Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (25 page)

February 19
^th
, 2014

2:52 a.m.

Sick

I woke up to the sound of
clucking geese.

It was morning. My
head was still so foggy from the
sedatives,
I could
hardly lift it to get a good look around.

I was in a poultry stall
at the fairgrounds. The rows of cages were still filled with birds that had been
entered into the now-abandoned fair. They were starving and molting. Some were
dead. I was covered in loose hay and feathers.

Somehow, I was still
holding onto half of Morgan’s flannel shirt, my dad’s map, and Jason’s wallet.
I forced myself to sit up.

I had no memory of
making it as far as the fairgrounds before passing out. I was still naked. My
bare feet were cut and covered in dried blood.

I opened Jason’s wallet.

I threw out a debit
card and some kind of Home Guard mess hall card. And then, there it was: a
simple white card with a magnetic strip, the words “Pharmaceutical Access,” and
a warning that failure to return it to the Home Guard if found was a crime
punishable by indefinite detention.

I kept the card and
tossed Jason’s wallet into one of the goose cages. Feeling inside the breast
pocket of what was left of Morgan’s flannel, I found that the single quarter
I’d saved was still inside.

I crept from the poultry
stall out into the sun. The morning was surprisingly warm after a cold night.
The fairgrounds were totally abandoned, and for a moment I just let the
sunlight fall onto my naked body. I was still pretty woozy, but I could feel
some of my energy start to return.

I looked out toward
the fields stretching away from the poultry stall. As far as I could see,
Jason’s SUV was gone.

The fairgrounds,
luckily, were filled with pay phones. The nearest was just across the roadway
beside the horse stables.

I’d torn up Chris’s
letter after memorizing his number, but that felt like forever ago. Thankfully I
was able to clear the cobwebs from my head just enough to remember the digits
as I deposited the quarter into the pay phone.

Chris picked up right
away. “Please tell me this is Ashley,” he said. He must not have recognized the
incoming number and hoped it was a pay phone.

“I got it,” I said. I
told him where I was and asked him to pick me up. “Bring me some clothes, will
you?” I added. “Don’t ask. It’s a long story.”

While I waited for
Chris, I found a relatively concealed place in the sun behind a wooden barrel
that had been converted into a flowerpot. I listened to the horses in their
stalls, whinnying loudly. Poor things. I knew my sister’s horse
Kaypay
was among them. They probably hadn’t heard a human
voice for nearly two weeks and were starving.

A car approached. I
ducked down behind the flowerpot and peered over its arrangement of dead
pansies. A dust-covered hearse pulled up in front of the stables. It came to a
stop by the pay phone. Its engine cut.

Chris stepped out. He
was in a white Home Guard uniform and a lab coat with two armbands, one with a
black H.G. logo and the other with a red cross.

The uniform must have
been a disguise, but why was he driving a hearse?

“Don’t ask about the
car and I won’t ask about your clothes,” Chris said, tossing a small duffel bag
behind the flowerpot. It landed by my bloodied foot. I unzipped it.

“Scrubs?”

“What else?” Chris
looked away while I put on the faded blue hospital clothing he’d brought me.

I looked like a mental
patient.

Now that I was
clothed, Chris walked straight over and gave me a big hug. “You are fucking
amazing, Ashley,” he said. “Fucking amazing!” he yelled out. “Let me see it.”

I gave him the access
card.

“Fucking incredible.”
He was elated. “I didn’t even think you’d get my note. How did you
do
it? Did you give him the sedative?”

“Sort of.” I shrugged.
“Seriously, don’t ask.”

“Do you think he knows
you took the card?”

“I think he knows his
whole wallet’s missing.”

“Shit,” Chris said.
“We don’t have much time, then. Let’s go.”

“Just a minute.”

I hurried into the
stables. Thirty or forty horses, all in individual stalls, pranced and snorted
when I came in. They weren’t in as bad of shape as the chickens, but they’d
eaten through all of their feed, not to mention all of the hay on the stable
floor. The water in their shared trough was down to a muddy puddle.

I turned on the trough
faucet and started emptying sacks of oats into the feeding bins.

