But the Children Survived (44 page)

Gerald pushed the button for the hatchway, but it wouldn't open.  He banged on it and he lost his footing.  Gerald fell straight down and hit his head on the floor. 

Christie ran to him and found him unconscious.  She got on the PA system and asked for help.  Andrew and Simon got there first and were able to pick Gerald up and carry him up the stairs and into the Town Square.  They laid him on a bench and waited for him to come to. 

Calvin came up and told them what had happened to the animals.  This was the first time they’d heard of the danger outside.  Calvin also told them that Gerald had punched him and asked them all to keep the idiot away from him. 

When Gerald woke up, he again began to rant about Martha.  Andrew and Simon held him until he calmed down.  Christie brought him a Valium, which Andrew and Simon made him take.  When it was determined that Gerald would be okay, they left him sitting on the bench alone. 

Gerald wandered up to his lab and took out his cellphone.  He had a picture of Martha he had taken a few days before.  He downloaded it into his computer and made a copy of it for his desk.  He also used it as wallpaper for his computer's monitor. 

Gerald began to change.  He’d never been much of a social animal before, but now he never joined the others, even for meals.  He spent all his time in the lab, and one day Christie suggested he learn how to use the satellites to see if he could find any signs of life on the outside.  Gerald liked this suggestion.  It galvanized him into action and gave him purpose.

Within 24 hours of activating the satellite, he found a little infrared figure in Tarpon Springs.  He gathered the others together to decide how to go about saving this little person.  Andrew said he would try reprogramming the locks so that he, along with Simon, Pat, and George could go and pick up the child.  Wilmer had ordered hazmat suits with the intention of sending someone out to inspect the damage caused by a nuclear blast.  The team could now use them to get in a truck and find the little human who was apparently alone. 

Andrew worked on the locks until he was able to open them.  He left them open because Gerald hadn't been able to find anything living except this one little person.  Whatever was out there was deadly enough to drop a cow in seconds.  How this little person had survived was the big mystery, but the odds of someone finding the biosphere and breaking in were next to zero. 

He and the team would suit up and take a truck to Tarpon Springs with the coordinates Gerald gave them.  There they would hopefully find the little infrared figure alive and well.  Gerald was anxious to test this person so he told the team to handle the child carefully. 

When the team got outside, the only indication of what was to come was the pasture full of dead animals.  They saw Martha at the farthest corner of the pasture. They got into one of Wilmer's trucks and started down the dirt road that led to US Highway 19.  When they got to the access road, they could see cars parked on the highway. 

Some cars had driven right off the road.  Some were piled up into each other.  They were all filled with at least one dead body.  The team hadn’t expected this.  For some reason, they thought it was just some fluke that had killed the animals. 

As they drove up the access road to the entrance of US 19, they were hundreds of cars for miles each way.  They would have to drive on the grass to get past the cars if they were going to get to Tarpon Springs.  George suggested taking a back road to Tarpon.  There would be less traffic to navigate around.  So George guided them through the back roads until they came to Alternate 19 and headed north. 

There was traffic here too, but now there was more room to maneuver.  They were also close to where Gerald told them the little figure could be found.  Simon read the directions and Andrew followed them until they were on the right street.  They slowed down and patrolled the area with all eyes searching for the little person. 

There were cars in driveways with no bodies in them.  This meant the houses were full of them.  Suddenly Pat spotted a little girl sitting on the porch of a small, pink, stucco house.  She was a little Hispanic girl with long brown hair.  She was sitting there with her head in her lap.  When she heard the truck, she jumped up and ran towards it. 

Andrew stopped the truck and they all got out.  The little girl ran over and took Andrew's hand.

“Por favor, please, I need help!  Por favor!  Mis padres estan muertos.” 

She was crying and the tears were streaming down her face.  She was a pretty little thing and Andrew squatted down to look her in the eye. 

“English please, honey.  We don't speak Spanish.” 

