Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (14 page)

Then the corporal took
something that looked like a home pregnancy test from his flak jacket’s pocket
and jabbed it into Patrick’s lower abdomen.

Patrick screamed out
in what seemed like intense pain and collapsed onto the ground.

Jason held back the
girl’s hands and stabbed a similar white plastic applicator into her stomach,
just above her pubic bone. She writhed in agony, but still didn’t make a sound.

“What’s yours?” Jason
stood, shaking his applicator. “Stage one? Bet it’s stage one.”

I had no idea what
just happened or what Jason was talking about. The whole time, Shawn kept
quiet. He just shifted his gun back and forth between Patrick and the girl.

The corporal looked
closely at his applicator. “Stage one!” He smiled. “Bingo! What’s yours? Stage
two, I bet. Look at her.
Gotta
be stage two.”

“Hold on, it’s
coming.” Jason shook his applicator and looked at it again. “Stage two!” He
yelled. “Corporal, we got ourselves a couple of officially confirmed sickos!”

Jason held up his
white plastic applicator and tapped it against the corporal’s like they were
clinking glasses for a toast.

“We’re already almost
out of these.” The corporal tossed his applicator into the bushes beside the
Burger Shack.

“Next shipment’s
supposed to be in soon.” Jason shrugged. “Not like we really need these things
anyway. Waste of time, if you ask me. I mean, big fucking surprise these two
are sick, right?” He drew a handgun. “Are you ready?”

Patrick was trying to
stand, clutching his abdomen. The girl was still writhing on the ground.

The corporal drew his
own handgun. “Ready.” He took a deep breath.

Jason nodded. He placed
his gun against the girl’s head. The corporal placed his against Patrick’s.

They both immediately
fired, almost exactly at the same time.

Patrick collapsed. The
girl shuddered,
then
went still.

“
What the fuck!
” I yelled out, mindlessly banging my cuffed hands
against the seat in front of me. “
What
the
fuck are
you doing?
” I was suddenly sobbing. I
couldn’t believe what I’d seen. I never thought that
Jason
could do anything like this.

Patrick and the girl
lay dead in gathering pools of blood at the rangers’ feet.

“Your turn, this
time,” Jason said to the corporal. “Bag ‘
em
and bury
‘
em
.”

* * *

The corporal
stayed behind with a pair of body bags. Jason drove out of town, following the
highway west, toward the mountains.

I couldn’t stop
crying. I felt like I was going to break in half. I’d been through more than I
could handle. Bryce was silent, riding with his head pressed against the
window. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It looked like he’d kind of shut
down. Shawn sat beside Jason with his gaze fixed forward. If it weren’t for his
combat helmet and the setting, it would have looked like he was just working
some desk job.

I kept wondering where
Ian was. I knew he wouldn’t put up with any of this new Home Guard ranger
cowboy shit, and I was worried about what they’d done with him.

There were only four
men now that the corporal had stayed behind. I decided that if I got another
chance, I’d run.

“Holy fuck.” Jason was
driving us past a dairy farm in the middle of a broad hay field and craning his
neck to look out the window. He pulled onto the side of the road, exclaiming, “Ladies
and gentlemen! I do believe we have a
clusterfuck
.”

“
Clusterfuck
?
Where?” One of the rangers, the youngest of them, peered out the window. “I
haven’t seen one yet. Where is it?”

“Out past that tree, private.
Right there.” Jason brought the still-slowly moving vehicle to a stop. “See
it?”

There was a mass of…
something
in the field just beyond the
dairy barn, but it was partially obscured by an idle
swather
.

Jason pulled the
military vehicle into the field. As we moved closer, I could see that the mass
was actually thirty or forty
people
.
They had gathered in a tight circle. Most of them were sitting or lying in the
dirt, almost as if they were having a group picnic. But it was definitely no
picnic.

“Holy
fuck
.” Shawn opened the door as Jason
brought the vehicle to a stop.

