Apocalypse Of The Dead (44 page)

The girls mumbled their thanks and went in.

Aaron pointed Barnes to the door and said, “Come on, I’ll see you out.”

They stepped out into the night air, and the sudden chill felt good against Barnes’s face. He breathed deeply. A constant, howling wind moved over the prairie, sending waves through the grass that moved off into the darkness. The sky was alive with stars.

“I’ve never seen so many,” Barnes said, his head craned back to admire the view.

“Yes,” Aaron said. “It’s beautiful here.”

Barnes looked at him, a middle-aged man who should have been radiating the joy of being one of Jasper’s privileged lieutenants but instead seemed distant, preoccupied, troubled.

“You’ve been with Jasper how long? Nearly twenty years, isn’t that what he said in there?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I’d found him twenty years ago,” Barnes said. “It would have saved me an awful lot of wandering.”

Aaron didn’t respond right away. He looked back at Jasper’s quarters. Inside, they could hear one of the teenage girls talking.

“Listen,” Aaron said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well tonight. My stomach. If you’ll excuse me.”

“Sure,” Barnes said. “Good night.”

Aaron nodded, and walked away.

Alone once more, Barnes leaned his head back and watched the stars. One of the girls inside giggled, and it brought Barnes out of his reverie. He put his hands down into the pocket of his Windbreaker and started up the trail that would lead him back to his dormitory.

He saw one of the patrols heading from the vehicle storage lot behind Jasper’s quarters over to the utility well and smokehouse, and he waved. The two men waved back. Though the curfew was in effect, Jasper had given him permission to wander the camp whenever he wished, and the patrols knew to let him be.

He reached the main road and walked toward the pavilion. The wind coming in off the prairie moved the swings on the playground and sent a chill through him. Soon, it was going to get extremely cold. He’d already seen ice on the grass in the mornings and small snowflakes in the air on cloudy days, and he realized he wouldn’t be able to enjoy these nightly walks much longer. He’d have to find some other way to meditate about the changes he was going through, which was a shame. His midnight walks were so calming, a chance to reflect on all Jasper had taught him so far.

He heard a faint crack to his right and stopped. In the darkness, he could see the outlines of the supply room and the vehicle garage on the other side of the office. In the starlight, their roofs looked touched with silver. He stood still and watched and listened. Nothing moved. He couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the faint creaking of the swings behind him. But his cop instincts had gone on alert, and he glanced at his watch to note the time. Then, as quietly as he could, he walked that way.

There were three of them. They were trying to remove the screws where the dead bolt fastened to the door frame. Besides the one screwdriver, he didn’t see anything else that could be used as a weapon.

Barnes stepped around the corner and came up behind them before they had a chance to react. One of the men noticed him when it was too late and tried to make a break for it, but Barnes was too quick for him. He shoved the guy into the wall, and the man hit it hard enough to shake the building.

By that point, the other two had turned to face him. They watched their friend hit the wall, then slump to the ground, rubbing the back of his head.

The guy with the screwdriver stepped forward, wielding it like a knife. He said, “All you gotta do is step aside, man. It ain’t worth your life.”

Barnes just stared at him.

“I mean it, man. I’ll fucking run you through.”

“Put your weapon down and get facedown on the ground,” Barnes said. “Or I’ll kill you.”

The man Barnes had knocked against the wall stood up. The other three seemed to take that as some kind of cue, and the man with the screwdriver lunged forward like he was going to stab Barnes in the belly.

Barnes stepped outside the man’s thrust, grabbing his wrist with his right hand and pulling the arm straight while at the same time pivoting his body so that he could strike the back of the man’s elbow with his left hand. The man’s arm broke with an audible crack and he screamed. At the same time, Barnes bent the wrist back to the man’s shoulder and kept downward pressure on his doubled-up arm, walking him around in a circle until his momentum forced him to fall face forward on the grass.

When the man rolled over onto his back, Barnes slammed his heel down on the man’s mouth.

He turned back to the other two just as one of them threw a clumsy roundhouse punch. Barnes dodged it easily, then closed the distance with a flurry of left jabs and a hard right to the solar plexus. The man doubled over, unable to breathe. Barnes grabbed him by the back of the head and pulled his face down to meet his knee.

