe glasses stood up in the audience and
asked what he should do with the corpses.

“Walter, this isn’t the
place to discuss such things,” said Donna with a frown. “Why don’t you and I
have a little chat later, maybe over dinner?”

He nodded and sat back
down.

Twenty minutes later,
the meeting was adjourned, and the audience filed out. I kept a close eye on
Walter as he turned down Front Street and wandered off.

Howard was still
watching me like a hawk. I tried to play it casual as I strolled down the
street, following Walter. He was heading away from the main intersection, to a
part of town I hadn’t yet seen.

Behind me, Howard’s
footsteps quickened.

Walter took a turn up
ahead and disappeared from view. I picked up my pace, and Howard called out,
“Stop!”

I took the corner.
Walter walked ahead, still in a hurry to get wherever he was going. The street
sloped gently upward for several hundred feet. The houses stopped at the beginning
of a long, grassy plain that continued up the hill. Farther on, a wide, squat
building sat alone, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence.

The street was lined
with pine trees until the houses met the field. The base of each tree was
littered with pinecones and dead branches. Citywide beautification must have
been put on hold for the apocalypse.

I ran to the closest
tree and ducked behind it as Howard turned the corner. He hurried past without
seeing me. I picked up the largest branch I could find. It was about the size
of a baseball bat, but felt a lot less sturdy. Gotta work with what you had, I
guess.

Howard looked around in
a panic, searching for me. When his back was turned, I stepped out from hiding,
raised the branch high over my head, and whistled.

He spun quickly as I
swung down, cracking the branch over his skull. It shattered like the rotted
wood it was, and Howard stepped back, more from surprise than anything else. He
reached for his sidearm and I jabbed the splintered edge of the branch between
his eyes and twisted. He screamed and stumbles backward, still groping for his
gun.

A quick kick to the
stomach sent him sprawling to the ground. I stepped on his groping hand and violently
twisted my heel, feeling bones snap. I bent down and smothered his mouth before
he could scream. Walter was still walking toward the lone building, unaware of
the drama playing out behind him.

Howard tried to bite my
hand as I forced his head down into the dirt. The revolver in his side holster
glinted in the sunlight. The safety catch was already undone. I grabbed the gun
and smashed the butt against Howard’s temple. His eyes rolled up and he blinked
slowly, but he wasn’t out yet.

One more hit did the
trick.

I dragged his limp body
off the road, grateful to be on a seemingly abandoned street. There was a nice,
body-sized hiding spot behind a nearby building, and I dumped him there. I
wasn’t an expert in this regard, but I guessed it was going to be a little
while before he woke up.

I took his belt with
holster and strapped it on, then spun the revolver around to the back so it wasn’t
visible at first glance. Then I went back to the street and followed after
Walter, toward the building on the hill.

T
here was no cover once the houses stopped at the edge of the
grassy field. I waited behind the last pine tree until Walter unlocked the
fence gate in front of the squat building. The few windows on the side facing
me were near the roof, far out of arm’s reach, and tinted black. They could not
be opened. Walter disappeared inside the only door, a bright blue rectangle
covered with multiple warning signs. The rest of the wall that was visible to
me was concrete, painted a light yellow.

The midday sun beat
down on me as I moved as quickly as I could up the hill. My left leg was worse
off than my right. It had taken more of a pounding in the accident.

I was sweating bullets
by the time I reached the chain-link fence that surrounded the squat building.
There was a nondescript sign on the fence that told me it was Hillview Men’s
Correctional Facility. If Donna was looking for a place to stow her undesirable
citizens, a building like this would have been ready-made to keep people from
getting out.

There were no guards
outside that I could see. It was about one hundred feet from the fence to the
building. I looked up, scanning the roof for security. Empty.

Then I noticed that the
chain and lock from the fence gate were lying on the ground. Walter had left
the gate open. I was just starting to think my luck had changed when it
occurred to me that the only reason he might do something like that is if he
was coming right back.

