Juggernaut Read online

  I’d understand if you did. You are as the Lord made you, Zach’s voice whispered to him in the dark dormitory when other members of Sierra Company fumbled around on their narrow bunks around him. I’ve known who and what you are all along, and what you need.

  They weren’t words Zach had ever spoken to him; they’d never discussed this possibility. But if Nico did indulge, he had no doubt Zach would understand and forgive. Maybe he wouldn’t even consider it a betrayal, since they had no realistic hope of ever seeing each other again. The sanest thing to do would be to move on and try to find happiness of another sort, but to Nico it felt like a betrayal. He had no idea what inside him had changed, to make the unapologetic whore into a monogamist dedicated to a man he could never hope to be with, but there it was.

  Just over a year ago, Nico could have seen Zach every day, even with half the country separating them. They could have indulged in hours-long vid calls, talked dirty to each other until they both came all over their hands, and then signed off with an I love you and a smile. It wouldn’t have been the touch he craved, but it would have been something.

  Now he couldn’t even send a letter. He’d managed to requisition a notebook and pencil—which had earned him a narrow-eyed look from the supply officer—to try releasing some of his loneliness and need for Zach by journaling. It felt woefully inadequate, the sentiments trite and clumsy. Zach had become the only thing that made surviving in this merciless new world worthwhile for Nico.

  The Jugs had lost everything, even their freedom, but they still had one another, and the bonds of love and friendship, and even the lust they were forging together. But Nico could never really share in that. Not when his heart demanded he stay true to Zach, and when his conscience insisted that he was part of the chain of events that had ruined the Jugs’ lives, taken away their families, their freedom, and their hope.

  Swallowing back another wave of misery, he pulled the pillow over his head to block out the sounds around him.

  People kept telling Zach that just over a century ago, Colorado Springs had been known for its dry and relatively mild winters. It didn’t seem possible after months of being lashed by violent monsoons. Purportedly, late summer had once been monsoon season, but the weather patterns had shifted, the summers becoming dryer and more scorching, and the winters colder and wetter. And longer. Much longer.

  Now, the rain was half-frozen, pelting the windows of the clinic as if it would batter the place down, while he and Chantal hunkered inside, each in several layers of clothing, trying to stay warm with no heat in the building.

  A violent rapping at the door startled them both in the gloomy silence.

  “Shit. Is it that time again?” Chantal groaned.

  “I’ll get our suits.” Zach slid off his stool and made his way to the back storage room, where they kept the hermetic suits they wore when making what the military police euphemistically referred to as “wellness visits” to the quarantine pens. The quarantine population had grown large enough that the medics weren’t able to handle the load, so he and Chantal had been given suits and pressed into service. Fortunately, there had been very few cases of Bane requiring victims to be euthanized. There had, however, been an excess of cases of infected wounds, broken bones, tainted food, and contaminated water. Not to mention pneumonia, frostbite, and other exposure-related conditions whenever the temperatures dropped below freezing. Pregnant people were miscarrying courtesy of the inadequate diet or dealing with childbirth complications, including postpartum bacterial infections.

  And suicide. “The Second Pandemic,” as it was being called. No one could forget the suicide attempts. Or the fact that it was rumored to be another reason there were no longer enough military medics to handle the workload.

  At the moment, it was only by virtue of the increase in new arrivals that the population of the Clean Zone was growing. The death rate still far outpaced the birthrate.

  The tension in the quarantine camps was palpable, even through the miserable, icy downpour. The tents leaked, and their occupants coughed. The attitudes ranged from sullen to downright confrontational.

  “When are we getting out of here, huh?” one woman demanded of their military escort while Chantal examined a wheezing child. “You said we’d be here three months, and it’s been over four. Yeah, I’ve been keeping track. I can fucking count!”

  “You’ll be processed into the Clean Zone once we’ve found living quarters for you,” the guard said. His hooded head didn’t dip; he wasn’t looking at her face, he was looking over her head.

