The Pandemic Sequence (Book 2): The Tilian Effect Page 5

  Erik continued mumbling for some time, mostly repeating himself, before finally losing consciousness. Further fragments began to come together, enough that Andrew and Michelle understood that Paul and his search and rescue team were returning to the states to look for survivors. It was clear that the inclusion of rescuing Derrick had originated with Erik, especially since the mission’s destination was hundreds of miles west of Florida.

  Michelle believed she was starting to understand Erik’s downward spiral into alcoholism. Where he had chosen drink, she had chosen books to block the pain of their long struggle. Too much had been lost, too many horrors witnessed, too few of their friends still alive.

  Her appetite gone, she gently covered Erik with a blanket, and joined Andrew as he climbed the stairs to their bedroom. No words passed between them. What else was left to be said? she thought. The virus’s effects still haunt us.

  Chapter Five

  Staring at the fleet of armored vehicles before him, Paul wondered if the sense of awe would ever leave. After two weeks of his team training with the massive machines, his jaw continued to dip slightly each morning when he walked into the facility. General Reed had told him that the Council, in an uncharacteristic pronouncement, had offered to supply the mission to the Gulf states with unlimited resources. Paul had doubted the governing body’s sincerity at first, but as he stood in front of the twelve steel behemoths, it was clear the Council had followed through.

  Ten of the vehicles were in the Stryker family of armored fighting vehicles, noted for their reliance on an eight-wheel structure, rather than the tracked system seen on most tanks. They ranged in use from a medical evacuation unit, infantry carriers, a command vehicle, and even two anti-tank guided missile models. Rounding out the fleet’s dozen were two MS Bradley tanks, bookending the Stryker units like rooks on a chessboard. The sheer tonnage of metal and technology before him caused a quickening of his pulse.

  Once allocated to the search and rescue team, the desert camouflage pattern was exchanged for one in various shades of black and gray. Even in the well-lit hangar, the darkened hues emphasized the ominous power and dominance of the machinery. The presence of the fleet, and the team training with them, cemented the previously wavering reality that Paul struggled to accept since Reed first informed him of the mission.

  He’d tried to focus on the general’s briefing, yet for all his effort he still needed several points repeated. His team had never engaged in a mission longer than a month. The Council believed the team aptly prepared for an extended deployment, however. The impetus for the mission had remained unclear to Paul, save that the Council believed the island was equipped to accept new refugees – if any still survived. Beginning in the most southeastern port in Texas, the approved route would make wide arcs through the Lone Star state, and then cross into Louisiana and Alabama, before completing the trek in Panama City, Florida. With the additional personnel transports, survivors would be shuttled to the coast where ships waited at strategic locations.

  The directive was one Paul had avidly wished for, and the complement of armored vehicles had worked well to diminish the initial misgivings he experienced regarding a return to the States. In the weeks following his briefing with the general, while his team trained tirelessly to assimilate themselves to the complex instruments of the vehicles, he conducted a search for replacement team members for those who had fallen in Turks.

  Eleven spots had required filling, and though the mission was not classified, Paul had been instructed to be as circumspect as possible in his search. There had been little discussion with Lisa before she agreed to join the team. Admittedly he worried over potential effects to their personal relationship as a result of a commander-subordinate dynamic, however they were both unwilling to be apart from the other for such a length of time. They would make it work.

  As covertly as he had attempted to conduct his search, Erik managed to catch wind of their destination and approached him with a plea to be allowed a spot on the team. He had become an infrequent presence in Paul’s life as the younger man preferred to spend his time with an upended bottle at his lips. Stories of his involvement in drunken brawls had grown so common that Lisa no longer found the tales remarkable enough to share with Paul. It had been difficult to reject the request, but he would not risk the safety of his team by including the neighborhood drunk.

  Behind the bloodshot eyes, Paul could see a haunting darkness that had been eating at Erik’s spirit over the last year. He had argued, pleaded, and raged—all with slurred tongue—before eventually stalking off, inevitably to drink his emotions numb.

