Mass Extinction Event (Book 2): Days 9-16 (27 page)

Elizabeth

Pennsylvania

"This is crazy," Bridger says, getting up from the table and walking over to the pitcher of water. "It's gone midnight. We're not going to get anywhere by sitting around here like this and staring at each other. No-one's infected."

"That's what an infected person would say, isn't it?" Eriksen replies, with his feet up on the table. Grinning, he looks over at Patricia, then at Thor, and finally at me. "Isn't it? Jesus Christ, you guys, have you all lost your sense of humor?"

In my arms, the baby lets out a faint gurgle.

"Maybe it's her," Eriksen continues. "Maybe the kid's infected."

"You're sick," I reply, unable to hide my disgust any longer. He's barely even held his own daughter, and now he's suggesting that she might have been infected.

"You think kids are immune?" he asks. "Seriously? If I was some fucking weird-ass sentient virus thing and I wanted to hide, I'd go for the newborn baby. Makes total sense, doesn't it?"

"No-one's excluded from suspicion," Patricia says firmly, clearly pissed off with Eriksen, "but at the same time, it's highly unlikely that the baby would be a carrier. She's had far less exposure than any of the rest of us. Granted, we don't know the mechanism of transmission, but let's not just to conclusions just yet, okay?"

"The voice of medical reason, huh?" Eriksen says with sarcasm dripping from his voice. "The world was full of fucking doctors and so-called experts, and now look at the fucking mess we're in."

"We all know who it is," Bridger says solemnly. "He's upstairs right now, and he's getting worse."

"It hasn't been twenty-four hours," I point out.

"So what?" He pauses, before turning to Patricia. "I went in to take a look at Toad earlier. The guy's sweating like a pig. He's getting worse and worse. There's no point waiting twenty-four hours, not when he could spread this thing to the rest of us. We need to take action. We need to put him out of his misery, and then..." He pauses.

"And then what?" Patricia asks uncomfortably.

"That
thing
you're keeping out in the forest," he continues. "We have to kill it."

"It's too valuable," she replies. "Our only hope for finding a cure is if -"

"There's no cure!" Bridger says firmly, exhibiting more passion than I've ever seen from him. "There's nothing! This whole world is just dying, and we're the unlucky ones who got to sit around a little longer than the rest and watch what happens! You have to kill that thing before we all get sick!"

"Try to be rational," Patricia replies. "You're acting on instinct. You're no better than a caveman. If we're going to get out of this situation, we need to be calm and logical and -"

"Screw that," Eriksen mutters with a laugh. "We've tried being calm and sensible, and now look at the fucking mess we're in." Reaching over to the table, he picks up pistol. "I can do it if the rest of you are all too fucking scared. I'll go up and put a bullet in his head while he's asleep. It's not like he'll even know that anything's fucking happened. He'll just never wake up. It's just like killing a chicken."

"We agreed to wait twenty-four hours," I say firmly.

"That was before the situation became so fucking urgent," Eriksen replies, getting to his feet. "I don't see why we should sit around and let that fucking disease get stronger and stronger." He pauses. "I'm going to put a vote to the group, and a simple majority carries the day. I propose that I go upstairs and deal with the Toad problem, and then I'll go outside and deal with that fucking creature, and then we'll decide where to go from there. Who agrees with me?" He raises his hand, and waits for the rest of us to do the same.

"No," I say, turning to Patricia.

"No," she says, staring down at the table, almost as if she's in a trance.

"I agree with Eriksen," Bridger says, raising his hand.

"You can't!" I say, shocked that he'd turn against Toad so easily.

"I'm just being logical about it," he replies. "We can't let one person put the whole group in danger!"

"What about you?" Eriksen asks, turning to Thor. "You've got the deciding vote, old pal. What do you reckon?"

Thor stares at him for a moment, before turning to the rest of us one by one until, finally, he looks down at the baby.

"I vote with Eriksen," he says eventually. "I don't like it, and I appreciate everything Toad's done for us, but if we're going to have even half a chance, we need to make tough decisions. This is the only way. All the evidence we have so far suggests that the most likely threat comes from Toad. We have to act."

"Then it's decided," Eriksen says with a faint smile, as he gets to his feet with the gun in his hand. "I guess I'll carry out the actions that have been chosen democratically by the group. I just want to say, first, that it gives me no pleasure at all to be doing these things. Toad was a good friend to me for many years, and although I hadn't seen him for a while before I rocked up here, I still hate to have to plug him. I'm sure he'd understand, though. This is the only right thing to do."

With that, he turns and heads over to the door.