The man fell back on his ass, his face covered in blood, trying to gulp air through his shattered nose and mouth.

One of the patrols had been alerted by the noise and was running up from the cottages. The third man saw them coming, looked at Barnes, and took off running in the opposite direction. Barnes motioned for the patrol to cover the two injured men and ran after the third man.

He caught him just as they entered the playground. Barnes pushed him forward and the man tumbled to the ground, landing beneath the swings.

Barnes was on him before he could get to his feet. He wrapped one of the swing’s chains around the man’s neck and yanked on it. The man was gagging and turning blue by the time the patrol got there.

Jasper emerged from his quarters, still buttoning his shirt.

Aaron and Barnes were standing off to one side. The three men Barnes had caught breaking into the supply room were on their knees, their hands secured behind their backs with plastic flex ties. The patrol stood behind them, rifles at the ready.

“What in the hell is going on here?” Jasper said, storming across the lawn.

Aaron wasn’t surprised at Jasper’s anger. Jasper could handle government agents and criticism in the press with barely restrained contempt and maybe a temper tantrum or two. But betrayal from within, by those he considered his children, his people, was enough to send him into a paroxysm of rage that might take days to die down. And he was definitely in a rage now.

“I asked, what in the hell was going on?” he said.

One of the patrol guards looked at Aaron for help, but Aaron simply nodded at the man.

Jasper was breathing hard, opening and closing his fists.

“Answer me,” he screamed.

The guard who had looked to Aaron for help blurted out an explanation, glossing over in a few words what Barnes had done to capture the men.

“Is that true?” Jasper asked Barnes.

Barnes nodded.

Jasper stared at the prisoners. “You’re Tom Wilder,” he said to the first man, the one who had tried to attack Barnes with the screwdriver.

The man looked away.

“And you,” Jasper said to the second man. “Your name is Reggie Waites, from Norman, Oklahoma.”

Jasper went to the next man and said, “Harold Morrison. You work in the kitchen.”

None of the men spoke.

Jasper motioned for the two-man patrol to get back to their route. When they were gone, he pulled a .45 pistol from his waistband and handed it to Barnes.

“This is yours,” he said. Barnes took the gun with a smile. “I cannot abide a traitor,” he said to Barnes. “When you first came here, I told you to trust me.”

“Yes.”

“I told you that you would grow strong if you did.”

“Yes.”

“These men have betrayed that trust I extended to them.” Jasper paused. “Do you know what I want you to do?”

Barnes adjusted his grip on the pistol and nodded.

As Barnes stepped behind the prisoners, raised his pistol to the back of the first man’s head, and fired, Aaron heard Jasper begin to laugh. It was a high-pitched tattoo that Aaron had heard many times over the years. But this was the first time it ever made him sick to his stomach to hear.

Ed had warned him not to do this in the daylight, but Billy Kline needed a better look at that door to the supply room. After their last midnight raid on the supply room, the Yale lock had been bolstered with two additional locks, one of them a dead bolt. It was going to be much harder to get in there now. Not impossible, but certainly harder.

He scanned the communal area. A cold front had rolled in during the early-morning hours and an icy sleet had started to fall. Already, the ground was slushy and the air bitingly cold. Most of the people moving through the communal area were more interested in getting inside as fast as they could than in milling around and talking, and that was a good thing.

With his hands in his pockets, walking as slowly and as casually as he could, Billy approached the supply room door. He stopped in front of it and glanced around. Aaron, Jasper’s number-one guy, was coming out of the radio room off to Billy’s right, not sixty feet away. Billy knelt down and started pretending to tie his bootlaces as Aaron walked by.

But Aaron seemed preoccupied, maybe even troubled. He didn’t look up at Billy as he walked by. He was muttering to himself, the words indistinct, and a moment later, he was gone.

Billy looked around, didn’t see anybody else, and went back to examining the locks. He would need tools, he realized. He could get in and out without making it look like the locks had been tampered with, but it would take time.

