Scavengers. Part 25

Dr. Robbins shook hands. "Come on in here out of the hallway so we don't have the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n place listening in on your personal business." He ushered them into the conference room. Stew closed the door.

They filed in and sat in the padded chairs Robbins indicated they should sit in.

"How do you think I can help you?" Robbins asked.

"Well, like Stew said, I'm looking for my daughter. I haven't heard from her or my husband," Dejah glanced awkwardly at David, "since the Monday after the initial lockdown. I'm hoping you can tell me if you've treated her at the hospital - or if she's dead."

Robbins watched Dejah visibly flinch when she finished the sentence. "Have you been told about the quarantine camp?"

Dejah shook her head no.

"Shortly after the infection began, it became clear that we weren't going to be able to contain the amount of infected patients we were seeing coming into the ER. With the college nearby, we treat local residents and most of the students in Commerce. Sick patients were coming in by the droves. The military set up a quarantine camp on land loaned by a hospital board director, and we started sending all infected people to the camp."

"Only it's not just infected out there," Stewart interjected. "Family members refused to leave their sick relatives, so there's another section of the camp for non-infected people."

"Right," Robbins said. He opened his briefcase and removed a fat file with a big rubber band stretched around the center. "I've got a patient manifest here. If your daughter is at the camp, we'll know if she's sick or well and to which tent she's been a.s.signed."

Dejah exhaled in relief.

"Now, I'm not saying she's there. I'm just telling you we'll know if she is or isn't. What's her name?" Robbins snapped the rubber band from the folder.

"Selah Corliss."

Robbins flipped through the doc.u.ments. "Daughter of Thomas Corliss?"

"Yes! That's her! Is she sick?"

"No. She and Thomas came in with a Lily Corliss - his mother. She's sick," Robbins said.

"Oh no, not Lily! Anything about Vince?"

Robbins shook his head. "No Vince mentioned." His eyes met Dejah's with an unstated a.s.sumption.

"He would never have left Lily's side."

"I can only tell you the information I have in this file. I'm sorry." Robbins closed the file and replaced the rubber band. "I'm going to the camp. It's on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Tawakoni, on a cattle ranch. The three of you are welcome to come with me today - at your own risk."

"Why the risk doctor? Don't you guys have the place secure?" David asked.

"We haven't had contact with the camp for forty-eight hours. I don't know what we're going to find when we get there."

"I'm going," Dejah said.

Dr. Robbins looked between Dejah, David, and Shaun. After sizing them up, he looked at Stew. "Do you think this can be arranged?"

Stew shrugged. "I'll finagle you another Jeep. They're only going to give you two men though, so you'll have to use them as drivers. Can any of you handle a rifle?"

They all nodded.

"Good. Well, okay then, Matty. Tell you what. I'll wait until after you've left before I mention this to anyone. They're not going to go after you once you're there." Stew smiled.

Robbins scowled. "Anything you know about the camp that I should hear?"

"We haven't heard from them in two days. Do the math, buddy. You've been in the thick of this long enough to know that when something goes wrong with this mess, it goes really wrong."

CHAPTER 37.

"Touch him!" Bal Shem ordered, anger flooding his voice. Selah cowered between the filing cabinets and the desk. Tears rolled over her cheeks as her whole body trembled.

Spread on the floor of the trailer was the mangled, mostly devoured, twitching body of a man. Stringy bits of meat clung to his joints. His ribs were broken, but his abdomen was intact. All skin and muscle tissue on his limbs were gone. Bal Shem let the infected eat everything that wasn't vital to the person being healed and useful again.

Selah sobbed, her hands and arms caked with dried blood. Her clothes were filthy. Flies buzzed around her unwashed hair, and the trailer smelled foul. "Please. I'm so tired. I can't."

"You can and you will. Touch this man, now!"

Selah stretched her hands to the gruesome remainder of a man. She closed her eyes tight and blindly groped what should be a corpse. Shudders of exhaustion shook her small body, and her knees buckled. The generals of Bal Shem fought to be the first to catch her. To touch her. Snarling, they shoved each other in the struggle.

"Enough!" Bal Shem shouted. They stopped quarreling. He held Selah by the waist, supporting her body. "Finish it!"

Selah grasped the man's leg bone. Her shoulders slumped. Her head lulled to the side.

"She needs to sleep," the only woman in the room said. "Too tired."

The others nodded in agreement. Bal Shem was furious. "She can sleep when she's finished with this one."