"You can't!" I shout, standing up and hurrying over to him, with the baby still in my arms. Before I can reach Eriksen, however, Bridger grabs my arm and holds me back.

"Just let him do it," he says firmly.

"It's murder!" I shout, as the baby starts to cry.

"It's democracy," he replies uneasily.

"It's okay," Eriksen says. "Democracy ain't about pleasing all of the people. It's about pleasing the majority." He pauses for a moment, and a grin breaks across his face. "What matters is that the people of this place have spoken, and now we're going to -"

Suddenly there's a loud bang and Eriksen jerks back into the door-frame as one side of his head explodes, spraying blood and brain matter across the wall. As he slumps to the ground, I turn and see, to my horror, that Patricia is sitting at the table with a gun in her hand.

"Holy shit..." Thor mutters.

Calmly, Patricia stands up and fires at him, dropping Thor to the ground with a single hit to the chest. Without blinking, without even registering any kind of reaction at all, she turns and fires once again, hitting Bridger directly in the eye and sending him falling back against the wall. Turning to me, she pauses for a moment with the barrel aimed straight at me, and then slowly she lowers the gun.

"I'm sorry," she says after a moment. "I had no choice."

Looking down, I see the bodies of Eriksen, Bridger and Thor on the floor. I take a step back, unable to suppress the sense of panic that's flooding through my body.

"They were losing their heads," Patricia says calmly. "Eriksen was always a live-wire, and Bridger and Thor were starting to be too easily led. If I hadn't done something, they'd have messed everything up. They'd have killed Toad based on little more than superstition, and then they'd have killed the creature, and I couldn't allow that to happen. All three of them had crossed a line, and there was no way back for them."

"That doesn't give you a right to execute them," I reply, staring at the gun in her hand. "You can't just... You can't take matters into your own hand like that!"

"Why not?" she replies. "Because we had a vote?" She pauses, and there's a barely-suppressed smile on her lips. "People can have all the votes they want, but if they end up with the wrong decision, it's up to the smarter members of society to put them in their place. If I hadn't acted, they'd have formed this little three-person voting bloc and they'd have pushed on with a series of increasingly dumb decisions until this whole place came crashing down, and then it would've been every man for himself. They were out of control. All I did was hurry things along."

"But -"

"I'm sick of being held back by idiots," she continues. "Seriously, those men were dumb. They were useful, sure, but at the end of the day, they were starting to cause more problems than they could solve. What was I supposed to do? Let them fuck everything up, just because we all had a vote about it?"

"But the creature," I reply, trying to decide whether or not I need to turn and run. "One of us is still infected!"

"Maybe," she says, clearly lost in thought, "or maybe not. I haven't seen any firm evidence that the infection has reached us. If it has, the most likely culprit is Toad, but I want to see some proof. Decisions have to be made based on science and fact." She looks down at the bodies. "We need to burn them," she says after a moment. "One of them might have been infected, and we still don't understand the mechanism of transmission, so -"

"How can you be so calm?" I ask, interrupting her. "You just shot three men in cold blood!"

"It was the right decision," she replies, as if it's the most natural thing in the world. "I let you live because I trust you, Elizabeth. I think you understand the importance of making decisions based on logic rather than emotion, and for that reason, I'm hoping you'll be useful." She pauses. "I'm not going to regret that decision, am I?"

I stare at her for a moment. "If I say the wrong thing," I reply eventually, "are you going to shoot me too?"

She smiles. "No. But I'd appreciate it if you could help me get these bodies out of the house. I'll go and build a bonfire, and then we can burn them. It's better to be safe than sorry."

As the baby starts to cry, I try gently rocking her back to sleep. I want to turn and run, to get away from Patricia, but I feel as if I'm trapped here. Although I can just about see the logic in everything she says, I can't shake the feeling that she's
too
calm and
too
rational; she can't see the human side at all. She heads outside to get started on the bonfire, and as I carry the baby over to the window and watch Patricia's progress, I can't help thinking that I'm not safe here. When she decides I'm no longer useful, she'll kill me, just like she killed the others.

Thomas

Missouri

As soon as the sun comes up, I start loading the truck. There's not exactly an abundance of supplies in the creepy old man's house, but I manage to salvage a few items that might be useful, and I still have a few days' worth of gasoline. I don't really know where I'm going to go, other than just to keep heading east. I figure that sooner or later, I have to bump into someone who can help. At the end of the day, I refuse to believe that there's no-one out there who can turn things around. Maybe it's taking longer than expected, but the army or the government or someone has to get their act in shape eventually.

