The Dead Series (Book 2): Dead Is All You Get (26 page)

The old man didn’t answer. Instead, he got up and set out placemats for each of us. Then he put out bowls, napkins and flatware. When he was finished, he sat down again and rubbed his eyes.

“Few months ago. Some of those ungodly creatures wandered over here from Tres Marias. Usually, they’re dumb, you know? But these things seemed to be more cunning. Couple of ’em got the others to follow and surrounded my boys like a pack of coyotes. Bit ’em up pretty good before they could shoot their way out. By the time they made it back here, they were in bad shape.” He cleared his throat and squinted away a tear.

“Sorry for your loss, Mr. Manson,” Pederman said.

“Call me Guthrie. And thanks. We keep them out in the garden. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Though I trusted my friend, I was hesitant to find out what exactly Guthrie meant. He led us out through the door, between two rows of beautifully manicured apple, peach and apricot trees towards a wooden shelter where Caramel kept her gardening things. There, chained to metal posts sunk deep in the ground, were Frank and Jerry. They seemed smaller than I remembered—and thinner. Their faces and arms were a leathery grey color and their clothes torn and bloody. They seemed listless and, as we approached, looked at us with mild interest.

“Caramel wouldn’t let me put ’em down,” Guthrie said.

“Do you … feed them?” I said.

“No. We felt it was better to let them wither away. My wife wants to keep them close as long as she can. Won’t be too much longer.”

I remembered the draggers I’d seen over the past few months who were farther-gone. Eventually, their craving for human flesh would end and they would lie listless on the ground, waiting for a real death. Something else was bothering me, though. “Guthrie, you said you thought those other draggers came from Tres Marias. How would you even know?”

“Because Mt. Shasta has been clear for weeks.”

“Black Dragon didn’t do that,” I said to Pederman.

“No, our contract is with Tres Marias.”

Guthrie turned to me with tears in his eyes. “We know it’s crazy, keeping them here. But these were our boys. They were all we had.”

As Guthrie approached them I instinctively reached for my weapon. At first, Frank and Jerry stared at their father in mute fascination. Then matching sneers crept across their faces and they snapped at him viciously.

The old man saw me pointing my weapon. “It’s okay,” he said, then turned sadly and started back towards the house. “It’s gonna be okay.”

Guthrie took a large bowl of beef stew from Caramel and set it on the kitchen table. It smelled incredible.

“You did not just make this,” Pederman said, smiling.

“I like to keep a lot of food on hand.” She set out loaves of fresh homemade bread and butter and handed everyone a beer—except me. I received a can of Mountain Dew.

“You remembered,” I said. “Thanks.”

“So, Dave,” Guthrie said, pointing at my shirt. “You workin’ for the man?”

I glanced at Pederman, trying to hide a smile. “I like having unlimited access to awesome weapons.”

“I heard that. Say, did you ever find your wife? What was her name …”

“Holly,” Caramel said and smiled at me as she sat.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, nodding. “It’s a long story that I’m happy to share with you sometime.”

“How about now?”

As we ate, I told them everything that had happened since the last time I’d been there, much of which Pederman didn’t know. Though it made me sad talking about people I cared about who were no longer alive, it felt good, too. I wouldn’t say it was cathartic, but speaking their names again made them alive to me.

“Helluva story, Dave,” Guthrie said. “Glad you have your wife back.”

“Turns out she’s a way better shot than ol’ Dave here,” Springer said.

“Hey, I’m good with an axe.” We laughed, then I got serious. “Guthrie, we need to talk about Evie Champagne.”

“I figured. Let’s have some coffee. After, I can show you something that might interest you.”

After we cleared the table, we sat on handcrafted furniture in the bizarre, colorful living room I remembered from my last visit. Springer reached between the hanging plants and toyed with one of the many calaveras hanging from the ceiling. I think it was supposed to be an undertaker. Or a politician. I eased into a chair that, though irregularly shaped, was surprisingly comfortable. Outside was cold, wet and windy. Heavy curtains hung across all the windows so as not to tip off strangers. Or draggers.

Caramel had made brownies. At first, I was hesitant to try one, but she assured us she’d added nothing “extra.” What concerned me was the way she smiled.

“I’m going to check on your friend,” she said.

“Was she a nurse in a former life?” I said.

Guthrie smiled. “We’ve learned to take care of ourselves over the years.” He became serious. “Those men you said were chasing you. Sounds like the government.”

“That’s about right,” Pederman said. “Have you seen them before?”

“Evie tipped us off when she and her cameraman got lost in the forest and stumbled onto our place. Said those guys had been pokin’ around Tres Marias for some time. Not drawing attention to themselves, mind you. Just sort of … lookin’.”

