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  He pointed at himself and then at the pad.

  That one single word was, “IMMUNE.”

  Chapter 20

  The Memorial and Training Days

  I felt as if my soul were draining out of me as Kara spoke.

  “Our hope is not here on Earth, but in eternity,” Kara said, her voice steady and strong in the crisp air. We buried Chuck near the golf course. Most of our people were there with exception of the people on guard duty. This was hard for the people at The Manor. The people who had come with us from in town had seen their share of death, but still, it had been a while since we had lost anyone. I never got used to it and I doubt many of the others did

  I looked around the crowd and saw that many people openly wept. I fought tears throughout the entire ceremony. But it was more than grief that worked away at me. Guilt cut into me like a knife each time I looked to where we had buried Chuck.

  Kara continued, “But regardless of where our hope lies, we are a selfish people. The heart wants what the heart wants, and we want our people around us for as long as we can. And we certainly wanted Chuck with us a lot longer. But it is not to be, and while we will grieve, we will also find comfort in the fact that we’ll see him again.”

  Brother Ed took that moment to interject a loud, “Amen.”

  Kara nodded at him politely and continued, “If there is anyone in the crowd who’d like to say something, now would be a good time.”

  Brandon started, and I felt myself drift away from his words and the others that spoke. Some of the stories brought on more tears, but some made people laugh. My funny bone was severely depleted, and I couldn’t muster even a smile. It seemed obvious that I should say something, but I knew that if I spoke, I wouldn’t be able to contain myself, and nobody wanted to see anything that messy.

  My thoughts kept turning back in on me, going back to that basement. I could see Chuck standing in front of the door. I could see him reaching for the doorknob. I could see the door opening. If I had acted sooner. If I had been smarter. If, If, If.

  Someone grabbed my arm, and when I came out of my spiral of thoughts, I saw that most of the people were moving away from the graveside and back toward The Manor. Greg was standing next to me with an intense look on his face.

  “You need to let yourself off the hook,” he said. “I’ve been there in wartime. Things happen.”

  “But this wasn’t a war,” I said, “I should have seen that there was danger behind that door.”

  “In Afghanistan, you think I didn’t make a mistake,” he said, and I could see that he regretted the word choice almost immediately. “Listen, there are choices. Not all of them good. Time and energy devoted to tasks aren’t unlimited resources. We, meaning you, me, and any of us that go out there and take risks for the good of everyone else. We have to make choices.”

  “My choice got Chuck killed.”

  “No, it didn’t,” he said, his voice rising. The few people still there looked our way and then started toward The Manor.

  “Chuck made the choice to open that door. He’s got…he had the same experience that you’ve had. In some ways, more. In fact, you would have caught it, right? You said you knew something was behind that door, but Chuck made it to the door before you could stop him. Right?”

  “Yes,” I said, but my conviction faltered.

  I felt a hand on my back and turned to see Kara. Her eyes were red. I guess she had waited for the crowd to disperse before letting out any of her real emotions.

  “Joel, you’re not doing anyone any good if you keep beating yourself for a choice Chuck made,” she said.

  I felt the hot sting of tears coming down my cheeks.

  “Before we left the city, Mike and Logan did everything they could to protect us, and they died in that duty,” she said. “The world is more dangerous than any of us could have thought it could be. People we know and care about will die. It’s tragic and heartbreaking. My heart was almost broken when we lost Mike and Logan, but I knew they wouldn’t have wanted me to blame myself. They’d want us to go on.”

  I said, “I keep wondering why it couldn’t have been me?”

  “Because it wasn’t,” Greg said, “and that’s a good thing. We need you here. We need all of us here.”

  Kara reached out and gently tugged at my hand. “It’s cold out here. Let’s get inside.” Greg put a hand on my shoulder.

  I’m not sure I would have been able to move if they hadn’t been there to push me forward. Despite their protests, guilt still worked on me at the edges, but it did seem less palpable.

  I have heard that time “heals all wounds,” but I think that’s bullshit. I’ve never forgotten Chuck. I’ve never forgotten that door. But I’ve learned from both.

  The only distraction from my spiraling thoughts and remorse was Jason. I had sworn Travis and Brandon to secrecy about what we had learned from Jason. At least until we had brought the issue before the leadership team. The only person we brought into the loop was Doc Wilson because he would be treating Jason

  There were several reasons to keep what we had learned about Jason a secret. First, we didn’t want to create any chaos at The Manor. Second, we didn’t know if Jason was telling the truth. He had obviously been through a lot. Maybe the wounds weren’t zombie bites, but he had convinced himself they were and then gone on to imagine that he was immune. It seemed a deep, deep stretch to believe there were live humans out there biting people as either an attack or in self-defense.

  Deep down, though, I knew what Jason said was true. He was immune, and this could be a game changer.

