Badlands Trilogy (Book 3): Out of the Badlands (38 page)

“That damn thing is still alive,” Jasper said.

“Just barely.” Ed looked around the parking lot and saw a few other carriers moving slightly. But only a few.

“What the hell could cause this?” Jasper asked. “They couldn’t have just up and died, could they?”

“I don’t know anything for sure anymore.”

“There are so damn many of them.”

“Let’s get these cars and get back to the others,” Ed said. “We need a meeting.”

* * *

They gathered in front of the smaller building after some formal introductions. Ed couldn’t remember all the names of the people they’d found; nearly a dozen children and three women, all held captive by the human monsters who’d almost killed him and his sons. Surely there’d be time to share stories and get to know each other, but for now they needed a plan.

Ed suggested his idea to stay put until they figured out just what was going on with the carriers and until everyone had time to recuperate.

“I’m with Ed,” Emily said to the group.

“There are some supplies in the smaller building,” Jim said, his manner of speech more indicative of an adult than an eleven year old boy. “Stuff they stole from people they killed. Stuff they collected from other places too.”

“Are we still going to California?” Sam asked. “I mean, ultimately.”

“I’m not even thinking that far out,” Ed said. He motioned toward the destruction and carnage around them. “All this has changed everything.”

* * *

The women and the children talked and a story began to form. The men with the guns had been a small family; Red (a.k.a. “Daddy”), his three sons and a few other men who Red considered to be surrogate sons. They’d been living in the sanitarium for a number of years, ambushing unsuspecting people on the road, killing the men and taking the younger women and children. They killed women not of child-bearing age.

Red had attempted to breed the women with himself and his sons, but his attempts hadn’t been entirely successful. Two still births and two active pregnancies. Janet and Kathy—the two pregnant women—remained distant and mostly non-verbal. Lisa, who was not pregnant, offered up more information. Ed treaded gently with the women, considering the loss of their friend Denise on top of the trauma they’d endured at the hands of Red and the others.

They set to work unloading the vehicles and setting up a room inside the second building. As it turned out, Building Two had been used for administrative purposes during its heyday, housing offices for the doctors as well as the clerical staff to support them. Most of the contents of the building had been long since removed and the entire operation appeared to have been abandoned for at least twenty years before the first case of the virus showed itself.

After canvassing the entire building, Jasper and Emily ran across a room full of collected supplies. Sleeping bags, clothes, canned and dried foods, matches, kerosene, toilet paper and more. They also found rooms containing beds, dressers and other items. Even posters on the walls. By all appearances Red and his boys had used the second building for their base of operations, living there while they kept the women and the children in the sanitarium as slaves.

The children directed Ed and the others to the back of the second building where they showed off the garden they maintained. There the children had been forced to farm potatoes, corn, tomatoes, carrots, peas and a handful of other vegetables. More searching turned up seeds, hundreds of them, collected from prior harvests and kept for later use.

After a full day of inventory and exploration, the group turned in for the night, distributing their numbers into multiple rooms inside the administrative building. Smoke from the sanitarium still tinged the air, but the bulk of the flames appeared to have died out. Carriers called out in the night, as had become the norm, but on this night they sounded different to Ed. Desperate; pained, even.

Exhausted, he drifted off to sleep, alongside Trish and the boys.

That night he dreamed of Sarah.

In the dream she was smiling.

The days accumulated as Ed and the others inventoried the rest of the compound. They found a basement below the administrative building containing Red’s true arsenal: more than two dozen rifles, ten pistols, four shotguns along with bows, knives and more. Even a sword. Hundreds of rounds of ammunition accompanied the find. Red and his boys had been busy, for sure.

They ventured back into the main sanitarium after a few days, finding the secondary cache of weapons completely destroyed by the fire. Most of the building had been gutted by the flames, leaving behind only charcoal and the blackened remains of carriers.

