The End Has Come (22 page)

Or — you could be perfectly fine. You could be completely clean, live out your whole natural life and never succumb. You just never knew. Once you had the tattoo on your left hand, it didn’t matter.

The guard followed Whitman as he walked down toward the Capitol dome. Not as nice as the old one, the above-ground one, he thought. This dome was made of concrete and wasn’t even painted. It was designed to survive even if the entire bunker came crashing down around it, a million tons of rock.

Inside, it looked much like the old Senate floor. Rows of desks turned inward toward a big podium. The desks were empty today, but five senators sat at the podium. Whitman recognized three of them. The other two were very, very young.

One of them, a man with white hair and gold-rimmed glasses perched on top of his head, had his own honor guard. A soldier stood behind him with an assault rifle, waiting. The senator had a plus sign on his hand just like Whitman’s. Apparently no matter how powerful you might be, the tattoo still made people nervous. A great democratizer, that tattoo.

A table stood in front of the podium, covered in loose papers and manila folders and two microphones on flexible stalks like the eyes of a crab. Two men were already sitting there. One of them — the lawyer assigned to Whitman’s defense — stared at the floor, his mouth a set line. Whitman had seen plenty of people like that. People who survived the Crisis but couldn’t handle what came next. People who couldn’t forget what they’d seen.

The other man turned as Whitman approached. Whitman couldn’t help but be surprised. It was Director Philips, Whitman’s old boss at the CDC. He’d heard the man had killed himself.

Pink scar tissue covered one side of Philips’ head. His ear was missing. Aha, Whitman thought. He had enough medical training to recognize a self-inflicted gunshot wound. So Philips had tried to kill himself — tried and failed.

Whitman could sympathize. He’d tried lots of things in his life, and failed. Now he was going to get to tell a select committee how badly he’d fucked up.

He was ready. He actually wanted this.

It meant closure.

• • • •

Whitman stood on the gritty shoulder of the road, keeping one eye on the trees twenty yards away. There could be zombies out there. But he had to check the van, make sure it wasn’t going to conk out at the worst possible moment.

The painted government seal on the driver’s side door was scratched to hell, and his window was a complete loss. The tires seemed alright, though, and when he bent low to look at the undercarriage, he found only a few dents and scrapes.

They’d been lucky. As fast as he’d been driving over those rough roads, they could’ve cracked an axle.

When he straightened up, he nearly jumped out of his shoes. A figure with long stringy hair was walking toward him. It was only Grace, though.

“I told you to stay in the car,” he said.

She shrugged, then nodded at Bob sitting in the back seat. The kid was still screaming, though he’d grown hoarse and it wasn’t quite as deafening.

“I’m not like him,” Grace said.

Whitman took a deep breath. He had a pretty good idea what was coming. When he’d picked these two up, back in Atlanta, he’d been aware they were both positives. Positives weren’t allowed to live inside a proper city.

Being positive didn’t mean you were actually infected. At least that’s what every one of them told themselves.

“My friend Heather and I found a zombie in this underground mall. We weren’t supposed to be there, but . . . look, it bit Heather. I get that. They took her away and I don’t know what happened to her.”

Whitman could probably guess. Heather wouldn’t have been a positive, then. She’d been a confirmed infected. Only one thing happened to people like that.

“I ran away. I know that was . . . cowardly,” Grace said. She sounded like she’d prepared this speech well in advance. “I know it was wrong. But I never even got close to the zombie. It didn’t touch me.”

Whitman nodded. He supposed he had to hear her out.

“The police wouldn’t even listen, they just tattooed me and locked me up. They don’t know all the details. I know they were just trying to be careful. But I’m not at risk.” She gave him a hopeful smile. “I’m really not. Please. You can just take me back. Tell them I’m clean.” A little shake of her hair, which probably worked great on boys her age. “Please,” she said.

“I don’t make the rules.”

“I shouldn’t be out here!” she said. “It’s dangerous — those bikers would’ve killed us, they would’ve . . . what they would’ve done to me —”

“You’ll be safe at the medical camp,” he told her. He pulled open the driver’s side door and jumped back inside. “You coming?”

