The Secret: A Thriller (26 page)

* * *

A
fter the memory of Abby’s imprisonment had returned to me I barely managed to get through the day without lashing out wildly. But that wouldn’t help. I settled down finally in the room I’d made my own, and stared at the ceiling. Waiting.

Tomorrow, would I be myself still? Or would I again become one of Bob’s mind-slaves? Would he notice that I had been freed, even temporarily? Had Tim’s interference just
killed Abby?

A lot of the minds near me seemed to be somehow…blunted. Vague and unfocused. Was that due to stress, or trauma, or Bob’s influence? Or had they always been like that?

But something else about the memory of going underground with Bob tugged at my mind. Suddenly I remembered—Sam, the teenager from our compound, the one who’d been such a great hunter—
he’d been there with us
in Bob’s home. The guards in Bob’s home—they were teenagers! And
Sam
had seemed to be in charge of the kids. He was more than he’d seemed when he’d come to us up on the mountain. More than that, his mind had seemed
smooth
, thoroughly alien, but also free of the red tinge of Bob’s influence. And I’d had the sense that underground tunnels connected Bob’s lair to the teenagers’…camp, or hive, or whatever it was.

Bob had hidden that part of the memory more deeply in my mind than the rest.

How much could I trust my impressions of Sam? At one point I’d thought he’d been a relatively normal teenager. Had he been Bob’s spy in our camp? How long had he been the…leader?…of the teens? Or was he more of a liaison?

I had a lot to figure out. A lot to atone for. But I felt my eyes closing…and as the sky outside darkened the mind-feel changed around me. People’s essences seemed to become weaker. Less vibrant. Except for one, that hadn’t been present at all until just now. It glowed red, dark red, and swirled through all the others…

My sharp-edged thoughts became dull and fitful. Energy turned to lassitude. I tried to fight it and remain conscious, but could feel myself drifting away.

One last thing became crystal-clear even as my eyes closed: Bob was awake.

* * *

W
eeks later I sensed something strange to the north, and was already moving out of the high school with a squad of twelve when we were met by a runner.

“Men coming. Group of four. Carrying a white flag,” the man told me, panting.

I studied him. “Who’s out there?”

“Carmody, Duncan, and Compton. They were holding back when I left. Watching.”

“How far?”

“Just past Reverend Bob’s church,” he said.

I nodded. “We’ll head out. Follow when you can breathe, then catch up if you can. We’re not going to move quickly.”

He nodded, sprawling on the ground and elevating his legs by bracing his feet on an elm tree.

I gathered my men by eye. Sort of. “No shooting unless I say so,” I told them. “They might be friendly.”

* * *

T
he group we were approaching had apparently stopped in the church itself. I wondered whether that had been deliberate. I studied the building from behind a grove of trees that had sprung up along a creekbed, giving me a clear view across about a quarter mile of field to Bob’s old haunt.

Shrugging, I made up my mind. “You guys stay here,” I told my guys. “I’m going to see if they want to talk.”

I got uneasy agreement from my followers. But…I didn’t sense hostility, or much fear either. Most people didn’t seem to have a lot of resistance to following orders left in them, lately. It was useful, but I also wanted to apologize. To help them break free. But to my shame, I hadn’t found the courage to do anything about it. And might not, as long as Bob held my daughter underground. If her fate was truly up to him.

I walked slowly across the field, trying not to focus on the picture of Sam's enigmatic face that was suddenly in my mind. Out in the real world, nothing moved. I caught a quick impression of someone watching me—from the woods on the other side of the road, not from the church itself—and nodded to myself.

I didn’t want a battle. Or at least…not yet.

I knocked to the side of an open door. “I’m friendly,” I called. “I left my men outside and came alone. You folks want to talk?”

I heard a laugh behind me, and tried not to jump when a hand fell on my shoulder. “Good to know,” a voice said.

I turned and saw a man with black and silver hair. He held a shotgun casually in his left hand, and wore a checked shirt, suspenders, and work pants. Work boots too. He looked like…a local, really. But I didn’t know him.

