“Don’t,” Durkee said. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. Renati may well have thought giving them that was preferable to doing nothing. He probably thought if they did die, at least they wouldn’t come back. Can’t say I don’t understand the feeling. There is nothing worse than doing, well, nothing.”
That had been my logic when I gave out a drug that turned people into self-aware revenants. Man, if I ever got another moment of peace, I was going to sit Renati down and find out what the hell his motives were.
Tony and Dax were staring at him, their expressions a mixture of horror and astonishment. Gloria and Jay had clearly heard at least part of the story before, but their attention remained fixed on the captain, waiting for the next bit of bad news. Durkee must have held back the segments about intelligent zombies when they were all first introduced.
I jammed the last of my granola bar into my mouth and chewed it as quietly as I could. Hey, you try eating nothing but pastrami for weeks and see if you can turn down some good old-fashioned sugar.
“After that, no one looked at me quite the same way.” Durkee sat up a little straighter. “I ordered what remained of the research team to stand down. To study the actual undead, rather than actively try to prevent anything. Lattimore was left in charge of actually trying to heal the sick. We had outbreaks, people kept dying…” he paused, scratching the back of his neck. “I thought we could proceed along as normal. But we couldn’t. My men didn’t believe in me anymore. Maybe I didn’t believe in me. They got me in the middle of the night and threw me in here, and I’ve been twiddling my thumbs ever since.”
“By they you mean Keller,” Tony guessed.
“He was in charge of the coup, yes.” Durkee pushed his cap up again. “To this day I don’t know if I blame him. Maybe I’d have done the same thing, if I watched that happen to my squad mates. I assume you’ve been told I’m dead.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard there was some kind of breach and the undead ate you.”
“Reasonable. Keller can’t throw me in that arena—people would recognize me—and he’s still too afraid to actually kill me.” Durkee tapped his fingers against his knees. “I’ve heard gunfights. There are still breaches?”
“Frequently,” I said. “The soldiers come in to the medical facility in the mornings.”
“And it’ll keep happening. Hastings wasn’t designed to be cordoned off. No big city is. The dead always find a way through.”
Ain’t that the truth, I thought.
“Gloria tells me she heard a handful of transmissions from Hastings, but that Elderwood was concerned about us. The radio broke…right before I wound up in here. I was about to send another team out to the library before…this…all happened. I should have waited longer. Maybe the area would have cleared out more. At the time, everything on the east side of the fence was a crawling cesspit of the dead, even before the squad we experimented on got in there.”
Tony nodded. “We went and got the radio turned on. It was pretty empty, until the end. We got jumped by dead guys.”
“They sprang a trap,” I muttered. “Must’ve been your…um…team.”
Durkee shook his head and stared down at his hands. “You’re lucky you escaped. I don’t know what else those…those men…out there can do. And I don’t know how many undead are in that area of the city, not really. Survivors came pouring in from all entrances. I imagine those who wound up on the infected side were quickly taken themselves.”
How had all of this gone on without Elderwood knowing any of it? Had Durkee simply not reported it? Or had General Anderson, and later General Hammond, just listened to depressing reports alone, in the darkness of the radio room, and simply not told a soul about them?
“You got the radio on,” Gloria said. “Did you talk to anyone?”
“We asked Hammond to come save us.” Tony held up his hands, staving off the sudden grins on Gloria and Vijay’s faces. “Hold it. We don’t know if he can actually do anything. He’s in kind of a shit storm himself. But he knows we’re here.”
Durkee sighed, then tipped his head to rest it against the wall.
“So what do we do?” Dax asked.
Durkee pulled his blanket up over his shoulders. “Not much we can do, son. There’s not any escape routes out of here. Frankly, from what you’ve all described about what’s going on out there, this cell might be the safest place for the time being. So I suggest you eat something besides pastrami, get some rest, and maybe we can all play a nice game of charades in the morning.”
Charades.
The dead were talking, we were all in prison, and he wanted to play charades?
Oooh, I know! You’re Death, standing over us!
My stomach made an ominous sound, and a familiar pain twisted its way through my gut. Not emotional this time—no, this was more of the sort of severe displeasure that happens when you introduce any other sort of food, namely pure sugar, to a diet that has been comprised largely of fake pastrami.
There had to be a way out of there. There had to be a way to get Hammond to come get us.
What’s he going to do? Throw his survivors at a wall of soldiers? And a battle will just attract the dead from the other side. We’ll be fucked even if he does come.