CHAPTER 25

Ed Moore rose at dawn and walked out of the tent he shared with the other men from the Springfield Adult Living Village and stretched. He was looking for Billy Kline. All around him, spread out over a five-acre grassy field south of the Marine Corps Logistics Base outside Albany, Georgia, were more than two thousand military-issued tents. They were packed in like bees in a hive. There was trash everywhere. The pathways between the tents were crisscrossed with laundry wires. The ground was worn into muddy troughs after the previous morning’s rainstorms, and you couldn’t walk more than a few feet from your tent without getting stained with mud up to midcalf. Though it was only a few minutes past sunrise, and much of the landscape was still shrouded in early-morning shadows and haze, the hive was already bustling with refugees trying to get a head start on the crowds that would soon be gathering around the mess halls and the commissary and the medic stations.

Ed frowned at the commotion. This was not at all what he had expected, and he was feeling the vague, unfocused anger of the disillusioned. True, the military had made good on its promise to feed them, clothe them, get them into shelter, but he was appalled at how haphazardly things were being run. Art Waller had yet to receive anything more than a cursory examination by a Marine Corps medic. He was inside the tent now, running a high fever. He’d kept Ed up most of the night with his coughing. There were generators and heaters inside the tents, but no fuel to run them. There were no showers. The only bathrooms in the camp consisted of a row of twenty port-o-pottys that had become disgusting messes by the end of the first day. It was useless to bag your garbage. Field mice and raccoons and feral cats made nightly forays into the camp, and by morning, the bags were gutted and the refuse left to rot all afternoon in the sweltering sun. Everywhere he turned, he saw a reflection of his own frustrated anger staring back at him from other residents of the camp.

They had been here for over a week now. The camp’s official military designation was the Pecan City Temporary Relocation Facility, though the residents simply called it the camp.

Ed thought it would be better to call it the sty.

The first day, he’d witnessed the total collapse of military organization, and by that night, the security forces assigned to watch the camp had backed out of the area entirely, letting the residents work out their own law and order.

Ed watched their retreat with bitterness and resentment—but at the same time, he supposed he couldn’t blame them. There’d been only a handful of them, none of them older than thirty, and those boys with fully automatic weapons had suddenly found themselves confronted with thousands of screaming, complaining, desperate refugees, every one of them demanding more than an entire division of soldiers and Red Cross volunteers could have possibly delivered.

Their retreat left a leadership vacuum in the camp, and things went downhill rapidly. No provision was made for traffic out on Highway 133, the main road that led along the western edge of the camp, and throughout that first day and well into the night, a steady stream of vehicles poured into the area. The road choked with pedestrians and vehicles till it was impassable. A red, cloying dust hung in the air and made breathing difficult. The new arrivals were uncertain where to go, and nobody seemed to know what they needed or how to get it. People loitered around the camp’s facilities, further choking the area.

Few tents were set up at that point, and Ed and the others settled into a sort of temporary encampment a little ways off the road while they waited for somebody to assert some control over the situation. But as the morning wore on and the day grew hotter, the crowd’s agitation mounted, and soon it became obvious that order would not be restored anytime soon.

“Atlanta’s gone,” Ed heard a passerby say.

“Macon, too,” answered another man.

All through the day, news filtered in from refugees from the surrounding states, and with every new flood of stunned, staring faces came more dire news.

“We passed through Charlotte two days ago,” a woman said. She was with a man, the two of them carrying their few possessions on what looked like the door to a trailer, the door held between them like a stretcher. “Wasn’t nobody but dead bodies left in the whole damn town. Every street was deserted.”

“What about Knoxville? I have family there.”

“Gone, too. Sorry.”

“Montgomery? Anybody heard news from Montgomery?”

“They’re all gone.”

“Columbus?”

“All dead.”

A man in a dirty business suit walked by them. His face was vacant, his eyes open but unseeing. He was babbling, clutching at his hair with one hand while he swatted the air with the other. “It’s all over,” he said. “Fucking gone. Everything’s fucking gone.”

Streams of people on foot filled the road. Others drove their vehicles, honking to clear the road, leaning out their windows, screaming obscenities while shaking their fists.

“Get out of the fucking way,” Ed heard the driver of a battered red Ford pickup shout.

He was answered by vacant stares and pedestrians so dead on their feet they simply showed him their backs and marched on.

Enraged, the man in the truck revved his engine. “Get your asses out of my fucking way,” the man shouted again.

Suddenly, the man hit the gas and the truck lurched forward. He tried to leave the road and skirt the knots of people there, but in his haste he lost control and hit a man who was lugging a heavy rucksack along behind him. The man screamed, then fell under the truck. The rear of the truck bounced over the man and threw him some five feet away into the grass. Ed managed to reach the scene in time to see a child, a girl of five or six, staring wide-eyed and stricken at the mangled pile of twisted limbs that lay at her feet. Inevitably, there were infected among the refugees. Shots were fired. People were trampled.