“I’m Jacob Ashton,” I told him, wondering how he’d come up without my noticing. “People call me Ash.”

I heard movement inside the church, and the man in front of me stuck out his right hand. “John Trebonne. Glad to meet you. Just down from Pennsylvania, or what’s left of it. Ah, will your people get upset if you come inside for a bit?” He nodded toward the trees I’d come from.

I shook my head. Not unless I decided I wanted them to…but I didn’t say that. “No, we’re fine,” I told him, and waved a hand in the air, glancing back in the same direction he’d indicated. And then again, to two other spots. Which was kind of a lie. But only because all twelve of the men I’d brought, plus the runner, had actually spread themselves out and were sighting in on us with hunting rifles from several angles.

“Hm,” I heard behind me as I walked into the church.

* * *

I
came out an hour later and started walking back toward town. I gave a whistle with two fingers in my mouth and made a circling motion over my head as if it were a prearranged signal,
pushing
my men to fall in behind me as I went…and felt eyes behind me until I got out of sight.

The strangers would be coming back in force, in two days. Forty men and women, who had traveled all this way because McDermott’s broadcasts had been the last they’d heard. And…there had been a man, a Pennsylvania native who had died from injuries he sustained coming home from Washington DC. He had pointed them in our direction.

Whether it was true or not? These people believed the President of the United States had been coming this way. For safety. Weeks ago. And they hoped to find a stable government in the area. Stranger still, these people seemed mostly unaffected by the changes the rest of us had been going through.

At first that gave me hope, but then I looked farther into their minds and found recent memories of a large yellow-bearded man who screamed to them about racial purity. I found darker memories, of the way these people had turned on any of their own who began to change. There were forty of them now, but they’d had over a hundred when they’d started this way. What they did to strangers along the way, even those who’d appeared normal, even children, was…hard to believe. Bob would have a tough time assimilating this new crowd once they got a look at the people of Henge. But he didn’t need to know that, did he? Nor did they need to know about Bob, yet.

A particularly gruesome death of a teenage girl whose ears had begun forming delicate points swam to the forefront of my mind—they had cut the ears off when they were done, and their leader wore them as a kind of trophy—and part of me wanted to kill these four right where they stood. But I was going to use them instead.
All
of them.

So…my conscience gnawed at me, and I was afraid I might be sentencing my daughter to death. But I
used
the strangers’ dreams of stability and freedom. I lied to them and
made
them believe me. I twisted their minds and made them remember they had come into town and been treated well.

And then I sent them away, to bring others.

Two days. I had to be ready for a fight. Or at least as ready as I could be.

I hadn’t had a lot of time left to make a move anyway. Bob had been starting to stare at me a little too often. Sam too, though I still didn’t sense malevolence there.

Or anything else, beyond the fact that he was paying attention.

* * *

“D
amnit, Tim!”

I’d been finding him for my daily dose of epinephrine for weeks now. It had been getting easier and easier for me to think clearly during the day. Maybe my mind was getting stronger. Maybe it was just that the days were getting longer and the nights were getting shorter. Maybe both.

But today of all days? Tim’s mind-essence was barely there at all. His normal sharp-eyed glance and quick injection of synthetic adrenalin was nowhere to be found. Instead he stared at me blankly. “How may I serve the Master?” he asked me with a vacuous smile.

“Fuck.” I thought about it—maybe Bob had given him some special attention last night? “I require attention, Doctor. I feel ill. Will you treat me?”

“Of course. What is the nature of your complaint?”

He sounded like he might fall asleep at any moment. On the other hand, since his mind seemed so weak…maybe I could
push
him awake…

Nope. And I couldn’t find his drugs. Well, there was another alternative.

* * *

“C
rap! Ow!” Tim hissed.

I grinned at him. “Yeah, sorry about that. Next time tell me where you keep your stuff. That might have worked too.”

“You broke my goddamn arm!”

“Yeah. Feel like yourself yet?”

“Fucking hell, Ash!”

I shrugged at him. “Seriously. You should show me your stash. And what happened to you today, anyway?”