  “So when’s that going to be?” she pressed. “There’s a whole city full of empty buildings here!”

  The guard sighed like she was being bothersome, which made Zach dislike him intensely. “The buildings that were occupied by possible pandemic victims have to be burned down and new housing built. At this point, there are no more quarters available within the Clean Zone perimeter, and construction has been slowed by the weather. We’re working on scouting new neighborhoods with empty housing, but it will take time.”

  The woman threw up her hands. “So why can’t you put us in a tent in the Clean Zone? Or quarter us with someone else? We’ve passed quarantine. There’s no reason to keep us here!”

  “How would that be any different from staying in your tent right here?” the guard asked snidely.

  “Because at least there I wouldn’t be locked in a cage, with someone only checking on us a couple times a week! I could get my son to the doctor when he starts sounding like he’s drowning, instead of waiting for someone to make time to get to us!” She began gesticulating angrily with each word, stepping closer to the guard, then pitched forward, bending double as a racking cough took over.

  He brought down his weapon. Not quite aiming it at her, but . . . “Step back. Now.”

  “Hey!” Chantal shot to her feet, advancing on him like she was driven by God’s own wrath. “Don’t you dare point that at her! You have absolutely no justification for even the threat of deadly force here.”

  “Then tell this bitch to get out of my face,” the guard gritted out. Zach wasn’t sure how his blank, copper-toned mask could look irate, but it did.

  “How about you get out of my face and go requisition me some antibiotics and an albuterol inhaler for this child?” Chantal retorted, bracing her gloved hands on the hips of her suit.

  The soldier’s head moved emphatically back and forth. “No can do, Doc. New regs from inside the mountain. Pharmaceutical supplies are only for people who have passed quarantine. We can’t waste meds on someone who might die from the Rot anyway.”

  Chantal went rigid with outrage. “What the fuck sort of regulation is that? Besides, you heard her. She’s been here four months. She’s passed quarantine.”

  “Not my call. I have orders. No drugs in the pens. Talk to the committee if you don’t like it. Now, are we done here?”

  Zach clenched his hands into fists inside his sweaty gloves. Chantal’s posture suggested she wanted to punch the soldier in the throat too, but she eased back, her breath slashing through the filter in her mask. She knelt down beside the boy’s cot, tucking his blankets around him. “You rest now, sweetie. I’ll be back soon with medicine, okay?”

  The boy’s nod turned into a fit of violent coughing, and Chantal turned her masked face toward the woman. “I need to see what I can do about this medicine situation, or getting you out of quarantine and into the clinic in the Clean Zone.”

  The woman didn’t look reassured. There was no more anger in her eyes as she looked at Chantal, only fear and doubt. Unable to contribute anything more useful, Zach closed his eyes while they spoke, muttering a prayer for the woman and boy softly enough that he thought it wouldn’t be heard outside his suit.

  He was wrong. “Who are you talking to?” the boy rasped from his cot.

  “God.” Zach tried to put a smile in his voice, to let the kid know this was a hopeful, good thing Zach was trying to do.

  “Who’s G
od?”

  Zach shot a glance to the woman, who overheard the boy’s question and managed a soft chuckle.

  “His parents—my brother and sister-in-law—were atheists.”

  “Ah.” Zach nodded and sidled past Chantal and the woman to squat beside the boy. “God is sort of a friend of mine. A really big, strong, powerful, kind, invisible friend. He’s a good guy. He loves everyone, especially kids. And some people, like your mommy and daddy, don’t believe in Him, and that’s okay. He loves you, anyway.”

  The boy blinked. “Invisible friends aren’t real. My brother said so when I was little.”

  Zach shrugged. “Did you ever have a teddy bear? Or a doll, or a blanket? Something you liked to hold on to that made you feel better?” The boy nodded. “Well, maybe that thing had a special power to make you feel better or maybe it didn’t. Or maybe it only had that power because you believed it did. But it still really made you feel better when you held on to it, didn’t it?”