Sometime around eleven that night, reinforcements arrived and the military moved back into the camp to try to assert some kind of order. But the soldiers were so few in number, and the confusion was so great, that they quickly became exhausted and angry. They ended up causing as many beatings as they stopped.

It was only around the morning of the second day that some sort of order settled over the camp. The dead were cleared out, their bodies dumped into military trucks and carted away. Soldiers with bullhorns moved through the camp. They passed out colored cards with numbers on them, lottery cards, and announced times when you could take your lottery card to the scant facilities the camp offered. It was a reasonable system, and might have worked under reasonable conditions. But it didn’t work now. There were fights, and stolen cards, and double dipping, and every manner of graft.

But somehow, despite all the fighting and the riots and the confusion, Ed managed to make a niche for his people. They had tents. They had food. They had water and new clothes. They had the basics, thanks to him. He was proud of himself for getting them that much. Looking around, he could see it was more than most had.

But now he needed to find Billy Kline. He had a list of supplies they needed, but he wouldn’t be able to carry them alone.

Ed found him a short distance away, coming back to the tents from the toilets. He was dressed in jeans and a red Marine Corps T-shirt that was tight in the sleeves. He hadn’t shaved in three, maybe four days, Ed guessed, and his face was dark with patchy stubble.

“I need you to come with me,” he said. “We got some stuff to do this morning.”

“Fuck off,” Billy said.

“Boy, I told you I don’t like you cussing at me.”

“Seriously? Are you for fucking real? What the fuck do you care if I cuss or not? I’m a grown man.”

Billy ducked his head and tried to push his way past Ed. “Get the fuck out of my way.”

Ed pushed him back. “Not so fast. I need your help getting supplies.”

“I told you to fuck off.”

“And I told you to watch your mouth.”

“Whatever.”

Billy tried to shove Ed out of the way but found his hands deflected. He rocked backward, off balance, and fell onto his butt. Billy looked up at Ed, uncertain how he had ended up on his ass.

He climbed to his feet. “You stepped in some shit now, old man.”

“Really?” Ed said. “Does it have to be like this? Why can’t we just do what we gotta do?”

Billy dusted off the seat of his pants, then raised his fists.

Ed let out a weary sigh. “Well, come on then. Give it your best shot.”

Billy charged forward and swung a huge, wide-opened right cross at Ed, who sidestepped it easily. Off balance again, Billy spun around on Ed, only to catch a left jab in his mouth. He rocked back, and for a second his legs wobbled beneath him.

Stunned, he touched his fingers to his lips. They came away bloody.

He charged Ed again with another right cross. Ed ducked it, and Billy’s punch only managed to knock Ed’s cowboy hat from his head. Ed moved back a half step and fired three quick left jabs into Billy’s face, following with a quick upper cut to the younger man’s solar plexus.

Billy fell to his knees, coughing, gasping, a rope of bloody spit hanging from his busted lips. When he looked up at Ed, Billy’s head was swaying on his shoulders like he’d just been hit by a brick.

Ed was standing over him. Though seventy-two, he was still more or less straight up and down in his jeans and flannel shirt, still formidable looking. The muscles stood out like cords on his bare forearms. Only the cap of uncombed white hair on his head belied his age. He stood like an old-time boxer, fists at the ready, but down low, at belt level.

“Get up,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Billy answered, rubbing his jaw.

“We gonna do this again? I told you to watch your mouth around me. Now get up. I need you.”

“You need me?”

“You’re the strongest man here, Billy. I need some help.”

“Strongest man here,” Billy said, and laughed. He moved his jaw with obvious pain. “I think you knocked out one of my teeth.”

Ed reached down and scooped up his hat. He dusted it off, then seated it back on his head.

“There ain’t no shame in where you’re at right now, son. Old age and guile is gonna triumph over youth and raw ability every time. The guile I can teach you, but the old age you’re gonna have to get on your own.”

Ed held out his hand.

“Now get on your feet, son. I need you.”

Billy looked at Ed’s hand, then at Ed.

“You’re gonna teach me how to fight like that, right?”

“Someday soon,” Ed said.

After dark that night, Ed was sitting with Margaret O’Brien and her two grandkids, watching a newscast out of Albany, Georgia, on a portable TV set. He was eating a granola bar. On TV, a young woman in a black pantsuit stood in front of a burning apartment building in western Albany. Riots, she said, were breaking out all over the city. There were fires raging to which the fire department couldn’t respond. The infected were everywhere. The streets were littered with bodies, and authorities were ordering evacuations, though no safe areas were suggested.