The people in the
field—all thirty or forty of them—were having sex. It was some kind
of…orgy. Many of them were completely naked. Some of the men’s pants were
around their ankles while they
thrusted
and licked their
way from one partner to the next. Some of the women had two guys between their
legs with their own faces planted in someone else’s groin. When Jason cut the
engine, I could hear a chorus of quivering moans. Everyone was filthy, covered
in dust and dry alfalfa. I’d never, ever seen anything like it.

“Watch this,” Jason
said.

He gave the horn a
long honk. It was deafening. He flicked the siren on and off, which was even
louder.

No one in the field
stopped having sex. Not one of them even paused or looked up. If anything, the
moaning grew more intense. It was like they were all lost in a trance of carnal
insatiability.

“Why do they do that?”
asked the younger private. “Why don’t they run?”

“Because they’re
fuckin
’ sickos,” Jason said. “Just look at them.
Shameless.”

“But we only have,
like, three test kits left.”

Jason laughed. He
banged on the horn again. None of the people in the field responded.

“There’s your test.
Every
fuckin
’ one of them is
stage
three. I guarantee it.” Jason looked into the rearview mirror. “Anyone disagree
with that assessment?”

Shawn said, “Fuck
protocol.” He shouldered his rifle.

All the rangers got
out of the vehicle.

“Remember,” Jason
warned. “The closer we get, sick as it is, you’ll probably get an urge to join
in. It’s a trap. Fight the urge. That’s what you’ve been trained to do. ”

“Yes, sir,” the men
replied all at once.

They approached the
massive
orgy,
guns raised, and began to make their way
around the idle
swather
.

“Hold up,” Jason said.
“Don’t waste your ammo.”

He climbed into the
swather
.

“Keys are here!” He
called out, jangling a set out the door.

“Oh
shit
.” The private grinned.

A
swather
is basically a giant lawn mower that cuts a twenty-foot-wide swath of hay and
spits it out the back into a neat row. They’re hard to maneuver, and Jason
wasn’t nearly as good a driver as my dad was. He started the engine and struggled
to steer the
swather
toward the orgy that was playing
out in the field. The other Home Guard rangers chuckled and clapped, including
Shawn, who goaded Jason on.

I couldn’t believe
this was happening. I couldn’t
let
it
happen. I stumbled out of the military vehicle and ran awkwardly toward the
swather
, my hands still in
theircuffs
.

“Stop!” I yelled.
“Jason!
Stop!
”

The men laughed at me.
There was nothing I could do. I was a small woman in handcuffs, and Jason was
driving a giant hydraulic machine with churning blades.

“Get the fuck back,
Ashley!” Shawn yelled.

I collapsed in the
field.

Jason
maneuvered around me, then steered directly toward the mass of people still
obliviously fucking on the ground. As the
swather
approached, one guy and two women got up and ran. It was futile—the rangers
shot them before they got far. They twisted to the ground like hunted geese, and
then the rangers shot them each again in the head.

Jason drove directly
into the cluster of bodies
who
hadn’t run. There was a
nightmarish sound of chopped flesh and the sudden scent of exposed bowels as
the
swather
churned into the cluster of human beings.
Most of the people didn’t even stop having sex until the moment they died. The
swather
deposited a trail of chopped limbs and viscera in
its wake.

Shawn was smiling and
nodding while the two other privates cheered triumphantly and slapped hands. Then
the younger private, who’d been looking on squeamishly, suddenly threw up. The
others laughed at him, including Shawn.

This was too much.

I’m sure I must have
known at least some of those people before they’d contracted whatever hellishly
bizarre plague was spreading through Muldoon.

I vomited. And then I
stood and ran.

I sprinted as fast as
I could through the stubble in my handcuffs before I tripped over a tangle of
dried alfalfa, pitched forward, and fell. I got up and ran again. I was heading
for the dairy barn, but it was at least a hundred yards away. I waited for a
bullet to tear into my back. Any second now I would feel lead ripping through
my flesh, I was sure of it.

Instead, someone
pulled me down by the hair.

It was one of the privates.
He started dragging me back to the military vehicle, still clutching my hair. I
thought he would rip it out by the roots in a clump. I grasped for his wrists
to hold up my weight as he dragged me.

