“What’s your name?” Amy suddenly blurted; it had just sunk in that she was safe, at least for the moment, and in the company of another real human being.
“My real name’s Joseph Hunter, but I prefer Joe.” He stood up from the bunk, and from one of the boxes that littered the room, he produced a bottle of water. “I’m sorry, Amy. I bet you’re awfully hungry and tired from the look of you. Why don’t you help yourself to some food and get some sleep. I’ll keep watch outside. I have some things to tend to anyway. We can talk later, okay?”
He held out the water and Amy accepted it, drank most of it in a single gulp. “Thank you, Joe.”
He nodded and shut the huge door on his way out.
Amy ate a meal of Vienna sausages, Pringles and crackers, then stretched out on the bunk. A smile lingered on her lips even as she slept.
As the days passed, Joe told her the story of the town of Bloomington. Like everywhere else, it had been plunged into darkness and chaos the night the wave struck the earth. Joe and his pop made their way to the church that night with the other survivors, but the holy place hadn’t offered them any protection. The crazies outside attacked it time and time again, whittling down its defenders and their stockpile of ammunition. Then people inside began to change, and the pastor ordered that they be shot.
Finally Joe and his pop got of the church while they still could and made it here to their place of business. As far as they knew, by that time the entire town was crazy except for them. He and his pop had taken shelter here in this backroom, listening to the changed ones pounding on the metal door and howling for their blood. Eventually the crazies must have realized they couldn’t get inside, so they left the station. After that, there had been a few close calls, a few firefights with the mindless kind that couldn’t shoot back, a few narrow escapes when they ventured into town for things that weren’t kept on hand. But they managed, Joe informed her.
When Amy asked where his pop was now, Joe lowered his face into his hands and quietly told her that the old man had changed. “I got him with his own damn shotgun,” Joe told her. “Buried him out behind the station.” It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, and it troubled him still.
Joe imagined before he met Amy that he, too, would go insane, if not from the wave’s effects then from just the pain of being alone. He’d been extremely happy to find Amy on his doorstep. He believed she saved his life by showing up when she did.
She was grateful for him too, and she was happy in this place. In a matter of days, she had invited Joe to share the bunk with her instead of making him sleep on the floor. They needed each other desperately to feel alive, to feel hopeful when they looked in each other’s eyes. Joe wrapped his arms around her after they made love at night, made her feel safe and allowed her to think that someday things would be okay again.
What Joe had said about most of the creatures leaving town had proved true as well. As long as they were careful, he and Amy could venture almost anywhere they wanted, for supplies or to just get some fresh air and stretch their legs for a while. Well armed as they were, they never encountered more crazies than the two of them could handle. All they needed was each other, and together they could rebuild a little piece of the world they had lost to the wave.
16
The conversation with the Freedom had been cut short when its orbit had taken it out of range, but the survivors of Def Con had learned a lot during the brief communication. It wasn’t the real Freedom Station they were speaking to, at least not the one known to the public. The station identified itself as the Freedom II, a military-oriented prototype based on the original Freedom’s design; it had still been under construction when the wave hit. Hank, the astronaut with whom they spoke, explained that the original Freedom had been destroyed by the energy blast and that only the experimental shielding of the Freedom II had kept the station functional enough to save the crew and allow them the necessary time to make repairs. Still, only Hank and one other member of the eight-man crew were left alive, and they wouldn’t last long: they were quickly running out of supplies and were down to one-quarter power. Hank and Toni arranged a time to talk again when the station’s orbit brought it back into range, and they traded downloads of information regarding what they knew of the post-wave world.
Sheena was beside herself. Now she could finally get the data she needed firsthand to see whether the wave’s worst damage was over with. Nathanial, Geoff, Wade and Troy were howling for a celebration. Only Ian seemed reserved.
“It’s a lie,” he informed the crowd gathered in the control room. “There is no Freedom II.” His words cut their excitement like a knife.
“How could you possibly know that?” Sheena asked as Nathanial clinched his fists and almost charged the CIA man.
“Lies and cover-ups used to be how I made a living, my dear, or have you forgotten? I know more truth about what America has and hasn’t done in the last five years than all of you put together. Trust me. There is no Freedom II, nor will there ever be.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, Ian, if I don’t take the word of a self-professed liar over what my own ears just heard,” Geoff remarked.
“I’m inclined to agree with Geoff,” Nathanial said. “If Hank isn’t on the Freedom II, where is he? Who is he? It just doesn’t make sense for it not to be true.”
Ian sighed as if confronting a group of school children. “He’s one of them, the infected.”
“Oh, now that’s just bullshit!” Troy roared. “Those creatures up there can’t tell their asses from a hole in the ground. Have you ever seen one, just one of them, try to climb the fence? They could, you know, if they could think to do it.”
Ian sighed again. “Before we lost D.C., I received a packet of downloaded data on the infected from a doctor named Buchanan. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was the chief science advisor to the president. His reports in the packet disputed his earlier conclusions about the radiation and its effects. Yes, it turns some people into monsters, the majority actually, while some like us, for whatever reason, remain sane. Buchanan believed the possibility of a third group to emerge, a thinking, reasoning breed of those snarling killers up there…” He pointed at the ceiling.
“Fuck off, Ian,” Wade said. “You never told us this before.”
Ian ignored the mechanic and added, “You all heard what you wanted to hear just now, not what you actually did. Hope can be a powerful weapon if wielded correctly.”
“Get out of here, Ian,” Sheena ordered. “Go back to your damn coffin in the armory!”
Ian nodded and walked toward the control room’s exit. “Just promise me one thing,” he said. “Do not give them our location until you’ve had more time to study the transmission and its origins.”
“You’re too late on that one, Ian,” Toni called after him as he disappeared around the corner. “I already did.”
After a moment of silence, Jeremy said, “What if he’s right?” Suddenly he felt everyone’s eyes on him. “No, I mean it. He’s damn weird, I’ll give you that, but he was CIA. Toni, can’t we trace the source of the transmission? Find out where it came from?”
“Yeah,” she answered quietly. “We can, but it’ll take a lot of work.”
“It would go a lot faster if we had your help, Nathanial.” Jeremy glanced at the computer tech.
Nathanial shrugged. “Sure. Okay.”
“In the meantime, I think all the rest of us have stuff to be working on, right?” Geoff said. “Dr. Leigh, why don’t you continue your study of the wave; the rest of you, suit up. We’re going up top. There are about forty more of those things at the fence again and I, for one, want them gone.”