  One addition to the team, Paul believed, was the price for the Council granting the use of the armored fleet. Benjamin Hicks had been part of the mountain camp refugees, albeit one of the more reclusive members. The man had been one of the last to join the camp, arriving alone in the heart of the fourth winter after the outbreak. Divulging little about his past as a government-hired private contractor during the second Gulf War, Hicks had rebuffed most attempts to be included in camp life. Consequently, Paul knew little of him except for his exceptional tracking skills.

  Hicks’ stony personality was matched by his physical appearance. Well over six feet, the solitary man possessed an imposing form of solid muscle. In the steel blue eyes others had deemed dismissive, Paul sensed the hard wariness of a soldier that viewed all with detached calculation. He doubted much escaped the man’s notice, assigning threat or advantage to everything. The benefit from Hicks’ skills was one he welcomed on this mission, but the man’s cold self-possession was a source of distrust for Paul. His misgivings were futile since the Council had all but demanded Hicks be added to the team.

  And there was one that Paul had reached out to immediately after learning of the assignment. Lisa had cautioned him against it, fearful the response would re-open old wounds of disappointment that had only recently begun healing. In truth, he had anticipated the result, though that had done little to lessen the pain.

  --

  Walking the unfamiliar streets, Paul forced himself to lower his expectations. Lisa had gently argued the same thoughts he had left unvoiced. Sensing his resolve, she offered a kiss as he headed out the door, her tender warmth not disguising her worry and concern.

  The neighborhood was sparsely populated. Occupied homes were indistinguishable from their equally rundown, vacant counterparts. Even the reclusive Hicks had selected a more thriving neighborhood than the one in which Paul now stood. The choice of residence had been a strong indication of the occupant’s withdrawal from the familiar.

  Standing at the door, he took a settling breath and rapped his knuckles on the faded wood. A dog barked in response while Paul waited. Seconds later, the door swung open and an energetic gray terrier rushed out to greet him with tail-wagging leaps into the air.

  “Gazelle!” he said with a smile, as he caught the canine mid-jump. A wet profusion of licking ensued as she lapped at Paul’s face. “Aw, I missed you too, girl.”

  Shifting the dog to a more restraining crook in his arm, he looked to the figure standing beyond the home’s threshold. It had been several months since he had seen Mike Allard, the man who had once been friend and brother to him. At their last meeting, Mike was still recovering from the vast injuries incurred during the harrowing escape from Miami. He had been pale and thin, and Paul was pleased to see a marked improvement in the man’s appearance.

  “She’s still as lively as ever, I see.” He broke the ice, immediately regretting the words for fear Mike would take it as a comparison.

  “Yeah, she never tires,” Mike responded with a weak smile. A noticeable silence passed momentarily before he continued. “It’s good to see you, Paul. Come in.”

  “Good to see you, too. I’d have come sooner, but with work and all…” he let the sentence trail off as he followed Mike into the house. I’d have come sooner, if I thought I’d be welcome, he thought to himself.

  If the home he shared with Lisa w
as spartanly furnished by design, Mike’s small dwelling could only be described as unintentionally neglected. The living room consisted of a floor lamp, coffee table, and a lone recliner. The scarcity of seating indicated how little company Mike had, or perhaps wanted. The bare wooden floor held occasional stacks of badly-worn books and precariously piled papers.

  Closing the door behind him, Paul returned Gazelle to the floor, though she still danced happily around his feet. Mike disappeared briefly through a doorway before returning with a wooden chair from the kitchen. The two men took their seats and engaged in a strained conversation. The absence of the easy banter of prior years was painfully evident. Paul provided short updates on the lives of those who had crossed over together. Mike nodded, smiling with each mention of old friends, yet never pursued questions, forcing Paul to carry and direct the conversation.

  “So, I hear you’ve started teaching again,” he mentioned in an attempt to draw Mike out of his reticence.

  “Yeah, the doctors gave me the green light a few months ago.”

  “That’s great. You must have been anxious to get out of the house.”

  “Yeah,” Mike replied.

