“I’m not going to just let my men die.”
“Then work with me and let’s help prevent
that from happening,” I said as we stood outside of the entrance to
Richard’s room. “I have resources that can help you here.”
“What the hell do you have that I could
possibly need?”
“The Electorate hasn’t trusted you for years,
Jerald. You must’ve known that. Do you really think they would’ve
entrusted the Dawn program to you without a failsafe or two in
place? Like the anti-air missiles, for instance, or the purge
system here.”
“They didn’t know that General Covington
still had access to their system,” said Jerald, his chest puffed
with assurance. “We disabled the purge system a long time ago, if
that’s what you’re worried about.”
The Electorate had equipped this facility
with a system that could purge all floors except for where the
Dawns lived. In the event that an outbreak occurred, the majority
of the hidden base was to be burned, and a team selected by The
Electorate would be sent out to take over the management of the
Dawn program, hopefully preventing any lapse. Richard was aware of
these precautionary measures, and understood that they would be
used to wipe out the base upon The Electorate’s realization that a
rebellion was in the works. He promptly had the system shut
down.
“I’m not talking about the purge, I’m talking
about a way to help you find Levon’s friends, these High Rollers I
believe they call themselves.”
He crossed his arms, but I had his
attention.
“I’m talking about drones, stationed not far
from here, ready to scour the land in search of your hidden
friends.”
He squinted as he pondered my offer. “Drones?
Why would The Electorate have drones out here?”
“They were supposed to ship them here after I
came for my transfer. When we discovered that two Dawns had managed
to escape, we realized how porous the security here had become. The
drones are equipped to search for the Dawns, but we could still use
their cameras to look for other signs of life out there.”
“Why didn’t anyone from The Electorate offer
that to us already?” asked Jerald, helping me to see how he didn’t
fathom the situation in the least.
I looked at him quizzically, wondering if he
was simply feigning ignorance. “Because they want as many of you
dead as possible, Jerald. They don’t want you to create a new
vaccine.”
He must’ve felt as helpless as a cow at an
abattoir. “But…” He stammered as he reconsidered his position in
the game being played around him. “They’re not immune. Right? The
strain mutated. They’re hoping we can find a cure. That would be
good for everyone.”
“Would it?” I enjoyed prompting the oaf to
think for himself. Watching his eyes squint as those rusty wheels
ground away in that thick skull was the only entertainment I got in
this drab prison-life I’d been subjected to.
“Yeah, of course it would.”
“Are you sure?”
“Goddamn it! If you’ve got something to say,
then fucking say it. Stop playing games with me.”
“The Noah Initiative had several goals, but
none as important as cleaning the slate,” I said as I walked slowly
down the hall. He followed like the docile pet he’d always been.
Richard had tamed him and sent him out to nip at his foes, but a
dog obeys the one tugging the leash. “They wanted to erase any
knowledge about how the original apocalypse began. There was no
greater threat to our future than how the innocent would react when
they learned the truth about the plague. We had to erase that
knowledge, and The Electorate is still planning to do it, whatever
the cost.”
“I knew it,” said Jerald, as proud as a man
that had figured something out on his own, though he certainly
hadn’t done anything of the sort. “They’re just waiting us out,
hoping we all die down here. Right? But what about their precious
Dawns? Aren’t they worried about them?”
“Not as long as Richard has his secret hidden
down here with us.”
Jerald slowed his pace, and I turned to face
him before explaining, “The Electorate already knows about the Dawn
he’s hiding here.”
“You told them?” he asked in anger.
“Not me,” I said with a sharp laugh. “I don’t
have contact with them except when I’m with you. No, Jerald,
Richard’s told them everything.”
Richard was desperate to free himself of the
ravaged body he was stuck in. When Charles Reagan burned down the
Nederland facility, he nearly murdered his old friend in the
process, and Richard was closer to one of the walking dead outside
than he was a human anymore, kept alive by his machines and daily
purifications to accommodate his failing body.
