The Oasis of Filth (10 page)

It turned out that we brought back everything Rosa had on her list. But then she needed eggs.

20

After using the new equipment to make cultures, Rosa put samples of the flu into fertilized chicken eggs and incubated them. Then came the risk she had to make someone else take. Since Rosa had already been cured, she couldn’t test the solution on herself. But in two days time, a family of three came into The Oasis, with their little girl already in the process of turning. She had been bitten by an attacking zombie while the family slept in a tent two nights before they arrived. It was amazing they all made it to The Oasis on foot after that. Rosa talked it over with Marian, and took the girl to the lab. They decided to try the egg solution. Cracking an egg, Rosa carefully went through a series of steps to extract the part she wanted into a beaker, then used pipettes to transfer the results into several test tubes. Loading those into the centrifuge we had recovered in Augusta, she set it spinning. After a time, she unloaded the tubes, extracted another portion using another pipette, and put that into a clean new test tube. She turned around with a tube half full of a milky, yellow-tinged fluid, looking at me with a nod.

“You’re the doctor,” she said, holding out the test tube and a syringe. Wordlessly, I prepped the needle and jabbed it into the girl’s deltoid. In her feverish state, she put up no fight.

“A very small number of people are deathly allergic to eggs,” I said while working. “If she is, she dies either way.” No one seemed to appreciate my honesty.

But the little girl wasn’t allergic, and she didn’t die. In two days, she was alert. In five, she was out playing with the other kids.

Rosa had found a way to deliver a cure for the zombie outbreak, and it even came in a convenient carrying case, inside its own shell. She made dozens of egg cures. In just weeks, the original processing of new people was ended — no more saliva swabs, no more gurneys and restraints, no more anxiety and terror. Everyone who came in was just given an egg.

Soon, Rosa felt compelled to share the answer with the outside world. She talked to Harvey. “I want to take this to Atlanta,” she declared.

Harvey, as usual, was nonplussed. “To the CDC, I assume?”

“Yes. I can show them how easy it is to reproduce, to transport. They can verify my results. We can tear down the city walls and go back to living.” She was passionate about it, and Harvey agreed we should try.

“But it won’t be easy,” he said. “They aren’t going to just swing open the gates for you.”

I thought about nearly having been blown up on the highway. “Richmond shot at us,” I said.

“Yep. Cities tend to do that.” Harvey thought for a moment. “I can send scouts. We can test out the range of their guns and find a way to deliver your message without being shot on sight.” As anxious as Rosa was, she knew it had to be done. Within an hour, Harvey had recruited Hank and Janine for the new job. The next morning they were on the way. We had to wait three days for their return. It wasn’t good news.

21

Hank and Janine looked shaken. Harvey had gathered his inner circle, eight of the oldest and I assumed wisest citizens of The Oasis. Next to Harvey’s office in the lodge, there was a large event room offering some privacy, so we met there.

“Atlanta fell,” Hank said, with no preamble. “There’s no one at the wall, and several pieces of it look like they’ve been torn down. There was a lot of smoke, too.”

Janine took over. “A
lot
of people are streaming out of the city. They’re looking for somewhere to go.”

“Do you think they know where we are?” Harvey asked.

Hank and Janine shared a sideways glance, embarrassed, guilty. “Maybe,” Hank said, looking down.

“Oh, my God, did you
lead
them here?” It was one of the inner circle, a thin, nebbishy older man with glasses, named Gerald. The rest of the inner circle looked around at each other; some made whispered comments.

“No!” Hank looked shocked.

“Hold on, hold on,” said Harvey, raising his big hands. He looked at Hank and Janine. “What happened?”

Hank hung his head. Janine started, “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

Eyes locking on Hank, Harvey said, “Son, no one here is going to blame you for doing a job I sent you out to do. Just tell us what happened.” Harvey glanced at the others, willing them to be patient.

“Janine and I have scouted around Atlanta many times before...,” Hank began.

“The very reason I sent you this time,” said Harvey.

“Right,” Hank said. “So, we knew the area. We knew generally where the defenses were strongest. We took our jeep in on Interstate 20. It shoots directly into Atlanta going west, so we can get pretty close. They don’t hold that area behind their wall, they’re in the downtown and northern areas.” He took a breath. “As we got near Grant Park, we knew we’d have to be on our toes. Around when there’s the split for 75/85 North, you can see the downtown, all the tall buildings. There’s a fence there, but it’s too far outside for anyone to guard. It’s good for cover, if you want to sneak up and take a look at downtown. We’d done it before, but we’d never seen anything like this. A few of the skyscrapers were on fire, the golden-domed one and some taller ones farther north. So we decided to come up to the southern wall as close as we could to see what was going on.

“Closer to downtown, Interstate 75/85 is the south wall. There isn’t a lot of great cover around there, so we did it slow and stayed hidden. By the time we went a few blocks, we could
hear
them. There were people — lots of people — outside the wall.” He paused.