She stood there for a while, her face a mask of disbelief. She must have really thought she could talk her way out of this. Finally, she turned and looked back the way they’d come.

“Those bikers —”

“They were after our water, our food, our gasoline,” Whitman told her. “They must’ve been following us for a while.”

“They’re not going to give up, are they?” she asked. “They’ll kill us.”

Whitman shrugged. “They didn’t have any guns, or they would’ve used them. I guess after ten years there aren’t any bullets left out here. That gives us a chance. Plus, we’ve got a head start now. The sooner you get in the van,” he told her, “the sooner we get to Florida.”

She got in the van.

• • • •

“Once we walled in the cities,” Director Philips droned on, “zombie incidents fell by a considerable degree. New infection rates are down nearly ninety-nine per cent . . .”

Even the senators looked bored as the Director droned on with his endless report on the progression of the Crisis. Whitman barely listened to any of it. He knew the numbers. As the CDC’s ranking field agent, he’d been responsible for collecting most of them. The last few years had been a blur as he traveled around the country interviewing what passed for medical personnel, overseeing the administration of the hospital camps, working with the army to get a sense of how many zombies were still out there, hiding in the wilderness.

It had been depressing work, if vital.

“Outside the cities, looting has become endemic,” Philips went on. “The vast majority of people surviving outside of protected communities make their living by foraging. Of perhaps greater concern is the appearance of so-called road pirates. Gangs, organized to a lesser or greater degree, who prey on the looters and even government convoys . . .”

Whitman had seen the pirates, though only from the window of a helicopter. Packs of scavengers. He’d pitied them, looking down from that height. They were only doing what they had to if they wanted to survive, he supposed. He’d assumed the army would put a quick end to such nonsense, but it seemed they had more important things to do.

“Food stocks continue to be a problem, though the agricultural worker program has made considerable advances in that regard. The key seems to have been adequate policing of the countryside around the farm complexes . . .”

Plantations, in other words. Out west, whole communities had been conscripted to work the fields. Battalions of soldiers watched over them, keeping them safe from zombies — and making sure they couldn’t run away.

“I believe that completes my report. I want to thank the committee for allowing us this chance to speak about —”

“Horseshit,” Whitman said.

The senators stirred in their chairs. Philips fell silent. Even the braindead lawyer sitting next to him twitched his head around as if looking for the cause of the disturbance.

Whitman was surprised at himself. He hadn’t meant to interject. Maybe his tolerance for obfuscation was just at its end.

“Mr. Whitman, we will have order in this chamber,” the white-haired senator insisted.

“Fine,” Whitman said. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “I just thought we could all save a little time if we skipped the pleasantries. We all know you didn’t bring Philips and me here to talk statistics. We could just as easily have submitted those in writing.”

“Then why,” the white-haired senator asked, smiling like a shark, “do you believe we asked for this face-to-face meeting?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Whitman asked. “You want someone to blame for the end of the world.”

• • • •

When night fell, he had no choice but to pull over.

“We’ll take turns sleeping,” he said.

Grace protested — she wanted to keep driving through the night — but Whitman knew better. “Nothing out here shows lights at night,” he said. “The merest flicker, and the zombies would be all over us.”

“So we drive without headlights,” she suggested.

He laughed. “Sure. Then we blow out a tire on something we can’t see. Or run into a tree trunk that fell across the road. One accident like that, and we’re walking to Florida.”

Eventually, she agreed to go to sleep. Whitman took the first watch.

Not that there was anything to watch. Outside the van, the moonless night was just a flat plane of black, as if someone had spray-painted over their windows. He forced himself to stay awake, punching himself hard in the thigh at one point just to clear his head.

At some point, he realized he was being watched.

He turned around and saw Bob’s eyes, just two smudges of pale gray in the unrelieved blackness.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

The boy blinked at him.