  The boy’s feverish face scrunched as he thought this over. “I guess. Does talking to God make you feel better?”

  “Sometimes.” Zach stroked the boy’s brow, feeling the warmth of his skin through the gloves. “And sometimes I ask Him for favors, like taking care of people who are sick or sad. I ask Him to help them feel better.”

  “Does it work?”

  The innocent question went through Zach’s heart like a dagger. It was the question he kept coming back to, the question that had him feeling like his own faith stood on wobbling, constantly weakening legs. He couldn’t possibly answer yes without being a liar. And lately the needless, endless death and terror around him made God’s will seem very random and capricious, indeed. He didn’t know how to reconcile that with the loving and merciful God he prayed to.

  “Sometimes,” he whispered, drawing his hand away and standing quickly. “But right now, medicine will work better, so I’ll ask God to help us find a way to get you the medicine you need, okay? You get some rest while we work on that.”

  He hurried—or rather, ran—out of the tent before the little boy had another chance to ask him questions he wasn’t sure he believed the answers to anymore.

  Public sentiment in the Clean Zone wasn’t much more favorable than it was in the quarantine camps, especially after the government issued an edict that rations would be cut back by ten percent for the winter. It was becoming apparent that as the populations grew, the stockpiles held somewhere within the complex beneath Cheyenne Mountain were depleting at an alarming rate.

  Gangs had formed among the population, running protection rackets in exchange for a portion of people’s rations. Unfortunate things had a tendency to happen to people who didn’t pony up, and no amount of complaining to the Clean Zone authorities seemed to alleviate the problem. The soldiers said they had no way to track down the extortionists, and the multitude of excuses for their failure to act had some people muttering that the soldiers were getting kickbacks out of the pilfered supplies.

  Sexual crime was also running rampant within the Clean Zone. The “lone wolves,” as Chantal called them—meaning unattached people, usually men, whose families had died in the pandemic, or who had never had family to begin with—were frequently too aggressive about trying to secure companionship. There was no official word on what the age of consent within the Clean Zone was, and rumor suggested this was due to concern that anyone above the age of puberty might need to contribute if the Clean Zone had any hope of establishing and maintaining a viable gene pool. It wasn’t true, according to Chantal; the Clean Zone had a more than adequate gene pool. But since no one in power had asked her opinion, many of the youngest women were being bribed, coerced, or outright forced into relationships with sickening age disparities.

  Some of those relationships were with the guards themselves, who had been granted permission to start families with the civilian population if they so desired.

  Then there was the serial rapist, who seemed to have a preference for young men. Since the youth with the perforated colon, there had been no more deaths. It almost seemed as though the perpetrator had realized he’d gone too far. But by the end of February, there were three subsequent victims, all of whom had lived, but only one of whom could provide any useful details about his attack.

  “He offered me food,” Ross, the seventeen-year-old boy, had told Zach as he recuperated in the clinic. “I’d just been shaken down for my last rations. I hadn’t eaten in a few days, so when he said he’d share his if I’d blow him, I figured why not?”

  Zach had nodded sympathetically, doing as Chantal had instructed him, listening without judgment to anything Ross wanted to share.

  “He couldn’t get it up.” Ross’s voice broke, and a tear traced down his cheek. “That’s when he started hitting me. Shit, I don’t know, maybe I was bad at it. I’ve never blown anyone before. But he— It was like . . . he wasn’t hitting me because I didn’t do it right. He was hitting me to try to turn himself on. And when it didn’t work, he made me suck him again, and then he’d hit me some more, and hit me harder, and then he used the belt, and—”

  Ross dissolved into sobs at that point, but Zach had already heard him recite the rest of the story before, to Chantal and one of the guards. Unable to rouse himself by inflicting pain, the perpetrator—whose face Ross hadn’t gotten a good look at because he’d been wearing a scarf when he picked Ross up on the streets before taking him into a darkened building—had become increasingly violent, finally sodomizing Ross with a cane when his own body wouldn’t cooperate.