Once the truck is loaded, I look back toward the house. Joe has been much quieter over the past twelve hours, as if he's finally losing the ability to remain conscious in his decaying body. He manages a few words here and there, but it's clear that the end is coming. In fact, having spent a couple of hours putting supplies into the back of the truck and making sure that everything's ready, I'm starting to wonder if maybe I've missed the point of Joe's second death. Trudging toward the front door, I brace myself for the possibility that all I'll find will be his withered body, with his mind having long since drifted away.

"What took you so long?" he asks as soon as I enter the front room.

"I was sorting out the truck," I tell him.

"You should get going soon. There's no point leaving it 'til tonight."

"I'm not going yet," I reply. "I told you, not until..."

He smiles. "Not until what, Tommy boy? Not until I'm dead?" He pauses. "See, here's the thing. I've been thinking long and hard, and I've kinda made a decision." He takes a deep breath. "I don't want you to get all uppity about this or nothing, but I don't wanna die with an audience. I don't reckon it's right. I wanna die alone. Just sitting here will be good enough for me, but I don't want no-one seeing me or touching my body or anything like that. It's not natural to have someone around when you're about to fall off your perch. It's a private thing, and it should be done in private, with no-one watching."

"I'm not leaving you," I say firmly, even though I can feel my resistance starting to wear down.

"You've already done enough," he replies. "I
want
to be alone when it happens, Tommy. Maybe I'm being stubborn or vain or whatever, but I don't want you or anyone else here when I die. Anyway, I figure you should hit the road as soon as possible. You don't wanna be late."

"Late?" I reply with a faint smile. "For what? A long drive to nowhere?"

He pauses. "Remember how I told you that I could see through other eyes?" he says after a moment. "The psycho who's behind all this, he can occupy all these bodies at once, seeing out of their eyes all over the world, and when I forced him to leave me alone, I saw how he left. I followed, and I realized I can go wherever he goes, so..." He pauses again. "I've been looking for Martha," he continues eventually. "I've been looking through the eyes of all the creatures out in California, around San Francisco, and it took a while, but I found her."

I stare at him, unable to believe what he's saying.

"Martha's alive," he continues. "She's with some other people, and they'd been hiding out. But now..." He pauses, as if for a moment his mind isn't quite stable. "I spoke to her," he says finally. "I told her to meet you at that four state corner monument place. You know the one? Where, like, Arizona and New Mexico and a bunch of other states meet? You've gotta go there, Tommy. Martha's already on her way. I figured it'd be kinda roughly half-way between where she is and where you are, but you've gotta get a move on. If you hurry, you can be there tomorrow evening."

"Martha..." I pause. "You haven't found Martha," I say after a moment. "You
can't
have done."

"She's family," he replies. "Maybe that made it a bit easier. Fuck knows, but she's gonna go and meet you, so you'd better get your ass over there, you understand? Pedal to the metal, boy, and don't look back. I don't know where the pair of you are gonna go after you've found each other, but two heads are better than one, right? At least I was able to give you a hand before..."

I wait for him to finish. "Are you sure?" I ask eventually, with tears in my eyes at the thought that maybe I'm not going to be completely alone after all. I'd already forced myself not to hold out hope that our sister might ever turn up, and I'm still not quite ready to believe she might still be alive. I'd like to think that Joe would never joke about something so important, but I know him too well to let my guard down just yet. "Is it really Martha?" I ask. "Are you completely certain?"

He nods, but he's clearly in pain.

"And you swear you're not kidding me?" I ask, my voice starting to tremble. "I swear to God, Joe, if this is some kind of trick, I'll never forgive you!"

"Why would I..." He pauses again, and finally that old, well-worn smile crosses his lips one last time. "I tell you what, Tommy. I'm gonna prove it to you. Kinda, anyway. I'm gonna show you that I can do what I claim I can do. You know that old broad in the bed upstairs? She was infected with whatever this thing is, even though she wasn't dead. And that means I can... abandon this body and go into hers and..."

I wait for him to continue. "Joe?" I say after a moment. "You're not making sense!"

Silence.

Stepping closer, I reach out and touch the side of his neck, and I realize that he doesn't have a pulse. I guess his body has finally given out.

"Rest in peace," I whisper.

"Hey!" a voice calls out suddenly, from upstairs. "Up here!"

Looking up at the ceiling, I'm gripped by a sudden sense of fear.

"It's me!" the voice calls again. It sounds like the old woman, but at the same time, there's something very familiar about the way she's speaking... something that reminds me of someone else. "It's Joe!" she shouts. "I'm up here! Come on up and see!"