Juggernaut Page 23

  Zach, what have I done?

  “What will I do there?”

  “Same thing the rest of the troops are doing. The surviving staff and guards at the CDC and the Juggernaut troops are establishing a settlement, a plague colony, if you’d like.” No, I wouldn’t like, you son of a bitch. Nico swallowed the urge to snarl. “We can’t bring them here to join the rest of the population, and just like us, they won’t have enough rations to get by indefinitely. So they’re learning how to provide for themselves.”

  Nico gulped. “And there’s . . . no chance I can ever return? Can I at least—I don’t know—write letters or something?”

  “Fuel cells are being conserved for only top-priority communication between us and the CDC,” McClosky answered with a shake of his head. “I’m sorry, Nicolás. You need to let it go.”

  “Easy for you to say.” He turned his back, unwilling to let McClosky see what the knowledge that he’d never see Zach again was doing to him. “Get out.”

  “Nicolás—”

  “I said get out!”

  The suited soldier with the gun had it tucked against his shoulder and aimed at Nico before he finished shouting, and Nico sneered at him.

  “Go ahead, asshole. Shoot me! Unless you blow my head off, I’m betting there’s a good chance I can rip the general’s mask off before I die.”

  McClosky held up a stilling hand. “That won’t be necessary.” He paused a long moment, as though he were taking Nico in, tempted to say something, but then his shoulders sank a fraction of an inch, and he turned away. “Take care, Nicolás. I’m glad you made it through alive.”

  Nico managed to hold back his tears until the general and the guard had left.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why they kept Zach in quarantine longer than the prescribed three months. He was fortunate that they hadn’t decided to kill him as a precautionary measure. Instead, he had to sit through hours of grilling by suited personnel demanding to know everything about his time with Nico, including details of their sex lives. How often did they have sex? Who was the penetrative partner when they had intercourse? Did Nico ejaculate in his presence? Did Nico ejaculate in his mouth? In his rectum? What did Nico do with the condoms he discarded? Was Zach sure he used one every time? Had Zach noticed any differences in his level of appetite? In his strength or endurance?

  Sometimes, when the aching solitude and longing for Nico were unbearable, and the utter mortification of having such sacred, cherished memories invaded so crudely was at its strongest, being shot seemed like it might have been preferable.

  He was being melodramatic, of course. Once Nico had been taken away, the isolation and fear had just become too crushing, and Zach had sunk into a melancholy unlike anything he’d ever known. Some days he felt too disheartened to even pray. It didn’t seem as though God were listening to him, anyway, if Zach had lost the one thing in this whole nightmare that had given him solace.

  Had they killed Nico? Or did they have him imprisoned somewhere even lonelier than the pen where Zach now lived by himself? Nico, who so desperately needed human contact and physical touch; he would be wretched living that way.

  He wanted to resent Nico for leaving him behind, for not fighting harder for the two of them to stay together, but he couldn’t. He understood all too well the fear that had driven Nico’s choice; he might have done the same if the situations were reversed.

  But knowing that didn’t help the loneliness.

  When Zach could find it within himself to pray, those prayers were full of more questions than he’d ever had before. He’d never been one to doubt God’s will or plan for him, but now all he had were doubts.

  Why give me someone to love, Lord, someone who loves me without reservation, if we can’t be together? Why put me in Nico’s path? Why show me how it feels to finally be complete only to take it all away?

  Surely Zach simply wasn’t seeing the greater purpose to it all.

  Or was he?

  Sitting alone and sleepless under the stars, Zach looked back toward the tent where Nico’s pack sat in a corner exactly where he had left it. Within one of the pockets, he knew, was the final ampule of the Alpha virus that Nico had offered him twice.

  Is that it, Lord? Am I meant to take this gift?

  If Nico were still alive, it would mean that Zach could be with him, wherever he was. In refusing to accept the Alpha strain, was Zach standing in the way of God’s plan for him? He was reminded of the tale of the Christian man in the flood, who kept rejecting all rescuers who came along because he knew God would save him, never seeing that the rescuers were God’s attempt to do just that until it was too late.

