The Pandemic Sequence (Book 1): The Tilian Virus (24 page)

“What’s your name?” he asked him.

“Mike. Mike Stevenson.”

The shared given name struck Mike strangely. Though a common name, Mike Allard could feel the anger towards this man rising in him for having the same name. It was an irrational response, he knew, but he began to see himself in the man before him. The infected—the Tils—had no choice in what they became. But this man had been the master of his own fate. He had, at some point in time, chosen the path of brutality and ruthlessness. To Mike, it made this haggard person a far darker enemy than the infected would ever be.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Mike Stevenson,” he said with a lifeless tone.

As the man looked into Mike’s eyes, searching for mercy, Mike slowly raised his gun and ended the man’s life with a bullet through the skull. In the years to come, he would acknowledge that day as the death of two Mikes. One that had chosen violence and murder and met his end with a bullet. The other, a kind and hopeful man that had been thrust into a world beyond his control, thrust into a struggle for survival, who met his end by delivering that bullet.

* * *

There was little conversation as the survivors set about clearing the area of evidence of the horrific battle, their movements determined and coordinated. The security the stone home had enveloped them in over the preceding months was irrevocably shattered. The bodies of the attackers were dragged to the cliff’s edge and unceremoniously cast over into the deep canyon below. A wordless agreement had been made among the survivors that the men would not receive the same type of burial Mike now presided over for Blaine.

The teen boys had dug a shallow grave into which the body of their friend was placed. The excavated dirt had been returned to the hole and several large rocks now covered the site. Arrayed in a horseshoe around the grave, the others stood with bowed heads as Mike struggled to find the proper words for the primitive ceremony. As he spoke the half-prayer, half-eulogy, his tear-filled eyes looked over those gathered. Michelle unsuccessfully fought back tears as he spoke, she and Blaine had grown close during their time in the wild. Sarah, her hands still tinted red from her scrubbing of the blood in the home’s threshold, clung tightly to her son. The boy pressed his face into his mother’s side. Jenni and Derrick held hands, while Jake and Erik clenched their jaws against the emotion of sorrow.

As he stood before them now, Mike could not shake the image of their disbelieving eyes as he had lowered the weapon that took an unarmed man’s life. Hours later, he still could not bring himself to feel remorse for his actions, but he knew the faces of his companions would haunt him in the days to come.

“Amen,” he said in conclusion, which prompted the others to repeat the word. He had not been overly religious before the disease laid waste to the world, and he had struggled since to find any claim to faith. If pressed, he would have admitted an unorganized belief in God prior to the outbreak. Perhaps from the way he was raised, or just from the ease of accepting a higher power, Mike had never considered himself to hold any atheistic beliefs. In the long, quiet nights at the campsite, he struggled with his current view of God. He questioned, as he was sure others that survived did, how any god could allow such devastation to exist in the world. His theological musings, however, always came to the same conclusion. He could not relinquish an acceptance of God because the current world would be too dim without it.

After the youngest of the survivors had taken to their beds early that night, Mike found himself sitting alone at the table in the front room. Sarah had relentlessly swept the floor clear of any shell casings and bullets. Mike wished such a method could cleanse his mind of the day’s events. His hands, rougher now than when he had been a teacher, warmed themselves around a mug of coffee. Though the nights were still warm, he could not shake the chill that had clung to him since pulling the trigger.

Sarah quietly emerged from the room she shared with her son. As she gently pulled the door closed behind her, Mike asked, “How is he doing?”

“Still shaken up, but no worse than the rest of us,” she replied as she poured herself some coffee and eased gratefully into a chair at the table.

“How are you doing?” she asked, after sipping from the steaming mug.

“My shoulder’s going to be pretty bruised for a while,” he answered.

Both took a long drink from their respective mugs and sat in silence for several moments.

“You did what you had to do,” Sarah whispered, breaking the tension.

“I could have let him go,” Mike said. The words seemed appropriate, though he said them without conviction.

“
You did that once already. They had a second chance that
you
gave them, which was more than what they were going to give us. What happened today wasn’t your fault. If things had gone differently, they would have gladly killed us all, or worse.”

Mike knew Michelle had confided in Sarah how terrified she had been months earlier when the men had tried to take her.

“I keep telling myself I should feel bad, that I should regret it, but I can’t, I don’t,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t have done it in front of Andrew, though. He didn’t need to see that.”

“Yes, he did.”

For the first time in the conversation, Mike raised his head and looked into Sarah’s eyes. There was a force behind her words that made the utterance even more shocking.

“Before all this happened, months ago, I would have said you were right. But, this is the world now. This is our reality. We can hide as much as we want in this cave, but it doesn’t change what’s going on out there.

“It’s funny. I would never buy any video games for him that had violence or guns. I thought I could protect him, shield him somehow from the bad influences. But I can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s cruel, I don’t know. What I do know though, any day something could happen that takes me away from him. He needs to understand what is happening. He needs to know what the world is like now, that there are people in it who mean him harm and would kill him for no other reason than to see him die.”

“That’s a harsh lesson for a kid,” Mike said.

Nodding, Sarah replied. “Maybe. But today he also saw that sometimes good people have to do difficult things to protect what is right, to protect the ones they love. As his mother, I think it’s a fair trade.”

Mike rose from the table and poured himself another cup of coffee from the still-warm pot. He had no intention of sleeping that night for fear of another attack. Knowing the others needed to rest both body and mind, he did not ask for any help in splitting the night’s watch. Instead he resigned himself to the aide of highly caffeinated coffee.