Ed watched the woman and thought of all those idiot reporters he had seen over the years standing in their rain slickers, desperately trying to stay on their feet as the hurricane rolled ashore, and he wondered how long it would take a band of the infected to come in from off camera and sweep her away.

“Ed?” Margaret said.

Ed turned and looked at her. She wore a light-brown Windbreaker over a white blouse and brown slacks, and she had her arms around her grandkids, Randy and Britney.

Margaret had really blossomed since all this started, dedicating herself entirely to those kids. Ed could see the life coming back into her, the sense of purpose, and in a way, he envied her for that.

She said, “Ed, is this really…all over the world?”

He knew what she meant. All day long, the cable news shows had been running images from the Middle East, from China, from Mexico and Europe and Africa and South America. He sighed heavily. “I’m afraid so.”

“Can it really be as bad as all that? I just can’t believe that everything can fall apart so fast. It’s been less than two weeks.”

“It’s hard to believe,” he agreed.

She wrapped her arms more tightly around the kids and squeezed them close. Randy whimpered softly, and she shushed him.

“What will we do, Ed?” she said. “We can’t stay here. You know that, right? This place. It’s bad.”

He put his granola bar down. Maybe it was the lingering depression he felt from watching the news, or maybe it was his own tired body, but the granola bar had lost its flavor, and he had no stomach for it. He rose to his feet and leaned against the edge of the tent. His back and his buttocks hurt from sitting.

“There’s been talk around here,” he said. “I’ve heard people speaking about this guy out of Jackson, Mississippi, named Jasper Sewell. Supposedly, he led over a thousand people out of Jackson without anybody getting a scratch on them. He’s supposed to be setting up some kind of community in the Cedar River National Grasslands of North Dakota.”

“A community?” Margaret looked doubtful. “What does that mean?”

“It’s just talk I’ve heard,” Ed said.

He’d heard stories about Jasper around camp. He was supposed to be some kind of preacher, and that had put Ed off.

Though he’d spent nearly his entire life in the South, he’d never felt comfortable with the Southern evangelical spirit. There’d always seemed something desperate, even primitive, about it, and the last thing he wanted to do was throw himself and the people he’d promised to protect into that kind of madness.

But that was where the uncertainty came in. For all the religious fervor that seemed to surround Jasper Sewell and his exploits, the one thing that all the stories agreed on was that the man was saving lives. He had, it seemed, actually led a huge number of people to safety and was gathering more survivors together every day. Compared to the military’s failure to provide for them, his community in the Grasslands seemed to offer at least a ray of hope.

He said, “I’m not sure if it’s everything people are saying. You know? I mean, it probably isn’t.”

“But you’ve already made up your mind, Ed. That’s what it sounds like, anyway.”

“No,” he said. “Well, maybe. Jesus, I don’t know.” He took his hat off and fingered the bill where a thread was coming loose. “Look, Margaret,” he said. “There’s a lot going on here, but I think this could be a good thing for us. North Dakota is isolated. There aren’t many people up there, and that means fewer infected. Plus, it gets cold there in the winter. We’ll be dealing with that soon, the colder weather. If we’re somewhere farther north—maybe not North Dakota, but somewhere farther north—we’ll have the weather on our side, too. The infected won’t be able to deal with that kind of exposure.”

“That’s true,” Margaret said, and nodded. “Yeah, Ed, that makes perfect sense.”

“Well,” he said, and shrugged good-naturedly. He smoothed his white hair down with his hand and slipped his hat back onto his head. Then he smiled at her. “We’ll see,” he said.

“Ed?”

He turned, still smiling, and saw Julie Carnes standing in the lane between the tents. Her gray hair was down around her shoulders, coming loose from her ponytail. Her face had an odd, strained quality, and she was trembling.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Margaret rose to her feet, but didn’t let go of the kids.

“Ed, I need you to come quick. Please.”

“What is it?”

“It’s Art,” she said. “Ed, he’s…he died a few minutes ago.”

Art Waller’s body lay on a cot along the back wall. The others stood a respectful distance off. They were all trying very hard not to look at the body.

Nobody spoke.

Ed stared down at Art. His body looked so frail, so hollow, like spun glass. Ed let out a breath and closed his eyes. Leading these people, surviving, was so much harder than he thought it’d be.

That day they were rescued from the attic, when that army major told him he was back on the clock, it was like his prayers had been answered. Getting reactivated sent a thrill through him. It made him feel like he was getting some long-lost piece of his dignity back. He’d thought it’d be that easy, too. A simple matter of putting his badge back on. God, he’d been such a fool. His shame at his own gullibility actually made him shiver.

When he opened his eyes, Julie Carnes was standing next to him.

Ed took a deep breath, then another. He said, “Did anybody tell the medic station?”

“Yeah, we told them,” Billy said.

“Did they send somebody over?”

