“Mama, I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”
“Cass,” Larry said. “Cass, he has to eat. It’s really important. Here.” He rummaged in a cooler between the seats. “Have him drink this protein shake.”
“That’s not for kids!”
Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”
“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”
Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.
He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it down.
“His hands are strong! That’s amazing; just yesterday he would never have been able to pick up that can!”
“I know,” Larry said. “It’s a miracle, a God-blessed miracle. I’m so sorry about Zeke. But this stuff…it’s gonna fix Ricky and it’s gonna fix Beulah and a lot more people in the world. We’ve got this place in the hills, you’ll see it soon…” He went on explaining, bringing her up to date on what had happened.
She listened with half an ear and half her mind, lost in the wonder of her son’s recovery.
-19-
Elise and Daniel met them hand in hand at the cavern with all the vehicles, what they called the Motor Pool. Daniel knew there was something seriously wrong when he saw the expressions on their faces as the two men in the Cherokee got out.
“Weren’t you guys supposed to take off?” Daniel saw the Land Rover but didn’t see Zeke. By the time he had looked around, the others had opened the back of the SUV and hefted his body onto the cold cavern floor.
Daniel stared at it in shock. At them. “How?” Elise clutched his hand, her eyes pouring tears.
“Unlucky shot. They had four guys on the house. We only spotted two. The other two must have been a reaction force. They opened fire on us and we took them out. But Zeke…” Skull waved vaguely, a helpless thing. More emotion showed on his face then, than Daniel had ever seen before: grief, anger, bitterness.
Daniel wanted to make some kind of gesture to Skull. If it had been Larry, he might have hugged him. He settled for putting a hand on the bald man’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing him back.”
Skull shrugged Daniel’s hand off, turning away. Daniel could smell his barely-buried rage. Maybe that was a good thing; maybe rage meant he wasn’t sociopathic, just…angry.
They took Zeke’s body and put it on ice in the bunker’s morgue. The scientists wanted to make sure they had the cadaver to study later. That was what Zeke would have wanted, they claimed. Daniel got the family settled into quarters. Elise stayed with them, and even though they’d only just met, the two women clung to each other in sisterly comfort. The children seemed to accept her naturally as a second mother, or at least an older sister. Eventually they all slept.
Daniel’s sleep was troubled with images of death and horror, of bodies lying asleep and he couldn’t wake them. He woke in the middle of the night, thinking, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way!
But he knew everyone died eventually.
The next morning brought some relief. When Daniel got to breakfast he found Ricky shoveling canned ham and eggs into his mouth, with Cassie and Millie and Elise at the table with him, eating more sedately. He got a plate of breakfast and sat down with them. He spoke to the boy. “How you doing, sport? You remember me?”
Ricky shook his head.
“That’s all right, it was five years back or so.” He looked at Cassandra. “Sorry to be such a stranger. And I’m sorry to have brought this on you and your family. If I’d have known…”
“None of us can know, DJ. We’re in God’s hands.”
That made Elise angry, though not as angry as she might have been before the Plague. “How can you believe that? With all this crap going on, how can you believe God cares?”
Cassandra turned to the other woman. “Maybe because I think things would be a lot worse if He didn’t.”
“Then why doesn’t he clean the world up? Why just keep things not too bad and not too good?”
“Maybe He expects us to do our part. Make our own mistakes. Take responsibility. Maybe He doesn’t want to be our nanny. And maybe He works through people – people who make things like the Eden Plague.”
Daniel held up a placating hand. “Please, let’s not have my two favorite women in the world fighting.”
“We’re not fighting, we’re arguing.” Elise looked petulant, irritated.
“Either way. We’re all friends here, and we’re under a lot of stress.”
Cassandra reached across the table to put her hand on Elise’s arm with earnest, tear-filled eyes. “My heart aches for Zeke, but he died doing what he wanted to. Protecting people. Saving people. Saving us. He passed this Eden thing on to Ricky and saved his life. We treated Beulah and she recognized me this morning! We have to hold on to the good he did. And this Eden Plague is so amazing! This whole thing. It will change the world. He was willing to die for that.”
Daniel said, “Yeah. But will it change the world for the better? It could be a wrecking ball.” He exchanged glances with Elise. Then Spooky caught his eye from across the room.
“Excuse me a minute.” Daniel walked over to the Vietnamese man.
Spooky said, “We go now. Skull and me. Better that way. You want to reach me, you talk to Van Vinh.”
“What about…what about Skull?”
“I don’t know. He love Zeke. He very angry. Maybe he stir up the hornets. What can we do? No man can live in another’s heart.”
Daniel licked his lips. “You still have some Eden Plague in that other syringe?”
“Yes.”
Daniel stared at him, willing him to understand.
Spooky’s eyes widened fractionally. He nodded, slowly. “Only if I must.”
“It’s better than killing him. At least then he has a chance to change. Maybe the Eden Plague will help him heal some of his pain.”
“But you say with the Psycho, they maybe turn very evil.”
“That’s just a guess. We have no evidence or proof of how any of this works. I just know we have to give him a chance. What you do is on your own conscience.”
He looked at Daniel’s face for a few more seconds, searching. For what, Daniel didn’t know; certainty perhaps, but he wouldn’t find it. Spooky swallowed, then bowed, formally. “Goodbye, Daniel Markis. I think you are the Colonel Zeke now.”
Daniel bowed to him in return, shaken. Master Sergeants don’t become Colonels overnight. He guessed now he had no choice. He sure didn’t feel ready. Pushing the thought aside he watched Spooky walk down toward the motor pool.
Good luck, Spooky.
***
A week of being buried alive here in Sosthenes made Daniel realize the idea about quarantining himself wasn’t going to work. Physically he was not limited; it was the oppression of the mountain above him, the damp cold air anywhere not heated by machinery, and the lack of open spaces that was getting to him.
He drove himself hard, to keep the oppression and the black thoughts of Zeke’s fate away. He spent as much time with Elise as he could spare, and with Millie and Cassie and Ricky, trying to make up for the Zeke-shaped hole in their lives.
Cassie bore up well, and she quickly established herself as the master of their intel field work, what is called tradecraft by those in the business. She spent long hours with Vinh, who ate up the knowledge and reveled in his job as gopher, supply specialist and intelligence operative. She soon had him taking trucks to various towns and cities, never the same place twice, selling currency and coins to private collectors and shops and jewelers, buying loads of electronics, spare parts, cabling, fresh food, everything that the bunker needed.