Season of Rot Read online

  For over forty minutes she stayed hidden, watching for any sign of trouble or movement before finally creeping out of the trees. The sound of her own footfalls on the pavement unnerved her. She glanced around, making sure she was still alone.

  As Amy approached the glass doors of the station, she breathed a sigh of relief. Not only did there appear to be no one inside, but its aisles hadn’t been trashed. She started to open the door when she heard a gun being cocked behind her.

  “You can put your weapon down now, ma’am,” a voice with a heavy Southern accent ordered. She dropped the .45 to the pavement and turned to see a very large gun pointed in her face. She guessed it might be a Magnum like Dirty Harry used in the movies, but wasn’t sure. The man who held it was young, much younger than she was. He barely looked out of his teens. A mess of thick blond hair covered the top of his head and he wore a pair of filthy overalls over a white T-shirt that had seen better days. His appearance would have been comical if not for the way his deep-blue eyes watched her with such dead seriousness.

  “I reckon you ain’t one of them,” he said, “but you sure as heck ain’t from around here neither. Everybody here is dead or crazy. I ain’t seen anyone else alive for a while now, so just where did you come from? Who in the heck are you, lady?”

  “Amy. My name is Amy… I’m from New York,” she added hastily.

  The man laughed. “New York? You’re a long way from home.” He lowered the huge pistol and nodded, as if to himself. “Welcome to Virginia, Amy. We’d best get inside. Most of them things are gone from ‘round here, but there are still a few stragglers left, I think. Best not to take chances, ya know?”

  He reached past and opened the glass door for her. She started to head inside again, but he stopped her. “Don’t forget your gun,” he said, grinning and pointing at the weapon she’d dropped. “You may need it.”

  She retrieved the pistol and followed him to the back of the station, where he unlocked a massive metal door and ushered her inside.

  “Place used to be a restaurant or something,” he said, closing the door behind them. “When Pop and I bought the place, we turned the freezer into a backroom of sorts. We kept the door though. It’s solid steel. Nice place for an office if you get robbed or the world suddenly goes F-ing bananas.”

  Amy didn’t laugh at his joke. She was busy eyeing the room. It was small and furnished with a singular desk and what appeared to be a makeshift bunk; food and other supplies were stacked all around the space and packed in the corners.

  “You’ve been living here… since the wave, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “No place else to go.” He sat on the bunk and stared at her. “Guess we have a lot to talk about, huh, Amy?”

  Hundreds of questions flooded her head, but the first one she asked was, “You said most of the creatures are gone from this town. Where did they go?”

  “You mean the crazy people? Don’t know. A group of guys drove into town and rounded them up—only the guys weren’t normal either. The crazies didn’t attack them. It was pretty messed up. I hid and stayed out of their way. Didn’t see much. All I can tell you is that they went south, all together in one big group with the weird guys leading them.”

  “What’s your name?” Amy suddenly blurted; it had just sunk in that she was safe, at least for the moment, and in the company of another real human being.

  “My real name’s Joseph Hunter, but I prefer Joe.” He stood up from the bunk, and from one of the boxes that littered the room, he produced a bottle of water. “I’m sorry, Amy. I bet you’re awfully hungry and tired from the look of you. Why don’t you help yourself to some food and get some sleep. I’ll keep watch outside. I have some things to tend to anyway. We can talk later, okay?”

  He held out the water and Amy accepted it, drank most of it in a single gulp. “Thank you, Joe.”

  He nodded and shut the huge door on his way out.

  Amy ate a meal of Vienna sausages, Pringles and crackers, then stretched out on the bunk. A smile lingered on her lips even as she slept.

  As the days passed, Joe told her the story of the town of Bloomington. Like everywhere else, it had been plunged into darkness and chaos the night the wave struck the earth. Joe and his pop made their way to the church that night with the other survivors, but the holy place hadn’t offered them any protection. The crazies outside attacked it time and time again, whittling down its defenders and their stockpile of ammunition. Then people inside began to change, and the pastor ordered that they be shot.