“We can’t stay here much longer.”

“I know.”

“Not just because of today, though that probably means we need to leave sooner. With winter coming, we need to be able to have shelter and food that this place can’t provide,” he said as he leaned against the wooden countertop.

“I can start packing things up tomorrow. But, where are we headed?” Sarah asked. It was the same question that Mike had been unable to answer for the past several weeks.

“I don’t know, yet. I was thinking maybe a farm, something we could fortify with fencing around the house.”

“Well, wherever you decide, we’ll follow. You’ve steered us right this far.”

“More like we have been lucky this far,” Mike said as a joke, but his self-doubt was conspicuous in his tone.

Sarah left her seat and placed her empty mug on the counter. With a motherly gaze, she stood before him and lifted his chin so his eyes were forced to meet hers.

“We all owe our lives to you, Mike. You may not think it, but you’re the leader we all look to.”

As she stepped away and turned towards the bedroom door, Mike looked at her retreating form and asked, “What if I don’t know what I am doing?”

Sarah reached the door before she turned around and, with a face full of feigned gravity, she answered the question that Mike had struggled with since the first night huddled inside the school’s faculty room with several frightened students.

“Fake it,” she said. “We won’t know the difference.”

Mike could not help but let out a bellowing laugh, which promptly turned into a fit of giggling shared with Sarah. With the exchange of goodnights, he settled back into his chair, placed his guns on the table top, and settled in for the long night.

Hours after departing, the convoy had only covered a little over one hundred miles. Though Mike had wanted to press on, the refugees—having left so precipitously that morning—required a bathroom pit stop. Conceding to their needs, the convoy now sat idly on the side of the highway. The security force was in a hyper-vigilant mode. The Tils that had been sighted earlier were now many miles behind, but still the men and women responsible for the refugees’ safety kept their eyes scanning the area for fear of another force of infected. After answering his own call from nature, Mike received updates from Paul and Lisa regarding the convoy.

“The vehicles seem to be holding up okay,” Lisa relayed from her discussions with the few refugees with mechanical inclinations. “The bus is overheating a bit, so we may have to schedule a stop here and there to let it cool down.”

“That’s the one vehicle we can’t risk losing. After this break, I want to cover another two hundred or so miles before we stop for the night. We can schedule a break half way for the bus,” Mike instructed. At their current pace, they would reach the Florida coast the day after next.

“Any thought to what we do when we get down there?” Paul asked.

Though the message from Cuba purported to offer safe haven from the infected, there was little in the way of information regarding how to reach the island nation. There would, supposedly, be ships that ferried survivors across the sea, but the frequency of the ships had not been mentioned in the notes.

“We wait, I guess,” Mike responded. “We might find that our destination is packed with other survivors, and we might find nothing. If there are ships, we could be waiting a day, a week, or a month. We don’t know, but as soon as we reach the coast Lisa, I want your people to set up as secure a fortification as possible. If the wait is an extended one, we’ll need the area to be safe for us.”

“Yes, sir,” the woman replied. “The camp won’t like it, but we will need to keep our area as condensed as possible. It will be unfamiliar territory, and I don’t want us spread out too thin.”

“Agreed,” Mike said with a nod.

“What about the other possibility?” Paul asked with some hesitation. The council had discussed the risk that the message might turn out to be a trap to lure survivors to a renegade camp that wanted their supplies and weapons. Over the years, the refugees had had several encounters with those that had used the chaos of the pandemic to establish lawless societies. Those groups had survived through greed and aggression and were, in many ways, as irrational as the infected.

“I haven’t decided, yet,” Mike answered honestly. “When we make camp tonight, let’s get the council together to weigh the options.”

Soon after the discussion came to a close, the convoy was once again making its way south along the highway. As the miles slowly passed behind them, Mike turned his mind from thoughts of the future and focused them on the vistas beyond the truck’s windows. The road stretched through rural communities with fields of untended grass, overgrown and wildly high. He could only assume that cattle once grazed in the fields, but now the only sign of domestication and civilization were the sporadic wooden fence posts that had enclosed the grazing land. Even those posts were infrequent as much of the wood had long ago been looted for fires.

The road itself in these areas was marked by the encroaching power of nature reclaiming its dominion. The black macadam was riddled with pot holes from several winters. Strong weeds and other flora had pushed through the hard surface and stood brazenly amidst the work of man. Downed trees, either from storms or age, blocked lanes and forced the convoy to travel through some back roads before once again finding the highway.

Though like any interstate, the rural areas it passed through were as abundant as the remains of metropolitan cities. The stark contrast of “once” and “now” was thrust into a greater vividness. Wind-tattered billboards beseeching travelers to visit various locales flapped unhindered in the wind, the colors of the advertisements having long ago faded and blended together to resemble the ink blots of a Rorschach test. Felled trees no longer impeded the convoy’s progress, but were replaced exponentially by abandoned automobiles and the sun-bleached skeletons of old victims. Whether having fallen to the Tils, renegades, or the ravages of time and starvation, the remains gave no indication to the final moments of their respective lives.
Guess it doesn’t matter anymore
, Mike thought to himself,
there’s not enough of us left to mourn them
.

He had traveled through cities several times over the last six years, but there had always been a task or mission to focus on. Now Mike was able to observe the sights as he passed them. Tall skyscrapers reached to the heavens. A few stood relatively intact, but most had windows blown out from their facades. Others had toppled to the ground, while some remained standing yet completely burned, leaving only the steel skeletons that had supported their immensity.
Bodies, fences, and buildings
, he mused.
All skeletons now
.