“Shoot, you ain’t no fun. It works like you couldn’t believe. We had some problems with it early on but we got her pretty figured out now…so long as they got some bricks or shit around.”
“Earl, is it? Can you do me a favor?” Clary questioned.
“You gonna let me stay here and maybe let me take one of them there tanks out?”
“You got half of that right,” Clary said, having absolutely no intentions of ever if possible, letting this man be behind the driver’s seat of a machine so capable of destruction and causing incalculable havoc. “Greg, take your new buddy Earl and show him where he and the others are going to be staying until we get to know everyone.”
Greg pointed to himself, “Seriously, I can’t even think of the last time that you had to yell at me…don’t look at me like that, you knew bringing this many girls here wasn’t going to leave me with any options but to full bore try and find a girlfriend. It isn’t my fault that the ladies like what I got. I meant as far as anything not related to me having to blow something up or leaving or Ellie getting a bump on the head. Come on, there are fifty people, okay maybe not that many, but many that can do this.”
Clary didn’t change his poker face. He held Greg’s stare until his shoulders sank a little. He motioned for Earl, and Scott motioned to the boys to follow them. When they were out of earshot, Scott said, “Thank you, it has been a long day. Just a pre-warning he probably won’t let that tank thing go. He is usually pretty hell bent on pursuing ideas.”
“Can he drive it?”
“No way in hell. He has two friends who went to Canada on a fishing trip. Earl is the most optimistic man I’ve ever met. He also ranks up with the most annoying at times…at most times. He’ll grow on you if he’s here long enough though, Clary.”
“I’m not really looking for a new friend...that’s a redneck, who is also old. I want to know more about this cure, what's it actually doing?”
Mark held up a hand. Clary nodded and Mark cleared his throat. “They ingest it, now I don’t know why they breathe but we think that they do. The science behind these things is not what I expected, when we realized they do not have a heart, or at least one which is intact. I am confident you won’t drown one, but that they probably aren’t able to swim.”
Ellie shivered at this, thinking about her time in the river. “If they get moving fast enough, they can get pretty close to doing it with the current helping them out.”
“Did you see some of them trying to swim, Ellie?” Shaun asked, always curious to learn more about the dead and what they were capable of.
“Yeah, you could say that.” She didn’t want to bring up how she’d gone off halfcocked trying to find him and losing her mind. When she had, there’d been a horde and the only reason she was still alive today was because of her quick thinking and jumping off the bridge. If it had been a dried-up sand bank beneath her, she would not be doing anything now but hunting for meat, given they’d left enough of her to make the turn.
Shaun didn’t continue with further questioning. He knew damn well that too many questions inevitably would guarantee him to only be met with answers which he might not actually want to have to deal with thinking about.
Clary felt like he was holding the winning lotto ticket. He asked impatiently, “Okay, so I don’t care if they can swim or about their abilities in the water. I want to know about this. Is it really going to take them out? Is there no coming back from this? I’ve seen some pretty horrible things that they’ve been able to regenerate from. Did you know that they could do that?”
Mark pushed his glasses up, looking around the exposed open highway which was very much secured once on the opposite side of the fence. “You think that maybe we could take everything inside of your gates so we are safe? It doesn’t seem very smart to stand out here in the open. I’m sure that is how you military folk think it should be, but I couldn’t do much with one of those heavy looking guns but to hit someone with it or to maybe throw it if I was lucky,” Mark said trying to make a joke out of it unsuccessfully.
Clary asked, “So are you going to be able to set up something to prove that this so-called powder works?”
“It works. Brandy and I were trapped in this building, which is how we met up with Earl. I actually about cut his head off because he was so bloody. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t one of the Turned. Scott and Bob came for us, they only had vials of this that they were using in a less than impressive fashion. Basically, they were just throwing the vials at the Turned. They had to clear the building and lock it down before we could come out,” Shaun explained.
“I don’t understand, Shaun.”
Mark interjected, he was the engineer behind it and wasn’t going to let someone too young to vote try and explain his genius. “See, Mr. Clary, with the original version they made it was so strong that we, which is Scott here and myself, that humans might die from it as well if we inhaled it. Now that wouldn’t be much of a help for humanity now would it?”
“No, probably not. So, you guys inhaled it now and you are good to go?”
“We did overkill with the