A few days earlier, he’d met a guy named Tom Wilder from Bowling Green, Ohio. The guy had done some time for burglary and forgery before the outbreak, and like Billy and Ed, he’d also been on edge about some of the things that were happening around the Grasslands. He’d become part of their growing group at the midnight meetings and, the night before, he’d volunteered to go get additional radios and maybe a TV if he could from the supply shed.

Now, looking at the added security, the freshly installed locks, Billy wondered if Wilder’s group hadn’t screwed up somehow. They must have done something to tip off Jasper’s people, something careless.

They both had the early dinner. He’d ask him then.

“Hello? Is somebody there?”

Billy nearly jumped out of his boots. He spun around, half ready to fight, half ready to run away, and saw Kyra Talbot standing there.

He let out a sigh of relief.

Then he smiled. Kyra was wearing a white heavy coat over blue jeans and brown snow boots with blond fur around the tops. Her brown hair was tied back with a black velvet band and it hung between her shoulder blades in a ponytail. She was smiling, her sightless eyes looking in his general direction, but not at him.

He said, “Kyra, here. It’s me, Billy Kline.”

She straightened. The smile wavered a bit.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello, Billy.”

He stepped away from the door and walked over to her. “You delivering a message?” he asked.

She nodded. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, I just stopped to tie my shoes. I’m on my way down to the laundry.”

She nodded again. For a moment, he thought she was about to turn away and head off to the office without saying anything else, but then she surprised him.

“Is that what you’re doing, working in the laundry?”

He smiled, thinking of something Jeff Stavers had told him. What have they got you working at? was the question on everyone’s lips around the camp. It was a conversation starter.

“In the mornings, I work in the kitchen. After lunch, I work in the laundry.”

“Oh,” she said, brightening a little more. “Do you know how to cook?”

“Sort of,” he said. “Not like you’re thinking of, though.” He hesitated here, because he hadn’t really wanted to admit this, not to her. “I was in jail for a while before the outbreak. That’s where I learned to work in a big kitchen. That first day, while we were in quarantine, Jasper came up to me and asked me if I’d ever been in jail. The way he looked at me, I couldn’t lie to him. He asked me if I’d ever worked in the kitchen or the laundry and I told him yeah, I’d done both. He just clapped his hands and said he had a job for me.”

“He’s pretty good at reading people that way.”

He’d frightened her with his talk of jail, and he mentally kicked himself. Her lips were pressed tightly together and she looked nervous, like she wanted to leave.

“Look,” he said. “Don’t let the whole jail thing frighten you about me. I mean, yeah, I’ve been in jail. Several times, actually. Oh, man, that sounds bad. But I’m not a bad guy. That sounds stupid, I know, but I’m really not a bad guy.”

“I don’t think you’re a bad guy,” she said.

“You don’t?” The way she said it, he wasn’t sure if she was being honest with him, or merely appeasing him so that he wouldn’t hurt her.

And then she smiled, and it was a beautiful smile. An honest smile. “I believe you because of Ed Moore.”

“Because of Ed?” He shook his head. “Why Ed?”

“Ed likes you. He’s taken you under his wing. Billy, I grew up around men like Ed Moore. Cowboys like him, I know the importance they place on a man’s character. If he thought you were bad news, he would have dropped you already.”

Billy liked that. He liked talking to this girl, too. There was something about her, the twang in her voice, the mixture of vulnerability and solid, inner strength, that turned him on.

She said, “Billy, what’s prison like?”

He was caught off guard. “Uh,” he said. “Well, I was never in prison. I was in the county jail. Prison is for state or federal prisoners. Those are the guys who go in for the big-time felonies. Me, I was strictly small-time.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s reassuring, I guess.”

He chuckled. “One jail is pretty much like another. There’s a lot of waiting around for nothing to happen. There’s this feeling that your life is slipping away, like you’re stuck in the weeds in the side of a river while the rest of the world floats on by you, and you’re powerless to stop it. It drives some men crazy.”

“I’ve heard stories from the guys in the town where I grew up. A few of them have been in prison. Or jail. Actually, I don’t really know which they were in. But none of them described it like you did. They were just angry, you know? Kind of mean about it. You, though, you don’t sound angry.”