“Happened? Oh.” He looked thoughtful. Well, thoughtful and in pain. “I guess…I think Bob came and worked on me some last night. Didn’t seem to like how it was going, then made me drink some of his blood.”

“Seriously? And that actually
worked
for him?” I shook my head. “That guy’s stone weird.”

Tim grunted. “Eisler’s no better.”

“Maybe not.” We’d both noticed Eisler and the Reverend were more evenly matched than it might appear. They both mind-raped our fellow citizens. Bob had the lighter touch, seeming to inspire a sort of lassitude, a might-as-well willingness to obey his commands. Eisler did some of the same, but his approach seemed more crude. Still powerful, though. And sometimes Eisler destroyed people’s minds utterly—to the point Bob wouldn’t even bother to hunt them. Though that didn’t mean they didn’t get eaten. The cafeteria zombies weren’t picky.

“Big news today,” I told Tim. “There’s a group of survivors from Pennsylvania. They heard McDermott’s radio broadcasts a while back and started this way. So…there are about forty of them.”

Tim’s head swung up. “Newbies? So they’re not under Bob’s control yet?”

I shook my head. “Not anybody’s, as far as I could tell. And I don’t think they’ll react well if Bob tries to grab ’em. Listen—stay alert tonight. Bob’s probably going to have to strain himself when he wakes up. Meanwhile I’m going to get
everybody
as agitated as I can. And pull as many people as I can out of this place, so Bob has to come to us if he wants to keep a lid on things.” Partly because I wanted to stress Bob by geographically separating the people he’d need to control. But mostly because I didn’t want him anywhere near Abby tonight if I could help it.

Tim frowned. “You can
do
that? Pull people away from here? I mean, without Bob figuring it out?”

I shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe he’ll blame it on the newcomers. He knows they’re coming, knows I scheduled a meet for tonight when he’d be awake. Thing is, I need you to dose as many people as you can today.”

He studied me. “Sounds like a one-shot deal, Ash. We screw this up, Bob’s going to figure it out and kill us. Tonight, no more chances.”

“Yeah, well. I’m getting stronger. You were too, until
last
night. And I don’t think we were ever going to get a lot of chances like this, when Bob’s going to be pushed to his limits. I say tonight we kill the bastard.”

Tim was silent, considering. Then a rare grin splashed across his face. “About fucking time.”

* * *

M
cDermott, shaken but willing, looked up at me from where he sat on the floor, rubbing his arm where Tim had injected him, twice, before heading out to grab more people. “I can arm myself. And a few others. And we can be ready to follow your lead.”

“Is that all?” I asked.

His forehead furrowed. “All of what? What do you want me and my men to do?”

I shrugged. “What you said is fine. But look, Captain, I need to know—what kind of perimeter does the Army have around town? I know at least one group has traveled right through it. What happens if Bob suddenly goes away? Are we looking at reprisals, or medals, or what?”

“Oh. There
is
no perimeter.” He looked into my face, tried to grin, and gave up on it. “Mr. Ashton, the whole…disease…started right here. At the prison, anyway. Then it spread to other parts of the country. We tried to contain it—”

“By blowing up the prison? Plus an EMP bomb so nobody talked to outsiders? Then napalming downtown?”

He looked away. “We tried lots of things. A lot of things happened, early on. I was relieved of command twice for refusing to follow orders. But people kept dying. Including my replacements.”

He stood, unsteadily, and squared his shoulders. Then looked directly at me. “Mr. Ashton, at first this seemed to be ground zero of the worst epidemic of—well, the worst epidemic—ever to hit the United States. But when it spread…”

I didn’t want to ask. I was busy, damnit. But I had to know. “What happened?”

“Look, this isn’t easy to take.” He bit his lip, then told me: “Henge, West Virginia might be the closest thing to a town left in what used to be the United States. Maybe, by now, the last town in the world. It’s been a while since we got anything via radio. But the last we heard, whatever happened…it was spreading. Here. Europe next, then Asia, then…everywhere. Except that in most places, maybe everywhere but here, people just…they died. All of them. It made getting details really hard after the first few days.”

I was leaning against a wall, trying to stay on my feet and think past this. “Well…shit.”