  Maybe God meant for him to become one of the so-called Juggernauts.

  The thought haunted him through the night, which was far too hot for sleeping. Finally, as the first gray hint of predawn light stretched across the sky, Zach left his blanket on the ground and went into the tent. The ampule was exactly where he’d last seen Nico tuck it away. It was lighter in Zach’s palm than it seemed like it should be. Shouldn’t an object of such magnitude be heavier?

  He could take it. He could be with Nico. Yes, he would be a plague-bringer, his blood deadly to anyone he might ever go near, but at least he could be with Nico.

  And he’d be powerful. Strong. Fast. Resilient. He wouldn’t have to be afraid of anyone or anything, ever again.

  Except . . . that didn’t feel like God whispering in his ear, urging him along the right path. It felt like the voice of temptation, guiding him in the direction his own unadulterated self-interest wanted him to go. He knew the peace and certainty that came when he was acting in accordance with God’s will. He’d felt it when he’d begun standing up to his father, when he’d helped Bryan, when he’d kept the reverend from killing Nico, when he’d left his family behind and tied his destiny to Nico’s. Each step of that journey, he’d felt God’s hand on his shoulder, offering comfort and reassurance that yes, this was the right thing to do.

  Looking at the ampule, his shoulder was cold in the absence of that encouraging weight. Only the selfish desire of his own lonely heart urged him to crack open the nasal spray and inhale.

  Clutching it in his fist, Zach stirred up the fire he used to boil his drinking water and threw the ampule on it, then got as far away from the fire as he could within the confines of the pen. He heard the pop of the ampule rupturing and prayed that it meant the heat was incinerating the virus within, rather than dispersing it on a cloud of smoke. Huddled in one corner of the pen, he waited for hours until the fire died down.

  Once the sun rose, Zach grabbed a shovel and dug a small, deep hole at the roots of one of the pine trees he’d planted. He shoveled the ashes from the fire into it, stamping the dirt firmly on top of them.

  His heart ached, but his shoulder felt warm again. Or maybe it was just the intense heat of the morning sun. Either way, when the guards arrived that afternoon and told him his quarantine was over and he would be allowed to join the growing community inside the Clean Zone, he left willingly, and he didn’t look back at the tightly packed dirt beneath the pines.

  “I think you should start leading prayer meetings,” Chantal said as Zach helped immobilize the man’s shifting bones so she could splint his leg. He’d been injured falling off a leaky roof he’d been trying to repair. The man was lucky the injury hadn’t been worse. “You can’t spend all day every day working here.”

  “Why not?” Zach snorted, keeping his eyes on the patient. “You do.”

  Aiding the few doctors and nurses who had made it to the Clean Zone so far had been a grim and eye-opening experience these last few months. There was talk of whether or not it would be possible for the Clean Zone to establish a viable gene pool with the current mortality rates. The coming winter didn’t look very promising, particularly for those still living in tents in the quarantine pens.

  The statistics of detainees and Clean Zone denizens who had succumbed to the summer heat were astronomical. Now, wi
th the advent of the autumn rains, the water supply had become tainted for some quarantine pens and homes inside the Clean Zone, or perhaps the people had simply failed to boil it sufficiently. And that wasn’t the only problem. Shocking numbers of people were dying from other causes, as well.

  The pyres didn’t just burn for pandemic victims these days.

  “Zach, did you hear me?”

  He shook himself and looked across the legs of the groaning man at Chantal. “No, actually. I tuned you out. I’m not a minister, and I’ve come to realize I don’t actually want to be one.”

  She blinked and frowned, but didn’t reply until the splint was secured and one of the other volunteer medical assistants was walking—well, hobbling—the man through the process of requisitioning a pair of scavenged crutches from the communal storehouse.