“From there, we started to see people all over, but farther away,” Janine said. “Lots of big groups, making caravans, headed somewhere. It looked pretty disorganized — people going everywhere. But a lot were headed east. We went in closer. I think we were just...
curious
. We’d seen the outside of their walls so many times, no one around, nothing but the possibility of getting shot. And now there were people.”

Hank took over the story again. “So we were trying to sneak around... and we stumbled right into a group of people standing in the parking lot of a small old building, some kind of old store.” Hank dropped his head again, but kept talking. “They were loading guns, gear, food, water — all into some pickup trucks. We tried to go by without them seeing, but...”

“But you don’t
look
like them,” Harvey offered.

“Yeah. The city must have just fallen within a couple of days. They were all still trying to be really clean, really neat. They had on those synthetic clothes everyone wears in the cities, so when they looked at us, they just knew. They could smell it on us and see it in every fiber of our clothing — that we were different.” Hank set his jaw, drumming his fingers on the table. “A couple of them, they had another look:
infected
. But I don’t think the people with them had noticed it yet. One of them was even the driver of one of the pickups.”

Gerald interrupted. “You saw a
zombie driving a truck
?” There were gasps.

“We saw him behind the wheel,” Hank said. “And he came after us along with the others. So, yeah.” Hank looked around the table, at all of us, like he was willing us to understand how seriously he meant this.

Harvey thought it over. Then Anya, the oldest-looking woman in the circle, spoke up. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Rabid animals experience a period of behavioral change, they don’t just immediately become hyper-reactive. With RL2013, the disease acts even more erratically. Sometimes the various stages are longer or shorter. An infected person might have many days when they can still maintain normal functions — including driving — even though they’re progressing downward into dementia. But an infected person behind the wheel of a car...” She trailed off.

“Would be like a lunatic guiding a missile.” Harvey completed her thought. We all stared at one another until finally Harvey turned back and asked Hank and Janine to finish their report.

Janine took a breath. “We dodged them all we could. We thought we’d lost them by the time we made our way back to our jeep. We took side streets to stay unnoticed; they must’ve taken the highway the whole way.” Harvey nodded, silently prompting her to continue.

“When we finally got back on to 20 East to make time, we saw them in the rearview behind us. But not just those couple of pickups. There were dozens of vehicles. They weren’t too close to us then, but we stood out. We were the only moving thing on the road in front of them. It was too easy to follow us.”

Hank had been nervously drumming his fingers the whole time Janine spoke, but now he stopped. “As soon as we saw them, we knew we had to try to send them in some other direction,” he said, “so we got off 20 and went south toward Macon.” Hank pulled out a worn paper map to show us. “We did a bunch of zigzagging to try to throw them off. We saw them follow us south, a whole huge bunch of them. But we really don’t know how far they went that way, or how convinced they were.”

“Especially since there are rumors,” Harvey mused.

“Yeah.” Hank shuddered.

Harvey addressed Rosa and me. “We know from people coming into The Oasis that they’ve heard rumors, at least throughout Georgia and South Carolina:
Go to the border lakes
. So if these people from Atlanta have heard the rumors, we could be in for a whole lot of company.”

Janine nodded grimly. “That’s what we’re worried about.”

Rosa and I exchanged a careful, noncommittal look. This didn’t seem like the time to let them know that some rumors had made it at least as far north as DC.

Vincent, another member of the circle, snapped. “We’re doomed! I mean, we’re
done
here, folks.” He had the frantic, smiling sarcasm of someone who thinks there’s nothing left. “Kiss The Oasis
goodbye
!”

Harvey’s stern voice stopped Vincent. “How many?”

Hank returned Harvey’s frank gaze, dead serious. “Based on the number of people we saw, if half of them make it out here, we’ll be overrun.”

Harvey stared at the scouts for a minute, thinking. I knew he’d been through a lot as the leader of The Oasis, but this was a challenge to dwarf all others. Then he spoke. “We can’t support an entire city of people, and we can’t turn them back if they want to come in. So now what?”

Harvey’s eyes traveled around his inner circle. No words passed. Where before they’d blurted out what they thought or felt, now we witnessed the full effect of Harvey’s strength. Through force of will, he kept them from losing the self-control, the sanity and judgment, he knew he needed from each of them. He looked to each one in turn. In my mind, I assumed he was saying, “What would you do? If you have an idea, speak it now.” No one said a word.

After a long while, Harvey said, “We’re peaceful people. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to set up a new perimeter, as far outside the current walls as we reasonably can. Every able person will help in the effort. There are lodges all through the lake areas, not just here where we are. We’ll stop them and tell them that we can save them, as long as they’ll do it our way. We’ll cure them of the disease if they come to us peacefully.”

It was a brilliant plan that had no hope of ever working.