  Late the night after Chuck’s memorial, I convened a clandestine gathering of the leadership team in a secluded basement room. I laid our cards on the table, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “You should have told us the moment you brought him in,” Greg said, his face suffused with color.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that,” I said, not able to meet his eyes. “We just thought with Chuck’s death it would be better to wait. Besides, if the word got out, how do you think people around here would react? It just seemed like a better idea to keep it quiet. Plus we had no way of knowing if what Jason said was true.”

  “Do you think he’s lying?” Hub asked.

  I didn’t want to speak first, but I looked to Travis.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think he’s telling the truth,” Travis said.

  “What about you, Brandon,” Greg asked.

  “Hell, if I know,” Brandon said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Joel, did your vision say anything about Jason being immune?” Kara asked.

  “Wait,” Doc Wilson said, holding up a hand, “what is this about visions?”

  “Joel’s been having visions,” Kara said, in a matter of fact way. “He had one about meeting this boy, and now that has happened.”

  “Joel, is this true?” Doc Wilson asked.

  I felt a wave of embarrassment sweep over me. “Doc, I don’t know what it is. I have dreams that seem as real as if I were awake, and, well, this one came true.”

  “But you’ve had others?” Hub asked.

  “Yes,” Kara said. “Joel saw the attack on the church before it happened, but that time we didn’t know what his visions were all about.”

  “Can we stop calling them visions?” I asked plaintively.

  Greg broke in, “Let’s stick with this one for now, okay?” He looked around the group for assent, and everybody was good with that. “So, you had this vision, and there was nothing in it that would tell you if he were immune, right?”

  I nodded my head.

  “But he had bite wounds that look like they came from human teeth?”

  “Yes,” I said, and Travis added his own yes.

  “Any chance that these wounds are from humans and not zombies?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure this guy just went around and let people bite him,” Brandon said.

  Greg skewered Brandon with a glare, and he shut up.

/>   “Doc, is there any way to tell if this kid is really immune?” I asked.

  Doc rubbed his chin for a moment and then said, “I don’t have lab equipment. I’m not sure how I would do it.”

  “We could let a zombie bite him and see what happens,” Brandon said.

  I jumped in before Greg got to Brandon, “Yeah, that’s a constructive idea. We’ll let one bite you and see what happens first.”

  “I don’t claim to be immune!” Brandon said with a hard stare in my direction. “How do we really know that those bite marks are human?”

  “I took a look at them, and in my estimation, they are from human teeth,” said Doc Wilson.

  “Folks,” Greg interrupted, “we could go round and round with this all night. Why don’t we go to the source and see if we can get more information?”

  Doc Wilson insisted that we should give Jason a couple of days to recover, but there was too much momentum towards getting answers.

  So, the next morning, we found ourselves in the infirmary crowded around Jason’s bed.

  Jason still looked insubstantial, as if he could literally evaporate in front of our eyes. He had to know why we were there, and his eyes displayed a combination of deep curiosity and resignation with a little bit of worry splashed in.

  Greg took us through brief introductions and moved onto the interrogation. Interrogation was probably overstating it, but it certainly felt like that to me.

  “Joel told me that you say you’re immune to the zombie virus,” Greg said. “How do you know this?”

  Jason looked around our group, picked up the pad and pen we had provided, and started writing. He wrote for a good thirty seconds before handing the pad to Greg.

  Greg looked it over and said, “To speed things up, I’ll read this to everyone.” He turned his attention to the pad. “I was attacked and bitten by a zombie. My family took me to the hospital in Dayton, but it was overrun with people who had been bitten like me. All of them died and came back, but I didn’t.”

  “Did the doctors tell you that you were immune?” Doc Wilson asked.

  Jason took the pad back and wrote again. Greg read what he had written to the group. “No. The soldiers did.”

  “What soldiers?” Greg asked.

  Jason wrote again, and Greg read it. “The ones who took me from the hospital and experimented on me. The ones that killed my mom and brother.”

  The story came out like this over the next half hour until Doc Wilson insisted that we leave his patient to rest. Soldiers took Jason from the hospital just before it was overrun by the undead. He was taken to a military base where he was, at first, treated with kid gloves but things quickly moved to desperation, and the gloves came off. He was probed, sliced, and diced, and experimented on. It was during a procedure when they invasively checked his pituitary gland that they damaged his larynx and took away his ability to speak. It was a small consequence of looking for the cure to save humanity, they said.

  At one point during our interview, Doc Wilson asked if he could inspect Jason’s body, and Jason complied. We found multiple surgical wounds and scarred-over areas on his arms and hands where blood had been sucked out of him almost continually.

  Jason reported that they were about to perform an operation on his brain which would most certainly have killed him when his father and uncle broke into the military base hospital and rescued him. Both of them were killed, but he had escaped and wandered for several days. Hunted and alone, he stayed in hiding but was so weak from all the procedures he knew he wouldn’t make it.

  One night when he was hiding in an abandoned hotel, he was so very close to surrendering to the soldiers that were hunting him, but then he had his first vision: a vision of me.

  They came back to the park every day for the next week. Them and their zombies. Russell came back, too, and watched from a safe distance.

