Outbreak: Brave New World (18 page)

However t
he constant gnawing hunger that had plagued her at the school was still fresh in her mind. There were probably a lot of people out there worse off than they were and she should be grateful. Heck, she even seemed to be more or less getting a pass in the morning sickness department too. There was a little queasiness sometimes but nothing like they made it look like on TV or anything. Her dinner stayed where she put it which was great because they did not have the food to waste.

Carl was winding his little dynamo powered radio at the table in the dining area while Frannie and Adam were trying to get the kids ready for bed when Frays came out of the bathroom.
The boy had first watch and kept himself awake by going through the radio bands, hoping to find a signal. So far he had reported no joy. The hide-a-bed was folded out, taking up a good portion of the floor in the living room. Lacey looked up from tucking Becca into bed. “Um…Frays, why don’t you sleep in your parents’ room?” he asked tentatively. There was an odd look on his face, as if he was not sure how she would respond. Frays got the feeling that they had all been talking about this while she was in the shower. So far nobody had the guts to go into the back bedroom for more than a couple minutes.

Frays
frowned slightly as she looked around the house. One of them would be sleeping in the recliner, probably Rodriguez and there was the rocking chair…Carl had his cot in the dining room. She looked uneasily at the door to her parents’ bedroom. “I’d feel better if we were all together.” Amy said quietly as she rolled her shoulders. The woman winced as another electric shock ran down her arm but it was not as bad as before when Lacey had touched the base of her neck.

“Aim, you need a comfortable place to sleep.” Carl said as he finished winding up the radio and plugged a set of earbud headphones into it. The boy put one into
his ear and looked seriously at his sister for a moment then a hint of a smile tugged at his lips. “I mean, if you don’t want that nice soft bed, I’ll take it and you can have my cot.”

Amy looked uneasy but nodded. It made sense, seeing as how she was getting pretty pregnant. “Alright, guys.” Frays grumbled as she turned towards the door. She paused and poked her head into the dining area. “We’re going to have to have a talk in the morning, alright?”

Rodriguez gave her a drowsy thumbs up from the recliner as Lacey got into bed with his children. “Roger that, boss.” the man called as the little ones cuddled up with their daddy. “Good night, Frays. I’ll wake you around 0400 for watch.”

Carl twirled the little dial on the radio as he sat there, listening to the various degrees of static on the radio. He was getting pretty good at distinguishing the different stations simply from the ratio of hisses to pops and whistles to whines. He did not really think that he would actually hear anything, but…it was something to do. And, well, if he
did
hear something it would be awesome because they all seemed to be getting a little claustrophobic and scared ever since…the thing the other day.

Carl
frowned as he changed stations and watched Frannie sleep. She really was hot even with the scars on her face and stuff. He wondered what it would be like to hold her close, feeling her warmth as Frannie leaned against his chest. She snorted in her sleep and flinched, obviously dreaming and it made a brief smile flash across the boy’s face. An intense feeling of discomfort radiated from his groin so he turned away and focused on the noise coming through the earbud.

His frown deepened
as he changed the station again. Carl could tell everybody was scared and sad and worried even if they were not saying anything about it. Amy was hurt and probably pretty bad judging from the way she flinched and nearly screamed whenever somebody touched her neck or turned her head too fast. Not to mention that the idea of his big sister giving birth here at the house without a doctor or anything almost sent him into screaming fits every time he let himself think about it for more than three seconds.

The boy had never really thought about it, but he loved his big sister even though they had never been close
growing up. Amy had gone away to college when he was about nine or so and she was fourteen cutting down on the chance for them to really get to know each other or anything save hunting trips in the spring and fall with Dad or when she came home from college during the summer. Sometimes he could not help but get a little pissed, like his teachers and parents were expecting him to be a goddamn super-genius like his big sister…

Not that it was all bad: when Aim was over in Iraq it made him a minor celebrity around school for awhile. Nobody else in his class knew anybody over there and lots of people wanted to talk to him about it. It stopped being cool when he got called down to the counselor’s office
one afternoon where he met his parents.

Mom had been crying a lot and Dad had that same stony expression on his face whenever something was bothering him
but he did not want anybody to know about it. It turned out that there was a video on YouTube showing little bits of this metal box thing all over the place. He did not get why Mom and Dad were so upset about it at first until they said it was where Amy was living over in Iraq. It took him a minute but he recognized a couple things in the background from the pictures Amy had emailed him. He got to go home from school while Dad frantically tried to get a hold of someone in Amy’s chain of command to see if she was alright. Mom had cried and cried all afternoon on the couch and clutching a picture of Amy in her dress uniform, taken at her graduation ceremony.

Even Dad started to cry when the phone rang in the middle of the night. Amy had called from a satellite phone and spoke to each of them for a few minutes to assure them that she
was okay and currently had the same number of parts as she did when they last saw her. Somebody over there had told her about the video and she had worked a drug deal with a reporter to use his satellite phone so she could call them and let everybody know she was alright. He remembered how shaken up his big sister had sounded as she talked to him from half way around the world. Carl had guessed that there was something she was not telling him but he let it go. Aim just probably did not want to worry anybody. Yeah, he loved his sister.   

Frannie looked sad a lot
too even though she tried to hide it. He thought about bringing it up with Amy and Adam but he was embarrassed to admit that he watched her a lot. He scowled bitterly as he switched stations. A pang of sour anger came and went as he remembered all the shit that some of the real douchebags at school would give him. Carl was generally pretty sociable but for some reason he could not talk to any of the girls. He could not even conjure up the guts to say a word to any them but instead hung back and stared. So, of course, the swaggering jocks would pick on him: creep, loser, weirdo…or if they were feeling particularly malicious, they would call him a rapist.