After fleeing the Nederland facility, Richard
searched The Electorate’s database for the genetic code of one of
our male Dawns. That was how he stumbled upon the information about
Ben Watanabe, and he used that boy’s code to create a new Dawn in
the hope that immunity triggers would be replicated. That Dawn, now
nearing adulthood, was being stowed away somewhere inside of this
building.
Richard had hoped to perform a transfer at
the facility where I’d been captured. Unfortunately, the bomb that
Levon had set off inside had destroyed the equipment, making it
impossible for Richard to achieve a transfer without turning for
help to The Electorate. Any upper hand that Jerald thought he had
here was being undermined by his superior’s desperate hope to
survive. All of the grand posturing Richard Covington had exhibited
when I first arrived had melted away as soon as the realization of
his impending demise sunk in.
Jerald’s expression soured and his ears
burned red. For a second, I actually feared him. He exploded in
sudden rage, and yelled a curse as he turned and punched the wall,
leaving a crack in the stone and blood on his knuckle. I was so
startled that I yelped and set my fingers over my lips before
quickly composing myself. The worst way to deal with a person’s
temper is to show weakness in the face of it.
“Stop that,” I commanded and made certain my
voice didn’t waver. I was reminded of my first meeting with Levon
at the facility, when I’d annoyed him enough to cause the brute to
start firing his pistol around. I wasn’t as used to dealing with
men like these as I needed to be, and I had to remember how easy it
could be to push them past their breaking points; as well as what
danger there was in doing it. “Calm down.”
“So you’re all just working together to…” He
was yelling and I had to silence him.
“Calm down,” I said as I reached out to grab
his arm forcefully. I gripped his thick wrist like a mother might
secure her rowdy child. “If you want to win this, then get a
grip.”
“Win?” he asked with his anger still
apparent. “I’m just trying to fucking survive at this point.”
“That’s what winning means in this game.” I
loosened my grip. “And the more players you have on your side, the
more likely you are to make it out alive. So let’s be friends,
Jerald. Okay? I might be the only friend you’ve got anymore.”
“With friends like these,” he said before
chuckling and shaking his head as if in exhaustion. “I’m not
letting my men and their families die. Sorry. I’m not going to do
it.”
“Then work with me. I can help you save
them.”
“How?” he asked, and I sensed the desperation
in his voice. I knew that I had him.
“We can use the drones to scout the area.
Let’s find Levon’s friends and get them here. We need the child,
but we’ll take what we can get. Any of them might’ve been
influenced by exposure to Reagan. Let’s get them here, and then
we’ll have a bargaining chip in our favor, which is something we’re
sorely lacking. The Electorate wants to erase the history about the
plague, but they’re not fool enough to send future generations
blindly into a world where the disease is still running rampant,
with no protection at all.”
“But what about the Dawns?” asked Jerald.
“Aren’t they worried about them?”
“Some of them are, but not everyone. You
haven’t been privy to the battles going on within The Electorate.
You’ll have to trust me when I tell you that there are plenty of
them that would happily wipe away the Dawn program for good and
erase the eugenic legacy we built. I can’t let that happen. That’s
how I define winning, Jerald. The same way that you care for your
men, that’s how I care for the Dawns. I want to make sure they live
through this, and I’m not confident anymore that Richard can carry
us through to the end anymore.”
“Fucking politics,” said Jerald. “I thought
we buried that shit.”
“That’ll never happen. Politics is a side
effect of society, and anarchy’s a fool’s game.” I could see the
weariness in his expression, and I didn’t want to lose him.
“Jerald, help me help you. I can’t do this alone.”
“What exactly do you need from me?” He still
sounded tired and perturbed, and I knew that he hadn’t yet given in
to working with me. Still, I had to sway him.