"It's happening."

They gathered around the man's body and watched as it regenerated. It was a miracle of supernatural reconstruction. Veins straightened and reconnected, striated muscles uncurled and enmeshed. Blood seemed to flow beneath a transparent layer until skin reformed like a crawling sheet of wet rubber, then solidified and formed unbroken layers over the wounds. And then, the man sat up and screamed. As if he knew he'd been resurrected again to serve as a perpetual feast for Bal Shem's infected ma.s.ses and was crying out not so much from the pain of his death, but the pain of his existence. Over and over again, they consumed the bodies of the healthy, and then forced Selah to heal the all but dead heaps of bone and organs.

Selah went limp. Bal Shem pa.s.sed her to the woman who took her to the closet to sleep.

The woman returned. "Too many."

"What?" Bal Shem demanded.

"Too many bodies to heal. The girl is too tired."

"We'll let her sleep longer." Bal Shem said, ending the discussion. "Blue Shirt," he said to the general in the blue plaid shirt. "Take woman and troops in one Jeep. Drive to the houses along the lake and bring back more people. If we have more healthy, the girl won't have to fix the bodies so much."

"We did that before," Blue Shirt said.

"Yes, you did. But there are still more healthy by the lake."

The generals looked at each other, seemingly agreeing that this was a good plan. Blue Shirt and the woman lurched out the door, and into the crowd of waiting infected patients that were constantly congregating around Bal Shem's trailer.

Bal Shem watched Blue Shirt drive the Jeep toward the county road. Blue Shirt was the best driver. He remembered how to operate vehicles. The Jeep swerved, narrowly missing a fence post, but continued along the road until out of sight. Bal Shem turned toward the remaining generals.

"The food is being delivered to the barn and the tents?" he asked.

"Yes. We've done everything like you told us to do." An infected named Joe answered.

Bal Shem gave him a satisfied smile. "Good. All of you are doing very good."

Joe snickered nervously, but pleased. "Can the girl touch me?"

A scowl replaced Bal Shem's smile. "No, you idiot. Woman just told us the girl needs sleep. She'll touch us later. Find her the cans she liked."

"Peaches," Joe said, and left the trailer in search of the fruit.

Rubbing his temples, Bal Shem tried to focus. As the days progressed, the pain intensified. Selah's touch lost its potency and he needed her more often. Without her regenerative touch, his mental skills faded. He forgot more. He grew angrier and less competent. As long as she routinely touched him, he could function on an almost normal level. The others improved as well, none quite as lucid as he became, but close to it. But their constant demands were sapping her powers.

His brain ached. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding with the reverberation of a surging ache, like a hangover on a hot day. He could feel the bones of his skull vibrating.

His headache was intensified by a female scream outside.

He staggered out onto the steps.

There was a loud argument in front of the barn to the right of the clinic trailer. The barn behind the clinic trailer was in bad condition. They rarely used it for anything, but the larger barn now housed some of the healthy upon which they fed. The voices grew louder. Bal Shem spotted three infected patients who held a healthy woman against the barn door.

Two other infected men grunted at the three aggressors. Joe appeared from the storage shed, anger in his voice as he ordered the trio holding the loud woman, Evelyn - Bal Shem remembered her name because she'd caused problems before - to let her go. Unauthorized consumption of the healthy was forbidden.

Two of the infected balked at the order and moved closer to bite the screaming woman. Joe cursed. "Let her go!"

This kind of behavior was expected from the feral infected, but those identified as such were kept on the other side of the camp now. Bal Shem frowned. Maybe more are deteriorating. Growing worse, he thought. He watched as Joe finally pulled a gun from his waistband and shot the two troublemakers. The gun reports snapped the air and echoed across the farm. The headshots jerked their necks. Their bodies fell to the dirt, and the woman shrieked, running into the barn.

Joe ordered the bodies delivered to the feral quarter. If the bodies were not too ravaged, the feral would eat their own kind if they couldn't find a healthy person. Joe gestured wildly to the pair who were supposed to be guarding the barn and then, leaning over, picked up the bag he'd discarded beside a water station. Joe delivered the bag of canned peaches to Bal Shem, then left for the feral quarters to make sure the bodies were disposed of properly.

Bal Shem took the peaches inside. Slowly, he opened a can and plopped the golden fruit into a plastic pink bedpan. He would give the peaches to the girl when she awoke.

