CHAPTER 57

The military delegation from Minot arrived the next morning. It was late October and intensely cold. The sky was a gray, leaden swirl above Aaron’s head. Snow was heavy in the air and thick on the ground. The wind was a constant roar. Aaron, who was standing on the downhill slope in front of his cottage, didn’t see or even hear the helicopter until it was right over top of him, coming down in the open area west of the cottages.

Michael Barnes and a small group of security personnel were out there with trucks to meet them. From his front porch, Aaron watched the helicopter touch down in a blast of disturbed snow. As it powered down, soldiers in winter gear climbed out and approached Barnes and his group. None of the soldiers looked to be armed from what Aaron could tell. And yet, they were here.

Ever since Jasper had started taking Thomas to his bed, Aaron had been plagued with questions. Over the years, he’d burglarized the homes of new members, looking for information for Jasper to use during prayer services. He’d helped slander elected officials who were critical of Jasper, and he’d sabotaged their election campaign functions. He’d overseen the beatings of Family members who tried to leave the church. He’d lied to federal prosecutors under oath. He’d even delivered his own son up for a ritualized rape, all because Jasper had asked him to. And over the past few months, during their time at the Grasslands compound, he’d heard Jasper deliver his dire warnings of governmental conspiracy to the people during mealtimes. He’d listened as Jasper told them of the military’s plans to kill their children and rape their women, and he’d shouted and prayed for Jasper to protect them, even though Aaron was one of the few who knew that the military had made no such announcements.

But watching as Thomas sank a little more each day into his own private hell had made him doubt all of that. It was like somebody had suddenly wiped the cobwebs from his face, and he was only now realizing that he was standing in the midst of corruption so vile and complete there was no way to pull himself out. He had come to question everything, to react with nausea and distrust to everything Jasper said.

And then the military arrived.

Their presence here was a powerful confirmation of the things Jasper had been telling them. Aaron shivered, though not entirely from the cold.

Kate brought him a cup of coffee, black with a touch of sugar, just enough to take off the bitterness. “Thank you,” he said, holding it close to his chin to let the radiant heat warm his face.

Together, they watched Barnes and the military delegation trade greetings. Then Barnes led them to the waiting trucks and a moment later the whole procession was headed for the west gate. One of the officers pointed out into the prairie beyond the fences, where the infected had knotted along the fence line and were banging on the wire. Farther out, long dark caravans of the infected were approaching, and Aaron wondered where they had all come from. There had been hundreds before. Now, there were literally a thousand, maybe more.

Aaron looked over at Jasper’s quarters. He had yet to make an appearance, but Aaron was certain he was ready for them. He only wished he’d been invited to listen in.

“Things are changing pretty fast,” he said.

“Should I be scared, Aaron?”

He looked at his wife. She was still an attractive woman, though her age was beginning to tell in the crow’s-feet wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the wisps of gray in her hair. It was the soft glow of her smile that had won him over more than two decades before and he hadn’t seen that in a long while. He missed it.

“I think—” he said, and stopped himself. This was important. Too important to lie to her. He said, “Kate, I’m worried.” He nodded out toward the approaching vehicles, a gesture that included the approaching zombies beyond. “I’m worried about that. And I’m worried about what’s going on here. I think, maybe, we might have made a mistake.”

There, he said it. For better or for worse, the cat was out of the bag.

She didn’t say anything for a long while, simply stared out at the prairie, at the approaching crowds of zombies. She had been his faithful companion now for twenty-two years of marriage. She’d borne him a fine son. Together, they’d lived in the shelter of Jasper’s church, their love for each other growing as the church grew and prospered. Now, he’d thrown down a gauntlet. Would she follow him? Would she turn away from the man who had been at the core of their life together for so long, or would she turn him over to that man? He waited on tenterhooks for her reply.

At last she looked at him. She moved her hand to rest on top of his, and she said, “Do you want to leave here?”

He nodded.

“Can we survive out there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I know we won’t survive in here.”

She brushed the hair from his forehead with her fingertips.

“I’m with you, Aaron. You, me, and your son. We’ll make it together.”

The vehicles were pulling up to the front of Jasper’s quarters now. Aaron turned and watched the soldiers, four older air force officers and one young, long-haired man who had obviously not spent a day of his life in the military, climb out of the trucks. They looked around, taking in the size of the village, before being ushered up to Jasper’s quarters by Michael Barnes.

The younger man’s head was on swivel. He kept turning every which way, like a country bumpkin dropped into the heart of the big city, and Aaron could see right away that the kid didn’t belong. It made him curious.

Aaron took another sip of his coffee.

It was definitely time to leave the Grasslands.

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

The Grasslands, North Dakota: October 18th, 3:30 P.M.

The military delegation arrived today. They’re down in the pavilion now, interviewing Jasper, I think.