“Seriously?” Chris
called out when he saw what I was doing. “We don’t have time for this. We have
to go!”

“You’ll thank me
later,” I said. “I promise.”

When all of the horses
had been fed and the trough was full, I turned off the water and got into the
hearse with Chris. I was glad to see it wasn’t carrying a coffin. The engine
was already running. As soon as I closed the door, Chris put the clutch in gear
and sped forward.

“Can I really not ask
about the hearse?” I asked.

Chris shrugged. “Well,
it’s the best way not to get stopped and searched at a check point,” he
explained. “Most of the rangers on guard duty are the young ones, and they’re
all freaked out by coffins with people inside screaming to be let out…understandably.
They’d rather just pretend this kind of thing isn’t happening. So most of the
guards just wave hearses through.”

I tried not to think
about how many people must have been buried alive.

Chris pulled out onto
the highway and headed straight toward the center of town. One Home Guard squad
was standing around a fire in the supermarket parking lot, warming ration
packets on the flames, but they didn’t pay us any attention.

“I just really hope
this uniform passes at the pharmacy.” Chris patted the H.G. logo on his armband.
“I’m on the wanted list, but I’m hoping they won’t pay much attention to me if I’m
wearing my old stuff.” He took a deep breath. I hadn’t realized until now how
scared he was. “We’ll see,” he said, exhaling. “Fingers crossed.”

I hadn’t expected that
actually getting in would be a problem once we had the access card. Somehow, stupidly,
I’d imagined that Chris would be able to just swipe the card, waltz right in,
and take whatever he needed.

“Is the pharmacy
pretty well-guarded?” I asked.

Chris laughed
hollowly. “Even with the steel door they put in, they’ve stationed an entire squad
there. All kinds of meds are in short supply, from ibuprofen and chemo agents
to TGV test applicators. And the Home Guard
really
doesn’t want people getting their hands on any antibiotics.”

“I don’t get it,” I
said. “Isn’t the whole purpose of the Home Guard’s existence to eradicate the
pathogen in the quarantine zone? Shouldn’t they
want
people to have access to antibiotics if it fights the
disease?”

“Not
when the cocktail doesn’t actually
weaken
the parasite.”
Chris glanced at me sardonically. “Guess we didn’t tell
you that little detail, did we? When I was testing the cocktail months ago on
earlier strains—before we really knew what this thing was—we found
out that it actually
strengthens
the
parasite. The species adapts and becomes resistant to the antibiotics, allowing
for stronger, longer-living larvae. It becomes a superbug. The longer the
parasite lives, the longer the host stays viable, and the slower the disease’s
stages progress. With the right antibiotics, you could keep people in stage one
for months, maybe even longer. But that would mean giving the host a longer
period of time to spread the pathogen on to someone else. The Home Guard just
wants to wipe the whole thing out.”

“That’s why they’re
only really interested in shooting people? Or burying them alive?” Suddenly, I
understood. “They don’t care about curing anyone.”

“There is no cure,”
Chris said somberly. “You can slow the disease, but only by strengthening it.
You can’t cure it.”

He reached into the
back of the hearse and handed me a shotgun.

“It’s all I have,” he
said. “I hope you won’t need it, but keep the safety off.”

I noticed Chris was
wearing his pistol under his lab coat. I held the shotgun low and kept it
pointed at the floor.

* * *

Chris wasn’t
kidding about the guards at the pharmacy.

An entire squad of six
rangers—complete with a large, armored vehicle—was stationed at the
entrance. It was hard to imagine this was the same place my mom used to buy me
cough syrup when I was a kid.

Before we even began
to slow down, the squad’s sergeant—a stout, brawny guy I’d never seen
before—waved at us to stop.

So
much for Chris’s hearse strategy.

He pulled over on the
opposite side of the road and parked beside the Bronze Dragon, Muldoon’s single
Chinese food restaurant. Both the restaurant and the apartment above were now
abandoned.

“Papers?” the sergeant
called out.

None of the rangers
seemed too concerned about us. Most of them leaned against the armored vehicle
looking bored with their guns slung over their shoulders. They stirred only to
push forward a very young private, obviously new to the squad, to examine our
papers.