  Finally Joe and his pop got of the church while they still could and made it here to their place of business. As far as they knew, by that time the entire town was crazy except for them. He and his pop had taken shelter here in this backroom, listening to the changed ones pounding on the metal door and howling for their blood. Eventually the crazies must have realized they couldn’t get inside, so they left the station. After that, there had been a few close calls, a few firefights with the mindless kind that couldn’t shoot back, a few narrow escapes when they ventured into town for things that weren’t kept on hand. But they managed, Joe informed her.

  When Amy asked where his pop was now, Joe lowered his face into his hands and quietly told her that the old man had changed. “I got him with his own damn shotgun,” Joe told her. “Buried him out behind the station.” It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, and it troubled him still.

  Joe imagined before he met Amy that he, too, would go insane, if not from the wave’s effects then from just the pain of being alone. He’d been extremely happy to find Amy on his doorstep. He believed she saved his life by showing up when she did.

  She was grateful for him too, and she was happy in this place. In a matter of days, she had invited Joe to share the bunk with her instead of making him sleep on the floor. They needed each other desperately to feel alive, to feel hopeful when they looked in each other’s eyes. Joe wrapped his arms around her after they made love at night, made her feel safe and allowed her to think that someday things would be okay again.

  What Joe had said about most of the creatures leaving town had proved true as well. As long as they were careful, he and Amy could venture almost anywhere they wanted, for supplies or to just get some fresh air and stretch their legs for a while. Well armed as they were, they never encountered more crazies than the two of them could handle. All they needed was each other, and together they could rebuild a little piece of the world they had lost to the wave.

  16

  The conversation with the Freedom had been cut short when its orbit had taken it out of range, but the survivors of Def Con had learned a lot during the brief communication. It wasn’t the real Freedom Station they were speaking to, at least not the one known to the public. The station identified itself as the Freedom II, a military-oriented prototype based on the original Freedom’s design; it had still been under construction when the wave hit. Hank, the astronaut with whom they spoke, explained that the original Freedom had been destroyed by the energy blast and that only the experimental shielding of the Freedom II had kept the station functional enough to save the crew and allow them the necessary time to make repairs. Still, only Hank and one other member of the eight-man crew were left alive, and they wouldn’t last long: they were quickly running out of supplies and were down to one-quarter power. Hank and Toni arranged a time to talk again when the station’s orbit brought it back into range, and they traded downloads of information regarding what they knew of the post-wave world.

  Sheena was beside herself. Now she could finally get the data she needed firsthand to see whether the wave’s worst damage was over with. Nathanial, Geoff, Wade and Troy were howling for a celebration. Only Ian seemed reserved.

  “It’s a lie,” he informed the crowd gathered in the control room. “There is no Freedom II.” His words cut their excitement like a knife.

  “How could you possibly know that?” Sheena asked as Nathanial clinched his fists and almost charged the CIA
man.

  “Lies and cover-ups used to be how I made a living, my dear, or have you forgotten? I know more truth about what America has and hasn’t done in the last five years than all of you put together. Trust me. There is no Freedom II, nor will there ever be.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Ian, if I don’t take the word of a self-professed liar over what my own ears just heard,” Geoff remarked.

  “I’m inclined to agree with Geoff,” Nathanial said. “If Hank isn’t on the Freedom II, where is he? Who is he? It just doesn’t make sense for it not to be true.”

  Ian sighed as if confronting a group of school children. “He’s one of them, the infected.”

  “Oh, now that’s just bullshit!” Troy roared. “Those creatures up there can’t tell their asses from a hole in the ground. Have you ever seen one, just one of them, try to climb the fence? They could, you know, if they could think to do it.”

  Ian sighed again. “Before we lost D.C., I received a packet of downloaded data on the infected from a doctor named Buchanan. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was the chief science advisor to the president. His reports in the packet disputed his earlier conclusions about the radiation and its effects. Yes, it turns some people into monsters, the majority actually, while some like us, for whatever reason, remain sane. Buchanan believed the possibility of a third group to emerge, a thinking, reasoning breed of those snarling killers up there…” He pointed at the ceiling.

