Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (15 page)

“What were they?”

“Sedatives,
tranquilizers. Who knows? He’s got access to the pharmacy and he already thinks
he’s some kind of drug kingpin.”

So Jason had been
planning to drug me and force himself on me. I can’t even imagine what someone
like him would have done to me if he’d had me locked up in some jail cell.

“Thank you, Ian,” I
said. “Thank you so fucking much.”

“You’re okay,” he
said. “You’re safe.
For now.
I was able to pull some
strings and get your arrest warrants cleared, but we’re going to have to be
careful.”

I tried to calm down.
I still couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight. All I wanted
was for Ian to just pull over and hold me in his arms while I cried. I knew I
shouldn’t want that—it was wrong—but I couldn’t help it. I took a
deep breath and tried to get myself under control. We were passing back into
town. Ian slowed to avoid the empty, abandoned cars strewn all over the
roadside.

“What’s
happening
?” I asked. “They took you
away, Ian. And now you’re… What
are
you?
What’s
going on
?”

Ian drew a deep
breath, gave me a look I tried not to interpret as despair, and then stared at
the road. “Everything’s falling to pieces,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”
He shook his head. “We’re inside what’s now an officially designated quarantine
zone. It covers all of Muldoon and the surrounding areas—about forty
miles across. They’ve got the National Guard patrolling the borders. I swear to
God the perimeter looks like Iraq: HESCO barriers, concertina wire, the whole
thing. And I guess we’re not the only
zone
. There’s
supposed to be four more throughout the West, all in remote, rural areas, like
us.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe how fast they set this thing up since
the pathogen broke out. I guess no one really understands how to cure it or how
it works, except that it’s a kind of venereal disease and somehow it drives
people mad with carnal desire. It’s basically an STD that acts as an
aphrodisiac.”

Ian glanced at me. I
could hardly believe it, but he blushed a little. He cleared his throat.

“Officially,” he said,
“the federal government’s supposed to lift the quarantines when everyone living
inside tests negative for a full twelve months. The pathogen’s supposed to be
contained inside the zones, but word is they’re dumping infected people in from
the outside. And I’ve sure seen a lot of infected people around who I don’t
know. They can’t all be outsiders stuck here from the fair.”

I couldn’t really
believe that everything had changed so fast just because an aggressive disease
was spreading. I was finding it hard to comprehend that I wasn’t still living
in the same old Muldoon, and that everything about our lives had changed…probably
forever.

“What happened when
they took you away?” I looked at Ian’s black combat uniform warily. He still
hadn’t told me everything. “What
are
you now, exactly?”

“Home Guard.” He
scoffed. “Either you join, or you get thrown into detention. Indefinitely.
That’s the deal. It’s basically a paramilitary force that’s been granted the
rule of martial law over the entire quarantine zone. They conscript a lot
people from the inside, because, well, how many volunteers are you going to get
from the outside to go into a quarantine zone? They take you to this center
they have set up west of town, give you some bullshit, day-long, crash-training
course, assign you a rank, and off you go. Because of my experience, they
cooked up a medical lieutenant rank for me. Everybody else keeps busy doing the
rounds—patrolling residences and taking daily urine tests, then
separating out the infected from the uninfected. We were supposed to bring
anyone who tested positive to the center of our zone; they were going to keep
them all in that
Walmart
warehouse over there. But
now it looks like all the squads are pretty much just ‘expiring’ positives on
the spot.” Ian looked at me with a mixture of awe and fear at what he was about
to tell me. “They’re getting away with killing people because there’s a legal
loophole. Anyone who tests positive is technically already dead.”

I didn’t understand.
“What do you mean? How is that possible? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Do you remember Chris
Trevino? That new doctor kid?”

I vaguely remembered a
young doctor who’d started at the hospital just about the time Shawn was
finishing up his physical therapy, but I didn’t know what he had to do with
anything.

“Yeah, I remember him.
I guess so. Why?”

Ian had been driving
toward my parents’ house, but now he turned off the unpaved road that lead
around to the back side of their property.