A week passed. The children instructed the adults on how to harvest the garden, having had a strict regimen beaten into them by Red. This time, however, they worked willingly and freely. They played together outside during the day and slept in the same room at night. Ed had begun to get to know most of them, but a few remained shy. He didn’t force it.

Lisa, the only woman held prisoner who was not pregnant, began opening up. She and Trish became quick friends, both having survived similar ordeals. Kathy and Janet began to come around, but Ed figured it would be some time before they opened up, if they ever did.

Each night the carriers came out, howling and screeching their tortured calls to one another and every morning Ed and the others found more bodies. Dozens more died each night, the fresh bodies lying alongside those who’d expired earlier. After three days the bodies began to rot, filling the air outside with the stench of death.

Ed thought it was the most wonderful smell he’d ever known.

Night after night the sounds of the carriers lessened until by the seventh day the night grew silent. The bodies stopped accumulating and the rotting began in earnest, filling the air outside with a putrid stench that clung to their clothes. They retrieved as much gasoline as they could from the idle cars nearby and while the fuel wasn’t fit to burn in an engine it turned out to be tremendously effective for burning bodies. The charred flesh provided its own terrible smell, but once the task had been completed the air around them became breathable once more.

On the seventh day, with the bodies now charred piles of ash and chunks of bone, Ed sat on the front steps of the administrative building, surrounded by Trish, Jasper, Emily, Sam and Chloe. Lisa joined them while Janet and Kathy supervised the children. Zach and Jeremy played with the other children, smiles on their faces as they remembered what it was like to be kids again. Ed smiled as he watched them play.

“The carriers are all dead, aren’t they?” Trish said.

“I don’t know,” Ed replied. “But the nights sure are quiet now.”

“They’re gone,” Jasper said.

“We don’t know that for sure,” Chloe said.

“Maybe not, but when I went out for that gas to burn the bodies I saw hundreds more, all dead. None of them even twitch anymore.”

“What could be killing them?” Lisa asked. “Another virus?”

“That would be ironic,” Emily said, eliciting a chuckle from the group.

“They didn’t look sick though,” Sam said. “It’s like they just dropped dead from out of nowhere.”

“What if…” Jasper trailed off.

“Go ahead,” Ed said.

“No, it’s dumb.”

“We won’t know that until you say it. Go on.”

Jasper looked down at the floor, as if gathering the courage to continue. “I know it’s crazy,” he began, “but what if this is all part of a plan?”

“What do you mean?” Trish asked.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You do that when you spend a lot of time alone. Anyway, I always thought it was weird that the virus could spread so fast. I mean, it took no time for it to go worldwide. Do you remember when it first broke and it was all anybody on TV was talking about?”

Everyone nodded.

“CNN and the other channels had it on twenty-four-seven,” Sam added.

Emily nodded. “Until the whole system collapsed and the TVs went dark.”

“Then you remember they interviewed everybody and their brother about it,” Jasper continued. “There was no shortage of crazy theories and the like. Well, some guy came on the Today show and talked about it being germ warfare. Some kind of virus that the Russians or the Chinese or the Arabs put into the air that got out of control. Seemed like conspiracy theory at the time, but I started wondering about it after the shit hit the fan.”

“So what are you saying exactly?” Chloe asked. “You think the Russians attacked us?”

“I’m saying that maybe this virus was designed. First, it wiped out the population by making them go nuts and eat each other. Then it went to phase two, where the people infected changed into something else. The apex carriers. Maybe these guys were designed to hunt down any survivors and clear the area.”

“Clear the area for what?” Ed asked.

“For phase three,” Jasper replied. “These apex carriers, maybe they reached their expiration date. They’d done their job and had eliminated just about everybody left. Now they’ve died off, leaving the world wide open for…”

“For what?” Sam asked.

Jasper looked at the group, his mouth a thin line. “Invasion. Then occupation.”

“Invasion by whom?” Ed asked. “The rest of the world is just as dead as North America. Who’s left?”