He gently opened the door to the closet, careful to keep the light from shining on the face of the sleeping child. Selah's chest rose and fell weakly with each breath. Bal Shem was relieved to see she still had life in her.

"Sleep, little one. Sleep."

He closed the door with a quiet click, fighting the urge to yank it open and touch the flesh of the girl and stop the pounding hammers that tortured his sick mind.

CHAPTER 38.

"Oh, that had to hurt," Private Abbott said, laughing, as they watched the Jeep on the road in front of them dip into a ma.s.sive crater pa.s.sing for a pothole. Metal shrieked against asphalt, and the Jeep bounced back onto the road.

Dr. Robbins rode in the first Jeep with Private Brooks and crates of supplies. Dejah, Shaun, and David rode in the vehicle behind them, every muscle in her neck and jaws clenched with nervous antic.i.p.ation of what they'd find at the camp, and a nearer dread that they'd end up on their roof in the field. To describe the county road they were on as "poorly maintained" would have given it too much credit. The Jeeps b.u.mped and bounced over crater-like potholes, washboards, and deep cracks in the earth that looked deep enough to die in. On a normal day, she figured the road only saw action from tractors and a battered pick-up or two, if that. Dejah clung to the side of the door, cold air freezing her face and ears.

"I wish I had a hat!" she shouted over the din of the Jeep. David and Shaun concurred.

"Cold fall this year," Private Abbott said. The Jeep swerved to avoid the jagged pothole encountered by the vehicle of Dr. Robbins and Private Brooks.

Dejah let her mind wander to fall, to this autumn that was like no autumn that had ever come before. No harvest parties, no fall festivals, no beer sampling or human-sized turkey legs at the various Octoberfests. No, this autumn had only seen the arrival of destruction and death. Halloween was a complete bust, unless you considered the real life walking zombies a plus. She watched the trees whiz past as they drove along: oaks of all variations, southern pines, cypress trees - the greens just hinting at a fade to brown.

The Jeep ahead slowed to a stop, and Private Abbott braked. Abbott shifted into park and got out, walking to the driver's side beside Brooks.

"What's the problem?" Abbott asked. Brooks had turned off his Jeep.

"Right front tire is flat. Didn't you see it?"

Abbott crossed in front of the vehicle, and looked at the tire on the front pa.s.senger side. A large two-p.r.o.nged harvester blade protruded from the black rubber like fangs ripped from a giant mechanical vampire bat.

"d.a.m.n. Looks like a blade off an old combine."

Brooks got out of the Jeep. Abbott frowned at the destroyed tire some more. Then he glanced at Dr. Robbins. "This won't be a problem, doctor. We'll have the tire changed in a matter of minutes."

David leapt from the Jeep and approached the soldiers who were removing the spare tire from the back of the vehicle. "A few minutes are all these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds need to find and swarm us, gentlemen."

"He's right." Brooks nodded. "Abbott stand guard, I'll change the tire."

"I'll help," Dr. Robbins seized the jack, and started back around to the front. David joined him.

Dejah and Shaun sat nervously in the car, scanning the dense trees for signs of threatening movement. The wind blew deadfall and dried leaves in whirlwinds of brown and black around the tree trunks, forming strange patterns that seemed suspicious at first glance.

"I wish they'd hurry," Dejah said to Shaun, her voice low.

Shaun rubbed his arms fretfully. He knew as well as she did they were sitting ducks out here on the road. There was nothing else out here aside from them and trees, and a few abandoned trailers set back in the woods here and there. "You want me to go see if they need any help?"

"No, we should stay out of the way."

"Did you see my new boots?" Shaun pointed to his black-booted feet. "Genuine Army issue. Courtesy of the U.S. government." He grinned and gave her a thumbs-up. Dejah looked down at his shining boots and smiled with him, nodding appreciatively.

Gunshots ripped the air. Dejah reflexively jumped at the noise. Shaun dove onto the floorboard, hands over his head, as if the sky would collapse. The gunfire continued. The M-16 in Private Brooks's hand spat lead into the treeline several yards from the road. The rifle reports echoed.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," Dejah said. "Stay down, Shaun."

David ran toward her and the Jeep.

"Start the Jeep," he yelled. Abbott ran behind him. Dejah climbed over from the back seat and turned the key. The engine fired up. Abbott and David reached the vehicle at the same time and scrambled in. Dejah jumped out of their way into the back seat to make room.