“My parents, they are dead.  Please, help me.” 

She grabbed Andrew's hand as if to lead him into her house. 

“We can't go in there, sweetie.  We came to take you back with us.  We have a place for you to stay, with food and a nice little house just for you.”

“But my parents, please, how can I leave them like this?”

“Hey, Andrew, maybe we should, you know, we could dig a hole,” Pat was saying.

“I think we could do that for her,” George added. 

“Did any of you bring a shovel?”  Andrew asked.

They all stood shaking their heads. 

“We have a shed,” the little girl said very quietly. 

“What's your name, honey?”  Andrew asked her. 

“Maria Elena,” she answered.

“Well, Maria Elena, we’ll take care of your parents.  Where would you like them to go?” 

She looked very sad.  She knew they were going to put them in the ground.  This was an awesome decision she had to make, and she wanted to think about it.  Finally, after looking all around her, she settled for a spot at the end of the road where there was a park. 

She took Andrew's hand and led him down the road.  While they walked to the park, Simon, George, and Pat went to Maria Elena's shed and found a good shovel.  Pat went down the road with the shovel while Simon and George went inside to find Maria's parents. 

The smell in the house was strong.  The kid must have been living on the porch.  Her parents’ bodies were extremely decomposed. George and Simon took a blanket and rolled Maria Elena's mother onto it, causing her bones to rattle.  They picked up the ends and carried her out of the house and down the road.  They laid her beside the spot Maria Elena had picked out.  They then did the same for her father.

When Pat had finished one hole, George took up the shovel and started digging the other one.   Andrew and Simon laid her mama in the hole and they all kicked the dirt over the top of her.  When both of her parents were buried, Maria Elena said a little prayer in Spanish.  Then she said goodbye.

“Adios, papa y mama.”

Chapter 54

Every time Gerald found an infrared figure on the map, he would dispatch the team to pick them up.  In between, the team would move the cars off the highway and pile the bodies on the side of the road. 

They took the cars to parking lots where they could easily extract the gasoline from the cars' tanks.  They would also hunt for food and other supplies that the growing population of the biosphere required. 

Once Andrew found the stash of food underneath Wilmer's residence, the food forays discontinued and the only time the team left the biosphere was to find office supplies, pharmaceuticals, or clothing for the children. 

When Mark Collins moved into house number 200, Christie had told Gerald is was time to take daily checks of the air quality.  If the air was clear, then they would start to search for a place to live topside. 

Christie argued that if there were more children out there, they would need more room to house them.  Gerald in turn argued that they had everything they needed in the biosphere and that even if the air was good, they should continue to use the facilities. 

Gerald of course had alternative motives for keeping the air quality a secret.  From the day they brought in Maria Elena, he was determined to discover why she had survived when his Martha hadn't.

Wilmer and March Pharmaceuticals had invented a wonderful machine that was able to take a blood sample and determine what type of disease or bacteria plagued the owner of the blood.  The machine could also type the blood, and run a DNA panel. It proved too expensive to manufacture, so Wilmer took the only one produced and installed it in the biosphere.  When a child was brought in, a blood sample was taken and run through the machine.  So far, the children’s blood had been remarkably normal.

Gerald couldn’t understand what had kept these children alive, and it was driving him crazy.  The downward spiral that began with the death of Martha was deepening into a full-blown mania. 

Gerald was tired of Christie's interfering with his plans to extricate cells from the children’s bodies.  He was sick of her protecting them, as she did with that cretin Mark, an evil boy who’d put them all at risk by leaving the biosphere.  Christie had sealed her fate the moment she picked up Martha's picture from his lab and used it to free that miserable boy. 

Gerald had decided that Christie was expendable, as was Calvin, the other thorn in his side.  He was working on a plan to get rid of them and it was shaping up nicely.  He would use the Nembutal he had ordered to euthanize animals should the need arise. Since there were no animals left except those scrawny chickens, he planned to inject Christie and Calvin with the Nembutal and then suit up and drag their bodies outside.  They complained of being cooped up, anyway. 