  “You don’t want to be a minister? Since when?” she demanded, sweeping back wisps of gray-streaked blonde hair that had escaped her bun. Chantal was one of two MDs who had made it to the Clean Zone so far. It wasn’t likely that there would be many more. Medical personnel on the whole had been especially obliterated by exposure to the pandemic. Chantal had only evaded infection because she had already been homebound when the pandemic started spreading, recovering from cancer treatments that had compromised her immune system. “I thought your dream had been to go to seminary once upon a time?”

  Zach shrugged, digging in the box of nutrition bars they kept in the break room of the “clinic.” It had actually once been a boarded-up secondhand clothing store that had gone out of business, but since most medical facilities were off-limits due to fear that they might be contaminated, the government had begun repurposing other buildings, particularly those that hadn’t been inhabited at the time of the pandemic.

  “I was a lot younger then,” he finally replied. “I thought I wanted to be like my father and have my own ministry, but these days I’m more inclined to heed Christ’s words about praying silently and worshipping in private.”

  Not that he was worshipping much these days. More like floundering desperately in the darkness, hoping against hope to accidentally brush against the grace that had once reassured and comforted him.

  “Zach . . .” Chantal gave him a worried look. “I’ve heard you with the patients. You’re respectful of the ones who don’t share your beliefs, but for the ones who do, they take a lot of comfort when you pray with them.”

  “And I’ll happily continue doing that.” The protein bar was dry in his mouth, but Zach didn’t feel like choking down flat, boiled water at the moment. “Working here with you is very rewarding for me, especially when I can give people in need spiritual support, as well. But that’s all I want.”

  Chantal sighed. “Look, I’m just saying, it’s not only people’s bodies that need healing right now. Everyone is scared and lost. Everyone is grieving. For friends and family and spouses and children. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to offer them something to help heal their souls.”

  “That may be, but I’m not sure it would be good for my soul.” He wiped the crumbs from his hands and discarded the wrapper. “My only example of how to run a ministry involved a great deal of hypocrisy and dogmatic bludgeoning. I don’t ever want to get to a place where I think my voice is God’s. Just let me help you patch people up. Their souls will find their way to God on their own.”

  A crash in the outer room of the clinic startled both of them before Chantal could come up with another argument. Three rain-soaked men, one of whom was a uniformed member of the Clean Zone security force, came charging in; the other two carried a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, or perhaps an undernourished and underdeveloped eighteen.

  “We’ve got another one,” the soldier—whose face Zach recognized, though he couldn’t place a name to it—gasped as the civilians laid the boy carefully on the examination table. He was nude and covered in bruises, just like the twenty-year-old man who had been found behind a derelict house last month. This boy was shivering, though from shock or the rain, Nico couldn’t be certain.

  “Where did you find him?” Chantal demanded, leaping into action. Zach wrapped the boy in blankets as she checked his pulse and blood pressure, shone a light at his pupils, and listened to his heart and lungs.

  “Another empty property. Complete other side of the Clean Zone from the last one,” the soldier replied. His eyes kept skating away from the boy on the table, as if he were unwilling to really see the mess someone had made of him. Both the boy’s eyes were swollen shut, his lips puffy and split. From the swelling of his face, it looked like one of his cheekbones might have been fractured, and the whimpers and moans he made whenever they tried to move him—even while unconscious—weren’t promising.

  “He’s, um, bleeding too.” One of the civilians who had helped transport the boy gestured to the pinkish stains on his wet shirt. “Not just his face, if you know what I mean.”

  Zach swallowed as Chantal grabbed one of their carefully rationed examination gloves. “Help me get his legs up, okay, Zach?”

  He nodded, feeling ill, but he did as she asked. Like the soldier, he couldn’t look at the boy. He couldn’t see that ruined face while helping Chantal check for the sort of trauma she was checking for.