“I don’t know. We’re assuming the rest of the world is dead, but we don’t know for sure. The TV went dark and that was that. Maybe there are some people still alive, maybe a whole country full of people who wanted to take over the world. They could have quarantined themselves off at the last minute. They could have given their people a vaccination against the virus.”

“Do you really think that possible?” Trish asked.

“After everything we’ve seen, why not?” Jasper said.

“It’s plausible,” Lisa said.

Jasper wasn’t finished. “Or maybe it won’t be another country that invades. Maybe everybody on Earth is dead and that’s what
they
wanted.”

“They being who?” Emily asked.

Jasper pointed at the sky. “Them.”

“Aliens?” Chloe asked, her face incredulous.

“Why not? I’m mean, it’s plausible, right?”

“I don’t know,” she continued. “It seems far-fetched.”

“Sure, I give you that. But it’s still plausible, do you not agree?”

Chloe shrugged. “Remotely,” she replied, not as skeptically as she originally had.

As winter approached, the likelihood of reaching California before the snow and freezing temperatures came seemed improbable at best. Having traveled through multiple winters, Ed didn’t want to risk it, even if the carriers were dead. With a harvest of vegetables, a stockpile of weapons and supplies and free-range game animals now in abundance, it seemed a fool’s errand to continue on before the weather broke.

They stayed put and the snow came hard. Ed, Jasper, Zach and Jeremy hunted deer and rabbit, returning to their temporary home in the evening with their kills. There the rest of the group would butcher the animals and cook up the meat. Supplemented with their stock of vegetables they ate well most of the winter months, finally putting on some weight.

They slept better than they had in years, rotating guard duty between so many people allowed everyone to sleep more often and longer than before. They occupied a dozen rooms inside the building, the children piling into a few of the rooms and the adults taking up their own, or doubling up with a partner.

By spring they’d hunted, eaten, laughed and cried together. They finally mourned the loss of their friend Terry. They talked of his boisterous laughter and larger than life personality as they giggled with tears in their eyes.

The apex carriers that had once owned the night all but vanished. Over the weeks following the initial die-off, Ed rarely heard their shrieking cries in the distance. Eventually the sounds stopped completely, replaced by the familiar sounds of the natural animals of the world taking back the night.

By the time the snow melted there were two new additions to the group: a baby boy and girl. Emily helped deliver the two children without issue. They named the boy Casper and the girl Regan. The group came together around the children, breaking down the stigma that came with the circumstances surrounding the pregnancies. No one spoke of Red and his monstrous boys, allowing the new babies to become a symbol of hope for their future.

Emily began to show when the thaw came, already coaching an elated Jasper on how he would help her with the delivery of their own child. Having assisted on the delivery of two births already, he’d quickly moved into the station of nurse as Emily became the group’s resident physician.

As the days warmed and spring approached, Trish showed the tell-tale bump of her own pregnancy. With a fall delivery date on the horizon, serious contemplation of their plans had to be made.

During a warm day in April, the group gathered near the garden. The children had already begun tending to the seeding, as directed by Ed in spite of their uncertain plans on when they might leave for California.

With the work for the day complete and a venison dinner consumed, the children played a game of baseball together in the open field beside the garden. Emily and Jasper sat next to each other, holding hands as she rubbed her belly absent-mindedly.

Ed sat and watched the children playing as the sun slid toward the horizon, the last of its rays beginning to dissipate, allowing the cold to return for another night.

Trish walked out of the building they’d called home for the past four months and approached Ed. She reached out her hand and smiled at him. “Come with me,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” Ed asked.

“Nothing. Just come.”

Ed took her hand and she led him to the other side of the garden, away from the rest of the group. Before them the dried grass of the overgrown field surrounding the building swayed in the chilly breeze. She turned toward the group, watching them for a few minutes before speaking.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

She paused. “What if this is home?”