“Well, you’ll meet him
soon,” Ian said. “
Chris’ll
be able to explain
everything better than I ever could. He’s a good guy—young and a little
high-strung, but a good enough guy. We’ve been helping each other out. He sort
of defected from the hospital when the Home Guard took over. After Bob Hershel
died, he asked me if I knew where he could do an autopsy without anyone finding
out. I found him a place.”

I thought about Ian
shooting Mr. Hershel that night. It seemed like Morgan had fallen into her coma
so long ago. The last I’d seen of her, she’d been hidden away in my dad’s hayloft.

“And Morgan?” I asked.
I was terrified that she wouldn’t have known what to do when neither Bryce nor
me had come back to the loft. What if she’d been caught by the Home Guard?

“Morgan’s…safe,” Ian
said.

But he didn’t say
anything further, and I could tell he was holding something back.

Ten minutes later, Ian
pulled up toward the ramshackle barn that’d been standing precariously by the
river for as long I could remember. It was on the Hershel property, across the
river from my parents’ ranch. I got out to open the barn doors, and Ian parked
the SUV inside, hiding it from view.

“We’ll leave it here
in case anyone tries to track it,” Ian explained. He locked the doors.

Bryce and I followed
Ian toward the low concrete dam that spanned the river from bank to bank. As
kids, my sister and I used to take our shoes off and cross through the
ankle-deep water that spilled over the dam’s edge, but now Bryce and I followed
Ian’s lead and sloshed through in our shoes, too tired and shaken to care about
getting our feet wet. I had no idea where Ian was taking us. We were more than
a quarter mile from my parents’ house.

My dad used to raise
grain before I was born, and an old corrugated tin granary still stood on the
flats along the river, more or less hidden behind the bluff. I hadn’t seen it in
years. My dad used to make Danielle and me swear we wouldn’t play inside the
tall, barn-like structure that housed the old grain elevator. It was connected
to a row of six squat silos, long since empty. Every surface of the granary was
corrugated tin, and by now it had all rusted to a dull orange. Ian walked
through the weeds toward the granary’s door.

“I’ll take you to the
house in just a sec,” he said. “I just need to check in on Chris real quick.”

I looked around at the
old rusting structure. An arrow-shaped weather vane creaked at the rooftop. “Does
my dad know you’re using this place?” It made me a little nervous that Ian was
hiding bodies from the Home Guard on my parents’ property.

“I told him I needed
to use it,” he answered. “I also told him I couldn’t tell him why. He agreed.
He swore he wouldn’t tell a soul about anything going on down here. I know he
won’t.”

Ian was right. I knew
that if my dad swore not to say anything to anyone, he wouldn’t. He could keep
a secret, even from my mom. Once he’d taken me on a cross-country horseback-riding
trip into the mountains way beyond town, and we stumbled onto an abandoned
village of ancient Native American cliff dwellings while passing through a
gully. We spent the afternoon walking up and down the stone steps and exploring
the network of rooms carved into the rock. We even found petrified corncobs. He
made me swear to keep it a secret; he didn’t think anyone other than us knew about
it, and he didn’t want backpackers ruining the place
.,
He never, ever said a word about it later, not even to me.

“What about my mom?” I
asked Ian. I knew she wouldn’t be happy about him using the granary. “Does she
know you’re using it?”

Ian shook his head.
“No, just your dad.” He opened the granary door. It creaked on its wire hinges.
“You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to. You’ve seen a hell of lot
today. I wouldn’t blame you.”

I was feeling so numb that
I didn’t think about it; I just followed Ian inside. Bryce came in, too. I
think it was mostly so he wouldn’t have to stay outside alone.

The interior was dark,
shot through by points of light coming in through tiny holes rusted into the
tin walls. Everything was covered by decades-old grain dust.

“Hey, Chris!” Ian
called out. “It’s me. I have company.” His voice echoed strangely through the
massive tin building.

As my eyes adjusted
once again to a dark space—though this was far more cavernous than the
last—I recognized the doctor sitting at a makeshift desk in the far
corner. The desk was surrounded by medical supplies, from boxes of antibiotics
to a battery-powered defibrillator to empty IV bags hanging on nails. There was
even an old heart monitor, though it appeared to be missing a power supply. Ian
had obviously been busy bringing Doctor Trevino more than just cadavers to
study.