  The word was spoken slowly and in a tone that made Paul doubt the sincerity. From there, the conversation ground to such an extreme idleness that he resigned himself to bring up the purpose of his visit.

  “The Council has assigned my team a new directive,” he began. As he proceeded to discuss the mission’s details, Paul could almost see a shadow, a cloud of pain, drape itself around the other man. Shadow and cloud came close to dissuading Paul, but he pressed on. “I want you on the team, Mike.”

  The empty room filled with oppressive tension as the words hung in the space between them. Though their stare was unbroken, Paul could feel Mike’s vision grow vacant and pass through him, seeing something other than his old friend and former second-in-command.

  The haunted man finally did break the steady gaze and shifted his eyes to the floorboards at his feet. With an almost imperceptible movement, Mike shook his head, whispering in a voice suddenly hoarse: “No… no.”

  “I need you on this mission, Mike,” Paul countered. “You kept us alive all those years. Kept us going, kept us whole. I need that again for my team… for me. There’s no one—”

  “I didn’t keep everyone alive,” Mike interrupted.

  “—better at this than us,” Paul finished before hearing Mike’s words. “Of course there were losses, Mike. How could there not be? What we faced… how could there not be losses?”

  “You need to leave,” he said, voice flat and void of emotion, as his stare rose again from the floor.

  “Mike, listen to me—” Paul began.

  “No! You listen to me! I’m not going back there. Not now, not ever.” For the first time that afternoon, Paul heard passion in the man’s words.

  The tenuous restraint he had managed over his tone evaporated, allowing his words the bitter edge he felt, “So, that’s it then? You get rescued and say screw anyone else that needs rescuing? You’ll just cut yourself off from everyone that cares about you, all of the friends that you had you don’t need any more, because you got rescued?”

  “That’s not what I did,” Mike uttered in little more than a hush.

  “What?”

  “Do you know what I see when I look at them? Do you? I don’t see Andrew anymore, I see his mother… dead. I see Michelle’s father… dead. I see Derrick and Jenny, Tim, Blaine, my family, all of them. All the ones that I couldn’t save. That’s what I see when I go to bed at night, and it’s the same faces I wake up to. Them… and the damn Til that didn’t kill me!” Mike paused briefly as he took a slow, shuddering breath. When he resumed it was with a tone both hushed and pained, seemingly directed at no one, and Paul wondered if Mike even remembered the ranger sat across from him.

  “When I close my eyes, I smell its breath. I can feel its weight crushing me. I can’t sleep. Who could? Not with that feeling. It should’ve killed me. I wasn’t fighting back… I was too tired to try to live… I surrendered. It should’ve killed me.”

  Paul sat mute, a confessional moment warranted respectful silence. If pressed, he was not sure he would have been able to craft any fitting response. Like the flipping of a switch, he could see the recognition of his presence return to Mike. Their eyes locked once more, before the other man rose. “I can’t go back, Paul.”

  Some minutes passed after Paul heard the closing of the bedroom door. Before taking his leave, he gently scratched behind Gazelle’s ears, who sat by his feet with barely contained exuberance. With a last look at the nearly empty space, he realized that the room—and home—was in fact cluttered to suffocation. Regrets and nightmares, remembrance of things best forgotten, furnished the room more fully than any chairs or tables could have. The invisible décor reflected its owner perfectly. Haunted and broken.

  His thoughts troubled him for the length of his walk home. As well as he thought he had prepared himself for the meeting, the deterioration of his old friend wore heavily on his heart. He desperately wanted to be angry at the man for succumbing to the tortures of his own mind, yet he could not bring himself to find fault. Mike had kept them whole, had led so many of them to safety. It was only now, when the casualties could be fully assessed, that Paul understood the cost his friend had paid. No, he told himself, no fault… only grateful admiration.

  --

  “Paul?”

  “Yeah,” the ranger replied with a start, the memory returning to a corner of his mind.

  “The dispersal scenarios?” Benjamin Hicks said as he handed over several pages of intricate formations and symbols. Though it was with reluctant acceptance that he added Hicks to the team’s roster, Paul intended to leverage the man’s superior skills.