Like the rest of the non-Family members, I had to stay out of the way during their tour. Barnes’s security people told us to make sure we avoided all contact with them, but there was never any real danger of us getting close enough for that to happen. They kept us pretty well corralled. The only time I got a really good look at them was when they filed past our dormitories at a double-time march. I stood there with Ed Moore, Sandra and Clint, Jeff Stavers, and some others while the delegation was hustled through their tour. Looking at Jasper, I got the feeling the tour was not going well. He was angry. He kept running his hands over his face. He waved and gestured and once, after they’d got about twenty yards up the road from where we stood, I even heard him raise his voice at one of the officers. Wish I had heard what he said.

But then something really interesting happened. Billy Kline came up behind us with the blind girl, Kyra Talbot, holding his hand.

“They gone?” he asked.

Ed nodded. Then he tipped his cowboy hat to the blind girl and said, “Ma’am.”

“I want you to listen to what she’s got to say, Ed,” said Billy. “The rest of you too.” He squeezed her hand. “Go ahead, Kyra. It’s okay.”

I hadn’t talked to Kyra at all before that moment. I’d heard from Jeff Stavers that she was good people, but that she was totally enamored of Jasper. Supposedly, she loved it here.

And that made what she told us seem even more incredible.

She told us how she had overheard Jasper and Barnes talking about killing Tom Wilder and his two friends. Ed had told us what he’d seen that morning the zombies broke through the main gate, but I don’t think any of us had really wanted to believe that they’d been murdered.

But now, we couldn’t deny it.

By the time Kyra finished speaking, Ed was leaning against the side of the building, eyes closed, trembling as he tried to catch his breath.

And then Kyra really dropped another bomb on us.

She said, “They want me to be at the office in ten minutes to meet the military guys. I want to give them this.”

She held out a piece of tightly folded paper for one of us to take.

Sandra took it from here and unfolded it. It read:

SOME OF US WANT TO LEAVE

AND HE WON’T LET US

GET US OUT OF HERE PLEASE

I was stunned. This was it, then. As soon as the military saw that, they would know something bad was happening here. Something beyond the sudden increase in the number of zombies we’ve seen at our gates lately. They would press the issue. The country was still technically under martial law, after all, even if the military was powerless to enforce it on large population centers. They could do it here in the Grasslands, though. They had resources close by.

“There’s no turning back once they see this,” Sandra said.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “Ed, what do you think?”

I could see him steeling himself for the task ahead. Old as he was, there was a singular strength about him that I found reassuring.

“Okay,” he said. “Do it.”

Later that afternoon, Aaron sat at a picnic table in the pavilion with about four hundred other Family members, attending a reception for the military delegation. At one point, the military leader, an air force colonel named James Briggs, stood up to say a few words.

He was a tall, fit-looking man in his forties, nearly bald except for a thin cottony donut of hair at his temples. His cheeks were bright red from the cold.

He said, “When we first planned to come down here, we had no idea what we’d find. We half expected you folks to be starving or freezing or living out of holes in the ground.”

This brought a few well-orchestrated chuckles from Family members.

“But now that we’ve seen the Grasslands for ourselves, I have to say that there are a lot of folks here who think this is about the best thing that has ever happened to them.”

His next sentence was cut off by a torrent of applause. He dutifully stopped talking and smiled at the cheers. But the cheers went on a little too long. They seemed a little too enthusiastic. Aaron watched the colonel watching the crowd, and he realized that Briggs had picked up on it, too.

Not everything was as it seemed in the Grasslands compound.

An hour later, Aaron was standing next to a table where Jasper was talking with Colonel Briggs and his delegation. The conversation was not going well. In all the time they’d known each other, Aaron had never seen Jasper so rattled. He was sweating, disoriented. He kept touching his face, dragging his fingers down his cheeks, almost as if he could pull his black hair down over his head like a hood and block out the interview. One minute, he was nearly screaming. The next, he was pleading with Briggs to understand what he was trying to achieve here. Briggs, for his part, seemed more and more alarmed.

At one point during the interview, Briggs said, “Do you think everybody’s happy here?”

The question seemed to take Jasper by surprise. “Of course they are. We’re a family.”

“Not all families are happy families,” Briggs said. “What if I told you that some of your family wants to leave here? Would you let them go with us?”

“Who wants to leave?” Jasper countered.

“I don’t know,” said Briggs. He held up a tightly folded piece of white paper. “This note was passed to me anonymously. I look around, and I see a lot of smiling people. But I’m also a trained observer, Mr. Sewell. I’ve seen the people watching us from the cottages and the dormitories. We haven’t spoken to them yet. What if there are people here who want to leave? I’m told you won’t let them.”

Jasper shook his head. He seemed to be holding on to his temper with both hands.

“What can I do about lies, friend? People tell lies.”

“Will you let them leave?” Briggs repeated. “If I come back here tomorrow with enough trucks to get them away from here, will you let them leave?”

Jasper threw up his hands.

“Leave us, friend. I beg you. Leave us. We’re not hurting anybody. We just want to be left alone. There’s no racism here, no hatred. It’s not like it is out there in your world. We just want to be left alone.”

Briggs sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

“That’s a nice sentiment, Mr. Sewell, but it doesn’t answer my question. Will you let them leave? Yes or no?”

Jasper dragged his fingers over his face.

He said, “Anybody who wants to go can go. Just go now, please. Leave us in peace.”