That proved to be the case
when the building door opened and he stepped outside. He was the type of guy
who walked with his head down most of the time, staring at the ground. He
didn’t see me until the door closed behind him and he looked up to align
himself for the walk to the fence. By that time, I had covered half the
distance to the door from the fence, my revolver leveled at his head.

He fumbled for the keys
in a panic, his fingers shaking too much to grab the one he needed to get back
into the building.

“Hello, Walter,” I said.

He stood perfectly
still, panting like a cornered animal. Then he adjusted his wireframe glasses
nervously. Walter’s clothes were a size too big. He wore a flannel shirt tucked
into carpenter’s jeans, and dark brown workman’s shoes. He had a full head of
short brown hair – not bad for a guy who looked to be approaching fifty. His
eyes were beady, too close together. I pegged him for a good follower.

“How do you know my
name?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I need to get inside
the building and find a couple people I lost when I came into town. The
security cameras in this place still work?”

He shook his head, no.
“This part of the grid was shut down. We’re only running a few systems off
reserve diesel, but not security.”

“Good news for me. I’m
not going to shoot you, Walter, unless you make me do it. Understand?”

He nodded, relaxing
only slightly.

“Go ahead and get that
door open. You know the people I’m talking about?”

He nodded again as he
took his time selecting the right key and unlocking the door.

“Any men in there with
guns?” I asked.

“Why would there be?”

“Thought you might want
to keep your prisoners extra safe.”

“We can’t spare the
manpower,” he said. “Besides, most of the people in here are dead anyway. They
just don’t know it yet.”

“Yeah, them and
everyone else on the planet, if we don’t get moving.”

I tapped his head with
the revolver’s muzzle to drive the point home.

He pulled the door open
and escorted me into the building.

The first few rooms were
administration offices, all empty. Dim red emergency lights glowed above each
door.

Without air
conditioning, the place was a swamp. Whatever mold hid inside the old walls
created a thick humidity that did nothing to ease my sweating. It felt as if
someone was pouring salt water over the laceration in my scalp.

Walter used another key
to unlock a thick door which opened onto a cell block. It wasn’t like the
prisons I had seen in movies, with a large room and barred jail cells on
multiple levels. It must have been solitary confinement, or where they stuck
the truly mental patients. Each door only had a small square window and a
horizontal slat near the bottom for food trays.

“My friends are in
here?” I asked Walter as I followed him down the long corridor.

“At the end of the
hall.”

“How many more rooms
are there in the building?”

“This is Block 1. There
are seven more just like it. Each with twenty rooms.”

“All of them full?”

“About half.”

“All of them infected?
I heard you locked up foreigners and travellers as well, even if they were
clean. I noticed a distinct lack of…how should I put it…
diversity
in the
streets of your town.”

“Let me ask you
something,
doctor
,” Walter said. “If ninety-nine percent of the people
who blew up school buses full of children were, let’s say, Eskimo, and someone
in your town blew up a school bus, who would you arrest first?”

“We’re not talking
about blown-up school buses.”

“No, we’re talking
about bio-terrorism.
Terrorism
, doctor.”

“News flash, Walter.
The virus wasn’t unleashed by bio-terrorists. It was mother nature all the way.
I was there.”

“I don’t cow-tow to
sympathizers. Every generation has them, and they do nothing but gum up the
works.”

“You’re good friends
with Donna, then?”

“We’re extremely
close.”

“Where’s the main
control panel for the building?” I asked.

“In the room we just left.
Why?”

“No reason.”

I cracked him on the
back of the skull with the butt of the revolver, and he hit the floor like a
sack of flour. I was getting pretty good at that.

I was almost back to
the control panel room when I heard a footstep from the other end of the long
hallway behind me. A gun went off and a bullet whizzed past my ear. I dove to
the side of the hallway and more bullets hit the wall over my head.

Walter lied to me.
There were
definitely
men with guns inside the building.