  As he looked over the plans, he could not help but be impressed. Only three days prior, he had tasked Hicks with developing dispersal formations for the various environments likely to be encountered during the mission. In that short time, the man created contingencies for urban, coastal, flatland, and even the swampy bayous of Louisiana. He had then run the team through the scenarios, and the pages now contained notations highlighting speed, efficacy, and potential weaknesses. If the others had not exactly taken warmly to Hicks, to a man they would begrudgingly admit his tactical expertise.

  Paul began to reassess his view of the private contractor. Certainly, Hicks had been standoffish during his time in the camp. Perhaps we were just as closed off to him as he was to us? He survived a war in the desert only to return home to witness a virus devastate the world. Who wouldn’t be hardened, probably embittered, by that? With determined resolve, he decided to shelve his unfounded dislike of the man and work to forge a better understanding.

  “These are excellent,” he commented as he looked over the plans. “You’ve done some great work with the team in the last few days.” If the praise affected the man, Paul could not tell; Hicks remained stoic and unreadable.

  “So,” he began with a tone of camaraderie. “You think they’re ready?”

  “No,” the man replied dispassionately, his face like chiseled stone. “Half of them are little more than amateurs that’ll run off while pissing their pants at the first sign of danger. The other half are overzealous and likely to shoot when they should stay quiet. Not sure which one’s worse, but both are likely to get us all killed.”

  With his assessment delivered, Hicks turned and left Paul in eyebrow-raised surprise. The man had just uttered more words than Paul had ever heard him speak in one sitting. Yet those words, delivered much like one would discuss the chance of rain, only now formed meaning for him.

  “Okay,” he said aloud. “Yeah… no, he’s still an ass.”

  Chapter Six

  The weekend had passed quickly. Too quickly, Michelle mused as she sipped from her mug of lukewarm coffee. When she and Andrew had risen Sunday morning, the only sign of Erik had been the soft indentation on the couch pillows. That was his way
, to leave early either out of embarrassment or in search of his next drink. She had not been disappointed by his absence. His drunken rantings the night before had unsettled her, and she could see the same held true for Andrew as they shared a quiet breakfast.

  They spent the day busying themselves in the house, neither speaking of the previous night’s incident. The avoidance of the subject was evident in their struggle to speak only of trivialities, or in not speaking at all.

  Erik’s sad state angered her greatly, not solely because his potential and spirit were being squandered, though that was a part of it. Rather, she hated seeing the effect it had on Andrew. He had been but a child when the outbreak began, and after the loss of his mother, had developed a brotherly idolization of Derrick and Erik. Michelle knew, though he had never stated it, that Andrew had elected to work in the mechanic division because of Erik. With Derrick’s refusal to join them in safety, he had tried to maintain his bond with Erik. It pained her to see her fiancée’s quiet disappointment in losing yet another important figure in his life. Her anger at Erik was always replaced by guilt over her own inexplicable distance.

  Setting aside the mug, Michelle returned her thoughts to the present and the project before her. When she had arrived for work on Monday morning, she was summoned to a meeting the Southeastern U.S. Councilor had unexpectedly called. She had been one of the few in the room not surprised by the official announcement of a rescue mission aimed for the southern United States. Where Erik’s detail had been a chore to piece together into a coherent picture, Councilor Adam Duncan discussed the various aspects of the mission and its eventual impact on New Cuba.

  With the potential addition of several hundred survivors, thousands if one was overly optimistic, the drain on the food supply was a matter to be addressed immediately. Though the mission was planned for a nine month deployment, convoys of rescued survivors would make frequent trips to the island to deposit passengers. Preparations for increased planting and harvesting had to commence immediately, but likewise needed to be balanced against waste should the mission fail to yield significant numbers. Once the challenges and expectations had been delivered, the meeting soon divided into sub-committees, thus Michelle now found herself sitting in Agriculture Director Wilson Armenio’s office, along with her immediate superior, Assistant Director Ruth Maldonado, two people for whom she had great fondness and even greater respect.