Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) (34 page)

The guard nodded. He was a young kid
by the name of Kenny Benneder, a private not much past his
seventeenth birthday and eager to please. He nodded and settled in
with his rifle on his knees, determined not to let his commanding
officer down. But he was tired from all the excitement and his
eyelids felt heavy, so he was glad when another guard arrived to
relieve him a few minutes later.

"Take ten, boy. Get some fresh air,"
Private Ramsay told him. "I'll cover for you."

* * *

Captain Cheever did not head straight down to confront Wainwright.
There were a few things he needed to check first, a couple people
he needed to speak with before doing so. He didn't want to walk in
on the interrogation unprepared.

He shook his head with regret, knowing
deep in his heart that no matter what Wainwright said, it was not
going to end well. A lot of what Eddie had told him confirmed
suspicions he'd held for a while.

The old man had been a friend since
Cheever was assigned to the depot as a first lieutenant straight
out of OCS, a year or so before the Flense. Wainwright had taken
him under his wing.

Within six months, the colonel
promoted him to captain and made him his executive officer, even
though that role typically fell to someone with the rank of major.
They had developed a special bond. Lyle Wainwright had always
treated him like a son.

Which is why Eddie's accusations shook
him to the core, especially his claims about the empty graves. How
he could possibly know something like that was beyond Cheever, but
it certainly warranted checking into.

However, he planned on visiting the
cemetery last before attending to the colonel. What he expected to
accomplish there in the graveyard he didn't know. Maybe he just
needed to set his mind at ease. He had a theory to test that might
indicate whether the graves were fake or not.

Along the way, he picked up a piece of
steel rebar. His thinking was that freshly disturbed ground would
be sandy and loose. The rod would push easily into it when
inserted. If it stopped prematurely, hit undisturbed clay, then
that would be a sign that the grave was shallow and therefore fake.
Lazy men, men who worried more about appearances, wouldn't bother
putting forth the effort to dig a full, deep grave.

The cemetery was a small marked-off
area in the north-east corner of the base. It had been established
there in the early days, right after the Flense began to spread and
there were a lot of casualties. Not all of the bodies had been
infected and required putting down. Some victims had succumbed at
the hands and teeth of the diseased. Some simply couldn't bear to
live in such a world anymore.

The rest were collateral
damage.

There actually was an old cemetery
outside, but after the fall, it was easier and safer to dig the
graves inside the wire. Now it was filled with close to seven
hundred graves, some containing multiple bodies.

They were all marked with sandstone
chips the same color as the desert floor. Each new grave was dug
next to the previous one, continuing the row until it reached the
end before starting a new one.

Five graves had been dug since the
arrival of the people on the bus. Of that, Eddie was correct. One
was a woman who had been a resident since soon after the Flense.
She was old then and only got older. A few weeks ago she refused to
get out of bed; the day before yesterday, she'd passed from
malnutrition and kidney failure. She was one of the rarest of all
the survivors— a victim of old age.

He was able to push the metal rod into
the soft clay and sand of her grave all the way up to his hand,
burying close to three feet of iron.

The rod refused to go more than about
a foot into the next grave over. It behaved exactly the same in the
next three.

"Goddamn it," he whispered.
He spied another piece of rebar between mounds and realized that
Eddie must have used the same trick. He picked it up and hurled
both rods into the darkness, where they clattered over the rocky
ground.
"Sonofabitch!"

He flexed his sore fingers, checked
that his sidearm was loaded, then headed off to find the
colonel.

Corporal Lawton sat watch on the steps outside of the
administrative building's front door. He jumped to his feet when
the captain approached and saluted. "Sir!"

"At ease, Corporal." He gestured
inside and asked, "Why are you standing out here? Aren't you
supposed to be inside?"

"Colonel didn't want me coming
in."

"Why not?"

"I guess because of the broken door.
Said he needed privacy."

Cheever frowned.

"If you're going in," the corporal
said, "could you take this?" He pointed to a box filled with
wrapped sandwiches and bottles of water. "He told me to go see if I
could rustle up some grub in the mess hall, but that was twenty
minutes ago."

"He hasn't been out to check on
you?"

"No, sir."

Cheever glanced nervously at the door.
"Sure, no problem." He used his key to unlock it. "Stay out here,
please. Don't let anyone else in. Understood?"

"Yes, sir. Um, sir?"

Cheever hesitated.

"Is it true what they're
saying?"

"About what, Corporal?"

Lawton stepped closer and whispered,
"That those people have a cure."

Cheever gave the soldier a surprised
look. "I-I don't know anything about that."

He let Lawton hold the door open for
him, then waited for it to click shut behind him and lock before
setting the box down on the floor again.

Stepping away from the door, he
removed a silencer from his pocket and screwed it onto his
revolver. Thus assembled, he slipped the weapon into the back of
his waistband and pulled his coat down over it. He wasn't sure how
he'd spin the colonel's death just yet. The camp would swallow
whatever story he gave them, but only if the scene had been
properly staged.

He picked up the food box again,
squared his shoulders and headed down the hall.