  “Before he left . . . he said he wanted to see me again. Like we’d been on a fucking date! He told me to make sure he could find me when he came looking again. Came looking. Like he’s just passing through town. Creepy, sick fucker.” The brutalized boy broke down again, and all Zach could do was watch him weep.

  Despite the information Ross had provided on when and where the attack took place, the guards’ purported investigation turned up nothing. Given the attitude the guards were taking to most crime happening within the Clean Zone, Zach entertained the uncomfortable suspicion that the investigation had been minimal, at best.

  Time seemed to pass in a weird sort of stasis. The situation in the Clean Zone was untenable, but there was no way to change it. Just like when he’d been in quarantine, and before that, when he’d been stuck with his father and brother. He was biding time, waiting for something to shake the new world out of this strange deadlock and make them all begin to live again rather than just exist.

  It was coming up on the second spring since the pandemic had begun. Almost a year ago, he’d met Nico. How long would it take, if not to get back to normal, then to at least accept that the present reality was normal?

  Zach entertained these mopey thoughts while he worked on cleaning the already-pristine clinic. Chantal was still back at her house sleeping, since she’d been up late assisting with a birth. They had moved in together so that Zach’s house could go to someone still stuck in the pens but on the waiting list for the Clean Zone. His stomach growled, but he was getting used to ignoring it. Rations were lean enough that he never felt truly full anymore. If not for the emptiness in his heart, he could have been glad Nico wasn’t here. He would surely have starved to death by now.

  Did Nico at least have access to more sufficient rations wherever he was?

  Sometimes that was the only thought that sustained Zach when the yearning to see Nico again became too keen—that Nico might be thriving better than he could have here. Zach refused to let himself think that Nico had been killed. Surely he was too valuable an asset for that, being one of these superhumans the Alpha created.

  Zach paused in the middle of disinfecting a supply cabinet inside and out when he heard shouting seeping through the walls from outside. Dropping his cloth in the bucket of bleach water he’d been using, he stripped off his gloves and wandered into the makeshift lobby. A crowd was gathering a block down, and smoke billowed through the rainy midmorning haze. Alarm ti
ghtened his shoulders, and Zach rushed out and down the street.

  One of the houses at the end of the block was fully aflame, and the fire had clearly just spread to its neighbor. Bystanders were clustered on the other side of the street, watching the structures go up, while two men and a woman argued with the guards who had come to investigate.

  “I’m telling you, I know who did it, so why are you still standing here with your thumbs up your asses and not dealing with this guy?” one of the men yelled, going toe-to-toe with the soldier. Zach had seen him around the neighborhood but couldn’t recall his name. He was sporting the vestiges of a black eye. “Cole Leehan. White, sandy hair, brown eyes, six foot one, tattoos up both arms.”

  The guard looked almost bored. “You’ve been bitching about this Leehan guy for months. You’ve never been able to show a bit of evidence that he’s running a protection racket, and everyone in his area of the Zone vouches for him.”

  “There’s your fucking evidence!” the woman beside him—was her name Karla?—shouted, gesticulating wildly at the burning houses. “We’ve made sure he can’t get to our rations anymore. We told you last week when he beat up Adam that he said he’d be back and something worse would happen if we didn’t pay up. This is on you. You could have stopped it and you didn’t!”

  “Lady, we don’t have the resources to chase down everyone you’ve got a beef with!”

  This was met with another round of incoherent shouting, and Zach had to shoulder his way through the crowd to get to the participants in the argument.

  “Excuse me, Private . . .” He trailed off invitingly, but the soldier refused to provide his name, leaving Zach standing there awkwardly. “Fine. Private whatever. If you haven’t noticed, there are about a dozen more houses on this street downwind of the fire. I assume you’ve contacted your superiors about getting a fire engine out here?”