Briggs looked at the others in his delegation, then scanned the rapidly dwindling crowd of Family members at the surrounding tables.

“Okay. We’ll be back tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred.”

“Fine,” Jasper said, and waved them away without looking at them. “Just go, please.”

Briggs and the others stood and walked out. Jasper remained at the table, his face in his hands. Aaron was shocked to see Jasper so deflated. But as Briggs and the others left the pavilion, Jasper suddenly sat up again, and his face was grim.

He motioned for Michael Barnes, and though Aaron couldn’t hear what he whispered to Barnes, he was pretty sure he knew what was being said.

And it made his stomach turn.

Aaron was standing on his porch again when Barnes and his men drove the delegation out to their helicopter. Thick gray snow clouds were hanging low in the sky, though the air was, for the moment, clear. It would be dark in another hour, and the night promised to be a cold one.

He was leaning against a wooden post, thinking of all the ways his world had changed, when he thought he saw a bright flash from inside one of the trucks.

He stood up straight, straining his eyes to see.

Three more flashes erupted inside the lead truck, followed by a few more in the back truck. Aaron listened, but there was no sound save for the wailing of the wind coming off the prairie and the faint mechanical whine of the helicopter’s rotors.

The trucks pulled up to the helicopter and two soldiers came forward to greet them. Both had rifles, but the rifles were slung over the shoulders.

Barnes stepped out of the lead truck and shot them point-blank with his pistol; they never had a chance.

Aaron could almost picture the pilot’s reaction. He heard the whine of the engines growing louder, higher in pitch, and he knew the man was trying to power up fast.

It did little good, though.

Barnes jumped aboard, and a moment later, two bright flashes finished the matter.

Then Barnes turned to the lead truck and motioned for his patrols. They climbed out with the young man from Briggs’s delegation in tow. The kid looked scared. The patrols dragged him up in front of Barnes. Behind the kid, other members of the patrol pulled the dead bodies from the vehicles and put them on board the helicopter.

When it was done, they climbed back into the vehicles with the terrified long-haired kid and sped back toward the quarantine room.

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

The Grasslands, North Dakota: October 18th, 8:40 P.M.

We were called to curfew early tonight. Jasper got on the PA and told us the military delegation was dead, that they had attacked without warning, but that Michael Barnes and his security forces had managed to put them down.

“I didn’t plan this,” Jasper said, “but I know that it happened. We didn’t want this, but now we’ve got to deal with it. People, people, people, don’t you see? It’s only a matter of time now. We’re gonna get more soldiers in here now. They’ll parachute in here and burn our houses and bayonet our children and all because they cannot abide the life we’ve made here.”

There was more, but there’s no point in recording it here. He talked in circles. He said the same thing over and over again. I could tell he was becoming unhinged. One minute, he’d be ranting, full of paranoid conspiracy theories. The next, he’d be pleading with us to understand that he’d done all he could to save us.

But I think Sandra Tellez said it best. She was sitting between Ed Moore and Clint Siefer, holding Clint’s hand, as Jasper’s speech came to an end. She looked around the room and said, “That man, he’s about to kill us all.”

Not get us killed.

Kill us all.

None of us bothered to contest it.

P.S.: Ed says we need to make a break for it as soon as possible. Like, maybe, tomorrow morning. Minot will almost certainly send a party out looking for their missing delegation. He says that when they do, we need to be ready to flag them down. We need some way to separate ourselves from the rest of the Family.

Poor guy. I’ve gotten to spend some quality time with Ed these last few days. He blames himself for not getting these people out of here sooner. But from what I’ve heard and seen, I can’t imagine he could have handled the situation any differently.

It was nearly dawn, and neither Jasper nor Michael Barnes had slept.

Barnes was coming out of the quarantine room, rubbing his bloody knuckles. There was blood splattered on his face and on his clothes and smeared along the toes of his boots. Behind him, inside the room, the kid from the Minot delegation was on his side, curled into a fetal ball, whimpering.

Jasper studied the young man for a long time. His name was Nate Royal, and it was much as Jasper suspected. Things at Minot were bad. They’d been overrun, and Briggs and his delegation had been bluffing. They’d had nowhere to go back to. But Jasper had already suspected that from what Barnes had told him earlier. What he really wanted to know was what a senior group of military officers was doing with a mullet-headed peckerwood in tow.

Barnes had stripped the man out of his heavy winter gear before beating him, revealing a blue air force utility uniform underneath that was completely devoid of insignia. It only reinforced Jasper’s hunch that the man was not a soldier.

He had nodded to Barnes from outside the glass and the beating went into high gear. Moments later, Nate Royal was babbling something about a cure for the necrosis filovirus the military had distilled from his body. Barnes had stopped then and looked at Jasper. Jasper took in the news and was furious. It was a lie. An awful, insidious lie.

“Where is this cure?” Barnes asked.

He kicked Nate in the gut and Nate vomited blood on the floor.

“At Minot,” Nate said. “The doctor who developed it died yesterday. His research is there.”

Jasper motioned to Barnes to come out.

He said, “It’s time. Go tell your men to get started.”