  “Fuck off, Ian,” Wade said. “You never told us this before.”

  Ian ignored the mechanic and added, “You all heard what you wanted to hear just now, not what you actually did. Hope can be a powerful weapon if wielded correctly.”

  “Get out of here, Ian,” Sheena ordered. “Go back to your damn coffin in the armory!”

  Ian nodded and walked toward the control room’s exit. “Just promise me one thing,” he said. “Do not give them our location until you’ve had more time to study the transmission and its origins.”

  “You’re too late on that one, Ian,” Toni called after him as he disappeared around the corner. “I already did.”

  After a moment of silence, Jeremy said, “What if he’s right?” Suddenly he felt everyone’s eyes on him. “No, I mean it. He’s damn weird, I’ll give you that, but he was CIA. Toni, can’t we trace the source of the transmission? Find out where it came from?”

  “Yeah,” she answered quietly. “We can, but it’ll take a lot of work.”

  “It would go a lot faster if we had your help, Nathanial.” Jeremy glanced at the computer tech.

  Nathanial shrugged. “Sure. Okay.”

  “In the meantime, I think all the rest of us have stuff to be working on, right?” Geoff said. “Dr. Leigh, why don’t you continue your study of the wave; the rest of you, suit up. We’re going up top. There are about forty more of those things at the fence again and I, for one, want them gone.”

  #

  Troy shielded his eyes as he stepped out of the shed onto the main grounds of the base. The cacophony of the maddened creatures washed over him like a tide. “Jeez, Geoff, where the hell did you learn how to count?”

  Geoff stepped out behind him and followed Troy’s gaze. There weren’t forty creatures outside the fence. They numbered closer to a hundred or more. The heavy, reinforced poles that held the fence in place swayed under the massive force.

  “Got some gas no one seems to be usin’ over in the garage,” Wade offered.

  Within minutes, Wade had a jury-rigged hose running from the large fuel tanks. Troy and Geoff helped him drag it out and turn it on.

  “Yee-freakin’-hah!” Troy bellowed as he held the hose’s nozzle, spraying down the creatures and the fence alike. “Anybody got a match?”

  Wade shook his head and held up a silver Zippo. “This was my favorite lighter,” he said, looking at it sadly. Then he lit it with a flick and tossed it at the fence.

  Howls and screams rose up as a burst of blue flame swept through the ranks of the infected. Geoff shut off the hose, and the three of them stood in silence. Black smoke drifted into the heavens, and it was all Troy could do not to vomit from the odor of burning flesh.

  #

  “I don’t believe it.” Nathanial slumped over his computer screen. “What the hell does it mean?”

  He and Toni had been able to trace the source of the message supposedly from Freedom II. It hadn’t come from orbit at all but rather somewhere in South Carolina—only a few hundred miles away from the complex.

  “It means Ian was right,” Jeremy said. “Someone out there, whether it’s those creatures or not, knows we’re here now. They know we’re alive and sane. Worse, they know how many of us there are.”

  “Oh God,” Toni said, suddenly sobbing, “I am so sorry.”

  “Hey.” Jeremy took her in his arms, and she nestled her face deeper into his shoulder, wetting his shirt. “It’s all right. You didn’t know.”

  “So what do we do now?” Nathanial asked.

  Jeremy gritted his teeth. “We get ready. We get ready for whoever or whatever’s coming.”

  17

  The doors of the lift opened onto the armory level. Jeremy had never been to this part of the base before and was taken aback by the condition of the hallway. Unlike the rest of Def Con, this area hadn’t been repaired since the battle after the wave. The lighting was poor, as many of the lights had been shot out or were flickering badly, casting eerie strobes along the corridor. The metal walls themselves were scarred by some kind of explosion, as if someone had set off a grenade. Spent shell casings littered the floor as Jeremy made his way to the end of the hall. The entrance to the armory was open. Ian emerged from an unnoticed side corridor behind Jeremy.

