End of the Line (Book 2): Stuck in the Middle (37 page)

             
“All the women have, but for me only once. After it happened, I told him if it happened again there would be no doctoring to his men. He would have to kill me. He got angry, said it didn’t matter that I was a doctor, I was still be expendable but no visits came afterwards.” She walked away for a minute and went to the closet. Inside it was packed with medical supplies. She searched through and brought back a packet of pills. Then handled it to me.

             
“Bill got to you?”

             
“Yes.”

             
“Emergency contraception. It’s effective up to five days.”

             
I was only 19 when the virus hit. I had never thought about having a child. I knew one day I would get married and have children. Now I didn’t even know what would happen. Daddy was a Republican, gave money to pro-life charities but I don’t think he would have a problem if his only daughter took a pill to make sure she didn’t get pregnant from a rapist.

             
“Did you find Joel?” I asked, holding the packet. I would decide later what to do.

             
She didn’t respond right away.

             
“What?”

             
“Tanya found him, hiding, he surrendered. He’s tied up with his men in the library.”

             
I didn’t get a chance to say anything because the door opened and Tanya came in with Aisha and Ariel. Tanya smiled and walked over to the bed. She was holding something white in her hand and had yellow file folders underneath her arm.

             
“Not giving Sam any trouble?” she asked.

             
I shook my head. I decided I could forgive her for before. Tanya handed me the white thing. It turned out to be a long frilly sleeveless nightgown. I got up with the blanket covering me, turned my back to Tommy and slipped it on. It was silk and felt nice against my burnt skin. I nearly giggled as it would have been a fantasy for Tommy Haldish to see me naked.

             
“She’ll be okay with a few days of rest. She can stay here. We’ll look after her.”

             
“I think maybe all of you should come back to Harbor. I got two people who need a real doctor. We got a pretty good community—well did until Joel shot it up, but we’ll get there again.”

             
“I would like that but we got vegetables and fruit growing. Whoever wants to stay should harvest everything. One thing I got to say about Joel. He was a tyrant but he knew how to run things.”

             
“Hi,” Aisha said to me and smiled. “Grace.”

             
“Aisha,” I said. She looked a little shocked that I acknowledged her presence and that I was friendly. “Ariel,” The girl came closer to me, shier now than before. I took her hand and pulled her into an embraced. She didn’t hug tightly knowing I was burned.

             
“You saved me,” I said when we finished. “Thank you.” I looked to Aisha. “It was probably hard to send her out but she saved my life.”

             
Aisha still looked shocked and Tanya looked at me like I was on drugs, but Daddy told me to always say thank you and do it right.

             
“We couldn’t let those people die—I mean some did but we tried to get them water at night.”              “She saved me and Tommy.”

             
Aisha smiled. “I like you better this way. Not mean.”

             
I think I liked myself better this way.

             
“Here,” Tanya said. She put the two files on the bed. “It’s the files Joel was talking about. I read them. Didn’t understand, and gave them to Mike. He says they were a plan from five years ago-- If an outbreak happened. Nothing to indicate it was man made.”

             
“I didn’t believe it. Not for a moment. Tanya—my father loved money, he loved making it. And I’m sure he made some screwing people over. I’m sure he owned parts of factories where people were treated poorly. He wouldn’t deliberately do something that would kill people. He did have a line. My father wasn’t a monster.”

             
“I figured.”

             
I didn’t say anything. Only one thing still bothered me.

             
“How did Joel know about the carriers?”

             
“Funny you should ask,” she opened the file and handed me a sheet of paper, a fax from Health and Human Services about possible people who didn’t get the H311 virus and when bitten showed no signs of the advanced disease C254, the zombie virus.

             
“The files from your father’s lab were from five years ago. The fax was from right around the worse of the outbreak. They weren’t together. Joel did that in his twisted mind. He wanted someone to blame. Felicia because she was from the government and you because of your father.”

             
And because I said no to him. “Why did he kill Felicia and not me?”

             
Tanya laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny.

             
“What?”

             
“I think he hated you more.”

             
I let that sink in. “What about Joel?”

             
“We got him locked up good.”

             
“What are we going to do with him?”

             
Tanya looked at Aisha, then at me but didn’t say anything. I got the message she didn’t want Aisha to know.

             
“Tanya?”

             
“Yeah?”

             
“Someone drugged my food. Someone at Harbor.”

PART 5

Chapter 24

Mike.

             
Gwen was the one who figured out Joel had to be near Greenport because of the lights Jim saw and the woman she recognized. We filled a black SUV with half of my firepower and went to the Harbor Heights police station to get protective gear. No one questioned me about bringing my rocket launcher. I wanted to blow up those motherfuckers for killing my son, almost killing my daughter and throwing our home into chaos. Dena insisted on coming, said she owed it to Simon. She surprised me by being sensible not emotional in her argument. Dena knew weapons almost as well as I did. She promised to listen to me without question.