“It must have something to do with Robbin-Sear,” I said. “I wonder why Evie never mentioned them to us.”

“Because she was scared.”

Pederman looked at Guthrie. “Did Evie say who she thought they were?”

“Government operatives.”

“So who exactly
are
they?” Warnick said.

I shook my head. “Department of Defense, CIA. Does it really matter? The point is, someone has a vested interest in keeping this experiment going.”

“Follow the money,” Guthrie said. Warnick and I turned to Pederman, who smiled knowingly. “Oh, for … Didn’t you ever see
All the President’s Men
? Watergate? Deep Throat? Ringing any bells?”

“I remember that movie,” Pederman said. “So are you suggesting this is all about money?”

“Or power. Or both.”

“Look, this isn’t a sleepover,” Warnick said, getting to his feet. “And we aren’t a bunch of giggling middle school girls. We seriously need to figure out what’s
really
going on.”

“Well, I’m just a simple farmer,” Guthrie said, “and I don’t claim to know the truth. But I might be able to help.”

Groaning, he got up. We swallowed our coffee and followed him down a long hallway towards the rear of the house to a storage room. Guthrie pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the door, swung it open and turned on the light.

Inside on the bare floor lay an expensive-looking Sony video camera along with a portable lighting kit and a mass of cables. And boxes of memory cards. I remembered that Evie Champagne had mentioned Guthrie before leaving the command center. Now, I knew why. She’d asked him to store the evidence of her investigation for safekeeping. And she’d wanted
me
to find it. It was like she was still there, helping us.

“What is all this?” Pederman said.

“If we’re lucky,” I said, “it’s the truth about what happened in Tres Marias.”

Excitedly, we hauled the camera and memory cards to the living room and used a cable to hook the camera up to Guthrie’s big flat-screen TV. Then we went through the cards, arranging them in chronological order according to the labels, and popped the first one in. Most of them contained the mundane—things we’d already seen on the local news. My heart ached as I watched Evie in her bright blazer, short skirt and stilettos reporting on the violence, the fires and the few random acts of kindness.

Warnick, Pederman and I spent nearly the entire night going through those recordings. As I watched the progression of the plague, I thought about where I’d been in all this as Evie reported the news. There I was, working at Staples. Then leaving Tres Marias to join Holly in Mt. Shasta. Arriving there only to find that she was missing—and that her mother was among the undead.

We were down to the last third of the memory cards. Evie looked hungry and desperate. As we worked our way through the stories, her reports became more personal—more confessional. She talked about growing up in Fresno, the child of an abusive, alcoholic father and a timid mother who was used to taking beatings most nights. She talked about how she’d lost count of the number of times she’d run away and how, still a teenager, she’d finally left for good to live with an unmarried aunt in San Francisco.

Evie’s aunt was a painter and hung out with poets, writers and theater types. Evie went to school in the city and spent all her free time at museums or with her aunt’s friends. They encouraged Evie in her own writing and helped her to form a picture of herself that was different from anything she could have imagined. They even held a fundraiser to help her go to college, where she majored in journalism.

Evie’s father had died drunk years before, choking on his own sick. Soon after, her mother succumbed to throat cancer. Though she’d separated from them, she’d managed to scrape together enough money to bury them both, each with their own headstone.

“A reporter should never become the story,” she said on one of those later recordings. “Screw that.”

Somewhere along the line she’d interviewed Ormand Ferry, the leader of the Red Militia, and he’d mentioned Robbin-Sear. Said he knew “something fishy” was going on out there in the forest. Evie and Jeff had investigated, eventually encountering Larry and Judith. The Internet was unavailable, and Evie had made her way to the public library, where she’d found old newspaper articles on Robbin-Sear, one of which was printed with a photograph taken in front of their offices in Virginia. As the camera zoomed in on the photo, we saw—standing next to Doctors Robbin and Sear—an Army general and another man who looked a lot like Bob Creasy, only younger and healthier.

“This thing was a military operation from the get-go,” Evie said in voiceover. She looked directly into the camera. “There’s one more connection. Originally, I thought Black Dragon was behind this, because they and Robbin-Sear are owned by the same holding company.”

I stared at Pederman, who looked back at me with eyebrows raised. He was as surprised as I was.

“But there’s someone else involved. In my research I turned up articles about Plum Island where, supposedly, secret government experiments went on for years. These same sources also referenced another secret facility in Mt. Shasta. I intend to get out of this town and find a way up there. I
will
get to the truth.”

That was the last thing Evie Champagne would ever report.