  “How the mighty have fallen,” said the agent.

  Jeremy whirled around at the sound of his voice.

  “Calm down, young man. I’m not some monster come to end your life.”

  “Ian, you were right about the Freedom II.”

  “I know.” He walked past Jeremy into the armory. “Would you care for some music? I find Wagner particularly relaxing in times like these.”

  “How did you know so quickly about the Freedom, I mean?”

  Ian took a seat in a folding chair between the racks of weapons, which lined the walls of the vault-like room. “Their shielding,” Ian said. He picked up a cold cup of tea sitting beside the chair and sipped at it. “There was a project like what they described, but it never got off the ground. The energy expenditure to generate the kind of field they mentioned was impossible. The project was scrapped because of it.”

  Jeremy took a seat on the floor in front of Ian. “Why do you stay down here so much?”

  Ian laughed. “I’m not immune to the radiation like the rest of you seem to be.”

  Jeremy’s mouth dropped open.

  “This is the most shielded part of the complex. I choose to stay here because I value my life. Even so, I am finding it harder each day to resist the urges rising inside of me. Very soon I think you may find yourself in a position where my disposal will become vital to your own survival.”

  Jeremy shifted uncomfortably.

  “I assure you,” Ian said, “you will have to do it. None of the others, not even our good doctor, even suspect that I am unwell.”

  He paused and set down his tea. “I don’t have any magical answers about who the people onboard the fictional Freedom II might be. I’m not God, Jeremy. But whether they are looters, survivors like us, or reasoning versions of the creatures outside, they will be coming. Will they bring death or hope? I don’t know. Personally, I believe hope died the second the wave touched our world.”

  “Will you help us get ready for them?”

  “There’s nothing I can do, Jeremy. I’m certainly not about to go up top again, and I don’t think you can really ask that of me. Geoff is the military expert. He can handle it.”

  “And that’s it? That’s all you have to offer?” Jeremy shook his head. “Don’t you ca
re about anyone?”

  “Yes,” Ian answered, “I care about me, and either way, I am dying. Now good day.”

  Ian picked up a book and opened it to the chapter marked with a piece of ribbon. Jeremy didn’t argue. He got to his feet and went in search of Geoff.

  Something had to be done, and it looked like it was up to them to do it. His life and the world he knew had been taken from him once; he wasn’t going to give up this place too—not without a fight.

  18

  “It can’t be done,” Geoff slurred, dropping the empty jug to the garage floor. “This base was never designed to be a defensible position out here. It’s a damn bomb shelter, kid, a really high-tech one, but still just a shelter.”

  Jeremy grabbed Geoff by the front of his uniform and tried to yank him to his feet. As drunk as Geoff was, he pulled Jeremy’s arm behind his back with incredible ease as he stood. “Kid, it’s all open space and fields up here. The fence is the only real obstacle to anyone who wants onto the grounds. If these things show up with welding torches and burn through the perimeter and the outer seal in the shed, then maybe they deserve to have us for dinner.” Geoff released his hold on Jeremy and staggered out into the sunlight. “Jesus, kid, I just roasted a mob of people alive to save your ass. What more do you want from me?”

  “Where are Troy and Wade? Maybe they’ll listen to reason.”

  “Reason!” Geoff spun around to face Jeremy. “There ain’t no reason left anymore, kid. Just death, death and the dying.”

  Jeremy drew the .45 from the holster on his belt and leveled it at Geoff. “Do you want to die so badly, Geoff?” He shook the gun. “I can make it happen, right here, right now.”

  Geoff’s eyes narrowed, and he finally nodded. “Okay. We’ll play it your way, Jeremy. We might as well go out fighting.” He stumbled over and threw an arm around Jeremy’s shoulders. “I just hope to God you or Wade can come up with a way to make a stand up here. I’m shit out of ideas.”