The doctor stood as we
walked in. He was even younger than I remembered—not much older than I
was—small and thin, and he was waving smoke from the air.

He was holding a
joint, and not entirely guiltily.

“Hey,” he said.

“This is Doctor
Trevino.” Ian eyed the joint warily. “Chris,” he said disapprovingly. “What is
this? Really?”

“Hey, man, when you
come to a bum-fuck town in the middle of nowhere for a one-year residency and
end up stuck in a quarantine zone, probably for life, you want to allow
yourself a joint every now and then. That’s my medical advice.” He shook my
hand, then Bryce’s. “Hi, how are you?”

Ian waved away the
smoke. “Ashley wanted to know why the Home Guard can shoot the sick at will,”
Ian said. “I told her you could explain it better than me.”

“Because they’re not
sick.” He shrugged. “They’re dead.”

“Go easy,” Ian
whispered. “They’ve been through a lot. Remember? I told you what happened.”

“Oh shit! I’m so sorry.”
Chris covered his mouth. “You guys were in the…buried…thing. Right. Shit. I’m
so sorry.” He touched each of our shoulders apologetically and stepped back.
“Well, you’re alive. So congratulations for that. That’s better than the TGV-positives
can say, because, like I said, they’re not. They’re dead.”

“Okay,” Bryce said.
He’d been in a state of shock for the last hour or so, and now he was losing
his patience. “You’ll have to explain this. I’m not a doctor, but what the fuck
do you mean,
dead
? Like fucking zombies
or something? Bullshit.”

“No, not like
zombies.” Chris sat down at his makeshift desk. “They’re totally conscious.
They don’t feel any different—not at first anyway.”

He leaned back, took a
drag from his joint, and then released the smoke, eyeing us.

“Okay, so,” he said, “
here
’s the deal. Have you ever heard of Toxoplasmosis?
The disease that’s caused by Toxoplasma
gondii
?
It’s a parasite that reproduces inside cat intestines and causes infected mice
to be sexually attracted to cats, which makes it easier for cats to eat them.
It’s real. I’m serious. Look it up. Well, as far as we know, the plague
pathogen is a mutation of Toxoplasma
gondii
, one that’s
evolved to use humans as hosts instead of mice and cats. Normally it causes
higher rates of risk-taking behavior and suicide in humans, but, like I said,
this is a mutation. They think a strain got into a bunch of chickens in one of
those giant factory farms—probably from cat shit in the chicken feed. That’s
where it mutated, and then somebody somewhere must have eaten some undercooked
chicken. The Home Guard’s been going around incinerating every chicken in
Muldoon, but it’s a waste of time because the parasite mutated again after it
got into the human population. Now it’s Toxoplasma
gondii
five—TGV. This strain’s transmitted among humans entirely through sexual
acts. In fact, in women and men both, the parasite is only released through
orgasm. After sleeping with someone who’s infected, people get flu-like
symptoms and slip into a coma. Anywhere from a few hours to a few days later,
they die.”

Chris took one last
drag from his joint before stubbing it out in an ashtray made from the bottom
of a soda can.

“This is where it gets
weird,” he said. “Death triggers the parasite to take control of the amygdala
in the limbic system, where all the most basic, primitive functions are
located. The infected person wakes up feeling healthy with all of the brain’s
original personality and memory centers intact. They’re basically normal, but
with two exceptions: number one, they’re dead, and number two—just like
in mice where the original strain first evolved—the host’s libido is
stimulated. That’s because the parasite has begun to lay its microscopic eggs
in the tissues of the host’s reproductive organs. We don’t really understand
how, but it makes infected humans do virtually anything to…do the wild thing.
To get it on.
The humpty dumpty.
Know what I’m saying, people? There’s evidence that a pheromone is released along
with the eggs, which attracts even
un
infected
people to the host. This is stage one, and it lasts no more than about five
days. In stage two, things go downhill, and the sex drive gets even stronger.
People start to lose verbal skills and go numb at the fingers and toes. This is
because the parasite’s larvae feed on the outer brain matter. It slowly begins
to eat everything
but
the amygdala.
Meanwhile, the colony lays millions more eggs in the host’s reproductive organs.”