Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) (11 page)

A woman behind the priest screamed. He just stared at Ruth. He had expected her to give in. It wasn’t supposed to end that way. She had
rules
, damn her. Even
she
had limits. He’d counted on it, driven her to them on purpose. A chunk of asphalt flew past him and hit Ruth’s hip with a thunk. He didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Another rock sailed past and hit her in the back and she turned to flee. A crawling burn formed in his gut as she disappeared. It mushroomed into fury and finally broke his paralysis. He turned around. Most of his Congregation had run off, chasing Ruth down the street. But the new convert, Gray, was watching him.

“She’ll kill the rest,” Gray hissed, “Our community can hardly thrive without the Zom— I mean, the Afflicted, Father. We have to stop her before she takes more innocent lives.”

It had been a mistake to tell her about Juliana. He was convinced her friendship was the only thing that restrained Ruth. But Juliana had pushed him out, left him with no alternative. He couldn’t let the hospital fall into Ruth’s hands. It was his calling to minister to the people left in the city, all of them, the sick and the well. He had been released, recalled from madness to perform this holy work.

He knew better than Ruth or Juliana what the Afflicted experienced. He knew the good the morning readings must do. Locked in their insanity, the Afflicted could not ask for guidance, but they would remember it when at last they were cured. He had. He remembered everything. How a word or act of kindness, though it fell upon a man blind and deaf with rage, was now the sweetest medicine for his spirit, something he looked back upon with all the relief it ought to have created at the time. And the guilt of his own violent actions drove him to amend, to repair, to strive to forgive. He could not abandon his Afflicted brethren to someone who didn’t understand, who had no faith in a coming cure. He couldn’t let Ruth have them. Anything, even violence, was preferable to that.

“Father?” whined Gray, “have you forgotten your flock?”

Father Preston shook himself out of his dark thoughts. “We must get to the hospital first. Juliana won’t be so willing to have Ruth stay there once we tell her what has happened here. Don’t worry, Brother Gray, the Afflicted will know salvation yet.” He smiled and the man ducked his head in agreement. “See how many of our people you can round up,” Father Preston continued, “I will go have a talk with Juliana. In the meantime—” he glanced at the shopping cart, “bury the boy. And destroy this place of evil. Salt the earth beneath her. I don’t want Ruth to have anywhere to come back to when I’m finished. I want her out of this city for good.”

Gray’s face split into a slow smile and Father Preston felt a slick worm of doubt twist in his gut. He ignored it and began walking toward the hospital, rehearsing the story he would tell Juliana.

Chapter 8

Nella stood on the edge of the station platform. Frank held a hand up to her. She took a deep breath and hopped down with his help.

“Only four stops, okay? Then it’s just a few streets over.” He smiled and handed her the lantern. She flipped it on as they reached the steep hill that plunged out of the daylight and into the cool, damp throat of the city. She tried to concentrate on just her feet, watching one foot settle after another. She knew her fear of the dark had been irrational once, that she would have treated a patient with the same phobia by doing exactly what she was doing now. Exposure therapy. But it wasn’t irrational any more. It was a survival instinct, some sense that had lasted through modern life until it became useful again. She didn’t know that she
wanted
to treat it. She tried not to hear the scuttling noises of rats around them. Frank seemed completely at ease.

“Aren’t you nervous?” she whispered.

“Not really. It’s an empty tunnel. But I can understand why you are.”

“Are you sure it’s empty?”

“What would be down here? There’s no food for wild animals— well maybe at the stations, but I doubt it. Nobody has been here in eight years. There’s no litter or trash for them.”

Nella tried to let the thought comfort her. “What do you think is down here?” Frank asked a moment later. Nella blushed.

“I don’t know. I guess maybe I expected Infected or some sort of underworld gang.”

“I doubt there’re any Infected left. What would they eat? I kind of felt like this whole mission was more of a goodwill thing from the governor, not really a rescue operation. I doubt we’ll find more than an odd handful of Infected left in the whole world. And if we hadn’t been through all that empty space yesterday, I might believe a gang would use the subway, but as it is, why lurk around down here when all those vacant buildings are just sitting, still full even, out there? There’s no one down here but us. We’ll be okay, but we can take it slowly. Do you want to get out at the next station and get a breather?”

Nella shook her head. “It’s only four stops. Let’s get it over with.”

It was colder than Nella remembered a subway being. No lights at the station, no train exhaust, no hot water pipes overhead. She could hear the wind blowing down the staircases before they reached each station, like listening to the emptiness of a long-dead seashell, but the summer air didn’t reach the track. It was a long time to be in dread and even Nella’s adrenaline wore off long before the third station. The tunnels had been empty, an occasional rodent nest or some long-discarded trash, but nothing new. No food wrappers or empty cans, no water bottles or used up batteries. Nothing to show the tunnels had been used at all since the Plague.

Until they reached the third station.

Frank tripped over a loose sand bag, and Nella caught him before he could slam into the cement floor. She lifted the lantern higher to look around them. The tunnel should have opened into the smooth dome of the station, but the tunnel had been blocked with sandbags and trash barrels stacked above.

“Do you think it was to protect the city from the Infected?” asked Frank.

“I don’t know. Did they really think they could quarantine the city? It had already spread through the population before people started showing symptoms. What good would a barricade do?”

“We have a barricade.”

Nella nodded. “Yeah, we do. But we also have people manning it to let refugees in. It wasn’t meant to keep everyone out, just to keep the Infected from overrunning us.”

Frank shrugged and grinned. “Hello?” he yelled. There was a shuffling around them, but it was too slight to be human. “We’ve brought help! A cure. A chance to trade.”