The drone of voices grew louder.
Yellow light poured through a hole in the duct taped window,
illuminating the fine desert dust that never seemed to settle out
of the air.

As he stood outside the door and
leaned down to eavesdrop on the conversation inside, Cheever
worried why the old man would want to conduct the interview alone
and in private, without witnesses.

What are those boys
telling him?

Bad things, things a man would die
before copping to.

The door abruptly opened, and a young
boy stepped out and ran into Cheever, nearly forcing him to drop
the food. The kid backed up again, his eyes wide with
surprise.

"Grant!" the colonel exclaimed, seeing
him there. "How long have you been standing out there in the
hallway?"

"Just, uh . . . ."
He held up the box.

"Ah, good, Lawton found some food.
Bring it in! Set it there— No, not on the desk. Over there." He
pointed at the filing cabinet along the side wall. "Boys, this is
Captain Grantham Cheever, my right-hand man."

Cheever eyed the old man carefully,
studied his body language, the sweat beading up on the paper thin
skin of his forehead.

What have they told
him?

He was surprised to see a
black man seated at the worn wooden chair beside the filing
cabinet, his arms wrapped about a young boy perched on his lap.
Both stared in his general direction, but did not make eye
contact.
They're the blind
ones.

The boy who'd nearly groined him
followed him in. He started digging through the food box as soon as
Cheever set it down.

The other two, both teenagers, stood
over by the map of the bunker that the colonel had hung on the wall
two nights before.

Their
bunker
, he thought.
The dam.

"I was just about to tell these boys
about our rescue plan," Colonel Wainwright said. "They have quite
the story of their own, which you should hear."

Cheever tried to look interested. He
didn't want his friend to sense his true feelings, that he already
knew. "Couldn't be any more incredible than the story I just
heard," he carefully replied.

Wainwright shook his head. His thumb
and fingers worried the pistol on his own hip, a nervous habit he'd
developed since all the killing he'd done in the early days of the
outbreak.

Cheever had seen the man pull and fire
his revolver well over a thousand times, rarely missing a shot. He
was deadly with the thing. In fact, Wainwright had always joked
that the pistol was a natural extension of his own body, like the
fist is an extension of the arm. He probably slept with it in his
cot.

"How are our friends?" the taller of
the two teenagers asked. His eyes were red, and he looked
exhausted. He wore an ill-fitting Nebraska State sweatshirt and
baggy sweatpants, and for a moment Cheever couldn't figure out why
they looked wrong on him, but then he realized that they were meant
for a girl to wear. The lettering was pink. "How's Danny?" he
asked. "And Eddie?"

"You
are . . . ?"

"Finn Bolles."

Cheever nodded. "Well, Mister Bolles,
Mister Mancuso is lucky. He sustained a surface wound on his arm.
He also has a number of scratches on his arms and neck from—" He
pointed at the mangled blinds in the window. "The medic is
attending to him still."

"And Danny?"

Cheever hesitated, then shook his
head. "We couldn't save him. I'm sorry."

The shorter of the older boys slammed
his palm on the wall. He also wore a set of sweats meant for a
girl, and Cheever wondered if they'd salvaged their clothes from a
coed college dormitory room. He knew firsthand that most of the
department stores and private homes had been raided in the years
since the outbreak, emptied of just about anything useful. And
since most of the survivors had been men, women's clothing would be
easier to find.

"Bix," Finn warned.

But the other boy pointed at the
captain. "Danny was right not to trust you!"

"Me?" Cheever replied,
startled.

"Bix," Finn repeated. "Let's
not—"

"You shot him in cold
blood!"

"Son," the colonel calmly said, "I can
assure you that Captain Cheever did not shoot your man. He was
nowhere near the gate."

Captain Cheever turned a cold eye to
Bix. "Why would I shoot him?"

"So he wouldn't talk
about—"

"Enough!" the colonel snapped.
"Everyone just calm down. Let's get back on track."

Bix dropped into a chair and covered
his face. The taller boy went over and tried to console him.
Despite the dazed look on this boy's face, Cheever noticed
something else, a sharpness. The kid's brain, whether he was aware
of it or not, was busily trying to fit all the pieces
together.

Wainwright pulled Cheever to the side
and spoke quietly to him. "This Danny fella that was killed, this
didn't happen to be the same one who left in the middle of the
night a few days ago, was it?"

Cheever tore his eyes away from Bix to
face the old man. "Yeah."

"You told me he left on his
own."

Cheever nodded. "He did."

"So, why would these boys say that's
not what happened."

Cheever's throat felt as dry as the
desert. "What are they saying happened?"

"That he was taken from here, that he
was beaten for information about the bunker. That he was then
sold — him and two others, apparently — to some roamers
up north. Cheever, you didn't—"

"Sounds like a story to me," the
captain quietly replied. He turned his cold gaze toward the
boys.

Wainwright gripped Cheever's arm,
forcing the younger man to look at him. "They said they were made
to cage fight infecteds."

"Did they say who allegedly did all
this to them?"