Immune Page 3

  10:00 PM

  THOOMthoomTHOOMthoom.

  Landon slipped out of Penny’s embrace and spun around. All of the other men donned their headgear in unison. White cowls, clear face shields, breathing apparatuses connected by tubes to the tanks on their backs.

  “No,” Landon whispered.

  THOOM!

  The final explosion echoed up the face of the mountain and turned the night to a kind of scarlet day. The crowd appeared frozen in time, trapped in the strobe of light.

  Silence descended in its wake, falling over the gathering with the resultant darkness.

  He took Penny by the hand and jerked her to motion.

  “We need to get out of here!”

  A cheer erupted from the crowd. The applause was deafening. Voices murmured in awe and delight.

  A haze of sulfurous smoke settled around them in a mist that clung to the trees. He pulled Penny through it until one of the men in white stepped into his way to block the path leading out of the park. The man raised his rifle, but Landon was already skidding on the path in his hurry to switch directions. He guided Penny back toward the others, pushing and shoving and knocking people aside in a furious effort to distance them from the gunman.

  “What’s happening?” Penny screamed.

  All around them, men and women clamored for light. The darkness was moderated only by the starlight, which merely diffused into the pall of smoke hanging over them.

  Someone coughed. More wet, raspy coughs rose from all around them, like a chorus of dogs barking in the night.

  “Everyone,” an electronic-modulated voice said over the PA system. “Please remain calm. We’re currently experiencing technical difficulties—”

  The voice was drowned out by screaming from somewhere to Landon’s left. He could barely see the people immediately around him through the smoke. They jostled for space as the thousand people out of sight barely restrained the panic that crackled between them like an electrical current, which would provide that spark that would cause them to stampede one another at any moment.

  Something warm and wet slapped the side of his face. He turned to see Andy Wilton clap his hand over his mouth. Flumes of dark fluid fired between his fingers.

  More screams. From all around him now.

  A hand grabbed his sleeve and nearly pulled him to the ground. His eyes met those of Becky Henderson. The vessels in the whites of her eyes had ruptured, making them appear almost black. Tears of blood drained over her lashes. She sputtered fluid and tugged even harder on his arm. He had to slap her hand away before she dragged him down. She collapsed to her back and a geyser of blood spurted from her mouth.

  People grabbed and clawed at him from all sides. His ears were filled with the rising sounds of screams and coughs.

  “Cover your mouth!” he shouted back to Penny. “Try not to breathe the smoke!”

  He pulled the collar of his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose and nipped it between his teeth to hold it in place.

  Someone bumped him from the side. His feet snagged and he fell onto something soft and forgiving, hauling Penny down right behind him. He tried to push himself back to his feet, but slipped on the sheer amount of blood covering a woman’s chest. Her face was unrecognizable with the spatters all over her cheeks and the starbursts around her eyes. He had to crawl off of her and onto the grass, using his elbows to fend off legs that threatened to trample him, before he could find solid footing. He lunged to his feet, but met with resistance from Penny and collapsed back to the ground.

  The screams were punctuated by rapid bursts of gunfire.

  “Come on, Penny!” he shouted and crawled back toward her. She was sprawled on her chest, the back of her shirt covered with sloppy footprints. He rolled her over and tried to get a grip under her armpits so he could pull her up with him. She coughed a mist of blood into his face. Her lips and teeth shimmered crimson. “No, no, no!”

  She made a gagging sound and started to whimper.

  As he watched, the vessels in her eyes hemorrhaged and filled with blood.

  “Land—” she sobbed. The word dissolved into the blood that overflowed her mouth, poured down her chin, and across the front of her shirt.

  “Penny,” he moaned, and pulled her to him. Her head lolled against his shoulder. He felt a rush of warmth run down his back. When she coughed, the wet rattle in her lungs vibrated against his chest. Blood trickled from her ear onto his cheek. “Hold on, Penny. Please hold on. We’ll find a doctor.” He rocked back and shouted at the top of his lungs. “Dad!”

  It took every ounce of his strength to pull her up from the ground. Her feeble grip around his waist slipped and her arms hung limply at her sides. He staggered forward, holding her tightly against his chest, barely able to shuffle, let alone walk.

  “Dad!” he screamed. His voice cracked and sounded shrill even to his ears. “Dad!”

  Penny’s head flopped backward, her face to the sky, and bounced with every step he took. He couldn’t spare a hand to lean it forward against his shoulder again for fear he would lose his grip and they would both end up on the ground again.

  “Dad!”

  All around him, bodies littered the field. Some were on all fours, vomiting blood onto their hands, coughing so hard it sounded like they were being strangled. Others were crumpled in unmoving heaps, drenched with blood that stood out against their pale skin and clotted in their hair.

  The screams faded to the point that individual voices now stood apart from the riot. Rifles no longer discharged in spurts, but in sporadic single blasts.

  He tripped over lifeless legs and fell onto Penny, forcing a rush of blood out of her mouth that splashed into his left eye. Crying, he wiped it away and stared down at her face. Her eyes looked like tomatoes stomped on cement. Blood flowed freely from her crusted nostrils to join with the mess of spatters all over her face. Pinpricks of blood even welled from her hairline.

