CIA man.
“Lies and cover-ups used to be how I made a living, my dear, or have you forgotten? I know more truth about what America has and hasn’t done in the last five years than all of you put together. Trust me. There is no Freedom II, nor will there ever be.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, Ian, if I don’t take the word of a self-professed liar over what my own ears just heard,” Geoff remarked.
“I’m inclined to agree with Geoff,” Nathanial said. “If Hank isn’t on the Freedom II, where is he? Who is he? It just doesn’t make sense for it not to be true.”
Ian sighed as if confronting a group of school children. “He’s one of them, the infected.”
“Oh, now that’s just bullshit!” Troy roared. “Those creatures up there can’t tell their asses from a hole in the ground. Have you ever seen one, just one of them, try to climb the fence? They could, you know, if they could think to do it.”
Ian sighed again. “Before we lost D.C., I received a packet of downloaded data on the infected from a doctor named Buchanan. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was the chief science advisor to the president. His reports in the packet disputed his earlier conclusions about the radiation and its effects. Yes, it turns some people into monsters, the majority actually, while some like us, for whatever reason, remain sane. Buchanan believed the possibility of a third group to emerge, a thinking, reasoning breed of those snarling killers up there…” He pointed at the ceiling.
“Fuck off, Ian,” Wade said. “You never told us this before.”
Ian ignored the mechanic and added, “You all heard what you wanted to hear just now, not what you actually did. Hope can be a powerful weapon if wielded correctly.”
“Get out of here, Ian,” Sheena ordered. “Go back to your damn coffin in the armory!”
Ian nodded and walked toward the control room’s exit. “Just promise me one thing,” he said. “Do not give them our location until you’ve had more time to study the transmission and its origins.”
“You’re too late on that one, Ian,” Toni called after him as he disappeared around the corner. “I already did.”
After a moment of silence, Jeremy said, “What if he’s right?” Suddenly he felt everyone’s eyes on him. “No, I mean it. He’s damn weird, I’ll give you that, but he was CIA. Toni, can’t we trace the source of the transmission? Find out where it came from?”
“Yeah,” she answered quietly. “We can, but it’ll take a lot of work.”
“It would go a lot faster if we had your help, Nathanial.” Jeremy glanced at the computer tech.
Nathanial shrugged. “Sure. Okay.”
“In the meantime, I think all the rest of us have stuff to be working on, right?” Geoff said. “Dr. Leigh, why don’t you continue your study of the wave; the rest of you, suit up. We’re going up top. There are about forty more of those things at the fence again and I, for one, want them gone.”
Troy shielded his eyes as he stepped out of the shed onto the main grounds of the base. The cacophony of the maddened creatures washed over him like a tide. “Jeez, Geoff, where the hell did you learn how to count?”
Geoff stepped out behind him and followed Troy’s gaze. There weren’t forty creatures outside the fence. They numbered closer to a hundred or more. The heavy, reinforced poles that held the fence in place swayed under the massive force.
“Got some gas no one seems to be usin’ over in the garage,” Wade offered.
Within minutes, Wade had a jury-rigged hose running from the large fuel tanks. Troy and Geoff helped him drag it out and turn it on.
“Yee-freakin’-hah!” Troy bellowed as he held the hose’s nozzle, spraying down the creatures and the fence alike. “Anybody got a match?”
Wade shook his head and held up a silver Zippo. “This was my favorite lighter,” he said, looking at it sadly. Then he lit it with a flick and tossed it at the fence.
Howls and screams rose up as a burst of blue flame swept through the ranks of the infected. Geoff shut off the hose, and the three of them stood in silence. Black smoke drifted into the heavens, and it was all Troy could do not to vomit from the odor of burning flesh.
“I don’t believe it.” Nathanial slumped over his computer screen. “What the hell does it mean?”
He and Toni had been able to trace the source of the message supposedly from Freedom II. It hadn’t come from orbit at all but rather somewhere in South Carolina—only a few hundred miles away from the complex.
“It means Ian was right,” Jeremy said. “Someone out there, whether it’s those creatures or not, knows we’re here now. They know we’re alive and sane. Worse, they know how many of us there are.”
“Oh God,” Toni said, suddenly sobbing, “I am so sorry.”
“Hey.” Jeremy took her in his arms, and she nestled her face deeper into his shoulder, wetting his shirt. “It’s all right. You didn’t know.”
“So what do we do now?” Nathanial asked.
Jeremy gritted his teeth. “We get ready. We get ready for whoever or whatever’s coming.”
17
The doors of the lift opened onto the armory level. Jeremy had never been to this part of the base before and was taken aback by the condition of the hallway. Unlike the rest of Def Con, this area hadn’t been repaired since the battle after the wave. The lighting was poor, as many of the lights had been shot out or were flickering badly, casting eerie strobes along the corridor. The metal walls themselves were scarred by some kind of explosion, as if someone had set off a grenade. Spent shell casings littered the floor as Jeremy made his way to the end of the hall. The entrance to the armory was open. Ian emerged from an unnoticed side corridor behind Jeremy.
“How the mighty have fallen,” said the agent.
Jeremy whirled around at the sound of his voice.
“Calm down, young man. I’m not some monster come to end your life.”
“Ian, you were right about the Freedom II.”
“I know.” He walked past Jeremy into the armory. “Would you care for some music? I find Wagner particularly relaxing in times like these.”
“How did you know so quickly about the Freedom, I mean?”
Ian took a seat in a folding chair between the racks of weapons, which lined the walls of the vault-like room. “Their shielding,” Ian said. He picked up a cold cup of tea sitting beside the chair and sipped at it. “There was a project like what they described, but it never got off the ground. The energy expenditure to generate the kind of field they mentioned was impossible. The project was scrapped because of it.”
Jeremy took a seat on the floor in front of Ian. “Why do you stay down here so much?”
Ian laughed. “I’m not immune to the radiation like the rest of you seem to be.”
Jeremy’s mouth dropped open.
“This is the most shielded part of the complex. I choose to stay here because I value my life. Even so, I am finding it harder each day to resist the urges rising inside of me. Very soon I think you may find yourself in a position where my disposal will become vital to your own survival.”
Jeremy shifted uncomfortably.
“I assure you,” Ian said, “you will have to do it. None of the others, not even our good doctor, even suspect that I am unwell.”
He paused and set down his tea. “I don’t have any magical answers about who the people onboard the fictional Freedom II might be. I’m not God, Jeremy. But whether they are looters, survivors like us, or reasoning versions of the creatures outside, they will be coming. Will they bring death or hope? I don’t know. Personally, I believe hope died the second the wave touched our world.”
“Will you help us get ready for them?”
“There’s nothing I can do, Jeremy. I’m certainly not about to go up top again, and I don’t think you can really