“This one’s all
yours.” One of the rangers nudged the private forward with his boot on his
backside. “A girl and a fairy. You can handle it.”

“Get her number,” another
ranger said mockingly. “
Hers
, not
his.”

All of the rangers
laughed. The young private nervously crossed the road to approach us and
examine our papers.

The problem was, of
course, that not only did neither of us have travel clearance, but both of us
were also wanted. We had a pharmacy access card, but what good was that going
to do if we didn’t have any clearance papers? Obviously, Chris hadn’t
anticipated this.

“Fuck,” he whispered,
eyeing the approaching private. He had no idea what to do. He leaned back and
put his hands on his head, helpless.

I had to do something.

I reached into his lab
coat and grabbed his pistol.

“What are you—?”
Chris began, startled. “Ashley!”

I tucked the pistol
into the back of the scrubs I was wearing and got out of the hearse. I walked
directly toward the private.

I wasn’t sure what I
was doing—I wasn’t even wearing shoes—but suddenly I was overcome
by another weird rush of what felt like limitless confidence. The fog from my
sedative hangover had cleared away. I had no idea where these spikes of nerve
were coming from, but when they hit me, I was strangely, recklessly without any
fear at all.

The private was very
young. I met him in the middle of the road. We stopped on opposite sides of the
road’s yellow line. He couldn’t have been a day over eighteen. He was gawky,
with a plump, pink zit on his cheek. He was obviously nervous.

“Your papers, ma’am?”
he asked politely, avoiding my gaze.

I thought about
Morgan. I thought about the young girl with the vacant green eyes who had
passed me on the highway.

“What would you do to
me, private,” I asked quietly, “if I were positive?”

“Just your travel
papers, ma’am,” he mumbled. “Then you can be on your way.”

“You didn’t answer my
question,” I said. “What would you do?”

The private’s face was
flushing deeply now. I stared right at him, practically breathing on him, and
he still refused to meet my eyes.

“My sergeant’s orders
are to shoot any known or suspected positives on sight,” he recited.

“Shit, Gomer! I think
she’s kind of into you!” one of the rangers called out. “Work your Gomer magic!
Maybe you’ll get a hand job out of it!”

The squad laughed.

“I didn’t ask you what
your orders are,” I said softly. “This is a test, Gomer. Your answer’s
important. What would
you
do if I were
positive?”

“Yes, ma’am. I would
shoot you,” he said briskly, as if speaking to a superior officer.

“You sure about that?”
I asked. “Is that your final answer?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he
stammered.

“Do you know what I’m
going to do?” I whispered.

“Show me your travel
papers? Ma’am?”

“No. I’m going to
shoot you. Right in the chest.” I gently tapped his chest. “Not because I have
any orders. But because I’ve come to the conclusion all on my very own that it’s
just the
right thing to do
.”

The private stared at
me dumbly.

I pulled Chris’s
pistol from my scrubs, jammed it into the private’s chest, and pulled the
trigger.

The sound of the
gunshot exploded across the quiet street. The private stumbled backward,
gasping, tugging at his bulletproof vest. As quickly as I could, I pulled the
semiautomatic rifle from his shoulder and started firing at the squad.

None of the rangers
expected this. Their faces fell as they scrambled to shoulder their guns and
take positions behind the armored vehicle.

I didn’t expect the
private’s rifle to be so powerful. Every time I pulled the trigger, the stock
leapt up and bit painfully into my shoulder. All of my shots sailed way too
high as a result, but it was enough to scare the squad and buy a little time.

I raced back to the
hearse.

Chris was baffled and
terrified. “What the fuck, Ashley?” he kept saying. “What the
fuck
?!
”

I handed his pistol back,
keeping the rifle for myself, and pulled him behind the hearse. As soon as we
hit the ground, a barrage of bullets slammed into the hearse’s body and
shattered its windows.

When the first volley
let up, I fired back. I couldn’t even begin to hope to hit any of the rangers
with the unwieldy weapon; I just wanted to give us enough cover to fall back
into the Bronze Dragon. I pulled Chris with me, firing one shot into the
restaurant’s glass front door, and we both ran through the frame and took cover
behind the register stand.