  “Get up!” a voice shouted into his ear.

  Landon could only stare at the locket resting in the puddle of crimson that welled in Penny’s jugular notch. The golden heart was dulled by the dark fluid and partially opened, as though the crack in its side were the source of the blood in which it rested.

  “Listen to me, Landon!” the voice shouted. Hands shook him by the shoulders. “There’s nothing we can do for her now! We have to get out of here! Now!”

  Landon’s vision constricted from the edges until it felt as though he were viewing Penny through binoculars that grew increasingly distant. His body felt heavy, like it was being absorbed directly into the ground. Even the voice yelling right into his ear reached him from a great distance, an unrecognizable, incomprehensible sound falling away from him down a well.

  “Get up, damn it!”

  The hands jerked him off of Penny and onto soil muddy with blood.

  “No!” Landon screamed, and lunged for Penny. He wrapped his arms around her neck and tried to raise her from the grass again.

  “Listen to me, Landon! She’s gone!”

  Penny’s slick skin slipped from his grasp and her head bounced from the ground. He tried again to no avail. On the third attempt, her necklace tangled around his fingers and snapped when her head fell. He clenched it in his fist and bellowed up into the smoky sky.

  Hands knotted into his shirt and hauled him to his feet. He whirled and blindly threw punches that connected with his father’s chest until his old man was able to grab him by the wrists. His father brought him closer and shouted into his face, spittle striking his cheeks.

  “Snap out of it! You need to run! Get to the highway! Flag down a car! Get help before everyone here is dead!”

  “What about you?” Landon whined. He could only stare blankly at his father as the smoke swirled around them and the ground tilted on an invisible fulcrum.

  “Don’t worry about me! Just run, for Christ’s sake!” He spun Landon around and shoved him away. “Run!”

  Landon stumbled until he found his leg
s. He staggered to a jog and then finally to a sprint. He jumped over and weaved around all of the bodies lying throughout the park. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he sobbed so hard he could barely breathe. White shapes stalked through the smoke like specters, the laser sights of their rifles cutting through the smothering mist like scarlet spears. There one moment, gone the next. All he could see was Penny’s lifeless face as he ran with no idea in which direction he was heading.

  A red line traced the ground in front of him.

  He heard his father cry out behind him.

  Ahead, he saw where the park opened to the street. A hundred yards farther and he could use the buildings as a screen to reach the river. From there it was only a half-mile to the highway.

  Something struck his back and threw him forward.

  There was no time to raise his hands.

  His forehead ricocheted from the path. Pain blossomed from the back of his ribcage.

  Before his momentum tapered, the blackness claimed him.

  10:21 PM

  Landon awakened to a beeping sound. His head felt like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat and he tasted blood in his mouth. The pain intensified when he opened his eyes. The smoke had settled to a thin mist that crawled over the ground, where bodies were sprawled as far as he could see. He had to blink the blood from his eyes to keep them open. Men in white suits stalked through the carnage, like the ghosts of the dead hovering over the aftermath of a great battle. They leaned over each of the bodies, raised one of the arms, and directed a small plastic gun at the bands around the limp wrists. Once the gun made a beeping sound, they dropped the arms back to the ground, and moved on to the next corpse.

  The world started to spin and he had to suppress the urge to vomit. Searing pain in his back served to focus him. He remembered something striking him from behind, and his head pounding the earth. Then he remembered Penny and started to cry. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and join her, if he wasn’t dead already. Surely the white men were apparitions come to claim the souls of the fallen. It was only a matter of time before they reached him and took him back to hell with them.

  Beep.

  To his right, he recognized the blood-streaked face of Todd Ellison. A black fly crawled over his lower lip and into his mouth. Only two months earlier he had wanted to punch Todd in that same mouth for smacking on his gum behind him in English Lit class. The fly crawled out of his mouth and buzzed over his cheek to alight on the lower lashes of his left eye, where it cleaned its face with its front legs.

  Beep. Closer this time.

  His eyes fell to the pink bracelet on Todd’s wrist.

  Another beep from his left.

  That was the reason for the bracelets. The barcodes served as their identification. When the men in white scanned them, they were added to the list of the dead. They’d been issued from the start to serve as high-tech toe tags. These men had known from the start exactly what was going to happen. They’d chosen this town for their extinction agenda and used the shell that was Travis James as their Trojan horse. His fists tightened, closing the heart locket in his hand.

  “There’s another one over here!” a voice called, breaking the silence beneath the monotonous beeping sounds.

  A white boot nudged Landon’s side.

  He cringed away from it.

  Shadows fell over him from all sides and hands grabbed him by the arms and clothing, hauling him upright. The sudden onset of dizziness made him swoon. He would have collapsed to his knees had the white men not been holding him up.

  “Identification,” one of the men said. Another jerked his wrist up. “Landon Crane.”

  “Scan the barcode.”

  The second man pointed his plastic gun at the bracelet and there was a loud beep.

  “The data confirms he’s a seventeen year-old male who resides at 110 Pine Ridge Lane. We already have his father in custody.”