“They said if he’s dead there’s nothing for them to do.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah. Just like that.”

Ed snarled to himself. “Damn this place,” he said. And damn me, too, for my vanity.

“Okay,” he said. He reached down and pulled the top of a yellowed cotton sheet over Art’s face. “Okay. I assume they’re not gonna help us bury him, either.”

Billy shook his head.

“Okay. We’ll do it ourselves. Billy, I’m gonna need your help again. Can you find us some shovels?”

Billy nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

While Billy went out into the camp to find some shovels, Ed and Julie Carnes and Margaret O’Brien wrapped Art’s body in a sheet and tied it off along the seam. Flies had already started to gather and were buzzing around Art’s mouth and eyes. Ed waved them away while they tied off the sheet.

When Billy returned, he offered to carry the body, but Ed refused with a shake of his head. “I’ll do it,” he said, and picked up the body. Art was light, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, but it was still more than Ed was ready for. He didn’t put the body down, though. He needed to do this, as much for himself as for Art. It wasn’t quite a penance, but at least it gave him some way to confront his grief and his anger at himself for his foolishness and his vanity.

“You got it?” Billy said.

Ed nodded.

They chose a spot on the far side of the main road west of the camp. It was a narrow lane of grass at the edge of the pinewoods. Ed and Billy dug in silence for the better part of an hour. Margaret’s grandkids, Randy and Britney, slept in the grass a short distance away. Margaret sat near them, stroking Randy’s hair while he slept. Julie had her arm around Barbie Denkins. Barbie had gone strangely silent since their arrival in the camp, and Ed wondered how aware she was of what was going on. Despite the fog of Alzheimer’s, he figured she was probably aware of more than he gave her credit for.

When it was done, the adults gathered around the grave mound and stood in silence. Ed had a dull headache behind his eyes from the heat and the exertion and the frustration caused by too many days in this place. His gaze wandered from the grave to the camp. Darkness had settled over the land, but there were fires burning in fifty-five-gallon drums all around the camp, and to his blurred vision the orange glow of the fires looked like molten rivers of light snaking through the tents.

“Please be at peace, Art,” Julie said. “Please.”

The others muttered a quiet amen, then fell silent once more.

Ed felt uneasy. He had, in the back of his mind, assumed they would spend another day or two at least here; but now, looking down at the grave and around the small circle of faces, he felt a renewed sense that they had to leave right away. This was no place for them.

Margaret caught Ed’s eye and said, “Will you tell us what you want to do?”

Julie still had her arm around Barbie Denkins. Barbie looked tired and distant, like she was somewhere else.

Julie said, “What are you taking about?”

Billy looked from Julie to Ed. He said, “You want to leave here, don’t you?”

Ed nodded. He looked toward the camp and shook his head. “That place is no good. I think we need to go someplace else.”

“But where?” Julie said. She sounded suddenly frightened.

“Tell them what you told me, Ed,” Margaret said. “About the Grasslands.”

“The Grasslands?” Billy said. “I’ve heard about that. You’re talking about that preacher from Mississippi, aren’t you? You want to go there?”

Ed nodded.

“What is this place?” Julie asked. “What are you people talking about?”

Ed told her what he had heard of Jasper Sewell.

She listened to it all, and when he was done, she said, “You want us to pick up and travel all the way across the country to follow up on a rumor? Is that really what you’re asking us to do, Ed? What about transportation? Did you think about that? We don’t have a vehicle. We don’t have a way to get one. And what about Barbie, Ed? Did you think about her? How is she going to make the trip?”

Barbie looked up and muttered something Ed couldn’t hear.

Julie squeezed her close.

“Well?” she said.

He didn’t have an answer for her, only his conviction that this place was a death trap.

“If we stay here, we’re going to die,” he said.

“You don’t know that. There are soldiers here. They can protect us, feed us.”

“They couldn’t do anything for Art,” he said, and he was suddenly angry. His voice rose and he couldn’t make himself bring it back down. “Do you think they’ll be able to do anything for Barbie? Or for any of us? What happens in the next few weeks, Julie? What happens when the rest of us need help? Huh? What happens?”

Julie looked away from him.

“Please don’t yell at her, Ed,” Margaret said.

They were silent for a long moment, none of them looking at each other.

Finally, Billy said, “Should we…I don’t know…take a vote?”

Ed sighed. He looked at Margaret, who nodded, and then at Julie. She said nothing. Only frowned and looked away.

“Okay, then,” Ed said. “All those who want to leave here…”

Slowly, Margaret and Billy raised their hands. Ed raised his.

“I’m sorry, Julie,” Margaret said. “I have to think of my grandkids. This is no place for them. It’s not safe here.”

Julie just shook her head. “Come on, Barbie,” she said, and led the older woman away, back toward the camp.