It would be easy to explain away the sudden descent into madness that drove them above ground, only to be killed off by the poisonous air.  The only thing Gerald had to work out was getting them up the ladder and out the hatchway.

 Their bodies would be dead weight and almost impossible for Gerald to hoist up alone.  He would figure something out.  In the meantime, he decided to lure one of the kids to his lab to try and take a cell sample by cutting into their skin.  It would be no more than a scratch. 

Chapter 55

Joe and Dani left Atlanta in two buses and headed south on Interstate 75.  They’d found a school bus in Atlanta and divided the kids up evenly, with Julius traveling with Joe. 

I-75 was a heavily traveled highway.  When the poison struck the area, it was during the morning rush hour and some parts of the highway were loaded with cars.  Navigating the abandoned vehicles slowed them down considerably.  Dani and Joe became expert bus drivers in no time.

It took ten hours but they finally hit Tampa and Interstate 275.  They were close to home.  Joe felt an adrenaline rush as they crossed the bridge over Old Tampa Bay and saw signs for Largo.  His first instinct was to head towards his mother's mobile home. 

Dani was following him and she knew where he was headed.  The road leading to Mimi's park was full of cars.  Joe tried to navigate around them, but the shoulders here were too tight.  He stopped the bus and got out.  He walked around to Dani's bus and asked her to open the door. 

“I'm walking,” he said.  “I have to see if my mom...or if Mindy is there.”

Dani didn't say anything.  She wanted to go too, but she had to stay with the kids.  Julius was asleep and it was too much to ask of Jenny, so she just nodded.  Joe took off on foot in the direction of Mimi's park. 

He walked up the small road leading into the park.  He had to walk two blocks down to get to Mimi's home.  When he turned onto her street, he could see the skeletal remains of her neighbor still sitting on his porch across the street. 

Joe approached his mother's home slowly.  The place didn't look that different except for the leaves and other debris left there by the last hurricane.  He climbed the long metal ramp that led to her front door.  The door was open.  He could smell that there were no bodies in there. 

Joe walked from room to room.  The kitchen had bags full of empty cans.  There was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink.  He walked to the little room Mindy had stayed in.  Her book bag was there as well as the pictures of them she’d brought with her.  Her pillow was still here too.  But where was Mindy?

Next he went into his mother's room.  The bed had been slept in, but otherwise it looked the same.   Where was his mom, or Baby Girl?  There were no clues here as to what had happened to his family.

Joe went to the shed and looked inside.  He moved the dirt out of the way and checked the plastic containers.  Some of the food was missing, but the guns were still there.  After a quick look around, Joe headed back to Dani and the kids.

Dani was disappointed when she saw Joe walking towards them alone.  She knew he hadn’t found his mother or Mindy.  When he got to the bus, he told her that no one was there.  Dani breathed a sigh of relief.  They decided to head for St. Petersburg. 

They took Second Avenue to St. Petersburg.  Second Avenue was a side road.  Motorists avoided it because there were so many schools located there.  Kids were constantly being dropped off or picked up, so anyone trying to get to work on time would stay away from Second Avenue.  Joe had been right to come here.  The road had few abandoned cars.  School had been out when the poison struck. 

There was a turn in the road ahead, but Joe could see the roofs of two or three large buildings looming over the trees.  As they drew closer, the buildings appeared.  They resembled three large churches; brick façades covered with Ivy.  He also saw a big, wooden FOR SALE sign in front of a huge wrought iron fence.  He slowed the bus and came to a stop. 

On the front gate was a sign that read “St. Thomas School for Boys.”  The place looked like it had been closed for a long time.   Joe got out of the bus and walked over to the gate.  He looked back at Dani and motioned for her to come over.  She told the kids to stay put, got off the bus, and joined him.