Before I left
Hannah asked me if I was a little sweet on Grace. I laughed. The girl was only four years older than Dena, but watching the way she holds that rifle and her fast motion should make any guy drool. When I saw her tied to that pole, her skin burnt, her hair in shambles, and seeing that she wet herself I wanted to rip Joel’s head off and shove it down his neck. Not that I already didn’t want to do it before. He killed my boy. My poor Hannah couldn’t stop to mourn him because of all the other people he shot.

I knew when the flu and zombie outbreak happened there would be some lawless men. It disturbed me how many of them came together under Joel.

              Some of his men surrendered to us pretty fast. Most of them stayed because it meant safety and once he was gone, they were looking for someone new.

             
They ain’t gonna get it from us. Anyone who blindly followed Joel wasn’t welcomed at Harbor.              Joel had about fifty or so people he used as slaves, a lot of them women. Three of them got pregnant by a man named Bill who Grace and Annemarie rightfully tossed to the zombies. He had forced himself at least once on every woman there including Grace and Aisha. He wasn’t into kids so at least he left Ariel alone.

             
The zombies killed him too quickly.

             
I got pieces of the story from the more talkative guards. Bill’s favorite had been a woman named Jackie. No one knew Jackie was married to Howard. Bill found out and murdered him. One of his few female guards Carla tried to help Jackie escape along with help from another guard named Tommy, yes the big movie star Tommy Haldish.

             
Joel found out what they did.

             
He left the women alone with Bill for three hours.

             
He took them naked to the fenced in zombies and got them bitten. Thomas was given four days on the pole. He was only saved when it rained one day. Not enough to hydrate him, but enough to keep him from dying.

             
Joel and his murderers came to Harbor the night before the massacre with the two zombie women. Joel knew our schedule because he looked at it while pretending he wanted a date with Grace. He knew Grace took lunch at two and that people went to the beach.

             
They released the two women at our beach so we would leave and they could get off the island with Grace without being seen.

             
I went into the bedroom upstairs where Dr. Philips, a real general practitioner, was treating Grace and Tommy. Both of them were asleep.

             
Aisha identified only four guards besides Thomas who had been kind to the hands sneaking them extra foods, water and medicine when they could. She had known them from the camp and one was a 16 year old boy Joel recruited from the Catholic school Jim had been at. They had gone with him to hunt zombies. A lot of camp people including some of the people who had come to hunt had resisted and Joel randomly tossed five people to the zombies to keep them in line.

             
Not counting Joel, we captured eight of his men. They were locked and tied up in the library. I knew some escaped. Dr. Philips said Joel maintained a motorboat he used to get supplies from Connecticut. Tomorrow we would take them by boat and release them on a beach there. They complained about rights. Tanya told them to fuck their rights and if we ever saw their faces, they would be dead. The exception was the electrician Gil. Someone had to replaced Dave and he offered to set up solar panels for electricity and hot water as he had done for Joel.

             
Aisha said he had beaten one of the field hands. For now we planned to put him in a house close to the farm, and not give him a gun. The field hand he beat was long dead by Joel’s hand. I let him know that I didn’t care how much talent he had he was expendable.

             
“Hey Dr. Philips, came to check up on Grace.”

             
“Call me Sam. She’s sleeping. I heard your wife was a medic. She’ll want some training. As far as I know I might be in the only doctor left alive.”

             
I didn’t respond.

             
“I’m alive because I’m a coward. They were begging doctors to come treat flu patients in the hospital. I didn’t respond to my calls-- I knew this was bad. So I stayed home. My husband got the flu. At least one of my kids did. I had a grandson—when I went to see my daughter. They were all dead. Her, her husband, baby. I went to my other daughter’s house but she wasn’t there, never called, didn’t leave a message.”

             
I didn’t say anything. When the flu got bad, I kept my family home. Ironically I would have called people lazy if they called in sick when they weren’t, but that law the government passed allowed Hannah and my son Vincent to call in sick and Dena to stay out of school. Hannah wanted to work but I scared her into staying home. I screamed at her, even thought about tying her up. Eventually she relented.

             
“My fellow doctors got the flu,” she said. “Or were killed by zombies.”

             
“After we banish those men to Connecticut, we are going back home. I want you to come. We have some wounded and my wife isn’t a doctor. You can bring all the patients with you.” I said, with my eye on Tommy Haldish. Still couldn’t believe that was him.

             
The door opened. I looked and saw it was Tanya. I swallowed hard. Unsure if I was ready to do this. I looked at Grace. She had just opened her eyes. She looked at me and smiled.