Nella winced at his lack of caution, but no one answered anyway.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” sighed Frank. He started tugging on the debris blocking the tunnel, testing it for weakness.

“I don’t know if you should announce what we have to the first stranger we meet. They may not all be friendly.”

“I know you’re probably right, but I’ve been thinking about what we’ve come all this way to do. The farther we go without seeing anyone, the more I think that when we
do
find someone, we might be the very first person they’ve seen since the Plague. I was hoping—
am
hoping— that we’ll find a working government here. A massive crowd of healthy, sane people. That someone is putting the world back together.”

Nella placed the lantern carefully on the ground and began pushing on the trashcans near the top of the tunnel. “If that was happening, wouldn’t we have heard about it? Wouldn’t there be missions sent to look for people? For us?”

“That’s what I mean. In the back of my head, I guess I just assumed that somebody out there knew what was going on. That somewhere, the rule of law meant something, that civilization was creeping back from the edge. Even after all this time. I expected— I don’t know, maybe not rescue, but some kind of organization or something to come along. But now— Nella, whatever is behind this wall, it isn’t going to be like home. I know that. It probably seems pretty stupid to walk in waving a white flag and announcing ourselves. But what if
we’re
it? Maybe you and I are the very first people to reach out to help anyone outside their tiny bands of survivors? What if everyone out here is waiting for
us
? If we want to rebuild a modern society, we have to act like we’re already part of one. We have to be confident, pretend that we have so much extra that the thought of being robbed or attacked never occurred to us. Then the people we meet will trust us. They’ll think we have an army behind us, a government. That someone, somewhere, cares if we disappear or are harmed. It’ll make good people feel more secure and bad people hesitate. That’s what I was thinking anyway.”

Nella grunted and shoved against the trashcan, moving it a few more inches. “Whatever happened to sailing away to a deserted tropical island?” she asked with a half smile.

Frank leaned into the same trashcan. “Not quite ready to retire yet. Besides, I’m starting to get a little lonely as it is, aren’t you?”

Nella stopped pushing and turned to her husband. She put a warm hand on his cheek and smiled when he looked at her. “We’ll find someone Frank. There were hundreds of survivors around us. It’s a big world. Bigger than it’s been in a few centuries. We can’t be the only ones. We’ll find them.”

He hugged her before turning back to the barrier. He pushed the trashcan the rest of the way through and it popped into the farther room with a hollow clang. Nella held up the lantern and Frank peered in.

“Well, I don’t think we’re going to find them here, at any rate.” He let Nella take his place at the opening. She squinted trying to make anything out. The lantern fell on a gleaming red canister that lay on its side on the tracks.

“Is that an extinguisher?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Frank, pushing a sandbag out of the way to make more room, “but there’re no lights and no people. If it were really important to protect this tunnel, you’d think they’d have left a guard.”

They made a hole large enough to climb through. Frank slid through first, his feet puffing clouds of gray dust up when he landed on the other side. Nella handed him the lantern and climbed through. Everything was covered with thick colorless clumps of ash. Frank was looking at a tangle of shapes on the station platform. They looked as if they had been blanketed with dirty snow.

“Are those people?” Nella asked.

Frank leaned forward and gently brushed the ash from a small lump. Skin crackled like cellophane and fell away from a thin white bone. Frank shuddered and wiped his hand on his shirt. He held up the lantern again.

“So many. Why did they stay? Why did they block themselves in?” he asked. Nella carefully climbed onto a clean section of the platform and Frank followed. The far tunnel was blocked with more bags and the benches from the station. They picked their way through the tangle of people toward the stairs. Gold summery sunlight filtered down onto the staircase, glinting in the flying soot that Nella and Frank disturbed with each step. A strange, thick puddle of blackened glass lay at the base of the stairs. Nella stared at it as Frank climbed up before her.

“Why did this glass melt but the bones from the people are still here?”

Frank shook his head. “I think that was more sand, not glass.”

“What?”

“Come and see,” he called grimly. She shut off the lantern and climbed slowly up the stairs. Even before she reached the top she could tell that the light was all wrong. Overexposed, uninterrupted. As if the station emerged into an empty field instead of dense city landscape. Frank was shading his eyes with one hand and she couldn’t see his face. The top of the stairs sunk from her line of vision as she climbed. A ring of sea green bubbles surrounded the stairwell, almost a foot high. Nella reached out and touched it. Cool and hard. More glass. She looked around her. The roads were obscenely exposed instead of tucked behind buildings. There were no buildings. A few square empty sockets, a few walls leaning here and there, a sea of broken concrete at their feet. And everything swirled with ash and grit that caught in her nostrils and the corners of her eyes. She wiped her face and spun around to look behind her. Far behind, she could make out the edges of buildings in the direction they had come from. They were like islands in a fog though, indistinct, wavering. Less real than the rubble she stood on.

“Everyone?” she asked.

Frank nodded. “Must be. It’s miles of this.”

She spun around, looking back the way they had come. The moving ash made a haze, but she thought she could just make out a line of buildings breaking the horizon. She tried to picture the capitol as it had been, tried to remember which parks or monuments she should have been able to see from the subway. It was impossible. Just lumped, huddled concrete rubble in perfect squares. The roads between each demolished city block were the only sign that any human— that any living
thing—
had ever been there. That they hadn’t suddenly emerged from the subway onto the surface of a barren planet.

“How did it spread so far? Even without firefighters— it should have burned itself out.”

He touched the bubbled glass mound in front of them with his fingertips. “This wasn’t just a fire. Bomb maybe. Not the first. This was a shelter. That’s why those people blocked off the tunnels, to keep from getting sick. Sandbags were here too, that’s what the glass is.”