The actual execution was over fairly rapidly, accompanied by silence from the crowd, broken by a few gasps here and there.
“Leave the body until dawn,” the Mayor said to his guard. “Then burn it in the pit so the wind can scatter the pitiful remains to the four corners of the planet and completely erase all traces of the bastard from the world.”
He left the scaffold and strode away, going into the admin building. As he departed there was a cheer from the citizenry which he acknowledged with a wave of the hand as he disappeared into the lobby.
“He’s an effective leader,” Tamsyn said. “The guy who tried to take over our town was just a local bully wanting power, careless and mostly incompetent. No experience running anything, much less a town in an apocalypse. This man cares about his people. He’s trying to do the right thing and keep them all alive and on the side of civilization.”
“I admire him,” Melly said. “He’s done a lot to reclaim Millersville and keep it functioning.”
Chapter Eighteen
They stayed in Millersville for another week. The mayor’s wife went into labor and Melly spent twenty hours with her, delivering a healthy seven pound baby boy. Mother and child were fine and the successful birth was taken as a good omen by the town.
Jeff and Cody spent hours interviewing people who had any knowledge of conditions at Glastine.
The first man had little to share. “The people running the place wanted to take my blood,” he said. “Which was when I noped out of there. They already knew I was uninfected because they do scans when you arrive so what the seven hells did they need my blood for? I’m no lab rat. I said let me out of here and these big guys with guns took me to the same gate I came in and tossed me out. Kept my weapons they’d confiscated too. I barely escaped the infected who came to see what was going on. Made my way here and never looked back.”
Others had more details to share but the account Cody found the most chilling was from a woman with haunted eyes, who fidgeted across the table from them when it was her turn to be interviewed. After Jeff thanked her for coming forward, she said, “You don’t want to go there, believe me. There’s something really off about the place.”
“What do you mean?” Jeff asked. Others had told them about the throng of infected constantly surrounding the camp, pressing against the force fence and the barricades. Cody and his captain had speculated privately whether the fact Glastine drew such a massive swarm of infected might be what was keeping Millersville from being overwhelmed. Certainly a number of infected were attracted to the humans they could sense behind the town’s defenses but as yet there’d been no significant swarm in the vicinity.
“People disappear,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning forward. “A group of five of us made it all the way from the capital city to the camp. We were friends from college days, tight. A found family. The camp took us in but split us up—different residences, different work details…but we’d get together every week without fail. And then Shelly disappeared. She was just gone. Her living space was all cleared out and cleaned up like she’d never been there. The people running Glastine told us she’d decided to leave and they let her go. But she wouldn’t leave without telling the rest of us first. I mean, of all of us she was the most scared of the infected and you’re telling me she walked out the gate alone and weaponless? They said she was heading to Millersville but she sure ain’t here.”
“So you decided to leave too?” Cody asked.
“The four of us who were left, yeah. We asked for permission to go and were denied. Which is another weird thing about the story the people in charge told about Shelly deciding to leave. So we bided our time and found a weak point in the barricades where you could slip through.”
“What about the infected?”
She shook her head. “They weren’t too bad at this spot. The swarm is heaviest around the gates.”
“Makes sense,” Cody said and Jeff nodded.
“Anyway, we waited until there was a new group of people coming in which distracted the guards and the officers in charge. We all slipped away from our jobs and snuck off to the place we’d found to get out.” She sniffed and flicked a tear off her cheek. “Tommy was the first one out and the infected got him. I was next and I ran like hell for the trees while they were…busy with him. I was the planetary champion sprinter in high school.” Her smile was brief and forlorn. “I didn’t wait to see what happened to the other two. We’d agreed to meet up at Millersville but they never showed up.”
Jeff got her to draw them a map of Glastine as she remembered it, which Cody would compare later to the aerial intel his drones would gather when they got closer to the camp, and to indicate where the weak spot her group had found was in the barricades.
“It’s probably been patched by now,” she said when she was done. Throwing the pen down she got up from her chair and walked toward the door. “Don’t go there, I’m telling you.”
“Thanks for your help, ma’am,” Jeff replied.
Once she was gone Cody exchanged looks with the captain. “The more we hear about this camp, the more I’m convinced there’s something bad going on.”
Jeff rapped his knuckles on the woman’s crude map. “Yeah, but the question is, does it have anything to do with the underlying problem of how the Western Flu came to be and how to eradicate the infected. We need to know a lot more about this place. That’s our next phase of this mission we’re on.”
Cody kept his thoughts to himself for now. He assumed the captain was going to want at least a couple of the team members to enter the camp disguised as refugees. They’d done similar operations in the past on other worlds but not with ravening infected surrounding the target. The situation on Randal Four was a unique challenge. He personally had even more at stake now too, with Tamsyn. Always before it had only been his teammates and his own life he had to be concerned about but now he had a precious incentive to survive and s woman to protect. He wished they could drive straight to their own ranchland and hole up there. Let the damn planet solve its own infected crisis while he enjoyed his well-earned peace.
But even at their isolated veterans’ acres stake, the problems in the wider world would affect them so he sucked it up and squared his shoulders. “No peace for the warrior,” he said.
Jeff must have been thinking along similar lines because as he gathered up the map the woman had drawn he flashed Cody a tight grin. “Not yet. Not for a long time, going by what we’ve learned so far.”
* * *
Tomorrow they’d be leaving Millersville, despite warm invitations to stay from the Mayor and everyone else they met. The town was grateful for all the assistance the group had provided, medically and militarily. And they should be, Tamsyn thought. Take nothing for granted in this apocalyptic time.
But today was Melly and Jeff’s wedding day. Tamsyn was the bridesmaid, which was bittersweet. She and her best friend had sworn to be in each other’s weddings but Sally died in the last days of Rosewater and while Tamsyn loved Cody and was sure he loved her, he hadn’t said anything about marriage yet. But Jeff had proposed to Melly and the doctor had been as ecstatic as Tamsyn had ever seen her when the couple announced their news at dinner the previous night.
Given the state of the world, Tamsyn was wearing a dark blue dress someone had located in an abandoned bridal shop in the uncleared portion of Millersville and Melly was in a simple floor length white dress from the same venue. The mayor had sent a team into the shopping area to locate the items and the woman in charge, who was as tough a fighter as anyone else in Millersville hadn’t blinked twice at being ordered to act as a fashion consultant. Apparently she read a lot of romance novels in her spare time and relished the idea of arranging a wedding in an apocalypse. Melly had a short veil and a bouquet of flowers from the mayor’s overgrown garden. The squad leader had found shoes at the abandoned store in close to the right sizes.