Why did this have to fucking happen?
Carl thought, growing frustrated and lonely… He started flitting through the stations on the dial, hoping and begging silently to hear the sound of another human voice. “Holy shit!” Carl shouted as he jumped up from the table.

Rodriguez
leapt out of the recliner and stumbled into the end of the hide-a-bed as Lacey launched himself off of it and plowed right into her. Carl might have found the whole scene funny if he was not busy fiddling with the dial on his radio: Adam and Frannie were crawling over each other trying to stand up. Amy burst into the dining room with her M4 in her hands and expecting to find a horde of zombies pulling the dang house down around their ears from all the commotion in the living room.

“Hey guys!” Carl hissed as he unplugged the headphones from the radio and slowly dialed up the volume. “Listen to this!”
Rodriguez and Lacey hurried over to the table and stood by the boy as he owlishly stared at the dial, tuning through the static. “I know I heard something. C’mon…c’mon dammit.”

Frays scowled at her little brother as she scratched sleepily at an itch on her nose.
This had better be good!
Amy thought with a little frustration. As she had suspected, Frays found that she could not get a wink of sleep in there leaving her tired and grouchy. The bed was comfortable enough but the room itself seemed like it was full of ghosts. She kept expecting Mom and Dad to come in and kick her out at a moment’s notice and the bedclothes still held scents that reminded her of them. She could smell her mother’s hairspray and the lingering odor of burned tobacco, the tang of Dad’s deodorant and the powder Mom used sometimes. Lacey and Frays gave each other nervous smiles across the table. They had apparently both been thinking the same thing when Carl had started yelling.

Carl and Amy’s jaws dropped
when the radio finally managed to pick up a weak signal and a voice, familiar even through the feedback and static, came through the radio’s tiny speakers. “-ow to the head. These things can be destroyed by damage to their brains.” explained a tired but friendly voice sounding voice before disappearing into a cloud of hissing white noise.

“Aim!” Carl hissed excitedly, a look of utter disbelief on his face. “Aim,
that’s Ian Punnett! Ian goddamn Punnett!” Frays smiled at her little brother, holding an index finger over her lips as she concentrated on trying to make out more of the broadcast. The boy picked up the radio and moved closer to the window, stumbling over the stair going down into the living room.

The broadcast returned, still faint but a little stronger than it had been once Carl managed to get closer to the glass doors. He turned up the volume a little louder, all of them transfixed by the first human voice any of them had heard in weeks that did not belong to one of them. The host gave information on how to
salt and dry meat, purify water…all useful stuff to know, but not exactly what they were looking for. Frays dug out her little pocket notebook and tried to scribble down as much of what the broadcast said as she could.

There was a brief fit of static. “I ow you’re scared.
You might be hungry or lost.” said the voice coming in over the radio “Please, don’t…prey on each other. Things are bad enough out there right now without that. Help each other out. That’s the only way we..as a species are going to get through this, by working together.”

After maybe ten or fifteen minutes the
radio turned back into a hissing little box in the palms of Carl’s hands. A cloud of disappointment settled over the room as they moved back to the dining room table. The children watched the grownups from their place on the bed, drowsily blinking at them before rolling over and going back to sleep. “Who’s Ian Punnett?” Lacey asked as he stretched. He was tired, but too wired up right now to go back to bed at the moment.

“He hosted a radio show that was on
Saturdays in the middle of the night called Coast to Coast AM.” Amy said quietly. She frowned unhappily then yawned and looked at her watch. “Carl got me kind of addicted to it. They talked about all kinds of weird stuff.”

The boy smiled a little. “I
remember sent you shows on flash drives when you were in Iraq.” Carl said, still smiling as he got up and went to the fridge where he got out a big pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid. “Good thing I got them cheap, huh?”

“Yeah.” Amy said coolly as she went to the cabinet and took down some glasses.
The flash drives had gotten blown to bits along with everything else in her connex when a ‘private military contractor’ had accidentally fired an RPG in the air at the other end of the compound when she was overseas. She lay there blinking stupidly up at the sky everything kind of blurry and running together deaf save for the ringing in her ears no pain yet, still too much information trying to elbow its way into her addled brain… Amy shook the thoughts away as she set the glasses on the table and sat down. It looked like the meeting that she was planning on having in the morning was going to take place now.

Carl frowned
as he put the pitcher on the table and sat down. Somehow, he got the feeling that he had just put his foot in his mouth again. “So…” he said quietly and filled his sister’s glass then Frannie’s. “What’s going on?”

“We need to assess the situation.” Amy said quietly. She sipped the Kool-Aid and
did her best to hide a grimace. Carl had made it without sugar. After a couple seconds she managed to continue her voice a little choked and raspy. Frannie and Adam chuckled quietly until they tried their drinks. “So: here’s the facts. I’m about three months pregnant. I think, anyways. I dunno what the date is. We’ve got a pile of MREs in the attic, but we’re low on first aid supplies, medicine as well as canned and dry goods.”

“And toilet paper.” Carl interjected, drawing laughter from the others around the table. Amy playfully swatted at her brother for interrupting her then put on a serious expression before continuing.

“And toilet paper. On the plus side, we know now that, somewhere out there, there’s other people.” Frays said as she looked around the table. She rolled her shoulders and tried to stretch the kink out of the base of her neck. Amy felt a pop followed by a spasm in her arm which she did her best to hide. If anybody noticed they gave no sign of it.

Frannie tried to choke down a little more of the awful tasting drink. “Did anybody catch it if he said where he was?” she asked. The woman looked thoughtful for a second as she scratched the scar tissue on her neck. “I don’t think he did.”