              We went to the library and opened the door. Annemarie and Dena were guarding it. Joel and the remaining men were tied to folding chairs. One of men must have tried to escape because his chair was overturned and he was faced down on the floor still tied to it. I would have laughed but I couldn’t. I left him on the floor.

             
Sam patched up the one shot in the knee and was nice enough to give him pain killers and antibiotics. I would have let him bleed out. The kid that Grace called Broken Nose, because she broke his with a shoe, didn’t look happy. I thought about allowing him to come to Harbor because of his age which he claimed was 17 but Aisha said he never seemed bothered by any of the orders Joel gave.

             
I had no idea if any of these men were the ones that killed our people in Harbor. Part of me wanted to shoot them all.

             
Joel was tied to a chair as well and in a corner. He hadn’t tried to escape. He looked exactly the same as when I tied him up this morning. We fed them all; scraps like he gave his workers.

             
“Hello,” he said to us. “I guess I’m about to get my punishment.”

             
I didn’t say anything. Instead I untied Joel but not his hands. I yanked him up.

             
“My foot’s asleep.” I let him stomp around. After a minute, I pushed him lightly to move.

             
“Follow Tanya.”

             
We walked into the meeting room and into the large hall, then out the front door.

             
“Not so civilized after all.” Joel said.

             
“We’re gonna make it quick and painless, that’s a promise. Better than what you did to our people.”

             
Joel laughed. “You’re all phonies—you know that. You think you’re all high and mighty and better than me, but now you’re going to kill me in cold blood.”

             
I didn’t want to do it but Joel had murdered nine of my people and countless more at the estate which meant human life meant nothing to him, not only that but he had enslaved free people and allowed a rapist to do what he wanted.

             
We walked him to the bunkhouse and made him stand near the side wall. It was empty now, the people in the fields had taken up bedrooms in the estate house, even servants quarters were better than this bunkhouse. It had originally been equipment storage for the tennis courts and swimming pool. It had no heat, AC, or windows.

             
“Do you want anything, a cigarette or a drink?”

             
“No—just how did you find me?”

             
“You left the lights on,” Tanya said.

“We knew you were close to Greenport,” I explained. “That woman you killed—Carla? She saved Jim and Gwen when they were in Greenport. Jim saw a light from far away, dismissed it as a fire, but it was you. We came last night and followed your light.”

              “Clever—“ he paused. “And what about her?”

             
“Who?”             

             
“Did she tell you what her father did?”

             
“Her father didn’t do anything, Joel. It was all in your delusional mind. You’re a murderer.”

             
“So is she and both of you will be soon enough.”

             
“The problem, Joel, is we can’t leave you alive. You’re motivated by revenge and you’ve murdered innocent people, not zombies, not people with the virus. I’m wondering if you even knew the difference.”

             
“The government has laws, where’s my trial?”

             
“There ain’t no government, Joel,” Tanya said. “An eye for an eye now.”

I thought about Jim. There was no way he would approve of killing an unarmed man, even a mass murderer. Tanya would tell him afterwards
. He would get pissed but it would already be done.

             
“Any last requests?” I asked.

             
“Just to know that I wasn’t always what you call bad. I had a wife, a daughter and a son. All died of the flu. I held my little baby girl in my arms while she died terrified and choking in her fluid filled lungs--”

             
“Please—“ Tanya said, her voice angry. “Every single one of us lost people and didn’t go nutso. The flu killed billions of people, entire families. You ain’t special.”

             
I didn’t say anything because of something Grace told me earlier. The flu did kill his family but Joel seemed more upset over losing his livelihood.

             
“Do you have any last requests?” I repeated. I didn’t want to talk philosophical. I wanted justice to be served.

             
“Please don’t kill me?” Joel said, his voice oddly bright.

             
“Do you want a blindfold?”

             
“No.”

             
He stood against the wall and turned around. “Do it,” he said. “Shoot a man in the back.”

             
I aimed. Looked at this unarmed living man. Yes, he murdered my son but I couldn’t pull the trigger.

             
Neither apparently could Tanya. We were both fail-safes. I thought one of us could do it.

             
Joel turned around, looked at us and laughed. “Cowards.”

             
Then I heard the crack of gun fire. A bullet hit Joel straight in the head. Blood and brain matter splattered the wall behind him and his body fell.

             
I looked behind me to see Grace standing there with her pretty rifle still wearing her white nightgown, looking like an angel of death.

             
“I was worried you wouldn’t be able to do it. I guess I was correct.”

             
I didn’t say anything. Neither did Tanya.

             
“I don’t think you’re cowards for not being able to pull the trigger. I admire that you can’t.”

             
“Grace—“ She walked towards me, stumbling a bit. Tanya and I got her steady. She looked at me in admiration. When she tried to put her hands around me, I stopped her and she pulled away.

             
“I think that it might be time to put down my gun and become one with society.”

             
Two days later we went home.