Mutated - 04 (38 page)
Authors: Joe McKinney
“Really?” He studied Nate anew. “Well, I’ll be. Here, Niki, set him down here. I’ll look at you both.”
Niki put Nate down and sat down next to him. All at once the exhaustion overwhelmed her. All she wanted to do was fall asleep.
Fisher crawled over to Nate and squinted at his injuries. Then his face hardened. “This man’s been bitten,” he said. “You brought an infected man into our camp.”
Eddie and Jason moved in immediately, weapons up.
“No,” Niki said.
Quickly she explained. She told them about Nate’s immunity, and the flash drive, and about the Red Man’s death. Eddie and Jason didn’t look like they believed any of it. But Fisher was different. The suspicion was already leaving his expression.
“You say the Red Man’s dead?”
“Nate here killed him.”
“And you say he’s immune to the necrosis filovirus?” His eyes flickered in the firelight. “Fully immune?”
Niki turned to Gabi. “Let him see it,” she said.
Gabi took the iPad out of its plastic baggie. She handed it over to Fisher.
“What’s this?” he said, taking it.
“That’s the cure,” Niki said.
Half-smiling, Fisher ran his finger along the edge until he found the device’s on switch. “I used to have one of these,” he said. “God, I loved mine. Used it all the time. Remember, honey?”
His wife was kneeling next to him. “I remember.”
“This one’s got a lot of videos on it,” Fisher said. “Still works though. A little cracked, but—Hello! Here it is.”
His face took on a milky hue in the glow of the iPad’s screen. His eyes moved across the text, not blinking.
“Who authored this?”
Niki looked at Avery.
“Nate said the man’s name was Dr. Kellogg,” Avery answered. “I didn’t catch his first name.”
Fisher shook his head. “Never heard of him.”
He studied the display again, dragging more of the text onto the screen.
“No,” he said to himself. “This is . . . I wasn’t going this way at all.” He shook his head. “Not at all, but . . . this is a vaccine, not a cure. My God, this is brilliant.”
Niki felt his pulse pounding. “You think it’ll work? You can use that?”
Fisher took a deep breath. He was still smiling, still a little stunned.
“Yes,” he said. “I mean, if we were able to produce this in quantity and vaccinate people . . .” His attention went elsewhere for a moment. Then a smile lit the corner of his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “Yes—This’ll work.” He looked at her. “We can do this!”
C
HAPTER
32
HAPTER
32
Hobbling along on crutches, bandages all over his body, Nate propped the iPad up on top of a tombstone and sat down on the marker opposite it. He scratched at a sticky spot on his neck where the bandage had separated, coughed, and cleared his throat. He drew in a ragged breath and started speaking:
“Hi, I’m Nate Royal.” This isn’t my computer. Or . . . well, I guess it is now. Before me it belonged to this guy named Ben Richardson, who was one of the two smartest men I’ve ever known.
“Ben used to be a reporter for a magazine. I don’t remember which one and I guess at this point it doesn’t really matter. Before everything pretty much went down the toilet Ben set out to write the whole history of the zombie outbreak. Things went south on him before he got a chance to finish, but he didn’t give up. He went on collecting stories. For eight long years he wandered this used-up garbage dump of a world we live in, collecting stories from everyone he met.”
“Nate?” It was Avery, calling to him from the clearing that Nate and the others had been sharing with Fisher and his family for the last week while everyone mended.
He waved to her.
“Over here, Avery.”
He turned back to the iPad.
“Where was I? Oh yeah: stories. Ben believed that stories were the glue that held us together. He said they were as much a part of us as the blood in our veins, and that we needed them just as much. For him, getting somebody to tell their story was as natural as breathing. He had this crazy dream that one day, when the zombies were all gone, all the survivors would gather round and the stories they told would reshape the world into something better than it was. He thought humanity was something wonderful. He thought that we naturally went to the good, that we listened to the better angels of our nature. I . . . don’t know about that. I haven’t done a lot of listening to my better angels during my time on this globe of ours. But, like I said, Ben was a better man than me, and he said that stories were like a magic mirror that showed us what was best about ourselves. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. But I do know that his eyes used to shine when he talked about it. He really believed it. It wasn’t just words to him. Stories were his religion, and, for him, collecting them was the most holy thing a man could do. It makes me sick to my stomach to think that the world’s got to count on me for that now.”
He shook his head, coughed. Everything hurt.
Nate straightened and blinked away the pain.
This was for posterity. It had to be good.
He said, “I think about the two great men I’ve known in my life—Ben Richardson, who I just told you about; and Dr. Mark Kellogg, who used my blood to figure out a vaccine for the zombie virus—and I want to weep for all that we’ve lost. So much goodness, so many great minds . . . just gone.” He smiled bitterly, and shrugged. “The world is passing on to mediocre men who remember great men. We are only echoes of them, and not very good ones.”
“Nate,” Avery called to him. She was coming up behind him, breathing hard from the climb up the hill. “You almost ready? Dr. Fisher says we need to get going before the day gets too hot.”
“Yep,” he said. “Almost.”
He focused on the iPad again.
“Time to wrap this up. This is Ben’s book that I’m trying to finish here, so I might as well leave you with something Ben said to me a few days before he died. He said we all do the best we can, and that most of the time, that’s good enough to get the job done. And if it doesn’t do the trick, well, we still own it. We may have lost the old world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a new one. We just stagger on, zombie-like, one foot in front of the other, and trust we’ll get there eventually. And you know what? I think we will.”
He shrugged, then smiled.
“That’s it. That’s all the wisdom I got.”
He leaned forward and tapped the screen to stop recording.
Avery, wearing a sundress borrowed from Dr. Fisher’s wife, stopped a short way off and waited for him.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked.
He turned.
Richardson was standing on a small rise behind her, facing east, watching a golden haze looming in the trees down by the road.
“Ben . . .”
Avery followed his gaze, her brow wrinkled. “You okay?” she asked. “What are you doing up here?”
Nate stood, favoring his broken ankle as he slid the crutches under his arms. “Can you help me with the iPad?” he asked.
“Sure.” She tucked it under her arm and stood next to him. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. Thanks.”
“You didn’t tell me what you were doing up here.”
He gestured at the iPad with his chin. “Just finishing up something for Ben. Something I promised I’d do.”
She smiled uncertainly, as though she didn’t quite know what to say. “Are you ready to go? Dr. Fisher wants to go.”
He looked over at the next rise, but Ben was gone.
To Avery, he said, “Yeah, I’m all set.” And together, the two of them walked down to the camp in the late morning sun.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2012 Joe McKinney
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3053-8
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