“Don’t shoot her!”
Shawn yelled. “I wish like hell we could, but they’re wanted for questioning!”

“I know, I know,” said
the private, still dragging me.

Jason jogged over,
waving his hand at the private. “Hey man, hold up. Hold up.”

The private let go of
my hair and Jason helped me stand. The private obediently walked ahead.

Jason put his arm
around me. “I’m watching out for you, Ash,” he whispered. “Don’t forget that.
I’ve got you. I’ll take care of you. We’ll just get you all checked out—
make sure you’re clean. I know you’ve been through a hell of a lot. But I’m
here for you. I can help you take the edge off.” As he guided me toward the
military vehicle, he pressed a couple of round pills into my palm. “These’ll
make you feel better. Remember, Ash, I’m here to help you take the edge off, in
any way you want.” He squeezed my shoulders.

He didn’t release his
firm grip as he lead me all the way back to the vehicle.

I didn’t think I could
be any more sickened by Jason after what he’d just done with the
swather
, but I was. I was so distraught and
angry,
I thought I’d collapse again. I didn’t know exactly
what he meant by
take the edge off
,
but I got the gist. I knew he’d do anything to take advantage of me if given
the chance. I held onto the pills he gave me only to avoid pissing him off. I
would rather die than be held captive by Jason Gibbs, but that was exactly what
was happening.

Gunshots rang out—a
burst of rapid fire.

The rangers lifted
their weapons, startled. I ducked down.

I thought someone was
shooting at us, but when I glanced up I saw a man approaching us from a dark
military SUV. He was dressed in a black version of the combat uniforms the rangers
were wearing and was shooting up into the air.

“Stop,” he called out,
firing his rifle again.

The rangers lowered
their weapons.

“What is it?” Jason
yelled back.

“What is it,
sir
,” the man barked as he approached.

“What is it, sir,”
Jason mumbled.

“I’m taking these two
off your hands.”

It was only now that I
realized the man approaching was
Ian
.

I didn’t know whether
to cry out in relief at seeing him, or to be terrified that he was one of them.

Ian held out a wad of
documents in his free hand. “I’ve got clearance papers,” he said. “They’ve been
cleared.”

Jason shook his head
in frustrated disbelief. “But we’re taking them in! They’re wanted for
questioning!”

“Not anymore, they’re
not.” Ian gently put his hand on my shoulder and nodded at Bryce. “Get in the
car. Right now.” Bryce and I both hurried toward his SUV.

Behind me, I heard Ian
yell at Shawn, “How
dare
you!”

“Fuck you, Ian,” Shawn
called back.

By then Bryce and I
had climbed into Ian’s SUV. Ian jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the
door. He handed me a set of handcuff keys and started the ignition.

“What’s going on?” I
was sobbing. “Tell me what’s going on. I need somebody to tell me what’s going
on!”

Ian sped through the
field toward the highway. “They think you’ve been harboring infected
fugitives,” he said.

I looked back. Jason,
Shawn, and the other rangers were still milling around the mass of tangled
limbs. They weren’t following us.

We reached the
highway. I was still too terrified to fully let my guard down, but I let out a
huge sob of relief.

Ian put his hand on my
shoulder and I pressed my cheek against it.

“I know what happened
to you guys,” Ian said quietly, glancing also at Bryce in the backseat. “I’m so
sorry, Ash.” He squeezed my shoulder very softly. “I can’t even begin to
imagine.”

Bryce said, “Thank
you.” It sounded like he was trying not to cry, too. “Jesus, buddy,” he said to
Ian. “Thank you.”

I could barely unlock
the handcuffs because my fingers were trembling so badly. I passed the keys
back to Bryce.

I realized I was still
clutching the pills Jason had given me. I stared at them dumbly.

Ian grabbed them from
my palm, rolled down the window, and threw them outside.

“Jason gave those to
you?”

I nodded.

“Jesus Christ.” Ian
shook his head, disgusted. “He’s a little piece of shit.”