  “Take him over there with the others.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man shoved Landon forward and across the field of corpses toward where he could see a group of people gathered behind one of the panel trucks. As they neared, the men in white prodded the men and women with no such protection into the back of the truck.

  “Thirty…Thirty-one…” one of the men counted as the cargo was crammed into the small, canvas-enclosed space. “Thirty-two…”

  “This one makes thirty-three,” the man behind Landon said, pushing him against the tailgate.

  Landon looked up into the wide, terrified eyes of the people staring back at him from the darkness.

  “Roughly a three percent survival rate. Not bad at all,” the man who’d been counting said. Landon saw the scar hooking around the man’s right eye. “Are you sure there are no more survivors?”

  “We’ve already catalogued more than nine hundred dead and there are plenty more out there. If any more of them were still alive, we would have seen them by now.”

  “Start the door-to-door search. This entire town has to be cleared before dawn.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man with the scar tucked his clipboard beneath his arm and goaded Landon into the back of the cab. He had to press his body into those of the others. There was barely enough room to stand, let alone sit. He smelled the sour reek of body odor and fear. People whimpered and cried behind him.

  The engine started with a shudder that nearly toppled him to his knees.

  He caught a glimpse of the contented smile behind the man’s clear shield before the canvas flap was lowered in front of him.

  “Anyone tries to jump out,” the man said, “shoot them.”

  The truck lurched and headed across the parking lot.

  10:54 PM

  Landon peeked through the gap beside the canvas flap. A pair of headlights shined in his face from the Jeep following right behind them. The man in the passenger seat was standing, his rifle pointed directly at the back of the panel truck. A red laser pierced his right eye and Landon ducked back into the sweltering darkness. Their amassed body heat and hot breath made the nausea return.

  “Where do you think they’re taking us?” a disembodied voice whispered.

  “It doesn’t matter,” another answered. “They’re just going to kill us when we get there.”

  A child cried from the press of bodies. Her mother tried to soothe her with a song between her own sobs.

  “Quiet down,” a harsh voice said. “They aren’t going to kill us.”

  “Like they didn’t kill all of the others?”

  Right now, Landon didn’t even care. All he could see in the blackness was Penny drawing her last sputtering breath through a mouthful of blood.

  “It was an experiment,” a familiar voice whispered. “Whatever they exposed us all to…it had to have been in the smoke from that last firecracker. They’re taking us somewhere for testing, so they can figure out why we lived when all of the others died.”

  “Dad?” Landon said.

  “Landon. I thought you escaped.”

  His father shoved his way through the others until he was close enough to wrap his arms around him.

  Landon shook as he cried and leaned into his father’s embrace.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I tried. I ran just like you said…”

  “It’s all right, son. We’re going to get out of this. I promise.”

  The truck slowed and bounced over a bump, nearly throwing Landon and his father out the back. As the slope steepened, they had to lean into the others, whose hands probed the darkness for anything to hold on to. After nearly a minute of being rocked from side to side on a winding road, the truck finally came to a stop.

  “If I tell you to run,” his father whispered into his ear, “then you run, no questions asked. Don’t look back. Just run as fast—”

  The rear flap was thrown upward. The two men from the Jeep stood below them, silhouetted by the headlights, rifles sweeping across the men and women who shielded their eyes from the glare. />
  “Climb out of there now. One at a time,” the man on the right said. “If any of you even think about making a break for it, you will be shot. And we’re not using rubber bullets like we used back in the park either. We’re talking about five-point-five-six by forty-five millimeter rounds that could punch through a car door at a hundred yards, firing at six hundred rounds-per-minute. You’d be Swiss cheese before you hit your stride.”

  “Out,” the other man said.

  Landon’s father stepped in front of him and climbed down from the tailgate first. He reached back and helped Landon to the asphalt. They stepped around the side of the vehicle and looked to the south in the direction the panel truck’s headlights shined. The Historical Mineral Springs Spa resort stood before them, all of its windows now aglow.

  They were barely the length of a football field from their house, but it might as well have been halfway around the world.

  “I guess we just met the new neighbors,” his father said.

  Landon stuffed Penny’s locket into his pocket and stared at the forbidding façade with its stucco walls and green-trimmed windows. It towered over them like some ancient Spanish fortress. The steam from the hot springs behind its iron-fenced courtyard made it appear to be on fire.

  On a primitive level he knew that once they passed through the front doors, they would never leave again.

  The barrel of a rifle jabbed him in the back where the rubber bullet had struck him earlier and he stumbled forward toward what he now thought of as the gates of hell.

  JULY 5, 1991

  1:13 AM

  Landon huddled in the corner of the empty room, knees drawn to his chest, tear-blurred eyes focused on the lone steel door and the small wire mesh-reinforced window through which the shielded faces of unknown men intermittently watched. The carpet had been stripped to the cold, tiled floor. The manila-colored plaster walls were bare. A solitary window had been replaced with bulletproof glass that had barely shuddered when he pounded it with his fists. The weak starlight drew a wan rectangle of mote-infested light across the floor in front of him. A single light bulb was mounted to the ceiling inside a metal cage, but the switch was out in the hallway.