  Already, a small but spreading crimson stain was coloring the sheet of the examination table beneath the boy. Zach saw it as he helped bend the boy’s legs and spread them so that Chantal could examine him.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. “This much blood is more than just anal trauma. He’s bleeding internally. And there’s no trace of semen here. My guess is he was raped with a foreign object, with enough force to perforate his colon.” She looked up at Zach with bleak eyes, then turned to the civilians who had brought the boy in. “Does anyone know his name? Does he have any people? Family, or anyone he traveled with to get to the Clean Zone?”

  They all shook their heads, looking sickened.

  Chantal turned to the guard. “I’m going to need you to go to the population registrar and see if you can track down who he is and if he has anyone who’ll want to say good-bye to him. And I want you to do it fast. Even if I had the surgical skills to repair the damage to his colon, he’s going to die of peritonitis, and it’s going to be painful. You’ve got maybe a couple hours, and then I’ll euthanize him. Go now. Every minute we waste, he’s suffering.”

  Once the soldier had gone, Chantal mustered a reassuring smile for the civilians and thanked them for helping transport the boy. She told them to go back to the work they’d been doing, or to go hug their own people, and they took their leave as if they couldn’t wait to get out the door, abandoning Chantal and Zach to sit a deathwatch.

  “You’d think they would have stayed to at least be here for the kid, in case no one else shows up,” Zach muttered, watching their departing backs.

  Chantal shook her head, wiping a tear from her face as she caressed the boy’s muddy hair with her other hand. “I don’t blame them. No one wants to be close to something this horrific. God, Zach, what have we come to? As if enough people weren’t dying, we have someone here in the Clean Zone doing this to the survivors?”

  “You think it’s the same person who raped that man last month?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. But the fact that the only two really violent rapes we’ve had so far with damage to this extent have both been committed against men who were of a similar age suggests the possibility of a connection.”

  “The other man survived,” Zach pointed out, his stomach twisting as he took note of the crescent-shaped bite marks all over the boy’s chest, shoulders, and neck. “It wasn’t this bad.”

  “Which means, if it’s the same person, he’s becoming more aggressive,” she said bleakly.

  The soldier never returned. Which wasn’t surprising, unfortunately. He had seemed like a decent guy, but the population registrar was, quite frankly, a sanctimonious asshole who resented being asked to do any work unless his superior officers commanded him to do i
t. And whoever the guard’s CO was, he might have decided there were more pressing duties than running an errand of mercy for Chantal.

  So she and Zach were still alone with the victim when she opened her chest of medical supplies and withdrew a 50 cc syringe. Zach took the boy’s hand in his and began murmuring a prayer.

  “Lord, be with this young man, to help ease his suffering and find his way into Your eternal grace. Comfort any survivors he may leave behind who love him, and will miss him, and will be bereft of the joy he no doubt brought into their lives. Protect the rest of us from becoming the next victim, dear Lord, and help us find whoever is guilty of this heinous deed and mete justice upon them for the sake of this boy and any of Your other children he may have already harmed. In Jesus’s name, Amen.”

  She waited for Zach to finish and echoed his “Amen” before she slid the needle into the boy’s carotid artery just beneath his ear. She depressed the plunger slowly, injecting a bolus of air. Zach startled when the boy convulsed, his damaged face contorting and twitching, and the hand Zach held spasmed painfully around his own.

  It wasn’t an immediate death. He and Chantal somberly waited out the stroke until, deprived of blood to his brain, the boy died.

  Chantal covered him with a sheet and wiped her eyes. “Zach, will you go find someone on patrol to come collect the remains to take to the crematorium, please? Then you can go ahead and call it a night. I’ll finish up here. I think I’d like to be alone awhile.”

  “Sure,” Zach whispered, and did as she asked. Walking through the eerily empty streets toward the reclaimed house he’d been assigned to, Zach found he envied Chantal her tears. She hated them, grumbling bitterly that she’d lost all professional detachment with the knowledge of how precious few people had survived the pandemic. Zach’s own eyes were hot and dry. The grief over that young man’s senseless and violent death was pent up in his chest like magma pooling beneath a volcano.