  The Lord of the Dead drilled his trainees mercilessly. If he saw them falter, he encouraged them with the electrical shock collars. More than once, Russell could hear their screams as they carried from the park to the house he was hiding in. He would watch as one of the trainees would fall to the ground in agony, clutching at his neck. This process was repeated throughout the week, but became less frequent as the trainees became more adept at controlling their undead thralls.

  Russell considered firing on the Lord of the Dead, but fear gnawed at him. The fear was a voice deep down in his soul. It was a voice of doubt. It was a voice of terror. It told him that if he missed, the Lord of the Dead would send his legion of undead after him. They would get him this time, and their teeth and hands would rip him apart just like they did to his brother and friends. But he wondered why he even came to watch these perverse proceedings at all?

  Maybe it was to gain information? Maybe he was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to strike? He decided it was the latter and lived with that rationalization for as long as he could.

  The trainees improved in their mastery over the undead as they worked to the point of exhaustion each day. If Russell could admit he was impressed, he would have. Like shepherds using sheepdogs, the trainees used their electrical control of the zombies to herd them, to cow them, to get them to attack on command.

  One trainee became particularly skilled with his group of zombies. He was a bulky man with a scraggly beard. Back before the world turned on end, Russell would have called him a redneck or a holler-dweller. He was the type of guy who drove a domestic pickup truck with a Confederate flag in the back window with a bumper sticker proudly stating, “The South Will Rise Again.”

  This redneck could split a group in two, send half in one direction and the other in the opposite way and then bring them together with the skill of an orchestra conductor. This caught the attention of the Lord of the Dead, and he seemed to show this trainee a little more attention than the others. He also punished this trainee less, too. Russell sensed there was some bond forming between the Lord of the Dead and this one.

  After hours of watching, Russell sensed that this training session was winding down. He also sensed something more ominous. It was as if all this training was a preparation for something consequential, and the training was coming to an end. It was time to put practice into performance, and this transition filled Russell with an anxiety that he couldn’t put in words. Since there was no one to tell anyway, it didn’t really matter, but his gut was telling him that something big and bad was about to go down.

  Chapter 21

  The Visitor

  The food brought in from the house where Chuck died turned out to be a real boon for the community at The Manor. Despite the general sense of melancholy that permeated our ranks after losing one of our own, people delighted in the canned fruit and the other food treasures we bought back from Peebles. The truth was that each bite of the food was a true guilty pleasure. For me, it was dull and tasteless because it had been paid for with blood.

  In the two days since we had buried Chuck, I checked in on Jason periodically, but he was always asleep. Doc Wilson said that Jason was in worse shape than we had thought. Another day without food or shelter would have done him in, but he seemed to be improving. Rest and food were what he needed to recover. Doc had no idea how long that would take, though.

  After my most recent checkin on Jason, I was walking toward the dining area when the alarm sounded, resonating through the building. There was never a dull moment in the zombie apocalypse.

  As we had practiced so many times, the people assigned to getting the kids to safe areas did their thing while the others geared up for action. I was one of the others.

  As soon as I got upstairs, I saw Greg disappear down the hallway that led out of the dining area and towards the front of The Manor. I jogged to catch up and saw him talking into a walkie-talkie.

  I pulled up beside him after he finished an exchange with one of the guards. “What’s the lowdown?” I asked.

  “Jo has the front gate. She says it’s only one guy,” Greg said as h
e stowed the walkie-talkie on a belt clip. “He’s well-armed, but he’s put his weapons down and wants to talk.”

  “Any chance he’s not alone?” I asked.

  “Always a chance of that so I’ve sent two teams out the back to circle around. Travis has one, and Brandon has the other. Plus, I have the other observation posts scanning the area for any possible activity. No one’s reported anything, but that doesn’t mean there’s no one sign of others. I’ve told Jo to have the guy cool his feet until we get there.”

  Caution was our watchword since the last incidence of visitors had turned out so badly. For some in our group, this practice was a bit too lax as their sense of caution called for a shoot-on-site reaction. Cooler heads prevailed, and while we were extra careful now, we still wanted to maintain an even-handedness when it came to outsiders.

  We moved at a quick clip and made it to the front doors of The Manor in less than a minute. Greg pulled up a small pair of binoculars out and looked over the area around the gate.

  “He’s placed his rifle on the ground at his feet and is standing in a relaxed pose,” Greg said. “The rifle looks like an old M16.”

  “What’s our play?”

  “First, make sure he’s alone, and then find out what he wants?”

  For the first order of business, we waited until all teams reported in. This took a good twenty minutes, and our visitor maintained his quiet holding pattern during the delay. All reports showed there was no activity in the area and that this guy was what he said he was: a lone traveler.

  “Time to find out what he wants,” Greg said. “I’ll go out first; you follow five seconds later.”

  And that’s what we did. Greg headed out, his rifle at the ready, taking the left side of the road to the gate, and I followed down the right side.