“I’m sorry you got scared back there when those bikers came at us,” he told the kid. He didn’t know what else to say. “I didn’t want to scare you.”

“My mom said you would keep me safe.”

It was the first thing Bob had said to Whitman, other than to give his name.

“She said to obey you.”

“Who, me specifically?” Whitman asked.

“She said they would send a man. Then she just cried.”

Jesus, Whitman thought. He imagined the scene. The mother, probably on the far side of a pane of glass, looking at her child — her potentially infected child. How could she give him up?

But of course they wouldn’t have given her a choice. They would’ve taken the boy away the second they realized he was a positive. And who knew? Maybe she had looked at the tattoo on little Bob’s hand and maybe — maybe she hadn’t put up much of a fight.

Everyone knew the risk. Everyone knew the rules.

Whitman tried to keep Bob talking. It would help pass the time, help keep him awake. He asked the boy how he’d become positive, but Bob didn’t seem to understand. So instead he tried to talk about the future.

“You know where I’m taking you?”

The boy just blinked.

“It’s a camp. Not exactly like a summer camp, though. There’s no archery or making lanyards or anything, but —”

“I don’t know what a summer camp is,” Bob said.

Oh. Of course he didn’t. Bob was maybe ten years old. The Crisis began ten years ago. There hadn’t been summer camps in a long time.

“A camp. I’ll be safe there,” Bob said, because his mom had told him so, no doubt.

“That’s right. You’ll be safe from zombies and  . . . and bikers. They’ll feed you and make sure you don’t get sick.”

Which was about all Whitman could promise.

“You like baseball?” he asked, to change the subject.

Bob blinked. Maybe they didn’t have baseball in Atlanta anymore, either.

After a couple hours, Whitman woke Grace up so she could take a watch. When he opened his eyes again, it was dawn and pink light smeared across the roof of the van.

“Anything to report?” he asked Grace.

“I thought maybe I heard engines, once,” she told him. “Except I’m not sure. Maybe it was just animals or something, growling in the trees.”

Whitman put the van in gear and moved out.

• • • •

“It’s the business of this committee to hear a lot of reports,” one of the senators said. Whitman didn’t even look to see which one. He was watching his lawyer, the one they’d assigned to his case. He realized he’d never even caught the man’s name.

The lawyer’s eyes were glazed over, and his mouth was open in a rictus of horror. Whitman could only wonder what he saw, what moment of the Crisis he was reliving.

“What we hear disturbs us,” another senator said. “Director Philips presented the most optimistic data we’ve heard in a while. He didn’t mention the outbreaks of cholera and hantavirus in the cities of the Southwest. He didn’t say anything about the nutritional deficiencies we see — pellagra, beriberi, even childhood blindness.”

“You can hardly blame us for that,” Philips said.

The senator wasn’t done, however. “We were very alarmed to hear about conditions inside the so-called hospital camps. The camps are beyond overcrowded. Positives are herded inside and all but forgotten. They are given some food and clothing, yes —”

“Now, now,” the white-haired senator broke in. “We’re talking about people who might be zombies, here. The resources we have should always go first to healthy people. People who can live productive lives.”

“Nevertheless. Medical care is non-existent in the camps. The guards refuse to even touch the inmates. Riots and violent altercations kill more of them than zombie outbreaks ever could.”

Whitman turned and looked at the podium. The senator who had been talking had flecks of spittle on his lips, and his eyes burned with outrage.

“Mr. Whitman, you speak of blame. We’re more interested in justice. You don’t think the people of America — the people we represent — deserve better than this? You don’t think they have a right to know who was responsible for the Crisis?”

He might have answered, if he wasn’t interrupted by a sudden strangling noise.

Whitman swiveled around to see the lawyer jerk spasmodically upright in his chair. At first he thought the man was having a seizure. A clear, lucid light came into his eyes, though, and he stood up, his chair squeaking across the floor.

“Senator,” he said. “Senator, I — I object to this line of  . . . of questioning,” he announced. “You can’t suggest that my clients were personally  . . . personally . . .”