22

The first of them arrived that night, in vehicles of all sizes: cars, trucks, RVs, tractor-trailers. Regardless of our planning, they would have broken through, and did. The time we had to make a new perimeter wall was not enough. To my knowledge, Harvey was never even able to present his offer of a cure in exchange for mutual peace. By the time our scouts raced to tell us outsiders were coming, it was too late. The new perimeter — a wide arc of thick wooden posts from freshly cut trees, not even half-finished — crumbled like tissue paper. Then the real gate did, too. There were groups of men with guns, families, women caravanning together, kids scattered among them all. Too many, too enraged. Not infected, just too worked up with fear, adrenaline, and desperation to think straight. They plowed through our defenses just to get at what we had: safety, serenity. They paid no attention to the fact that their destruction was the antithesis of what they had come for.

People died. Their people, fighting their way in. Our people, holding the gates, or protecting their loved ones at every lodge door and campsite. Once the main gate was breached, their vehicles streamed in. But it was a small road, narrow, bordered by Hickory Knob’s dense woodland. They all tried to get in at once and quickly jammed up. Cars and trucks were locked against each other, with new arrivals piling up behind them by the dozens or the hundreds, or maybe even the thousands. From somewhere far outside the gate, past the new
perimeter, we heard a terrible noise that sounded like the end of all things. At least for The Oasis, it was.

The awful noise grew, a gnawing, grinding din that soon absorbed all other sound, turning more and more heads, until finally everyone, all of us, people of The Oasis and the people from Atlanta, seemed to be stopped, staring, waiting. And finally, there it was. Emerging from the back of the line, clawing through it, crashing into cars, trucks, people, came a tractor-trailer dragging a huge tanker of gasoline. In a perfect world, or just a better one, this would have been a blessing — fuel for countless uses. Here, it was the worst of all possible scenarios. The huge truck drove through the smaller vehicles like a bowling ball through pins: everything was crushed, shoved aside, flattened.

Rosa, hearing the commotion, raced to the lab and grabbed as many eggs as she could in an effort to protect her work. Then she and I were dodging through the chaos, racing for some kind of safety. Without thought, we made for the only shelter we’d known since we left DC: the RV. But the roar of the incoming semi stopped us. As the truck approached, lights from the lodge buildings clearly illuminated the driver. His face was snarling, eyes wild. He made manic gestures, blood streaked across his cheek. He had the disease, and somewhere on the road from Atlanta, he must have turned. Now, our worst fear was smashing through the gates of The Oasis.

The truck slammed into one of the buildings on the north side of the lodge, flipped, exploded. The tanker of gas disappeared in a fireball beyond belief. Rosa and I were blown backward by the blast, blinded for a time. The entire building and anyone near it were torn to shreds, then burned on top of that. The zombie driving was incinerated. If only he’d known he was steps away from a cure, would that have done anything to change his actions? At that stage of the disease, I doubted it.

Through the smoke and flames, I saw Harvey standing in front of the ruined lodge, shouting orders, but I couldn’t hear what he said. My ears rang. A group of young men confronted him, and he tried to block their path. One of them impaled him on a long, sharpened stick, and left him on the lawn to die, gurgling blood. Rosa shouted Harvey’s name. We both sobbed. It was pointless. He was dying or already dead. Only escape would matter now.

Ironically, the same semi that destroyed the lodge had plowed an open path through the crowded road out, pushing aside all the vehicles that had been clogging the way. Rosa and I saw our only chance. We got into the RV and started moving. Confusion was our advantage; before anyone else could fill in the gaps, we shot toward the gate, now a ragged, gaping maw.

About halfway there, a handful of cars and trucks started to move again, swerving back toward the road, right into our path. Rosa rolled down her window and shouted, trying to make people turn their attention in different directions, away from us. Whatever it was that she yelled, it made people move. Again, Rosa’s mind saved us.

              With new vehicles continuing to pour in from the south, the road was rapidly becoming jammed again. We cut off into the woods, where the RV took a terrible beating. We drove slowly, both to preserve the vehicle and to avoid detection. Eventually, we met up with a state road running north. It was eerily quiet. We stopped for a moment and listened. Back in the direction of the camp, there were muted explosions, screams, sounds of pandemonium. Rosa reached for me and hugged me, tight, still crying.

From out of the woods on our right, a figure lurched, illuminated by the moonlight. A zombie, spasming and angry, stepped onto the road. He was maybe 25, strongly built, filthy hair that might once have been blond. He looked brutal enough to tear the door off the RV and rip us apart. Rosa gasped, gripping me even more tightly, but the zombie walked right past the front of the RV and didn’t look at us. He was clearly drawn toward the light and noise from The Oasis. Then we looked down the road. There were two more zombies, then four, following in the broken footsteps of the first. With new urgency, I hit the gas and we started back north, leaving heaven on Earth dying behind us.