“I need access to Richard’s tablet, or the
computer that its information is transferred to. And I need you to
return my tablet and bracelet.” They’d taken both from me when I
arrived. My tablet had been damaged at the transfer facility, but
not destroyed. They were sturdy machines, and Jerald had used mine
to spy on the activity of The Electorate from the time that he’d
captured me until Audrey Winchell was murdered. After that, The
Electorate had ceased sending data to my computer.
“No,” he said too quickly for my comfort. “It
won’t do you any good anyways, everything’s encrypted now.”
“But my tablet can get past the encryption,
Jerald. And with the information that Richard had access to, which
I’m certain you’ve copied somewhere in your system, we could get
into The Electorate’s system again. Then we could deploy the
drones, and…” I purposefully became lost for words, allowing him to
suspect that we’d have more options than I dared share yet.
“Jerald, we could win. I could save the Dawn program and you could
save your men.” I sensed his uncertainty. “Let me prove myself to
you, Jerald. Get me my tablet and access to the system, and you can
monitor everything I do. You can keep my tablet except when we’re
together, to make sure I’m not lying to you or trying to go behind
your back.”
I thought my former jabs at him might’ve made
it impossible for us to get along now. He sulked, with a frown that
seemed to fit his face better than a smile ever could, but then
nodded and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
It didn’t take long for Jerald to do as I’d
asked. He brought me my tablet and the bracelet I needed to wear in
order to activate the device. He allowed me to access the
information that Richard had denied, but stood over my shoulder and
monitored everything I did. We activated the drones and sent them
out along a stretch of road that Jerald said was formerly used as a
trade route, and had been the main thoroughfare between the
settlements that had been recently extinguished. He thought this
would be a good place to start looking for Levon’s missing
friends.
The drones were designed to locate escaped
Dawns, and would be able to track them down with ease, but
unfortunately they were incapable of distinguishing other humans
from zombies, meaning that nearly every alert we received ended up
being false. We spent a long time scanning pictures of zombie
hordes that the drones had taken while flying above the devastated
landscape. To his credit, Jerald didn’t get disillusioned. He was
conscious of how useful the drones could prove for him as opposed
to the satellite photos he’d been using until now.
“Our system’s set up to only allow data
transfer at specific times,” said Jerald as he sat beside me and
looked at another photo that a drone had sent us of a drove of
zombies that were moving through a shattered town. “The time
varied, but it was normally between dusk and dawn. Even when we got
confirmation of the Rollers’ whereabouts they were usually on the
move.”
“Why only at night?” I asked, although I was
hardly curious. I was just making small talk with him to pass the
time. I already knew about the restrictions placed on outgoing
messages here. That was how I was managing to get sporadic
communication with The Electorate without Richard or Jerald
knowing.
“Used to be just once a week, back in the
early days,” he said. “It was because some of the survivors were
tooling around with devices that searched for Wi-Fi signals. All
they needed was a cell phone and a battery. It was like we were a
gold coin on a beach and they were old men with metal
detectors.”
I chuckled at the analogy. “A friend of mine
used to do that, back before the plague,” I said as I ruminated on
easier times. “He thought he’d get rich out there, waving that
machine back and forth as families lounged on the beach. All he
ever found was loose change that’d slipped out of someone’s
shorts.”
Jerald grunted, and I wasn’t sure if it was a
pleasant response or a tepid one. He could be a difficult man to
read. He wore a scowl as comfortably as most people might wear a
hat.
“What’s that,” said Jerald as he pointed down
at one of the ten pictures that had scrolled up onto the screen of
my tablet. “The structure there.”
I enlarged the photo he was referring to. It
was a decrepit water tower on the outskirts of a small town. The
paint had long since chipped away, leaving it looking like a metal
zeppelin left floating atop its hill, supported by a skeletal frame
that looked too rusty to carry the weight. A catwalk ringed the
fattest portion of the globe, and a person stood leaning against
it, staring ruefully down at the silent and dead town below.
“Well I’ll be,” I said as I inspected the
speck of a human captured in the photo. “Doubt a dead man climbed
up there to get a look at the town.”